Category Archives: Fiction

THE BANKRUPT CIRCUS by J. Bradley Minnick

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

J. Bradley Minnick
THE BANKRUPT CIRCUS

Before the Bankrupt Circus came to town, my bud, Decie, and I spent our summer lunch breaks arguing about the merits of olive loaf sandwiches while we sat on the curb in the midst of chores in front of his mother’s house—a squat typical one-story brick affair—two eleven-year-old boys caught in the grip of the summer lunch-time economic blahs.

Remember olive loaf? It’s a working man’s lunch meat: one-part salty bologna, one-part salty olives, a third-part salty preservatives—a super salty concoction that went down perfectly with cold orange sodas in pull-tab cans.

Thus, during our lunch breaks, Decie and I found ourselves embroiled in arguments about the merits of proper condiments. It was difficult for me to agree with what my bud, Decie, said, even when the bold and ludicrous statements that verily fell from his salt-encrusted tongue turned out to be true. We were both in perfect agreement, however, that mustard added a layer of sticky brine to the meat; ketchup was just plain gross; combinatorial spread mixtures sat too heavy, even on an eleven-year-old belly; heretofore, Decie boldly stated that only a cool layer of mayo spread deliciously atop the part-olive, part-meat would do—I opted for Miracle Whip.

“Expeller Pressed Organic Soybean Oil, then,” Decie smirked.

“Low-fat whipped cottage cheese,” I gagged.

We both stuck our fingers down our throats at the mention of low-fat.

Decie and I argued for a while longer and then turned to the importance of bread—we both agreed individual hoagie rolls purchased from Benvenuti’s Market on the corner were essential and far better than the crusty stuff in the Bread Depot. Benvenuti and his baboushka-wearing wife, Carm, baked fresh bread on Fridays. I argued that Friday’s rolls were fresher; Decie argued that Saturday’s rolls gained in experience.

Then, Decie’s mother stuck her head out the door and pointed to the lawn mower, the gutters on the roof, the hose in the yard, and the paint cans next to the door.

As I said, until the Bankrupt Circus came to town, arguments about the merits of olive loaf, the most lubricating condiments, and the best day for purchasing bread had been the cultural capital of our summer vacation—as much ado about anything and everything as nothing at all.

Enter: Decie’s neighbor—Mr. Rancer.

For every day of the year save one, the summer solstice—the longest day of the year—Mr. Rancer refused to allow anyone to set foot on his perfect grass. Neighborhood boys, almost grown, heads filled with the unpleasant and humiliating memories of being lectured to and berated by Mr. Rancer in his Economics class, spent their nights rambling through the middle of his yard. This intrepid battle raged on until Mr. Rancer literally raised the stakes, knocking spiky metal heads into the ground and through cause and effect tore Tommy Tutonie’s oil pan right out from the bottom of his car. All Mr. Rancer had to do was follow the oil leak up the street and write down the license plate number. Afterwards, Mr. Rancer’s KEEP OFF THE GRASS sign became a permanent fixture, except on the longest day of the year when he took it down and put up another to promote his garage sale, thus letting all trod on his beloved grass.

As far as I could tell, Mr. Rancer imagined himself the middleman of garage sales. In late spring he frequented them most weekends, when he wasn’t tending to his lawn, bought the most unusual items, and then waited for his fortunes to improve by staging his own super-saver-summer-solstice garage sale blow-out. That’s what his sign said anyway. Problem was, when it came time to resell the junk, Mr. Rancer never remembered quite how much he had originally paid, and he never put price tags on anything. Each time one tried to hand him money, he insisted on haggling for both fun and profit.

Mr. Rancer would wait for an offer and then begin right away to drive up the price. “Simple supply and demand,” he would say. “You’d know this, Decie, if you ever had the G’s to ante up and take macro-economics. Simple liquidity, son. The beauty of the free market at work right here in the ol’ neighborhood.”

“The two miniature unicycles,” Mr. Rancer told me, “had belonged to THE Bankrupt Circus, and they had only been ridden by clowns—not bear cubs.” Rancer said he “picked ‘em up for a song. The Bankrupt Circus,” he explained, “had gone belly-up and stalled just outside of Hiemont.” Bank officials, Rancer told me, had seized nearly everything, and when it was clear the Bankrupt Circus would forever be insolvent, officials began selling off items in lots.

Immediately, I could tell Mr. Rancer regretted that he had tipped his hat and whispered, “Nick, let’s just keep these little particulars between you and me, okay?” Along with the unicycles, Rancer bought flashy fringed costumes worthy of tightrope walkers and trapeze artists, and he displayed these costumes all along the concrete walls of his garage. Additionally, he had procured a human cannon, two whips (he refused to sell these to children—said he was going to “use ‘em on anyone who stepped on his grass”), two giant spheres (you could climb into them and roll around), and three hoops he lectured “an enterprising performer could light on fire and juggle.”

For weeks that June, we had seen unemployed circus performers hanging around Hiemont’s town limits with their animals—monkeys in military vests and caps, tiny pigs in summer dresses, and bear cubs wearing spiked collars—waiting for the 51C bus.

A photographer for The Hiemont Chronicle snapped a photo exposé, posing the down-and-out Strongman, an unkempt bearded woman, a flaccid Muscles the Clown, and a tattooed fire-eater holding the ends of the leashes attached to the befuddled animals, who in the pictures looked forlorn, sick, and down in-the-mouth.

Such stories usually go unnoticed, but this one, perhaps because of its high pathos, caught fire, and before Hiemont could issue “damage control,” our best local newsman, Yippie Freeman, was busy interviewing the Bankrupt Circus performers.

The following statement was issued to Yippie by Muscles the Clown on KUKY: “When a clown, willing and humble, can’t get work in America, the whole meritocracy is DEAD!”  Muscles the Clown was, of course, alluding to a whole way of life that had, in fact, been taken away when those multinational corporations had moved in right next to so many of Hiemont’s independent mom-and-pop stores. Places like the Bread Depot.

On television, the circus performers were not drunk—although no one would have blamed them had they been. Instead, they used their wits and innate understanding of the entertainment news capital America was becoming—all an illusion—and they grabbed the big fat ill-fitting keys to even the most cynical grown-up child’s heart.

Muscles the Clown, because of his facility with Standard English, quickly became the spokesman for the group of cast-out circus performers, all of whom decided exactly when it was best to let go of their leashes.

CBS broke the story nationally, and twenty million viewers tuned in. Each night, experts sounded off and provided multi-screened commentary underneath sad pictures. The Town of Hiemont was forced to issue an unremorseful apology for closing down the circus and trying bit by bit to sell it off. Nobody believed the town officials’ apologies, and this disbelief turned America irate and further stoked the viral ether.

“In America,” Muscles the Clown said, “a half-assed apology is worse than no bleeping apology at all.” Twenty million viewers didn’t even move to cover their children’s ears, nor was there the expected outrage over Muscles the Clown’s poor and un-calibrated statement. Even eleven-year-olds like us recognized that Muscles the Clown had spoken from his real, not his rubber heart. He was a person underneath that painted-on clown smile—after all.

Thankfully, I was able to haggle with Mr. Rancer for the unicycles before Show BIZ TV got whoopee-cushioned wind, flatulent and fetid, of the capitalistic unpleasantness going down in that bargain-basement garage sale across town.

On television, Rancer looked apoplectic, pointing and making great and pronounced finger gestures in the direction of the BIZ TV’s news truck tires that had found purchase in his front lawn. “Doesn’t a man have any rights? Isn’t anything sacred?” Rancer howled red-faced into three different cameras while attempting to hurl a circus ball through the windshield of the news truck—the same circus ball, we later learned, that had spent most of its time encircled in the trunk of a well-worn and beloved elephant named FRIEDA, who preened and balanced and raced for The Cure. (YouTube showed footage of Freida extending an uncoiling trunk, snooted around a large-sized check for a sizable amount to thankful wig-wearing children, thus inflating several Big Top towns all across America.)

Yippie Freeman reported, “In this downtrodden economy with so many homeless and unemployed, there is something about the desperate pieces of this story that has found its way pluckily into the main artery of America’s heartstrings. A Bankrupt Circus, dehydrated animals, and now an unemployed Muscles the Clown [backlit picture of Muscles flexing inverted arms] put a face on the problem.”

Public television pontificated: “Picture yourself, standing there, holding the end of a forlorn leash, attached to an unhappy bear cub named Bubby. The animals, the clowns, and America is in bondage, and those of us who pay attention clearly realize Muscles’ painted-on smile is the same smile we put on every morning. And, those of us who truly do care to reflect for even the shortest amount of time on this America, our America, realize that we are all down-and-out clowns; we are all pitiable circus animals attached to leashes, and we can’t let go because we have held onto them for so long that we have come to believe they are extensions of our arms. Has America, as represented by this tiny northern town, turned into a Bankrupt Circus?”

And then, when the President, in an off-hand remark, referred to evidence of a “Bankrupt Circus” after pointing to a series of boarded-up financial institutions, those in the media suffered a veritable viral parapraxis. Quickly added to pop culture’s idiomatic urban dictionary—The Bankrupt Circus came to mean more than “I sincerely apologize.”

Luckily, though, while America was seemingly at a standstill, Decie and I had bought, paid for, and wheeled away two shiny Bankrupt Circus unicycles shortly before Biz TV’s heavy news truck sullied Mr. Rancer’s lawn, and he became known as “The Grass Crank from Hiemont.”

Decie and I didn’t give a shit about the news; we didn’t read any newspapers, and although big events—usually celebrity deaths found their way to us later rather than sooner—in truth, we didn’t care either way. We had more important things to argue about—the merits of olive loaf and figuring out how to ride those one-wheeled bicycles I had blown my birthday money on.

Decie grabbed a unicycle from my hands, ran astride of it, and attempted to hop onto the banana-shaped seat, as if he were an outlaw pulling himself up onto a galloping horse; he sat atop the seat for a few painful seconds, howled in a high-pitched falsetto and fell to the ground gently cupping his nads. He yelled, “My balls have become bruised olives,” which brought to mind our constant arguments about olive loaf sandwiches and put me in no mood, I assure you, to eat them. Decie found his unsteady feet. He was still nursing his injuries. I prayed he wasn’t going to ask me to take a look.

Aside from being nearly maimed, Decie was convinced that we had been gypped, and he insisted that we return the unicycles—invoking the Lemon Law.

Hell, I was trying to do a good thing, something different, you know?

By the time we wheeled the unicycles back to Rancer’s house, the BIZ TV truck had set its tires permanently on his once-pristine lawn, and Mr. Rancer’s comments were being edited into usable sound bites; there was footage of him hitting Yippie Freeman over the head with his big-super-saver-summer-solstice garage sale blow-out sign, stealing Freeman’s handheld microphone, and spewing forth the following: “One of the consequences of such notions as ‘entitlements’ is that people who have contributed nothing to society feel that society owes them something, apparently just for being nice enough to grace us with their presence.”[1] We last saw Mr. Rancer using the circus whip repeatedly on the BIZ TV truck tires before being wrestled to the ground and led away in handcuffs. “Arrested,” Rancer’s snarky lawyer said, “humiliated, disgraced, taken away from his own garage sale. Just a poor American man trying to make a buck.”

Decie and I quickly learned on that summer solstice day that all wasn’t quite as it appeared when an inexorable gaggle of clowns from the Bankrupt Circus suddenly replaced the haggling Mr. Rancer with wide-angled, make-up-smeared shots of tear-filled clown faces reunited with their beloved costumes, juggle rings, cherry noses, fake ears and pairs of floppy shoes.

There is that now infamous picture of Muscles the Clown, who stands in his polka dotted socks pointing with wonder and reunited with his bulbous shoes, the laces of which dangle by a nail pounded into the block cement with a sign that read, “Best Offer.”

Muscles the Clown points to his hammer-toed feet and says, I quote, “We thought everything, even our shoes, had been sold off and were long, long gone, but it’s all here!”

While Mr. Rancer was presumably being fingerprinted, Muscles the Clown and his ilk took over his garage and, in full view of all, and on cable television, performed a spontaneous, first-ever to America’s knowledge, Garage Sale Circus—the idea being if they could collect enough money, maybe, just maybe, they could pay their debtors, buy back their circus stuff and reverse the insolvency that had injected itself into the content of the American character.

Enter: Decie, all bruised and holding his balls, and me with a huge smile—as if we had recently got wind of the Garage Sale Circus and, on cue, were returning the unicycles we had ourselves wrested away from a rich neighborhood capitalist and were wheeling them back to their rightful owners.

“Everything must go!” Muscles the Clown shouted.

As we rolled the unicycles into the garage, Yippie Freeman, now in a flak jacket and with an icepack on his head, said: “There are glimmers in the boyhood of America that with steadfast prayer and a belief that if just given a chance, our younger generation will rise to the occasion, if called so forth.”

This made-up back-story, without a word to deny it, confirmed what everyone perched by a television set in America was thinking.

“Their Quixotic quest is over!” Muscles the Clown reiterated and pointed a stiff finger at us.

Suddenly, all of the clowns surrounded us and were patting us on the heads and rubbing our bellies and going, “Bong! Bong! Bong!”

“And now ladies and germs, what’s a Garage Sale Circus without—animals!”

Enter: three seals who tossed beach balls with their noses and bear cubs still wearing collars, who rolled around with purpose on the insides of hollow spheres.

“We wish we had the elephants, but alas all the elephants, even Freida, have been impounded. Help save the elephants!” Muscles the Clown again pointed his flaccid finger at America.

A strongman appeared wheeling out the human cannon, which came to a grinding halt before us, and Muscles gestured like clowns do for Decie to “Get in.”

Decie, overcome by the moment, hesitated.

“This is NOT a good idea,” I said but my voice was drowned out by an orchestra of fun whistles and stupid kazoos.

I saw the last of Decie’s head disappear into the mouth of the cannon.

Then, the Fire Eater appeared as if from the very walls of Mr. Rancer’s garage and pulled from his mouth a flaming sword, which still had the price tag on it, which he used to light the comically enormous cannon’s fuse.

“Ten-nine-eight,” Muscles the Clown began the count, “seven-six-five” we all chimed in “four-three-two” BOOM!—a thousand leaflets burst from the human cannon like confetti, advertising the Garage Sale Circus. Muscles the Clown made a big ‘to do’ about climbing onto the barrel with a handheld camera and peering down into the mouth of the human cannon.

“The boy is nowhere to be found!” Muscles the Clown exclaimed and pushed his gloved hands to the side of his face.

[Wide-angle of the impossibly empty barrel.]

“Gone to free the elephants,” Muscles exclaimed and clasped his hands together like a supplicant.

The kazoos crescendoed and the fun whistles shrieked, and then everything about the Garage Sale Circus paused—“Commercial,” the Bearded Lady whispered in my ear as soft as silk.

The clowns grabbed suddenly the unicycles from my hands.

Five minutes later the annoying kazoos and ear-splitting fun whistles started up again; errant clowns were hopping on pogos, two bear cubs were riding the unicycles, and there was Muscles the Clown still sitting astride the cannon, a camera lens very close to his face, “And ladies and germs, theeerrrreeee he is!” the flaccid finger suddenly turned straight.

Decie made his way from around the side of the garage—leading five elephants trunk-to-tail in tow. “They follow the boy like butter,” Muscles the Clown said into the camera while behind him the elephants put on a show: they balanced on little stools, they tossed bouncy balls back and forth, they tilted their great hoary heads and trumpeted in the air freedom’s sounds upon command.

Re-enter: the Fire Eater who held up a large ring aflame. I tasted the creosote and smoke.

The cub bears were holding hands, balancing their furry bottoms atop the unicycles. Together they gathered up speed and jumped through the flaming ring, over three tiny pigs, and landed successfully on God’s side, our side.

One cub bear dismounted, and there was Decie in the middle of it all, clapping, happy.

I had never seen Decie so happy. When one of the clowns during the next commercial break showed him how to mount the unicycle, one foot on the ground, the other on the pedal and up! up! up! he grinned from ear to freckled ear. The Strongman and Muscles held onto each of his arms and together yelled, “The boy is on his way!”

As I stood there surrounded by clowns and bears and elephants, as I watched the cannon being lit once more and advertisements and confetti being shot into the air—all I could think was, this whole thing should have happened to me. I was the one who bought the unicycles; I was the one who wheeled them back here; I was the one who understood cause and effect, supply and demand, the warp and the woof. Yet, it was sad-sac, ever-antagonizing Decie they had picked, not me.

I sat right down on the curb, I swear, and one of the 24-hour news guys handed me a sandwich, and guess what? It was olive loaf. Yet there was only mustard, not mayo, not Miracle Whip. And he said, “Kid have you ever seen anything the likes of this?”

_____________

[1] Quote by Thomas Sowell

J. Bradley Minnick is a writer, public radio host and producer, and a Professor of English at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock. He has written, edited, and produced the one-minute spot “Facts About Fiction,” and Arts & Letters Radio, a show celebrating modern humanities with a concentration on Arkansas cultural and intellectual work that can be found at artsandlettersradio.org. He has published numerous journal articles and fiction in Toad Suck Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Literally Stories, Inklette Magazine, and Potato Soup Journal and Potato Soup Journal’s ‘Best of 2022’ anthology. Forthcoming work will be featured in The GroundUP, Southwest Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SUNK BY MINES by Tom Sokolowski

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SUNK BY MINES by Tom Sokolowski

Tom Sokolowski
SUNK BY MINES

Driving to Cascades Park, I pass The Florida Bar and the Smokey Hollow Commemoration and Community Garden where, on a bench facing Franklin Boulevard, Lonely Man, with a knapsack beside him, is always grinding rotten kumquats under his sneakers. Today, Lonely Man is squishing a fat one. He’s always looking like the loneliest man in the world. I barely compete. Especially since I have a date.

Lonely Man becomes tiny in my rearview. I hit the light at Lafayette, loop around to Suwanee, and street park in front of The Edison—a square brick building with big arched windows overlooking the Cascades open-air amphitheater. The building turned coal to gas for Tallahassee in nineteen-whatever and looks like a train station, especially with the tracks running a hundred feet behind. Now it’s a restaurant, the type with napkins peaked on tables. And there’s happy hour—four-dollar draughts, five-dollar mojitos. They squeeze fresh limes.

Elise is outside the restaurant in a yellow short-sleeved sundress with white polka dots and these thick-heeled wedge sandals with woven fabric exposing too much foot. Her eyeliner spans into wings. Elise’s weight surprised me last week, when I met her, though I didn’t expect a twig—all her profile pictures are from cleavage up. She’s four years older than me and teaches middle school science, or maybe math. Her voice is nice. Society obsesses over what people look like but never about how they sound. And too-pretty women can be mean. One on Tinder said I look like a Goomba from the Mario movie with John Leguizamo. I’m just thankful to talk to someone. I can get so empty I want to be dead.

Startling park joggers bounce by. My polo clings to my back. I side-hug Elise and hold the door, and (after inquiring) the host warns me they’ve recently adjusted the schedule and happy hour won’t start for an hour.

So, Elise and I walk through the park, past a playground full of yapping children, past ducks floating in a pond at the bottom of a depression fed by an artificial waterfall (city development extinguished the original a hundred years ago) that’s not running and is just, really, a concrete wall with hard-water stains. But Elise steps like her feet hurt. Really hurt. And more joggers traffic the sidewalks. It’s like everyone in the world is running, spinning the world with their heels. Everyone but Elise, that is.

In an offshoot surrounded by sycamores sits a Korean War memorial. We wander in. On a circle of pavement detailed with a ten-foot map of Korea rises a giant horseshoe-shaped monument enclosing a statue of the Battlefield Cross. DUTY, HONOR, COUNTRY etches across the horseshoe face. The monument is meant to be a ring with part of the top snapped off. In front of the horseshoe lays the broken piece inscribed with LIFE and a list of names on the concavity. All around are sporadically placed boulders named after battles.

“My grandfather was in the Korean War,” I say. “The Navy. His ship got hit by artillery during the invasion at Inchon.”

“Did he die?” Elise asks.

“Nope.” I wipe my forehead with the back of my hand. “Only a handful did, maybe. His ship didn’t sink. Just damaged. You know about Inchon?”

“Uh-uh.” She shakes her head and runs a finger along the monument. That seems disrespectful, but I’m not overly reverential to such things. I feel bad for everyone involved, but war comes with too many implications.

I read the list of dead from the broken piece. Abercrombie Wherry L, Adams Melville Eugene, Adams Richard L, Adams William Hill… “The only ships sunk in the Korean War were minesweepers,” I say, sufficiently overwhelmed by the names. “American ships that is. They were all sunk by mines.”

“Seems unlucky to have been on one of those. And a bit obvious,” Elise says, smiling. “I wonder if anyone chose to go on a minesweeper or if they were always assigned?” Her teeth are perfect except for a bottom incisor and canine leaning together like a couple of cuddling penguins. “Maybe it would’ve been the most exciting. Maybe that’s the type of ship I’d want to be on.”

“I wish I could ask my grandfather how assignments worked. He’s been dead seven years.” I count my fingers. “Eight.”

“You never know what’s lost when people go.” Elise presses her heel into one of the boulders. Whether she’s checking the durability of the monument or her sandal, I’m unsure. “At least he didn’t die in the invasion,” she says. Then, “Inchon, you said?”

“Inchon.”

I tell Elise about the community garden and we continue north, cross Meridian to a sidewalk along Lafayette with a concrete retaining wall cutting through earth like a pie knife in cake. I take Elise’s hand. She curls her fingers around my palm, and we walk holding hands, me swinging my arms carefully, gripping firm but gentle, my pace slowed so Elise doesn’t have to walk so wobbly in those sandals. The highway overpass, which nearly ceilings the garden, is in sight. At a traffic light, cars gust Elise’s hair. She secures mutinous strands behind her ear.

“The garden is more about history than produce,” I say to fill silence. “It’s a memorial to the Black neighborhood the state erased when it claimed eminent domain. All throughout the park, there used to be hundreds of shotgun houses and businesses and churches, everything. Hundreds of families lived here, in the park. The whites thought the properties were slums and too close to the capitol building.”

“What happened to the people?”

“Their homes were dismantled. They were sent packing without an ounce of federal or local help.”

“Jesus,” she nearly whispers.

“History is shameful,” I say. “It can really make you mad.”

Quietly (because what else is there to say?) we cross the street, walk below the Apalachee Parkway overpass (traffic thunders), over a dead lawn scaled with leaves toward a brick path networking the garden boxes and three of these symbolic skeletal houses—metal frames sprouting from concrete foundations anchored around brick fireplaces and chimneys. The metal slats framing the roofs have quotes from people who once lived in the Smokey Hollow neighborhood. There’s not much in the garden, not enough to make a meal. The basil is thin and black at the base and spider mites seed the leaves. I found that out when I gathered some for pasta. There’s cilantro that’s too little to take and unripe oranges that I first mistook for limes. But mint weeds all throughout, and there’s a rosemary bush and a tree with kumquats that are a bit too yellow but good enough.

If this is all there is to make amends, it’s a tragedy, truly.

But it’s important to think about the good things in life. And this date is going well enough that I’m more nervous than ever. A catch-22.

Oh. Of course, Lonely Man is still on a bench before the kumquats. His knapsack hugs his hip. He has a gray ponytail that doesn’t match his shaved face. Somehow, we’ve never spoken. I’d feel horrible if bringing Elise here meant making him feel lonelier.

I step onto the brick path first. On Elise’s way up, her sandal catches the curb and she lurches forward. I get startled like a cat and clamp her hand. My arm goes rigid as if I can keep her upright by pinning her knuckles to some point in space just above the ground.

I don’t catch her. Not even close. Elise bellies the sidewalk. Her face thuds. I finally let go of her hand after she starts this warbling bird noise. It scares me more than all her blood leaking over the sidewalk. I hinge at the waist to eye her. Oh god. Oh god. What the hell am I to do? I’ve always hated how timid I can be. When fire alarms go off, I get dizzy and it’s hard to stand. I always freeze up. I don’t know why.

“Why’d you hold her like that?” Lonely Man asks.

When did he come over?

“Sure goofed that one,” he says, rolling Elise over. Her front teeth are shards. She looks like she’s jumped off a surgeon’s table and escaped the hospital. He waves a few inches from her face. “Call an ambulance.”

I find my phone (my first time dialing 9-1-1).

“She your girlfriend?” he asks after I hang up.

“It’s a second date.”

“Don’t think there’ll be a third.” He puts on his knapsack and sits on the curb near one of Elise’s sandals.

Elise finally comes to. She doesn’t have any questions or say anything. She just makes a sound like a sip through a punctured straw. Then the ambulance is lighting the garden.

“She tripped,” I tell the paramedics.

“Just couldn’t make it onto the sidewalk,” Lonely Man says.

Elise gets collared and stretchered then rolled into the ambulance. A tall mustached paramedic asks if I want to ride with. I tell him my car isn’t far.

“She’s not going to want anything to do with you.” Lonely Man says after the ambulance turns out of sight.

We face for a too-long moment. The wind rustles the leaves of the kumquat tree. I curse under my breath. Poor beautiful Elise. It’s hard enough to get a first date, let alone a second. Could she have been the one? I’ve fucked it all up.

“Want to get something to eat?” I ask. “It’s happy hour at The Edison. I was supposed to go with her.” I gesture in the direction of the ambulance.

Lonely Man tells me his name is Marcelis, and we walk back the way from which I came, under the overpass and through the park around the waterfall pond. We walk silently until Marcelis tells me one of the sycamores in the park orbited the moon as a seed. He doesn’t know which.

“Great fact,” I say and ask if he’s seen the Korean War memorial.

When we’re side by side staring at the horseshoe monument, clawing for conversation, I ask, “You know anything about naval war?”

“I’ve seen a trireme replica. It was displayed in Athens,” Marcelis says. “I didn’t get to see it float.”

“What about modern combat,” I ask, “have you ever seen a real warship?”

“No,” he says. “But the triremes were used for war. They had bronze rams that looked like bird beaks. The Greeks painted eyes on the ships too. They were works of art.” He leans to get a close look at the boots of the Battlefield Cross statue. “It’s strange to think of a weapon as art, huh?”

We move on.

Past the Edison’s double doors, a kid wails on the waiting area bench. The mist of citrus oil perfumes the room. The host asks how many. Marcelis answers with a peace sign.

“Kids,” I say to Marcelis as the host navigates us through the tables.

“Have any?”

“One day,” I say. “I like to think.”

Marcelis sets his knapsack on the cushion of an empty chair, and we sit by a window framing the park’s dead waterfall. In the distance are freshly built luxury student apartments, certainly for Florida State. I lap my napkin and grip my menu, a social buoy. I look up wanting to say something, but my mind blanks. I use the window. College-aged kids picnic cross-legged on an oval of lawn. Books scatter around their feet. It almost looks as if they could conjure something—if they had candles and patterns drawn in salt. Could an old wooden house have sat in that spot? Just years before the land was annexed, the community expelled, had some woman my mother’s age once played as a child in the hollow between the picnickers? And now I’m here, about to enjoy a nice meal despite history, despite Elise. What type of person am I?

The waiter introduces himself. Marcelis orders the spiked rosewater pink lemonade. I order a tall Jai Alai and a fancy nacho appetizer to give us time to decide the entrées. When the drinks come, I gulp half my beer with the first sip.

“I’m not afraid of a girly drink. My wife would drink the manly ones. Scotch,” Marcelis says, pinching his straw. “I always had the umbrellas and big chunks of pineapple. We balanced each other.”

“The universe could use more balance,” I say and stare at the menu. “The whole universe operates on balance.”

The waiter delivers the nachos—freshly fried potato chips with goat cheese crumbles and pickled jalapenos all drizzled in a honey sauce. I extract a chip.

“The important thing is that that girl didn’t die. At least I don’t think she could’ve died from that.” Marcelis unrolls his silverware. “But maybe she will. Maybe she’s got the tiniest brain hemorrhage.” He taps his fork to his forehead just above his right eye. “From my experience, people can survive things that look certain to kill them—car wrecks, explosions, plane crashes, that sort of thing. It’s simple things that get us. Heart attacks while playing basketball, an ugly mole, short falls. You see?” he says. “A little piece of plaque could shoot to my brain and kill me here, or I could get hit by a bus walking home and just bounce off with a dislocated arm.”

My head is mixed up like an angry cloud of bees. “I don’t want to talk about this.”

The waiter surprises us, and we shut up. We order another round and entrées. I get lemon butter chicken with an extra side of mashed potatoes. Marcelis gets a steak medium with French fries. Outside the window, a cardinal flutters to a branch above the college kids.

“I bet most married couples,” Marcelis says, “at least once, wish their spouse would die. Not me though.”

“What do you know about marriage?”

“I had a wife.” He tosses a piece of goat cheese in his mouth. “I told you this, man.”

My second beer comes. The waiter tells us the entrées will be out soon.

“She died two years ago,” Marcelis says. “My wife. Never once did I want her dead.” He reaches into his knapsack and retrieves a little plate with a tiny sperm whale etched in the middle. The edge is ringed in blue. “I always bring this to the park. Don’t know why.”

“A plate?”

“Greece was our last trip. My wife and I,” he says. “We bought this plate early in the trip, so it went with us everywhere over there. Then it came home with us and she had it for another two months.”

I look out the window. The cardinal is gone. I can’t grasp the significance a little plate could have to a man. He’s lonelier than I imagined.

“We went to the Acropolis,” he says. “I never wanted to go to Greece, but it was a bucket list thing for my wife. I ended up loving the country.” He rubs the plate with his thumbs like he’s making a wish. “At the museum were these statues of women that served as pillars. Caryatids. The statues have these entablatures on their heads—flat parts to lay bricks and such on.” He frames the top of his head with his palms. “They reminded me of Green Bay cheesehead hats.”

The food comes. The waiter tells me my plate is hot. Marcelis slips his whale plate back into his knapsack, checks his steak, and says it’s cooked perfectly.

“Maybe I should see her at the hospital.” I say, putting down my fork.

Marcelis looks lost in thought. Finally he says, “I don’t think she’ll want anything to do with you.”

I push my food toward the center of the table. “What do you know? You carry around a plate.”

Marcelis grins, takes out the whale plate again, and drags his finger across the center like a blind man reading braille. “She joked that she needed a big entablature to cover up her shiny bald head. She had such a good spirit,” he says. “She had cancer, my wife. Lost all her hair.” He pats his head as if I don’t know what hair is.

Neither one of us is eating. We are two men without love. Love can end countless ways—war, being ripped from your soon-to-be bulldozed home, cancer, a damn trip to the pavement. But Marcelis had loved. I’ve never felt it. I want to tell him this, but I don’t know how. His eyes are like ice that could crack from the slightest pressure.

Marcelis sacks his whale plate. “In Greece, we took a boat tour, my wife and I. She wore a hat to cover up. She was bald.” Squinting, he pauses. “I said that. The hat blew into the sea. She was upset, not so much about the lost hat or her bald head, but about being powerless in such things. That’s how I saw it. She was very strong, and she hated being powerless. After that hat sank in the Mediterranean, this Canadian started talking to us. He was a little younger than middle-aged, maybe late thirties with a Kennedy head of hair. He was very charismatic. He didn’t say anything cliché. Nothing about hope or things happening for a reason or things turning out okay and such. He just said it was a shame to lose such a nice hat, but that maybe the fish will like it, or, better yet, maybe it will float down and top some lost statue.”

I picture a sculpted Greek god turned turquoise from the sea and covered with barnacles wearing a wide-brimmed woven sun hat.

Marcelis continues. “The Canadian told us a joke. My wife liked it too much. So much so that I can’t get it out of my head.”

“Just tell me already.”

“Okay.” Then, holding up a finger, Marcelis adds, “I’ve added my own flavor.” He clears his throat. “A little rocky island country had a princess. A man who lived on the island wanted to impress the princess. He scoured the beach and made her a necklace of shells and brought it to the castle. After he gave her the necklace, she brushed him aside. He went home and scoured the coast again, diving until he found a perfect pearl. After he gave the princess a pearl necklace, she said to him, ‘Whale, whale, whale.’

“Now the man had at least learned what the princess wanted. But they only had rafts on his tiny island country. He needed a boat to catch a whale and would need to build one. But the olive trees on the dry island were sparse and small. At the docks, he asked a traveling merchant for a cedar sapling. The merchant brought the sapling on his next visit. The man grew the sapling into a tree, harvested its seeds, and planted them, but the island was dry and there was only enough well water to grow a single tree. So the man grew cedar trees one by one and split each into as many planks as possible. This took a long, long time, but finally, he had a boat big enough to whale hunt.”

“Then what happened?” I say, taking a bite of chicken.

Marcelis outstretches that shushing finger; he’s nearly pointing right at me. “He caught a beluga and made a necklace of its teeth and brought the necklace to the princess. ‘Whale, whale, whale,’ the princess said, rolling her eyes.

“The man knew he needed a bigger whale. He dry-docked his boat and kept growing trees, expanding his boat until he had a ship. This time he caught a killer whale. He brought the princess the killer whale tooth necklace, but again she said, ‘Whale, whale, whale!’”

I nod along.

“The man, undeterred, dry-docked his ship again and grew more trees until he had an impressive vessel. This time, he went all out and harpooned a blue whale. When he presented the princess with the gigantic necklace, she shouted, ‘Whale!’

“‘That’s what I’ve given you,’ the man said. ‘There’s no bigger whale.’

“‘I said, wow,’ the princess said. ‘What’s wrong with you?’

“‘Oh no,’ the man said.

“‘Well, well, well,’ the princess said.”

For a few moments, I don’t get the joke. I think it over while Marcelis chuckles. Then the similarity between whale and well hits me. A terrible joke, really. And blue whales don’t even have teeth.

“My wife loved that,” he says. “She really did. We bought the plate with the whale on it right after. It broke on the plane home, but she glued it together. She couldn’t hide the crack, but she said it was suiting, that the plate looked ancient, like Greece.”

I ask to see the plate. Marcelis hands it to me with hesitation. The crack shoots down the whale’s bulbous nose. I imagine fishermen dicing a whale, harvesting its fat. I imagine Elise and her broken teeth, a crack bolting down her head. I picture a row of shotgun houses bulldozed into ruble and dust.

“She honestly thought the crack made the plate better,” Marcelis says. “She had such a great spirit. My wife really did.”

“I know a joke about boats too,” I say. “Want to hear?”

He looks at me and makes his face small. “You’ve got a way. Sure. Have at it.”

I hand him his plate and begin, “A boat is sinking. On board are three people—an American, a Brit, and a Pole—but only two life jackets. The American says, I never learned to swim, so I need a jacket. He takes one and jumps into the water. Both the Brit and the Pole know how to swim, so the Brit, being polite, says, we can play rock, paper, scissors to decide who gets the jacket. They play, and the Pole wins with scissors, laughing about how it’s too wet for paper. The Brit says, ‘Fair is fair,’ and jumps off without a jacket. The Pole puts the remaining jacket on and goes into the boat’s cabin. The American and Brit, bobbing in the water, ask the Pole what he’s doing. He replies, ‘Whenever there’s a disaster, like a plane crash, or if you get lost, say while hiking, you’re supposed to stay in place so they can find you.’”

Marcelis stares with a tiny smirk. I look out at the park.

Placing my finger on my exact obligation to society is not easy. But I know I don’t want to be alone. And sometimes, it’s best for broken people to just recite jokes.

I stand, lay out a crisp hundred, and leave for the hospital.

Tom Sokolowski completed an MFA at the University of Central Florida where he was awarded a Provost’s Fellowship and is now a PhD candidate at Florida State University. He is married to the poet Olivia Murphy Sokolowski and lives in Tallahassee. Find him online at tomsokowriter.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

FIVE SECONDS by Matthew Burrell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FIVE SECONDS by Matthew Burrell

Matthew Burrell
FIVE SECONDS

J.D. stood up without his grenade pin. We were heading toward the Guadalupe range after a live fire exercise in White Sands Training Grounds, otherwise known as the ‘Sand Box’, during a hot afternoon in July 1998 when the last guardpost of safety that kept us living, breathing connected tissue instead of imploded molecules of gelatinous red goop, the grenade clip, caught on J.D.’s entrenching tool, discharging into the air, and afterward, Ramirez swore he could hear the material ignition over the clanging of everything else—all the battle rattle, entrenching tools, canteens, compasses, magazines, warm brass shell casings—like the telltale vibration of a rattlesnake’s tail.

The exterior walls of the Bradley, thirty millimeters of spaced laminate armor, were impenetrable to small caliber ammunition. But inside, all that armor had the inverse effect, creating an enclosure that would multiply the devastation of an explosion by tenfold to its passengers, the hundred and eighteenth infantry detachment, out of Forest Park, Illinois, third squad, which consisted of myself, Squad Leader Sergeant Mack, Spec Ramirez, Private John David Steward, whom everyone called J.D., and the gunner in the turret, Corporal Carlson.

Sergeant Mack was the first to notice the orphaned clip and yelled, “That ain’t no dummy grenade,” while simultaneously grabbing J.D. and wrestling him down into the front compartment. Ramirez hurled himself to the floor with his hands over his Kevlar, like they trained us to do back in basic. I turtled up where I sat on cargo netting near the rear.

It all happened because J.D. had Rambo’d his grenades earlier in the day by removing the safety clips to make quicker throws—a great concept in the movies but a pretty shitty one in real life. Because J.D. wasn’t Sylvester Stallone, we had roughly five seconds before detonation.

Five seconds, in the Army, could feel like an eternity.

◊

Before all of this, before you could become a passenger of a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, before you were field certified to carry live grenades, fire live ammunition, or even touch an M-16 rifle, you must sign your life away to a recruiter in an ironclad contract that says you belong to the Army and are thereby and henceforth (and forevermore) property of the United States of America. When the recruiter soothes your mother with talk of government benefits, new skills, access to the G.I. Bill, affordable education, they never mention the fact you’re more likely to die in a helicopter crash during a training exercise than actual combat. Or that when you do finally get sent overseas, percentages say you will get KIA’d in a vehicular rollover rather than a roadside bomb. The recruiter fails to state the number one killer of veterans in America isn’t physical injury but mental health, and the rate of suicide among veterans is more than twice the rate of Joe Q Public.

I can’t speak to what J.D.’s recruiter told his mother, but I will say J.D. loved the Army more than any of us. Sergeant Mack liked to say he was blessed (or cursed) with the right combination of small-town Hoosier (having never left the midwest except once to go to South Carolina for basic training) and a woodsman-hunter ingenuity that was requisite of good soldiering. And unlike the rest of us, who were disinclined to speak fondly of the military (we tried not to speak of the Army at all except in laconic terminology and outright cursing its very existence), J.D. was a proud lifer from day one: first to the rifle range and last to chow, loved to spend hours breaking down the M-16, part by part, scrubbing the inner workings with cotton swabs before applying copious amounts of lubricating oil to the bolt and reassembling the weapon; highest scores in marksmanship; the physical fitness test; the urban warfare course, mountaineering, navigation, airborne…the rest of us bullshitted about going to Ranger School in order to appear squared away, but J.D. was already waitlisted in the fall class at Benning and serious about doing it.

The other thing you should probably know about J.D. is that up until we arrived at Fort Bliss, Texas, he was a virgin—in fact, both of us were. That was probably why we became such close buddies in a compressed military timeframe and stuck together during the reservist annual training. In the evenings, after a day in the field of playing soldier, the rest of the unit would go out to the enlisted club to drink Miller Lite, smoke cigarettes, and shoot pool, and J.D. and I would go to the barracks and continue to play soldier on Call of Duty. We didn’t smoke, but J.D. showed me how to chew on sunflower seeds—a handful at a time, sucking the salt out of the shells, getting the bits caught in your teeth, and spitting the rest into an empty water bottle. The grappling we learned in hand-to-hand combat, we’d practice there on the dust-swept floor among the discarded sunflower shells, twisting each other into figure fours, hyperextending joints, and constricting chokes in a game we called ‘blackout or tap out’. And when the rest of the soldiers came back drunk, we had all of our equipment out and prepped for training the next day. J.D., who otherwise was thin as a popsicle stick, cut a mighty stoic figure in pressed BDUs, spit-shined combat boots, and all the knee pads and camo vests an Army surplus store could stock. But up close, the most defining features were an unblemished face, rosy cheeks, and peach fuzz-like gravelly dirt across the upper lip. He was nineteen years old, and so was I.

Before the grenade detonates in four seconds, J.D. and I must first lose our virginity. Which is an impossible task in a place like El Paso. Back in those days Fort Bliss wasn’t a big military base like it is today, but a barren dusty stretch of warehouses and missile batteries and rows of barracks and churches and more churches and more barracks. It was the antithesis of the dictionary meaning of bliss because the military is full of irony. Flat as a saucer and every building the same and not a single female at the enlisted club, not just one of the worst military bases in CONUS, it ranked up there with the worst places in the world, period.

◊

The night before the live fire exercise our liaison, Major Bentley, took us up to watch the sunset from one of El Paso’s rocky overlooks. After the sun fell there was a flickering in the distance like a prairie of Wisconsin fireflies as darkness came on. The orange glow of twilight sparkled like an electrical current ran through the sky, and all of us were curious to what it might be until Major Bentley broke the spell, “That right there is Ciudad Juarez, troops. And you’ll have to trust me when I say you don’t want to go there.”

As we walked back to the vehicles, Sergeant Mack elbowed me sharp in the ribcage and whispered, “Ciudad Juarez is exactly where we’re going.”

◊

The days prior to the live fire exercise were spent in a stretch of lonely New Mexico desert backdropped by the magnificent Guadalupe range. In 1945, it was the site of the world’s first atom bomb, also known as Jornada Del Muerto, or ‘the Route of the Dead Man’, where at precisely five thirty in the morning Oppenheimer’s ‘Trinity’ test instantly disintegrated the one hundred foot tower carrying the device and turned everything else—all the sand and grass and rock—into emerald hued glass. All of that was accomplished before anyone could say ‘Jack Robinson’. But seconds later they heard the explosion and felt an eighteen-kiloton blast that seared the earth and sent shockwaves with enough force to knock down observers from miles away.

A few seconds was also the time it took Ramirez to urinate on the black lava rock obelisk commemorating ground zero, where we’d pulled the Humvees over to take a group photo.

“I’m, like, pissing on history,” Ramirez said as he shook the last drops out.

“Some fucking history,” Sergeant Mack said. “A scientific experiment in mass destruction to kill brown folks. That’s what this was. Ever consider why they never used the bomb on Hitler?”

“Huh,” Ramirez said, buttoning up his trousers.

“Didn’t think so,” Mack said. “You, of all people, should understand the cultural significance of mass genocide.”

“What’s that supposed to mean, sergeant?”

Sometimes it was hard to tell if Sergeant Mack was fucking with you or giving you truth like a water cooler salesman in the desert.

J.D. came from around the obelisk and took a photo of the blackened glass. He unslung his rifle and peered through the scope.

“Nothing for miles in every direction.”

“That’s right,” Mack said. “They blew half this desert to test a fucking bomb. Then they dropped it on not one, but two cities. You’d think they’d notice a couple soldiers missing if we never came back?”

“Don’t say that, sergeant,” J.D. said.

“What do you want me to say,” Mack said. “That you’ll make a fifty grand signing bonus and drive a Corvette and fuck every stripper on Victory Drive?”

“Careful, Sergeant Mack,” Carlson said. “You keep talking like that and they’ll make you a recruiter.”

“Sheet,” Sergeant Mack said. “Who says I wasn’t one already?”

◊

Later, in the barracks, while drinking warm Jose Cuervo straight from the bottle and playing spades, bright fluorescent lights fizzled every couple seconds and indiscriminately went dark, flies crowded the windows, and cockroaches the size of quarters skittered on the white linoleum floors unafraid of the light, unafraid of us, even. We lived in a shithole, frankly, of painted concrete walls, rusted steel bunks, sordid mattresses, and air that was grainy with dust and who knows what else. Three of the four latrine toilets were clogged since the day we arrived. We’d put in a work order, but that only seemed to aggravate the situation. The next day there was a half-moon-shaped piece of shit on one of the toilet rims. “Maybe they missed,” someone said, but the rest of us all agreed it defied physics. Somebody was intentionally fucking with us. It was the same story everywhere.

Three seconds before implosion I could still see Sergeant Mack throwing down his cards and saying, “I’ll be damned if I’m gonna sit here drinking warm tequila all night and eye fucking the rest of yous.”

“What can we do,” I said. “It’s not like J.D. and I can stroll into the enlisted club.”

“I know something we can do,” Rameriez said, a wry half-drunk smile spread across his face.

“Are you certified insane?” J.D. said.

“Ain’t no laws about IDs down there; you got hair on your balls, they’ll serve you.”

“It doesn’t seem fair,” I admitted, “sending us to war without letting us buy a beer.”

“Life ain’t fair, you dumbass,” Sergeant Mack retorted. “Think you’re special ’cause you signed the dotted line?”

“No,” I said sheepishly. Sergeant Mack had a way of tearing you down before he built you back up.

“But you are right. Makes no damn sense taking a bullet without a shot of tequila to numb the pain.”

He stood up from his chair and untucked his brown tee and showed the rest of us, something he’d done many times before, an old gunshot wound. A spidery crisscrossing of dark scar tissue across the abdomen. “Got this before I joined up. Reason I did,” we’d all heard the story before, but it was a good one, “figured if I’m gonna get shot, I may as well get paid for it.”

So when Sergeant Mack told us we had nothing to worry about in Juarez, nothing a couple of well-trained, no-shit hi-speed soldiers couldn’t handle, we agreed to go—after all, urban warfare was what the annual training was about, so, in theory, some sporadic automatic fire would do us some good.

And that settled it. We were going to Ole Mexico.

◊

We departed for the Land Port of Entry at twenty-one hundred hours and parked our rented Suburban on the El Paso side and got out with just enough cash to last a couple of hours and left all other valuables, besides our common access cards (CAC) cards and IDs, in the vehicle. J.D. took a fold-out knife “just in case” and slipped it into his cowboy boot before we lined up with the rest of the civilians at the pedestrian bridge.

A few minutes later, we were in Mexico.

“So this is Mexico, huh?” Carlson said.

“Yeah,” Ramirez said.

“Looks a lot like Texas.”

“Yeah.”

Migrant workers with tired faces piled into the beds of pickup trucks, families milled about waiting for buses to come, others began to walk down the street to who knows where—the road faded into darkness because, after the land-port-of-entry, which was lit like a Macy’s, there were no street lights. Eerie darkness opened like a wound in the night and bade one to wonder if it had simply been there all along, dormant, waiting to be discovered like some piece of unexploded ordnance in an otherwise bucolic field.

We looked around the border station, but there were no signs saying “G.I.’s this way” and Sergeant Mack had disappeared suddenly. The border station quickly emptied and filled again as more people made the trip over. We were beginning to talk about what a mistake this was when Sergeant Mack came around the corner in the bed of a pickup truck like he’d planned the whole thing.

“Don’t just stand there looking like a bunch of gringo assholes.”

“I ain’t no fucking gringo,” Ramirez said.

Two seconds until a grenade blows all of us to Kingdom Come, and we’re rolling through downtown Jaurez in the back of a pickup truck and I’m still thinking about the smell. Not of the backed-up latrine but of the brothel we found on one of the darkest streets I’ve ever seen. The lights looked the same on all the roads of Juarez. Then, as we made a turn, a pink neon ambiance glowed and rats skittered like rose-colored figments through the streets into gutters. A howl rang out in the near distance, either coyote or dog, I couldn’t tell which. My only thought was, this must be the place.

When we entered, there was a group of older Mexicans wearing jeans and flannels shooting pool in one of the corners and an older barmaid behind a rickety bar top. J.D. grabbed a pool cue off the wall.

“We’re not here to play pool, dickhead,” Sergeant Mack said.

J.D. put the cue back on the wall.

“We’re here to get fucked up,” Carlson said.

“Ding ding,” Mack said. “Folks, we have a winner.”

“It smells like pussy,” Ramirez said, “but I don’t see any girls.”

“I guess your mother doesn’t start her shift until eleven,” Mack said.

“Fuck you.”

“Ahem.”

Sergeant Mack gave Ramirez a dour look.

“Respectfully, fuck you, sergeant.”

The atmosphere in the pool hall seemed to portend something. The sight of the place made my stomach churn, for along the wall were unlabeled tequila bottles with worms sitting at the bottom of each. They were kept in uneven rows, half full or a quarter full, never fully full. I looked to J.D. and he was looking at the bottles, too, stacked high like a rampart on a tower wall. I’d never seen so much alcohol in my entire life. The soldierly thing to do, we innately understood, was to commence a siege at once.

“What do you think, J.D.?”

“Fifty bucks to the Joe who gets the worm,” Mack said, sidling up to the bar.

“Fifty bucks is a good price for a worm,” J.D. said, looking at me, “is what I think.”

Sergeant Mack took out a fifty and laid it on the table and next thing I knew the bottle was turned up in my mouth. Soon after the smooth brick walls were oscillating and lights strobed the bar top. The bartender, a striking woman of fifty years old, was giving us winks from bespeckled purple lashes. In no time we’d each finished a bottle and swallowed a worm and claimed the fifty dollars from Sergeant Mack. Then, at around midnight, we found out what the fifty dollars was intended for.

I have no idea where they’d come from, but suddenly the pool hall was a real live wire, belting out mariachi songs and filled to the brim with hustlers, pool players, Mexican cowboys, and some of the most beautiful prostitutes I’d ever laid eyes on. They were, in fact, the first prostitutes I’d ever laid eyes on. In no time at all they formed a half circle around me and J.D. and were pushing us into the far corner of the pool hall.

Sergeant Mack was doubled over, laughing. He thought it was a pretty funny scene, I guess, us skinny, needle-dicked teenagers being corralled like some wild mustangs into the corner by a group of take-no-prisoner, mercenary hookers.

Anyway, that was it for me and J.D. That was all the cajoling we’d need. We’d already made up our minds. We were done being virgins.

One second to go and I am staring at a pink-hued ceiling mirror, wondering why I always imagined it would happen differently. The room was dingy, even by brothel standards, and I somehow knew this even though I’d never been to a brothel. The plaster on the walls was peeled, with either mold or fungus, it was impossible to tell in the sallow light. The only other furniture in the room was a decrepit armchair, which was home to at least one mouse I’d seen escape into his ripped legs when we first entered. It had been several minutes since the girl had left, and I couldn’t help but wonder if J.D. had the same experience as me, with the same feelings of loss and confusion afterward, yet somehow satisfying in a way that made you want to do it again as soon as possible.

When I found J.D. in the pool hall he was leaning over the countertop, him and his denim jeans and flannel shirt, cowboy boots, and high and tight haircut, sipping on a glass of mezcal. The expression on his face, when he wheeled around, was the same as when the grenade went off. Not fear, necessarily, but a look of bewilderment—like he was saying with his eyes, “What the fuck did I just do?”

In a brilliant flash of light and sound the grenade detonated. The reason I’m here to tell you about it is because the grenade was not the standard fragmentation kind, but a signal grenade. There was a fizzing and almost immediately the personnel cabin of the Bradley where we happened to be, a claustrophobic steel armored box no bigger than a small closet, began to fill with noxious colored smoke, and I lost all vision but could hear J.D. hollering like he was dying.

By feeling alone I found the drop switch and was able to open the back ramp, and when the smoke cleared out into the desert air, I could see Sergeant Mack and J.D. rolling on the bed of the rear compartment, smoke from J.D.’s chest as though he bled a red colored toxin. Carlson was up the turret screaming for a medevac. Pretty soon Sergeant Mack was also screaming, but J.D. had gone quiet.

Sergeant Mack had managed to peel away the grenade and toss it, but the sky was still red with smoke when the Blackhawk choppered in from Bliss. There were two gurneys—one for Sergeant Mack and one for J.D. We watched the bird lift off and dust plume up, and for a while we watched it grow small and blur into the horizon. Then we all got back into the Bradley. There wasn’t much else to do, and no one said anything the whole way back to the rear.

For two days we waited outside the Fort Bliss hospital where we could visit J.D. and Sergeant Mack. It was always during the morning that we would sit in the waiting room, bright white, always the same. Then we’d take turns going into the rooms, but there was nothing to see. They were both unconscious, covered in blankets, and the only sound was medical machines doing their work. But something with Sergeant Mack changed after two days. He woke up, but J.D. lapsed into a coma.

We waited, hoping, until they told us we had to go back to Chicago. By the time the plane landed at O’Hare, J.D. had died. From what had he died? The First Sergeant called each of us into his office to tell us personally what happened. That signal grenades can reach temperatures of eight hundred, a thousand degrees or more. They won’t kill you from a distance, but pressed up against human flesh for a significant duration? It could be lethal.

◊

Before I got out of the Army for good, I met up with Sergeant Mack in a bar on the south side near the stadium. We were planning to watch the White Sox play the Red Sox, but the game got rained out, so we sat in a dark bar and drank Old Style.

“I was watching a documentary the other night,” Mack said. “About Alaska or some shit. This crazy motherfucker moved there and decided to live with grizzly bears. Imagine that? And I thought soldiers were dumb.”

I nodded, wondering whether we were going to talk about what happened all those years ago. A few seconds into the conversation I already knew we weren’t. It was unseen wounds that took the longest to heal. Some never did.

“How’d it end?”

“You’re a funny motherfucker,” Mack said. “How you think it ended?”

“Man and bear live happily ever after?”

“If nuptials mean devouring your lifemate, then yeah, you could say that.”

He shook his head, laughed, and took a sip of Old Style. There was that easy demeanor, a wit so sharp it left marks. Sergeant Mack was still our talisman, always would be.

“It’s a fucked up thing,” he said. “About bears.”

“What’s that?”

“Tell me,” Mack said. “A bear is on your ass. There’s a downsloping hill on one side and a tall tree on the other. Which one you taking?”

“Hell, can’t bears climb trees? I’m taking the hill route.”

“Nah,” he said. “That ain’t right, either. It’s a trick question.”

“Then what are you supposed to do?”

“You make yourself big,” Mack said. “You make yourself bigger than you’ve ever been, and you bow up to that bear and you scream your heart out. You scream until your lungs bleed.”

Matthew Burrell is a reformed expatriate who’s spent much of his life in strange places. He lived in Tokyo for three years and in southern Thailand (all over, really) for another four years. Before that, he served in the US military and completed tours of Iraq and Bosnia and Herzegovina. A sometimes dissident who’s been through his fair share of immigration SNAFUs, Matthew is empathic to the plights of the marginalized and disenfranchised everywhere. A graduate of Converse College MFA program, he is most interested in the fiction whose subject matter makes readers uncomfortable yet enlightened. He is currently looking for a publisher for his completed novel, Legends of the East.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE ACTIVIST IN THE NURSING HOME by Pat Ryan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Pat Ryan
THE ACTIVIST IN THE NURSING HOME

It was Monday morning, a few minutes shy of noon, when I entered the Visitors’ Room of the extended care facility where I was embedded. The room is square and high-ceilinged, with a round table in the center for magazines. Beyond the table is the outside door, which is unlocked from noon to four p.m. The door handle beckons seductively, and yet I know that no one can enter or exit discreetly. The door’s unoiled mechanisms, no matter how gently manipulated, shudder when opened and crash when closed.

The one window in the room faces east onto a landscape where a pine-covered hillside is scored with trails that lead north into the Berkshires. On the outside, hikers, campers, birdwatchers, photographers, and artists flock to admire the view. From the inside, when sunbeams hit the glass, we (inhabitants, employees, and visitors) see this landscape through greasy smudges. In the bottom left corner, there is a child’s handprint. Perhaps the child had been trying to open the window and climb out. If I had observed this escape attempt, I could have explained that the window was permanently and securely locked.

My own escape happened by chance that morning. I was alone in the room, slumped in a chair, weighted down by world-pity and helplessness. Suddenly, a fire alarm went off in a far hallway. The room was empty. The reception desk was unattended. I shed my melancholy and rose up, filled with a primal desire for freedom and for fresh, hot coffee.

The door banged behind me as I walked out with a $10 bill in my pocket to buy the strongest cup I could find, one brain-shaking jolt of caffeine. I didn’t see the harm in it. It’s not as if I were going to zigzag down the road in my flannel nightgown and furry slippers.

I had one gulp of espresso at the café before the facility’s body snatchers found me, escorted me out and scooped me into their van. I didn’t protest. Through it all, I held the cardboard coffee cup upright—not a drop spilled.

That was my first escape. The second time, I cashed my Social Security check at the ATM and walked all the way to the Big Guy grocery store. That was when I had the run-in with Mr. Golfer.

I was in the fast-checkout line with six bags of hot tamale chips, six jars of peanut butter, a box of crackers, a package of fudgsicles, and a bouquet of tulips.

A man pulled up behind me. “This is the express line,” he said. “Ten items max.”

“I have five items,” I said.

“You have fifteen items.”

He pushed my cart aside. I pushed it back.

“Move out of the way, lady,” he said.

“Who do you think you are?” I countered.

“I’m a golfer,” he said. “We play by the rules.”

I threw the tulips at his face, grabbed the fudgsicles, and was heading for the exit when the body snatchers arrived.

That escapade landed me on the watch list.

“We could be sued,” the director said to me. She had learned this in a phone call from the lawyer who represented the management company that operated the nursing home corporation that owned the facility.

◊

My name is Val. I have survived breast cancer (chemo and radiation), a heart attack, three falls, and one hip replacement. Now facing debilitation, I am a resident of the Mountainview Extended Care Facility.

In the early days, I tried to make the best of it. I tried to converse with the other inmates by making polite conversation about current events. I asked if they were aware that women’s rights were being chipped away.

“We don’t talk politics here,” one woman said, swinging her arm to encompass the Aquarium Parlor. She added, “Don’t start trouble.” She didn’t introduce herself; I call her Mrs. Trouble.

How did I, a lifelong nonconformist, end up in this place full of old immovable objects? Was it a devil’s joke or a deity’s punishment to throw me into my special hell? Maybe I’d stepped on some godling’s toes during a Save Our Planet protest.

So I stopped talking. Cloistered in my room, I wear big black headphones and listen to NPR on my radio.

Today is the summer solstice. During the winter months, escape was on hold because I lacked protective clothing. The winter had been bleaker than ever before. It seemed longer too, reluctant to leave; its bone-chilling damp remained far into the springtime.

I had waited it out. I had been patient. For my reward, a silver lining appeared in the cloud of gloom. I now have a friend, a short but sturdy woman named Esther. Her skin is the color of parchment, her hair is metallic silver, and her eyes are black-brown. I can’t discern her ethnicity. Then again, who knows what anyone’s ethnicity is? We’re all hybrids, and it matters not.

Though my friend Esther doesn’t say much, she’s a good listener. She nods in agreement when I pause. I conclude that she will take her time before revealing secret thoughts.

“Today is the solstice,” I tell her, proud that I remembered the word. Yesterday it took me until noon to retrieve the lyrics “Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme.” I might as well sing about herbs and spices because they are never used in the meals here. No taste bud is ever tickled. I fantasize about the restaurants where Esther and I will dine after we escape.

In the dining room at dinnertime, I turned to the woman next to me and took a chance. “Did you know,” I said, “that the Fourteenth Amendment is under attack, and Roe v. Wade is in grave danger of being repealed?”

“I’m sick and tired of worrying about that Roe v. Wade,” she responded. She pursed her lips and simulated a gulping codfish while repeating “that Roe v. Wade.”

Across the table, Mrs. Trouble revved up her chewing and swallowing. “About time,” she said. “It’s unconstitutional. The braless feminists got it passed during their so-called sexual revolution.”

The first woman crossed herself while also managing to take the last roll in the bread basket.

Mrs. Trouble summed up her case: “My brother-in-law, who is an insurance commissioner, says it’s immoral, no matter what, and I agree.” She beckoned to the food attendant, held up the empty basket, and asked for a refill.

The roll delivery roused the man next to her. “Too much female clabber in this country,” he said, his face reddening under multiple liver spots.

“Too much bullshit in this room,” I said.

So I stopped going to the dining room. I also stopped eating the bland food. The dietitian has reported me to the doctor.

The doctor who is assigned to us visits on an irregular basis, always early in the morning while we’re in bed. He asked me if I struggle to remember words and dates, if I forget names and appointments, if I become easily upset or anxious. He named 10 objects and then asked me to repeat the names. I answered him in American Sign Language.

The doctor made a note on my chart. He wants to put me on the latest drugs for dementia. He told the nurse to order cholinesterase inhibitors.

As soon as the doctor and nurse left, I went to the Tranquility Chapel, hoping for a peaceful hour undisturbed. Eased into a back-straightening chair in a corner of the empty chapel, I breathed deeply, listening to the rhythm of blood flowing through my heart.

I’ve been giving myself memory tests. I try to recall verses I learned in grade school. I was reciting the Benéts’ poem “Indian” out loud and had just reached “They may be gods—they may be fiends,” when I was interrupted by the arrival of the spirituality chaplain.

This was the very person I had been avoiding (or one of them). My sister had asked him to perform a belief assessment on me. She had explained that it would relieve my depression.

“Face it, Val, you’re no longer an activist in an anti-war crusade,” she had said. “You need something to believe in, or else …”

“Or else, what?” I’d asked.

“Or else you’ll be a fossilized rebel without a cause.”

I still had causes, of course, but I missed my fellow rebels. I missed the talk. I longed for the plans—and the love—we shared.

Instead, here I was with this chaplain, sent by my sister to spiritualize me. He had seen my lips moving. “I’ll join you in saying your prayers aloud,” he said.

“Balls,” I replied.

So no more Tranquility Chapel. I moved to the library to study the newspapers, to fact-check the aberrations and lies of the powers that be.

I decided to arrange the books in this tiny library. I started with health and medicine, and discovered a copy of  “Our Bodies, Ourselves.” I sat and read the front pages, concentrating on every word. Yes, I remembered: In the 1970s, I was part of the sexual-health workshop in Boston where that book was written.

“You’d have thought it was pornography we were selling,” I said to no one in particular. “We had a folding table in front of the library. An angry man walked up and threw an apple pie at me—missed by a mile.” I continued talking to nobody. “I’ve often thought of him. I still wonder who made the pie.”

That afternoon in exercise class I derailed the warm-up by asking the group if they knew that the Doomsday Clock had moved thirty seconds closer to midnight.

I tapped my cane. “Tick, tick, tick, down to the final curtain,” I said. “Thanks to nukes and missiles, climate change, and the dickheads.”

I got in trouble for that. “Rules of politeness must be followed,” the Mountainview director said. Reading upside down, I could make out the words on my file report: “impulsive, impaired judgment.”

“What about my right to freedom of expression?” I asked.

“There are boundaries,” she said.

“What about the First Amendment, civil rights, civil liberties, and the ACLU?”

“Fine,” she said. “I’ll call them when I lose my job.” She opened her office door. “The aide will accompany you back to your room now.”

The young aide and I walked slowly down the hall. “Be careful,” she whispered. “They’ll move you to the third floor, the Alzheimer’s Ward.”

“I don’t have the big A.,” I said.

“You shouldn’t have run into the kitchen screaming ‘Balsamic!’” she said.

“Esther has never had a salad with balsamic vinaigrette dressing,” I said.

“In the future, let me know what you’d like,” she said. “I could sneak something in.”

Depression overwhelmed me. Was this what’s meant by second childhood—not how you act but how you’re treated? Screw that. Even in my first childhood I fought to have a say in how I was treated. “That girl sure can assert herself,” my father said.

My first civil disobedience was in seventh grade. Our yearly school movie, on the day before summer vacation, was announced as “Pollyanna,” with Hayley Mills. In the hallways between classes, I circulated a petition demanding a switch to “G.I. Blues,” starring Elvis Presley.

Before I was through canvassing my classmates, our homeroom teacher snatched the petition from my hands, declaring that I was “a big disappointment.”

As a result, (1) the movie assembly was canceled that year, and (2) I lost friends in my peer group but gained one or two livelier ones in the eighth grade.

◊

I know what I want to say, but I’m having trouble writing it. My Letter to the Editor is stalled. My sister’s words haunt me. The Alzheimer’s Ward does too.

Routines have taken hold. By foot, walker, and wheelchair, my dormmates and I circle about after lunch to claim the prime afternoon rest stops. I’ve noticed that the “female clabber” guy reeks of Mrs. Trouble’s patchouli scent; they must maintain close contact in a private nook somewhere. Esther and I are usually in the Aquarium Parlor.

Esther asks me about the scar on my right cheek. Without answering immediately, I slide one finger along the scar. As if it’s a fairy tale, I say, “This is what happened to me one day.”

I had been an abortion clinic escort, one of those volunteers in pink greeter vests who hurry women past rows of shouting people. I remember the posters of fetuses, the anti-abortion protesters swaying their hands back and forth over their heads to the Christian music, an old man who shouted “murderer” through a bull horn, a teenager walking a Rottweiler in front of a pro-choice group. I remember that women brought their children, especially their tiny girls, and the tiny girls brought their baby dolls. They had a box filled with dismembered dolls splattered with blood-red paint. They threw the doll parts at the women and girls who walked past them to the clinic. The mothers were excellent shots. They hit the women on the legs, chests, and heads.

Outside the abortion rights clinic one day, a woman handed me an umbrella and asked if I would shield her face to cut off the photos as we walked to the door. I had stopped for a second to click open the umbrella when a broken doll body winged the side of my face, and my blood began to gush. I had to bend over to catch my breath. I went to the emergency room and was stitched up, but it never healed smoothly.

Esther didn’t like that story, but I assured her that it’s my scar of honor, and I’d do it again.

She closed her eyes. I began trying to recite the alphabet backward when I closed my eyes too and fell into a nightmare.

There’s a gigantic clock; the ticking is deafening. Hordes of people are dancing frantically past me, elbowing me aside. I’m left alone in a swamp. My feet are mired in quicksand. I’m lost, immobile and speechless, while the slobbering Hound of the Baskervilles bounds toward me.

Someone was shaking me gently. “Val, are you all right?” a man’s voice asked.

Seems I have survived, once again.

“Tell me how you’ve been feeling,” he said, calm and understanding (not a golfer).

The pain is getting worse, I told him. I explained that it begins in my lower back and goes sizzling down my legs.

On his next visit, he brought painkillers. It turned out that he was not a product of my scattered brain but rather Esther’s grandson, a physical therapist who lives in New Zealand.

The three of us sat in the Visitors’ Room every afternoon. While he and I talked, Esther listened and nodded. On the day he was leaving to return home to Auckland, he brought a basket of sandwiches, strawberries, fancy crackers, and different kinds of cheese, including a sweet, soft brie.

We took a ride in his car—it was not an escape because he signed us out—and stopped at a roadside picnic bench. We spilled cracker crumbs on our laps, sucked our cheesy fingertips, and lifted our plastic glasses filled with wine from a bottle with a kangaroo on the label. We toasted the future and the pursuit of happiness. We laughed a lot.

At four p.m. exactly, he walked us to the Mountainview door, hugged me, and kissed Esther on both cheeks. “Behave yourself,” he said to her.

◊

I stare into the darkness surrounding my bed, wondering why I awoke. I hear a tapping on the window. Esther is outside, shining a flashlight at my face and motioning me to come closer.  I command my legs to move. I roll my body off the bed, swing my butt and keep the motion going into a shuffle step to propel me over to the window. It’s open a crack, and I lean on the sill.

“Come outside,” Esther whispers.

I look at my digital clock. It’s 11:58, almost midnight. When I sneak out—not through the banging door with its night alarm but the kitchen deliveries one with an easy lock—Esther is seated on a low stone wall in the moonlight. I see a spark and realize she’s striking a match.

“Holy shit,” I say (too loud). “Is that weed I smell? Am I dreaming, or are you holding a marijuana joint?” Esther doesn’t approve of profanity, so I apologize. This is not the moment to offend her.

“Esther, my friend, my dear friend,” I whisper as we sit next to each other, sharing the smoke and holding the butt tight. What was I going to say? I hum a bit of “Scarborough Fair.” I pause to admire the way my breath floats upward.

The cool air feels fine. I’m alive once more, lively, active. I remember my thought. “Esther, I know I talk too much. Please tell me what you’d like to do when we escape. Tell me what you wish for.” I don’t actually expect her to answer, but she does.

“I would like to go to a séance,” she says.

There’s more to this woman than I imagined.

“I went to one once,” she says. “But I was frightened.”

For the next half-hour, she talks without pause. Once upon a time, she went to a séance, accompanying a friend who wanted to speak to his recently departed mother. They joined a group sitting in a darkened room around a table. A woman said she was the Spirit Control and told them to hold hands. After a short silence, they heard a rhythmic humming, then a voice proclaimed, “I am Yo-Tania-Z. I have come to communicate with someone in this room.”

Esther takes a last puff and finishes her story. She had no idea what was going to happen, she says, and could feel goose pimples run up her arms. All of a sudden, the air was filled with barks and growls. Next to her, a bald-headed man shouted with joy. The Spirit Control said the man’s beloved Chihuahua-Poodle had arrived from “the other side.” The man squeezed Esther’s hand, which frightened her even more. Above the barking, she heard her friend yell, “Where’s my mama, where’s my mama?” Before he could continue, the Spirit Control, in one smooth move, swept him and Esther away from the table, and they found themselves standing outside the house, slightly dazed.

“My friend was very sad that his mother had not appeared,” Esther says.

From somewhere beyond the parking lot, deep in the pine grove, a kindred night owl hoots his sympathetic notes.

“That’s quite a tale,” I say. “How did you feel?”

“I was so scared I forgot to ask the dog’s name,” Esther says. “I’d like to know it.”

“It’s never too late,” I say.

“It’s something to look forward to,” Esther says. “With you, I wouldn’t be frightened.”

We listen to the sounds of tree frogs and spring peepers.

“I wish I had a real dog,” Esther says.

“We should have pets here,” I say. “We need a Pet Petition.”

“That would be a good thing,” she says.

I stand up. No backbones creaked. “I’m on it.”

Pat Ryan’s short stories have been published in the literary journals Chautauqua, American Writers Review, The Ghost Story, and The Hopper. Her reviews and articles on movies, music and literature have appeared in numerous publications, including The New York Times, where she was an editor in the Culture Department. She is a member of the Massachusetts Cultural Council of Deerfield and president of Deerfield for Responsible Development.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HELL’S MOUNTAIN by Brendan Stephens

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Brendan Stephens
HELL’S MOUNTAIN

Long ago, after I died, I found myself alone in a vast wasteland with nothing on the horizon except a single imposing mountain gray with distance. This wasn’t paradise. I’d never been a believer, just an ordinary sinner.

Beside me lay a tightly-coiled nylon rope, a pouch full of chalk, pitons, a climbing hammer, and a rock climbing harness in the dried-out clay, the waist belt covered in carabiners. No explanation was necessary; I was supposed to make my way up the ice-capped peak, so far away. From where I stood, it had to be at least a thirty-mile hike before beginning the long, long climb. It’d take me days, maybe weeks to summit the mountain and discover what awaited me.

Either way, I had nothing else to do. I slung the harness over my shoulder and headed off, the cracked, copper-colored earth scorching my feet. I only had what I’d died wearing, which unfortunately was just pajama bottoms. I had woozily gone to sleep not realizing there’d been a carbon monoxide leak. If only I would’ve died wearing shoes.

As I walked, in the distance, a far-off figure deeper in the wasteland hustled—almost sprinting—towards the mountain until I lost sight of them in the wavy heat. Why the rush? We had plenty of time down here.

By sunset, I hadn’t even made it close to the mountain’s base. My mouth was sticky with dehydration, and my pulled muscles stung sharp. I’d never been a fit guy, and once I started streaming video games full-time, I didn’t have time for exercise. I’d been known for marathon streams where I gamed for twenty-four hours, minimum. Still, I surprised myself at how far I’d gone. I collapsed.

However, when I awoke, the mountain seemed farther away than where I’d fallen asleep the night before, as if I’d lost yesterday’s miles while retaining the aching joints and torn muscles. So once again, I pushed on and again woke up right where I’d started.

Then I understood: giving the damned an impossible goal was a joke.

I stopped trying. Lifetimes went on. Yet, when I squinted into the horizon, each morning the same figure hurried out of sight as the sun rose. Over and over, uselessly they strove. Once or twice, I tried to catch up so I could talk some sense into them, but I was never fast enough to even make it within shouting distance. I wanted to grab hold of whoever they were and shake them, saying, “Haven’t you realized that hope is our torment?”

That mountain loomed in the distance, out of reach. I wasn’t sure if God, Satan, or some other force had made this place, but whoever it was, they appreciated subtlety.

◊

Regarding Hell, it is a hundred degrees even without breeze or shade. There’s no lake of fire, just a brilliant sun in a cloudless sky baking the arid landscape. Everywhere—the faint scent of striking matches.

In this way, I spent decades shielding myself from the sun and ignoring the starving pit in my stomach. Ordinary sunburns colored my pale shoulders, and each morning my cotton-mouth built into a dizzying thirst. With the rope, pitons, and my pajamas, I often fashioned myself a narrow tent of sorts. If I made it from sunrise to sunset without moving, it was a good day.

This was a lonely place, but every couple of years you’d run into someone. The wasteland was full of ordinary people, even though there were miles of desert between us. I preferred to be alone.

Then everything changed. The figure on the horizon that always headed to the mountain approached. He was a hulking man, walking with determination. As he moved, his muscular form cast rippling shadows like when sunlight hits the ocean. His blond hair and beard hung past his shoulders. Along with his climbing gear, he wore a chain mail shirt and a wool tunic. I wasn’t a history buff, but it was clear he’d been here for a very long time.

As he approached, he removed a goat-leather waterskin and offered it to me. I couldn’t believe it. He must’ve died with the waterskin, making him the luckiest person I’d ever met here. For the first time in who knows how long, I drank deep. The water had warmed, but it didn’t matter. Instant relief, a feeling I’d forgotten.

As I finished off the water in a series of deep pulls, he introduced himself as Arwald, The Isle of Wight’s last pagan king, a Jute that held to the old ways while the Anglo-Saxons converted. He’d died battling Cædwalla’s Christian army in their campaign to slay his people.

Still seated, I handed him back the water pouch.

“Done?” he asked with an accent that sounded both a little German and Scandinavian.

I nodded.

“Then gather your things. We’re going.”

“Where?”

“The mountain.”

I chuckled, but then I realized he was serious. That made me full-belly laugh. I said, “Thanks for the water, but you’re going to have to find someone else.”

“It shall be you.” Arwald was already winding my rope around his free shoulder. “I need an anchor for my climb. As you are the nearest soul where I awaken, you shall bear my weight as I climb the peaks.”

Even though I’d never say it out loud, it felt so good to be needed, even if just to hold a rope. Still, I said, “It can’t be done, Arwald. You should know that better than anyone.”

“Yesterday, my climbing partner reached the summit and went onto whatever comes next. I’d been her anchor. Now it’s my turn. I’ll teach you how we climbed, and when I’m gone, you shall find your own anchor.”

I didn’t want to believe him because my afterlife had grown so comfortable and predictable. However, when Arwald offered out his hand, calloused and blistered from rope and stone, I took it.

◊

Here’s the thing—it’d been so long since I made an honest attempt at the mountain. More time than I’d been alive. In those decades, I had wasted away. I’d grown skeletal. My ribs looked sharp as if they could pierce my papery skin. My femurs were broom-handle thin. My eyes: sunken, revealing deep sockets. I wasn’t convinced that if I fell I wouldn’t shatter. We trudged towards the mountain as fast as my legs would carry me. Each footfall stung like glass shards severing tendons.

Arwald jogged in place beside me, telling me I had to dig deep. He was like a personal trainer, except he never said anything uplifting. No. Arwald said, “Faster! Cædwalla’s forces nip at your heels. He shall boil you in lamb fat!” Or Cædwalla would flay me alive. Or have my feet roasted. There was no shortage of torture if I didn’t keep the pace.

At the day’s end, I hadn’t ached all over like this before. Not in life or in death.

“It is as if we hadn’t journeyed at all. Look.” Arwald pointed to where we’d come from, still visible on the horizon. “Today, Cædwalla of Wessex has broken your bone cage and forced you to watch as vermin feed on your lungs. Pathetic. Tomorrow you must fare better.”

What I didn’t tell Arwald because he wouldn’t understand was that I’d been a popular video game speedrunner. I held many world records, completing games in forty-five minutes that took others months. My waking hours had been dedicated to shaving off fractions of a second on each level through memorization and repetition. Every button pressed with perfect timing. I skipped meals, received little sunlight, neglected everything until I got what I wanted. I had an audience of hate-watchers transfixed by my skill and the lengths I’d go for a little digital glory.

But here’s the thing—I would’ve done it even if it hadn’t been my job. My compulsions felt more like addictions. When I committed myself to a goal, an itch grew underneath my skull. The only relief was being the best in the world. Sometimes, even that wasn’t enough. Instead of moving onto the next game, for months I would beat my own world record over and over until finally the itch disappeared.

Now that I knew summitting was possible, I already had that itch. I had a lot of memorizing to do.

Arwald sat down beside me and watched the sunset.

“What do you think happens when you make it to the top?” I asked.

He shrugged. “If we’re lucky, we go where our loved ones await. Though my first partner always thought that would be too easy. Perhaps there’s another test. She believed we would have to explain why we should be released from this place.”

“How long did it take for you to reach the top?” I asked.

“Do you really want to know?”

After a long pause, I said I did.

Arwald looked away. “Centuries.”

◊

The next day, my shins and ankles throbbed as if I’d stricken them with a ball-peen hammer. Soreness everywhere. My mouth had gone chalky. I lay there in the dried-out clay until Arwald crossed the horizon. He grabbed the harness and lifted me like a puppy. I stood on quaking knees.

“The Wessex forces are heading this way, razing the countryside. Let’s see if you outrun them today.”

We set off. Then the next morning, again we set off. Over and over, day after day, year after year, we set off.

The distance closed between us and the mountain’s base. The soft pads of my feet hardened almost into hooves. I grew accustomed to aching muscles, almost welcoming the dull pain. At each day’s end, the mountain stood a little larger.

In all that time, I rehearsed my summit speech for when I made it to the peak. I tallied all the sins in my life, the ones that used to make falling asleep difficult and also the ones I didn’t regret that were merely human nature. I’d beg for such forgiveness.

Then we finally reached the mountain. On that day, Arwald and I let out cheers echoing throughout the ridges.

The sun had almost set. Those cliffs glinted.

“Huzzah.” Arwald slapped me on the back so hard I nearly crumpled. “Those bastards from Wessex have indeed still captured you, yet today they merely gave you twenty public lashings.” Arwald held the waterskin out to me. “Here. You shall need this.”

He explained the next step was for us both to race to the mountain alone. We wasted too much time with him walking several miles to meet me each morning.

“Won’t this canteen just return to you in the morning?” I asked. Once or twice, I’d been robbed by others, taking my pajama bottoms since it was all I had, but the next morning they were back around my waist.

“Not if given freely.”

I hadn’t known that giving was possible. In all this time, it’d never occurred to me that one might offer the little we had.

◊

With the waterskin tucked into my pajamas, I hurried across the wasteland alone. Sore all over, I pushed through as my joints and tendons ached in the usual way. To me, it was important I met Arwald at the first climbing face where we agreed. All the better, if I made it there quick enough that he spared me details about the Wessex armies. I settled into a decent stride. Alone, I didn’t have to share water, so I guzzled.

Believe it or not, I came to the rock wall even quicker than the day before. Yet Arwald wasn’t there. I called out, yet the only response was my own echo. He was never going to hear the end of this. For at least a hundred years, I’d bust his balls.

For a while, I leaned up against the rock face. Just to get a sense of what I was up against, I found crevices where the tips of my fingers and toes could fit. I held tight until my grip gave out, which didn’t take long. The muscle I’d built hiking the desert didn’t help. Sure, my calves were strong like cast-iron, but above the waist, I was gaunt. My uncalloused hands were as soft as a kitten’s ear. It’d be a long time before I could support my own weight, let alone Arwald.

Still, the sun set without Arwald in sight. Only in the cold moonlight hours later did he come trudging.

As he approached, I called out to him. “Valiant effort my friend, but the Saxons have shorn off your ears.”

He didn’t laugh. He collapsed beside me, and with a small voice he asked for water.

I hadn’t saved him any.

“The water helps more than you know.” His voice was raspy and dry.

“I’ll save some for you tomorrow.”

Eyes closed, Arwald nodded. “In time, I’ll grow accustomed. As everyone who came before me once had.”

He said nothing more. For the first time, Arwald, the berserker king, seemed frail and limited. Human, he seemed so human.

◊

Arwald approached wheezing. “How did you climb so high?”

I shrugged. I sat on a narrow ledge, legs dangling several hundred feet above what I had bouldered up before he arrived. I lowered my rope to him.

Time had passed. I continued to beat Arwald to the mountain, and to kill time I climbed unharnessed until he arrived, his lips cracked and mind dazed. I always saved him whatever I could spare in the waterskin, which he’d finish off in a single pull, whether that was a single gulp or half the skin. In what time we had left, he’d teach me how to knot the rope and belay it in such a way that I could catch him when he repeatedly lost hold.

The truth was that the physics of climbing came easier to me, even as my strength still didn’t match his. But rock climbing was more than brute force and dangling one-handed from a cliff. It’s intuiting your center-of-gravity before taking a move, using momentum to increase your reach, pushing and pulling at the same time. It’s breathing and never panicking. And when climbing Hell’s mountain, more than anything, it’s memorization. From the moment I awoke thirty miles away until I passed out exhausted on a narrow ledge, my mind obsessively went over the holds, contemplating counter-intuitive maneuvers in order to bypass logical holds and shave off time.

Yet even after showing Arwald how to cut off two valuable seconds by climbing perpendicular with the ground while using his leg as a counterweight, he could only climb in the way he’d learned centuries before I’d been born.

Once, during a short breather as we looked out across dry clay as far as our eyes could see, Arwald said, “Just as my son, you too climb like a lynx.”

“You had a son?”

“Two. Wulfric and Leofgyð.” His breathing steadied, though dehydration and exhaustion made him loopy. “Both were fierce. They would’ve made great kings.”

“What happened to them?”

“Haven’t you unearthed that by now?”

It seemed obvious. All this time, he’d been warning me. “Cædwalla. He captured your sons and killed them.”

“Aye.” Arwald sat up. “After I’d died in battle, my sons were a part of the retreat. When the Saxons caught them, they were tortured until they disavowed the old gods. Only after converting were they slain. That was Cædwalla’s idea—send my sons to Paradise, not for their sake but to punish me. Being damned alone wasn’t enough for me. No, Cædwalla needed for me to burn alone.”

I wanted to tell Arwald that he was not alone, but when I opened my mouth to speak, my words escaped me.

◊

Over the next half-century, we settled into a routine. I was memorizing my way up the mountain. Through trial and error, I’d even discovered how many strides I must take in the wasteland before wetting my lips in order to reach the mountain’s base by mid-day with half the waterskin left for when Arwald arrived. As I waited, I ran my rope its entire length for him. Then I bouldered up the mountain with no safety line if I fell, hammering wedges into crevices to help Arwald as he brought his way up behind. Then when I saw him climbing so far below, I made my way back down to be his anchor.

For a long time, Arwald’s frustration in himself built. He thought he hid it well.

Then finally the day came when Arwald said, “I’m holding you back.”

I told him that we were making progress, bit by bit. Yes, we had miles to climb, but we had eternity to close the gap.

He listened, nodding along, but there was resolve in his eyes. Resolve and sadness. The truth was we’d actually been losing progress. A long time ago, we used to make it almost halfway up the mountain. Those days were gone.

He gave me a tight hug and then, grabbing me by the shoulders at arm’s length, said, “Tomorrow I find a new anchor.”

“We need each other. This is a two-person job.”

“For me it is.” He sad-smiled. “But alone, you shall climb the peaks. With water, I’ve no doubt you’ll succeed this very year. To slow your ascent to the Great Beyond would be a sin.”

It felt odd discussing sin in this place, especially since we’d already been judged so our transgressions no longer mattered. Yet I understood. For Arwald, sin wasn’t about dogma but rather going against his own morality.

And he was right about holding me back. We’d never summit together. I was always waiting for him to catch up, and my constant help lowering the rope for him was making him lose his climbing instincts. Both of us knew this. Yet we’d gone a long time ignoring these facts because parting would hurt so much.

As the sun set, we dangled our legs over a cliff. He held me, and I felt so small.

“Can I ask you a favor,” I said.

He nodded.

“Don’t come looking for me. There’s already so much pain here. Why purposefully reopen wounds?”

“You’ve been a good friend,” Arwald said.

What I didn’t have to say was that Arwald had been my only friend.

When we settled in for the night, as he was on the verge of dozing, I attached the waterskin to his harness. For the first time ever, I prayed. I asked that when Arwald awakened, he would accept the gift.

In the morning, when I woke, the waterskin was nowhere in sight. I brushed away the copper-colored dust and walked into the desert alone. On the horizon, Arwald wandered the opposite direction.

◊

Unlike Arwald, I was unable to make it to the mountain for a long time. Without water, I spent many years back in the wasteland passing out from heat exhaustion. I had to relearn how to push my body, new ways to forget my thirst, new stride counts before collapsing, new ratios for resting days. When I finally crawled my way to the base, my softened grip made easy ledges difficult and difficult ledges impossible.

Still, I often thought of Arwald whom I hoped had found an anchor and made more progress than we’d ever made together. As the centuries passed and I finally reached the spot where we last parted, I grew convinced he’d already reached the summit.

I too was getting closer. Inch by inch.

How can I convey three thousand years? The identical trudge, the face-first stumbles into dried-out earth, the tumbles down rock ledges. The hundred-thousand times my body crumpled into the earth and I gave up in a whisper, only to wake up and crawl towards the mountain. Countless lifetimes with a swollen tongue, broken toes, fingernails torn from their beds. Centuries of near misses as I finally made it to the snow-capped region where my frostbitten body gave out with the icy peak in sight.

My mind emptied, losing track of time and miles. A detachment, if such a thing was possible here. From exertion, it was like watching someone else trudge endlessly. Even in the dark, I climbed with pure muscle memory. Sometimes without thought, I’d find myself having quickly scrambled up a ledge that had taken me months to scale.

The itch only grew as I came closer to the peak.

How can I convey three thousand years of frustrations and victories and loneliness and straining and regret and yearning?

And then one day, everything came just a little easier. My strides, a bit longer. My thirst, more successfully ignored. My hands found solid holds within reach. My only thought: This has been a good run. Maybe I’ll summit in a few more decades. That thought was with me as my aching joints, frostbitten toes, sunburnt shoulders, unimaginable thirst, and the millions of pains I’d grown accustomed to melted away.

I’d done it. I’d made it to the mountaintop.

The peak disappeared, and I stood in a void with a woman wearing a gray robe held about the middle by a simple cord.

“I’m surprised,” she said. “To tell you the truth, it was supposed to be impossible to arrive here on your own.”

That didn’t matter to me. Instead, I said, “Has a man named Arwald passed through here?”

She looked off in remembrance. “Ages ago. He asked me to deliver a message. He said, Huzzah. You’ve finally outpaced the Wessex invaders. You’re safe, my boy. You’re safe.”

For the first time in a long time, I was happy.

She said, “You may now state your case on why you deserve salvation. When you finish, a judgment will be made.”

It was strange. In all that time, the many rehearsed speeches from back when I thought I’d plead for forgiveness had fallen away. I didn’t even want forgiveness because I’d long since forgiven myself. That was enough. Everything I had once regretted was barely a memory of a child who failed without knowing any better. Children—all of us. What was a single lifetime compared against thousands?

I suddenly realized, in life, my waking hours were consumed by repetition. Whether intended or not, Hell had been tailor-made for me.

“I don’t want Paradise,” I said.

“Then why’d you come all the way here?” she asked.

“Because I need the creator of this place to know I’m going to keep climbing. Even if you make the mountain taller or give me more miles to trek. Sever my foot off at the ankle. Whatever you do, I’m going to keep striving. I’ll keep coming back. You’re going to see that I’m growing better, even down here.”

She stared deep.

“You’re serious?”

I refused to look away.

The woman nodded so small I might’ve imagined it. She said, “Your message has been received.”

◊

In the morning, I was thirty miles away. My throat was parched. My knees, stiff. Still, I forced myself to stand.

Just then, a small cloud, the first I’d seen in all that time, passed over the sun, casting beautiful shade. A gentle breeze whistled across the scorched ground. The wasteland was changing. Maybe in another millenia, a light drizzle would fall. Saplings would grow, and the heat would dampen. Perhaps after a hundred thousand years, fruit would fall freely to soft grass. In time, the wasteland would look indistinguishable from Eden, perhaps even Paradise. On that day, the walls between Heaven and Hell would be removed. Arwald would return, and we’d finally conquer the mountain together, not to escape, but for the challenge. I saw it so clearly. Hell was worth saving. Every soul, especially the damned, redeemed. I’d never felt so alive, even before I had died.

Then the cloud drifted away, and the red sun blazed as always. I set off, one footfall at a time.

Brendan Stephens is a writer hailing from western Maryland. His work has appeared in Pinch, Epoch, SmokeLong Quarterly, the Southeast Review, and elsewhere. His awards include multiple Inprint Donald Barthelme awards, an Into the Void Fiction Prize, and a Sequestrum Emerging Writer Award. Brendan earned his PhD in creative writing and literature from the University of Houston. Currently, he serves as a submissions editor for SmokeLong Quarterly.

Andrea Caswell interviews Brendan Stephens on writing “Hell’s Mountain” in “The Craft Chat From Hell”. 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

YOUR BEST IMPRESSION by Lauren Baker

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Lauren Baker
YOUR BEST IMPRESSION OF AN EARNEST MAN

There was a Post-it with a heart drawn on it stuck to my desktop computer. I folded the paper square into halves, fourths, and eighths and scratched at the residue it left on the screen. Another heart on orange paper rested on a banana peel and half a protein bar in the trash can.

I thought Daniel was behind the Post-its; one of my coworkers mentioned she thought he’d miss me. The notes started after I put in my two weeks, and my time was almost up. The job was supposed to last until I found something better, but I hadn’t. I stayed too long and hadn’t bothered to get to know my coworkers, Daniel included.

The trash in my cubicle meant the janitor hadn’t cleaned. I scrubbed my desk and keyboard with an antibacterial wipe as Jack, my manager, walked by. “A few germs won’t kill you, Charlie,” he joked.

I put on a pot of coffee in the break room. The Folgers Breakfast Blend was old and the flavor was weak because Shelley, the receptionist, bought too much at once. I didn’t drink strong coffee anyway. I smelled Daniel before I saw him, but not in an off-putting way. His cologne reminded me of rich soil and eucalyptus leaves. I pretended he wasn’t there; that wasn’t rude early in the morning. His warm stare burned into the back of my head, so I said, “Good morning.”

“What do you think?” he asked.

“Of what?” I responded.

“The notes,” he said.

Daniel dealt with people in an off-from-center way; our coworkers found it endearing, but I felt like conversations with him were tests. I suspected the notes were a joke at my expense.

“I liked them,” I responded.

Shelley, who had entered a late-in-life goth phase, once said Daniel’s teased hair reminded her of Robert Smith from The Cure; it trembled in the breeze from the vent. I squeezed the palm of my hand because I heard it could lower blood pressure. Daniel let my response hang in the artificially cold air. The coffee maker dripped, and he massaged his jaw.

Our coworkers considered Daniel’s sickly good looks evidence he did his job well; they said you could tell he put in the hours. People asked, “Are you eating?” No matter what he said, they brought offerings from the vending machine. Daniel complained about the attention, but I knew he liked it.

The machine beeped, and Daniel poured himself coffee. “Alright, Charlie?” he asked but left the room before I could answer.

Later, I sat on the fire escape and ate my sandwich: turkey, swiss, and Wonder Bread. Everyone else had lunch in the break room except Syd, who went to Subway and came back smelling like an amalgamation of sandwich ingredients. Daniel climbed out the window and sat next to me. “How’s it going?” he asked right after I took a bite.

I covered my mouth. “Pretty good.”

Daniel either already ate or wasn’t eating. His legs looked streamlined in his slacks.

“Guess what,” he said. I looked up and tried not to chew too obviously. “You like Talking Heads, right?” he asked. I nodded; I’d worn a Fear of Music shirt to work before. “I saw David Byrne at a bar near my apartment,” he said.

I tried to display the appropriate emotions when Daniel described how Byrne smoked a cigarette with another musician from his Broadway show, American Utopia. I didn’t believe him; it seemed like one of his weird jokes. When Shelley started wearing dark makeup, Daniel told everyone she was sick and got them to sign a Get Well Soon card.

I didn’t see Daniel the rest of the day after he climbed into the building, but there was another Post-it with a heart the following morning. I stuck it to my desk and typed in my username and password. When Daniel walked into my cubicle, I opened a spreadsheet and studied it. The document wasn’t related to my work that day.

Daniel pulled his phone out of his back pocket. The case was enveloped in stickers from different fruits. After a minute, he asked, “You want to go to Frank’s for lunch?” which was a pizza restaurant by our office.

I didn’t want to go anywhere with Daniel. I hadn’t hung out with anyone outside of work, but as he stood and stared at me with his phone in his hand, I couldn’t think of a good reason to say no. I liked Frank’s cheesecake and wanted to know why Daniel was paying attention to me. If I embarrassed myself or it went badly, my two weeks’ notice was up in a few days.

I still dreaded the trip to Frank’s all day. I remembered what Daniel did to Shelley; she hadn’t been upset or anything. She even laughed when he handed her the card. If Daniel planned to do something like that to me, I didn’t know what I’d do.

At lunch, he found me in my cubicle. “Ready to go?” he asked. I grabbed my wallet and followed him to his car, ready for it to be over. He had covered the floor of his Honda Civic with trash. There were at least four Dunkin’ cups among the debris; it made me nauseous to wade through it all. He blasted Danzig and Black Sabbath, so I didn’t have to worry about the conversation. I thought his speakers might blow out. He drove too fast, and I put my hand on the dashboard at the traffic lights like I could make him hit the brakes.

Frank’s was a strange pizza place because it had a drive-through; this probably meant the food wasn’t made fresh, but their cheesecake was the best I’d ever had. Daniel insisted on paying even though I reached for my wallet first. When I tried to hand him my card, he pushed it away. Once we’d been given our food in plastic containers, Daniel turned the music down a little.

“Is it okay if I pick up my vape from my place?” he asked. “It’s only a few minutes away.”

“Aren’t we going to be late?” I thought it would be rude to say no outright since he drove and bought me food.

He assured me we were close to his apartment and it would only take a second. I agreed, and he turned the music back up.

He pulled into a parking spot outside a run-down building and turned the car off. “I’ll be right out,” he said and walked toward a set of stairs that led up the side of the building. I tried to make myself comfortable. We had plenty of time to get back, and I hadn’t had to talk to Daniel that much.

His hair bounced as he jogged up the steps. I put my feet on the dash and looked around. There were construction vehicles parked in a dirt lot nearby. I imagined the noise got annoying. Other than looking a bit industrial and old, the area was nice. I wondered if Daniel lived alone and how he afforded it; we didn’t make much money.

Daniel reappeared on the landing. He started to lock the door behind him but seemed distracted by something outside a nearby building. He crouched down and started to wave me over. I could see the grin on his face from where I sat. I acted like I didn’t notice, but he was persistent.

I opened the door and yelled, “What?” He put his finger to his lips and waved me up aggressively.

I felt like I was walking into a trap, but I closed the car door and ascended the steps anyway. He motioned for me to get on the ground when I reached the top. I stood and asked, “What is it?”

He shushed me, grabbed my hand, and tried to tug me down. I turned red but didn’t pull my hand away. “I won’t until you tell me why,” I said.

“David Byrne is at the bar again,” he whispered.

“Stop being stupid.”

“I’m serious.”

I thought for a second before I joined him on the concrete. I pulled my knees to my chest. “Why do we have to hide?” I asked. “Where is he?”

“Look, over there,” Daniel said.

I looked where he pointed and saw a very wiry, older man. His back was to us, and he held a cigarette.

“I read somewhere he’s a nervous person,” Daniel said.

I didn’t believe him, but I realized the only image I could recall of David Byrne was as a twenty-something in the seventies. I took out my phone and searched for a recent picture of him.

Contemporary Byrne looked like how people drew angels in children’s books. His hair was pure white, and though he was clearly in his late sixties, his face maintained a youthful quality. He was at least six feet tall. The man in front of us had pure white hair and height, but I couldn’t see his face.

Daniel hit his vape and exhaled the cloud into the collar of his shirt. “You’ll see when he turns around,” he said.

We sat and waited for the man to finish his cigarette. When he finally crushed it beneath his shoe and turned to walk inside, I was surprised to find myself faced with the Talking Heads frontman. Daniel grabbed my arm and squeezed. “See!” he said. I laughed. As I watched David Byrne walk into the bar, I was happier than I’d been in a while. I didn’t understand why I felt so good, but I didn’t overthink it. Neither of us suggested we try and meet him; I think we agreed that would somehow ruin the experience.

We didn’t talk much on the way back to the office. Daniel handed me his phone and told me to play my favorite Talking Heads songs. Without planning to, we relayed the story to our coworkers as soon as we walked in the door. Everyone was excited for us but didn’t understand why it was a big deal. I didn’t mind.

When I made my way back to my cubicle, I found every inch of wall space covered in sticky notes; some coworkers had written kind wishes for my future endeavors, and others had drawn silly illustrations. Daniel had orchestrated it all. They brought a cake out from the break room. After everyone went back to their tasks, I peeled the sticky notes off, stuck them together into a booklet, and put it in my pocket.

Lauren Baker is an incoming MFA student in fiction at North Carolina State University. She currently works in natural resource management and fire management, and is interested in the intersection of environmentalism and creative writing. Her stories have appeared in Litbreak Magazine, X-R-A-Y Literary Magazine, and Litro Magazine. You can find her on Instagram @boom_mic_operator and Twitter @boommicoperator.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

DISTRACTED by Pat Jameson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

DISTRACTED by Pat Jameson

Pat Jameson
DISTRACTED

That afternoon was the afternoon I followed the starlings across town and accosted a distracted driver, but before that, me and the other irregulars were at Joe’s explaining to a new recruit how you could tell whether you were irregular or not. The kid’s name was Eddie. He was a nice guy, a veteran, a fucking hero or something in the machine gun nest. Not long ago he’d suffered a wound, won a Purple Heart, but now he was down here in the gutters filled with daytime whiskey and beer, and we felt it was best to bring him quickly up to speed.

“Listen—” I waved my beer around. “Listen—have you ever been at the grocery store or mall and someone walks by, just a normal Joe talking on his phone, good haircut, nice teeth, and he says something about shoe shopping or meeting up for brunch and you feel like shouting—‘Jesus! Oh, What the hell was that, you’re just so goddamn typical?’”

“Oh sure.” Eddie nodded. “All the time. Sometimes I look at people and they’re like lizard men. Or lizard women, heh heh. Sometimes I see things that aren’t even there.”

“Good good. Audiovisual disruptions. That’s the first sign of being irregular. That’s how you know something is amiss. Does that make sense?”

“Yeah…. But hey—what about these animals, man?”

“What?”

“The fucking animals. Am I seeing this right? Or are they, uh, disruptions too?”

“Oh,” I said. “Those.”

He was talking about the mounted heads on the walls: antelope and lions and water buffalo. Once, the pride of the savannah. Now, murdered and hung up for spectacle. The owner of Joe’s, Joe, was a big-time game hunter. He had the largest collection of safari trophies in the contiguous United States. Or at least this corner of Pennsylvania.

“Forget the animals,” I said. “They’re dead. It’s the living you have to worry about.”

“Right…”

Besides Eddie, the other two in my cadre were the twins, Paul and Rock. They were machine workers—hulking, real savants in the gym. Each day they worked out at six a.m., showered, and drank wine coolers until sundown. Never any beer. Because of the calories, I think. Like me they believed in the irregular lifestyle, the idea that there was a world beneath our own only visible through a haze of alcohol and bad decisions.

We all did a round and then another. Everything was going great. Until I asked Eddie about the war.

“The war?”

“Yeah, the goddamn war. I’ve always wondered.”

“Well, I did good things and bad things and things I was proud of but most of all—”

“Yeah?”

“It was….” He paused. “Fucked.”

Fucked. What else was there to say? We raised our glasses. To Eddie, hear hear! Then, the thing happened like it always does, time sped up and became blurry, malformed. I was suddenly outside and the sun had swiveled from one point of the sky to the other. Fumbling with my car keys, my feet carried themselves down the pavement. My friends yelled at me to come back and quit being a fucking dumbass. “Don’t go anywhere!” I shouted. “I’ll rally the men!”

I hit the fob, jumped behind the wheel, and screeched out, thudding over the curb. I looked in my mirror. No sirens. No detached bumper or body parts strewn in my wake. Life was good.

◊

Once I left Joe’s, I just drove—east and west and north and south. Across railroad tracks and down long country roads. Past trailer parks and race tracks and churches, so many churches. I drove until I felt as if I was in communion with the universe and that if I was patient, something stupendous might happen. At a stoplight near the airport, would you believe me? It did. The sky became suddenly unglued. Black shapes swooping and chasing one another. A flock of tiny birds. Chirping. Calling. Yes, these were my starlings.

The starlings settled for a bit, pausing long enough for me to follow them down the highway and into the lot behind the old mall. Breaking formation, they lit on the B in the abandoned Best Buy sign. There were maybe fifty or a hundred of them. A veritable army of beaks and eyes, fluttering wings. They stared at me and I stared back, awaiting further instruction. In my pocket I had a beer I’d nicked earlier while the bartender was in the john. I cracked it and took a deep swallow. It tasted wonderful.

Squawk! Squawk! Squawk! The starlings were now bowing and bobbing in unison. They seemed to be gesturing towards something, which was when I saw the BMW streaking across the parking lot. Its owner, a vague man shape, was slumped sideways in the seat. The starlings went apeshit. They flew upwards, broke apart, and reformed as an arrow pointing in the BMW’s direction. I understood then. Wherever this driver was headed, I was going too.

◊

Around downtown, I caught the BMW. He was really speeding then, swerving back and forth across the yellow lines. I beeped my horn. Once, twice. Then began to flash the high beams. Click clack click clack.  He must have gotten the message, because the car slowed, easing onto the shoulder. I drove up behind him, highlights still pulsing. I wasn’t sure what to do next—the starlings hadn’t specified—so I hopped out and strode up along the driver’s side window, beer held out of sight and at hip level.

The driver was a young guy. Good-looking with a vicious, black widow’s peak. I figured I’d assess his irregularity and then proceed from there.

He rolled down his window.  “Yes?”

“Sir, I’m an undercover police officer. I’m going to need you to explain why you were driving so erratically.”

“Excuse me?”

“Have you been drinking? Is that what’s going on?”

“Drinking?”

“How much have you had to drink, motherfucker! Don’t lie to me!”

He looked stricken. “Well, none! I haven’t had any. I’m lost.”

“Lost?”

“Yeah! I made a wrong turn back there somewhere… I was following directions on my phone.”

He held up his device as evidence. In its glow, I noticed for the first time how smooth his skin was. Moisturized, manicured. Like a sandbelt had run the length of him. And his watch! It flashed, glittering like a satellite. I won’t even get into the thickness of his hair… but the point is this—everything about this person screamed danger. He was my mortal enemy. The most regular man in the world. With a single call, he could end me.

“Well, hey, I’m sorry mister. My mistake. Let’s call it a warning.”

He peered at me, taking notice of the stains on my shirt, the smell of beer wafting between my teeth. “Right… Listen, can I see your badge?”

Badge. The way he said it. I had the sudden fear that he might lean forward and bury his teeth in my eye socket. “I, uh, left it in the car. I’ll go get it. Two seconds.”

“Sure,” he said, grinning. “Take your time.”

I forced myself to walk away. Once clear, I threw open the door. Revved the engine. Peeled out, burning rubber and smoke. When I passed the BMW, the driver had his face pressed up against the glass, leering. His features were mask-like, haunting. I’ll never forget them. It was the sight of Armageddon. The end of days. The things that come for us all.

◊

It was almost dark when I pulled up to my house. Inside, the lights glowed brilliantly, casting sparkling shadows across the street. All around me were perfectly mowed lawns. Immaculate homes. Little boxes straining to contain the life of the world. Up above was a universe, boundless and galactic. Not for the first time, I felt like an ant crawling through the lens of the Hubble Telescope.

I walked up to the front door, opened it, and stepped inside. Four faces turned to greet mine. My wife and our little babies. “Daddy!” They flocked towards me, slavering like a zombie horde. I lay down and let the children clamber across my lumpy and bloated corpse. My wife stood over us, wine stem clutched between her beautiful and judgmental fingers.

“Where were you?”

“Work.”

“Have you been drinking?”

I didn’t answer. I grabbed the nearest kid and barrel rolled onto the carpet. They were on me then. Sudden movement activated their killer instincts. One grabbed my ear. Another stepped on my crotch. Little irregulars in the making. How could I not be proud? My wife sighed and sat on the couch. It was a night like any other. The house was full of screams and laughter. The cat vomited in the corner. I could have died from love. There are worse ways to go.

Pat Jameson is a writer based in Roanoke, VA. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in SmokeLong Quarterly, X-R-A-Y, BULL, Maudlin House, Apocalypse Confidential, and Hex, among others. His story “Death Drive” was a finalist for the 2022 SmokeLong Quarterly Flash Fiction Award. He is a first reader for Reckon Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SAHARA DREAMS by A. J. Jacono

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SAHARA DREAMS by A. J. Jacono

A. J. Jacono
SAHARA DREAMS

The first night of the tour, after the guides had hitched the camels and secured the mess tent and laid out the steaming tagines and plates of couscous, Cash decided to make some friends because he hadn’t had a meaningful conversation in days and sat with two people from either New Zealand or Australia. One of them held out a hairy hand and introduced himself as Reeky; the woman with him, he said, was Queen.

“Super hot today, wasn’t it?” said Ricky. “Sweated out half my body weight by noon.”

Quinn squinted at him, said, “No shit,” and stuck a spoon into her couscous mountain. “We’re in the middle of the fucking Sahara.”

Cash wasn’t sure of their relation. Quinn was too comfortable snapping at Ricky to be even a close friend, and they didn’t resemble each other—he was large and had a doughy midriff, whereas she was five feet tall and bony as a ghoul. So, Cash glanced at their left hands. Quinn wore a ring; Ricky had a tan line where there’d recently been one.

“It’s pretty noticeable, isn’t it?” said Ricky, lifting the hand. “It fell off on the way. My camel kept scooting out of the line to sniff the females’ asses and then tried to mount the one in front of me. Flung me back pretty far, but I didn’t break anything, thank God—little bruise on my shoulder. I didn’t think anything else was wrong until we linked up with your group here and Quinn was like, ‘Where the hell’d your ring go?’”

Ricky chuckled, but Quinn glared out of the corner of her eye. He cleared his throat and forked a few more chicken chunks while Cash, unsure of what to say, perched his chin on a fist and wondered whether he could’ve convinced Sarah to come with him anyway. Flying to Morocco together wouldn’t have made her forgive him, but at least he wouldn’t have had to sleep in every hotel bed alone, walk through unfamiliar cities alone, explain to people why he, a young professional with a high-rise New York City apartment, had come all of this way alone. And at least he wouldn’t have to practically force himself to banter with a couple that reminded him of his and Sarah’s own dysfunction, and of how, after five years, he couldn’t fathom how to be a better partner.

For a time, they didn’t speak; Quinn sighed, Ricky chewed, and Cash looked around, wondering if the other guests would be easier to befriend. Then someone lurched into the tent coughing and kicking up plumes of sand. They wore a patchwork scarf that shrouded their face and a dangling, off-white tunic, but Cash sensed that they weren’t a guide; their stiff, robotic gait indicated a certain discomfort, as though they weren’t sure how to walk without the constraint of a pair of jeans. The person coughed again and scanned the tent’s many faces before settling on Cash’s. Then they wobbled over, sat next to Quinn, and unraveled their scarf.

“Join the party,” said Ricky, offering the man his hand. “I’m Reeky, that’s my wife, Queen, that’s our new buddy, Cash—and who do we have the pleasure of meeting?”

An effusive greeting, not that Cash could blame Ricky. Though the man was sunburned, out of breath, and speckled with sand, he reeked of mystery—where had he come from, and why hadn’t he been at camp earlier, and why had he chosen their table—and he was also, Cash noticed, quite handsome: curly auburn hair, jungle-green eyes, tiny brown birthmark on his upper lip. Even Quinn smiled when he introduced himself as Gareth in the same round-voweled chirp as hers and Ricky’s.

“Another fucking Aussie,” Ricky beamed. “You’re the fifth or sixth we’ve met on this trip. It’s like the whole continent relocated here for the winter.”

“We are a pretty unoriginal bunch,” Gareth wheezed, pouring himself a glass of water from the pitcher in the center of the table. He finished it and turned to Cash. “But you—you’re an American. That right?”

Cash raised an eyebrow. “Didn’t know it was possible to see nationality.”

“It’s not how you look. It’s the name. I’ve never met anyone called Cash except white trash and Wall Street bankers.”

Cash might’ve been offended had Gareth’s tone not been so jocular, and he smiled when the Australians burst into laughter—yes, they meant well, and maybe they’d let him join their posse for the next few days. Gareth was slapping the table when he fell into another coughing fit and went back to hogging the water pitcher.

“You okay?” Quinn asked. “You’re hacking up a bloody lung over there.”

“You should’ve seen it,” Gareth said, holding back a belch. “This old man in our group collapsed in the middle of the route—fell right off his camel. Everyone freaked out, thought he died, and the guides, they spent an hour using up the water reserves to make cold compresses until he came to. Not to be an asshole, but the whole time, the other twenty of us were shriveling up in the heat. You ever sweat so much your eyes burn? By the time we got back on our way, it felt like someone’d massaged them with bushfire ash.”

Cash nearly laughed, but Ricky frowned, and Quinn whispered, “You shouldn’t really be joking about that.”

The table, and coincidentally the rest of the tent, fell so quiet that Cash could hear Gareth’s boots shift under the table. “Sorry. Insensitive,” he said. “Although I do think I have the right. I’m one of those poor fuckers who lost his home.”

And so began a story that Cash had only ever heard on the news: Gareth and his girlfriend in a cottage in Cessnock, two bedrooms because they wanted children and in the interim could use the extra space as a painting studio (they were hobby artists, had met in a class)—a simple life they weren’t aware was as flammable as grain alcohol. Gareth would never forget the night he and Alana woke to an explosive whoosh in the backyard forest, stuffed a backpack with food, and ran barefoot into the glowing orange dark, where they watched the fire devour their home. They weren’t hurt, but they’d been branded: Gareth became prone to rages, smashing mugs and plates and once a chair in their cramped new apartment, and his girlfriend slipped into a depression that would have her attempt suicide twice and, eventually, leave him for another man.

By the time Ricky and Quinn offered their own stories—friends who’d lost pets, neighbors who’d lost businesses, a cousin who’d lost his life—Cash could hardly listen out of a shame that he’d comparatively never lost much: his mother, but she’d had cancer for a decade; a few thousand dollars in the stock market, but he had plenty saved; his wife’s trust, but she would probably forgive him eventually. He wondered, too, why he had to be jealous that the Australians were bonding, especially when that bonding occurred in the name of unspeakable trauma; was Cash so desperate that he half-wished his own life had turned to dust?

Cash caught Gareth leering at him, either angered or confused by his silence. Cash did want to contribute but felt like he didn’t have the right, so instead, he thought of how, back home, Sarah was probably searching for another man, one who was less reactive, less unfaithful, and less emotional than he—a man who didn’t like to cross his legs, watch reality television, and drink sangria with her mother when she visited.

After what felt like an eternity, Ricky raised a glass: To Good Health And An Even Better Excursion In This Desert Wasteland. Gareth and Quinn lifted their glasses, too, then stared at Cash, who, tired of straying in the social sidelines, grabbed an empty cup and thrust it forward. It hit Quinn’s glass, which tipped out of her hand and soaked her clothes.

She said something that began with “Fuck,” but was interrupted by Ricky’s half-shocked, half-amused laugh. Quinn’s face went a violent red, and briefly, Cash was certain that she’d lunge forward and beat him over the head with the water pitcher, but she wound back a hand and smacked Ricky instead. There was a loud, wet crack; heads turned, and Quinn rushed for the exit. Ricky gawked after her, holding his cheek.

“Well, I . . .” There were tears in his eyes, though whether they were from emotion or the impact’s force, Cash couldn’t tell. “I should—”

He got up and ran out. A woman at a nearby table said, “What the fuck did he do?” and a guide across the tent shouted in Arabic what Cash imagined meant, “That? That was true entertainment!”

Across the table, Gareth put his face in his hands. “That was . . . that was really—”

“Unexpected?” Cash offered.

“That’s generous.” He shook his head. “I wanted to ask the guides for food, but that whole thing kind of did away with my appetite.”

Cash considered apologizing, as if it would erase the last few minutes of their lives, but at the same time, he didn’t want to appear weak and possibly melodramatic in front of Gareth, a man who looked, and probably was, much stronger than he. So, instead he said, only realizing after speaking how dull he sounded, “Agreed.”

They stared at Quinn and Ricky’s empty chairs, the meats and sauces coagulating in their tagines. The tent grew louder, guests chatting and laughing and one of the guides telling a group of women a corny knock-knock joke, and Cash, unsettled by his table’s quiet, said, “Seems like it’s impossible to escape fucked-up relationships. Even in the middle of the desert.”

He didn’t mean to be funny, but Gareth snickered. “Bad relationships are common as trees.”

“Do you see any trees out here?”

“A lot of sad little shrubs. Which might be worse.”

Cash sighed. “Just expected a little more peace. You know, desert for miles, no civilization. You’d think people would wind down.”

“Are you sure that’s not a you problem?”

Cash cocked his head.

“If you wanted peace,” said Gareth, “you could’ve locked yourself in your bedroom for a week or something. Not flown halfway across the world for a social vacation in the desert. So, either you’re kind of an idiot or there’s another reason you’re here.”

A nosy way to pivot to another subject, but Gareth was right; it didn’t make sense to have come so far for some elusive quietude. So Cash said, “My wife was supposed to come along but couldn’t make it. I spent a lot on the tickets and didn’t want to waste them, so here I am.”

“Alone?”

“You’re saying that like it’s a bad thing. It’s a good way to meet people.”

“At times, sure. But I’ve been alone in this country for, what—five, six months now, and most of the time, it’s brutal. People coming and going, nobody there when you really need them.”

“Are you sure that’s not a you problem?”

Gareth smirked. “No, it’s you, too. When Ricky and Quinn were with us, you kept opening your mouth, but you didn’t say anything. It almost seems like you’ve been alone for long enough that you’ve forgotten how to talk to people.”

Cash must have made a face, because Gareth laughed, then reached over the table and put a hand on Cash’s. Cash’s heart sputtered; he tried to pull away, but Gareth clasped harder. “I’m out of my right mind, too,” he said. “Hardly spoke to anybody for almost two weeks before this trip. So excuse me if I’m a little socially challenged.”

He stuck a hand in the pocket of his robe’s thigh, took out a flask, and swigged. Cash watched him drink but too eagerly because Gareth said, “If you want some, I’d prefer you asked, not eye-fucked me across the table.”

“Please?”

Gareth extended the flask but withdrew before Cash could take it. “Wait. Keep forgetting you can’t drink in public in this country.” He stood up, tucked the flask away.

“Where are you going?” Cash asked.

“Outside.” He started for the exit. “You’re welcome to join. Or you can, you know, keep sulking in this perfect peace and quiet. Sober.”

A circle of middle-aged men two tables away burst into such rowdy laughter that Cash’s ears buzzed. Gareth shrugged and left. Shortly after, Cash followed.

Outside, the sky had gone black, and the air was cold, though considering how warm it had been earlier, Cash took the change as a relief, and so, it seemed, did Gareth, who lifted his hands and proclaimed, “Thank the Lord for the miracle of heat redistribution.” He turned to Cash. “You don’t seem nearly as thrilled.”

“I’m not the one who got stuck in the desert.”

“And be thankful you didn’t.” He peered into the distance, pointed. “See that? That little dune over there?”

Cash followed Gareth’s finger. It was hard to spot in the darkness, but about a half-mile ahead, there was a low sandhill that glowed silver in the moonlight.

“Don’t tell me you want to walk there,” said Cash.

Gareth grinned. “Why not?”

“I’m tired. It’s dark. We’ll get lost.”

“It’s a straight shot on flat ground. There are lights all around camp.”

“And if the guides turn off the lanterns?”

“Excuses, excuses, excuses. Stay behind and rot, then. But here’s the truth: there’s no danger. Worst comes to worst, we can’t find our way back tonight and sleep on the sand. It’s as comfortable as any mattress. We’d be back by breakfast.”

“What are—”

Gareth was already waddling away, boots carving lines in the sand. Cash called out, but Gareth kept moving, arms out to his sides as if he were about to fly. Maybe it was better that Cash didn’t join—he would get rest, wouldn’t get lost—but he couldn’t go back to the mess tent, which had just begun to shrill with the sound of an oud. He also didn’t want to go back to his own tent, because he’d have to fall asleep to the thought of Sarah’s magmatic words—cheating fucking pansy—and to the sound of his own breathing, which had become a disturbing reminder that nobody else’s breath was there to harmonize with his.

He broke into a scurry after Gareth, who was already chuckling.

“You proved me wrong,” he said.

“What?” Cash asked.

“That stick in your ass. It’s there, but it’s not as deep as it looks.”

Cash coughed to mask his laugh. If Gareth was fooled, he didn’t say, and he picked up speed; Cash tried to keep up but trailed far behind. It took longer, too, to arrive at the base than he thought it would—thirty minutes slowed by stumbles and shifting sandpiles—and once they crested over the summit, he fell on his back, drenched in sweat.

“Christ.” He stared up at Gareth, who looked dry and bored. “Do you run marathons?”

Gareth squatted next to Cash. “You don’t get out a lot, do you?”

Cash wiped his forehead. “Too much work.”

“Modern problem for a modern man.” He nodded at the countless taller dunes scattered among the flatness beyond them, then reproduced the flask and drank. “What do you do?”

“I’m in management consulting.”

Gareth almost choked on his next sip. “Management consulting?”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“What’s it supposed to mean? You’re quiet and on edge and can barely hold a conversation. Aren’t consultants big, loud, douchey types?”

Cash swiped the flask and took a long pull that burned his insides. “If I were you, I wouldn’t be so quick to make judgments. You might end up offending someone.”

Although Gareth’s lips curled into a defiant smirk, there was a certain embarrassment in his eyes, as though he were trying to think of a redeeming excuse, but that could have just been the moonlight, the shadows muddying the contours of his expression.

“I don’t enjoy it, if that’s what you’re getting at,” Cash sighed. “I’m good, but there’s no satisfaction. Schmoozing’s fine at parties, but it’s different when you’re getting paid for it. There’s something really underhanded about monetizing your social aptitude and making promises you know you aren’t qualified enough to execute. And yet people trust you anyway, because you’re the funny, popular guy they hired to drag their company out of the mud.”

Suddenly, Gareth looked somewhat annoyed. “You realize you’re complaining about a situation that’s entirely within your control to change, right? You don’t have to be a consultant, but you do it anyway. And why? My bet is it’s because of all the money.”

Cash swallowed back a marble of existential chagrin. Not so much because Gareth had slighted him, but because there was a rift between them that couldn’t be mended by emotional sincerity; their existences ran, and would likely always run, in opposite directions, and that had to be true between Cash and billions of other people.

They stared into the night, Gareth slurping on, until Cash said, “I’m sorry about your house. And your girlfriend. Really, I am.”

Gareth nodded, circled the flask’s rim with a finger. Then he asked, “Do you at least know what you’d rather be doing?”

Cash shrugged. “Going new places. Trying to believe there’s something more.”

He expected criticism—traveling aimlessly wasn’t a job and implied that Cash had means—so he was surprised when Gareth said, “Home’s that rough, huh?”

Cash didn’t know how to respond. Gareth had been too abrasive for him to reveal anything else about himself, yet he couldn’t smother the urge to lay himself bare, if only to prove to himself that he was capable of creating, and not simply tarnishing, sincere connections. If Sarah had been on that dune with them, hurling all sorts of vitriol, it might have been easier to answer, but she was too far away—always would be, now—so Cash pinched an ankle to ease his nerves and said, “Maybe.”

Gareth watched him, waiting for more that didn’t come. Only when he turned away did Cash continue, “Have you ever made a mistake you wish you could take back, but only because it’d make things easier to deal with, not because you actually want to?”

Gareth crossed his arms. “If you wanted to do it and stand by it, it wasn’t a mistake. Maybe an inconvenience, but not a mistake. A mistake means whatever you did was an accident. That you did it in spite of better intentions.”

Was that really so reassuring, or was Cash just getting drunk? There was an alcoholic buzz in his fingers, but he felt as clearheaded as his exhaustion would allow, and anyway, he hadn’t taken much from the flask. So if not drunk, then either he was as weak-willed as Sarah thought him, or Gareth was so charmingly self-assured that Cash couldn’t help taking his word as truth.

“This is about your wife, isn’t it?” Gareth said. “She didn’t come because of what you did.”

Cash didn’t answer. Gareth drew a circle in the sand between his legs.

“I don’t know what you did,” Gareth said. “But even if it was atrocious, she’s out of her fucking mind to have passed up the opportunity to come here for free.”

Cash snorted, because it was true, and Gareth laughed, too. There they were: two adult men giggling like boys, two dissatisfied idiots under the infinitely pinpricked sky, two giant flecks of sand among a sea of incalculably more. And was there not something beautiful in it all, or was Cash just so soft to think there was? Still, he felt that beauty within himself, and he saw it in Gareth’s gently glowing skin, in his sandy, glimmering robe, in his endearingly crooked front teeth. And they were becoming friends, or something like it, and the gulf separating them snapped closed as Gareth leaned in, his lips cracked and bleeding and tasting much the way they looked.

It felt good. As good as when, a month prior, Cash had met Marvin at a bar in the East Village and ended the night, naked and breathless, with him in the very bed he and Sarah had always shared. And how ecstatic it had been to touch and harness and make love to a body just like his, how much more he felt like a man with that boyish stranger than he ever did with his wife. He could say the same as he fell into Gareth, whose breath was so warm and whose face was so soft, and what a pleasure he was, what a delight.

Then Sarah was jabbing his shoulder, and he was a faggot and a man-whore and a pole-smoker, and he was saying he was trying to figure things out, please listen, it had meant nothing (but of course it had meant something), and she was saying she’d known the whole time, so many years she’d wasted trying to prove herself wrong, and he wrenched himself out of Gareth’s reach.

“No,” Cash said. “No, no, no.”

Gareth sat so still that he looked like a mannequin. “What?”

Cash couldn’t string together the proper words, so he started to scamper down the dune, sand flying, some catching in his hair. Almost immediately, Gareth was scrambling behind him. Cash wanted to stop, to let Gareth’s hands, and maybe even his tongue, track the landscape of his body, split ends to toenails, but he kept going, and near the bottom of the dune Gareth called out, “What are you doing? Let me apologize, at least,” as if remorse would help, as if it would untie the rabid, starving knot under Cash’s ribs.

Gareth pleaded for another minute before he gave up to plod mutely in Cash’s wake, at which point a cold wind picked up and thrust them in the camp’s direction. Cash wondered whether he should let Gareth catch up so they could share each other’s warmth but couldn’t decide before they reached the mess tent, outside of which fifty people were huddled around a firepit. One of the guides was playing the oud Cash had heard earlier, and Ricky played a somber accompanying melody on a battered guitar. Quinn was nowhere to be seen.

Cash swept into his tent and, in the bedside lantern’s light, searched for a zipper to seal the entrance, but there wasn’t one, so he fell back on the mattress the guides had prepared and hoped that Gareth wouldn’t bother him again.

Thirty seconds later, there was a shuffling outside. “Can we talk?”

“If you haven’t noticed,” Cash said, “the reason I ran away is because the answer’s no.”

A sigh. “If I wanted to lie, I’d say it was a mistake. But I don’t want to lie.”

Cash stared at a hole in the tent’s ceiling. Through it, he could see a dark patch of clouds.

“You know,” Gareth enunciated, “that was the first time I’ve done something like that.”

How was that possible? Gareth had put far more passion and confidence into that kiss than Cash, who had gone so far as to have sex with another man.

“I wasn’t sure if I’d like it,” said Gareth. “I mean, I wanted to do it from the moment we met. But I didn’t know how to get there. I’ve only been with women my whole life. I don’t know how to be with men as anything other than a mate.”

It was then that Cash recalled that what they’d done, at least in that country, was illegal, and the fact that Gareth was talking about it with such public impunity alarmed him enough to say, “Just shut up and come inside.”

Gareth entered looking hopeful, but frowned when he saw that Cash was scowling.

“Do you know how loud you are?” Cash hissed. “You could get us thrown in fucking jail, Gareth. This isn’t a joke.”

Gareth scratched his arm. “Yeah,” he said. “I know that. But you can’t expect me not to react. I’m having a moment here, for God’s sake.”

“If you’re going to react, then do it quietly, please.”

Gareth sniffed, nodded to himself, then walked over and sat down. In Cash’s head, Sarah was railing again, and the guides had probably heard them and were on their way to drag them to some remote desert gulag, where they’d be forced to work until they died on the desiccated ground.

Then Gareth said, “Hey,” and touched Cash’s chin. Cash gasped and pulled back.

“What’s wrong?” Gareth asked.

“I’m not—I’m not supposed to be doing this.”

“Not supposed to? According to who?”

“It doesn’t—we’re putting ourselves in danger, Gareth. And my wife, she’s—we’re still married, and that’s how things are, so we shouldn’t have done anything, you and me, okay? And my wife, she’s angry, and she already doesn’t . . .”

He trailed off, hoping Gareth wouldn’t press, but he did: “Doesn’t what?”

Doesn’t like me anymore, Cash wanted to say; loves me out of obligation, but doesn’t like me. Doesn’t know that the only reason I married her was my friends were getting hitched and I felt like the odd one out, and I’ve always hated feeling like the odd one out, so when she came around, I stuck that ring on her finger and carried her off into the fucking sunset thinking, stupidly, that it would right my oddness. And she also doesn’t know that, ever since the morning after the wedding, when I looked at her naked, sleeping body and felt neither attracted to nor protective of her, I’ve felt guilty for sucking her into my shameful, insecure vortex, because she deserves a real man, one who actually wants her and one she actually wants in return, and isn’t it a tragedy, Gareth, isn’t it such an awful tragedy?

The only sound Cash could produce was a low groan. Gareth sat there for a time with his brow caught in a furrow before he hugged Cash—didn’t kiss him but held him as though he were a child. And he was gentle and smelled of argan oil, and he rubbed Cash’s back, which made him tired. He started to fall back on the bed; Gareth followed him down until they lay facing each other.

“It’s okay,” Gareth said. His skin was almost translucent in the lantern light. “You’re right here. I’m right here.”

He dabbed Cash’s eyes with his thumbs and licked the tears off those same thumbs. Strange, maybe even funny—nobody had ever done that—but Gareth was so serious that Cash wept more, and Gareth dabbed those tears and licked them, too.

“What are you doing?” Cash asked.

Only now did Gareth chuckle. “I . . . I know it’s weird. But I want to. Is that okay?”

Cash nodded. Because in a way, he was now part of Gareth, those tears metabolized into care from the sorrow they began as.

Gareth licked one, two more tears, then said, “You look tired.”

Cash’s eyes were shut before he could finish nodding. Gareth made a noise—neither a sigh nor a moan—then pulled Cash closer. Gareth’s breath was on his forehead, his hands were in his hair, and he heard Gareth’s heartbeat, or maybe it was his own, or maybe it was both of theirs.

He slept without dreams.

◊

In the morning, the air smelled of chickpeas and baked eggs. Voices hummed and plates clinked outside. Cash turned on his side. Gareth wasn’t there.

He’d slept in his clothes, so he got up and went to meet the group. The day was hot and the mess tent was still flapping in the wind, but everyone was eating around the coals of the previous night’s fire.

He searched the crowd for Gareth but couldn’t spot him, so he sat next to a woman with cropped red hair and a mole on the back of her neck. She smiled but said nothing. A bearded guide handed Cash a plate of eggs, which he was about to eat when he saw Quinn and Ricky across the firepit. Ricky was saying something to Quinn, who was turned away.

Ricky was the first to notice Cash. “Morning,” he said, waving his dirty fork in the air. Quinn looked over. Cash wasn’t sure if she was glaring or trying to remember who he was.

“Morning,” said Cash. He looked once again at the faces around him.

“Looking for Gareth?” asked Ricky.

Cash nodded slowly.

“He left about an hour ago,” Ricky explained, licking his fork clean. “His group was only here for the night.”

Cash pursed his lips. His toes went numb.

“He told me to tell you it was nice to meet you,” Ricky continued. “Said he didn’t want to go into your tent and wake you—said you needed rest more than a nosy friend.” He smiled. “You know, I saw you two coming back from the dunes last night. Thought to myself, ‘Wow, those fuckers are brave, going all the way out in the dark like that.’”

Cash looked down at his plate. Only now did he notice that the eggs were overcooked, and that the reddish sauce in which they swam had already congealed. He forked one egg, hand trembling, and stuck it in his mouth. It burned his tongue.

A. J. Jacono is a proud Manhattan native who has been writing ever since he could hold a pen. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Southeast Review, Upstreet, and Lunch Ticket, among many other journals. He is the recipient of the 2019 Herbert Lee Connelly Prize and is the founder of The Spotlong Review, an online literary and arts journal. He is also the owner of Bibliotheque, an upcoming bookstore, café, and wine bar based in New York. If you would like to learn more about A.J., you can visit his website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE PHANTOM BABY by A. C.

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE PHANTOM BABY by A. C.

A. C.
THE PHANTOM BABY

The baby dies on garbage day. It’s a Monday, very cloudy, with a sixteen percent chance of rain. There’s a little cough, a little spit, then nothing. The collection truck comes on time.

It was not a Monday when the baby first revealed itself—in my table drawer, wrapped in something now a far cry from my best cloth. The police found it hard to believe that the baby in my house wasn’t mine. It didn’t help there was no documentation of that time it had happened to my grandmother. Only after I offered my birth canal for their examination, did they begin the search for the baby’s family. Still, I was obliged to care for it as more officers came and went, their theories more and more unsettling. The mother would be found in the worst neighborhood. The mother had to be an inmate at the local institution. The mother just didn’t want it.

Your mommy loves you, I told the baby. She’s on her way. She just stopped to get a little tan by the lake.

It was much more difficult to speak to the baby about its father. I knew as little about men then as I do now, so I signed up for a story-telling workshop. Then I remembered the baby and called up the place, asking if it could come. The receptionist had to confirm with her boss. It’s fine, she said eventually, as long as they’re quiet.

It’s a baby, I wanted to say, it’s never quiet. I said thank you instead. I then wrote an e-mail, hoping for a refund.

Being in public with the baby made me miserable anyway. People I didn’t want to speak to came over in the supermarket, day after day, with questions I continuously didn’t want to answer. I only care for it temporarily, I’d say loudly, hoping to be heard by the people I did want to speak to, who now hid from me and the baby in the cat food aisle. I cried a lot in the supermarket. Everybody but those I cared for showed understanding they should’ve saved for actual new mothers since I really didn’t want it.

At home, the baby took enthusiastically to television. It had an elaborate taste. It wanted authentic suspense, exquisite acting, and superior cinematography. I became an HBO subscriber, but within a week, the baby was over all the breasts. I got Netflix then and hooked it on the IV of complex people and their very real crimes. Mostly murders. It bothered me, it really did, but the crying bothered me more.

The baby didn’t like music, so we didn’t listen to any. Some days the sounds of my insides wouldn’t leave me alone and it drove me a little insane. Sometimes I heard birds chirping in the garden and wondered how long they’d lived there.

In the only piece of writing on the phantom babies my grandmother left behind, she mused about their purpose. Her own grandmother believed it was to share certain much-needed wisdom before fading away into a spring night. For a time, I believed my lesson was that I should spend more time at home and never go to the supermarket. Long after I considered it learned, however, the baby was keeping me up each spring night. Every other night, too.

The birds and the isolation lost their charm after the baby and I survived what I believed to be a home invasion. I put the baby to sleep early that evening, but still bitter over my singing sending it into seizure-like fits, I came back later to recite poetry over its little limp body. I found cigarette ash on the floor. The baby didn’t smoke. I ran into town where a young drunk man drove us to the hospital. The doctors had many peculiar questions. Was I sure I wasn’t a smoker? Could the butt be left by a friend? What friend? Postpartum hormones, they whispered back and forth. I couldn’t correct them as I watched myself from the outside, hyper-crying and hyperventilating, clinging to a baby that didn’t want to be with me very much. What was this wailing creature? What happened to the one I used to be? The things doctors administered turned out to be lovely. Perhaps the baby’s wisdom was that sedatives were my friends.

It was that night we stood outside the house for an hour, the baby’s cloth left inside, and I’m convinced that’s where the illness came from. Many people came to tell me it wasn’t so. Nurses, therapists, cousins. Even my neighbor came over to claim he saw us that night and that it wasn’t so. But I am convinced. I am convinced the baby sneezed.

In the first three days after the “incident”—“Young mother distressed after potential home invasion,” the paper said—nothing much happened. On the fourth day, the illness began. My mother had been grieved by no one in town, and deservedly so, as she broke even more marriages than she did municipal laws, just for fun. But all that fever, and wailing, and acidic saliva in my shirt made me wish she was here. Not because she’d help, not because she’d know how. She’d be someone, though, and if there was someone, I could force the baby into their arms and run, run, and run.

The hospital didn’t want us to come. They told me to take the baby’s temperature via its anus. I refused. If she’s not desperate enough, it can’t be that bad yet, I heard a nurse say. But then, a baby shouldn’t pay with its health for an unfit parent. But then, the ward is full. They then discussed the underfunding. I put the phone down when they moved onto workplace relationship policy.

I sat down with the baby, and we had a conversation. I told it about my mother, and the men she’d left me with, and that I couldn’t take its temperature because I’d had things done to me and it would undo years of intensive therapy. I informed it that therapy was expensive, and how expensive, and that it wasn’t covered by insurance. I told it about capitalism and that the world had a lot of issues. The baby got better. As a token of my gratitude, I took it for a stroll by the river, which it hated.

The illness came and went after that, seemingly with no logic behind it, but always accompanied by a small-scale peculiarity. Once the baby’s eyes went back to the post-natal deep dark blue. Once a bird died in its drawer. The one time the hospital agreed to admit us, they reached no diagnosis. So the illness came and went, marking fleeting moments, grandiose or not. St Patrick’s Day. Christmas. Wednesday. Valentine’s. Sunday. Grocery day.

I went to the foster services to enquire about the appropriate day for the baby’s birthday celebration. I received little advice. Whenever is fine, they said, since you will not keep it anyway. If you insist, the file says it was probably born in early spring, mid the latest. I chose the first day of May. I booked a clown and an ice cream truck and made an invitation list of twenty children. Then I made a list of ways to convince their parents the illness was not contagious.

All that’s left to do now is to cancel all that because the baby is dead.

Things move quickly now, where they used to drag and crawl. Everybody listens to me, too, now that I have nothing to say. It’s because I took it outside, I said once. They didn’t like it, so I’m quiet now. I don’t want to see any more therapists. Or neighbors. Most of all, cousins.

It’s a Monday, garbage day, sixteen percent chance of rain. The baby’s dead, and the collection truck comes on time. I smile at the driver, ask her about her cat. She says it’s responding well to the chemo, its appetite is back. She says that God is good. With no answer, I place my plans and affection among the rubbish.

A.C. is an aspiring computer scientist, ballet dancer, and learning addict. She has published fiction and poetry in spots such as Litro, Maudlin House, Sideways Poetry, and Pulp Poets Press, and she thinks this writing thing just might stick.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE TATTOO by Wendy MacIntyre

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE TATTOO by Wendy MacIntyre

Wendy MacIntyre
THE TATTOO

Wita’s mother had a tattoo that colonized her left forearm. Six words, sinister and enigmatic: “Keep me safe and kill me.” The dyes that needled this sentence into her flesh were sea-green and Prussian blue. Wita was sure she had an infant memory of trying to clutch at the shimmering sea-green stuff beneath the bath water where her mother held her snug.

What had she thought the tattoo was? Pretty. Dazzling. A fish perhaps? But she was then not long out of the womb and did not know what a fish was, or even how to distinguish her mother’s body from her own. What she saw was all of a piece, amorphous and ever-shifting, with sometimes these patches of dazzle and gleam that made her want to reach out and grab them fast.

Ouch. No, Wita. That hurts. By two she had learned the tattoo was part of her mother. The lovely colors lived on her skin. To pluck at them was to cause Mother pain. Don’t!

When Wita mastered sounding out the letters of the alphabet, the words of her mother’s tattoo were among the first she ever read. Two beginning with a high-kicking K. Two me’s. (Was that selfish?) Two words she recognized as in some way opposites of each other: “safe” and “kill.” To kill was always bad, wasn’t it, except mosquitoes or poisonous snakes about to bite?

“What is your tattoo saying?” she asked. “What does ‘Keep me safe and kill me’ mean?”

“It’s only nonsense,” her mother said. “A silly thing; like, they sailed to sea in a sieve, they did; or there was an old woman who lived in a shoe.”

“It must mean something.”

“No, just silliness.”

For some time Wita accepted this explanation even though she found it deeply unsatisfying, like being read stories without a proper ending. Meanwhile, her mother covered up the tattoo with long-sleeved blouses and dresses for her work teaching piano at the university and at home on the Steinway Grand. The blue-green words were also hidden for parent-teacher meetings and visits to the doctor and dentist. When her mother went out with friends on summer evenings, she left her arms bare. Why was the tattoo hidden some times and not others? Why was it there?

There was no one else to ask. Wita had no father. He had died in a ferry accident in Indonesia before she was born. The boat was in bad condition, her mother told her, and over-crowded. There were not enough lifeboats for people to escape when the ferry began to sink in waters dark and deep. Her father had been on his way to visit his grandparents who lived on the island of Lombok. They were originally from the Netherlands, as he was: the country of wooden shoes, windmills, and tulips, like the Darwin Hybrids her mother grew. In springtime, when the garden was its own rainbow of white, scarlet, orange, and purple tulips, her mother would make twice-weekly cuttings, slicing the stalks near the base with her special curved gardening knife. She would arrange these proud flowers in blue and white vases throughout the house, although never on the Steinway Grand.

Wita found the cut tulips fierce and forbidding, particularly when her mother put the white ones together with the red. They were too much like scarlet lips and teeth withholding terrible secrets. We saw your father drown. We know what the tattoo means. They laughed down at her from the height of the marble mantelpiece, and she saw their true nature was cruel rather than lovely. The worst part was when they dropped one or two of their long, broad petals to reveal the naked stamens within. The stamens looked like little men. She imagined them growing full-sized overnight, haunting the house and whispering her father’s name.

It was Michael. Michael De Witte. Witte meant “white.”

She was not De Witte but Spens, her mother’s name. That was Spens with an “s” as she would have to clarify with good grace many hundreds of times throughout her life for people who believed they knew better than she how her name ought to be spelled.

Nor was she called Wita after De Witte. Wita was a Polish name. Her mother chose it for its music and because it had the English word “wit” inside it. Her name was a blessing and a reminder, her mother said. She must remember that wit meant a sharp, quick intelligence. She had to cultivate her mind the way you looked after a plant. “Study hard. Think before you speak. Watch closely what is happening both outside and inside your head.”

“Inside?”

“Yes, by looking at your feelings and the questions they raise, like ‘Do I trust this person?’ or ‘Is this situation safe?

”

“Should I never trust someone without thinking first?”

“Never, Wita. Never.” The white exclamation mark appeared between her mother’s eyebrows.

“Did Michael have a sharp mind?”

“Yes, very.” Her mother frowned. She did not like to speak about Michael. Wita assumed this was because it hurt her too much to think of him dead at the bottom of the sea.

There was only one photograph of Michael in the house. It was not on display either in a stand-up frame or hung upon the wall, but stored in a brown envelope in the four-drawer, steel grey filing cabinet in the basement. Her mother, under duress of pointed questions, had shown Wita this picture once. Thereafter, Wita regularly sought out the photograph on her own when her mother was giving a piano lesson. As long as she could hear the rippling music and the thump of the pedals from the floor above, she was free to examine the face of the tall, lean man whose hands rested on her mother’s shoulders. Wita knew he was tall because the top of her mother’s head did not even come up to his chin. They stood together beneath a tree whose spreading branches cast leaf-shadow, like a school of tiny fish swimming across his face. Although this meant his features were in part obscured, she could still make out the marked hollows in his cheeks beneath clear ledges of bone. These hollows made him look hungry and fierce in a way that knotted her stomach. His eyes were dark, as was his hair, swept back from his forehead in a thick wedge.

He did not look at all like the image she had conjured up: a grown-up Hans Brinker with a floppy blond fringe, round blue eyes and ruddy cheeks. Michael was at first a shock, with his height and cavernous cheeks. She tried and failed utterly to imagine him hugging her. His boniness would hurt. Then she worried this was a wicked thought because Michael’s bones were all that were left of him.

She searched the photograph repeatedly for any way in which she resembled him. Her cheeks were softly rounded, like her mother’s, and she was not particularly tall for her age. Her hair was neither straight nor black, but a wiry, dark red-gold that hung about her face in unruly curls. There were some days—how she hated them—when she looked like a cocker spaniel.

The sole resemblance to Michael she could glean from the sparse pictorial evidence was long fingers. People often remarked on Wita’s and said: “You must be musical, just like your mother.”

In fact, she was not. The piano keys repelled her touch, chilly as ice cubes and as slick. Her fingers slipped off, and she was relieved to have the alien contact ended. Nor could she relate musical notation to sounds that she heard played or sung. When she looked at the books of piano music open on the Steinway Grand, she saw only little pot-bellied birds balancing on wires. They will fall off, she thought, just as her fingers fell off the cold, slippery keys.

One day she ventured the question: “Did Michael play the piano?”

First the frown; then: “No.”—Only that.

“Did he…?”

“Enough, Wita. I’m busy now.” Once again, her brave foray yielded next to nothing. She sometimes thought her ignorance of her father was as deep as the fathoms of seawater that washed over his bones.

She wanted to ask, “Did Michael also have a tattoo?” but could not gather up the courage. Her dead father and her mother’s tattoo were mysteries of equal weight.

For some days after her tetanus-diphtheria inoculation, Wita’s arm was stiff and sore. Nursing a dull remembrance of the alien prong in her flesh, it occurred to her that her mother must have suffered countless similar needle pricks for the sake of the six “silly” words that made the sea-green banner of her arm. From the Internet, she learned that some people passed out from the pain of the tattoo artist’s work, while others cried and could not continue. Given the various colors and expanse of the nineteen individual letters inked into her mother’s arm, Wita guessed the ordeal must have taken two or three sessions of six to eight hours each.

Her mother was fine-boned and literally thin-skinned. Wita was sure she sometimes saw light shining through her mother’s wrists as they flew over the piano keys. Wouldn’t the tattooing have hurt her more than someone whose skin was thick and coarse?

Try again, Wita. “Did it hurt much?” she asked one dinner time when her mother appeared particularly preoccupied. She was half-hoping the question would take her by surprise.

“What? Did what hurt, Wita?”

“Getting the tattoo.”

“Oh…a bit, yes, I suppose so. It’s long ago now.”

“Why…?”

“Not now, Wita, please. I’m playing.”

This meant her mother was running over the notes in her mind. She had a concert coming up with the piano trio of which she was a member. Wita liked to have a seat at these events where she could see her mother centered just behind and between the violinist and cellist. As their bows flashed round her, she became a living jewel in her long-sleeved ruby or navy dress, framed by the string players’ lightning motion. Now her mother’s eyes were closed, the long lashes resting on her cheeks. Like a portcullis coming down against Wita’s questions. Wita liked the word “portcullis.”

At ten, she began an instinctive assault on her mother’s fortress. Her weapons were words, because the English language was for Wita what music was for her mother: sustenance and empowerment. The sensuous sound of fine prose, as much as its meaning, could make her feel she was flying. Or stir her with a thrilling fear.

She sat spellbound when she first came upon her own surname in the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. Poor Sir Patrick, whom the Scottish King sent on a fruitless mission to “Noroway oer the faem,” his grim fate foreshadowed by an image of the moon distorted and doubled.

I saw the new moon late yestreen

Wi the auld moon in her arm;

And if we go to sea master

I fear we’ll come to harm.

 

This verse, and the one etched with the sparse, sorrowful detail of her forebear’s (was he?) shipwreck, Wita took to droning in her mother’s hearing:

O forty miles off Aberdeen

‘Tis fifty fathoms deep

And there lies gude Sir Patrick Spens

Wi the Scots lords at his feet.

She tried as best she could to assume a doleful tone, to become a kind of living bagpipe. In fact she was genuinely sad for the Scots lord and his attendants, who had perished in the same way her father had.

“Wita, would you please stop that tuneless droning. It is maddening.”

“It’s from the ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. Perhaps he was our ancestor?”

“Perhaps. But it’s still painful, Wita, to hear the same lugubrious verses over and over. The words become meaningless.”

“I have to look at the words on your arm over and over, every day, all my life, and you’ve never explained their meaning in the first place.” She pointed rudely.

“Oh, Wita, Wita.” The sigh sounded twisted. Her mother sank into a chair. She sat with her slumped shoulders and her fists pressed against her eyelids, all hurtful for Wita to see. What had she done? Was this like Pandora’s box? Would letting loose the secret harm them all?

Her mother’s knuckles were turning white. This made Wita frightened.

“Mom, are you all right?”

The arms lowered. The eyes opened. Her mother stood and returned to the kitchen counter and the cutting board. With her back turned to Wita and her head only slightly inclined, she said, “Tonight, when you have finished your homework, I will tell you about the tattoo.”

At 9:10, she entered the living room where Emma sat on the couch reading, the book in her left hand, and her right drawing the fluid shapes of her finger-flexing exercises upon the air. Wita assumed her best listening pose in the chair opposite, back dancer-erect, and her hands cradled one within the other, thumbs precisely crossed. There should be some ceremonial symbol for the occasion, Wita thought, like a glass of wine, or, in her case, something that looked like wine, or music with a trumpet fanfare.

Her mother put down her book and drew out from between its pages a photograph, which she passed to Wita. She saw a fair-haired teenage boy with a heart-shaped face dominated by a spatula-shaped nose and large blue eyes. The way his arms were wrapped around the cello he held told her, as much as his wide smile, how much he loved this instrument.

“That is Alastair Kos,” her mother said. “He was my best friend through high school and then in our first two years in music school together.”

“Your boyfriend?”

“No, Alastair was gay. But we were very close. We played so well together, for one thing. It was as if we shared the same body and breath so that our response to each other was seamless. Music rippled through him, just as his laughter did. He had a zany sense of humor. I adored him.”

How heavy a thing the past tense could be, thought Wita. She knew before she asked the question that death had come into the room along with Alastair’s picture.

“What happened to Alastair?”

“He died—in an accident. He was just twenty-two. It was a terrible thing because he was such a rare person, so kind and generous-spirited, and truly gifted. Alastair could have played with one of the great orchestras of the world, the Hallé or the Concertgebouw.

“And it is because of Alastair I have the tattoo. One very hot day, in our first year of university, we were cycling to class along the river and I stopped at a drinking fountain. Very close to the fountain there was newly painted graffiti on the pavement. Whoever did it had used a stencil. The letters were all very neat and uniform, two-inch capitals in glistening white.

“I think we were both intrigued because it was one of the strangest graffiti we had ever seen. The words made no sense but they stayed with you.”

“Keep me safe and kill me.”

“Yes. That’s how it first came to us, in those white stenciled letters on the bike path. And Alastair found the words so funny. ‘How bizarre,’ he kept saying. ‘How absolutely bizarre.’ He was laughing the way he did, so that his whole body shook with its rippling through him. Even after we rode away, the words lodged with us.

“When we met for lunch that day, Alastair had already come up with the idea that we should both get the words tattooed on our forearms. It was a crazy suggestion, of course, and a late teenage act of rebellion, I see now. But he had a strong belief the tattoo would create a lifelong bond between us, like a blood pact.

“‘No matter where we go, no matter what happens, we’ll always be joined in this way,’ he said. We both knew he would be going away soon. He was just too brilliant not to get a scholarship to a school like Juilliard. I was never of his caliber, so I knew it was inevitable we would be parted.

“Getting the tattoos was like a marriage ceremony for us, foolish as that may sound. And that is the story, Wita, behind my tattoo. So you see, the words themselves are meaningless, as I told you. The sentence is only a sort of strange found object that Alastair and I fixed on that morning and then used to make a visible bond between us.

“That is why I keep it. In memory of him. I still miss him. Every day.”

Every day. She had never said that about Michael.

“Thank you for telling me,” Wita said, handing back the picture of the young man with his cello. “I am sorry about Alastair.”

Her mother started, as if surprised to hear the name on Wita’s lips.

Wita lay in bed unable to sleep, picturing her mother and Alastair at their discovery of the peculiar painted message on the pathway. Downstairs her mother was playing The Moonlight Sonata on the Steinway Grand. It was a piece Wita liked and knew well. So her nerves tightened in surprise when her mother jumped from the end of the first movement to the beginning of the third. Why had she omitted the second movement? Her mother had told her Franz Liszt described the middle section as “a fragile flower between two abysses.” Emma was playing only the abysses. Why would she leave out the flower?

It struck Wita with a sickening clarity that her mother was deliberately tormenting herself. She was making the Sonata discordant because she had not told Wita the whole truth. It was still a dark glass her mother held up for her, and she was playing that darkness now.

A desolate weather beset Wita’s mind, like the curdled skies of the Old Ballads. What if Emma never gave her the full truth of the tattoo, if it eluded her always? Like a sleek fish darting off into those dark waters where her father’s bones stirred. What if your sole living parent remained as much a mystery as the dead one you had never known?

Would you still find yourself in the end and know who you were?  Or would you be clutching always at that blue-green flash and dazzle, wondering and longing?

Downstairs Emma continued to play only the two abysses. “O forty miles off Aberdeen, ‘tis fifty fathoms deep,” Wita recited. Her drone tonight was strong enough to drown out her mother’s music altogether.

Wendy MacIntyre is a Scots-born Canadian who lives in the small town of Carleton Place, Ontario. She is drawn to myth and archetype, the visual arts and perplexing moral issues as inspiration for her work. Her PhD in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh focused on the Black Mountain poet Charles Olson. She has published short fiction and essays in literary journals in Canada, the US, and the UK. Of her five novels published with Canadian independent literary presses, the most recent is Hunting Piero (Thistledown Press, 2017). Details of her books are available on her website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

PARAÍSO by Mark Williams

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PARAÍSO by Mark Williams

Mark Williams
PARAÍSO

Henry Hoover is in his bedroom, mastering the G-chord on his Martin acoustic, when his father walks in and brings up Science Camp. With Henry’s sophomore year of high school behind him and all of summer ahead, he couldn’t care less about Science Camp. “You need to expand your horizon, young man,” says Henry’s dad, giving the Martin a thump.

Henry thinks there is no horizon to expand. It’s filled with coal dust and shit. We’re toast. He almost says something about his father’s horizon (he’s an orthodontist) but instead asks, “If I go to Science Camp, will you buy me an electric guitar?”

“What’s wrong with the guitar you have? It was good enough for me.”

Here it comes, thinks Henry.

For about the hundredth time, Henry hears how his father paid his way through dental school by playing in a bluegrass band throughout southern Illinois and western Kentucky. “Do you know why I named the band Midnight Oil?” asks Ronald. Henry calls his father Ronald. It’s his name.

And for about the hundredth time, in a disinterested monotone Henry has perfected, he says, “Because that’s what you were burning.”

“You bet I was.”

But though his G-chord still needs work, Henry has mastered Ronald. “Kevin and I want to start a band, like you did.”

Kevin Kallbrier is Henry’s best friend. Kevin has twelve fingers. His parents’ religion didn’t allow them to cut off the extra two when Kevin was born.

“What kind of band?” asks Ronald.

“A band that plays my songs.”

“Since when are you a songwriter?”

“Since when I get an electric guitar.”

The next day, Ronald takes Henry to Pawnstop and buys a Fender Telecaster and a Gibson Minuteman amp. That night, Henry is in his room, screaming, “The sky is black. The earth is scorched. Expand my horizon, girl, before it goes dark” (in G), when Ronald drops his phone on the bedspread. Henry puts down his guitar, brushes a purple forelock from his eyes, and sees a list of Science Camp classes on the screen: Marine Biology, Nanotechnology, Projective Geometry . . .

Great, thinks Henry. But there, just below Stalagmite? Stalactite? is String Theory.

Henry knows there is a theory to music, some kind of math or something. And he could use some help. “This one,” he says, pointing with his thumb pick.

“That should expand your horizon, all right,” says Ronald.

Science Camp is being held at The Surf & Turf. Or at least that’s how Henry thinks of it. Two years ago, the surf consisted of a pool full of kids and fish sticks at the snack bar. The turf consisted of a miniature golf course and burgers. Ronald paid one hundred dollars a month so Henry could backflip and putt-putt.

It was there that Henry felt his first breast (his only breast) when Kevin Kallbreier pushed Sophie Beardsely beneath the high dive as Henry flipped and descended. When Henry hit the water, his right hand went down her top. In return, Sophie gave Henry’s balls a painful squeeze and said, “We’re even, Hoover.”

With the construction of a nearby public pool, a private school purchased the club and turned the pool into tennis courts, the miniature golf course into an archery range, and the clubhouse into classrooms.

The day after persuading Kevin to enroll in String Theory with him, Henry and Kevin are walking to class. It’s hot. Too hot for Henry to carry a Fender and a Minuteman. But not too hot for a Martin. Kevin is carrying drumsticks. He hopes to buy drums soon. So far, Henry and Kevin are the only members of their band, Scorched Earth.

Nearing the school, Henry asks, “Why’d you bring drumsticks to class? It’s about strings, not drums.”

“I can back you on a school desk or trash can,” Kevin says with a stick-twirl. (As far as stick-twirls go, Kevin’s extra fingers are a bonus.) But as Scorched Earth passes the tennis courts—site of Henry’s hand-plunge—he thinks not of Kevin’s fingers but his own. It felt like a water balloon, only with water on both sides, thinks Henry. Fingers tingling.

As they enter the classroom, Henry and Kevin are greeted with a hearty “Greetings, multiverse travelers!” by an old smiling dude with a gray ponytail, satellite-dish ears, and weird eyes. One looks one way. The other looks the other. Multiverse Travelers? thinks Henry. Cool name. They must be late to class.

“No, sir, we’re Scorched Earth,” says Henry as Kevin performs a dual stick-twirl.

“Welcome, Scorched Earth,” says the old dude. “Prepare to be transported.”

Turning toward the seated students, Henry sees he won’t be the first to transport. For there, flanked by Pam Peters and school geek, Troy Short, sits Sophie Beardsley—as if brought here by Henry’s breast-thoughts.

“I see you brought your strings,” says the old dude as Henry takes a seat behind Sophie. “Good man.”

Why wouldn’t I? thinks Henry, though other than his guitar and Kevin’s drumsticks, he sees no other instruments in class.

“My name is Felix Capshaw,” says the old dude, pointing to his name on the whiteboard. “In this universe, I’m a retired physics professor from SIU. Pluck us a string, Pythagoras,” he says with one eye on Henry and the other on the Martin.

Pythagoras? thinks Henry. “Which string?” he asks, pulling his Martin from its case.

“Give us a low E.”

Henry plucks his E.

“What do you hear?”

“My E.”

“Pluck again and listen closer.”

Henry plucks.

“What do you hear? Anyone.”

“Vibrations,” says Troy Short.

“Correcto!” says Professor Capshaw before launching into some bafflegab about real-Pythagorus, who plucked a string and discovered it vibrated in ratios. And now scientists think everything inside the atom is nothing but vibrations on little strings, and these vibrations are the music of the spheres. Or did he say years? wonders Henry. Because time can be bent so we might be sitting in this classroom while also traveling to a black hole, through a wormhole, and out the other side. Or maybe we’re in another universe already and also traveling through this one. It’s confusing.

By the time Professor Capshaw wraps up, Henry is fairly sure he won’t be learning any new chords. But with his eyes on the monarch butterfly tattooed on Sophie Beardsley’s right ankle, it occurs to him that maybe in another universe he and Sophie are getting it off. On a bed of dry pine needles in Shawnee National Forest, say.

“And tomorrow we’ll discuss how to make a black hole,” says Professor Capshaw. “Safe travels.”

Turning in her seat toward Henry, Sophie says, “You thought this class was about music, didn’t you, Hoover?”

“No,” says Henry.

“Bullshit. See you tomorrow.”

She spoke to me!

That night, over a dinner of spaghetti and clam sauce, Ronald asks Henry how class went.

“Okay.”

“What did you learn, honey?” asks Sheila. Henry thinks of his mother as Sheila. He’s never known why. Her real name is Alice.

“I learned that another me might be somewhere else.”

“How is that?” asks Sheila. “Pass the Pinot, Ronald.”

Jiggling a noodle on his fork, Henry says, “Because we’re all made of strings, and their vibrations can send us to another universe.”

“You seem to be there most of the time,” says Ronald as Henry flicks the noodle to Whizbang, the Hoovers’ toothless Yorkie.

“Now, Ronald,” says Sheila. “We agreed to be less judgmental. Please, Ronald, the Pinot!”

Just before midnight, Henry texts Kevin Kallbrier, Dog park in ten? After receiving a 👍 from Kevin, Henry opens his bedroom window, crawls down the porch roof, grabs an oak branch, and drops to the ground.

“I’ve been thinking,” Henry tells Kevin at the dog park, the halfway point between their houses, “We could be someplace else right now and not even know it.”

“Like where?”

“I don’t know. A Cardinal game.”

“At midnight?”

“In another universe, it might be daytime. Or maybe Scorched Earth is onstage at Full Terror Assault. It can go on all night.”

“We don’t have a lead guitarist or a singer. Or drums.”

“Or maybe we’re screwing around in my uncle and aunt’s living room,” says Henry, pointing past the poop can to his Uncle Duncan and Aunt Darlene’s house, kitty-corner to the dog park.

“What are we doing there?”

“I don’t know. Let’s go see.”

Uncle Dunc grew up in the same house he lives in now, in Arcadian Acres—named for the kind of well water that went to all the houses. Many years later, it was discovered that the water had been polluted by Ivory Laundry & Dry Cleaning. After Uncle Dunc’s parents croaked, he moved back into his childhood home with Aunt Darlene, Sheila’s older sister. It was then that the dry-cleaned water that Uncle Dunc drank as a kid kicked in and messed up his grown-up mind. Uncle Dunc hears voices.

One night at Henry’s house, Uncle Dunc told Henry that Ricky Gervais didn’t believe in either religion or security systems. “He told me so,” Uncle Dunc had said. “And he said I shouldn’t either.” Plus, Uncle Dunc said it was scary enough hearing voices without also hearing alarms every time he forgot to punch in a code he could never remember. “And who’s going to find a front door key in a backyard birdhouse anyway?” Uncle Dunc had asked.

Henry, that’s who.

“What’s his name?” whispers Kevin as a large, one-eared orange cat brushes against his legs in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s foyer.

“Robinson Crusoe,” says Henry. “They found him at an interstate rest stop.”

Looking down a dark hallway, Kevin asks, “What’s that gurgling?”

Henry had heard Aunt Darlene complain about Uncle Dunc’s snoring. And he’d heard her complain about the noise the machine Uncle Dunc wears to keep him from snoring. “I’m surprised you don’t hear it at your house,” Aunt Darlene had told Sheila. “It’s loud enough to wake his dead parents.”

“His snoring or his machine?” asked Sheila.

“Both. We sleep in separate rooms with both doors shut,” said Aunt Darlene.

Stepping from the foyer into the living room, Henry tells Kevin, “It’s coming from a machine that helps my uncle breathe.”

“It must be shit to grow old,” says Kevin, gathering Robinson Crusoe in his arms.

“We’ll probably never know. Unless we move to Mars before Earth ends.”

Henry’s been in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s living room a thousand times. His parents usually sit on the couch, over there. In Henry’s mind, he sees them now. And across the room stands Uncle Dunc. Other than at meals, Henry has never seen his uncle sit down. Ronald says it’s because of the drugs Uncle Dunc takes because of the water that polluted his mind. Usually, Uncle Dunc paces while everyone else sits. Like now. And when Henry was young, Uncle Dunc used to pick him up by his ears. Like now. It hurt. It hurts, thinks Henry, giving his ears a rub as Uncle Dunc hoists young Henry up in front of the fireplace. What did the old dude say? Time bends?

Turning from the fireplace, Henry imagines his imaginary parents scooting over on the couch to make room for Kevin and Robinson Crusoe. Robinson is in Kevin’s lap. Kevin is using one of his extra fingers to scratch behind Robinson’s only ear. Henry’s parents are staring at Kevin and Robinson as if they’d rather not be sitting next to a boy with twelve fingers and a cat with one ear. When they turn toward Henry, they look pissed. They’re like, What are you doing here, young man?

“Everybody’s got to be somewhere,” says Henry.

“Very funny!” says Ronald—loud enough to frighten Robinson from Kevin’s lap and send him running down the hallway toward the gurgles.

Imaginary my ass, thinks Henry.

“Who were you talking to?” asks Kevin.

“Let’s get out of here.”

In class the next day, Professor Capshaw explains how scientists made a black hole out of 8,000 rubidium atoms and a laser beam. “You mean we don’t have to go into space to find one?” says Kevin.

“We’ve gone boldly where no man has gone before—in a laboratory,” says the professor. “Yes, Miss Beardsley.”

“I hope we make a better world than the one our parents stuck us with.”

Going boldly, Henry says, “Yeah.”

“You kids have good reason to be worried,” says the professor. “But we’re getting off the point.”

“What other point is there?” asks Troy Short.

“Totally,” says Sophie. “We’re even afraid to have kids. Aren’t we, Pam?”

“Totally.”

But instead of addressing the point, the professor talks about how some guy in a wheelchair thought he might be able to understand God’s mind if he, the guy, could come up with an equation that solved everything. An equation no longer than a thumb. But then the wheelchair guy died, and scientists are still trying to come up with the answer.

“As long as whose thumb?” asks Kevin.

“Very funny!” says the professor, whose words transport Henry to last night.

Upon return to the dog park, Henry had said to Kevin, “I’m telling you, my uncle and my parents were in the room with us. I heard Ronald talk.”

“You were just remembering stuff, that’s all,” said Kevin.

“You saw how freaked Robinson was. He heard Ronald too.”

“This string shit’s got you freaked. Later, Dude,” said Kevin, skirting the poop can and heading for home.

Now, as Professor Capshaw drones on about dark matter, Henry wishes he’d never heard of string theory. He’s okay with living in one place, even with the shit shape it’s in—guns, floods, fires, Republicans. And he has Scorched Earth to look forward to. Doesn’t he? As if to punctuate his thoughts, a loud explosion outside the classroom sends all five students beneath their desks. “Well done,” says the professor. “But it was just a backfire by the sound of it. Dual exhaust backfire, I’d say. Have an out-of-this-world weekend, earthlings.”

Dual Exhaust Backfire, considers Henry. But he still prefers Scorched Earth. Then, strange as last night was, it’s nothing compared to what happens next. Still crouched beneath his desk, Henry sees a monarch butterfly walking toward him. “What’s up, Hoover?” says Sophie Beardsley, bending down to Henry’s level.

Aside from the pool that day, Henry has never been this close to Sophie. Her eyes are the color of my Fender, he thinks. Mystic Seafoam. She smells like mouthwash and roses. In the monotone he uses on his father, Henry says, “Oh, hi, Sophie,” as if she finds him huddled beneath a desk every day.

“I see you didn’t bring your guitar,” says Sophie. “Why not?”

“The professor only asked me to bring it the first day.”

“Bullshit.”

But now the strange thing to top all strange things happens. As Henry crawls out from beneath his desk and stands, Sophie asks, “Would you want to do something with me sometime?”

“Uh, sure. Like what?”

“Like talk about this stuff. Maybe at the pool tomorrow.”

“Which pool?”

“The pool.”

“Oh, yeah.”

In his room that night, instead of practicing his C-chord (he’s got the G down), Henry spends the evening cutting off his blue jeans to an appropriate poolside date length, adding strategic slashes so that, wearing no underwear, hints of thigh and butt cheek might show through.

“Goodnight, honey,” says Sheila from the hallway. “Oh, and I found a nice, bullet-proof backpack for you to wear when school starts.”

“And you’re always safe at home with Pete and me,” says Ronald. Pete is Ronald’s Glock 19. It’s like Pete’s a part of the fam.

“Thank you,” says Henry.

Sitting on towels at the pool the next day—with Sophie looking pretty fine in a yellow two-piece—they share their recent stories, in Henry’s case, time-traveling in Uncle Dunc and Aunt Darlene’s living room; in Sophie’s case, crash landing a twin-engine Lockheed Electra on her way to Howland Island.

“I was sunning myself like this, only in my backyard and without you, when all of a sudden, I looked up and the sky was an ocean, and I was flying over it. I’d never even heard of the pilot, but I know that’s who I was. I looked her up. She’s famous.”

“When I saw Uncle Dunc pull me up by my ears, they hurt all over again,” says Henry, wishing he’d been someone famous too. Kurt Cobain? “I think it really happened, sort of.”

“I think so too. For me, I mean. And you. I know, let’s close our eyes and see if we can go somewhere now,” says Sophie. “Where do you want to go?”

“A bed of dry pine needles in Shawnee National Forest.”

“You’re weird. But okay, lie on your back and hold my hand.”

Fucking A, thinks Henry.

With his eyes shut and the sun beating down, Henry sees Sophie and him walking hand-in-hand down a tree-lined trail, she in her yellow two-piece, he in his ratty jean cut-offs. A little more butt cheek than he’d intended.

Walking down the leafy path, on lookout for the needle bed, Henry’s glad he signed up for String Theory after all. If he hadn’t, he wouldn’t be with Sophie now—either at the pool or in the forest. He wouldn’t be holding her hand anywhere, and he wouldn’t be seeing a gazillion monarch butterflies up ahead in the forest. They’re flying in the shape of a word.

“Do you see what I see?” asks Henry.

“A gazillion,” says Sophie. “They’re beautiful. Everything is. The sky is so blue. The trees are so leafy. What are the butterflies spelling?”

“I don’t know. I think it’s Spanish. Monarchs live in Mexico most of the time, don’t they? I bet they don’t speak English.”

“Look, over there,” says Sophie. “Honeybees! Lots!”

It’s like there are two hims and two Sophies. One pair by the pool and one pair in the forest. For sure, the poolside world is fucked. Try telling dads like his to drive Leafs or give up their guns. And like everything else, aren’t monarchs pretty much history? But look at all of them here. Plus, bees. Henry wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t polar bears and white rhinos somewhere.

Maybe here everything is okay. Maybe laundries don’t dump poison in the ground and uncles don’t snore or hear voices. No guns, no fires, no batshit crazy politicians. We can have all the kids we want, thinks Henry, giving Sophie’s hand a squeeze.

“It seems so perfect,” says Sophie. “Do you think we can come whenever we want? Stay as long as we want?”

Here, my mother’s name is Sheila, thinks Henry. Whizbang has all of his teeth. Robinson Crusoe has two ears, and Kevin Kallbreier only has ten fingers. Here, there’s no need for bullet-proof backpacks, and our band’s name is God’s Mind.

“Sure,” says Henry, “why not?”

Mark Williams’s fiction has appeared in The Baffler, Eclectica, The First Line, and the anthologies American Fiction, The Boom Project, and Running Wild Novella Anthology, Volume 4, as well as other journals and collections. His poems have appeared in The Southern Review, Rattle, New Ohio Review, and The American Journal of Poetry. Kelsay Books published his manuscript of poems, Carrying On, in July 2022. In this universe, he lives in Evansville, Indiana.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SHUTTING DOWN by Thomas Johnson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SHUTTING DOWN by Thomas Johnson

Thomas Johnson
SHUTTING DOWN

Stevie watched the road. Driving right now made him nervous. Cars moved tightly in each direction on the highway. Stevie’s wife, Ruth, was next to him in the passenger seat, and their friend, Helen, shared the backseat with the dog. Everyone sat in silence, Stevie driving, the others thumbing a phone. Stevie tried to concentrate.

“So many more cars than I expected for a Sunday,” said Stevie.

Helen spoke up from the rear seat. “Normal for this part of the country.”

Stevie started to say, “Maybe it just feels crowded because of,” but he trailed off.

“Whatever it is that’s happening,” said Helen.

“When do we get home?” asked Ruth. She thumbed her phone without looking up.

“Best guess a couple of hours.”

There were lines of cars on the interstate. Every lane was congested. It had been Stevie’s second time in Philadelphia, but the first since he and Ruth moved to D.C. on New Year’s Eve. They met Helen shortly after the move and decided a trip together for St. Patrick’s Day would be a nice way to get to know each other. But now they were heading home, worried they might get sick. The virus had come to the States, and it seemed like every minute some city or state ordered a shutdown of all businesses. But there were so many cars still on the road. He wasn’t sure if this was actually normal, or if it was just the typical end of a holiday, or if he was just nervous from the lack of any direct answers about what was going on.

Traffic sped up at intervals in places and slowed down in others. Cars darted between lanes and cut people off. There weren’t as many billboards along the road as he was used to either. Unlike the open highways of Texas that were cut wide and deep, these coastal highways cut narrowly through the thicket of the woods, the dense forestry standing so close to the pavement it almost leaned over onto the road. It didn’t help that clouds covered the sky and held back rain, casting darkness on everything. All Stevie could see were all the taillights of the large trucks he couldn’t get around and all the trees looming over their place there in the road. It felt claustrophobic. From the driver’s seat, it looked like everyone was trying to escape to somewhere else. Stevie didn’t like it.

“What is happening out there?” asked Helen.

“I have no idea,” said Stevie. He looked over at Ruth in the passenger seat. “Have you seen anything yet?”

“Nothing we don’t already know.” Ruth thumbed her phone.

“We don’t really know anything,” said Stevie. “That’s the problem.”

“Everyone is guessing that people are heading home to prepare.”

“I thought they already were home,” Stevie said. “It’s Sunday.”

“We’re the only losers who went out this weekend,” said Helen.

“We barely spent any time inside with other people,” he said. “That’s how you get sick.”

“But people are dying,” said Helen.

There was a pause.

“Again, you get it just like any other virus,” said Stevie. “And you didn’t make out with any strangers, that I know of.”

Ruth laughed. “Such a shame for Rick,” she said.

Helen laughed along. “Oh, my god,” she said, “why did you invite your friend to join us from New York City?”

“We live four hours apart, now,” said Stevie, “and I hadn’t seen the sumbitch since the Army.”

“Maybe there’s a reason for that,” said Helen.

“Don’t be so hard on the guy,” said Stevie.

“He walked into my room at three a.m. and asked me to make out with him.”

“Your loss.”

“And what if he brought it with him?” asked Helen. “How close does he live to New York City?”

“You can see it from his house.”

“Christ,” said Helen.

“That doesn’t mean he had it.”

Everyone fell silent again. Stevie was looking for a gas station and trying not to think about everything going on out there. Why had they gone to Philadelphia? He had been excited to finally live in the mid-Atlantic and to finally see his friend. He didn’t ask for all this to happen. It was nice to see his friend. Even when the concert they were going to attend was canceled, he didn’t feel like it was a wasted trip. The city still celebrated St. Patrick’s Day and everything remained open.

“We wouldn’t have been able to do anything or go anywhere if there was something to be worried about,” he said. “And we’re going home now.”

“Who really knows,” said Helen. She sat in the backseat looking out the window. Helen slouched into the corner of the backseat where it met the door, and Stevie could sense that she was worried. Next to her slept Stevie and Ruth’s dog, undisturbed.

“Let me say, thanks for coming along,” Stevie said to Helen.

“You said that earlier,” she replied.

“Positive reinforcement.”

“I just needed to get away.”

“Might have been the last time,” said Ruth.

Stevie found an exit with a Wawa. He couldn’t see the gas station from the highway, but he knew it was a popular truck stop in the area. It would be big enough to get in and out of easily. Stevie took the off-ramp and felt relieved to be away from the busy highway. The exit led from the interstate and into the tree line for a half-mile before opening up at a small shopping center. The traffic light had only two gas stations on either corner, and Stevie saw the Wawa to his right. A line of cars stretching the entire parking lot and out into the road waited to get to the gas pumps. There, tucked into the small intersection carved out of the swamp, cars gathered in a frenzy and fought for space. It felt claustrophobic again, like everything coming down on them all at once. Stevie moved the car into the first line and then saw an open parking spot. He quickly moved out of the line and parked instead.

“We can make it home,” he said, and then again, “We can make it home.”

“Do we have enough gas?” asked Ruth.

Stevie looked over the console. The reading showed the car could make it up to 110 miles, but the GPS indicated the drive would be 98 miles to home. Stevie didn’t like cutting it close. With every passing minute it felt like they were already cutting too many things too close, and needing gas was getting in the way. Stevie looked again at the gas station. This intersection off from the highway should have been free of traffic, but there were cars surrounding the building and people were walking in all directions.

“There’s enough to not get into this mess,” Stevie said.

“Is it a run?” asked Helen.

“What?” asked Ruth.

“Panic buying,” said Helen.

“Why would they need gas to stay home?”

“People will buy anything in a panic,” said Stevie.

“Are you going in?”

“Could use a piss and a water.”

“Let me know what it’s like inside.”

Stevie walked through the commotion of the cars and then into the station. It looked like all convenience stores, except people inside were rummaging through everything. Servers paced behind the deli counter, and cashiers barked out orders from behind their face masks. When did that start? Stevie thought. He didn’t remember hearing anything about masks. He found the restroom, used a urinal, and left without touching anything. He wondered if he could touch anything, even to wash his hands. He didn’t know for sure.

Outside the restroom, Stevie paused as other customers rushed by on their way to somewhere. He grabbed the few water bottles remaining in the refrigerators and the only bag of chips. Stevie laughed to himself. He didn’t think that single-use bottles or bags of chips would save anyone, only that he was thirsty. Then, he stopped himself from laughing out loud because that seemed out of place as well. He didn’t really want to laugh right now.

Checking out didn’t take long. Everyone moved quickly. Being outside again relieved him. He got in the car and handed a bottle of water to Ruth.

“Has there been any news?” he asked.

“What more is there to learn?”

“In the absence of everything, anything would be sufficient.”

Stevie sat in the front with the air conditioner blowing on his face. Cars backed up now through the parking lot and into the shopping center next to the station. He wasn’t sure how they’d get out of the lot. A sign pointed traffic in one direction, but with so many vehicles coming and going, it all kind of just ran together senselessly. It made Stevie anxious. He knew it was going to take a few minutes just to get in a line to leave the gas station. He tried not to think about it. He set the navigation on his phone and plugged it into the dashboard.

“This is pretty wild,” said Helen.

“I can’t tell if it’s panic or not,” Stevie said.

“Like, it’s a disease,” said Ruth, “not a hurricane.”

“I think that’s why everyone is so confused,” he said.

Stevie got the car into the line exiting the lot, but it took half an hour to get through the traffic light and back out onto the road. Thick forestation crowded the road on either side, and nothing could be seen for miles but more trees and traffic ahead. It felt to Stevie like everything, including home, would never be reached. He just wanted to get moving again. He just wanted to get home. Just then his phone buzzed with a text message from work: telework starting Monday, acknowledge.

“There it is,” he said. “I’m not reporting to work tomorrow.”

“But you still have to work?” asked Ruth.

“From home,” he said.

“Lucky you.”

“You’ll get a job, hon,” he said. They had only been in Washington, D.C. for two months, but he still felt like that wouldn’t be a problem for her. It always took time to get a new job, and there were more opportunities for her in the District than there were back in San Antonio. It would just take more time. “Everything’s going to be okay,” he said.

Stevie finally got the car onto the interstate. It looked like there were more cars than before. They were moving along, but he didn’t like being stuck behind so many others. He could never guess what someone else might do, and it made him tense. He just wanted to be in his apartment. He wanted to be in his bed. He wanted to be home with his wife and his dog. He wanted to feel safe.

“All this for something we can’t even see,” he said.

“Aren’t people choking on their own lungs?” asked Helen.

“Didn’t they say it was just like the flu?” he asked.

“Who knows,” said Helen.

“There should be something,” he said. “Not all this… nothing.”

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” said Ruth.

“Maybe we’re being misled.”

Helen replied, “Maybe no one really knows anything and everyone is just guessing.”

Stevie wanted to know what was going on. Everyone he met this weekend joked that it was nothing to worry about, but he worried that he just didn’t know. Some information was saying the virus would spread around the world, but all the governors and mayors held press conferences to talk about patience. Stevie didn’t think there was anything to be concerned about, but he was worried that, in the end, he just didn’t have any information at all. He worried now that they had made the wrong decision. The trip had been paid for in advance, though, and they weren’t going to get the money back, and even then they didn’t go to the concert because it was canceled, and also, they hadn’t really been around too many people, and now they were heading home. That should have been enough, but he worried he was compromising. It was hard to make sense of it all. It was hard to hold back regret. He wished he’d been smarter.

Stevie calculated the distance to their home over and over. Even as they rounded Baltimore and passed through the harbor tunnel, he kept looking down at the console over and over. There was an old tale about cars, that they held a gallon in reserve, but he could never remember if that was calculated into the distance reading or not. He tried not to worry and kept his focus on driving them home. The interstate would lead them all the way back home without a break, a stop, or a turn. It was going to be a long drive. He wanted it to end. It was a disaster. Stevie had an awful thought.

“This is just like 9/11,” he said.

“That’s a statement,” said Helen. She sat in her slouched posture in the seat, still staring out the window. She never broke her gaze. He didn’t know Helen well, but he could tell she was worried, too.

“There was this whole thing happening somewhere,” he said, “but I couldn’t see any of it from where I was.”

“I was only seven years old,” said Helen.

“Marching band rehearsal was outside that morning and when I got to second period, a girl I knew leaned over my desk and said something like, ‘Two planes hit the Twin Towers, and there’s smoke coming out of the Pentagon.’”

“She wasn’t wrong,” said Helen.

“Then, the teacher walks in and says we’re not allowed to watch the news ‘because we have things to learn.’”

“I swear.”

“To her, it was just something happening on the news,” he said. “It was all just something going on out there.”

“But looking back on it now,” said Helen.

“Changed my entire life,” said Stevie.

“Governors are recommending to stay home now,” said Ruth. “Like, ‘if safely possible, it is recommended’ or whatever.”

Stevie wondered if that meant anything. He asked if it was an official statement or an emergency, but Ruth couldn’t tell if it was just guidance or a mandate, or a rule, or however it might be called. It remained confusing, and Stevie didn’t think it would help anything. He didn’t feel any better and just wanted to be home.

“You know, I met these younger kids here in town a couple months ago,” said Helen. “Like just turned twenty years old or so, friends of a friend.”

“College kids are going to be so fucked up with all of this,” said Stevie.

“And these boys had no idea what the Watergate Hotel was,” said Helen.

“What do you mean?” asked Ruth.

Helen said, “They didn’t know the building, they didn’t know anything about Watergate, they didn’t even recognize the term or know a single thing about Richard Nixon.”

“Watergate takes up entire chapters in even basic history books,” said Stevie.

“Who reads books anymore?” said Helen.

“People still score it as the root of all distrust in this country,” said Stevie.

“We even talked about it,” said Ruth.

“In Europe?” asked Helen. Ruth nodded.

Stevie rushed through all his childhood memories learning about these events. He remembered his journalism professors spending entire months picking apart the Washington Post coverage of that election, and he remembered studying the coverage of race during the Hurricane Katrina disaster. He thought of all the patriotism surrounding 9/11 and how he ended up in that same war fifteen years after it began, just to pay off that education. So many years before now, with this thing happening now out there, without any explanation. It never felt like he was going to get away from it all.

Traffic held up all the way home but seemed to disappear once they were inside the District. Stevie looked from the road to the console and back again. There would be gas enough to get all the way home, and he could fill up in the next couple of days.

The sun remained overhead when they got back to D.C., but there weren’t any cars on any of the residential roads and it didn’t look like a single person was out anywhere. No one walking on the sidewalks, no one buying groceries, no one going anywhere to do anything. It felt more abandoned than empty, like everyone had not just gone inside but had actually gone away to somewhere else. Stevie thought to get gas now while it seemed easy, but he could sense that everyone just wanted it to be over.

He drove to Helen’s apartment in Georgetown and parked in the road, opening the hatch to get her bags. Everyone exited the car and stood on the steps of the sidewalk leading to the door of Helen’s duplex. The sun had come out of the clouds. There were no sounds of the city. Everyone just sort of stood there.

“So, we’ll see you soon,” said Ruth.

“Oh, I know it,” said Helen.

Everyone hugged. It was brief.

“What do you think happens next?” asked Helen.

“I just want to get to the other side of this,” said Stevie, and after another minute, “Then we’ll be able to look back.”

Stevie and Ruth got back in the car, where their dog waited for them. It was only a few blocks until they were parked and inside their apartment, at last. More news spread of shutdowns all across the country and all over the world. Messages came in from family members and friends. It would be months later before the car would need gas again.

Thomas Johnson works as Associate Fiction Editor for West Trade Review. He holds a B.A. from the University of Texas at Austin, and afterward enlisted in the United States Army. He is currently pursuing a Master of Arts in Writing at Johns Hopkins University and lives in Washington, D.C. His work is available in the Museum of Americana Literary Review and forthcoming from Valparaiso Fiction Review. All credits and biography are available at ts-johnson.com.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

RED SUN by Mary Lewis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RED SUN by Mary Lewis

Mary Lewis
RED SUN

Using the full twelve-foot length of the handle, Jake pushed the floater over the last slab of new concrete, then pulled it slowly back towards him. This was his favorite part of the job because after all the heavy work of ground preparation, framing, pouring, leveling, and compacting, he could watch the new surface turn glossy and smooth under his touch. Daryl could have done it, he was as good at it as Jake, but as the business owner he liked to give himself the pleasure. Daryl could start the cleanup while he had these moments to himself.

But with thunder growling nearby, they did need to wind it up. Concrete likes moisture while it is curing, but hard rain or hail would pockmark the surface, so they’d better put a tarp on in case. He’d had to take chances with the rain this strange summer with so many days over ninety. Still, it was better pouring with rain in the forecast than in hot weather when it sets so fast you’ll never get a really smooth surface.

He leaned on his truck and admired their work. With all the increased traffic on the river, the old muddy put-in lot for kayakers needed this upgrade. Daryl brought over the big tarp and they laid it down with two-by-fours weighing down all edges.

Then he lit up, took a long drag, let it out slowly. “Don’t look at me that way, Daryl. I live for this moment.”

“Sure boss. Your lungs.” Daryl was halfway to his car. “We doing Byler’s place tomorrow, right?”

“Yup. Your shoulders good for swinging that sledge?”

With his small front loader Jake would lift the edge of a slab of old concrete that was too big for the bucket while Daryl swung his sledge like John Henry over and over at the right spot to break it into pieces. Jake’s back told him to stay away from that these days, he’d done his time.

“Long as I use my trusty Aleve.” Daryl got in and waved through the open window.

Jake ducked into Kwik Spot for a six-pack and on the way dodged rain that splatted down hard from the dark sky. That sure came up fast. He couldn’t understand this kind of rain, too big to be drops, it was like someone was dishing out water in cups and throwing it down from the clouds. Good timing about that tarp.

By the time he got home, the sun had edged past the swift-moving clouds and made the dripping trees in the front yard sparkle. Sarah in the front yard yelled, “Dad look, a rainbow!”

She’d been the rainbow finder in their family since she was ten. Now at nineteen, she still danced barefoot on the soggy lawn every time she found one.

He pried himself out of his truck, joined her on the wet grass, and squinted at where she was pointing.

“Are you sure?”

An old game.

“C’mon Dad, it even has a double up on the left, see?”

He squeezed his eyes harder, shaded his brow, looked in the wrong direction, and she turned him back.

“Ah that little thing, sure enough.”

“It’s a full bow, what do you want?”

“What’s at the end of it?” He put his arm around her and they stood there while it brightened in one spot, dimmed at the ends.

“Did you have a good day, Dad?”

“Fair, finished the pour on that river site, but then the rain came. Should be OK though, we covered it up.”

She pranced over to the big oak, bounced off it somehow, and raced back to him, like some erratic planet careening around him. He tried to remember the last time he’d hurled himself like that. Maybe never. “You know, Dad, this is a world worth saving.”

She’d just started her second year at community college and couldn’t stop talking about environmental stuff.

“Let’s go see what Ma is cooking.”

“No, Dad, wait a minute. I want to ask you something.”

“If it’s about a boyfriend, I want to meet him first.”

Now she stood with legs apart, arms akimbo. Like she did last time he said that. “Do you think I do nothing but think about boys?”

“Not at all, you’re going to pester me about doing something for the environment, I can see it coming on.” He headed around the house to the back door, which had a mudroom like the one in the farmhouse where he grew up.

Sarah followed him, still bouncing. He could hear it in her footsteps. “You are in the perfect business to make big changes.”

“Wait here.” He went in and stripped off his work clothes, put on a fresh T and pants he’d laid out in the morning. He still felt smug about his idea last month to place them right there, should have figured it out years ago.

It was like he’d stopped a hose for a bit and now the water came out with more pressure. “Dad, you know concrete puts a lot of carbon dioxide into the air, not just from the fuel it takes to make it and move it, but because of the curing.”

He was already in the kitchen, lifting pot lids, hugging Martha from behind at the sink. “How’s my tropical flower?” Something from their honeymoon, so long ago, when she put on a Hawaiian dress in the middle of winter, and they turned the heat up so it would feel like a summer day.

She kept the faucet on and didn’t turn around but reached one arm back to land on his bottom. “Nice clean butt, did you do any work today?”

When Sarah came in she retrieved her hand. She was modest that way, don’t let the children see.

“Mom, you missed the rainbow.”

Martha turned off the faucet, dried her hands.

“You’re in that stupid basement all day, why wouldn’t you want to see it?”

In the safety deposit section of the bank. He could never take it, but it didn’t seem to upset her.

Martha brushed them aside to cross the kitchen. “You’re all lucky I have bank hours and come home and make you supper.” She opened a cupboard and gestured like some game show bimbo presenting the grand prize washing machine. “See, plates, glasses. Will someone put them out please?”

Being a boss all day at work, it was kind of nice to have one at home, as long as it was something small like setting the table. He and Sarah went at it, then he sat down.

“Call Kim will you, Sarah.” Martha said from the stove. It wasn’t really a question.

“Do I have to?”

Martha was ready. “Do as you’re told.”

But Sarah didn’t have to because just then Adam streaked in to land on Jake’s lap, while Kim ambled to the doorway. Adam squealed even before Jake began to bounce him and watch the flash of brown eyes streaking up and down. “Little tyke grew since this morning.”

Kim, in a bathrobe, slid into her seat. “He loves his Bapa.”

If it weren’t for the little boy, that girl might not get out of bed. Well, he couldn’t blame her, almost done with cosmetology school and COVID hit. Still, she could contact the salons that were opening up again, see if they needed help.

“Kim worked on reception favors today, how about it honey, want to show Dad?”

“Maybe later, Mom.”

How those women could make such a deal of wedding stuff amazed him. But not Sarah. He turned to watch her.

She stood in the corner of the counter, arms folded. “You could be looking for an apartment instead of tying little ribbons around bags of mints that look like flowers but you bite into them and find out they’re soap.”

He put a napkin to his mouth to stifle a laugh. The two kids were so different. Kim a lot like her mom, Sarah, like herself. Maybe a little like him but much braver about speaking up.

Kim sat Adam in his highchair and tied on his bib. “Some people like weddings.” She gave him his juice cup and then daggered a look at Sarah. “You know I could find another bridesmaid.”

He could try to stop their squabble, but they were grown up now, let them figure it out on their own. Of course it didn’t help that Sarah had to give up her room to Kim and Adam when they left their apartment and moved back home. This little house was doing the best it could, but he’d be happy when they finally moved out, better be by the time of the wedding in a couple of months. At least Gabe had a job, working in construction and saving money living with his parents for now.

Sarah filled the teakettle with a blast from the faucet, then marched to the stove and banged it down on a burner. “It’s incredible you’re having a wedding in the middle of a pandemic. Do you know that’s the best way to spread COVID?”

Martha turned the heat on under the kettle. “Sarah, you know we’re going to be as safe as we can. Outdoors, masks, dancing six feet apart.”

“Oh yeah, that’s going to work. Everybody jerking around like zombies spilling wine all over their wedding finery. How are they not going to run into each other?” Sarah illustrated with a crazy dance that made it look like her limbs were about to fall off.

Jake didn’t hide his laughter this time. He loved the way Sarah zinged into everyone. Of course, he could be the target too.

Martha leaned back against the counter, arms folded. “Stop it Jake, you barely have to lift a finger, let us do this right. She’s got this wonderful guy who loves her and her kid, even though it’s not his. How often do you find a guy like that?”

True enough, he couldn’t do that.

For supper they had tuna surprise, which he actually liked, especially with potato chips on top. Then, for dessert Martha brought out these godawful cupcakes from the bakery that was going to make them for the wedding. They needed to decide on which ones. The yellow ones weren’t bad, but the frosting on the brown ones looked like the concrete he’d poured this afternoon.

It wasn’t till evening that Sarah cornered him about her great environmental ideas. While Kim put Adam to bed and Martha knitted in the living room in front of TV, he sat in an adjacent small room with a little bay window. Sarah pulled up a chair to sit next to him.

Before she had a chance to speak, he said, “Dear Sarah, I know what you’re going to say. You think I don’t know my own business? Yes it uses a lot of energy, yes it puts out CO2, but it’s a great building material that’s not expensive and it’s what our cities are made of.”

“I know Dad, but I’ve been hearing how we could do it better, especially for driveways and parking lots.”

“Which don’t let the water through so the rain washes off into the rivers and causes flooding.”

“Yes, and those slabs absorb a lot of heat, and we really don’t need that these days.”

He looked out the window where yellow streetlights cast cones of light on the street. “And we don’t need all that light either, and some of it goes right into the sky where the astronauts can see it.”

Sarah stood up and went to the window. “Don’t make fun of me, Dad. For one, I’m the next generation who’s going to have to live with all of this.”

“You’re right, we left a great mess for you all. But darling, it’s not going to be gloom and doom. This climate stuff, way overblown.”

“You said yourself you could barely find a day under ninety to pour this summer.”

“We live in the Midwest in case you’ve forgotten. What’s to say it won’t snow next July?”

Sarah clasped her hands and stretched her arms way over her head. She did that when she was frustrated. “I know you do a great job, Dad, best concrete man in town. That’s why you can be the one to make changes and rake in money at the same time.”

“I suppose you mean porous concrete.”

She looked at him like she used to on Christmas morning. “That would be huge. The water could go straight through it into the ground, not even get to the storm sewers.”

“Except that it’s more expensive and not as strong. Leave out the sand, leave out the smooth surface.”

“But you don’t need that strength for parking lots. And think of how nice it would be to our river.” Sarah in one move sat down, hooked one leg over the arm of her chair, and leaned forward. “So many people want to do something about the environment. You could say, here, do this. And grassed paving, have you seen that driveway on Oak Street?”

Jake put his elbows on his knees. “Sure, network of concrete, with little clover-shaped spaces for soil and grass. Pain in the neck to lay out by the way. And after the pour, you have to go and punch out each of those holes. I can’t see Daryl wanting to do that, and I certainly don’t want to.”

Jake picked up the paper, and Sarah went to the kitchen. But she came back with a couple of beers in hand. “I’m going to save homework till tomorrow,” she said as she handed him one. “Should have started out this way.”

She picked up a mag and they read side by side while they sipped their beers. She knew when to back off and still be friendly. Not everyone does.

Two days later when he left for work a strange whiteness filled the sky that wasn’t clouds but smoke from the fires out west, blown all the way to Iowa. He went to check on the parking lot they’d poured by the river, but when he got out of the truck, it felt like he’d come to the wrong place.

The river was much too wide, like a lake, and roiling along in muddy waves. It took him a moment. How could it have risen like that? They hadn’t had much rain. He jumped out and walked to the edge of this new river. There were other people looking too, at where the river had covered up the trail. Under the bridge nearby, the water lapped to within a few feet of its underside.

Someone pulled up in a car and got out. Daryl. The two of them looked at the place they’d poured two days ago. Daryl said, “You wouldn’t even know it was there.”

Jake threw a stick into the river. “That pour is too new, it’ll be ruined.” He’d never had a job flooded this soon after a pour but knew the water could wash out so much cement from the concrete it wouldn’t hold together.

Daryl shifted from foot to foot. “Good thing the job we’re doing now is up the hill.” Not much could rattle Daryl, which was great but maddening too.

“I can’t understand how this happened.”

Daryl adjusted his cap to shade his eyes. “Didn’t you hear? Rained eight inches last night up in Overbake.”

God, upstream ten miles. Sarah would tell him, lots of parking lots by the river up there with the new Allmart shopping center. Runoff. Of course plenty of that from farmer’s fields and feed lots too.

“I suppose we’ll have to do it all over again.” Daryl sounded like he was reciting a grocery list.

“We’ll look at it when the river goes down.”

What good would one of Sarah’s fancy parking lots have done? Not much. But a whole shopping center? A whole town?

They couldn’t do any work that day because the city closed the bridge to the Hauzher addition where the Byler’s job was, for fear it might give way. So, they spent the day cleaning equipment, organizing tools, and he caught up with bookwork. At the end of the day, he went back to the site of their parking lot pour. Water even higher than this morning.

And way upstream on the far bank something odd. It looked like someone had climbed a tree that overhung the river. That made no sense until he saw an empty kayak hung up in a tangle of tree trunks fifty yards downstream.

He called 911 and then raced over the bridge on foot since they weren’t allowed vehicles on that one either. It wasn’t just a matter of walking to the bank though, as the water had risen well over it all the way to the road. So, he went back to the bridge for the height that gave him a better view, but he could do nothing but squeeze the railing and will that poor sucker to keep hanging on. By the time the water rescue team arrived his knuckles were white and his head ached.

Two trucks with half a dozen guys in red and black gear and helmets arrived. They drove way upstream of the person needing help and launched a motorized raft anchored by long cables to their trucks, and with another cable to a point downstream where one of them could direct the boat toward the bank or away from it. Two guys in the raft. To save one person.

Over the next half hour, the raft bucked the raging waters like a ship on the stormy Atlantic, moving closer, then bashed away, then closer again until the cables held it in position right under the tree, but it jerked so much, how were they going to get the person down?

They did though, somehow, because when they began to pull the raft to shore, three people were in it. He let out a breath that he must have been holding. From his distance, he couldn’t see clearly, but maybe it was a woman the rescuers helped onto the shore. She flung herself to the ground, and it looked like she kissed it. And then he knew. That’s something Sarah would do. He ran the 500 yards like he was doing the 100-yard dash in high school.

She was sitting up now, with a blanket around her shoulders. He sat with her, cradled her in his arms. There was nothing he had to know right now. Let her come back.

Gabe, Kim’s guy, came over with cups of coffee. Really, he didn’t know he did this. Turned out he was one of the guys in the raft. “Hi Sis, didn’t know the middle of the river was one of your hangouts.”

Sarah took the cup with shaky hands. Her mouth couldn’t make words yet, but she smiled and socked him with her blue fist.

When she was able, they took her by truck to the ER where Jake watched them taking vitals.

“I’m so sorry, Dad.” She stood up from the bed, but the nurse made her lie down again.

Martha came bursting in. “Sarah, you OK? Oh my god, what on earth were you doing?”

Jake held her and put a finger in front of his lips. “We’ll figure it out later.”

It took a day or two before Sarah bounced back to her normal self. She and a couple of her friends had gone kayaking that morning before the waters rose and got caught in the flash flood. Why hadn’t they checked the weather? He could ask the same of himself for timing the concrete pour. The other two managed to make shore OK, but her kayak ran into a snag and capsized. Her friends lost their phones, and by the time they found help, the rescue operation was already underway.

Since she didn’t have a firstborn to give to the guys on the rescue team, she wanted to send them big baskets of fruit and cheese like they have at Christmas. Martha wanted to adopt them. Luckily, one was already joining the family soon. A son, Jake thought for the first time, that’d be something.

On the third day, Sarah sipped coffee in the sunshine by the window where she and Jake had talked before all this happened. When she took up the concrete reform idea again, he was so happy he told her, sure. He’d try anything to help prevent a flood like that again.

“But Dad, there’s so much more we need to do and we can too. Like with the fires out west. It’s all about climate change.”

Sitting next to her in the sun, he could think of nothing but how good it was to have her there, prodding him again.

“Sure honey, we’ll tackle that next.”

He said it in jest, and she knew it. But when he went out for a walk at sunset, he saw the red sun. He wanted to watch it set, but in the thin white of the sky, it disappeared before he had a chance to watch it vanish over the hills. Because of fires thousands of miles away.

Mary Lewis has an MFA in creative writing from Augsburg University, an MS in Ecology from the University of Minnesota, and she taught in the Biology Department of Luther College in Decorah, Iowa. She has published stories and essays in journals including Antigonish Review, Blue Lake Review, Book of Matches, Litbreak Magazine, North American Review, Persimmon Tree, RiverSedge, r.kv.r.y. quarterly, Sleet Magazine, The Spadina Literary Review, Superstition Review, Toasted Cheese, Wordrunner, and The Woven Tale Press. Forthcoming: Allium, Evening Street Review, Feels Blind Literary. FInd links to some other stories at her website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

VILLAINS by Samantha Neugebauer

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Samantha Neugebauer
VILLAINS

Back then it was impossible to do anything with my mother sleeping. In the evenings, we watched Prancer and ate turkey clubs; in the mornings, we drank coffee, then Bloody Marys. It was when I worked in the afternoons that she liked to sleep, so I schemed to thwart her efforts (although I did celebrate her condition in the abstract). I’d give her small tasks; send her out for a forever stamp, or to Dunkin’ Donuts, or to pick up her prescriptions, things like that. My bank account had become anorexic, so we kept our overhead low.

It was a transitional time for both of us. My mother, sixty, had recently gone on disability after an injury at her job. I, thirty, had moved back after working abroad for ten years, although no one was interested, so I tried not to think about it.

In general, my mother was more maudlin than me, while I was more calculated. What my mother saw as human nature, I saw as flaws in a design. I couldn’t help it, I’d gone to college. She was a size twelve and I, a sixteen, although we could wear each other’s clothes—sizes, like everything, had become so negotiable. Every day we missed my father, and my brother, and her parents, also Walter, my best friend from high school, and Byron and Flake, our family dogs (miniature Border Collies), and Agnes, her childhood cat, and less so, my father’s parents, her sister, the aunts and uncles, and the parakeets, not because we didn’t love them, but we had to draw the line somewhere.

We lived in Philadelphia, in the town where she’d grown up, the place I’d always considered “my grandmom’s house” and she’d considered “home.” The town had seen better days, but so had everything. The neighborhood, Burholme, was sliding off into the suburbs though we were technically still part of the city. On certain blocks, the downtown was visible, thumb-sized. The mail came every day, and the trash was collected once a week. The trash collectors were angels (everyone said it) because they made the boxes disappear. There was an epidemic of boxes—big, small, very little, boxes everywhere all of the time. Nobody liked it, but we all loved shopping online. The old neighbors criticized the young neighbors for not collapsing their boxes, while the young neighbors blamed the old neighbors for still being alive. The old said the young didn’t know how to do anything. The young said the old had never taught them anything. The cure, I insisted to anyone around, was that the companies themselves ought to recollect the boxes! Some neighbors agreed with me, others threw up their hands. I became a broken record. An old neighbor hissed that my idea wouldn’t change a damn thing. Still, my mother and I would run outside, and give the trash collectors Gatorades or water bottles whenever we heard their trucks.

Nothing changed. Nothing happened.

I never told anyone about us watching Prancer or our afternoon Bloody Marys or my mother’s long conversations with the dead while she slept. I didn’t want anyone thinking I was trying to be quirky or unique. That was the last thing I wanted, although there were years when I had wanted that more than anything; my years between eleven and twenty-nine to be exact, which I can’t help but know are the ages of Jesus’ lost years too.

Quirky is to surreal what anxiety is to leprosy. “I really hope,” my mother liked to say during or just after Prancer when we would have a cigarette on the back porch, “that people from the way future watch this movie, so they know we weren’t all airbrushed and self-interested, that we had double-chins and buck teeth and wondrous instincts.”

Instincts. I had one. That winter I had become obsessed with the villanelle. I’d convinced myself that if I could write one good villanelle, I could be happy forever. That was the work I was trying to do in the afternoons while my bank account dwindled and my mother rolled around on her bed.

I had the younger neighbors to thank for this obsession. They were rowdy and gloom-struck. They wore their clothes tightly, their weight like some stubborn disappointment. They congregated at the Red Rooster after work, smelling of Old Bay seasoning and Little Trees car fresheners. Many were married. Some had children. Cashiers, managers, and teachers, they were, yet they were not the same boys and girls I’d gone to elementary school with, only a similar variant.

From my grandmother’s house, the Red Rooster was a short, L-shaped walk, which I took almost every day as the sun set. I turned off my block to Dungan Road, a steep street, which began with nice trees and houses and descended into brick apartments and no trees at the bottom. At the very end was the Red Rooster on one side, in the middle of a small strip mall, and on the other side, a rather large and ostentatious old folks’ home, although the old folks were rarely seen since the mall’s grocery store had transformed into a Dollar Tree.

One Thursday in November, I sloped down Dungan Road, fighting my authoritarian streak as usual. I admired the houses, even the iron dragonflies staked in their bushes and the polyester garden flags, which said ‘welcome, we’re human, God bless’ in various manners. These weren’t the kind of doodads my mother and I liked, but I no longer wanted to mock them. Outside the apartments, drug doings and domestic disputes transpired. Heavy music pounded, and a man emptied the plastic trash from his car into the gutter. If only there were trees, I thought, if only the apartments were nice and tidy. If only, if only. I had all the answers. All the solutions. I liked to blame this streak on college, but it has something to do with the Gateway Hypothesis too, a concept introduced to me as a child during D.A.R.E. in my inner-city elementary classroom. If there were seemingly harmless Gateway Drugs to worse things, I supposed, there had to be seemingly innocuous Gateways to better things, too. Trees are to godliness what weed is to opioid euphoria, or something.

The sky turned a murderous pink, then the buildings shone redder and grayer. Behind me, the pines and oaks shivered. I loved the color, the whole feel of it. I thought of a line from somewhere—“What do I love when I love my God?”—it was a question I considered often though I’d been a follower of atheism for some time. I regularly switched around the words: What do I love when I love the sky and leaves? What do I love when I love my poem? My old dog? I had no idea. Was it just the thing or was it something within it? If it was something within it, I feared all I loved was nostalgia and myself and art that didn’t harm me.

Between the apartments and the old folks’ home was a grassy strait owned by PECO, the electric company, for giant pylons. The black pylons stretched endlessly around the city, turning slightly, like disciplined sentries heading to a cosmic battle, or illustrations of sentries in a children’s flipbook, except not a flipbook with a beginning and end, but one encircling as if on a metal ring. My mother and grandparents would always say it was lucky to live in front or behind land PECO owned because it would never be developed, but it was already developed in a way, of course. I wanted the pylons in my poem, only I didn’t know what for and where to put them; they seemed so useful and steady where they were already.

Inside, the Red Rooster was thick with attitude and history, the way I liked places to be. I couldn’t find places like this in the cool neighborhoods where my college peers from the suburbs moved after school. Those suburb kids never learned how to blend and invest. From what I’d witnessed, they kept to themselves and considered their transactions at restaurants and bodegas as their neighborly interactions. Also, I was bitter because I could never be them, and I could never be the old me again either. Nostalgia makes you old prematurely. One of my mother’s doctors told me that. I’m not sure if she was a real doctor, but I liked her a lot. The poem is to help me with my bitterness. So is the walking and drinking.

I sat down at a table across from the bar. There were a dozen adults, more or less, and two children. To borrow from Mark Twain and Lorrie Moore, as I had been taught to do, they were men with hammers and women with hairbrushes. One child was leaning over the bar stealing maraschino cherries from a foggy box. The other child napped in a sack on a man’s hunched back. Mona, the waitress, ferried over my dirty martini and my extra cup of olives. With her high cerulean eyeshadow, she came toward me like an eel in a dark cave. Mona was definitely in my poem.

I opened my notebook and sipped my cocktail. My notebook was filled with doodles and notes like: I am peasant stock and to peasant stock I shall return. The doodles were nothing special, mostly lines and houses forming my grandmother’s neighborhood and my childhood neighborhood. I tagged each house with the name of the family who lived there or had lived there. On other pages, I drew little squares representing desks in the various classrooms I’d learned inside; I tried to remember the names of people in those desks and mark them too. A neighborhood is to a classroom what a handbag is to a wallet. Only some people don’t carry handbags anymore.

Mona brought me my third martini. Game after game blared on the TV screens. The lights dimmed more, or so it seemed. It was too difficult to see my notebook. I put my notebook away and began to feel young. I wanted to be touched and noticed. In the dark back, a group of men had begun a game of pool. I sauntered over and introduced myself—Liz. “Well, Liz,” they said. Their names, like mine, had all belonged to saints first.

In the morning, I woke up in a rowhouse closer to the downtown than to my grandmother’s town. The man, a nice one, left me a note “to help myself” to a box of Cheerios. I took the box with me and Ubered home. My mother didn’t ask too many questions, yet she did remind me twice how she hated waking up alone. It rained for hours, then it was too hot for a jacket. Our day, otherwise, was the same.

Why the villanelle? It started after I repatriated. In my online dictionary, I’d gone to look for the Italian word for peasant, and an etymological rabbit hole revealed itself to me. Villano and villana were the old words for peasant and peasantess. In time, the word inspired the English word villain because then, like now, the people who lived outside of the city centers (the downtowns), the rough people without the right clothing, manners, and speech were the villains. The first villanelles were their peasant songs.

I’m not sure any of this is true, but I’m choosing to believe it. Belief is to knowledge what cake is to torta. If I checked my online bank account before working on my poem, I couldn’t work on my poem at all. I would get lost in worries of how the abroad money was running out, how I would need to get a job soon, how in three months I wouldn’t have enough to pay my student loan bill.

The next few evenings, my mother fell asleep during Prancer. I continued to watch it alone while my mother laughed and chattered. I couldn’t make out the words, but they sounded like happy ones.

The following night at the Red Rooster, I found myself telling Mona about the villanelle. I told her how the old peasant songs weren’t very structured. The rhymey-ness and formalness came later as the educated French and English and Americans took the song over. The original songs were longer, messier, more improvised. I don’t care about meter or rhyme, I told her. I wanted the five stanzas and the closing quatrain. I wanted to capture the pastoral, or what was left of it. I wanted the song to be small, like me, so that if anyone ever read it, they would know that I knew what I was. That even though I’d gotten too big for my britches, I’d found my way back. “That’s great hon,” Mona said, “that’s real great.”

Most of all, I was interested in the repeated refrain. I wanted to create a refrain that would extract more meaning each time it reappeared, creating a theme that built in intensity.

“Hey,” a bearded man said as he slid over and sat down across from me at my table. “I’m Manuel.” He was handsome, younger than me, or he looked like it.

“Liz.”

“Elizabeth, I overheard what you were saying.”

“Yeah?” I was interested.

“And I got to tell you, you’re wrong. Your bitches are shredded.” He drank from my glass. “Your britches.”

I danced my fingers on my notebook.

“Listen,” he said. “I know because I know.”

I had a fantasy of him and me together.

“Another!” I called to Mona, then to him, “You listen…” I lost my train of thought.

“I had a professor once tell me that repetition in verse works best when what’s repeated isn’t quite the thing repeated,” he said.

“I can do that.”

“Is this doing that?”

I had no answer.

“Let me show you something.” His eyes glinted like the whiskey bottles behind the bar.

“Please,” I said, rolling my shoulder.

“Not like that.” He sighed. He held up his hand. “I’m married.”

“Oh.”

We paid our tabs and walked across the lamplit street and into the PECO strait. “I’ve never walked through here,” I said. The grass fronds were spiky and sharp. Manuel was wearing a maroon sweatshirt and black joggers that were tight around his calves. My legs were exposed and cold. I wished I had on his joggers. “Humans are getting to a smarter space,” he was saying. “We can appreciate the acausal now even if we don’t like it…” Crazy is to drunk as chongkukjang is to legumes. I’d worked awhile in Japan and sometimes I vacationed in Korea.

Fermented drunkenness. “You can’t talk yourself up into somewhere, and you can’t talk yourself down into nowhere either…” Manuel continued explaining.

“Listen,” I said finally, “I’m sick of new wisdom, and also old ideas.”

“Okay. Come on,” he said. He opened a back door to the old folks’ home, and I followed him inside. “I work here.”

Maybe, I thought, he’ll let me work here too. I was beginning to sober. “How’s your job security?” I asked. “Is it a good place to work?”

“They’re not hiring,” he said. “I’m sorry.”

“I have a job.”

“Alright.”

“But maybe there are sometimes volunteering opportunities?” College career websites always advised volunteering as the train to opportunity.

“Possibly,” Manuel said.

We entered the elevator. It had a gold handrail on every side. There was hay all over the floor. “What’s with the hay?”

“I been meaning to pick that up.” He reached down and began collecting the hay, and I followed suit until the elevator stopped with a jolt. In the hallway, the lights were low. A dank and fertile smell suffused the corridor.

“I’m pivoting to animals,” Manuel said. He took the hay from my hands and bunched it with that in his own hand. “Look here,” he said, and I followed him to a door with a window on it. I looked inside, and on a queen mattress, I saw a pair of foxes curled in bed together.

“What the hell…”

“Shh…” he said.

I ran to each window, checking the occupants: bats, dogs, cats, deer, coyotes, squirrels, moles, rabbits, raccoons, voles, egrets, and wolverines. “Where are the people?”

“I’ve got them all on the bottom floor.”

“And they let you do this?”

“Nobody let me. I took over.”

“I can’t believe this.”

“Follow me,” he said, and I followed him down a flight of steps to the next floor. These rooms had bars on their doors. “Meet Bear,” he said, leading me to the bear’s room. It was an American black bear. I sobered. “Where is Bear’s partner?”

“I could only save one at a time.” He nodded at me as if he trusted that I was understanding him. “My next paycheck, we got to buy the girls, my daughters, new winter coats, then I’ll go get Bear’s partner.”

I clasped my hands around the bars. The bed had buckled and Bear was sleeping on it. His coat was thick and lovely, like nothing I’d ever imagined. He snored too, like my father.

“I’ve got otters in the pool in the exercise therapy room.”

“I see.” I turned to him.

“Do you?”

“How has no one noticed?” I asked.

“No one pays attention to old people.”

“You know I did notice they weren’t around so much…”

“Don’t get defensive.”

“Okay.”

“Aren’t they squished all on one floor?”

“They like it. They don’t mind. They believe in the project.”

“Really?”

“Well, some of them don’t understand it, but they don’t understand much anymore, so it’s no better or worse for them.”

“My mind hurts,” I said.

He smiled widely. “That’s the thing, isn’t it? My mind doesn’t hurt anymore.”

“Aren’t you worried you’ll get caught?”

“Sure, sometimes. I’m human.”

I wondered if I had entered a dreamworld like my mother, if my intellect had forced my senses to infuse people and events from the past with things from the present. Was I talking to Noah? Or was it something else, something new?

“Would you like to see the otters?” Manuel asked me.

I imagined the otters, slippery and playful. “Yes,” I said, letting go of Bear’s bars. It was true. I wanted to see the otters. I wanted Manuel to show me a new way, even if it felt a little unreal and somewhat repetitive.

Samantha Neugebauer is a lecturer at Johns Hopkins University, a senior editor for Painted Bride Quarterly, and a podcaster for Slush Pile. She is also a 2022-23 D.C. Arts Fellow with Day Eight through which she is writing for the Washington Independent Review of Books. At the moment, she lives in Baltimore with her husband, their two cats, and books, etc. Visit her website.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

RANDOM PRECISION by Caleb Murray

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RANDOM PRECISION by Caleb Murray

Caleb Murray
RANDOM PRECISION

I woke up in the morning with a hemorrhage in my brain that made me think that life is some kind of nightmare even though, logically, such a state of affairs would be irrelevant to life—after all, if life is a dream, or if there is no such thing as reality (there is and there isn’t, as it were), it would make no difference to how we think about practical matters. Through the kitchen window I saw my neighbor, a heavy woman with dark hair, standing in the road with a black blob in one hand and a stick in the other. The stick opened into a wide, flat scoop against the asphalt. It was a snow shovel. The black thing seemed to be a small duffel bag. She tried to scoop up some unresponsive, wiry lump in the road. Her face was wet, and it took me a long time to understand what was happening. She had to hold the thing with one hand while pushing the shovel with the other. She lifted the shovel with both hands, although it couldn’t have weighed more than ten or fifteen pounds, because then she held it in her armpit while she unfurled the trash bag with her free hand. Then she dropped it in the bag. It was a trash bag. She wiped her face with her forearm and went inside.

The spot where the cat had been looked like an oil stain. I stood at the window and looked at the spot for a while. In my head it grew—from a mirage of desert oil to a psycho-sexual inkblot to a monster that tried to strangle me, the same thing I fabricated for Yang the first time I met him—while it stayed the same in the road.

The coffee in the pot was done. It smelled like tires. I’ve always enjoyed the smell of tires. As a child, I would lie in the driveway, next to the car, looking at the sky, and my father would say, “Craig, what’re you doin’ on the concrete?” Later, I would be so up-ended I couldn’t drive, and I would lie there, before the stars, answering to all my childhood concepts and beliefs, no matter how remote—whether infinity was a number, whether my mind was a thing able to be controlled, how far away something has to be from earth until we cannot see it anymore—as if the four-foot tall version of myself were there, standing before me, asking me questions. I used to think often about my childhood. The reason I think I don’t as much anymore is because it used to be so much more immediate, more of a living memory, and now my entire childhood is like a stack of cassettes I’m trying to get to play on the screen of my phone. How stunning, how immediate and visceral it is that I can watch a video of Charles Mingus showing off his shotgun on a phone the size of my palm! Culture is so self-aware it no longer has imagination. All I think anyone would say, looking at me now, would be, “Craig, you’re sitting there, all relaxed-like, drinking coffee out of your blue abstract mug, thinking too much about yourself. Why don’t you tell us a story?”

Why don’t you go to hell? I turned around, but no one was there, and I couldn’t remember if I’d yelled those words or just imagined myself yelling them. I stood up and poured myself another cup. The porcelain cow clock on my kitchen counter read 15:15. The Beaujolais was on top of the fridge. I held it in my hand, passed it to the other, looked to the ceiling, and set it down. Early afternoon was too early and, after all, I was not trying to be an alcoholic.

My phone rang. It was on the coffee table in the other room. I didn’t recognize the number or area code.

“Hello, is this Craig Perkins?”

“Yes. May I ask who this is?”

“Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric calling to inform you that, unless you pay your bill from the last three months by the end of the week, we will be shutting off your power to your residence.”

My power to my residence? What was this idiot trying to say? “I’ve paid that. I’ve been paying you people online for months and haven’t heard a single word until now.”

“Okay, well, let’s see if we can’t find some information on you, Mr. Perkins.”

Mr. Perkins.

“It looks like you set up online bill pay with us back in November. Is that correct?”

“November? Yes, it was November.”

“Okay, sir, let’s just see.” I could hear her tongue and lips smacking together and pulling apart. “Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Sure, but, what’s your name again, please?”

“My name is Alyssa.”

“I’m Craig.”

“Okay, Craig. Hold on a sec, okay?”

“Okay.”

I imagined her, the way her voice reached out to me, her melancholy eyes pleading up to me, her plastic-blonde hair spread over her hands and shoulders. I reached for my blue coffee mug and touched the bottle of wine—still on the phone, I walked the Beaujolais to the kitchen and found my coffee on the counter. If this were a dream, I thought, then how would I react to such sleight of mind? Would I try to run but be stuck, as if in water? Or would someone appear, one of my friends with another’s face, or would I start to have sex, dirty, mean sex, with some childhood friend even though I knew I was back together with Cara? I would never get back together with Cara, that addict bitch, and therefore I would know it was a dream, but assuming that I wouldn’t and didn’t—would it be any different? I can’t think so. It would make no difference to how I lived my life and no difference to how I thought about practical matters. My dilemma, the wine on the table, was much more immediate, a thing in fact physical and real, and thus not even analogous to a dream. My mind had slighted me. That was all.

“Okay, Craig? Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

What?

“Craig?”

“What?”

“Mr. Perkins, our records show that we have received no payments for the past three months.” She was silent.

“What does that mean?” I said.

She said, clearing her throat, “Well, sir, it means either there is not enough funds in your account to withdraw—”

“There are funds, there’s funds there, that’s not the problem.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins, okay. The other option is that we are unable to withdraw funds from your account.”

“Why?”

“Why is that an option or why would that be?”

“Why would that be? Why would that even be an option?”

“Excuse me, are you…”

“What other options are there?” I was pacing. “Someone is controlling my account and taking my funds? Is this a case of identity theft?”

“Mr. Perkins, perhaps I should transfer you to my supervisor…”

“Because if my identity has been stolen, I’m gonna need all those funds I paid you back.”

“I cannot speak to that,” the girl said. “If your identity has been stolen, you’re going to need to contact your bank.”

“I’ve been sending my funds to you, not to my bank.”

“Let me transfer you to my manager, Craig, okay?”

“Because I’m not gonna repay all those payments.”

“Okay, Mr. Perkins? Okay, here you go.” She pressed a button, and I heard a ring.

I went to the kitchen, pulled the cork out of the wine, poured myself a glass and drank it. I wished I had strawberries and brie. Maybe dark chocolate, and grapes and dried figs.

Click. A male, faintly Hispanic voice said, “Hello, this is Todd Phillips. How can I help you?”

“I assume my employee told you that my identity might be stolen?”

“Your who?”

My whom. “Your employee. Lisa or Susanna or whatever.”

“I believe you spoke with Alyssa.”

“Alyssa. That’s her name. I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry,” Todd said.

“I’m not sorry. I’m just trying to remember.”

“Why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

“What?”

“How can I help you, sir?”

“Are you a machine?”

“Excuse me?”

“Who are you?” I screamed. Then I hung up.

I pressed play on the stereo, and some acoustic bass banged through the surface of the speakers in an alien rhythm, soon followed by piano and drums that, had I not recognized, however belatedly, Sir Duke, would have made no sense to me. My shoulders and knees kicked at unseen targets as I made my way across the room. I uncorked the bottle to let it breathe even though it was a few days old and thus nearly vinegar. All that remained in the fridge were green grapes and cheddar cheese, which I scarfed with my wine. The milk, bread, and eggs would wait for the morning—and the Samson and Delilah Seasonal IPA for the following evening. It was unbelievable that a racial enigma and Human ATM such as Mr. Todd Phillips would ask me what my problem was. If he knew what it was like to be a real human being, he wouldn’t ask so many questions. I laughed, and with my head back, spine arched, and arms raised like a goblin, I poured the rest of the wine from the glass into my mouth. An awkward splash in my throat made me cough, and even as I tried to breathe, even on my knees, I could only choke and cough, and I spit a little bit of red on the carpet. I was sweating by the time I finished and could breathe again. The stereo was playing something I couldn’t understand—random drums, then piano parts, back and forth, while the bass played continually though not, apparently, the same song the other two were playing; if understanding and “appreciating” music like this is what studying music or what being a clinical musician is all about, then I would rather be self-taught, well-versed but nonacademic. I turned it off. I stumbled past the table until I could sit on the couch. I imagined Yang saying, “You’re so drunk you can’t stand up.”

Such a deep interpretation of my current state of mind, you hack! No wonder you aren’t getting any more payments.

I ran a bath and opened the IPA. Next thing I remember I woke up on the couch with all the lights on, in my underwear, while in the bathroom the bathtub was half-full of cold water. An unopened bottle of beer lay flat under the water next to the bar of soap.

◊

The pattern on the pillow at my feet ebbed and pulsed so that everything around it was flooded with a golden light that mashed everything out of my vision. I kept hearing the phone ring, but when I turned my head it stopped. This happened a few times. I was lying on the couch, trying to read some propaganda assigned to me, but the patterns kept changing, like constellations, though flickering and rearranging out of impulse, not convention. My eyelids were difficult to hold open—when I was a child I didn’t know how to describe blurry vision, so I said, “Just make everything look like dots,” and then I would cross my eyes, slowly at first, then quicker and more relaxed while dropping my eyelids.

I was awake. An intruder was in my apartment. Maybe he’d kicked in the grate while I was asleep and had slid between the sidewalk and the windowsill. I jumped and looked behind the couch. He was gone already. A few blueberries remained in my refrigerator, the “fridge-berries,” those trite little monsters with inflamed eyes like vaginas that popped and tasted like dirt, blood, and sugar between the teeth and on the tongue. As I ate them, the intruder kept jumping back into my apartment, behind my couch, and even as I turned and beheld the room empty I would hear him say something, some inaudible and wordless version of, “Crab-leg, I am here in your room whether you like it or not.” I tossed my hands in the air and walked to the stereo. I pushed play, and some clunky piano music came on that I remembered liking. Someone was making goat noises in the background along with the piano solo. The rhythm kept stopping, suspending a chord in the air as a delirious, audible self-portrait. Every time I looked back a different song was playing. When I looked up, the album was over and the sun was going down on mother earth. Before long her great monolithic eye closed in ecstasy and her billions of synapses flickered into view. Their intimate, unconscious connections—Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion—were barely apparent and profoundly beautiful. An entire LP had passed while I mouthed the words, “delirious, audible self-portrait,” and the lights of Polaris, Betelgeuse, and Sirius were all there. I lay behind the couch, but no one showed up. If I moved he would be there again, so I stayed. The phone rang, but when I turned my head it stopped. Otherwise the sky was still and the room was peaceful.

I awoke in bed with all of my clothes off. The sheets gently scraped my crotch. I went to the kitchen for orange juice and decided to put wine in it because I didn’t have a job. Through the kitchen window, I saw a garbage truck lifting my neighbors’ industrial-size dumpster—I watched for a cat-shaped trash bag in the load but saw nothing. If I owned a cat, I would never let it outside to die in the street.

The garbage truck drove away in the fog. It was a little after 5:30. The second glass of red wine and o.j. was more difficult to finish because I kept imagining myself in the street in the earliest hour of the morning, crying, scooping my dead cat up in a snow shovel that I kept in a corner of the garage.

The phone rattled against the glass table. I imagined alarms going off, trying to scare my subconscious away, flashing its lights at me as if I had just walked through an emergency door. If I had known who was calling, I might not have answered—although, more accurately, if I had known what she had wanted, I wouldn’t have answered because I might have assumed she wanted something else—had I only known who was calling.

I answered the phone.

“Hello. Mr. Craig Perkins?”

“No.”

“I’m sorry. Is Mr. Perkins available?”

“Yes. I think so.” I put the phone against my chest. Somebody was singing some version of Gershwin’s “Summertime” on the stereo, but that’s all I remember. “Hold on a sec.” I opened the front door, went outside, looked at the bug-eyed puppy making its way toward me on the sidewalk, walked around the block, through the door, into my apartment, and said to the phone, “This is Craig Perkins.”

I overheard her saying something like, “Na, he’s not there,” to someone. After a while she said, “Mr. Perkins, this is Alyssa from Pacific Gas and Electric, calling to inform you—”

“Wait,” I said, closing the door. I poured myself a cup of wine and sat on the couch. “What is it?”

She cleared her throat. “I’m calling to inform you that you’re three payments past due. Therefore we will have no choice but to shut off your power if you fail to take action within one week.”

When she finished the statement, I could feel my heartbeat in my fingertips. I exhaled and was static until I reminded myself to inhale; then I couldn’t find a rhythm natural enough to become involuntary, so I had to breathe as if manually controlling my lungs, and the longer I consciously controlled my breathing the more aware of it I became until I imagined I could never forget the breathing process and let it become unconscious—perhaps, after enough time, my lungs would no longer work involuntarily—and I would be stuck this way for the rest of my life.

“Didn’t I pay that already?”

“According to our records,” she said against some moist background noise, “you set up online bill pay in November, and yet you haven’t paid the funds in three months.” It sounded like she was chewing.

“Three months?”

“Yes. Our computer wasn’t able to pull your funds. They were not available for them.”

What in God’s name was this girl babbling about?

“Are you there, Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.” Again with the Mister Perkins.

“If you think there’s been a mistake, you might want to contact your bank regarding your account.”

“You mean if my identity has been stolen?”

“Exactly.” Bingo. “Or something else.”

I had her. “Who are you?”

“My name is Alyssa. I’m with Pacific Gas and Electric—”

“No,” I said, scanning the list of last names that scrolled in my head: Alyssa Mubarek, Harquist, Aronson, Moehler, Krugher, Jarvis. “Do you know me?”

“Mr. Perkins, I—”

“Let me speak to your supervisor.”

“But I—”

“Put him on.”

“I’ll put her on,” she said quickly.

I heard a click and then realized my bathwater was still running. I turned the water off, opened a can of beer, and undressed. The phone, on a towel on the floor, was set to speakerphone. When I awoke, however, the bath was a quarter full, the water lukewarm, and my beer can was floating at my feet.

◊

The neighbor scooped up the dead animal carcass with a snow shovel in the road in the afternoon. I watched her while drinking a soda. I wiped my face. Underneath the road’s surface people were scooping up our debris. The floor sank, the walls lifted, and as a person was scooping a pile of trash another was pointing and screaming, “Move faster! Work harder!” The man kept scooping, without wiping the sweat from his eyes, until his back was unable to stretch taut, whereupon he was thrown into the furnace by his coworkers, and his sizzling flesh smelled like steak, and his screams, loud at first, were subdued and drained. I beheld this kind of thing beneath the ground’s surface and felt like a tourist—this ancient, bizarre, impossibly magical place, this cathedral, this mausoleum—this underground tradition, the disappearing act. I watched the man’s flesh peel from his fingers until the gleaming light revealed bones like talons. When I blinked, the fire’s negative was suspended in directionless, spaceless black. Horseshoed by a series of fire pits in massive asymmetric gourds, packed in between hundreds of workers sweating into their shoes, without a view of the street or the walls that rescinded from my house, I was lost. A man screamed from his gut, then another from his nerves and tongue. A woman herded children behind me. They were gone before I could see them. I sat in the lounge chair, the big brown recliner, and watched the parade—Dmitri Shostakovich, Thelonious Monk, Syd Barret all walking in procession, angrily, chained together, their hands oily and black and spider-webbed. I shook my face of it.

I pulled the telephone from the recliner’s furry armpit and dialed the number for Pacific Gas and Electric.

“Hello?” a female receptionist answered.

“May I speak with Alyssa Eliot please?”

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling to inform you that I think my identity has been stolen. My bank contacted me the day before yesterday and said I’ve been withdrawing payments for electric bills that have not been delivered to the electric company. Now, I’m confused. Should I take action to see that my bank pays what I owe, or are you responsible?”

“Let me transfer you to my supervisor.”

“No,” I said, watching as snow began to fall through the windows—the snowflakes looked like falling coals against the sooty orange background. “I want to speak with you.”

“Me?” she said. “Why me?”

“Because you know who I am.”

“Who are you?”

“Craig Perkins.”

“Mr. Perkins?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know you.”

“Crab-leg.”

“I still don’t know you.”

I laughed, and another man threw himself in the furnace.

“How do I know you?” she said.

A piece of fingernail broke off between her teeth, and though it may have been painless, I imagined her mouth full of blood, her finger curling under enormous pressure, blood dripping on the keyboard.

The intruder was back in my apartment, this time in one of the back rooms where he couldn’t be seen, and he was screaming through the vents so that his voice resonated throughout like brass, “Crab-leg, I’m here to eat your soul.”

Only he would say such an impossible thing.

Thus I don’t know why she said, “What are you talking about?”

“Um…”

“I’m here to eat hers, too.”

“Craig, you’re scaring me.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, my hands waving in the air like swords—if she were there in the room with me I could have explained myself better.

“You need to stop calling here.”

“Just give me your home phone number, and I’ll call you there. I promise I’ll stop calling you at work.”

“That’s not possible.”

“Are you still there?”

The snow had put out all the fires. All four sides were glowing so that my skull squeezed against my brain and I could feel my heartbeat in my temples. I decided to walk to the store to buy more red wine and cheese and perhaps some dark chocolate. I grabbed my jacket and scarf. In the mirror I looked like I could be a legal aide or a medical intern. I took the phone off the couch—

“Are you still there?”

The phone’s screen was black. I set it on the end table by the couch, zipped up my jacket, and left my apartment. The first person on the street likely worked for an advertising company, but the second person—dumpster-snatched jacket, untrimmed beard, wool cap, milkshake eyes—was a junkie. I walked to the store with my hands in my pockets, filed alongside my money clip, watch, and keys. The faces I saw were unreadable, but I hadn’t come here to analyze humanity—even when we do, it doesn’t amount to anything substantial because we got it wrong in the first place: we are never not human, we are never not real, and therefore certain analyses are impossible. I watched an old woman, wrapped in curlers, a robe, flip flops, and bracelets, as she pushed a cart carrying several frozen dinners, a bottle of lotion, a box of wine, and a can opener. She paused at a couple different aisles before going down the frozen foods and dairy aisle once again. She checked an entire row of milk for expiration dates before picking one half-gallon carton and putting it in her cart. A man walked past the aisle, but I didn’t realize who it was until he was out of view. The woman began to walk toward me. I didn’t know what to do. I stood still and tried not to look at her, but she kept staring at me and wouldn’t look away. She had dark eyebrows that almost touched above her nose. She wore a retainer where saliva had pooled and would flap against the roof of her mouth as she breathed. The underwear under her sweatpants was loose-fitting, with large elastic bands on the edges. Her eyes darted around an awful lot for someone with not much going on upstairs.

Caleb Murray is from Montana and currently lives in Western Massachusetts. His fiction has appeared in Cleaver Magazine, Fiction Southeast, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, and Garfield Lake Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER by Kelly Pedro

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER by Kelly Pedro

Kelly Pedro
THE BEST THING YOU REMEMBER

The baby shower was on a Sunday, a day that was supposed to be about peace and rest, but Connie felt anything but peaceful or restful. Her hips still ached from a terrible night’s sleep. The body pillow she draped her leg over at night was no use. And now she waddled around a conference room in the Four Seasons Hotel in Yorkville like a rusty can opener, stilted and slow, but still getting the job done. The job today was to be sweet and smiling, grateful and, mostly, surprised, even though her mother told her weeks ago she was planning Connie a baby shower.

Natalia picked the Four Seasons against Connie’s wishes. With its plush carpet the color of steamed milk, cherry wood furniture, and a brocade couch with ornate carvings, the conference room was meant for high-powered meetings and not the sticky hands of her cousin Louisa’s son or the full red wine glass a tipsy Louisa was now holding. Connie had wanted something small and simple, something at the little Portuguese café her parents owned with their family friend Luis, or the Portuguese club or even her own condo.

“Bah,” Natalia had said. “If we do it at your place, everyone will know you know. Where’s the fun in that?”

Connie knew the day was not about fun, it was about her mother showing off. Her parents had always felt the weight of immigrant responsibility—Connie and her sisters never had dirt under their nails, never tangles in their hair, never a cavity to find at the dentist, her parents with cars never more than five years old. This sheen of perfection that coated their lives.

Louisa, who married money last year, had offered to pay for the location as Connie’s baby shower gift. And Natalia had picked the Four Seasons, promising Connie it would still be small and intimate. Just their family. Just their closest friends. But when Connie walked in an hour ago, feigning surprise that she thought she was just meeting her mother and sisters for brunch, she knew her version of simple and her mother’s lived on opposite poles.

A foldable wall that separated two conference rooms had been pushed back, and the two blended rooms were the size of a small hall. Natalia had arranged a brocade couch in the center of the room where Connie would later open gifts. A table, covered in a white tablecloth and small bouquets of white lilies in glass vases, held tiny gold-trimmed china plates of macarons and smoked salmon sandwiches, the sight and scent of which made Connie gag. Lately, all fish smelled rotten, like carcasses that had been left floating on the surface of the ocean for days before being skimmed off. Connie had told her mother she couldn’t handle fish during her pregnancy. Why had her mother made smoked salmon sandwiches a menu item? There were also tiny quiches, bacon-wrapped scallops, and small plates of potato pavé with thin slices of rare steak. Tiny elegance that Connie struggled to hold with her swollen hands. Absent, Connie noticed, was the Portuguese food she had dreamt last night would fill the table. She had taken such care to write out a menu for her mother. Where were the mini strawberry shortcakes she loved? The pasteis de nata, the São Jorge cheese, the grilled chourico, the creamy shrimp rissoles? Or Luis’ piri piri chicken—the hotter the better she had written and underlined twice?

She found her mother in the crowd and gently pulled her close. “Where’s the food I wanted?” Connie whispered.

“What, you don’t like this?” Natalia asked, her mouth drooping toward the loose skin around her neck. “Louisa said the hotel would cater, and they said this was what all the new mothers had at their baby showers.”

“I don’t care what all the other new mothers have,” Connie hissed. “I’ve been craving Portuguese food.”

Natalia stepped back and tilted her head, looking Connie over. “You can have that stuff any time,” she said. She took a plate off the table. “Here, have a smoked salmon sandwich.”

Connie pressed her hand to her mouth and turned away. She wondered why she even bothered talking to her mother these days. She was like a one-way radio, constantly blaring noise.

She turned back to her mother, defiant. “I’ll pick up some chicken on my way home then.”

“The café isn’t open today. Inspectors are going through it,” Natalia said.

“Inspectors? What for?” Connie asked.

“Didn’t you hear? Louisa bought the place. She’s taking over next month.”

Connie looked over at her cousin who was holding her wine glass out to the bartender for a refill. They were supposed to have bought the place together, but Connie’s husband Jeremy didn’t want to take the risk with a new baby on the way. Connie didn’t begrudge Louisa for going ahead without her, she just never thought Louisa would. When she was younger, Connie always imagined taking over the café. When her father spent long hours working at the place, Connie would beg her mother to drop her off so she could spend the night helping her father place the dough for the Portuguese buns in clay bowls so they’d be ready for the oven in the morning, covering each with a warm cloth like she was tucking in one of her dolls. She sighed. Smile, be sweet, be grateful, act surprised, she reminded herself.

“What is that?” Natalia asked, tilting one ear to the room.

Connie could hear people playing musical instruments in the next room, the notes falling all over each other with no discernible harmony.

“It’s mus—” Connie started to say.

“Music? That’s not music, that’s noise,” Natalia said. She hurried over to Louisa, and a few seconds later, Louisa left the hall, and soon after that, the music stopped.

Connie watched as her mother frowned at her from across the room. Soon, Natalia was standing next to Connie again, her breath hot in her ear. “Connie, you didn’t iron your dress.”

“I steamed it this morning,” Connie said, pulling at her neck where the sheer fabric of the high-collared dress made her feel like she was suffocating.

“Steam?” Natalia shook her head. “Not good. You need the weight of the iron to straighten everything out. Then you won’t have,” her mother fingered the wrinkled edges of Connie’s sleeves, “this.”

Connie pulled her arm away and headed for the bar. Her mother was too much on any day, let alone today when Connie’s body strained with pregnancy, with a blood volume that was doubled, she thought as she placed a swollen hand on the edge of the bar to steady herself.

“Can I get a club soda with ice in a wine glass please?” she asked the bartender.

Natalia approached, motioned to the bartender for a bottle of red wine. “You can have this,” Natalia said, pouring wine into Connie’s glass, and Connie watched as the club soda, turning red, frothed and bubbled. She quickly set the glass down and looked around the room.

Natalia shook her head and sighed. “When I was pregnant with you, your father mixed a raw egg and some red wine in a cup for me every day. And see? You’re fine,” she said, waving an arm over Connie.

And that’s why I’m never asking her for parenting advice, Connie thought, turning her head, before she faced her mother again and smiled sweetly. “How comforting,” she said.

Connie searched the room for her cousin. Maybe Louisa would keep the café open or at the very least share the piri piri chicken recipe with her. But before she could spot Louisa, her aunt Edith sauntered toward her. She placed both hands on Connie’s belly and squeezed slightly but enough that Connie felt her bladder strain under the pressure.

“Oh, it looks like a boy. Definitely another boy in the family!” Edith said.

“Bah,” Natalia said. “Look how low she’s carrying. I carried like that. It’s a girl.”

Her aunt waved her hand over her mother’s face, then turned to her. “What do you think, Connie?”

Connie, standing between her mother and aunt, clasped her hands to her belly. “As long as it’s healthy, we don’t care if it’s a boy or a girl.”

But ever since she discovered she was pregnant, Connie had been secretly hoping for a girl. Of course, she wanted a healthy baby first. Of course, she told everyone she didn’t care what she had, that she and Jeremy were excited for the surprise of their firstborn child. But in bed before turning out the light, while Jeremy snored softly next to her, Connie would place her hands on her burgeoning belly and whisper, “C’mon baby, be a girl.”

She had had enough of boys for now. Louisa’s son, Carlos, was a raucous nose-picking child who constantly swept things off Connie’s coffee table when they visited the condo—the books and architectural magazines Connie had delicately fanned across the glass table, the aloe vera plant she had positioned so it caught the golden beam of morning light that peeked through her window. When Carlos scratched himself—because he was always scratching himself—Louisa would pick off part of the aloe vera plant and rub the oozing liquid on his skin. Connie was annoyed at how her cousin felt entitled to her things. But she would just smile and ask, “Don’t you want some Polysporin instead?”

Now that she was pregnant, Connie wanted a daughter she could teach to be firm and outspoken, proud of who she was and where she came from, confident and secure—all the things Connie felt she wasn’t. But she wasn’t sure how she’d manage that with her mother hanging over her, pushing Connie to do things her way, and when Connie resisted, doing it her way anyway. Like this baby shower. She had plans to be her own kind of parent, much different from Natalia. She was taking her full maternity leave even though her mother had already bragged to her friends how Connie was too important at work to take a full year off. Natalia acted like Connie was constantly on some kind of stealth mission instead of someone who worked at a bank.

Standing on the brocade couch, Louisa wolf-whistled and gathered everyone for a game. Every night as Connie settled in to watch House or Rescue Me or Lost or Desperate Housewives, the titles like a prime-time lineup of her life, Louisa called and kept her on the phone for hours, asking about her parenting style, parenting goals, and the do’s and don’ts Connie would follow as a first-time mother. Then Louisa pressed Connie to hand the phone to Jeremy to answer the same questions long after Connie had missed the end of the House episode where a woman’s aching wrist was really a blocked artery and she was rushed into surgery.

“Did she survive?” she asked Jeremy later that night when they were already in bed and snapping off the lights.

He shrugged. “No idea.”

Now, in the conference room with its wainscoted walls, Louisa carried a cardboard box plastered with robin’s egg blue and dusty rose question marks and explained how she had been interviewing Connie and Jeremy all week and the box contained the results of those interviews.

“Everyone has to guess who said what,” Louisa said, setting the box down and picking out a piece of folded paper.

“When you’re at the end of your rope, tie a knot and hang on,” Louisa read. “Connie or Jeremy?”

“Has to be Connie. It sounds like something she read in a book,” Natalia said quickly, placing her hand on Connie’s shoulder and squeezing gently. She was standing next to Connie like a bollard, as if ready to protect her from some impending impact.

“Not a book,” said a woman Jeremy’s mother had earlier introduced to Connie as her cousin, whose name Connie had now forgotten. “Our mother always said that.” The woman’s glasses were slung low across the bridge of her nose so that she looked like a teacher scolding Natalia for not paying attention in class. “That has to be Jeremy,” she said.

Natalia frowned, and Connie wondered whether her mother was searching her own mind for similarly convincing evidence. Natalia looked up at the woman and smiled deferentially the way Connie had seen her do so many times before with English-speaking Canadians.

“If you say so. My Connie reads so many books, it’s hard to keep up. When she was a little girl she’d disappear for hours, and I’d find her sitting on the toilet with a book.”

“Mother,” Connie said, her voice slicing the air like a paper cut.

“What?” Natalia asked, looking around and sipping her wine.

“Okay, okay, that’s enough guesses,” said Louisa. “It was Jeremy.” She handed the woman a small clothespin. “Whoever has the most pins at the end of the game wins a prize,” Louisa said, stretching the word “prize” into four syllables.

Louisa swished her hand in the box, notched her chin, and raised her eyebrows as though she was choosing a golden ticket and not a piece of paper that Connie knew her cousin had pulled from her recycling bin the night before.

“Children learn what they live. If a child lives with shame, they learn to be guilty. If a child lives with acceptance and friendship, they learn to find love in the world,” Louisa read, before turning to the room. “Who wants to guess this one first?”

Natalia snorted. “Now that’s Jeremy.”

Connie felt the air shift. “Why would you think that?” she asked. The words came stilted from her mouth. The letters, once organized neatly, were jumbled, and she had to unscramble them before saying them out loud.

“Shame?” Natalia said, her voice deep, the heat of her breath washing over Connie. “My kids have never lived with shame.”

Rivulets of sweat dribbled down Connie’s back, soaked into her dress, which was now chafing her neck. She desperately wished she had worn something different, but her mother had surprised her last week with this dress, and Connie knew she’d feel guilty if she hadn’t worn it today. She looked around for sparkling water or a dabble of wine—just a few drops to settle her down—and noticed that everyone was looking at her except Louisa, who was quietly ripping the sheet with the quote into tiny pieces as if she were peeling an egg.

“What’s this?” Natalia said to Louisa. “Who said that?”

Louisa looked up, clenched her fist and the pieces of torn paper. “Doesn’t matter. Let’s move on.”

Natalia whipped her head toward Connie. “You said that?”

Her mother was giving her the look, the one she gave in public when Connie was younger, when she and her sisters were bickering in the grocery store or at the local Biway and Natalia wanted them to stop but didn’t want to yell at them in public and make a scene. The look Connie and her sisters called “the golf balls” because her mother’s eyes protruded as if she had stacked them onto tees.

Edith came over and rubbed Natalia’s arm. “Let it go, Natalia,” she whispered.

But Connie knew her mother would never, could never, let it go.

“Well, if your childhood was so shameful, then I don’t know why I’m here,” Natalia said. She swiped her purse up into the crook of her elbow and padded across the carpet, past the uncomfortably hard black chairs wrapped in bleached white covers and knotted with yellow satin bows, and out the heavy wooden doors, a whoosh sweeping into the room as she left.

Edith started to follow, but Connie stopped her aunt. “I’ll go, Tia. Sorry everyone,” she called over her shoulder. “Have some smoked salmon, we’ll be back soon!” Eat it all, she thought as she waddled out of the room, her hips aching from the kitten heels her midwife told her would ease her lower back pain. She pushed opened the doors and looked up and down the long hallway, empty except for a wooden pedestal with a sculpture of two elephants, their trunks entangled. Connie headed for the front desk and approached the dainty woman behind it and asked whether she’d seen her mother go by.

“Why yes, she went left,” the woman said, pointing to the hotel’s glass revolving doors.

On Yorkville Avenue, Connie stood in the bright Toronto afternoon sun next to a red-tiered fountain her mother had used as a landmark in the directions she had written out on each baby shower invitation. Connie crested her hand over her forehead and headed left, past a fire station, where a fire engine was wailing out of the driveway, and the public library with its long stone steps, and she thought of the irony of some place so loud next to some place she found such comfort as a child. She walked past town hall square with trees in round concrete planters and thought of old Portugal Square and St. Mary’s Church where she went for Portuguese lessons as a girl, not far from here but which, to Connie, felt a world away from the Portuguese seafood shops whose walls were lined with large slabs of stiff salted cod that stood erect like signposts in white buckets. She came out at Scollard Street, where she saw her mother slip into a café at the base of a behemoth building. She followed her into the café and was confronted with the hisses and pops of an espresso machine that lined a white quartz counter along the back wall.

“Mom, wait!” she called. “Please.”

Her mother turned, her face carved into a frown. “Why you want to embarrass me in here too?” Natalia spat.

Her mother’s whole life, Connie thought, had been about avoiding embarrassment.

“Don’t be ridiculous, I haven’t embarrassed you at all,” Connie said.

“Oh, so now you’re telling me how to feel?”

Connie pinched the space between her eyes. This was not what she had intended when she followed her mother. She needed her mother to listen to her for once. To just have a normal conversation. She had come to explain the line came from the poem they saw framed in the baby store while Natalia was helping Connie register for a Diaper Genie and a baby bathtub that came with a handheld shower hose. Connie had scanned the framed poem too. She had pictured it hanging above the changing table to remind her of the parent she wanted to be. It wasn’t a look to the past, she wanted to tell her mother now, it was a promise for her future, something she could hold on to when she became preoccupied with the details of parenting and forgot everything she wanted to be.

“Are you going to order something, or are you just going to stand there and argue?” The woman behind the counter leaned over onto her elbows, her high dark ponytail rising above the shelf of espresso mugs and saucers.

Natalia approached a glass cabinet with colorful pastries and pointed. “Duas,” Natalia said, falling into Portuguese the way Connie saw her do whenever she was flustered.

“Which one? And how many?” the woman asked, her finger sliding back and forth along the shelf.

“This, this,” Natalia said. She pressed her finger in front of delicate pastries with brown and white stripes along the top and layers of thin pastry and custard underneath, leaving a ghost of her finger imprinted on the glass when she pulled it away.

“The mille-feuille? And how many? One?”

“Duas,” Natalia said.

The woman shook her head. “I don’t understand.”

“Two,” Connie said, stepping up to the counter. “My mother wants two.”

“They’re six dollars each,” the woman said, her eyes bouncing between Connie and Natalia. Connie held her face very still. Her toes were jammed into the front of her kitten heels and liquid-filled blisters were sprouting from the back of her feet and she knew she’d clip off a piece of aloe when she got home and ask Jeremy to rub it all over her soles. The skin around her belly was so taut it itched, and she felt as though she was suffocating in her damn dress. But she refused to show any of this to the server standing in front of her.

Smile. Be sweet. Act grateful.

Connie stretched a smile across her face as tight as the skin that pulled across her eight-month pregnant belly. “In that case, make it three,” she said, making her voice light and tempered the way she did when she was talking to an irate executive at work.

The woman folded a shiny white cardboard box into a square and placed three mille-feuille inside. Natalia paid in cash, and they stood at a counter by the door and bit into the flaky pastry, Connie brushing golden buttery flecks from her mother’s cheek.

Natalia chewed and scanned the sky and the clouds, grey and pulled like wool. “Bah,” Natalia said, shrugging. “Luis’ pasteis de nata are better.”

Connie laughed. “And they’re not six dollars.”

“Maybe I’ll tell him to raise the price,” Natalia said.

Connie shook her head. “I’m sure Louisa will do that when she takes over.”

Natalia took another bite. “Too much sugar. Too sweet, even with a coffee.”

Connie nodded. Change is hard, she thought. Her mother was accustomed to Portuguese custard tarts, not fancy French-named desserts served in a cold café. “It’s because you have the taste of Luis’ natas in your head. Nothing is ever as good as the best thing you remember,” she said.

Her mother looked at her a long time, then licked her finger and wiped a spot on Connie’s cheek before sweeping crumbs off the counter and into a napkin, throwing it in the trash.

They left the café, Natalia holding the white box with the last mille-feuille inside, and walked past the square, past the round concrete planters where a young girl was tiptoeing across one of the edges, a woman by her side holding her hand as the girl counted each step. Connie threaded her arm through her mother’s as they headed back to the Four Seasons, and she decided not to bring up the poem or why she picked it. Let them just be happy right now, she thought, let them just be mother and daughter, two people who were doing their best, who offered each other grace when they needed it most.

Kelly Pedro’s fiction has appeared in PRISM and The New Quarterly. She was short-listed for Room’s 2022 fiction contest. She’s currently revising a collection of linked short stories and lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada located on the Haldimand Tract within the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishnawbek, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Find her on Twitter at @KellyPatLarge.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

FIRST CHOICE by Hannah Felt Garner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Hannah Felt Garner
FIRST CHOICE

It is fall break when we arrive on campus for the interview. No one around but the student workers in Admissions and a security guard in a golf cart, silently cruising under heritage elms. My father and I have just toured a more prestigious college nearby when he announces this little detour on our drive home. I resist but only a little, sick already of a process which will later give me hives. Twice: the day of the December deadline, then again the week leading up to the one in January. My body is leaning as far as it’ll go against the car door. It wouldn’t be my first time jumping out of a moving vehicle, my father’s favorite interrogation site.

After an exuberant campus tour delivered by a junior in plastic flip-flops, my father disappears into the glassy Admissions Office then re-emerges, Ferris-wheeling his arms like a child. “Come on in! They can squeeze you in for a student interview!” I doubt the spontaneity of this arrangement but let myself be ushered in. In a windowless back room, I sit across from a senior Creative Writing major concentrating in Gender Studies, the first time I hear this phrase. Tall and narrow-shouldered in a rumpled button-down, the honey wisps of hair along his forehead framing wideset cheekbones and receding eyes, the senior interviewer has my attention.

“Can you tell me about one of your English essays?” he asks, sussing out the only school subject I want to talk about. “Well,” I say, scooching up a bit in my seventies-upholstered armchair, “in eleventh grade we all had to write a ten-page research paper. I wrote mine…”

I had written mine on men who put women on a pedestal, mistaking their idolatry for enlightenment. I had used as my examples: Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby, Hesse’s Demian, and Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye. I had told my advisor the selection was the result of thoughtful research, but in truth they were the three texts I had taken off my sister’s bookshelf one summer in middle school after she had said to me, eyeing my Harry Potter: “Isn’t it about time you started reading real literature?” As for the paper, I had turned every draft in late, never finding my footing in an argument. I hadn’t yet the language to talk about gender, about the Bildungsroman, or indeed about the destruction left in the wake of a young man’s coming of age.

“…And if you look at Gatsby,” I say, “you see how, if a man’s idealization of a woman goes too far, he will end up by destroying himself”—confident in my eloquence but ignorant of the misogyny of my point.

We move on to other subjects, but I don’t forget how his gaze heats up when I talk about literature and women. Shaking hands at the end of the interview, he is polite and even-tempered but falters ever so slightly in saying he’s “impressed” by my interests. I feel the shame I always feel when eyes are on my face, but I also think I see my desire reflected back at me. As we make our way to the parking lot, my father pokes me for details: “Did you get the chance to talk about your UN internship?” “I bet he was really interested to hear about your play.” But my hackles don’t rise as usual, because I am calculating under what scenario—alumni reunion? Five years from now?—choosing this small liberal arts college with no theater department will lead me to him.

The admissions letters received, I lay them out on my bed, a neutral map of choices. But even here there is the bias of backdrop: the cheerful quilt my mother bought from a catalog in an attempt to fix what she calls my “negativity,” not knowing how to put a name to sadness. Then there is the bias of lush foliage outside my creaky single-pane window, the mating calls of squirrels and blue jays. With the too-rural, Midwestern, and poorly ranked schools eliminated, it comes down to the liberal arts college and a large, hip university in New York City.

The pull of New York is strong. My sister has been living there for years. My parents and I will go up for the weekend, to see a Neil LaBute play at the Public Theater or the Brahms concerto at Lincoln Center (my sister could have gone professional, she says, but they never bothered to buy her a better violin). Whenever we go, I look around me as though in a virtual reality. I think: can I picture me here in this coffee shop on the Upper West Side? As this Juilliard student? As this Chelsea gallery girl?

The pressure to choose the more prestigious school is also strong. I’m not proud of my acceptances. I didn’t have the grades or the confidence for the Ivy League. And when I hear, too late, of my friend’s application essays—sweet tales of growing into themselves structured around food and painting metaphors—I feel ashamed. Because what I have submitted is a laundry list of exaggerated feats strung together into melancholy prose in a dissociative state, late nights on my neon green bubble Mac; my father standing behind me, his grip on the back of my swivel chair causing an unconscious, controlled wobble. The essay had been my chance to steer my destiny with my own story, but I had allowed even that, even writing, to be directed by him.

After formally accepting, I plan a return to campus, this time alone. The night before, I attend a high school party at the Guatemalan ambassador’s residence. The ambassador’s son Billy is the only new kid in our senior year, and we take his bribe for acceptance in the form of piña coladas prepared in the kitchen blender. We gulp down the frozen drinks, kiss Billy on the cheek, then turn back to the same friends and crushes we’ve had since middle school.

Me and Sami eye each other from opposing sides of the room all night, as is our custom. Then, three cups of piña in, I climb the stairs to go find the girls (who I’m told are sipping cotton candy vodka in the bathtub). Sami climbs the stairs after me and pulls me into a guest room, the familiar dunes of his warm lips finding mine and mine and mine. When we detach, I catch a vulnerable expression on his face, like loss or fear, but then he lifts my skirt to slap my thigh, hard, and his lips resume their put-on snarl: “I need a smoke,” he says.

◊

Next morning, I board the Amtrak local with a hangover. I doze, then spend the last two stops imagining a reunion with the senior interviewer—I’ll come across him on a secluded campus path, and he’ll be standing over me under a blooming canopy of lilacs and say, “I’m so happy you chose to come here.” And I’ll say, “It was meeting you that convinced me. I knew if the other students were anything like you, I’d have made the right choice.”

I’ve arranged to spend the night with a freshman named Liz to preview what life will look like come fall. When Liz unlocks the door to her suite, her three roommates are arranged on the common room furniture. “These—are the Marys,” she says, anticipating a reaction, and then explains that someone in the housing office had thought it funny to place the three freshman girls of the same name together in the same suite. Watching the Marys move around one other in the apartment, I think to myself, “It’s lucky that they’re all beautiful, but in different forms.” They strike me as iterations of the feminine ideal. One, tall, blond, athletic, is something of a Virgin Mary, golden and unerotic. Beside her, the second girl, short, breasty and flirtatious, falls nicely into the Mary Magdalen category. The third, adorned with a nose ring and armpit hair, stands for the pagan alternative, a modern asterisk to the old duality.

“Hey, are you from Brooklyn?” Magdalen Mary asks me, in reference to the sweatshirt I’m wearing. It’s a brandless, gray hoodie that reads “BROOKLYN” across the chest in blue patch letters. “Oh! No. Actually it’s my sister’s. She lives in the city. I just borrow her clothes.”

My sister had bought it off a street vendor outside Atlantic Terminal mall on a cold day in the 2000s when she first moved to the city. Unemployed, college dropout, she spent afternoons walking along Atlantic Avenue from Bed-Stuy to the river. It was the moment she handed the man fifteen dollars for a sweatshirt that she had decided to live.

The gray hoodie didn’t exactly fit in with her nineties garb of furry boots and embroidered coats, so I appropriated it, figuring she wouldn’t notice. By the time I had worn it more than her, I had spent years envying my sister’s insistent freedom up in New York, and as many years being instructed over the dinner table not to end up like her. You might say that wearing the sweatshirt on my second campus visit is a small act of rebellion against the choice I had to make: not to follow her there.

“I grew up in the Village,” Magdalen Mary replies. I don’t know exactly what that refers to, but I know it’s the city. In that moment Magdalen Mary becomes my second reason for choosing to stay.

Two plain-faced guys from downstairs arrive toting plastic bags of potato buns, corn, and liter bottles of soda, fuel for the dorm barbecue set to start in an hour. Liz and Magdalen Mary improvise a fruit punch and dance to femme-pop as the guys de-package the food. I hang back at their insistence—I’m their guest!—but enjoy the crinkle chips and the curves of Magdalen Mary’s skinny jeans and American Apparel bodysuit.

Virgin Mary returns from the train station with her boyfriend in tow. “Hey—Jonathan,” the boyfriend comes up to say, by way of introduction. “I hear you’re joining the crew here next year—congrats! I often think I should have gone in for the liberal arts myself,” he says, then clarifies that he’s enrolled at the number one business school in the country.

As we chat, I can overhear the Marys in the corner, discussing sleeping arrangements. “No, I didn’t tell her to bring a sleeping bag in the end,” I hear Liz say. And I catch something Virgin Mary is telling the others, “Ever since that weekend in the Catskills…” and some outcome I can’t decipher. Magdalen Mary’s response is: “Well yes, then definitely take the blowup mattress, we can set it up in the living room.”

I have just been telling Jonathan about my summer in Italy when Liz comes over to touch my forearm. “Hey,” she says, “Mary and Jonathan are going to stay in the living room, so, is it ok if we put you in her bed?” Magdalen Mary sidles up to add, “You’ll sleep in my room, ok? I don’t snore, don’t worry.”

We descend to gather on the patchy grass in front of the dorm. We sip beer out of Solo cups and pick at our burgers, morsels of watermelon juicing onto our paper plates. The other freshmen gathered look younger than the Marys, wearing oversized brightly colored t-shirts commemorating a service trip to Nicaragua or their hometown travel soccer team. As I survey the smattering of uncool, friendly teens, I think I might in fact be happy here.

“They’re so cute together, right?” Magdalen Mary says to me, indicating Virgin Mary and Jonathan. “She could have had any of the guys here of course. In this context, she’s a ten, but she and Jonathan have been together since tenth grade.” Then she turns to me with eyebrows raised, and I notice dimples like points of exclamation to her lips. “I’m sure you’ll have lots of success next year,” she says, as she reaches her hand to my collar bone and brushes a strand of my hair to the back.

Even in my tipsy exaltation, I have the presence of mind to go to bed early so that I don’t have to change into pajamas in front of the others. I get into Virgin Mary’s flower-patterned flannel sheets, where I can smell her Pantene Pro-V on the pillow. I turn to the wall, feel its cool surface, and fall asleep.

I awake to a touch. I turn onto my back and find Jonathan sitting on the bed. “Mary?” he says in the dark. “No, no, I’m—Alice—I’m—the prospie,” I say. The hand which had been resting against my side shifts up along my oversized t-shirt to my left breast. The hand strokes upwards once against the nipple, then shifts back down to my stomach. The outstretched palm strokes back and forth and the t-shirt gathers awkwardly into creases. No one says a word. “Goodnight,” he then whispers and leans over. My body stiffens as his dry lips smack against my forehead.

Next morning, Liz, Magdalen Mary, and I creep past the sleeping couple on the living room floor and walk up-campus. We set down our trays at a red picnic bench outside the dining hall to eat chocolate chip waffles and orange juice dispensed from a machine. Magdalen Mary spends the meal regaling us with anecdotes of her weekend exploits with upperclassmen. I eat up her performance, thinking next year I’ll do the same, have adventurous sex with men I don’t really know, then laugh about it with my roommates over brunch.

◊

It’s August, and after depositing two bags of dorm room essentials purchased at the local strip mall, my father turns at last to leave. What he says, in lieu of goodbye, is: “I can’t wait to read all the amazing essays you’ll write in college!” As I watch his mini-van descend the elm-lined drive, I promise myself I won’t send a single word.

Orientation week is an Olympics of hall bonding which culminates in an event entitled Diafora, after the Greek. Diafora is kept hush-hush up until the moment where you find yourself in a blackened room with your hall-mates, and invited—not instructed—to share your most personal truth, assured it will never leave the room. After one girl tells the group about the childhood friend she lost to schizophrenia, I put words to the scene etched onto my insides: the afternoon I come home from school, climb the stairs to the sounds of conflict, and stand on the landing halfway up to the third floor as my father forces a pill down my sister’s throat, my mother holding her down in a sickened embrace.

Diafora creates a momentary illusion of equivalence among our family troubles. But in the weeks following, some start to wonder if the lacrosse star from Connecticut who shared the fall-out of his brother’s DUI and the first-gen girl from Philly who described her mother’s drug-induced miscarriage both emerged from Diafora with an equal relation to bonding.

Despite what we had agreed one afternoon when I snuck him into the basement to fuck me against the washing machine, Sami has ceased all communication since arriving at his own college campus. I get nothing from him for weeks, then one morning in October I wake up to geese honking on the grass beneath my dorm window. I slide open my phone to three paragraphs describing a revelation he’s had in the Vermont wilderness. He has created a crop circle in my honor, he says: a large ‘A’ through some farmer’s field. The outcome of an acid trip, I surmise, and determine it best to ignore.

Campus is littered with boys named Dan and David and Josh and Matt, each as indiscriminately needy as the next. The girls on my hall spend weeknights speculating which ones we might hook up with at the next basement party, then cuddle under a blanket watching The L Word DVDs on loan from the library. “What about Elliott? Elliott Lander,” someone says one night. I stay mute because EL is in my philosophy seminar. In class I fix my eyes on his brown leather boots, a synecdoche of him. When I’m alone, I click through Facebook photos, free to linger on the contrast between the crisp fold of his white v-neck t-shirt and the smooth slope of his bicep. The girls pull up a laptop to click through the photos and I avert my eyes lest they recognize my recognition. “Oh, him,” my roommate chimes in. “That guy’s dating a sophomore named Mary something.”

As chummy as we had felt the night of my campus visit, Magdalen Mary gives me the barest smile now when I cross her path on my way to class. It takes me a couple times seeing her wearing my Brooklyn sweatshirt before I realize it is indeed mine. I first spot it layered under an oversized denim jacket she wears to a student art show. It’s just a coincidence, I think. Then I see her at the library with her headphones in, hoodie up, and there’s no mistaking the missing drawstring, which I had pulled out too far and couldn’t finagle back in. She must have found the sweatshirt on the floor of her dorm room after I had left. Maybe it had gotten kicked under a bed. Maybe by the time it was found they had forgotten I was ever there. Figured it was left behind at a party. Asked around their friend group but no one claimed it. Then she tried it on and liked the way it fit. When people saw her in it, it made sense: after all, she was from there.

The first floor RA who buys us alcohol on the weekends knows Mary from frisbee. So I confide in him: I want it back. That first conversation I don’t think I make myself clear. “Are you sure?” he says. “I remember seeing Mary in that sweatshirt a lot freshman year.” A few weeks pass and then he finds me on the steps heading into dinner. “Hey! Turns out it probably is your sweatshirt! She says she’s happy to hand it over, once she retrieves it from her pile of things. She isn’t sure where it is exactly. Maybe in the laundry.”

One night I am leaving the science building when I see EL in his black denim jacket. He is walking away from me, his arm around a short figure in a gray hoodie. The possible made tangible. He has seen her in it, touched her in it. They would be heading to her apartment now, he would pull it off her then. Her breasts filling the wife-beater she has on underneath. The chest of my Brooklyn sweatshirt likely already stretched out, would hang limply over mine. I know then that if and when I get it back, I will never be able to wear that sweatshirt again. It belongs to her.

In early December, our dorm holds a Secret Santa. The afternoon before the unwrapping party I meet with my sculpture professor about my final project. I have purchased seven plain mirrors, twelve by twelve inch squares, and sent them in unpadded cardboard boxes to my sister, father, two best friends, favorite high school English teacher, and first boyfriend. “The piece is essentially conceptual,” he says, working through the idea with me. “These are people in your life who have shaped your self-image. Is it fate you’re playing with, superstition, by sending them through the post without protection?” I admit to hoping some will break, but not others. Though the meaning of the break will depend on which way the distribution goes. “And then there’s the fact that they’re rather ambivalent gifts,” he adds. “A bit violent too?” I volley back. “Yes, maybe you want to force these people from your life to confront something they don’t want to see in themselves.”

At dusk, our dorm gathers on the first floor. Early arrivals get the armchairs and sofa while the rest of us plop down in our sweatpants on the carpeted floor below fairy lights strung along the molding with tape. The first floor RA walks over to me and drops a cushy wad of Christmas wrapping into my lap. He wears a satisfied smile. I tear at the tissue paper until my fingers touch gray fleece. Shame plucks a familiar string in my stomach. I exclaim, “My sweatshirt!” without missing a beat. “Back in the arms of its owner at last!” the RA says. I feel a little sorry now, that I treated him as her accomplice. Sorry, too, that I had made him privy to my demand. “Aw, thank you!” I say to him, and give the Brooklyn sweatshirt a little squeeze, for his sake. “Of course!” he replies, happy with his good deed. We turn to tell the curious onlookers the funny story of it all. Something about our narrative is meant to affirm my presence there, my college choice, and the fitting coincidence of finding what had been lost. But the charade rings a bit false. As though I were being made to thank him, and by extension her, for gifting me what was already mine.

Hannah Felt Garner is a writer and teacher of prose living in Brooklyn, NY. She recently got her MA in English Literature from Rutgers University, where she studied feminist critique and the autobiographical form. After a brush with the art world and a tangle with academia, she has heartily taken to teaching literature and composition to adolescents. You can find her bite-sized culture reviews over at artthouart.wordpress.com and on Instagram at @hannahfeltgarner.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MELT by Candice Morrow

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MELT by Candice Morrow

Candice Morrow
MELT

A record high, the porch thermometer reads one hundred and nine, and your father sleeps naked without even a sheet. You left for college yesterday, and I suppose this means, among other things, that we can sprawl exposed for the rest of our lives. Fuck.

From the freezer I take a Popsicle rocket pop, a kitchen staple since you were three. Grocery lists on the refrigerator door read milk, eggs, bread, and, in your tiny, scrunched cursive: rockets. I set the sprinklers and sit by the window to watch water spray out from the dark, hit and roll down the pane.

The rocket is Americana: red cherry fading into vanilla fading into a mouth-staining blue, its very colors suggesting a revolution for the driest of summer tongues. But why keep buying them now that you’re gone? Gone with your new suitcases—I ripped the tags off at the airport. Gone with your shiny handles and soft leather—“Only the best for my daughter,” he said. Gone with your plastic wheels rolling with ease—as if every road after our road is a smooth road. Well, it’s not.

The way I see it, there’s a real bummer to how the two sides of a double-stick rocket split. They rarely separate equally, one side always melting faster, dripping over palm and wrist a liquid thicker than saliva and, let’s be honest, tasting wholly unlike cherries.

You know, your Nana used to buy double-stick rockets for Uncle Ben and me. Standing outside the Safeway where she worked, she would wipe her hands down her thighs and chew open the wrapper. She had crooked, yellow teeth back then, and I remember feeling disgust as I watched her. Part of me just didn’t want her ugly mouth near my dessert. (And now you know what they looked like before they were straight and white and vacationed in a water glass every night.)

To head off potential whining, she paused before breaking the popsicles apart and said, not with sympathy but as a command: “Life is not fair.”

Behind her stood a defaced phone booth, the half-sized, metal kind that protrudes from the wall, providing enough privacy for your elbows only. She didn’t seem concerned if we studied its graffiti, the vulgar accusations and invitations. In fact, she used the scribbles as another lesson. In two parts, one for each child. For Ben—what good people don’t do. For me—what good people don’t do to you. We nodded and paced atop concrete parking blocks, watching her ugly teeth and watching our rockets split and ooze thin lines of cold sugar.

Roughly ten years later, I left for college and, come to think of it, became captivated by similar wet lines. These were on cans of Shasta cream soda: the tabs cracking in and the aluminum contracting like bodies with the breath knocked out of them. This was Houston, in an empty UH dorm room where my—girlfriend? lover?—and I met for lunch and sex. I’ve never told you about her. I wanted to when we were driving to the airport, but your dad was there, and I’ve never told him either. Her name was Sue, and she drank Shasta cream soda.

◊

I was your age. I’d impressed my family with acceptance into a real university, not one of the community branches with its free daycare after six p.m. I was nursing a major in History when I met Sue, a thirty-five-year-old groundskeeper who blew the leaves off our sidewalks.

An empty dorm building was scheduled for renovations the upcoming summer, and while No Trespassing and No Loitering signs were posted outside, she had a key. We chose the room with an abandoned Einstein poster tacked to the wall. Beneath it, we started with little games evolving through flirting and joking. You’ll know what I mean someday. Silly games that made us feel closer than we actually were, things like swapping memories as if they were future plans. Like this.

She would unbutton my sweater while I said I had big ideas about plant life that could land me a blue ribbon in my high school science fair.

I would unlace her boots while she suggested she might someday regret trading her extensive baseball card collection for a neighborhood kid’s second-rate water gun.

I eventually realized she never shared memories past the age of eighteen. Pumpkin, you have to watch for shit like this. I began to feel like I was talking to only half a person. I began to feel like we’d grown up together, and then she’d gone off to win an extra fifteen years, squandering them on other people and experiences.

We ate cans of ravioli. I purchased a can opener at the campus convenience store and kept it in our abandoned dorm closet. Cranking the tool as if winding a toy, I felt a silly fear of the metal snapping up—like how you can’t bear to hear a biscuit cylinder burst. I would then press in the tab on her Shasta, and we might sing the brand’s jingle. I taught it to you when you were a toddler.

I want a pop, pop, pop. I want a Shhhhhhhhhhhasta, Shasta.

◊

We met on my nineteenth birthday. Before sitting, we stripped down to our underwear, laying our clothes out beneath us on the cracked linoleum. Her jumpsuit smelled of cut grass. When she took it off, sweat beaded between her shoulder blades, not unlike the sweat on your sleeping father.

I finish my rocket pop, and, licking the stick clean, return to the back of the house to stand at our bedroom door. He sleeps on his belly, his arms and legs spread wide.

His moonlit ass frightens me. How perky it still is?

I, too, am not much changed from when we first met. We have wrinkles, yes, most notably around the eyes. We have aches. He denies it, but his hair is retreating up his scalp. Still, he looks good, we look good, and we have something like thirty years ahead of us.

I see, superimposed on him, Sue—for the life of me, I cannot remember her last name—Sue unsnapping my bra and pressing her forehead between my breasts like a billy goat gently bucking a tree. And if Sue is a goat, then he is a starfish, pale and tender in the moonlight. For a moment, I feel as if I can reach out and break off his limbs. I extend my hand into the room, opening and closing my fingers.

I know what you’re thinking, and I don’t know, Pumpkin. Maybe? To watch it grow back?

◊

For my birthday, Sue packed a bottle of vodka to add to our Shasta. She presented me with a portable CD player and a mix CD wrapped in layer after layer of red tissue paper. We uncoiled the headphones, clicked the CD in. Leaning cheek-to-cheek with cramping necks, we listened to Modern English, I’ll Stop the World and Melt with You.

Sue raised a forked ravioli: “To the tenth-grade science fair!”

But I didn’t want to toast the past. I said, “To love!”

She pressed me to the floor. Through our makeshift bed, I could feel the imperfections, the cracks and bubbles of the aged linoleum.

◊

I take off my nightgown and nudge his shoulder.

“Hot,” he groans, turning onto his side to make room.

The sheets are damp with his sweat.

◊

Afterward, the outside walkway was blindingly bright. I rested against the doorframe, feeling half tipsy with an ache between my eyes like a mild case of brain freeze.

She said, “I guess you’ve had too much of me too fast.”

With an anxious hand, I clipped the CD player onto my pocket and hung the headphones around my neck. I asked her to take me somewhere real, like a restaurant.

She reminded me we just ate.

I told her I’d like to see her house.

“I live in an apartment,” she said. “And anyway, I have to get back to work.”

We cut down a side path, past the chemistry building. This path, well this path is three memories to me, and, goddamnit, they’re running neck and neck and neck tonight.

◊

One memory is how we met—at the hydrangea bushes. She’s clipping off dead heads. While she’s not the first person at college to in-that-way look at me, she’s the first I look back at. Her gloves are thick and covered in dirt. She offers me a flower. When I point out the petals are browning around the edges, she says she knows where she can find something more like me, pretty and fresh.

I smile and ask, “Where’s the chemistry building?”

“Better question is,” she says, “can you feel the chemistry building?”

◊

Another is more bricolage than event, a memory composed of the weeks after my birthday—hot, sad days dissolving into a single moment: me, sitting on one of the concrete benches. Of course, I’m convinced no one will ever love me again. I am not ugly, I tell myself, not dumb. But, somehow, I will die alone, and how fucking fair is that?

I imagine my death as only the young do, as I’m sure you imagine yours—with beauty and whimsy. I envision the Virginia Creeper at my feet wrapping around my ankles, pulling me into the ground where I gracefully swallow dirt and become still. Of course, how I now think about dying involves a car crash or cancer, and your father is always standing over me.

◊

The third memory, the one I think I’ll linger on and let carry me through dawn, is my shiny June afternoon. You see, Pumpkin, in Texas you have to learn how to fall asleep with the ones you love.

It’s my birthday, and I’ve had more than enough vodka in my Shasta. I’m walking Sue, returning Sue, to her work. At the end of the path—right as I’m thinking, What do I really mean to this woman?—she grabs my hand, and my body spins back toward her as though she has something sweet to say.

As though she will say one sweet thing, and it will split into two sweet things. Then four. Eight. I keep spinning toward her, always toward her until I finally win my science fair, and my body falls to the earth under the weight of my enormous blue ribbon.

Candice Morrow’s work has appeared in Colorado Review, The Right Way to be Crippled and Naked: The Fiction of Disability (Cinco Puntos Press), A capella Zoo: the Trans, Gay, and Lesbian Collection; Eunoia Review, Prometheus Dreaming, and elsewhere. She teaches writing in Poulsbo, WA, home of the world’s best donuts, the ghosts of Vikings, and considerable rain.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE by Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen
HOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE

YOUR ASHES ARE EVERYWHERE.

You don’t know how to smoke a cigar. I’m going to teach you tonight. I shouldn’t—but I will. Here, hold it like this, see? Between your thumb and index finger, like that, see? Isn’t that better, hm? Now, you dab the edge of it in the ashtray, like that, perfect. It’s tidier that way. Don’t cough like I do. You’re too young to cough like I do. Normally, they don’t let you smoke in here. Normally, I wouldn’t be talking so much. Normally, well there’s not much normal anymore, is there, kiddo?

PUFF SLOWLY. IT’S NOT A RACE.

I don’t want you sick tomorrow morning. Your mother will have my balls. Not a word to her about any of this. Not a word, you hear me? You should never lie to your mother. It’s not right. You should tell your mother the truth about everything. Just not this, alright? A man’s got to have a secret or two with his son, hasn’t he? A man’s got to have a little time with his boy, hasn’t he? That’s right, mhm.

SCOOCH YOUR CHAIR CLOSER.

They’ve got the piano turned up too loud. Angelo’s hearing isn’t so good, and he likes to listen to the music in the kitchen while he cooks. That stupid player piano’s the one thing they brought over from the old country. Thing probably hasn’t been tuned since 1930. Back then, they said it was a hundred years old. A hundred years before that, I think they said it was a hundred years old. And on and on and on it goes, everything is old, and that makes it good, somehow, for some reason. Makes it feel like things are going to last. Makes it feel like things don’t end. But things end. I’m drunk. I’m not making my point well enough, but you see what I’m trying to tell you, don’t you? Things do end. And if you hold onto them, you’re holding onto a crappy piano that plays crappy music. Things have got to end. We’ve got to let them end.

AND TONIGHT IS AN ENDING OF SORTS.

A damn sorry one, don’t you think? The restaurant’s half empty. Just a few of the usuals. No big splash. No big send-off. No grand jubilee. Just Angelo shuffling back and forth in the kitchen trying to not drop the zuppa di pesce with the shaking in his hands. Teressa going from table to table, emptying every bottle of red wine she has in the place into our glasses because what are they going to do with it? Who needs that much red wine? She doesn’t even like red wine. Angelo can only have a sip here and there. The doctor said so, and he has to listen to the doctor. If he doesn’t listen to the doctor, he could die. And if he dies, then, well, it’ll make no difference to the restaurant since it’s already closing down, but it’d be sad. Awfully sad, y’know. Who doesn’t like Angelo? Sure, he’s a bit racist after his two sips of wine, but he makes a damn fine pomodoro, don’t you think, hm?

CENT’ANNI! CENT’ANNI!

Toast with me, come on, toast with me. You know what cent’anni means, hm? May you live a hundred years. A hundred years. You’re going to live a hundred years, kid. Your great-uncle Angelo, maybe not. Me, maybe not. But you and your mother, you’ll live a hundred years, a hundred years kiddo. Look at the old guy seated at the table behind us. Don’t turn your head too obviously—don’t be rude, for God’s sake. Yes, the one in the burgundy sweater, seated beneath that tourist printout of Milan or Tuscany or whatever fake Italian town that is. He’s ninety-two, you believe that? Ninety-two. He comes here every night. His wife passed five, six years ago. They never had kids. He’s got no one. But he likes this restaurant. And he’s got nothing else to spend money on, so he comes here every night. Every night, he orders manicotti and a glass of Tomasetti. He speaks maybe three words of English. Maybe.

MAKES YOU WONDER, DON’T IT?

What it’d be like, to be that old… What it’d be like, to be alone, like that… Makes you wonder about things you’re best off not wondering. Why aren’t you eating? There’s still some left. Come here, take a piece of bread. Mop up the rest of the tomato sauce with it. My father always said it’s a sin to waste sauce. He used to say he’d forgive me if I killed a guy, but if I wasted my mother’s tomato sauce, I’d be out on the street. He was very strict about that. He died young too. Heart attack. Just one of those things, you know. What are you gonna do.

NO, I’M FINE.

Wine makes me morbid. You’ll understand when you get older. You’ll speak about your father like that someday. Well, I don’t know. Maybe you will, maybe you won’t. Alright, you finish the sauce? Good, good, that’s my boy. Get up, I want to take you to the kitchen. I want to show you around. Last night, you know, might as well. Oh, don’t be nervous, Angelo doesn’t mind. He’ll be glad to see you.

I’M ALRIGHT, I’M ALRIGHT.

Just give me a second. Give me a second. Sometimes, when I first stand, I… Maybe, I’ll take a break from the cigar. I’ll leave it here. No, no, you smoke yours. I just might need a break from mine. My lungs are… Well, you know. Come on, let’s walk, don’t worry about me. You shouldn’t worry about your old man. You shouldn’t have to worry about your old man.

DAMN, THAT LOOKS GOOD.

Look at the cut of veal, your aunt Teressa just brought out. My God, makes your mouth water, don’t it? That’s how I got to be so tall—grew up eating that for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Well, not veal, no, veal’s expensive. But whatever was leftover, y’know, back when my grandfather, your great-grandfather ran this place, before he gave it to your Uncle Angelo. My mother had to work, well, she said she was working, but, well, that’s a story for another evening… My grandfather and grandmother, they really raised me after my father passed, you know. In this place. Come here, look at these tiles. Come here, I can find it. This one, see this black one with the crack in the middle. I did that. My nonno was retiling the hallway, and I ran past and knocked over a stack of them…and this one cracked. But he was too cheap, he wasn’t going to buy a new tile. He just put it up anyway. I could barely walk for three days.

THIS CLOSET, HERE…

…here, there we go. Where’s the light, it’s… Ah, there, see all those jars? When he first started this place, all the tomato sauce came from the tomato plants in his yard. Every single one, not a joke. He’d pick ‘em in the spring, make the sauce, and jar them. Used to strain the sauce by putting it through a white pillow case. Not a joke, he really did. The murder pillowcase we used to call it. Stained red like blood. He’d go down to the basement and spend three days there just attending to the sauce. Now, they just buy the stuff, I guess, the tomatoes, what is this? Cento. Alright, well, well, it’s not the same, but Cento’s not so bad. Cento’s not so bad. Not like some of these places squeezing packets of Heinz. My father would roll over in his grave.

DAD LOVED TO COOK.

No matter how tired he was when he got back from the hospital, he’d always cook for us. He stole a scalpel from surgery once. He’d use it to cut the garlic real thin. Listen to me, listen very closely, this is the best piece of advice I can give you—don’t ever go out with a girl who doesn’t like garlic. If a girl doesn’t like garlic, that’s a problem. She’s not the girl for you. Don’t forget that. That’s good advice. I won’t even charge you for it.

THEY REALLY LOVED EACH OTHER, YOU KNOW?

My parents, they really did. I never saw them fight. Not once. You know how hard that is? I fight with your mother all the time. Oh, we’re alright, we love each other, but you know, when you’re married, well, that’s marriage. But my parents, that was a real true love. That… I don’t know. That’s probably why it got so bad after he croaked. With her drinking and, yeah. If you plan to die young, don’t find true love. It’s mean. It’s just mean. To love someone that much and die. Better off finding someone you just feel alright about. If that’s the plan, you need the Plymouth of love, not the Mustang. That Mustang will never run again after you’re gone.

DEATH IS LIKE ESPRESSO.

It should be enjoyed after a long, rich meal of life. It should seal the stomach and the soul. If it comes after the appetizers, well, it’s lousy. It’s just lousy.

WHY ARE YOU LETTING ME GET MORBID AGAIN?

Slap me the next time I get so depressing, alright? You hear me? I really mean it. Pow, right to the cheek, alright, kid? Alright, let’s go. Got to keep moving. Can’t believe I’ve never given you a real tour of this place before. Can’t believe I’ve never gotten to do that. Alright, here’s the kitchen. See those black spots on the floor? Roaches killed before you were born. No, I’m just kidding, it’s probably just mold or something, don’t worry. Angelo, mind if I show the kid around? He can’t hear, can he? His hearing, I swear… Well, he doesn’t mind. Come here, try this, stick your finger in. No one’s looking, just do it. How’s that, hm? That’s the sauce they cook the veal in, the porcini mushrooms. That’ll make you believe in a higher power, won’t it?

THIS IS WHERE THE WAITERS PICK EVERYTHING UP.

This counter, here. Let’s see, what have we got? Branzino. Meatballs. Burrata. Beautiful, beautiful. I’d steal one of these if I wasn’t already bursting at the seams. Stealing is wrong, though. That’s an important lesson. Stealing is wrong because if you get caught, you get in trouble. You understand? So, if you’re going to do it, don’t get caught. Then, it’s not stealing. Then, it’s economics. You understand?

THEY USED TO PAY ME A BUCK FIFTY AN HOUR…

…when I worked as a waiter. A buck fifty, and I didn’t get to keep any of the tips. That was the real shame. I used to get a lot of tips. I was handsome back in the day, I really was. Wear some tight slacks, and the old Italian women would come in and tuck a fiver into your back pocket. I mean, come on, it was easy money, easy money. You’ve got to work as a waiter sometime. You’re going to be president someday, you understand, but you’ve got to be a waiter first. That way you know how to treat people. That way you know how hard life is, you understand? People who’ve never waited tables have never had to wait for anything. And they’ll keep you waiting forever on their kindness.

BUT DON’T BE TOO KIND, EITHER.

People take advantage of that. When my grandfather retired, they looped him into some investment thing for this truck stop way out on I-90. It was going to make him a millionaire, and they stole all his money. He ended up back working here. Keeled over right in front of that stove. Not a joke. It’s the same stove. Aneurysm. His head fell right into the alfredo. Luckily, they pulled him out before he got too burnt up, you know. Open caskets are a big thing for Catholics. I never understood that. I don’t want that. I’m as Catholic as the next guy. I get the cracker every week, but when I’m gone, I’m gone. I don’t need visiting day at Madame Tussauds. No, thank you.

COME OUT THIS DOOR, THIS WAY.

This leads to the alley. I used to take a little extra long when I took the trash out. There was a sweet piece next door. Busgirl. If we happened to take the trash out at the same time, we’d neck against the wall. We only ever said a few words to each other. We’d just see each other and start necking. I don’t know why we did that. I shouldn’t be telling you that. I shouldn’t be telling you any of this, but, well, I don’t know.

THERE WAS A CAT.

Mangy looking thing. Tabby. We used to give it a little saucer of milk if we had any left over. He’d rub himself against my leg and purr. If I tried to pet him though, he’d scratch me like no one else. Probably still have some of those scars. Alley cats are like that. They love you, but they hate you. It’s like America with immigrants. That’s called a metaphor. It’s not a very good one, but now you know what a metaphor is.

IT’S TOO COLD, COME BACK INSIDE.

I’ve got to get you a better coat. Moths own this one as much as you do. Used to be my coat, actually. Your mother kept it. She kept everything. Money was going to be tight after—so she figured, she’d keep the stuff and just give it to you. You grew up walking around in a fashionable tomb, didn’t you? You grew up cold, didn’t you? That was my fault. That was, well, that was this place’s fault. I’m… I wish you hadn’t had that. I wish for a lot of things, kid. I wish for a lot.

I TOLD YOU TO SLAP ME, DAMNIT.

Come here, I want to show you two more things. Two more things, then we can go. I know you’re—you probably want to be with your friends. You probably want to go catch a movie with some pretty girl. You probably want to sneak into a bar and have a few beers. I want you to do it. Whatever it is, I want you to do it, you understand? Just after this. I want you to go and do something you enjoy, something that makes you smile, you understand? I want you to do something for you. Just for you. I want you live, kid. I want you to really live. You’ve got to.

THIS IS THE OFFICE.

Believe it or not, it looks more organized than usual. I always remember it being even messier than this. Angelo comes here after he closes up the restaurant and goes through the receipts and tips. He marks it all in that leather ledger, decides what number to tell Uncle Sam, and says a prayer to the Holy Mother that he can stay open another night. That last part’s not a joke—look, he’s got a rosary somewhere around here. Here, top drawer, see. The secret to piety is desperation. Nothing makes a man believe in God more than him needing God to help him out of whatever mess he’s in.

THIS IS WHERE I LEARNED TO SMOKE.

Right here, in that chair. I was thirteen. Thirteen years old. I worked as a busboy in those days. We’d closed up for the night. It’d been busy that night. Lot of dishes. Nonno was sitting in here running the numbers, and he called me in from the kitchen. He was sitting right behind that desk, smoking a cigar. His hand was still on the phone, just kind of cradling it, you know? Holding it like you’d hold onto a baby bird, something delicate, something to be cared for… And he just sat me down there, and he told me my father had croaked. And he handed me a cigar. He lit for me. Stuck it in my mouth. I don’t know why. But that’s how I learned to smoke. Just sitting there. Not saying anything. Waiting for my mother to make it back from the hospital. That’s how I learned.

THAT’S A LOUSY SLAP.

Come on, you can do better than that. Really, let me have it. Come on, really let me have it. I want to feel it. I want to feel it. Oh, come on, don’t chicken out. I want you to hit me. I want you to… I want you to take it out on me. You deserve to take it out on me. You deserve… You deserved a lot more.

THEY SAY IT’S NOT YOUR FAULT.

The doctors. They say that. But it is. Other cancers, sure, it’s not. But lung cancer when you smoked every day for twenty-five years? It’s my fault. It’s my fault, you’re going to grow up without a father. It’s all my fault.

ONE LAST THING.

Come here, let’s go back to the table. I hate this office. I don’t ever want to step foot in here again. Come here, let’s go. There, that’s better. Sit down, pour your father a little more wine. Just a little more, can’t hurt me, eh? You see the table next to us?  You see the couple there? Look at the candlelight in their eyes. Look at the guy. His tie is dipping into the tiramisu. Look at how tightly she’s holding his hand, fingernails pressing into the calluses on his knuckles. Look at how happy they are. Look at how beautiful they are. That’s where your mother first told me she was pregnant. Five days before I found out the diagnosis. Five days before I found out I had five months. She told me right there on that night, and I stood on my chair. I stood on my chair, and I announced it to the entire restaurant. I was so goddamn happy. Angelo came out, even he heard the noise. He patted me on the shoulder. He patted me on the shoulder and handed me a cigar.

Originally from Miami, Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen is an MFA student in the Creative Writing Program at New York University. His writing has previously been published by The Nation, The Miami Herald, and The Chronicle of Higher Education. During his undergraduate years at Cornell University, he was the recipient of a Marvin Carlson Award and a Heermans-McCalmon Award for his writing. He’s currently working on a novel manuscript and a television pilot, which you can learn more about here.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HAUNTING VIVIAN by Amy Savage

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

HAUNTING VIVIAN by Amy Savage

Amy Savage
HAUNTING VIVIAN

The first ex to haunt Vivian waits until she’s left her bar stool to use the restroom. On return, she finds his embossed business card cowering next to her martini, the bumpy letters of his name like chocolate-covered ants, striving to entice but making her skin crawl. She quickly scans the crowd, but his bald arrogant head is nowhere to be seen. That white shiny orb of a skull that had drawn her like a moth to a flame. Vivian texts her friend Kelly, who’d nursed her back to life when he’d cheated, who’d urged Vivian to change her social media status to widowed and, whenever she thought of him, to chant, “He’s deceased, I’m released!” For closure, Vivian had even written up a sample obituary for him. Cause of death: cerebral hematoma resulting from fall from dude ranch fence. It wasn’t so far-fetched—he had nearly tumbled on that trip to Utah.

“EERIE,” Kelly now responds. “Coincidence?” The next day, Vivian receives a LinkedIn request from him. A week later she receives a second LinkedIn email which leaves her spooked. The subject beckons: Someone is noticing you. They still want to connect.

The second ex to haunt Vivian appears ten months after the first. Vivian is clerking at the local library when she catches a whiff of his caustic cologne and flees circulation. While she peers at him from the children’s section, he paces a dozen times through the DVDs, stopping to finger the rom-coms, tilting cases outward, then popping them back in, disgusted. He looks thinner but with the same callously contemptuous lips, the lips that would kiss Vivian’s tenderly and then tell her she was too disorganized to make it through law school. “Has to be a doppelgänger,” Kelly says. “Public libraries are beneath him.” But Vivian isn’t so sure. She knows how queasy she felt when she saw him. For that obit, she makes him a father: survived by five devastated and resentful spawn. In lieu of flowers, send donations to the Baldwinsville Public Library.

The third? Well. Elliot isn’t exactly an ex. And, to make it more complicated,  he’s nowhere near dead to her.

◊

It’s a Sunday afternoon in late October, a day so uncannily sweltering as to cause wobbly mirages on the streets and prickly chafing between Vivian’s thighs, when Elliot calls. Her first serious crush in high school. She’d even go so far as to say first love, the boy who eclipsed all the others. Vivian had collected bits of him: a scrap of red satin from his cape in their school’s production of Much Ado, a stiff tube sock that had fallen from his gym bag. She had, at the end of lunch one day, slipped one of his chewed-up Capri Sun straws into her pocket and that night, after finishing her AP American History response paper, sucked on it in the dark, ran it across her lips, inhaled the last trapped droplet of 16% juice, still waiting for his mouth.

Vivian and Elliot haven’t talked for five years—since she was a freshman in college. She sees his name on her phone and is surprised to feel her palms turn clammy and a sudden urge to tidy. She’d noted everything about him, studied him. Tall and sturdy with thick, messy brown hair, fluoride-stained teeth, and long jazzy fingers, adorable love handles with shimmery stretch marks. She would ask him to reach for the highest beakers in Chemistry just to see those rippled silver lines, manifestations of his ravenous appetite, his body’s bursting from within. She’d stared at his yearbook picture for hours, blushing when she read and re-read his scrawled salutation in the back cover (“Hey lady—” He deemed her a lady!), envisioning the halter-topped, lightning-bugged, and Elliot’s-lap-riding possibilities of “We should hang out this summer.” All while longingly sucking his straw. She could practically conjure him.

“VR!” Elliot says now on the phone. Her old nickname. Virtual Reality. She’d always beat him at GoldenEye 007 at their friend Jenna’s house. He had relished defeat, playfully punching her arm, grabbing the console from her, any excuse to touch her. And she had happily succumbed to the most rudimentary form of flirtation: teasing.

“Just drifting through,” Elliot says now. He doesn’t mention where he’s headed. “Went to see my parents.” As far as Vivian knows, they still live in their hometown. “Can I stop by?”

He said “I”. He’s traveling alone. No mention of the girl he’s been dating all through college. The girl who Vivian was sure had initiated him into manhood. “Yes,” Vivian says, too quickly, grabbing a sponge and swiftly wiping crumbs from the counter into the sink. “Of course.”

“Perfect. I’ll be there around nine.”

Nine. Either he plans to stop just long enough to pee—she squeezes a ring of blue chemicals around the inner rim of her toilet—and will drive through the night, or he plans to stay over. In her studio apartment, she has a non-reclining armchair. And a full bed. He’s six-two. Well then. She makes the bed, plumps her deflated pillows. He’ll be hungry after a long drive. He’ll need to put his feet up. She shreds cheese and cracks eggs for a quiche. She whisks her broom around to catch cobwebs.

The cloying heat makes her drowsy. She wheedles her splintered windowpane open a few more inches but, with only two windows on the same wall, there’s no cross-breeze. The garlands of paper bats she’s strung up for Halloween hang static on their strings. Sweat runs down her neck. She turns on her window fan and flaps her arms around to stir the air, pleading with the puny machine. Her armpits smell impudently of the onion’s she’s diced. Why did she decide to bake? It’s 8:30. She needs a shower. As she lathers her hair, she hears the buzzer. Crap. He’s never early. Enshrouded in steam, Vivian is visited by an uninvited memory.

She’s seventeen again, walking to school. Sometimes she would come upon Elliot at the corner of Dove and Eagle and they’d walk together. One afternoon in study hall, he asked if he could pick her up the next morning at 7:30. Because he didn’t have a car, “pick you up” meant on foot—it implied he would do this with his body, their bodies. They’d walk the whole way together. Was this her first date? Would he ask her out? But at 7:40 he still wasn’t there. She knew she’d be late for the eight o’clock bell if she didn’t leave soon. She was so nervous, she had to shit. She felt a few bubbly pains in her stomach and then it deepened, a bowel churning gurgle that, deepening further, threatened to blast. Vivian ran to the bathroom, exhaled as her body sputtered, emptied. She strained to clear herself but nothing more released. A few seconds later, another gnawing and stabbing pain gripped her from within before splattering into the bowl. After she washed her hands, Vivian ran to the window to look for Elliot. 7:45. A barren tract of asphalt. Vivian left, walking faster than was comfortable to make up time. Her calves burned and she would have jogged but her backpack was so heavy it would smash around and probably cause a bruise. She was such a loser. But about halfway to school, she heard her name. She recognized his voice, but it was rough, agitated.

“You didn’t wait,” Elliot said.

She expected jolliness, an apology. “You were late.”

“Why didn’t you wait. I caught up to you,” he said, his arms gripping his backpack straps, his normally expressive, lively fingers clenching the padded nylon. In her fantasies the night before, those fingers had reached for hers, woven together, held in tender pressure. “We would have been on time.”

“I’m sorry,” Vivian said.

“See you at school,” he said and strode off. She felt like a bitch. How different it could have been had he said, “Me too,” and reached for her hand. But those long, sturdy legs launched him forward and away. That day, he was a little early to school. Vivian, with her much shorter legs, though walking briskly, barely made the first bell.

Now, in her studio apartment, she hastily rinses the foamy lather from her hair, towels off, and throws on a thin scoop neck tee and her best jeans. A quick flick of liquid eyeliner. She’s a woman now. She can’t believe he’s early. And she hopes he hasn’t taken off. Mercifully, she hears the buzzer again. He’s grown up, too.

“It’s me,” he says, invoked by the intercom.

Vivian’s finger slips, sweaty on the little white button. Her lips graze the plastic grille covering the microphone. “Come up.”

When she opens the door, he’s more beautiful than before. His jaw is sharper, his brow settled. A man now. She wants to kiss his eyelids, pluck the stray hairs between his eyebrows. But he’s still wearing graphic tees and cargo pants. At their high school’s awards night, Elliot won the Ray Holmes award—he played a mean jazz piano—and had worn to the ceremony a blue plaid button-down with an irresistible yellow and red polka-dotted bow tie. His gray slacks were held up by suspenders, his pants were a little tight, the pockets jammed to bursting and jingling with all the gear he’d kept stowed in those signature cargo pants. He was guileless, with the fashion sense of a storybook toad.

“Sorry I’m late,” he says now, grinning. Is this a slippery apology for all those years ago? He hugs Vivian, her face going straight to his ripe armpit, musky as a coy dog. Her head floats with lust. She resists the urge to go back in for another whiff, to twiddle his hairy nipples through the thin screen-printed cotton.

“Hungry?” she asks, trying to ground herself.

He makes direct eye contact, irises the color of bourbon. His voice is softly intimate. He sounds full of regret when he says, “Always.” He grazes her back with his musical hands and she feels a tingle that spreads to the nape of her neck. She feels like she’s never been touched before, the ghosts of her exes dissipating into the ether, Vivian is a pure well, primed to be pumped and slurped and drained dry by her first love. But what can she offer to drink?

“I have milk and seltzer,” she says, abashed.

“Aha,” Elliot says, and reaches into both his cargo pockets and pulls out two airline-sized bottles of twist-top cabernet.

They clink glasses and joke about their friends and teachers from high school, picking up where they left off. Vivian slices the quiche and serves them each a generous piece. For a while Elliot talks and talks but doesn’t eat, the fork floating in his hand. But after he finishes his wine, he gives Vivian a pink-toothed grin and digs in. She serves him a second slice. Then he starts serving himself. Little flecks of pastry cling to his plump wine-stained lips. He eats and eats and eats until he eats the last piece. Then he tilts and taps the empty tin to collect the crumbs, dumping them onto his palm and slapping them to his mouth.

Vivian could purr with satisfaction, jump into his burly lap on her rickety kitchen chair. But she holds back—this is the guy who learned to knit to make his college girlfriend a scarf. Vivian hadn’t planned to be petty, but where is this worthy-of-knitting girlfriend, anyway? “Does Monica cook?” Vivian asks, hating herself.

A storm brews on Elliot’s brow. He reaches for the black plastic cauldron of multicolored hard candies Vivian set out for Halloween.

“Monica’s in Patagonia studying penguins.” Elliot unwraps two green candies and crunches them simultaneously. “She called me last week to tell me her translator Raúl,” he rolls his eyes, swallowing the shards, “not only looks like Gael García, but can coax flames from ice,” he says, his voice chopped.

“Sorry.” Vivian’s not sorry. Again. “Hey, let’s listen to our old faves.” She digs in her dresser and finds a mix tape Jenna had made her. The opening drums of “Naked Eye”  take her back to the summer before Junior year, before the fall, before Elliot cooled from their near-miss. She rises to wash the dishes.

“Let me help,” he says, at her back, his arms reaching over hers, his hands over her hands. They are dancing and scrubbing the buttery crumbs from the cutlery. His closeness, his forwardness, is what she has always wanted. His chin rests gently on her hair and he hums along to the song. She slides the plates under the gushing faucet, slipping them into their places to drip. She hums along, hypnotized by his crooning vibrating in her back, merging with her own voice, blending like honey. Her hands continue to wash, dishes turning smooth as a trance.

“Let’s watch a movie,” he says when she’s placed the last fork in the drainer. So, he’s not leaving or interested in talking.

Vivian puts on Hocus Pocus. It has finally cooled off. They share a blanket on her bed, close, but not quite touching.

She loves this movie. She loves it more with Elliot there. She loves him. Again. As if there’d been a doubt. They’re going to make out any minute now. Her jack o’ lantern string lights cast a cozy flickering glow over her bed. She hears his breathing change. But it’s not heavy-sexy, only the perfectly regular and relaxing rhythm of someone who’s fallen asleep. She admires him, takes him in. He’s here. He’s asleep in her bed. On the senior trip to Six Flags, when they had become “just friends,” they’d shared a seat on the bus, and he’d fallen asleep and drooled on her shoulder, his body as tantalizing as fresh lemonade to a parched tongue.

She leans toward him now and touches the tip of her tongue to his salty temple.

◊

Vivian wakes to the sound of galloping horses and hissing kettles. The super must have fired up the steam radiators for the first time this fall. It is still dark. From the window, the crisp air pools over the warmth of her bed. Vivian is as comfortable as she has ever felt. Wait—Elliot is curled against her, his arm draped over her, tucked under her breasts. His breathing is regular and deep. Hypnotic. He sleeps like the dead.

He is where he belongs. Where he belonged all along.

Vivian’s nipples perk up, alert. She shifts her hips, arching her lower back slightly to press against him. She’s already wet. She hopes and hopes he will get hard, sink himself into her. He doesn’t. She is aching to turn and nibble his ravenous mouth, to nip his dainty earlobes right off, suck his Coltrane-plunking fingertips until they shriveled, get a taste of those silvery noodle stretch marks. But she’s reluctant. Snug in his arms. She mustn’t break the spell. Outside her window, the first bird chirps. She’s waited eight years. What’s another hour?

Shadows shift on the ceiling. Vivian inhales the pleasant sharpness of woodsmoke and sweet mulled decay of fallen leaves. The birds grow louder. The room swings from twilight black to crepuscular blue. Elliot stirs. Now, she thinks. Kiss me. She wishes she were a little more impulsive. And she worries about whether he’ll want to shower in the morning. She only scrubbed the toilet, not the tub with its grimy rim of all the skin she’s shed. Worse, she only has the one towel, the one she used last night, the one that passed over her nether parts, catching her smell and probably snagging a few hairs.

Elliot pulls her a little closer, nuzzles her neck. A pleasurable chill nets her scalp. He breathes deeply, smelling her hair. Kisses the crown of her head. Wait, Vivian thinks. Who does he think he’s kissing? She could be any warm body. A moment passes and she feels his arms and shoulders flex slightly. He’s waking up. Does he even know where he is?

“Huh,” he says, groggily. “Jenna uses the same shampoo.”

Vivian bristles. She always suspected he’d had a crush on Jenna after her. Her successor. He’d never dated Jenna, as far as Vivian knew. But now she wasn’t so sure. No—she was sure.

“Jenna?”

“Yeah,” Elliot whispers, his arms still wrapped around her. His voice rises to a conversational volume. He’s awake. “I saw her this week when I was home.”

“Well,” Vivian says. Her eyes sting as if shampoo has dribbled where it shouldn’t. He’s been on tour. The Penguin Revenge Tour, Cold Case Crush Tour, Near-Miss Tour. Nearly-Mrs. Tour. His presence in her bed is curdling.

“I guess Jenna and I have the same taste,” she says.

Elliot laughs at the coincidence but doesn’t catch her meaning. He looks at his watch. “Seven?! My alarm didn’t go off!” He yanks his arm out from under her neck, throws the blanket off them both. She feels robbed of the warmth and grabs the blanket back for herself. “I’d better go,” he says, picking crusted drool from his cheek.

“I can see,” Vivian says.

“You got a washcloth?” Vivian has a clean washcloth but points to the dishcloth she’d used to handle the hot pie tin. He yanks it from the oven handle and scrubs his lips, pastry crumbs and dried spittle flaking off onto Vivian’s floor.

Vivian notes his stubble is only coming in over his lip and in a weak patch on his neck. Elliot shoves his feet into his sneakers. “Monica’s flight arrives at nine,” he says as he turns the knob and disappears.

“Right through you,” Vivian whispers.

Vivian hears the ding of the elevator. She flings her blanket aside and grabs her robe. The elevator doors close slowly, but she can’t catch a glimpse of Elliot. The orange-lit numbers drop until they reach L. She stands looking down the empty hallway for a long minute. She realizes he hadn’t even bothered to shut the door behind him. She’s in the frame the way he left it. She steps back into her apartment and feels a tiny sliver of pleasure to shut the door herself. Vivian is suddenly very hungry; she feels dizzy, a sugar crash that could make her faint. In her kitchen, there’s no sign of Elliot’s visit but for his dinky wine bottles and her empty pie tin. She’d been a fool to expect leftovers.

Vivian’s hand trembles as she selects one of the candies from her cauldron.

She texts Kelly, who, thank goodness, wakes up early for spin class. She needs to contact someone. Her fingers shakily tap out:

So, Elliot stopped by last night.

THE Elliot???

No, an apparition. Yes, THE. Woke up spooning but he took off already

Vivian untwists the candy wrapper and parts her lips for the red tablet.

Viv, you’ve been looking at this all wrong

Vivian rolls her meager consolation into her cheek. She didn’t reach out to be reprimanded. Can’t Kelly see the pattern? She’s about to silence her notifications when Kelly’s text comes in.

You’ve been haunting them, too

The stale sugary lozenge dissolves, vanishing into her.

Amy Savage’s fiction appears in Bellevue Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, Cleaver Magazine, Oyster River Pages, and elsewhere. Honors include selection for One Story’s Summer Writers’ Conference ’22, AWP’s Writer to Writer, and Pioneer Valley Writers’ Workshop’s year-long manuscript program. Based in Rhode Island, she teaches medical Spanish, translates, and performs in medical simulations. She recently finished writing a collection of stories in which this story appears (or disappears?). @asavagewriter

Cover Design by Karen Rile

FAVOR by Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FAVOR by Kim Magowan

Kim Magowan
FAVOR

Liam,

Emailing because I just heard that you and Genevieve split up, so I wanted to reach out and say—well, I was going to say how sorry I am. But that isn’t entirely truthful. At any rate, I’m here if you need me. Divorce, ugh: been there, done that.

And I will also say that personally, I didn’t find it helpful when people would say mean things about Jim, thinking that in so doing they were being supportive. But all that did was make me feel shitty and question my own judgement. Like, was I supposed to thank them for saying they had always thought Jim was an asshole, or boring, or bragged too much?

Anyway, all this is to say: I truly understand what you’re going through, and by no means do I want to add to your suffering by participating in that well-intentioned but misguided pile-on upon a former spouse.

So maybe you should stop reading here, since I am violating my own experience of what is helpful or appropriate to offer at such junctures. And I truly don’t intend this email as a slam on Genevieve—just some perspective on why it might not be the worst thing in the world that you two split up, even if now things feel really grim.

So feel free to stop reading at this point. If this were a review, I would now write, SPOILER ALERT.

But should you keep reading, make of my experience what you will.

When I was leaving your wedding five years ago, Genevieve’s mother or aunt (I assume a relative because she had a certain family resemblance to Genevieve, a square jaw) was standing by the double doors and handing people, as they exited the hotel, the wedding favors: five-by-seven inch ornate picture frames. People accepted them in a kind of startled way and said “Oh thanks!” I am assuming you had no hand in these picture frames? If you did, please forgive me. Please stop reading now and delete this email.

But if my supposition is correct and this was all Genevieve’s brainwave, as I have always assumed, well—what kind of wedding favors are five-by-seven picture frames?

Women at a fancy evening wedding, like yours was, generally bring tiny clutch purses that carry, at most, one’s cell phone, lipstick, and compact. I couldn’t even fit my wallet into my clutch bag, so I just had a credit card and some cash. Of course men are not going to be carrying purses. Men, if they have female partners, will expect these partners to carry the five-by-seven picture frames, which, as explained, will not fit.

This problem could have been averted if Genevieve’s mother (or whoever that square-jawed woman was) had given us, as we exited the hotel, bags in which to tote our picture frames, but she did not. I have wondered why not. I know Genevieve is very worried about climate change; I have heard her (more than once) pontificate about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But paper bags are recyclable.

I’ve thought about your wedding favor quite a bit over the past five years, and I am relaying this story to you now in hopes that it will make you see something askew about Genevieve. For many reasons, a picture frame is a terrible wedding favor. It’s ostentatious: picture frames are expensive. It’s, as already explained, cumbersome and impractical. It’s also narcissistic. What were people supposed to do with these picture frames? I assume her concept was that we should put a picture of you and Genevieve inside one, but is this realistic? Do you, for instance, have a framed picture of me in your house? I doubt it!

Perhaps Genevieve would say, of course she does not expect that, it’s a gift, put whatever picture we choose within our frames. Indeed, when you and Genevieve came over for dinner last year—this was a few weeks before Jim moved out, when I thought everything was fine, though you might have detected something brewing that I was oblivious to—Genevieve looked around our living room in an investigative way, casting her eyes over the table-tops in particular. This made me think she was looking for, and not detecting, that picture frame. At any rate, she wore a cross, chilly expression.

But seriously, what was I supposed to do with a five-by-seven metal picture frame? When our car was parked at least fifteen blocks away, because Jim always grabs the first parking space he sees, and was never mindful of the fact that I was wearing heels?

Anyway, my hope is that this anecdote might illuminate for you some features of Genevieve’s (to recap: ostentation, impracticality, inconsideration, narcissism) that might, over time, have a leveling effect on the pain I have no doubt you are currently experiencing. Seriously, reach out if you need me.

With love,

Amy

Kim Magowan is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come (2022), published by Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. www.kimmagowan.com

Cover Design by Karen Rile

OFF by Suphil Lee Park

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

OFF by Suphil Lee Park

Suphil Lee Park
OFF

You wake up in complete darkness. It is the kind of darkness that strikes you as a jolt of realization that you’ve never found yourself in complete darkness up until that very moment, not that terrifying night at a cabin nestled deep in the Norwegian woods, not when every ion of light is strangled out of an airtight, soundproof Broadway theatre just before a burst of spotlight, and not even that one time you crawled into a washer full of dirty laundry during a hide-and-seek turned competitive sports and fell asleep. The first thought that hits you, still hazy with sleep, is that Dax must have closed the blackout curtains before you went to bed. With one arm, you swipe what you think is the perimeter of your bed. Your voice comes out shrill, unsure: “Dax?”

Sound and space have an odd relationship. Even though your spatial perception is generally far from that of a bat, you sense something’s off the moment that one syllable leaves your lips. The sound’s missing the treble and resonance with which it’s supposed to return to you. Like a speech given in an auditorium, instead of in your bathroom, in practice. You are not where you thought you were. Which is to say, you’re likely not as safe as you’d like to be. And it’s probably best that you utter not a single word more without thinking twice. You try to stop your mind rushing to the movie Buried Alive where Jennifer Jason Leigh comes to in a coffin, underground. Blinking doesn’t change the dark before you. Not a hint of gloss or moist that usually gives darkness a textured presence, the way the nighttime ocean surfaces from within itself with the evidence of undulation. But when you try, your invisible hand stretches out in front of your face without hitting the lid of a coffin. You realize you’re without covers. No bedsheets under your back, either. The sleek, dry surface of whatever is underneath doesn’t remind you of anything at home you could be possibly lying on. Definitely not your room. If not so sure, you would have thought this complete darkness was due to your temporary blindness. And you would have thought, great, now this is the backwash of last night, faintly recalling the rumor you heard back in high school that someone drank the contents of a laboratory alcohol burner lamp and turned blind. And you would have heard the voice of your permanently pucker-faced aunt who begins every conversation with “I hate to say but,” like some untimely narration: bad habits catch up.

Last night. Dax went overboard with his silver-tongued flatteries last night. He rotated Janet’s newly furnished living room like a medical intern on his first shift. As if in competition, you went overboard with the red wine and capped off a nearly full bottle only halfway through the night. The cheese board fell short of the scale of the party Janet was hosting and most guests had been sipping patiently on their empty stomachs. It’d become clearer to both of you, each obligatory gathering like this, how embarrassed you felt of each other in general. In public, you greeted in unison at the doorway and were quick to drift apart. In private, you’d settled into that feeling of sitting in a bathtub full of tepid water, where there were dead skins of half-hearted affectionate gestures, no longer recognizable as your own. Last night, you found yourself trying yet again to ignore Dax talking over others; he was yet again an all-too-eager participant in the usual match of wits, during which everyone takes turns to mock a present or absent friend with the adult charade of congeniality. You knew all too well he’d be deep down criticizing you as judgmental or aloof, even. Past the point in a relationship when foibles somehow endear the person, however, you rarely knew what to do with them anymore. And you had no better idea what Dax must have been thinking, helping you into the car last night. Did you retch in the irrigation ditch, swaying on the curb? Did you two Uber away together as always? You bickered dispassionately about a weekend ski trip. But the rest was all a blur.

When you exhale, your throat burns with the tang of hangover and dehydration. The darkness doesn’t budge. It occurs to you that you could have fallen in a manhole, or even in a sinkhole, had you gotten into a real fight with Dax and managed to scramble to your feet and off on your own, couldn’t you? You did once wake up in your friend’s moldy basement, way too late in the day, just when Dax was getting serious about reporting you missing. You let out a sigh. That doesn’t hurt, surely a good sign. It doesn’t feel like you broke your rib, but the alcohol—still far from wearing off—has probably left you under the spell of this blissful numbness. So you slowly test your limbs and bones, stretching and contorting, bracing for a pang of pain. Nothing. Now you bring your hands to your face, which feels uninjured to the touch, before gently patting yourself down. Oh, you say almost out loud. You’re stark naked.

How many times have you been so cluelessly and defenselessly naked in your life? At least never since you were old enough to want something only noncommittally and still work as hard, if not harder, on getting it. It was probably since that night you stole too many bloated olives from cocktail glasses and ended up in bed with an ex, as you liked to say back then, on a whim, your nudity feeling like a nuisance and hers, a kind redundancy. Or it could have been further back, like that muggy evening when everyone in your family went out and you sat in the massage chair butt naked, straight out of the shower, only to doze off and wake up to your stunned parents. When did the general matters of the body, your own as much as others’, become so unsurprising, so generic? The warm burst of shock that ran through your body—when you stripped down to a pair of socks and compared your adolescent body with your friends’ in one of those moles and all dares, when you sampled a box of condoms until your fingers were slimy and smelled of rubber, when you placed a tampon between your lips like a cigar, when you slipped your tongue in your friend’s earlobe in the back of the school bus, tasting her tart citrus hair spray—all of it felt like a world away. Oh, it was a world ago. Speaking of moles, once, you found a nipple-shaped taupe mole sitting at the dome of a shoulder. This unusually hairless guy next door, whom you slept with every time you knew your then-boyfriend was off to see this girl, laughed it off when you poked at his mole. He had an old dripolator that squirted grainy coffee you always politely declined, and you also never mentioned the boredom that comes with the scenario of betrayal and its petty details, although you had a feeling he understood; how what could have been, years back, ingredients for a heartbreak now did not amount to much: irritation at someone who’s chosen to be enough of a hassle to necessitate supervision when old enough to have a child himself, and the romantic overtime that went into finding someone to cheat with and keeping this side business afloat, just to make it even, out of self-righteousness. With only mild interest you watched both relationships not pan out in their own ways, got tired, and moved out at the end of your lease, without telling either man. That was the last time you noticed the shape of anyone’s mole. But you could not quite put your finger on any of it still, how each turn of sexual events reiterated itself with ever-diminishing potential to be less repetitive, which you might have still made work with some deft articulation, which, unfortunately, turned out to be something you lack.

The fact of your nudity has put you on a brief hold, but finally, your thirst forces you into motion. Not now, you tell your brain prone to thinking the worst, I could have very well taken off my clothes god knows when. As suddenly and uncontrollably, thirst is all that’s chanting through your veins and holding your body together. You fumble around. Support your weight with two hands and manage to sit upright. For a brief moment, the darkness comes swirling into your head and you fight the gravity of dizziness. You can sniff yourself out in the dark that tightens around you in fluctuating knots. Maybe I’m dreaming, you entertain a possibility that seizes you out of nowhere, trying to steady yourself. But how does one find a way out of a dream like this? Your chest contracts with a violent feeling you’re unable to name. Your palms pushed against the lukewarm floor. A waft of sweat and a night without shower from your stray strands of hair. The soured woody notes of fermented grapes. Standing on your feet is out of the question, so you’re soon on all fours, feeling your way around. For all you know, you might be in a dark room the size of a football field, but it could also be the very opposite. Either way, you think. On you crawl.

Your mother used to say that you were such a pleasure before you started to crawl. With crawling came the possibility of small accidents that could prove to be catastrophes on a new, fragile human body. She had to strip all of her walls bare, extricate, in her own words, all the keepsakes that once hung there without much imposition, from a set of Derby on shelves that were once considered perfectly safe to decorative spearheads, all suddenly bad omens in the presence of your frail, uncertain life. She said “uncertain,” as though that were a limited edition gift only she could have bestowed, which was probably true from her perspective. Uncertain, with a savory ring to it. It took a leap of faith to tug at, stumble upon, or taste anything during those first years of your life. And your mother, who used to dream of living in a tiny house on wheels or piloting a commercial plane across various latitudes before marriage and its ramifications got in her way, liked to think of those first years as forgotten bliss, an offering born of her sacrifices, the best of times when everything held potential. Whenever she brought that up, you could have pointed out how affordable a mobile home actually was to her now, or mentioned Blanche Stuart Scott, the first American woman pilot who was born nearly a century prior and was married, but as a child, you soon learned that such good points would only make your mother answer out of spite, “Sorry for being not so extraordinary.” The first decades of your life were predominated by equally unhappy or far unhappier people who seemed to think life is supposed to be unhappy to begin with. To whom a downside of anything is the more important side. So, as it goes, when you headed for college, you were determined to make a set of entirely different choices. But you didn’t understand those choices would not necessarily entail an entirely different life, but can only guarantee a considerably different kind of unhappiness.

You try standing on your feet mostly to fathom out the height of the space. But as soon as your weight shifts, you realize even your sense of balance is under the influence of darkness. You tilt like an hourglass slipping out of grasp, sand inside running amok. Once you manage to pull yourself together, you stretch your arms and make a cautious arc with them. Nothing. You even dare a timid jump, expecting, or rather hoping, to hit a low ceiling or a beam, an exposed pipe, anything. Still, nothing. Your lack of vision did not only completely take away any sense of confidence that you’d need to freely navigate the world on your own, but seemed to have wrecked your awareness of self, and even your ability to keep track of time. How long has it been since you started crawling around in this dark? You have yet to come across a sliver of light or any spot where you feel the impenetrable darkness has watered down even slightly. Never in your life have you experienced the kind of depths you feel this present reality must be built upon. You imagine a hole, a bunker, giant and deep enough to make you lose your sense of space and time so utterly and to drown out light to this extent. The existence of a place like that, or the chance of you being transported and situated in that kind of facility overnight, seems like such a remote possibility that you find yourself leaning toward an equally implausible theory that the world might have come to an end, and that you’ve awakened to an apocalyptic world drained of the ever-illuminating, always-dependable light that you’ve never not taken for granted. It is this thought that sends you into a bout of full-blown panic, which first comes out as a shriek in two syllables: “HELLO!” into the unanswering, impervious dark.

Before your life was in full swing, which is to say, before the consequences of your choices took real, tangible shapes, as they do—from frown lines and the type of car you feel comfortable driving to the dating pool you get stuck in and the surprisingly narrow list of new dishes you can safely digest—you considered unhappiness a state of conscious need, possibly for antidepressants. So, even as you came to associate the grey carpet of your office floor with concrete slab, and couldn’t feel any spark of interest in the designs for hardwares you could only identify as serial numbers, from a wheel bearing for a dump truck to off-road tires, you didn’t deem yourself particularly unhappy. Even when your mother finally decided to end her marriage and remained unhappy all the same, you didn’t take it hard. Statistically, it all fell within the range of a perfectly normal, comfortable life in America, and you were not about to add to the whiny list of first-world problems, no thank you. Statistically, you found a much-sought-after footing in the thin middle class slice, of the much-fantasized country with the number one GDP per capita in the world, with much luck. You amicably albeit dutifully greeted your adjacent desks every workday. You accepted the fact that, as a designer, and one of a certain caliber, you would never get a glass-doored office of your own or a corporation card to whip out as you please, and that only your ability to compromise and level-headedness—a set of your “entirely different choices” with some pivot, but mostly the focus of your grad studies on industrial design, instead of rustling, crumpling, slithering fabrics and a sewing machine—secured you this title and coworkers, places of residence and go-to entertainment, and the certainty of those premises around which you built your life. Nor did you feel entitled to more than your social life cycling in the familiar conversational orbit, or the repetitive way in which you decompressed every weekend: Netflix, old and new rooftop bars, and unhealthy foods in rotation. A bottle of different ibuprofens became part of the routine to manage your chronic wrist ache, which soon spread to your shoulders and back. But it was no more than a pinprick of discomfort. As is everything in the beginning.

Filled to its brim with darkness, the world is still empty of light. You’re washed of most sensations but an undeniable knot of dread at the bottom of your stomach. You’ve virtually lost your voice from having screamed far too long, to no avail. To an inaudible, invisible audience that might be lurking in this dark, you’d be washed of your gender, race, age, any such visual signifier of your social identity. You’d be bodiless. You’d be mostly scents. Little clues, just glimmers of who you might turn out to be in the light. At least until you start to speak to get yourself across, or until you’re touched, probed, prodded, and investigated. But as long as you stay out of reach, you would not be identified. You’d be an impersonal, directional you. You’d perhaps even pass for a slightly warmer segment of the darkness, if you could steady your breathing well enough. But the darkness breathes, too. It heaves as your lungs swell, your chest more accentuated than usual from hyperventilation. It wrings you out like a reptilian constrictor as each horrible thought passes your mind. It threatens to flood your mouth, nostrils, mind, seep into your veins and blot out the increasingly indiscernible border between you and itself, until you’re completely awash with its crushing presence. It clinches around you as if you, and only you, are an area of concern. You shut and then open your eyes, no visible difference taking place during the short transition. You breathe in, thinking, is this it? Then out: is this death?

Is this it? You once asked yourself, when you strayed off the marketplace route by accident and found yourself on a shore. Unimpressed, as you grew to be as a traveller. Beaten from many days of backpacking, and although you’d been refusing to admit, from the repercussions of your twin’s diagnosis that sent you on this trip to begin with. That night, the Balinese moon neared the color of pale egg yolk, caught in a halo. Even though the beach was off a poorly maintained local road, it didn’t prove to be empty and was in fact far from it. A number of tourists were sprawled on sand in twos and threes, one hand resting on their belt bag as if in a bizarre fashion cult. They looked irrelevant to the rest of the night. You felt self-conscious to be of that smattering of foreign faces, even though your parents’ home country was practically next door, so you took out your vape, as you do in order to mask various kinds of feeling. It was then that you noticed a line of marchers approaching. Presumably locals. Gently swaying, like a field stirred by a thorough breeze. Candles in hand. You watched the ocean behind the marchers come alive in a series of faintly glowing horizontal bars. It felt as if the beach fell silent all at once, although noises continued unwaveringly, from the tables under the awning of the nearby seafood restaurant, from the tourists now snapping pictures of the marchers crossing their field of vision in silence. Raising the vape to your mouth, you accidentally locked eyes with one of the marchers. A young man, or more of a boy, with an open face. The unmistakable grief in his eyes made you feel incredibly, indisputably foolish for having come all this way from home just to grieve. He turned his head almost immediately. Instead of smoking, you watched the marchers disperse from the straight line they first formed and disappear into the night together as a dimming impression of light. You tucked the vape in your pocket and plopped down on the cool, powdery sand. A spot in the sand seemed to have come to life, and when you looked closer, you spotted tiny crabs, the exact same color as the sand, no bigger than quarters, crawling all over the place. When you looked, really looked, the moonlit beach seethed with the creatures. You picked one up. Held it between your fingers. Its whole body wrestling to break free felt like a feeble pulse. It weighed so close to nothing that you could forget you were holding it if you just closed your eyes. But otherwise, it was an ordinary, familiar crustacean. One that you’d find anywhere in the world. Just a slightly different kind.

When you finally open your eyes again, everything looks the same at first. You lie spread-eagle on your back staring off into the dark. You blink away drops of salty water, your hair pasted flat along your temples. Blinking slowly, you see a tiny white dot on the periphery, like a puncture in blindness or a crack in a coffin. You try to blink it away, thinking it must be some particle stuck in your eye. It doesn’t go away. You turn your head in the direction of the dot and are now looking at it directly. No, it’s not stuck in your eye. You hold it in your unblinking gaze, light-headed. The dot is getting bigger and bigger, almost imperceptibly at first, and now more undeniably by the second, or getting closer and closer. It widens like a mouth of light, a manhole lid getting lugged open, a nightmare falling apart at the seams, a meteor dashing down for the final blow, the world beyond death opening up, a shimmering raindrop, the birth of a new moon, a sphere of surgical lights calling you back, back to consciousness, or everything at once.

Suphil Lee Park (수필 리 박 / 秀筆 李 朴) is the author of the poetry collection Present Tense Complex, winner of the Marystina Santiestevan Prize (Conduit Books & Ephemera 2021), and a poetry chapbook, Still Life, selected by Ilya Kaminsky as the winner of the 2022 Tomaz Salamun Prize, forthcoming from Factory Hollow Press. She’s received fiction prizes from the Indiana Review and Writer’s Digest and her recent fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in the Iowa Review, J Journal, and Notre Dame Review, among others. You can find more about her here.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

ZOLOFT NANNY by Madeleine Gavaler

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Madeleine Gavaler
ZOLOFT NANNY

Red drips down Dasha’s chin as I watch her through the playground bars.

I hold my phone a distance from my cheek, giving my voice air to wade through before making its way to some faraway woman at a desk who doesn’t know why none of the meds work on me. “Zoloft made me want to kill myself, so actually I would not like to keep taking it.”

I press the sound of her between my shoulder and face, the way suburban moms do when they’re busy cleaning but still have to talk to their friend Nancy—women can hold so many things. I crawl under the slide to the child and lick my thumb, smudging cherry slushie around her massive cheeks. Another nanny, older, wordlessly hands me wipes from her more well-equipped but lower-tech stroller.

“Thank you,” I mouth. My psychiatrist continues to proselytize into my ear about the many months it takes each antidepressant, mood stabilizer, and antipsychotic to work properly. Christine is the doctor in charge of keeping me alive. She is not doing an impressive job.

I set my phone down and close my eyes. Ice hits my lips. Dasha’s grinning face is inches from mine, spoonful of cherry slushie raised to my mouth. I smile back and let her feed me red.

“You look like fancy lipstick, like my mom. Or like ouch and blood.”

“Thanks, you too, babe.”

The two-year-old leans her head against my shoulder, cuddling me as she uses my sleeve as a napkin. I stroke her hair, and we look down at our feet and the phone in the grass. Faintly we both hear my psychiatrist asking if I’ve been exercising lately, because that can be really good for depression and anxiety. I hang up the call with the tip of my sandal.

“Why are you so sad?” she asks, reaching up and touching my cheek with sticky fingers.

“I’m not so sad! I just had some delicious slushie and I’m at the playground with my favorite person,” I remind her. I poke her cheek back, gently.

“Okay,” Dasha says and smiles slightly. “But you seem like sick.”

“Yeah, my brain’s a little sick. Will you give me a new one?” When I close my eyes I see the steering wheel jerk toward blurry trees. Can you cut that part out of me, Dasha? Christine?

She jumps up and mimes cutting around my head, gently scooping out its contents, and sewing it back up.

“A-plus lobotomy, thank you.”

She runs back towards the slides, sneakers alight.

◊

Earlier, Dasha had been sitting on my new velvet couch, eating goldfish while we listened to a Winnie the Pooh audiobook and I scrolled absently through dating apps, vaguely nauseated. “Who’s that, who’s that?” she asked, glimpsing men holding fish on my screen. “Christopher Robin,” I told her.

Now my ex is sitting there on the same couch, a much further distance between us. She scans my apartment for newness, barely containing her glee at being my emergency contact. My phone is open to a search of nearby psychiatric hospitals. I am not winning the breakup.

This couch is very long, I notice. My ex is wearing my clothes, a floral shirt I had left in a trash bag and asked her to take to Goodwill when I moved out. It drapes on her gracefully. My old favorite pair of jeans fit her perfectly. She suggests I became suicidal because of her.

“If you were a cartoon character, that would be your outfit,” she tells me.

“What?”

“Like, they’re always wearing the same thing. Like you.” She gestures at my old t-shirt and shorts with a rip up one side.

“Oh. Thanks.”

I look down at us from above, my knees pointing toward her, hers pointing away toward my yellow chair, the former visual centerpiece of our former apartment. For me it had been sunshine breaking through clouds of dust and poor first-floor lighting. She had never particularly liked my taste in decor. I hated that apartment. Maybe it had been the way a grey wall wasn’t worth repainting to her that first made me suicidal? The way she liked to sit in the evenings with her back to me? It may have been sleeping in a bedroom with no windows in a bed with someone who didn’t want to touch me. Or it may have been a malfunctioning serotonin system.

“It’s so nice that we’re hanging out,” she says, making thoughtful eye contact with the needlepoint dandelion on my wall. “I’m glad we can be friends now. I’m glad you called.”

From my dissociative ceiling vantage, I can see myself processing this new meaning of hanging out, which now includes when you call your ex because you’re suicidal even though you swore you’d never see her again and then she comes over and sits very far apart from you on your couch and compliments the studio apartment you moved into because she dumped you but still inexplicably wanted to live together and the sliver of you that was still alive said well that’s a bad idea and now you live next to a cemetery but you painted it green and it’s rather pretty.

“I like the green.”

“Thank you.” I study her face, illegible. “I don’t want to be alive.”

“You seem like you’re doing okay,” she tells me. “How’s nannying going?”

“Nannying’s good.”

She stands up and peers around the rest of my apartment. “Oh good, I was looking for that shirt.” She points at a striped button-down hanging in my closet. I untangle it from a series of hangers that are also hers and hand it to her. She does not ask for the hangers back. Her eyes linger on other objects she once purchased, nail polish and deodorant, but she does not request their return, after everything I’ve been through lately.

“How are the meds?”

“The meds are not good. I stopped taking the meds.”

She nods. “Well, I need the microwave too. It belongs to the landlady.”

I help her carry it down to her car. She goes for a hug and I go for a handshake. She laughs at my choice, and we shake hands, three ups and downs.

◊

“Hell is other people. Have you ever heard that one?” Dasha’s mom asks. “It describes other parents perfectly. Hell is other parents.” For a moment we both watch her in her mind’s eye, printing “hell is other parents” on expensive diaper bags and selling them on Instagram.

“Yes,” I say.

I get vertigo walking between her house and mine. I sleep in my little green box of dandelions and yellow chairs, and then each morning my world balloons into Dasha’s mother’s air-conditioned castle, jewel tone walls reaching miles above us. Early in the fog, when I had just been left and felt very empty but not quite in the way that I was going to—I mean, before I had reached a therapeutic dose of Zoloft, which rarely, in some lucky individuals, makes you even more desperately want to drive off the highway and impale yourself on evergreens—this woman had asked me to hold her toddler for the summer, and I said oh yes, that sounds lovely.

“Anyway, can you heat up the oat milk for her nap? I promise I’m actually about to leave, I’m really gonna leave the house, since I’m paying you to be here.” She chuckles.

Dasha’s mom sells vintage objects out of her living room, so I don’t know where she goes to work. She pays for my company often, putting frilly price tags on dresses and chunky jewelry while her child happily plays independently. I sit between them, occasionally asking questions about what the dolls are up to and the online marketplace.

“How are you doing?” she asks me. “You seem off.”

Can I tell this rich, beautiful mother that I am having a very hard time being alive right now, but thank you for entrusting me with the life of your baby, she is very important and probably the best thing in my life. “I’ve been better.”

She continues to look at me intently.

“My meds aren’t working.”

“Ahh. I went off mine when I was pregnant with her, I cried every day. But I felt so alive.”

“I guess I feel alive.” Sometimes I scratch bits of my skin off and it momentarily invigorates me—is that what you mean? I rub behind my elbow, one of those places.

She nods. “Depression is what makes us human,” she informs me. “Did I ever tell you about my nine-day panic attack in Barcelona?”

“Is it? No, you did not.”

I do not listen to this story; instead, I fly up to the rafters and perch, looking down at this beautiful woman telling me unhelpful shit. I wonder if Christine is beautiful too. Is she even a doctor? Is she just a woman who Googles “What is a mood stabilizer?” I would rather Dasha’s mother prescribe me oat milk and trips to Spain. It seems to have kept her alive.

“Anyway,” she ends, “I left you guys zoo tickets on top of the baby grand, just in case you want to go after her nap, it’s gonna be a beautiful afternoon. Have fun together!”

She finally puts on her mules and leaves, and I carry Dasha up the stairs. She has a crib, but they let her sleep on a queen mattress on the floor, covered in a red patchwork quilt. She mashes the pillows around her, cocooning angrily.

“I don’t wanna sleep,” she says, frowning up at me.

“I know.” She drifts away after thirty seconds of oat milk and nose pets. I lay next to her much longer, eyes tracing the stars on the ceiling, listening to her tiny, slow breaths.

Back down far too many flights of stairs, I pour the remainder of the oat milk down the sink, absently reading the carton for its protein stats. “Can babies be vegan,” I search on my phone. Google refuses to critique Dasha’s mother’s child-rearing menu, opting for diplomatic dietary hedging instead.

Scrolling down an article rigorously debating oat vs. almond milk, I receive another text notification. Our “conversation” is mostly a series of my ex’s questions: Do you want to go for a walk sometime soon? Are these your bras? Most inexplicably: Do you want me to buy you a tv? And of course: Did you take the broom??

I stare at the gray bubbles until they blur into a bright, colorless light that makes my eyes water. I set my phone down on a pile of books about potty training and browse the living room, where Dasha’s mom has encouraged me to shop for a special reduced price. I finger a floral skirt, worth just three of my nannying hours. I press the hem against my waist and sway in the dim living room, where the flowers swish in a semicircle around my calves.

I walk back to the kitchen and slip a few of her Ativan into my bag instead.

◊

I push the stroller up the hill to the lions, a droplet of sweat rolling down from my armpit to my ankle, soaking into my sandal. The sun drenches me and the lions too, who have no deodorant. They roll lazily in their patch of yellow grass.

“I’m bored of the lions,” Dasha announces.

“Okay.” I push us back down the hill, seeking penguins.

I had barely gotten us there, driving through the city in her mom’s shiny car, my phone screaming the correct route to the zoo and dinging persistent ex texts of seemingly benign questions designed to make me sadder and Dasha screaming that I packed the wrong apple juice pouch. “Don’t crash the car, don’t crash the car,” I whispered, tethered to the road only by my angry baby in the backseat. “Don’t crash the car,” she agreed. I gripped the steering wheel until I felt dizzy, and she reached forward with all her might to pet my hair. “Hi,” she said. I reached backward blindly to hold her hand.

We find the penguins. Dasha climbs out of the stroller onto my lap, my dress immediately turning dark blue with sweat where she presses onto me. She shrieks with joy as the penguins swim toward us, shrinks back in fear that they might crash through the glass with the sheer delight of their desire to play with her. She leans back into me and I feel so warm I might burst.

Water rains into the penguins’ tank and we watch them swim up, heads above, feeling the droplets on their shiny feathers. “Are they birds?” she asks me.

“Yes,” I say. Are they? They seem too happy to be birds.

It’s raining on us too, washing off our sweat and warmth and ice cream smears. She looks up at the gray-blue sky and giggles as raindrops land on her eyelashes. We lean there for a long time, and I imagine the rain filling up the penguin tank until it leaks over, the penguins leaping and waddling up to us, Dasha joining their waddle dance. She giggles at my vision and tells me that won’t happen.

I ache for her, I want to wrap her goodness inside of me and let it make me good again. I am paid to rent her briefly each day. I want to be her real mother and I want her to take care of me and I want someone to stop me from being her mother because I’m unfit and then I want them to go inside of my brain and fix the things that are wrong and then give my baby back.

I push us back to the car, Dasha yawning as she flaps her penguin wings, asking me what they eat and where they sleep and who their friends are. I fish for the keys in my bag and my fingers find the rainy paste from the pills, anxiety med soup soaked into the fabric. I stick my finger into the grainy whiteness and lick it. I shudder at the bitterness.

Madeleine Gavaler is a preschool teacher and writer living in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Her short stories and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Plains Review and The Bookends Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

BIRTHING LESSONS by Rebecca Ackermann

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

BIRTHING LESSONS by Rebecca Ackermann

Rebecca Ackermann
BIRTHING LESSONS

The woman on the screen howls in agony and communion as her partner reaches into the water to grasp their child’s crown and pull him free. They are all three naked, swirling in blood and insides. Sunlight pours in from a round window above the blue-tiled tub. All three cry, the woman and her partner whisper a few words to each other, then the screen cross-fades with a video of the ocean before it turns black.

“Does that bathroom come with the class fee?” jokes the pregnant woman in the multi-colored jumpsuit from the other side of the circle. She has a big black bun balancing on the very top of her head, which dips and recovers like a sleepy passenger when she speaks. “I think we could have a great baby in that tub. Our bathroom is, let’s say, less photogenic.” Her companion rolls her eyes, but the top bun woman only shrugs and looks at the instructor as if she’ll provide a real answer to her question.

“It’s important that you choose a place where you feel comfortable,” the instructor emphasizes, holding up both palms to the jumpsuit woman as if they contain all the precious options. “That may be a hospital bed, that may be your own bathroom, that may be a birthing tub that you can rent from our website.”

I curve my right hand under the weight of my belly, where it rests on the top of my thighs, and try to conjure the feeling of sitting in a kiddie pool in the middle of my living room. The body I now share with a faceless roommate is unpredictable, I cannot soothe it. I have no idea where it would find comfort.

“How long can the baby be in the water? Can it swim around?” a slim man to the left of my husband asks. His mouth folds down on the sides, and his eyebrows meet each other in a grimace. His partner sits very straight in her metal folding chair against a floral pillow she brought to class in a bookstore tote bag. I’m jealous of the woman’s pillow, I’m jealous that her companion thought to ask about the baby’s aquatic skill. Since I learned I’m pregnant, I can’t think ahead, I can’t seem to wonder about the person that’s growing. Sometimes I’m sure this means my future doesn’t have the baby in it. Sometimes I worry I don’t want it to.

“Babies won’t breathe until they’re exposed to air,” the instructor says. “It’s very safe, but did you see in the video how they brought him out of the water quickly? Babies should get air as soon as possible. Air is life.” She raises her arms and lifts her chin as if she’s emerging into the sunlight. Most of the soon-to-be-mothers—but not the jumpsuit woman—tilt their heads to glimpse the imaginary opening. My eyes rest on the little hamsters of armpit hair peeking out from the instructor’s shirt sleeves. They stare back, and I wonder if I should let mine grow too.

“Are you listening to this?” my husband nudges me. “You have that look. Like you hate everyone already.” My face always knows how I feel before I do, and I can’t stop it from sharing the news.

“I’m listening,” I whisper back. “Air is life, water is death.”

“She didn’t say that!” he hisses. I ignore him and let myself examine the jumpsuit woman’s jumpsuit across the circle. The fabric is a pale pink with big cartoonish swashes of bright blue and saturated red and yellow in a pattern that never quite seems to repeat. One long zipper runs the length of her middle, straining as it reaches her belly. The jumpsuit conceals how pregnant the woman is. She could be four months in, she could be ready to go. As I’m watching, the jumpsuit bunches and stretches to allow her to lean forward and launch another question at the instructor.

“Next week, are you going to show a video where something goes wrong with the birth?” she asks. A murmur surfs along the crest of metal chairs. The instructor’s eyes widen and then narrow and reset. I look at my husband, but he doesn’t seem to have heard.

“No,” the instructor says. “If something goes wrong, the doctor or midwife or doula will know how to proceed. In this class, we’re focusing on the birth experiences you each want to create for yourselves.” I can tell the instructor is frustrated, but she is trying to translate it into some other emotion—pity, maybe, disdain.

“I want to create a living baby,” the jumpsuit woman says. The honesty jolts me. She looks serious, but also like she’s trying to tear a seam in the prenatal theater the instructor has labored to build. She wants the truth, even if it’s dangerous. That’s all I want too. Hosting a baby has had the strange effect of erecting a force field around me that no one wants to penetrate with something true. They only lob flowers and sweet wishes at my insulated form, when I’m desperate for a real conversation.

“I understand that, Kyle. I think everyone here understands that. I’ll email you some resources, ok?” I’m grateful the instructor has said the jumpsuit woman’s name again so I have another chance to remember it. Kyle. I didn’t pay attention at the beginning of class when we went around introducing ourselves and our greatest hope for the unborn among us. I was too busy repeating my own name in my head and deciding if I wished more for this imaginary creature’s happiness, health, or bodily autonomy.

“Let’s get back to the experience we just watched,” the instructor refocuses. “What adjectives would you all use to describe the mother’s sensations during the first part of labor?” I think “unbearable” to myself, but I don’t say it because I don’t feel like dealing with my husband’s face.

◊

“I thought it was good,” he says as we walk home from the class. It’s a long walk, but I like walking, now that running with a melon belly turns my diaphragm into a trampoline. The class was his idea, to help me feel closer to the pregnancy. He worries about how I’m not buying anything for the baby, or making a list of names, or even wearing maternity clothes. I stole his shirt and sweatshirt for class today because most of mine don’t fit anymore. As I walk alongside my husband, the metal button of my (his) jeans is attached to its buttonhole with a pink hair tie and a safety pin. I’ve stopped drinking, though, and nothing makes you want a drink more than the daily science experiment that is carrying a child. But I don’t get credit for not doing something.

“It was fine,” I say. “But I don’t really buy that the pain doesn’t feel like pain, the way she said.”

“Take what’s useful from it, babe. Leave what’s not,” he says.

“Take a penny, leave a penny,” I sing.

“You know what I mean,” he says.

My husband is a good guy, a smart guy, a nice guy. I’m hard to be around, a lot to take, more than bargained for. That’s our whole thing, and we’ve both been comfortable with it for the past four years of our relationship. But a mother isn’t hard to be around, is she? A mother is the original good guy. Since my belly has begun its great expansion, I’ve started wishing my husband would vacate the role.

“Maybe next time I should go alone,” I say. “It’s kind of hard to focus with you there, and maybe it would help me feel more….” I don’t want to say connected, I hate saying connected. It makes me feel like an electrical device that needs to be plugged in. But I can’t find another word in my porous pregnancy brain, “…connected.”

“That’s a great idea.”

I don’t tell him that I’m still thinking about Kyle, or that I’m planning to get to the next class not too early and not too late so I can angle for the spot next to her. I don’t tell him that I’m planning to buy a jumpsuit too, a different one, more my style but an echo of hers that might call her towards me. The first piece of clothing I buy since getting pregnant and it’s for her.

◊

The next week I walk to class alone in the jumpsuit. It’s black linen with tortoiseshell buttons from my neck to the place where my pubic hair starts underneath my stretched-out (stressed-out) cotton underwear. I have a striped hand towel in my bag to make the metal chair more tolerable. I’m learning. Kyle is already there, and her partner is standing behind her, rubbing her back. They are each wearing one earbud in one ear and moving their heads almost imperceptibly in rhythm—I say almost because I can perceive it, maybe I’m the only one in the room who can. I hover next to Kyle, arranging my little towel on my chair, and then lower myself down onto it. My back and legs are grateful to be seated, relieved for the half-inch of softness between my tailbone and metal. But the aching doesn’t stop, it only recedes to a hum. This is the way now: more discomfort or less, but never peace. I can hear Kyle breathing, but I won’t look at her. She seems like a person who refuses to be surprised, but still, I don’t want to spook her.

“Five more minutes until class starts!” the instructor projects, her hands folded at her chin. “Today we’ll be talking positions!” She’s pleased with her set up so I can tell what’s coming next. “No, not sexual positions, folks. That’s how many of you got here! I mean laboring positions.” Little groan balloons float up from the circle as the class finds seats and starts to settle.

“You should get to choose jokes or no jokes when you sign up for the class,” I say towards Kyle in the practiced deadpan of the high school girl I was years ago. I haven’t found another way to make friends since then.

“She can tell all the jokes she wants, as long as she quits with the bullshit,” Kyle returns, taking the earbud out of her ear and handing it backwards to her partner, who eyes me before excusing herself to go to the bathroom in the four minutes before we start.

“Yeah, tell me about it,” I say, trying to hide the thrill that my plan is working. “That video had to be staged. Why is she trying so hard to convince us it’s not going to hurt?”

“You know she hasn’t had a baby, right?” Kyle sounds like she holds every secret in the world.

“Are you kidding?”

“No, it’s true. Everyone in this town passes around her name like this class is the key to solving birth, but all her advice is theoretical. That’s the ultimate bullshit. I only want to hear from people who’ve been in the trenches. I don’t know why I let Sharon talk me into coming.”

“I guess you should be allowed to teach something without having done it yourself…” I think out loud.

“Yeah, but you have to disclose that first.”

“Like a disclaimer at the bottom of the class,” I say.

“She should have to wear a sign around her neck that says: ‘I don’t actually know if you can control your birth story because I’ve never had to fucking do it myself.’ ” Kyle almost spits the end of the sentence. I’ve never seen real anger on a pregnant woman before and it looks incandescent.

“It sounds like you’ve thought a lot about this,” I say cautiously.

“My last baby died,” Kyle returns, jaw set in stone. I stare at her, but she doesn’t return my gaze.

“Ok, class, let’s begin with positions!” the instructor announces. I sit up straighter and try to digest what Kyle just told me so there’s space left for an hour of optimistic labor lessons. But I don’t think there will ever be space again. I feel sick at the thought that while we were all summoning our future infants, little cherubs hovering over our heads, Kyle was carrying around a death. I could almost see it there on her shoulders, hiding behind her tipsy knot of hair: a warning in the shape of grief. I struggled to take a deep breath under my linen jumpsuit, but my own passenger pressed down on my lungs.

“I’m sorry,” I whisper to Kyle.

“Thanks,” she whispers back.

◊

Later that evening while my husband sleeps next to me, I let the light of my phone bathe my face for hours while I look up all the reasons why babies die during delivery. The list is long, infinite it seems, and bursting with enough blame for everyone: mothers, partners, doctors, nurses, medicine, machines, genes, weather, exercise, food, gravity. I can see why Kyle was so angry at the class. The instructor is ignoring an entire solar system of possibilities to focus on a single planet that contains only one outcome: a healthy baby. It feels heretical for the instructor to deny the existence of this other reality. She is just one more person keeping the truth from us. As I fall asleep, phone still bright, limp pillow sandwiched between my thighs, I send thoughts of gratitude and affection to Kyle wherever she is.

◊

“I’m due August 17th,” I tell Kyle when she asks me five weeks later. We’re sharing a walk to the bakery during a break in class, the pregnant equivalent of stepping outside for a smoke. We both had breakfast, we’re both still hungry.

“Ah, a Leo. You’ll have your hands full. I’m a Leo too,” she laughs and fake roars at me. She’s wearing another jumpsuit, this one all purple with silver hand-drawn clouds spread out across her limbs. An electric blue scrunchie holds her hair in its usual knot, and this week her fingernails are bubble gum pink. “Mine’s September 21st, a Virgo.”

“Like me,” I smile, imagining Kyle’s new baby coming out a tight perfectionist. With only a few weeks to go, I’ve finally bought maternity jeans that fit and the tag is rubbing against my back, a sensation like bees in my brain. I resolve to cut it out thread by thread when I get home.

“Oh, that’s funny. Sharon tells me that this baby will teach me a lesson, tame me. But I think I’ll have to show him how to have a good time.” Kyle shakes her wide hips as she walks and I catch an intoxicating glimpse of who she is outside of class, outside of motherhood. I like how I feel next to her, like neither of us is good or bad or too much of anything. Like we are just us.

“It’s a boy! I don’t think you told me that,” I say. I know she hasn’t, but I don’t want to sound like I’ve indexed our conversations over the past weeks of class. She’s told me that she and Sharon live in the Mission, that she grew up in Dallas but went to school in Philadelphia. She’s told me she hopes the baby comes out light brown like her because Sharon always burns when she steps into the sun, even in Northern California. She told me they have a small room ready for the baby—the room that was ready for the other baby—and that she never wants to leave their apartment because she can see the water from their roof. I’ve shared, too: that I’ve started to see my baby in my dreams, that I bought her a crib and a stroller and clothes, and I can finally imagine her in them. That my baby hides from the ultrasound and my husband has to hum on the left side of my belly so she’ll show her face for the picture, that I plan to name her after a flower.

“Yes, it’s a boy,” Kyle says more shyly than I’ve seen on her. “We just went to the doctor yesterday and he says he’s perfectly healthy. That’s what the doctor said: ‘perfectly healthy.’ They never said that about the one before.” I can hear hope in Kyle’s voice, and I’m happy to be the only one to witness it. I’m so happy we’re friends.

◊

The pain starts before the sun, quiet and deep like an underground pool. I lie in bed with my eyes closed, willing it towards a nightmare and away from the reality: this is early labor, not the kind of early in my late-night Google searches exactly, but earlier than I’d wanted. My husband is silent next to me. I have been alone in a sense my entire pregnancy, but as my back burns with ache, I know I am more alone now. I think of Kyle and her grief baby, how heavy it must be for her to carry, invisible to everyone else.

The ache turns sharp for a while, then dull and then sharp again. Our bedroom goes pale yellow, morning diffracted through fog and curtains. I know my husband will wake on his own soon, but I’m suddenly struck by fierce jealousy and shake him hard to come back to me. He arrives drowsy but stiffens when I tell him it’s happening. He sits up and pulls the comforter off us both to announce a beginning. I see there on the sheets what I hadn’t noticed in the dark. There is a circle of blood beneath me, black cherry red in some places and Bing cherry red in others. What I thought was cold is wet, what I thought was safe is not.

The next set of hours enter my mind as colors, smells, sounds. The familiar rumble of our car on the road, the chime of the hospital elevator, the silver of its insides, the monstrous lump of the hospital bed with its levers and cords, the razor sharp scent of disinfectant, and the black black of the inside of my eyelids as I focus on not falling into the pain—I want to scream to the class instructor that it is, in fact, very painful. It is a pain that crosses over into another sensation like breaking glass.

In the darkness, I think again of Kyle’s grief baby, and how it released its grip on her, now that the doctor decreed her baby would be perfectly healthy. Had it jumped onto my back instead, crawled inside me? Was this a grief baby curled up and pushing against me now? I feel infected by Kyle’s story, by her fear, by the anger that lit her up when the instructor ignored the possibility of her own experience. What kind of mother exposes her child to that kind of influence? This is why people won’t allow thoughts of tragedy near our swollen stomachs. I didn’t know that the alchemy of motherhood demands hope above all else. I was too scared of losing myself to understand it before. In the haze of drip drugs and bright lights and the too-cold too-big room, I promise the universe that if it can save her, I will be the good guy for my child. I will shut out the dark solar system of dangerous possibilities and give her only one happy future.

My baby arrives in a hurry, crying, coughing, wriggling, purple but alive, so very alive. They plop her on my bare chest for a moment before taking her away for tests. The nurse who stays with me, checking my heart rate, pulling the blood-soaked linens away from my skin, tells me the baby will be ok and so will I.

“That was a little scary, but she has a good strong cry,” she says. “You did good, mama.” A week ago I would’ve cringed at the word “mama,” property of online forums and customized T-shirts. But now I want to bear hug the nurse and thank her over and over with pure devotion. I sob like my eyes have never done anything else.

◊

I walk by the class building with my 6-week-old, perfectly healthy baby strapped to my chest over my black jumpsuit with the tortoiseshell buttons. It isn’t the right day or time but I wonder what Kyle thinks when I’m not in the metal chair beside her anymore. I wonder if her baby is here now, if he is as the doctor promised, if she and Sharon are with him in the little room that was for the other baby. I have to wonder because we never exchanged numbers or emails; our friendship was forged in one-hour intervals once a week and then it was done. I feel sorry not to have said goodbye. I miss how it felt to be with Kyle, both of us ourselves and no one’s mother just yet. But I stop myself before wondering more, thinking of my hospital promise and how I narrowly escaped the grief baby.

◊

A year later I am at the playground with my husband and my Violet, watching her from a nearby bench. I see another child in the sandbox with a small, sweet rendition of Kyle’s face in a blue jumpsuit dotted with little white stars. Kyle leaps back into my mind and I look for her, keeping one eye on my girl unsteady on her feet.

“That woman from birthing class might be here,” I nudge my husband.

“What woman?” he asks, focused on Violet’s stubby arms.

“The one with the jumpsuits and the bun? The one I talked to all the time.”

“Babe, you wouldn’t talk to anyone in that class. I bugged you about it constantly, remember?”

“Yeah, ok, I hated the class, but I liked her.” I scan along the diameter of the metal fence for Kyle’s top bun, for her smile and her eyes as she shared the best secret, but I can’t see her. I’m vibrating with the memory of our fast friendship, buried under so layers of diapers and milk stains, dreams and fears, guilt because I worried for my baby more than hers.

“I really don’t know who you’re talking about,” my husband sighs and takes my hand as if to still my mind. “I think if you had a friend I would’ve known.”

I hold onto Kyle’s face, pasting it back into every moment we shared with determination. But each time, she blurs a little more, like a copy of a copy until she’s just a greyed-out smudge. I squint to get her back, but then Violet cries out on the playground and my mind snaps to her face instead, so special among the other squished and busy bodies. When I return to my friend’s memory, she’s gone, not even a name. There is only me and my little family, a closed circle with no room for any ghost.

Rebecca Ackermann is a writer, designer, and artist living in San Francisco. Her essays have been published by MIT Tech Review, The New York Times, and The LA Times, and her short fiction has appeared in Wigleaf, Barren Magazine, Flash Frog, and elsewhere. She’s currently a fiction reader for Okay Donkey. You can find her tweeting strong opinions @rebackermann.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE SOFT ANIMALS by Nathan Willis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE SOFT ANIMALS by Nathan Willis

Nathan Willis
THE SOFT ANIMALS

There are four deer in the garage. They’re made of metal and they don’t have heads. Mom’s been sneaking out at night when she thinks I’m asleep. This is what she’s been working on. She wants to take them to the craft show, but she can’t get them in the trailer by herself. They’re too big.

There’s a utility bucket in the corner with the leftover pieces she didn’t use. I tell her I’ll help in the morning and take the bucket.

On my way upstairs, I stop in the dining room, where we keep Dad. Logistically, it just makes the most sense. It’s the only place that’s both out of the way and big enough to facilitate his hospital bed.

The doctors had diagnosed him as unresponsive. He’s connected to hoses that keep him alive. The hoses run through the wall to a box outside the house that dispenses his medications. It’s the size of a refrigerator. It makes a humming noise that reverberates through the neighborhood. All we have to do is change the battery when it beeps.

I shake the bucket until it makes a terrible clattering sound.

I dump the bucket on my bed and shut the door. I push the metal pieces against my skin. I am giving myself the face and antlers of a deer. The metal sticks on its own, so I know I’m doing the right thing.

Mom used to make plush animals. They were little and cute and they had heads. Her mom taught her to make them when she was a kid. Mom gave them names and jobs and created a fictional town for them to live in. She took them to the craft show for years and never sold a single one.

Dad said she should give them away and start over. New animals. A new town. It would be good marketing.

Mom knew better. It didn’t have anything to do with marketing. He hated her animals and he didn’t think she’d be able to start over.

The deer sold before the general public even had a chance to see them. They were bought by other craft vendors who saw us setting up our booth. We would have gone home right then, but we had to stay until the end so the vendors could pick them up.

All day, people stopped to ask about the deer. They said how much they loved them and how they had never seen anything like them before. They wanted to know how much they cost and when we would be back with more. I felt awful about disappointing them, but Mom said this was a good problem to have.

When we finally do get home there are three girls in the front yard. They are teenagers like me. Not old enough to drive but old enough to know the future ahead of us will require sacrifice if we want to make it our own. Their faces are metal, and they have antlers like me as well. They approach Mom and say they are her daughters. They tell her that they want to come home.

The morning that Dad wasn’t there, Mom called the police. They told her there had been a car accident overnight. The driver wasn’t carrying ID, and the car was such a mess, they couldn’t look up the registration. It was still out there, on the stretch of highway that runs next to the twenty-four-hour golf course. We were welcome to check it out to see if it was ours.

Mom’s plush animals were scattered all over the asphalt. Further off, we could see what was left of the car.

Mom notified the police. They told us which hospital Dad had been taken to and informed us that since no one else was at fault, we were responsible for cleaning up the wreckage.

We pushed the car onto the trailer and left the animals.

The New Daughters keep to themselves. At night, they sleep standing up in my room. I taught myself to do the same. It took a week. We face the window by the garage.

The twenty-four-hour golf course has security cameras on its floodlights. They sent Mom a video of the crash in case she needed it for the insurance. We watched it together.

There was a giant deer in the road. It was three stories tall. Dad swerved at the last second, but it wasn’t enough.

He made it out of the car and tried to crawl away on his elbows. The deer lowered its head and pushed an antler against his back until he was still.

Mom said, “Did you see that?”

“The giant deer?”

She shook her head. The giant deer didn’t faze her. She rewound the video. The car hit the deer. Dad got out. The deer held him against the pavement.

She paused it and pointed at the deer’s leg. The impact had torn away skin. We could see inside. It wasn’t bone. It was metal.

That night, Mom started going to the garage.

Mom wants to make more animals so we drive around looking for accidents. We need cars so broken that the metal has become light and malleable. We didn’t think they’d be hard to find, but we never considered that we wouldn’t be the only ones looking.

Every time we leave, the New Daughters gather in the dining room. We see them through the windows as we back out. They hold hands in a circle over Dad. It looks like a ritual.

We find a car in the grocery store parking lot. There is no single point of impact. There is equal damage on every side. It’s in the perfect condition for molding and sticking. We already have it on the trailer when Mom sees why no one else had touched it. The bodies were still inside. An elderly couple was slumped over in the backseat, their arms wrapped around each other.

We put them in shopping carts, wheel them inside, and leave them in the breakfast aisle.

We cover the trailer with a tarp and take it home. As we back it into the garage, we hear a single, short beep. It’s a warning from the machine. The battery in Dad’s medicine box will need to be replaced soon.

That night, the New Daughters are too excited to sleep. They begin telling a story that will continue for many nights. Each night they tell it in concert, correcting each other as they go. The story is from my dad’s memories. The New Daughters move backward through his life until they get to something they don’t want to tell. A fearful glance passes between them and they go quiet.

The New Daughters tell Mom that they need metal bodies. They are overdue. They are owed. They have tears in their eyes and she knows that they are right.

She tells them she has been working on another project. It’s a surprise, and there is not enough metal left for their bodies. She wants this for them so badly. They just have to wait until we find more metal.

The New Daughters don’t understand.

That night as we stand in my room and look at the garage, they whisper about how they have had to wait too long already, and how far they’re willing to go to get what should already be theirs.

I don’t want to be a part of what happens next. I think about Dad. I close my eyes and try to make myself unresponsive, but I can feel their hands pulling at my face. Then they pry with their antlers. The metal doesn’t give, but the skin underneath begins to split. Blood seeps up between the pieces. The New Daughters give up and go to the garage. It’s locked so they break the door open. Inside, I hear them throw Mom’s project against the walls and the floor. I hear it break into smaller and smaller pieces until they are so small the New Daughters can use them for something else.

In the morning, the New Daughters are at the kitchen table. They say nothing about the night before. The skin on their arms and necks is swollen and irritated.

I warn Mom that if the metal from the grocery store car wouldn’t stick to them, nothing will, but she already knows. She saw the same thing I did. She is worried about what they’ll do the next time it doesn’t work, or the time after that. Things like this only ever get worse.

I ask Mom if she knows where Dad was taking her animals. She doesn’t. She didn’t think there was anything out that way but woods. That’s what she was always told when she was growing up. She told me the same thing. That’s what everyone is told. That it’s nothing but woods and it’s dangerous and to never go any farther than the golf course.

I tell the New Daughters that if they want metal bodies, they need to get on the trailer. They nod and load themselves in without protest.

We get to the end of our street and hear a beep. Then another. It doesn’t stop. It’s the battery.

Mom doesn’t turn around. She gets on the highway. We drive over the soft animals and pass the twenty-four-hour golf course.

The highway becomes a state route, then a road, and then a parking lot in front of an abandoned airplane hangar.

The New Daughters hop off the trailer, and we go inside. The floor is broken into large squares and walkways, marked off with wide, red tape. Each square is piled high with personal and household items that aren’t old enough to be junk and too new to be donations. These are all things that are missing. These are all things that have been taken from someone.

While we’re there, people arrive with items in boxes and plastic grocery bags. They look around for a particular square, leave what they’ve brought, then go. There is an order to things here that we don’t understand.

The New Daughters wander around picking at the piles. The same instinct that told them they need metal bodies is telling them that something here belongs to them. They just have to find it. They are too preoccupied to notice when we leave without them.

At home, the beeping has stopped, and Dad is gone. We don’t call anyone. We move his hospital bed and the medicine box to the garage. We break them down into parts that we organize in piles on the floor.

We are going to rebuild Mom’s surprise project, which wasn’t an animal at all. It was a sculpture of me, with my face the way it used to be. She doesn’t want me to forget who I was before the accident. Before I knew about all of the things that would be taken from us.

Now that it’s not a surprise anymore, Mom wants me to make this one myself. She fills my hands with metal then folds them together in her own. I close my eyes and we stay like this for a moment. It feels like something is transferring between us and when it stops, she lets go. I open my eyes and I begin working the pieces together.

Nathan Willis is a writer from Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Split Lip, Passages North, XRAY, and Necessary Fiction, among others. He can be found online at nathan-willis.com and on Twitter at @Nathan1280.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE UNDERCURRENT by Mariana Sabino

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE UNDERCURRENT by Mariana Sabino

Mariana Sabino
THE UNDERCURRENT

The Czech woman had returned to the wrong place, that much we knew, and we weren’t about to watch out for anyone, especially this pearl smeared with oil. She arrived in one of the local public vans, not in her own car as you would expect. Taking the van could only mean money was scarce.

She stepped onto the street in front of our bar, at the route’s final stop, having trouble with her bulging suitcase. We figured she must be over forty now, her face thin and pale like paper, her hair streaked with long white lines. As she trundled that suitcase in the direction of Samuel’s house, the left wheel dislodged from the main frame, wobbling and then toppling over like a broken leg. I’d done my share of schlepping around without going anywhere, but this story isn’t about me. The thought of putting down my beer glass, walking over, and offering her a hand did occur to me, but I figured she should get used to how things would be from now on. Still, I had to hand it to her, she found her way back to this off-road Brazilian village we liked to call the end of the line. A spot for those in the know.

We were sitting on Cheeks’ outdoor stools and watched her go by, as really, none of us had anything better to do. Low season was lull season. At most, we’d be repainting or renaming our fishing boats, “artisanal” dinghies, as tourists liked to call them. Cheeks’ son, Yuri, was doing just that when the woman appeared. He was peeling off the old paint of his father’s boat jutting out of the side entrance. With his green eyes and mottled hair that matched his shorts, Yuri looked like the stray cats around, furtive and alert. He noticed the woman just as we all did, though you heard no peep out of him, his eyes and hands on the boat’s hull.

“What’s she doing back here?” said Nando next to me, wiping his sweaty chin on his red T-shirt. “Her husband is dead. She should be with her family.”

“Look at that outfit. Putting on airs like always. She doesn’t even look like a foreigner,” added Grazi from across the counter. Slim and of medium height, the woman had hazel eyes, auburn hair, and light skin. If it weren’t for the accent and the airs, she could’ve been anyone’s city cousin from Rio de Janeiro, a couple hours away from here. In the wind, that slapping September wind, her dress clung and cut through her form as she moved, her long hair trailing her like a windswept casuarina tree. She had no children, no friends, no one to speak of, as far as we knew.

“Do you think she’ll want me to go over there?” asked Marcela, squinting at the slice of sun that struck her leathery face. “If she wants me to clean that house, she’d better pay more. Samuel was always stingy and sure did ask for the world.”

Marcela cleaned the houses for tourists during high season and rich people’s houses all year round, which meant she was mostly unemployed right now, but that didn’t bother her so much after a couple of beers, especially since she often didn’t pay for them, being friendly with Cheeks’ wife, Grazi, who kept a generous, drink-three-pay-for-one tab for whomever fell into her graces. And, like Nando, Marcela often had the currency of fresh gossip and jokes, which mostly involved the people she worked for.

Nando downed his dregs and raised his glass as an interjection. “Ah, let it go! Samuel was a good sort. He got us work. He paid and looked everyone in the eye. Him we don’t talk about.” So that was that. Samuel remained sacred. In a way, so was she. Except that no one really knew anything about her. We didn’t even know her name. She was the official wife, though Samuel always went around with many women. Then he crashed into another driver on his way home one night, and after that she went away and now, here she was again.

Samuel had owned a chain of bakeries and made a pretty penny during high season when the town floods with rapacious tourists. During the rest of the year, he could take it easy, devoting time to his house. He had employed everyone out of work in the neighborhood—gardeners, electricians, plumbers, construction workers, housekeepers—to make and maintain that house of his. We all knew its layout, as we had all been there at one point or another, some of us to work when he was alive, others to filch a generator or other household appliance once he was gone. As Nando said, “What’s the use of a house to a dead man?” By now there was nothing left to take, though.

The veranda was one long white strip with three pillars vined with jasmine. Javier, the Argentinean architect in the neighborhood, called it a rustic outpost for modernists—whatever that means. Samuel had built it in sections, the scale of the rooms in direct proportion to the bounty of the summer, each piece tacked together like Legos. The centerpiece was the living room, its ceiling as high as a cathedral with exposed beams and tiles—both grand and crude. Half gentleman, half beast himself, Samuel would by turns build and destroy another part of that house when a part of it no longer interested him. Once he demolished the entire concrete stairway on the side of the house that led to the terrace. “Tacky and predictable,” Samuel had said about the staircase when asked about it—“And there’s nothing worse than that.” Well, we could think of a few things worse than that, such as not having enough for a bag of rice or a beer, but as we say around here, “Those who can, can.”

Often enough, someone would see Samuel naked while he went about discarding blocks of wood or plants onto the street in the middle of the night. “My husband said he’d kill him if he pranced around with his sack of marbles while I was cleaning,” Marcela said, recalling those days.

At the time, the goons from the mayor’s office had also threatened fines, but Samuel would just grin and invite them in for coffee. They mostly figured him for a well-off madman and left him alone. The front yard was a mixture of sand and earth jumbled with cactuses, shrubs, and Bird of Paradise. Now the garden was overtaken by so many plants you could hardly see it from the street. No one had been inside that house for at least three years.

The Czech woman took the shortcut to the beachside street, where Samuel’s house stood. Someone saw her standing in front of it for a long time, her suitcase left on the pavement, her eyes fixed on the mesh of green tangled over the wooden gate. Somehow she managed to go inside. God knows what she saw in there—termites, roaches, mounds of sand, and nature’s spoils. There was a light on in the house well into the night and she slept there, that’s all we knew. She must have really had nowhere else to go.

The next morning the woman walked over the path that led to the bar, the van stop, and the rest of the neighborhood—the well-off and the rest of us separated by this shortcut. On the beachfront were the big nice houses, and just behind it there we were, the workers and grocers and bar owners that everyone came to sooner or later. Even those who shopped in town eventually came to us if they spent any real time here. They all needed mineral water from Cheeks. Sure enough, she came and ordered a twenty-liter container.

Hours later, when the water container still hadn’t arrived at the house, she returned to ask about the delivery. She spoke Portuguese well enough, but that accent—too nice, too polite, too formal—rattled our nerves. Cheeks wasn’t in, so Grazi eyed the woman with lowered lids in an expression both challenging and insolent. We knew that look. “He’s not back yet. When he’s back I’ll tell him you stopped by,” she said. The woman went next door to Big Paul, the grocer, to buy small water containers and other basics, lugging them home herself.

When Cheeks returned, Grazi didn’t mention a thing about the woman stopping by and neither did we, truth be told. If she wanted water, she would need to come get it, which is what she did. She started coming every day. She found Seu João to do some gardening for her. He was too hard up to refuse and, besides, he had been loyal to Samuel, figuring his old boss wouldn’t want him to mistreat the widow. He was there for an entire week, chopping, pruning, and weeding so that cartloads of the house’s brambles were being dumped on the empty side lot. Once, when he returned from his toil, he stood with us at the bar. Nando, ever curious, started to joke about Seu João’s time at the house. “What did she give you?” he asked.

“Coffee, toast, and cabbage salad with yogurt,” the old man answered, which got a laugh from all of us.

“We mean money, fool. How much did she pay you in money and ass?” Nando asked.

Seu João, crunching up his face like he’d eaten a bagful of sour limes, snorted, shook his mug and said, “You’re all rotten. Leave her alone.” That we did. The women even harbored a special distaste, an enmity towards the foreign woman who, truth be told, was in much better shape than most of them, and since coming back here she had gained a little weight and got some color in her cheeks. You could even say she was pretty, but not like an actress, more like one of those deities in prayer cards that had been torn in a drunken fit and taped back together in repentance. The beatific look invited both curiosity and aversion. We had come to think of her as one of the flowers in that wild garden of Samuel’s—too strange to touch.

Some of us pretended not to understand her accent. We all watched and laughed, waiting for her to repeat herself. She’d ask Marco, the butcher, for chicken and get liver; she’d ask for pork chops and get sausage or ground beef. When she protested, she’d get the eyebrow raise and the taunting sneer. “Take it or leave it,” Marco would say. She took it.

Then she stayed indoors a few days, no one saw her anywhere. “What’s she eating, owls?” Nando quipped. You could spot an owl everywhere at night, in the middle of the street as well as on fences and power lines. The wind showed no mercy in October, shaking up the panes and whistling through the cracks in the roof of even the best houses, and Samuel’s was no different. Seu João said the tiles were blowing away. “They need to be fastened in place. I’d do it myself, but my back won’t let me,” said the old gardener. “One of you layabouts should help her out.” We didn’t, of course. What was in it for us? She now seemed to have even less money than we did.

When she finally came around again, Nando asked when she was leaving. By then she’d been here almost two months. At first she didn’t say anything, but then she stared at him squarely and answered, “I am here for as long as I am here. Not that it is any of your business.”

“Did you get that out of a phrase book?” Nando said, his face red from the cachaça, the whiteheads on his nose erupting. From then on, Yuri started to make regular water deliveries to her house, bypassing his father and Grazi.

When leaving Big Paul’s grocery, she would cast one look at Yuri and within minutes he’d hand his post over to Grazi, grab the hefty container, drop it inside his father’s car, and make the short ride to the house—way too laborious for the sake of one delivery. He could have easily dragged it there by foot on a cart, but Yuri was young enough to be dazzled by a middle-aged foreign lady with good manners and soft eyes. Let him. We kept hoping he’d come back with a decent story. But when pressed he just gave us that grin of his and handed us another beer. Not a bad businessman, that one. Sly as the best of ’em.

Yuri was the only person the Czech lady came to depend on aside from Seu João. She cleaned the house herself, never hiring Marcela or anyone else. Still, Yuri treaded in that house like walking on owls’ eggshells. Once, while going to the beach, Nando and I saw him pull up and yell out Samuel’s name, of all things, as if to ask for the dead man’s permission to cross the threshold. We stood there watching from across the street as the woman called him from inside. Yuri left the wooden gate open, carrying that twenty-liter thing on his shoulder as he made his way from the sandy courtyard to the kitchen in the back. We leaned on the green wall across the street, waiting to see how long Yuri would stay, how far he’d get with her, but no sooner had he gone in and already he was walking out of the gate with an empty container. “You should’ve unloaded something else,” Nando yelled. He pretended he didn’t hear us.

Just as the wind began to quiet down, easing into a summer breeze, the woman could be found at the beach, sitting on the raised wooden planks. If you were being generous, you’d call it a bench, but it was only raised on account of a nail haphazardly tacked on each side, and it cracked and fell every month or so. Someone put it up on the spur of the moment, and we’d fix it when we felt like it. The woman went there several times a day and just stared out. Her stillness was disturbing. She seemed as unfathomable as the sea itself—at times very tranquil, at other times turbulent, waves cutting each other sideways, and then suddenly still, not calm but still, like those undercurrents that have trapped and killed so many when they thought they were swimming in a nice pool, an oasis, unaware they couldn’t touch the ground and could only swim in place unless they managed to follow the current. But how many could see the current? Not many. It’s hard to know when you’re stuck. Most panic. Most run out of breath eventually. Most get swilled and ground onto the rocks like broken oyster shells. Many children have been lost this way. Nando’s son, for instance, but we don’t talk about that anymore.

The thing about living near the sea, especially in a remote village, is you feel the roar of the ocean at all times, the presence a constantly running engine that buzzes in your brain. The massiveness keeps you sedated for the most part. Hemmed in, we grow tense and oppressed by the weight of too much of the big nothing. We now hate more easily than we love, and we trust nothing—least of all beauty. Passing ships at dusk, that’s probably the only thing that still rouses us, reminders of chances come and gone.

That woman, we saw her swimming and wondered if she was aware of the undertow. We figured Samuel must have mentioned it, as she skirted around these treacherous pools like a pro. Grazi and Marcela often made snide comments about that, envious of having forfeited their skills long ago—the mixture of chores, children, and grievances keeping them mostly indoors, tuned into TV fantasies.

The woman swam well, back and forth in a synchronized, breathe-in breathe-out manner. This riled up Nando and he would pace, imitating her movements. “This isn’t a pool, honey,” he shouted once but she kept going. Eventually the taunting started to get old. If she wanted to stay, let her. There sure was plenty of sea for all of us.

Sometimes the woman took long walks, going from one end of the beach to the other, either along the shore or through the restinga, braiding through the thicket before retreating into the house. One day Yuri showed up at the bar with a book, which he quickly slipped under the counter. “Ah—ah—ahhh! What’s this?” asked Nando, leaning over the counter for a look. With a slight forward motion of his hand, Yuri pushed back Nando’s fat pimply face without touching him.

“It was Samuel’s. It’s about Prague.”

“Prague, eh? As if you’ll ever go there! You’ll get no farther than the end of the block.”

“I might. I still have time, unlike all of you. Time is on my side, like the Roooling Stones says.”

“Rolling Stones, eh? Now you’re talking,” said Javier, the Argentinean old-timer who, after many years, was one of us. Grazi huffed: “Your father wants you to pick up the ice from the back.” Grazi was the kind of person who demanded something by saying someone else, namely her husband, wanted it. Yuri nodded. He was barely out the back door when Grazi tossed the book aside. “Wait till Milena finds out about this,” she said. Milena was Yuri’s on-again, off-again girlfriend. Apparently, they were on again.

Javier threw in his two cents. “No harm in a book,” he said.

Grazi pointed to his empty beer glass as a way to answer Javier, her eyelids half-closed in that blasé glaze of hers. Javier shrugged, accepting the small consolation prize that came with the rebuff. Yuri soon returned to leaf through the book. “Look at this,” he said to Javier, “it’s an astronomical clock, measuring, um, celestial bodies. It measures time in different ways. It shows where the sky and the moon are in relation to the place.”

Grazi popped some peanuts in her mouth. “Like I need a clock to tell me where the moon and sky is at. That’s why that woman is so dense. Needs everything explained to her.”

Yuri ignored her as he leaned closer to Javier, his fingers tamped down on the open book. “And this skeleton here holding the hourglass, that can only mean—”

“Death,” said Javier, peering at the page. “Sand is like time. And time, my young friend, slips through your fingers like sand without you feeling a thing.”

“Ah, I could do with something besides sand and time. That’s all we ever get around here. Watching time go by,” said Yuri.

Javier took a swig, the edges of the glass frothy and dirty.

“Let me see that!” said Nando, snatching the book from the counter. Yuri snatched it back quickly, and as he did so, a page ripped. “Argh, look what you’ve done, you troglodyte!” he said—we laughed at that—“How am I going to hand it back to her now?”

Staggering off his stool, Nando stood facing him, pontificating. “You watch your mouth. What do you think, she’s going to take you away from here? She’s an old tart without a penny, fool!” Nando said. Yuri’s eyes went blank as he fumbled for some tape in the drawer. Milena then showed up with her jean shorts and tight T-shirt so revealing it was almost innocent. Slipping the book inside the drawer, Yuri stepped out, and they went across the street to the van stop. Little was more unoriginal than the news that soon followed: the girl announced she was pregnant.

Summer came around. We were all too busy then to pay much notice of anything besides squeezing money out of tourists. The Czech woman stayed on, and while no one ever really warmed up to her, she joined the ranks of the other lonely widows and retirees around. “Eleanor Rigby,” Javier called her. We didn’t know what he was talking about until he played the song on his cell phone, translating the lyrics on Google Translate.

When you passed the house on those balmy summer nights, you would hear music playing from a record player—of many genres. Samuel had a large record collection, but he mostly listened to jazz. Some of those records were worth something, Javier said, but few knew that, so they remained where they were. We played our own tunes. The woman would come and buy groceries, walking by us and smiling. “Lively,” she’d say sometimes, and we assumed she was mocking us. Throwaway compliments, you know, we didn’t trust them.

Yuri continued to deliver water at her place throughout the summer and, aside from Seu João, he was the only one who got to see the house from inside in those days. It now had that so-called woman’s touch, they said, with fresh flowers in vases, cushions on the wooden seats, and everything in order.

Seu João was the one who found her when he came for his bi-weekly pruning. He saw the front door open, and sensing something was off, rang the bell before walking in. By then, she had been dead for days. The old gardener was entrusted to the task of digging the grave right there in Samuel’s garden—where else? It’s the only option that made sense, that we all agreed on—and a few of us came by as witnesses, some to pay their respects, others to gawk. The widows and retirees now acted pious, some pressing hands to their hearts and reciting prayers. “Poor dear,” these ladies said. “If we had only known she was sick. She should’ve come to us.” Javier and I snorted at this. Medication was found inside the house, which those very same ladies examined knowledgeably, their eyes gleaming, almost salacious. “Heart failure,” they proclaimed. Suddenly, they were all praise about the woman, who was now officially deemed “a lady.” Even Grazi spoke well of her. “We won’t see the likes of her again,” Grazi said. “She asked for nothing and we gave her even less than that.”

Isn’t that the truth.

Apparently she had been ill all along and had chosen this godforsaken place to spend her last days like animals do, burrowing in solitude. Maybe she saw in this place what we’ve forgotten to see.

We fall in love by a pacified sea with the flitting glow of plankton under a long beam of moonlight. We learn to swim when we can barely walk. We surf and take up hang gliding, our days aligned with the horizon. It takes time to snuff out the magic, it only happens when time gets measured by gains and losses, only then do we spend most of our time at the bar, our wives turn into crabs for us, their glow and life dimmed by that same buzzing, that same expansiveness that once had us screaming in outpours of joy. But that takes time, scraps of time.

Yuri stayed away from the house when the lady died. When he heard, he nodded. Only twenty, he already bore the understanding of life’s undercurrents. When his son was born, he reopened the Prague book. “You’ll go there someday,” he said to the baby. Less than a year later, there would be another baby. Yuri’s own ship, we knew, had already sailed, but he still went to the beach with Milena and they dove under the plankton-lit sea. Maybe his son would be aboard his own ship someday. Maybe that ship would be named after the lady. “Eva. That was her name,” he told us. And we raised our glasses that reflected the amber moonlight: “To Eva.”

Mariana Sabino’s short stories can also be found or are forthcoming in Four Way Review, Paris Lit Up Magazine, Open Pen, and Mediterranean Poetry. In 2021, she was shortlisted for the Granum Foundation Fellowship Prize. She holds an MFA from the Bennington Writing Seminars.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

INTUITION by Maggie Mumford

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

INTUITION by Maggie Mumford

Maggie Mumford
INTUITION

1.

An acorn appears. The orb centered on the welcome mat in the curve of the C, the WEL and the OME forming a bracket. I decide the placement is an accident of nature and that this tree part was sent by the combination of a loose stem and a strong wind. I turn the knob on the door I painted green. I step over it and into my house. The soft jazz my husband plays warms the kitchen, where he is cooking potato leek soup.

I say, “It’s the strangest thing.”

He nods. At this point he is used to me finding strangeness where he would find nothing.

When I was a little girl, a little girl went missing. The TV did nothing but talk about her for months or what felt like months. The news anchors’ voices at once somber and thrilled: tonight at eleven.

My mother and father watched from the couch where they sat most evenings. Her legs layered over his lap as she said to my father, “Some maniac took her. She’s dead by now. Those poor people. That poor thing.”

I wondered if they knew I could hear them. I wondered why and when she became a thing.

2.

A cigarette butt. The yellowed filter sticks straight up, the cylinder caught between the boards of the porch floor. I notice it because of the acorn. I’ve been looking down at the ground more when I walk, checking for fairies or smart squirrels or…something.

Something that is not fairies or squirrels and I know it.

Were it not for the acorn, I don’t know that I would notice this piece of trash standing at attention. I used to smoke on this porch, and a cigarette butt could easily have swelled up with the rain, like an earthworm. Some dreg of my past to remind me of the time when I was not quite so boring. Or perhaps I was more boring than I am now, since I was young and thought smoking would make me interesting.

I reach down to pull it out with thumb and forefinger. The logo has shredded against the wood and humidity, so I can’t check if it is a brand that I smoked. My husband sees me bent down and says, “What are you doing?”

I say, “Checking this cigarette.”

He shrugs and goes inside, into his own hemisphere of the house. In that space, there are no small things, only big things. Desk, chair, lamp, computer, phone. He has kept the items in his life in large manageable chunks.

Everything in my world is small and uncontained, spilling over into his, perhaps annoyingly. At least, I assume it must annoy him. I have never asked him about it. I would be afraid of the answer. I too have a desk, chair, lamp, computer, phone. But the desk is covered in crumpled pages. Empty cans of seltzer ring when I shift my chair, which has an old sweater crumpled in the space between the seat and the backrest. A rosary winds around the base of my desk lamp (I don’t remember why), the computer desktop is pocked with files, the phone is separate from the charger which is separate from the wall adapter and all of it is usually separate from me. In short, I am crumbs and my husband is as big and solid and contained as the house itself. I notice the small things because in many ways, I am one of the small things. I am scattered, as they say. I am not together.

  

At eleven years old a teacher wouldn’t let me take off my sweater because of the breasts that were forming there. The breasts became a piece of me separate from the rest: the first part of my body that observation breaks off and gives to those who see it instead of live in it.

3.

The third thing that appears on my doorstep is a package that I ordered but forgot about. I am startled by it, big and blocky, before I remember what I’m expecting. My relief only lasts for a moment. On top of the cardboard box a frayed piece of fabric clings to the sharp corner and flutters in the breeze.

The pattern on the fabric looks familiar, but I can’t connect it with any garment. I decide the pattern is homey and would look familiar to anyone—green vines, blue flowers, and the hint of what might be a strawberry at the fraying edge.

I’m not sure why but as soon as it is between my fingers, I turn around and look out at the front yard. I appraise the road, the dark trees across the street, the windowed eyes of my neighbors’ houses.

I could say each of these items was brought by the wind but dismissing all three feels like an excessive weight to put on the chance of atmosphere. I bring the swatch to my husband and say, “This was on the package I ordered.”

He accepts the cloth from me and squints at it. “Huh,” he says.

“That’s all you can say?” I respond.

“Well,” he says, the fabric draping lifelessly over the back of his hand, as if it is playing dead for his benefit. “What do you want me to say?”

“I want you to acknowledge that it’s odd,” I say, after much deliberation.

“Are you freaked out?” he asks me.

I pause for long enough to appear to be considering. I am not considering. I am freaked out. I always have been. Freaked out is a condition of my existence.

“I think so,” I say.

“It’s just some fabric,” he says.

“No—but—it’s—” I stumble. I turn away from him to the counter where I’ve put the box. I open it with a knife (don’t think about being gutted) and take the contents out of the squeaky Styrofoam stuffing. I have turned away so that I can say: “Last week it was that cigarette butt, and the week before it was a perfectly placed acorn!”

“A perfectly placed acorn?” he interjects.

“There’s always something, like, waiting for me when we get back to the house. Like some kind of message that I shouldn’t get too comfortable. Like it feels—sentient,” I turn to him with closed eyes, ashamed.

When I open them, he folds his arms over his chest and lifts his eyebrows higher on his forehead, as if the one motion activated the other.

“You don’t know what it’s like,” I say.

“What what is like?”

I stare out into the backyard. The wind carries yellow leaves in tall whirls. I can’t explain this feeling to him. I feel like I am always blaming the wind for what might be malevolence.

He puts a hand on my shoulder and says, “It’s okay. We’re safe. I promise you.”

Without thinking I say, “Can anyone actually promise that?”

I have asked him this before.

“Of course,” he says.

“Of course?” I echo.

“Of course, I can promise we are safe. We are inside, aren’t we?”

I think again, you don’t know what it’s like.

When I was fifteen, an older man and I exchanged emails for about a month until my parents found out and put an end to it.

I shudder when I think about the line of questioning the emails were working up to: when and where he could see me.

  

4.

At the sight of the whistle hanging on the doorknob, I freeze. It’s rusty, but I can tell it was once silver. It is on a lanyard that is fraying and brown with mud, but pink and neon yellow peek through. My husband is behind me with groceries. He is talking about something normal. He has been talking about something normal for the duration of the drive home from the store. I’ve been listening to normal, but I’ve been watching the faces around us, searching for someone familiar, for some warning. A face I have seen repeatedly but cannot place.

I feel him behind me, with that sense we all have of a human close. I can feel him see the whistle. These feelings, the awareness of him, the fact that I can tell when he is tense or when something has stopped him, when he is near, when he is nearing, the fact that I can recognize the sound of his footsteps coming up behind me, even in public, calms me on the good days. If all that I’m afraid of were real, I would know it, feel it. On the bad days, I think, you are feeling it.

“What have we here?” he says, and I’m already disappointed by his response to this clearly evil whistle. How oblivious he is to ill-will dangling from the door. He steps onto the porch and picks it up. I’m immobile on the top step, watching my husband with this thing that might as well be poisonous to the touch, and he is saying “One of the kids in the neighborhood must have left it.” I’m thinking how can you look at something like that and think of children and not of murderrapedeathdismembermentdisembowlementdecapitation? 

He loops it around the stem of the potted palm next to the glider, steps back.

He says, “There!” as if it looks nice, as if it is decoration.

Walking to my dorm at night, a car slowed at the sight of me. The lights pulled into a side street and then began to back out; it was turning around.

By then I knew to be afraid, and I dove into the bushes and crawled to the back entrance of the dormitory, skirting the patch of light from the friendly bulb above the door. Darkness equivalent to safety in that moment, danger to being seen.

5.

I decide that I’m getting rid of the whistle. I’m sure that my husband has forgotten about it by now, though I can’t. I lie awake at night thinking about it curled around the plant like a plotting snake. I imagine someone in the woods, smoking whatever brand of cigarette they left for me, watching the yellow windows of my house.

I imagine rheumy eyes dipping down from my bedroom window to the plant. I imagine them seeing the neon of the lanyard there—reflective in the dark—and thinking, Idiots don’t even know a threat when they see it. 

I imagine this shape of a man shoving the whistle into the open dusty mouth of my severed head, which crowns the bloody bundle of my parts and my husband’s parts piled on the living room rug.

I’m wearing gloves when I open the door to retrieve the whistle. I nearly trip over the fifth offering: a pile of butterfly wings in the upturned lid of a cardboard box.

I scream and slam the door.

My husband comes down the stairs, still not alarmed enough for my taste. “What’s wrong?”

“Look on the porch,” I say. “Box,” I add in a hoarse whisper.

He opens the door and bends down. “Those kids,” he clucks to himself.

I scream in fear and rage. “Kids? Are you kidding me?”

He puts the box down and stands up, guiding me into the house by the elbow and closing the door behind us. He puts his hands on my upper arms and looks me in the eyes, “What is going on?”

“I don’t know how much more of this I can take,” I say.

He says, “Why are you so afraid all the time?”

I say, “Why aren’t you afraid all the time?”

“Why would I be?” he says.

I laugh. “Good point,” I say. “Why would you be?”

He holds me close; his instinct to protect me against the world kicks in. I suppose my instinct, at this point, is to curl into him and imagine that he actually can protect me. It means something to me that he wants to.

 

My husband can walk at night. When it is dark, he’s the one who takes out the trash, whistling to himself as he does, sending the sounds of himself out into the dark. His existence pushes outward with abandon, mine shrinks in. The small things make animal noises.

6.

The sixth item might not be an offering at all. I can’t tell. It’s an empty soda can that I blame it on the wind because I don’t want to feel crazy.

When dating, friends helped me to take precautions against the strangers I was meeting. My husband was one of these friends, circling me into a hug when I returned to the apartment complex that we both lived in. He would say, “I’m glad you’re safe. I didn’t trust that guy.”

Then we would smoke and laugh and talk about horrible stories of online dating, always stopping short of the urban legends or the murder stories. The women who had lived and explored the wilderness but never returned hung in the air with the smoke.

7.

The seventh item is a severed finger.

I hear a thump on the porch and swing open the door, suddenly brave, to find a bloody ragged woman placing it there. She has nine fingers and a red stump, and she drops her right index finger onto the mat without looking up at the door, although I know she must have heard me.

I can hear her breath and I can hear mine. We are both breathing like we are running scared.

The crown of her head is thinning and caked with mud, matted locks forming behind her ears. Her clothing is ragged, the fabric of her shirt torn and recognizable as what was on the box. I know the print from somewhere.

I can’t think. I might be more afraid that she is muddied and not acknowledging my presence, but I am relieved she isn’t a man.

But then the bloody finger, let loose from her dripping hand, is so disturbing that I have ceased to think for now. I will have to process the horror of it later. For the moment, all I can do is wait for her acknowledgement.

I know she can feel me staring at her. Just as I can tell that my husband is waiting in the kitchen with one ear out for me to scream or something. He is waiting to comfort me because I always seem to need it. I needed it before him. I’ve needed it for as long as I can remember.

The woman looks up, ragged and spectral in her disarray, but unmistakably me.

The fabric of her shirt is the fabric that I wore the night I crawled back to my dorm. At the time, I was unsure if I needed to be so frightened. At the same time, I was positive that if I hadn’t, that night would be either my last or a jagged thing. A shard of memory, broken glass that I must crawl over to live.

I say, “Why are you frightening me like this?”

She speaks in a slow stammer, the sound of which I will hear when I get into bed next to my calm husband tonight and the night after that and all the nights that I remember I can be killed. The words jumbled, slow, lengthened, like the moan of an animal learning to speak. “So you never let your guard down.”

Then animal-me rewinds herself, thread respooling, until she has rolled back into the shadows of the trees across the street. There she can be useful: keep watch.

Maggie Mumford is a writer/director from rural VA. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Crab Fat Magazine (Best of the Net Nominee), Bodega, After Happy Hour, Waxing & Waning, and The Wire’s Dream Magazine. Her story “Flying Circus” received an Honorable Mention from Glimmer Train for the 2017 short story award for new writers. She has an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Memphis, where she served as Creative Nonfiction Editor of The Pinch. She teaches composition and information literacy. Sporadic musings and attempts at networking can be found on Twitter @MaggieMumf.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

NO NAME ISLAND by Lara Markstein

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

NO NAME ISLAND by Lara Markstein

Lara Markstein
NO NAME ISLAND

In the beginning, in that first month that they’d lived with their uncle on Aorere Drive as kids, Hamish and Kylie passed whole days in the bay. Before Stuart could go on about the cost of diesel with the lights they left on in every room, they kicked free of the breakfast table and rushed down the hillside into waters that clouded with each step, their feet skimming the soft surface of the earth. Hamish scanned the sea for stingrays, pale sprats, and sea snails with perfect spiral shells.

When the tides turned, the bay became mud flats, bubbling with sand flies. So they walked south towards the tip of the peninsula. They were scouts, searching for new routes and lands, as they followed the water to the boulders of the headland, which they could clamber over timed right. The sea still licked at the rocks, which were slippery with slime, and they edged over the sharp stones, barnacles biting at their flesh, until the waves hit their chests. At this point the water before them changed to a darker shade of blue and the ground vanished. Hamish and Kylie stood at the precipice, linked at the hands, held up, it seemed, by the most fragile of shelves.

“Do you reckon people have even seen this place before?” Hamish asked. His knees stung, his breathing was ragged, but he did not complain. Looking out over the ocean, the vastness of it all was terrifying. His lungs ached at the sheer expanse. Nothing but sea straight to Antarctica.

Kylie and Hamish breathed in deep and quiet, then leapt.

◊

Just two years apart, Kylie and Hamish were inseparable. They took turns lying on the kitchen tiles with frozen packets of chicken and peas over their eyes, waiting for the long, blank summer days to end. At night, Kylie wet the back of his neck with her breath. They shared everything: socks, tissues, friends. Hamish finished Kylie’s homework and ate the food from her plate. Kylie cleaned his damp bed sheets and sported a black eye after saving him from a bash at school. They even looked the same. Both with jaw bones so low and wide you could trip over their scowls.

Following their father’s death, they lived even further in each others’ pockets, playing hooky so they wouldn’t have to be apart. Their father had died of a heart condition, so their mum had said. While he’d been diving with friends. They imagined their dad somersaulting into the water, unfolding until he was long as a taniwha—or at least a water snake—and spearing his body down to the rocky bed. When his heart stopped, he floated on and on. “Do we have heart conditions, too?” Their mum never said. She’d gone a bit funny in the head since their dad’s death.

At night, they lay their ears against each others’ chests searching for a fatal sign. A formality. They knew in their bones they were doomed.

Then the social workers found out about their mum and sent all three of them to Stu.

“I’d like to lodge a formal complaint,” Kylie had announced that day as Stu pulled away from the curb.

“So would I,” he said. “Know anyone who’s listening?”

◊

They swam, shrieking, kicking their legs like the tail of a great fish, a whale—a submarine!—till their teeth chattered and their shoulders shook. About them, whole shoals of fish. Not the small triplefins of the Bay, but spotties and flounder that reached tip to tail to his nose. Hamish stretched his hands out wide as though he could gather them all in. Afterwards, they scrambled over the boulders into a cove, a small, secret space, with caves the waves had carved and trees sprouting from rock. A deserted landscape, Kylie claimed; theirs. How much better than the bay, already crowded with a litter of lives! Their inlet was clean of everything but centuries-old ghosts they found in buried bones. A finger, a femur, a rounded plate of pelvis, honeycombed. The owners long gone, unable to correct her invented histories. Hamish steered a stuck starfish ocean-side.

Kylie and Hamish hung their clothes on pōhutukawa branches—the rocks themselves were covered in mussels. Later, Kylie would bring knives so they could prize open the shellfish that tore the skin from their soles. Then they stretched out over sandbags that scratched once they’d dried, staring up at a curtain of blue. Above them, a retaining wall seemed to bang up like a pyramid against the sky—one terrace after the next, a steep staircase climbing to some fantastic sacrifice! Hamish felt almost weightless peering uphill, dizzy.

“You could survive here forever!” Kylie said, satisfied. “We’d never have to go to school.”

“We’d live with the fish. Just you and me.”

“Don’t get any ideas,” Kylie said, kicking him with her feet.

He kicked back, and soon they were shoving each other, till they fell in a tide pool, wrestling among the anemones. Kylie a sea-monster, rising from the shallow water, cloaked in seaweed, shells for nails.

◊

They looted pipis with their feet, stole birds’ eggs from the nest, ripped crabs from the mud and fried snails to watch them burn. It was not personal; they were good at killing things. With stolen knives they fashioned spears from sticks, wild hunters on wild land, and they used the weapons to stalk possums along with eels beside the estuary. Their knees cracked from the fine cuts of paspalum grass. When Hamish nicked his index finger with the blade, they did not quit. Kylie sucked at the cut instead and wrapped his hand in a sarong, as though they were not five minutes from plasters and rubbing alcohol, but years and continents away and so had to survive on just their wits. Her lips red as an open wound, a lattice of leftover blood along her teeth. Hamish did not cry. Tears annoyed Kylie. And complaints and bad jokes and carelessness and slowpokes. Her irritation at this weak, dumb world overflowed.

At almost-thirteen, Kylie wanted to poke and prod and squeeze until every organ burst. She tested the boundaries of things—of life, in particular. Her insides were bubbling and she had to scream and run and tug at the seams of the universe. And Hamish followed—because Hamish was good at following.

◊

Then the school year started, and Kylie took a shine to fishing. For him, of course. “You’re a growing boy,” Kylie said. “You need a real meal.” They angled for food with sticks and twine and hooks she had him tie with his fat thumbs. Kylie squinted past the sun to where the neighbor’s boys hauled hoki and the trevally and pilchard they’d barbecue. “Like I always said, we have everything we need right here.” Hamish hardly left Aorere Drive. How was he to know what they lacked? “It’s bloody Moby Dick,” she crowed when they caught a sprat.

Kylie was taking control of their sorry lot. Which meant that Hamish had to get his ass into gear, to learn to pull and reel and gut—entrails and seawater and blood, and just toss the dross aside for the sharks.

But the sea didn’t always cough up its innards easily. “We’ll try harder.”

Only he couldn’t, he wouldn’t. Hamish sat on a boulder, resentfully probing with his finger the wounds he’d received helping his sister so far with her tugging and towing. The skin caved a little, rubbery, like jellyfish. He’d have rather hid hungry in the cove amidst the exquisite teeming waves than kill all that was bright and beautiful. Toast with butter, toast with jam, toast with marmite and Skippies and tomato sauce. There was plenty they could eat without ruining the beach. He was rooting for the sea creatures here.

But Kylie wouldn’t give up. “We could cray? What do you say?” She nudged him in the back with her knees so that he had to hold onto the wood planks to keep from falling into the sea. The neighbor’s son, Jono, had hauled three cray clear the other day. They could leap from the dock into cool water, dive-bomb and somersault. Kylie didn’t like bathing and had a funky, sweet stink.

“The water’s colder than you think,” Hamish said.

“We need food.”

“We need nothing.”

◊

So one day Hamish did not follow her. He planted himself in the sand that seeped from beneath his feet and burrowed his toes in the beach, determined to stay right there on if not solid, then familiar land. If she wanted to floss between sharks’ teeth, she could do so alone. Hamish wouldn’t go ripping out the guts of his ocean companions. Everything went Kylie’s way. For once, Hamish would do as he pleased.

“I’ll go myself,” Kylie said. “I’ll leave you.”

“Look,” he said finally, bending to tear a knuckle of shell from the ground, just like their dad had shown them years ago. Hamish turned the pipi over in his hand, studying the thick lips, which lined the beaches in various states of decay. What he meant was: the world is filled with wonder right here. They didn’t have to fish, to do, to see something marvelous.

“Eat it,” Kylie said. She watched his throat bob up and down. Turned away when he clasped his knees and retched.

◊

Kylie loved him, alright. For his birthday, she planned a party. “Where are we going?” Hamish wanted to know. It was a secret, and she wouldn’t say.

The night before, Kylie cut little sandwiches that got soggy sitting in the fridge. Stu even gave her extra money to buy lollies from Mrs. Froneck in town. Hamish didn’t dare argue with her when she packed damp blankets into their backpacks and dredged out their togs. Normally, they wore their undies when they swam. Or they just dived into the sea bare butts and jiggly bits. She’d gotten hairs between her legs, though, and pointy nubs for tits, and had started covering herself when she caught Hamish staring at this change, so it was possible she’d grown embarrassed.

“No one else runs around starkers,” Kylie said. And she was doing this proper. She even scrubbed the mold from an old umbrella that had housed a horde of small brown spiders and pinned dishrags to Stu’s caps to shield their necks from the sun. Kylie bore sunscreen from the bowels of the pantry, like an archeologist who had unearthed a treasured artifact.

“Ready?” Kylie asked, lifting Hamish’s heavy backpack so he could wind through his arms.

“Now can you say where the party is?”

“Your favorite place.” Hamish sprinted to the cliff, almost skidding down the sandbagged retaining wall, the rope tied to an old pōhutukawa stinging his palms.

“Happy birthday!” Hamish stood stunned. In their cove, all three neighbor boys: Jono and Liam and Sam. A sloshing pitched in his gut.

Kylie skidded down beside him then directed them all to lay their goodies on a blanket just so. Jono punched an old umbrella in the sand, and they lay out lollies and sammies slathered in Thousand Island dressing in the circle of shade. Sam even brought out a sixer of beer and little wax candles that did not add up to Hamish’s age. Their picnic looked like an oil painting. And they all stared at each other, unsure what was left to do.

Kylie was determined, though, that they have fun, and what couldn’t she conjure out of the sheer force of her desire? So she handed Hamish Jono’s fancy fishing rod as though he’d enjoy the well-oiled whirr of the reel, the pleasing weight of the sinker, the stink of bait.

Hamish grabbed a bag of chips and turned away. He sat apart on the dock, where the nail heads burnt small red circles into his skin, and he studied the spiders weaving webs in the shadows of the struts. Impatient, Kylie peeled off the clothes over her togs, but the swimsuit was too small for all that length she had now.

“Come on then, chickens!” Kylie ran down the dock and dived into the sea, the tips of her fingers slicing through water and weed.

Jono and Liam set down their beers and followed with a roar and a great splash that wet what was left of the chips. Though they were soggy, Hamish stuffed them in his mouth. “Come on, Hamish!” Kylie shrieked.

But Hamish did not want to join them in the water, which slapped the balustrades, churning up a fine froth. Hamish thought the beach was prettier before, when it was just he and Kylie and the shellfish on the rocks.

“Oh come on, Hamish. Don’t be a spoil-sport,” said Jono. And Hamish wished they’d all stop hassling him.

“You’re being a real baby,” Kylie said.

But Hamish wasn’t a child to be bossed around and left behind. So he shoved aside the plastic bag and walked towards the boulders, ignoring all the yelling at his back. Hamish raised his arms above his head like a gymnast, closed his eyes, turned, and ran. He drove the balls of his feet hard against the wood, pounding all the splinters smooth with flesh and fat, though he felt light now, elegant. Any moment, he would rise. Gravity could not keep him down. Hamish spread his body out like a sail, pushing the dock’s final slat with just his big toe. He flew; he soared; he surfed the currents of air, a flying fish in human shape, and he built a gob of spit in his cheek he’d hurl at his sister and Jono and Liam and Sam, the suckers! —if he didn’t crash belly first into the sea.

His face, his arms, his nut sack stung and the cold water froze his lungs. He gasped, gulping at salt-water. His legs kicked out one-two, one-two, but he could not find sand. His eyes stung as he searched for light and air, and he heard his wonky heart pounding, out of time. Just like his Dad, floating in the sea.

Then two hands grabbed at his armpits, the skin soft and slippery—Kylie hauling him like a whale from the surf. Their chests expanded and shrunk, expanded up towards the light, a creature with two hearts. Hamish gasped.

“I got him!” Jono cried, one hairy forearm crushing Hamish’s throat.

Kylie, on the deck, clasped her hands to her chest, like some stupid movie heroine. Her shadow lengthened on the crests of the water to cover them, as though she’d grown before their very eyes.

Hamish knew that if Jono had not been there, his sister would not have left him to die. He knew that. Still.

◊

They called Kylie a whore in high school. There was no reason he should have found out. He and his sister did not attend the same school.

It was cross country day at Hamish’s primary, which meant every child had to run and cheer following a series of nonsense rituals. Hamish hated it.

But the real torture began before they even announced his age group, when a troupe from each House performed a haka—all in the spirit of building a healthy sense of competition. Nothing more invigorating than skinny pre-teens slapping their bare thighs and chests, which pimpled in the chill of a windy, late June afternoon. Hamish was enlisted in this show, though he didn’t know the moves. Copying the kid at his side, Hamish was half a beat behind, facing left when the others turned right; his mouth twisted silently around unfamiliar vowels. He’d hoped no one had noticed, but the whole school laughed at him afterwards. Boys passing Hamish mimicked his performance by flailing their arms.

“Should have been in the back with the girls swinging pois!”

“Nah, bro. The spaz’d have taken someone out with one of those things!”

Hamish tried to blend into the groups laying on the grass waiting to participate, but his knee hit a girl’s back, and she said, “Ew,” then her friend, “Scuse you.” He knew no one; he shifted and twisted and curled up small, but others still wiped the sweat of his shoulder from their skin, as though he were catching.

Hamish slipped away and no one noticed, and that hurt, too.

Afraid of encountering Stu at home, Hamish dropped into the crawl space along the foundations, strewn with nails and beer cans and potato chip packets.

“Did you have cross country, too?”

“Jono reads this rubbish,” she said, tossing him one of the girlie magazines she’d been analyzing. She’d picked through the garbage and collected a whole stack. “Got to know what’s going through his mind.” Now that Kylie had a boyfriend, she scrutinized everything, and Hamish sucked in his stomach, worried that his sister might judge him, too.

It seemed to Hamish that Kylie was possessed; one moment her body could not contain her energy, the next, she sunk listless to the ground. She flipped onto her stomach and picked up a pen to doodle on the pages, her bent legs kicking back and forth, the pale sun through the slats marbling her back.

“You’re not very good,” he said of her artwork.

“You wouldn’t know.”

He lay on his tummy and bashed her shoulder until she passed across a pen. “What are you drawing?”

“A map.”

“Of?”

“Of where to go from here. Where to hide.” Girls were bitches at her age, she said. “I’m not the fucking whore.”

“You drew the peninsula wrong.” Hamish twisted the cove to the left.

“That looks like a dick,” she said and they both laughed and laughed until Kylie snorted and their stomachs cramped and they choked, unable to breathe.

◊

Kylie made plans to escape. He woke one night to the smell of sweet air, overripe with rain, and found Kylie down the hall squatting over a pool of clothes, her window opened wide though it was cold. He’d meant to say don’t go but said instead, “They’re mine,” indicating a pair of gumboots.

Still, she seemed to understand him well enough. “Sometimes, I reckon Uncle Stu’s right. You’re a real baby.” Sometimes Hamish reckoned so, too. The thirty months between him and his sister gaped. Hamish felt Kylie had lifetimes on him.

“You’ll miss me?” she asked. When he didn’t answer, afraid of seeming even more of a sissy, she’d stepped in close, her old-beef breath warm and stale on his chin. “God knows how you’d survive if I left. You ever kissed a girl?”

“Of course.” He knew that if he hadn’t, he’d be teased.

“Prove it,” she said, although she didn’t sound as if she was talking of kissing anymore but something larger that he didn’t yet grasp.

Hamish was terrified. He’d never kissed anyone. Certainly never with his mouth split open wide like an exposed plug.

His heart clanked clumsily in his chest and he pressed his mouth roughly against hers, aware that if he hesitated, he’d be mocked, and the rain splattered through the open window on the bed and her tongue slithered between his teeth, along the roof of his mouth, his gums. Like an eel, strong and wet. He kissed her hard and long so he could fix her in this place and she could not escape, and his skin pimpled in the cold that washed around their bare feet.

Kylie told him afterwards he sucked. “Not even! You’re worse,” he said and threaded his legs through hers as she lay on her back, staring at the ceiling, having given up on running away for the night. They talked about Australia.

Kylie was waiting for Jono to leave. He was going to play for an Aussie Rules team in Sydney. He said he’d take her, too. So they deliberated over where she should live.

“Better not be too pricey so you can afford it when Jono leaves your sorry ass. You haven’t even got real tits yet,” Hamish said. Kylie punched his shoulder as if to keep from laughing loud, but she punched too hard and the next day he bruised in a network of purple and blue, like the tentacles of jellyfish as they uncurled. A reminder of his nastiness. He’d felt bad about what he’d said, because his sister was beautiful and any man would be lucky to have her, but he wanted to prove that nothing ought to change. That she was the same as him: a child.

Hamish wondered if his sister was trying to tear him apart so they’d both be broken bits.

◊

At night, Kylie still sneaked into Hamish’s bed and, wound together tight, she whispered how they’d sail together by sea, returning to the cove just for supplies. “Like nomads. Pirates.” Hamish wiped the beer they’d stolen from Stu’s fridge from his mouth and passed across the bottle for Kylie to finish. Hamish wanted to believe his sister was building an ark; that they would troop aboard, two humans, side by side. But when her sandy feet rubbed his beneath the blankets, they roughened his skin.

Hamish held onto his sister. Because he loved her; because this broken world of Kylie’s was filled with wonder. Jasmine choked the fences and pohutukawa burst with red flowers and every night the sky exploded into stars. Against this terrible beauty, how could he not race with her from one destruction to the next?

Kylie stared out the window long after Hamish fell asleep, her eyes gathering the stars—which would forever fall like calcified fish, all dried skin and bone, by her side.

Lara Markstein is a South African-born American-New Zealander. Her work has appeared across a variety of literary journals, including Glimmer Train, Agni Online, and The Michigan Quarterly Review, and has been recognized by the Pushcart awards, the Sargeson Prize, and the Bank of New Zealand Katherine Mansfield Short Story Awards. She lives near the town of Waitohi on Tōtaranui/Queen Charlotte Sound in the northernmost part of New Zealand’s south island, Te Waipounamu.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

URGENT by Gemini Wahhaj

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Gemini Wahhaj
URGENT

When Polly’s father died, she received an outpouring of love from his friends. She was grieving by not taking any calls—no tears, no ceremony, just silence, and a total loss of appetite—but these were international calls, coming from Bangladesh, in the middle of the night, from strange-looking numbers. Her father had died in Bangladesh. Her mother had died a year before that. Polly was an only child, unmarried, living by herself in faraway Houston, where she knew few Bengalis, certainly not anyone from her parents’ past. She had left home two decades ago for a master’s degree in the US and never returned.

“Come back and settle your property,” Bashir Uncle advised Polly over the crackling phone line one night.

Another night, she woke up to fierce ringing and Rahim Uncle’s words, “We are all meeting to discuss how to help you.”

Yet another of her father’s friends, Musa Uncle, cried to her for several minutes, then asked in a clogged, emotional voice, “Tell me, child, what can I do for you?

Polly called them Uncle, but she was not related to them by blood and she did not know them well, knew them only by name or remembered them only dimly from the past, after long years of absence. Her real uncle, her father’s younger brother in Dhaka, had given her the news of her father’s death. Her father had been ill for months, with lung cancer, and she had been meaning to visit in December.

“Should I fly home?” she had asked her uncle with a child’s cry of alarm. She had been frightened by the news.

In the end, Polly did not attend her father’s funeral. They would not have waited for her, in any case. Her uncle had explained that according to the rules of Islam, the body had to be buried as quickly as possible. But he told her to come soon, to settle her affairs while he was alive. Her parents had been teachers at Dhaka University, but they had still managed to build a house, and her father had some agricultural land in his village.

It was this last bit that had frightened her, if she could put her finger on it, that she was suddenly an adult, expected to take care of her affairs, open the bowels of her parents’ accounts, their properties, belongings, legal documents, and the annals of their home, bulging with their personal belongings and the dark tunnels of memory. They had never taught her about money matters, never involved her in their affairs, leaving her to study, to earn degrees, relegating the twists of property, legalities, and money to the grownups. She still did not consider herself up to the task.

When Polly finally flew to Dhaka in December, scrapping together Christmas holidays and three days of grief leave with her paid vacation days from work (good work—in the finance section of an oil company), she was heavy and rasping for air, unaccustomed to the sudden movement. The whole flight, she sat stricken in her airplane seat, eyes frozen on the personal TV screen in front of her, watching one episode after another of a funny sitcom on the flight’s entertainment offering.

Her uncle had said he would receive her at the Dhaka International Airport. She was to stay with him, now that she had no parents and no home. Just before she had flown, there had been last minute negotiations about these arrangements. He had emailed her asking her to change her travel plans, because on Thursdays he usually played cards with his friends, contract bridge. This time, the game would be played at his house, and the friends were invited to dinner, an invitation his wife had sent out months ago, so it was set in stone. Additionally, the driver had asked for leave on that date and had already been granted it. Could Polly book a different flight, he inquired, or perhaps stay somewhere else on the first night? Then at the last minute, he had called to say that he would be there after all, the whole business leaving her wide eyed, heart thumping.

When she emerged from customs, with only a roller carry-on, there was no one waiting for her inside the airport. She was to go outside and find her uncle. When her parents had been alive, they had a trick of meeting her in the domestic terminal, which was deserted and calm compared to the crammed, crowded anxiety of the international arrivals. Polly pushed herself through the crowd, the air thick with the odor of her fellow countrymen. This was her first time visiting in December. The fares were usually higher in the winter months, so she had preferred the off-season opportunities, a week in February or March, and before that, in the ancient past, when she had been a master’s student, she used to go for the whole hot, sticky summer.

At first, she could not find her uncle and had to wander farther and farther out on the dusty balcony outside the brick airport building and then onto the dust-swirled parking lot, thronged by coolies who wanted to help carry her luggage.

“Apa, this way.” A thin, short man approached Polly. “Do you remember me? I’m Ali, your uncle’s driver.”

Her uncle, a retired diplomat and as big a smoker as her father, sat in the back seat of the blue refurbished Toyota, a car she still remembered, a family icon, his fingers holding a cigarette to his mouth.

“Hello, Polly,” he said through smoke, his eyes squeezed, forehead furrowed, looking thin and dark, shrunken.

Polly climbed into the back beside her uncle while the driver rolled her carrier bag to the back of the car and lifted it into the trunk. On the ride home, Polly’s uncle spoke slowly, like an old man, explaining about the dinner party plans canceled at the last minute, then laboriously going over the burial details (her father had been buried in their village home, outside Dhaka) while Polly sat listening dumbly.

Her uncle lived on the north side of town in a respectable, ancient house, one of the last houses in a rapidly developing city where single-family homes were being torn down to erect high-rise buildings to accommodate a growing urban population. The furniture was old, heavy tables and ornate sofas brought over from Turkey, China, and India, relics of all the places where he had been posted. Frumpy curtains kept the room dark and heavy. Polly had to sit on the sofa and chat with her uncle, without washing or taking a bath, things she would have normally done had she gone to her parents’ house. A manservant wearing a khaki suit rolled in a dinner trolley bearing cucumber sandwiches and chicken patties, little quarter plates with floral designs on the rim, and triangular, folded napkins.

“You have to go see your parents’ flat tomorrow, to decide what to keep and what to throw away,” her uncle said.

Her aunt, an emaciated woman with a gold bracelet on each sticky wrist and black lines under her eyes, entered the dark room and greeted her in a somnolent voice, then asked her in a serious tone what she planned to do with her mother’s saris. “You should give them away to poor women,” her aunt advised.

Polly ate five mini sandwiches and felt her throat run dry. A wave rose in her chest. She thought of all the things she must do and how little time she had.

“Tomorrow, you must go with me to obtain a death certificate,” her uncle said, picking out a fresh cigarette from his packet.

“Does she need a national ID?” her aunt asked.

“We will do that. Is your passport current?” her uncle asked, turning to her.

Polly nodded with chicken flesh in her mouth.

“Don’t forget her parents’ bank accounts,” her aunt said to her uncle. “She should withdraw the money.”

“We must go to court after that. The court is in Sadar Ghat, near the Buriganga…” her uncle said.

“Are you sure she has to go to court? She’ll get sick traveling to Sadar Ghat. There is dust in the air, and you have to sit in the traffic for hours on those narrow roads.”

Polly’s parents had lived in the south of the city, in a flat on the university campus, given to them for the duration of their university jobs. The court was even farther south. Dhaka traffic meant that it might take the whole day just to get one thing done.

“I have to meet my father’s friends?” Polly spoke up timidly. “They’ve set up a meeting tomorrow morning to figure out how to help me.”

“Is the car available?” her uncle asked her aunt.

“No. The driver agreed to take his vacation from tomorrow—”

Polly’s eyes became heavy. She leaned back against the dusty upholstery of the sofa, rested her bare feet on the Persian carpet, and closed her eyes, comforted by her relatives’ voices buzzing above her head in the cold, airless room as she drifted off into unconsciousness.

◊

The next morning, Bashir Uncle sent a car to Uttara, where Polly’s uncle lived, to bring her down to Dhanmondi. The Pajero arrived at ten in the morning. Polly climbed in happily, resting her plump body in the backseat, panting for breath. But the sleek Pajero soon became stuck in traffic, with buses, trucks, and cars honking and hooting in the clogged air. The landscape of Dhaka had changed, with new bridges and buildings but also the sheer number of cars.

Bashir Uncle lived on the eighth floor of the apartment building, accessible by elevator, on top of a tight parking space crammed with cars that had to back into their spaces with precise movements. The building was modern with a crisp hallway and marble floor, not like the building her parents had lived in, built in an earlier decade. The brick walls and plaster of olden days were gone. Inside the flat, the floors were marble and the rooms were arranged on split levels, spinning off into multiple universes, with painted walls and high ceilings. A floor-to-ceiling terracotta mural by a famous artist covered one living room wall.

“How was the trip?” Bashir Uncle asked.

Polly could not place him. He was thin with a grey mustache and close-cropped, immaculate silver hair (Polly’s father’s hair had been receding and graying, too, but Bashir Uncle had lived long enough to rescue the look). He looked elegant, well preserved in a sleeveless blue sweater and collared white shirt. Polly’s smoker father had exploded in decay and rot.

“Oh, the traffic is very bad. It took me three hours to just go, what, a few miles?” Polly said, staring at her father’s friend through narrowed, jealous eyes.

Bashir Uncle laughed. “No, no. I meant the trip from the US to Bangladesh.”

A servant, a slight boy with matchstick brown legs sticking out of shorts, wheeled a two-tier dinner trolley laden with food into the room. He had a stern, serious face, a high forehead, and large, focused eyes, an old soul. Polly checked out the familiar wares of the dinner-trolley with hungry eyes, all the food she expected from a nashta (a snack offered midmorning and then again at high tea, a relic from her childhood)—samosa, chotpoti, little fried vegetable fritters, and three different kinds of sweets. She rose from the sofa and helped herself, clattering porcelain quarter plates and silver forks. The bell rang rapidly in succession and more uncles walked in, greeting one another in loud, cheery voices, alive and hearty.

“This is your Rahim Uncle,” Bashir Uncle said, introducing Polly to a tall, big man with jet-black hair and a red face. “He just flew in from Rajshahi today to meet with you.”

“I’m honored, Uncle,” Polly said, setting her plate down and rising to meet the tall man. “What do you do in Rajshahi?”

“Oh, I retired and settled in my ancestral home. My father used to have a small house there and agricultural lands. I’m not rich like your other uncles here.” Rahim Uncle laughed, with force, showing strong lung capacity. “But it’s enough for me to live off. I get everything I need from our lands. Rice. Vegetables. We have a few mango orchards.”

“Your uncle goes fishing,” Bashir Uncle said to Polly. “He is living the life.”

Polly looked from one face to the other, their able bodies and rosy, youthful faces, recalling her shrunken parents in their last days, cooped up in their flat, their skins pale from lack of sunlight, eating processed noodles—they had stopped going to the market to buy fresh food. Their lives had shrunk to just existing, paying bills and taxes. Her father, too, had wanted to retire and return to his village home, but he had not made it.

The meeting began when Musa Uncle arrived. The others evidently thought him the most capable among them to steer Polly to success. They all said repeatedly that they wanted things to go well for her. Polly remembered Musa Uncle more sharply than the others. He had taken a share with her father in the cow they slaughtered for Eid, had come to their university flat to discuss club activities, played bridge with her father. The little boy returned, carrying a heavy porcelain tray of teacups, and the uncles helped themselves, one black tea, one black tea with ginger, and one milk tea with no sugar. Polly took the tea with milk and sugar, helping herself to an additional spoon of sugar. Then she sat back down with her teacup and looked at the faces of her father’s friends sitting on sofas and chairs around her.

“You all look very well,” Polly said. “What is your secret?”

“We meet frequently,” Bashir Uncle said (Bashir Uncle was the host, although she kept getting them mixed up. She stared at each uncle, trying to burn their faces and their identities into memory). “We meet to play cards and badminton. You know what they say. Good feelings flow when old friends meet.”

“Now, Polly,” Musa Uncle began, “you know that we helped your parents build their house in Gulshan. You have to hand it to a developer now—”

Musa Uncle was the one Rahim Uncle had thought most suitable to help Polly.

“Can I just sell it to someone instead, a person?” Polly began, a hot samosa crumbling in her mouth.

“No, no,” Bashir Uncle, the host, said, “no one will buy a whole house nowadays. You have to build an apartment building, and the only way to do that is to hand the property over to a developer.”

“But my father did not believe in apartment buildings. He believed there is a problem of overbuilding in Dhaka. He would not have wanted to turn his house into an apartment building and crowd the area,” Polly said.

She knew that they knew that, knew her father, and loved him. Their solid presence surrounded her in the enclosure of the warm drawing room, with the familiar glass showcase holding curios, resembling the showcases in her parents’ flat that she had not yet entered, and a wall lined with old bookshelves, the spines of Bengali novels standing upright next to dark volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

“We know that, but for you that is the best solution,” Rahim Uncle, the country gentleman idling his retired years in Rajshahi, said confidently. “Sell it to the developer, they give you an advance, and they handle everything. Otherwise, it’s impossible for you to deal with so much from so far—”

“I’m selling my own house to a developer,” Musa Uncle said. “We can approach them together, get a good deal on the advance and turnaround time. You will get a lot of money.”

At these words, Polly’s eyes glittered. She began to imagine a new level of comfort for herself, a gift from her parents and the country she had left behind.

“The amount of money your parents have left you…you will never have to work a day in your life.” Rahim Uncle guffawed (he was the one who had called the others to Polly’s aid).

“The developer could even sell the flats for you,” Musa Uncle said. “Don’t worry about a thing. Your uncles are here to protect you.”

◊

Polly spent the next two weeks following her father’s brother, her real uncle, to government offices, getting her passport renewed, a national ID card, a death certificate, and a letter from her uncle to show that he had no right to her father’s property. Accompanied by Musa Uncle, she met with the developer in a high-rise building in Gulshan, where they showed her a sample contract, pages and pages of it, which Musa Uncle promised his lawyer would look over.

There was one thing Polly had to do on her own—clean out her childhood home, her parents’ flat on the university campus. By then her uncle’s chauffeur Ali had arrived back from his vacation in his village home in nearby Tangail, where he had gone on some matter to see about his ailing, elderly mother, who was on her deathbed. Ali accompanied Polly to the flat in the university quarters, which had been left empty for her to sort through out of respect for her father. As soon as they entered the flat, a thick atmosphere of dust engulfed them.

“Get out of here quickly, Apa!” Ali advised, addressing her respectfully as an elder sister. “You will catch a fever from the dust.”

While Ali leaned against the front door, young and aloof to the dust, which he identified as the fingers of death, Polly stepped through the damp, dank rooms. Dust balls entered through her nose, ears, and eyes and settled at the corners of her mouth. Her mother had been a lifelong academic, reciting long tracts from a chapter she was reading to Polly and her father at dinner. Her books were still arranged on shelves in the living and dining areas and both the bedrooms. Looking from the TV to the showcases laden with glass figures to the almirahs full of saris, Polly called Ali to pack up the saris, her aunt’s advice ringing in her ears. Soon afterward, she fled, taking nothing, directing Ali to throw away or sell everything else. Later, she realized that those rooms had held, at the least, her parents’ diplomas, PhD dissertations, her own degree certificates, family albums, and everything else of hers that her parents had carefully preserved over decades.

At the end of two weeks, Polly returned for America. At first, she called the uncles for every question she had. The developer had asked for a certain document or had proposed an advance of a particular amount, less than what they had talked about. What should she do? Perhaps her questions were exceptionally needy, perhaps she called them too much or her voice screeched, but slowly, the connections began to weaken. Musa Uncle had a heart attack and could no longer answer Polly’s questions about the developer. She called a few times after he returned from the hospital. After a preamble about his health, she proceeded to ask about finalizing their contracts with the developer. She couldn’t help it. She wanted to get everything she could out of the country, to her present life, where she could use it. Panic gripped her heart when she grasped the urgency of the matter. Bashir Uncle visited Australia for six months to visit his daughter, and Rahim Uncle’s phone connection in Rajshahi was particularly bad. The little web that had been knit around her slowly disintegrated like old wool.

◊

A decade later, Bashir Uncle called Polly out of the blue. His wife had died, and his daughter had moved to Austin, Texas, so he wanted to see if he could come visit Polly, his old friend’s daughter, in Houston. They met, at a Starbucks he had named in Katy. His daughter had dropped him off and left, and he was sitting alone at a table sipping coffee out of a paper cup. She stared at him in shock. He was missing two front teeth and his mouth had caved in. The skin on his face and neck were loose and his eyes were glassy. After half an hour of the visit, he said he was tired. He called his daughter to come get him. Even sitting down, his movements were sluggish and depressed. A part of Polly was satisfied to see her father’s friend come around to where her father had been, a decade ago.

In those thirty minutes, Bashir Uncle asked Polly, “What is the status of your parents’ house in Gulshan?”

“I don’t know. It’s still there. Nothing has been done about it.”

“Really?” He looked at her vaguely. “Musa’s sons signed with a developer and they got ten flats, but Musa was never able to live in his own home. The flats were completed while he was alive, but Musa died two weeks before he could move in.”

Polly nodded, bitterness on her lips, because her house had been left as it was, and there was no one to help her navigate the process of turning it into anything.

“How is your father’s brother?” Bashir Uncle asked.

“He died last year. Of lung cancer,” Polly said, breathing hard. She had gained another twenty pounds in the last decade. She had ordered a latte with extra sugar, a grande. She slurped from the cup now, burning her mouth.

“Your Rahim Uncle is not doing well,” Bashir Uncle continued, his eyes looking over her shoulder at a wall, as if she had asked. “You remember him. He retired to Rajshahi, to his ancestral home.”

“Of course, I remember him! He was very healthy when I saw him.”

“I heard he has dementia. He doesn’t recognize anyone. He can’t make out words when his friends call.”

Polly nodded, realizing that this meeting wasn’t about her but about something she represented to her father’s friend. She was supposed to listen and to receive his panic, a mere confidante. Their roles had changed. They fell silent, slipping into a memory of decay, turning back to look at the long shadow of those who had left.

◊

Later, Polly realized that she had not asked Bashir Uncle about his wife’s death (she realized that his slow movements and toned-down demeanor might have been symptoms of his grieving) or even about his own health. As she drove home, she recalled a conversation she had had with her father before he had died. He had called Polly, coughing and hacking, a few days before he had died. He did not call much in his last days. It was difficult for Polly to call him, as she had to go through various servants to reach him, and the call ultimately dropped. Even when she was able to get him on the phone, he seemed distant and distracted, too tired to talk.

But this one time he had called her, wild, his voice piercing through the telephone line in her ear. “What did I do wrong?” he had demanded of her passionately. “Why am I dying so young while my classmates are all big shots?”

“You’re not dying!” she had said automatically.

“Oh, I’m dying,” he had spat out in disgust.

She had been jealous of all his friends from that instant, on her father’s behalf. Later, when they had offered their help, she had thought to extract from them what they owed her as her father’s daughter, in exchange for the tragedy of her parents’ premature death. They had promised her, promised her, that they would take care of her, that they would do everything for their friend’s child. But in the end, their lives and their children and their health had come in the way, and they had abandoned her. As she drove home in the falling light of day to her high-end apartment building in Katy, where she lived alone, she realized that she had moved on from an urgency for action, the desperate fear of losing her parents and all that was rightfully hers, to acceptance. On that day a decade ago, when her father’s friends had met to help her, they had looked so criminally healthy and able and she had been distraught by this discrepancy between them and her parents, she had still had them, had still been surrounded. And now she mourned them, one by one, as the sun set in the Western sky, glowing bright orange, lighting up the scattered clouds before going out.

Gemini Wahhaj is Associate Professor of English at the Lone Star College in Houston. She has a PhD in creative writing from the University of Houston. Her fiction has appeared in Granta, Zone 3, Northwest Review, Cimarron Review, the Carolina Quarterly, Crab Orchard Review, Chattahoochee Review, Apogee, Silk Road, Night Train, Cleaver, and Concho River Review, among others. An excerpt of her Young Adult manuscript The Girl Next Door was published in Exotic Gothic Volume 5. Forthcoming publications include Scoundrel Time, Chicago Quarterly Review, Arkansas Review, Allium, Valley Voices, and the Raven’s Perch. She is the editor of the magazine Cat 5 Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris

Colette Parris
EXTRA CREDIT

The three of us together constitute a smidge of impurity in what would otherwise be an unadulterated cup of salt. Not the Himalania Fine Pink Salt that will run you $8.99 for ten ounces at Whole Foods. (That’s right. I just googled the price of pink salt at Whole Foods, because I’m all about precision. And while I was at it, I checked to see if gluten-free blueberry waffles are back in stock. Alas, no.) I mean the regular iodized salt that you can get for less than a dollar at Target, the salt that comes in the dark blue cylinder with the yellow-dress girl and her wholly unnecessary umbrella. What do umbrellas have to do with salt? For that matter, what do girls in yellow dresses have to do with salt?

I digress.

By “the three of us,” I mean me, Lakeisha, and Annette. I am Patrice. Five foot three at best on a dreaded “high heels necessary” day, I have a snub nose, average body, shoulder-length braids, thick eyebrows, and red cat-eyes glasses. Lakeisha, whose willowy frame, heart-shaped face, hazel eyes, naturally pouty lips, and relatively well-behaved long hair would cause me to hate her if we weren’t besties, is at the low end of model height. Annette, with her signature bun and pearls, has an “AKA all the way” vibe. A little bit plumper than me and glasses-free, she is my height twin. We are all in our late twenties.

I am not going to describe my complexion, or either of theirs, as cinnamon, cardamom, caramel, chocolate, cocoa, coconut (shell, obviously), coffee, or anything else that begins with c and might make one hungry or thirsty if mentioned. Nor is it necessary to discuss potting soil or paper bags. Suffice it to say that we are each conclusively in the brown family, but we are not the same shade.

The three of us are law clerks at a courthouse in a newly purple state. I started last year. Lakeisha, who already had several months of clerking while black under her belt (“Really? You’re a law clerk? To a federal judge? In this building? Huh.”) when I arrived, encountered me in the elevator during my first week, stared conspicuously at my I.D. card, smiled widely, and said, “We are going to have so. Much. Fun.” She wasn’t wrong. Annette joined us around six months ago, and we seamlessly became Destiny’s Child (Michelle Williams era), the legal version.

The first time I was mistaken for Lakeisha, I had been working at the courthouse for about three weeks. I was confused but flattered, because hello, Lakeisha is hot. And then it happened again. And again. The reverse was also happening on a regular basis, which I assume was less exciting for Lakeisha; while I’m on the right side of presentable, ‘hot’ would be an exaggeration. Annette’s arrival did not help matters. It became axiomatic that on any weekday ending in y, at least one of us would be misaddressed by day’s end.

A meeting was held. (No, we did not go to H.R. Don’t be ridiculous.) We sat at a table in the courtyard during lunch hour, eating salads and casting envious looks at two male clerks devouring meatball subs nearby. Between dainty bites of kale and arugula, we determined that the problem would not go away and that we would need to make the best of it. We ruminated for some time over what making the best of it would entail.

It was Annette who first realized the glorious benefit of our coworkers’ ineptitude with respect to cross-racial identification. Her fork, loaded with greens and fat-free balsamic vinaigrette, froze halfway between her plate and her precisely rouged lips, and a Cheshire cat grin slowly meandered across the bottom half of her face. “Oh,” she said as she slowly returned her fork to her plate. “Oh, ladies, we’ve been looking at this all wrong. This is a gift.”

Lakeisha and I simultaneously cocked our heads to the left. “How so?” I ventured.

“Think about it. What is the absolute worst part of this job?”

Lakeisha beat me to the punch. “The stupid, interminable, purportedly optional but really mandatory after-work events.”

Allow me to clarify. Much to our consternation, our coworkers are rabidly social. There are happy hours. There are soirees to honor milestones reached by various judges. There are birthday celebrations, baby showers, holiday parties. Sadly, the list continues. These gatherings are not our jam. Our workdays are beyond exhausting. Not only do we spend long hours navigating the labyrinthian maze that is federal law in order to make our judges look good, but we do it while dealing with the usual, hourly micro-aggressions (with instances of blatant disrespect sprinkled in). When the sun finally sets, our instinct is to flee to our respective sanctuaries to lick our wounds and prepare to do battle yet again the following day. However, in order to avoid hearing that kiss-of-death phrase—“not team players”—applied to any of us, we had been dragging ourselves to these affairs. Good times were not being had.

“Exactly. Now think about this. Why do we all need to show up for this nonsense? These fools can’t tell us apart. If only one of us goes to an event, we all get team-player credit.”

Lakeisha and I mulled this over and saw no flaw in Annette’s reasoning. I whipped out a pen and notepad, and with input from my fellow Destiny’s Child members, listed all events scheduled for the next month under the heading “I’d Rather Poke My Eye Out With Any Object (Sharp Or Dull, Doesn’t Matter) Than Attend The Following.” We split the list into thirds.

Three weeks into Project Extra Credit, things are going swimmingly. I was able to avoid, among other things, a retirement party for a secretary who always looked astonished when she saw me enter the code for the employee-only bathroom. Of course, Annette and Lakeisha dodged a bullet when I alone attended Judge Foxwood’s coma-inducing lecture on preemption. I doubt that they fully appreciate my sacrifice. But that’s okay.

I am currently walking across the lobby with my co-clerk, Jennifer, a green-eyed, no-nonsense brunette. While we haven’t officially crossed over to close friend status yet, Jennifer and I get along exceedingly well, and I’m fairly certain about her stance on lives that matter (although we’ve really only danced around the topic). We are on our way to the florist to select a bouquet for our judge, whose birthday is approaching.

Halfway to the lobby exit, we are waylaid by Mary, one of the court reporters. “Jennifer!” she gushes, her alabaster cheeks pinkening with pleasure. “Patrice!” she doubly gushes. “It was so nice to see you at Rhonda’s shower! We love it when the law clerks show up to these things!”

“Happy to be there.” I smile.

After a brief coughing fit, Jennifer murmurs, “Same. It was a really nice affair.”

Additional pleasantries follow, and then we delicately extricate ourselves from Mary’s clutches. Once outside, Jennifer looks at me quizzically. “What was that all about? I was at that shower from the beginning to the bitter end. You most definitely were not. For any part of it.”

True. Rhonda’s shower had been Annette’s gig.

“Well, if you must know….” I proceed to explain Project Extra Credit and its origins, confident that even if Jennifer doesn’t approve, she won’t rat us out. Winding down, I do a little dance and say, “And now I can add the tenth-floor-Mary moment to our list of successes to date.”

I glance over at Jennifer. She has the most peculiar expression on her face, and for a moment my heart skips a beat and I wonder if I have this all wrong. I have visions of her outing the three of us to each of our judges and bad things following. And then she sits on a nearby bench and laughs and laughs. And then she laughs some more.

I am now relieved but perplexed. “Okay, I know it’s kind of funny, but is it really that funny?”

“Oh,” says Jennifer. “It is. It really is. That wasn’t Mary the court reporter in the lobby. It was Barbara from payroll.”

Colette Parris is a Caribbean-American attorney who returned to her literary roots during the pandemic. She is currently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work can be found in Streetlight Magazine, Vestal Review, BigCityLit, Lunch Ticket, Burningword Literary Journal, Sleet Magazine (forthcoming), and elsewhere. She lives in New York with her husband and daughter. Find her on Twitter @colettepjd.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti

Charlotte Moretti
RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT

She chewed on a jagged piece of skin that she had pulled along her thumbnail as she drove, her right wrist dangling limply on the steering wheel. She drove quickly as she snuck glances at me—sharp, suspicious looks. I watched through a shaft of sunlight coming in from the windshield as dust billowed in through the open windows of the Jeep and settled, lazy and drifting, on my lap.

Her arm was freckled like I remembered, but now the skin was loose, bunching and drooping. I wanted to touch it, to lift it up back into place; it was as though I had closed my eyes and she had melted by the time I opened them.

I leaned down and pulled out a cigarette from the pack that was nestled in my bag between a few of my other things—a pair of gas station sunglasses, a bottle of iced tea, a jade necklace, a couple of credit cards. As I brought the cigarette to my lips, lighting it, she glanced at me, alarmed, and swatted it from my mouth.

“Don’t,” she said, instinctively. “Don’t—you don’t. You don’t smoke.” Her certainty faded. After all, maybe I did. What did she know?

I nodded, choosing to take her admonishment as an instruction rather than a question. “Okay,” I said evenly.

I glanced out of the window; the dirt road we had been barreling down was now paved, lined with squat buildings and plastic signs that had been pushed stubbornly in the hard, thawing spring grass and now stood lopsided in the heat. We passed my high school, a Taco Bell, GNS Heating & Cooling.

She switched on her turn signal—cautious, I thought—and we pulled up the steep driveway to the house she lived in with John.

I got out of the car, staring up at the condo and immediately resenting it. It was smug, with its neat grey siding trimmed with matching white shutters, wind chimes dangling from an eave. The porch steps were flanked by huge flower pots—gardenias, I guessed. I had been with a botanist once.

I walked up the steps carefully, primly, my shoulders stiff. I wanted her to know I didn’t feel welcome. She stepped behind me, and I could feel her impatience radiating from behind me. She always had a quick temper, and with her red hair, we used to call her Heatmiser, like from the old Christmas movie. I would piss her off—breaking a dish in our stupid, too-small kitchen or spilling her perfume—and she would toss her hands up, frustrated. “Goddamn it, Hannah! I mean, come on!” she would say, her voice high. Then I’d say, slyly, “Sorry…Heatmiser,” and she would slowly look up, trying not to smile until she couldn’t avoid it, and she would chase me around the house until she had me pinned down, tickling my ribs while our sheepdog Louie ran in circles around us, howling and licking us.

When I got older, she would come out of her bedroom clipping on her big gold earrings or zipping up her black leather boots, going on a date to see Ozzy Osbourne or to some beer crawl, and I would be mad and alone and hungry and tired, and I would call her a whore under my breath, it didn’t matter if I teased her and called her Heatmiser later. She’d leave, and I’d spend my night spooning peanut butter from the jar for Louie and I.

I stood facing the door. There was a wreath and a welcome mat.

“Hannah, come on,” she said, her voice low and tense behind me.

I pushed open the door and stepped over the threshold. There were a lot of words for what her house with John was—cute, small, charming—but mine wasn’t one of them.

John was boring, that much was clear. When I had been growing up, my mom had decorated our apartment with candles and gauzy drapes, Oriental rugs she had haggled for on Delancey when she had lived in New York, she told me. It was always dark and messy and ours. Girls from school would come over and take their shoes off, and my mom and I would laugh at them.

I didn’t say anything, just looked at the beige and the floral print. The decorative stone angels. “Where’s John?” I asked mildly.

“He’s at work,” she said. “Listen. If you want, you know, a night alone with just us, no men, just let me know, okay? He can stay at his sister’s.”

I shrugged. “I’d like to meet him.”

She kicked off her shoes, lining them along a plastic mat in the foyer, and made her way to the kitchen to rinse her hands at the chrome sink. “Okay, baby. That’s fine. But, you know, just let me know if you change your mind.” She opened the refrigerator—balls of cantaloupe in neatly stacked Tupperware, a carton of soy milk, a clump of asparagus.

“Okay,” I said, scooting up onto the kitchen counter. “But I mean, he is like, my new daddy, right?”

Her shoulders tensed, and she stood with her head still in the cool of the fridge. One, two, three deep breaths. She turned around and smiled. “What do you want to eat, baby? Anything you want. I can make lasagna, we can order Chinese, pizza—I don’t care. Anything you want.”

Melon balls, I thought before deciding not to bait her. The thought of my mother’s hands with their chipped black fingernails wrapped around a melon baller was alien and comical, something we would have laughed at. “Chinese sounds good.”

She rubbed her hands together, excited. “Yum. Perfect. Okay. There’s a great new place down the road; you’ll love it.” She paused, closing the refrigerator and leaning against it as she stared at me, drinking in the face she didn’t recognize, reconciling herself to the fact that this was me. “Baby…I’m sorry we don’t live at the apartment anymore. I know it’s…I know it’s hard for you to come home to this. But, you know, John already loves you. I love you so much, Hannah.”

She leaned forward and touched a lock of my hair, pulling it forward. It fell gently into place along my jaw. The last time I had seen her, my hair had been long and tangled, falling midway down my back. “I know, Mom.” She lifted a hand to stroke my hair again, and I instinctively backed away. “Can I see my room?”

She led me down a carpeted hallway to a bedroom. There were dents in the carpet, probably from a desk or maybe some exercise equipment. John loved me, my mom said, but let’s see if he loved me more than his Stairmaster.

There was a twin bed in the corner. It was neatly made, the unfamiliar duvet pressed and tucked. There was a stuffed shark propped up on a pillow, a cheap claw machine prize my high school boyfriend had won me at the bowling alley. I had forgotten what we called it.

The walls were bare save for a poster of Siouxsie and the Banshees and a couple of photos of the two of us she had tacked underneath it. I hadn’t even really liked Siouxsie and the Banshees, but my boyfriend had.

My mom sat down on the bed, picking up the shark and putting it on her lap. She picked at its cotton teeth, running her fingers back and forth. “We tried to keep your stuff. You had so much stuff, you know. Remember those posters? God, your walls were covered. We had a hell of a time picking the gunk off the walls. You know, Hannah, you wrote on your walls in Sharpie? Do you remember that? It took, I don’t know, something like three days to scrub all of that off. We went through two whole bottles of Lysol.”

She was talking, I knew, to cover something up. The silence, the stink in the air, the weight of the years I wasn’t here. To silence my silence, to shut up the ugly that had happened to me. If she talked and talked and talked about scrubbing and Lysol, something clean, something that smelled good, we wouldn’t have to talk about where I had been, how I wasn’t clean anymore.

I walked to the window. I had a street view. There were no blinds, just long, white, clean curtains that billowed gently. I pressed a hand to the window, my index finger catching on the corner of something. I ran my finger against it—it was tape, a little scrap of paper still stuck to it. I scraped at the tape with my fingernail until it came loose. Holding the paper up, I could just make out capital letters ‘NG’—like in ‘MISSING.’

She sighed. “Fuck. I told John to take that down.”

I shrugged. “He did.”

“Well…not enough, I guess.” She patted the spot next to her on the bed. “You shouldn’t have to see that.”

I sat and turned to her, surprised. “I’ve seen them. You used my senior picture, which you knew I hated.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, for Pete’s sake, Hannah. What did you want me to do? Use a baby picture?” She stiffened. “You looked different, anyway. I guess it didn’t matter.”

Six hours earlier, when my mom had picked me up from the train station, she had been sobbing—deep, guttural, animalistic cries. It was alarming, actually. I didn’t know how she hadn’t crashed her car. My first thought was that something was wrong—someone died, Louie or my grandma, until I realized that I was what was wrong—and now it was right.

When she had last seen me, three years ago, I had been seventeen. My hair was long. I was skinny—all knees and elbows and ankles. I liked Harry Potter and running track and blue nail polish. I drank Smirnoff Ice with Erin, my best friend, and hadn’t done more than give a blow job. We liked to go to the woods behind her house with her older brother and his friends and whisper and flirt. I liked racing Louie in my backyard. I was good at math, and teachers liked me, even though my mom never chaperoned on field trips or baked brownies for the PTA sales. I liked listening to Oasis and thinking about kissing Henry Nelson in his mom’s Ford Taurus, like I had done once my freshman year. I liked to dream—I liked to think and think, to be somewhere else, until the places that I was imagining myself out of were too bad to be ignored.

I thought of these things as though Hannah were a different person. She was a sweet, stupid girl who had been pissed off at her mom and had run out of the front door on August 18th and who had never been back through it. Poor thing. The irony of being a track star that couldn’t get away was not lost on me.

I was soft now, rounder, less attractive. I had a scar on my belly, a scar on my neck, a scar on my wrist. She didn’t know this, she had thought the terrible men had done it, but I cut my hair myself in the train station bathroom with some scissors I had bought from a Rite Aid.

My mom stretched out on the bed, putting her feet on my lap. “People missed you, Han. There were these shitty spaghetti dinners that…Jesus, you would have hated them. Caitlyn Burke organized one. I was like, hello, you didn’t even know my daughter. She bullied you once in eighth grade, I remember.”

I shook my head. “Who is Caitlyn Burke?”

The shark rolled out of my mom’s hands and off the bed. “Caitlyn Burke. She…you went to elementary school with her.”

“It doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Oh. Well. It doesn’t matter.” She scooted up, sliding off the bed. “Well, you should take a nap, baby. It’s been a long day. John will be home around six; we can eat then.”

She left, and I crawled under the covers. Siouxsie stared at me. You wish you could pull off short hair, she said. I closed my eyes.

◊

John was short and affable. He was the exact opposite of the kind of person I would have dreamed my mother would be with. He ate his Chinese with a fork and knife, nodding happily at my monosyllabic sentences. He acted as though I were coming back from a study abroad in France—and oh, sorry, while you were away, we moved, and your dog died, and your mom started wearing cardigans. He slurped a lo mein noodle, rubbing his fingers together to wipe off the soy sauce on them. “Hannah, I don’t know if your mom has mentioned this, but I work for a travel agency.”

I wrapped a noodle around my chopstick, pulling it up as high as it would go until I nearly had to extend my elbow. “Uh-huh,” I answered.

John cleared his throat. “So, you know, I talked to your mom and we thought, whenever you’re ready, we’ll take a trip.”

I felt my face flush, imagining myself smiling with Mickey Mouse ears next to John. Three hours inside and they were already pushing me out. “A trip where?” I said quietly, the pitch of my voice betraying the calm I was faking.

“Anywhere, babe,” my mom put a hand on mine. I started to sweat. “Paris, the Grand Canyon, Hawaii,” she rattled off. I knew she had an image in her mind too, of riding a tandem bicycle under the Eiffel Tower, a baguette perched cheerily in a wicker basket up front.

I swallowed my food hastily. It was suddenly too strong, too palatable, the glistening chicken and whole snow peas seeming obscene. I could feel panic start to rise from my stomach, numbing my fingers and toes. I took a sip of water, relishing the cold of it as I ran my fingers against the threadbare tablecloth, feeling for a grip.

“Han?” my mom said, gently prodding me with a chopstick.

I met her eyes. “Do you think,” I said, unaware that I was even speaking, “that you deserve a prize?”

They were both silent for a moment. Even John’s fork clinking against his plate subsided. “I don’t know what you mean, Hannah,” my mom said eventually.

I shook my head. I could feel tears forming behind my eyes, and I knew if I spoke they would fall.

For all of his apparent deficiencies, I had to admit that I admired John’s tact in that moment, his careful disengaging from the scene as he gathered the plates and take-out cartons and edged his way into the kitchen under the guise of clean-up duty.

My mother and I sat across from each other. I could feel her eyes on me, waiting for me to explain what I meant, as if I had the words; as if I wasn’t relearning how to speak again.

“How could you do that?” I finally whispered. “How could you be dating and fucking and breathing with someone while I was gone? How did you do that? How did you just pick yourself up like I was still here? What did you guys talk about? ‘Hi, I’m John, I’m in travel.’ ‘Hi, I’m Teri, my daughter is missing and presumed dead’?”

She sat perfectly still for a moment, stunned into silence. Her lower lip was quivering daintily. She looked for all the world the perfect part of the grieving mother, each tear sliding down her cheek glossy and round, the tip of her nose blossoming into a flower-petal pink.

“Is that what you think?” she whispered.

I gestured around madly. “What else can I think?” My voice was low and dangerous and unfamiliar.

She stood up and walked to the living room, slowly easing herself down onto the arm of the couch. “Hannah, I met John at a banquet in your honor. He has a niece at the high school. I…I needed to talk to him because if I didn’t, I swear I would have killed myself.”

She rose from the couch now, catching her breath. “How would that have felt, then? It wouldn’t have been just Louie and just the apartment, it would have been me! You would have had no one!” She swiped furiously at her nostrils with the back of her hand, her gaze never leaving mine. “I lost twelve pounds. My hair fell out. It made me sick, physically sick, being in that apartment without you. I thought you were dead. Isn’t that big enough for you, Hannah?”

I stood up, my body moving of its own accord. I felt hot and cornered and panicked. I was creating a mess where there wasn’t one. Her body had been a vigil to me—there were the candles I missed so much. She had consumed them like a side-show performer, consuming every bit of me, every article that still smelled of me or bore my skin, hair, nails. She had tried to raise me from these fragments, and here I was, but changed. I felt myself crumple to the floor—how could I bear this? How could she?

She knelt on the ground with me, rubbing my back.

“I’m mad, Mom,” I wept. “I’m mad and I’m still scared.”

Her tone was hushed and reverent as she sat with me on the ground, the person, like a side-show apparition, that had, quite literally, disappeared into thin air. “I know,” she said. “I am too,” she said.

◊

The sun had just set, and the sky was the blue-purple of a bruise. I sat at the foot of the closet, lacing up my old sneakers from high school, flexing my toes against the tight fabric. I could hear the TV, the sound muffled from the living room where my mom and John laid on the couch, their bodies curled up together like smoke.

I left the lights off as I crept down the hallway, grateful, for once, for the soft padding of the beige carpet. I didn’t want the questions; the worry shaped like a whistle and a flashlight, a car creeping slowly behind me. There had been eyes on me for three years. I hadn’t been alone for three years.

When I was little, my mom had a friend in jail. His name was Thomas, and he had known my mom from when she was a bartender and he a line cook at some dive bar that had closed down before I was born. He had been locked up for some bogus drug charges, my mom claimed, and she visited him semi-regularly, eventually bringing me along when she figured I was old enough or she just couldn’t find a sitter. He was a good guy, she would say on the long drive to the prison, just a bad prisoner. He would get solitary for weeklong stretches for fighting with other inmates or giving a guard attitude. When he’d get back to “gen-pop” (it didn’t make me popular to know prison lingo by the 5th grade, believe it or not), he would be skinny and scary, his eyes bruised and puffy, his knuckles red and scraped raw. It took me awhile to realize that he didn’t go in looking like that. When he couldn’t fight with other inmates, he fought with the walls. He had to get fourteen stitches from his left earlobe to his left eye socket once, but my mom never told me why.

I thought about Thomas as I shut the door behind me, stepping into the cool evening air. Cicadas hummed as I knelt down on the dew-damp lawn, breathing in the heady smell of the grass and my own sweat. For Thomas, ‘solitary’ was a dirty word, imposing, choking, threatening. I ran the word over my lips, tasted it as though it were a fruit on my tongue, dissolving there. It was delicious and intoxicating to me. I had been solitary, when three years ago I stepped off a porch as recklessly as if I had stepped on a landmine. The thrill of independence had beckoned me until it had warped, rotting and grotesque.

I wanted it back, I realized, stepping through the long blades, carving my own path. It was my grass. It was my moon that was beginning to slice through the dark of the sky. These were my legs, scraped and long and strong, that were now running, the weeds and wildflowers grabbing at them. It was my body.

It was my mom, I thought, who had been alone for two years, who finally threw open the windows to let in some air. I was mad, and I was hurt, but I was whole as my heart kept pace in my chest with my feet, pounding and angry. I’m here, it said. I wasn’t a ghost anymore, a cautionary tale whispered with a frank yet titillated whisper at barbeques and in grocery store aisles, afforded only to those whom tragedy has never touched, just skimmed its fingers along as a flat tire or a missed flight.

I passed trees, their green branches reaching for me like fingertips. I reached back, brushing against them, feeling the cool, waxy leaves against my skin. I hadn’t been to Paris, I thought. I hadn’t been more than forty miles away from where I was born. But the world seemed to open itself to me, as if a flower blooming, and I knew that I would go—I could go. At this moment, twenty-four whole, heavy hours later on the other side of the split that had divided us, I couldn’t run to Paris or the Grand Canyon or Hawaii, just down the sidewalks I had learned to crawl on. But that was enough—and so I ran.

Charlotte Moretti is a filmmaker and writer based in Detroit, MI. She graduated from Wayne State University, where her fiction earned her the first place Tompkins Award for creative writing. Shortly after graduating, she moved to Brooklyn, NY, where she formed the production company Ride Home Films (ridehomefilms.com). She returned to Michigan to make the films Call Me When You Get Home (2019) and Fairmount (coming 2022). “Running Alone at Night” came from a dream about a missing person poster taped to a window, and explores themes of femininity, independence, familial ties, and the changes that slowly—or quickly—overtake us all.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross

Michelle Ross
THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS

Andrew

It was a mini fridge, so not much. Also, it was college, so mostly beer most of the time until we drank those Heineken, one by one winnowing down to whatever else remained: a package of sliced extra sharp cheddar; a Yoplait with its silver, reflective seal that you peel off, making me think of Andrew’s tube of anti-itch cream; a crinkly plastic bag holding a few wrinkled, mushy green grapes. “Are you going to eat those?” I asked him that afternoon. Unless we were making out, I sat on Andrew’s desk chair. His bedding left a slightly sour smell on my skin. “I might,” he said. “But they’re mushy and gross,” I said. “Some of them might not be,” he said. “Even if some aren’t, they will be soon because of the company they keep,” I said. Andrew plucked one of those mushy grapes from its stem and told me to open my mouth and catch. I turned so that it bounced off my cheek.

Jorgé

Always there was at least one saucepan. If the saucepan was small, plastic wrap stretched tight across the top, held in place by a rubber band. If the saucepan was large, it was sealed by its glass lid, which wasn’t airtight, Jorgé lamented, but he didn’t have a rubber band that could stretch that far. In those saucepans, there might be French lentil soup with softened onions and carrots, mushroom risotto, a chunky stew, or sweet potato gnocchi he’d made by hand. When I tried to help him cook, he snatched up knives and spoons and various ingredients because I was “doing it wrong.” This was when I lived in Minnesota for a couple of years, the winters so cold that except for school (me) and work (him), we hardly left Jorgé’s apartment. Jorgé grew his own mushrooms in that apartment—inside a hall closet that he’d dedicated to that pursuit. My first visit, when I opened that closet door by mistake, looking for the bathroom, Jorgé freaked. The next time he invited me over that door was duct-taped, and it remained duct-taped all the time we were together.

Max

Swampy green juices in glass jars. At least two kinds of beans. Something approximating the name of an animal though it was not animal: tofurkey, ground be’f. Max was a fitness instructor, a thing I liked about him until I didn’t anymore. He was always beginning sentences with, “I’m really into” as in “I’m really into functional strength” or “I’m really into eating to live rather than eating for pleasure.” As much as Max liked to talk about himself, I didn’t really feel I knew him at all. He was like those juices in his fridge: stripped of fiber, stripped of anything solid.

Derreck

A refrigerator like a time capsule, the way it recalled my childhood refrigerator: white sandwich bread, packaged deli meat, condiments, pickles, peanut butter, jelly, a head of iceberg lettuce. “What about vegetables?” I said the first time I opened Derreck’s fridge, and he opened the freezer and pointed to frozen stir-fry mix, frozen corn. Staring into that refrigerator, I said, “What about pleasure?” and Derreck said, “What are we talking about exactly?” I’m not sure “ex” is even the right term for Derreck. I slept with him no more than five or six times. He’d take off his shirt, and I would envision that loaf of sliced white sandwich bread nuzzled next to a gallon of white milk on the top shelf of his refrigerator. That was another thing about Derreck, he drank milk with dinner, like a child.

Noah

Noah’s refrigerator was the most beautiful, most immaculate refrigerator I’d ever seen—the fridge of my dreams. It had a clear door so you could browse without wasting energy. Its contents were as organized as the books in a library. Noah was a meal prepper, so there were always healthy, macronutrient-balanced, ready-to-eat meals stacked on the second-to-top shelf: salmon with mango salsa, roasted chicken with broccoli, breakfast enchiladas. On the third shelf from the top were little glass containers of berries with measured servings of yogurt, carrot sticks with hummus, no-bake energy bars Noah had made himself. Unlike the contents of a library, though, Noah’s food was not for sharing. When he emerged from the shower one afternoon and caught me eating one of those yogurts with berries, he said, “That was my mid-morning snack for Thursday!” I said, “There’s a lot of food in here. Can’t you snack on something else Thursday?” Noah explained, once again, that he planned every meal and snack for the week out on Sundays and that there were no spares. “Well, that sounds like poor planning,” I said. “There should always be something to spare. What about emergencies? What about me?” I offered to buy him a carton of yogurt and a pint of berries to replace what I’d taken. He said, “There isn’t room for your stuff in my fridge.”

Trey

Trey is not an ex, but my brain can’t help but look for the details that will define him if he ever does become an ex. His sourdough starter, maybe. The way he talks about that sourdough starter—“I have to feed my sourdough today”—like it’s a pet. He stores that starter in an unmarked container in his fridge, and inevitably, I open the container looking for food only to find a bubbly, gooey glob. However, if I were to make a list of things I love about Trey, that loaf of sourdough he bakes every Saturday morning would make the top five. When it first emerges from the oven, it’s so hot, I have to hold that loaf steady with a paper towel when I slice into it so I don’t burn my hand. The way the salted butter submits to that bread. Like a lover, I think. I would seriously miss that bread.

Michelle Ross is the author of three story collections: There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You, winner of the 2016 Moon City Short Fiction Award; Shapeshifting, winner of the 2020 Stillhouse Press Short Fiction Award (November 2021); and They Kept Running, winner of the 2021 Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction (forthcoming in April 2022). Her work is included in Best Small Fictions, Best Microfiction, the Wigleaf Top 50 and will be included in the forthcoming Norton anthology Flash Fiction America. She is fiction editor of Atticus Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen

Eric Rasmussen
MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES

I.

McKenzie sees it coming. The party’s host is drunk: she’s laughing loud, touching everyone nearby, gesturing with the knife she’s using to cut whole pickles into spears for bloody marys. McKenzie should say something or take the knife, but this woman is the boss of the guy she came with. By the time the host raises the blade again, it’s too late. Her pinky is in the exact wrong place. McKenzie tries to yell, but her synapses can’t work that fast. The woman slams the knife down and cuts off most of her finger. Besides the thunk, McKenzie’s gasp is the loudest sound in the room.

Within moments the kitchen enters full meltdown. The host’s husband wraps his wife’s hand in a white cloth napkin, asking “What happened?” over and over. A semi-circle of partygoers around the island pulls out their phones to call ambulances or Google “how to treat a severed finger,” and a woman in too-tall high heels barrels towards McKenzie and the freezer behind her. “I’ll get ice,” the woman says as she busts through the other guests. “For the pinky. To keep it cold.”

As McKenzie sneaks out of the kitchen, she imagines what will happen when she tells this story tomorrow, to a friend or her sister, probably her mom. Whoever it is won’t even care about the finger. “Who were you there with?” they’ll ask instead.

“Tim?”

“You’ve never mentioned a Tim.”

“I met him at the clinic.”

“Doctor?”

“Patient.”

“You work in a urology office,” she (friend or sister, hopefully not mom) will point out. “That’s not weird?”

“We saw each other later, at a sandwich shop. What’s weird about that?”

By this point the commotion has drawn most of the partygoers to the kitchen, but McKenzie finds Tim where she left him in the piano room.

“Is there punch left?” he asks.

“I didn’t make it that far.” She turns as a shout reverberates through the condo. “Your boss just cut off most of her finger.”

Tim overacts his shock by jerking forward with eyes open wide, as if she were joking. Back in the exam room at the clinic, he was understandably quiet and timid, and these were the same traits he exhibited in line at the deli. But since then he has opened up like a comedian getting comfortable on stage, and this is what McKenzie likes most about him.

This time, as the seriousness sets in, she can tell he has no idea what to do. It’s date three, a pivotal one either way, and she had been hesitant about accompanying him to a work thing. But he insisted.

“Is there anything you need to do?” Tim asks.

“What do you mean?”

“Like, medically? Are you obligated to help?”

“I don’t know what I would accomplish.”

“Should I go help?”

McKenzie watches Tim consider his options. In a way, he’s like the woman staring at her recently detached digit. The action he takes now will determine much about the connections he hopes to maintain in the future.

“I think it’s best if we excuse ourselves.” Tim stands up. “Right?”

“I have no idea what party etiquette is when the host maims herself.”

“If I’m wrong, we’ll send a card.” Tim gestures her towards the door with one hand outstretched and the other on the small of her back, and that, as far as McKenzie is concerned, is the exact right choice.

“Finger reattachment surgery is way more successful than you’d think,” she says as they find their coats on the hooks behind the door.

“Yeah?”

“Seventy percent success rate.”

II.

Tim has been to worse parties, except his fishnets are killing him. The waistband digs in under his hip bones and the netting cuts into the skin between his toes.

“Nice legs, dude,” says the Tarzan guy seated at the rec room bar next to him. The flurry of introductions when Tim and McKenzie arrived overwhelmed him, but he thinks this is Tarzan’s house. No idea what the dude’s real name is.

The costumes were McKenzie’s idea—early 2000’s goth kids, with black boots, cutoff jeans, and the aforementioned hosiery, black hair covering their eyes and faces caked with black makeup. She can pull off the look. Tim cannot.

“My girlfriend wanted me to shave them,” says Tim. “I almost did.”

Tarzan smirks as if Tim just revealed his bank account number or his porn fetishes. Most of McKenzie’s nursing school classmates married men who sell real estate or own their own landscaping companies, and they all have enormous basements that smell of paint and new carpet, like this one. Tim has no idea how to talk to them.

Tarzan’s wife is wearing a Jane costume, and she stands in a circle with McKenzie and the other nurses. McKenzie had explained the set-up on the thirty-minute drive out to the suburbs. “Everyone’s having kids, so they’re desperate to prove they’re not old and lame.”

“Do you feel left out?” Tim had asked.

“No. Why would I?”

So far, the nurse moms are succeeding. Most of their costumes would look more appropriate at a college house party, and they’ve paused for shots three times in the hour since Tim and McKenzie arrived.

Tarzan holds up his beer. “Fucking beauty routines.”

“Amen,” says Tim. “Although, I understand it feels pretty good. Smooth legs on cool sheets. Might be worth it.”

The King of the Jungle shakes his head, then excuses himself, and Tim follows the perimeter of the room to the table with the snacks. If he never stops moving, he won’t have to talk to anyone else. Every few minutes McKenzie turns from her group to offer him gratitude with eye contact and a smile. This attention is the only thing making the party bearable.

A couple hours later, someone turns the music down, the nurses shed their wigs and shoes, and most of the gathering opts to sit. Tim’s phone buzzes in his pocket. It’s his mom. I promise I wouldn’t be texting if it wasn’t important…

McKenzie is perched on the arm of couch next to him, and he waits until she finishes her conversation with a lingerie-clad devil about the difficulties of cleaning breast pump tubing. When McKenzie turns back, Tim whispers, “My dog just died.”

“You don’t have a dog.”

“My childhood pet, from back home.”

“Was he old?”

“She was thirteen.” Tim squeezes his eyes shut as his shoulders slump. “But she got hit by a car.”

“Oh my god.” McKenzie brushes the hair away from her eyes and rests her hand on his shoulder.

“I need to go.” Tim shakes his head as he leans forward on the couch. “I’m sorry. Can I drop you off?”

McKenzie stands. “I’m coming with you.”

“You haven’t met my parents yet.”

“I know.”

Tim tugs at the ragged hem of her cutoffs. “And you’re wearing this.”

“You said I look hot.”

“How much have you had to drink?”

“Enough that accompanying you sounds like a good idea, not enough that I can’t give full consent.”

Tim can’t bring himself to react to the joke. “You really don’t have to,” he says.

“Let’s go meet your parents.” McKenzie pulls Tim up, then leans in to whisper in his ear, “They can’t be any older and lamer than these people.”

III.

The box has been sitting in the middle of Tim’s boss’s coffee table since they arrived, which means it’s inevitable. Before the evening is over, they will be playing Overshare: The Hilarious Couples Party Game That Will Have Everyone in Stitches! McKenzie has come to detest Tim’s work gatherings. He expects her to act like she’s having a blast and laugh off every lame comment. His coworkers expect her to share every detail of their relationship and play terrible games. Still, she keeps focused on the lid’s yellow bubble lettering because it distracts her from Tim’s boss’s pinky. A year after the pickle incident, it’s still discolored and swollen. And a little crooked.

“I’m so happy we can gather like this.” Tim’s boss remains elegant despite the finger, in a draping blouse and showy jewelry. “We have so much to celebrate.”

Their company manages civic fundraising campaigns, and they recently nailed a big one, twenty-one million dollars for an aquarium in North Carolina. Parties accompany all such victories, but this one is the smallest yet, with only employees and their romantic partners. No one will need stitches tonight, no matter what Overshare promises.

Tim leans over and asks McKenzie, “Are you comfortable?” She sits on a distended ottoman. At least Tim is on the floor.

“I guess,” she says.

Tim rests his hand on her knee. The awkward angle makes it an unnatural gesture. “Are you okay?”

“Super fucking okay. Okay?”

Tim retracts, and McKenzie considers apologizing. Instead she goes back to staring at the game box.

The group talks about nothing: favorite shoe brands, some office snafu that the romantic partners don’t understand, how long it’s been since everyone’s been to the dentist. Soon Tim’s boss directs the group to the kitchen for food, and McKenzie eats off the relish tray because everything else spread out on the kitchen island contains seafood. While they stand there, one of Tim’s coworkers asks McKenzie when she plans on getting engaged. McKenzie nearly chokes on her olive.

Finally they reconvene in the living room and Tim’s boss lifts the lid off of Overshare, which makes a farting noise. “Goodness, excuse me,” she says. Then she reads the directions, in their entirety, out loud. Overshare is basically Truth or Dare geared for church social groups. Which piece of your partner’s clothing do you find most alluring? Perform a PG-rated strip tease for your partner.

Tim must be able to sense McKenzie’s dread, because he whispers a preemptive, “Can you please try to have fun?” in her ear.

The action progresses around the living room. Butts are squeezed, sex acts are alluded to, and the accompanying laughs are gentle and polite. When it’s McKenzie and Tim’s turn, he gestures her towards the pile of cards in the middle of the coffee table. It’s a truth one. What was your first thought about your partner when you first met them?

“We first met when I was at work.” McKenzie can feel Tim wincing from the floor next to her. He hates this story, but he’s making her play Overshare and if Overshare wants the gritty details, she has no choice but to comply. “I’m a nurse in a urology office, and Tim came in for a procedure, so my first thought was… he’s really hairy.”

“Wait,” says one of Tim’s coworkers, a tall guy with slick hair. “That means you saw his…” The guy gestures a circle around his crotch. “…his ‘area’ right away?”

“Yep.”

“Nice.” The guy nods and leans back. “And I assume you were so impressed that you had no choice but to ask him out?”

McKenzie rolls her eyes. “Exactly. I was mesmerized.”

This time the chuckles sound more genuine. “Alright Tim, now I’m curious,” says the woman who handles social media. “He really is the whole package,” says the wife of the company’s vice president as she taps McKenzie on the shoulder. “Get it? Package?”

Tim waves them off. He isn’t smiling. “That’s enough. Whose turn is it?”

Later in the kitchen, Tim pulls McKenzie into the corner. “Why did you have to tell everyone?”

“It’s funny. They liked it.”

“I work with these people.” Red splotches creep up his neck towards his ears.

The last time she shared the story was at a dinner where two of her nursing school friends managed to guess Tim’s specific procedure, then referred to him as “The Strangler” for the rest of the night. After that incident, McKenzie promised never to bring it up again. “Can we fight about this some other time?” she asks.

McKenzie returns to the living room, and ten minutes later, when she tries to find Tim, he’s gone. No one saw him leave. Tim’s boss completes a quick search of the condo but comes up empty-handed. “That’s so odd,” the woman says. “Did he say something and maybe you didn’t hear? Could something serious have happened?”

IV.

McKenzie leads Tim into the back room of the restaurant, and no one gathered there shouts “surprise.” This is fine, because people jumping out of the dark is a bit cliché, and anyway, Tim had noticed a few text alerts on her phone that indicated she was planning something. Still, as he stands in front of his coworkers, his parents, and the handful of McKenzie’s nursing school friends who have become his friends too, he imagines how he would have reacted if he had gotten the full surprise party routine. Eyes wide, big smile, hands crossed over his heart in gratitude. Maybe he would have bowed.

“Thanks for this,” Tim says to McKenzie before they separate to greet their guests.

She kisses his cheek. “I told you I’d make it special.”

Tim finds his mom first. “What a nice party. That McKenzie is so thoughtful.” She drinks a bright red concoction out of a martini glass. “This seems like a big step.”

“Yep, she’s great.” Tim looks past her to check the line at the bar. “What are you drinking?”

“I have no idea.”

Next Tim finds Tarzan, whose real name is Jason, at the bar. He holds his beer with his pointer finger and thumb circled around the neck and gestures by waggling the bottle. “I heard a rumor you’re going to propose tonight.”

“Who told you that?”

“Or maybe my wife just thinks you will.”

Tim snaps around with a force that startles them both. “Does McKenzie think that, too?”

Jason holds up his hands and takes a step back. “I have no idea. I’m only repeating what Gina said.”

Six months ago, Tim had finally happened upon what he and Jason have in common: whiskey. They joined a bourbon club that meets once a month at a bar downtown. But their relationship is still tenuous, so Tim says, “Sorry. No surprise proposals tonight. Hopefully someday soon.”

Jason claps Tim on the shoulder. “You’ll get there.”

By the time Tim finds his boss, other guests have started to leave. He’s only had two drinks, and he’s barely touched the food.

“When you first brought McKenzie to our place,” she says, her stack of bracelets clinking as they slide down her arm, “I knew you two were going to work out. I could see the electricity between you. How long ago was that?”

“Almost two years.”

“That’s right.” She holds up her hand with the infamous yet surprisingly normal-looking pinky, and the bracelets sound again as they slide back towards her elbow. “Thanks to that little blunder, I’ll always know exactly how long you two have been together.”

Three hours after the start of his party, Tim locates McKenzie in the restaurant foyer.

“Gina and Jason just left,” she says. “I said goodbye for you.”

“Can we leave too?”

“Why?”

“Isn’t it lame to be the last person at your own birthday?”

McKenzie shrugs. “I’m still having fun. What about your friends?”

“I don’t care about them. I’d rather be with you.”

The ringing of pots and pans from the kitchen and the throb of conversation from the dining room fill the foyer, yet the absence of a response from McKenzie surrounds them like the vacuum of outer space.

“Is this a sex thing?” she asks after a moment. “We can still do it, even if it’s late.”

“No.” Tim runs his hand through his hair. “I don’t understand. Why did you throw me a party if you’re not ready to get more serious? That doesn’t make any sense.”

McKenzie interlaces her fingers into his, and Tim believes she would give him what he wanted, if only she could. But all she can muster instead is a gathering in the back of a steakhouse. “Tonight was a lot of work. Can we focus on that for now?”

“Fine.”

“And if you want to leave, we can leave.” She glances at her watch, then twists to see who remains in the backroom. “Twenty minutes. We need to say goodbye and wrap everything up.”

“Sure,” says Tim. “What’s twenty more minutes?”

V.

McKenzie crouches in the boulevard next to her car and prepares for the onslaught of three-year-olds.

“Tenzie!” shouts Gina’s daughter as she dives in for a hug.

“Y’all are getting huge,” McKenzie says when she stands again.

Gina approaches across the lawn in a red, white, and blue sundress. “Get away from the road,” she instructs the kids, who scatter towards the backyard.

“Is he here?” McKenzie asks.

Gina crosses her arms. “Jason invited him. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s inevitable, I suppose.” McKenzie follows her friend, who walks slowly, almost as if she’s offering McKenzie a chance to bolster herself before seeing Tim for the first time since the break-up.

“The landscaping looks great,” says McKenzie. Gina and Jason have redone their entire yard since her last visit. Instead of evergreen shrubs and broad swaths of grass, stone paths crisscross the property, leading to juvenile trees extending upwards from bursts of hostas.

“We’re not sure the lindens are going to take,” says Gina. “The soil’s pretty sandy.”

“They look like they’re doing okay.”

In Gina’s backyard McKenzie finds the type of party she’s grown accustomed to. Some drinking, some talking, mostly chasing kids. Tim stands by the grill with Jason, and McKenzie avoids looking at him until she’s certain he notices her not noticing him. Then she pours herself a glass of wine from a folding table and joins the circle of her nursing school classmates. They used to talk about weird patient stories. Not anymore.

“They just raised our deductible,” says one of her friends. “We couldn’t afford to have another kid if we wanted to.”

“Are you trying?” asks another friend.

“We’re talking about thinking about it.”

Jason summons Gina over to the grill to whisper in her ear. Gina returns to the circle and gestures for McKenzie to lean in. “Tim wants to know if you want him to leave.”

“Are you kidding me?” McKenzie responds.

She crosses the stamped concrete patio to Jason, Tim, and the plume of greasy hamburger smoke. Tim is not a bad guy. He’s a great guy. Kind, funny, always able to make her feel special, and even some muscle definition across his shoulders. But if McKenzie has to pick one human to hang out with daily for the rest of her life, would she pick him? And that’s not even the question she’s been asking herself for more than two years. The real question is, would she pick anyone?

“We need to talk,” says McKenzie, hands on her hips, facing Tim as Jason backs away with his metal spatula up like a samurai sword.

Tim gestures her towards a boulder surrounded by fresh mulch, this time without his hand on the small of her back.

“We need to fix this,” she says. “I don’t want to make the whole party weird.”

“Me neither.”

“Good. So it’s easy, right?”

Tim overacts his shock with an open-mouth double take. “Of course it’s not easy. It’s anything but easy. But I’ll try.”

“Thank you.”

He puts his hands in his pockets. “You’re welcome.”

Then, they party. Wine, burgers, a new yard game with frisbees and beer bottles. No conversation is so deep that it can’t be interrupted by a beverage refill or a handful of potato chips. When McKenzie tires of listening to toilet-training war stories, she leaves the patio and enters the yard to find Tim chasing a group of three-year-olds in between decorative rocks and tufts of waist-high grass. With his arms out he looks like a zombie trying to catch enough kids for a modest lunch. It’s obvious to everyone that this is what he wants: the yard, the kids, close friends standing around, debating whether to have one more beer.

McKenzie sits on a boulder as a thought occurs to her. For the next barbecue, if Gina and Jason only choose to invite one of them, they’ll most certainly choose Tim.

For another moment she watches the chase and listens to the screams. Then, in an instant, Tim falls to the ground and grabs his ankle. The kids stop, then return to stand over him with their fingers in their mouths.

“Are you okay?” Gina’s daughter asks. “What happened?”

The party relocates around Tim as he grimaces and inhales through clenched teeth. McKenzie keeps to the periphery. “I’m so sorry,” Gina says to him. “They needed to replace some of the in-ground sprinkler heads, but they didn’t have enough on the truck, so they left holes everywhere.” She hits her husband on the arm. “I told you someone was going to break their leg.”

“It’s not broken,” says Jason.

“I don’t know,” says one of the nurses, and the rest chime in with their opinions. “He could have fractured his talus.” “I’m sure it’s just a sprain.” “Look at the swelling. That’s an anterior tibialis tear for sure.” Before they reach a consensus, the excuses start. “I’d drive you to the hospital, man, but I’ve had too many beers.” “I just put Gwen down for a nap.” “How’s your insurance? Do you have ambulance coverage?”

And just as quickly as the injury earned everyone’s attention, Tim loses it again. A kid grabs a handful of cake, another spills his juice. A girl screams at some terrifying bug she finds on the ground. Gina leaves to find a bandage, the rest of the group drips away. Except McKenzie. She steps towards her ex-boyfriend and crouches on the brick path near his head.

“What’s your diagnosis?” he asks.

“They’ll probably have to amputate.”

“That sucks.”

“Seriously, though. I should probably take you to the hospital.”

When McKenzie tells this story (to a friend or sister, probably her mom), she’ll say that she picked him up and carried him to her car like a fireman rescuing someone from a burning building. In reality, the trek across the yard is much more awkward, with his arm around her shoulder, her trying to lift him with one arm around his ribs, and him hopping in between gasps and winces. When they reach her car, he says, “Are you sure you don’t mind leaving?”

“Not at all.” She leans forward to pour him into the passenger seat. “I hate parties.”

He relaxes, leaning back on the headrest like he’s finally arrived home. “I didn’t know that.”

“I thought you did.” She grabs the seatbelt and hands it to him. “You do now.”

Eric Rasmussen is a Wisconsin writer who serves as fiction editor for Sundog Lit, as well as editor for the regional literary journal Barstow & Grand. He has placed short fiction in North American Review (2022 Kurt Vonnegut Prize runner-up), Fugue, The MacGuffin, and Pithead Chapel, among others. Find him online at theotherericrasmussen.com.
Cover Design by Karen Rile

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl

AJ Strosahl
N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984

A monster named Ogopogo lived in Lake Okanagan and Sylvester’s father Clyde had once seen it drown a bear, face first. It happened a few years before Sylvester was born, when Clyde was almost a boy himself. Clyde told Sylvester that it happened as these things do, which is to say: out of nowhere, on an unremarkable day. Clyde was fishing for perch on a stretch of shore where you could wade in, waist-deep, with your feet anchored in the silty lake bed. It was late in the day, with the sun high and the air thick with pollen and light. Clyde had just felt a tug on his line when a silence fell.

It was the loudest silence he’d ever heard.

“It was kind of . . . respectful,” Clyde said, when Sylvester asked how he’d known to cease all movement, to still his hands and the slow shifting of his legs in the water and even his own breath. “Like your Ma used to say: sometimes time drops a stitch. Everything stopped so he could come to the water and drink.”

The animal itself seemed to materialize out of the air, a few yards to Clyde’s left, at the lapping shoreline.  At first its form was unclarified, just a blobby haze. Then, a slow coalescence: a hulking form of textured sable, mountainous dorsal hump and questing snout, a predator stink on the breeze, glittering black eyes. It bent low to drink from the waters at the shoreline. The bear’s teeth were endless and profound; it was a grizzly, unmistakably, and barely three yards from Clyde.

“What did you do?” Sylvester always asked when he could tell that Clyde was sauced enough to tell the story the right way.

“What did I do?” Clyde would bray his screeching laugh. Sometimes, depending on how late in the evening it was, he would also hang his head in disgust, like he was shocked he could have raised such an imbecile.

“Don’t be a smart aleck! I pissed myself!” Then the laugh would come again. “Son, there wasn’t any do. A grizzly, you get me? I didn’t think one single thought, let alone do. I froze like a fawn and accepted the state of things, just like any intelligent animal does when it’s beat.”

Sylvester had pictured it so many times, he might as well have lived it: his own body cramped up in involuntary surrender, awed face slack, with hot urine running down his legs into the lake. The moment was locked in time so stubbornly it felt like an exhibit in a museum that Sylvester could visit at will.

The bear wasn’t the end of the story and it wasn’t the end of Clyde.

As soon as the bear turned its massive head and took note of Clyde for the first time—its eyes narrowing and hackles coming up—a writhing cylinder burst forth from the water and towered above them both. If the bear had stopped time, then the monster from the lake was all motion, pulling the rest of the world along at its own speed.

It was odorless and scaled, its hide pulsing with all colors at once, like an oil slick. It was as big around as the trunk of the elm tree in Clyde’s yard growing up, which his mother had said was hundreds of years old. It moved as a snake would and with such force and precision that, Clyde said, he knew instantly that what was visible was only a fraction of the whole animal. Its head darted to and fro above with dizzying, alien grace. The prehistoric scale of it—the suggestion of its true length—was sickening.

“It could have taken us both, or taken every house from here to Penticton, or plucked a single acorn from a tree five feet away. The control it had! All that tail beneath the water, the part of him I didn’t see . . . it could have been a hundred feet. And strong, like God’s own hand.”

Clyde always whispered that part, like he didn’t want anyone except Sylvester to hear him name the extent of the animal’s focus and power.

It was a serpent, and it was not. It was whalelike and it was not. It had a face and it did not. It was Ogopogo, as indisputable as the bear. Ogopogo, to whom the lake belonged. Ogopogo, who strained its massive body up and out toward the bear, moving past Clyde so quickly every hair on his body stood on end.

Then, the bear’s face was obscured by a flexing, muscular coil and its body was whisked forward into the lake, like it weighed nothing at all. The last things Clyde saw before he passed out were the ass end of the bear, dragging through the water, and his fishing pole, which had been wrenched from his hands and sucked into Ogopogo’s wake, irretrievable. The pole and the bear vanished completely, save for a rippling movement below the surface, just a glimmer of iridescent scales.

◊

As he waits inside a hollow log for his own death to arrive, Sylvester thinks of his father—who died of a stroke in ’76, just after the war—and of Ogopogo. He wonders what death will feel like and suspects it is probably already in progress. It hasn’t hurt badly so far, at least not worse than he can bear. He has shelter and there is fresh water everywhere and, though the forest has become a horror to him, it is not unlike somewhere he’d have selected as his final resting place, if he’d been given the opportunity to choose in advance.

The log is strangely dry inside, despite the rain. For the first time since he and Elias got lost on their way back to camp, Sylvester is grateful he doesn’t have a flashlight, so at least he does not have to see what insects and animals are sharing the space with him. He can feel them against his skin, crawling and burrowing. During the days, he’s been eating all the beetles and worms he can find, because he knows they’re safe. But if he puts something in his mouth without seeing it, in the damp, dark log, it could be a poisonous spider or something else he’d regret. He’s regretting quite a few things now, truth be told.

Last night, he’d ripped spongey moss in huge handfuls from the ground and stuffed it into the log around him as tightly as he could. Like eating bugs, it was another thing Clyde had told him to do when Sylvester was a young man, if he ever found himself lost in the woods. The moss helps, but it’s still getting colder. The temperature has dropped every night since the forest had swallowed Sylvester and Elias up, eleven days ago, and, once the rain turns to snow, if hunger hasn’t already put him down, exposure will.

Sylvester and his friend Elias had camped by the river dozens of times on fishing trips in the Tualatins. It took a hammer and a surprising amount of strength to finish the trout off once you hauled them in, but they were delicious charred over a fire. Elias was good company in that he mostly kept his own counsel. They’d fish and build campfires at night, sticking close to the river, sometimes hiking to Wapato Lake or setting rabbit snares. Elias was gone now, lost somewhere in the pines.

On their fifth day gone, Elias had eaten something poisonous that came back up in a froth of green vomit. Whatever it was made his mind go haywire and his forehead burn with fever. He’d wandered away from Sylvester, mumbling incoherently about running out to the store for a pack of smokes. They’d been walking so long, and Sylvester was so hungry and frigged up himself that he’d been too tired to stop his friend. He’d watched Elias stumble through the brush, the back of his red shirt vanishing slowly, then Sylvester had just kept walking. That was six days ago, he was pretty sure. Or seven. It was hard to keep track.

Things hadn’t gone wrong all at once, but Sylvester knew that they usually didn’t. It was another thing Clyde always said; in the bush, it’s death by a thousand cuts. First you find your water source fouled. Then you stumble into some poison oak and your legs swell up like balloons or you break an ankle or something starts bleeding too heavy to stop. Then there’s a storm. It’s rarely ever like it was on the banks of Lake Okanagan that day, the day Clyde dodged death twice without moving a muscle; when people die in the forest, it’s the result of dozens of little wrong decisions. And so it is for Sylvester.

The first mistake: he and Elias had followed a trail of chanterelles after they’d finished fishing for the day. They’d been south on the river, at a deep reservoir, where Elias’s cousin said he’d caught good-sized crappies and walleye. It was slightly further afield than their normal spot, but neither had registered it as particularly far from camp or taken any special note of it. The chanterelles bloomed from the forest floor like tumors, delicate and a cheerful ochre color. They were so plentiful that Sylvester had taken off his overshirt to make a pouch for them as he and Elias picked. Elias had brought a quarter stick of butter on the trip, which they’d planned to save until their last night. As they picked further and further away from the river, they couldn’t stop talking about the mushrooms, how delicious they’d be roasted directly under a fish, smothered in butter and salt.

By the time they realized that dark was falling, they’d inched a good ways down a craggy incline. They couldn’t even hear the river anymore. And two hours after that, wandering in what felt like circles, Sylvester had fallen and gotten his bell rung, hard. And instead of hunkering down in one of the logs or crevices they’d seen, they decided to walk through the night, certain that they’d come across their camp. They weren’t far from it, they were sure!

The second afternoon, Elias and Sylvester ate the mushrooms raw while they walked and spent the next night and day shitting their brains out on tree roots and ferns, their fingers clenched into the dirt. They never found camp or the river again—just an endless ocean of trees—increasing and decreasing altitude and constant unknown animal sounds, a storm that seemed to be malevolently gathering right over their heads. A thousand cuts, indeed.

And so: the log. The left side of Sylvester’s face still aches from when he’d fallen on the first day, and he keeps using his dry tongue to worry the socket of the incisor he lost and the jagged half of its neighbor that remains. The wind moving through the pines howls and the rain hitting the canopy sounds like waves. But the log is quiet, a dead structure—solid, and stuffed with live things.

Down here, low to the ground and packed in moss like a toad, Sylvester only hears the susurrations of the beetles and spiders, the rustling of ground cover as it is struck by the rain. His stomach doesn’t even hurt anymore, but it feels like his bones are made of slowly-cooling metal, like they could drop right through his skin. Thoughts float through his mind without stopping; he cannot attach meaning to them or to anything.

If Sylvester wakes up tomorrow, he thinks, he will crawl out of the hollow log with more ticks burred into him and aphids filling his mouth. He will squeeze moisture from the damp leaves he finds on the ground for something to drink and then he will walk. Maybe he’ll fall, like he did on the first night, and knock out more teeth or split his kneecap on a poorly-placed rock. Maybe the next handful of pine needles he eats will be coated in something toxic and he’ll die with his throat puffed shut and his nose full of blood. Maybe he’ll stumble on a bear, so majestic and terrible that time itself will stop. Or maybe it’s the walking that will get him and his body will come to its end that way, in shambling motion that slows and slows and slows until he is nothing but another carcass decomposing on the forest floor. Twenty-eight is too young for a long death, he thinks. I hope what’s next happens fast.

The trees moan with the wind and Sylvester trembles. It’s cold, yes, but the moss, his boots and warm socks, and his wool overshirt, long emptied of the chanterelles, are keeping him warm enough. Perhaps the cold snap won’t come tonight. It’s early October, which can stay quite mild, even in the mountains. Sylvester tries to fall asleep, if only to pass the time until he can walk in daylight again. He wishes Elias was here so there could be some companionship in the fate that has found them both.

Every inch of the forest in front of him these last long days is the part of Ogopogo his father could see: stunning, but only cursorily representative of the whole monster. All the forest beyond what Sylvester sees is the long tail beneath the surface of the water, the source of its control and power. Sylvester could walk forever, probably, and not come to the end of this wood. It is all he knows now. It is the world.

◊

Clyde’s buddies got sick of the Ogopogo story eventually—though Sylvester never did— and not just because they’d never believed it. It was because Clyde used it for everything; it never had a fixed meaning. Sometimes he’d seen the bear and Ogopogo that day because the good Lord knew that Clyde was the only mortal man worthy of viewing His most fearsome creations. Sometimes he’d seen them because he was a lucky man or a humble one or a brave one. There were other stories out there, after all, about frail sorts who’d seen the monster and collapsed, stone-dead. Even To’o Jessup, a known hard-case, had been found face down in three inches of water right on the shoreline in ’73, not a scratch on him, and he’d only been forty-two.

Sylvester was having a whiskey with his dad at the tavern in Oroville one afternoon that year when To’o’s sister Coee came in. Sylvester and Clyde were both working the orchards then, before they moved to the Tualatins. Coee came into the bar already half-drunk and Clyde was never not in his cups by that time of day. So he’d started up with her, telling her how To’o must have been unable to handle what Clyde had seen and survived and more’s the pity.

Sylvester had winced and started apologizing immediately; he liked Coee and he’d liked To’o, too, and even though Sylvester never got tired of the story, it was just not the time. But Coee had laughed in Clyde’s face, unbothered.

“You pussy,” she said when she was done. “You fucking leech. You saw N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ and you are telling me you lived because you were stronger than my To’o? Christ, you’re a donkey. Fucking moron.”

“They both could have had me, but I kept my wits and Ogopogo…” Clyde started, but Coee laughed louder, more violently.

“Don’t you call him that, fool,” Coee spat and took a pull of the sweating Budweiser the bartender had just set on the bar in front of her. “That beast saved your life. He knew you were weak. He saw the bear and he knew you never stood a chance. N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ doesn’t need to eat you; he would have spit you up like trash.”

Coee had helped Sylvester roll Clyde out of the bar later. When Sylvester asked her what she’d meant about Ogopogo, she’d told him, more gently: “Your father was never in any danger and my brother had a heart attack. Just his own dumb ticker. Your dad doesn’t even know how blessed he is, or why. God protects drunks and children, right? Well? N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ is his name. The lake god. Don’t you ever let me catch you calling him Ogopogo again. That dumbass might not get it through his thick skull, but you can. Right?”

After they’d deposited Clyde on the couch at his friend Happy’s place, which was next door to the bar, Coee walked Sylvester back to the dormitory where all the pickers slept. She hummed ‘Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ so vigorously that Sylvester joined in. When they finished, laughing, he said: “I’m sorry about him.”

“Don’t be sorry about Clydey, kiddo,” Coee scoffed. Her teeth shone white in the darkness as she grinned. “He doesn’t need your sorry, he’s sorry enough.”

They stood in silence outside the dormitory barn for a moment more before she shooed him off to bed.

“Don’t forget,” Coee whispered as Sylvester cranked the lever to open the barn door and the sound of the sleeping breaths of the off-shift pickers filled the air. “Don’t forget his real name.”

◊

Ten years later, in the log, in the cold and rain and incomprehensible wilderness, Sylvester thinks: N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, please I beg, and it is his last thought before he falls asleep.

The next day, he is too weak to leave the log. He spends the day with the upper half of his body sticking out one side, like a half-peeled egg, watching the daylight move across the forest floor. Sylvester eats two pads of moss and three earthworms, then retches it all back up. He lets the intermittent rain wet his shirt then sucks the water from its sleeves.  He wishes for a monster, a savior, to appear, but he is in the bear’s jaws now or he is the bear, in the grip of a deity. He’s not sure. Sylvester sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps. Wakes.

Sleeps again.

Wakes again.

Sleeps.

Sleeps.

Sleeps again.

Wakes to snow.

Sylvester uses his hands to pull himself out of the log, reaching and grabbing the earth, then dragging himself forward. His entire body shakes. Once emerged, he can see the snow everywhere; it has remade the forest under a dusting of variegated white. But he doesn’t feel the cold of it, or the wet, even as he watches his fingers turn red and then a mottled purple. He’s been wrong, he sees that now: he won’t walk out of here. He can barely crawl.

Sylvester recalls faintly that hearing is the last sense to go before death; in the end, you are reduced to your ears. He’d read that somewhere or maybe someone told him; the nurse he dated in Pocatello? Coee? His mother, Kiyiya, who had died herself when he was eleven? Sylvester can still see, mostly, though his vision is warped on his left, and on his right pocked with dark spots. The light in the forest is working strangely and he cannot tell if it is day or night. But he is alive.

Sylvester decides he will crawl to the next tree.

It takes a very long time.

When he gets to the next tree, he collapses in its roots, in the snow. His fingers are blue. There is a constant, cyclical breath that rattles his body and threatens to shake him apart. The breathing sounds somewhere outside of him, so outside that he could feel it, scalding hot on the back of his neck. But who was to say? He had lost track of where the mountains ended and where he began.

N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ or something like you, he thinks, please come.

Something does.

It doesn’t come as a serpent god from a lake. It doesn’t come as a bear.

It comes as light.

Sylvester rolls over onto his back and lets the snow fall into his open eyes, his mouth, across his cheeks. His vision wavers, but inside him there is radiation, a warlike feeling, a suffusion of brightness and energy. He can move again. He’s nearly weightless, he can carry himself with almost no effort at all. Inside, he is aglow.

Sylvester feels it suddenly, a separation of mind from body, like he is looking down at himself from six inches above his head. He can make this starved, frostbitten shell do whatever he likes. Sylvester rises, feels nothing. Just light, light. He is beyond it all. He walks forward ten paces, stiff-legged, before he can bend his knees again. Then ten paces after that. And then he begins to run.

He runs. And he is the bear blundering toward the lake’s shore on a spring day and he is his own father holding a fishing pole with lake mud between his toes. And he is life itself, he is a human animal made of skin and cells and spells, he is running toward death, headlong and heedless, an endless nova of darkness spiraling through him, dimming his vision to almost nothing, just flares of light winking out.

Sylvester knows now what his father never did: that he is blessed, he knows that death’s light is a sonic landscape of the next world, that it is his holy fortune to have found himself here, running blind and dying through a snowy forest. He is running faster than he ever thought possible, down a steep slope now, just light and light and more. More. The world is so big, so astounding. It is unending. He is on the razor’s edge between something and nothing, between mortal terror and the miraculous. If this is his lot in life, it will also be his privilege to run off the edge of it all.

Sylvester runs and runs, for hours or days, in this world or the next. He runs until he falls and then he gets up and runs even more. By the time the ground has leveled off and he thinks he can hear the flapping of canvas tents in the wind and the distant trill of children’s voices, he never wants to stop. Even when he runs into another body, feels warm living hands catching him and holding fast, he still strains madly forward, longing to stay in motion and sound and light. The hands hold him tight about the shoulders and Sylvester weeps with dry, unseeing eyes because he is saved, yes, but also he is stopped. And oh, oh, oh: he’d been absolutely flying.

AJ Strosahl is a writer and small business owner who lives in Oakland, California. She has work published or forthcoming in Oyster River Pages, Signal Mountain Review, Ruminate Magazine, and other outlets. Her essay ‘Dogs I’ve Read’ was recently a finalist for the 2021 VanderMey Nonfiction prize, and in 2022, AJ will be an Artist-in-Residence at the Vashon Island Arts Residency and the Bryn Du Art Center. ’N ̓x̌ax̌aitkʷ, 1984’ is an excerpt from her novel-in-progress, Only In Pure Air.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney

Ann Stoney
THE OTHER SIDE

When you wake up in the night, don’t flush or wash your hands. Go straight back to bed. This helps. You’ve been awake on and off. Dreams take the shape of lightning. Exaggerated versions of yourself, they crash unexpectedly, then fade away—a tide that rips, then spits you on the shore of waking.

You think of tomorrow. You’ll divide the day into three parts: (1) a business activity, something practical, (2) a bit of exercise, (3) something creative, whatever that is.

But when tomorrow comes, you fill the day with useless things and once again are left with the night to figure it all out.

So you do. You consider taking the yoga class in the morning, but it starts too early, you’ll never make it. Not now, when you’ve been up half the night.

Let’s face it, they’re all over—the mice. This keeps you awake, too.

Your mind is adrift between sleeping and waking. Is this what death is like? Or is it more like anesthesia? You worried a lot as a child about dying—Am I gonna die, Daddy, am I gonna die? Wondering in your child brain how it would feel not to exist, knowing on some level that this was a contradiction, but you wondered anyway.

Your family moved around a lot. That was hard, always the new kid on the block. Pretty much the same as not existing. Maybe that’s why you wondered about it.

You were eight years old when you’d get up in the middle of the night to guard the house. You believed this was necessary for your very survival. Because your parents were about to be kidnapped, you were sure of it, and you needed to be awake when it happened. You’d listen for any noise, tapping or knocking, stand in the hallway military-style, pacing back and forth, back and forth.

Why is it when you can’t sleep, your childhood haunts you? A distinct memory of bullying—you were twelve, kids picking hard red berries from trees, throwing them at you. You ran into the house and up the stairs, followed by a kid, the only concerned one. You turned around, snarled like a dog until he ran away.

You think about smoking pot. Your retired husband sells it part-time, doesn’t have the same problem with it that you do. He’s sleeping peacefully next to you, twisting and bending every now and again, uttering guttural sounds.

The pot is everywhere—grains on table edges, roach butts in film canisters, inside the leather pouch in his backpack. You don’t think he realizes, really, how dire it is. You could pad downstairs in slippers and robe, light up on the deck.

But that’s an issue. If you smoke tonight, you’ll want more tomorrow. Inhale it with your coffee, then all day long. In fact, that’s why you can’t sleep in the first place. It’s been two days since you quit. If you give in now, the pot will keep you awake before putting you out. Tricky. So you lie awake in a fog with your mind racing.

Your husband laughs at you when you make those silly faces. At you, not with you. Part of your past. Like your mother, he says. Don’t be your mother. Your mother, may she rest in peace, loved to amuse, entertain, scrunch up her face, howl and speak in funny voices, snort until you were screaming with laughter, gasping, Stop! Stop!

You’ve carried that with you so far, the funny faces, the silliness, but your husband says it makes you unattractive. It’s not who you really are, he says.

So you don’t do it around him. You stop the primal impulse to be silly. Other men used to laugh their asses off, proclaiming you a comic genius, but not your husband. You’re more sophisticated than that, he says, made for better things. But you love letting off steam, being wild and crazy and decadent. It’s in your nature to be so.

So, this is something that has to be resolved, one of the things you think about when the dark pierces you awake.

Exploding Head Syndrome. It has a name. You looked it up on the Internet. Another reason why you can’t sleep; just as you’re about to, it grips you in the terror of paralysis. It comes on slowly at first, a far-off wave, rendering you powerless, until it takes over and you’re drowning in noise like wind whooshing through your brain. A siren, a high-pitched ring.

A rare condition, a misfiring of the neurons, the brief article said—brief, because no one knows much about it. A condition difficult to track. Like a cougar. You never know when it will attack. What’s the point of going to a sleep clinic when it might not attack that night?

The Exploding Head Syndrome waits until you try to quit smoking pot. But at least you recognize it now, and that helps a little. You relax with the noise and hope for the best. Release yourself to the gods.

The first time it happened you were sixteen, certain you heard a woman in a voice of steel say, “And a man stood before you.” You spent years in therapy trying to figure out what that meant. Where did the voice come from? Who was the woman? Were you molested at some point in your childhood? your therapist asks hopefully.

When I was fifteen, you reply. A family friend, but it was consensual and we never had intercourse, although we did everything else. Does that count?

In school you mentioned the Exploding Head Syndrome—you didn’t know what it was called then—to Mr. Lenz, your study hall teacher, who sometimes made short films starring a student or two. He showed one of them in class once, about a beautiful girl whose name you’ve long forgotten, sitting on a blanket in the park, peeling and eating an orange so sensuously that you longed to be that girl. So you flirted with him enough to land a date, the kind a girl has when she’s about to make out with her teacher and lie to her mother about it. You tell her you’re sleeping over with a friend, which is true, but you leave out the part about how Mr. Lenz picks you up at the Wythe Shopping Center in front of the A&P and takes you to his apartment where you neck on the futon couch until you’re afraid to go any further and then he brings you back to your friend’s house where you try to fall asleep but can’t.

You wonder what it is about this experience that keeps you awake. It’s only one of many, why this one? The men were usually older, that’s what you liked. The family friend at fifteen, then the high school teacher—years and years of broken relationships, exhausting you into middle age until you finally met “the one.”

So now it’s all settled; he’s sleeping beside you. You no longer need to run to the arms of strangers. He’s only eight years older, an improvement, blessed with a rent-stabilized apartment in New York City and a house upstate with a view of the lake and a yard full of wildflowers. He really loves you and you really love him, so it’s all settled. You no longer need to run at all.

Yet your mind races as if it’s got legs, ready to run a marathon.

You bolt straight up in bed; he’s taking too much of it. You measure, just to be sure, not with a real tape measure, it’s too dark for that, but with the one in your mind. You lean over, feel the amount of space between him and the edge, and it’s huge! At least six inches, if not eight. You’re dying for a king size bed, but you know he’ll never agree. It was a major battle to convince him to buy the queen.

He’s always inching in closer, forcing you to move further away until you’re practically falling off and this is why, you suddenly think, you cannot sleep. This is the sum total of all the reasons right here. You need space. You cannot have anyone touching any part of your body while you sleep. You don’t know why this is true, but it is. You wonder why this never occurred to you before.

Is this normal? Is it normal for someone to not want human contact, even from her husband, while she sleeps? You’re not sure whether it’s normal or not and this makes you nervous so you think about it some more, about maybe bringing it up with your therapist except that you’re no longer in therapy because you decided you were okay. You’re settled and okay. Still, it’s an interesting question. Maybe you should call her about it—this problem you have—or is it a problem? Your mind races back and forth as to whether it’s a problem or not. Can you help it if you sleep better alone? Aren’t a lot of people like that? Isn’t this why older couples often retire to separate bedrooms? Does this mean you don’t love your husband? Does this mean you’re not fit to be in a relationship, that you’re better off by yourself?

But you were alone for years, you gently remind yourself, gently because you’re now in a state of panic over the bed situation having put your whole marriage on the line in thirty seconds flat. You remind yourself of all the years alone, hopping from one man to another, miserable and lonely. You remind yourself over and over.

Once you were a stripper. You took off your clothes and men rejoiced. They also hurled insults and dumped beer on you. Like slitting the throats of kittens. Who was that person? You stare at the ceiling, so black you need a flashlight to get to the john. You can’t believe someone once paid you five hundred dollars to … don’t think about it. That you did it for so long, your husband says when you finally break down and tell him. More like an eight yearlong moment, you say every time he mentions it—to support the acting career. Just a fact, nothing more. Please don’t tell any of our friends, he says.

So you don’t. No one knows about it. Except of course, the friends you knew back when, the ones you hardly ever see. Misfit friends. Let’s face it, his friends are more interesting anyway—writers, artists, a whole group of them. You’re not used to groups. But somehow, you’ve managed to fit into this one. They like you. You can’t believe it. You’re amazed.

You’re relieved you told him early on. What would you do if you had to go through all that now? You’d be beside yourself. He went on and on about it for two years in couples counseling until you were ready to pull your hair out. Waking you up at four in the morning, obsessing until dawn. Asking questions like, why? What made you do it? For which you had no answer.

But you endured. You calmed him down, stroked his brow, told him over and over how much you loved him until he finally shut up.

Was it really that big a deal? Stripping? He certainly has no qualms about telling people he sells pot, which has always been a sore point, a contradiction in your marriage. You’re muddling through the bottom drawer of the file cabinet in the office. You’re not sure how you got there, on the floor in your nightie searching for sheet music from a previous life, when you performed your original songs in cabaret. Before you transformed yourself into an English teacher. Recorded a demo that never made it. Your boyfriend at the time—the sax player who would later break your heart—helped you arrange them. You find the demo first, under a pile of tax returns.

You imagine life with the sax player. You’d probably be stumbling across condoms in the wastebasket right now, flipping through his little black book. Spending your days with the names of women fluttering in your heart.

Some of them—your songs about stripping—are buried deeper than others. Dust clings to your fingers as you hunt.

You find the songs, draw a bath and sing them, softly so as not to wake him. He’ll never know. You like taking baths, building a castle within his walls. The claw foot tub a smoke away from the window, the scented candle from two Christmases ago, sea salts with fancy names. A piece of a throne you’ve pulled together, complete with lavender scrub and loofah mitt.

You sink into the tub, sing about how you once made love on a pier and it didn’t matter. Then you sing about a stripper who steps outside to take a break, lights up a joint, then huddles alone in the alleyway. The customers think they’ve got her by the tail, but in the end she gets all their money and takes a taxi home, where she tosses and turns all night wondering if she’ll be okay.

You sing to yourself and lay down your weapons. Give up the notion that your life is nothing more than a boxing ring with the men in one corner and everything else in the other. As the construction worker you once dated said, that’s all over now. He would have given up the others to spend the rest of his life with you, which would have been okay, except that he had a habit of tearing up your nightgowns and throwing things. Let’s not forget the night you were forced to flee to your girlfriend’s place on Christopher Street.

No, these songs are private now, best sung alone. There is no turning away from the person sleeping in the other room. Not that you’d want to. You love him. Then you cry, which is what you always do when you sing your songs in the tub.

You slip back into the bedroom and grab some clothes. How about a walk to the lake? Why not? It’s not as dark as it was. You peer out the window to make sure. Dawn is slowly revealing itself, the sun beginning its journey towards the maple trees. You dress quietly, tie your sneakers and head downstairs.

You’re lucky to have the lake so close, nestled at the foot of the winding trail your husband chiseled from the woods with hacksaw and scythe. An amateur landscaper, he enjoys carving footpaths, lining them with ferns and wildflowers, transplanted from the wildlife preserve nearby. Ditto for the annual Christmas tree, rescued from one of many in the forest.

You cross the road and reach the dock, pulled onto the marshland long ago, so rickety you fear you might fall right through, though your husband has tried many times to steady it with extra boards and nails. He fixes things in a ramshackle way, as if using a Band-Aid will stop a rushing tide of blood. But he’s so proud of his efforts, you find it endearing—the driftwood he turns into yard sculptures, the broken birdfeeder from a yard sale he manages to glue back together.

The dock is a little better. You grant your husband a mental tip of the hat. You don’t usually sit here, preferring the lounge chairs further up, but the early light beckons you closer to the water, as if its ripples have something to say. You pull up your knees and cast your eyes across the lake; a row of pine trees shimmers through the mist.

You wish you had a proper dock, but you and your husband don’t have official lake rights. You enjoy the water on a neighbor’s land, originally owned by the grandmother, her ashes scattered under the apple tree. The warring grandkids can’t decide what to do with the property, so no one comes up and nothing gets done. Thank God you’re allowed to use it and keep the canoe there, too. The house itself is uninhabitable, a faded elegance complete with white plastic swans and crumbling stone steps. It wallows behind you, its paint a spackled teal blue, collapsing inch by inch into smithereens.

Sometimes you take guests down to see it. Cocktails in hand, giggling like school children, you peer through cracked windows at frayed wallpaper, wicker chairs fanning the premises as if they owned it, grimy shelves dotted with porcelain figurines. Like a scene from New Orleans. Once your husband offered to buy the piano. Hell, he tells our guests, we’d buy the whole property, house and all, if only they’d sell. They nod in agreement. We’d have lake rights and could build a dock, a little gazebo. They look longingly through the windows again.  Of course, you know that this will never happen, the family will never sell.

Your husband can’t stand things going to waste. He’s always discovering new treasures on the street and dragging them into your lives, which annoys you at first, but then you get used to it, sometimes even enjoy them when you’re not worrying about the clutter. What’s wrong with these people? he asks, as you sip cocktails on the crumbling porch.

But you understand what’s wrong with them. You stretch out your legs, watch the ducks making their way across the lake, innocent and smooth, mother in front, babies soldiering behind. The family can’t bear the idea of change, that their memories of those delicious summers visiting their grandmother will be shattered if they sell a single item. So they keep the abandoned place intact, even as it falls apart.

You keep your eyes on the ducks. Like all creatures on this land—the squirrels, birds, chipmunks, the occasional fox—they are fascinating to watch. You envy the simplicity of their lives, the purity of it, their only worries finding food and not being eaten. But you also know this is an illusion, that nature is unforgivable and cruel; their lives are as complex as yours, if not more so. No living creature can escape that.

The ducks are swimming effortlessly to the other side, where the sun is just beginning to rise. It’s more isolated there, further away from the road, no houses, at least not yet. But some of the land has been cleared, a hint of things to come. You and your husband take advantage of the privacy while you can. On sunny days, you pack up the picnic basket with beer and snacks, sometimes a joint if you’re smoking, and canoe to your favorite spot—a makeshift beach amidst the pine trees and rocky, uneven ground. You spread out the blanket, hoping the ants won’t invade, and inhale the sun. Your husband always wants to swim, no matter how cold the water, and begs you to join him, but you rarely do. You can’t swim like the ducks, and he has an annoying habit of shouting pointers at you whenever you try.

Instead, you prop yourself up and watch him through your straw hat—strong arms plowing through the water to what he affectionately calls the finish line, a tree trunk stranded in the middle of the lake. You can barely see it from where you’re sitting, here on the dock. If it ever disappeared, he’d have nothing to guide him, no marker in sight. He needs that log as much as he needs you, as much as you need him.

Now that’s something. You zip up your sweatshirt. The sun, now full in the sky, has disappeared behind a cloud. You need him, but why? Why so much? He’s strong, lean and attractive. Maybe that’s it. The best sex you ever had. Women go crazy for him. They tease and flirt. Once a couple was visiting and the wife, feigning shock at some silly sexist remark he made, threw an ear of corn at him, and he laughed it off with a twinkle in his eye. He hardly ever gets angry. You can yell and scream, which you’ve often done, and he can take it. He won’t leave. He will never leave because he loves you. You can’t understand why—you, a former stripper and pothead driving him crazy with your ups and downs, but he does. For some reason, he does.

You know just how important this is.

Yet how engulfed you are in his world, his circle of friends—this beautiful house with its deck and birdfeeder and bench in the yard, as though you’re already deep in the middle of the lake. You could swim there now if you wanted to, even though you’re a lousy swimmer. Take off your clothes, sink to the bottom. No one would know, at least not for a while. You contemplate wading through shallow mud, wild reeds tickling your face until you reach the deepest part, the crystal clean part, the depths of which your feet cannot touch, where you would swim the best you could until you could no more. You contemplate this like you did as a child when you wondered how it would feel to not exist—to disappear.

You don’t, of course. You cling to the rickety dock, fingers clenching the slats, wondering if he’s awake by now. He’s probably making coffee and breakfast and suddenly you’re ravenous, ready for fried eggs, sausage and grits. You love the fact that he cooks for you. He may be controlling, but at least he cooks. He cooks and cleans and has no qualms about doing the laundry. He’ll do anything for you if you ask.

Soon you’ll return to the house, tell him where you were. You’ll say you couldn’t sleep and went down to the lake to meditate—the truth, sort of. You’ll sit with him on the deck and leisurely eat the breakfast he lovingly made. You’ll kiss him, thank him for making it. You’ll both watch the birds, talk about what the day might bring.

But for now, you linger a little bit longer, staring across the lake to the other side, where nothing exists except the sweet smell of pine, and the rocky ground beneath it.

Ann Stoney is a writer based in NYC. She is the most recent winner of the Tampa Review’s Danahy Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in PIF Magazine, Duende, and Monkeybicycle, among others. She has been recognized in several contests, most recently as a finalist in the Cutthroat Journal’s 2021 Rick De Marinis Short Story Contest. When she is not writing, she’s busy reviewing stories for the Bellevue Literary Review.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

HOOPS by Maggie Hill

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Maggie Hill
HOOPS

We’re going to jail for Christmas. Sing Sing. Ossining, New York. My brother Bobby and I ride in the back seat, the both of us held captive by images of branch, stone, sky going in the other direction. Our mother and father—the both of them, together—ride up front, not talking. It’s supposed to snow.

“Kate, crack your window a little to get the smoke out,” my father says.

She does. It is immediately freezing. Bobby, whose seat is behind the front passenger, my mother, looks at me as if it is my fault. I got sick once in a car a million years ago and nobody ever forgets it. He wouldn’t dare complain to them—not today. Not after getting thrown out of Bishops High School for the latest infraction. Smoking cigarettes. That’s what they told me. I know it was smoking, but it wasn’t cigarettes. I let them think I don’t know it was pot. They need me to be innocent.

“How is the wind back there?” my mother asks, even as she is rolling up the window. “Claire, don’t read. You’ll get sick.”

“Don’t get sick in this car,” my father says to nobody, everybody.

“She wasn’t reading, Jack, I was just reminding her in case she was thinking about it.” My mother looks back at me as if she is examining me for signs of future criminal behavior. I open my lips, mouth What? This gets a smirk out of Bobby.

The sky looks puffy with snow just behind it. Shapes seem to be pressing down, making land feel closer to sky than usual. Up ahead, a white blob meets the horizon, and I imagine it is already snowing up there. It is especially quiet outside; a combination of the mummy sound of almost-snow and the geography of upstate New York.

Since we left the city, there are only a few cars on each side of the road. It’s a monotonous view. Row after row of trees jut out from woods held back by huge boulders and stones, surrounding us, on either side. Every once in a while, ice clings to the branches, making them look sculptured and eerie. We’re the only people on this four-lane highway; it looks like someone hacked it out last night, pouring white broken lines over black, flattened silly putty.

We are doing so many unthinkable things in this car, on this Christmas Eve, for this family, that it’s better if we are all just rolling along, stunned silent. First of all, we’re going to jail for Christmas. No, first of all, my brother John is in jail. Christmas is just the after-effect.

My father is driving us to the prison in one of his cab driver friend’s cars. He has been upbeat, even almost in charge since we left. This is what he does—drive—and he seems to really know what he’s doing about getting on highways. I hear him, but I can hardly see him over the high back of the front seats. From the rearview mirror, I can see the top of his cap. And the smoke of his cigarette drifts back here in skinny, horizontal lines. Not like my mother’s smoke, which blasts through the car like we’re in Vietnam and we have to run for cover.

They will be—my mother and father—in prison with John tomorrow—Christmas—while Bobby and I wait back at the motel. I imagine John in his cell wearing grey clothes, looking like himself except he can’t open the locked gate. When he first went away, I used to have cartoon bubbles in my head of him wearing black and white striped pajamas, and a ball and chain around his ankle. That was a year and a half ago, and this is not a freaking cartoon. This is John.

We can’t ask direct questions about anything because we’ll get them nervous, then they’ll just yell at us. So Bobby and I have pretty much figured out the way it’s going to work. We also know that when the time comes, we’ll just be given directions and that’s that. We figure we’ll probably stop by the prison on the way to the motel for visiting hours. Me and Bobby’ll wait in the car. Hopefully, there will be a window we can wave up to so John can see us. We only got as far as that. We figure the way it’ll work is they’ll drive to the parking lot, then tell us to be good, and they’ll be back in, probably we think, an hour or so. Bobby and I have talked about it, so we’re used to the idea.

“Can you put the music on?” Bobby asks. I whisk my head over to him, are you crazy?

My father doesn’t make a big deal of it; he just says, “No.” But my mother’s shoulders wing back a little. She says nothing.

“Oh, man. Why not? Come on,” Bobby whines.

My mother starts: “Are you driving this car? Are you trying to find the exit when it’s about to snow all over the place and the road is unfamiliar? Do you think we should stop this car and break out our dancing shoes because you feel like a little music in the backseat there? Do you…”

“All right, Kate, I said no. That’s all,” my father says. He sounds like he’s trying to be gentle, but he can’t because his voice has a rumpy coughy rolling in it. Like he has never been able to clear his throat.

Bobby’s hands are shoved inside his new pea coat, his head against the bumper next to his window. His eyes are slits. I peek at him now that my mother has been startled into one of her nervous machine-gun ravings. Bobby always messes up timing with her. He doesn’t remember to gauge the level of whether it’s going to be immediate or take some time for her to become hysterical. I’m so much better at timing her than he is. But she is much, much more loving to him than all of us. It used to work. Now he gets angry all the time, about nothing.

Here it is….here they come. We are surrounded by little tiny flakes in hundreds and thousands of swirls. “Bobby!” I say, shaking his arm. “It’s snowing.”

“Cut it out!” Bobby swings and punches me, hard, in my shoulder. I scream and lunge for him across the inches that divide us. I am punching his head and neck, he grabs my right arm and twists it right up my back. It goes beyond regular hurt. He keeps twisting, twisting. I am begging. God. God. Stop.

My mother is halfway into the backseat along with us, her arms tearing at Bobby. He lets go. I curl up into my side holding my shoulder and arm. My mother is chanting, “What is wrong with you? How can you hurt your sister like that? What is wrong with you?”

Bobby’s reason is that I woke him up. I startled him. I think I can do whatever I want. I am a spoiled brat. He hates me.

My father opens the window, spits, closes it. “I won’t have this goddamn behavior in this car, do you hear me?” He shouts. In the mirror, I can see how red his face is, and we are all stunned at how mad he is. “You keep your hands to yourself, boy, and you stop with all the chatter, miss. Goddamn kids.”

I have made things worse than they are by forgetting to think before I act. I forgot that Bobby can’t take sudden movements; I forgot that I can’t win a fistfight with him.

“I’m sorry,” I say, forcing myself, my head against the window.

Bobby is crazy and I am the only one in the car who knows it. If I can bend my behavior around him, I am safe. The long quiet softens the pulsing inside the car. We drive forever.

After a while, my father says, “I have to stop for gas. We’re almost there, but I don’t want to get caught on empty. Tell me when the next exit is, and we’ll stop there.”

“Yes. All right. Maybe we can stop at a restroom, too. Claire, do you have to go to the bathroom?” my mother says. Then as an afterthought, “Robert?”

“Okay,” Bobby murmurs to the bathroom idea. I don’t have to look at him to know he looks exhausted, sick. He always does after he goes crazy.

“We’re stopping for gas and for a quick bathroom visit, period,” my father says. “No lollygagging around.”

I twist my head to Bobby, who twists his head to me. I do my lollygagging face—stick a pretend lollipop down my throat, choke, gag, panic—until I see Bobby’s face cave into a mime man’s laugh. We make no sound but snort one at a time through our noses. I catch my father’s eyes in the rearview mirror; he winks at me.

It looks darker out than before, as we drive through a turn that’s cut in the middle of two lines of giant trees. They’re so tall and this road is so narrow, the tops of the trees seem to be bent toward each other, like ladies talking over a clothesline.

My father is hunched up right next to the wheel with both hands on it, looking ahead at what’s coming. My mother looks like she’s ready to shovel out the whole country if she has to; she is sitting upright, one hand on the door and one hand firmly placed on the console in front of her. If there’s a gas station anywhere, she’ll dig it out.

The main road is empty, and we make a right turn onto it. We are slowly, slowly moving through the sheets of snow down this deserted road, surrounded by trees and quiet.

“Up ahead,” my mother points. “There’s a town, and I see orange lights. Exxon is orange, isn’t it?”

We all strain forward to see if we can see it. “It’s on the right, after that church steeple, see it? It looks like that’s a post office or a government office across from it, it’s right up ahead,” my mother tells us.

We can see the town ahead on the downward slope of the road, how it just appears out of nowhere. A bunch of dirty-white, two-story buildings in the clean snow. A frayed American flag pointing straight out, flying with its head down. Old cars half on the road, half up on a rise. Crooked Christmas lights nailed over a broken screen door. Not even one person on the street.

My father rolls up to the orange sign with no words on it, and we enter the gas station as if we were a boat, rocking back and forth and finally settling into place in front of the only pump. It feels like the dead of night.

The fattest person I’ve ever seen comes out of the doorway to the office, where the windows are so dirty it’s not possible to see inside. He moves toward the car in thundering steps. He wears no coat; only a plaid shirt over a big undershirt, inside the widest pair of jeans overalls ever made. His hair is thin, light, wispy. His face is pink, stretched, wet-looking. He could be, but he’s definitely not, a fatter Santa Claus. He’s not smiling.

“What do you need,” he demands.

“Fill ‘er up, pal,” says my completely-at-home father. “Do you have a john we can use?”

I am not going in that john, no way. I am not getting out of the car.

“Inside,” he indicates with his head. His eyes are so wide apart, they could be on either side of his temples, like a great sea animal. They have no color.

“All right, let’s get this show on the road,” my father says.

“Come on kids, out of the car, let’s use the toilet,” my mother says as she is opening her door and stepping out. Bobby is stepping out, too. My father is already out. Snow is slanting down at them.

“It’s okay, I don’t have to go,” I say. I don’t either, or at least not much. I can hold it, I don’t care how much farther it is to the prison.

My mother bends into the car, “Come on, now. Let’s-go-inside-together and then come-back-out-together.” I know what she means, but I can’t move.

“No, go ahead, I’ll just stay here.” Bobby sticks his head in the front seat side. “What are you doing? Come on.”

“I’m staying here! Just go.”

My mother shuts the door as she and Bobby straighten up. Her head reaches only to his shoulders. She starts inside. Bobby follows, then turns around. He goes back to the side of the car and gets in next to me.

“What are you doing?” I demand.

“Staying here,” Bobby says, bunching his arms up under his shoulders and pushing himself against the seat, hunkering down.

I peek out at the gas station guy. He’s capping off the hose, ready to replace the nozzle. His eyes are blank, his face is closed. I turn to Bobby, evil on my face. There’s a macaroni commercial that Bobby and I always scream laughing at. This poor fat kid is playing on the street and his mother starts yelling for him out the window. He doesn’t answer her, but then she tells him it’s spaghetti day. The fat kid drops what he’s doing with a big moronic smile on his face and runs home. I am making that face now as Bobby turns to look at me.

“Hey, Anthony, it’s Prince spaghetti day! Come on, I got a barrel of macaroni for you! Open up those overalls, Tony, because you’re gonna need more room. Anthony, wait, here’s a fork…Anthony, take your head out of that pot of macaroni…”

We are both giggling as the doors open on either side, and my mother and father look at us accusingly before they settle back in.

There’s no big street sign telling us that we are nearing the prison. We just reach a corner of the town, turn left, head toward it. Here, the road slopes downward to the Hudson River, a liquid neon sign in the snow, glinting at the end of the white road. We ride down this sloping, quiet, empty street until the fortress of Sing Sing Prison rises up to stop us. It braces against land on the edge of the river. It’s a hulking structure, all turrets and stone, with two tacked-on wings spreading from the center. It looks like an over-fed eagle turned to stone as it was about to crash into the river.

Inside the iron-gated entry, we are directed to the parking lot. Another guard directs us to a parking space and to a tiny door in the body of the building. A paper sign, taped to the door, says, Visitors entrance. My father puts the car in park, then turns to my mother for further instructions.

“Bobby, Claire, let’s go,” she says.

“We’re going inside?” I’m the first to get the words out.

“Did you think we were going to leave you outside in the car?” my mother says.

We get out, walk together toward the door. I feel like I am walking inside a bubble of gum. I am blinking to clear my eyes, to feel awake. My words come out slower than usual, whispery. “I thought you said we couldn’t visit.”

“No, you can’t, but there is a waiting room for children. They told us it’s a nice room where you can wait for us,” my mother looks at both of us as if she just told us someone died.

I’m blinking and slow. “Is there a bathroom there?”

“I’m sure there is. And you’ll both be together in the room. There’s nothing to be frightened of,” she says.

“Ma, we’ll be fine. We are fine,” Bobby says. To me, he says, “I have to go to the bathroom, too. I’ll find out where it is and take you there. Don’t worry.”

I want to tell them that I’m not worried. Words form in my head but they get stuck in my throat.

My father is blowing his nose, turning his head away from us. My mother seems smaller than her usual five feet, two inches. She stands there in her cloth, three-button winter coat, holding the handle of her pocketbook in the crook of her left arm, her forearm stiffly pointed up as though she just donated blood. Her old white dress gloves, buttoned at both wrists, cover her clenched hands. She sewed a button on the left glove last night. She is wearing her old navy blue suit underneath that coat; it’s always the same skirt but she changes the blouse and puts a sweater with it sometimes to make it look like a whole new outfit. She’s clever like that. My mother stands like she’s always telling us to: keeping her spine line-straight and squaring her shoulders. On her head, she wears a small hat, really just a fabric-covered thick headband with a gathering of tiny glass beads on one side. She has short hair but a lot of it, dark black, dipped in white by the scalp. She doesn’t wear any makeup, ever, on her lined, dry face. I am looking deep into her strong brown eyes, which look back from her clumpy lashes that huddle together at the corners. Her eyes are bright, clear, sober.

My father shuffles behind her as we walk. Although he was a soldier, my mother is the General in this army.

Bobby and I are deposited in a room full of brown, white, black children. When the guard calls for the visitors, my mother is the first to line up, head up, for the walk to the prisoner visiting area. Everything about her says, It’s Christmas. I’m here to see my son.

Maggie Hill is a writer in Rockaway Beach, New York. She has an MFA in Fiction and was a fellow at BookEnds manuscript mentoring program. Her essays and non-fiction have been published in The New York Times, The New York Daily News, and Scholastic professional magazines. Current publications include Flatbush Review, Persimmon Tree. She teaches creative writing and literature at CUNY-Kingsborough. HOOPS is her first novel.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP, WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK UP? by Amy Savage

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP, WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK UP? by Amy Savage

Amy Savage
WHY DON’T YOU SHUT UP, WHY DON’T YOU SPEAK UP?

“What do you call the men? Ballerinos?” Sophie’s mother asked at intermission, frowning. “Some of them need another layer down there. You can see all their parts.” She ran her fingers through her bushy gray bob and sighed. “I’m just so lusty for men,” she said. “I’m never satisfied. And I’m dog-tired of being teased.”

It was Sophie’s turn to sigh. She’d saved up as a receptionist at the women’s clinic downtown to take her mom to Swan Lake for Christmas, and this was the first thing her mother thought to say? That the bulges had unfairly aroused her? In the recent years since her parents had divorced, Sophie often felt her mother shared too much, treating Sophie as a friend, or worse, a therapist.

“Why don’t you try online dating?” Sophie now asked. They’d had this conversation before. Marguerite had posited that Sophie was treating her like merchandise. “Would you put my picture up in a store window?” she’d said, aghast.

This time Marguerite ignored the question. Her voice weary, Sophie’s mother said, “I don’t know if I have much clitoris.” The man seated in the row ahead of them shifted in his seat and scratched his bald spot.

Sophie didn’t want to doubt another woman’s experience in her own body, but… really? Sophie couldn’t believe she was about to go there, but she did anyway. “You should get a toy, Mom. Then you’ll know.” When her mom didn’t smile, Sophie took on an apologetic tone. “I think it’s just that you’ve only had bad sex.” Sophie’s counselor at college had warned her about this: as much as her mother wanted her to be her friend, Sophie was her daughter. Now she’d fallen farther into the trap and had criticized her father’s lovemaking. Gross, Sophie thought, I’m turning into her. Thirty years too soon. Marguerite, however, was completely unfazed by Sophie’s breach of boundaries. She did look crestfallen, though, at the thought that it all could have been bad sex. The better option might just be clitorisless-ness. But Marguerite also had a pondering look. She was considering her daughter’s advice.

When the curtains closed, Sophie and her mother left through the side entrance of the theater to walk back to the car. They heard a bell and soon saw the ringer. An old man in battered fatigues and signature red Salvation Army apron stood next to a large red cauldron and rang his tiny bell. Marguerite fished a dollar out of her wallet and dropped it into the dark hole.

“God bless you,” the man said. He took two miniature candy canes out of his apron pouch for mother and daughter. Marguerite blushed and pocketed both candies. Later that evening, Sophie saw three texts from her mother:

Was just thinking about that Salvation Army volunteer.

He seemed so nice.

Wonder if you could find him on social media? [Halo emoji]

Two weeks later, on New Year’s Eve, Sophie went out dancing. While her friends were buying drinks, a shaggy-haired guy with an overbite approached her and got close, fast. He slid a hand into her back pocket and tried to kiss her. Sophie reared her head back and held up her ring finger like it was her middle. “My fiancé wouldn’t like that,” she lied.

Since age seventeen, Sophie had ironically worn the modest diamond purity ring her parents had given her to bribe her into celibacy. The ring had failed to keep her a virgin, but now, surprisingly, it did ward off this douchebag. The stone glinted in the strobe lights. Overbite held up his hands in surrender and, turning toward the bar, said he respected other people’s property. Sophie sought haven in the women’s bathroom. She checked her phone. Her mother had texted two hours ago asking her if she was having fun and one hour ago to ask if she was safe. Sophie didn’t respond. She was both annoyed by her mom’s anxious protectiveness and ashamed that the truthful answer to both questions would be Not really. A few minutes before midnight, Sophie saw more messages from her mother. You must be having a ball. Send selfies! Just before midnight, Marguerite sent Sophie a text for every number counting down from ten.

The next day, Sophie met her mother for their traditional New Year’s brunch at a diner. “Remember what we talked about at the ballet?” Marguerite said furtively, a fleck of yolk on her lower lip.

Sophie’s head pounded from the previous night’s rum-and-Cokes. She remembered her mother ignoring her suggestion to try online dating again.

“You always meet nice guys,” Marguerite said. “I don’t.”

Sophie took a sip of her coffee. She tried to think of who these nice guys were that her mother had in mind.

“So,” Marguerite continued, “can you take me to the store?”

“Wait,” Sophie said. Did her mother think she should actually put her picture up in a store window? “You need groceries?”

“No, sweetie, the other store,” Marguerite stage-whispered. “To buy a toy.”

“Oh my god,” Sophie said, remembering. “Mom. Why can’t you just look online?”

“I don’t want those things in my browser history, Soph. I’ll start getting ads.”

Sophie resisted the urge to remind her mother that she’d recently asked Sophie to online-stalk eligible veterans on her behalf. Sophie didn’t even want to think about what kind of ads that could lead to.

“Is that really worse than being seen,” Sophie said, mocking Marguerite’s whisper, “shopping for dildos? In public?”

“Sophie,” Marguerite said, taking a bite of toast. “You’re so contrary. You’re the one who suggested this. Anyway, we won’t see anyone you know. But maybe we’ll make some new friends!” Marguerite laughed and nearly choked on her toast. It was a laugh Sophie hadn’t heard before.

The following afternoon, Sophie drove her mother to Zebra, a gentleman’s club and sex toy shop which she knew about only because she’d had to drive past it to get on the highway. Zebra was a grim, squat, concrete block structure that looked like it should have been a garage or a very small prison. When they pulled into the pitted parking lot, Sophie’s rusty Escort hit a deep pothole, so suddenly and violently that there was a loud bang and she and Marguerite were jolted violently in their seats. It didn’t help that Sophie was already nervous. Despite Marguerite’s request to bring her here, Sophie still didn’t want to look too experienced to her mother, or too inexperienced to the staff. To be discovered as a dildo-procuring amateur! Imagine them trying to educate her on best practices for donning a strap-on! Or giving her a tutorial on the range of vibratory strengths! And then her mom would start asking questions… Just something simple, please!

The parking lot was flanked with filthy mounds of gravel-flecked snow. Sophie’s windshield was covered with a mottled gray film of salt. As new snow began to fall silently in fat flakes on the glass, it melted, leaving drops of water so pure they only served to emphasize the grime. The winter sun was setting. It would be dark soon. Sophie heard a car’s wheels spinning in the distance, an engine revving. Someone out there was stuck in a snowbank, trying to flee.

Above the building, a large sign featured a white woman’s prominent, round, air-brushed buttocks cleaved by a fluorescent pink thong. The ass sat astride black-and-white striped haunches. “Zebra,” Marguerite said, squinting at the sign. “They don’t use animals here, do they?”

Sophie fiddled with her ring, sliding it up and down to the first knuckle, switching it to her right hand, then back to her left. She stared at the woman’s ass on the sign for Zebra. She wondered what the woman’s face looked like. She turned off the car, pulled on her hood in a last-ditch attempt to hide her own face, and hurried inside with her mom.

In Zebra’s lobby were two doors. Behind the left one could be heard loud music and men’s laughter. On the right one, taped a little higher than Sophie’s eye level, was a white paper which read MERCHANDISE. Inside, a middle-aged man with a yellowy comb-over sat behind the counter at the register. Behind him, a young woman Sophie’s age, in her early twenties, came out of another door with a bottle of Windex and a rag, her hands bare and visibly red from chilblains or excessive washing. “Wiping the poles now,” she said flatly to the clerk. He looked up from his newspaper but did not acknowledge the girl otherwise.

Marguerite turned to the girl and said, “You should really be wearing gloves, shouldn’t you?” The girl looked at Marguerite and smiled apologetically. Sophie smiled apologetically at the girl.

The shelves boasted anal plugs, pleather gloves, handcuffs. Flavored condoms ranging from jalapeño to cinnamon bun. Edible panties in assorted tropical fruits: mango, banana, kiwi. And the merkins! Sophie didn’t even know pubic hair wigs existed before. There was a broad array of colors, textures, and cuts.

“Are these toupees?” Marguerite called out loudly to the clerk.

The clerk’s eyes stayed on his paper. “Basically,” he said.

Sophie hurried away from her mother toward the vibrators. The size range alone was baffling. A sampler vibrator chained to a discount shelf had two stickers. One read: DISPLAY ONLY. The other, over the power button, read: TURN ME ON. Sophie pressed the button. The vibrator had one setting, which was so strong that after five seconds Sophie’s hand went numb. Next to it was a glass piece, reasonably priced. Sophie couldn’t understand how that could be comfortable, but obviously there was a market for it.

“Mom, look,” she said, holding the glass phallus out to Marguerite. “It’s dishwasher safe. You can even put it in the microwave and freezer.”

Marguerite’s eyes narrowed in concentration. “But what if I drop it? It could chip. That wouldn’t be safe.”

Her mother could talk herself out of anything. “You could probably fix it with epoxy,” Sophie muttered.

Marguerite flipped over all the packages to see the prices before she inspected the actual items. The clerk decided to attend to his customers. “There’s also Christmas clearance, honey,” he called out, jabbing his finger in the direction of a huge cardboard box hand-labeled 70% OFF NO RETURNS.

“Did you hear that, Soph?” Marguerite said, loud enough that Sophie knew the clerk could hear. “He called me honey.”

Sophie followed her mother to the bargain box. Christmas overstock. There were gingerbread vulva cookies, a sexy elf blow-up doll, golden star pasties. And there, a sizeable silicone candy cane vibrator (complete with red and white peppermint-scented stripes), the curved end designed as a handle. Sophie looked at the price and calculated the discount. A little under thirty dollars. A steal if it meant no more Mom Sex Comments. She showed it to Marguerite, who grabbed it from her, overcome with delight.

When they approached the register, the clerk looked at their choice and nodded in bland approval. Sophie felt queasy and hoped he’d hurry up. Marguerite put two twenties on the counter. Letting the vibrator rest there between them bothered Sophie, so she picked it up while Marguerite fumbled to put away her change.

“Who do you belong to, sweetie?” the clerk then asked, addressing Sophie.

“What?” It seemed to come from nowhere. Belong to? Did he think she had a John? Or did men bring their wives here? Or did she need to show someone’s membership pass to pay, like at a wholesale club? The clerk pointed at her hand. She looked down at the thin band on her left ring finger. Ah.

“She’s mine,” Marguerite said.

Sophie, a little too emphatically, said, “That’s my mom,” to clarify they were not engaged. She couldn’t believe they’d come here together. She’d had enough. “And, for your information,” Sophie said to her mother, “I don’t belong to you.” She took off the ring and handed it to Marguerite, who looked stunned. Sophie turned to leave.

The clerk, embarrassed, said to Marguerite, “Well. Must be a lucky guy. Whoever he is.” Before the door shut behind her, Sophie heard her mother’s voice.

“I didn’t raise her to be so rude. And, by the way,” she said, “we’re both single.”

Sophie braced herself against the cold and stepped out into the parking lot, the box with the vibrator still in her hand. Her car looked strangely crooked, sagging toward the rear. She had a flat tire. She groaned, remembering the enormous pothole they’d hit. Sophie got in the car and called Roadside Assistance. She pulled the vibrator out of the box and cursed it. She never should have come here. She threw the toy on the passenger seat and dropped her purse on it so she wouldn’t have to look at it. A floodlight suddenly illuminated the dim parking lot, casting a harsh white light over the grimy snowbanks.

Then she noticed a man walk around from behind the corner of the building. He saw her and started toward her car. They made eye contact. Fuck. Sophie pretended she hadn’t seen him. She locked her doors, looked at her phone as if she were busy, and prayed he wasn’t interested in her.

When the man was just outside her door, Sophie couldn’t help it—she looked again. He had lank greasy hair hanging over his ears, an untrimmed beard, and a tawny moustache. He wore a black nylon jacket and jeans. She knew it would be better to avoid eye contact. Or maybe eye contact would humanize her? He leaned down to look her in the eye and smiled with stained teeth. He tapped her window with his knuckle. “Hey beautiful,” he said, loud enough to make himself heard through the glass. He was practiced at this. Whatever you’re thinking, she thought at him, please. Don’t. Despite being locked in her car, she felt exposed. She pretended she hadn’t heard him and looked down at her hands. Her ring finger was bare. She couldn’t even pretend to be taken. “You work here?” he asked.

He would think that, wouldn’t he. Not that there was anything wrong with the profession! “No,” Sophie said. It was the only word she would say to him, she told herself. But by speaking at all, she knew she had already said too much.

She didn’t look up at him but heard the smirk in his voice. “I know a lie when I hear one.”

It was against her better judgment but, because she hated not being believed almost more than anything else, she looked at him with her best don’t-try-me face. She desperately hoped her mom would come out and save her, then realized it would leave Marguerite outside the car with the man.

“Okay. But if you’re not a dancing girl,” he said, “then what are you doing here?” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it as if he were settling in. Then he smiled again with the cigarette tight in his teeth. He laughed. “You like to watch, don’t you,” he said.

“What do you want?” Sophie said. It was like she’d been programmed to engage, even to please. Why was she like this? Why was he like that?

“Look,” the man said, “I’m not asking for a ride. I just need to get downtown.”

Sophie said nothing. The man stood there, waiting. Sophie was slightly relieved by the change of subject but alarmed by his unpredictability, fearful of what he really wanted.

“I’m not asking you for a ride,” he said again. “I would never do that. I just need to get the bus once I get downtown. I went for my treatments at Saint Mary’s,” he said, referring to the nearby hospital. He pulled up his right pant leg to reveal a skinny, bruised shin.

Sophie glanced at his leg, then back at his hairy face. Memorize his face, she told herself, just in case. “I can’t offer you anything,” Sophie said. “I’m sorry.”

“Look,” the man said, his voice louder in his impatience. “Six bucks never changed anybody’s life. If you needed it, you’d want someone to give it to you.”

Sophie wished she didn’t know that it only cost two dollars to catch the bus downtown. She wished it for his sake, embarrassed on his behalf for his overreach. If she opened her wallet, the man would see there was a little more cash in there than he’d asked for. If she was a good Samaritan like the Bible said she should be, he might even demand more. Blame her for resisting to begin with. Blame her for wanting to keep her hard-earned money. She hated that she was poor and yet still felt guilty about how much more she had than he probably did. And he was right—if she needed it, she would want someone to give it to her. How much compassion do you show for someone who threatens you? Was she a capitalist scrooge? Sure, it was only a bit of money, but it mattered to her. It mattered how he’d approached her. It mattered that he assumed she would give it to him. It mattered that it was hers to give.

Sophie looked back at the man and took a breath. “I told you,” she said, more loudly, “I don’t have anything for you.”

“Just six fucking dollars!” he yelled. Then he raised his fist and slammed it like a gavel on the roof of her car. The car shook. “If you needed it,” the man growled lewdly, “you’d get it.”

Should she call 911? Where was Roadside Assistance, for fuck’s sake? Sophie didn’t know how to deal with this kind of violence. Sophie knew silence. She knew passive aggressive. She didn’t know slamming fists. She should have taken self-defense. There had been fliers on practically every bulletin board throughout every semester in college. Why hadn’t she done it? And although Sophie was locked inside the car, what about her mom? At any point, her mother could come out of those doors and into the path of this man’s rage.

“I said no!” Sophie yelled through the glass. She looked around frantically. “I have nothing for you!”

She was going to text her mom to stay inside. If only her trembling hands could get her phone’s screen to unlock. She turned the screen away from the man and entered her passcode incorrectly. As if in a nightmare, she entered it wrong a second time. Sophie considered her options. She could threaten to call the police. She could try to play nice and lie, saying her dad had the same leg problem and what was it called again and do you see the same specialist at Saint Mary’s and what is their name again? Maybe she could divert long enough if he had answers or maybe he’d leave if she called his bluff. But no matter what she did, more than one person would blame her for whatever would happen. Just give him what he wants, she heard the voices say. It’s your fault for coming here, for just existing in this parking lot, putting yourself and your mother in danger. Why don’t you shut up? Why don’t you speak up? Sophie prayed her mother would stay inside a little longer.

Then it occurred to Sophie that maybe she did have something for this man. She forced herself to smile. She turned away from the window and broadened her mouth to feel like what she imagined a killer’s grin would feel like. “I told you, I have nothing,” she said, as she reached under her purse and grabbed the striped proxy cock. She turned back to face him. “Unless you want this!” she screamed, shaking the vibrator like a demented toddler with a rattle.

She widened her eyes so that, she imagined, they would show far too much white above the irises. Her smile was too wide, enough to hurt, stretched to surpass the openness of desirability and thus enter the realm of ruination. Sophie’s mouth and jaw were so tense she felt a sharp cramp in the left side of her neck. She thwacked the phallus against her window as if casting a spell. It made a rubbery thud on the glass. “Eat,” Sophie said. Thud. “Mint.” Thud. “Dick.” The vibrator wobbled, then went still.

The man was quiet a second. His eyes narrowed. His lip twitched. He stared at the vibrator’s head. Then he seemed to recover from the surprise. He reared back a half step but not before slamming his fist once more on her roof. “Crazy cunt!” he shouted. He turned and headed for the corner of the building where he’d first appeared.

At that moment, Marguerite came outside. Sophie watched as the man turned his head, saw Marguerite, paused, and then headed toward her. Her mom. Her mom who couldn’t help but engage, ceaselessly. The man smiled at Sophie’s mother. Marguerite’s face brightened. She smiled at him. No, Sophie thought. Please. She bargained that she would tolerate any and all boundary-breaching clitoris comments if only this man did not con, or seduce, her mother. Marguerite might even offer him a ride.

But then her mother smiled at Sophie and waved. The man glanced from mother to daughter. His stare lingered on Sophie. Marguerite looked back at the man, expectantly. Sophie threw the hackneyed phallus-turned-sword down on the passenger seat and laid on the horn. She held her hand there and made the machine scream for her until the man realized it wouldn’t end. Marguerite looked back at Sophie and frowned. The man made a quick salute to Marguerite and headed off toward the other side of the building.

When he was out of sight, Sophie let go of the horn. Her arms and hands trembled with adrenaline. She took deep breaths, hoping to appear calm by the time Marguerite reached the car. At least her mother would be safe. This time. Sophie told herself maybe it wasn’t so bad that she’d brought her mom here after all. They should be able to come here if they wanted, damn it. And she’d exercised courage. And won! But still, Sophie knew she wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened—someone would inevitably judge her, not take her fear seriously. Someone might even find the whole thing funny.

Marguerite opened the passenger side door, her mouth hard. “Really, Sophie,” she said. “The horn? You shouldn’t be so aggressive. I was only an extra five minutes.”

Marguerite moved Sophie’s purse to the console and then picked up the candy cane vibrator like it was any other toy her child had left lying around. “Had a nice chat with Burt,” Marguerite said, pulling on her seatbelt. “He gave me this loyalty card.” She tapped the hole-punched card twice on the dashboard. “When we complete it, we’ll get a 20% discount.”

Marguerite then wiggled Sophie’s purity ring off her own pinky finger where she’d stored it and handed it to her daughter, her grip lingering a beat after Sophie had grasped it. Marguerite raised her eyebrows at Sophie to remind her of her recent display of insolence and then released the ring. Sophie slid it back on her finger. She felt a surprising sense of relief. Her finger had grown used to the thing. While it was still a failed bribe to keep her abstinent, Sophie now welcomed her parents’ intended protection. The vibrator would be a similar charm for her mother, she thought, to stave off bad sex, bad men. Even if Sophie had originally suggested it to silence her.

“By the way,” Marguerite said, pointing to the corner of the building, “did you see that man?” Sophie’s mother’s cheeks were pink from the winter air. She was glowing, even smug. “He wanted to talk to me, didn’t he?”

Amy Savage’s fiction has appeared in Bellevue Literary Review, The Carolina Quarterly, BlazeVOX, and Euphony. Her nonfiction has appeared as a guest blog on Discover magazine’s Inkfish. Honors include selection for AWP’s Writer to Writer program. When not writing, she translates, teaches medical Spanish, and performs in medical simulations. @asavagewriter

Cover Design by Karen Rile

CONCERNING RITA HAYWORTH by Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Kim Magowan
CONCERNING RITA HAYWORTH

“So what do you do?” George says, then winces. “Sorry! Reductive question.”

“At least you waited until we each had a glass of wine.” Cora examines her hands, the body part she used to be most vain about, though now even the candlelight picks out age spots. “Since that question always involves paying jobs, I’ll start with what I did.”

She tells him about the newspaper, the many years when she felt like one of the lucky elite who actually enjoyed her job. Then, more recently, the grim years, the waves of layoffs, the newspaper itself thinner every year, more cheaply made, the newsprint smearing onto one’s fingers: a smudgy, emaciated thing that embodied the withered job. After escaping three rounds of layoffs, Cora quit.

George grimaces. “You should never quit! What about severance? What about receiving unemployment?”

“But I maintained my dignity!” Cora snaps a breadstick in half. “I just couldn’t stand it anymore. It’s the strangest experience, watching one’s profession become obsolete, in real time. I felt like a manufacturer of carriage wheels or a lady’s milliner.”

“So what are you doing now? You’re too young to retire.”

Broken at the bridge, George’s nose looks as if someone carefully shifted it two millimeters to the left. His glasses sit crookedly, which gives him an intriguing askew look; he’s a subtle Picasso. In person, he’s more attractive than his Match.com profile picture, where he wears a banana-yellow polo shirt. Her daughter Josie bullied her into responding to his email.

“I keep busy,” Cora says and tells him about the Rita Hayworth biography she’s writing. “I always wanted to write a book, and now I have vats of time.”

“Caskets of time,” says George. “Vats are industrial. Caskets have their own character, which they impart onto whatever they hold. But why Rita Hayworth?”

“Oh, she’s fascinating. For one…” Rita Hayworth, born Margarita Carmen Cansino, changed her name after being cast in only “exotic” roles. She dyed her hair dark red to look more Anglo, got electrolysis to broaden her forehead. Cora shows him pictures on her phone, Margarita with her black widow’s peak, then Rita with her wide, white forehead.

“She has so much makeup. I can’t tell what she looks like,” says George.

Cora remembers how Josie reacted to that electrolysis information. “Ouch!” Josie had said and then told her mother that Finn, her live-in boyfriend, “Wants me to get electrolysis on my pussy.” When Cora looked horrified, Josie said “Good grief, Mom, you’re such a prude! Fine, my nether region.”

“I’m horrified by the concept, not that word. Did you agree?”

Josie laughed. “I told him only if he got branded,” and then laughed harder when Cora recoiled.

“You have no filter,” Cora said, and Josie raised her feathery eyebrows and said, “Look who’s talking!”

Cora tells George that Hayworth married five times, the second time to Orson Welles, the third to Prince Aly Khan. Hayworth was candid about her Alzheimer’s diagnosis, bringing publicity and awareness to a disease that had been misunderstood for years, regarded as shameful.

“But why write about Rita Hayworth today? Why does she matter to you?” says George.

To think she almost vetoed George because of that unfortunate shirt, only replied to his message because Josie forced her. Josie snapped her profile picture, insisted that she wear her garnet earrings.

“Well, I relate to her,” Cora explains. Her father, like Rita’s, had immigrated, Cora’s from Venezuela. Her mother was American, like Rita’s, Swedish-looking; more than one rude stranger asked if Cora were adopted. Like Rita, Cora felt pressured to follow her father’s professional footsteps. With Rita, it was dance, with Cora, journalism, which her father made glamorous. Cora demonstrates the way he’d bang his fist against the table when he talked about freedom of the press. “I adored my father.”

“The thing I’m proudest of in my life is being a good father,” George says. “I wasn’t perfect when they were small—too obsessed with making partner. But after Suzanne died, I had to step up.” He pulls out his phone to show pictures of his son and daughter. “And this is May, my granddaughter. She’s three.”

Without her reading glasses on, the child is blurry, so Cora can tolerate looking at her.

“Do you have grandchildren?” George says.

George’s phone is still in her hand; May’s eyes look like holes. “Yes, two. Griffin and Iris, my daughter Amy’s kids.”

Amy goes by Amelia now, Josie told her. Ironic, since Cora always complained about her daughters allowing their beautiful names to be shortened, made frivolous.

“Do you have pictures?”

“Not on my phone,” Cora says. She leaves out the rest—that she has never met either child. That she only knows what they look like (Griffin has a long ballerina neck like Amy’s, Iris’s ears stick out) from snooping in Josie’s house. She rifled through a stack of holiday cards while Josie basted a chicken.

Another fact about Rita Hayworth: she had two daughters but was estranged from the older one. Yasmin Aga Khan was with her when she died, but her older daughter Rebecca Welles went seven years without seeing her. Why? Not due to Orson Welles, who described Rita as the sweetest person he’d ever met.

Probably Amy disliked her for years before she withdrew altogether. Late at night, Cora often replays the Christmas of 1998, a few months after she and David had separated, when Amy was thirteen. Amy gave her a green leather journal with a clasp and tiny key for Christmas, and Cora refused it because she knew David had helped Amy pick it out. Amy had cried. “Why are you so cruel?” she said. But Cora couldn’t give David the satisfaction. She had such a limited capacity to hurt him, so she had to snatch any opportunity available.

It was only recently that Cora understood what Amy meant: why was Cora cruel to her? Why can’t Amy understand it had nothing to do with her?

“Don’t put me in the middle, Mom,” Josie said more than once. “I won’t discuss Amelia.” Unfiltered Josie, who talks about her boyfriend wanting her to zap her pubic hair. “I’m never having children,” Josie likes to insist. “I’d just screw them up.”

A book explains the difference between “no contact” and “low contact,” which is how Cora now understands those years preceding Amy’s complete withdrawal—Amy’s refusals to come home for Thanksgiving, her terse responses to every tenth email. What instigated the move from “low” to “no,” what lever switched the track? Somewhere in the Rita Hayworth archives there’s an answer to why Rebecca Welles refused to visit the sweetest person Orson Welles knew. Somewhere, Cora has to believe, there is a tiny key.

Kim Magowan author photoKim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. She is the author of the short story collection How Far I’ve Come, forthcoming in 2022 from Gold Wake Press; the novel The Light Source (2019), published by 7.13 Books; and the short story collection Undoing (2018), which won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her fiction has been published in Booth, Craft Literary, The Gettysburg Review, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Her stories have been selected for Best Small Fictions and Wigleaf’s Top 50. She is the Editor-in-Chief and Fiction Editor of Pithead  Chapel.  www.kimmagowan.com

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LEFTOVERS by Regan Puckett

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Regan Puckett
LEFTOVERS

I almost had a husband once, but we never made it to the wedding. Now, he’s someone else’s husband, with a baby announcement on Facebook and a house two towns over. Our last date, we went to an Italian restaurant that served brown bread in gold baskets and didn’t list prices on the menu. A couple’s restaurant. You can always tell who the married ones are. The quiet ones who sit like crumpled napkins and don’t share dessert, eyeing everyone but their own lovers with unreserved curiosity. Visualizing each new body, craving them the way my almost-husband would’ve craved someone else if we’d ever married, even if I let him swallow me whole. I lost my appetite and packed the rest of my carbonara to go.

◊

My father has always been a sloppy cheater. He’d come home smelling like cherries and smile too obviously at his phone when his mistresses sent him a lure, cut out of dinner early when a flirty selfie hooked him. My favorite of his affairs was a waitress at a sandwich shop. She’d send him home with overflowing styrofoam boxes full of cold cuts, kettle chips, loaves of soft bread. Perhaps out of guilt, he’d give them to my sister and me. We’d feast on the leftovers, whispering our theories about what the woman must’ve looked like, if she knew he was married, questions we didn’t ask him, but wanted to. My mother didn’t ask questions either, because she had answers of her own to hide. She’s a quiet cheater. Her affairs leave no trace and bring no gifts. For all my life, their marriage has been a game of hide and seek.

◊

The last married man I slept with was my landlord. I came on to him after careful consideration of his features: brown hair that cradled a blooming bald spot at the top of his skull, a secret for only birds to see, or women he lowered beneath; arms like udon, spongy, thick, and stretchy; furry ankles peeking beneath pants that were too short, like he’d had a sudden growth spurt in his forties, or didn’t have any women to buy him properly fitting clothes. The kind of man who blames his dwindling sex life on his wife’s premenopause, who stares too long when I pass by in the lobby wearing the kind of skirt his wife hasn’t since college. Who gulps when I tilt my head and invite him upstairs. The kind I’d flatten myself against the laminate flooring of my apartment for, let him devour me.

◊

I’ve never slept with a man of my own. Even my almost-husband started as someone’s boyfriend, the kind that couldn’t resist me. Something about me screams I’ll be what your girlfriend isn’t right now. I spent years trying to muffle it before I became the girlfriend and realized some other woman would soon take my place. She didn’t have to be hotter than me, or funnier, or sweeter. She just had to be there, wherever I wasn’t, and make him want to be there too. In the months before our wedding, I searched for signs of cheating, clawing through the couch cushions for unfamiliar hair bands, tracing the rims of the dirty mugs in the sink with my finger in search of lipgloss residue. When I found no evidence, I packed my stuff and left my engagement ring on the nightstand, knowing it is better to give something up than to have it taken.

◊

The landlord’s wife was beautiful and kind and deserved a better man than him. Sometimes I’d linger in the lobby just to watch her arrive, ferrying him coffee and a blueberry donut from the shop down the road, kissing his cheek as a treat. Next to her, he was a wax figure at a museum closed for winter. Greying and sweaty and lifeless. Each time he shed his clothes in my living room, he’d carefully set his wedding band on the edge of my coffee table and slip it on as soon as we finished. I’m not going to leave her, he’d say, firm, as though I was trying to sway him. I don’t want you to, I said, and meant it. A year later, his wife left him instead, marrying her pilates instructor. He sold the apartment complex to a new landlord, someone unmarried and dull.

◊

I attend my sister’s wedding alone. At the reception, I sit between my parents, gossiping with my father about snooty relatives we wish hadn’t come. My mother texts her current affair beneath the table, looking up to smile at us every few minutes. I watch my sister’s husband’s every move, counting how many seconds his eyes linger on a server, how close his hand dips when he leans in to hug a bridesmaid. My sister rolls her eyes at my paranoia, but secretly, I think she’s grateful; he was someone else’s at first, too. When my father leaves early with a headache, Mom kisses his forehead gently, and they both nod. We scrape plates when the last dance ends, and as we do, she asks me why I hadn’t yet found someone of my own to commit to. Instead of responding, I focus on the sound of metal against ceramic. Watch the uneaten food fall into the trash, spoil.

Regan Puckett is a writer from the Ozarks. Her favorite leftovers are Indian takeout. Cold pizza is a close second. Her work has been recognized by a multitude of flash fiction contests and awards, and her most recent stories can be found in Fractured Lit, Emerge Literary Journal, and the 2021 Best Microfiction anthology.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

SEVEN STARTS TO THE WOMAN WHO WENT OVER THE FALLS IN A BARREL by Frankie McMillan

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Frankie McMillan
SEVEN STARTS TO THE WOMAN WHO WENT OVER THE FALLS IN A BARREL
Annie Edson Taylor, 1901

1

Picture the cold dark inside of the barrel. Annie feeling her way over the padded mattress to a harness hanging from the side. The barrel sways in the water. Picture her fastening herself upright into the harness, pulling the leather strap tight across her chest. Picture Annie flailing about, she can’t find her lucky heart-shaped pillow. Now picture the barrel picking up speed, with the current, heading straight towards the falls.

2

It’s not as if falling was something new. Early on, I fell from my crib, I fell through haystacks, I fell from grace, I fell behind the church to kiss the bridesmaids, I fell between heaven and hell then into marriage and when my good husband was taken off to war I fell into despair. When cholera came and took the baby I fell so low I did not know I’d fallen. I fell short of loving men. I fell into debt. I fell about the house; birds beat against the windows, mold grew upon the cheese. Yet in the dark I dreamed that fame could come with falling.

3

Us boatmen watch the wind fall. Then we anchor by Goat Island so we can get Mrs. Taylor and the barrel ready without too much sway. When she begins undressing, we turn our backs. Let the oars rest in the locks, listen to the falls. We’d done talking. We’d told her no one has ever survived going over in a barrel, it was madness it was. She was killing herself and on her birthday.

We turn around. She stands there, a man’s coat flung over her shoulders. A big flowery hat on her head. Can’t help but stare. The long barrel begins bobbing alongside the boat. Later it’ll have white letters painted on it. Heroine of Niagara Falls. But we don’t know that now.

We spit on our thumbs, hold them up to see which way the wind’s coming.

4

If I hide my grey hair under a hat, if I lie about my age, I have my good reasons.

 5

My poor head is full of measurements. The length of the barrel staves, the circumference of the iron hoops, the position of the bunghole, the exact weight of the anvil at the bottom so the barrel floats upright during the ride. I look the barrel maker in the eye. I tell him I have every expectation of surviving.

Night comes. I talk to my lucky heart-shaped pillow, I talk about the barrel maker, the boatmen, the beef-faced newspaper men, I talk about their buffoonery, their banter, and blather, I talk about the Buffalo Exposition, the crowds that await me, how lucky the timing was for my stunt, and I go on talking while candlelight gives such a ruby glow to the pillow I  push my cheek into the plump mounds of silk and Maude, Maude, Maude I breathe though I don’t know any Maude, not even a bridesmaid Maude and later, to knock some sense into my God-fearing self, I draw my knees up to my chin, listen to the noise of the falls and brace, brace, brace, I cry.

6

A huge crowd had gathered on the Goat Island bank. Some had been there the previous day when the wind got too fierce to get the barrel out. Over the noise of the falls, we hear snatches of a voice shouting from the wharf. Mrs. Taylor, refined teacher of New York  …What are the bets …Will she take the plunge… We head around the inlet into view. The crowd erupts in cheers. Horns blast the air. We pause a bit as Mrs. Taylor stands in the boat, big hat on her head, her arms held out to the falls.

7

The noise from the falls grows louder. You are in a barrel heading for the plunge. You are still upright in the harness, arms crossed over your chest. Your lucky heart-shaped pillow, wedged under your chin. The barrel begins to spin. You are prepared, you tell yourself. You have planned for this. Below the boatmen are waiting. Below is your new life, fame and fortune. The noise is deafening. Happy birthday, you breathe into the red silk pillow. Happy birthday, you.

Frankie McMillan is a poet and short fiction writer. Frankie McMillan’s latest book, The Father of Octopus Wrestling and other small fictions (Canterbury University Press), was listed by Spinoff as one of the ten best New Zealand fiction books of 2019.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

NIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED by Peter Amos

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Peter Amos
NIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED

Mom fell asleep around Labor Day that year and the slumber was deep. Dad bagged the recycling, drove to school on weekdays, spread his papers across the living room floor in the afternoons, and asked me often if I needed anything. I always told him no, but each Sunday when I’d finished my chores, I’d wait at the kitchen table for the chunk-chunk-putputput-whirrrrrr of the lawnmower in the backyard, then venture upstairs to see if Mom had stirred.

One Sunday evening in October, Dad was changing the mower blade out by the shed and I figured he’d be occupied until the stars came out. “Mom?” I called gently from the foyer. “Mom?” She didn’t answer and I quietly mounted the stairs. “Mom, are you awake?”

The bedroom door was open and I crossed the threshold. Twilight sounds stirred in the yard, beyond the drawn shade and the poplar boughs in muted silhouette. The oscillating fan in the corner whirred calmly as I neared the foot of her bed. She was reduced by then to a snoring, pillow-laden mound of patchwork quilts; sometimes on her stomach, other times curled up; sometimes a leg flung free of the bedding, other times an arm. But she was always there, and I stood at the foot of the bed, watching the rise and fall of her breath, uncertain if her presence was a comfort or a disappointment. The clock on the wall, the cicada drone, the fan’s hum all seemed to stretch like a tape cassette when you put a finger on the ribbon. Slower and slower, dragging and slurring, until my ears made it silence and I decided to wake her. I had to wake her. I even moved to touch her leg, but, for some reason, I stopped myself, hand outstretched and fingers spread.

I’m still not sure why.

The best I can think is that I was scared. I couldn’t name it at the time, but I know now that I was wary, especially in those first weeks, of spoiling her solitude, of pinching her while she dreamed, of who she might have become with her eyes closed and how much of it she’d remain if I woke her too early. I can’t remember exactly what was going through my head in that moment, but I hesitated. I held my hand over her leg for a split second, and that was more than I had.

“Shh. Come away from there, Laurie,” Dad said from the doorway. I jumped and drew my hand back, startled. “Your mother’s very tired,” he said, leaning with his elbow on the molding. “Come away from there.”

Mom resumed her snoring and the opportunity stole away with the waning daylight while I watched her and damned my indecision. If I had to guess, I think that was when the idea took root, deep in my belly, that I’d wanted her to keep sleeping, that I’d hesitated because I didn’t necessarily want her awake. She pulled the pillow more firmly over her head and Dad cleared his throat, but I just stared at her, willing away the sudden fear that she might never move again. For almost a minute, Dad and I stood there with the hallway light in a column over the floor and evening gathering in the corners. He sighed and I finally turned to leave, but the idea clung to me. You didn’t want her to wake up, did you? Go on, say it out loud.

I never did say it out loud. It was nonsense.

◊

Dinner that night was reheated chicken over buttered pasta. We ate late, Dad and I, at opposite ends of the table and, when we’d finished, I left the dishes to soak and Dad to wipe down the countertops and went upstairs to finish my homework. Mom snored steadily on the other side of the wall and I blocked it out with headphones full of music. Quadratic equations, I think it was, and I worked and worked while faces stared down from just beyond the dim lamplight; posters of movies, photographs of friends, and caricatures drawn by an amusement park artist on my twelfth birthday in which Mom’s head was too big and my face was cheerier than I remembered being. I worked and worked until, with a pop, the bulb in the desk lamp burned out.

For a moment, nothing moved but the moonlight on the wall. Shadowy branches tickled the pale glow and I removed the headphones and went downstairs. I padded across the dimly lit kitchen to the cabinet where Dad stashed the extra lightbulbs, but none remained, so I wrapped my hand in a dry dishrag and unscrewed the single bulb from the light over the sink. The kitchen went black and, at that very instant, a sudden cough cut the silence. I froze and it came again: close. I opened the back door and found Mom sitting on the porch rail, feet swinging against the balusters.

“What’s that?” she asked casually, balancing a cigarette between the fingers of her right hand. I’d always known she smoked—the house smelled like old pennies and air freshener—but I’d never seen her with a cigarette, never found a pack lying around, never seen her stop to buy them.

“What?” I could feel my face slacken and my eyes grow wide, but she didn’t seem to notice. I felt like an intruder in the night, but she was calm, in control of those parts of herself that were visible in the darkness.

“What’s that?” she said again, this time pointing her cigarette at the rag in my hand.

“Oh,” I said, staring at the red ember as I unwrapped the rag and held up the bulb so that she could see. “We’re out of lightbulbs. My desk lamp died. This is the one from—”

“Ah.” She nodded at the dark kitchen window. “I saw.”

Rustling leaves and the distant, irregular harping of a bullfrog hovered around the edge of the quiet and she raised the cigarette and took a drag. Smoke spilled from the corner of her mouth and I remember her staring back from the shadow, not into my eyes but rather just past them, over my ear or maybe at my forehead or the tip of my nose, like an actress taming her nerves. I started to speak, but she cut me off.

“It’s dark out tonight,” she said.

I stopped with my lips still formed around the word Why and she dropped her gaze. Her feet clicked against the balusters and I looked around.

“Sure,” I said. The sky was a truer black, with a faint silver ripple of cloud in the space where the moon hung earlier. I looked back to her and nodded. “Sure,” I said again. “It’s probably the clouds. It’s just the clouds, I think.”

She took another drag and stared just past me again. As she released the stream of smoke, her face turned slowly from mine until she was gazing over her shoulder, into the night.

“I like nights like this.”

“Like what?”

“Dark,” she said.

“Dark?”

“Dark.” She tapped the ash from her cigarette, then motioned with it toward the yard. “I feel like I can hear more of what’s out there. I feel like, when I close my eyes, I can see what I’m supposed to. Better than in the daylight.”

I didn’t know what she meant so I just nodded, and she was silent for a long time, staring off into the yard. The quiet chewed away at my ears and I wanted to return to the kitchen, close the door behind me, climb the stairs back to my room. “I like it too,” I said finally, just to hear something other than night. “It’s—it’s nice.”

She sighed and took another pull. “I used to come out to sleep in the yard, under the clouds, on nights like this. A long time ago. Before you were born, before this house, before your father.” The crickets billowed and we were both quiet and I remember being oddly certain that she wasn’t waiting for me to speak so much as for her words to decay, to break down into their component elements and join the earth under the poplar where the hostas grew. So I waited. “It’s been years now,” she said, after a long time. “It’s been many, many years.”

A light flicked on somewhere behind me while I puzzled over her face; old and smoke-carved; half-lit by the feeble moon, freed again from the clouds. How could she be so comfortable, sitting there talking like that? I was still watching her when she ground the cigarette cold on the rail, dropped it into the garden, and slid from her perch. The questions vanished and my mind raced for something to say, something to keep her there; anything, fact or fiction, question or statement, that she might find interesting. “Without a tent or a blanket or anything?” I blurted out. “You just—”

“I should get inside,” she said, as though I hadn’t even spoken. “It’s getting late. It’s really getting late.” She yawned, then glanced from the house, back to me. “See you in the morning.”

The door swung shut behind her and I stared after her and knew that she wouldn’t. She slowly disappeared into my reflection and I watched my pale face in the storm door, counting under my breath until I was sure she was far enough away. The crickets sang and I still held the bulb in the rag as I pushed the door open again and climbed back to my room.

◊

The next morning, I came out before Dad was up and found the cigarette butt in the silent garden. My breath came in clouds and I covered the butt with mulch, then went back to the kitchen for breakfast. That night, I finished my homework early and, once Dad was in bed, tip-toed quietly downstairs and out onto the empty porch. The wide moon winked behind sparse clouds and the night chirped and buzzed and rustled. I sat next to the burn mark Mom had left on the railing and clicked my heels against the balusters, but she never came and I gave up and went to bed.

For months, I repeated the ritual, each night after Dad fell asleep. At first, I obscured my purpose in case he woke. I carried a glass downstairs to fill with grapefruit juice from the fridge, left my backpack in the kitchen so I could pretend I’d come down for a book, or rummaged in the catchall drawer for batteries or rubber bands until I was satisfied he was still dreaming in the guest room overhead. After a week or two, I abandoned the pretense, safe in the knowledge that I’d be alone.

She slept through the falling leaves and rain and cooling weather and, over and over, I watched the moon drift from shining climax, all the way to nothing, and back again. From the porch, I listened to the crickets in the hedgerow, the frogs in the creek bed. With only the shape of the night to mark the hours, I waited and waited, but Mom never came back out.

◊

One night, while frost still slicked the grass, I decided to sleep in the yard. It was March, I think, and I had no way of knowing that, in a few weeks, I would wake to the smell of hot bacon and descend the stairs to find her standing over a popping skillet like she’d gotten a single, wonderful night’s sleep and nothing more; that she would wish me good morning and pass me a plate loaded with avocado, eggs, sugared berries, and sliced grapefruit; that I wouldn’t know what to do but pretend I hadn’t thought about waking her, every night for half a year.

I had no way of knowing, and I let the storm door close quietly behind, dropped the pillow and quilt on the porch, and sat for a moment on the rail, under the moon and clouds. The night whirred and whined and I wondered if Mom would’ve gotten out of bed that evening in October—and every morning since—if I’d just shaken her leg. Might she be stretched out right now, waiting for me on the empty lawn, if I’d just wrenched the blankets from her body and thrown open the curtain?

I hopped the railing and pulled the quilt and pillow after me. Mulch and petals, then grass and leaves cooled my feet, and the crickets breathed. I unfurled the quilt in the quiet and the crickets erupted in song as my head struck the pillow. Staring at the moon, I thought about marching back up the stairs and shaking her awake, but with that impulse came the idea that I might’ve been dwelling on the wrong failure, the wrong opportunity missed. Like a flash, it passed, and I fell asleep and dreamed of daylight in the windows, of roller coasters on my birthday, of popcorn on the couch, and her face under the blue flicker of a movie that I knew in the dream but couldn’t recall upon waking.

Peter Amos lives in Queens, New York with his wife and one-year-old son. He was raised in rural Virginia and studied jazz and classical guitar in college before moving to the city. His writing can be found at The Maryland Literary Review, Eclectica, and on his website, The Imagined Thing.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN) by J. M. Parker

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AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN) by J.M. Parker

J. M. Parker
AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN)

I kept a hand-written note, on creased but still clean typing paper, wedged into the pages of a book

Dear Sweetheart―

You’ve got the tv program and today’s newspaper―
some white wine in the fridge,
and the end of a bottle of red one on the table,
and another one and pastis in the kitchen―
I don’t know what time I’ll be back
but until that moment
I kiss you―
Frédéric
Also, if the phone rings
let the answering machine answer―see you―

I’d kept a photo of the two of us grinning while cutting up a dead rabbit to put in a stew, after which, as I remembered, we’d sat on Fred’s couch, and I told him I had a boyfriend in America. “I love him,” I’d said, “But he isn’t in love with me.”

“Without love, it’s like a day without sun,” Fred said―and this had sounded romantic, or even sympathetic.

After pulling his note out of the pages of that book and then a phone call, I stood in the atrium of Fred’s office, looking up at his desk. Fred sat at a monitor, smiling at something on his screen until he glanced down to see me. “Sorry I’m a little late,” he said downstairs, meaning he was sorry I’d been standing in the lobby in view of his colleagues instead of waiting by the door, as he’d suggested.

It was gray outside, boats along the canal St. Martin battened down for winter, tarps sagging with water. In French, as in English, people are expected to ask each other how they are on meeting, then to reply pleasantly before inquiring all over again more methodically. If they’re interested. We were. Sitting down in a café, Fred talked about Abriel. “Abriel is complicated,” Fred said. “I’m complicated myself. It isn’t easy for complicated people. Every week is like a Russian mountain.” Fred made up-and-down movements with his hand, I supposed to illustrate the shapes of mountains in Russia.

Two years earlier, Abriel’s name had come in the same moment Fred taught me the French word for “magpie,” one morning, sitting on the couch. As Fred explained that Abriel had spent the night in the courtyard downstairs trying to call, a magpie had landed on a chimney outside, catching my attention. “What is it, that bird?” I’d asked, and Fred told me. I’d never seen a magpie. “They’re fascinated by bright things. To steal them,” Fred said, explaining the magpie’s personality. I’d thought of the two of us there on the couch with the sun and coffee, of Abriel waiting in the courtyard, and of a long-tailed bird who steals bright things that catch the light. “Look,” Fred had said, “With Abriel, things have been getting more serious lately.” Then Fred had put me on a train and we’d said goodbye.

Will you have wine? Fred asked.
Will you?
Up to you, he said.
I don’t mind.
A carafe, then.

We sat discussing our story, discussing how we felt about it, the way you’d talk about a film or a book and what you thought of it. Fred didn’t mind if you looked at his face, but if you looked into his eyes, he shifted them slightly so they changed their way of looking to something more blank. If you persisted, he looked away. “You look a bit sad,” he said.

“You always say that,” I said. Then there was a silence between us, after this reference to an “always” that covered only a few distant days. I waited to see what he would do with that silence.

“I wonder,” Fred said, “What you think about us.”

“Us?” I asked. His face puckered in disgust at my pretending not to understand.

“It was two years ago, wasn’t it?” he said.

“What was?”

“When we met. Was it October?”

“Yes,” I said. “It was in October.”

“I wonder what you think about that now?” The strangest thing happened now, something that hadn’t ever happened to me before and hasn’t since: without moving in the least, my line of vision suddenly fell perfectly level with the tabletop, so I saw everything on it, our plates and glasses with their sharp outlines, from their undersides. It was difficult to draw away from this vision, but his face above it all waited for an answer.

My answer, completely unplanned, was completely familiar. “I came back to Paris because of the sentiment I had here with you. Now I’m here, and never see you, and miss you.”

He sighed. “I didn’t know your thoughts then. I wasn’t sure of you.”

“You didn’t expect me to stay, so you took me to the station and put me on a train.”

“Yes, it was like that,” he agreed. “But you are here now?”

“I’m here.”

“You can call my office when you want to have lunch.” Full of wine and caffeine and energy, I walked across the canal, wanting to think. Fred and I had always been honest with each other. It felt good to say the truth.

I put my hands behind my head on a park bench on the other side of the city, watching a tiny black poodle walk alone across the wide dusty paths and, for the first time, saw I wanted something that wouldn’t be simple to get and that if gotten, wouldn’t be because of anything I did myself to make it happen. A low fog made everything close grainy, everything faraway closer. An hour with him made it easy to remember how he made his coffee, the cup he drank it from, the noise he made falling asleep. Above the Champ de Mars, Eiffel’s tower stood, clipped from a painting, pasted over the chestnut branches, hanging there. The drug-like sense of everything being an option intensified: an option for happiness, an option for sadness, one of a thousand spaces somewhere in between. I’d fallen in love with Fred two Octobers ago. This fascinated me.

That autumn two years before, backpacking across Europe, I’d prepared for France. Handing my passport to the receptionist at the youth hostel, I’d been the only person in line who spoke French. “You are American?” she’d asked. “Yet you speak French?”

“Yes,” I’d said, “I’ve also recently purchased a métro pass―want to watch me smoke a cigarette?” I put Paris’s neighborhoods on different sections of my tongue, moving them around slowly―sweet, salty, sour, bitter. I’d drunk watery lattés and eaten greasy croissants at the youth hostel, found Shakespeare & Company full of American divorcées with loud purring voices, and Gertrude Stein’s house in a street where gusts of wind brushed the granite facades, pouring along ankle-level, like a beach. From Montmartre, the sun withered behind the city, the clack of roller blades passing up through the trees. A Paris sunset.

I took the subway to the Marais, feeling foolish and happy. In a bar, two men stood together laughing, one stout with glasses and a pasty complexion, the other shorter, blond, a silk blazer hanging off his shoulders, shaking as he laughed. After a beer I said hello. The men exchanged a startled expression which read―a foreigner! The blond, curious, stepped closer, clearing his throat, turning his face up into the light so you could see it. It was a nice face, drawn around the mouth with a smoker’s wanness. Turning to his companion in a furious whisper that seemed to generally establish shock between them more than to seek a response, he turned back to me. “Tu parles Anglais?”

“Oui. Pourquoi? Mon français, c’est mauvais?”

He turned to his companion again before answering. “Ah, non! Your French―it is vary, vary good!” He’d taken some care in selecting his clothes, you could see, his hair neatly brushed: a professional. They both smiled. He turned back to his companion, who was making a blowing noise with his mouth, then to me.

“My name is Frédéric,” he said. “This is Jean-Pascal.”

“Max,” I said, putting out my hand. Frédéric and Jean-Pascal had had a little chuckle together. Max: the monosyllabic glamour of the American first name―yes, a real American. Frédéric shook with laughter.

“We are going to another bar,” he shouted over the music. “You might like it. A bar for―les artistes―yes? You will come?”

At the bar for artists, glaring, middle-aged men and goateed boys with glasses danced slowly, foot to foot. A mustached Turk in a baseball cap looked on, shuffling his feet now and then. Jean-Pascal and I danced. Frédéric got drinks. I stood holding mine to my lips, watching Frédéric pound the floor with his shoes, scrunching his shoulders under his blazer. After a while I sat down and he sat beside me.

“Sleepy?” he said. Green eyes. Eyebrows flecked with blond.

“Oui, un petit peu.” I said, mimicking his pronunciation.

“Can I take you home?” he asked. We looked out to where Jean-Pascal was dancing by himself.

“He’s having fun,” I said.

“Yes,” Frédéric said, “Jean-Pascal likes to dance.”

Outside, the street quiet and dark. He hailed a cab. “My things―” I said, “Mes affaires―sont à l’ostello―à la . . . la maison de jeunesse, the house of youth, non?”

“Oui, oui. Où est ton auberge, your things?”

“Bastille,” I told the driver, kissing Fred, then remembering that we’d already kissed in the bar. Frédéric waited in the cab as I came downstairs with my bags, smoking, a hand hanging out the window. “I never waited for a boy in a cab before,” he said, bemused. “I didn’t know how long to wait―one cigarette, or two . . .  three.”

“Was I long?”

He nuzzled me. His hair was the softest thing I’d ever felt. “Richard-Lenoir, s’il vous plaît,” he said.

The next morning, children played in his courtyard. Women called across balconies as they hung out their wash. The sun through the skylight came across Fred. I went to test his shower, smelling like a tourist―paté, beer, dust, and smoke. Fred climbed down from the loft, taking me by my shoulders to dance on the tiles in his bare feet. “Je t’aime,” I’d said. Then Fred was prostrate on the couch with a cigarette, ashing into the blue ashtray.

“Je t’aime,” Fred explained, isn’t a phrase one unleashes on a new-found lover. “Je t’aime” is très serieux.

The second time I called for lunch, it rained again. The canal boats’ plastic tarps dripped and sagged. He wore the same brown turtleneck, face red from the cold.

We ordered plats de jour, getting warm. “Abriel is jealous now,” Fred said. “I always tell after I’ve seen you, but never before we meet.” He paused. “When I describe you, I must make you out to be rather the ideal boy.” I smiled, hating myself―easy flattery. “With us, it’s always like a Russian mountain. Last month we broke―I think the same in English―‘broke up’?”

“Yes.”

“Two weeks not seeing each other.” He paused, lit a cigarette, offering me one. “I was happy with you,” he said, going off in a slew of French he must have been saying for its own sake, seeing I didn’t understand. Rain spattered in waves across the window behind him, a pure gray, as gray as the city looks from an airplane window in winter. Normally his eyes were so sharp that I was surprised every clerk in every store, every waiter, every person on the street, didn’t realize how amazingly alive he was and jump on him, all at once. Looking at me carefully now, his eyes went dead, with nothing in them.

“Listen.” I’d had too much coffee now. That we only had an hour together―and how much time apart after that―terrified me. “If it gives you trouble, I don’t want to see you anymore. But if there’s anything in your heart that gives you any indication that you feel something similar to what I do, please think about it.” Unsure what I was saying had been true half an hour before, it seemed true now. Fred picked up his glass and set it down again. “The last time you asked what I thought of us, you didn’t say what you thought,” I said.

“I would ask you not to ask me that. Let’s eat our lunch. You’ve hardly given me a moment to think.” The waitress came for our plates, and that was the end of it.

At the third lunch he explained that he had a tank of fish that were slowly dying. He and Abriel lay in bed watching them swim. Every few days another dead body had to be scooped from the surface of the water. It was Abriel’s birthday recently. I said it was my friend’s birthday, too. What day, he asked. Ah, well, that was also Abriel’s birthday. But he couldn’t understand why his fish were dying.

“Did you get your tank new or used?”

“Used.”

“Did you clean it before you put the fish in?”

“No. Perhaps it is that.”

“I have sympathy for the inhabitants of your aquarium. Because you killed some of me, too.” Learning a language, drunk on the options of things you can say, you sometimes say anything that comes to your head.

“Oh? I killed some of you?” Fred smiled, turning away, the smile still on his lips, enjoying it to himself for a moment.

“What did you do after I left?” I asked.

“There’s no sense talking about that.”

“I’ll say what I did,” I said. “I sat in that train for five hours, feeling sick. Once the train stopped, I walked all over whole cities feeling sick. Then I took another train, a lot more trains, and buses, and a plane, feeling sick some more in all of them. I bought a bottle of Pastis, drinking it every night to make myself sick again. After a while, I didn’t miss you anymore. I just made myself sick.”

“I didn’t mean to make you sick,” Fred said. We were quiet for a while.

“Abriel is in Province,” he said finally. “I don’t know if he’ll come home tonight. I hope not. He always wants to go out, and I love to go to bed early. I like to get up Sunday morning―at ten, say, or eleven. Abriel isn’t easy to live with. But I’m very difficult, too.”

“I never thought so.”

“Oh, yes. I’m always afraid of losing someone. If they say anything―for example, Abriel and I were at a restaurant, and I asked, ‘Are you happy?’ and he said, ‘Happy about what?’ and I”―Fred pulled a sad face, glancing back over his shoulder like a scolded dog. “I can be sad for no reason. Just sad. I’m very difficult to live with, I’m afraid.”

“You were never afraid to lose me.”

“No. Perhaps because I knew I would. There’s some irony for your story,” Fred said, putting his glass down. “Does your friend travel very much, too?”

“Tonight he leaves for Strasbourg.” Our eyes met without either of our faces saying anything.

I thought he might call; I thought I might call him; but I didn’t see him again for two years.

He was “content de me revoir”―de m’avoir retrouvé, he corrected himself, explaining that content, a strong word, which most people used to mean “satisfied,” meant “fulfilled.” Our original fifteen days together―he’d counted them―had been a dream. At three in the morning on the Boulevard Sebastopol, our hands in each other’s pants trying to hail a taxi, Fred said he was falling in love with me. I wasn’t falling in love. I was already in love. He was my destiny, Fred said. I’d been pretty close to thinking it was my destiny to be with someone else, I told him. That wasn’t my destiny, he said. I should get myself used to that idea, Fred said. He’d been alone, mostly alone since Abriel left, and wasn’t ready for me yet. But if I went back to America for three months, he’d be ready when I came back.

Over the months I was gone, I received notes like this:

I’m a little drunk
I’m not going to say anything now because you will think I say that because
I’m drunk
I have a lot of things to tell you
you will see if you ask me…………..
you have to ask yourself questions concerning abriel, ask me, I will answer
and you will see that you REALLY are in my heart and in my LIFE
I love you and it’s not a joke
as Carmen would say, “et si je t’aime prends garde à toi”
fred

I had no particular questions to ask. He wrote back: “Why don’t you write? Did you meet someone else?” I sort of had.

We agreed to meet in New York. This story doesn’t have a happy ending. Imagine it like this:

A guy gets off a plane with that dopey, expectant look people getting off planes have, waiting for a face to come up out of the crowd at them, too shy to look at every head in the terminal, the whole fluorescent-lit crowd, the features of each a pang of disappointment. Imagine the guy walks past the crowd, his gullible ears perked up, waiting for his name to be called, like a half-hopeless dog, steeled for the surprise. At the back of the terminal, he pretends to be just a guy in the crowd, watching the heads coming off the plane from behind. Imagine him walking toward the exit, that same goofy half-grin on his face making people want to smile back at him, though they can’t because he’s avoiding all eye contact like hell.

Imagine that half-grin gone by the time he stands outside, his jacket collar (someone else’s) tugged up to his ears (he thinks leather jackets look good on him), smoking cigarettes and scanning the inside of each passing bus. He’d never fly into Kennedy in a million years if it wasn’t that the guy he’s supposed to meet found a cheap flight from Frankfurt and was afraid he wouldn’t find the hotel. But with construction at the airport, finding an address in Manhattan is easier than finding the right terminal at Kennedy, it turns out, because the hotel’s night staff tells him his friend the European checked in two hours ago and is waiting for him at the bar next door. There he is, not looking him in the eye.

He’s since sworn never to travel with the French again. For all their railing against American-style homogeneity, they want everything the same wherever they go. Any fluctuation―in coffee, food, prices, smoking regulations―becomes an item to deconstruct.

They drink beer sitting up in bed, sleep coming fast, that nice effortless kind you learn to appreciate, curtains left open to a view of barren Midtown wasteland. Imagine that last night in a cab or a bar, when Fred said he wasn’t in love anymore. “But touch me,” Fred said in the cab, “Like that,” the cab speeding up the avenue, past a statue he’ll see years later, then again more years later, and again after that, first with pangs, then with simple familiarity.

Imagine, when things start going wrong, he calls someone else who lives in New York. Imagine, one night when things start to go wrong, he meets this someone else in front of a theater, goes back to his apartment, explaining nothing of what is going on in a hotel room twenty blocks south and saying nothing to Fred when he comes back to it. Imagine the next morning he gets in a taxi and leaves Fred eating breakfast on a Broadway terrace.

Imagine a long line of gauzy curtains against a bay window the size of a ship’s prow, someone else asks, “Why did it end between us?” And imagine he can’t really think of a reason.

J. M. Parker’s fiction has appeared in Roanoke Review, Segue, Foglifter, Gertrude, and SAND, among other journals, and been reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2015. His novel Seattle or, In the Meantime was recently published by Beautiful Dreamer Press. He lives in Salzburg, Austria, where he teaches creative writing and American studies.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Sarah Schiff
LAB RAT VENGEANCE

In the neuroscience lab where I worked as an undergraduate intern, we were studying what makes mice experience the sensation of fullness. You can just imagine who’d want access to those findings—the know-how to regulate people’s appetites. The primary investigator, Dr. Hillbrawn, suspected a specific subnucleus of being the moderating agent of satiety, so my job was to locate and then lesion it (which is fancy scientific jargon for destroy, and, just so you know, I am pretty fancy). Once I could do the surgeries without supervision, I started coming in late at night so I could work without the distractions of other people’s gossip and smells. One grad student played Nirvana on a loop, so the whole white room consistently felt filled with dismay.

On a late September night, I had an adolescent mouse head-fixed into the stereotax, a kind of miniature operating table. The mouse, big for his age, lay belly down. While his red eyes looked blindly up at me, shiny with ointment to keep them from drying out, I shaved the white fur at the top of his head, made a slice, and pulled the pink skin apart into a vaginal-looking wound. After I drilled a hole through his skull, just as I was about to lower the electrode, I saw the mouse’s whiskers twitch. Or I thought I did. From ethics training, I knew we were supposed to give a booster of anesthesia if we sensed the mouse waking so I pinched his tail, and his whole body flinched, a clear indicator that the dope wasn’t enough.

But what if it had to be? If I continued the surgery how would this mouse react, skull-cracked, brain-exposed, but alert to the world? What if I just—

At the electrode’s pulse, his sticky eyes filled with dampened terror, followed by screeches that rent the antiseptic night. When I pulled the wire free, his body and limbs thrashed across the metal surface, his head locked in place.

I watched with a kind of thoughtful horror. This writhing mouse has touched death, must sense himself on the brink, caught up in the suck toward oblivion.

What a rush it must be. I could almost feel it myself.

After sealing the mouse’s scalp with vet glue, I set up an arena and video camera and grabbed one of the female mice we kept for breeding.

Even among mice, males are considered the norm, the females too inconstant, so to ensure we always had female mice in estrus, all hot and bothered and ready to rut, we had to keep them separated. Just like us, female mice get on the same cycles with their fellow cage-dwellers. Whenever a new litter of pups was born, we’d wait the twenty-one days until they were weaned, pick out the surplus of females, dump them into a tank, and fill it with carbon dioxide, slowly at first to put them to sleep, then full blast. Their very own girls-only gas chamber.

At least they were spared the life of a lab rat.

During my training, I’d watched some videos of mouse sexual behavior, which happened to be even more formulaic than human. The male would dally before sniffing the female’s backside, and that sniffing would go on for quite a while, in all kinds of positions, before mounting, then withdrawing to lick his junk, then mounting again, and soon done after several quick-time humps and rapturous squeaks. The technical term for mouse foreplay is, get this, anogenital exploration.

Feel free to use that next time you’re looking to spice up your dirty-talk.

This mouse, whom I would dub Ladies Mouse, was having none of it. He must have been woozy from the drugs, but once I put him in the cage with the female, he leaped at her like Superman, or rather, Mighty Mouse, snort. It was as if it was his last lay, his final chance to pass on all the genetic material that defined Ladies Mouse and Ladies Mouse alone. He did it for the same reason shipwrecked men carve their last words into the bark of trees. Because even the most is never enough.

The going theory was that if you stress out animals, they’ll do all they can to return to homeostasis. The last thing they’d be up for, supposedly, was the agitation of a courtship ritual. But Ladies Mouse defied the theory. He didn’t fight or flee but found a way to do both, to force himself on another and allow his DNA to escape.

I put on a pot of coffee, already planning my next experiment. First I had to confirm that I’d lesioned the part of Ladies Mouse’s brain I’d been aiming for. Stereotactic surgery only gives you a suggestion of which part of the brain actually gets hit by the electrode. Mouse brains are small, after all.

Which meant I’d have to kill Ladies Mouse. Wishing I hadn’t named him, I put him in a cage and marked it: “Surgerized mice. Save for Deb.” It would take a couple weeks for the neurons to die off, if I’d destroyed them at all. Maybe I’d just stimulated them. Or maybe the burned neurons had nothing to do with it. Was the stress of waking during surgery enough to explain Ladies Mouse’s desperate and freakish last lay?

Over the following weeks, I prepared for Ladies Mouse’s final surgery, and wh