Roses

Wali watched skeptically as Rasool crouched on the floor unfolding the carpet. “I’m not buying right now,” he said. “The store is way too full.” He lifted his arms and gestured around him. The floors were entirely covered with stacks of rugs, the walls were draped with ancient Chinese and Afghan pieces, and every aisle was lined with either a Turkish runner or a faded Kilim. Just outside the door, greeting the numerous cars and pedestrians on College Avenue, was a stack of camel bags resting on a sawhorse.

“Come on, Wali, just have a look. This is the most beautiful Gabbeh in the world, I swear,” Rasool said, winking at Wali.

When Rasool had the carpet spread out evenly on the floor, Wali walked around its perimeter with his arms folded across his chest.

“The colors are too bright—synthetic. And it can’t be more than fifty years old,” Wali said.

“C’mon man, it’s beautiful! What’s wrong with you? You could sell it in a day and you know it,” Rasool snapped back.

Rasool was right, it was beautiful. Probably the most beautiful Gabbeh Wali had ever seen. Unlike the others, it was not dominated by eccentric geometric shapes and figures, making it look as if it were woven by a child. Instead the entire field was filled with brilliantly colored roses — magenta, orange, fuchsia, and gold, each lined up side by side, separated by an almost imperceptible square frame.

It was also true that Wali could sell it in a day. In fact, he had at least three clients who would buy it unseen, over the phone, at whatever price he asked. Tribal carpets were hot, and Gabbehs the most collectable. Turning over a corner to inspect the knots, Wali realized the entire rug was as soft as a blanket.

“How much?” Wali asked.

“I won’t take less than ten thousand. You know it’s worth twice that — easy.”

“But you still owe me five from the Mercedes,” Wali said.

“Okay, five,” Rasool said firmly. “You’ve got to give it to me today, though. My landlord’s going to throw me out of my apartment.”

“Your wife’s on the phone, Wali,” Alexander the shop assistant called from the back of the store. “She wants you to pick up a bag of rice and some yogurt from Safeway on your way home.”

Wali did not respond. Instead he bent over and began folding up the rug. Rasool grabbed at the opposite end.

“How’s Zara?” Rasool asked.

“Fine.”

“And your daughter, does she like college?”

“Sure, she’s all right. Can you take a check?”

“As long as it’s good.”

After Rasool left, Wali put the carpet in the back office and went home for the day, leaving Alexander to close up.

***

When Wali opened the shop the following morning the entire back office smelled of flowers. Not the sharp smell of a cheap perfume, but the intoxicating wine-like fragrance of a large blossoming red rose. Wali was reminded of his mother’s garden back home.

“You see,” she would say, bending down to smell a rose, “they are sweet, just like God.”

“Good morning,” Alexander said, arriving late for work, as usual.

“Good morning,” Wali answered, not looking up. “Hey, Alexander, did you have a girl in here last night?”

Alexander was at that age and Wali knew he occasionally brought friends into the shop late at night to party. As long as they cleaned up after themselves and didn’t start a fire, he didn’t mind.

“Of course not!” Alexander said, pretending to be offended. “Why?”
“The place smells of flowers.”

“I don’t smell anything,” Alexander said, sniffing at the air.

“I guess it’s nothing. Forget it. I’m sorry.”

Wali thought of calling Dr. Weinsfeld about the new Gabbeh. Then he remembered how pretty it was. Maybe I’ll hold off and keep it in the shop for a few days, he thought to himself. What do I need money for? Zara will just spend it on a new washing machine. No, I’ll savor it for a little while. Besides, it will be nice for the customers to see.

Wali sat at his desk waiting for Sharon, the young girl from the hair salon next door, to come out for her morning cigarette. Unlike the other carpet dealers in town, Wali did not go out at night drinking or keep a mistress. Instead, he limited the pleasures in his life to three: his wife’s cooking, spoiling his daughter, and visiting with Sharon in the morning when she had her cigarette. The problem was that lately, for some unknown reason, his wife had begun withdrawing the one last remaining bit of joy she still managed to give him. Her rice was almost always sticky now, her vegetables pale and lifeless, and she hardly ever used spices anymore. Lately his evening meal had become little more than the necessary acquisition of sustenance, ingested at a silent table. To make matters worse, his beautiful, most-beloved daughter had just started college and was hardly ever home. Sharon was all he had left. The minute he saw the edge of her flowered skirt in the front window, Wali grabbed his pack of cigarettes and leapt from his chair.

“Good morning,” he said, smiling.

“Good morning,” she said, smiling back. “How’s things?”

“Okay,” Wali said, looking down at the pavement.

“You look tired, Wali. You work too hard. What you need is a good massage.” Sharon stretched out her long, ringed fingers, and kneaded at the air like dough. Wali stared in enchantment. “You should come over to my place sometime after work, I’ll give you one. I’ve taken classes, you know.” Wali was blushing like a teenage boy.

“What’ll it be today?” he said, trying to change the subject. “A dragon, a lion, the Tree of Life, what about diamonds?” Each morning, Wali would ask Sharon this question, and then dash into his shop to look for a corresponding theme in a carpet for the front window. “Actually,” Wali said, remembering the rose rug, “I have a surprise for you.” He then stuck his head in the door and asked Alexander to hang the new rug in the front window.

Now, Wali owned some pretty impressive carpets, and he was not stingy with what he allowed to be exposed to the harsh afternoon sun. Why, just yesterday he hung up a Nain that once belonged to the Shah of Iran, simply because Sharon asked for birds gathered around a fountain. But nothing, not even that silk Nain, had ever made her eyes sparkle quite the way they did when she saw Alexander unfolding the rose Gabbeh.

“It’s beautiful,” she said, putting out her cigarette so she could go inside for a closer look.

“Wali, It’s beautiful!” She repeated, brushing one of its soft corners against her cheek.

“Where is it from?”

“Iran. It was made by a nomadic tribe.”

“Nomads, cool! How much is it?”

Sharon had never asked Wali the price of one of his carpets before. This was a good thing, in his view, since he knew she would not understand. The Nain up the day before was worth eighty-five thousand, maybe more. How could he possibly tell this to a young girl giving massages after work to earn extra cash?

“Oh Sharon, I don’t know. I haven’t priced it yet.”

Sharon spent the whole day popping out of the salon to have a cigarette and admire the rug. Every so often Wali could overhear her proudly explaining to one of her coworkers that it was woven by nomads.

***

At about four o’ clock that afternoon a middle-aged man driving a vintage Jaguar pulled up in front of the store. He stood for some time looking at the rose carpet before coming inside and asking Alexander to take it down. Wali sat in the back office watching. The minute Alexander brought out the step stool, Sharon appeared with another cigarette. Wali waited a few minutes before getting up to greet his customer.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Wali said, finally making his appearance. “Wonderful piece, isn’t it?” The man didn’t respond. Instead he walked slowly around the carpet.

“The dyes are mostly synthetic,” the man said, stopping to flip over a corner of the rug with his shoe, “and it’s not terribly old either.”

Wali glanced outside at Sharon, who was pacing back and forth like an angry animal.
“No, you’re right. It’s not very old, maybe fifty years.”

Sharon motioned for Wali to come outside. He pretended not to see, but then she leaned her head in the doorway and softly called his name.

“Excuse me for a moment,” Wali said. “Would you like some tea? Alexander, please bring this gentleman some tea.”

Sharon stood nervously in front of Wali. “Is he going to buy it?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

She then leaned close to him, so close he could smell her. It was the same intoxicating fragrance that filled his office earlier that morning. “Wali,” she said, “whatever that man offers, I’ll give you twice as much.” Again she stretched out her ringed fingers for him and rubbed a mound of imaginary flesh. “Twice as much,” she repeated in a whisper.

Wali was drunk with her smell and the sight of her young hands when he walked back into his store. Twice as much, he thought to himself. Twice as much.
When he returned, the man was sitting on the edge of a large stack of carpets, holding his cup of tea and scowling down at the rug.

“I’m very sorry to keep you waiting,” Wali said, as he quickly began folding up the rose carpet.

“Please, don’t take it away. I’m thinking of buying it. How much?”

“I’m sorry, it’s already been sold. I’ll have Alexander show you some more tribal weavings.”

“I don’t understand,” the man replied, clearly irritated.

“I’m very sorry, sir, but this carpet is sold. I have to leave now. Alexander will help you. There are many more beautiful rugs in the store. You will find another you love.”

Wali held the rose Gabbeh in his arms like a baby as he left the store. The girl is so sweet, he said to himself. Like God.

About the author:

Mira Martin-Parker is pursuing an MFA in creative writing at San Francisco State University. Her work has appeared in Diverse Voices Quarterly, Literary Bohemian, Mythium, Tattoo Highway, Yellow Medicine Review, and Zyzzyva.

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Hello Shoes

 
I’m in a stiff white dress. I’m attached, as only children can be, to my grandmother’s side. While the photo could have been taken anywhere, I know that it was taken at a party in Iran. It’s a Polaroid. If you look close you can see I’m not wearing appropriate shoes. The photo also fails to capture the brown aura around my grandmother. No one can see that but me.

My shoes were red leather sandals with yellow stitching that formed the pattern of a smiling apple on each foot. I stared at those apples a lot. Around them there was always sand and on my feet, always apples. On the TV there was “The Angry Man”. We were in Tehran just before the hostages were taken.

30 years later I am five years married. No surprise. I was bound to marry. I was a keeper of boyfriends. My first was a blonde in kindergarten who wanted to kiss me. I would only hold his hand. I turned him down when he offered to show me his noodle. Together we wore smocks for art class, held big fat yellow pencils and drank milk that tasted like band-aids.

I could go back there, back to childhood, have a kid and live through them. I could name it Sandy. It would be easy to get pregnant, to be off the pill with its daily dose of chemicals, hormones and control. Control, I can hear Janet singing that.  I could sing it. Dance Nasty.

Even thought I haven’t had Control since I was Wonder Woman and wore my red and white boots that made me run faster. They matched everything. Linda Carter was God: that skin, those eyes. I’d give anything for more than brown eyes, brown hair. I’m full of it up to here; up even into my aura. That’d be progress, if I no longer saw everyone’s bright bursting spirit colors.

Progress isn’t this new treatment plan. It is not a trip to a three-walled room where the fourth is a mirror that even a child knows is the glass through which they watch You. But like participants on reality TV, you forget the Observers are there. You let it all hang out and even tell Them about what the shoes have to say. Then you have to list.

Catalog: that was Christmas. We’d open the JC Penny Gift Book to circle, tab and tear out pages for what we wanted. We’d get one of the many we marked along with piles of Christmas clothes which looked like what everyone else called Back to School clothes.

When I was twelve, I circled a pair of shoes, a pair of fuck-me pumps. They weren’t red. They were black and pointed with a low heel; they would have to be worn with panty hose. The good looking girls at school wore panty hose beneath their jumpers when it was cool out but not cool enough for jeans.

I wore those shoes with everything.

Wouldn’t it be easy for everyone if I could say that those pumps proved their name? What if I could say I had been fucked at twelve or thirteen? But no one fucked me. Not physically. No, I waited a long time to be literally screwed. I was very linear, chronological. Like college, then graduation, and onto marriage. Like time ticking away. Like my biological clock tock . . . tock. Where is my baby? Caught in the ellipses? It’ll get its little head stuck between those dots, or the slats of a crib. I won’t be there to save it because I’ll be here, getting high on prescriptions and sessions and tasteless excuses for yogurt and pudding. But what can taste good, anyway, when your mouth has the consistency of cotton?

If I had a little one it could wear all kinds of little baby shoes. Like the ones I used to sell. I loved to help kids try on tiny Nikes and ballerina slippers. My feet were small enough to fit into little boy boots and sneakers. You could save some cash that way but little kids shoes have no support.

Can’t I just stay here with the staff? I could just sit with a book and a note pad, in a room by myself because I’m tired of walking, of getting up to wash dishes, of bothering. But, I’m not suicidal no matter what my husband says. Downing a handful of aspirin isn’t suicide, it’s stupid. I’m not enough of one way or the other. I just wanted the bottle to be empty, done. I never regret walking to the recycle bin. The bin at home a red crate just waiting for my washed out bottles and cans. I can still smile like apples.

About the author:

Jessie Carty’s writing has appeared in The Main Street Rag, Iodine Poetry Journal and The Houston Literary Review. She is the author of two poetry chapbooks At the A & P Meridiem (Pudding House 2009) and The Wait of Atom (Folded Word 2009), as well as a full length poetry collection, Paper House (Folded Word 2010). Jessie is a freelance writer and writing coach. She is also the photographer and editor for Referential Magazine. She can be found around the web, especially at http://jessiecarty.com where she blogs about everything from housework to the act of blogging itself.

Camouflage Discipline

Someone must manage the debris in vacant lots beside bus depots and railroad tracks, he thought, because there always appeared to be the same number of bottle shards, shreds of paper, rusted cans and absolutely miscellaneous things.
Across the street was a bench and he went over and sat down — and was rather too quickly joined by a man about his own age with a wet egg transparency of skin that was suggestive of a blind snake. Somehow that always seemed to happen to him. He was like a magnet. The clothes and the smell were all too familiar.
“They look just like people don’t they?”
“Who?” Casper asked.
The man with the even more unfortunate complexion than his own pointed to some people in the street.
“Down to the tiniest detail. It’s amazing. The subtlety. That’s what interests me most…the subtlety of them. The way they blend in so completely. You think you see them. Then they’re gone. And you can’t remember what they looked like. Like birds. You can’t say if you’ve seen them before. Maybe you see them all the time — the same ones. Maybe they’re watching you. You’d never know. Of course, they’re watching us. All the time.”
“I’m not sure I understand,” Casper said.
“Who does?” the man shrugged. “My bud Maxwell — you know Maxwell? Hanged himself in the Gatwick Hotel. Hell of a thing. He thought they were all one species…but nothing like us…more like intelligent energy that was somehow all one…like a colony of insects. I don’t know. I miss Max. He was trying to help Tweetie Boy, this kid who collected parakeet toys…stole them…from pet shops. Tweetie Boy was all chromed out from inhaling spray paint. Doctors shaved his head. Haven’t seen him in a long time.”
“I’m…I’m sorry to hear that,” Casper said, wondering if the man was on drugs. He spoke very clearly for someone who was high on something.
“How do I know who’s one and who’s not?” the man asked after a moment’s pause. “I go with my gut. It would take sophisticated technology to be dead sure. To see through the camouflage. That’s what it is. And it isn’t just people,” he continued. “I had another friend, Lala. She said that wacko things go on all the time at zoos and you never hear about them. Like one morning, in St. Louis or San Diego…somewhere like that…one of the keepers went to check on the male tiger. His name was Sultan or something. Rajah. Well, you know what? He was there all right…in his enclosure…this big male tiger. Only it wasn’t Rajah. It was another tiger. That same day…on the other side of the world…at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, I think it was…their male tiger went missing. In its place was Rajah. Like they’d been switched, you know? Like pieces in a game or something. Thousands of miles. Tigers transferred! Freaked the zoo keepers right out. They put a lid on it of course. Didn’t want anyone to know. Maxwell was still alive then. He thought maybe it was a test. Like an experiment…before they started on the real stuff…you, know replacing Presidents and heads of companies and shit.”
Casper had had many strange ideas cross his own mind — he was glad he didn’t have this particular concern to cope with. “You be careful,” he advised, seeing an opportunity to slip gracefully away.
It was something he’d learned. Validation. One of the handiest skills there is. All you had to do was find out what someone’s favorite show was — that’s what he called it — their favorite show. Once he’d cottoned on to that, everything became much clearer. He got over the choking fit that sometimes overcame him at cash registers or on the brink of conversations. He stopped getting into fights. People nodded. Smiles came at the right times. He realized everyone had a favorite show — not just the residents, but the staff and doctors too. Once you could talk about their show with them, or listen sincerely, it was okay. You didn’t have to agree with them — most times people are as suspicious of too hearty an agreement as they are upset or angered by outright disagreement. What people want is validation.
“They don’t give themselves away easily,” the man replied, seeking to hold his attention a moment longer “You know what they call that in that military? Camouflage discipline.
Ah, thought Casper. The military.  Everything’s connected.
“But I’ve gotten sharper. They each have their own individual tale. That’s the thing that gives them away in the end. That’s what makes the watching worthwhile. That’s what gets me by — I’ve turned the tables on them. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”
Actually…Casper mused as he sidled back toward the bus station…he would believe what the man had seen. He believed many things.
He’d seen shooting stars over Death Valley and the lights of Sing Sing from across the Hudson River.
He’d known a man in jail called The Pelican, who could swallow and regurgitate light bulbs whole without breaking them.
He’d had a truly delusional period in his late teens and early twenties…periods of bizarre visions…black-robed judges with the ears and snouts of limestone cave bats — highway patrol officers with the heads of grasshoppers — skeleton girls shimmying around glittering poles before corpses rotting at a mirrored bar.
Then things had gotten clear again. For quite a long time it seemed.
He’d picked up many skills over the course of his haphazard journey, but the one thing he considered himself really good at was listening to strangers — believing they were really there. That’s what people were most afraid of — not actually being. Phantoms. Nothingness. And so people opened up to him. They came to him as if called. They came like the wounded and the destitute had flocked to Jesus. Children…and children of trial.
That was an important part of his own favorite show. Listening to the troubled, the emphatic, the hopeful and the haunted…needy believers and those who seemed to have abandoned all faith. Like the strips in his Medicine Bag, their messages always seemed to connect with something that was happening to him, as if they were messages from his Bag brought to life.
He knew that if you listen closely enough to strangers, you always end up hearing your own story, however strange it may seem.

Kris Saknussem is the author of the novels Zanesville and Private Midnight, which recently became a bestseller in France. Enigmatic Pilot is due out from Random House in 2011. This story is excerpted from his latest novel, Reverend America.

E-mail Kris

www.saknussemm.com

http://www.facebook.com/saknussemm

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Nora Meyer is an Argentine artist living in Miami.
More of her work can be seen at http://web.mac.com/rulipon.

April Third

On the network news that night, the town where the shootings took place, which is the town where you live, is characterized as sleepy, bucolic, a company town where people look out for one another. The immigrant community –  the shooter was Vietnamese – is described as small, though it doesn’t seem small to you, who have lived your whole life here – it seems large, and growing.  Residents are declared to be in a state of shock, but most of the people you have encountered today, at the post office or the grocery store, though they might express shock, don’t seem shocked at all.  You can’t blame them for this – why should the fact that it happened here be any more shocking than if it happened anywhere else? Yet your own lack of shock seems like a shortcoming.  It is an unstated point of pride with you that you don’t manufacture or express emotions to conform with others’ expectations of what you should be feeling; but right now you’d like to feel more than you do.

The weather was supposed to be good, so you stayed home from work to clean the yard.  Shortly after you got back from dropping your daughter off at the high school in the morning, she called to say she had forgotten her violin, which she needed for orchestra.  No hurry – she didn’t have orchestra until the afternoon – so you helped your wife with the breakfast dishes, drank a second cup of coffee, read the sports section, then drove back across town with the instrument. The day is crisp and sunny; buds are appearing on the trees, and though the grass is not yet growing, it has turned a vivid green.  As you near the school, you see street barricades and flashing lights down the block, but think nothing of it. At the rear door to the school – the delivery door, usually unlocked and unattended, which you use to avoid going through the metal detector and being issued a visitor’s badge by the cop at the desk at the main entrance – you are met by an excited blond woman you know vaguely, a secretary at the school, who tells you there’s been a fatal shooting at the American Civic Association.  She says that hostages have been taken.  The Civic Association is around the corner from the high school.  The blond woman tells you the school is under lockdown: she will let you in, if you’d like, but you won’t be able to get out.

Looking at this woman’s round, flushed, expectant face, you are a bit dazed; then you feel the mind-clearing interest and relief that come in the moment when reality shifts and your routine is disrupted.

Your daughter will not be needing her violin today.

You will not be cleaning the yard.

You return to your car and begin the drive home, trying without success to find some news on the radio.  You notice a helicopter circling in the clear blue sky overhead.

Shootings, though hardly common here, are common enough; but you can’t recall anyone having been taken hostage. The hostage aspect, and the fact that whatever is happening is happening at the Civic Association, already give the event some context.  The Civic Association provides services to immigrants.  English and citizenship classes are held there, as well as cultural events – a garlic festival takes place each June in its parking lot.  Your mind begins to entertain various violent scenarios, having to do with the difficulties of adjusting to American life, nativist hostility towards newcomers, inscrutable foreign feuds transported whole to upstate New York.

When you get home, your wife is upstairs in the shower.  You are reluctant to break the news to her, anticipating the puzzlement, the embarassed expectation, on both sides, to react.  You sit on the couch and flip through the television channels, still looking for some news.

Then the phone rings.  It’s your wife’s brother, calling from Texas.  He is on the edge of hysteria.  Driving to work, he heard on the radio of a mass shooting and hostage situation in your town.  Fifteen people are dead.  Like you, your brother-in-law is a native of this place.  You assure him that the family – the very large extended family – is fine.  Of course, you have no way, at this point, of knowing with absolute certainty that this is true; but how could it be otherwise?  Calming your brother-in-law takes some time.  A few minutes after you hang up, your wife comes downstairs, toweling her hair.  She asks who called.

Suddenly, the story is all over the television.  The coverage is both local and national – the networks already have correspondents on the scene – and for the next two hours, you and your wife sit at either end of the couch and watch.  The situation is ongoing.  Fourteen dead – your brother-in-law’s figure was high – have been removed from the building; but the building has not yet been secured.  SWAT teams are moving through the building room by room.  There has been no communication with the gunman, or gunmen – on Fox, there is speculation that there may be more than one.  As many as forty people remain in remote areas of the building.  It is unclear whether any of them are being held hostage.

You have heard nothing from your daughter.  The public has been asked to refrain from the use of cell phones so that the frequencies will be open for emergency communication.  On Fox, someone suggests that the gunman, or gunmen, may have escaped the Civic Association building and be on the loose.  You are not worried – even if this is true, what are the odds of him– of them– getting into the school?

In mid-afternoon, with the news coverage tending to repeat itself, you walk to the post office and the grocery store.  When you get back, there is still no word from your daughter.  You dial her cell phone, and hear a ringing in the kitchen.  You find her phone on the kitchen counter, hooked up to its charger.  You decide to do some yard work after all. As you rake a winter-hardened ridge of leaves from alongside the garage, you can see the helicopter continuing to circle over downtown.  You are loading an armful of dead branches into a garbage can when a car pulls into the driveway and your daughter gets out.

The newswoman who refers to your town as bucolic reported from Ground Zero on 9/11 and from inside the Super Dome during Hurricane Katrina.  Now she is reporting live to the nation from a picturesque streetcorner in this “company town” – but the fact is that the company is virtually gone, the population is half what it was fifty years ago, and the mostly vacant downtown, where many people no longer feel safe walking at night, is struggling, with the help of state grants, to transform itself into an arts center. All over the television dial, famous faces are trying to explain what happened today in your town.  In this saturation news coverage, you feel a perverse sense of pride, a proper sense of shame, and a powerful sense of the transitory – this attention, which somehow seems worth holding onto, will shortly be withdrawn.

Your daughter was brought home from school by the mother of one of her friends.  The students had been confined to their classrooms all day.  They had been served pizza and bottled water and watched movies. They were not allowed to listen to news – there was concern that some of the students might have relatives in the Civic Association building – but your daughter could see the building, and the commotion there, from her classroom.  There had been talk among the kids about having to spend the night at school, but in fact they had been dismissed at the usual time.  Apparently, by then the danger had passed.

Most of her schoolmates, your daughter reports, ignored the request that they stay off their cell phones; but she is otherwise uncharacteristically gentle in her assessment of the conduct of students, teachers and administrators during the lockdown.  Your daughter is an only child.  You had her late in life, after years of trying – in fact, you had given up trying.  She is an excellent student who hates school; but she hates it for all the right reasons, and even in this you are proud of her.

A news conference comes on the television, live from City Hall.  You flip through several channels, and see the same image on each of them: a somber lineup of public officials standing shoulder to shoulder behind a lectern topped by a bank of microphones.  Though only the public officials and the backs of the heads of the front row reporters are on screen, you can tell that the room is crowded.  At the lectern, the mayor speaks haltingly, the governor eloquently, their words punctuated by the clicking of cameras.  The chief of police provides what details he can.  At nine fifteen that morning, a Civic Association client, still not positively identified (though his name is all over the national news), barricaded the rear door of the Association’s headquarters with a borrowed car.  He then entered the front door armed with two semi-automatic pistols.  He shot two receptionists, killing one.  Next, he went to a classroom.  In less than a minute, he fired ninety-eight rounds, killing a teacher and eleven students.  Then he turned a gun on himself.  Four other people were wounded.  Two of those are in critical condition.  Thirty-seven people who were in the building at the time of the assault barricaded themselves in the basement.  They remained there for three hours until police finally entered the building.  Contrary to earlier reports, at no point had anyone been held hostage.  There is no evidence that there was more than one shooter.  The shooter’s motive is unknown.  The guns were legally obtained.  Asked to describe the scene in the classroom, the chief refers to it as “unbelievable” and leaves it at that.  Counseling has been made available to any law enforcement or emergency personnel who feel the need to talk to someone.  The chief’s predictable characterization of the shooter’s suicide as “cowardly” strikes you as a misstep – if the perpetrator, instead of killing himself, had shot it out with the police, would the chief have called him brave? – but for the most part it’s an impressive performance.  You know the chief slightly.  He’s been chief for less than a year.  He seems to you to have grown in the job.

When the officials are done speaking, the camera moves to a young reporter for a local station.  She is frantically preparing for her turn on camera, which she doesn’t realize has begun.  She brushes back her hair, checks her notes, fumbles with her microphone.  She is talking, to someone off camera, or to herself; she looks towards the camera for a sign.  Even when she begins to speak to the camera – to you – her veneer of professionalism is too thin, her ambition too apparent.  The utter falseness of her position seems somehow to parallel your own.  When she refers to the community’s shock, you change the channel.

The news is over, but you and your daughter continue to sit in the living room, watching television.  Outside, it is growing dark.

Your wife is in the kitchen, making a late dinner.

She is a fine cook.

She is still beautiful.

You have been lucky in your life.

Every night, you and your wife and daughter have dinner together.  You do not have many family rules, but this is one.

Tomorrow, you will go out of town on business for the day.  When people hear where you’re from, they will offer their condolences, and you will find yourself in the same position as the public officials and newscasters, the headline writers and editorialists, having to say something.

Tomorrow, or the next day, a list of victims will be published.  You will scan the list for a familiar name.  Obituaries and profiles of the dead will appear in the newspaper.  Reading about their lives, their places in the community, the reactions and recollections of those they’ve left behind, you will begin to feel a little bit of what you are supposed to be feeling.

You sit in the living room and watch television.

Your wife tells you it is time for dinner.

***

David Cody is a married father of five and 1975 graduate of Binghamton University.  He retired in 2005 as Deputy Commissioner of the Broome County Parks and Recreation Department, and coaches track and cross country at Binghamton High School.  His fiction has appeared in The Seattle Review.

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"Bali", Photilation by Larry Hamill

The Light in the Sky

         We board a boat, one I don’t think I would step into in the U.S., but I am on vacation and like all the other tourists crowded on a creaky dock in La Parguera, I trust.  La Parguera is a small tourist town on the southern coast of Puerto Rico known for its phosphorescent bay.  Tour companies run trips of $5 per person and on moonless nights you can see how the water burns.  My mother hasn’t noticed that I’m pregnant, and I haven’t told her.  Why speak of things that will never come to fruition?  Instead of being at an abortion clinic, I came to Puerto Rico.  Every day when I was home, I said I was going to do something.  To make a decision.  But the only move I made was to get on a plane to come here.  At the last minute I told my mother I wanted to go to Puerto Rico, and my mother, just reaching retirement, quickly agreed.  I let her plan the rest of our vacation, but La Parguera is the one place I had to come to.  Everyone I see on this dock is Puerto Rican; the white or Asian tourists don’t make it this far south into the Island.  They like to stay near San Juan where the policemen are everywhere, making sure they don’t make a wrong turn into La Perla.  Even though everyone in Puerto Rico says there is crime everywhere, everyone still leaves their doors open.  We go from house to house and sometimes have to wait minutes before seeing a human face.  But, I wanted to come here because everything about Puerto Rico makes me feel safe. 

            There are about ten of us this late at night — I think we are the last boat of the night — and the small boat seems just right.  This is not the ferry going to Oak Bluffs where we are 10 million miles above the water.  Leaning over with one knee on my seat, I am confident I could touch these black waters.  I don’t know how to swim, and I am sure that I am not the only one.  A pile of life jackets that have lost their orange luster rests in the back of the boat.  No one so much as looks at them, except for me, and I am keenly aware that I will look like a jibara if I put one on.  So I hope for the best as the engine turns on and we slowly start to descend into the bay.

            As soon as we are a few feet from the dock, my mother pats my leg and points to the sky.  This woman who sits next to me is not the woman I know on U.S. soil.  This woman in Puerto Rico peels fruit with her bare teeth, picks fruit off the ground and checks it for edibility, even though it seems like anything she picks up she deems edible, while I cast a wary glance on all the fruit put before me.  Some of the fruit I have never seen and can’t name in English.  She can’t translate it into English, so I don’t have a comprehension of what the fruit is.  I have to take her word for it.

            Tonight she surprises me again: this normally sound woman points at the sky and says, “Look, I think there is a UFO.”  Something that she would never entertain in her sleepy town in Massachusetts.  I look up at the sky, never having thought about UFOs.  I have been prone to irrationality all my life, believing in the impossible, the seldom, or the other.  I know it is not a plane because the position of the light is steady.  The light in the sky blinks and blinks.  So, the longer I look, the more UFO seems like the only sensible option.  I think that if this were several hundred years ago, and I were a religious peasant always on the lookout for an apparition of the Virgin Mary in any incarnation, I would believe that this was some sort of sign from God.  I don’t normally believe in the Virgin Mary or God, but because I am three months pregnant and the last thing I want is to be pregnant, I wish this time only that the Virgin Mary would come and take my baby.  I feel none of those inklings toward motherhood.  I side with those post-partum mothers who drive their children into the water.  Give them over to Yemaya.  Let her have those children. 

            There is a young mother on the boat with her boyfriend or husband or whatever who sits next to us — she could be 18 or she could be 24.  I notice her because she is unremarkable.  She is the girl my mother warned me against being all my life — the girl who gets pregnant.  Her man is loud and bombastic; in short, an asshole, and an asshole on vacation must be unbearable in real life.  His voice overtakes her, and the baby starts wailing.  She tries to rock the baby within its carriage before she realizes she has to hold the baby so that it will stop crying.  When she starts to pull the baby out, her man starts to yell, “Watch what you’re doing.  Damn, be careful with the baby.”  This breaks everyone’s merriment, even my mother turns from her UFO conspiracy babbling to turn and look at him.  She whispers ueeewww to me.  I whisper ummhmmm to her.  I can imagine the years ahead for this young mother.  Dismal years of being overshadowed, sullen, on the verge of death and having someone else telling you what to do.  As soon as I found out I was pregnant, I broke up with my boyfriend.  All of a sudden, I turned him over in my head and found him wanting and didn’t want my life to be irrevocably linked with his.

            My mother pulls on my arm, so we get back to the UFO.  My mother starts speculating that maybe when we get to the phosphorescent part of the bay there will be a UFO there ready to take us away.  She starts to recount every story of UFO sightings that she has heard of in Puerto Rico.  Even though we were in El Yunque last week, known for alien abductions, at least for those people who seem incapable of staying on a hiking trail, and there wasn’t a UFO in sight.  The more that she talks, the more her case is solidified.  And I start to think that if the Virgin Mary doesn’t come to take my baby, maybe the next best thing will be an alien abduction. 

            I wonder if this couple is from here or there, Puerto Rico or the U.S., but I don’t know if that will make much of a difference, if her lot in life somehow improves.  This is a place where a man will build you a house with his bare hands.  Every piece of the wall, every piece of the floor you touch will be built by his hands.  This is the loveliest of reality.  When I go into these houses built by these men,  I wonder what it is like to live your life indoors, tending to the house that your man built and the kids your man made.  I sometimes imagine this as the easier life, doing what you are supposed to do — getting married and having kids.  But like any place, this is a place of contradiction, this is also a place where men beat their wives, not different from the U.S., but on an island so small, the stories are packed in. 

            But these same wives ask me when will I get married, when will I have kids.  My answer is never to both.  And after they have asked me what they have asked — and each woman who I have run into has asked me the same two questions, and to each I have given the same answer — each one has said: good, don’t do it.  Not one has advocated it and gone on to tell me about a life of happiness.  And I think the only way to be happy is to be alone.  A life without compromising, without having to share.  I wish someone had told this young mother that.  Instead, she will be one of those women, after she has divorced, who will tell girls like me not to do it.  Of course most won’t listen, opting to not notice her unhappiness or anyone else’s and think her unhappiness is a rarity in the same vein that the grand love they will have is also a rarity. 

            My mother and I turn our attention to the other couple, the teenagers.  We comment on how they haven’t taken their lips off each other since we were on the dock.  I wonder on which side this girl will end once the desire to kiss for hours has fizzled.  Which rarity will she ultimately believe in?

            A speedboat passes by us and makes our rickety boat wiggle in the water.  The people in the speedboat hoop and holler as they race away.  And my mother starts to follow another line of speculation:  “You know, this boat was late to pick us up, but there wasn’t anyone on the boat when it arrived.  So, if there wasn’t anyone on it, why was it late?  I don’t know, what if that speedboat is full of thieves and they’re going to kill us all.  I mean I’m just saying.”  My mother was raised in Puerto Rico, but for some reason she does not feel the safety I feel here.  It’s like we have switched places once we disembarked — she is now the authoritative one.  She speaks fluent Spanish and only a few words of English and somehow she has become the irrational one.  While I find this amusing, I do my best to show concern.  I respect fear.  I know what it’s like to be scared.  So, I employ logic to calm her down, while in my head, I relish her theories.  There will either be a UFO.  Or the speedboat that has passed us is part of a murderous theft ring.  These people on the boat will meet us, steal our money, and dump us in the water.  Maybe that is the best end for me after all.  This wouldn’t be such a bad place to die.  My mother looks from the UFO that is still hovering above us, to the fleeting light of the speedboat.  I ponder this choice against the UFO option.  The speedboat seems like the most viable option.  There is a human face at the other end of this.  Human hands that can alleviate my ambivalence.  I feel the boat start to slow down and I want to stand up to get a glimpse of what is indeed ahead of me. 

            The boat comes to a stop and the captain announces that a crew member will jump in the water and swim around to stir up what makes the water phosphorescent.  The captain explains that due to pollution the phosphorescence has become harder to detect.  All the people on the right side of the boat dangerously rush to my side of the boat to see the water shimmer.  They are enraptured with the lights.  But I am not.  I can hear the people from the speedboat and one of them is in the water and it looks like she or he is walking on water.  Me and my mother watch and watch, finally seeing a miracle, but then my other senses kick in and it becomes clear they are just out here partying.  Then I overhear someone ask the captain about the light in the sky, and my heart lightens.  But he says, “Oh that light, it’s a blimp put up by the Coast Guard.  It’s to catch drug dealers coming in from the Dominican Republic.”

            My mother exhales relief. 

            One by one, as the lights turn off, I grab a life jacket and decide to swim toward, to catch, that last image.  In the dark, I see him walking back towards me.  He knows I’m coming.

Ivelisse Rodriguez has published or has work forthcoming in the Boston Review, Vandal, Kweli, and the Bilingual Review.  She has received fellowships to attend the Writers of Americas Conference in Cuba, Voices of America (VONA) workshop, and the Summer Literary Seminar in Kenya.  She holds a Ph.D. in English-Creative Writing from the University of Illinois at Chicago and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College. She has finished a collection of short stories titled “Love War Stories”.  Ivelisse is currently working on a novel about the African Diaspora and a novella about Salsa music.  She is an Assistant Professor of English at Borough of Manhattan Community College.

Run, Yesterday is a Ghost!

   Arinze said that Yesterday must be forgotten for it is a ghost appearing with dimness and melting with luminosity. That idea stood close to my heart until he called on the phone and said he was in Abuja, nestled against his clean bed-sheet on the ninth floor of a prestigious hotel, absorbing a pretentious view of Nigeria. Arinze was eating mangoes when he called. It showed in his lip-smacking and hurried way of talking, and flat eagerness as he requested one of Chimamanda’s books. It was our ritual in London; this reading of African literature before siesta; and after we rolled up the soft blanket like a mat, we’d read portions of delicious African books till sleep came and possessed us. Arinze’s theory is that siestas are ephemeral, like youth’s passing beauty, and must be spent in the coziest of ways. I was a composite part of that ritual — a thread interwoven in his cloth of ideas — because I sought an aroused mind that could pen the laughable trivialities of life, like how Mama’s jumbo fowl crowed whenever the clock struck five.

   I knelt on the carpeted bedroom floor like an infant listening to stories of naughty Mbe or the tortoise, and flipped through my pile of books. I picked memories not worth remembering and dropped them when they grew hot in my hands. I ran a palm over Purple Hibiscus, wiped its dusty cover on the floor, and prayed the storyline wouldn’t be easily misread by a man in love with a woman. But I was nothing like this in London. I never wiped dust on the crimson carpets my Hoover walked over till they shone like new grassland. I tucked the book into my handbag wondering if we would ever get to read it. It stuck in the bag’s throat like fishbone and slipped in after I hit it on the mahogany desk.

   I scratched my legs prickling from insect bites, unsure if the moistness on my palms was due to the humid weather or fear. My little isolated cosmos was shattered by piercing thunder as the rain sprayed on sizzling hot shingles. Just to keep thinking, I fantasized Arinze’s reaction if he ever discovered my chance meeting with Nnamdi eight years ago. I was a sweet sixteen learning to ride a bicycle in the solitary parts of Zone 6 when we met. Fresh out of cleaning the charcoaled blackboards of the secondary school, I was returning from the bank where I had gone to buy a university matriculation exam form when he spotted me and carried me in his sleek car that smelt of talcum powder. After he slid down the car windows mirroring my reflection, I slipped in because I read in Mama’s beauty magazine — the one with a bare-skinned fashion model on top of the bookshelf — that exposed skin suffers when it sunned. So I entered the car out of concern for my skin and not to listen to his advanced sweet-talk.

   I recall caressing the leather seats just to be sure they were genuine leather and not personas in my daydream. I remember reliving my favorite fantasy in which I rode my bicycle down the neatly tarred roads knocking down the shocked passersby. Other reveries were a bit more colorful but not as expressive as that one and yet, I couldn’t ride my bicycle in the afternoons because too many cars sped along the tarred roads. And the February sun, I imagined, was hot enough to bring a potful of clean water to a boil in a matter of minutes. We exchanged cool pleasantries, pulled into Herbert Macaulay way and joined the long queue of cars on the tarred road. The dialogue began as a drizzle then progressed to heavy rain. I don’t recall who said what, but I remember rolling my eyes when Nnamdi said that he was a thirty-year-old banker in search of a homemaker.

   Nnamdi’s amorous glances melted like butter on hot bread after I said that I was questing after encyclopedism and not romanticism; and he managed to look serious when he warned that the university is an intense institution that will give you knowledge you may never need. Freshly mowed grass perfumed the air as we drove past the manicured gardens. Their scent was deeply delightful, like the perfume of newly opened pomade. On stopping at the traffic lights, his dimpled cheeks collapsed into a smile when I said that his skin is the color of the coffee Mama made on Saturdays before she added milk to it.

   “I don’t see the university as negatively as you do,’ I argued with lukewarm pomposity. ‘You sentence it as if it was a filthy criminal, yet it has produced the best minds of our time.”

   Nnamdi’s face crumpled into a melancholic smile when he said that I had a romantic view of the campus that will change when I discover it simply nurtured my craze and suppressed my practicality.  He laughed at my confusion, then at himself for confusing me. One way or another, his laughter merged with the air and made the masquerade trees chuckle with bent heads. Nnamdi’s tie laughed too, pausing on his chest occasionally to catch its breath. But after he said that females believed he was such a good catch, I smoothened out my short skirt and arrogantly pointed at the green signpost leading to my destination.

   Nnamdi rushed out of the car and raced after me like a sprinter amusing the idle bystanders with his fake theatrics. I didn’t turn when the bus wheels screeched, when the sound of his split bones whooshed up pity from the mouths of passersby and splashed it into my ears.

   “You didn’t even turn,” Arinze said without looking as I opened the door and handed him Purple Hibiscus. I couldn’t imagine how he unearthed me so quickly. “Ojugo, can I ever forget that my brother Nnamdi was reduced to a limbless man in a wheelchair, and you didn’t even turn?”

   ‘I didn’t know that craze could also mean a type of fashion,’ I said walking away, glad that he didn’t call me back.

About the author

Jill Okpalugo-Nwajiaku writes whenever she can. She studied pharmacy at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and currently lives in Richmond, Virginia, with her husband. Okpalugo-Nwajaku is interested in African creative writing that focuses on female gender issues. She has been published in online literary magazines, including Snap! All Things Girls, Identity Theory, Poetry and Writing, Word Catalyst, St. Something, Splash of Red and Glint.  She is working on an MFA in creative writing, and her first novel.

Herm Card, Poetry, Rebecca Benedict, Illustration. From the Syracuse Poster Project, 2010.

By Jeff Katz

My Imaginary Friend Has a CD

I never had an imaginary friend, but if I did he’d be a bit younger than me, the little brother I never had. He’d definitely share my taste in music – Elvis and The Beatles, The Beach Boys and Paul Weller. He’d also dig jazz, Ellington, Ella, Sinatra. We’d watch old Annette Funicello movies, some Hope and Crosby pictures, Apocalypse Now. Oh yeah, he’d be British. That would be way cool.

Maybe Baby (or, You Know That It Would Be Untrue), is a series of fanciful columns I’ve created, “what if” moments in rock and roll history – what if Otis Redding had lived, or if John Lennon blew off Paul McCartney when they first met, or if Stephen Stills had been a Monkee. Since it rolled out last summer, my readership has grown, especially in England. I think the British have a keener sense of appreciation for this sort of thing. It’s via the Maybe Baby blog that I met Jon Nickoll, my imaginary friend turned real.

Jon became a follower of the blog and its Twitter feed of daily rock factoids. When I premiered my ragazine column, with a piece on my own peculiarities of LP storage, I sent it over to him. See, Jon is a vinyl junkie too and his blog, I Buy Records, recounts the highlights of his once a week flipping through record shop (or, in his case, shoppe) racks. Jon loved the article and our friendship grew. We’d chat about albums, recent Maybe Baby pieces, all sorts of music related topics. I went over to Jon’s website and started listening to his music. I was impressed and told him so.

Jon has two distinctive musical careers. One is as pianist and jazz vocalist at The Dorchester Hotel. Before that he was, at 26, the youngest resident at the Savoy Hotel’s American Bar, the legendary piano bar that dates back to 1898. A Who’s Who of celebrities has made their way through the place. Jon had always messed about on piano, but he got the job after an impressive audition for a London agent who supplied city hotels with performers. At The Savoy, he could be seen stompin’ with Paul McCartney. (Macca shared his story of meeting Elvis with the Presley-obsessed Nickoll). Amy Winehouse popped in and pulled up a piano stool for a half hour of duets and Johnny Rotten requested a Tammy Wynette chestnut as he doodled giant breasts on a Savoy napkin. Pretty heady stuff!

I love Nickoll’s jazz style. His playing is tasteful and beautifully done; his vocals are smooth, not sappy, and reminiscent of great singers in the Mark Murphy tradition. His soul is undeniable. But late at night, after his genteel sessions at the hotel are over, this ivory-tinkling Jekyll becomes a rock and roll Hyde. Jon’s latest disc, Cinema Music, finally came sweeping across the ocean via a very slow Royal Post, and I was bowled over. It’s a great record.

From the time he was six years old, Jon has been a rock and roll animal. He was watching Elvis’ 1970 concert documentary and Jon remembers it as “a lightning bolt. I was converted! I was utterly transformed by the film and it shaped my self-identity. I wanted a piece of what I just seen.” His parents surrounded him with Beatles, Paul Simon, Hollies, Everly Brothers and little Jon would spend all his pocket money on records. What a good boy!

At 18, a treasure trove of his own songs in tow, the prolific Nickoll roamed Scandinavia for three years, honing his craft, meeting girls and making a reputation. When he returned to Jolly Old England, he nearly garnered a record deal with BMG, but one record exec, like so many before him, made a bad decision to pass on this great talent. Their loss.

Undeterred, Jon made his first album on his own. Arena Parade, which included the piano tune “Technology Will Break Your Heart,” an Internet hit. The folky, singer-songwriter approach of his debut has been shunted aside for the more expansive, much deeper songs that are Cinema Music. Nickoll impressively plays every instrument on every song.

From the opening rhythms of “Green Man,” the album captures your attention. “Dig the Changes,” employs Beach Boys harmonies circa Pet Sounds and Smile. Jon played in a band with a guy who had all the Beach Boys albums and the mere sight of all that vinyl blew Nickoll’s mind. The beauty, complexity, and honesty of Brian Wilson’s sound led to many a night listening to the master’s works.“Eva Versus the King of Hearts” is a soulful tune with a title out of a Godzilla movie. Written over a heartbreak suffered in Denmark, it’s a sparse, funky delight. Every song is worth your time; there’s not a clinker in the bunch.

There are recurring religious themes that pop up, though Nickoll is not a churchgoer. In fact, he was surprised that I noted the references to Jesus, guilt and the sacred. He’s clearly a spiritual guy, and creator of excellent imagery. Like all of us lowdown sinners, Nickoll is not above a bit of a guilt complex, but there’s not a whit of shame in his love of pop music. His definition of perfect pop – Brill Building tunes of the Goffin-King variety, The Hollies hits, early 1960’s Elvis, “Wouldn’t It Be Nice,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” He calls it, “mind-blowing pop.” Amen brother!

So, how does he reconcile his schizoid life of smooth, cool hotel pianist/crooner by day, rocker by night? He loves dropping the tux and donning jeans, there’s something more. Nickoll’s  jazz vocals and rock vocals are poles apart. Does he say to himself, “I need this voice for a jazz sound and this sound for rock?”

Whatever it is, he’s aware of it. “I feel sensitive about it too. I’m like The Talented Mr. Ripley with music. The changes in my voice are automatic. It’s really weird. I haven’t analyzed it too much. But I am aware that I’m a better singer in the traditional sense when I’m in my ‘jazz’ voice, it’s something I can just turn on. I feel more exposed doing my own stuff, but it means more personally.”

Believe it, this Mr. Ripley delivers and there’s more on the way with a new album scheduled for a summer release. Amidst his new “kick arse” gear, Nickoll has 15 or more of his own songs from the wood inspired by his surrounding garden. Will there be a tour of the States? “I really hope so,” is all he can say at this point.

Snatches of influence abound – Jeff Buckley, Paul Weller, the aforementioned Wilson and Winehouse, but don’t get the wrong idea. Jon Nickoll is a distinctive artist who, like other greats, distills what he’s learned and makes something new. The cover of Cinema Music shows Nickoll, guitar case in hand, climbing a metal staircase. He’s going up, folks, most definitely going up.

Jon’s site http://www.jonnickoll.com/

I Buy Records http://ibuyrecords.blogspot.com/

Maybe Baby http://maybebabyoryouknowthatitwouldbeuntrue.blogspot.com/

The Hunted

           1959. The night was blacker than cats-a-fightin’ as Tommy Ringer and I rolled along the deserted back roads of Citrus County in the old Model-A Ford pickup truck we had converted to a swamp buggy. We were headed for trouble and didn’t know it.

          Gone were the Model-A’s original 21” rims. We bounced along on four airplane tires that gave us height and mobility in the woods. By attaching chains we could go just about anywhere. The old headlights barely swallowed up more than fifteen yards of darkness at a time, and that’s assuming they worked at all. Every jounce along the cracked macadam road jiggled the connecting wires, but we forged ahead, safe in knowing nobody else was fool enough to sacrifice precious sleep-time so as to train dogs to hunt raccoons in the middle of the night.

          Between Lake Panasofkee and the little town of Inverness lay an expanse of some of the best hunting land in Florida, especially for a couple of ‘coon hunters. It was a paradise of lakes and ponds, studded with oak and pine and cabbage palm. Interspersed through it all were open expanses of palmetto. Every kind of game was there — deer, turkey, bear, wildcat, quail, and dove. Even a few panthers still roamed that area of the state. But ‘coon hides were a cash crop and it was ‘coons we were after. 

          High above each front fender, welded to the buggy’s frame, were a couple of “shooter’s-seats,” metal seats we’d salvaged from derelict John Deere tractors. In daylight they provided grandstand views of whatever we hunted. At night we sat up high enough to keep our night vision.  

          I rode in the seat above the right fender, my .22 rifle cradled across my lap. The humid September night tugged warm against my face and arms. On either side of the road, barely visible in the poor light, a rancher’s hog-wire fence stretched for miles, a blurred honeycomb of pewter wire punctuated by cypress fence posts.

          It was Tommy, staring straight ahead through the windshield, who saw the ‘coons dart across the road in front of us from left to right. 

          “Hot damn, hang on,” he yelled as he braked onto the right shoulder. “Did you seem ‘em?”

          “See what?” I asked, grabbing the edge of my seat.

          “A mama coon and six or seven young’uns.” The engine hadn’t coughed and sputtered to a full stop before Tommy unlatched the first dog cage at the rear of the buggy. The three coon-hounds caught the excitement of the coming hunt and began baying. 

          “Get on the other side of the fence and I’ll hand ‘em over to you.” Tommy held a full-grown dog in his arms.

          Small game can easily scoot through the five inch squares of a hog-wire fence, but it’ll stop a dog and strangle him. A hound follows scent without worrying about wire. But with his head poking through, he fights it and gets tangled. It can cut him badly or kill him before you know it.

          I unloaded my rifle and laid it on the front seat. I clipped the battery of my hunting light to my cartridge belt and adjusted the headlamp band around my head so the miner’s light shone from the middle of my forehead.

          “Hurry up,” Tommy urged, hoisting the dog before I was ready. “Those ‘coons will be all the way to Lake Okeechobee before you know it.”

          I took my time. The fence was about shoulder high, too high to jump. I rested my hand on the post and came forward with a springing step, then shifted my weight to the top of the post and rolled over the top.

          What happened next remains a blur. I cleared the wire and my 180 pounds thudded into the tall palmettos. To my left, nearly beneath my feet, an explosion. High-pitched buzzing. Like a thousand angry bees. Not bees. Rattlesnake. I froze. Knees bent, arms outstretched. The head-lamp snapped loose and dangled alongside my left jawbone, its beam playing back and forth across the toes of my boots.

          Time crawled. Tommy dropped the dog and reached for his shotgun. The hound rammed its head through the hog-wire and strained against the fence, baying as if he’d treed every ‘coon in Florida. Tommy cocked the twelve-gauge and adjusted his miner’s lamp.

          Light flooded me.

          “Hot damn,” he swore. “Don’t flinch, or he’ll get you.”

          I never so much as rolled an eyeball. But I oozed fear. Oozed it like a rabbit caught in a snake’s trance.

          “I mean it. Don’t move. I’m gonna fire right in front of your face. Lean forward you’ll get hit.” Tommy rested the shotgun on the fence post where my hand had been. The eye of the barrel widened as it moved closer, above and to the right of my head. 

          “Just kill him, dammit,” I muttered through my teeth. Crouched as low as I was the fangs could easily strike me anywhere – arm, leg, or worse. Poison hitting my neck or head, I was dead. “Shoot the damn thing!”

          Tommy squeezed the trigger. The muzzle flashed. Buckshot blew past my face. My right ear deafened, my cheek burned. 

          “Got him,” he yelled. But I already knew it. The frenzied rattling subsided with each convulsion of the dying snake, like a child’s metal toy winding down to a quiet clatter, only to spring to life with brief, final spasms. 

          I stood up slowly, testing my jellied knees. 

          “I told you I got him,” Tommy said, as he pulled the hound away from the fence.

          “I know,” I replied, adjusting my headlamp and shining it all around me. “Just checking.” Snakes traveled in pairs and another one couldn’t miss the dead rattler’s gangrenous musk that choked the air like a morning fog.

          I managed to cross the fence again before Tommy remembered the dead diamondback. 

          “How about grabbing the rattler while I get this dog back in the cage?”

          “Tommy, I thank you for saving my butt, but I’m not touching that damned snake. You want him, you go get him.”

          He did, hoisting it up by the rattles. The head twirled from the few strands of skin keeping it attached. The mouth gaped open and the pearl-white fangs glistened in the light of our headlamps. Tommy tried handing the snake to me, but the best I’d do was hold open a burlap bag for him to drop it into. Even without the head the snake measured six feet long. Since a rattler can strike a distance two-thirds its length, the entire time I remained crouched there in the palmettos, I felt I was the hunted.

          As I cranked the Model-A, Tommy glanced at his watch. “Hey, we still got some time left before the moon comes up. What do you say we turn the dogs loose?”

          “That snake said it all,” I told him. “I’m done hunting for tonight.” Actually, I was pretty much finished with it altogether. That was the third time within weeks that a rattlesnake had nearly bitten me. Two months later, in November, I met a girl on a blind date and married her in March. Shortly after that I sold my purebred Redbone hound to a feed salesman who broke him of hunting ‘coons and made a deer-dog out of him.

          Tommy was happy with his new rattlesnake belt and hatband, and sported them everywhere. He was welcome to them. He even dried the snake’s skull with the fangs extended in the strike position. He mounted it on the dashboard of the hunting buggy.

          I didn’t need any souvenirs. Escaping death that night in Citrus County was the only memento I needed.

Money Art, Valerie Brown Woven Photograph

Seasonable Desires

White Cotton Shirt

She picks a peasant shirt from the rack and looks for her size. There are 2 smalls, 3 larges, and 1 medium. Her fingertips pass over black paisley embroidered borders. The hanger dangles over her arm like a compass pointing southeast in the direction of its country of origin. She slides her bra straps off her shoulders, unties and reties the ebony satin ribbon into a bow. Spring ahead, longer daylight hours, summer not far off.

Did you find what you were looking for? Russian or Eastern European accent, to her ear both sound similar. Only the shirt, for now.

She gets into the Japanese hybrid redolent with cumin, cardamom, turmeric, and sumac. The driver’s lunch, half-eaten, in a foil puddle on the front seat beside him. Her destination given (forty-fourth and second) she repeats it in single digits, 4-4—and 2.

Argentinean Malbec bought at the liquor store a block from her apartment. She buys Italian Gorgonzola (dolce), Greek olives, and sundried tomatoes in Tuscan olive oil from the gourmet grocer next door, and stops at the Korean market on the corner for baby lettuce, and blueberries imported from Chile, a container of milk. A north wind off the Hudson; winter still hangs on.

She puts the bags on the glass top table. Uncorks the wine, shakes the baby lettuce into the salad spinner, the blueberries in a bowl. She lays the white cotton shirt embroidered with black paisley borders and ebony satin bow wrapped in tissue across her bed.

Washington Square Park

The cloud hovers in a space between treetops. The cloud hovers on top of a building with a red tile roof. The cloud drifts lazily in the breeze touching her arm. A cloud between treetops, over a building with a red tile roof, leaves lush after a rainy spring—verdant at the start of a new season. Bird song, traffic slush, and children chirping—a breeze on her skin. Two women in black and white—the space between two strangers—almost astride, skirts dance around bare legs. One in a black dress beneath a white pinafore, thick straps crisscross at her back tie in a bow at her waist, a second behind, in a white sleeveless blouse over a black trumpet skirt, gussets fan open with her leg’s movement.

A red brick circle— in spots yellow tipped grass breaks through the cement mortar. A chick, a babe, and a girl sunbathe, lounge around the circle, roasting their flesh to a perfect hue, sits on blue jean legs eats crumbs from the bottom of the brown paper bag and reads—sits up, reties her bathing suit, tote bag on peach towel spread over red brick, rearranges the tote pillow, reclines—a straight leg flat to the ground, a leg bent at the knee, (stems), coral jean skirt, frayed hemline, black rubber sole flip-flops point north and south, head east, and body west, her fingertips travel her firm belly. Two leave. Tanning is tedious work.

The trees lush after a rainy spring—verdant in their infancy at the start of a new season before the onslaught of July and August heat. Bird song, traffic, voices of chirping children carried on the breeze. Dope dealers, chess players, and rats in the vegetation around the brick housed public bathrooms. Aware of my surrounding—never let my guard down—I am a New Yorker.

Six Floor Walk-Up

She sits at the open window. A rind hangs from her hand. Pulp—red and fleshy—slips from her chin onto the front of her white t-shirt. Black seeds (watermelon) drop to the street below. Kids in bathing suits splash in hydrant surf on asphalt sand. 

A Fish Story 

Day slips into dusk. The air turns cool. She walks along the shore, her face damp with fog. A dark shape huddles close to the dunes. Driftwood dragged off the beach, chained behind a pickup truck and set on a deck. Buff skin like chamois. Tree trunks churned in ocean waves and sun bleached, wind silenced in absent branches.

Wind through the hollow trunk—nothing more. Day after, Labor Day, sea glare blind windows squint into the thickening mist. You know how she responds. So much had happened, if not to her then to other women. A gust lifts party streamers like Isadora’s chiffon scarf tangled in spokes. She moves without hesitation.

Deborah Di Bari is pursuing a MFA in Creative Writing at CCNY. Her narratives have appeared in Ozone Park, and Guideword. She is a not so recent transplant from the design and fashion worlds. In her search to merge tense, she is pursuing an investigation of hypertext through the artist book.

Where You Are Now

     You are leaning over me, holding a noisemaker, clutching my arm. Your eyes are shadowed by a false drunkenness, convincingly posed behind the green glass of an O’Doul’s bottle, the label carefully removed. Your purple dress, speckled with sunflowers, rests across your legs. You are the most important object in the room. Everything else is brown leather and brown wall paneling and grey marble, which I am told is very expensive. I don’t remember who took the picture. I do remember someone saying your eyelashes steal everything away, being encouraged to accept the metaphorical red ribbon.

    A child, you are already trained in the art of seduction; lips curled up, a teaser of a smile. I am your little boy-girl cousin, sitting next to you, left without enough room on the edge of the couch. My arms are crossed, a failed effort to cover those cruel and useless tits, cloaked by an oversized Miami Dolphins jersey, an orange turtleneck, and tattered, open hair shafts.

     It is New Year’s Eve. The ball is just about to drop, or already has.

     Your grandfather’s too-loud projection television, quite literally the length of the kitchen wall at my house, is just out of the frame. Dick Clark is on, and a room full of overweight family members are eating slabs of lasagna, of eggplant parmesan. They’re devouring mounds of salad drenched with oily dressing that will inevitably wind up on their clothes. The evening always culminates with a mad dash to the sink, and frantic, flawed attempts to remove stains that have already set. With plates on their laps, zoning out underneath the glow of the screen, they sip iced champagne, always Dom Pérignon. A sharp contrast from my five-liter boxed-wine parents.

     We are the only people who know that, on other days, when there are no guests but us, your grandfather watches porn on that television, yells, “Stay out of my bedroom. Later. I’m having sex with my woman tonight.” The kind of man whose wealth came almost directly from his brashness and frugality, he is the type of person who brings home cartons of maxi pads from liquidation centers tied to the roof of his Cadillac, screaming at us to unload them. He keeps an inhaler for his asthma in every room. All the time, he says he will die soon.         

     His “woman,” Margot, the mistress whom everyone pretended was his wife for the sake of convenience, didn’t leave her house for three years after you left, and wouldn’t let anyone in. Then, she just arrived at Belmont Lake for our annual Fourth of July picnic, sat down at the table, and made herself a plate. Two hamburgers and a generous side of baked beans. “It’s nobody’s business, what I do,” she said, perpetually defensive, angry, when anyone asked her why she’d done what she did.  “Because I felt like it,” she’d say, other times.

     Nothing in that house ever changes, or grows. Margot’s oldest daughter, Suzanne, still lives in her childhood bedroom at the end of the hall, still wears the same hairdo; a sweeping wave of bangs brushed back over her fluffed, stiff mane. A Brooklyn bouffant, my mother calls it. Suzanne is fifty-four years old. She has over one hundred teddy bears facing her bed, which we were forced to take naps in on New Years Eve. My mother constantly worried that I would fall apart from fatigue. I never slept. Suzanne still has a fake boyfriend named Nick whom no one has ever met. She tells people, “I pity anyone who doesn’t have satin sheets.”

     I chose her as the sponsor for my Confirmation, thumbing my nose at my family’s God. It was this move that provoked my father − botanist, teacher, skeptic— to ask me if I didn’t believe anymore. A scientist, he always sought clarity, evidence. I was twelve. I said no, I just don’t.

     Nodding, he said, “Good for you.” Then, “Don’t tell your mother.”

***

     Really, it is unbelievable, the things you don’t know.  How it has come to this, that this picture of some insignificant evening is the only photograph I have of us together.

     I used to keep so many photos of us I couldn’t even begin to count. And they weren’t crushed into the bottom of a nightstand drawer, like this one is, laden with white marks and accidentally torn, the edges warped from the heat. They were in quilted photo albums, labeled with glue pens, the years written in my mother’s cursive. I remember looking through them often, even after I gave the books to my grandmother, who displayed them on her coffee table as if our memories were ones anyone else would want to look through. Now, those albums are in her attic, per my request, stacked behind the gigantic yellow teddy bear I cannot imagine my mother once loving. They are covered with dust and bits of sawdust that fall from the ceiling during thunderstorms, and the only reason I don’t wipe it off (because, despite not wanting to open the books, I always open the books) is because it would feel like telling a lie.

     The attic was legendary, a revealer of false bravery. Both of my grandparents discouraged us from going up there. My grandfather — World War Two veteran, Greek bull — said it was dangerous; was infested with wasps, had poor ventilation, and an unreliable floor. My grandmother — Brooklyn-born Italian, chronic worrier, believer of miracles — said she’d heard people up there at night; ghosts sliding their feet across the pine planks, never daring to make the trip down the five steps into her bedroom. They feared the crucifix, she’d said, which was affixed to her door. \

     “Why are they afraid?” I’d asked, young, looking at the many crosses that adorned her walls, wondering how she could sleep underneath so many tortured men, some with dried palm still tucked behind their metallic heads.

     “Everyone is afraid of God,” she told me. My grandmother was constantly making statements like this, and even now, after over a decade of my absolute atheism, she stills signs all of her cards “You’re in my prayers.” She is the only person who can get away with things like that. And in her attic, where the fear of God keeps everything in and the fear of bees and asphyxiation keeps everyone out, the albums remain.

     Out of the hundreds of photographs in those books, spanning over at least fourteen years, I can only remember three. In one of them, we’re teenagers, posed on the bed in my mother’s childhood bedroom, which, like much of my grandparents’ house, seems untouched by time. All of the furniture, cloaked in plastic, pictures of dead people and sold houses cluttering the mantle. The carpet is the same hunter green my mother had walked upon when she was in high school — then, the beautiful star in the school musicals, envy of others, now the office manager at a job she is too good for. The rug is so stained and faded, patterns unintentionally emerge from the corners. Her twin sized canopy bed is still in the middle of the room, the comforter properly folded, the pillow aptly fluffed. For thirty-two years, no one has slept in it. In the picture, there we are: giving the peace sign for an undisclosed cause, smiling through too much lipstick. I am wearing a long, maroon skirt and an unflattering white button-down shirt; I am still too shy to show my legs, to accentuate the shape of my breasts with form-fitting sweaters. You come from a family of people who are only comfortable in green velvet and black satin and are dressed accordingly. You stare directly at the camera, and I do too, almost. My eyebrows, now too thin, where then too thick. I was a blonde, and so were you.

     In another picture, that is just of you, you’re standing on stage, holding a bouquet of red roses, wearing that peach-colored bridesmaid dress that was left over our Aunt Joanne’s wedding. She hadn’t even asked me to be in the bridal party, and while silently devastated, I still had fun with you, sitting in the suite, stealing sips of champagne and glances in the mirror. I remember you wore your hair pin straight and jet black, bangs swept to the side. My hair, a purposely unnatural red, had been dyed in passive aggressive protest the day before. But in the photo, taken a year later, your hair is honey-brown again and your smile is huge, honest. Your teeth are visible. I remember sitting in the front row at the beauty pageant, bored, watching your full lips mouth thank you; and your mother, next to me, who always smelled like cigarettes and wore too short dresses, pointing to your competitors, and saying, “All those girls would be terrible fucks.” She only clapped for you.

     That was in the days when we used to have sleepovers and watch television all night — usually MTV, back when it was still okay to like it — until we fell asleep on your living room couch, comfortably experimenting with drugs. That living room, all different shades of green. Your mother thought she had it in her to be a designer, but I hated that room, I absolutely hated it. I felt like I was in a forest, somewhere lost in the underbrush with low hung branches scrapping against my skin. It was so dark in there. I don’t know how you stood living in a house that was so dark. But back then we still swam in the fountain in front of city hall at midnight. We squatted, by choice, in the unfinished building we lovingly named The Foundation. That was before you squatted, without choice, strung out, living on scaffolding above the Lincoln Tunnel. That was before I lost you.

     The other photo was taken much earlier, at the Manorville Game Farm out on the east end of Long Island. We must be no more than eight. On the mornings of the long car ride, I recall awaking in a terrible panic, immediately hit with the realization that I would become ill during the journey, forcing my parents to pull over as I threw up onto the side of the parkway, much to my brother’s dismay; because our car had a rust hole on the floor behind the driver’s seat, we were pushed together, buckled into a single seatbelt, far away from the hole. “Pull it,” my mother would say, yanking the belt across our chests, and we’d pull it, covertly seizing the opportunity to dig our elbows and knees into one and other, already learning to fight for the biggest piece of the smallest corner. He was always the kind of kid who was in a rush, even if it was at your expense, begging my parents to continue on, as if oblivious to the events that were presently unfolding. His left foot, severely scarred from an unfortunate accident involving a scalding hot cup of tea, would beat on the back of my father’s seat as he half-cried, “I want to go now.”  But it wasn’t his fault. He was born too soon. There wasn’t enough space between us, and the walls in our house weren’t thick enough to conceal the hushed, late night dinner table conversations about high food bills, no vacations, the lack of money to finish the goddamn basement/leak in the roof/rot on the tool shed, and the endless question of what did we do wrong that everyone else did right?

     There is none of this, though, in that photograph. These gripes are new blues. When it was taken, things were different. My parents were still firmly together, the kind of a couple who held hands in the front seat. My father doesn’t yet live in the basement. My mother doesn’t yet throw her birthday presents into the Atlantic Ocean, or sleep, when she feels like it, at her office. I do not yet hate her and I do not yet forgive her; I do not yet understand that type of loneliness to do either of those things. But in this picture, there is just you and me and my brother, not yet my friend, standing a little off to the side, disgruntled from hanging out with the girls. There is a straw in each of our mouths. We’re sipping soda from a single can.

***

     And now, a letter appears in my mailbox, along with this picture from an unknown New Year’s. The envelope is blue and the handwriting is yours, just as I remembered it, alongside mine, scrawled across walls of abandoned buildings. Judging by the way you shape your letters, the roundness of your vowels, the open circles above your i’s, you are still fourteen years old, the kind of girl who forges love letters you will never have the courage to send. I won’t say the same doesn’t go for me, but I don’t even bother writing them. Not anymore. Always nostalgic about something, the girl (now the woman) who stares out of living room windows during family parties, watching the passing traffic, wondering who’s riding with whom, trying to picture myself in a million lives, quietly trying them on to see which one, if any, would fit.

     Rather than telling me where you’ve been for the past six and a half years, you’re explaining that girls who are married aren’t allowed to compete in the Miss America pageant and you sound profoundly upset, truly disappointed. It seems like you just don’t understand, or don’t want to acknowledge, the fact that you are no longer a kid. No longer a beauty queen, climbing trees and sleeping in the woods, with me, watching the sunrise.

     You do not mention the time you set fire to your bedroom with both of us in it, how you took an X-acto™ knife and sliced up all of the furniture in your mother’s apartment, drawing all of those crazy designs on your walls and mirrors and telling me I couldn’t understand the code. You do not mention us finding your flattened dead kittens laying on the concrete floor of the unfinished basement, the grey one’s tails curled halfway around the rusty leg of your father’s old worktable, forgotten and covered with mildew, left to rot underground. Those are the memories I think of now, when I think of you at all. How the black fleas ran up our legs that night, forcing us, together, crying and naked, into the shower.

     But that’s not what you think of. You have never been the type of person who knows how to look back. You just say, I miss you. That we should have a sleepover. That you hope I’m well. Mockingly, you still call me Ms. Nobel Prize, ask if I’m “still too smart” for you. You use too many exclamation points. You never use a question mark, even when you ask “How are you.” You just end the sentence with a period, with a single flick of your pen. It is more of a line than a dot. Everything you write, it seems, proves why my grandmother was afraid to tell me about you. Because you are too the same. Because you are still a child, now overgrown. At a family wedding a few months ago, she’d come up to me so slowly, her hand crumpled around a piece of paper — your grandfather had given it to her, making my family do the dirty work again. I could tell she didn’t want to give it to me by the way her fingertips lingered around the edges. But there was no drama like I imagine you’d think. There was just a piece of paper, passed from one hand to the other, with your name and phone number scribbled in your handwriting, and nothing more. No conversation about where you’d been, if you were healthy or the kind of sick that you never recover from, or out on bail or on parole, or really free, trying to make an honest go of it again. There was none of that. Your resurgence was so unceremonious, so quiet. My grandmother simply handed me the paper, and asked if I’d tried the cake.

     And in spite of it all, regardless of the fact that I never called you, even after I received this letter in the mail that I hid underneath my mattress for three days after seeing your name on the return address, I finally, late at night, drew the deepest breath I could, exhaled over what felt like a minute, and opened it. And there we are: on the couch getting a second chance, wearing old expressions, yours still self-assured and smiling, and me, right there next to you, uneasy, regretting every second, but lacking the courage to move.

 Alex Straaik is a writer of fiction and thinly veiled non-fiction. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Copyright Alex Straaik. Used with permission of the author.

Pounds

On Monday Dr. Brussels says, “It is a new month. I think it is time.  Do you feel ready to express your anger, and be honest with the people in your life?  When you start to let go of your fury you will shed its physical manifestation …”

She grabs her midsection passionately and squeezes.

“Oh, right. It’s going to be bathing suit season in a couple of months.”

“Lydia.”

Her voice is stern, a reminder to be serious. 

I look away, at the empty sushi tray by her feet. Why does she always eat during my appointment, doesn’t offer to share and leaves her trash sitting out?  I have doubts about Dr. Brussels. 

“If you get this anger out of your belly,” she continues, “I think you will see results right away.”

I want to be healthy.  And hot. At least it’s not a liquid diet.

I look at the clock and then she looks at the clock.

“Time,” she says.

I walk to Washington Square Park because it’s close to Dr. Brussels’ office.  I don’t want to go back to work.  What I really want is a beer, but it’s only one o’ clock so I just sit on a bench in relative isolation from the homeless people and lunching office workers.  I think about Dr. Brussels’ theory.  It was actually my theory first. “I want to lose thirty pounds,” I said, “but I carry my anger in that fat and I don’t know how to get rid of it.”

The extra weight has distributed itself pretty well on my 5’2” frame.  I’m bigger than I was in my twenties but most of it is from the anti-depressants. You get an office job and realize you don’t need to go to the gym every day because you’re not sleeping with as many people as you were in college.  Maybe you’re not sleeping with anyone.  Maybe you find gyms as pleasant to be in as holiday-season shopping malls.

Dr. Brussels loved the challenge.  For a year she made me talk to her footstool. The footstool became my mother, my ex-lovers, my skinny sister, my co-workers.  By the end of the year I was spitting, gesturing, crying, and screaming at that footstool.  Once I threw up.  She was kind enough not to charge me for the re-upholstering because I already pay on a sliding scale.

Pigeons fleck the grass on their lunch-hunt.  I decide to start with my most recent ex-boyfriend because I don’t think an expression of anger will surprise him.  I just hope the public arena will keep me from freaking out. My stomach tightens with anxiety and I remember that I haven’t eaten lunch, but I’m not hungry anymore.  I don’t want the beer either.  My stomach is closed; it is adamant.  Nothing gets in before something comes out.

“Hello,” Justin says. “If this is about your books, Lydia, I don’t have them boxed up yet, okay? I’m a little busy right now.”

“This isn’t about my books,” I say.  “I need to tell you something.”

He sighs.  I can hear other voices in the background, one of them a woman’s.

“I’ve been pissed off at you for most of our relationship, but definitely more so since we broke up, and definitely the most since we started sleeping together again.”

“We slept together, like, three times.  I don’t think it’s something we’re starting.” 

 “You can’t treat me like a convenience,” I squeeze out.

“What does that mean?”

“It means that you only call and ask how I am when it’s convenient for you, which is usually when you want to sleep with me.”

“Three times, Lydia.  Three times.”

“For most of our relationship,” I say, my voice getting higher, “I put all the effort into making things work.  We wouldn’t have stayed friends if not for me, and maybe we shouldn’t.”

“Then why do you still call?”

“And one other thing.  Every time we slept together I was thinking about the boyfriend before you.”

He is silent.

“Okay, maybe that’s a lie,” I say, “but even the most amazing sex, which I’ll admit we had on occasion, cannot make up for the way you treat me.”

That’s a lie too.

“I feel like a non-person in your life,” I say.

He takes a deep breath.

“I don’t really know what you want. I think you’re still relying on me for emotional support, but I can’t give you that.  Maybe we shouldn’t talk for a while, just let the air clear out.”

“You’re probably right.  But I still want my books back.  And I have to ask: do you still love me in any way?”

“I’m not in love with you anymore,” he says slowly, “but I still care about you.  I think you’re a good person to know.”

“That last thing,” I say, my voice rising again, “is bullshit. I get mad at you when you say things like that.”

A space the size of a Robin’s egg clears out in my stomach.

I lose five pounds by Wednesday.  The next Monday I feel a little weak.  I try to get out of bed, but my legs wobble when my feet touch the hardwood floor.  I call into work and my boss’ administrative assistant answers the phone.

“Marissa, it’s Lydia,” I say.  “I’m not feeling well. Need to talk to Henry.”

“He’s attending a conference. Would you like me to tell him you won’t be in?”

I think I hear exasperation in her voice.  She’s on my list along with the rest of the office, but not for today.  I feel a clean line of nausea go down my throat and pool at the bottom of my stomach.

“Yes, Marissa, that’s exactly what I’d like you to tell him,” I reply evenly.  “And please tell anyone who needs to get a hold of me that I will check my email today.”

“Sure,” she says in her artificial sweetener tone.  “Feel better.”

I hang up.  Before I worked for a non-profit I thought that everyone would be extra nice.  I mean, when you’re walking around fulfilling some higher mission how can you not smile?  But everyone is fake.  It’s like there’s some kind of invisible Joan of Arc Virtue Pageant taking place at all times, and if they sense you’re even the tiniest bit ahead they have no qualms about elbowing you off the runway.

I try to get out of bed again.  I have to use the furniture to steady myself on the way to the kitchen.  I think I just need to drink some tea and have breakfast.  I’ve noticed that my appetite has been down since I called Justin; honesty is stressful.  I open the refrigerator; there is a block of fine cheese I could eat with bread. My stomach growls, but not in the hungry way. I fix my eyes on every object in the fridge, one at a time, and wait for my stomach to react.  Halfway through I notice a pattern.  My stomach vetoes every item that isn’t green. Strange, but what can I do?  I make a salad for breakfast.  I reach for a cucumber and then remember that they’re white inside.  I consider buying Fruit Loops and only eating the green ones.

I feel alright after eating some broccoli and decide to call my mother.  First I brush my teeth. She can smell bad breath through the phone lines and will ask why I’ve let myself fall into such a slump.  I coil myself around a large pillow in the living room and press the phone against my ear. It’s only 7:00 a.m. on the west coast, but she’ll be up, ahead of the rest of the country.

“Good morning, sweetie, are you calling me from work?” she asks.

“No, I’m at home.  I’m feeling sick today.”

“One is or isn’t sick, Lydia.  If you only think you might be sick you really should go to work.  You don’t want a pattern to develop.”

“A pattern?  Mom, this is pretty much the first sick day I’ve taken in my entire life.”

“Is it very important, darling?  I was just watering my tomato plants.”

“It is,” I say. 

She exaggerates a sigh. 

“Before I tell you, you should know that this is a therapeutic exercise designed and overseen by Dr. Brussels.”

My mother loves my psychiatrist.  She was recommended by a friend of a friend of a friend, but Mom acts like they were college roommates.   

 “She’s been a miracle worker with you,” Mom says.

She thinks I’m such a nut job that anyone who could treat me must be a genius and a hero.

“I’m so happy to hear that you’re cooperating with her.”

“Just listen to me, okay, Mom?”

“I’m listening.”

“Why didn’t you pay more attention to me when I was little? I was your only child.  What was going on in your life that was more important than me?” 

I hold my breath.

“That was a long time ago.  You’re thirty now.  How is it relevant?”

Her voice is high and pinched, which is what it sounds like when she’s trying to stay in control.

“Well, it was a handicap both when I was growing up and into my adult life.  In fact, it’s the experience that I attribute my current unhappiness and trouble with relationships to.”

“Trouble with relationships?” she repeats, an edge coming into her voice.  “I don’t think you can blame that on me.  You pick such terrible men. They’re trouble before the relationship even begins.”

I hug the pillow until I start to lose circulation in my arms.

“Mom, I just want to know why you were hardly around. Can you answer that?  I mean, if you’d only shown me a little more encouragement …”

“I did encourage you,” she interrupts.  “I wasn’t around because I was getting my MBA so I could get a better job and send you to the best schools so you would be encouraged and have the chance to do whatever you wanted with your life.”

“But I didn’t want encouragement from anyone except you and Dad,” I say.

“Lydia, don’t be a baby.  You want to know the truth?  You never had any clear direction. Dance lessons, gymnastics, a drum set, swim team, photography – whatever your interest was that year we made sure you were nurtured in it.  You chose to go to art school in New Mexico over Princeton.  Do you think we were happy about that?  I couldn’t sleep for a month.”

I hold the receiver away from my ear.

“And you still don’t have any clear direction. You went from art to the medical field, but we’re so happy you got that job at the non-profit.  If nothing else, you’ve got to have health insur-“

Click.

I drop the pillow and run to the toilet.  My stomach clamps and sends its juices up my throat.  This is the first time I’ve ever hung up on my mother.  It feels good.

On the last day of the second week I weigh myself.  Ten pounds lighter and I feel like shit.  Weak, achy, sluggish.  The weirdest thing is not being able to eat anything that isn’t green.  I go to friends’ houses for dinner and pray that there will be vegetables.  They think I’m on some kind of fad diet, or maybe starving myself. I tell everyone that I’m trying something new, involving honesty, and swear that I didn’t read it in a book or on the internet. 

“My body’s adjusting,” I say, “and I’m listening and it’s telling me that it only wants to eat green.” 

What can they say?  Luckily, I have supportive friends.

I get naked in front of the mirror.  My body doesn’t look too different.  My boobs have shrunk, and there are places around my stomach where the skin seems to have receded but is still loose. Anyway, ten pounds means I’m one-third of the way there and I haven’t said anything at work yet.

I skip an appointment with Dr. Brussels.

“I’m on a roll and I’d just rather wait to talk about it until it’s all done,” I tell her.

“Why do you think you can dictate a new therapeutic arrangement, Lydia? Don’t you think you pay me to know better?”

“Not this time,” I say.

“Fine,” she says, “but if you don’t come back next week I will not be able to see you anymore.”

I go to work and it’s terrible.  My boss turns in his resignation and everyone is on edge.  Their conversations circle around the empty spot like they’re sniffing out opportunities with words.  No one is qualified to replace him.  Marissa cries after he tells her.  She cries the whole day, doesn’t even bother to wipe her nose before answering the phone, and makes sure everyone can hear that every sentence she utters is forced out mid-wail.

After another lunch of steamed spinach with a side of broccoli I am not in the best mood.

“Shut up!” I finally snap in the 3:00 hour.  “Shut up, shut up, shut up!”

She stops crying.  Everyone stops whatever they’re doing.  I’m not an ass-kisser, but I’m usually polite.

“I’m angry because I don’t think you are sincere,” I say to Marissa.

I look around the office.

“No one is being sincere,” I repeat.

Then I switch to the ‘we’ pronoun because I think it will be less threatening.

“We are a selfish, catty, scheming office.”

Marissa starts sniffling.

“And Marissa, I hate to break it to you, but you didn’t even like Henry.  You thought he stared at your chest too much.  So stop the crying already.  No one believes it.”

She stares at me, her mouth slack.   I walk into my office and very calmly shut the door. 

I am getting ready to leave at 4:55 when an unfamiliar woman opens my door.  She identifies herself as someone from HR, a department I didn’t know we had. I know what comes next; they always fire people at the end of the day.

“Ms. Pearson, the outburst you had this afternoon created a hostile environment for your co-workers. I’m afraid that we find this kind of behavior unacceptable.  I have a resignation letter with me; you can sign it right now or we can terminate you.  Whichever option you choose is effective immediately.  Please collect your belongings. You will not be allowed to return to this office tomorrow. See the shipping department if you need boxes.”

She slides a piece of paper across my desk.  They must actually keep resignation letters on hand for a situation like this. I ponder my options.  I have little savings, not even enough to live on for a month.  If I resign I can tell my next employer that my mother suddenly fell ill and I needed to care for her.  As much as I hate its generic language, I sign the letter.

When I come home I go right to sleep.  I don’t wake up until ten the next morning.  I can tell that I have lost even more weight, but I don’t bother to check. My clothes hang with a ghostly emptiness off of my shoulders and hips.  Could it be the flu?  I call Dr. Brussels.

“I need to come in today, if I can get out of bed.  Do you have any openings?” I ask.

“What is the nature of your emergency, Lydia?”

“I wouldn’t call it an emergency, although my whole life is kind of being derailed along with this plan of yours.”

“I can see you at 3:00.”

I feel energy come back into my body.  I drag myself to the bathroom, turn on the shower, take a bar of soap from its holder and begin to lather my skin.

At exactly 3:00 I take a seat in Dr. Brussels’ waiting room.  A small radio plays classical music at an inoffensive volume.  Magazines fan out across end tables, the same four actresses reappearing on the covers. My eyes jump with my stomach, from Lose 10 Lbs Here’s How, to Why Men Cheat and Women Secretly Don’t Care (Because They’re Cheating too), and back to Three Miracle Workouts from Three Oscar Winners. I feel anxious. I check the time on my cell phone: 3:05.  Sometimes when Dr. Brussels is late I think she’s forgotten about me and I knock on the door.  Usually there’s just an especially upset person in the room running over their appointment time.

At 3:08 a middle-aged brunette emerges.  Dr. Brussels gestures for me to come in.  She takes in my appearance, but doesn’t allow her expression to change even slightly.

“Lydia, how are you? It’s been a long time. I am very eager to hear how you’ve made out with the plan.”

“I feel like I’ve had the flu since last week.”

“Why don’t you start from the beginning?”

“Well, I called my ex-boyfriend first. It did feel good to tell him that I was angry about the way he treats me and that I won’t put up with it anymore. He didn’t hang up on me or say he hates me. We just agreed not to talk for a while.”

She nods. “Good, good.”

“And then I talked to my mother.  I told her that I felt like I didn’t get enough attention as a child. I hung up on her and she hasn’t called me since.”

“This could be a huge breakthrough for you,” Dr. Brussels says, “we will begin to focus on your mother as soon as this treatment succeeds.”

“But, I feel terrible.  I’ve lost like 25 lbs this month. I have no appetite, and when I’m hungry my stomach balks at any food that isn’t green.  I lost my job because of your treatment.”
            “Green, green,” Dr. Brussels muses. She looks up at the ceiling as if to ponder a riddle. “What do you think the significance of that color is?” she asks.

I’m exasperated.

“It’s the color of jealousy.  I don’t know.  I’m afraid to talk to my friends, afraid that I’ll suddenly start yelling at them even if I’m not angry.”

“Well, you must stay the course.” She says. “I think your present strife will lead to great rewards in your mental health.”

“Is that all you have to say?”

“Emergency sessions are half as long as regularly scheduled appointments.  I had to squeeze you in and I’m afraid our time is up now.”

I leave, feeling more than a little bit sore about the $100 check I handed over.  I feel like an anecdote in an article she will write: “Subject reported feelings of fatigue and isolation, yet progress has been encouraging.  Instructed subject to continue.”

I turn around in the lobby and ride back to the ninth floor.  I knock on her door, even though I know it would inexcusable to interrupt someone else’s session.  She is alone, which makes me even angrier. 

“Listen,” I say, “I’m feeling pretty angry about the check I just left with you.  I don’t feel you really earned it. sYou didn’t give me any emotional support.”

She steps back and turns her head to look at something on her desk.  When she looks at me again she has a huge smile on her face.  Her eyes display the conviction of people holding bibles or guns.

“It’s working,” she whispers, “I knew it, it’s working.”

COVER FROM NOV.-DEC. 2009 

 Above: Chas Ray Krider photo. See more in “Photography”

______________________________________

Danger — Killer Issue Ahead

November-December 2009

 Nunca Triste                            Lynda Barreto

Bring Me Waterlilies

We lay on the damp sand bank of a pond, and when the heat of day threatened to erase us, we dove below the water’s first few feet of warmth, following the tethered stems of waterlilies rooted in mud. We loved oblivion so much, we didn’t want to miss one minute of it.  We fought the nods, our heads bobbing in their wake. We swam, but he went further out than I did, circling the acres of the pond, returning with buds of waterlilies saved from drowning.  I floated on my back, one blossom wedged between my breasts. Night fell.  We saw the true moon float on the pond’s surface, a disk rooted in deep water, its appearance in the sky a mere reflection. We were raised by strangers and we had no blood kin. We heard oblivion calling from our veins. We looked for more. We scored. He fixed me, and then he fixed himself. Near dawn we fell asleep, near waves, his sex slipped like the lily bud inside my sex that opened. The lilies browned and rotted on my window sill. I left when I met my future husband. He left when his high school sweetheart finished rehab. We stayed blood siblings. He lived inside me like a pulse, in dreams of anodynes and ponds. The virus blossoms ‘til we die.  I was like him when we lived like waterlilies, both spawned and drowned by where deep night is.

Morning Star, My Father, Mine

Every soul has its peculiar intelligence. Sometimes the brain, sometimes the body, sometimes both. Sometimes just the second toe of the left foot inching like a worm. The strong man in the freak show knows how to heft, brilliant placing his feet precisely there, knowing precisely where to breathe now and how deeply, knowing too his limit, when to stop lest his inadequate brain and leopard-skin thong get crushed beneath his body’s stupidity. Or the autistic child who speaks only through screams knows who knows what his silences mean and thus with them is silent. The fire that burns, the water that floods, the wind that bends, the girl that loves.

 •••••

The mother’s intelligence was her beautiful body walking, bending, twisting, reaching, waving, posing – living doll selling stuff, nuff said. The father’s too: Clark Gable once saw him stroll into a Hollywood restaurant and exclaimed,startled into truth, “Isn’t it a sin to be that damn good looking?”

If in fact a sin, then the father was the devil himself. Girls and women suspected him of being a movie star, stared trying to place the face with a name they didn’t know, couldn’t, never would. And he could’ve been in movies save for his dim-witted arrogance. Pissed off all the powersthatbe with his scratchy-wool blanket statements:

“Nobody in charge knows a damn thing about making movies.”

“A monkey could do a better job of acting/directing/writing.”

“Give me a million bucks and I’ll be in your little movie.”

“I wouldn’t give him/her the time of day if my life depended on it, and it doesn’t, so there you have it in a nutshell, how ‘bout them apples, sport.”

Said to agents, producers, directors who raised one eyebrow, paused to stare at the sinfully handsome man, thinking, What a goddamn waste of meat, sighed through the nose, said, “Thanks, we’ll call you.” Didn’t. And he didn’t get it so much he didn’t even give a shit.

 “What a bunch of dummies,” he’d laugh, stick a Lucky Strike between his amazing lips, flame a match against a manicured thumbnail, think about lunch, a drink, the satisfactory ass of the secretary who slipped him her phone number before he walk-strutted out the door. Peacock. Cock o’ the walk. Cocksure. Cock and bull and bull’s cock between his legs so there was no doubt ever, no way no shame, no vengeance, no how. His unwavering belief in himself.  In he.  In being.

 Simple.

 The devil himself he was on plenty occasions – incubus between the damp dreaming creaming thighs of pretty girls who wanted: the house, the car, the kids, the knight-in-shining husband bringing home the Wonderbread and homogenized milk to their homogenized neighborhood, and on those forever-spring years of the Fifties of having-getting-owning, waving to Mrs. Jones envying across the white picket fence, I’m a real woman, honey, see what I got, the swellest of the swell!  Yet nowhere in that postwar equation fine fucking and lots of it for fucking’s dirty-bad like the letters S-E-X pressed tight and rubbing up against each other – SEX – spelling what’s really just a way to get/have/keep the stuff, ain’t it? No matter if they wanted S-E-X they pretended to not, learned to blush and giggle at the mention, tease the cock, be the virgin liar, Holy Mary Mother of Girls-in-Denial, denied by their own mothers who taught them, The way to a man’s heart is through his stomach: unspoken: cholesterol and saturated fats: make him a meat-and-potatoes-hot-buttered rolls kinda guy who’ll die at 50 of a heart attack while you’re still young enough to feel free and good about widowhood and never by God-in-His-SEXless-Heaven ever have to spread your legs, avail your cunt, knock your skull on the headboard, inhale the sweat, suffer the wet, close your eyes and think of England.

 • • • • •

 But see:  The father knight-in-shining-skin loved to fuck and vowed he’d never marry a gal who didn’t want/do/like the same cause life was short, shorter, shortened, he already saw the curve up ahead and nothing beyond but nothing.

 • • • • • 

And sex’s another color altogether. Colors altogether, that’s creation. To create. To make. Make love. Marvelous. Marvel at these colors beyond your unextraordinary range. You can’t imagine how you can’t imagine these colors nameless except to me in my Language of Right Eye. Synesthetic seeing-sound. Shuhkkht, for example, color of rage. Ahyai, color of sorrow. Kkih! color of the moment the eye catches sight of the rarest bird, the last of its kind, hovering above a new-spring sprung flower. Just that moment. Before the words come to dissect it, splay it with genus and species, categorical classification, stick-on-label box-around-it flatsquishing of the mass that is life, not the idea of life. 

 • • • • •

And fucking’s another word altogether. The cock as knife, as sword, as spear, missile, bomb. Penetrating, stabbing, impaling, exploding, wounding, killing. Gonna fuck her till she can’t walk. Fuck her brains out. Fuck her to death. Fuck the hell out of her – hell evidently a place of infernal internal denial: O what hell he did to me I didn’t like it and liked less my body craving the memory of it: It: IT: S-E-X: my sin I know cause The Bible tells me so. 

Taste of destruction in the creational stew of his-and-her fluids, that’s fucking. Amazing. In its own fashion. Sometimes that pretty girl in the modest skirt and blouse just wanted to watch the world blow up. Feel it detonate right in the center of her wet creation.

But.

In the Victorian era, era of Icky Queen Vicki, era that never ended merely waned then ebbed via the verbal ejaculations of pinched-tweezer dicks of the inconoscenti fanatical fools hiding-shivering in church pews thinking, believing S-E-X’ll go away if they pray long enough, hard enough: Go away hardness between my legs my devil-desire like a leper’s suppurating sores waiting for St. Francis on Jesus’s road to Damascus to kiss me on my pus-pore lips, my piss-poor cock that wants what it wants when it wants, embrace me what repulses you, oh Lord – is it really the Twenty-First Century?

• • • • •

 O how the fashionable father fucked! Took from the givers, the eye-closers, the If this is what I have to do to get the house and car and good-looking kids and oh the television! and oh the color-coordinated appliances! then I will. Determined, those gals. Like the pioneer women rolling across the prairie. Big storms, they were, thundering across history to labor hard pumping out babies and well water, they did. Lifting, hauling, sweeping, hoeing, sewing, cooking, cleaning, feeling . . . something not quite right in their raging river of frontier life over too soon and where/when was it not hard: life, the husband’s cock: I’m tired, Lord, of being torn by him goin in and babies comin out, going and comin and goin so many of those babies dead before their time, before they may say, Momma!

Some young closeted queer (was the Fifties, after all, gay still a mainstream mood) advertising exec on vacation from New York spotted the father single on a beach in Malibu. Dressed barely, the father, touching his toes, jumping jacks, running dry into the surf, running out wet and shining and packed, thin baby blue trunks he’d had tailor-made clinging to his massive cock-and-balls. The ad exec saw what everybody saw: that everybody saw: men, women and children could not stop seeing, gawking, absorbing, savoring, committing to memory the fine way light fell on/around the handsome black-haired blue-eyed man just out of his teens, how he seemed lit from inside – sun going nova – while their ordinary spent-comet faces gazed fearless of being burned, rather aching for burn, burning to memory every devilish devil-may-care inch of him they would later and frequently dredge to clean their plate of so much banality it hurt, hurt to look at him, really, though they could not not, indulging themselves nevertheless, never to forget, the moment the father was there there there in all his glory and their seeing what it was to see beyond flat-imagination live myriad dimensions of possibility.

Do you remember that guy on the beach in Malibu way back in, what was it, 1951? who was so . . . oh! Well he took your breath away, that’s what. Remember? On that sunny beach in California? Wonder whatever happened to him?

Whatever: Became an underwear model. The too-handsome-for-words guy in the tightie-whities. Copywriters need not apply! Skin and bumps said it all, man. 

That day at the beach the ad exec summoned his courage and gave the father his card:  “Call me, I’ll make you rich.”

The father bit the card between his smiling teeth, shook the exec’s hand, held it longer than etiquette demanded – until the exec flushed red down to his nipples.

Rich, thought the father, nodding. Now that’s more like it!

• • • • •

Narcissus. Such an old improbable tale, you’d think it would’ve vanished in the mythological past where gods and goddesses toyed with humans as if humans were ants under a magnifying glass on a hot-sunny day. But no. Myths are forever. Earthbound gods and goddesses do toy with ordinary humans. Narcissus reborn every generation to gloomily gaze gaga into the water at his unembraceable reflection dissolving to ripples when kissed. Narcissus the manifestation of the universe’s amore de profundis that keeps the planet spinning, black holes devouring, gas clouds spitting out new stars to light new planets spinning toward a new genesis, new beauty to come to new love. And if not love, then what? And if not beauty, then why love?

 • • • • •

That amazing graced face grinning above tan pecs and overstuffed genitals stuffed in snuggies posed for some of the advertising industry’s first photos of a near-naked man, crotch intact, ballsy magazines printing full-page brazen blazing-color ads instead of simple illustrations of men neutered by an artist’s brush or pen keeping it clean, they thought, IT, cleanliness next to godliness, godliness next to emasculinity. “Tarzan of the Cosmopolitan Jungle,” wrote a gossip columnist who made the father famous, eventually, briefly (ha ha) in queer circles and later sewing circles where the only thing sewn were seeds of sexual desire, undomesticated housewives basting themselves in martinis and putting each other in stitches over catty remarks, nasty rumors, sexual confessions and lascivious declarations of lust for “Captain Kielbasa,” they called him, “Sergeant Salami,” they said, “Root Toot Tootie,” they giggled. They and a hundred others stole posters of him from every underwear section of every department store in L.A. until one Pentecostal mother caught her son jacking off to “The Jack of Jewels” and formed a coalition of sexually repressed mothers (metaphorical clitoridectomies complete) coalesced to ban images of the father everywhere and eternally lest their children all go wart-handed and blind.

So much for rich.

His career lasted three photo shoots for which he was paid fifty dollars each. The advertising industry caved to conservatives, tucking its tail – and cock – between its legs, reverting to watercolors and pencil drawings of button-nosed guys with pubis mons smooth and sexless as a flatworm.  And the Pentecostal snake handlers saw that it was good: The serpent had been squish-squash-quashed, Satan had surrendered once again to immaculate intercourse, and the father was out of a job.

• • • • •

Lucifer was not Satan was not the Devil. He was the bringer of light, Phosphor, the lump on the end of a matchstick, morning star, planet Venus, escort of each dawn. Stolen by Christians from the Romans, Lucifer came to [mis]represent the descending demise of the most shimmering angel of all, all asparkle, for beauty of course must be punished, damned to eternal hell: Do not shine too brightly or we shall douse you with our bitter piss and smother. The world full of dark-ugly so big it swallows light-pretty whole.

O my bringer of sunrise and life, my morning star, my father! 

Later years those sphincter-lips-they would say my real father was Lucifer, my name Lucy eponymous, that I was born of the loins of the most magnificent fallen angel fornicating with the daughters of men on his way down, just stopping by for a sex-snack, said they, so to speak, to sow his seed, wild oat hybrid me rockinrollin among the cultivated tame.

And sure I’d be the antichrist if I’d been born a boy: girls evidently incapable of attaining such eminent evil.

So then.

Debra DiBlasi can be contacted through her web site: www.debradiblasi.com

The Litchfields, Lynda Barreto