Category Archives: Fiction

FIRST CHOICE by Hannah Felt Garner

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FIRST CHOICE
by Hannah Felt Garner

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.

MELT by Candice Morrow

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MELT
by Candice Morrow

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.

HOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE by Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

HOW I LEARNED TO SMOKE
by Andrew Vincenzo Lorenzen

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.

 

HAUNTING VIVIAN by Amy Savage

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

HAUNTING VIVIAN
by Amy Savage

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

FAVOR by Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

FAVOR
by Kim Magowan

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

OFF by Suphil Lee Park

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

OFF
by Suphil Lee Park

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.

ZOLOFT NANNY by Madeleine Gavaler

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

ZOLOFT NANNY
by Madeleine Gavaler

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.

BIRTHING LESSONS by Rebecca Ackermann

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

BIRTHING LESSONS
by Rebecca Ackermann

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.

THE SOFT ANIMALS by Nathan Willis

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE SOFT ANIMALS
by Nathan Willis

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.

THE UNDERCURRENT by Mariana Sabino

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE UNDERCURRENT
by Mariana Sabino

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.

 

INTUITION by Maggie Mumford

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

INTUITION
by Maggie Mumford

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.

NO NAME ISLAND by Lara Markstein

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

NO NAME ISLAND
by Lara Markstein

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.

URGENT by Gemini Wahhaj

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

URGENT
by Gemini Wahhaj

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.

EXTRA CREDIT by Colette Parris

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

EXTRA CREDIT
by Colette Parris

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.

 

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS by Michelle Ross

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE CONTENTS OF MY EXES’ REFRIGERATORS
by Michelle Ross

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.

 

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT by Charlotte Moretti

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

RUNNING ALONE AT NIGHT
by Charlotte Moretti

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.

 

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES by Eric Rasmussen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

MEANINGFUL DEPARTURES
by Eric Rasmussen

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.

 

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984 by AJ Strosahl

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

N ̓X̌AX̌AITKʷ, 1984
by AJ Strosahl

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.

 

 

THE OTHER SIDE by Ann Stoney

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE OTHER SIDE
by Ann Stoney

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.

HOOPS by Maggie Hill

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

HOOPS
by Maggie Hill

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

“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

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CONCERNING RITA HAYWORTH
by Kim Magowan

“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

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LEFTOVERS
by Regan Puckett

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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SEVEN STARTS TO THE WOMAN WHO WENT OVER THE FALLS IN A BARREL
Annie Edson Taylor, 1901
by Frankie McMillan

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. Her 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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NIGHTS WHEN I’M TIRED
by Peter Amos

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by
AUTOPSY OR, THE HOUSE OF YOUTH (LIKE A RUSSIAN MOUNTAIN)
by J.M. Parker

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

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 when the time came, I laid him down in a tray of crushed ice inside the fume hood. This time I was sure to inject him with a healthy dose of anesthetic—actually it wasn’t so healthy, har har.

This final surgery, a transcardial perfusion, would be belly up.

A draft from somewhere rustled some hairs that had escaped from my bun as I made a horizontal incision just beneath his rib cage and pushed apart the skin with my thumb and forefinger. The twitching bright redness of his organs made me stop. I could just glue him up now, virtually no damage done. But I kept going, remembering the steps of the surgery in my head like a telephone number. With the scalpel, I traced the shape of a shield along the edges of his ribcage and, as if peeling away a sticker, lifted the skin, followed by the sternum. There his heart pumped wildly, I couldn’t believe with what tempo and vigor. His system was drugged and irreparably damaged, but his heart beat pertinaciously on. Holding my breath, I pinched the pulsing heart between the forceps, pierced a hole in the right atrium to let the blood ooze out, and, with a trembling hand, inserted a needle into the left ventricle. I didn’t exhale until the saline, then paraformaldehyde began their journey through his organs. Ladies Mouse’s whole body moved as if in a seizure, then just his fore paws, as if waving goodbye. In less than twenty minutes, his body had gone stiff, all the organs paled to a chalky white.

Rather unremarkable scissors are sufficient for cutting off mice’s heads, but I thought Ladies Mouse deserved the guillotine that we reserved for tough-necked rats, the royal treatment.

With his head in my blood-dappled gloves, I scissored away his skull as if it were a cuticle on a nail, and the clattering sound of me dropping the scissors back on the tray made me jump, an alarm bell shrilling its warning in my head. I looked around, expecting to find someone who’d been watching me this whole time.

But, no, I was alone. What was the next step again? All I could think about was the bloody, decapitated body and a missing witness. Had I pickled Ladies Mouse for nothing? Then I saw the mini-spatula and knew what to do.

After severing the cranial nerves, I popped Ladies Mouse’s brain out like a pea from its pod, and my heart clamored against my chest as I caught it before it fell to the floor. Concentrate, I told myself as I slid the brain into a vial of paraformaldehyde for post-fixing. Then I tossed Ladies Mouse’s corpse, wrapped in a surgical glove, into the freezer with the other carcasses, bound eventually for the incinerator, and tried not to feel sad for him. All the next day, I stayed in the lab, drinking coffee and keeping my eye on the solution, making sure no one disturbed it. That night, after everyone had finally left, I cut the solidified brain into sections, stained them, and searched for the missing neurons under a microscope.

It was a miss. I’d put Ladies Mouse through all that, only to hit a neighboring subnucleus.

But maybe it was a happy miss. Discoveries can’t be anticipated, after all. Maybe, I thrilled to think, males also have an ever-elusive g-spot, and maybe it’s in the brain.

The next morning, I was woken by Jason, the grad student responsible for supervising me. I didn’t like sharing what I’d been up to, but I’d need his help, and Jason was always railing against the Man, by which he meant academia, its rigidity, its unpredictable hesitancies, and its general stinginess. He usually spoke in a low, emphatic tone that sounded on the verge of angry, but once I’d explained my plan, his voice seemed to jump an octave. “Sweet, nice work, Deb. Way to stick it!”

He set me up so I could spend the next few months breeding my own litter of mouse pups, which mostly just consisted of him signing forms I put in front of his face. After I’d put aside half the weaned mice as the control group, I dove into my experiments. How could I get them to take that desperate lunge toward whatever life remained rather than retreat to nurse their wounds? The findings, I knew, could have huge implications. Forget controlling appetite. Whoever knew the formula for invigorating the sex drive could rule the world. Or at least buy it—and was there a difference?

◊

Over the holidays, the city was aglow with Christmas spirit, but I was in the lab, trying to figure out what I was missing in my research. As the new year approached and as more and more mice failed to live up to their predecessor, I started to suspect that my initial results had been an anomaly, related more to Ladies Mouse’s distinctive qualities than anything endemic to mice, let alone humankind.

There was no payday in sight.

Then, at the beginning of Spring term, Jason delivered a presentation to the whole lab, complete with PowerPoint slides. The topic: my research.

I was sitting at the back of the conference room, in denial. This couldn’t be my hypothesis, my experiments and data, my potentially field-changing findings he was claiming as his own. I considered briefly, and absurdly, that he’d been working on a parallel experiment this whole time. But no, I even recognized my mice in the videos, the ones whose neurons I’d been destroying and whose sex acts I’d been filming. The more he spoke, his voice assuming that self-righteous tone of being the only person in the room to have thought of something previously unthought, the more insistently my heart pumped, and the feeling of it nearly bursting through my chest made me remember the blood draining out of Ladies Mouse. What did Ladies Mouse ever do? The undeserving one was Jason.

I wasn’t even a footnote.

After the presentation, I found him in the cafeteria, a huge building, airless as a shopping mall, with a daunting design of hatched wooden planks on the high ceiling. Fight or flee? I went up to where he was sitting and slid his plate of salad bar salad down the length of the table like an air hockey puck. When I put my face in front of his, the clatter of his dropped fork, just like that of the scissors I’d used to trim away Ladies Mouse’s skull, made me shiver. But his obvious fear made mine manageable.

“Deb.” Even in that one syllable, I could hear the quavers in his voice. “How was your Christmas?”

“Bullshit, Jason.” I got so close, our lips were almost touching. From afar, the moment might have looked romantic, like I was willing to vault a cafeteria table just for a kiss.

“There’s nothing to say,” he went on all aquiver. “I was the lead on that experiment, set you up, supervised you.”

“It was my idea, Jason. I did the work. You just gave the okay.”

“More like you were the manual labor, the benchman.”

“That’s a lie, and you know it.”

“I provided the materials, the animals, the equipment, got the go-ahead from Dr. Hillbrawn. You don’t even have a college degree. Everything you used was mine, which means so are the findings.” He sneezed, and it sounded like the karate chop yip—hiya!—of a cartoon ninja.

Maybe he’d done those things, but none of it was enough to justify taking my work. Authority too often gets the glory, without even showing up. “I’m telling Dr. Hillbrawn everything.”

“He’s been kept apprised this whole time. We even got IACUC approval and had to cover up some of your shadier techniques in the process, I’ll have you know. As far as he’s concerned, the experiment’s mine, and that’s because it is.”

“That’s some false reality you live in,” I said, but to my own ears, at least, my voice sounded thin. He couldn’t have me beat.

“I tell you what, Deb,” and he hopped his chair forward and picked up his fork as if about to dive into an invisible meal. “I’m presenting the findings at the conference in April over at NYU. You can join me at the poster session, help me answer questions when it gets busy.”

“I’ll be there.”

He lowered his eyes to my short black skirt and rainbow leggings. “Just make sure you look the part.”

I made my best holier-than-thou face. “I thought you were all about sticking it to the man.”

“I am. But sometimes you have to play the game.”

And here I was, thinking I was playing.

When I left the cafeteria, it was snowing. As I watched my step over the sidewalks, I wondered why it didn’t thunder in a snowstorm. Where was the protest of the sky?

◊

Since ketamine is a schedule three controlled substance and hallucinogenic, any lab that uses it is subject to DEA inspection, thanks primarily to a rather experimental bunch of 1970s California yoga instructors with a death wish. Dr. Hillbrawn kept it in the lab as anesthesia for the mice and rats. The problem, though, was the dosage: I’d need to hoard it for months before collecting enough to cook down and concentrate, but I didn’t have that kind of time. Or patience.

How ironic, then, that powder AP5, just another antagonist of NMDA receptors, was readily available for a couple hundred taxpayer dollars. In Dr. Hillbrawn’s lab, there was AP5 to spare.

So when it came time for the neuroscience convention, I was ready. In a single bathroom off the main conference hall, I took out my stash of AP5 in dimethyl sulfoxide, since it can dissolve chemicals that are hydrophobic (afraid of water, of all things). It’s also great for transporting substances through skin.

As I stirred deliberate figure eights into the solution, I could feel the heat building under my arms with the prospect of revenge, but that was soon chased by doubt: Was I the bad guy here?

Feeling like a witch above her brew, all I could think was I needed to come out of this without losing my dignity, even if meant doing something as rotten as the smell drifting up from my potion: a heady blend of spoiled milk and asparagus-laced urine.

All vengeance really was was self-defense after the fact, a welcome balm to helpless feelings.

As I looked around to ensure I hadn’t left anything incriminating behind, I caught a glimpse of myself in the streaky mirror. It was the nicest I’d ever dressed: gray twill pants and a white collared shirt, complete with a narrow snake-skin belt.

No witch was I.

After pulling on fresh surgical gloves, I donned another pair, these made from black lace. The left-handed one was soaked in my solvent. Before leaving, I doused myself with patchouli to cover the smell and thought, it’s not just mathematics, firefighting, and rock and roll that young girls get dissuaded from. Our potential for bad doings gets stymied too. We unlearn our capacity for trouble. Beamed to us daily, we hear the messages that we’re built for good, for caretaking, obeying. Boys will be boys, but girls aim to please.

How deep did the lesson run in me?

Across a sea of ambling scientists, there was Jason, setting up his poster at the far wall. In all his high fashion sense, he was sporting a short-sleeved collared shirt with a bowtie. Feeling as if my gliding body was a substitute for the real me, I weaved my way toward him, protecting my left hand as if it were broken. I felt unbound, sipping on trouble, a drink like liquor that rouses and dulls.

“No hard feelings,” I said, clutching his arm and holding on a few seconds longer than a casual greeting merited. He grinned, reached for my shoulder, and said, “That’s my Deb.”

With my most innocent smile, I withdrew my hand, claiming nervousness. “Gonna go to the little girls’ room before the big show.”

“You might want to wipe off some of that patchouli or whatever the hell it is. It reeks. And lose the gloves, Elvira.”

“I guess I got carried away,” I said and hurried back to the bathroom, feeling as if I’d had too much caffeine and might be propelled into a topple. To get the stink out, I rinsed and scrubbed the glove, wrapped it in a couple plastic bags, and buried it deep in the nasty bathroom trash. Then I splashed some cold water on my face, trying to tame the flush in my cheeks.

“You go here,” Jason told me when I returned, indicating the spot against the wall. He stood on the other side of the easel that held a rather shoddily designed poster. The sheets of data pinned to the board hung askew, and the small font was hard to read. Shockingly, he hadn’t asked me to design it for him, but probably—rightfully—he hadn’t trusted me to give it my best. My kind of crafty wasn’t for him.

He didn’t seem at all conscious of his poster’s inadequacy but stood with hands on hips, looking out with a devil-moon grin at the meandering scientists. When he bent to tie his shoe, I scribbled my name into the bottom corner.

As the scientists made their way toward us, they stood close to the poster, as if about to grab the easel up in a waltz. Soon they were gathering in droves, intrigued by the originality of the research, not to mention the fact that it was about the sex drive. Salt-n-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk about Sex” was stuck in my head, and I hummed it to try to still the nerves. When would the AP5 kick in? As he handed out ivory-colored business cards, Jason’s voice rang with confidence, and with each card, I worried more. Maybe I hadn’t held on to him long enough. Had I screwed up the dosage? Maybe AP5 didn’t work the same way ketamine did. If nothing happened, I told myself, nothing would happen. Maybe it would even be a good thing.

Motivated by the size and stature of his audience, Jason kept expounding, but after he’d been through the spiel multiple times, handed out at least thirty cards, and answered dozens of questions, his responses grew suddenly curt. He shuffled the cards in his hands. Was this it? When he stared at the ceiling, mouth agape, I took over the presentation. “As you can see, the results far exceeded the expectations of my hypothesis.”

The next time I glanced at Jason, his business cards were strewn across the floor, and each hand was clasped to the opposite shoulder, his elbows draped in a V across his chest. He started rocking, alternately standing on his tiptoes and falling back on his heels. Accustomed to eccentricity, the scientists looked at him out of the corners of their eyes.

Then Jason growled, and the real hallucinations set in. “Fuck you,” he started yelling at the scientists. I flinched at the first one. “Get the fuck out of here!” He was moving erratically, like a bee was after him.

Now my fears were upturned. Maybe I’d given him too much. What if he became violent? What would an overdose of AP5 look like?

“Are you okay?” one of the scientists asked him. Her name tag told me she was Dr. Chelsea Pak from Stanford.

What if he died?

“Get off me!” he yelled.

“Is this normal?” a Dr. Brian Alexander asked. I’d all of a sudden become Jason’s handler.

What if there was an investigation?

What else hadn’t I thought of?

“Shut up with your incantations!” Jason got up close to the scientists, who wiped his spit from their faces. Then, as if they’d bared fangs at him, he jumped back, dabbing his forehead, chest, and shoulders before holding up his two index fingers in the shape of a cross. Like a sprinkler, he moved the cross back and forth, forming a barrier between him and some of the smartest people on the planet. “Christ!” he screamed. “Christ, save me! Save me from Satan’s children.”

“Anyone an MD here?” Dr. Pak asked. Another scientist, Dr. Portia Green, was inching toward Jason, making shushing sounds. As she approached, Jason crumpled to the floor and crawled under the table, wailing hysterical tears, ringing the pathetic tones of a lone child finding himself at the end of the world. “Oh Christ, Oh Christ! Save me from this hellscape.”

As the scientists looked at each other in nervous horror, I slipped Jason’s business cards into their unfeeling hands, feeling fine and redeemed.

But the next morning, I woke in sheets that felt marinated in sweat. What if there was a comeuppance? I’d covered my tracks well, but would Jason suspect me? After all, he knew I had a motive. I spent the next several nights drinking late, feeling by turns monstrous and vindicated, sip by sip.

But time passed, and I was left alone. Vindicated then. I’d done Ladies Mouse proud.

Why had I even doubted myself?

I’m not sure what was more damaging to Jason’s credibility, the delusional hysterics or his invocation of Christ, but, as far as I know, he never got a job in academia.

Dr. Hillbrawn, though, became the director of a major sexual dysfunction research center in Manhattan. Last I heard, none of his products worked better than placebos. But sometimes that can be enough—just thinking things are so can be pretty damn persuasive.

At other times, though, you need every corrective at your disposal.

Sarah Schiff earned her PhD in American literature from Emory University but is a fugitive from higher education. She now writes fiction and teaches high school English in Atlanta. Her stories have appeared in Raleigh Review, J Journal, MonkeyBicycle, and Fiction Southeast, among others. One has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Lab Rat Vengeance” is excerpted from her novel-in-progress, As Though to Breathe Were Life.

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

THE SKULL by Marc Tweed

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

THE SKULL
by Marc Tweed

Marv.
Teenagers found him washed up on the sand, bloated and bright in his favorite Hawaiian shirt. A crowd gathered and called the police, but not before those who found him took his wallet, wedding ring, car keys. The car itself. Authorities appeared, took pictures, bundled him up and drove his body past the palm trees and liquor stores to the morgue in Oakridge on 31st. There were several other bodies already there so he waited his turn, something he’d always found difficult.

◊

Lorraine.
Around dinner time, a Broward County detective came to Marv and Lorraine’s condo in Plantation with two shoegazing deputies. He told her he wished everyone had their names sewn into their clothing because it would make his job a lot easier. Lorraine just looked at him with her mouth open. It was late when they left. She drank a whole bottle of Lakeridge Southern White and lay on the couch staring at the ceiling until daybreak, when she loaded herself and another bottle of Lakeridge Southern White into the Volvo. She transported what tears she could muster to the beach and spent an entire day rusting in the sun next to an ocean she couldn’t stop thinking briefly, fatally contained Marv. She sat there cradling her grief like a baby, careful not to break it or fray its edges as it was suddenly and without ceremony her only possession of any consequence.

She rocked gently back and forth, ignoring passersby, recalling certain details about her husband, a big, booming man in flip-flops born in Romance, Arkansas. She made a list in the air with some whispering. He loved to golf. He was kind to animals and children. He could drain a double gin & tonic fast. He was impatient. He served in the Coast Guard and had three missing fingers, as well as a human skull he found in an abandoned rowboat and kept for himself. She spoke the empty platitudes and idioms he’d liked best. Quick as a whip. All that jazz. Drunk as a skunk. Life isn’t always fair. Big deal, champ.

And this: he’d taken special interest in their new neighbors, a mother and son from Indonesia with whom they shared a wall. A very special interest and a very thin wall. She picked up several more bottles of Lakeridge Southern White on the way home from the beach. She bought a whole case, which is twelve bottles.

◊

Putri.
She had a list of complaints and spit them one-by-one into the phone at her hunched mother listening in Bali. Uh huh, her mother said.

The boy will only eat food that has been deep fried. He grows sullen if there isn’t anything deep fried close at hand for him to devour. America is ruining him. He is only age thirteen. He is inflating like a balloon. And sugar. There are dark circles under his eyes, and his breathing becomes heavy with little exertion. We are having disagreements over food and video games and school.

Silence on the phone.

He is failing school, Mom.

Just breathing.

I told you about Marv already. He’s dead, it was on the news. Before that, he was helping and there was some hope, but now Marv has disappeared just like Mauli’s father—well, he drowned—and there does not seem to be any more hope. What Marv would do; he would take Mauli on walks. To get his heartbeat up. And he would pay him one quarter for every block. And he would talk to me. And his wife hates me. And I’m scared to tell Mauli he’s gone.

Uh huh. Nnnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Putri’s mother’s voice dipped to its lowest possible octave.

◊

Lorraine.
The teenagers took the Cutlass on a lengthy joyride, and she had to retrieve it from an impound lot on the edge of Pine Island Ridge. The attendant, too animated for such a quiet place, looked at Lorraine with vast, watery eyes. He’d seen it on the evening news. That man your husband sounded nice, I like the way they say about him, just a nice guy all over. He was really sorry, sincerely sorry. His wife wasn’t dead, but his parents were, he offered. He said they were murdered right in front of him when he was only seven. He made a stabbing motion with an empty hand. The teenagers had slashed the seats and ceiling of the Cutlass, which Lorraine now considered an ironic name for this particular car.

◊

Putri.
Before she could tell him, a note was slipped under their door.

Perhaps you’ve heard Marv has drowned is gone. Whatever agreement you had is now null and void. Please return any belongings he loaned you by leaving them outside the garage. Your neighbor, Lorraine. Mauli stood in the foyer gripping the note with both of his thick hands and began to sob.

Putri worried at how depressed, how angry the boy had been since Marv didn’t show up Friday night to take him to dinner as promised. She worried about the secret time in his room. She worried about the fact that he was a teenager, a huge sullen teenager with no friends and a thick accent. She worried even more when she checked on him in the middle of the night and found him snoring in the glow of his night light, holding the skull Marv gave him to his chest, his eyelids open, his eyes rolled back in his head.

◊

Lorraine.
Lorraine’s shopping list was brief and sundry: onion rings, lube, cough syrup with codeine, a Komodo dragon. She veered onto 842 West from Plantation toward the shopping centers of Fort Lauderdale, reveling in a claptrap serenade: air conditioner drone, ice in her gin & tonic as castanets. She shook her head to the feral rhythm, the landscape a swerving, indistinct blur; a whoosh of charcoal pavement decorated with cerulean smears of rippled sky.

She looked at the coupon. 20% off select reptiles. The passenger seat occupied by several empty cans of gold spray paint. She had a lot of spray paint on her face, around her mouth. She rolled down her window and shouted something incoherent to even her at a passing car. Its driver frowned, as did she.

She turned on the radio full blast. Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue: The deafening distorted squeal was just a whisper to her. Tell me no secrets, tell me some lies. Give me no reasons, give me alibis. Tell me you love me and don’t let me cry. Say anything but don’t say goodbye. She ran her fingers through her loosening perm, ripping roots, and opened her mouth wide in a full-throttle yawn that turned almost seamlessly into a deafening scream.

Marv had been dead for thirteen days. Thirteen days since he’d waded into the Atlantic. She remembered the garish Hawaiian shirt and a blank look when he left the condo. She imagined his face framed in seaweed, his lungs spilling their last effervescent treasures, his body softly sinking to the ocean floor. She took a big sip of her drink. Fort Lauderdale loomed on the horizon. The Cutlass still reeked of weed and musky cologne. Long strips of ceiling fabric billowed in the wind, occasionally touching her face, covering her eyes. Oh Marv, Lorraine muttered sorely brushing it away as she steered unevenly past Galaxy Mart, Firewood City, Pump & Go, Sandy’s Place Too.

The night Marv drowned, the deputy had said, We’ll do everything we can to help you, ma’am. We know you’re feelin’ pretty bad, and I would, too. Do you have a friend or neighbor that can come sit with you? Neighbor. Lorraine frowned bitterly at the word and the thought of Putri. She thought of the day Putri moved in, not wasting any time sucking up to Marv. In her tiny white shorts and halter top, prancing shoeless in the kitchen, showing speechless, grinning Marv how to dance the Topeng while Lorraine and Putri’s son Mauliwarmadewa stared unhappily at each other over bowls of melting sherbet.

◊

Putri.
She stretched out on her bed in the afternoon, thinking of Marv, imagining him walking out of the ocean, covered in seaweed, mouthing words she almost knew as the ocean receded behind him. She fell asleep that way, and her dream carried the vision forward: Marv taking her by the waist, kissing her neck, suggesting with his soft brown eyes that she might consider loving him—at least consider it—as he guides her into the waves, under the ocean surface. Putri wanted to say that she had done more than consider it, but the words came out in a clump of oblong bubbles: Lorraine.

She woke and felt a presence, and the presence was her son. He was in the hallway, just outside her bedroom, where she sat up, squinting. He was moving in sweeping gestures. He was dancing? Mauli? What are you doing, please? Why are you awake? She rose and went to embrace him, but he shimmied away into his room and locked his door behind him.

◊

Lorraine
About five minutes from downtown, a highway patrol car pulled her over. Lorraine ducked and drained her gin and tonic, watching the officer in the side mirror as he approached, muttering into the radio clipped to his stiff blue shirt. She attempted a sweet smile and rolled down her window. What did I do, officer, she slurred.

Do you remember me? He adjusted the angle of his broad-brimmed hat. His teeth were huge. She felt her scalp crawl. With pursed, spray-painted lips, she shook her head and fidgeted with the tortoise shell clip in her hair. She couldn’t remember meeting him, but there had been so many policemen in such a short amount of time.

Ma’am, I was at your house three days ago. Your neighbor called us for the noise? The pounding on the wall and cursing?

Lorraine nodded slowly.

You were swerving pretty good back there. Can you please step out of the car?

What did I do?

You’re driving recklessly, endangering yourself and other motorists. We’ve had several complaints. Let’s step out of the car, okay? You got spray paint all around your face, you a huffer? Have you been drinking?

Of course not, it’s only one in the afternoon, Lorraine spat, her demeanor turning sour. She struggled out of her seat belt and, once she was out of the car, rushed past the officer and ran clumsily down the side of the highway until she collapsed in a bawling heap. As the officer carried her to his cruiser, she stared into the cloudless sky, her head rolling limp from side to side like a rag doll’s. The patrolman spoke into his shoulder radio as Lorraine sat handcuffed in the backseat of his cruiser. She squinted out the window into the sun, let its enormous glare swallow her whole, let herself float briefly, blissfully into a blinding white vacuum as they hummed down the highway.

◊

Putri.
She told her mother the truth about her arrangement with Marv, about the condo, the skull. Her mother wanted to know where she’d met him, and Putri surprised herself by admitting that Marv had contacted her on the internet. There was silence. And that is how I am in Florida, Mother, not working.

Uhh nnnnnnnnnnnnnnn. Her mother’s voice found the bottom of the well.

◊

Lorraine.
At the Broward County jail, Lorraine was issued a thin, scratchy sheet and an outfit like she’d seen on TV. She scrubbed her face hard over a sink. There were too many women in her cell so she’d have to sleep on the floor. She curled up next to a radiator and watched a group of unpleasant women play cards and roll their eyes at each other. She wondered who else among them had been awake for five days straight. The TV was on but nobody was watching. Something about a new kind of microwave oven: The convenience will simply. Blow. Your. Mind. The speed is incredible. And listen to that … total silence. See? Total silence! The studio audience exploded.

There was an argument between several of the women playing cards, and Lorraine asked them to speak more softly. A burly one with matted hair and bloodshot eyes struggled to her feet and loudly explained that she’d jam a pipe up Lorraine’s ass if she didn’t shut the fuck up that instant. Lorraine shut the fuck up. She retreated back to her blanket by the radiator and lay there, watching the last bloodless remains of daylight struggle through the milky-filmed window of the jail cell, angry at Marv for the shabby circumstances she found herself in. The Lakeridge Southern White and gin & tonics and gold spray paint had worn off completely. Her head throbbed. She pulled the sheet over her face and considered how wide-open her eyes were, how cavernous her expression likely looked. She felt the crazy electricity that comes with days upon days of vigilance, of keeping your eyes wide as saucers, anticipating every single molecular vibration and total catastrophe, the world coiled at the ready like a pit viper.

◊

Putri.
She took Mauli to the beach at night. They drove there in the car that would be repossessed. The car payments his wife would find out about if she hadn’t already. They went to see the place Marv died. They sat in the sand and cried. They had come a long way to be with Marv. She’d done some things for Marv, physical things that didn’t make sense to her. But over time something had begun to tug at every corner and curve of her, a little at first, then more. A fondness and a warmth and something else. But the plan was now dashed, as they say. Mauli’s head fell and his shoulders shook, silhouetted by bright moonlight.

When they returned home, she sat outside on the front stoop after the boy went in to sulk or sleep in his room. She heard someone call out for their cat across the lake behind the condo. She saw a tiny lizard scamper up a drain pipe next to the garage. It stopped here and there to cock its head at something only it could see. It went up, it went down. It had nothing in mind or everything at once. Maybe it just liked the feeling of its tiny claws scraping the painted metal of the drain. Maybe its son or daughter spent too much time cradling a stranger’s skull. Maybe it had just gone too long without sleep.

◊

Lorraine.
Someone sat down nearby and touched her hip.

I’m Shari. There’s no cause for concern.

Lorraine was extremely concerned.

All you need to do here is let it go, tell someone. See, I have done some unthinkable things.

She poked her head out. Shari was long and tough, buck teeth shining in the stripe of early-morning light the triple-pane window allowed. She had long, dirty hair and little wire-rimmed glasses. Lorraine sat up. So my husband always had this skull, skull of a little girl he thought. And he found it in a rowboat. He was in the National Guard and had missing fingers. I’m not sure, but I think he paid someone, a woman from Bali, to come live next door to us. And he spends…spent a lot of time with him, this woman’s son.

Shari said, Okay?

And then my husband, he died. I think he took his own life. And I don’t know if it was out of guilt or what. But I’m going to figure out how this bloodsucker got ahold of him.

Shari, sitting cross-legged, casting a thin shadow against the yellow-painted cinder block wall, asked, And what exactly are you going to do? 

Lorraine had no time to answer that question, as the sergeant came to inform her she was to be released immediately. She looked at the big metal clock above the lunch table. The place that sold reptiles opened in twenty minutes, and it just happened to be only two blocks away.

◊

Putri.
She and Mauli sat on the sofa looking away from each other. On the coffee table was the skull Marv gave him. Putri wanted nothing to do with it. But then again it was a gift from Marv, and Marv had paid for a lot of things over the last six months. There was a sound coming from the air duct high on the wall for the last day or so. The vent cover was off. It was a wheezing sound and scratching, then almost a hissing. And the room smelled foul. If Marv were alive she would call him, let it ring five times then hang up. He would use his key, and she would ask him to see what’s wrong, get on a ladder and poke around with a golf club. With Marv dead, they just sat silent until dinner and its necessary arguments began. Then the foul odor and hissing would be the least of her worries, at least she assumed so.

Marc Tweed’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in NOON Annual, New World Writing, The Normal School, Juked, X-RAY, and more. Marc has recently completed a collection of short stories. He lives in North Seattle, USA and also creates paintings, drawings, and music. www.marctweed.com

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

LOAVES by Lizzy Lemieux

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LOAVES
by Lizzy Lemieux

My daughter tells me her dream while I pack her lunchbox. What a terrifying nightmare! I say and kiss the top of her head. She narrows her eyes. Mom, she says, It was not a nightmare. It was a dream. She smiles, showing off two lost teeth.

I do not correct her. Even though it is polite, when you dream up terrible things, to pretend that they are unwanted. But she is still learning, still puzzling over the sound an ‘o’ makes. When is it a short exhale? When is it a sharp howl? I add a sticky note to her lunch and make myself proud. Motherhood is contained in small gestures. Later, I get the call. My daughter has decided today the ‘o’ makes the howling sound.

When I arrive at her school, the teacher says, Your daughter is crying because she cannot read the sticky note in her lunchbox. She pronounces love like loaves of bread. I bristle. She is very fragile, I say. I collect my daughter from the timeout corner.

As we are leaving, the teacher grabs my arm and says, I’m worried about her dream. I say, It was just a nightmare. No, the teacher says, It was a dream.

I drive to a department store. What are we doing here? asks my daughter. I maneuver the minivan into a parking space. We are shopping for a solution, but I just say, Shopping. Inside, I let her ride in the cart’s basket and she pokes her fingers through the holes. Which do you prefer? I hold up two nightlights. One is pink and pig-shaped. The other is a white rabbit. Bunny, my daughter decides. I agree.

Look what Mom bought me! my daughter shouts, at home, holding the gifted light out to my husband. He takes it, studying the high gloss packaging and the color-coated cardboard, and hands it back. It’s my money, he says, Mom did a very nice job picking it out. My daughter wraps her arms around his legs and says, Thank you! Thank you!

Then she plants herself in the middle of the kitchen and holds Bunny at eye level. They stare at each other, and she lisps words I cannot understand. Sometimes, she falls silent so that Bunny may respond. I want to sit with her and speak her language, as I had imagined we would commune before she was born, but I sense that Bunny holds answers which I do not. This must be how she feels when I spell secrets to my husband. I-c-e-c-r-e-a-m. B-e-d-r-o-o-m.

Eventually, she forgets the novelty and leaves the nightlight on the hardwood floor. When I tuck her in for the night, I pull it from the inside of my bathrobe, like a conjurer performing a trick. Look who’s back! I say. She yawns, waves lazily, and drifts off to sleep. I leave Bunny in the electrical socket. Light radiates from his nose.

I had the dream again! my daughter tells me on our way to school. Everyone was burning! she announces. All my teachers and all my friends! With each word, air escapes from the spaces her teeth left behind, filling our car with morning breath and a low whistle. She continues, My best friend Hannah said she saw the light, so that’s where I put her. Now that she is dead, she is going to live with us. With each detail, my daughter defeats me. Bunny was meant to soak up her nightmares like a sponge, leaving me an untroubled child, the clean surface I was promised.

I swerve to the side of the road and turn around to face her. Do not tell Hannah about your dream, I say. The fire would frighten her. Not everyone is as brave as you. My daughter laughs. Don’t worry Mom, she says, I won’t tell her. But I do not trust my daughter’s judgment. She is a child without pity. Or, she is without pity because she is a child. Either way, I cannot stop myself. I clean the kitchen. I make her bed. I launder her clothes. I worry.

The phone rings. My finger hovers over ‘accept call’, the sound echoing in our high ceilings. I am a brave woman. I answer. I say, Hello, who’s calling please? and I am glad, at first, that I do not hear my daughter howling. Instead, I hear the cries of a dozen children. I’ll be right there, I say, thinking the teacher must be on the other side, although she has not spoken since I picked up.

Blue mats are spread out on the kindergarten floor. The children have tired of screaming and instead rest their surprising weight on the ground. Some snore. My daughter is wide awake, sitting upright in the corner. When she sees me, she averts her eyes, burying them into her knees which pulls close to her chest. She is scared. She has disobeyed.

I go to her, crouch down, stroke her hair, do not ask what happened because I already know. What could scare them more than death? Most of them are so young they have not encountered it. Maybe they have squashed a beetle. Maybe the cat has brought in a mouse.

My daughter clings to me as I carry her out of the classroom, and I allow it, because she is only now learning that there are things our family can stomach that other people can’t. Tragedy is our common trait. I blame my husband. He is an oncologist who specializes in a rare form of cancer. He makes a lot of money off dying people, which makes death seem advantageous, joyous even. Although he would blame me, I’m sure.

In the hallway, we pass a weeping mother speaking softly to the principal. I eavesdrop. I gather the story. A child gone missing in the night. No windows left open. No doors unlocked. You never think it will happen to you, says the mother, dabbing tears with her shirtsleeve. This is how I confirm my fear; Hannah is gone.

I have no words. As we drive home, my daughter is the one who breaks the silence. I didn’t tell Hannah, she says, All you told me was not to tell Hannah, and she wasn’t even there today. This is true. So I forgive her and ask, Where is Hannah? even though I do not want to know. My daughter chews her lip. When we arrive home, we sit in the garage for a long while. Finally, my daughter offers an answer or at least, an action. Upstairs, she says. So we go upstairs.

She disappears to her room without me telling her. In this way, she is a good child. She knows when she needs to be punished. I drift to the backyard. I smoke a cigarette, a habit I kicked before I had kids because it was classless and repulsive, and which I picked up again for the same reasons. Sometime later, she pads her way down the stairs and peeks around the corner. Yes? I say, inviting her over. An object is held behind her back. Here, she says, placing it in my lap. It’s Bunny.

Your daughter did a very bad thing today, I tell my husband at the dinner table. He looks down at her and cocks his head to one side, silently asking our child if I am lying. Well, he says, I’m enjoying my meal. We will talk about this after. But we never do.

In bed, my husband says he’s sorry. He tells me, Sometimes I have to limit the day’s amount of sadness, and I nod, Boundaries are important. He is not a talkative man. His mouth is a straight line. I removed a patient from life support today, he tells me. I fondle his earlobe. You pulled the plug, I muse, That must be a hard decision. He closes his eyes, nudging my hand with his cheek, resting his face in my palm. It was sad, he tells me, But it was easy.

Tonight, I sleep with Bunny on my nightstand, and when I wake in the middle of the night he is the first thing I see. He has circular eyes and an X-shaped mouth, like a stitch sewing shut a wound. There is something strange about his milk-white body, how the usually luminous plastic has dulled. I flip him face down and shut my eyes but cannot shake the image of the metal prongs affixed to the back of his head, like the tines of a fork in soft meat.

I give in. I get up. I kneel down at the wall, feel blindly for the socket, and plug him in. Light floods his face like water fills a footprint. Then, the thread of his mouth comes loose, opening wide. I peer inside. It is like a dark tunnel. It extends so far backward that it collapses into a single point.

And from this blackness emerges a pinprick of light, like an eye floater. I rub my eyes with fists. The bright white circle grows larger. Now, it is the size of a match head. Now it is the size of a cheerio. Now, a wedding band. Now, a bottle cap. Now, a clementine. A coaster. A compact disk. A pancake.

I jerk away for fear I might be absorbed or go sunblind. The light grows and grows. Until it is no longer circular. Until it sprouts appendages. Until it takes the shape of a six-year-old girl. I know before the face forms that it is Hannah.

With a soft thud, she steps out of the mouth and lands on my carpet. I am kneeling and she is standing and so we are around the same height. Her torso is flesh. Her head is flesh. When she reaches out to see if I’m real, I feel her hands, and they too are flesh, mushy, fat, and balmy. I cover my mouth but cannot stifle the scream.

I yank Bunny from his socket. The light goes out. And so does Hannah.

My husband lifts his head, searching for the sound.

Night terrors, I explain, and crawl back into bed.

Morning beats on slowly. I watch my husband stir awake. The wrinkles around his mouth return first, then the ones on his forehead. The bags under his eyes fill up, like Michelin tires, with exhaustion. Of course, I get up first. I make breakfast. He eats and is gone before I rouse our daughter. I move to lunch making. No sticky notes. Just peanut butter and Wonder Bread and fluff.

I am glad when I drop my daughter off at school. We are lucky they let her return at all. I count my blessings. An empty house, erotic fiction. I chain smoke. I hide the remains. I have dug dozens of pits in the backyard that hide orange butts and several with other substances. Those holes are deeper.

Today I do not expect a call. I don one of my husband’s oversized undershirts, with armpits that smell like men’s deodorant. I lounge in bed. I pull the duvet over my head. I read a woman’s magazine. Bunny still sits where I left him, underneath the outlet. I ignore him successfully for half an hour. Then, I cannot resist. I get up. I go over. I plug him in. Legs crossed, as if I am meditating, I wait for Hannah.

This time, when she asks where she is, I have an answer. My house, I say. She looks around. It’s big. Where I live now is not so big. She begins to cry, tears tinged like ash, which she catches by pressing her hands to her cheeks and crushing the murky droplets like beetles.

I lean in, envelop her in a hug I have perfected as a mother. The cotton of my shoulder absorbs her sobs as I rub her back, remembering this same methodical motion drew her out of the nightlight and landed her here in my bedroom. She sniffs and says, You smell like my dad. Would you like something to eat? I ask. She smiles and her face glows orange, like a finger held against the warm, vibrating surface of a flashlight.

Do you know how I got here? she asks, sitting at the kitchen island. I set a glass of chocolate milk in front of her. It clinks on the granite countertop. Drink up, I say. She vanishes the liquid and then inhales, suctioning the empty cup to her face. Stop that, I say, grabbing it by its plastic bottom and pulling it off with a pop. You’ll leave a ring around your mouth. She shrugs. Does it matter?

I have no answers for Hannah but am working on several for myself. My daughter was scared. It was unintentional. Already, I am making excuses for her. I remind myself this make-believe danger has tangible consequences.

The microwave flashes half past one. Hop in the car, I tell Hannah, We’re late to pick up my daughter. But we do not make it to the minivan. Hannah is stopped by the threshold. She goes through the motions of walking but only manages to kick her legs out faster, as if riding a treadmill while the belt picks up speed.

I weigh my options. I tsk, tsk, tsk, in contemplation. Upstairs, Bunny still sits in his socket. I hate to do this, I tell him, But I cannot take any more disasters. I wish my husband was here because I do not limit my sadness and it is not easy when I pull the plug. Bunny dulls. Circular eyes stare blankly ahead. Is she inside you? I ask, already certain that she is. My daughter has always been gifted. Before I pocket him and Hannah, I hold his four-inch face up to mine. Tell her I’m sorry.

The longer my daughter stays at school the greater the chance of calamity. I am a good driver. I take stretches of road at seventy miles per hour. I put on the radio to revel in tragedies that eclipse mine. An oil spill in Lake Erie. A series of three celebrity suicides. A civil war in a country the US does not recognize as legitimate. All these to distract from signs tacked up to every telephone pole. Have you seen our Hannah?

I drive home slowly, pointing each one out to my daughter. Count them, I tell her, Count how much they miss their child. Don’t you see the consequences of your actions? My daughter counts. One, two, five, twenty. She has a good grasp of numbers. Maybe she will be a mathematician. On thirty-three her lip begins to tremble and I ready myself for a flood, securing hazardous items, seeking higher ground. How, she sobs, How, How, How, How many would you put up for me? I do not have a definitive answer. I do not know the ratio of signage to loss.

At home, I plug Bunny in, rub his nose, and will Hannah into existence again. My daughter squeezes her in a hug. When she is finished with sentimentality, she announces she is hungry. I make two peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, cut diagonally, and serve them on plastic dishware.

Now can we talk about it? I ask my husband before bed. He massages his bagged eyes with his ring fingers and says, I bet this is the rarest condition in the world. He searches his nightstand. Leaves the sex dice but takes the stethoscope. The girls are playing dress-up. I gave Hannah all my long skirts, even the sarong I bought for the Bahamas. Leave them be, I tell him, Her heart can wait. He’s already inserted the eartips, he must listen to something. I unbutton my blouse, reveal my clavicle, my breast bone, my bra, so he can press the cold metal bell to my skin and diagnose my heart murmur for the millionth time. What is it saying? I ask. He retracts, winds the tubing in wide circles and returns the instrument to the drawer. He says, It’s saying no.

Out of fear that the missing person posters might have multiplied overnight, I keep my daughter home from school. To entertain your guest, I explain, doling out playdough and washable paints. On slabs of blank paper, Hannah and my daughter finger paint pictures. Hannah draws a yellow crescent. My daughter, a yellow disc. That does not look like the sun, my daughter critiques. I know, says Hannah, This is the moon. My daughter dips her index finger into yellow and turns the half-circle full. There, she says, I fixed it.

Hannah begins to cry.

I shut myself in the living room to watch subtitled television, as if I can keep Hannah’s disappearance from even herself.

The newscaster announces a vigil. Tapered candles to be provided. Hannah’s parents stand on screen. Her mother fidgets with her wedding band, working it on and off her pale finger. At one point, she drops it, its hollow toll echoing on camera. When her husband bends down, his hand feeling blindly for precious metal, she snaps, Leave it, and the broadcast cuts. I touch my own rings. Not the ones we exchanged vows with. My husband bought these later, after graduating med school, and I feel a pang for the original.

The door rattles, and I investigate. My daughter’s eye sits in the keyhole. What are you doing? I demand, A shut door means a private room. I breathe deep. Remember she does not know love from loaves. How could she comprehend their grief as it scrolled across the screen? As if to prove me wrong, my daughter wonders, Does this mean Hannah has to leave? My heart swells. A tender bruise. She is brighter than I thought. These things take time, I tell her, which makes her happy. She darts off, and I no longer want for my wedding ring. Just a cigarette.

On the stoop, I revise my theory: besides the rush of nicotine, what I like about smoking is its meditative quality. Forced deep breathing. Thinking in repetitive pairs, In and Out, In and Out. Letting myself gather and assess. It is like in sleep when we solidify all that is significant and discard the junk. My daughter slept so deeply her dreams calcified, a bone among soft tissue. I grind the butt into the ground.

Tonight is moonless. I drive to the community park. Tomato plants climb chicken-wire and koi swim counterclockwise in their ponds. Those mourning Hannah amass in front of the gazebo, holding candles which they flame by passing a lighter like at a concert. Some of the mothers carry meager gifts: lasagnas, casseroles, hams. I hold my candle with both hands.

On stage, a portrait of Hannah sags under the weight of floral wreaths. Her parents shuffle towards it, wearing slippers instead of shoes. The crowd murmurs. I bow my head and channel my husband, how he soaks up sadness without spectacle. It is his practice, listening without feeling too deeply.

Please come forward if you have any information, finishes her father.

We queue to present our condolences. The mother in front of me brought a lasagna. The mother in front of her, a casserole. My candle still burns in my hands. Thank you for your thoughtfulness, says Hannah’s father, relieving the woman at the front of the line of her ham. It is the least I could do, she tells him, honestly. The way Hannah’s father shoulders the ham, it appears he is holding a baby in a football hold. He looks so lonely.

I know why my daughter brought Hannah into our world. It is the same reason I brought her into this one. I was lonely. I had a secret I needed to share. I head home, to my child. The light of my life. The porchlight is left on, as I requested.

It’s well past my daughter’s bedtime. I sneak upstairs and peer through the crack in her door, casting a pillar of light onto her shag carpeting. There is my daughter, and there is Hannah, asleep like spoons, a shape my husband and I will form later that night. I know we are all holding onto something, but my daughter is simply too young to hold so fast.

That is for the adults to do. My husband has left a note on my pillow. He has an early shift at the hospital but wants me to know all is forgiven. He does not believe in anger for it has no healing properties. I stare at Bunny’s luminous face. When I exhaust sleeping positions, I pace. It must be done, I decide. The second time is easier than the first. I do not apologize, just pull. Bunny separates easily from the wall, his metal prongs warm to the touch.

Breakfast is hard-boiled eggs, prepackaged. I cannot bear boiling water or hot surfaces. On TV, new disasters are announced every minute, and I do not keep them to myself. How can a fairy sink if they have wings? asks my daughter. A ferry is a kind of boat, I explain. Where’s Hannah? she asks, and I place Bunny on her plate like a leftover yoke. I say, It’s time for Hannah to go home.

I make my daughter carry Bunny with two hands while I ring the doorbell. Careful, I say and she pets his furless face with her thumb. Before the door unlatches, we hear the rustle of slippers, the clink of fork to plate. Hannah’s father answers with a mouthful of ham and eggs. His wife appears behind him, resting her chin on his shoulder to peer out at us. Her wedding ring has returned. She fiddles soundlessly, on and off, on and off. Have you found our Hannah? she asks, the words dry in her mouth, as if she has been reciting this question in her sleep. My daughter holds Bunny out towards them, as an offering. Yes, she says, Here she is.

Lizzy Lemieux recently graduated from the University of Pennsylvania, where she studied English. Her work can be found in the Best New Poets of 2018, The Massachusettes Review, and Penn Review.

 

 

 

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

 

 

PLENTY OF FISH by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

PLENTY OF FISH
by Dylan Cook

Matt felt the morning dew jump against his legs as his feet flattened the seagrass in his way. He had his fishing pole slung over his shoulder like a bindle and his tackle box swinging at his side. The sun had crested over the ocean, already strong and getting stronger as the light shifted from orange to white.

On a good day, no one bothered him on this beach. He could expect to see one or two old retirees fishing too, but they usually kept their distance and never said anything to him besides the obligatory “How’re the fish today?” to which he’d respond with either “Not a nibble” or “Got a few keepers.” Beyond that, they all had a tacit agreement to keep the peace by keeping to themselves.

Matt baited his line with some baby squids he’d picked up on his drive to the shore. He had a good feeling about today. High tide was just about to peak, so the fish would be caught up in the swell and dragged in towards the coast. That was the theory, anyway. Matt believed in it when it was working and blamed his luck when it wasn’t. He cast his line out about a hundred feet from the water’s edge to test it.

He wasn’t alone. Overhead, he saw a hawk circling, stirring the wind. Matt supposed the hawk saw something moving in the grass. Both of us are looking for something to eat out here, he thought. Further down the shore, a man, also fishing, kept stealing glances in Matt’s direction. Beneath the man’s baseball cap and behind his sunglasses, Matt felt smugness radiating off him. He didn’t appreciate any of the judgments this man must have been making about him, that that’s not how you should stand or cast your pole, that a teenager like Matt was too young to know how to surf fish anyway. Matt averted his eyes from the man and spat into the water lapping at his ankles, in and out. He tried to sync his breathing to the pull of the waves.

Still, he could feel that man getting deeper under his skin every time he looked over. He rested his fishing pole against his hip to free a hand for him to pull out his phone. He texted his girlfriend Good morning 🙂 and snapped her a picture of the sunlight glaring on the waves. He knew it would be a few hours before she woke up and saw the messages, but he wanted to make sure that she knew that he was thinking about her. He flipped through a few notifications and picked his phone again, returning to earth. He was back where he started—nothing on the line, Peeping Tom, and the hawk. But he didn’t mind the hawk so much; his stalking wasn’t anything personal.

He reeled in, hooked some new bait, and cast again. After he did, he noticed that the man did the same. Copycat. Soon, Matt saw his fishing pole bend over like a tree in the wind. He twisted his feet deeper into the sand to stabilize himself as he gave the pole a sharp tug to sink the hook into the fish’s cheek. He cranked on the reel to bring it in, each turn only bringing him a few inches closer. Eventually, he saw the waves frenzy as the struggling fish surfaced.

Matt held it up by the line and studied it. He’d caught a fluke, and a nicely sized one at that. Fifteen, maybe twenty pounds. Looking to his right, he made sure that the man saw him, that he caught the first fish, and he gave him a smirk. Serves you right, Matt thought. He didn’t need to fish anymore for the love of the sport. He had his lunch and that was enough, so he stuck his thumb in the fish’s mouth and carried it back to his car.

There, he dropped it on one of the wooden podiums where fishermen cleaned their catch. Now the necessary part. He took out a hammer and with one deft swing he hit the fluke in the head to kill it. He accidentally hit its eye, which popped and leaked a creamy white juice. Some of it landed on his shirt’s shoulder, but he just flicked it off and moved on. He took out a knife and started cleaning, first cutting off the head and then spilling the guts. He tossed the remains into the seagrass, hoping maybe the hawk would find it before the seagulls got to it.

Matt threw his catch in a cooler he’d brought with him. A new car pulled up with a new retiree fisherman. “Fishing’s good today, I take it?” he said with a smile.

By this point, Matt had lost his daily patience for nosy old men. “Good enough,” he said.

◊

Scarlett rolled over, for good this time. She had already partially woken up a few times but none of them had stuck. She was in the middle of a dream where she was rock climbing, where one day she’d grabbed a hold of a rock wall and was able to pull herself up as if she were weightless. She liked the feeling enough to want to stay in for as long as she could. Now, she reached her hand out into the half-light and searched her bedside table for her phone. 12:10 PM. It always gave her a great sense of satisfaction to get more than nine hours of sleep.

At the bottom of her notifications was a good morning text from Matt. She replied good afternoon 😉 and sifted through all the other messages she’d gotten.

She went to the kitchen to pull out some leftovers to eat for breakfast. Or was it lunch? It didn’t matter to her; she wasn’t very pedantic. She put two slices of pizza in the microwave for thirty seconds (she didn’t like her food hot, just warm) and started aimlessly scrolling through her Instagram feed. The sliding glass door to the backyard whined open and Irv walked in.

“Look who’s finally awake,” he said. A necklace of sweat was saturated into his shirt. “Sleeping Beauty.”

“Like I’ve said, I don’t have anything to wake up for these days,” she told him.

“You’re missing half the day! Don’t you want to get out there and do something?”

She hated that moralistic sense of superiority felt among people who wake up before seven. It was things like this that made Scarlett tolerate Irv’s presence rather than enjoy it. “I’ve worked and worked and worked. Now, I’m resting.” The microwave beeped and she took out her pizza.

“It’s not about work,” Irv said, pivoting, “it’s about getting out there and seeing some of the world.”

“I see plenty.” She was a little muffled by the food in her mouth.

“Just try to wake up before noon. It’s the least you could do.”

“Don’t tell me what’s the least I could do. I promise you I could do less.”

Irv pointed his finger at her. “Don’t talk to me like that in my own house. I’m only trying to help you.”

Scarlett had meant it as a joke, but if he wanted to argue, so would she. “You don’t boss me around if I’m not doing anything wrong. It’s not your life, so leave me alone.”

“Now’s the time in your life when you should be forming good habits instead of bad ones. Once you’re in college, you won’t have us there to help guide you.”

“Oh, how horrible my life’s going to be without you breathing down my neck every day. I wonder how I’ll survive.”

“I’m sure your mother agrees with me on this.”

“I don’t care. I can disagree with her too.”

As if she’d summoned her, Scarlett heard her mother walk in through the garage door carrying groceries. “Hello, hello!” she chirped.

“Maureen, we were just talking about you,” Irv said.

“What about me?” she said, unpacking items one by one onto the kitchen counter.

“I was saying that you’d agree that Scarlett should be up and dressed before noon. Wouldn’t you?” Irv said.

“Well…”

“And I said that it’s no big deal,” said Scarlett.

“Well, neither of you are wrong,” Maureen said. Irv looked at her, lowering his gaze and raising his eyebrows. “But Scar, it wouldn’t hurt you to get up a little earlier.

“Mom!”

“Please don’t raise your voice at me,” Maureen said.

“The both of you are overreacting,” said Scarlett.

“Don’t talk to me like that in my own home.”

“I didn’t choose to live here, Irv. Give it a month and I’ll be out of your hair anyway.”

Scarlett grabbed her plate and retreated back into her room. She scrolled through her phone between bites of pizza. She got another text from Matt, a picture of the fish he’d caught fried up with some rice.

looking good, chef, she replied.

Still good for later?

            of course 🙂

A soft knock on the door told her that her mother was there. “Can I come in?”

“It’s open.”

Maureen shuffled in and sat at the foot of Scarlett’s bed. “I think you owe Irv an apology for what you said to him.”

“What did I say to him, exactly? He’s a big boy. I’m sure I didn’t hurt his feelings that badly.”

Maureen cleared her throat. “That’s not the point. The point is—”

“What is the point, Mom? Illuminate me.”

“That’s it. I don’t want any more lip out of you. And you can cancel any plans you might have.”

“That’s not happening,” Scarlett said with a laugh.

“It is if I say it is.”

“Are you going to let me go to college?”

“Excuse me?” said Maureen.

“Answer me. Next month, are you going to let me go to college?”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“Because when I’m in Boston you won’t have any control over me anymore. So either make your peace with that now or help me look for secretary jobs.”

Maureen huffed and scowled, chewing on some thoughts before leaving without saying a word of them.

mom and irv are really up my ass today, she texted Matt.

That’s shocking, he sent back. Tell me about it later.

◊

After their dinner, Matt and Scarlett walked along the beach. The sun had recently set, and the last swathes of orange and pink were evaporating over the western horizon. The dividing line between the sea and the sky was blurred into a deep blue-black, but there were still plenty of lights twinkling along the shore and, up north, from New York City in the distance. No moon.

As usual, they weren’t holding hands. Their friends thought it was a quirk of their relationship that was an indication of some latent problems. In truth, neither of them really liked it. Holding hands got too warm and clammy, and they both felt like it attracted undue attention since nobody likes PDA. To them, the fact that they both hated this mawkish little thing was proof that it was all working.

“You see that?” Matt said, pointing out into the ocean.

“See what?”

“That light flickering out there.” He waited for Scarlett to focus on the ocean. Then he grabbed her by the shoulders and, lovingly, tilted her in towards the water, threatening to push her in.

“No!” Scarlett yelped. “Stop it, stop it, stop it!” Matt pulled her back in and Scarlett gave him a gentle slap on the arm and smiled at him. “Bad boyfriend.”

“What, afraid of getting a little wet?” he said.

“You know I’m jumpy.”

He knew. The pair kept walking until they didn’t feel like it anymore. The wind picked up, wiping away the last scraps of warmth for the day. They made their way to an overturned lifeguard stand and used it as something to lean against. Scarlett rested her head on Matt’s shoulder, and he rested his head against hers.

“I should really try night fishing out here sometime,” he said. “That’s how you catch striped bass.”

“I don’t know how you do that,” she said.

“Do what?”

“Like not the fishing itself. I don’t get how you can just kill them and eat them like that and not feel bad about it.”

“They’re fish. They don’t have rights.”

“I know. But to kill them with your bare hands like that. It’s brutal.”

“That’s how I get my kicks: brutalizing fish,” he said.

“Stop, you know what I mean. And you love fish, too, which is the part I really don’t get.”

“I don’t think it’s that strange.”

“Tell me about all your pet fish again,” she said, nudging him.

“I’ve told you that story a million times.”

“And it’s still funny. Tell me again.”

He told her about his three fish, all named Rex, which had all killed themselves in quick succession. The first two leapt out of their fishbowls in the middle of the night, leaving Matt to find them flat and crunchy on his floor the next morning. The last Rex, somehow, buried its head in the neon pebbles at the bottom and drowned itself. “I never understood why my dad kept giving me another fish.”

“And now you’re the expert in killing them.”

“See? Now you’re catching on.” Matt turned his head to smell her hair, clean with a whiff of salt. She felt his hot breath spilling out of his nose. “You know, it’s never too late for you to go to Rutgers instead. If you change your mind.”

“I think it actually is too late.”

“What are you gonna do in Boston anyway? Throw yourself a little tea party?”

“My dad went to B.U. I’ve always wanted to go there.”

“And that accent, Jesus. It’s unbearable.”

“Matt?”

“Pahk ya cah, ya chowdahhead.”

“Matt? Look at me. I know this isn’t exactly how we pictured things, but this is what’s happening. Hey.” She put her hand on his cheek, and he recoiled from the cold. “I’m sorry. You know I wish we had more time too.”

Matt sat there, breathing. He almost felt like he was being lied to, so he tried listening to the ocean instead, still saying the same thing it had been that morning. “You don’t really think that.”

“Of course I do,” she said. To Matt, it sounded like a beg. He grabbed her hand and squeezed it because that was the reassuring thing to do, and he didn’t have any words for that at the moment.

They sat like that for a while, seconds or minutes, it was hard to tell. Scarlett lifted her head and turned to face him. Her eyes were too dark for him to find any emotion in them. He leaned in and started kissing her, sweetly at first and then with purpose. He was trying to sap as much out of this moment as he could. Scarlett pulled back to catch her breath and look at him. There was something shiny in his eyes that felt off to her. He looked frustrated.

“What’s wrong?” she said.

“Nothing.”

“I know when you’re lying. Just tell me.”

He sighed and looked away, then turned back and kissed her on the head. “I don’t know what I’m going to do out here in Jersey without you.”

“You’ll be perfectly alright. You’ve survived this place without me before.”

“But it’s different now,” he said. Scarlett focused on the measured in and out of his breathing. Once she felt the rhythm change, she knew he was about to speak again. “I really think you should consider staying here.”

“I told you that’s not happening.”

“Rutgers would be so much cheaper, and it’s still a great school. You see how much of a problem student loans are. I don’t want you to have problems with that down the road.”

“That’ll be my problem. Not yours.”

“Your problems are my problems.” He kissed her head again. “I just care about you.”

“I think right now you only care about yourself,” said Scarlett, and she already regretted it. She was usually a bit more careful with her words.

“What was that?”

“I’m sorry.”

“Do you really think I’m that selfish?”

“I didn’t mean it. I’m upset too, so I wasn’t thinking. I know you’re not selfish.”

“Good.” He started running his fingers through her hair. “It’s okay, I’m not mad. You’re lucky you’re cute,” he said. His father used to say that to him, but he’d only recently realized he could use it on Scarlett.

“Who knows,” she said after a minute or two. “Maybe I won’t like it in Boston. Maybe I’ll go there for a year and hate it and want to come back.” With her head against his cheek, Scarlett could feel Matt’s face tense up into a smile.

“That would be nice,” he whispered.

They sat there with the sound of the waves. It was fully dark now, and the wind had wiped away the last shreds of warmth from the day, bringing in cool, salty air.

“We should get going soon,” Scarlett said. “I won’t want to be out too late.”

“If you insist,” Matt said groggily. They got up and shook the sand off themselves.

“I can drive if you want. You got up so early; you must be exhausted.”

“If you want. Do you know the way back?”

“I think so. But you can be my GPS if need be.”

“I’ll just drive,” he said. “I could spin you around and you’d get lost. And I feel fine.”

“Alright,” she said. On the drive back to her house, she counted the turns in her head. She knew them all.

◊

A good morning text from Matt was waiting for Scarlett again. She swiped it to the side so she could deal with it later. She had gotten up early, around ten, and he wouldn’t be expecting her reply for another hour at least.

In the kitchen, Scarlett scanned the fridge for food. There was nothing immediately appealing for her to simply heat up. There were eggs and pork rolls and other things she could make, but she decided that she wasn’t hungry enough for the effort to be worth it.

She went back to lay on her bed, already bored with the day. It was Monday, so both her mom and Irv were out at work. Not even anyone around to bother her.

Flipping through her apps, she realized she hadn’t spoken to her father in three days. She sent him a text, and her phone started ringing soon after.

“Hi, Daddy. Aren’t you working?”

“I can’t take a break to talk to my favorite daughter? I’ve been meaning to call you anyway. I booked a house in Lavalette this weekend. It’s right on the beach; it’s beautiful. What are your plans for this weekend? I know I should’ve asked you first.”

Scarlett thought about Matt. She couldn’t remember having any specific plans. “No, that’s fine. That sounds great.”

“Wonderful. I can’t wait to see you. I actually do have to run, but talk to you soon. Love you, sweetheart.”

“Love you too.”

Scarlett went back to her messages. She finally texted back Matt. good morning! i just talked to my dad. he’s coming down for the weekend 

That’s nice, Matt responded almost immediately. When? We usually get dinner on Sundays. 

we can move that around. it’s not like we have anything else going on lol

On the other end, Matt scrutinized every letter of her texts. He didn’t want to sound too pushy about their Sunday dinners, even though it did bother him. Should it bother him? He paused on that thought. What were they as a couple without their routines and habits?

Sure, he sent back. That should be fine.

Matt pocketed his phone and started pacing in his room. Before too much time had passed, he picked up his phone and added, It would’ve been nice if you said something first though. He liked that. It was the shortest summary of what he was thinking. He put down his phone again and it buzzed.

this is me saying something, Scarlett wrote.

He swiped the notification aside. He could deal with it later.

He got up to make himself some lunch. His father worked mornings, so he had just gotten home. Matt took out some sandwich materials.

“You alright, Matty?” his father asked. There must have been something about the way he was slathering mayonnaise on his bread.

“Fine. Why?”

“No reason. You just seem a little aggravated.”

“That’s odd,” Matt said. “I feel fine.”

“If you say so.” His father took a beer from the fridge and plopped onto the couch. “You gotta learn how to relax like your old man. You’re so stiff.”

“Maybe,” he said on his way back to his room. He tore through his sandwich without tasting it.

◊

Lou pulled up to his ex-wife’s house to pick up his daughter. He kept his eyes on the garage door since he knew Scarlett would come out of there instead of the front door. He saw the door list, and Scarlett walked out. He craned his neck to see if he could catch a glimpse of Maureen. Not to be nosy, just curious. But he didn’t see her.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said as Scarlett dropped a bag in the back seat before climbing into the front.

“Hi, Daddy,” she smiled at him. She wished he weren’t wearing his sunglasses so she could actually see him.

“This summer’s going too fast. I can’t believe you’re off to Boston next month.”

“I know,” she said flatly.

“Where have all the years gone?”

Scarlett had been asked this question so many times recently that she’d made the blanket decision to not answer it. Lou drove the familiar route to Lavalette. The way he always drove with one hand made Scarlett nervous, even though it had never been a problem in the past. They pulled up to a little bungalow with a white pebble lawn. It was decorated appropriately with shells and anchors and kitschy signs about how life is perfect down the shore. They put down their bags and went to the back patio to sit in the Adirondack chairs and plan the weekend.

Lou went on: “So we have this next two days, but I gotta see you a few more times before we send you off.”

“Whatever you have time for. I’ll be back soon for fall break. And Thanksgiving’s early this year,” she said. She had been studying the B.U. academic calendar a few days before.

“Sure, but you’ll probably want to spend that time with your friends.”

“I can always save some time for you, Dad.”

“Well aren’t you sweet,” he said, mockingly and lovingly. “Speaking of, how’s Matt doing? I haven’t heard anything about him in ages.”

“Oh, he’s fine,” said Scarlett. The last time she’d seen him was also the last time she’d seen the ocean. Here, twinkling under the sun, the water didn’t seem like it could be the same. “He’s upset that I’m leaving.”

“Are you gonna try to keep it going into college? If you don’t mind me asking.”

“I think so,” she said. She and Matt had avoided that particular conversation for so long that they both assumed the answer was yes.

“You have to do what makes you happy, Scar. So if that’s what makes you happy, then go for it. And there are so many ways to keep in touch with people these days.”

“Thanks, Dad,” she said. He turned to her and flashed a winning smile. She didn’t want to talk about it any further than that.

They spent the afternoon idling around their little beach house. Lou had brought some drop lines, which he baited up with chicken and threw over the dock on the edge of the property. It was too late in the day for them to catch much of anything. A few crabs here and there, but nothing worth keeping, so they threw them back.

“I’m hungry,” Lou said after a while. “And there are easier ways to get crabcakes.”

They went to a restaurant on the water where everything was cheap and greasy and served with fries. Lou watched Scarlett eat her scallops carefully, as if she didn’t want to hurt their feelings. Scarlett watched her dad eat in big mouthfuls and finish his crabcakes in a few minutes.

“Take your time, Scar,” Lou said. “I’m in no rush.”

Scarlett covered her mouth so she could speak between chews. “Thanks.”

“You remember Dr. Fiore? Your old dentist?”

“Sure. Why?”

“I read in an article that he’s got assault allegations against him from one of the technicians. His whole practice is already shut down and everything.”

“Oh my god, that’s horrible,” said Scarlett.

“I know. He was a good dentist.”

“I meant for the technician.”

“Oh yeah, her too,” Lou stammered. “That is horrible. It’s just crazy how someone can make a few claims and like that,” he snapped his fingers, “your whole career is over.”

“It’s not like he didn’t deserve it.”

“Sure, but you never know if someone just has an axe to grind and’s saying that you’re a creep just because they know it’ll ruin your name.”

“I think that’s pretty rare,” Scarlett said, trying to sound flat so she’d be taken more seriously.

“What if someone said something like that about me? What, would you jump on their side right away?”

“I don’t know, Dad.” Scarlett gritted her teeth. “What if I told you Matt did something to me. Would you say there was room for doubt?”

“Don’t be ridiculous. Matt’s a good kid. I know he wouldn’t do anything, like you should know that I wouldn’t do anything.”

“You don’t know Matt that well. I don’t think he’d do anything either, but you can’t be that sure.”

“You’re right, you’re right. You know I would believe you, sweetheart. But I hope that you’d believe me too.”

“Well let’s hope that it never comes to that,” she said as she drank some water to cleanse her mouth. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore.”

“Me neither.” Lou reached over to grab a small fry from Scarlett’s plate. “Do you know what classes you’re taking for your first semester?”

Scarlett sat up straighter. “I do, but they’re all introduction and requirement classes, like writing and calc I and stuff. The only one I’m really looking forward to is intro to anthropology.”

“I thought you were doing archaeology.”

“No, it’s always been anthropology. We’ve talked about this before.”

“So is anthropology the Indiana Jones one or the Jurassic Park one?”

“It’s neither, really,” said Scarlett. She had answered this question for him once or twice before, so she wanted to answer it this time in a way he’d remember. “It’s like… You know how scientists go into the jungle to study frogs or birds or something? Anthropology is doing that for people. So I want to study how humans work as a species, if that makes sense.”

“Sure it does,” Lou said. “You want to be like an alien studying people from outer space.”

Scarlett half-smiled. “Something like that.”

“You should still take some business classes, though. Just to make me happy. It’s always good to have some business smarts about you, and I really think you’d like it.” Lou watched his daughter shovel in her last few bites. The sun was set, and the ocean was unusually rough. Wave after wave fell over the sand with a violent hush. The ocean knew it was going to rain before either of them realized. “We should get going soon.”

Lou looked at their waitress and snapped his fingers in the air to get her attention. Scarlett looked down at her phone, embarrassed to be around someone beckoning a person like they would a dog. She quickly texted Matt: this is gonna be a long weekend

How so? he replied quickly.

i’ll explain later. it’s like he doesn’t know me. Scarlett paused on that last thought before sending, considering if it was fair for her to say that he didn’t know her or if she was expecting too much. She sent it anyway.

Matt was lying on his bed when he read her texts. He wanted to go fishing in the morning, so he was already half asleep, but now he felt a bit more awake. He got an odd satisfaction from knowing that Scarlett wasn’t wholly enjoying her time with her father, especially since it was impinging on their time together. This is perfect, he thought. He realized that all he had to do was be Scarlett’s better option. If she came to him whenever she didn’t feel great, he’d always have her crawling back.

Tell me about it over dinner, he sent her. I want to hear all about it.

He rolled over and slept well.

◊

Lou and Scarlett had been holed up in the beach house for the entire weekend waiting for the rain to pass, and by the time it did the weekend was over. Irv was outside pulling weeds when Lou came to drop her off. Scarlett hated every second that the both of them were in each other’s presence. Maureen was the only thing that the two of them had in common and knew about each other, so they always acted like they were in a silent competition with each other, sizing each other up with their eyes, even though there was nothing to win.

Lou got out of his car to hug Scarlett goodbye. He waved to be nice. “How’s tricks, Irv?”

“Same old, same old. And yourself?”

“Great. Just great.” Lou turned to Scarlett and pinched her chin with his thumb. “See you soon, sweetheart.”

Scarlett lugged her bag towards the house as Lou sped off.

“So how was your weekend?” Irv asked.

“Fine,” Scarlett said.

“Just fine?”

“I said it was good,” she huffed as she passed through the storm door in the garage. Irv tossed his weeds into the garbage can and then set up a sprinkler to water the grass. He went back inside and found Scarlett lying on the couch with her phone suspended over her face.

“Your mother’s not around tonight,” he said. “I was wondering if you wanted to get dinner later. Wherever you want.”

“I can’t. I’m seeing Matt later.” She didn’t look up.

“That’s still a thing?”

Scarlett let her phone fall on her chest with a thud. “Yeah, why wouldn’t it be?”

“I know you don’t like me, Scarlett,” he said. “And I don’t know if you’ll ever like me, so at the very least let me speak my mind and be honest with you.”

She rolled her eyes.

“You should think about calling it off with that boy. Going to college with baggage like that is only going to hold you back.”

“You have no idea what you’re talking about. I’m eighteen. I can make my own decisions.”

“You can, but you can still make the wrong ones. I could be wrong too.”

“Thanks, Irv, but I don’t need you meddling in my business.”

“Fair enough,” he said. “Have fun later.”

◊

“I can’t believe he didn’t remember.”

“Right?”

“You’ve always wanted to study anthropology.”

“I know. He can never keep track of those things.”

“Well I remembered,” Matt said. He tightened his arms around Scarlett. It had been a week since they were in that same place, on the same beach, leaning against the same lifeguard stand. The water was so gentle that it was almost silent. It was this calm after the storm that Scarlett preferred.

Matt was in good spirits. His fishing in the morning had gone well, and all-day he had the night to look forward to. Now, he could relish in the moment. It all seemed to be falling into place.

“I really like the idea of you coming back after a year in Boston. That’ll be a nice change of pace for you. And a year we can manage,” Matt said.

Scarlett didn’t respond immediately. She was trying to remember if and when she’d agreed to something like that. “Yeah, a year can go by quickly.”

“So you’ll get some time in a new city, and I’ll be here patiently waiting for you.” He tightened his arms again, but Scarlett didn’t feel comforted, she felt fastened down. She squirmed away from him.

“Sorry, it was getting too hot,” she said.

He tried to decode the expression on her face. “Something’s wrong. Tell me.”

“I’m fine.”

“I can tell when you’re lying. Tell me.”

Scarlett turned to face him. “I don’t want to make a promise that I’ll only be in Boston for a year, even though I do want to be with you. I just don’t know how things’ll go.”

“I think this can work. But you have to want this to work. You do want that, don’t you?” Matt said. Scarlett could see the muscles in his neck tense up as he swallowed. She waited a moment too long. “Don’t you?”

“Right now, I think so. But I can’t promise what I’ll think a month or a year from now.”

“That’s not the plan.”

“Maybe it’s not your plan.”

“It’s our plan. We work as a team.” Matt wrapped his fingers around her arm, just above the wrist, and squeezed.

“Let go,” Scarlett said. He didn’t. She slapped the back of his hand. “Don’t grab me like that.” She started shifting her weight to stand up.

“Where are you going? We haven’t figured out anything.”

“I’m done for tonight. I want to go home,” said Scarlett.

“Okay, we can talk on the car ride back.”

“I can take an Uber. I’m out of your way, anyway. And you’ve had a long day.”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Scar. We’re not done here.”

“For tonight we are at least.” She got up and swatted off some sand. Matt got up to follow her. She pulled out her phone to call an Uber. “I don’t want to eat the cancellation fee. Go home, it’s okay. I’ll see you soon.” She put her hand against his cheek to make him feel fine enough for the moment.

He walked off, routinely checking over his shoulder to steal looks at her. Scarlett sat down on a bench and waited for her ride. The wind picked up until it was louder than the waves on the shore behind her. She held her skirt down with one hand and hugged herself with the other, occasionally removing it to comb down her hair with her fingers. It got cold enough that she was shivering, but she didn’t mind because the breeze felt crisp and clean.

Dylan Cook is a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, where he studied creative writing and biology. He’s often reading and writing, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a genetics lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

 

Cover Design by Karen Rile

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Graphic design image of mountain range, green PS2 controller, title, and author name

SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN
by Nick Olson

I remember back in the day Nick used to try to get to Heaven. Heaven was a glitched-out place in San Andreas where nothing made sense or seemed quite real, and Nick would come home most days, boot up the PS2, and try again to get into it. There was a specific building in San Andreas where, if you went inside and used a cheat code to spawn a jetpack, you could fly through a certain part of the ceiling that didn’t have proper clipping. There was just one spot where you could fly through, a place that the developers had overlooked. Normally, this wouldn’t be a problem. This wasn’t something you were ever supposed to be able to come across just walking and jumping around. But if you knew what to look for and you did everything in just the right way, you could lift off and go through the ceiling. Fly right above the interior. From up there, I remember it looked like you had ripped the roof off a dollhouse and were looking down at its insides. And everywhere around the interior, where the outside world should’ve been, there was nothing but blank gray. Gray as far as you could see, in every direction. The way the game worked was that in order to save resources, only the exterior world or the interior world would ever be loaded at any given time, depending on what the character chose. The developers never intended for the player to see beyond the place that had been loaded for them, but Nick had found a way to clip through.

I remember every day he’d go straight back into that building and continue where he left off. You couldn’t save in Heaven, so he’d have to just repeat the glitch every time. There were no waypoints, no markers, so Nick would fly through gray nothing for what seemed like forever before coming across a new interior, some place he had never seen before. He’d go there and take mental notes of everything he saw, then fly back up through where the ceiling should’ve been and look for another place: a space explorer trying to chart new worlds. He’d find interiors you’d only see in passing in random cutscenes, abandoned test areas, and places you wouldn’t find anywhere else in the game. Many of these places were unfinished, so he’d land there and find himself able to walk through the walls, glide through props. It was like he was there but not at the same time.

The wild thing is, he committed so much of that to memory. There was no real way to map all that out. Once you were in the air, there were no landmarks to guide you, nothing but gray everywhere. If you checked your map in-game, it said that you were still at the building you’d originally entered. It was like you had never left. Like you were stuck, even though you weren’t.

I didn’t play San Andreas for years after Nick died. For a while, I just couldn’t. Then, when I wanted to, I couldn’t get it to work. The audio/video wires were old and frayed, and the electrical tape was coming apart, and it was years back, when I was still little, that Nick had spliced in old wires from a stereo system that no one was using anymore to replace the ones that had gone bad. He could’ve just gotten new wires, and I guess I can now too, but I remember how he cut and stripped them down, rubber to copper, demonstrating how you had to twist the proper wires together, like for like, but the two pairs you twisted together could never touch each other. They’d be taped down or pushed in opposite directions. They could be parallel, but they could never make contact again.

I think of checking eBay for a fresh set or searching how to properly splice wires, but I want to see if my memory is still enough. As they come untwisted, gangly and with their individual strands pointing in every possible direction, I have to remind myself that sights and sounds are transmitted through these things. Memories are. I cut a little further into the wires, past the unruly strands to get at the fresh portions, untouched. I cut too much off, if I’m being honest, but it’s just enough to get the two pairs connected again, pushed down onto either side, not touching, and I don’t have electrical tape to make it official, but that’ll be enough. It should hold.

I boot up the old PS2. It’s too early, and the sun is on the screen so I can barely make anything out, but I can hear that familiar old boot-up sound. And when the game cycles through, and I find that Nick’s old save file still works, and I track down that old handwritten jetpack cheat tucked away inside the game manual, I go back to that corner, from memory, and I fly straight up. Away and past it all.

Black and white headshot of Nick OlsonNick Olson is an author and editor from Chicagoland now living in North Carolina. He was a finalist for Glimmer Train’s Very Short Fiction Award, and he’s been published in SmokeLong Quarterly, Hobart, decomP, and other fine places. When he’s not writing his own work, he’s sharing the wonderful work of others over at (mac)ro(mic). His debut novel, Here’s Waldo, is available now. Find him online at nickolsonbooks.com or on Twitter @nickolsonbooks.

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM
by Sandra Florence

We are playing Concentration. First, she finds the Jacks and then the Queens. Her head was lopsided when she was born, and she stared up at me with rolling grey eyes. I unwrapped her and thought, this is the pure one. Lightens up my life. Released. Escaped from personal injury.

Potatoes. Ducks in a green sky. A turquoise moon. All these things in her. My daughter in red rubber boots crossing the street in rain.

◊

She has not seen her father for some time now. They used to watch prize fights and play dominoes. “He’s going to love another kid,” she says. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me.” Now the big mouth scream. The other kid wriggling in her crib. “It’s it,” she says. “The name I can’t remember.”

Diapers flap in winter air. He drives to the bank and opens the vault.

“My hands are so small with the nails painted cherry fudge and my teeth hurt,” she says. “Let’s send him the olive with my teeth prints. Then he’ll know we need the money.”

He takes the money and hands it to the other kid. What we deserve.

◊

A studio garden apartment in the Sunset. The rooms are chopped up and boxy. Frosted glass obscures the garden view. We are so far away. The only night we stay there, we eat in front of the gas heater and then curl up in sleeping bags. She puts her head in my lap, and I stroke her hair and listen as her breathing becomes deeper. Her small body is warm and heavy against mine. I feel small. Swallowed by the night and the fog devouring streetcars. Is there someone in the garden? Moving?

Dream? Water near the pier laps against the dock.

“I dreamed my friend got hurt and the next day she came to school with a black eye.”

“That’s psychic,” I tell her.

“What’s that?” she asks.

She’s hysterical. I’m going to cry tonight. She has pink curlers in her hair. She moves the rubber animals around in the sand tray. Trees, plastic fence, bridge, boat. Mama cow and her baby off in the distance by themselves.

“We know what that means,” the therapist says. “It’s significant.”

“Today at school the boys were chasing us, trying to hit us. We hid in the bathroom. We decided not to run anymore. When they came after us, we hit back. I picked up one of them and threw him in the air.”

At East of the Sun, a long line of children stand by the tables running their fingers through the small toys. Metal leap frogs, water guns in the shape of fish, wooden horses dangling from strings, animals masks, magic rocks, and blue marbles. Every toy for a penny or nickel. My daughter has ten cents. She is rich.

We take Highway 5. I’m going to a wedding. She’ll stay with her father. I drive fast through Altamont Pass and down into the San Joaquin. Rows of business parks and warehouses give way to green fields and the flat farmland. It is hot. Scorching. Waves of heat blast through the floor of the car. At the wedding in the garden, some friends play guitars and a violin. A young woman sings. There is laughter and later tears over the phone when he calls to say he has to bring her back early.

“My wife doesn’t understand. I can’t see her anymore.” He sets her suitcase on the porch steps, climbs into his car, and drives away. Back to the new wife and baby.

Up on Mt. Tamalpais, the kids are piled into tents. Wind whooshes through the eucalyptus trees, and the jagged surf crashes on Stinson Beach. When the bus returns them, their faces are covered with dirt. And later there are photographs. My daughter sitting on a picnic table holding her white hands up to the sun. Her blonde hair is tangled and wild.

We ride the bus downtown to the babysitter’s. She lives in a railroad flat on an alley near the Civic Center. Later, she’ll take my daughter up the street to the childcare center, an old storefront on Hayes St., the only one I can afford. I call from work two or three times a day to check on her. Is she okay? Can I talk to her? Winos stagger past the windows yelling angry threats at the air. The kids play in the cold sun. She makes chalk marks on the dirty sidewalk.

“What’s that?” an old man asks, pointing to her drawing.

Tonight, I go into her room to check. Her small body is there under the covers. I bend low until I feel her breath on my cheek.

We sit in wet sand. July fog. I’ve brought sandwiches and apples for a picnic on the beach, but it’s too cold. The windmill flutters in the tulip garden in Golden Gate Park. She digs in the wet sand, picks up driftwood, seaweed, pieces of shell. I keep my eyes on the green waves crashing under white water and wish I wasn’t afraid to dive in. Surfers ride the waves dangerously close to the rocks. She shudders and says, “Can we go now?” We move into the shelter of the park, and she puts her hand in mine. Squeeze. Quiet.

We get off the trolley and walk up the street to the corner of Arguello and Fulton, and stop in front of the Jefferson Airplane house. It looms large and gloomy. “Are they in there?” she asks. Huge pillars glisten in moonlight as we stand on the sidewalk waiting for music. Nothing. We tiptoe up to the house. She goes all the way up to the windows and peeks in. Nothing.

A card comes in the mail. A picture of a little girl in a pink jumpsuit holding a teddy bear. “Happy Birthday To A Sweet Six-Year-Old.” There’s a check for fifteen dollars in it. She jumps up and down. “See,” she says, holding the card in front of me. “He did remember.” I take the check and think groceries, coffee, cheese, eggs. I do midnight shopping at Cala Foods with the after-hours crowd cruising for someone to take home, and the panhandlers. One old man stretches his hat out to me, and I drop in a dollar.

When I get home, she’s lying in a puddle of moonlight. The card pressed under her cheek.

I read her a story while she soaks in her bath. “Outside,” a story with a girl hero. “We should paint toenails on the tub,” I tell her.

“It’s got claw feet,” she says.

“I’ll give the tub a pedicure,” and I take out red paint and paint each claw. She goes under water giggling. While she soaks, I paint. Vines coming out of the closet. Green vines all the way down the hall. And later in the kitchen, a green zebra appears over the stove. For a whole month, I spend my afternoons painting. There’s a park emerging on one wall in the hallway. Bicycle riders sneak in and out of the trees. Each day when she comes home, I’ve added a new item to the park: a castle, a quarter moon, a ballerina, and a winged horse sailing over the tops of the trees.

“I’ll never be able to let the landlord in here,” I tell her.

“It doesn’t matter. It belongs to us now,” she says.

She looks like her father. Has his round eyes. His mouth and perfect nose. Even his facial expressions. His way of sagging in a chair. His devotion to television. The only thing she has like me is a gold-brown color. I say, “Let’s take a walk. It’s drenched and stormy outside.”

“What about my favorite program where the dad comes home after being gone for years?” she asks.

“He’s not coming,” I tell her and go out into the street. The light is dying and I forget time and the wind pushes me up the hill and I get lost. Dogs rush toward the fence as I pass. It’s dark when I find my way back. She is under a pile of blankets in front of the TV. The blonde ends of her hair poke out. My own daughter who looks nothing like me.

Thirty parents arrive at the school in icy rain to hear about “the rules” and “respecting each other’s space.” We do an exercise, stare into each other’s eyes without blinking. Later, in the science class, a woman stands holding a small boa constrictor. The woman tells me all the kids handle the snake. She offers it to me, but I shake my head and leave the meeting early, thinking this will be the next exercise. I take the long way home through the park. Enormous dahlias unfold in the Tea Garden. Cherry blossoms drop petals into water, and the museum glows in its chalky skin.

At home I find her curled up in my bed. Crayons and magic markers scattered over the floor. She’s been drawing pictures. A girl on horseback. Shooting stars. Rainbows. Flying Sufi hearts. The giant hearts hurl through dark blue skies. She tucks herself down into the pillows. I tell her not to fall asleep in my bed. “I’m not falling asleep,” she says. “I’m just resting my eyes.” Later, I climb into bed beside her. She’s too heavy for me to carry now.

Her grandmother calls to tell her about the new baby girl. “Did you know you have another sister now? Your dad was hoping for a boy, but things don’t always go like we plan.” She hangs up and says, “There are two of them now.”

She writes a story. “The Cool Girl.”

Once there was a girl and her name was Susan and she was 18. And she loved motorcycles. But her mother did not like them. But anyway Susan bought one. The next day Susan and her boyfriend wanted to ride the motorcycle to school. But her mother would not let them. So Susan got very mad. And she and her mother had a fight and her mother would not let her go to school. So Susan thought of a plan. She thought of running away from home. So she did. And when she was riding she got hungry so she stopped at a cafe for a bite of something. And after that she went to France and had a great time and so she lived there. The End.

There are pictures. In one, she’s a dark-haired girl diving off a board into a turquoise pool.

Ballet class in an old Victorian in the Mission. In the purple light of winter, cold wooden floors creak as we walk up three flights of stairs and into a room of mirrors. Legs, white tights. A boy strutting back and forth across the open floor. She whirls around in her black leotard. Catches a glimpse of herself. The teacher is Japanese. Lean muscles. Years of work.

“Hard work,” she says over the heads of the tiny dancers. “She has good feet,” she says, bending to grasp my daughter’s feet in her hands. “Strong feet.” And my daughter’s feet carry her through rain. Through afternoon wind, to the corner store for bread. To the Swedish Bakery for butter cookies. Down littered sidewalks to catch her bus. “Do you pick her up at the bus stop?” Mr. Fiji, her school teacher asks. “Your neighborhood is not safe.” Smiling, he tells me he will teach her to read and speak Japanese.

She speaks to me in Japanese. The words are red and black. Choppy and deep. She presses her hands together, bows her head and says, “Good morning, Mother.” She paints characters on rice paper. Translates for me, “Happiness.” I put the painting in a frame and hang it over our door.

In Japan Town, paper fish fly through the air on sticks, and yellow umbrellas twirl in wind. We buy a pencil box and incense. Drink tea in a shop with red booths. Tea, almond cookies, and spicy crackers. She picks up chopsticks and holds the bowl of rice to her mouth as she eats.

My fortune: “The more you know, the less you understand.”

Hers: “Whoever can see through all fear will always be safe.”

In our house on a street that opens to battered storefronts, bars, bookstores, The Purple Heart Thrift Shop, she waits by the phone for him to call. She chews on her thumb, picks up a hand mirror and brushes her hair till the long blonde strands fly up, fan out with electricity. She waits, gives up, puts on a record, and asks her friend who lives upstairs to come and dance with her. Her friend is small with long brown hair. Smaller than my daughter who looks like an awkward fawn as she bows and stretches and turns in the living room with a naïve grace. The two girls whirl and their dance becomes more frenetic, wilder as they fly and laugh and fall. Till the neighbors begin to pound on our floor.

Every day she rides the bus to Valencia and 16th and gets off. She walks home passing Aunt Lil’s Antiques and dodging drunks as she goes. When she comes in the door today, I can hear her hurrying up the stairs. She tells me in a rush, out of breath, “A man tried to get me to go with him. He said come here, angel, I’ve got a lotta money. I ran but he started to come after me, then these two guys chased him. He drove away real fast.”

I call the police, but when they arrive, she can’t tell them anything about the man—just the car—a black Seville. And the money—”hundreds of dollars lying on the front seat.”

She gets a letter from her grandmother. In it there’s a photo of the two girls—one of them about six and the other a toddler. They’re dressed in identical pink jumpsuits. Her grandmother writes a few lines. “Here’s your baby sisters. I thought it was time you got to see them. Aren’t they dolls? And I want you to know I haven’t forgotten you. Love, Gran.”

She studies the photo for a few minutes, holding it tightly in her fingers. Then she turns to me and says, “I don’t know what he sees in them.” She tosses the photo onto the table and begins examining a broken fingernail.

Low riders rumble through the damp air past Mission Dolores and the Integral Yoga Institute where Swami Sachatinanda’s beatific countenance smiles down on his devotees, and just next door old women in old lace cluster under their icons of joy. Church bells and shirtless men returning to their women. My daughter wants to dress in black. To wear the uniform of another culture. A blonde chola in her black derby, black pants, and Chinese slippers. She pulls her hair tightly to one side and pins it back. Takes a red rose and sticks it over her ear. She lines her eyes with black. She looks ten years older than she is. Her lips a deep red. Her friends tell her, “You’re a wannabe.”

“Nam picked a fight with me today,” she says, staring into the mirror rubbing a bruise on her cheek. “We used to be friends, but she belongs to the Wa Chings now. She started yelling at me, calling me honky, saying, come on show me how tough you are. So I did. I forgot all the karate I learned, but I went for her anyway. I was swinging my fists and punching her head. Her friends were yelling, okay girl, okay, okay, stop.”

A boy appears at the bottom of the stairs. He has walked blocks in the rain from the Mission Flatlands where dogs roam freely and women sell tortillas on street corners. Hot and fresh, La Taqueria. Watermelon juice, papaya, mango. He tells me he has come to see my daughter. A silver cross dangles from one ear, and he smiles at me with his eyes.

Boys appear at our door. Black, brown, their hair in cornrows, hairnets, and shower caps. Protecting their most valuable asset. They walk her home from school, come up the stairs quietly, and sit in her room drinking soda and listening to the soul station. Their names are T.J., Bugsy, and Helio. They wear leather pants and Members Only jackets. Their mothers work in factories. They live in Bay Area Hunter’s Point and the Outer Mission. They don’t have money, so they walk and run to get where they’re going, and sometimes they boost what they can’t buy. Helio is wearing his flannels today. A blue bandanna around his forehead. Their names appear all over the city—in the Fillmore and Western Addition. Upper Market and the Embarcadero. “Helio Was Here” and “T.J. the Cool One.” Mexican hieroglyphs bloom on walls covered with bougainvillea. Rise above the salty air.

At school, the girls threaten her. Sometimes on the bus they swear at her, “Girl, you gonna get your ass whipped.” And she tells her grandmother these things, proud of her ability to stir up trouble. The phone rings and her grandmother asks, “Is your boyfriend black? I’ll disown you.”

At the concert the black man at the piano. “I’ve gotta get closer,” she says. She is clapping her white hands. I want to help her find her way down the stairs, through the crowd below. Ushers move toward us. Threatening. Flashlights. I don’t understand. Strange. Alien. My own daughter. The man at the piano, fluid and female as he moves to his own music. His hair braided into a thousand silver beads. He is smiling upward at my daughter.

Sandra Florence taught writing for forty years in Tucson, Arizona, ran two NEH projects in Tucson, and currently writes poetry, fiction, and creative nonfiction and blurs the boundaries between them. She has published creative and scholarly work and has just completed a short story collection entitled Everything is Folded.

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

ADDING APPETIZERS
by Claire Oleson

She was sitting on a stool in the basement of the restaurant watching the octopus spin. It was on a cold/cold cycle in the washing machine. This was how they tenderized it, Ellis had told her, overjoyed he had something genuinely interesting to offer. It was this nauseous moving smudge, the octopus, not his telling. She was coming to adore it, the borderless slosh. No, more than that, she could believe she loved it, adjusting her over-the-knee pin-stripe skirt in the cold-damp of the concrete room, it was good. A man she also loved was upstairs, drunk, frying things, cutting real close to his fingers, and working someone else’s shift, and Ellis was on his way down to her, in his unadorned state, in an apron, having been washing dishes, walking down the concrete stairs to finish talking to her about the new crudo option on the menu so she could finish her little write-up for some hyper-local culinary column that at least her dad liked to read. The suckers and the head were a singular hum.

When had she started with the rabbit traps? Seven winters ago when her grandmother had shown her, when they were up north and the snow had settled in whipped-cream heaves on every roof/road/sidewalk/way of getting anywhere at all. It made everybody a trudger. You’d look out past the exhale of farmland and someone would be getting to their truck, in the over-the-knee white, forcing themselves into the day, trudging. No one was delicate. No one was flashing with glimpses of dorsal appendages or outer gills, even though this, she supposed, had been a cold/cold cycle too. That thought was nothing. Her knees looked a little blushed against the stark border of black cloth. Her grandmother had liked French cooking. Her grandmother had tied barbed wire into halos for the rabbit traps and left them in the snow by the wood’s edge. They were attached to something else (Ellis was on his way, she could hear him upstairs), but she could never complete the traps herself. She could only bend and knot the wire with a pair of needle-nose pliers and pass the circles to her grandmother. Her mother would look on. Her mother would pass through the kitchen in little steps and look at the both of them, her eyes stinging with salt water, as if they were killing a man. Her mother’s whole face, one pang. She might have stopped making the circles if her mother didn’t also love the rabbit, the French rabbit, accompanied by glazed carrots, steaming up a frosted window, beyond which some neighbor was dredging their thighs through the snow. She just made the circles and slid them across the table.

The octopus was still making its own feverish orbits when he finally got down to her. His face was so pleased as it ducked under a ceiling pipe. He got to talk to her, her on the stool in the skirt across from the washer, he got to talk to her about the crudo. She had her recorder out, extended towards him. She looked politely happy. This was only a little worse than if she’d looked completely bored. Ellis knew she cared more for the prep chef who did cocaine sometimes, but the prep chef was upstairs getting paid more, not down here in the concrete enclosure with its stagnant fluorescence and one woman gazing at a thrashing cephalopod; Ellis was lucky. What if he just said he loved her and could get her good dinner, good dinner for years. Sure, he didn’t love her yet, but oh he knew he could muster it up, given some time. The tape recorder had its mouth towards him but hers was slightly parted and facing the washer. She was supposed to be asking him something, for sure, but she was tired and crowding her brain with full-fat pictures of brutal winters. Ones where the snow got over the height of the shed, once, but they’d gone on separating rabbit thigh from bones with their teeth like it hadn’t. Biting like they weren’t in any actual danger. Biting like the pale outsides were just salt hills, not the guts of snowstorms. She was supposed to ask him things, but what did he care. There wasn’t another stool. He sat on the floor in front of her. In between her and the octopus. He took up her sight and smiled. His face was so open, teeth haunting just behind his smile, words about to breach. His face was so open; one pang; she thought.

“So after an hour on rinse, we take them out and they are quickly cleaned, chopped, drizzled with olive oil and smoked sea salt, and accompanied with basil leaves and blood oranges and sectioned grapefruit. It’s plated on a dipped plate, not quite a bowl, but with sloped edges that makes a wide pool of it all. Everything is, absolutely, sliced as thinly as feasible. We take the tentacles through a deli meat slicer. They should be like meat-paper. It’s clean and refreshing on the palate. It’s a beautiful opener to a meal, scrapes the long day out of your mouth and sparks it with sodium and citrus.” She was looking at him now, realizing he wanted, almost, to just write the column himself. That no one said “sparked” unless they thought up the word beforehand, hauling it through their brain like an extra body, an extra life to push into the light. It would be a trim and sparse paragraph, thin and shoved to the corner, probably no wider than the sliced crudo itself, certainly not terribly thicker, if he’d meant what he’d said about paper. Okay, why not let him basically do it, him and all his hoping at her.

Her grandmother’s neighbor had come in weeping once. Around her ankle: pinching wire, and out of her grandmother: so many apologies, then an invite to dinner. An invite to the rabbit her neighbor could have been. Her grandmother kneeled and cut the wire off of the jeaned ankle. Nothing had broken skin, but the area was strained and swollen. Her grandmother had traced the red circle with the pad of her thumb, checking. She had been thinking that her grandmother ought to just marry this neighbor. When had her grandfather died? Well before she herself knew how to make halos for rabbits, that was certain.

Just look at her, the neighbor, sitting while a white-haired guilt kneeled by her legs. She was sitting and not crying and trying to let the feeling of being an almost-animal fizzle off her leg. Someone had to marry her. The wet sat in her eyes, poised bright like someone’s waiting child in a too-large chair.

“Is it good?” She pushed the recorder forward half an inch. It was the laziest, most inane question. He knew that. He could love her. Give him six months. Someone, give him six months.

“What? Oh, yeah, I mean I think it’s superb, and I have had it. They, I guess we, test all the new menu additions with the entire kitchen staff. Even if you’re only washing dishes, you get to eat the entire restaurant. It’s truly a stunner and certainly a very unique dish to have offered this far from the coast. I assure you,” he placed a palm on the washer window behind him, “that despite the distance, the octopus is incredibly fresh. Now, it’s not the Italian coast by any means, but show me better in small-town Montana and I’ll quit working here and move in with you.” He hadn’t meant it. Or sure, he had, but he hadn’t meant to mean it. She brushed it off like it was nothing, like it was stray hair on her shoulder, like he wouldn’t absolutely take a blushed knee in this basement and set a hand on her skirted leg and talk himself into already loving her. He watched her write something down about smoked salt. His palm thrummed. It was still on the glass, blocking the picture.

Something upstairs crashed. Something upstairs yelled and balked at flashing oil. What she was in love with was above them, she remembered. He took his hand off the glass and raised a finger. He ran up the stairs under a deluge of swears. He ran up the stairs to where she actually held some adoration. He started swearing along with them, to make it better, to slide into the hurt of the room like a knife into a block. The cycle stopped. The body stilled and slumped. The washing machine beeped four blissful robotic notes.

By the time the day was cleaned, by the time any glow bled out of view of the singular basement-alley window and Ellis came back down to her with new oil burns on his wrists and one on his neck that he’d have to find later, she would already be holding the octopus in her lap. She would be washing fingertips down its legs to check for bleeding, to check for signs of being an animal. Her hair would linger and stick to its damp bulbous head. A few blonde tips would cling to the wet of a cornea when she finally turned to find his face, his coming down.

Cleaver Poetry Editor Claire Oleson is a Brooklyn-based writer hailing from Grand Rapids, Michigan. She’s an alum of Kenyon College, where she studied English and Creative Writing. Her work has been published by the Kenyon Review online, the University of Kentucky’s graduate literary journal Limestone, the L.A. Review of Books, and Newfound Press, among others. She is also the 2019 winner of the Newfound Prose Prize and author of the chapbook Things From the Creek We Could Have Been. 

 

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL YOUR LIFE? by L. L. Babb

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

two women back to back

WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ALL YOUR LIFE?
by L. L. Babb

In a minivan borrowed from Connie’s sister, Connie and Lori were on their way to the town of Locke. Connie drove, keeping her eyes straight ahead. So far there had been no road signs for Locke. On the first leg of the trip, Connie had jabbed at the radio buttons, changing the stations—music, talk, static, music—then, somewhere around Antioch, she seemed to reach a detente with the ominous murmur of NPR. Lori’s hearing was not the best, but she hesitated to ask Connie to turn up the volume. The two-lane road crossed back and forth over the river, over drawbridges and through the Sacramento delta sloughs. The morning turned sunny, the sky above them was a giant, blue bowl tinged gray at the horizons with the dissipating fog, and although there was a considerable amount of traffic, they were making good time.

This trip was Connie’s idea, Locke being the location of one of her favorite restaurants “in the world.” Lori had been to Locke once, years earlier, with her husband, Frank, before he ran off with his coworker. Now Lori was single again at sixty years old, and she had a roommate, Connie, all within six months.

Something rather surprising had transpired between Connie and Lori the night before. Somehow they kissed. Lori had learned that Connie was gay several weeks after they’d become roommates. Now Lori wondered if she might be gay, although this morning she wondered if it was just a phase she was going to go through, like the time she thought she could paint portraits or learn scuba diving.

If she was gay, Lori thought this trip might be their first official public appearance as a couple, though Locke was hardly more than a ghost town. If Lori remembered right, most of the buildings lining the two or three short streets were sagging and boarded up. There were a few art galleries, an antique shop, and Connie’s ultimate destination. “The restaurant is all the way in the back of a bar,” Connie had told Lori when she suggested the road trip. “It’s a hoot. There’s no menus or anything, the waitress just comes up to you and asks, ‘How do you want your steak?’”

In the days leading up to the weekend, the whole adventure had seemed like the kind of thing two women who were new friends and roommates might do together. There was a lot of planning for the three-hour trip, which began with the BART train from San Francisco to the suburbs to pick up the minivan from Connie’s little sister. Connie’s sister seemed to assume that Lori and Connie were in a relationship. Lori had lived her entire life without someone thinking she was gay, and now it was as though the kiss the night before had left a mark on her for everyone to see. As the sister handed the keys over, she requested that only Connie drive the minivan, “for insurance reasons,” and that they be careful not to leave any personal items in the van when they brought it back, “because of the children.” Lori wondered if the sister thought that she and Connie would be returning from the day trip with the back seats full of vibrators and strap-on dildos and pornography.

Lori tried to catch Connie’s eye and smile, but it seemed that Connie was in one of her moods. Sometimes Connie needed lots of quiet and coffee in the morning.

Connie’s sister stood in the driveway watching as they backed out, her arms folded across her chest. She wore such a thin dress. Lori didn’t know any women who wore dresses on a Saturday except her mother, God rest her soul. Thinking about her mother made Lori feel a tight inward cringe. Her mother would have been appalled if Lori turned out to be gay. Her mother would roll over in her grave except, of course, her mother had been cremated. What would be the cremated equivalent of rolling over in her grave? Lori imagined her mother’s ashes, far-flung into the ocean, quivering at the notion that she might have a gay daughter. Not in my family, those ashes would say. Or maybe her ashes had been consumed by a fish, then eaten by a bigger fish, then pulled out of the sea and were right now being eaten by a stranger dining in a restaurant. She could see some heavyset man forking a bite of fish with her mother buried in it into his mouth, and then the essence of her mother was assimilated into his bloodstream. Was that bit of her mother flipping over as well?

They passed a front yard where someone had built a ten-foot-tall Christmas tree made entirely of green wine bottles, stacked and glinting in the sun. It must have taken years to erect what was now a permanent holiday decoration. The whole thing looked like a lot of work—the assembling, the maintenance, the drinking.

“Will you look at that,” Lori said, turning her head as they zoomed past. Connie grunted. Frank, Lori’s ex-husband, had not been a morning person either. Perhaps she and Connie could landscape their own yard with recycling, though Lori wasn’t creative that way. She was a paint-by-numbers kind of person—not capable of designing anything but pretty good at following directions to recreate what someone else had dreamed up. They could make something out of Amazon boxes. Robots, maybe. They could erect cardboard robots all over the front lawn like snowmen.

Lori was pretty sure the neighbors would have something to say about that. Lori and Connie lived in the house that Lori once shared with her husband and where she had raised her daughter. She’d have to pay the high school boy she employed more to mow around robots.

They turned a corner and came upon a stop sign flashing red, warning bells ringing, a gate, and beyond that another drawbridge, this one as if the erector-set structure of the bridge had simply turned ninety degrees. A boat glided past, two tan women in bikinis and sunglasses preening on the bow. A suave fellow guiding the boat past the bridge pulled on a horn and the women squealed. Lori quickly looked at her lap. Was Connie watching those girls? If Lori turned out to be gay, would she start to ogle girls like her husband used to? Did lesbians ogle?

Lori had so many questions. She hoped Connie would snap out of her mood soon.

The bridge clanged back into place, the gate rattled to the right, and Connie eased the van forward. The tires slid queasily over the grates in the road.

The kiss. Or, more accurately stated, the make-out session. Lori tried to work through the details of how they’d gone from sitting on the couch talking about the last episode of Dancing with the Stars to what happened. There was wine, of course, a tepid red, but there was always wine on Friday nights. It was their private happy hour, a tradition they’d started soon after Connie had moved in. Was everything going to be different now? Lori liked having Connie as a roommate. She reminded Lori of those Renaissance paintings of Joan of Arc, steely-eyed and determined. Tall. The kind of woman who could pull off carrying a broadsword into a room but with a softness around the eyes. Lori had never really known anyone who was gay.

She didn’t want to stay in the house alone, but she couldn’t bring herself to sell. She had moved into her daughter’s old room, packed her married life into the master bedroom, and locked the door. She went in there every month or so to dust and vacuum or sometimes to just sit on the bed. The room was crowded with artifacts of her previous life—the wedding pictures where she and her husband looked like shocked children, the collection of owl figurines she’d received for birthdays and Christmas and Mother’s Day year after year. So many owl figurines. Her nicest dresses, hanging in the closet, collected a gray film on the shoulders. Her daughter’s stuffed animals and carefully folded baby clothes filled the bureau drawers.

Her daughter. Lori would have to come out to her daughter. There was an excruciating thought. Her daughter, who knew everything at twenty-five, who already thought her mother was a silly woman. Well, this would confirm it. Then her daughter would tell her father, even though Lori would swear her to secrecy, and her ex-husband would tell his new girlfriend. Lori felt another cringe.

What happened? The wine had made Lori weepy, Connie had laid a hand on Lori’s knee, Lori put her head on Connie’s shoulder, then somehow their lips connected and there was that first, tentative kiss, which Lori responded to with more enthusiasm than either of them expected. A lot more enthusiasm. She’d opened her mouth for God’s sake. Was this how it started? She knew people didn’t choose to be gay. Had something been lying in wait inside her all these years, a sleeping beauty waiting for another princess’s kiss?

“Finally,” Connie said, pointing to a sign. “Locke, four miles.”

The river had been playing hide-and-seek all morning, opening up in full view in front of them, a glittering brown jewel, before disappearing behind levees. Near the water, the air smelled like rotting garbage and mud, but now, as they moved away from the river, there was the smell of mown fields. Brilliant green stalks of a tall crop flew past in a blur on the right.

Connie eased the minivan down a one-way street and parallel parked effortlessly. Her lesbian superpower. Perhaps now Lori would be able to parallel park as well.

They clomped down the narrow street over the old, wooden sidewalks, Lori following a few feet behind Connie. Just like when she was married, she thought. Connie’s broad shoulders could be interchangeable with Lori’s ex-husband’s. Lori wondered if she and Connie would ever be the kind of couple to hold hands in public, oblivious to other people’s stares.

Of course first they needed to discuss if the kiss last night was the beginning of something.

In the back of her mind, Lori unpacked an incident from middle school, a memory shoved in a shoebox along with the embarrassing crush she’d had on her elderly art teacher and the too-short, blue gym romper with her last name written in black marker across her back. Buried under everything was that time she and Del Buchanan had stepped into a closet for “Seven Minutes of Heaven” during her first boy/girl party. As soon as the door had closed, Del shoved one hand down the front of her jeans and the other up under her shirt. Lori liked Del. He was a funny-looking boy with a lazy eye, a blonde Afro, and Birkenstocks. The popular kids at school called him Garfunkel and let him hang around with their crowd sometimes, like a court jester. He was a visiting celebrity to Lori’s crowd of gawky adolescents. At the party, when someone yanked the door back open after only thirty seconds, Del’s hands were still in the vicinity of where they had started, and Lori emerged, clothes askew, blinking into the light. Del draped his arm around her shoulders the rest of the night, as if he was claiming ownership, and then never acknowledged her existence again after that. The rumor around school was he had called their half-minute of heaven in the closet a “mercy grope.”

Perhaps the kiss last night had been some sort of charity on Connie’s part.

Now Connie pushed through a pair of Wild West saloon doors. The bar was just as Connie had described—the yeasty smell of mildew and despair hit Lori as soon as she stepped inside. A neon jukebox glowed and blinked in the corner. Hundreds of blackened dollar bills and several pairs of what looked like dingy panties were stuck to the ceiling. How did they get up there? Two pale men at the bar, bent larvae-like over their drinks, didn’t look up as she stood there blinking.

In the back, meagerly lit by a wan fluorescent light, were half a dozen picnic tables, the kind where the benches attached to the tables with metal clamps. Were the owners worried that customers would walk out with the benches? The red-and-white checked tablecloths that Connie had rhapsodized about were just thin sheets of patterned plastic stapled to the tables. A kitchen area was partially visible behind a half wall in the back of the room. All the tables were occupied with tourists in shorts and visors, middle-aged gray men, and brightly dressed grandmothers. High up on the walls were the mounted heads of every antlered animal Lori had ever seen: deer, various types of antelope, a moose, a rabbit. A thin woman carrying a line of plates on one tattooed arm swooped past them, saying, “Sit anywhere.”

“Isn’t this great?” Connie said, the most animated she’d been all morning.

They had to share a table with another couple. Connie and Lori sat at the far end, twisting awkwardly to get their legs under. Their tablemates were silent—the man sawing at his steak, the woman watching him with a hostage-like expression. The plastic tablecloth was grimy. The knife protruding from the peanut butter jar looked sticky.

They ordered their steaks. The waitress returned instantly with two slabs of T-bones that barely fit on the plates, a stack of plain white bread, and two Budweisers. No glasses.

Lori’s ex would be in heaven here. This was the kind of place he would have been thrilled to go to. When they were married, Lori always did what Frank wanted to do. Now he was off trying to please someone else. Her daughter had told her that the new girlfriend made him go to the ballet. A ballet! This was the same man who refused to go to a movie with her if he thought the title was too “girly.” Now he was going to ballets, and she was here, surrounded by dusty dead animals, drinking beer from a bottle.

She had spent her entire life going with the flow, like a cork bobbing along in a stream. She could trace each step along the path that brought her here, bouncing from one thing to another, buffeted along by what other people wanted. Here she was at twelve years old, pulling weeds in the front yard for a penny apiece, when the neighbor, Dr. March, drove by. He lowered his car window to ask if she was available on Saturday nights to babysit his two boys. After high school graduation she morphed into Dr. March’s receptionist at his general practice. Soon there was this patient, her future husband, staring at her each time he came in for his yearly physical. Their brief courtship, their wedding, her father giving her away in the church like he was passing the baton in a relay race, her mother nodding her approval—in retrospect it all seemed like someone else’s idea that she followed along without thinking. Even her daughter just fell into her life, just like that; they hadn’t even been trying and Lori was pregnant. Frank said one child was enough, though she thought two would be better, but Frank got a vasectomy. When Dr. March retired, he handed her over to the doctor who took over his practice, Frank fell in love with someone else, and she was now, perhaps, a lesbian.

Lori had no control over her own life.

Lori looked up at Connie, who was diligently cutting her steak into bite-size pieces. Connie’s lips were pursed with concentration. The desire that had swept through Lori last night seemed as if it had happened to someone else. How much was a person expected to just accept in life? Because this was too much. She would not now be gay.

Connie, as if aware Lori was about to speak, stopped working on her steak and set her knife, then her fork down beside her plate. She glanced over at the other couple and said, sighing, “You’re not eating.”

This is going to break her heart, Lori thought.

Connie sighed again. “Look,” she began, “I’m really sorry about last night. Things got a little out of hand. I’ve got be honest. I’m just not into you that way.”

Lori blinked several times.

“Oh God,” Connie said, glancing over at their tablemates, who were listening intently while trying to look as if they weren’t. The man’s face was horizontal with his plate and just inches above it, like he was trying to read the fine print on a contract. The woman stared pointedly at a handwritten sign on the wall that said No Outside Food, but she had reached up and tucked a strand of hair around her left ear. Connie said, “Don’t look at me like that. I’ve been through this too many times to fall for it again.”

Fall for what? And how was Lori looking at her? “I…I don’t know what—” she began.

“If you want to ‘experiment,’ you’re going to have to find someone else. I’m not going to be your lesbian Sherpa,” Connie hissed, leaning forward, “I’m way too old for that shit.”

Why, Connie was angry. Had she waited all morning until they were in a restaurant full of people? Had Connie thought she would fall apart? Afraid Lori would make a scene?

“I really like you. I do,” Connie continued, “but I do not appreciate you coming on to me like that.”

Lori started, “No, now wait a sec…” but for the life of her she couldn’t find the next word to say. All at once she felt old and tired and incurably stupid.

“I’ve got to pee,” Connie said, standing up. “Pull yourself together. It’s a long trip back.”

Connie lifted her legs out from under the table and over the bench, then headed toward the restrooms without looking back.

Well.

Lori opened her bag, pulled out a compact, and checked her face. The mirror only showed the small, round center of herself—a sliver of forehead, her graying eyebrows, two faded blue eyes in their pouches of wrinkles, the bridge of her nose. She looked shocked, like she’d just lived through something life-changing. Now that all the excitement was over, the couple who had been listening pulled themselves up out of the scaffolding of the picnic table.

The waitress came over and looked pointedly at Connie’s plate.

“Is your girlfriend finished?” she asked.

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Lori answered.

The wistfulness in her own voice startled her. It was as if she’d lost her future, even though she wasn’t even sure it was a future she wanted. She felt tears well up and then spill over onto her cheeks. She was crying.

“Aw, honey,” the waitress said, sitting down backward at the end of the bench and curling her tattooed arm around Lori’s neck.

Her touch made Lori cry harder. She sobbed in a sort of gasping, gulping way.

“Hey, hey, it’s okay. You’re going to be okay,” the waitress said.

That kiss. The thing was no one had ever kissed Lori that way. It was the kind of kiss the characters experience at the end of every girly movie. It was so kind and sensual and slow, the way she had always thought a kiss should be but never was. It was a kiss that hadn’t asked anything of her but simply gave, touching all the womanly parts of her, reaching in and pulling at her shrunken ovaries and her useless uterus and her still gorgeous breasts that hadn’t seen the light of day in forever. That kiss had touched her heart. Her soul.

Lori dropped her head and let her body slump against the waitress. Her nose burrowed into the crook of the woman’s elbow—she smelled of kitchen grease and antiseptic soap. It felt so good to be held like this. The waitress patted Lori’s back once, twice, then settled on rubbing up and down with an open palm. Lori thought she could sit like that forever, just waiting for someone to tell her what to do next.

LL Babb author photoL.L. Babb lives in Forestville, CA with her husband, two cats, and a Doodle named Punky. She has been a teacher for the Writers Studio San Francisco and online since 2008. Her work has appeared in West Marin Review, The MacGuffin, Rosebud, and many other literary journals. She was voted first in the Sixfold fiction Winter 2019 competition. She is currently at work on a collection of short stories and a novel.

THE GREENER MY GRASS by Dylan Cook

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

tall grass against a blue sky

THE GREENER MY GRASS
by Dylan Cook

Maureen could clearly remember the day in December the two young professors moved in across the street and how much more she respected them back then. It was a shame that Mrs. Graham had passed, really, but Maureen liked the idea of two yuppies coming into that stuffy, gray house, sprucing it up a little bit, and bringing some fresh energy to the neighborhood. And professors, no less! With any luck, they’d be the first step in turning Manasquan into a kind of cultural center along the Jersey Shore where intellectuals and artists lived and worked, anything that would warrant it being bolded on maps. Each box they pulled from their U-Haul held that dream.

When she first met the professors, they had been so warm and kind, so cute behind their nearly matching pairs of glasses, that Maureen, for the first time in her life, considered greeting her new neighbors with a pie. She decided that a pie would be too kitschy, but she held the idea of her neighbors’ potential close to her heart like a locket. For good reason, too, because in a matter of weeks the couple had painted over Mrs. Graham’s gray with a tasteful, beachy yellow that promised to melt the winter that surrounded it.

“You better watch it,” Maureen’s friend and neighbor Donna told her on their routine evening walk. “The professors are looking to upstage you.”

Maureen laughed because “nicest house on the block” was not a title she was willing to part with easily. Every angle of her house and yard was carefully designed and consistently kept. She resembled her yard and vice versa. They were both lean, neat, and smooth, and she spent plenty of time and money to keep them that way. If the professors wanted to tire themselves out in competition, have at it. It would only help her property values to have something pretty to look at across the street.

But after the paint dried and winter died for spring, it became clearer that surface level touchups were enough for them, and they were content to neglect the harder maintenance needed for decent curb appeal. Their grass grew long and thick like a sheepdog’s hair. It hurt Maureen to look at it. In the evenings, she’d stand by her bay window and chew on her upper lip in a confused scowl until Donna knocked on her door promptly at eight o’clock.

“Can you believe what they’re doing?” Maureen would start.

“You mean what they’re not doing? Ugh! I don’t know how you could let your house get to that point,” Donna said. “It’s laziness like that that I can’t stand.”

“It’s a lack of pride is what it is. These kids don’t have that. They don’t know what it means to work for something and be proud of it. They could at least hire someone to cut the grass.”

Maureen peered over her shoulder to bring the yard back into view, as if to remind her of what she was criticizing. Even from down the block, she could see the sharp property lines where the neighbors on either side kept their grass short and tidy.

“You know what I think?” Donna said with a click of her tongue. “I think one of their parents bought that house for them. I doubt two professors could afford a house like that at their age. They don’t want to care about that house because it’s not theirs. They’re not paying someone to cut the grass because they can’t afford it.”

“I’d like to believe that,” Maureen said, thinking. “I’d like to give them the benefit of the doubt.”

“That’s what makes the most sense to me.”

And for days Maureen tried to see if it made sense to her too. Her husband, Irv, seemed indifferent towards a yard he could choose not to look at, so he was little help. Maureen was paranoid that a crumbling house across the street would reflect poorly on her, her house’s curb appeal, and the entire street’s reputation. Perhaps the professors really were just too poor to hire a lawn service, a thought that made Maureen sympathetic, though still dissatisfied.

“There’s no shame in being poor, but there’s shame in being dirty,” her mother always told her.

She couldn’t otherwise justify why the couple would jeopardize the neighborhood like this.

But, as much as she wanted to believe this, she couldn’t without proof. She sat by her window with a magazine spread over her lap but paid almost no attention to it. She nibbled the manicure off her fingers as she waited for one of the professors to show themselves. Professor Klein came out to get the mail, and Maureen decided she ought to do the same.

Klein was tall and handsome, even if a bit lanky, with wavy brown hair verging on curly. To Maureen, he looked like a bookish dweeb, like the kind she used to tease back in high school who never grew a harder shell. If he weren’t a professor, Maureen had a difficult time picturing him surviving as anything else. He didn’t look like he could handle being a lawyer, like Irv, or a manager or a doctor.

With mail in hand, Maureen waved at Klein and invited herself to his side of the street. As they exchanged pleasantries, she swept her foot across the grass and watched it unfurl in waves.

“You know,” she started, “I can give you the number for the lawn service I use. They do wonderful work, and they’re very reasonable.”

“I appreciate it,” Klein said with a clean smile, “and I can see that they do great for your house. But I think Renée and I are fine taking care of our lawn on our own.”

“Are you sure? I know I could get them to give you a free consultation.”

“For now, quite sure, but if we ever change our mind, I’ll give you a knock.”

Maureen feigned a smirk. Klein gave her a little salute with the envelopes in his hand and retreated back into his house. On the way back inside, Maureen knelt down to pull a weed that had sprouted in the gully between her grass and the sidewalk and threw it in the garbage.

“Take care of it themselves!” she scoffed at Donna on their evening walk. “That’s what they think they’re doing? Are they blind? You would think that professors would have more of their wits about them than that.”

“It’s just selfish,” Donna said, and Maureen was relieved that someone agreed with her disgust.

“Do they have any idea what this will do to our street? No one will want to live here anymore, and everyone’s property values will go down. We have a community we have to think about. We have to think and care about our neighbors.”

“This is exactly what happened to my sister Sue,” said Donna. “They had one bunch of slobs move in next door, and the next thing you know the neighborhood is trashed!”

Maureen shook her head and bit her lip.

“Ah! You know what I heard? The wife is pregnant now.”

“Renée? Who told you that?” said Maureen.

“The Myers, next door to them, they told me. Now, I don’t know how they know, but I saw her yesterday and I swear she had that glow to her. And she’s a little rounder around the waist too.”

“Well that shouldn’t be hard to notice. She’s a twig, that one. I can hardly imagine her ballooning like that on those little toothpick legs.”

But Maureen could imagine beyond that, all the way to them having a toddler running through grass that towered over its head, getting knotted and tripped up in it, falling, crying, blowing on dandelions, growing more weeds, cuts, scrapes, bruises, bug bites, rashes, hay fever, Lyme disease…

“Well they better get their act together,” Maureen said, “because if they’re not responsible enough to take care of their lawn, they’re not responsible enough to take care of a child.”

The summer went on hot and swampy. There was regular rain followed by relentless heat, keeping it humid almost all the time. That and the salty breeze from the ocean made the days unpleasant and the nights only marginally better. But it was a great time to grow. Maureen hired her lawn service to heavily fertilize her grass and trim it once a week on Thursdays—perfect for the weekends. She ordered some tropical flowers to place in pots across her property. They would only last the year, of course, but Maureen liked to have nice things while she could.

All around the town, people seemed to be pursuing similar goals. Every day the overlapping hum of lawnmowers, sprinklers, and cicadas sounded like a single species. Everyone was doing their part to beautify the neighborhood. That is, everyone except the professors. Their lawn was growing wicked and wild, with tall grasses, wildflowers, shrubs, and seedlings popping up irregularly. Looking at it, Maureen winced and bunched her brow, making her worry about the wrinkles this eyesore would cost her. So selfish, those professors.

The good news was that Renée really was pregnant, or at least she had started to look it and wasn’t intent on hiding it. The bad news, as Maureen saw it, was that with a baby on the way, it looked even less likely that the professors would spare precious time and energy fixing their jungle. Circumstances stacked as they were, Maureen had to work to avoid becoming hopeless. If she couldn’t stand looking at their yard, she couldn’t stand being quiet either. She’d annoy them, yes, but such matters were worth losing friends over, not that she and the professors were all that close anyway. There would be no love lost there.

She resumed her perch at her window, taking aim at the professors’ door. Their car pulled up, an outdated Civic, and Maureen went to get the mail. Renée and Klein almost made it to their door before Maureen got to their side of the street.

“Hello, hello!” Maureen called out to them. They spun around to face her. “I just wanted to extend my congratulations.”

She reached a hand towards Renée’s stomach. Renée rubbed her baby bump defensively.

“Thank you,” she said. “She’ll be our first.”

“When I was pregnant with my first, back when I was a bit younger than you are, I remember all I craved was olives, and I could never keep them down.” Maureen went on, burdening them with uncomfortable details until she could see them backstepping towards the door. “Before you go—I don’t want to hold you all day—I wanted to ask you about your lawn.”

“What about it?” said Klein.

“Well… some the neighbors, myself included, have noticed that it’s become a bit… overgrown. We want to know what your plans are for it.”

“This is the plan,” Klein said as he waved over his grass. Maureen blinked at him.

“What plan? Let it grow until you can’t walk on it anymore? It’s, it’s unsightly.”

“We want a natural yard,” he said. “We’re ecologists. Well, Renée is a bit more of an agronomist.” He tucked her under his arm, and they smiled at each other, as if to keep Maureen out of their joke. “Fertilizer runoff throws ecosystems out of balance, and we don’t want to contribute to that, especially here with the reservoirs and ocean nearby. It’s all very delicate.”

Maureen bit her lip again, unsure of how to deal with a kind of lunacy she’d never encountered before. “But can’t you at least trim it? The neighbors…”

“We’ve been busy,” Renée told her as she drew a circle around her stomach. “We’ve been focusing on making the backyard nice, since that’s where we like to spend our time.”

Frustrated, Maureen let them go, but she wasn’t sure if she told them goodbye. She paced around her home, biting her lip, biting her nails, and sneaking glances at the fresh meadow across the street. Irv got home around six, and she couldn’t wait until her walk with Donna.

“Is that so?” Irv said after she explained. “I never thought Manasquan would attract a breed of hippies.”

“I don’t know how you can be wedded to an idea like that when it actively hurts the people around you. I can appreciate science, but what happened to common courtesy?”

“Common courtesy and common sense are both going to die out with us,” Irv said, and Maureen agreed.

“Isn’t there something we can do? Can we report them to the town?”

“Outside of an HOA, there’s not much recourse. It’s their God-given right to let their yard go to shit.”

“What if it’s a safety concern? I’m sure they’re attracting all kinds of ticks and pests. You have to know some loophole that can get them to cut their grass.”

He said he’d look into it. Maureen made him dinner but was too distracted to make it properly and overboiled the pasta. Donna came, like clockwork.

Donna widened her mouth in a silent gasp as round as the pearls in her earrings. “Are they really that concerned? We all care about the environment, sure. I recycle. I don’t litter. But how can you do something like that?”

“Of course we have to care about our planet. We know that better than anyone. We’re next to the ocean. If it rises like they say it will, we’ll lose our homes!” Maureen donned concern, but behind that concern she had a fantasy that the ocean would rise right up to her backyard—beachfront property at last.

“There’s no reasoning with these people,” Donna said. “We have to try our best to ignore them.”

Maureen couldn’t let it go. Looking at that tall grass made her sweat, which was unusual for her. She tried putting herself in their shoes, imagining what it was like to care so much about the environment that you’d voluntarily live in filth, but her empathy couldn’t stretch that far. The environment to her wasn’t there in Manasquan but in mountains and forests so far removed from those suburbs. As long as she lived there, she couldn’t let their little experiment go on.

In a bin in the garage, Maureen dug out a Super Soaker that she gave to her grandkids when they came over. She filled it half up with bleach and topped it off with water. I’d rather see dirt piles out there than what they have now, she thought. Unusable dirt they’d have to at least cover with rocks, something more reasonable. Maureen put on a pair of black joggers and a black sweater. She looked like a cat burglar, a bad caricature of what a villain should look like. She wondered if she was stooping too low, but she quickly swatted that idea out of her mind. Nothing, nothing could be more important than her own sanity. She didn’t work hard until retirement for a couple of professors to ruin her peace.

Once it was good and dark, Maureen snuck out with her chemical weapon, crept across the street, and unloaded on a twisted column of grass. In the half moon’s scant light, Maureen could hardly see where she was shooting. Crickets drowned out the sloshing sound in her water gun, but she still worried that she would get noticed. She vastly underestimated how much she’d need, but she figured that whatever she sprayed would serve as a fine trial run. If she successfully stomped down a patch of the yard, she could come back, work bit by bit, and kill off the nuisance slowly.

She washed her hands, changed clothes, and climbed back into bed next to Irv. She threw an arm over him and slept well, and by morning she felt light in a way she hadn’t in weeks. It was Sunday, so no mail, but she could still wander around her front lawn plucking weeds, not that there were many left after all the Roundup, in order to get closer to her handiwork across the street. She could see a couple splashes of grass that had been drained white, but not quite the mass destruction she’d hoped for. Instead, there was a patchwork of stains that, hopefully, presaged death, and were luckily mild enough that they could be chalked up to a minor drought or the sheer volume of plants choking each other in a struggle for space.

What was more apparent was the steely smell of bleach that reached down her nose and nipped at her lungs. But even so, she could only smell it when she got close.

Convinced that her plan still held promise, Maureen set out to replicate it. She swapped the water gun for a plain bucket, reasoning that the bucket would give her the coverage she needed and would be easier for her to spill out and retreat. She also didn’t like the idea of her grandkids playing with a toy laced with bleach, so she washed it and put it back in its place. She stopped paying close attention to the bleach dosage, figuring that the water would evaporate and the bleach would accumulate until the soil was too poisonous for anything to grow.

She carried on like this, dumping bleach in their yard at night and sleeping soundly right after. The sore on her lip was finally healing. Neither Irv nor Donna, and especially not the professors, knew what she was doing, and she planned to keep it that way. The less they all knew the better. Still, it was hard for anyone to dodge the smell of bleach that suddenly began haunting the street like an industrial ghost.

“What is that?” Donna asked her each night.

“Chlorine? I bet the Myers are messing around with the chemicals in their pool.”

Donna accepted that answer at the time. When the smell sharpened, Maureen got her to believe that it was someone’s fertilizer. When the smell became a stench, Donna was told that it was emanating straight from the professors’ lawn, which was an easy sell because it became strong enough to pinpoint the origin. Conveniently, a good percentage of their lawn had died, turned brown, and began decaying into a juicy sludge that at least looked like it stunk.

It was working perfectly. The professors’ lawn was withering away, and in the process, it had become the disgusting onus of the street, leaving them no choice but to be ashamed of it. It was only icing that the whole dying thing provided a neat cover for Maureen. Now, whenever she saw the professors, she noticed embarrassed grief caked on their faces. She felt bad for them, truly, but some lessons have to be taught brutally, and Maureen thought it was incumbent upon the professors to learn how to properly take care of things, especially with a baby on the way. She hated seeing that shame inhabit them, but she mostly hoped that they’d change, work themselves out of it.

Maureen and Klein crossed paths at their mailboxes again, and this time Klein came to her side.

He conceded, asking Maureen if she could put him in touch with her lawn service, please.

“Really?” Maureen acted surprised. “I thought you were opposed to that.”

“I was. We were, but everything in our yard is dying.” He looked worried, maybe even close to crying, but he swallowed it. “I feel like I’m losing it. Every day I walk out my door and I swear I smell bleach, but bleach doesn’t just appear.” He ran his fingers through his hair and tugged on it.

“Bleach? I’ve smelt it too, but I assumed it was all the fertilizers people spray around all mixing together. Pesticides, insecticides, fertilizers, you know.”

“I can’t quite place it. I’ve been around plenty of dead plants, and I know it’s not them.” He paused. He bit his lip, for once. “Renée can smell everything right now. Her nose has gotten so sensitive lately. She completely believes that it’s bleach. She says she gets a migraine every time she leaves the house. I can’t disagree with her, but I don’t know how to help her either.”

He trailed off. Maureen held his arm and flashed him an assuring, winning smile. “I’ll get you the number.”

By early August, once everything in the professors’ lawn was dead or dying, the bleach smell too was subsiding as a heatwave scorched the soil dry. This was the best Maureen could ask for. Her lawn service was scheduled to clean out the debris and lay down sod in a week or so. But before that could happen, a nor’easter tore up the coast, shaking houses and laying down thick piles of rain. The next morning, the bleach was rehydrated, reinvigorated, and ready again to accost the street’s noses. Even from her porch, as Maureen stirred sugar into her morning coffee, the fumes mingled with her drink and turned each sip sour. Yet, she remained in good spirits because the gray-brown mess across the street would be gone shortly.

The professors emerged, as they always did on weekdays, around eight-thirty. Maureen had been seeing less and less of Renée, but she saw that she was coming along and had started waddling slightly in an effort to balance her stomach with the rest of her frame. Klein was dutifully by her side, arm in arm, helping relieve the pressure on her swollen feet. Then, once she got a good whiff of her yard, her veneer of calm cracked and caved inward as her face drained of all color. She folded at the waist and vomited before her feet. Klein held and straightened her, but she lurched forward again and further emptied bile from her stomach. He wrapped her arm over his shoulders, carried her to the passenger seat, and sped off.

Maureen watched it all unfold from her porch. After the first vomit, she stood up as if she were offering herself for service, but she was only searching for a better view. She sat down when they left, and it took her a few minutes to crave her coffee again. What a shame, she thought. All that big, nasty yard to throw up on and she chose her walkway. Left in the sun, that’ll bake in and leave a stain.

When Donna knocked on Maureen’s door two nights later, she had already pieced a story together from her threads of gossip.

“You didn’t get this from me,” she said, lowering herself to a whisper, “but I heard that they took her to the hospital, and she had a miscarriage.” She hissed slightly on the final s.

Maureen looked surprised, but news fell on her softly as if she’d known it all along. “No, no, she couldn’t have. She’s more than three months along; that’s unheard of.”

“I couldn’t believe it either. It’s rare, horribly rare, but it can happen under stress. At first I thought it was an abortion, because you know how these kids play fast and loose with those things, but I heard her say so many times that they were excited.”

“You’re assuming that the baby is gone,” Maureen leveled at her, “but we can’t be sure of that, unless you have her ultrasounds.”

“I’m just talking. You don’t have to believe me if you don’t want to. I heard this from the Myers, and you know they’re closer to them than we are. They haven’t led me wrong yet.”

Whether it was true or false was inconsequential to Maureen, nothing but another nagging loose end that came to mind whenever she thought of the professors. More crucial to her peace of mind was when the rotten plants would be trashed and the sod would be laid down. After the storm, the bleach must have leached across to the neighbors’ properties, because their grass too was getting that yellow tinge. The sooner that all got fixed the better, but Maureen hoped that the innocent bystanders would understand the collateral damage. It was horrible, really, that their yard had to go through that, but Maureen was confident that it would look so much nicer in the end.

Anticipating that, she spent the off hours of her days leering out her window sipping tea—she had switched to tea, it was lighter than coffee without all the cream and sugar. The professors’ comings and goings became less common, but Maureen always took notice. Their faces were difficult to parse, mostly because they now looked down more often than up, and they moved slowly, like the air around them was heavier than normal. Sighting after sighting, it became clear that Renée’s stomach was deflating rather than bulging. Maureen had been lucky that all three of her children came to her easily, so she had to imagine what a heartbreak like that felt like, and when she concentrated on it she could almost feel it, but the recreation was never as strong. The thought made her sad, and she didn’t want to let it go any further than that.

But it did lift her spirits to see truckloads of sod roll up to cover the barren landscape that had become the professors’ yard. She celebrated the sight by applauding to herself excitedly with tiny claps right in front of her face. Klein and Renée were outside overseeing the process, still looking down, but Maureen couldn’t blame them this time. It was beautiful. For the first time since Mrs. Graham had died, the lawns across the street flowed from one to the next. The street was respectable again, and Maureen was sure that everyone’s property values would benefit from being a part of such a presentable neighborhood.

Maureen didn’t bother to get the mail as an excuse to invite herself over this time. She had a vested interest in seeing how much they liked their new lawn.

“What did I tell you?” she said to the couple. “My guys do the best work.”

Renée broke her gaze to face her. Her mouth smiled but her eyes didn’t. “We’ll have to find a proper way to thank you. It looks so much… neater than it did before.”

“It looks marvelous,” Maureen said, getting carried away with her own satisfaction.

“It’s neat, but it’s plain,” Klein said. “We still want to have a natural yard one day, but we’ll plan it better next time. Do it right.”

“There’s always next year to try again,” Maureen said.

Maureen spat a goodbye at them and turned back to her porch. They’re already planning on ruining it again, she thought. They can’t think straight. I know they’re grieving but even in grief people should appreciate the silver linings when they come, and they got one served straight to them, and they want to throw it away. Ungrateful. They suffered a tragedy, I know, but life’s full of them. Lord knows I’ve had mine, Irv has had his, and Donna hers too. They’re too young to understand that that’s what life has in store from them, so it’s best to learn how to move on and try not to be so bitter about it. I’ll give them a year or two. That should give them enough experience to teach them how to stay in line and fit in around here.

Author photo for Dylan CookDylan Cook is a student at the University of Pennsylvania where he studies English, with a concentration in creative writing, and biology. He often reads and writes, and when he’s not doing either of these things, he can be found working in a lab, lost in the woods somewhere, or at [email protected].

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

FLARE by Mike Nees

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Abstract flare image

FLARE
by Mike Nees

As she clocks in, Jillian looks up from the computer to find a wrinkled envelope dangling in her face. Her chest tightens.

“Thank god you’re here,” Sonya says, waiting for her to take it. “Everyone’s calling out.”

Jillian grabs the letter, slips it in her apron pocket.

“Not me,” she says, out of breath. She and her dad are nowhere near the estimate the mold people gave them, and the latest bloom inflames her airways. “What are my tables?”

While Sonya checks the floor plan, Jillian answers the phone ringing at the counter. The man on the other end starts placing an order for pick-up, but his kids can’t make up their minds. You want Denny’s before the apocalypse or not? he shouts. She hears rumblings about getting Chili’s instead. As the debate drags on, Sonya glares at her.

“Can I help you?” Jillian asks the man, as forceful as she can muster. “Sir, can I help you?”

Sonya takes the phone and hangs up on him. “Some people can’t be helped.”

Jillian’s first table is a young couple with a daughter. “I’m incredibly strict with myself,” the man says, ordering his coffee. “I don’t drink milk, I don’t smoke, I don’t gamble. No sugar, no booze. My life is purity.”

“So no milk?”

“No, just a little milk.”

The woman seated across from him insists on ordering now, though she can’t decide what she wants. She flips back and forth between the regular and seasonal menus, desperate to solve the puzzle of her desire. Waiting, Jillian’s eyes land on the envelope poking out of her apron. Inscribed in large cursive where the return address goes: Hades. Her mom always puts something weird there.

Jillian last wrote her to ask for money, something she never did before, and she’s been regretting it ever since. Though she’d claimed it was for college applications, her mom no doubt knew it was for the house. Jillian remembers the chill that rose up in her as the letter slid down the rusty blue hatch, out of reach.

The next table is packed with teens, all arguing about the big news on TV. “I swear to god,” a boy says to a girl, “If you don’t eat a French fry before the end of the world, I will lose all respect for you.”

“I’ve maintained a state of ketosis since I was fifteen,” the girl says, ordering the Cobb salad.

The other servers, huddled around a monitor, invite Jillian to watch security footage of the big family who’d dined and dashed that morning. Embarrassed by her heavy breathing, she declines, instead spending her first moment of peace leaning back against the wall that the cameras don’t reach. She keeps a hand on the inhaler in her pocket, though she rarely needs it here. It’s the house that’s trying to kill her. Hoarding her tips for months, she’d almost saved up a quarter of the mold people’s estimate when the lights went out, and it took every dollar they had to turn them back on. Her dad was supposed to cover the electric, but their court drama controls his attention.

Jillian agreed to stay with him after the divorce, to help him fight her mom for the house, but she never dreamt they’d still be in the thick of it now, eight years later. Even as Jillian left for work this afternoon, her dad sat in his chair at the kitchen table, hunched over the latest pages of real estate law she’d printed out for him. He had the little TV on, yes, but he only half-listened to it.

“It’s the same reason people lose in court,” he said of the news—of the experts who insisted that the sun had just belched, and that a magnetic wave could hit the Earth as soon as tonight. “First whiff of danger, they panic.”

Jillian stared into the little box, wondering if she could trust a thing with so many faces. As she unbolted the door to leave, her dad took a loud, wheezy breath.

“There’s still only two kinds of problems in the world,” he said. “The kind you can solve and the kind you can’t.” He says this constantly. “Still stupid to panic over either—imagine if I’d thrown in the towel after that first subpoena? Where would we be now?”

In a moment of bravery, she pulls the letter out of her apron. Then, just as she’s about to open it, Sonya catches her standing idle. “Your side work is salad bar,” she reminds her.

‘Salad bar’ is usually her favorite. A reprieve from all the problems that can’t be solved with knives. She tries to focus on the head of iceberg lettuce that she chops—to feel the little shot of Zen this usually instills. That sweet, earthy smell.

But the letter won’t loosen its grip on her.

I get it, her mom will start. Your father is easier company. He never made you clean your room or mind your weight, because who is he to judge? If I got to pick my authority figure, I’d probably go with the dim one too. While her mom tutors Latin and writes letters to the editor, her dad watches daytime TV and collects disability. What she doesn’t say upfront, her mom will weave into the riddles that pepper all her letters. I just want you to ask yourself, peanut: what is it that always digs but never leaves a hole? She posed that one years ago. Jillian still has no idea, and it still upsets her. Even Google doesn’t seem to know the answer.

All the wall-mounted TVs show the same footage of sun spots churning. Solar Flare and Coronal Mass Ejection appear in the chyrons. She hears a scientist on some debate show arguing with a skeptic. “It won’t just be a few black-outs,” the scientist says. The world will fall into complete darkness.”

“Even if that’s true,” the skeptic says, “That’s why we have these things called generators, flashlights…”

“You don’t understand…”

So many different messages coming out. Dueling authorities who make her feel small. Jillian coughs into her elbow, feels her throat tensing up.

While serving desserts, her eyes are drawn to the little girl in the young couple’s booth. She’s reaching over the divider for an abandoned chicken nugget when she catches Jillian’s glance and responds by waving at her like an old friend she hasn’t seen in years. As Jillian waves back, charmed, a sundae slides off her tray. She can feel Sonya sneering at her before it even hits the floor. Before the thud of glass on tile, the flight of vanilla globs.

Bending down to clean it up, she hears a cook ring the bell. Then the teens start yelling for their check. White rivulets snake under a booth, towards the feet of an old woman in sandals, and as Jillian tries to intercept them with a napkin, she coughs on the woman’s toes. She hears Sonya yelling at her, telling her to let Antonio get it, but her whole body tenses up now. Between violent coughs, she sees the tips of her fingers turning blue.

She can’t breathe. She can hear her dad telling her that this is solvable, but that does nothing to stop the sense of drowning. The fact of drowning. Lying down on one arm, she finds the floor surprisingly rough. It’s craggy, like the bottom of a trench. She feels her shirt riding up like a plumber’s, hears her mom scolding her to pull it back down.

Working hard isn’t enough, the letter will say. We all need some scrutiny to keep us on the right track. If she’d moved out with her mom, Jillian thinks, she wouldn’t have wasted all these years feeding her tips to a money pit. She might have a degree by now, a desk in some office. By this hour, she might even be home for the night, sipping a mug of herbal tea, instead of dying on the floor of a Denny’s.

By the time she inhales that first paint-thinner tasting, Albuterol-laced puff, she’s nearly accepted her fate. It seems like a fair price for her incompetence—but her throat loosens anyway. Her terror ebbs. Another puff and she’s rejoined the world of the breathing.

Jillian crawls out from under the table. Then, as she stands up in the aisle, clutching an empty chair for support, a deafening snap. Everything goes black, inside and out. Every single light is gone.

High-pitched shrieks top the explosion of reactions. Someone very close begins to cackle. As people pack up and dash, bumping into Jillian on either side, Sonya pleads for order. She pleads for Jillian, specifically, “I need you now, Jillian! Now!”

But Jillian’s retightening trachea tells her to run from her boss’s voice. Mindful of her footing, she feels her way to the fire exit, out the building, past the dumpster in back—to the edge of the woods, where the air is luscious. Dizzy, she feels out the old lawn chair that Sonya uses for smoke breaks. It’s cushier than she expected.

She hears the yelling and honking on the other side of the building, suddenly-dead cars sliding into each other. Though her phone was fully charged, it stays dark when she tries tapping it to life. It’s just like they said it would be, all those grim-faced experts: complete darkness. She looks up for stars, wondering if they’ll shine brighter, but it’s too murky to tell. It’s been overcast all day, she recalls.

Admiring the dark blanket of clouds, all those churning shades of black, she imagines the version of herself who’d left with her mom after the divorce. Who bore the brunt of that scrutiny for the last eight years. So what if that Jillian has a desk in an office? In a stone-age economy, she doubts that will count for much.

She should probably feel terrified, but it’s a wave of relief that comes over her now. Fresh air always made her feel like a new creature, an animal with skills to hone. With her inhaler now the relic of a dead age, she can’t rationalize sleeping in the house another night.

How faintly she heard the drip as a child, when a pipe started leaking behind the wall of family photos. She would push her ear up against it to listen. Years later, when her dad turned off The X-Files, she could hear it resounding all the way from the couch. Drip—drip. Still, you couldn’t hear it outside the TV room, and her mom never joined them in there. Her mom called it the “boob tube,” a phrase that made Jillian feel dirty, like they were watching porn. But she liked soaking in the blue light. Her dad’s Marlboros helped conceal the musk when it seeped through the wall. She knew it had to be bad, whatever was reaching into her nose. The fingers of something vast and malignant. But to involve her mom still seemed more dangerous.

With no light to read by, she rips open the letter anyway. Maybe she just wants to feel it in her hands, this powerless sheet of paper. Sheets of paper. All these words she can feel but will never read, because she’s ripping them up. At the moment, she hardly cares if civilization rebounds in a month, or ten years, or never. She’s spent her life caught in the middle of a war she hates, between the scrutinous and the dim, and she’s found the cover to go MIA.

Mike Nee Author PhotoMike Nees lives and works in Atlantic City where he is a case manager for people living with HIV. His fiction has appeared in Typehouse Literary Magazine, matchbook, Heavy Feather Review, and elsewhere. He hosts Atlantic City’s Story Slam series, more on which can be found at https://www.storyslamac.com/.

 

 

 

Cover Photo by Jr Korpa on Unsplash

VIOLATION by Seyda Mannion

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

woman wearing headscarf in an airport lineVIOLATION
by Seyda Mannion

“Excuse me, Miss, is this yours?”

I turn and see the large, inquisitive eyes of a woman behind me. I’ve been startled from my thoughts, and I am briefly confused as my eyes follow her outstretched arm, down her red sleeve, to the pointed tip of her manicured finger. My neck scarf has fallen to the floor. I bend awkwardly over my carry-on to stuff it back into my bag, deeper this time.

I smile at her, looking past her eyes at the gray-streaked red hair that hangs limply at the sides of her temple. “Thank you.”

I turn back to face the front of the lengthy security line. I listen to the voices float around me in excerpts of excited and nervous chatter. I watch the woman in front of me dig deep into her small, red bag before she finds a rattling bottle. In one fluid motion, she takes a swig of her water and a white pill. I smile at the back of her head in empathy. She must be a nervous traveler, much like my mother was.

I am visiting my Grandfather. My Dede is sick, and while I don’t enjoy the lengthy and cramped flight to Istanbul, with young babies screeching in outrage, a stiff neck and the silent fight for the center armrest, I am looking forward to seeing my family. I long for hot tea and the döner from Iskander my cousin always has waiting for me when I arrive, steaming hot and swimming in juices.

I check my phone for the time and then put it away. I feel a wave of the dusty moths scatter across my stomach, awakened from their slumber, as the security line begins to shift. I shuffle my feet forward, looking down at the speckled floor. It hasn’t changed in all these years. The interior of the airport has been transformed. The stairs leading up to security are built into a faux rock wall, water cascading over it, as if the airport is in the midst of a jungle. The ripped blue sofas from thirty years ago have been replaced with smart, gray chairs and white side tables. The walls have a nice new coat of paint on them as well. But the floor has stayed the same. I step over the cracks separating each tile, just as I did as a child. I study the spots, a faded version of what they were, a smattering of black, blue and gray. I feel my eyes steady on the tiles as I am pulled back to a time in this airport, almost twenty years ago. A time when I traveled with my parents, my brothers and my sister.

“Lale, don’t even think about it!” Anne, my mother, yells at me. Her harsh words reverberate through the hollow expanse of the airport. Even though her face is covered, her eyes are angry, a warning that I am about to cross a line. I look longingly at the moving baggage claim belt and imagine how much fun it would be to climb on it. Defiantly, I brush my palm on the moving rubber, letting the belt skim my small hands, before Baba swats my hand away.

“Listen to your Anne,” he says to me sternly, but his eyes are smiling. I am often told to listen to my mother. He pulls me warmly into his side. Rubbing his scraggly beard with his other hand, he bends his head to murmur, “You are going to give her a nervous breakdown. She hates flying, you know.”

I adore my Baba. He makes me laugh until tears come out of my eyes. I watch my older brothers, Abrahim and Ali, playing with their Gameboys. We are waiting for my sister, who is in the restroom. When Miriam emerges, I feel a stab of envy. She tucks a strand of hair that has escaped her bright orange scarf. I can’t wait until I’m old enough to wear a hijab too. Only big girls get to wear them and, according to my Anne, I’m still just her baby at eight years old.

“Let’s go!” Baba yells, and we begin walking toward the escalators to security. When we get to the top, there is a long line. Baba reminds me that this is the part where they check our bags to make sure there are no bad guys. Abrahim’s Gameboy dies and now he and Ali are fighting over the second one. Miriam is reading her book, her gaze steady and intent, seemingly unaware of the bickering between my brothers. I swing myself back and forth under the ropes that divide the lines. Anne has given up on me. She stares ahead and breathes deeply, while Baba squeezes her hand.

“Next!” the security woman barks.

She has blonde hair, and her soft, brown freckles almost completely cover the pale skin of her arms. Baba gives her our passports and boarding passes, and she studies them intently before handing them back to him.

Miriam looks at the security line and frowns. “Baba, do you think we will make our flight on time?”

Baba smiles. “Yes, cenim, this line is moving quickly. See how fast they are moving people along?”

I watch a girl at the security line next to us. She puts her bags on the conveyor belt and walks through the metal detector. I realize this is what I must do. I shift the straps of my backpack off my shoulders and get ready to put my bag on the conveyor belt. But I freeze.

Because my Baba is raising his voice.

And he never raises his voice.

“Sir, I’m asking you to step aside, please,” the security man says.

“Is this necessary? We have a flight to catch. We’re running late.”

“It’s policy,” he says.

“You have let every single person through. Why not me?” My father’s smiling eyes are no longer smiling.

“You can either step aside right now, or we can help you do that,” the man yells at my father, and he moves toward him before my father throws up his hands in exasperation.

“Fine!” Baba follows the security man, passing an officer patting his hands down the back of another young man. I wonder why he is touching him in this way. My Anne looks at another security lady in alarm.

“Where are they taking him?” her voice quivers.

“Calm down, go stand over there. You’ve been selected for a random search.” The woman points to a tall man a few feet away.

He has white gloves and a light blue shirt on. The man gestures to my Anne to come closer. “Come here, ma’am, I just gotta check your person.”

Anne shakes her head. “This is not possible, I can’t do this.”

“Come on,” the man says, and his smile disappears. He frowns. “Now.”

Anne steps hesitantly over to him. He reaches for her waist and she cringes with her hands in front of her chest to guard her body. “Is there at least a woman available?” Anne says. “I’m not comfortable with this.”

“Calm down, it will take two seconds,” the man yells at her and he plunges his hands up and down her waist. Her billowy dress outlines her petite figure as the man rubs his hands down the outsides of her legs. He moves his hands to the insides of her ankles, and he runs his hands up and starts reaching inside her scarf to check her body underneath.

My cheeks heat up and I look away because I don’t want to see this man touching my mother in this shameful way. Abrahim and Ali are staring at their shoes, eyes wide, and they don’t say anything. It would also be shameful for them to look at my mother this way. Abrahim’s hands are clenched into fists at his sides, and Ali’s Gameboy trembles in his hands. Miriam’s eyes are wide; she is looking in the direction my Baba went, and I look for him instead. Baba will stop this man. Baba will know what to do. I see that the men have taken him to a little tent next to the security line.

Just inside the opening of the tent, I see a flash of my Baba’s belly.  His bare belly is very pale, like my own, and it has lots of dark, curly hairs covering it, and I can’t see a belly button. I realize he is naked, and I have never seen my father naked, and I can’t believe he is naked with all these people so close, close enough to see flashes of his belly. I feel my sister’s hand on my shoulder, pulling me gently. I look down at the ground. I study the speckled floor. Black dot. Blue dot. Black Black Blue. Gray dot. Blue dot. Black Gray Blue.

I feel myself moving forward, my gaze still steady on the dots on the floor. Miriam stops abruptly and brushes by. I peek forward as I watch her walk through a large, black door frame. She turns and gestures for me to come through. I creep toward the ominous black frame. One of the uniformed men has returned from the tent where Baba is, holding a black stick, watching me. I hesitate, Miriam’s gestures becoming more frantic.

“Gel, Lale. Come!” She tries to be gentle, but I can tell her voice is shaking, like my hands.

I see my Anne on the other side of the threshold and I know I must cross it to see my family. I walk through and jump as a harsh beep reverberates in my ears. The man with the stick comes forward, frowning, waving it before my face. I am afraid he will hit me. I cringe and crouch to the floor. He sighs with exasperation and pulls me by my arm.

“Let me,” I hear a woman’s voice say. I feel an arm gently pulling me up to standing.

She takes the stick from him and waves it over my head. It beeps again, and I duck my head down in fright. I wonder if they will take me to the tent and make me get naked too.

The woman smiles at me, and she looks really pretty and nice. She waves the stick and shakes her head as if it is the stick that is wrong. “It’s just mad at your cute hair clips. I love the purple! Is that your favorite color?”

“Yes,” I manage, nodding. That morning, I had adorned my long brown hair with metal hair clips. They are my favorite, with two large purple butterflies on them. I had coordinated them with my purple shirt. I am wondering if I am not allowed to have them.

“You’re okay. Go ahead, don’t forget your bags!” She gently guides me toward the conveyor belt. I watch our bags emerge from their dark cave, but I dare not touch them. I see that Anne is standing before a man on a bench. He has opened her bag on the table before him. He is rifling through the clothes.

Miriam grabs my hand and brings me to a bench a few feet away from Anne. I see Baba walking back from the tent, and I jump up from the bench and run to him. My arms are flung around his waist, and he presses my back gently toward him. I look up at him for reassurance, but he is frowning and quiet. The laugh and mischief are gone from his eyes.

Anne is given her bag and joins us. No one is speaking, and I decide that I shouldn’t speak either.

“Gel,” Baba beckons us. We begin to follow quietly. My Anne is pale. Abrahim and Ali have stopped fighting over the Gameboy. Ali lets his Gameboy hang limply at his side. Baba squeezes my shoulder and Miriam is holding her book to her nose, though I do not think she is reading it.

In the end, I chose not to wear a hijab. I prefer my face to vanish among the faces of the people in this line, in the grocery stores, and in the malls. I hold my purse tightly toward me, my head down, my hair framing my face in a curtain to keep them out. I watch my feet as I skip the cracks on the floor, concentrating on those speckles from all those years ago.

“Miss?”

The TSA security agent motions for me to step forward.

I feel a surge of the flurried moths in my stomach, but push through them with my carry-on in tow. I swing my hair around to the left side of my face, the ends curling at my ribs, damp from the rain outside. I feel apprehension as he studies my passport and then glances briefly at my face.

“Have a good trip,” he absently hands me the card and begins motioning to the next person in line. I place my bag on the conveyor belt. I peel off my sweater and take off my shoes as I pile them into a bucket. Before I go through the metal detector, I run my hands through my hair to check it, a habit, all in vain because I know the little metal hair clips with the purple butterflies are no longer there.

Seyda Akyuz-Mannion Author photoSeyda Mannion is a writer and World Languages teacher in Syracuse, New York. She graduated with a B.A. in Modern Languages from Wells College, where she earned a writing award for her thesis: Una Guerra Poetica. She earned an MST in Education from Lemoyne College. She also self-published Send Us Forward: Thoughts of a Teacher in the Face of Intolerance. This is her first published short story. Seyda enjoys traveling abroad with her husband, Daniel, and visiting her family in Turkey. They are expecting their first child.

 

Cover photo by Matthew Turner from Pexels