Where the Wild Goose Goes

As soon as he heard the first cool breezes of autumn rustling through the dry leaves, Philip Ryan imagined himself flying point in one of those southbound Vs of Canadians he’d seen moving across the sky. The sight of those flawless formations always excited him so much that he’d feel like answering their distant call with a good honk or two of his own. The feeling was so strong that sometimes he wondered if he’d been one of those soaring birds in a past life and had been reincarnated into his flightless form by some horrible mistake.

He figured he might not be able to fly like a goose, but he damned sure knew where the highway was. And one morning he would look over at the aging woman sleeping beside him and slip from her bed as quiet as a cat burglar. He’d pack his duffle, he’d take all the cash in the house, and he’d be down the road by sunrise, looking for something better, or at least something different, leaving nothing of himself behind save a few stray hairs and the imprint of his head on the pillow.

But this stay had been so long he felt like one of those fat geese whose wild spirit has been drained by the lush grazing around lakes and farm ponds. Instead of a pond, he found his easy pickings in a McMansion that sprawled across a tiny suburban lot south of Birmingham. By his standards, the place was luxurious. But he had grown weary of hearing how Carol’s ex had paid for it.

"Made the son-of-a-bitch pay through the nose," she would say after too many glasses of Chablis, pointing to what Philip thought was her best feature, her little button of a nose. "Through the fucking nose."

Tough talk, he thought. And about as much at home on her tongue as a ring would be through that cute nose.

She often came home from her job as the district sales manager for Wilmot Pharmaceuticals, packing some kind of bauble for his pleasure. She’d bought him more clothes than he would ever wear and a membership to Gold's Gym so he could keep his long, lean body tight and fit. And she bought a new car, a blue BMW Z4 convertible, for him to drive all the time as long as he promised to cruise by her ex-husband's place every day or so.

"Remind that cheating son-of-a-bitch that I don’t need him or his fucking money anymore," she said, a weak snarl masking the cracking of her voice and the tears welling in her eyes every time she mentioned her ex.

On a scale of looks, Philip thought she had probably always been several notches down from pretty. But with that button nose and those soft lips, she could’ve been recognized at one time as cute. He imagined her in high school as a perky cheerleader with her cheeks firm and dimpled, her brown hair long and ponytailed. She had never told him how old she was, but she now looked to be in her late forties, knocking hard on fifty. He could see a double chin collecting around her neck like slowly rising bread dough, with gravity doing its treacherous thing to the skin around her eyes. A shiver trickled up his spine as he thought, time is damn sure hell on the cute and perky.

He hadn’t thought of his own age since his birthday back in May. He remembered how old he was and bit his tongue before the dreaded number could pass through his lips. He walked over to the dresser mirror, stroked his blond hair that grew in a riot of curly tangles.

“Hell, kid, you don’t look a day over twenty-five.” He shrugged. “Eh, maybe twenty-six.” But he could do the math. Twelve autumns had blown by since that had been the correct answer.

That morning, as Carol scrambled around the house getting ready for work, he leaned back into the pillows bunched behind him on the headboard and sipped the coffee she brought him, wiping sleep from his eyes and thinking he had to get the hell out of there pretty soon. He could feel his wildness draining from him amid all that freedom-sucking domesticity.

“Would you mind taking a damp mop and going over these floors today?" she called from somewhere down the hall.

Instead of answering he stared at the door, telling himself to just walk through it as he had all the others. She could boss those toads at work around all she wanted, but he wasn't a man who took orders. He had no intention of mopping a damn floor. What bothered him was she suddenly dared to ask him. She had become too comfortable with him, leading her to talk about him to some of her girlfriends. He was sure those bitches had put her up to asking him to do fucking housework.

"And the kitchen," she said, now standing in the door. "I don't mind cooking when I come in. Really, I don't. I love to cook. But it would help me a lot if you'd have everything kind of cleaned up and ready. If you could do that, it'd really be great, baby."

She walked over to the bed, bent over and tagged his cheek with a quick peck. "Gotta go," she said, glancing at her watch.

As she walked away, he thought that if he left today, the swell of her hips in that tweedy brown suit would be his last sight of her. He listened to the familiar sound of her heels punishing the hardwood in the hallway, the front door opening and closing, the growl of her Mercedes' diesel turning over in the garage. By the time the scent of her hairspray and cologne faded from the bedroom, his coffee had grown cold.

Before her, all the older women he had lived with had at first been satisfied with having a young man sleeping in their beds. But they eventually wanted more, and it was this more thing that always scared the hell out of him. Their mores—usually: get a job, meet her family, go back to school, or some shit. It had never taken much of this to get him packed and down the road. But this was his second autumn in Birmingham, and Carol had already dumped a truckload of mores on him.

His experience led him to understand the unhealed wound of a broken marriage at this stage in a woman’s life, all those dreams and expectations crushed by an egomaniacal husband's need for something younger, leaving her to feel like a formerly cute puppy, grown into a fat, ugly mutt. That wound was his stock-in-trade, and he understood that he would have to listen to them lashing out at their exes. He knew he would have to hold them and make them believe his imaginary bond with them would get them through another night.

But with Carol, it wasn't just her ex-husband. It was her weight, her job, her intelligence, or lack of it as she sometimes thought. To him, her job sounded like a total train wreck. The night before, she spent hours glued to her computer and yakking on the phone, suddenly pushing herself away, shouting to the ceiling, "I don't know what the fuck I'm doing."

Listening to this kind of shit was the last thing he ever wanted to do. But the strong impulse he felt to leave at the sound of it was soon overcome by the horror of crawling on another Greyhound bus.

"Baby, you sure look like you know what you're doing," he said, moving in behind her, rubbing her shoulders, feeling her taut muscles melt under his fingertips.

"I don't, though," she whined, giving in to his ministrations.

"Of course you do, and you know it. Hell, you're the smartest woman I've ever known."

It was easy to compliment her because she really was smart. But she didn't always believe it. She curled up in his arms, content after his reassurances, but he knew she would be good only till the next office crisis, the next dip in her confidence which could be set off by anything, especially her weekly telephone call to her mother. Then she would look as if she'd been kicked in the gut by an NFL punter.

"That bitch," she said, pointing at the phone one day as if the old lady were curled up in it. "How did she get to be a mother, anyway?”

He’d had enough of her emotional meltdowns. He sprang from the bed and found his canvas duffle in the corner of the closet, crumpled under the parade of shirts, pants, and sport coats, all cleaned and lined up in neat rows. He pulled the frayed old bag out, brushed a couple of dust balls from its stiff folds, and watched them float to the floor. The thing wouldn't hold a fraction of the stuff Carol had bought him. Before he split, he'd have to get a suitcase or something.

He ran his finger across the rod that held his shirts, contemplating his choices, caressing the hanger hooks as if he were strumming harp strings, already missing the things he would have to leave behind. Then he thought the whole thing was too much of a decision to make before breakfast.

~

Phillip headed out to Joe Bean's Coffee shop. Remembering the fifteen hundred bucks he'd squirreled away, he figured it might be a good time to get out while he was ahead. As he gripped the wheel, he envisioned how good it would feel to have the highway crushing under his tires with trees and cities whizzing by his windows. But as he pulled into the coffee shop's lot, he released his grip with a sigh. He’d been spending Carol's money these days and doubted how long fifteen hundred dollars would stay in his pocket. Besides, the damned car was in her name. He knew he couldn't take it. With all the vindictiveness she targeted toward her ex-husband, he knew if he pissed her off by leaving in the Beemer, he'd be swimming in cops before he hit the county line. That meant he would be back on the Greyhound like the old days, and as he leaned back into the firm leather, he could almost hear the lonesome moan of the bus's engine, the hiss of its brake, the pungent scent of diesel, and the usual unwashed passenger sitting beside him, giving him a gap-toothed grin before taking a ragged pull from a half pint of cheap whiskey.

He sat in the coffee shop parking lot while everything he had come to know moved farther and farther away from him. His daily excursions here to the coffee shop, the gym, the track, the mall, and the TV shows he watched on the sixty-five incher in Carol's den every night. He shuddered at some of the things he'd done to get where he was now and wondered if he would ever have another set-up like this again.

Even before he climbed out of the car, he knew the blonde barista would greet him with a toothy smile, her face all scrunched up as if she were trying to beam at him.  She always giggled at everything he said and caressed the hair on the back of his hand after she handed him his coffee. When no one was looking, she would refill his cup and slip him some of the pastries she was supposed to chop up for customer samples.

She saw him coming and cooed. "Philip. Grande house blend.”

He reached for it. "Something extra for you,” she whispered. “Our new pumpkin coffee cake."

"Thanks," he whispered back. "You know. I'm going to have to do something nice for you one of these days."

"Yes, you are," she said.

He snatched a newspaper from the rack, and wended his way through a gauntlet of lattes and laptops, laying claim to an empty table next to one of the east-facing windows. Some classical piece seeped from the speakers hanging from the walls, soft violins and cellos, mingling with the gurgling cappuccino machine and the hum of conversation. 

He'd never given the barista a second thought, but as he sipped his coffee and rustled through the newspaper, he thought of her tits peeking at him under her short black apron. Carol's tits on the other hand—well, Carol's tits were fast surrendering to the law of gravity. They’d done all the peeking they were ever going to do. Those nights when she wasn't harried by work, depressed over her failed marriage, or inflamed by some backhand comment her mother made, he managed to talk her into making love. He often thought it was a mistake because they always ended up with her lying under him like a lump, breathlessly whispering for him to slow down. Slow down? He was already moving so slowly, like one of those shapeless globs wiggling in her stupid lava lamp in the den.

The barista surprised him, refilling his coffee and plopping another slice of cake on the table.

"Nice day, huh?" she said.

"Nice day?" he said, lowering the paper and looking out the window as if seeing the October sunshine for the first time. "Yeah," he said. "Damn, I think you're right. Kinda crisp or something like that. You know what I'm saying?"

"Crisp?" she said with a little giggle in her voice. "Yeah, I think I do."

"Hey, how long have I been coming in here?"

"I don't know," she said. "I've been here a little over four months. You've been in every day I've been here."

"That's what I'm getting at. You got my name when I ordered coffee on the first day. But I don't know yours."

"No. I don't guess you do, do you?"

"Oh, you're not going to tell me?"

"I don't know," she said. "Maybe I will."

"Well, whoever you are, you know what we ought to do on this nice, crisp day?"

"What?"

"Go on a picnic."

"A picnic? You mean like, together?"

"No, we should go on two separate picnics. Of course, together. I could jam some sandwiches into a cooler, grab a bottle of wine . . . Hey, I may have to check your ID."

"I'll show you my mine if you show me yours," she said.

"Got yourself a deal," he said. "What time you get off?"

"I get off at one today. But I'm supposed to go to the dentist."

"Blow it off. Let's go out to the park, have lunch by the lake, and, you know, chill with Mother Nature for a while."

"For real?" she said, cocking her eyebrow, a smile trickling across her lips.

"I’m always for real, baby," he said, pushing up from the table. "You up for some picnic or what?"

"I don't know. I guess.” A haze of doubt before her face broke into that beaming smile.

"See you out front at one.”

~

After driving back to Carol's, he nestled into his favorite spot on the couch for a little TV. Judge Judy talked him into a deep sleep, and when he woke it was a little past noon. Excited by the thought of getting his hands on someone young and firm with her full allotment of estrogen, he packed up a blanket, the cooler, and a couple of Carol’s fancy wine glasses along with the Chablis she had cooling in the fridge. He stopped by the local deli for a couple of roasted chicken sandwiches and got back to the coffee shop to find the barista standing at the curb, her black apron tossed over her shoulder, checking out her phone.

He screeched to a halt in front of her.

"I didn't know if you'd actually come or not," she said.

"You kidding? Who in his right mind would ever stand you up?"

"Well, I wasn't really sure about all that ‘right mind’ stuff.” She opened the door. "Nice car."

He wheeled up on the interstate with the wind whipping through his hair. "Let's get some tunes going up in here.” He cued the Foo Fighter's CD with Grohl belting out "The Pretender."

"You like this?" he asked over the roaring wind, the moaning traffic, and the driving guitars.

She looked up from her phone and shouted back, "It's okay. I kinda like old music sometimes."

"Yeah, me too.”

~

There were only a few cars scattered around the lake. He parked the Beemer, got out, and snatched up the cooler and the blanket. "This way."

The tall grass slapping against their legs. "You come out here a lot?" she asked.

"Not a lot," he said. Carol brought him out here once with the intention of picnicking. She had wept like a bereaved widow when she told him that it had been her favorite place to go with her ex.

He spread the blanket in the shade of a sycamore and motioned for the barista to sit. He dropped down beside her, opening the wine and filled the glasses.

"Wow," she said, looking at him with one eye through the pale liquid. "This is so cool. I feel like a girl in a TV commercial or something."

"You look like a girl in a TV commercial.” He raised his glass." Bottoms up." Drained it.

She followed his lead and swallowed her wine. She came up gasping, giggling, and dribbling wine down her chin.

"One more time," he said.

"I thought you were supposed to sip this stuff with your pinkie finger poked out," she said.

"We'll pinkie the shit out of it after we get us a little buzz going," he said, refilling her glass.

By the time he gulped down a second glass, the alcohol had him floating. He poured them another glass, and they sat sipping it without talking, the air nutty and sweet smelling. Across the lake, the hardwoods on the mountain shimmered red, gold, and purple among the green pines.

“So, what is your name?"

"Kirsten," she said. "My friends call me Kirsty."

"Want to hear a secret, Kirsty?"

"I totally want to hear a secret."

"I've been wanting to kiss you since the first time I saw you."

She smirked and shook her head. "You must not have wanted to very bad."

"Why do you say that?"

 She shrugged. "Took you four months to ask me out."

"My life's been kinda complicated.”.

"You probably stay all jammed up with a lot of women and all."

 "Well, not so many. I'm mostly jammed up with work."

"Work?" she said. "You mean you work somewhere?"

"What do you think I am, some kind of bum?"

"No," she said. "I just thought you were rich or something. You know, you drive a cool car, and you have a buncha time to hang around the coffee shop in the morning."

"I wouldn't say I'm rich, but I do all right.”

"Who do you work for?"

 "Actually, I'm self-employed,” he said. “You might say, I'm sort of a consultant."

"I guess you have to be really smart to do that kind of stuff, huh."

"Oh, not so smart," he said. "But you have to do a lot of listening. I mean a lot of goddamn listening."

"Well?" she said, scooting closer to him.

"Well, what?"

"You going to kiss me or not?"

"Yes," he said, slowly leaning into her. "Yes I am."

 He didn't see her toss her glass, but he heard it shatter on a rock. Her breasts crushing against him, tipping his own glass over, wine splashing on his blazer and spilling across his lap.

It didn't take him long to forget about Carol's blanket, her fancy glasses, his blazer, and even his wet jeans because Kirstin's hair smelled like sweet coffee, and her lips surrendered to his as they lay facing each other while his hand roamed from her breasts down her back to the curve of her ass.

Her breathing was so heavy, he wondered for a second if she were having an asthma attack. She sucked in a deep breath and rolled on top of him, clinging to him like a wrestler trying to pin an opponent to the mat. Her mouth moving down his face like some wet little animal. What would Carol would say if she saw a hickey the size of a drink coaster on his neck?

Her hand snaked down to his crotch, and he worried that there was nothing much going on down there. This had happened to him a few times with Carol in the past several months. She had held him and told him not to worry, to take his time, and he always recovered.

He untangled himself and sat up, gasping. "Wait a minute! Wait a minute! Goddamn! Slow down!" Kirsty tumbled back on the blanket, looking at him like he’d slapped her.

"Look," he said. "This may not be such a good idea."

"Not a good idea?" she said, blinking her eyes as if she were coming out of a trance.

"No, I mean. I just got to thinking. You're kinda young and all . . ."

"I'm twenty-two," she said.

"Well, see . . . that's a little . . . and I'm . . ."

"Whatever," she said, and for a moment she looked at him as if he were a birthday present she hadn't really wanted in the first place.

"Hey. I was just thinking it'd be better if we had some lunch first," he said, fumbling in the cooler. "I got these great sandwiches."

"I don't want any great sandwiches," she grumbled. By the time he raised up, sandwiches in his hand, she was already standing, staring down at her phone. She was just going to stand there, flipping her finger across the phone’s screen.

"You want some more wine?" he asked.

"I hate wine," she snapped without looking at him. "Shit. I missed my dental appointment."

~

He left Kirsty at the curb in front of the coffee shop, watching in his rearview mirror as she thumbed messages into her phone as if she were keying in a code that would delete the whole miserable afternoon from her life. He might have disappointed a few women in his time, but this had to be the first time he'd made one long for the medieval torture of a dentist's drill.

The barista had surprised him with that tsunami of passion. It wasn’t just surprise, he admitted to himself.  She’d scared the shit out of him. No wonder. He'd been hustling aging divorcees for so long his days had become nothing but a constant parade of the moods, fragrances, and special lubricants of menopausal women.

He drove for hours, thinking how he needed to move out and start dating young women. Of course, he would have to pick up on some other hustle. He didn’t think that would be any problem. He'd been such a wiz at pimping timeshares down in that Orlando the owner had begged him to go over and help him unload some properties in Boca. That was back when he’d latched onto that chunky red-head divorcee from Tallahassee. And here he was, eight years later, cruising around Birmingham watching the sun leave a pink stain in the western sky. 

He trembled with the thought of getting a job and going through an episode like this afternoon again. He'd always been able to talk any self-doubt away by giving himself a little pep talk. He drove into a Shell convenience store and pulled down the visor to look at himself in the vanity mirror.  If he ever wondered where those eight years since Tallahassee had gone, he'd just found them on his face. There was no use telling this reflection that it was the sun lightening his hair. The gray mingled in made it more taupe than blond, and it looked as if it were eroding into a peninsula in front. 

~

"Where have you been?" Carol asked when he walked in the back door, her voice so desperate she sounded as if she'd just organized a search party.

"Oh, you expect me to account for every second I'm out of your sight?" he snapped.

"No. You didn't answer your phone. I was worried."

"The battery on that new iPhone won't stay charged," he said.

"I'll see about it tomorrow," she said. "You hungry? I thought we'd have the leftover roast."

"Aww," he whined, deciding to see if he was still the leader in this little dance. "I don't want any old leftover roast."

"What if I fixed you an omelet," she said. "The way you like it. With ham and peppers."

That might make him feel a little better. He decided to raise the stakes. "Could we have those spicy potatoes you make along with it?"

"Whatever you want," she said. 

"And biscuits," he said, upping the ante. "We could have biscuits, couldn't we?"

"Of course, baby," she said. "And you can sit in the kitchen while I cook and tell you about my day."

While she baked the biscuits and sautéed the onions and peppers, he sat and listened.

"Mother called," she said with a groan. "That woman won't just come out and tell me I'm fat. Oh! Hell no. She sneaks it into a conversation like someone slipping poison in your drink. She knows weight's my sore spot because she made it sore when I was a girl. And she never misses a chance to peel the scab off. She just told me she hoped I was staying away from Twinkies. Then she chuckled like we were sharing a fond memory of my high school days or something. I swear, I've eaten only two Twinkies in my entire life. In the eleventh grade, she had me on nothing but carrot sticks and lettuce so I'd be thin and popular. I didn't have enough energy for cheer practice, so I ate everything in sight when she wasn't looking. I got those damn Twinkies from a friend. Mom found the wrappers in my room and made fun of me, pointing out that I had sucked all the sticky white stuff off the cellophane like a drug addict."

Without even thinking about it, he knew what to do because he'd done it at least a hundred times before. He held her and reminded her how smart and beautiful she was.

“Your mama?” he said. “Just a cranky old voice from a long time ago. This is what's happening now. You and me."

After eating, instead of taking up his station in front of the TV, he handed her the plates and glasses while she loaded the dishwasher.

“You want to listen to some music or something?” he asked when they finished.

“Who are you?” she said. “And what did you do with my boyfriend?”

In bed that night, she took him inside her, and he fell right into that dreamy rhythm she favored as if he'd mastered a dance he'd been practicing for a long time.  It may have been a far cry from the heat and passion of the barista, but it had been worth enduring once it was over and she held him in her arms with his face nestled in the hollow of her breasts. And sleep came easy to him there in all that warmth, smelling the damp, grassy scent of her skin and feeling the gentle thumping of her heart. He knew that if he ever did leave, he would miss this most of all.

Black Light

When she got home from the movie and her daddy hit her, Ivy’s feelings for him broke into a thousand pieces—like a souvenir that fell from its special place high on a shelf where she had been saving it to take down one day and cherish. He made clear he had washed his hands of her. She was not so lucky with Mama.

In the morning, she woke to the smell of fried eggs and bacon grease. Mama was on her way to the cotton mill. They would talk when she got home. Ivy was not to set foot outside the house. She spent the rest of her Saturday morning in bed staring up at the black-light poster on her wall—the wormhole hidden inside the ringed planet. All this time she had imagined Barry’s gift to be a doorway to another dimension, when, in fact, it was no better than all the junk she had hoarded from the flea market.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina let themselves in. Ivy peeked through her door at them sitting at the kitchen table, drinking sweet tea and filling the air with smoke. Then Mama came home and, still in her mill uniform, busied herself with refilling their glasses.

Ivy stepped out to face them, and Mee-Maw just stared, letting the smoke seep out of her lips and up into her nostrils. They were all dressed up, like they wanted you to think they had come from church. But it was Saturday. And Tina’s miniskirt was too short for church.

“I blame Hollywood,” said Mee-Maw. She adjusted her brassiere. It was evidently aggravating her eczema. Mama pressed her lips together and sat up straight in her chair. Ivy braced herself. If Mama cried, it always made Ivy’s tears come, too.

“She is just going through a phase,” Mama said and reached for the cigarettes. “Some boy has paid her attention, and she’s intrigued, I guess.”

“Are you intrigued?” asked Mee-Maw.

Ivy shrugged. That’s all they’d get out of her. Here in front of them, she did not even want to let herself remember the feel of his pleather jacket smooth against her cheek, his strong shoulder underneath.

“What is it you find so fascinating?” asked Tina. “I’m curious. I want to try to understand.”

“He’s nice,” Ivy said. “And smart.”

Mee-Maw sipped her tea and said how she knew when they integrated the schools, this was where they’d end up. When children started riding the bus together, it was only one little step further to hopping in a car and riding off to the movies. And now, she said, they had these Moonies everywhere, in their silk robes, with their Chinaman messiah and their gospel of interracial marriage. Mee-Maw asked Ivy if she had been approached by any Moonies. But, so far as Ivy knew, Moonies existed only on TV and in all of their minds.

“There won’t be a white boy to go out with you now,” said Aunt Tina, a note of triumph in her voice. “Or, if he does, he’ll expect you to put out.” Tina tugged at her miniskirt, but her panties still showed.

Mama went to the sink and reached up high to the cupboard, opening the door hanging by a single hinge. She took down a packet of aspirin powders and mixed them in her tea.

“I have tried and tried to tell her,” Mama said, “how hard it is to be a girl growing up in this neighborhood.”

“Don’t I know it,” said Tina, sucking her cigarette down to the filter.

“And I just cannot believe,” said Mama, “that she is so determined to make it impossible.” 

~

She had met Barry and his sister on the bus a month earlier, her first week at the consolidated high school. Consolidation was a four-letter word in her home. The preacher at the Pentecostal church her Mama’s family attended had been run off because he supported consolidation, just like the preacher who had been run off a decade earlier for supporting desegregation. Hailey Creek High School had joined with Crawford High, which was halfway to Charlotte and a lot more “urban.” Ivy had looked forward to the consolidated high school. New people. But the new people were harder to meet than she’d expected. Most of the kids clumped together with the same old friends. On her school bus, nothing had changed. Whites claimed the back, and the dozen or so kids from Double Springs sat up front. Usually two or three empty seats in between. But instead of riding the mile to the school in Hailey Creek, they all rode segregated together past seven miles of kudzu to the consolidated high school.

It turned out there were two new kids from Double Springs: a cute boy and a girl who looked a lot like him except half a head taller and no trace of a smile. The girl clearly did not want to be on this bus. Brother and sister sat together in one of the empty seats near the center. Ivy picked up her backpack and moved to the seat behind them. She saw the book the boy was reading, 2001: A Space Odyssey. She leaned forward and said she had tried to read that book but hadn’t gotten far before she had to give it back to the library. The boy smiled. The sister made a point of staring straight ahead.

After that first week, the sister moved up front with a friend. Barry and Ivy kept occupying two seats near the center. And every day he would give her an update on the novel, which was about a man trapped on board a spaceship with a paranoid computer. Barry got around to explaining how his family had moved to Hailey Creek to take care of his grandmama, after the death of his granddaddy earlier that summer. Maybe Ivy had heard of his granddaddy? No? He had served as the principal of the Double Springs School for three whole decades, until desegregation. “Ask your parents about him,” the boy said, but of course, Ivy was not about to do that.

~

While the church was looking for a new minister, men from the congregation took turns in the pulpit. Mr. Breedlove acted like he was a real preacher. Red in the face, battling the fires of hell. Pacing back and forth in front of the altar, he sounded like he had a fishbone stuck in his throat and he was trying to cough it up.

“Satan has been turned aloose in this community, A-ha! I say we need a Savior to protect us from Satan’s dark power! A-ha-ha!”

She was pouring sweat, smothered by Mee-Maw’s flesh on the one side and poked and prodded by Aunt Tina’s raw bones on the other.

At the end of the sermon, Mr. Breedlove launched into his altar call, pleading with sinners to step forward and be washed in the blood of the Lamb. She had sat through altar calls her whole life, terrified to step down that aisle alone and finally discover whether she was worthy of salvation.

When she slid out of the pew, the sweaty jeans stuck to her thighs. If Mama had been home instead of work, she would have made Ivy put on a dress. At the altar, the preacher knelt with her on velvet cushions. He laid one hand on her shoulder while he prayed into a microphone. She closed her eyes and waited for the magic, tried to make herself believe it was Jesus himself with his hand on her shoulder, his hand strong from years of gripping a hammer, a hand that wanted nothing but her wellbeing.

 ~

On the way home, Mee-Maw and Tina lit up, and Ivy had to breathe their smoke. Mee-Maw talked on and on about how she had never been prouder. You would have thought Ivy had won the spelling bee.

“It’s such a shame your mama couldn’t be there,” Tina said.

Ivy rolled down her window for air. At the edge of town, they passed the old Double Springs School, where Barry’s grandfather had served as principal for three decades. The windows were covered in plywood, and spray-painted onto the boards were some cuss words and a Confederate flag.

“Honey, you ain’t said a word.” Mee-Maw pulled off onto the gravel road that led to her house. She glanced back at Ivy. “I been running my mouth and ain’t give you a chance to tell us what it felt like?”

“What what felt like?”

“Why, being filled with the Spirit of God! I still remember being saved like it was yesterday. When the shackles of sin fell away, I could hear them crash.”

“It was a physical sensation,” Tina agreed. “The nearest I can describe it is being covered in filth from the swamp and then being hosed down with cold water. I get goosepimples still today just remembering.”

Ivy pushed her head out the window to breathe, but her chest still hurt. She wondered if her daddy was awake yet.

“Are you going to talk to us?” Mee-Maw said.

“I didn’t feel nothing,” Ivy shouted, as if the lack of sensation was their fault. “No magic. Not a thing. I guess I must be going to hell, after all!”

~

At home, Mama and Daddy were arguing again about rumors that the mill was due to close. Mama paced the room, while Daddy sat at the table in his plaid pajamas.

He said if they wanted his job that bad in Mexico, they could have it. He had about decided he wasn’t cut out for the regimentation of factory life.

Ivy stepped by them to her bedroom, but before she could close and lock the door, her mother was there asking about church.

“I don’t have to work next Sunday,” Mama said, “We’ll be done with this inventory. And maybe after church, we can stop by Tastee Freez.”

“I’m not going next Sunday. In fact, yeah, I’m not going ever again.”

“What!”

“I found out today what I needed to know. Like Aunt Tina is always saying, there’s only two kinds of people in the world. Well, I found out which kind I am.”

When her mama finally left her alone, she unscrewed the white light from the desk lamp and replaced it with the black one from her desk drawer. She pulled the window curtains closed and then twisted the knob. A faint purple light shined out from the lamp. Well, that was disappointing. She held the light right up against the new poster on her wall, but you could hardly tell. Too much sunlight came pouring through the window. If there was a wormhole in the center of the planet like Barry had said, she couldn’t see it. She felt just as trapped in her life as ever. Maybe later, after dark, she could try again.

In the kitchen, she heard her name. Daddy was taking her side. He said she was old enough to decide whether or not she wanted to attend church.

“She’s beyond the age of accountability,” said Mama, dead serious. “And she ain’t never been saved. If something was to happen . . .None of us knows about the Rapture. It could come tomorrow, like a thief in the night.”

“Shit fire,” said Daddy, “Ivy’s just like me, too ornery for the Devil to handle.”

 ~

The following Sunday morning it was a knock-down-drag-out, but Ivy had made up her mind she was not going. After the service, Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina came over for lunch. They had banana pudding for dessert, and then when they started smoking, Ivy asked to be excused and locked herself in her bedroom. She knew they were talking about her, so she cracked the door to hear.

Mama said it was a rebellion that most girls went through.

Mee-Maw said maybe Ivy was too young to properly feel the conviction of sin.

Aunt Tina said, “Not so. I got saved right after I had my first period.”

Ivy laced up her sneakers and, without making eye contact, stepped through the kitchen choked with cigarette fumes. She walked around to the backyard where Daddy was busy with his bees.  He had the hive torn apart and he was working the bellows on his smoker to calm the bees. Daddy was still wearing his plaid pajamas, but he had on his bonnet to protect his face. He always said he didn’t mind if he got stung on the hands, but he believed in protecting his face. Mama didn’t like him to work the bees on Sundays. He said it was his way of worshipping Nature, which was his God. Ivy figured a man who could look into a hive crawling with thousands of bees and not be afraid could also make up his mind not to fear hellfire. Daddy said to rob that sweet honey, he had to put every worry out of his mind. Bees could smell fear.

Ivy walked to the other side of the house and removed the hatch to the crawl space. She stepped down into the dark and musty air and moved across the mud on all fours until she came to Daddy’s stash of homebrew and behind that his stash of honey. Through the floorboards above her, she could hear the murmur of her Mama and Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina. She pulled a quart out of the box and then moved back to the rectangle of daylight. She stuck her head outside to make sure nobody was coming. With the jar of honey hidden inside her T-shirt, she stepped across the yard to the driveway and on down the gravel road until she came to the woods and the trail that led to the creek.

The current was running fast and high. The water splashed against her shins and soaked her jeans clear to her thighs. Kids from her neighborhood had claimed the creek as their own, but they hardly ever climbed this bank on the far side. Holding tight to the honey, she dug her free hand into red clay. She reached for an exposed root and pulled herself up and rolled over onto a carpet of brown leaves that crunched beneath her. These leaves belonged to Double Springs, a place she was strictly forbidden to go. She looked back across the water toward home, feeling like she had traveled through a wormhole to some distant part of the galaxy.

She didn’t have to walk far before she could see the backs of old houses, most of them needing a coat of paint as bad as hers. But there were a couple of brick homes and on top of the hill one two-story sparkling white with a veranda that wrapped all the way around and a million flowers in tended beds. On the bus, Barry had told her how his grandmama was obsessed with flowers. Ivy waded through broom straw until she came to the edge of the yard. Nearby, there was a fence with chickens inside. Up on the hill, all the windows in the house were dark, and she didn’t want to trespass.

She lay down in the soft broom straw that smelled so clean baking in the sun. Overhead, a jet plane crept tiny and slow, leaving two thin trails of vapor. To be so far away, the plane’s roar shook the heavens. It would be a day like this, a clear sky, when the Rapture came. Supposedly all she had to do to be saved was invite Jesus into her heart. She focused on the fleck of light way up there and thought about the spaceship in Barry’s book, what it would feel like to be trapped alone in outer space. She was just about to give up and walk home when she heard the rooster crow.

She rolled over onto her elbows and looked up from the broom straw. There was Barry, carrying a pail. Inside the fence, orange chickens pecked the dirt. Barry unlatched the gate, and the rooster crowed again, flapped its wings.

Ivy raised a hand to wave, but Barry didn’t see. He upended the pail, dumped scraps for the birds. The rooster charged him, and Barry jumped back and latched the gate. When he turned, Ivy saw the tie strung around his neck. His white collar looked starched, and his slacks were stylish and new. Church clothes. For the first time, she felt ashamed that she had stayed home today, ashamed of the mud on her knees. It was almost enough to make her sink down in the broom straw and hide. But there was the honey in her hand.

“Hola!” she shouted and stepped out of the field and across the yard. “Cómo estás?”

“Huh?” He looked as shocked to see her as she felt to be here.

“My daddy says if we all learn to talk like Mexicans, then maybe we can fool the boss into believing he already moved to Mexico, and the mill won’t close.” 

“Okay?” He laughed.

She passed him the honey and told him how she had tacked up the poster on the wall by her bed and how she planned to try the black light again tonight when it got dark enough. She asked if he had ever found any arrowheads down by the creek. She had two in her rock collection and plenty of rosy quartz. She could show him the best places to look.

He glanced over his shoulder toward the house. There on the veranda stood the sister in a white dress. A hundred feet away, and Ivy could feel her judgment.

“I’ll have to take a rain check,” he said. “We got family visiting.”

 ~

Back at the creek, she found a better place to cross, where the water was wide and shallow, with stones flat and dry. She didn’t see the man until she had crossed back over. He squatted in the water upstream. His hair and clothes were soaked. He dipped his hands into the water and brought them to his face. When he looked up, fear surged through her like an electric current. The man’s face was swollen with pink whelps that ran from his hairline down his jaw and neck. His lips and nose were lopsided. He looked like a monster, like a demon set loose from hell. The man stared hard at her. She wanted to run, to look away, but there was something familiar about him that scared her and that held her gaze, and then she recognized the plaid pattern of her daddy’s pajamas.

He explained that the bees had gotten into his bonnet and he had panicked. Then he’d bumped the bee box and the whole hive swarmed him. She dipped her hands into the creek and poured water onto his bald spot, covered in knots. The swollen scalp and the way his hands trembled made her ashamed she had stolen his honey. Corpses of bees eddied around him, and live ones crawled on the netting of the bonnet on shore. She stayed with him there at the creek until the light in the woods changed and he said he was ready to go home and face her mama. She reached a hand to help him up, and he turned his swollen face on her. His puffy eyes narrowed, and he stared at her like she was the stranger in the woods. In a tone of voice she had not heard in a long time, he asked her what she had been doing across the creek in Double Springs. Except he didn’t say Double Springs. He used the word he always used, the word everybody in her family and on her street used. The word she often heard at school and at church. A word she herself had sometimes used until only recently, when she had met Barry.

Ivy didn’t like to lie, but there was no way she could tell Daddy she had taken a quart of his honey to her friend in Double Springs. It was easier to say she was chasing a baby deer.

 ~

In the days to come, she and Barry would agree to meet by the creek, on his side. They hunted for quartz and skipped rocks on still water. They raced sticks at the stretch of rapids she called the racetrack. They stood together in the treehouse his granddaddy had built for him when Barry was still a child. She wondered if he might try to kiss her. She had never kissed a boy. She had spent a lot of years ashamed of wanting to be kissed, but now she told herself she was not ashamed, and whatever that said about her, she didn’t care. 

Every morning on the bus, Barry told her what was happening in his novel, which kept getting weirder and weirder. The spaceman had been transported to a far corner of the galaxy, where he had a vision of ancient civilizations populated by alien beings. Barry said one thing he was looking forward to about living out here in the country was learning the constellations.

“When you learn them,” she said, “maybe you’ll teach me.”

~ 

Ivy had grown up playing in the woods, and after she finished her homework, Mama didn’t mind her spending time down by the creek. No need to mention Barry. Daddy was still on second shift, so at supper, it was just her and Mama. One night, when the two of them fixed Ivy’s favorites, barbecued chicken and baked beans, Mama said she wanted Ivy to consider coming back to church. They had a new minister now, and she wanted Ivy to give him a try.

She shook her head, and when Mama pressed her case, Ivy dropped the half-eaten drumstick onto the plate and went to her room. She lay on her bed and thought about the new minister. She knew everything he would say without having to hear a single word. She turned on the black light and tried to relax in a purple room, concentrate on her poster of the ringed planet and its portal to an alternate universe. She tried to make the wormhole open and suck her through. But the doorway was shut. And, as she always did while lying in bed, she got to dividing everybody she knew into two groups, the wheat and the chaff, those who would be taken up with the Rapture and those who would be left behind with her while evil conquered and ruled a lonely planet. Seven years of Tribulation. Plagues. War. Daddy would be there, too. Neither of them had been saved. But Daddy was already so distant, so what help could he give her to resist the mark of the Beast?

 ~

Ivy saw the movie advertisement in the Gastonia Gazette and couldn’t wait to tell Barry. 2001: A Space Odyssey had been re-released and was playing at the Webb Theatre. She was speaking her fantasy. She would never have dreamed of asking either of her parents for a ride, even if Mama hadn’t already been moved back to second shift. 

“My sister can drive,” Barry said and, the next day, confirmed the date. Friday night. Ivy offered to meet him at his grandmama’s. It would be easier for her to walk through the woods, she said, than for his sister to have to find her house.

She arrived just before dusk, picking beggar’s lice from her jeans. It was clear in an instant his sister had not been expecting her. Barry tried to smooth things over. The sister shook her head.

“You said a friend. I thought you meant Boone or Jomo.”

“Well. You should have asked.”

Ivy did not get much out of the movie. From that opening scene with the apes and the bone they tossed into the air that turned into a spinning spaceship, she knew her mama would find the story somehow blasphemous. The movie was slow, not much action, but her mind was not on the movie. With his sister sitting on the other side, Barry reached out and took Ivy’s hand, their fingers slick with butter from the popcorn.

Back in Hailey Creek, Barry’s sister was not about to let Ivy walk through the woods, even with a flashlight. When they pulled into Ivy’s driveway, a fire in the backyard burn barrel was pumping out black smoke, chased by a whole galaxy of sparks. From the way it stank, plastic. Her daddy, who was supposed to be at work, came out onto the porch barefooted, without a shirt. He shouted her name and stepped down the cinder blocks. Backlit by the bare porch light, he marched directly toward the car.

~

The morning after the movie, she woke and rubbed her sore jaw where Daddy had smacked her. Mama made her leave her bedroom and come eat breakfast. Daddy woke early and went out to work his bees. He didn’t even glance in her direction. Mama was on her way to the mill. Ivy had never understood why Mama had to work Saturday mornings and Daddy didn’t.

Mee-Maw and Aunt Tina arrived and filled the kitchen with cigarette smoke. After Mama got home, Ivy left her bedroom to face their interrogation. The movie. Her friendship with Barry. Mee-Maw pulled a fine-toothed comb through her hair, checking for lice. Aunt Tina insisted that Ivy open herself to salvation.

“You need to get this done,” said Tina. “You’re very clearly beyond the age of accountability. I understand you might think it exciting to live dangerously—”

“She’s playing with fire,” said Mee-Maw.

“Like playing Russian roulette with her soul,” said Tina.

“You never know what tomorrow will bring,” said Mee-Maw.

“If not the Rapture,” said Tina, “then maybe a fatal car crash.”

“Your appendix could burst,” said Mee-Maw.

“You could contract some exotic, incurable illness,” said Tina.

“Maybe you already have it,” said Mee-Maw. “Some people are born with the thing that will kill them.”

“And then, like that,” Tina said, snapping her fingers, “your soul will be cast into hellfire for all of eternity.”

“Why risk it?” said Mee-Maw.

“She likes living dangerously.” Tina took the cigarettes from her purse and thumped them against her palm. She luxuriated in the ritual of lighting the cigarette and taking that long first drag.

 ~

The next morning was Sunday. Ivy woke while it was still dark. She turned on her bedside lamp and tried to read the novel she had borrowed from Barry. They both figured that after hearing him summarize, chapter by chapter, the entire space odyssey, it would be easier.  But the sentences still resisted her. The book made her feel defeated and dumb. She tossed it to the floor and flopped back on her bed. Still another two hours until it grew light. And then she would have to dress for church. She turned off the lamp and lay still, imagining herself the prisoner of a computer in a spaceship—in suspended animation.

When the bulb had cooled to her touch, she unscrewed it, then replaced it with the black light bulb she kept hidden in her dresser drawer. She removed the lamp shade so the purple light could fill the room. Stretched out on top of her quilt, she stared at the poster on the wall. It was a trick she kept practicing without success. Focus on the tiny pink cubes that made up the ringed planet. Blink and, presto, if the trick ever worked, Barry had explained that the planet was supposed to reveal the eyeball, which then transformed into a 3-D wormhole. Just relax her body, starting down at her toes and moving upward to her knees. Empty her mind. Breathe. When she got to her belly, she felt again the panic that had buzzed through her and that had filled the car, there with Barry in the backseat and his sister up front behind the wheel, when Daddy had stepped out onto the porch and shouted her name. She could not stop smelling the hot smoke from the burn barrel or stop seeing the way Barry’s sister had stared into the back seat, signaling for her to get out. And Barry, how while Daddy moved through the dark, shouting obscenities, hunched forward and carrying what might only have been a rolled-up newspaper, Barry had tried to smile but could not hide the fear on his face. Maybe everything her family said was true, that hell was a real place. Pain and punishment beyond her wildest imagination.

But this morning, she was still free to create the world she wanted to inhabit. Long, slow breaths. She set the lamp on the bed and held it between her knees so that the purple light bathed the poster and the pinks popped from the wall. She stared at that planet and blinked. Stared and blinked again. She could keep doing this as long as it took. Her eyes found the rhythm until she forgot where she was and found herself empty, floating in a trance. And then, blink, yes! There it was! Not a planet but an eyeball, the pupil dilating until it became a wormhole through space, a door to another dimension. And then the door opened and out stepped Barry wearing a shiny blue spaceman suit. His shoes flashed in the light of an alien sun. He paced back and forth across some cratered surface, sliding his feet like he did when they waded the creek and came to the stretch of flat rock covered in slick algae. He held out a hand and fixed her with an unwavering gaze, waiting. All she had to do was take his hand and step through that doorway. But understand, once it closed behind them, there was no coming back to Earth.

Faster

What if you were the boy
who gave me his gym shorts all those years ago

that time my best friend wanted to go skinny dipping
with a bunch of strange guys from a band

and i said are you crazy?
and we jumped in the black 

Atlantic fully dressed
and later, watching us drip

head to toe across his (your?) pale 
linoleum, offered to throw

our clothes in the dryer while we listened 
to (his?) your unplugged version of Kryptonite

that still plucks goosebumps when 
it comes up in my running playlist

// what if your grin 
is a secret handshake remembering 

the hungry tone of those
apartment walls & the comforting

smell of the dryer 
underneath the pulse

of the drums // what if 
the cling of my ocean-soaked dress

sometimes 
wakes you up at night— 

what if you grew up, too, with a fist 
full of regrets only answerable

in the next mile, the next doubtful
song you fall in love with?

Another Evening Lowdown

Dangling between
         Mom and Dad,
a ripe fig ready to drop,
         we walked
from ride to ride
         at Clementon Park:

Tea Cups, the Tile-a-whirl—
         roller coaster snaking
toward blue blank space.
         From fear to joy
and back. What else
         to know but this?

Ars Poetica

Black pepper lathered
into brisket, lines like bark—
charred, hickory ripe.

Buffalo Plaid

Lucy stubbed out her cigarette on a bench near the portico of the Douglas Memorial emergency room. They wouldn’t think to look for her here. Then she marched to the main entrance and rode to the third floor. The hallway smelled of something strange, maybe sick people. She buried her nose in the day-old bouquet. The florist had given her a break on the price. She thought of last week and the perfume that hung so heavy in the funeral home. She suspected that it covered the smell of dead bodies in the basement. Half of Atwater, which was nearby and not much of a town, had come to church to pay their respects to her mama. Half the men had probably fucked her. Lucy wondered if the funeral guys had left her mama’s heart inside, at least the pieces. That’s what the Egyptians did, she was pretty sure. She thought the Vikings had it right. She was sure there was still some part of her mama they hadn’t buried, something in the house.

She wore the same dress they had given her for the funeral. Maybe it was bad luck to wear it when you visit someone in the hospital. The overheads bathed the hallway in soft light. While everyone spoke in hushed voices, her sneakers kept squawking on the vinyl floor. A man in baby-blue scrubs told her that Mr. Hutchinson was expecting her. He took the bouquet and observed that her backpack looked mighty heavy. She shrugged it away from him. He directed her to Hutchinson’s room. She glanced back and found him staring at her. 

She leaned into the room. A picture of some water lilies hung on the wall. The Cubs were playing somebody on the silent TV. A reading lamp recoiled on its hinge. Hutchinson’s eyes were open. Bandages swaddled much of his head. His right leg and left arm were cased in fiberglass and pulled taut by weights hung from pulleys on a metal frame over the bed. Lucy cleared her throat. She caught the flicker of his near eye. 

“So you’re Janey Walker’s kid,” he said. “Come over here.”

She did, slowly. 

He was sweating. The left side of his face below the eye had caved into a purple hollow. 

“Not much to look at, huh?” His smile dragged the rest of his face with it. 

Her eyes hurt. Her mama had left him lying in a ditch. She put her hand to his cheek. 

He grabbed her wrist with his good hand, hard enough to make her gasp. 

“Don’t do that.” He released her. “They’ll build me a new face when they get around to it.”

“Course they will.” She smiled and nodded.

“I can do without the powdered sugar, thanks. And do your crying somewheres else.” 

She turned her face. 

“Look at you,” he said. “You’re a mess. There’s Kleenex on that table.”

“I’m just sorry what my mama did.” She blew her nose. She focused on her feet and the fading blue diamonds in the floor.

“And that jacket. Thing’s bigger than you are. Anybody tell you it’s still summer?”

“It’s my daddy’s,” she said, pulling it tight. It was red and black, and she wore it all the time.

His voice softened. “How you doing?” 

“Better than you.” She cleared her throat. How did he pee and poop?

“Maybe not,” he said. “When I get out of here, I’ll still have a mama.”

Neither spoke for a while.

“I’m sorry what happened,” Lucy said again.

“I don’t recall you driving,” he said. “Matter of fact, I don’t recall much. I know I bought a chicken from Paul Krieger.” His eyes grew blank. “I guess I didn’t look both ways before crossing.” He grinned and jerked a little. “Can’t laugh much.” His smile faded. “Crawled quite a ways to get back to the road. Your mama must’ve put her foot down.”

“She was upset. She didn’t get a job.”

“I would’ve gladly gave her mine,” he said. He stayed quiet awhile. “I think I worked with your daddy once.” Hutchinson eyed her. “He with the Park Service?”

“Was,” she said. “Been gone a year.” This guy knew more than he let on, she thought.

“Oh? Where to?”

“California. He’s gonna send for us when he gets settled.” 

“Taking his time, is he?” 

“I’m going to find him.”

“What if he doesn’t want to be—”

“—I’ll find him.”

Her daddy’s hair was so blond it looked white in the summer. He was built wide and strong. Head came right out of his shoulders. When she was little, he would pick her up and balance her butt on his hand. He’d walk around with her, all frantic like she was a wobbly stack of plates. “Whoa!” he would say, and he’d stagger around the house like it was all he could do to keep her from falling on her head. “Whoa!”  Of course, he never dropped her. Except this once.

Hutchinson stared at her. “You on your own?”

Lucy glanced at her backpack. “I guess. They put me in a home, but it’s not a home home.”

Hutchinson angled his body toward her with a grunt. “I am sorry about your mama. Folks say she was right on the edge. Must be hell on you.”

She nodded. Hell would be a nice place.

The room grew quiet again. Hutchinson’s head gradually sank forward. His nostrils flared and his forehead shone with sweat. He pushed a button, and a nurse appeared with a needle. His head gradually nested back in the pillow. He closed his eyes for a time. “I’ll be a junkie by the time I get out of here.” He could chuckle now. “Glad it’s the end of the season.”

The attendant appeared with Lucy’s bouquet in a plastic vase. He smiled at her. She pulled the jacket tight.

“Why, thank you,” said Hutchinson.

She nodded. They were the only flowers in the room. She leaned forward a little, widened her eyes, and dropped her jaw just enough to part her lips.

“You carry a gun?” 

He frowned. “What kind of question is that?” 

She shrugged.

“Not when I’m leading a bunch of day-trippers on a nature hike. But I sure do when I’m on patrol.” 

She asked how come. 

“Let’s say you was running a trap line in the Park, maybe doing some shooting too and making good money at it, and I catch you with your side-by-side and a bag of birds again. Now you’re looking at hard time. What would you do? Reach for the sky or leave me in the mud somewheres?” He cocked his head. “Why?”

She didn’t know the why of it yet. “Can I come back and see you some more?”

“Hell,” he said. “I’m not going anywhere.”

“You going to come out of this all right?”

“So they say. Might not look as handsome. Once my guts start up and the bones grow together, they’ll move me to some place, teach me how to walk. Sounds like fun.” He eased himself to look at her square. “You’re good to talk to. Kind of sharp. Come back any time.”

She sat on the bench again and watched them unload an ambulance. Everybody looked so serious. A cigarette hung from her lips while she searched for a match. She scratched it with her thumbnail, something her daddy taught her when she was eleven. She smiled. Never got tired of lighting his cigarettes. It was easy to steal smokes because the two of them were always so involved. She remembered the old daydream where they caught her smoking and spanked her and lectured her about the dangers of tobacco and took away her library privileges. She liked the spanking and lecturing parts, but not the library part.

She checked her watch. Minnie’s hand was on four. She rode to the third floor.

Hutchinson looked at her out the corner of his eye. “When I said come back any time, I didn’t mean all the time.”

“I won’t come back,” she said. She spat a shred of tobacco off the tip of her tongue. “Can I ask you some more?”

Hutchinson glanced at the pack. “Shoot.”

She blinked. “You know where my daddy is?”

“Girl, I hardly knew the man. It was years ago.” He ran his hand across his forehead.

“There is something you can tell me about him.” She looked him in the eye. “Tell me.” 

He presented the show side of his face. “I doubt you’d want to know.”

“Go on.”

“I never could understand it. He wasn’t good-looking.”

It stung. She nodded with a smile of pity.

“And to tell you the truth, on the job he was more show than go.” Hutchinson was feeling her out, she thought, trying to figure what she could take. “I picked up a lot of his slack. Quite the ladies’ man, if you know what I mean.” He was still searching. “Do you know what I mean?” 

She sighed. “I’m almost fifteen.”

She would curl up under the covers while they screamed at each other because he couldn’t keep his dick in his pants and she was sucking the life out of him and it was her house so he could just leave don’t leave and things would break. It would end in tears and whispers, then soft laughter like they were in cahoots. She could close her eyes when the bed springs started to creak. 

“He’d take a group out on a nature walk, find some girl he liked, and that’d be the last I’d see of him. One day he plain didn’t show up. I can’t say as I missed him.” 

She pulled up some brass and gave him a grin. “I’ll say one thing for him—he sure knows how to disappear.” Then she cleared her throat. She widened her eyes again. 

“How much does a park ranger make?” 

He smiled. “You from the IRS?”

“You make enough to raise kids and all?”

He nodded. His smile went away. “I’d be obliged if they keep paying me.”

She glanced at his ring. “You got kids?”

He hesitated, too long she thought, then said, “No.”

“You ever meet my mama?”

“Not too long ago, they tell me.”

She put on her puzzled look.

“I met her once,” he said. “A real looker. You take after her—looks, I mean.” He squinted. “But you don’t spend much time dolling yourself up.” 

She stiffened. 

His eyes wandered off. “She was kind of loose put together.” 

Her mama had large ice-blue eyes and caramel-colored hair cut short as a farm boy’s. She wore a pink tube top under her jean jacket and white polyester shorts tight enough to follow her creases. She often smelled of sex, more so between jobs, and she had trouble with jobs.

“My daddy left his gun. Why do you suppose he’d do that?”

Hutchinson hesitated. “I’m sure I don’t know. Protection?”

“From poachers.” She stood up. “My mama’s loose put together. So, he takes off and forgets his gun? How stupid is that?”

Her mama had brought a stranger home one night, both of them drunk. Lucy sat with her back braced against her bedroom door, hearing them grunt, then finally crawled into bed when it got quiet. She awoke to find her mama gone and the stranger still there, naked save for her mama’s nightie, scraping his teeth with a fingernail. He smiled and crooked his finger. She pointed her daddy’s gun at him, wobbling in both hands, and when he came at her, she closed her eyes and squeezed. It hurt her ears something terrible. When she opened her eyes, the stranger had vanished. Poof! She found a hole in the ceiling over the kitchen sink. Her mama wouldn’t notice. She pulled the spent shell from the cylinder and replaced it with a new one from the box. Then she fit the casing carefully into the space where the cartridge had been. Her teeth chattered even though it was plenty hot out. She pawed through the closet and found her daddy’s old jacket. Then she wore it to the beach.

Hutchinson was eyeing her backpack. “What all’s in there?”

“Everything.”

“You’re set to go, aren’t you?”

“You going to call them on me?”

“I don’t know who ‘them’ is.” He raised the eyebrow on his good side and lowered his voice just above a whisper. “Why on earth do you want to find that man?”

“He’s alive, isn’t he?”

“Darlin’, he threw you away.” Hutchinson coughed carefully. “Go on back to that home. Stay a few weeks, see what you think. You can run later.” He was sweating again. “You got brains. You read everything you can get hold of. You got looks. Get on with it.”  

“Don’t call me darling,” she said, “I’m not your darling. I’m not anybody’s darling.” She slung the pack over her shoulder. Then she caught herself. “How do you know what I read?”

Hutchinson hit the nurse button like it was a telegraph key.

“You were fucking my mama.” Tears came to her at the worst times.

He opened his mouth, but said nothing.

“You look like a stupid person.”

“It was a long time ago,” he said. "I wasn’t married.”

She slipped past the nurse and heard him say, “I’m not like him.”

~

Hitching to her house, Lucy passed on the first two rides. Then a big woman in overalls picked her up.

“You on the run?”

She shook her head.

“I don’t care, really. I ran away when I was your age. How old are you?”

She said nothing.

“All right,” the woman said. “I don’t need to know. Your folks mean to you?”

“They’re dead.”

“Yeah? I ran a couple of times. They didn’t call the cops, nothing. That cured me.” She laughed. The woman glanced at her. “What’s your name, Hon?”

“Mary.”

“Mary what?”

“Gonzales.” 

The woman let her off where a gravel road climbed the woods to the house. She hadn’t seen it since the day they pulled her out of Algebra to tell her that her mama had fallen ill. Her grandpa had built the house when her mama was a little girl. Why he had built it so far from anywhere, her mama couldn’t say.

The sun had set, and the katydids were revving up. The air was thick. It could rain. She tossed the dress into the bushes and pulled on her jeans. As she walked on, the night chorus grew so loud she couldn’t hear her own footsteps.

A couple weeks ago, her mama had pounded on the front door as though it were locked and said the bastard who promised her a job gave it to some cunt he hardly knew and after she had given him everything. Lucy ushered her to the couch, crooning that everything would be all right. She held her mama to her breast, whispering “Poor Mama,” and stroked her head. Then she pulled her up and walked her to the bedroom where she helped her into her nightie. She tapped out the pill, set it on the tip of her mama’s tongue, and handed her the glass of water. Then she tucked her in. Her mama raised her head. “He’s gone,” she said in the darkness. “I can’t do it anymore.” Lucy mouthed the words along with her. “No father, no mother, no brother, no sister, not even a goddamned cousin. I’m alone.” She kissed her, lifted a couple of cigarettes from her purse, and closed the door. 

Now she wondered, had she listened to her mama instead of making fun of her, if she might still be alive.

The insect noise stopped when she shut the door behind her. She toggled the switch and found the electricity had been turned off again. Whenever the power company turned off their lights, her daddy would play “Haunted House.” He would hide in the darkness—how could a man big as that hide in a house so small?—and when she drew near enough, he would scream “Ghost!” It wasn’t much fun, and she always had to change her underpants. 

She groped for the flashlight under the sink, then checked out the livingroom and kitchen. No ghosts. On the counter sat the last stack of books from the Douglas Public Library. “Lucy’s List.” She swallowed. No matter what shitstorm raged through the house, her mama delivered the books. They were overdue. She ground a knuckle in her eye.

She stood at the door to her mother’s room. She had read you shouldn’t hyperventilate because it only makes things worse. Her lips were growing numb. Ghost. She turned the knob, then lost her nerve and released it. She focused on the patterns in the raw plywood walls, fragments of wood exploding in every direction, frozen like fossils. She shut her eyes and leaned against the door, which gave way. Ghost. She screamed and sprawled into the room, the flashlight rolling before her, lighting up the clumps of dust under her mama's rumpled bed. She pounced on the light and swept the room, but found nothing to be afraid of. 

She gathered the top sheet, lifted it with a snap, and sent it billowing over the mattress. She tucked it in, and covered it with the rose chenille spread, leaving enough slack to fold under the pillow. With both hands, she brushed the bedspread so that the ribbing ran straight from the foot of the bed to the pillow. There.

Then she stared across the hallway at the door to her room. Soon she was panting again but barged in as though it were the last thing in the world that would ever frighten her. The door banged against the wall and swung back toward her. She trained her light on the floor, the ceiling, the walls. The bed.

It was a coagulated pool, as though someone had poured it from a pitcher, dull like dried paint. She sat next to it and folded her hands in her lap. Then she leaned over and sniffed cautiously. It had no smell. She spread her fingers and, as though unsure if a fry pan was still hot, settled her hand on it. In a while, out of some distant curiosity, she began to pick at it until she broke loose a crumb. She tumbled it between her thumb and forefinger. Then she placed it on the tip of her tongue. It tasted of rust and salt. She began to rock, holding it in her mouth until it disintegrated. When she swallowed, everything slowed and she felt awfully tired. She curled on her side—just for a minute, she told herself. 

She awoke hungry. The moon had set and the flashlight beam had faded to yellow. She opened the nightstand drawer to retrieve a half pack of cigarettes, then wandered through the darkness to the kitchen. She opened the refrigerator from which rolled a stink that made her gag. She could make out a carton of milk bulging like an ominous football and slammed the door. She cranked open the faucet, but they had turned off the water as well. 

In the cupboard above the sink, she found a dented can of stew, which she opened and wolfed down while she stood. Then she sat on the couch—"Poor Mama”—and cleaned the SpaghettiOs out of a can that was dented as well. They were always dented or their labels torn or the sell-by had passed. Fake Newtons washed down with Flavor Aid. Days-old bread and Velveeta with a rind. Bologna and bologna and bologna. The food at that home was pretty good. So was the lunch program at school until somebody ratted on her daddy for having a job. It was a good job even if he didn’t do a good job. They had the money. She struck a match. No, he had the money. She stared at the flame, then blew it out. “Taking his time, is he?” She bashed the empty can against her forehead and wandered back to her room. 

Her mama put up with anything so long as he didn’t leave. That crybaby. “Loose put together.” That smell. She glanced over her shoulder. “Lucy’s List.” She laid her head on the crusted sheets and cried without a sound, as though the two of them were still brawling in the next room. Then she gathered the bedding into a bundle and set it against the floorboard in the hall.

She heard a distant rumble and wrapped the books in her mother’s old rain shell, tying the sleeves into a grip, and carried them across the road. She hunted in the weeds for the gas can they kept out back and lugged it into the house where she emptied it on the last part of her mother. Then she struck a match and tossed it. That’s what the Vikings did, she was pretty sure. It flickered out. She stepped closer and struck another. It had barely left her fingers when a flash and whump knocked her down. She scrambled out of the house on her hands and knees and sprinted across the road, skidding and falling, running her fingers over her face and hair, patting herself frantically. 

A glow within the house grew brighter until it blazed brilliant yellow, and the flames and black smoke blew out the windows and ate the siding to the roof. Then, above the flashover’s roar, she heard her father’s bullets cook off like popcorn. She stood and brought her hand to her throat. He had given her mama the gun. Maybe he even showed her how to use it. The uprights gave way and the roof collapsed. 

Lucy drifted around the edges of the fire, occasionally startled by a raindrop the size of a dime. The flames cooled to embers that flickered and cracked in the gray dawn. 

She slipped a cigarette into her mouth and patted her pockets for a match, then realized that her pack had gone up with the house. As her shoulders fell, her daddy’s jacket slid to the ground. She slung it into the wreckage where it melted and caught fire. 

Lightning crashed close enough to drop her to her knees. She hung her head and listened to the random puffs of steam that rose from the rubble. Then the rain came hard, and she closed her eyes and lifted her face. She heard a siren in the distance. 

From the Collected Poems of Kermit the Frog

Once there were stars,
strings to dangle them,
an unseen hand disappearing
into the moon’s waxing
ass. It’s all hanged,
you see. My tongue
no longer flicks to the quick
of your hearts. You,
who once flocked weekly
to my swamp, come
no more. I rage
to no one,
not even dear Piggy,
who karate chopped me
so often
with her love.
Oh, these piggy thoughts.
I never laid
my stuffing bare to her. So many
canceled seasons ago,
we lay watching birds
out a window—not
the Sam and Betsy sort,
but ones with
bona fides.
I’m talking plover, cardinal,
and wren—sky-glazed
and singing, but Big Apple
bustle gobbled
them up. I almost
told her I wanted
to spring
into water, plunge to find
bottom, maybe a tadpole
or two. Now this pond resembles
what the mind wants
heaven to be—not a simple
infinity but a closet
that stores all we’ve missed until
it’s needed. Piggy,
wherever you are, does
a hot spotlight still warm
your loneliness? Are you also
haunted by capers lost?  
And have you heard about
poor Nanny, left to a single
paragraph
on the back page of a paper
no one reads anymore? All I can
remember of her now is a song
whispered from a doorway
just before I sink
into dreams.

Afterlight

When the telephone rang later than usual, Nora thought it would be her son, Charley. He’d forgotten to take home the extra pizza when he left earlier. Maybe he’d want to come by for it after he finished jogging.

Nora’s husband, Paul, listened to the caller with a blank expression, then let the receiver slide through his fingers and drop to the base with a clack. “I have to go to the police station. Someone was found—a jogger—on the road near Charley’s cottage. Of course, it’s not Charley.” He reached for his corduroy jacket. He slid his arm into one sleeve, but the other arm got caught up and hung halfway. Nora pulled it the rest of the way for him. Paul patted his pocket where the phone was, but he did not call Charley.

“I’m going with you,” Nora said. She got her coat. Paul waited while she buttoned it.

The sheriff had been waiting and asked them to go downstairs to make an identification.

“Downstairs?” Nora asked.

“You stay here. I won’t be long.” Paul cleared his throat, the way he does when thinking things over. But she saw the fear in his eyes, the centers dark like exoplanets.

 When Paul came back, he shook his head. “It’s him. It was Charley.” He stared at the tile beneath them as if looking into a bottomless pit. “Let’s go home. Someone will call tomorrow to make arrangements.”

But when they arrived home, everything in the house seemed off-kilter—the floor slanted, the walls leaned in. Nora listened for the jiggle of bottles when Charley opened the refrigerator for water, for the thump of his car hitting a bump while pulling out of the driveway. These sounds seemed more possible than the reality that Charley was dead.

She heard Paul brushing his teeth. The bureau drawer squeaked as he opened it for his pajamas. Paul was preparing to go to bed, like any other night.

 Weren’t they going to talk about this? Didn’t his nose feel smacked into—like bumping up against a wall—as he faced the reality head-on? What did he imagine she would do with her grief? Didn’t his heart seize up? What would she do with her grief?

Nora didn’t understand. Paul was processing this occurrence as calmly as if he were viewing one of the faraway galaxies on his telescope. Why didn’t he tell her how he felt, deep and close, like when stepping into one of Charley’s bear hugs?

 If Paul wasn’t going to talk about it, then she wouldn’t either. Nora found herself thinking that, in fact, maybe the accident had not really happened at all. She put the leftover pizza, still on the counter, into the refrigerator.

On the third day, the sheriff’s office called to say that they were ready to release Charley’s personal effects. Nora went to pick them up. She could not wait until Paul returned from work to bring them home.

She received a plastic bag filled with Charley’s billfold and his clothes, no flashlight. His tennis shoes stacked on top. Nora saw dark streaks in the terry cloth fabric at the bridge of one shoe. She touched one of the blood spots through the plastic.

She took the shoes into the laundry room, poured out measurements of soap and bleach and softener, numbly taking each from their places on the shelf. When she submerged the shoes, the dried blood unraveled tiny red ribbons in the water.

 Paul stopped reading his journal and came in to find her loading the wet shoes into the dryer. “Why are you doing this?”

“I have to.”

“Impact with that much force will break the belt,” Paul said. “You’d better turn it off.”

“I want to wait until they are dry.”

“He’s not going to wear them again. You know that, don’t you?”

“Of course, I know that. What a heartless thing to say.”

They were silent, standing face-to-face, locked in a motionless dance to the beat of the rubber soles hitting the drum. They were alone with each other, and each one alone.

Paul turned away. “You should come to bed,” he said, his voice trailing off as he went toward the stairs.

Nora sat down on the floor, let the banging continue on and on into the night. She listened to the sound of the rubber tennis shoes hitting the metal wall of the dryer. Bouncing in a closed place. The repetition lulled her, a clanging thud with every turn, two thuds, actually, because each shoe banged separately from the other. The repetitive bumping of the shoes was in fact soothing, the one predictable thing left.

When she finally did turn off the dryer, the silence in the house made her throat close against her need to scream. She looked out the back window, the yard dark now, and thought of Paul and Charley three days ago, near dusk, cutting the last of the wood from the fallen branches. Charley had come inside to eat pizza with them. He was excited, talking about his plans to return—again this summer—to the Pine Ridge Reservation. He asked if he could bring a stray cat he’d been feeding over to stay while he was gone. Had she hesitated too much in answering yes? Nora wanted to go back to that dusk, the cutting of the wood, the pizza, Paul walking out to the car with Charley. She wanted to start everything over.

Nora had trouble falling asleep when she went to bed. When at last she did doze off, she dreamed the same dream as the previous two nights. It was Charley—she was with him at the base of Brass Town Bald. He came toward her on the stone bed of the access road, a crunching sound. Against the night, the angles of the piled gravel looked like shards of broken tombstones. Charley bid her to follow, but before she could move, she woke.

She sat up, swung her legs around, and planted her feet on the floor beside the bed.

Her movement roused Paul. The bed creaked as he turned. “Can’t sleep?” he asked. “Again?”

“I’d like to go back into my dream,” she said.

“You never can go back into a dream, Nora.” Paul reached out to touch her shoulder, but she pulled away. “You know that, don’t you?”

Nora rose and went into the guest room, opened the window to look out at the stars, but the sky was overcast. Nora listened for the raspy rhythm of a blade sawing wood, for the thunk of a sectioned trunk hitting the ground. She wished she could still smell sawdust in the air.

Nora turned on the light and opened the closet door, pulled out boxes that contained Charley’s possessions she had kept even after he’d moved away. She took out a beaded medallion from camp, a pine box car he and Paul made, a baseball glove from grade school. The inside of the glove felt snug and soft when she put it on her hand and held it out as though ready to catch something. 

~

Nora went looking for the stray cat by Charley’s cottage but never found it. She stopped trying once the “for sale” sign was removed. She could not bear to see someone else living there. Nora gave up her volunteer work at the hospital. She stayed home, cooking more food than they would ever eat and cleaning the house more than was necessary. One day looked very much like the next.

Near the end of the summer, Paul told Nora he was planning a trip to Brass Town Bald to set up his telescope. “It’s the best month to see the third closest spiral galaxy. Remember—we went with Charley last year.”

Nora said she would go with him even though the place he proposed was so far away that they would not return until after midnight. She did not tell him that each night, she went to sleep with the hope that Charley would appear in her dreams. She felt uneasy about being away from home in case Charley came looking for her. 

~

Nora helped carry the heavy tripod to the set-up spot in the deserted parking lot of Brass Town Bald.

Then she held down the styrofoam packing, which screeched as Paul lifted the telescope out. He seated it onto the tripod.

Last year, Charley had tried to persuade Paul to drive up the service road to set up on the observation platform on top of the mountain. But Paul preferred the convenience of unloading in the parking lot.

“The view would be worth the extra trouble. You can see four states,” Charley argued.

“Not at night you can’t.” Paul always found a reason to be right.

Paul angled the scope to the eastern sky. Tonight—like last year—Paul would look in the Triangular Galaxy. “Why did you want to come tonight—on this night in particular?” Nora asked. It had been a year ago, minus one day, that they had come here with Charley.

“The alignment. With a binary star, the orbit has to be just right to see two instead of one.” Paul’s field was stellar astronomy, and Nora knew he’d been observing this specific star for many years.

Paul put his hands on his hips, frowning at the clouds passing in the sky. “Last year was better,” he said.

Of course it was better. Last year we were here with Charley, Nora wanted to say. But Paul would not talk about that. He never would talk about Charley.

Paul looked into the finder trying to bring the galaxy into range. “My star’s there somewhere.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ll find it.”

“You devote a lot of time to finding something that may not even be there,” Nora said.

“We can still learn. Everything we learn about the universe we are learning about ourselves.”

“You sound like you’re lecturing one of your classes,” Nora said.

“You shouldn’t have come if you didn’t want to,” said Paul.

“No, I think it’s good if we do things like this together. We must try harder to do that,” Nora said. She knelt beside the light of the Coleman lantern to untangle the drawstring of the homemade felt bag that held the eyepiece.

Nora heard the whine of the motorized apparatus that synchronized the movement of the scope with the earth’s rotation. Years ago, he’d needed her to help. Now he used a computer program to get a fix on the star.

Paul attached the eyepiece, leaned close to turn the focus knob and sharpen the resolution. He would be completely absorbed in his efforts now, the same as he had been last year. That’s what had given Nora and Charley the chance to climb to the observation deck of the mountain.

 Now Nora regretted that she had decided to come back to this place with Paul. She shivered in the night air. She told Paul she was going to the car to get her jacket. But she walked past the car and went beyond where it was parked. She did not know where she was headed in this world thrown off its axis.

 From the wooded area, Nora heard the call of a night bird. This call—a rapidly repeated single note broken by the entreaty “come-with-meeeeeeee”—was the same as she and Charley heard last year. Nora stopped and looked back. Paul was a street block away. She saw his shape, dark against the sky now that he had extinguished the lantern light. He sat on a small, fold-up stool, leaning into the eyepiece.

Nora heard a twig snap. She heard Charley before she saw him.

“Ah, here you are,” he’d say. A shadow. He was standing in it.

She held her breath. Was this the part of the dream where he would disappear? She reached out to touch his arm. But he had already turned to start the trail.

“Remember the shortcut?” Charley’s raven-black hair was longer now than in the beginning of the summer. He always let it grow to his shoulders when he taught at the reservation.

“It’s only a half mile. But straight up,” he reminded her, ducking under the first branch.

The path was steep. Nora felt like her thighs were gripped in a vise. Was she more out of shape now having given up going to Tai Chi? Nora heard her own labored breathing. The night bird had stopped singing. There was no chirp of crickets, no rustle of a creature deep in the woods.

But soon she heard Charley whistling. He had learned to do that from Paul, through his teeth not his lips. Nora thought of Paul, alone, looking at his faraway galaxy. Did he realize yet that she was gone?

Nora’s feet were heavy and the toe of one shoe scraped the ground. She looked ahead.

Charley carried a flashlight that lit the trail. She followed the beam as it burrowed into the darkness.

Nora wiped the prickly sweat on her forehead with the tip of a paisley bandana she took from around her neck. Bushes at the side seemed dense and flowed like thick velvet curtains across a stage. “I think I see flowers,” Nora said, making out cream-colored appliqués sewn into the night tapestry.

The flowers were Silberlich, “silverlight.” She knew the species. The blossoms—cup-shaped with stiff, waxy petals—would bloom for a long time. Nora ran her finger over an unopened bud, expecting to feel tiny ridges like on the sugar stars with which she decorated birthday cakes. But, instead, what she touched felt like air.

“There it is,” Charley said, aiming the light beam on the bare plateau ahead. “The ‘bald’—did I ever tell you the story?” They stepped from the dirt trail up onto the rock.

“There were so many stories,” Nora said. “Tell me again.”

“I heard this from a Cherokee guy I met, the summer I rewalked the Trail of Tears.”

Nora felt a breeze—more detectable now without the buffer of trees around them. She wished she had brought her jacket from the car.

“Folklore has it that heinous winged beasts—with pointy scales and sharp-toothed mouths—swooped down from the treetops here and gobbled up all the small children.”

Nora felt fearful to be so out in the open. “That’s a terrible story,” she said. “The stories I made up for you as a child had happier endings.”

“So does this. Medicine men summoned good spirits to kill the beasts with fiery thunderbolts. The tribes were so grateful,” Charley continued, “that they vowed to keep this land clear of trees forever.”

“But how could the Cherokee keep that promise? Weren’t they rounded up and forced West?”

“Well, look around.” Charley swept his arm across the bare terrain. “Do you see? One single tree?”

“You got me there,” Nora answered with a ripple of laughter.

When they reached the other side of the plateau, Charley leaped from the rock and helped ease her down. “We’ve arrived.” He crossed the paved path that led to the stone stairway up to the first level of the observatory.

Charley did not hesitate. He climbed straightaway to the first level of a darkened visitor center with fixtures for bolting down telescopes. It was hard for Nora to keep up. Tall and lean like Paul’s side of the family, her long-legged son took one step for each two of hers, even up the dark and narrow steps to the second level—the observation platform and the fire tower.

Nora felt her pulse throb against her fingertips as she made fists, bent forward to gather strength for the final mount. Charley hurried so much that Nora felt alarmed. To her, he seemed reckless—hurrying ahead in this desolate place without worrying if a plank were loose or considering that a fugitive might be hiding out around the corner at the top. Although she felt it was dangerous, she followed him. She would follow as long as she could.

Charley stood at the second landing waiting for her with his arms folded behind him, expectant as though ready to watch her open a present.

Taking a final step onto the deck, she felt she was floating on a wave of starlight, winking overhead, and stretching to the four horizons. And below, throughout the rise and fall of mountain ranges, were more tiny patches of light. Signs of life glowed in white wisps like the Queen Anne’s Lace that grew wild in fields near Charley’s cottage.

“I feel like I am so high up that I’m part of your dad’s sky. I wish he had come.”

“Me too. Let’s see if we can find him. He may be closer than you think.” Charley walked the circular deck until they could see the parking lot—the size of a game board, a bare recessed swath cut into the forest.

“I’m going to signal Dad. Maybe he’ll see us.” He leaned over the rail and shined the light down so it flashed on the tops of trees.

 “The beam won’t carry that far,” Nora said. She knew there was no line of sight to where they stood.

“You never know what’s going to reach someone.” Charley jiggled the light. “Like the shy students I helped at the reservation with remedial math.”

Yes, he was going to tell her another story.

“At first I got no response—the kids are so afraid that they might give the wrong answer. But I noticed that some students had one hand on their desk. So I asked what’s 2 plus 3. ‘That’s right,’ I told them. ‘Five fingers. Five.’ Next thing I knew, students with both hands up pulled one hand off. They wanted to have the right answer too.”

Charley grinned at her triumphantly, shined the light back to glow on his face. “And greatest of all—one kid unclamped the hands folded in his lap and put one hand out on the desk—he wanted to show me the right answer too.”

He then turned the flashlight around so that it splashed on the foliage below like paint poured from a tilted can.

“No, your father won’t see that,” Nora said. “The only thing visible from down there is the top of the tower,” she added, pointing up.

Charley redirected the flashlight so that the beam scampered across the planks and up the clapboard sides of the firetower. The tall windows reflected the light in beacon-like streams.              “Maybe he’ll see this,” Charley said. “I want him to know I’m thinking about him. If he misses it, you tell him. You tell him for me.”

“Is that the reason you’ve come? For your father?” Nora asked.

Charley tilted his head to a lopsided angle and smiled broadly as he walked closer to her. She smelled the familiar acetic scent of his warm body, the same as when he was a boy. Overheated from playing in the summer sun, he would run to her for relief. She wanted to lift a loose strand of hair out of his eye, tuck it behind his outward-slanting ear.

Nora looked down at her fingers, curving as though sand was slipping through them. “Don’t leave.” Nora wasn’t sure if she said it out loud or only in her mind. “Stay longer. You could wait. We could make a deal for you to stay—it could be our very own agreement, between you and me.”

“But we can’t leave out Dad,” Charley said. He paused, maybe to give her time to take in what he had said. “And you know I have to go.”

Charley backed away slowly, looking up at the sky with resignation. His broad shoulders, long legs, lean-forward stance—they all wavered in the light and shadows. He turned. The sole of one shoe creaked and became fainter with each step as he faded into the night’s veil. The beam of his flashlight went black.

Sooner than she wanted, Charley was gone. Gone again. Could she have stopped him? No, she realized that she could not, despite her longing. She might as well have believed the truth of the stories she had told him as a child—how the moon would come and sit in his palm with a warm glow or that one of Paul’s galaxies would sail by and sprinkle a million stars in their hair.

A cold draft blew so hard that Nora had trouble standing. The blustery wind brought her a brutal declaration—no deal. It was the universe taunting her. You are foolish to think you could make a deal. She knew she would not see Charley again.

Clouds covered the moon, and the night became so dark that Nora could hardly see where she was going, could barely see one step in front of the other. She held tightly to the railing and carefully walked down the two flights of stairs to the paved passage below the observatory.

She crossed the blacktop to the mountain’s “bald” plateau. Something seemed to swoop down on her. But no, it was simply the cloud sweeping by and out of the way so that it no longer blocked the moon.

Nora shifted all her weight to her back foot and lifted the other to heft herself up onto the bald. Her grounded foot faltered, and she could not raise it as high. As it landed on a lower stone, the branch of a sapling pine caught the cuff of her pants. She heard the cotton rip as she pulled it loose.

After struggling to get to the top, she sat down on the hard, cold boulder. The moonlight shined down on the smooth surface, giving it the luminosity of an ice-covered pond. But darkness completely bordered the other side. Nora couldn’t imagine how she would find the trail through the woods and get back to the parking lot without a flashlight.

And then Nora saw a faint dot in the blackness. Its sound grew clearer—a sharp hiss, gas seeping from the Coleman lantern. Paul was coming for her. The bright bead burned an arc into the space around it—a pendulum swinging in rhythm to his body.

“Why didn’t you tell me you were leaving?” she heard him ask as he crossed the bald.

“Why do you have the lantern so bright?” Nora asked. It gave off such a searing light that she could hardly see him walking beside it.

He set the lamp down and, with his left hand, turned the valve wheel to lower the light. His tone was reproachful. “Didn’t you consider that I would worry?” A fretfulness was in his voice. “You go off by yourself.” He stepped closer, trying to see her better.

“And so do you,” Nora said. “The countless hours you spend studying galaxies eons away, your towers of books and your endless calculations.”

Paul didn’t deny it. Silent he reached down to help her up. Nora realized he was using his left hand. “Why?”

“The edge of my finger got pinched. That’s all,” Paul explained. “The tripod collapsed unexpectedly.”

Nora felt a pang of guilt that she had not been there to help him. The steel legs were too heavy for him to hold in place by himself when folding up the tripod.

“I left so I could come up here with Charley,” Nora explained. She looked back at the observation center, at the fire tower, above them now like a diver about to make a plunge. “Did you see the light signal he made to you from up there?”

“He?” Paul paused and turned his face toward her. “You believe that you saw Charley tonight?” Instead of confronting her, Paul took a deep breath and turned away.

Nora reached out and pulled on the yoke of his jacket. “Did you hear what I said?”

He stopped and shifted his shoulder to pull the cloth loose as he looked back out of the corner of his eye.

“Charley was here tonight,” Nora said. She saw him blinking slowly with forced patience. “How could I have gone through the woods in darkness? Charley had the flashlight,” she said to convince him.

“Oh Nora,” he said. He looked up at the tower; he did not say if he had seen the light that Charley had flashed.

“Do you believe me?” Nora asked.

Paul tilted his head to look even higher, turned his attention to the stars overhead. Nora wondered if he was comparing this naked-eye view with the one through his telescope earlier. He said, “The light of stars in deep space glows for millions of lightyears across the universe, even after the star is gone.” He looked back at Nora. “I know you see things that you have to believe.”

“But this wasn’t my imagination. I saw Charley—and he was as real as you are now.” Nora put her hand on his sleeve. “I saw him tonight.”

“No, Nora. I am the last person who saw Charley alive. It was me who saw him last that night.” Paul brought his head and shoulders forward and down, drawing himself close to her. “The last moments. In the yard when he was leaving. After he’d come to help me split wood, after the pizza.”

“I was there too,” Nora said.

 “No, you were in the kitchen later.” Paul pushed his glasses up higher on the bridge of his nose. “I went out to the car with him. I knew he’d still go jogging and I thought he should wear something more reflective—something lighter to show up in the dark.”

“He always wore that gray college shirt, even the mascot was faded,” Nora said.

“Charley brushed me off and I was peeved that he wouldn’t borrow my jacket. This one.” Paul raised his arm. The beige color swept the night air like a light-colored flag. Paul groaned. “I should have insisted.”

“But what happened wasn’t your fault, Paul.” The gas light was faint, and Nora could not see his face well, but she knew what he was feeling. Sensing the heaviness of his presence beside her, she was no longer misled by the mask of restraint he forced himself to wear. “You can’t blame yourself for what happened, Paul.”

Standing on the bald next to Paul, Nora realized that life’s horrors are more cruel than the fanged creatures that swoop over a plateau to devour children, as in Charley’s fable. And they are more devious than a commonplace thing, the ringing of the telephone later than expected on a Tuesday night.

No, the real horror is what happens next—really monstrous things happen—or that don’t happen—between a mother and father of a child who has died.

Nora picked up the lantern. She suspected that the pinch on Paul’s finger was deeper than he was letting on. They walked across the bald and saw the gap in the foliage at the same time. As they stepped down onto the dirt trail, clusters of trees met from each side, forming a loosely-crocheted canopy against the sky. The stars came in and out of view.

“Those snatches of light—they remind me of watching Charley’s home run ball glide above the treetops,” Nora said.

“It was the best hit of his life,” said Paul.

“It soared so high, sailed so long that we couldn’t imagine where it would land,” Nora said.

“Until we heard the glass break in the window of the house near the field,” said Paul.

“Yea, no wonder! He really did wallop it.” They stopped walking now, in the darkness, with the stars elusive behind the branches. “We wouldn’t have changed a thing. It was a great night for Charley.”

“It was also a great night for the glass repair man. I had to pay him double to fix it,” Paul said.

They laughed, the sound echoing back from the soft cover of foliage.

“I kept the ball even after Charley scoffed at me for being too sentimental,” Paul said, “I have it still. In the garage.”

“After all this time?” Nora asked.

“Every now and then, I wipe off the dust,” said Paul.

“You’ll have to show me,” said Nora.

They walked on as the trail tapered in. The span between their hands—like what was once the infinitesimal distance between them—narrowed as the pathway closed in. Nora felt Paul’s hand touch hers. Their fingers interlaced with one another and held tight the rest of the way down the mountain.

To be a man

don’t sob at the sight of your grandfather’s ashes stored in a mausoleum for war veterans and husks of grandfathers that once loved but have since formed their hands into oysters. He powdered the pearls. South of the Greyhound station, you once ate biscuits, drank orange juice against the violet dayglow of the morning. You try

to recall what stories he said back then, but no amount of trying unbuilds the mausoleum that houses how you see him now—ashes long since cooled, knuckles long since calloused. Look at the oranging picture they set beside his wrinkled lilies, the one where he held the husks of three doves lined in a row, bellies slipping out of slits. In the South, a man is nothing more than the pain he could inflict. You can form

anything into a marriage of shame and silence. Pick a wife with a curved form and lips of sweet meringue, whose dreams are just as soft and shallow. If you try to leave your birthright, remember your stepfather whose crew in southern Vietnam traded Polaroids of heads and ragged entrails as currency—ashy cheeks, eyes somehow always looking up. They were just carrion, husks. Look at your stepfather now—a man who holds more pride in Agent Orange

than in birthing two daughters—and how he once spat clustered bombs of orange napalm on weeping village wives. He goes to sleep so easy, like forming a fist. You must be like him, like your grandfather, like the carob husks of Morocco whose purpose is to wrinkle and burn and become powder. Try once more to leave your birthright, to never become deciduous. Even the ash that holds the Nine Worlds in its womb, even the palo verde of Southern

California that dances like fireworks or arteries, even you, one day, south of heaven, will become a mausoleum. Think of your mother, her orange blossom tea and her lacy summer dresses and how she made the world her ash—tray after her lips deflated and her skin leathered and she couldn’t terraform her womb to support two daughters. Your stepfather did his best. He tried to be good. You must empathize since you too feel that gravity (the need to husk

something from its shell, like the wives and daughters who strip husks of rice with warm hands and leathered feet, who live in huts in southern Bangladesh with hopes of never seeing a single plane in the sky). Try to remember how easy it can be to leave, to smoke a carton of orange Pall Malls in a rusting cerulean pickup like your birth father did, forming fingers into snakes or oysters or carob pods still hooked to the tree. You can ash

that cigarette anytime. Try as you might to escape your birthright, husks of doves and daughters are expected so that your own ashes can rest, south of heaven, where oranges will blossom, where a mausoleum will form.

Ghazal for the Cast Iron

Because I haven’t taken the bristle pad’s sudsy scraping grace
to scour this pan as I do all others, erasing the grease

of bacon and garlic, because in coarse salt and shortening
and three wadded up paper towels I trust, I grace

this pan with butter, the slick black metal muting
turmeric’s threadbare screams. So little of what we make we grace

with time’s peppered gristle. Even rot’s scrubbed clean by rain and soil.
But this held my grandmother’s hashbrown casserole, saving grace

of red potatoes. This my grandfather’s good eye, goose-white
and gleaming as he sizzled the hams of West Virginia, graced

his knotted stomach with the dinner he’d scarf beneath
the nightshift’s ochre light, a piece of himself saying grace

with each raised fork. When my mother died on a street smooth
as a skillet, my father cooked himself through grief. Tonight, no grace

of rain on bloody asphalt, but short rib seared until meat falls
from bone, the once-translucent onion darkening in a wine-swilled grace,

and I hold this grease-hiss of family with a singed oven mitt,
oil bursts saying: Josh, even from burning comes a little grace.

The Fish

At first,

the bags of water
walked:

through red deserts,
through green forests,
through gray cities.

And then,

the bags of water
talked:

about race,
about gender,
about equity.

And then,

the bags of water
balked:

over history,
over liberty,
over private property.

And then,

the bags of water
stalked:

demanding homogeneity,
demanding retribution,
demanding silence.

And then, 

the bags
of water became unstopped:

drowning libraries,
drowning classrooms,
drowning cattle, chickens, and pigs.

And when
the bags of water
were empty,

they danced in a circle,
and prayed for a river.

The dark sky answered
and afterwards,
it just

rained
and reined
and reigned:

soaking our yards,
soaking our bread,
soaking our shirts,
soaking our shoes,
soaking our soil,

until all that was left were the fish.

Brett Stout

Midnight Confessions of an Empire

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Staples - 11"x14" - 2023

The Violent Nothing

Photography/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Book Clippings - 12x18" - 2023

Van Gogh Never Did This

Photography/Acrylic Paint/Watercolor Paint/Staples/Film Negative - 11x14" - 2023

The art that I’m submitting has the basic overall theme of “creative destruction.” I’ve taken my own photographs that I mainly take while walking the streets of my town, while on vacation, or riding my bicycle late at night. Then, I get prints of my photographs made, and I take the original prints of various sizes and defile and deform them into something different. I almost exclusively do this with an assortment of random and common household items and products, as varied as drywall screws, nails, cleaning bleach, staples, watercolor paint, duct tape, etc. I transform and make new art from already existing photographic art. Nothing I make will be perfect when partaking in the chaotic creative process, nor is it meant to be. I don’t go into making this kind of abstract art with a plan or any sort of idea of how the finished product will truly look. The new art could come out in the end as anything. It truly is random and sporadic chaos, which adds to the appeal and originality of it.

52 Pick-Up

This story won the 2023 Anthony Grooms Short Fiction Prize.

Dad always said I didn’t have to pay him back for everything, but I knew that was a huge lie, the way that beautiful people wearing long wool coats say, “Sorry, no cash,” when I asked them if they want to see a card trick.

“You haven’t even seen the trick yet,” Dad would protest in Chinese, breaking his cover as an elderly deaf-blind gentleman sitting three seats down the subway car, and I would have to stop shuffling and say, “Shhh, Dad,” except I didn’t want to blow our cover even more, so I would change course mid-word, say, “Shhh, dear sir.” But sometimes he would be so mad and say, “Let’s go, Sammy,” and drag me out of the train car.

He wore a yellow armband of old caution tape that we’d modified to say “DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT.” On top of that, he had old drugstore glasses that we’d Sharpied black to look like sunglasses and a beanie pulled down over his ears.

“Why do you have to be deaf and blind?” I asked him every so often.

“That way, there’s no way people would think we’re related,” he said, swinging me onto our kitchen counter so that I could practice pulling cards from behind his ears. “And that’s what you want, right Sammy?”

“Don’t say it like that,” I scolded him. “You know people pay more if they think I’m on my own.”

He still insisted on coming to watch me perform every weekend morning until he needed to leave for work, and people were sometimes alarmed to see a man wearing a DEAF-BLIND: PLEASE BE PATIENT armband spring up at Grand Central to kiss me goodbye and transfer to another train. I always had to switch to another train too, partly because people were staring at me, partly because I was so nervous when he left that I would try to do a thumb fan but my hands would shake all my cards to the ground. I had to walk the whole tunnel to Times Square to calm down.

Dad hated that I did street performances, but he still thought everything I did was amazing; and, I reminded him constantly, I did it for him. I didn’t like it either, but these performances were the only realistic way that I was ever going to earn enough to pay Dad back. If I waited until I was of legal working age I would be indebted beyond recovery. Plus, with my round cheeks and short legs I could shave a few years off when people asked me how old I was, which would almost always make them fork over more.

But I had to be careful of how deeply to discount my age. “Where are your parents?” the tourists would ask when I went too young, reaching into their tight jeans for their phones and dredging up ticket stubs and hop-on hop-off brochures. I would help them collect those scraps, smile my roundest-cheeked smile and say, “Don’t worry, I’m meeting my dad in a few stops.”

“Oh, sorry, I don’t have any cash,” they’d say, meaning, so why doesn’t he take care of you, and I’d hold out my hand with their wallet in it and say, “Credit card is fine too,” meaning, he does, why else would I be here, and by the time they’d realize I was joking and the wallet trick was all part of this show, the whole row of passengers would be staring. And I would have to switch trains then, too.

But it was all worth it when I got home and shoved the bills and coins in an old deli container and stuffed the container in the back of the freezer so that I couldn’t reach it without a stool. I labeled it DAD’S MONEY: DON’T USE. The words had to do. Dad and I had once tried to stop ourselves from spending money by freezing it in a block of ice, but eventually we wanted cheung fen for dinner and instead of waiting for the money to thaw, we’d brought the ice cubes to the cart downstairs. The old lady cooking inside shook her head and put the cubes on the griddle where they hissed until the dollars unfurled. We all looked closely to confirm it wasn’t a trick.

~

I started out just singing on the subway because it was the easiest to practice. We didn’t have a radio but on hot nights the neighbors who loved 92.9 FM Oldies would open their windows, and Dad and I would sit on our fire escape and sing into bowls so the sound would echo toward us. I told Dad he should go inside and relax, but he insisted he needed to be there to cover my ears when there were inappropriate lyrics. I used to sing, Take me down to the paradise city, where the hmm hmm hmm and the girls are pretty, before I realized that Dad didn’t know enough English to properly censor songs. After that, I still let him sit next to me on hot weather music nights, but when he fell asleep mid-chorus I wouldn’t disturb him.

“Sammy, why didn’t you wake me up?” he demanded whenever he woke up on his own, because his legs had gone numb from sitting on the grate or he’d drooled a rope of saliva long enough to lower us to the ground.

“I tried, but you were so tired,” I explained. “And if you help me, it just means I have even more to repay you for.”

“Dummy,” he would chuckle, swatting me upside the head. “You don’t need to repay me.” But I thought about the grass is green and decided he had it wrong.

It was actually my cousin Julia who gave me the idea of switching to card tricks because that’s all we played in her backyard: 52-card pickup. Uncle had so many free decks from visiting Atlantic City all the time, though the cards all had holes punched through or clipped corners. Julia would count down from ten and then toss the desk up into the air, and we would both try to collect the most.  Back then I sang so much, both practicing and performing, that my diet was just Halls lozenges that Dad swiped from streetside stands for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and my cheeks were constantly chipmunked with one lozenge on each side. It meant that Julia and I had very boring conversations.

“Do you want to play this game my dad taught me?” she asked, and I nodded because I would have leaked Halls syrup if I opened my mouth.

“Do you like it?” she asked me after we played a few times, and I shook my head.

“Do you know any other games?” she asked. Here, too, I shook my head, sucking hard on the lozenges, so she threw the cards again.

Dad and I visited every few months because Uncle didn’t know how to care for Julia as Dad did for me. Instead, Uncle had a lot of women visitors who would help take care of him and Julia until they realized Uncle wasn’t going anywhere, in the worst way, and they would abandon him in disgust. Uncle made Julia help prolong the relationships by pretending to be very precocious, but even that didn’t keep them around. She was like that the first time I met her, when we rang the doorbell of their apartment and she opened the door with glasses on and a very yellowed copy of The Prince in her hand.

“Oh, right,” she said when she saw us. She replaced the book on the milk crate that they used as a shoe rack, and took off the glasses, rubbing her temples.

“Brother, come in,” called Uncle from inside the house, and Dad went into the kitchen, leaving me with Julia. The house smelled like cigarette smoke and grass clippings. She eyed the notebooks and pencil case that I was carrying and came closer, hungrily.

“Can I see?” she said, already reaching out.

Dad got the money for my school supplies that year by making his hands a gun and sticking up the bodega down the street. They didn’t give him any money but they did call some hotline that summoned two counselors who escorted him back to our apartment. When I opened the door for him he produced a wad of wrinkled twenties and a Starbucks gift card. “The counselors linked arms with me as we came back, one on each side,” he said. “Left counselor had dirtier pockets but more money.” I was so proud of him, but mentally wrote it down as another entry in my checkbook, which brought me to sixty-four more weekends of singing on the train. When we went into the kitchen Dad was already explaining this all to Uncle.

“You just need to commit,” Dad explained to Uncle, smacking his palm with the back of his other hand. Uncle, who looked like a faded, oily version of Dad, paled even more at the thought, but still set down his cigarette to try it.

“Put your hands like this,” said Dad, showing Uncle how to interlace all his fingers except the pointers, and aim them at an imaginary head. “Now say stick them up!” Uncle could do it for a few seconds, but when Julia pretended to be the frightened cashier, he would unlock his hands and wave them in the air, saying, “It’s not real, it’s just a trick.”

“I know,” Julia would say, rolling her eyes and opening the sliding door to the backyard. Uncle’s ashy face froze like a mask, angry red diamonds blooming on both cheeks.

“Pathetic,” she laughed to me later, as she snatched the six of clubs from under my scrabbling fingers. We played in the backyard because Julia hated the smell of smoke. “He’s not even trying.”

“Well,” I said, feeling guilty for some reason, “you aren’t really trying either.”

“At what?” asked Julia.

I told her about singing on the train and the Sharpied sunglasses and PLEASE BE PATIENT. She laughed even more.

“Getting even is for people you’ll never see again,” she said. “I read it in that book.”

“I’m not ‘getting even,’” I said. “What would you know about that anyway?” But it was too late; I was already imagining Dad running out the closing subway doors on his way to work and the train falling off the tracks. I sat there thinking for so long that she eventually waved her hand in front of my face and said, “Hello? Sammy?” She had collected the whole deck on her own. Through the sliding glass door we could see that a small woman with a short perm had joined Dad and Uncle, and I think I saw Julia flinch, but she tossed the cards again and we watched them wag and flutter in the air.

~

It was a good thing I got the idea to switch to cards because my voice had started to sound like a cat’s tongue. We didn’t see a doctor, but we described my symptoms to one of Uncle’s lovers who had health insurance, who went to a doctor complaining of a sore throat, and a few weeks later she said her doctor thought she might have vocal cord nodules. “Stop singing,” she said, in her own raspy voice, fried from too many menthols.

We looked it up. Dad hotspotted our laptop by leaning off of our fire escape with his cellphone in his hand, which would just barely connect to the free city wifi.

“I’m no doctor, but Dad is a genius in other ways,” he had bragged when he figured this out. He was always beet-faced and white-knuckled with his eyes closed and I worried that when all the blood had finally gone to his head he would let go and fall into the street.

Once we learned that singing had knotted the strings in my neck, I snuck a deck of cards from Uncle’s stash and watched instructional videos at double speed and memorized them by repeating the words to myself to relieve him of internet reception duty as quickly as possible. For him, because I didn’t want him to fall into the street, but for me as well, because this was yet another service he provided me. And for the landlord, who would slip threatening notes under our door saying that we had to stop our hazardous behaviors.

“How’s my girl,” said Dad when he came in from the fire escape, and I said, tongue caught between my teeth as I practiced my pinky break over and over, “Very indebted, Dad, very behind on my bills.”

“You’re a child,” Dad laughed. “You have no bills.” As if that wasn’t my exact problem.

I practiced until my wrists were sore and then steamed them over the rice cooker to relax them, but my tricks always felt flat, somehow. I would fan the cards, ask Dad to pick one, take the card back, bring it to the top of the deck. “Is it the eight of clubs?” I asked.

“Yes,” said Dad, solemnly from his chair, as if swearing an oath.

“You don’t seem excited,” I said. “I found your card.”

“I knew you would find it,” he said. “You’re my amazing girl.”

“That’s not the point,” I told him, throwing the deck across the room in frustration, and in a few hours I would find the deck re-stacked, in order, clubs, diamonds, hearts, and spades. I had explained to him before that I didn’t want the cards ordered, that I would just need to reshuffle them so that people didn’t think I had somehow organized the deck to help me find their card. He’d tapped my forehead and said he wanted to make sure he had picked up every card.

“It’s easy to miscount,” he’d said, “but it’s hard to miss the order of things.”

When I asked Julia about the card pickup game the next time we visited, she laughed in my face. “That’s such kid stuff,” she said, tossing the deck of cards back to me, messily so that I only caught about half and had to scramble for the others.

“Why then?” I asked. But she was already stalking down to the kitchen and asking Uncle where her bookbag had gone.

“I don’t know,” said Uncle, busy stroking his new lady’s hair. She had tattooed eyebrows and very red glasses. Julia stopped short once she saw that they were both smoking indoors. She’d told me that he used to leave the house to smoke to try to protect her baby lungs, and he would walk all the way to the city and back smoking an entire pack. At some point he’d gotten tired of leaving.

“I said I don’t know,” said Uncle, looking up and seeing Julia still there. “What else?”

She just stared, which made Uncle look down at the cigarette in his hand and then wave dismissively at her, but she was already opening the sliding door and disappearing into the backyard. I thought she sounded like she was about to cry, but when I caught up to her she was sucking air like crazy and I realized she’d been holding her breath.

“Want to see a card trick?” I asked after a minute of her gasping, not knowing what else to say.

“What are you talking about?” said Julia in a carefully normal voice, and I started explaining the card tricks and fire escape to Julia, and she narrowed her eyes and snorted.

“You’re still on that?” She left me holding the pack of cards in the middle of the grass and went to sit on the concrete steps by the house. I went back inside.

She did eventually play with me that evening, as the sun started oozing all over the backyard. I found her squatting over a patch of grass, her head almost between her knees, her shadow dribbling long across the grass. When I got closer I saw she was arranging a handful of periwinkle stems and puffball dandelions around a dead bumblebee.

“What,” she said, looking up when my noodle of a shadow licked over her. It was less a question and more a greeting. She glared at me for a second before continuing to knit her daisy chain, which snaked around her feet.

“That’s such kid stuff!” I crowed, towering over her.

“No, it’s not,” said Julia. “I’m decorating his grave.”

“What,” I said, echoing her. I waited for her to explain but she kept arranging her pile of flowers.

“I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s the game?”

“Not a game,” she said, shaking her head emphatically. Then she ordered me to collect more dandelions and more of those weeds that dripped white sap when we broke the stems, which I did because it seemed so important to her. She piled them up until no one would’ve known that there was a bee inside.

“Now we pay our respects to our dearly departed, but we do not cry,” she said in a voice that said she had read more books than me. She squatted down and nudged the back of my knees so that I would do the same. After a minute of squatting my toes were numb and my knees were screaming, but Julia did these deep breaths with her eyes closed. Her exhales ruffled the grass and made the tufted seeds twirl on the dandelion head.

“Hello? Julia?” I said, but she didn’t open her eyes. I knew it was on purpose because she swatted in my direction. “What are you doing?” I asked, louder, but then she just started ignoring me. By the time she was done praying or whatever I was sitting on the grass just studying her legs, which were plumper than mine: the tendons in her ankles ropy, her calves and thighs squeezed tightly against each other like unopened hot dog buns. She stood up and shook her head at me, looming against the sky from my place in the grass.            

“I got tired,” I protested.

“Yeah,” she said, shaking out her legs. “Who’s not trying now.”

~

“How did you get Sammy to fear you?” Uncle asked Dad. A few months later he was smoking indoors again, so Julia was outside even though it was raining. She stood against a section of the under the eaves, but the rain was light enough to blow at a slant, so she was rain-dark all down her front anyway. I was crouching by the open sliding door, nose poked out so I could breathe clean air, too.

“Sammy doesn’t fear me,” Dad said. I heard the clink of a teapot lid and then the hollow knocking that meant Uncle was taking out a new cigarette. “Sammy thinks that she’s indebted to me somehow.”

“Same thing,” said Uncle, coughing lightly. “How do I get Julia to think that?”

Dad was quiet for so long that I thought he’d left somehow without me hearing. “I don’t think you want that,” he said eventually.

“Don’t I?” said Uncle. They were quiet for a few more minutes and I turned Dad’s sentence over in my head. Why wouldn’t Uncle want that? I ran through all the ways in which Julia and Uncle owed each other: Julia, beholden to Uncle for his card packs and tolerance for her sour spells; Uncle, beholden to Julia for making her stay outside all the time and wearing glasses that made her head hurt. They were much closer to even than Dad and I were, I thought, but because neither of them made any attempts to resolve their debts, I would likely repay Dad first.

“Remember when we were young boys, waiting for Ba to come home from work, and you threw a rock into the window trying to hit me?” Dad asked.

“You threw it at me,” said Uncle, and they both laughed. From the sound of it, Dad smacked Uncle across the chest, or maybe the other way around. I had a sudden vision of Dad and Uncle sweaty and skinny in dust-stained shirts, chasing each other around a rock-lined backyard.

“He cleaned up the glass himself,” said Dad. “Straightened up the whole room. Didn’t even say anything to us. And then he slept in the living room because he said the wind would stunt our growth.”

They didn’t say anything for a long time, and my legs started to fall asleep again. I tried to stretch them one at a time but my ankles gave out and I thudded onto my back.

“Sammy,” said Dad, walking around the kitchen island to discover me. “Why are you hiding here?”

“I’m not hiding,” I said, offended that he thought I would trick him, and I slipped outside to stand beside Julia.

Julia and I stood silently until I decided to pick a fight, because I was in a bad mood from listening to Dad and Uncle, and because I was suddenly sick of Julia acting better than me, like she deserved what she had. Of course I started by telling her that she never tried being nice to Uncle, no wonder he hated her, that I would be so angry if I were him.

“I heard him say that he wanted you to be more like me,” I said, leaving out the part where Dad said that Uncle wouldn’t want that.

“At least my Dad doesn’t force me to beg on the subway,” said Julia, barely looking at me. She kept shredding pieces of crabgrass between her fingers, like sticks of string cheese, and the wet strands clung to her fingers.

“I’m not begging,” I said, too late, flabbergasted at how wrong she had it. My mouth flapped for words for so long that I swallowed some rain. “I’m working. I need to be there.”

“Whatever,” said Julia. She made a face and wound her hands around each other a couple times, and then bowed weirdly and looked up at me with puppy eyes. “Let me show you a card trick,” she whined, “don’t you want to see a card trick?” She shook her hands and some grass fell off like confetti. “You think that’s what normal kids do?”

On the bus home, I almost told Dad what Julia said. I always told him everything, to avoid keeping anything from him that would be valuable. But I didn’t want to ask him

“Would you be mad if I stopped doing card tricks,” I whispered in his ear.

“No,” he whispered back. “I would be happy.” At this I rolled my eyes and hummed the paradise city song.

~

A few months later, Dad came back from work and told me the news: Uncle had gone for a walk again, but he hadn’t come back for a week now. We found out because Julia had waited to be picked up from school until it was dark and then slept on one of the couches in the principal’s office. As he told me about Julia, Dad had his bare feet in the dishwasher which had just finished running, so all the steam washed around his heels. He had been laid off last month, so he was temporarily working as a loader at a warehouse, where he said the conveyor belts moved faster than our wifi.

It was my turn to lean off the fire escape so that he could search for jobs. I didn’t realize that the hardest part was locking my feet under a metal bar to make sure I wouldn’t accidentally fall off, how numb his feet must have gotten when I was learning my card tricks. But I got through it just by thinking about how much I still owed him. The time he jumped down into the subway tracks to retrieve the eight of diamonds that I’d accidentally dropped. The time we ran out of hot water so he poured warm water through a colander for my shower. The time he got a plate of free samples, but was turned away because they recognized him, so he used his pocket-knife to hack off half of his hair, got a second plate, and then hacked off the other half for a third. I thought of so much that I often started to cry, big sobs that made my body buck up off the railing. When he finally heard me and came to investigate, he declared that he would stop searching for jobs.

“No, no,” I begged. “Just tell me what you do.”

“I just close my eyes and wait,” he said. That night I recycled another note from the landlord that said that this was our LAST WARNING.

We picked up Julia and on the train I told her that she was going to live with us from now on. She picked at her food at the dinner table and used her phone data, which made me resent her even more. I made room for her in my bed, taking a string and running it down the middle of the mattress. When she saw that she laughed and immediately put her feet over it, and I stormed to the bathroom.

I came back after brushing my teeth with toothpaste that I bought for Dad, and I was running my tongue over my front teeth when I heard her breathing hard under the blanket.

“Julia? What’s wrong?” I asked, burrowing under the blanket to find her curled up facing away from me. Her breath stank, steaming up the whole blanket. It smelled like she hadn’t brushed her teeth in a while.

“What’s wrong?” she shot back, thickly. “Oh, nothing.”

I sat quietly for a few minutes, trying only to breathe when I absolutely had to. I thought about Uncle asking Dad how to get Julia to fear him, and how Dad and Uncle had smashed open a window but Grandpa had cleaned up the glass silently, with Dad and Uncle maybe sheepishly standing in the kitchen with their hands behind their backs, not offering to help but feeling as if they needed to stop what they were doing.

~

When we woke up the next morning Julia was gone, the rumpled dimple next to me barely warm. Dad and I ran outside to try to find her but couldn’t. The cheung fen lady said a girl came to buy a box of zhaliang with freezing cold quarters, and I almost screamed. I ran back up the stairs just to check what I already knew was true: the deli container lid was askew, and the insides were empty as they were when we’d drained it of its original wonton soup.

“Julia is a thief,” I fumed to Dad, and he pinched my ear sharply.

“Julia is your cousin,” he said. He stared at the empty container, and I almost waved my hands, trying to bring him back. But I waited instead, watching his eyes glaze over, the same way he looked at the sky when he was hotspotting me, the same way Julia looked at Uncle when he was smoking. We stood there until his eyes started to water, and then he said, “Oh, Sammy,” like he was choking, and reached out and squeezed my hand.

Julia called from an unknown number a week later. I was filming myself for practice, trying to stop wrinkling my eyebrows and holding my breath whenever I did the double-lift, and when the phone rang I ran outside so that we could call over wifi, another of Dad’s tricks to save on a phone bill. I leaned all the way off the fire escape, which the landlord had blocked off with caution tape a few days before, and turned the phone on speaker so that I could hold it closer to the reception spot.

“Tell your dad that I’m okay,” she said, staticky and faraway, my arm and her voice waggling high above the street. “And also that I borrowed the cash he’s storing in the freezer to print some ‘Reward: Missing Person’ fliers.”

“The cash I’m storing!” I shout into the phone, nearly slipping my foot from the railing. “Where are you going?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said, and I could hear the smirk in her voice.               

She said see you later and I was too late to answer because I was trying to remember what she said that one afternoon, how small the bee was in comparison to the pile of flowers, how Julia breathed so hard it started to bald the dandelion puffs that we’d stuck in the roof of the crypt like little fairy globes, how when I looked outside the next morning, the pile was scattered all over the garden like confetti, the bee nowhere to be seen. Julia was already outside with her hands on her hips, like she’d volunteered to clean up a party to which she hadn’t been invited. And I knew, remembering the sturdiness of her legs and the way our whole family spent so much time staring into the distance, that she could be out there waiting for so, so long, just looking at nothing forever.

This story was featured in Volume 2, Issue 1. Click here to explore other stories from this issue.

Kreative Kwame

Through the Walls of Colorism

Et Tu Brute

The Window

Traditional healers and “sorcerers” have over the years claimed that people with albinism are “ghosts” who never die but merely disappear. In many parts of East Africa, people with albinism are targeted for their body parts, which some believe hold magical powers and bring good fortune. Albinism is a genetic condition that causes a deficit in the biosynthesis of melanin, a pigment that colours the skin, hair and eyes. “banaoroko” is an aspiring artist. I met him at a theatre close to where I work. He was there for rehearsal for a talent show due the next day. I introduced myself to him as an aspiring photographer and said I’ll love for us to make visual statements together. He opened up to me about dealing with colorism. “Dealing with stares from birth sounds a bit tough, but you get used to it” he said. We went on to plan a creative shoot which was so fun! I learnt a lot from him. Here is our visual statement.

---

The year 2019 was revolutionary for me. Amidst an internal conflict in my country Cameroon that had been going on for 3 years, changing the very way we live, I found the courage to share my love for art and created my IG page where I hoped to share my creations. 

I could never imagine this journey will lead me here. It was an escape from the realities we faced. I remember searching “how to edit cinematic photos that tell a story” on YouTube. I immediately went out with my then iPhone 7 and began shooting expressive photos. I’ve always liked the idea of creating photos in a series accompanied by an essay on the theme chosen. The interpretation of these often thought provoking photos that touch on different subjects is left for the viewer to decipher for themselves. 

Lior Locher

Childhood

Daddy's Study

Longing

I work in mixed media, printmaking. This usually involves several of these: acrylic paint, ink, marker pen or color pencil, paper weaving, collage and printmaking and performance. I just launched my first film. I love bright colors and media that dry quickly so you can add more layers. Printmaking adds science, whimsy and cool kit, elements that are fixed and yet vary from print to print. Collage was my first love and still plays a prominent role. It started with travel ephemera and a fascination with Japanese origami paper and traditional patterns while living there, and has since expanded to anything that’s flat and sticks. In my other life I trained in personal development, coaching and psychotherapy as well as teaching different styles of yoga. I continue to be fascinated by our inner lives as humans, how we make sense of our own journeys and experiences, and how our mind and body come together. Our lives always involve picking up what already is, at that point in time, and recombining it to move forward, adding our own flavor. Often ripping things up and starting again, layers and sedimentations that form over time into something uniquely ours. That applies to life and art. Mixed media work is a great way to capture this.

Letter from the Editor

Dear reader,

When Andy Plattner asked me to join the editorial team of The Headlight Review in the spring of last year, I brought along my history of editing literary magazines in the Midwest. Although I was prepared to find the South different from the Rust Belt, it didn’t occur to me that even the literary magazines here might be just a little bit different.

At least according to its mission statement, THR does not focus on regional literature. And, yet, by virtue of our place, our staff, and our contributors, we find hints of the New South in the pieces of this issue. Without seeking them out, we have stories of racial tension and progress here in the South, poems of southern music, food, and masculinity, and, of course, we have southern ghosts. The pieces of this issue explore our struggles to come of age, to understand ourselves, and to wrest language into authentic service.

The editorial team and I are proud to present this collection of fiction, poetry, and artwork as a testament to the brilliance of our authors and our own efforts to serve authentically in the last six months. In that time, we also awarded the 2023 Grooms Prize, judged by Anna Schachner. Begun to honor Anthony Grooms for his service here at KSU and his contributions to literature, the Grooms Prize awards $250 and a bespoke publication to a piece of quality short fiction. This year’s winner, Anita Lo’s “52 Pick-Up,” reveals a bold new voice confronting the difficulty of family and growing up. It appears in this issue alongside our two other finalists for the prize.

We have restructured the journal’s masthead for this issue, and I want to thank our guest editors, Gregory Emilio and Melanie Sumner, who edited our poetry and fiction sections respectively. Their hard work and insight have shaped those sections, and we’re immensely fortunate to have the benefit of their contributions.

Brittany Files, our Managing Editor, has been essential to sustaining THR as I came into this role. Brittany designs and publishes the website, works with our authors, and, in short, makes this publication possible, and I thank her for her service.

We also benefited this year from the hard work of Antwan Bowen, who serves as THR’s Social Media Manager, and I thank him, too, for his dedication to learning the ins and outs of publishing and for advocating on behalf of the magazine and our activities.

Finally, I want to thank Andy Plattner for offering me the opportunity to join this team. Though he will deny it, his dedication to THR has driven the journal from its inception. I’m happy to report that Andy and I have undertaken many exciting initiatives to carry his vision into the future. We’ve begun producing interviews with authors, planning a series of critical writings, undertaking some community service activities, and even designing a print edition of the magazine. About all of which, more in the next issue.  

With this issue, we recommit ourselves to our mission to promote new creative writing that demonstrates the persistent value of imaginative literature. I’m especially excited to emphasize the diverse perspectives of this issue and to encourage many more new and emerging writers to join us in exploring what it means to find ourselves in a new place and a new time still haunted by the legacies of our past.

Sincerely,

Kurt Milberger, Editorial Director

A Love Note

Our arrangement was simple enough. I was with Gloria the first and third weekends of the month; Ollie and Gloria were together the second and fourth weekends. Weeknights were infrequent and scheduled ad hoc. Gloria and I had regular dates at a few bars, with an occasional wedding when called upon. Ollie and Gloria mainly frequented American Legion halls and maybe some family gatherings, as far as I knew. Nothing fancy, but enough to keep us all interested. 

We settled into our routine with a regularity that made it difficult to remember our previous, more independent, lives. Of course, there were bumps in the road: Ollie occasionally wanted Gloria on one of my weekends or we had a conflict around a holiday, but not often, and we always navigated any obstacles smoothly. It seemed as if we could go on like this forever. 

It probably helped that Ollie and I had been longtime friends before Gloria came on the scene. We had known each other practically our whole lives, growing up in a small town in North Dakota. We ate barely edible school lunches together and had sleepovers in elementary school. We navigated the complexities of middle school at each other’s sides. We even sat next to each other in the high school band, with Ollie on the tenor sax and me on trumpet, our instruments mirroring our stature in the class photo. We lost touch for a time after high school, but we never stopped being friends. 

Now, many years later, after separately moving to Minneapolis, we had become reacquainted through the small world of gig musicians. Our friendship picked up where we left off, easy-going and without drama, close in the sense of men who have no desire to talk to each other of difficult things. We maintained our connection by watching sports on television, or by drinking cheap beers around a bar while talking about sports we had watched on television. True to form, we did not discuss details of our time with Gloria or really anything related to Gloria, other than changes to our schedule.

All of which led to my confusion at lunch one day when Ollie asked, “Don’t you think it’s time one of us moved on from Gloria?”

The question hit like a gut punch, made worse by his breezy inflection that implied, in his mind at least, the matter already had been settled and I’d be the one moving on. 

“What do ya mean? End it . . . just like that? I don’t under—” 

“I don’t think there’s a formal process for this sort of thing.” 

“That’s not what I . . . I mean, how do we decide who ‘moves on?’”

Ollie did not respond, so I filled the silence: “Anyway, I like sharing. That way we can both look after her.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Ollie said. “I just think it’s time for a change, that’s all . . . it’s not like we’ll stop being friends if we don’t share Gloria.” 

That was it. I jerked our conversation to more comfortable ground. First, baseball—“Do you think the Twins will make a move at the trade deadline?”—and then, music—“Have you seen any jazz at the Dakota lately?”—talking rapidly and more than usual, afraid of what Ollie might say to fill any gaps in the conversation. 

As is often the case, the end of this whole affair was not immediate. Gloria and I had a number of beautiful weekends together. I remember one night at a German American bar where it seemed we could do no wrong. We swayed in harmony on the dance floor to the Snow Waltz, kicked up our feet a bit to the Tipsy Polka, and even tried a tango. The night seemed to last forever and pass in an instant, as only the most memorable times do. Of course, Ollie had his time with Gloria too. And, of course, I continued to remain in the dark about where they went together.

Everything seemed back to normal, yet I could not shake the feeling that we were all on borrowed time together. Toward the end, I found myself holding Gloria more tightly, moving together for an extra song or two, under the harsh glare of the overhead lights and the occasional wary glances from staff as they scrubbed the glassware and did a cursory wipe of the bar and tables at closing time. 

Of course, I regret my inaction in the moment. Looking back, I had plenty of opportunities to avoid the disaster that ensued. I should have been proactive. I should have fought for Gloria like a true literary hero. I am not one to blaze my own path, though, and there are not many love stories involving our triangle of two musicians and an instrument. You see, Gloria is not a woman; she was—she still is—an accordion.  

It is possible this revelation may mitigate your empathy for my tale of heartbreak. If that is your reaction, I feel nothing but pity for you. On the contrary, as only the lucky souls who have held an accordion can attest, it makes my account more profound. 

Unless you have played your own accordion—actually hugged one to your chest as you felt her breath move in and out, matching the rhythm of your heartbeat—I can’t expect you to understand the relationship an accordionist has with his instrument. The way other instruments are played—the pursed-lip kiss of a trombone, the soggy taste of a saxophone, the plunking of cold piano keys, the violent banging of a drum—make them simply inanimate objects in your hand. 

An accordion, on the other hand, comes alive as you gently massage her keys, warmed by your own hands during an hours-long embrace in which she continuously changes form, gracefully expanding and contracting. Like any desirable woman, an accordion is both welcoming and independent, granting you the opportunity to join your voice with her melodic tones or to simply enjoy her sweet music. 

I’m not ashamed to admit that I remember my first time with Gloria as vividly as I remember my “first time.” When I first held her, I knew we were made for each other and that her music would be the sweetest I could ever hope to play. When I looped in Ollie to help pay for Gloria, I assumed he would feel the same way. I guess I cannot expect most people to understand the connection that I felt with Gloria, but Ollie, he should have known. We were a part of a small but vibrant community of accordion players enjoying a renaissance of sorts—at least in our small part of the world—driven by the improbable convergence of the elderly yearning for tradition and young people embracing the retro irony of a good polka or waltz. 

Perhaps none of that matters now. What does matter is that I called Ollie one Friday morning to arrange a time to pick up Gloria. I asked when I could stop by, and I was answered by a long pause. Finally, Ollie said the five words that always presage doom: “You had better sit down.”

“What is it?” I asked. 

“I don’t have the accordion.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t have Gloria. I haven’t seen her since yesterday.” 

“Yesterday? When were you planning to tell me?”

“I was hoping to find it.”

It. A subtle, yet significant, shift in terminology, like switching to the past tense when discussing a person who is chronically ill or gone missing.  

I couldn’t think of anything to say, so Ollie continued, “I had the accordion in my car when I stopped by the grocery store, and when I got home it wasn’t in there. I must have taken it out of the trunk to make room for my grocery bags and forgot to put it back in.”

I was stunned. I couldn’t process my life without Gloria. I knew that I could scrape together enough money to buy another used accordion, as I eventually did, but it was Gloria I wanted. Anyway, what was she doing in the trunk? And dammit, she’s not an “it.”

With no idea how to respond, I started peppering Ollie with obvious suggestions. “Did you go back to the store parking lot? Did you check inside the store to see if anyone turned it in? Did you ask any of the other customers?” 

We did our due diligence, of course. Ollie and I returned to the store together, and at least in my case separately on numerous occasions, to see if anyone had turned in Gloria. I walked through the parking lot nearly every day, hoping to catch a glimpse of Gloria next to a parked car. The store employees grew to know me, although the recognition that showed on their faces as I approached the customer service counter gradually evolved from welcoming to exasperated as the days passed. After a time, I started shopping at another grocery store to avoid reminders of Gloria’s absence in my life. 

We even stopped by the local police station for help, where we were politely informed that, based on the facts, the accordion was considered abandoned, such that there was “no potential violation of the criminal code requiring investigative action.” When I took it upon myself to seek surveillance video from the parking lot a city official efficiently closed the bureaucratic loop by requiring a search warrant to view any footage.

While pursuing the dead end of police assistance, we sought help from our community. We took refuge in the new town square and posted notices on Facebook and our neighborhood social networking site next to announcements of lost pets, yard sales, and complaints about neighbors not picking up after their dogs. We tweeted about our plight and scoured Craigslist multiple times a day for a post listing our beloved Gloria for sale, presumably at much-too-low of an asking price.

Leaving no stone unturned, and having no success with our online posts, we appealed to our actual town square. We tacked up handwritten signs around our neighborhood anywhere we could, including a Starbucks, a bookstore, a diner, a liquor store, and the grocery store where Ollie last had Gloria:

LOST ACCORDION!!!

Reward for Return!! Two free performances of your choosing!!

Last seen Thursday afternoon in the Lunds parking lot. 

The accordion was in a soft backpack case, root beer brown color, torn on one edge.

If found, please call Ollie (612-xxx-xxxx) or Pete (612-xxx-xxxx)

No Questions Asked! Just a Reward!!!

Even as we went to all this effort, we knew none of this would work. We had a sense of obligation, but never a feeling of hope. It was obvious, at least to me, that Gloria was gone forever; anyone lucky enough to have her now would be a fool to give her up. Knowing that, I moved on eventually, at least in the way that we all convince ourselves to go forward after suffering a loss. I suppose I even stopped thinking about her as much, although it was harder when I played at some of our old spots. 

Around this time, after I had remade my life without Gloria, I was on a long winter walk one evening and ducked into a small corner bar to warm up and have a whiskey. I heard her before I saw her. Her sound was unmistakably pure. I looked past the bar muddled with aging regulars sitting next to young hipsters and saw Gloria in the hands of another musician. He was about my age, and he was seated comfortably on a small stage in the corner of the room. My first impulse was to rush toward her and wrestle her away from the man holding her, but something about the music made me stop. I had never heard such lyrical sounds from her or from any accordion for that matter. I sat near the door and listened transfixed. 

When the set finally ended, I approached the other musician warily. “You sound great,” I said, cringing at the sound of my rising inflection. “I play as well . . . I really enjoyed your music.”

“Thanks,” he answered. He was sipping on a bottle of Grain Belt, his other arm draped over Gloria as she rested on his lap. “Oh, I’m Bill.”

“Pete,” I said with a nod. I longed to reach out and touch Gloria. Bill set his beer down on a side table and we shook hands. “That’s a beautiful accordion. Where did you get her?”

“I bought it a few weeks ago . . . at that music shop on Lake Street. It was used but had clearly been well cared for.”

“I don’t—” 

A group of young women brushed past me, each holding a rum and coke that was clearly not their first of the evening. They crowded around Bill and Gloria for a selfie. Bill shrugged his shoulders as they retreated to their table to post their photo. 

 “I was going to say . . . I don’t think I’ve seen you playing before.”

“Probably not. I just moved here from Wisconsin a few months back. I’m substitute teaching now . . . but I’m trying to get a full-time music job at one of the elementary schools. Since substitute’s pay is for crap, I decided to supplement my income by playing some accordion again. I haven’t played in a while, but it’s helping pay the rent for me and my boy.” He looked down. “Times have been leaner since my wife left us.”

I paused. I thought about telling him the whole story and demanding that he return Gloria, perhaps selling my own accordion to pay him off or working out some sort of trade. But then I remembered the beautiful music Gloria made as I listened to her that evening. It was clear that he needed Gloria more than I did, and perhaps, she needed him to reach her full potential. As if by Divine Providence, at that moment I heard Sting singing over the bar’s speakers, “If you love someone, set them free . . . Free, free, set them free . . . .” Dammit. Sting was right. 

I pulled out a five-dollar bill and stuffed it into Bill’s tip jar. “From one musician to another.” He tipped his beer in my direction as thanks. “Good luck landing that teaching job. And take care of that beautiful instrument, will ya?” 

With that, I took a last look at Gloria. I impulsively reached out my hand to feel her smooth wood case before I turned and quickly walked out of the bar. As I stepped outside to walk home, I paused to breathe in the crisp winter air, my mind as peaceful as the night sky filled with falling snow.

Madeline O’Neill

Muslim Woman and Child

Hidden

Banner Man

In my work, I strive to highlight the hardships many minorities endure at the hands of American society and the modern world. Typically, this inspires me to use my platform to emphasize the resilience and passion of the Indigenous population of North America, also those of the Muslim religion. It is important to bring forth the power and impact Indigenous cultures have on modern society, as we are advanced because of their diverse and inclusive culture. We should strive to have such diversity in our lives as well! 

Tyrone Mckie

Becoming the Sun

Head Storm

Nature Sees You

My artistic practice delves into the complexities of human experience, using digital paintings and digital collages as my tools of exploration. Drawing pencils capture fleeting ideas from my inner world and the world at large. These then transform into surreal digital paintings brought to life in Photoshop. With my digital collages, I curate fragments from various media sources, weaving them together to build a rich tapestry of imagery and often typography. As in our lives, where seemingly disparate elements coalesce to form our unique narrative, this artistic process reflects the interconnectedness of reality.

At its core, my art fuels a journey of self-discovery and a yearning to understand the world and universe around me. It's a visual conversation that invites viewers to explore their own emotions, ponder their place in the grand scheme, and engage with the questions that lurk beneath the surface. My work doesn't often offer easy answers, but instead invites contemplation and reflection, encouraging viewers to appreciate the beautiful complexities and contradictions inherent in being human.

Self Portrait as a Blushing Petal, Nestled into the Melt

I felt the seams of sky loosen and balloon over us the day I pedaled to your house, / my white skirt billowing behind me. Before, the ache did not disturb. Before, I clung to my / wake, vermilion and veined. I don’t know why the sun raked at my back, intensely begged me / to make my way to you. Does a crocus question / its readiness to bloom? Del Playa stretched open—this is where we kissed, the saltiness sealing familiarity on our lips. How many blackflies / have swarmed us since the night, digging us a ditch, / picking up next fight? Rousing our panic / like scattering field mice? But we floated / above this traffic, our bodies satin / in suspension, the tendrils / of our fingers irreversibly / and invisibly tangled, / and I can’t / and won’t / explain / this enigma, / a sweet fragrance / of red hibiscus / glazing over us / This stem, aerial, and erect. / These stipules, present, and free. / Our fusion protects a younger leaf— / look how she collects the dew, drinks in light / every time laughter shakes our joints. She may never know / how we suffered and recovered from two hard frosts. The blight crystallized, / thought never hardening us. I prefer this side of the story, how we came out warm. / and a bit weathered on the other end. I want to cup the syrupy smell in my hands again.

for her, an offering / of what love can cocoon. / Maybe now it’s plumeria / perfuming this place, / interlaced with the urge to love you / harder, love you even when / the biggest freeze of all towers over us, / livid and lethal. And yet-this stem, deep-rooted. / This blushing petal, nestled into the melt- / shivering in the delicate spring wind. / when you cradle me, heat flares. / When the stars spin / in wild directions, / you say, Burn, burn, / and explode into everything / you touch.