Category Archives: Fiction

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

LAB RAT VENGEANCE by Sarah Schiff

Sarah Schiff
LAB RAT VENGEANCE

In the neuroscience lab where I worked as an undergraduate intern, we were studying what makes mice experience the sensation of fullness. You can just imagine who’d want access to those findings—the know-how to regulate people’s appetites. The primary investigator, Dr. Hillbrawn, suspected a specific subnucleus of being the moderating agent of satiety, so my job was to locate and then lesion it (which is fancy scientific jargon for destroy, and, just so you know, I am pretty fancy). Once I could do the surgeries without supervision, I started coming in late at night so I could work without the distractions of other people’s gossip and smells. One grad student played Nirvana on a loop, so the whole white room consistently felt filled with dismay.

On a late September night, I had an adolescent mouse head-fixed into the stereotax, a kind of miniature operating table. The mouse, big for his age, lay belly down. While his red eyes looked blindly up at me, shiny with ointment to keep them from drying out, I shaved the white fur at the top of his head, made a slice, and pulled the pink skin apart into a vaginal-looking wound. After I drilled a hole through his skull, just as I was about to lower the electrode, I saw the mouse’s whiskers twitch. Or I thought I did. From ethics training, I knew we were supposed to give a booster of anesthesia if we sensed the mouse waking so I pinched his tail, and his whole body flinched, a clear indicator that the dope wasn’t enough.

But what if it had to be? If I continued the surgery how would this mouse react, skull-cracked, brain-exposed, but alert to the world? What if I just—

At the electrode’s pulse, his sticky eyes filled with dampened terror, followed by screeches that rent the antiseptic night. When I pulled the wire free, his body and limbs thrashed across the metal surface, his head locked in place.

I watched with a kind of thoughtful horror. This writhing mouse has touched death, must sense himself on the brink, caught up in the suck toward oblivion.

What a rush it must be. I could almost feel it myself.

After sealing the mouse’s scalp with vet glue, I set up an arena and video camera and grabbed one of the female mice we kept for breeding.

Even among mice, males are considered the norm, the females too inconstant, so to ensure we always had female mice in estrus, all hot and bothered and ready to rut, we had to keep them separated. Just like us, female mice get on the same cycles with their fellow cage-dwellers. Whenever a new litter of pups was born, we’d wait the twenty-one days until they were weaned, pick out the surplus of females, dump them into a tank, and fill it with carbon dioxide, slowly at first to put them to sleep, then full blast. Their very own girls-only gas chamber.

At least they were spared the life of a lab rat.

During my training, I’d watched some videos of mouse sexual behavior, which happened to be even more formulaic than human. The male would dally before sniffing the female’s backside, and that sniffing would go on for quite a while, in all kinds of positions, before mounting, then withdrawing to lick his junk, then mounting again, and soon done after several quick-time humps and rapturous squeaks. The technical term for mouse foreplay is, get this, anogenital exploration.

Feel free to use that next time you’re looking to spice up your dirty-talk.

This mouse, whom I would dub Ladies Mouse, was having none of it. He must have been woozy from the drugs, but once I put him in the cage with the female, he leaped at her like Superman, or rather, Mighty Mouse, snort. It was as if it was his last lay, his final chance to pass on all the genetic material that defined Ladies Mouse and Ladies Mouse alone. He did it for the same reason shipwrecked men carve their last words into the bark of trees. Because even the most is never enough.

The going theory was that if you stress out animals, they’ll do all they can to return to homeostasis. The last thing they’d be up for, supposedly, was the agitation of a courtship ritual. But Ladies Mouse defied the theory. He didn’t fight or flee but found a way to do both, to force himself on another and allow his DNA to escape.

I put on a pot of coffee, already planning my next experiment. First I had to confirm that I’d lesioned the part of Ladies Mouse’s brain I’d been aiming for. Stereotactic surgery only gives you a suggestion of which part of the brain actually gets hit by the electrode. Mouse brains are small, after all.

Which meant I’d have to kill Ladies Mouse. Wishing I hadn’t named him, I put him in a cage and marked it: “Surgerized mice. Save for Deb.” It would take a couple weeks for the neurons to die off, if I’d destroyed them at all. Maybe I’d just stimulated them. Or maybe the burned neurons had nothing to do with it. Was the stress of waking during surgery enough to explain Ladies Mouse’s desperate and freakish last lay?

Over the following weeks, I prepared for Ladies Mouse’s final surgery, and 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

Marc Tweed
THE SKULL

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

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

Dylan Cook
PLENTY OF FISH

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]. Visit his bio page here.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

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SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN by Nick Olson

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

Nick Olson
SAN ANDREAS HEAVEN

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.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM by Sandra Florence

Sandra Florence
GIRL IN THE ENCHANTED KINGDOM

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.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

ADDING APPETIZERS by Claire Oleson

Claire Oleson
ADDING APPETIZERS

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. Visit her bio page here.

Cover Design by Karen Rile

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

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

two women back to back

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

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

Dylan Cook
THE GREENER MY GRASS

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]. Visit his bio page here.

Cover Photo by Wolfgang Hasselmann on Unsplash

FLARE by Mike Nees

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Abstract flare image

Mike Nees
FLARE

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 line

Seyda Mannion
VIOLATION

“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

PETS FOR PENITENTS by Christopher David Rosales

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

PETS FOR PENITENTS by Christopher David Rosales

Christopher David Rosales
PETS FOR PENITENTS

It started off with cats, which was what my cellmate Rudy had, til his cat shrunk down to the size of a kitten, then a mouse, then disappeared altogether. Every once in a while, at night, besides the usual squeaks of the roaming guard’s boots, I’d hear squeaks of a different kind. Through the slight light at Rudy’s bunk, I could see where he lay with his head propped on one hand, the other hand cupped in front of a squinted eye. An eye he’d wink at me before putting his finger in front of his mouth and saying, “Shhhh.”

When my morning came, through the bars the guard handed me an armadillo. I guess, by the time they got down to people like me, they was all out of cats. They had already told me I shouldn’t self-punish. But for me the armadillo made a kind of sense, at least that’s what our group therapist Dr. Gronsky said, because I keep a hard outer shell. That’s why I’m supposed to write this all down, he said: to find myself a way out of myself.

An armadillo is small as a squirrel—lots of people don’t know that—and Aztecs used to call them Nahuatl, which meant turtle-rabbit. Rudy told me about that word because like all the Mexicans in here he likes to pretend he’s descended from Aztecs, though who’s to say he’s not just descended from Erik Estrada. Or was, anyway. I still don’t understand what happens to us after we leave here. Not when we leave the way he did.

My armadillo is cheap to feed—ants, grubs, roly-polies—and that’s how I spend my time in the yard. Me on my knees digging up dirt with my hands, Harriet with her little claws. I pet her leathery armor, warm like a saddle, warm from the sun falling behind the barbed-wire caging.

◊

The idea behind the Pets for Penitents program was that by trusting us with responsibilities we were made more responsible, that by being trusted we’d accept ourselves as trustworthy.

So there we were in the yard getting beat down by the sun on our necks. I sat on top of an aluminum table with my shoes propped on the blinding bench-seat.

Across the grass, Hector walking his peacock, strutting at the end of its leash, grooming those feathers like dancers’ eyes: all-day watching, blinking—tempting, even.

Tyrone watching the weighted barbells move up and down over chest after chest, all the while on his shoulder sat that iguana, throat-breathing.

Thad watching the whites play basketball, head bobbing approval at a three point swish; Twyla, his cockatoo, perched on top of his head and bobbing her own.

We inmates was all lock-step so our pets could get their walking privileges. So they could get a treat or two. An extra fly. A biscuit. Humans’ll take care of a pet better than themselves. Most. We all thought Rudy was the only one his pet didn’t check. We all thought when his cat disappeared, Rudy took to starvation.

We all thought wrong. Thing was, he wasn’t just getting skinnier.

◊

Rudy had been beastly, with tats scrawled across his buff shoulders and down his swollen arms. Now he stooped from five feet and a half to five, skin flabby beneath his chin and chest. His pants wouldn’t hang on his waist, so the warden finally issued him pants from the women’s ward visible out the window and across the boring Central Cali fields.

“Where’s your cat?” the warden asked, shiny shoes at the base of the bars. I watched with my pillow tucked down over my head. The warden thought of me as a problem. My armadillo, Harriet, she curled up into my tensed forearm, tensed at the thought of that word “problem.”

Rudy shrugged his now-knobby shoulders. “Must have made his escape from Alcatraz.”

That’s when the warden took Rudy’s TV time.

When the guards finally came into the cell, it got tore up from the floor up for some kind of clue. What was happening to him? He didn’t tell them shit. Rudy sat cross-legged, no bigger than a bronze Buddha for a garden, on the worn-out bed. He was down to four feet tall and one hundred pounds. They took his family photos; he just kept shrinking.

They had to stop there because prisoners were allowed by law to do three things: Crafts, Kitchen, and Crap. They thought maybe he wasn’t eating anymore, but he’d climb down off that toilet like a child and smile over his crusty mac and cheese in the dining hall. I had a deeper hunger for thinking on the past than I had for any food, and I pushed my macaroni around my plastic plate.

He sat across from me, clutching his tray topped with a plate empty of anything but a yellow smear, his denim collar and cuffs big as a Marx-bros hobo-skit. “You gonna eat that?”

At the bus tub near the dining hall exit, I dropped my tray in and looked back at Rudy eating my dinner at our empty table. Tyrone, with the slow-lidded iguana on his shoulder, nodded at my tray, took the hairnet off his bald head, and took the bus tub up in his delicate hands.

I asked him, “Is it just me, or is Rudy shrinking?”

Slow blink from Tyrone. Slow blink from iguana. Big-throated, double-chinned shrug from the both of them. “I hate to say shrinking,” Tyrone said. “Dr. Gronsky says we’re not supposed to make judgments.”

Dr. Gronsky ran our circle-time on Tuesdays. “What should we call it?”

Tyrone propped the bus tub against a hip and scratched his iguana’s chin. “How’s about self-induced reduction therapy?”

I asked, “That a thing?”

Tyrone didn’t answer, just fed a stray piece of macaroni from his fingertip to his iguana’s pink tongue.

◊

So there was Crap, and there was Kitchen, but when it came to Crafts Rudy ran the show. All day and night he super-glued twigs and popsicle sticks, Lincoln logs and heavy paper, light bulbs from Christmas lights no bigger than a bee’s ass.

Rudy, hunched over his project, now looked more like a four-year-old building a diorama than a man of eighteen building a piece of art.

“You know by now what I did, to get locked up.” He did know. He was the only one, really. That knew what I’d done and why. “What did you do?”

“Does it really matter?” He corkscrewed his tongue against his chapped lips and squinted down at the four-inch-high door he was gluing to the doorframe. A bead of sweat dripped off his small bald head to land on the stamp-sized welcome mat at his fingers. He sounded different and said in his new small flutey voice, “Dr. Gronsky says we shouldn’t self-punish.”

It should have told me something, that to Rudy I was the one who self-punished. He just kept on gluing pieces together. Kept on shrinking, too.

◊

That Tuesday, at circle-time, Dr. Gronsky put his grey-haired hand on my shoulder, to stop the sobbing. And he said our guilt would only disappear when we learned how to live in the moment, the way our pets did.

By the last days of Rudy’s stay, I had to leash Harriet to my metal bedpost—she could’ve blown Rudy over just breathing near him. The last time I saw him, Rudy was just big enough to open that popsicle-stick door of his little home, walk in, and, right after waving goodbye, shut the door behind him. The lights went on in the tiny windows crossed by toothpicks. I heard it again, then, the tiniest high-pitched meow, and a purr like the sound of a fly’s wings.

I petted Harriet’s armor, not much harder than a calloused hand, and I cried because I still felt hot-bellied with guilt, because I always would, even once the crying stopped. And it was a thing I had when I didn’t have many things, so I hung onto it. Then Harriet crawled stump-legged into my hand, sniffing up at me, her tiny black eyes reflecting me wide as a world. Now when I thought of Harriet I didn’t think Nahuatl, or turtle-rabbit, or even Armadillo. See, Harriet wasn’t her name when I got her.

When I blinked my burning eyes free of her gaze I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but my tears were gone. And there she was, still the size of a squirrel in my palm. Only, when I set her down on my pillow and she crawled across it onto the headline of my newspaper, I realized she was the size of a mouse. She sniffed at the date running long from her nose, and I thought, life’s a long time and a short time at the same time, isn’t it? She wobbled her artichoke back to tuck herself under my duffel-sized pillow. I took a deep breath. I laid my head back and imagined her settling in under there.

Christopher David Rosales is from Paramount, CA. His first novel, Silence the Bird, Silence the Keeper, won him the McNamara Creative Arts Grant. His second novel, Gods on the Lam (Perpetual Motion Machine Publishing, 2017), and his third novel, Word is Bone (Broken River Books, 2019), are available now. Word is Bone won him an International Latino Book Award, and his new short story “Fat Tuesday” is featured in the anthology of border noir titled Both Sides (Agora/Polis Books, 2020). Contact him at www.christopherrosales.com.

Cover photo by Matthew Ansley on Unsplash

 

DIRTY THIRTY by Shanna Merceron

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

DIRTY THIRTY by Shanna Merceron

Shanna Merceron
DIRTY THIRTY

She spread her legs and the neon blue lights shifted like we were underwater. She was wearing underwear, but they were crotch-less, white elastic stretching around her hips to hold her tips. Her hair was brown. I don’t like brunettes, especially not with how short she kept it, just barely brushing her shoulders, yet I watched her with interest. She stood up and moved to a pole languidly, her steps not in sync with the beats of the music. She was in her own world, she spun around the pole, her head hung like it was out a window, letting the breeze blow through it. She shimmied down the pole and then she was seated again, in front of me, her legs splayed out, she lifted her butt once, twice, maybe she thought that it counted as dancing, and then she went back to the pole.

I wasn’t seated. I stood in the aisle, hesitating, my friends behind me, waiting for me to join them on the purple velvet couch that stretched the length of the room. A man was in front of me, seated at the dance floor, his elbows propped up, beckoning my girl over with a twenty-dollar bill. She’s my girl now, I thought. My girl was wearing socks like she was a baseball player, maybe. All the women in the joint seemed to be confused, no clear costumes or personas, a mish-mosh of colors and fabrics and skin.

My girl had movie screen nipples. Her breasts were so white they easily grabbed onto the blue light and she moved like she had alien skin, she’s a blue-skinned woman, dancing on the ocean floor. Her breasts weren’t as big as mine, but still on the larger side. It’s unfair that her tiny nipples sat perky in the center. Only women in the movies have nipples like that, no areolas, just perfect little nipples. I resisted the temptation to look down my own shirt at my own nipples that dared to be average-sized.

My girl was looking at me. It only makes sense that she was looking at me because I’d been looking at her for so long, watching her socks and her nipples and her ocean skin. I met her gaze and her expression was interested but disinterested and I did my best to look the same. I was curious about her, about the place, about what kind of women came here. I kept staring at her. I learned that if you look away too soon, it means that the gaze meant something to you. I didn’t want this gaze to mean anything.

◊

We went to a strip club for my friend Teddy’s Dirty Thirty. I didn’t like that he called it that, I felt slimy when he said it. I didn’t like to imagine Teddy in dirty positions. In sticky situations.

I drove south with my friend Katie to Tampa. Teddy’s plan: steak dinner, casino, strip club. Katie and I were late, the GPS lied to us, we took a series of winding back roads that eventually spit us out where we needed to be an hour late.

We missed the steak dinner. Teddy called us, said we missed quite the show. Their waiter really had a voice on him, Teddy said he should audition for one of those singing shows, that singing Happy Birthday for someone’s Dirty Thirty shouldn’t be it for him.

Teddy’s roommate was with him. I didn’t like the roommate, Marvin. Now he, he was slimy. He looked like his underarms smelled toxic and he had permanent perspiration on his forehead. He had a way about him that made me uncomfortable.

Katie’s fiancé, Dylan, was coming from work so he met us at the casino. He was late too. He missed the steak dinner.

Katie and I stopped for food. She was on a diet and was counting calories, but when she realized that the pancake sandwich was only 70 calories more than the chicken one she said, “Fuck it, I’ll treat myself. What’s seventy calories anyways?”

She later threw up when we got to a casino bathroom. I heard her, she told me the pancakes were too greasy, they made her sick. I think she was just guilty.

My friend and I, we wore tight little dresses to the casino. I had never been to a casino but I’d seen plenty of movies. I did my hair up real nice, even wore some false lashes. Shoved my tattooed feet into four inch heels and pretended I was prettier than my friend when I watched her get out of the car. She was so tall and skinny, a real model type with chiseled cheekbones. I knew I was pretty, but I had to breathe through my Spanx. As we hustled out of the garage, her phone rang—her fiancé was at the bar.

We waited at the crosswalk to cross the street into the casino. A cop car pulled alongside us, the officer rolling down his window. “You ladies alright?” he asked. He gave us one long look up and down. It was less icky and more evaluating. I realized he thought we were hookers. We looked like hookers.

“Just headed into the casino,” I said, “it’s our friend’s birthday.”

“Dirty Thirty,” my friend said.

The cop stared at us and then nodded. “Alright, you girls have a good night.” He pulled away and we hustled into the building.

Whistles and eyeballs followed us into the casino. I slowly began to realize that we were still in Florida, not Las Vegas. People walked past us in t-shirts and flip flops. Women were wearing ripped jeans and tank tops. We still looked like hookers.

At the bar, Dylan gave us a long whistle, one hand wrapping around my friend’s ass, the other going over my shoulder. “How much for the night?”

I smacked him on the head and Katie told him to pay for our drinks and maybe he would get lucky.

Teddy arrived at the casino very drunk, Marvin was holding him up, one yellowed armpit next to Teddy’s head. “Let’s get playing,” Teddy said.

Dylan liked blackjack so we played blackjack. Marvin had a gambling problem, so he didn’t bring any money with him. He asked Teddy to borrow some, and Teddy handed him his wallet. The casino wasn’t very exciting. It felt kind of sad. Mindless Floridians moved like zombies from poker table to poker table, their sandals smacking against the carpeted floor, their drinks spilling over the rim of their cups, dripping down their hands, and they didn’t even flinch.

Katie and I tried the slots, seated next to old ladies wearing matching gold sequined scarves. A man walked past smelling of sunscreen and I turned my head into the scent, my eyes following him across the room. Sunscreen smelled like desire to me. Of summers sliding sunscreen under my friends’ bikini straps. But the man didn’t turn around, he didn’t feel my stare.

But I felt stares. They came from everywhere. The dealers, the guards, the men with mustaches and whiskey glasses, the women in the ripped jeans, the men watching the basketball game, daring a glance away from the screen to see my chest. One redneck man hooked his eyes into my flesh and dragged them up and down my body until I squirmed. How much? He mouthed to me. I couldn’t tell if he meant it in jest.

I grew tired of all the staring. Was I just imagining it? Was everyone really looking at me? Lingering on me? My cleavage was plenty. My heels were tall. My hair was blonde. People love to look at blondes. But was something wrong with me? Had I drunk too much? Was my makeup smeared across my face? I told Katie I wanted to use the restroom. Maybe there would be friendly women in the bathroom to share lipstick with. Katie patted Dylan’s hand, told him to wrap it up, and then followed me.

When I entered the restroom, I knew that something was wrong, I could smell a dangerously sweet smell in the air, my nose turning in disgust. I walked toward a stall door and pushed. It swung open, revealing a woman seated on a toilet, hunched over in pain, red down her chest, around her feet, splattered on the walls and floor. For a moment, I thought it was blood, for a moment, I thought she was dead. Her black dress was around her ankles. She sat in just her nude colored bra, the underwire digging into her pale flesh, turning it flush. She lifted her head and grunted at me, a string of saliva spilling from her wine-stained mouth.

“Oh!” I said, “Do you need help?” She clearly needed help.

She lifted a hand and in a whisper said, “Please, close the door.”

I entered another stall and peed real quick. I then joined Katie at the sinks. She was re-applying her lipstick.

“Katie, there is a woman in that stall—,” my voice was a hush, “we need to get help.”

“I know.” Katie smacked her lips. “I already let a security guard know.”

I risked a glimpse at my own reflection. I looked fine. Even my lipstick was fine.

We exited the bathroom and a guard was waiting outside. I pointed to the stall and thought that I might never drink red wine again.

◊

The strip club shifted between red and blue lights. When we walked in, it was blue, everyone cast in an electric shade, like we were underwater. My hand was stamped with a glow-in-the dark kiss print and my group settled onto a long velvet couch.

I was caught in the in-between, not yet moving to the couch, not moving to the stage where women didn’t quite dance. I watched a stripper. The stripper watched me.

“Hey? You alright?” Katie’s breath was on my neck. She took my hand and we sat on the velvet couch, my back to my stripper. Katie rested a hand on Dylan’s knee and clutched my close hand.

Teddy pulled a wad of rubber band-wrapped dollar bills from his pocket. “All for tonight,” he said. I tried not to cringe. His eyes roamed around the club, searching for the woman he would pay first.

“Who do you want?” Dylan asked. A pregnant stripper walked by, wearing a velvet and lace nightie. “What’s your type?”

Teddy glanced at my chest briefly then said, “Oh, I don’t care.” We knew he did. I shook off the glance like I didn’t see it.

Marvin asked him for more money. Teddy peeled away a few bills and handed them to him. Marvin grabbed the wrist of a stripper who walked past and they moved to a more isolated part of the room.

“How much is a dance?” I asked, wondering, as I gazed at a distinguished-looking gray haired man in the corner of the club. A stripper shorter than I and skinnier than Katie was dry humping him to the beat. Her eyelashes were glued on crooked but I could see her appeal. Cheetah spots were tattooed on her thighs.

“Twenty a dance, usually,” Teddy said.

“Damn.” Katie’s face looked concentrated. “Songs are what? Around four minutes? That’s like three hundred an hour.” Her eyes met Dylan’s. “I think I need a career change.”

Dylan laughed and hugged her close.

I dared a glance toward Marvin. All I could see were his sweaty hands roaming over the woman’s breasts in the reflection of the mirrored ceiling. I tried to imagine that being me. Dancing for money. I tried to imagine the last time hands touched my breasts like that. The image of pink manicured nails flashed through my head. On my stomach, then my breasts, I sucked one into my mouth… I shook the memory away.

“Anyone want a dance?” Three strippers stood in front of us. One blonde, one redhead, and one with a long, raven-colored braid. They could’ve been Disney princesses. Teddy eyed the redhead with the double D’s and gave a hearty nod.

The redhead’s name was Lacey. Lacey strutted across the room to put a dollar in the juke box machine and changed the song. Teddy seemed happy with her breasts in his face.

“You can touch my ass too, I don’t mind!” Lacey was fun.

The other princess strippers still hovered by our group, shimmering like schooling fish.

“How about you ladies? Do you want a dance? We would love to give you a dance. A double dance!” They squealed and the blonde clapped her hands in excitement. Katie turned to Dylan to see what he thought and he shook his head uncomfortably.

The blonde brushed the back of her hand against my cheek and said, “Maybe later.” She was almost my type, not like the woman I knew was behind me, slinking up and down the pole, lazily dancing the night away. Where does she go after? Or is she always on that pole, on that floor, like a genie in a lamp, granting temporary wishes. I resisted the temptation to turn around, to look at my girl, to see if the stripper I had watched was watching me, or still moving on the stage like she was under a spell.

◊

Teddy had a few more dances. The woman in the corner still grinded against the distinguished gentleman. Marvin appeared and asked for more money, his shirt sticking to him in sweat. Teddy gave him a few more bills, and Marvin disappeared again.

“Why do you do that?” I didn’t trust Marvin, I didn’t like him. I saw him in the mirror again and felt sick.

“He pays me back,” Teddy said. I didn’t believe him.

Dylan helped Teddy choose his next dancer and Katie and I spoke about the outfit choices of the women in the room. “I suppose men don’t care if they match,” she said.

“But women care,” I said.

“Yeah, but they’re not here for us.”

“I thought they would dance. I thought strippers danced.” I turned around then to see my girl, and there she was, spinning around the pole in a slow trance. She saw me staring. I held her gaze.

“It’s a nude strip club,” Dylan said, “they don’t have to put on a show, their clothes are already off.”

Teddy had a few more dances. His wad was slimming down. I caught Katie with her hand on Dylan’s groin. Marvin still held a stripper captive in his own corner. I wondered if the woman with the gentleman took breaks. I wondered how rich he was.

“Hi, ladies! How ‘bout a dance for y’all?” A new stripper stood in front of us. She wore a bright smile and a bright blue bra with rhinestones on it. Her skin sparkled too, she wore body glitter. “I’m gonna give you gals a dance, I sure am!” She pretended to sit down on our laps. Dylan laughed uncomfortably. “What?” the stripper said, “You don’t wanna see three ladies havin’ a good time?”

The stripper held his gaze until he conceded.

“Perfect! My name is Dixie, y’all.” A new song began and Katie and I found ourselves with a moon-white butt wiggling in our faces. Then Dixie turned and slipped off her bra. She scooted herself between us, resting her legs on us, her breasts in between our faces.

“Touch them! Go on, touch them!” She lifted my hand and put it on her right breast and put Katie’s hand on her left breast. As if on reflex, I squeezed it. My touch lingered. Dixie leaned her face in close to ours. “They’re fake.”

“No!” Katie gasped, “no way!”

“Way!” Dixie wiggled her chest and laughed. I caught Dylan, Teddy, and Marvin watching us with interest.

“I want implants,” Katie said. She gave Dixie’s breast a squeeze and whispered amazing under her breath.

“I want a reduction,” I said. I decided to give Dixie another squeeze too.

“The surgeries are so advanced now. I was even able to breastfeed.” Dixie turned to give us her backside. “Slap it!” she said. We slapped it. I felt excited. Is this how the men felt? Is this why they came here?

“Wow, you don’t look like you’ve had kids,” I said. Her body was perfect, slim and smooth. Her breasts were perfect.

“I have three!”

“No way!”

The song ended and Dixie gave us a hug, squeezing our heads between her breasts. “I love you girls. I love you. Have a good night, let me know if you want another dance.”

Dixie wiggled her eyebrows at Dylan and tried to saunter away. Marvin pulled her to his corner for a dance.

“What were you guys talking about?” Teddy asked.

“Breastfeeding.”

◊

Dylan walked Katie and me out of the club to my car. He was going to stay and make sure Teddy got home alright.

“I shouldn’t be long, he’s almost out of money. The Dirty Thirty is winding down.” Katie murmured something into Dylan’s ear and I walked away to give them some space. I could taste their tension. I felt tense. I stared up at the neon sign above the club, a giant clam shell that opened to reveal a naked mermaid inside. I let its blinking colors wash over me. It buzzed softly in the early morning.

“Hey.”

I looked up and my stripper was in front of me. My girl. She was standing in the parking lot in her baseball socks and nothing else. She stretched a hand out toward me.

“You forgot your phone,” she said.

I walked a couple steps forward and took it. “Thank you.”

She nodded. The clam shell opened and closed.

My girl took a step even closer, our feet almost touching. I looked intently at her face. She wasn’t very beautiful and yet I wanted to run my fingers through her hair, slip off her socks, kiss her brow. I stumbled an inch closer.

“Do you need a hug?” she whispered. My brows drew together, not understanding the question, not knowing how to answer.

“Do you?” my voice was quieter than hers.

My girl, my stripper, shook her head. Her mouth curved in a funny way like she was saying yes and no at the same time but she said nothing. She wrapped me in a hug and I remember everywhere I felt her skin.

She walked back into the club and I realized I didn’t hug her back.

Shanna Merceron is a Florida writer whose work can be found in many acclaimed literary journals and magazines. Shanna holds an MFA in Fiction from Hollins University, where she wrote stories that explored the darker aspects of humanity and pushed the boundaries of the strange. She is currently at work on her first novel, and when not writing, best spends her time traveling or with her dog. You can read more of Shanna’s work via her website at linktr.ee/shannamerceron.

Cover photo by Jakob Owens on Unsplash

SMOKY by Ben Austin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

a bicycle lying in the roadway at night in the rain

Ben Austin
SMOKY

My freshman year of college I lifted weights and kickboxed five days a week. The kickboxing gym was four miles down Riverside and I biked there every weeknight. There wasn’t a bike lane on Riverside and cars honked. My brakes screeched.

On my way home I stopped for Taco Shack. I tried doing the drive thru once but they said I needed a car to use the speaker box so I ate inside. I was drenched and sometimes bruised from the workouts and the staff looked at me while I ate the burritos.

One of the janitors wore nipple rings that poked into his shirt. The janitor was in his late teens/early twenties. He mopped with a crook in his low back and sometimes he perked up to yell at his coworkers in a Spanglish vernacular I had trouble understanding. His shoulders were undeveloped, his arms small. I looked down on this. For myself I wanted physical greatness. Shoebox calves were my main focus. Growing up I was skinny and Dad and uncles fed me extra steak at dinner parties saying “we gotta get some meat on these bones” and when I first saw results in the bicep region, from Dad’s pull-up bar in the garage, I decided fitness would be a big part of my life.

After getting home from kickboxing I ripped my shirt off used the bong and took in my reflection before entering the lounge where my suitemates drank alcohol and played Cards Against Humanity. I looked down on their ways especially those who never set foot in the gym. They were all getting fat and no one seemed to notice but me.

One of the suitemates Arthur played guitar. Arthur had a great memory for trivial things like stats about climate change and marginalized peoples. Arthur had sex often. He had a pair of logs for calves and he had a way of breaking out in song with the guitar and whenever he began strumming, as if sans agenda, the guys in the room traded looks. The girls looked at their cards or the floor, anything but Arthur or each other.

One morning that fall, sometime in October, I went for hot breakfast at 6:30 and saw the same janitor with the conspicuous nipple rings sweeping in the college cafeteria. He picked his nose and flicked the boogers around the floor. He had razor bumps between his mouth and nose and flakes of dead skin hung from his lower lip. His phone was playing new age rap that sounded almost American but not quite. Interesting fact: you judge people by the music they listen to but also you judge music by the people you associate it with. I wished the man had headphones in. I had an important lift after the omelet. Quiet is sacred, I thought, and that’s when I started feeling hotness in my chest and eyes. I tend to avoid conflict as Anger has been known to take over. I had problems with wall punching in high school and I saw a therapist about it and the therapist said it was Dad’s fault. I enjoyed our sessions but then Dr. Carlsen died in a car wreck and after that I stopped going to therapy. Sometimes people argue with me and I forget how to carry myself because I’m upset and unable to formulate proper sentences. It’s like the production of each word is some complex equation so I end up pausing for longer than acceptable and insert curses for fear of being interrupted and before you know it I’m yelling fucking this fucking that because basically I’ve forgotten how to communicate otherwise.

“Sir?”

“Yes?”

“Can you turn that down please?”

“What?”

“Can you turn that down?” I felt weakness in my neck and shoulders.

“Oh yeah man, yeah, my bad man,” and he turned the music down.

I continued talking. “You work at Taco Shack too, right?”

“Yeah, yeah. Taco Shack and Darlene’s.”

“You like it over there?”

“Yeah man. Good people. Free food. Pay’s alright.” He swept while talking but his form was dubious and there was no sign of a dustpan and no accumulation of Cheerios and dust and crumbs. “I got my business on the side though, so probably be outta there soon.”

“Oh, you have your own business?”

“Yeah man, yeah.” The man pulled on his nose and grabbed for his waistband.

“What does your business—What kind of business?”

“Um.” The man grimaced.

I asked Uriel the nipple-ringed Janitor why did he tell me about his business given that I was a student he knew nothing about and wasn’t that risky, and he said he knew I smoked weed cause of my tomato red eyes at Taco Shack every night and I said oh so you did recognize me and he said yes we have a nickname for you over there and I said what’s the nickname and he said stoned Rocky. I said okay good nickname but still, why. And he said he wanted to break into the college market and what better way to do that than through me. And I said why me and he said cause obviously you’re not a pussy like the rest of them, I see you coming through with them fucked up hands and black eyes and most of these college kids too scared to leave campus anyway cause they think it’s all methheads out here. He gestured toward the city. I said true, true, staring into space like someone who knows things, and we traded phone numbers.

The way it worked was I introduced Uriel to customers and he sold me weed for cheap. That and we lifted weights together. I said as a drug dealer he needs to project toughness and what better way to project toughness than by tacking on mass. He said that shit don’t matter but okay, if I can get him into the college weightroom he’ll lift some but nothing crazy, still gotta be light on his feet to run from five-oh haha. I said stronger quads and glutes will optimize your capacity for sprints and he said why you talk like that and I said my bad. I taught him how to squat bench deadlift and I wrote him a plan on Excel, heavy on the legs because you have to build a solid base, and he came in four mornings a week and never missed a day. He even changed his work schedule to optimize growth.

We smoked out of my one-hitter by the science center before and after our lifts. I had Sociology 100 on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 9:00 and I showed up to every class pumped and stoned. One time I came in late and locked eyes with the fat blonde wolfing down her ritual McDonalds with the supersize soft drink and I broke down laughing and the professor said please leave. Another time I came in late and shoved a bunch of chairs out of the way to reach my desk but then realized that someone had taken my seat, so I turned around and shoved the chairs again, wishing the chairs would please shut the fuck up, and that’s when I heard someone whisper behind me, as if full of wisdom and insight, “He’s so high!” After that the professor had a chat with me in the hall saying you have a D+ average. I said since when is D+ a grade and he said I’m happy to round it down for you and I said I’m sorry I’m having problems with mental health and he apologized and gave me a B- for the midterm.

My other classes were also going badly because I had no interest in academics. As mentioned, I put most of my time and energy into muscle upkeep and development. I had trouble focusing on lectures with my bulging forearms on the desk in front of me. I brought a stress ball to class and watched the triangles of muscle inflate and deflate. When the bad grades started coming in I told each professor I was having problems with mental health. The calc and stats professors asked for a note from the doctor but the religious studies professor Dawn told me depression is no joke and come over to her house tomorrow evening and I said okay. Dawn smelled like candles and she wore tapestries as dresses and usually sandals. In class she talked about sex positivity and discouraged the use of cosmetics and most shampoos. Dawn had a missing thumb from when her neighbor’s pit bull bit it off and she had this unusual habit of inhaling/whispering her one-syllable words, especially the word “yeah.” I went over to her house and she fed me asparagus and gave me sex on the ottoman. She asked could she call me Smoky and I said okay. Sexually I have a small member so intercourse is no picnic but Dawn was tolerant even though she sighed and averted her eyes post-explosion. Dawn gave me a flat C for the midterm.

On my way back from Dawn’s that night I looked at my reflection in whatever glass panes provided it. I felt less upset about my calves than usual because I had just gotten sex for the first time in seven months. The air was dry and the ridges in the sidewalk massaged the arcs of my feet. I smelled pesto sauce like Mom used to make it but then I realized the smell was pot. I had a gram waiting for me at the dorm. I would smoke it do push-ups analyze reflection and walk into the lounge shoulders breathing and maybe participate in Cards Against Humanity, depending on my reception. Although probably I would have to wear sweatpants because my calves were looking small. Either that or fire off a set of donkey calf raises in the stairwell.

As far as the weed one gram would be enough but more would be better so I called Uriel and asked could he swing by. He said he got hung up at work and why you be smoking so much I just sold you a quarter last weekend. I said my bad hombre and he said please don’t call me that and I said just playin,’ and he said why you all happy and I said I just got my nut and he said oh okay well don’t be annoying about it you’d think you never been laid and I said word? and he said aren’t you from Westchester and hung up.

He came by the dorm and we smoked and watched music videos. I fired off a set of diamond-grip push-ups and he said why you doing push-ups at 9pm and I said because discipline, plus I missed my kickboxing workout for the workout with Dawn. He said speaking of discipline what’s your GPA and I said did you or did you not graduate high school and he shook his head and looked at the ground and I said just playin’. People came by to pick up and I stared into space as money was traded for drugs.

Uriel sold better weed and cheaper weed than anyone on campus, except for this one kid Johnny, the drummer in Arthur’s band “Young Dads.” Johnny had a connect in Colorado who sent him vacuum-sealed kilos through the college mailroom. Johnny had long hair and he wore a hoop earring but only on weekend nights. Johnny came from Greenwich Connecticut and his face looked like something that might have been handsome in an alternate dimension but in this one it was pointy and hollow in all the wrong places. Johnny came by my room sometime around midnight. He introduced himself to Uriel and they talked about selling drugs. Johnny said he moved a lot of drugs and Uriel said he moved a lot of drugs and Johnny said I don’t think you move as much as I do and Uriel said okay well let me see what you have and Johnny said okay. We took the underground tunnel to Johnny’s dorm. The tunnel smelled like dryer sheets. We passed the Stench, a student who never showered and wore capes and talked to himself. When we passed him he mumbled something about blueberry pancakes.

Johnny had the poster of Johnny Cash giving the middle finger. The room smelled like hot Cheetos and dirty dishes. There were bottle caps wedged into the ceiling and empty Four Lokos on the floor and a total of three lava lamps, one on the blue-grey carpet in the center of the room. A plastic owl sat on the windowsill facing out. Something new-agey and instrumental played from the dumbbell-shaped wireless speaker. A black banana was becoming one with the desktop and there was clothing everywhere, one heap in the corner, presumably the clean pile. Johnny pulled a safe the size of a cooler out from under his bed and tweaked it open and said okay. He clicked his tongue and dumped the contents on the floor and grabbed for the stubborn bags of weed and tossed them in front of us, as if to say “there.” The countless wads of twenties skipped around and rested. Uriel swayed his head and rubbed the scruff on his cheek. He said okay that’s a lot where you get your shit from and Johnny said Colorado wanna smoke and Uriel said sure and looked at the door. When we left, about ten paces down the hall, Uriel said we’re robbing that faggot.

I toyed with the idea of saying no but then it was the day of the robbery and what kind of friend would I be if I backed out last minute. I met Uriel in the Family Dollar parking lot about two blocks from campus. The car was a light blue Honda Odyssey, a sturdy minivan with good gas mileage. I knew this because Mom had looked into buying one, a wholesome family car she had said, but then she closed on the Range Rover. The bumper sticker on the Honda Odyssey read “Jesus Wants You.” Uriel was in the passenger seat. The driver Craig was eager to share that he had been to prison twice, once for selling drugs and the other for knifing his supervisor at Quick Chek. I guess he thought of his time behind bars as a sort of accolade, which, okay, given the scenario he wasn’t totally wrong. Craig had stick and poke tattoos on his neck and part of his face. He touched his tongue to his nose before and after talking. The Teletubbies car seat rose and fell in the corner of my eye, up and down like a working muscle. A bird crashed into the windshield and Craig said yo that’s good luck and started the car.

Uriel turned to face me and said okay so you let us in your building, right, we take the tunnel and the system thinks you’re going home like any other day. Then we put on these (he handed me a beige stocking with black pineapples on it), and—if it’s open we walk in. If not we knock and move over to the side so he can’t see us through the thing. If anyone sees us with the, uh, with the socks, we bail and try again next week. Don’t say my name, don’t say shit to me. Matter a fact don’t say shit at all you let me talk I let you hit. Put those stupid muscles to use. (He slapped my shoulder, hard.) What’s your shoes?

“What?”

“What—is—your—shoes.”

I pulled my foot up and bumped the car seat. The car seat jingled. Uriel turned to Craig and sighed “White people.” Craig contorted his lips agreeingly even though he was whiter than me.

“You’re wearing purple Jordans.”

“Yeah. Okay. Got it.”

“Leave them in here. Take off your socks, don’t want you slipping and sliding around the carpet when you’re—(he laughed and then paused) when you’re making Jack o’ Lantern out of—(he waved the thought away). Yo—(we slapped hands). Yo, we’re about to be rich.” He reached for the door handle and retracted his hand. “Yo,” he said.

“Yeah?”

“Hit that motherfucker as soon as we walk in. Hit him in the mouth.”

I slipped off my shoes and socks and opened the door. The gravel nipped at my feet. I smelled the cafeteria food and the kerosene from the dry cleaner down the block. I saw the yellow fire hydrant by the writing center and the black tag on the side of my building that read “Gunk.” I heard the thumping bass from the frat alley behind the library, the crows yacking on the power line, the retch of a motorcycle somewhere deep in the city.

I buzzed us in. Uriel led the way down the tunnel. I noticed he only swung his left arm. The right arm seemed immune to momentum, as if the shoulder and socket had been soldered together. I would have to ask him about his rotator cuff, his posterior mobility. He wore a backpack, dark green with little pockets all over and a spiderweb sewn into the left strap. We caught a glimpse of four students in the laundry room. Three were huddled in a triangle and the fourth sat on the rumbling dryer, his nose in a hardcover. I kept seeing things—fliers, moths, hidden lightbulbs, a striped apron draped over the railing, a straggling pink jellybean at the bottom of the stairs.

Uriel turned to me and said, at full volume, “Okay put it on now.” He pulled his stocking over his head and I did mine. His was a brownish yellow. We raced up, two stairs at a time. I engaged my glutes and paid close attention to my form, careful not to buckle my knees. Johnny’s room was right off the stairwell and Uriel walked in. I followed him and he closed the door the way you close the door to the waiting room at therapy. I saw two bodies sitting Indian-style and a hookah. We stood by the door and looked at them and they looked back at us. They crept to their feet and inched away from the center of the room, and us, and each other. The hookah smelled like the watermelon-flavored toothpaste Dr. Weinburger gave me as a kid. One of the bodies, Johnny, said what do you want. Uriel said Shut the fuck up Shut the fuck up and reached into his pocket and I lunged at Johnny with a right hand, pivoting my left foot, driving the momentum up my leg and through my hip per sensei Chandler’s guidance. Nobody screamed. I grabbed Johnny by the collar and dragged him to the center of the room, knocking over the hookah, then planted my bare heel on the loose coal. I yelped. Black water spilled and soaked into a heap of clothing and the bright orange coal looked up at me like some sort of prophet. I said fuck and soccer-kicked Johnny in the ribs and heard a crunch. Johnny muffled a heave, and the body twitched confusedly. I looked over and saw Uriel pointing a Glock at the second body, Arthur, Arthur the sponge-brain whimpering please and making faces. I smelled urine and I kicked Johnny again, for the same reason you sip your drink twice as fast when you have no one to talk to at the bar.

The bag was full, packed with money and pot. We even made use of the little pockets. Secret pockets my mom used to call them. Great for skiing. Easy access on the chairlift. We took off the stockings in the tunnel. I stuffed mine in my underwear. Uriel said Craig’s out there and I said word. The same four were in the laundry room, unmoved, except the one had put his giant book on the floor, face-down as if in timeout. My heel was throbbing and I wondered if the burn would hinder my squat. I walked on the balls of my feet, engaging my calves. They say you can accelerate growth by up to 20% just by visualizing it.

The funny thing about the getaway drive is that I didn’t have anywhere to get away to. But I got in the car anyway and Craig drove, stopping at stop signs and clicking his turn signals. Uriel was digging through the bag and saying holy shit. Under his breath he said holy shit there’s damn near thirty grand in here. We drove to the Walmart and parked, and Uriel went around back and tapped on the trunk. Craig popped it open and Uriel dug out a shirt and shorts and pushed them through the window. The clothing fell into the crevasse between my seat and the door. The clothing belonged to Craig, I guess, but he didn’t object when I changed into it. I said you can keep my shit I guess and he said nothing.

Back in the passenger seat Uriel turned to me and said you have to walk and I said well okay, can you drop me a couple blocks down it’s like forty minutes from here and he said too risky. I said okay can I get my share. He picked a few wads and baggies out of the backpack and dropped them into a grocery bag under the glove compartment. The grocery bag made loud crumpling sounds. Craig looked out the window. Uriel handed me the bag over his shoulder. Walgreens. He didn’t turn his head and I stared into the bag. I opened my mouth but Uriel talked.

“You good?”

I got out and walked home and never saw Uriel again.

There were cop cars on campus, a cluster of them blocking the intersection between Ridgewood and College Street. The grocery bag was white and the contents were green so I walked in the shade and kept my head down. The bag weighed no more than a pound. I looked like a college student coming home with his pizza pockets and Zoloft.

Johnny was hospitalized, arrested, and expelled, in what order I’m not sure. Arthur wrote a song about the robbery. He called it “Johnny’s Song” and he played it at the campus bar. People cheered violently and you can be sure that Arthur had his pick of the litter that night. Me, I sat in the back of the bar drinking seltzer. I had an important lift in the morning. People looked at me and they would keep looking at me and they could look all they wanted. Scar or no scar, I never left my room without a pair of crew socks on, hugging the base of my stubborn calves.

Ben Austin author photoBen Austin is a writer from San Marcos, Texas. His work has appeared in Lotus-eater, The Metaworker, and elsewhere. He’s an MFA candidate in fiction at Texas State University. He lives with his cat, Mr. Behavior.

Cover photo by Liam Wheelden from Pexels

SOME OTHER CONTINENT by Melissa Benton Barker

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

View from the deck of an ocean liner at sunset

Melissa Benton Barker
SOME OTHER CONTINENT

The drink was called Spring Breeze. Elin had three of them at brunch, but Lucy never drank in the morning, so she’d missed it. It was the third night of a weekend cruise Elin had purchased on sale months ago, and they sat outside on an ill-lit and almost empty deck as the ship charged somewhere between Miami and the Bahamas. There was a stiff wind and no moon. Instead of the desired Spring Breeze, Elin bought two bottles of Amstel Light back to the table.

“The bartender won’t make it,” she said.

“What do you mean he won’t make it?” said Lucy.

“Apparently it’s a daytime drink.” There was a pinching sensation at the crown of Elin’s head, as if she were a plush toy in a claw machine, drawn upward by those spindly metal fingers. She didn’t enjoy Amstel anymore, but it was their drink back when they both still lived in the city, before they had money or married or bore children, back when marriage and children seemed like some sort of demarcation between past and future, loneliness and worth, domesticity and the abyss. Now they were both married. Elin had a son. Lucy used to have two sons, now she had one.

Lucy squinted at the menu. “Just tell him the ingredients, not the name of the drink. See if that works,” she said.

“He already said no to me once,” said Elin.

“God, Elin, I’ll ask,” said Lucy. She carried the menu to the bar, where she leaned on her elbows, making no pretence as she read off the ingredients. The bartender shook his head, but the drinks Lucy carried back to the table were adorned with a lime wedge and a sprig of fresh basil, as well as a half-closed hibiscus plucked from the potted plant that sat at one end of the bar. Lucy had never looked her age. She dragged the flower up from the ice cubes. It slumped between her fingers.

“It’s kind of sad,” she said.

“Poor flowers. They were trying to sleep, and he picked them,” said Elin. She tucked the flower behind her ear. Lucy draped hers on the table, where it melted into a pool of water. The sky had gone dark and the water had gone dark and they’d merged and still Elin and Lucy skimmed along over unconsidered worlds and Elin worried Lucy might be bored. Elin loved cruises, but Lucy had never wanted to take one.

“I’m glad we did this,” Elin said.

Lucy lit a cigarette, cupped her hand around the flame and inhaled, brightening the ash, despite signs on both sides of the deck forbidding her. She pushed the pack toward Elin. They’d started smoking together in high school, with cigarettes stolen from Lucy’s father. Lucy had quit easily the day after her twenty-first birthday, only started again after Max died. It had taken Elin forever to quit. She would always love the bright shiver of nicotine. She tried to avoid it.

The wind licked Lucy’s hair loose and sprayed it across her face. She had that blank look, but Elin could see the teenaged Lucy stamped underneath it, the fierce Lucy, the original Lucy she had loved. Something about the way she set her chin, pushed it forward in a way that made her almost ugly, and she had no idea. Elin thought maybe she would finally find the right thing to say. Three days should have been more than enough time to work up to it. It was as if Lucy had moved away and stood on some other continent, but maybe if Elin said the perfect thing she could drag Lucy back. She could remind Lucy that she still had another child to love, or she could tell Lucy how much she loved her. She could say how she felt Max with them that night on Lucy’s porch six months ago, that night with the wide orange moon slung low over the trees, demanding awe at a time when they couldn’t muster any feeling except a dull and plodding horror. Lucy’s cheeks wet. Her lip bloody where she’d bitten it. Elin at the Speedway at one in the morning to bring cigarettes back to Lucy. The cashier, almost a boy, joking with Elin about partying on a weekday. By that point it was early Wednesday morning. Elin lighting the cigarette because Lucy’s hands shook. Lucy refusing to sleep or even to go inside. Maybe Elin should lie and say she felt Max with them right now, insist that he was still with them, right this very moment, even on the cruise, but Lucy had pushed the third chair away as soon as they sat down as if to preempt her.

“Lucy,” said Elin.

Lucy scratched at her ankle.

“Did you get any bug bites at the beach yesterday?” she said.

Elin had not. She’d stayed out of the water, under a large umbrella, drinking sun-warmed champagne while Lucy floated away on her back, dressed in a bikini so that the world could see how her stomach caved, bug-like sunglasses covering her eyes.

Elin swallowed her Amstel. The Spring Breeze was already gone. It was too easy to drink through a straw. Lucy tapped ash into the hibiscus. In the distance, a stack of lights approached them over the water.

“Another ship!” Elin stood. The apparition drew closer, an identical beast, sister-ship, all tiered and lit up like a wedding cake on fire, and Elin saw another in the distance, behind the first, a speck of light, and then the first ship passed and the next came closer, bloomed golden in the dark and passed, and then, in the distance, came another.

“There’s so many!” said Elin.

“God,” said Lucy. “They keep coming.”

Melissa Benton Barker author photoMelissa Benton Barker’s recent work appears in Moon City Review, jmww, and Longleaf Review. Melissa Benton Barker lives in Yellow Springs, Ohio and is currently completing her first collection of short fiction.

Cover photo by Sheila Jellison on Unsplash

NIGHT CLASS by Jared Lemus

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Image of a computer keyboard in an office at night

NIGHT CLASS
by Jared Lemus

My mother became a maid for a rich, white lady a few months after my father bounced. She worked cleaning the lady’s house—vacuuming, sanitizing toilets in a bathroom with heated tiles, dusting—two days a week for over a month, while my brother and I went to school. The bills, however, didn’t seem to be getting any smaller; but as luck would have it, the lady had also invested in other properties, including a one-story office building that housed a local paper company amongst others. It turned out that the contractor the lady hired to do after-hours janitorial work was under investigation and had closed their offices and laid off their employees. Unsure of what to do, the woman had asked my mother if she knew anyone who owned a janitorial service. Needing the money, my mother lied and said that she did, but that it was a very small company that consisted of only three people. What she didn’t mention was that the people were me, her, and my brother.

I was all of thirteen years old, reading peacefully on one of the twin-sized mattresses—which had been moved into the living room after my mother’s sister moved in to help pay the bills—meant for me and Elias, when my mother burst through the front door, tripping over me.

“Move tu mierda out of the way,” she said, barely catching herself.

“Where am I supposed to put it?” I asked, pretending to set my book down next to me but failing because the mattress was pressed flush against the wall on that side.

“Or here?” I asked, placing the book between the three feet of floor space that divided mine and Elias’ makeshift beds.

“Keep it up, you hijo de puta, and I’ll put you in charge of the toilets,” she said, wagging her finger at me.

“You’re my m—wait, what toilets?”

Over dinner that night, eating the same thing we’d been eating all week—black beans and queso fresco—our mother told me and Elias that she had quit her second job at the Mexican restaurant down the street where her sister worked and had gotten us all a night job at an office. I thought she meant coding or trading stock, which I don’t know how to do but was willing to learn—my first real look at corporate America where I would make bank.

“When do we start?” I asked, naively.

“Get some rest,” our mother said. “I’ll get you when it’s time.”

◊

At 10:30 that night, the reality of the job set in as I stood over the sink of the paper company office, Lysol in one hand, scrubber in the other. I could see my brother across the hall wiping down the desks at a cubicle. Twelve years old and already cleaning up after other people to help keep the lights on.

The office building had four offices—a dentistry, the paper company, a call center, and one unused. The jobs were divided like this: I was in charge of cleaning the kitchen area in all three suites—counters, leftover dishes, trashcans, sweeping and vacuuming the carpet. Elias covered the desks in the call center and paper company—wiping them down with Pledge and bringing me mugs and plates people left at their stations, and our mother would do what was left—most of the dentistry because she didn’t trust us near the tools, bathrooms, etc.

“I miss being bored,” I called out to Elias, hands still in yellow rubber gloves. He was taking a trash bag out of its bin and replacing it with another, the way our mother taught him.

“Me, too,” he said, sighing. He sat down at the desk in front of him and kicked it, causing one of the loose drawers to slide partly open. He pulled it the rest of the way, and I could see his eyes light up because of whatever he saw inside.

“Come here,” he said, waving me over.

“What is it?” I asked, crossing the hall to him.

“Look,” he said, pointing at a family-size bag of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups. He reached in slowly, cautiously, as if the person who sat at the station had booby-trapped the candy. He grabbed the bag and held it up to the light.

“How many are there?” I asked, taking off the gloves. The bag looked almost full.

“I don’t know,” he said.

I took the bag out of his hand and weighed it the way I’d seen in movies when someone weighs a brick of cocaine or envelope full of money and says, “It’s light.”

“Okay, let’s take one and split it,” I said, “that way they won’t notice.” I pulled one out, undid the wrapping, then used a knife from the kitchen area to cut it in half. It was delicious. We never had anything like that at our house, our mother not wanting to spend money on anything that wasn’t necessary. Even when our father was around, the only time we got candy was during Halloween, when we’d dig our hands into bowls with signs that read “Please take one,” knowing whatever we got that night would have to last us all year.

“Tomorrow,” I said, “we’ll take another one.”

Elias and I weren’t getting paid to do this work—considering that the money the woman was paying our mom and her two “employees” was the equivalent, I would later understand as an adult, to be the same as what she would pay one white person in her employment—and we didn’t get allowances, so this was our only compensation. We threw the wrapper in the trash bag, where it blended in with everything else.

◊

The next night, after taking the recycling to the dumpster out back and making sure our mother was in the dentistry, we went back to the desk with the chocolate and took one each instead of splitting one. And once we got a taste of that sweetness, we wanted more. We reasoned that taking from only one desk would eventually get us caught, but if we took from a different one each night, no one would know. So began our search for treasure.

There were 61 stations between the two offices, and it took us only one night to look through all of them, taking a mental inventory. There were people with power bars, Oreos, mini-bags of chips, stress balls with their company logo, coupons and menus for restaurants. One person had, inexplicably, a pair of pliers, and someone else had a quarter collection that instructed the collector to place a quarter in the states’ slot only if they’d visited—it had only Arkansas, Texas, and Missouri filled in.

We spent the next two weeks doing this—picking up picture frames with family photos, pictures of dogs and cats; two people, for reasons I, to this day, do not understand, had pictures of the plants they had on their desks on their desks. There were funny calendars—my favorite had a different picture of Garfield for each day of the year saying something like, “I hate Mondays” or “Thursdays mean I eat lasagna.”

At the start of that third week of cleaning, Elias’ math teacher called our mother after speaking with his other teachers because Elias kept falling asleep at school, and I looked like the brown version of a Tim Burton character with 15-gallon bags under my eyes. They sat us all down in Mrs. Holloway’s class to ask our mom some questions, but she barely spoke English, so it was up to me to translate my own interrogation.

“Mrs. Castillo,” they began, “we’re concerned about your children’s health. They look tired. Is something going on in the house?”

“They want to know how you’d like to accept the award they’re giving us for being the best students at this school,” I said to my mother, in Spanish.

She didn’t believe me. The teacher’s faces were telling a different story.

“Tell me what they said right now,” she said.

“Well,” I said, sighing, “they want to know why Elias and I,” I said, signaling at my brother, “aren’t getting paid for working late at night.”

The look she gave me said, “If I didn’t think they’d take you away from me for beating your ass in public…” Mrs. Holloway must have noticed, because she said she was going to get our Spanish teacher.

“Why don’t you wait outside,” she told me and Elias.

I took one last glance at my mother and could tell that she was scared. She couldn’t very well let them know that we were tired because she was keeping us past midnight with a night-time job or we’d be put in foster care. She couldn’t tell them we needed the money so she made up a cleaning service, and she definitely couldn’t say she was being paid under the table; of course, at the time, I didn’t know any of this; to me, it simply looked how I imagined my mother looked when she was a child in school back home in Guatemala.

In the courtyard, my friend Guillermo sat reading an old book series he was obsessed with, titled The Keys to the Kingdom.

“I saw your mom walk into the school,” he said to me and Elias as we approached.

“Yeah. Elias here,” I said, slapping my brother in the back of the head, “couldn’t stay awake in class, and now we’re all getting deported.”

“Ow,” Elias said.

“Don’t joke about that,” Guillermo said. “They did that to my cousin, and no one has seen him since then.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “He isn’t back home?”

“My parents said they heard on the news something about concentration camps. They think he’s there.”

Kids. We got our information from our parents who got their information from the people on TV, who got their information from someone else, and so on. It’s a miracle any of the truth actually made it to us, but sometimes, like in that instant, we were talking about something important—something we didn’t truly understand—more than the adults around us.

“What are you virgins doing?” It was Fernando, Guillermo’s brother. “Y’all never gonna get any panocha reading this shit,” he said, slapping his brother’s book out of his hands. He was barely sixteen but acted like he’d been sixteen for years. He sat on the table in his faded jeans—holes at the knees—and Timberlands.

“Hola, Fernando,” my brother said, dumb as a rock.

“He’s going to lose his v-card before you two losers,” Fernando said, pointing at Elias.

Fernando did shit like that to us all of the time before he graduated to the high school across the street two years before. It had been even worse when he had an audience—the wedgies, the swirlies, the occasional dead arm just to impress some girl who would never notice him otherwise. What he didn’t understand was that sometimes it was better to go unnoticed, the way animals use camouflage to keep from getting eaten; I didn’t understand that then either.

“I already lost mine,” I said.

“Bro,” Fernando said, laughing, “You? You’ve seen a girl naked?”

“Yeah. Me and—” I blanked for a name, saying the first one that came to mind—a girl from science class. “Amy.”

“That a white girl?” Fernando asked.

“Yeah?”

“You better hope you lyin’ or that her parents don’t find out.”

“Her parents love me,” I said.

“Now I know you lyin’. Come on,” he said to Guillermo, “Mom’s waiting in the car.”

Guillermo put his book in his backpack and zipped it up, then waved and said goodbye. I watched him and Fernando—at least five inches taller than us—walk to the parking lot.

“Her parents love me,” Fernando shouted up to the sky, not looking back at us. “Ha!” he said and laughed the rest of the way to the car, his voice echoing in the courtyard.

◊

At home that afternoon, I wished my father was still around so I could ask him to tell me about sex, what it was, how it worked, everything. The only information I’d gotten was from TV, because sex-ed had been taken out of my lesser-privileged neighborhood’s school district for being too risqué, opting for teaching abstinence instead, leaving it up to parents to give their children “the talk,” but my mother, who cursed and drank in front of us, found that talking about sex was inappropriate. She waved me off if I ever asked, saying I’d find out one day, but then got angry with me for not knowing more. That was the real double-edged sword we’d learned about at Sunday school—simultaneously wanting, like the tree of knowledge of good and evil, children to have both information and ignorance.

I turned to Camila, her sister, for help before she went to work, and she told me to do what every other kid my age was doing—look it up on the computer. I reminded her that we couldn’t afford a computer.

“Do it at school,” she’d said, but I was too embarrassed.

Then it hit me—there were computers at our night job, and we would be going there that night, even though my mother promised to make sure we got more sleep. She told us that when she was a girl in Guatemala, she and her sister got only three hours of sleep a night between the two of them, holding down school and a job, and that we would be fine. Elias and I didn’t dare argue with her, and as much as I missed getting a full night’s sleep, eating like a king—and now gaining knowledge I’d lied about having—was sort of worth it.

That night, after our mother was in the dentistry, I started wiggling the mice at people’s desks, checking if any of the computers were on.

“What are you doing?” Elias asked.

“Help me. See if any of the screens turn on,” I said.

“This one came on,” Elias said a few seconds later.

I walked over, but it asked for a password.

“Look for another one,” I said.

I moved the mouse on the computer next to that desk and the home screen came on. I sat down on the chair and opened Google. Not sure where to begin, I typed in the first thing that came to mind: boobs.

“Boobs?” Elias said.

“Shut up. It’s my first time doing this.” I clicked search and got a ton of pictures of men with hairy chests. I tried something else: naked boobs.

“Try girl boobs,” Elias said.

I typed it in to no avail, but after several more searches, it finally happened—we found a website where women posed topless. All of the models were white, and their chests looked like two ceiling lights, nothing like what I imagined Amy’s looked like. I clicked on one of the pictures to enlarge it, but then we heard our mother coming down the hallway. Elias ran to the desk where he’d left the duster and pretended to use it, while I exited out of the window and all of the pop-ups as quickly as possible.

“Almost done?” our mother called out, still walking down the hallway. “Where are you?”

“In here,” I shouted back, closing the last pop-up ad and grabbing the bag of trash by my feet. We must have looked guilty because she wanted to know what we were doing in there. I told her I was done with everything but the vacuuming and thought I’d help Elias so that we could finish quicker. She looked convinced, but more than that, she looked proud, thinking Elias and I had a good work ethic.

“We’ll get some Waffle House on the way home,” she said.

“Really?!” Elias wanted to know. We could have taken a snapshot of his face and used it as their new ad campaign he looked so happy. I understood why though—we never got to eat out, and our mother never rewarded us for doing chores, so this was unprecedented.

“Finish up,” she said.

That night, she let us eat in the car; and with yolk running down my chin, I smiled a smile that comes only from those who’ve tasted the good life, or from those who’ve had the opportunity to taste it before the plate is taken away, the food only half-eaten.

◊

I spent the next week cleaning and vacuuming as fast as I could, then running back to that computer to do more research, this time asking about my own body. I discovered that stuff other than pee came out of my penis and that’s why my boxers were wet when I woke up, it was nothing to be ashamed of, it was natural. Of course, I also learned some misguided things—that I had more pubic hair than grownups, not knowing the people in the pictures had shaved, and that I was the only person in America with foreskin—because I was a child with no one willing to teach me otherwise.

Then, one night, I went back to the computer to find out about pregnancy and found the desk empty and the computer password-protected. I didn’t mention this to anyone but worried that I might have had something to do with it. A few weeks later, the desk was occupied again, but this time there were new family pictures, a new calendar, new plants.

It wasn’t until I had my first office job that I found out that employers can, and often do, monitor activity on employee computers. I understood then that I had gotten that person fired. I had looked up things like “penises,” “boobs,” “people get paid to have sex?”—that one was another gem from Fernando, whom I later found out heard about all of this stuff from his older sister who went to a community college and had to learn how to put on a condom and what birth control is as quickly as possible so that her peers didn’t laugh at her for not knowing. Did I end someone’s career or marriage trying to find out something that could have easily been told to me by my parents or health professionals at my school? I always hoped to write that person a letter one day apologizing, and I guess this is sort of it, even if I don’t know their name or where they live, and I don’t think they’ll ever read it.

The Waffle House night, our mother ran a stop sign in our neighborhood.

“You didn’t stop,” Elias said. “You’ll get in trouble with the police.”

Our mother smiled at us through the rearview mirror of our minivan.

“What they don’t know won’t hurt them,” she said in Spanish, none of us knowing how wrong she was, my brother and I looking ahead, watching the next stop sign get closer, wondering if our mother would stop to look both ways.

Jared Lemus author photoJared Lemus is a Latinx writer whose work has appeared in The Kenyon Review Online, PANK, Prime Number Magazine, and elsewhere, and is forthcoming in Kweli and Joyland. He is an MFA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh, where he was awarded the William S. Dietrich Fellowship and is working on his first novel and short story collection.

Cover photo by Liam Wheelden from Pexels

FOXLEY REDUX by Benjamin Soileau

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

small boy peeking through a window to the outdoors

Benjamin Soileau
FOXLEY REDUX

Foxley’s uptight on the glass, watching for the hard silver wink of Daddy’s Bronco. Mama said his ass was grass. He heard her on the phone tattling and when she brought it to him and he put it to his ear, Daddy said to wait in his room and to not be leaving even for the bathroom, that he was gonna get the whipping of his short life when he got home. Daddy told Foxley five o’clock couldn’t come soon enough, and that maybe, if he was lucky, boss man would let him clock out a few minutes early.

Every car that crosses the pane knots Foxley’s guts more and he tells himself that he’s making it worse. He might as well relax in the bed and be in the moment, since at the present, Daddy ain’t home yet, and his ass is fine, besides being pinched tight for dread.

Foxley on his bed’s still got eyes out the window, but here he can think better, try to tuck himself safe in the present moment. That’s what the book he found in Mama and Daddy’s off-limits dresser said to do. It had a picture on the front of a happy bald fat man sitting Indian style and holding a yellow flower. A pink sticky note on the cover with Mama’s tiny perfect handwriting said, Happy Anniversary Lou! It’s some things in here could help you simmer down some. But that book wasn’t nearly as interesting as the other one he found called 119 Satin Nights and that made him feel like he was climbing up and dropping off the Texas Cyclone. Shoot. He’d pick that book over AstroWorld any day, and he wishes now he wouldn’t have fooled so long with the blue one, since he only got a little time with the other before Mama walked in and went nuttier than a fruitcake.

Foxley can see Daddy now, rapping his door hard twice before walking through it anyway. He’ll say, “Foxley LeBlanc,” and unbuckle his belt. “This is gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna hurt you.” Yeah right. Foxley hates how Daddy stretches that belt out like a snake and then snaps it. SNAP! Like he enjoys it or something. But Foxley thinks he’ll be lucky if it’s just a regular whipping. Somehow, he thinking this might be worse. It ain’t just a rock spider-webbing the shed window, or him riding his bike over to the Seven Eleven when Mama told him not to. This is a direct violation of Daddy’s private things. Like maybe just as bad as if he was to fool with his rifles. But he can’t say for sure, since he ain’t that stupid.

Foxley hears Mama laughing and he sure hopes she ain’t tattling on him to Miss Roxanne. Ain’t nothing funny about that. Maybe Miss Roxanne gonna feel some pity for him and come steal him from his window like as to protect him from Daddy’s wrath. Wouldn’t that be ducky! Mama keeps yapping her way around the kitchen, getting supper together, and Foxley gonna ask to be excused from supper tonight and maybe for the rest of his life. He don’t know how he’ll ever look Mama in the face again after the way it screwed up at him seeing that book on his lap, like he uncovered a secret they gonna have to kill him now for knowing.

Foxley can’t get them illustrations out his head. Those big dumb peckers seemed amateurish for such a heavy book, looking like the ones his good friend, Buddy draws. But it’s the lady part, or like the lack of one that’s bugging his craw. When he tries to remember it, he sees instead the pretty red candle wax dribbled down the side of the chianti bottle Mama keeps on the dining room table. Foxley knows that ain’t right, and when he dips back into his memory fading fast, he sees that Venus flytrap snapping shut, what he saw on a PBS nature show the other night with Daddy called, Peculiar Critters. Good Lord! That what Jane Dupont got under her plaid skirt? Mama too? Foxley don’t want to know!

Foxley’s pretty sure he hears the beater going, which means Mama’s doling out measurements. He can see her in an apron dusted white, leaning over that spinning bowl, and something bigger than Foxley’s fear takes over, puts his hand on the doorknob softly to turn. Foxley’s got ninja skills of quietude, and soon, he’s peeking down the hallway to see the coast is clear. His crane stepping on the carpet into the master bedroom is a thing to be envied, something he learned from years of sneaking up on squirrels and birds across husky leaves like Daniel Boone through the woods.

The beater shuts off right as he’s coming up on the off-limits dresser, and Foxley freezes in place. He’s ready to sprint on a dime if he hears Mama’s slippers on the linoleum, but the beater whirs back to life and so Foxley makes his move. Dang, that book is heavy. His heart is drumming in his throat like a toad as he flips it open at the midway point, but it ain’t nothing but words there. His fingers are greedy to flip the page, sweaty and so clumsy that the paper tears. Comes right off in his hand. Oh Shit! Foxley realizes the beater’s not going and in a split-second ninja impulse, he crams the ripped page in his pocket and shoves the book back. He floats over the carpet like that Jesus lizard on water from the same PBS show and is soon back in his bedroom, panting behind the door. He listens for Mama, but his heart is slamming home so hard that his ears are like stuffed with rustling paper.

Now Foxley got two fronts. He glances nervous from the window to the door. That paper in his pocket, it’s burning right through the denim and branding his thigh, marking him for the after. He pulls out the piece of page, shaped like Idaho, and flips it from the boring side of writing with none of the words there being of any interest except for “gently on the tip”. The page ripped right through a cartoon of a titty. Ordinarily, that would make him laugh, but it’s the knee next to it that don’t make sense, that steals the funny right out of it. It’s frustrating to have just that little bit of Idaho in his fingers and Foxley remembers Montana. It’s a lot of room in Montana, Foxley thinking.

The clattering of Mama’s nails on the door startles Foxley almost out his skin.

“I brought you a beater,” Mama says muffled.

Foxley don’t understand. He cocks an eye out the window and still no Bronco.

“Hey, listen, Fox,” she says sweet. “I brought you a beater. Oatmeal raisin.”

Foxley thinks it could be a trick. “Just put it through the door,” he says. The beater comes through, thickly caked with dough and Foxley goes to it graceful, snatches it quicksilver from her hand and leans the door back shut.

“Listen, Fox,” Mama says. “What you know about all that?”

Foxley knows what she means, but he don’t want to say. “All what?”

“Oh, you know. The birds and the bees.”

“I don’t know no birds and bees,” Foxley snaps.

“That stuff what you saw in the book, Foxley,” Mama says. “You know what. Sex.”

Oh God, thinks Foxley. He don’t want to hear Mama say that. “I know what I need to,” he says. “Ain’t nothing to talk about.”

“Well then tell me,” says Mama, scratching at the door. “Tell me what you know.”

Foxley sure don’t want to have this conversation with Mama. Buddy told Foxley how it works. Buddy saw a video on his brother’s phone where two women ate a man’s stuffing from him like it was Friday’s Jello. But Buddy ain’t always truthful, like what he told about his brother being a Rambo for the government, on assignment in Canada. Foxley wants Mama to go away, but he got to give her something or she’ll scratch a hole right through his door.

“The man puts his thing in the woman’s navel,” says Foxley, just wanting to tell enough so she’ll leave him be. “Gently on the tip,” he adds. “I know what I know,” says Foxley, angry now that Mama’s putting him on the spot. He glows rosy hot to hear her chuckling through the door.

“Listen, Fox man,” she says. “I’ll sick your daddy off you. He been uptight all week long. Y’all need to have y’all a sitdown.”

“I don’t need nothing. I’m educated.” Foxley would rather have the whipping.

“I’ll call him off,” says Mama. “It’s some things you need to know, I guess, now. Your daddy’s on edge these days and I say you don’t need no spanking just cause you curious about nature. You know how uptight your daddy gets. You want that other beater?”

Foxley remembers the one he got already, unlicked and dripping gobs on his sneaker. “Nope,” he says. “And I don’t need no sit down neither.”

He waits for Mama to say OK, that he can just have his whipping back, but pretty soon, she’s off knocking in the kitchen again.

Foxley makes that beater shine, knowing he’ll need the nourishment on his travels. He goes to his closet and dumps the school books out his backpack. He stuffs some clothes in there but has to take some back out to fit his Buckaroo Box, what got his compass and flashlight and knife and sparkers for building fires. And he definitely ain’t leaving his basketball trophy. When Foxley’s through packing, he bends to some loose leaf. Dear Mama and Daddy, he writes. Time’s come for me to set out in the world.

Foxley can’t think what to say next. He squints up at the popcorn ceiling with his tongue tenting cheek, looking for wisdom from Lebron James slamming one home for the buzzer win, but Foxley don’t see him up there, like the constellation got scrambled back into the sundry, and Foxley guesses he might have done split for shame. Y’all been good to me, Foxley writes. Please don’t worry. I’ll send signs that I’m OK. Love Foxley Alphonsus LeBlanc.

Foxley weighs the note down with the beater and looks disappointed at scrappy Idaho. He understands it could be deadly to head out into the wild without knowing the mystery of the titty and the knee, that the wondering could dull his senses and make him vulnerable to the elements. And Foxley got to be sharp if Foxley gonna make it in the world. Plus, if he can gently separate the rest of that page from the book then Daddy might not even notice.

Foxley peeks from the door and when he hears the oven beeping at Mama’s finger punches, shoooom, Foxley Jesus lizards himself to the off-limits dresser. The book opens right to his spot. He gently persuades the torn page out and is back safe in his room before Mama can creak the oven shut.

Mission accomplished, thinks Foxley, surveying the beater and the note. He’s reaching greedy into his pocket when Daddy’s Bronco floats by the window, slowing for the driveway. For a second, Foxley don’t move, but then he spies his backpack at the window, the golden head of his trophy peeking out the top where he couldn’t zipper it shut, and he remembers what he got to do. Foxley thinks he needs to WD40 that screeching window, and he waits on the other side to slam it in cahoots with Daddy’s clamoring through the front door. Then he’s off across the front yard, squirreling his arms through the straps of his backpack.

Mister Shankle’s standing in his driveway with one of them long-armed paint rollers, knocking it against his rusted satellite dish. He throws up an arm, but Foxley ain’t got time for hidy’s. He burns it down the street without even looking over his shoulder until he can cut through the patch of woods that shortcuts to Seven Eleven. As soon as Foxley gets himself out of the open, he sits down on a log and digs out that paper. He removes it like a surgeon.

Foxley joins Montana to Idaho but sits puzzled by the sum. He’s looking at satin night #63. The titty and the knee joined to their purplish owners look like cartoons in the Buddy style. The lady’s on her back with her hands on the man’s behind, and him on all fours crouching over her, facing her feet. What they got between their legs is hidden, and the expressions on their faces are joyless, like frogs about their business. But the point of focus for Foxley, the main attraction soon enough, is Mama’s perfect tiny handwriting, captioned off in a talk bubble drawn from the lady’s mouth. “Hey Lou!” it says in blue ink exquisitely. “I see the tip of the stick! Fetch me some rope and Vaseline, and I’ll go in!”

Foxley seen some things. One time, a pink owl swooped down under the streetlight to snatch a rat from the ditch, and another time, Wendy Langois ripped a Sugar Daddy out of Kevin Brickey’s mouth with his two front teeth in it still. But he ain’t seen nothing like #63. He experiments with the two pieces of page, trying in vain for other geometries, until he tells himself that it’s best he don’t understand, like the knowing would make him just as fish-eyed vacant as the cartoon lovers.

Foxley puts the paper into his backpack and counts out the almost five dollars in change. He figures to buy various provisions to last him to the next town. Good thing he brought along that trophy to prove his moxie and guts to the world. Maybe Miss Roxanne gonna see him hobo-ing and pick him up, take him back home with her. She could keep him locked in her bathroom and feed him ice cream and pizza and play with his hair for long stretches instead of just the quick ruffle she gives when she comes over to gab with Mama. Foxley thinks about last time she come over, how he hovered outside the door and saw her and Mama trying on dresses. Miss Roxanne was just wearing her bra and she had her elbows out to pin her hair and Foxley saw she had little black patches of hair under her arms. Foxley on a roller coaster thinking about them patches. Mama told him to shoo when she’d seen him in the doorway, but he’d gone to Miss Roxanne like in a trance and asked her to pick him up. And she did it too! Only for a second, but she did, then said, “Woo you heavy,” and set him down before Mama chased him out. Maybe Miss Roxanne gonna keep Foxley hostage forever. That what Foxley hopes.

When Foxley sees them taquitos spinning behind the glass, his list of provisions goes out the window. They too hot to eat even and he tucks them safe in his backpack for later. He feels good at the Big Gulp station, mixing together his favorite kamikaze: Sprite, and Mr. Pibb. He skirts the hot dog dressing station ninja style and swipes some relish packets, liking his chances in the wild.

“Look out, world,” says Foxley through the door, blinded off the bat by Daddy’s winking Bronco. Daddy’s leaning on the wheel wearing the same froggy expression as the cartoons, like hypnotized by the business at hand. But then Foxley recognizes Daddy’s gotcha smile as he leans over to push the passenger door open.

“Fox baby,” he says when Foxley crawls up inside. “You got to quit running off.”

Daddy starts in with his never ever, don’t even think it, next time is murder speech about going anywhere near his shit again. Daddy knocks his fat ring against his buckle to make Foxley feel his warning and it tings out in the stuffy cab before Daddy finally confesses that it ain’t no whippings coming today. “Your Mama says we got to talk.” Daddy rubs his face like he plum wants to scrub it clean off. “What you know about sex then?” Daddy says into his hands.

“I’m good,” Foxley says. “You can just whip me if you want. I deserve it.”

“Yeah, you right,” Daddy says. “But I think you done outgrown whippings, maybe.” He starts rattling off about sperms and eggs and cellular divisions and Foxley, reflecting on #63, wonders is that what they getting at? Daddy stops talking when he sees Foxley’s face scrunched in thought. “Wait a minute,” Daddy says and starts worrying his face again. “I’m going backwards. You know you got the pecker, ahem. I mean the penis?” Daddy holds his arm out at a right angle from his elbow and makes a fist. “And then over here,” Daddy puts out his left hand and pinches his fingers to a point, wiggles them open like that star-nosed mole from the peculiar critters show. “And the woman, she got that.” Daddy wipes his forehead with his designated pecker before putting it back in place and waving the fingers on his lady arm at it. “The lady over here got a vagina,” he says and his voice breaks so that Foxley thinks for a second Daddy gonna have himself a heart attack by the time his story gets any steam. “Vagina’s like a flower, Fox. Just like a flower.”

Daddy rambles on and Foxley wishes he could help him tell it easier. A sweat bead tracks down Daddy’s sideburn and rides the creases of his cheek. Daddy thumps his throat to make a rain drop blop. “You know that uvula,” he’s saying. “Hangs down back of your mouth? Well, it’s like that, I guess. Except it don’t hang, not quite.”

Daddy squirms behind the wheel like a balloon artist without balloons, wrestling his hands together. Foxley tries to apply Daddy’s words to the context of #63, thinks if that’s what them cartoons are after, then they must be taking a detour to it. The way Daddy’s acting, this sex thing must be terrible.

Foxley can see why Mama’s always on Daddy about being uptight. He got to relax some. The vein in Daddy’s forehead bulges like a night crawler up through the dirt, and Foxley remembers the other day waiting for a table at Waffle House. Mama wanted to dance to the song playing and when Daddy turned her down out of shame in public, she’d twirled Foxley instead, right in front of all the waiting smiling folks, told Daddy over Foxley’s head that he got a stick up his backside.

“It feels like a giant sneeze,” Daddy’s saying. “That building up to one anyway.”

Foxley imagines them cartoon people as Mama and Daddy, and then he busts up laughing. Punch lines always finds Foxley late, and he got to give it to Mama. Nothing Buddy’s done in a while got his funny bone like Mama’s doodle. Foxley looks at Daddy’s red face, like it just been punched, and busts up all over again to think it might for true be a stick up there lodged. A big, long, pointy one too.

“Oh, for shit’s sake,” Daddy says. “It ain’t supposed to be funny, Fox! What you in a hurry for anyway? You younger than me by a long shot when I came to all this shit. You ought to be out catching frogs and reveling in your happy boyhood daydreams. It’s all downhill once you start to fooling with vaginas anyway. Jesus, what’s that smell?”

Foxley presents his taquitos to Daddy like them samplers at the Winn Dixie, relieved to hear Daddy crunching instead of talking.

“I forgot to eat lunch,” Daddy says, stuffing his mouth like them taquitos gonna scrape clean all the words been coming out of it.

Foxley don’t even care that Daddy gonna eat all his taquitos. What’s he need ‘em for now anyway? Foxley feels light as a bubble when Daddy puts the Bronco in gear and they roll out of the parking lot.

“You got all what I been telling you, Fox?” Daddy says, sucking clean his fingers. “You understand now a bit better about the human condition?”

“Yes Sir. But I don’t much care about it. I just as soon go frogging.” Foxley knows just what to say to Daddy.

“That’s good, Fox,” Daddy says, wincing and burping. “Frogging’s way better. Shit,” Daddy says and puts his hand to his chest. “Why’d I go and eat that?” Daddy pats Foxley’s knee. “If your Mama asks you anything, you just tell her we had us a talk and that you all cleared up on nature, OK?”

Closing in on the house, Foxley sees his bedroom window sliding by. He smiles to think of the blinds snapping shut, and a scared little Foxley behind them. He feels like a V.I.P being on Daddy’s end of it, and Foxley pretends he’s coming home after a long hard day at the plant to make things right. Little Foxley in there deserves a thrashing, he thinks. Little Foxley got to be smarter from now on. He got to WD40 up that window for one thing.

Mama’s fussing at the stove when him and Daddy walk inside single file. She’s wearing her polite face, like it’s nothing ever happened. “Pork chops in the oven,” she sings.

“Count me out,” Daddy says, with a hand to his throat. “I’m struggling this afternoon.”

“You told me that’s what you wanted, Lou! You asked for pork chops!”

Mama and Daddy’s words tangle up quick, and Foxley slips away down the hallway. They won’t bother him for the rest of the night. He feels giddy coming up on his bedroom door. He raps his knuckle on it, lets himself in. Foxley smiles to see his note on the dresser still, but without the beater to hold it down, since Mama don’t like her things where they don’t go.

He looks up to greet Lebron out of habit and is relieved to see his popcorn image returned. Foxley roves his room with his hands clasped behind his back, eyes cast up to check his constellations are all in place. Fat Godzilla’s there and so is the space rocket launching. Jolly Green Giant’s still on his battle turtle in the far corner, but Foxley notices that if he lets some other popcorns join in, then the Giant turns into Miss Roxanne with her arms up over her head, and them dark patches too, where the night light gives out.

It been a strange day, and Foxley’s ready to lie down and drift off into the popcorn galaxy. But first things first. Foxley cuts his eyes at the window, where Little Foxley cowers and quivers, hands already covering his butt, bottom lip shaking like an oyster.

“Fox, man,” he says, slipping off his pretend belt and snapping it. “This gonna hurt me more than it’s gonna hurt you.”

Benjamin Soileau author photoBenjamin Soileau is from south Louisiana. His fiction has appeared in Prairie Schooner, Colorado Review, Opossum, Grist, Louisiana Literature, Bayou, Superstition Review, Fugue, and many other journals. He won the 2018 Rumble Fish Quarterly New Year’s Writing Contest and is a special mention in The 2020 Pushcart Prize Anthology. He is a stay-at-home father in the Pacific Northwest. Reach him at [email protected].

Cover photo by Jeff Hendricks on Unsplash

GARE DU NORD, 1988 by Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

a street scene in Paris

Kim Magowan
GARE DU NORD, 1988

The girl escorts her boyfriend to Gare du Nord, where he will take a train to the coast and then a ferry back to England—this is years before the Chunnel will be built. He is her first serious boyfriend, and two nights ago they had sex for the first time. The girl is not religious or old-fashioned, but she had fetishized “going all the way” as a momentous journey, only to take with someone she loved. This is why she is twenty years old and only now, long after nearly all of her friends, has finally had sex. It’s a strange kind of fetishism, at odds with the fact that she has, over the last two and a half years, given blowjobs to seven men, including one whose name she doesn’t remember, though she does clearly recall his cleft chin, which looked like someone had begun and then abandoned cutting a cake: a knife pleat in the frosting of his face.

In a week, the girl will fly back to America, her junior year abroad officially over. England is where she met this young man, her first serious boyfriend, her first lover, and though she hopes otherwise, she knows that their relationship, this tender green shoot, will not survive the 6,000 miles of distance. They are not yet breaking up, because it seems tactless to do so, two days after they first had sex, after all those months of build-up. But she recalls the way, after they had “real” sex for the first time, her boyfriend held her briefly and then rolled away to sleep. She knows in the hollows of herself that their breakup will happen soon. That knowledge has been weighing on her for the past hour, as they left francs for their cafés au lait (this is before the introduction of the euro) and then boarded the metro and transferred at crowded, intricate, terrible Châtelet-Les Halles, with its grimy corridors of peddlers hawking purses and cheap, fringed scarves. That knowledge is fundamentally why she is sad now: not because they are saying goodbye.

It is also why she is a hundred feet away, floating above, holding an imaginary camera that films for posterity herself and her boyfriend. One thing her panning shot attempts to capture is how the other people in the Gare du Nord crowd (the girl thinks of them as “extras”) interact with her and her boyfriend (whom she thinks of as “the stars”). Do they think they are tragic or sweet incarnations of young love? Do they even notice them?

Most of the extras seem indifferent and oblivious. They look at the enormous, oxidized copper clock or their own watches or simply into empty space (this takes place long before cell phones, before everyone had something to attract and compress their gazes).

But there is a middle-aged Frenchwoman nearby who appears to be aware of the girl and her boyfriend, and watches them benevolently, with a smudged-lipstick smile, as if they are indeed sweet/cute/representative of amour jeune. As if they are like the famous black-and-white photograph by Robert Doisneau of the couple kissing outside the Hotel de Ville. It’s the girl’s favorite poster: all year it has been on her dormitory wall in Oxford. Sometimes she would open her eyes and look at it while she and her naked boyfriend fooled around (but did not yet have sex, because she would only have sex with someone she was serious about, and she was waiting for him to say “I love you”). In other words, it is no accident that the girl waited for this final romantic visit to Paris to have sex with her boyfriend. This moment kissing her boyfriend goodbye at the Gare du Nord represents the merger between the girl and her boyfriend, who with his sweeping, dark hair even resembles the man in the Doisneau photograph, and the couple outside the Hotel de Ville.

What the girl requires now is an audience, to confirm that they, like that couple, are romantic, appealing, and worth looking at, like the couples that the girl will seek out in the next few days when she wanders alone in Paris, mourning her boyfriend: the hand-holding couples that the girl will take pictures of and think, we were like that, in love.

Kim Magowan author photoKim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source (2019) was published by 7.13 Books. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, Smokelong Quarterly, Wigleaf, and many other journals. Kim Magowan’s 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 photo by JOHN TOWNER on Unsplash

SOME BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT by Reilly Joret

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Reilly Joret
SOME BRIEF THOUGHTS ON SELF-IMPROVEMENT

My wife fingered the remaining chocolate syrup from her bowl to her mouth and announced she was going to bed. I’ll admit The Tonight Show monologue that night wasn’t going to change her mind. It was all obvious punchlines about the president’s Asia trip, with some cheap shots at the end for the congressman with the Honduran mistress maid, and the reality TV star with the unflattering DUI mugshot. I feared this was becoming the norm. I followed my wife upstairs, hoping we might discuss this unsettling trend, or get in something cursory between the two of us, but she fell asleep in a way that suggested a medical condition.

Our doctor had recommended we remove the television from the bedroom, claiming it was best for both of us, studies had shown, etc. We gave it to a woman at my work who said she needed one in front of her treadmill. It wasn’t going to win us any humanitarian awards, but I was still trying to scrounge up some goodwill at the office. It hadn’t worked, and I’d been left with the increasing inability to fall asleep. Forty-three minutes, an hour seventeen, an hour fifty-one, two hours and three. Our doctor recommended warm milk and counting sheep to ease what he casually referred to as “an adjustment period.” So, I drank glasses of warm whole milk, then skim, soy, half-and-half. I mixed them together and drank that. And I counted. I tallied the barnyard, then the parking meters along Sycamore Street, the counties in the tri-state area, the bricks on the First National Bank’s facade. No luck. I lay in the dark, staring at the steady shape the streetlamp cast across the ceiling.

Dino pushed into our room like an invading army. His collar clanged like armor. His tail flogged the framed pictures of vacation beaches and the home store Buddhas that helped my wife with her yoga. I hissed at him to lay down, closed my eyes, and counted the thumps his tail made on the carpet. The number was nearing one hundred fifty, and I couldn’t stand it anymore. I went to shoo him away, but the blankets pinned me to the mattress. My wife layered and tucked the sheets and covers, trying to recreate the feel of a luxurious hotel bed, and it closed around us like a finger trap. I rolled my body to create separation, and kicked at the blankets. As their grip loosened, I dealt a harder blow, and heard my toenail tear a gash in the top sheet.

Dino shot up and stared at me from beside the bed with his ears back in defense from the sound. I turned to my wife. She was still asleep in the same dead pose. I listened to her breath, counting the seconds between inhale and exhale, waiting for it to quicken or for some other sign she’d noticed, but nothing changed. Dino walked three cautious circles at the foot of the bed and laid back down. His tail began thumping again. I pulled myself from the finger trap and slunk towards the bathroom. I had known for a while about my toenails. They’d been burrowing weird shapes in my socks, and making certain shoes uncomfortable, but they hadn’t done damage. Now, I was disgusted with my lack of stewardship.

I sat on the edge of the tub counting the floor tiles, and remembered gently kidding my wife for the time she spent in here, but no one was laughing now. For five minutes of time, I’d have to explain a ruined set of sheets. Of course, it would have been five minutes if I hadn’t let things become so far gone. It took five minutes just to snake my fingers through to where the clippers resided, deep inside the vanity drawer long ago claimed by my wife, and overcrowded with fiendishly-shaped grooming devices that seemed to threaten harm. And then I had to slowly chip away at the proof of my negligence. The big toes offered the toughest opposition, but the clippers and I prevailed, even if it was only a short-lived victory.

The results were poor. My nails were too angular and jagged, still too much like blades—though now they were serrated. I went to the drawer again, and found my wife’s nail file. Its sides were bifurcated, split between increasingly finer grits and labeled accordingly, which facilitated the institution of an assembly line on my toes. Then, once they were smooth and glossy, my fingernails looked outrageous by comparison. It took another half hour of work until I could approve of my hands. I returned to bed and fell asleep instantly.

A feeling of accomplishment pervaded the next day until The Tonight Show monologue, when looking at my nails no longer did anything for me. In bed, the minutes ticked by again. I tried counting them, but this only made it worse. My satisfaction turned to discomfort, and then became a nag, which manifested itself as an itch that radiated from my groin out over my entire body. I tried to scratch, but my nails were too short to alleviate it.

Standing naked in front of the bathroom mirror, I witnessed the severity of the problem. Here I was, peacocking around about an overdue nail trim, when the rest of my corporeal chunk lurched like a Sasquatch. I was a thin veneer, shamefully pretending to be civilized.

Waxing began with my shoulders, then proceeded to my back. A makeshift combination of vise-grips, a spatula, and a golf ball retriever allowed me to access the more remote areas. My chest and thighs were easier, requiring only a protractor and a ruler. The groin was last, and as anticipated: not pleasant, precarious, but necessary.

The next morning, I took a post-shower victory lap around the bedroom. I paused in the middle of the room and posed, as though sculpting myself into marble for my wife to behold. The water droplets slid unhindered from my body.

“Since when don’t we use towels?” she asked.

She threw one at me from the pile of laundry she was folding unevenly.

The post office delivered my last check from the bottling company. Just the check, no additional remarks included. I spent the afternoon practicing my signature, not wanting to squander a final opportunity to show H.B. Davenport & Co. what they were losing; but my pen didn’t wet the page properly to give my letters the boldness they required. I searched the house, but we only had one cheap box of the same cheap pens. I left the check on the kitchen counter, took a couple naps, and trimmed my goatee until my wife came home.

She set the groceries and junk mail on top of the check and didn’t mention it. She barely mentioned anything the whole evening, and then said she was going to bed. The monologue dry spell was beginning to sour her mood, I could tell.

After she’d gone upstairs, I sat on the couch stroking my face. Dino pawed at my leg, apparently concerned I hadn’t also gone to bed. I’d shoo him away, he’d come back. He was picking up on the restlessness surrounding him. I walked him around the house, hoping it would tire him out. It didn’t, so I got his leash and took him around the neighborhood.

After midnight, our street was as quiet as could be. The pulsing of the day—husbands and wives back and forth to work, children canvassing lawns for adventures, contractors’ saws and hammers, pneumatics and rotating electrics, cars, delivery trucks, front doors, garage doors, voices carrying through open windows and across backyards—retreated without any sign of ever having existed. The houses were silent, just spreading placid pools of light from front porches and central hall chandeliers. I walked Dino through the silence, remorseful for the jangle of his collar, hoping we could somehow capture the smallest fraction of the austerity the other houses seemed to have in abundance.

We returned home, and I wandered room to room. I couldn’t find tranquility across our threshold, only turmoil. A strange, almost sixty-cycle hum radiated through the house. I unplugged the television and cable box, the microwave and coffee pot, and turned off everything except the front porch light. It felt worse in the dark. The chaos, imperceptible during the day, cloaked by the commotion outside, now threatened to vibrate the house apart. I had to root it out before it tore us to shreds.

I dealt with the drawers in the bathroom first. Dull scissors, baffling implements, half-used duplicates of deodorants and perfumes. They were all discarded without second thought. What remained was cleaned, consolidated, and organized. I applied labels to the drawer fronts to prevent a return to this state. The kitchen received the same treatment. De-Tefloned pans, right-angled whisks, wax-gobbed spatulas, and Tupperware in need of birth control were tossed. I raided the refrigerator and pantry, the cabinets and sideboard. Night by night, I moved through the house. No room, no item was spared judgment. I took special delight in ridding our lives of the plush throw blanket my mother-in-law bought us in Graceland. A calm, Spartan order was settling in.

One morning, while we drank coffee from two of our remaining mugs, my wife asked if I’d seen the stick blender.

I remembered pulling the stick blender’s phallic case from the abyssal cabinet next to the dishwasher. It was buried under three items I didn’t even know we owned. This was enough evidence to condemn it. Her tone implied otherwise.

“You’re throwing our money into the trash,” she said.

“What’s the alternative? Live in a heap because it’s our heap?”

“What are we going to have left when you’re done?”

I explained that it wasn’t about what would remain. It was about trading things for a new feeling, an organic environment where we could breathe. I asked her to stop for a moment and open herself up to receive the sensation of the house. She was having none of it. She stormed off to work, leaving the ingredients for her split pea soup on the counter.

My magazines finally arrived in the mail. I read them all by the time my wife came home. She had a take-out meal with her that she said was for dinner, but the men’s magazines condemned this as being too sodium-laden and processed. I declined her invitation, and took Dino for a run instead. He was getting to be a real chunker, and I had to get my heart rate to one hundred and fifty-three BPM.

I thought about the interior design magazines while I ran, and for a long time after. They implored me to embark on a soul search for my personal affinities to Country Glam or Boho Chic, to explore space as texture, and couple sleek mid-century lines with thrift store finds that expressed personality and whimsy—if whimsy was part of my personality, I suppose. But I didn’t need design gurus utilizing esoteric terms with flippant familiarity. I needed the Platonic ideal of our living room, the Truth of the space. These were layers of reality, not shag pillows and low-pile rugs. The wall between the living and dining rooms was reality—and also load-bearing, evidently. I had to find the room constrained within the room, yearning for its realization.

I awoke to my wife yelling from downstairs.

“Did you move the furniture?” she kept hollering.

I came down to find her collapsed on the relocated chaise lounge, howling, and cupping her foot.

“Did you move the furniture?” she asked again.

The answer to her question seemed obvious.

Her toe was turning a tumultuous swirling of purples and yellows beneath the hairs that sprung from her knuckle. I placed a frozen bag of French-cut beans on it, and reminded myself to wash the bag before returning it to the freezer. She diagnosed the toe broken, and asked for supplies so she could tape it to its neighbor. I had marshaled our first-aid kit into order during one of my organizational nights, and brought it to her as though it sat atop a velvet pillow, proud that she could perform her task with ease. I made coffee and brought her a cup, setting it beside her before loitering a kiss on her forehead. She shook me away.

“Why? Just why?” she asked.

“The living room was a farce.”

“It’s been that way for five years.”

“It was difficult to get the indentations out of the carpet,” I agreed.

She huffed, and limped upstairs to get ready for work.

When she came hobbling through the kitchen door that evening, I was waiting for her at the table. Before she had time to set her purse on the counter, I handed her a loose assortment of wrinkled, coffee-stained copy paper.

“It’s not perfect, but it’s a start,” I said.

She read the first page slowly, then thumbed through the others with increasing speed and decreased attention. She finished the last page, then stared at me blankly.

“What is this?” she asked. “Pages—pages—of one-liners?” She looked at the papers again and shook her head. “What is this supposed to be?”

“It’s a rough draft. I printed a good copy, and mailed it to The Tonight Show.”

She fell forward onto the counter, and looked at the first page of my manuscript again.

“This is how you spent your day?”

“I know the monologue has been bothering you—”

“The monologue has not been bothering me. This,” she said, gesturing wildly towards everything, “has been bothering me.”

“I can only do so much at once.”

My wife took up a new hobby. She made phone calls, scheduled appointments, and shuttled me to doctors’ offices. We had long conversations with several of the doctors. They were quick to point out that they had no desire nor intention to place blame. I was quick to commend them. The other doctors were less conversational, and only seemed interested in tests they intended to perform at later dates for additional co-pays, and future follow-up consultations for the same. This was concerning. My wife was collecting referrals like trading cards, and her new hobby was beginning to impede my progress.

One doctor sent us home with probes and monitors we were instructed to affix to specific parts of my body before bed, which would measure all the things needing to be measured. My wife spent the better part of The Tonight Show clamping and taping the dongles and meters to my prescribed parts until they dangled from me like the jewelry of a space pirate. I lost all freedom of movement with these devices tethered to me. I couldn’t shave or spackle, paint or hammer. I couldn’t concentrate on anything. They beeped when connected; they beeped when disconnected. I couldn’t make sense of what they wanted from me. After a few nights dragging those things around, they had my wife drive me to a sleep center for an overnight stay. I lost a whole evening reorganizing someone else’s room.

With the experiments over, I could get back to work. I was mitering and coping an inside corner when my wife came down the basement stairs to talk to me about talking with the doctors.

“Don’t you remember what Dr. Phillips said?” she asked.

“Not as such, no.”

“She said we needed to establish boundaries.”

I examined the cut I just made. The power miter saw was not strictly necessary. I could have performed the work without it, but it moved the process along while still maintaining the required precision.

“Apparently, that was one of her more salient points,” I said.

Crown molding was exactly the type of boundary our dining room needed.

“Where are the boundaries? It’s three-thirty in the morning. We don’t have any boundaries.”

“What does it look like I’m doing?”

She leaned slightly while I carried the molding past her. Dr. Phillips, or perhaps Dr. Senglin, or Father Kendrick had stressed the need for us to engage with each other’s lives again. Maybe it was in one of the men’s magazines. I thought my wife might want to see what I was accomplishing, but when I returned to the basement with my next measurement, she was gone. She would have seen everything coming together.

The maintenance was becoming unsustainable, however. Something had to give. Everywhere I turned, a spot needed wiping, dog hair needed vacuuming, the yard needed scooping. Dino’s half-masticated rawhides were omnipresent. Stains were inescapable. My days were spent following him with disinfectant wipes and a garbage can.

He had to go.

My wife abandoned her hobby, and began spending long periods in bed. She didn’t watch The Tonight Show anymore, and she didn’t ask about the powder room I took down to the studs, or the old pickup truck I planned on using for runs to the home center, but had to park in the driveway and dismantle the engine. I worried she was regressing so far into herself that she wouldn’t be able to appreciate the transformations around, and that she would reach a place where I couldn’t reach her anymore.

I circled the bedroom one night, noting the frequency of the drafts swaying the curtains, and the patterns our feet left in the carpet. My wife’s breathing raised and lowered the blankets over her in the slow pulse of a summer lake. She slept on her back with her head turned to the arm curled behind her, and looked posed for a photograph or painting in the way that people used to. I saw the picture of her hung, huge and solitary, on the white wall of an empty museum. It had the same curiosity, drew the same fascination, as any great canonical work. It was easy to forget sometimes. When I looked at her, I saw the world drawn to scale, unified, pulled together in a more profound way than I was prepared to experience. That it would be her who was here, peaceful and full of grace, well…I was still as awed by her as ever.

I stepped back to take in the whole scene, to study it and burn the details I’d forgotten back into my memory. But the more I observed, the more it seemed out of balance. Her upper body flowed easy over the pillows and mattress, an effortless expression of comfort and serenity. A cocoon encased her from the waist down. Her legs were mummified under the blankets. Such an off-putting juxtaposition betrayed the truth of how she should be seen. I knelt at the foot of the bed and pulled at the pleats and folds like opening a present without damaging the wrapping. I found one leg under the covers, eased it out, and set on top of the blankets. This little correction changed the whole scene. It looked like she wore a flannel and down tunic as she descended from a Grecian urn. But her foot drooped to the side, making her look bow-legged. I reset it and adjusted the blankets to hold it upright. It fell outward again. I cradled her foot in my hands and inspected it for any inherent causes. Her toe had healed nicely, but those hairs were still on her knuckles. They were an aggressive disruption, asserting dominance over the idyllic scene. Those fine, haphazard hairs were all I could see. I retreated across the room, hoping distance could maintain the trance, but it kept receding. I didn’t want to lose her. I thought I could touch up the picture and hold on. There was still some wax left over. I retrieved the jar from the bathroom and set to work, but her scream shattered the tranquility of the vision, and it was gone.

She left a discomforting indentation on her side of the bed. Flipping the mattress corrected this concern, but there’s something disproportionate about living alone in a large house.

I’d ask her to come back, but there’s no helping some people.

Reilly Joret Author PhotoReilly Joret is a writer and mechanic. There isn’t as much overlap between those two fields as you’d think. He graduated from Washington College in Chestertown, Maryland with a B.A. in English and Creative Writing. He currently lives in Philadelphia, PA. This is his first published short story.

Cover photo by ANDI WHISKEY on Unsplash

THE LIVING AND THE DEAD by Melissa Brooks

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Melissa Brooks
THE LIVING AND THE DEAD

The world was fuzzy. Victoria blinked. She blinked again and again until the room came into focus. A pixelated ceiling. A window opening to blackness. An unkempt man slouched in a chair, fist propping up a mess of greasy dark hair. He had sallow skin, dark bags beneath bloodshot eyes. Familiar eyes. Barry’s eyes? Benny? Billy? Billy.

“Billy?” she rasped.

He sat up straight, suddenly alert. He flew toward her, swooping down and kissing her before she could stop him. His breath smelled like something rotten—a forgotten peach, curdled milk. His lips smashed into hers, pressing her hard into the pillow. Every time she thought it would end, it somehow kept going. “I can’t breathe,” she managed to mumble beneath the weight of his lips.

He released her. He dragged a chair next to her hospital bed. “Do you remember the accident?”

Victoria had a vague memory of leaving work. Nodding to the resident peddler on the corner. Fishing a bruised banana from her purse for him. Staring at the steady stream of hypnotic white lines, the empty pavement stretching to infinity.

“You smashed into a tree,” Billy said. “You must have fallen asleep. The doctor said you have a pretty serious concussion.” He was grimacing.

“Why are you making that face?”

“It’s the baby,” Billy said. “They couldn’t save it. I’m so sorry.” He brushed a lock of hair from her forehead, exposing a ripe armpit.

Victoria wrinkled her nose.

He grabbed her hand, but she could barely feel his touch. “It’s not your fault.”

She leaned back against the pillow and stared up at the ceiling. “I’m so hungry.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “I’ll go find the doctor and hunt down some food.”

After Billy left, she examined her body. The left side looked all banged up—leg in a brace, arm in a sling—but she felt perfectly symmetrical. She felt a large bump on her forehead, but it didn’t even hurt, like it wasn’t even real. She moved her hands to her stomach. She hadn’t even been showing, and yet, she felt lighter.

It was nearing ten p.m. The hospital was strangely quiet. Victoria got out of bed. The thin hospital gown hung from her body like a bag.

Outside, leaves rustled in the trees. The breeze drifted in through the open window, grazing Victoria’s exposed back. She nearly fell over. She walked to the hallway on unsteady feet, wispy legs. The gown fluttered behind her. She could barely feel the ground beneath her feet, like she was floating.

She floated out of the room, down the hospital’s corridors, all the way outside. The street lamps lit up a mosaic of reds and yellows blazing in the trees, openly signaling their imminent decay. The breeze rustled her hair, blowing behind her, going through her, carrying her faster, farther.

She remembered the great big oak rushing toward her. The flash of bark. The exhilaration she felt when she thought it was all over.

◊

“Look what came!” Billy said, appearing in the kitchen. Victoria sat at the island counter, eating chocolate chips straight from the bag.

Billy set down a bouquet of pineapples, strawberries, chocolate-covered bananas blooming from a pot wrapped in crinkled red paper. “Get better soon!” the card demanded. “We’re lost without you.” It was from her coworkers at the marketing firm. Instead of feeling guilty, Victoria felt relieved not to be there, contorted in her desk chair so long her knees went stiff, her feet numb, tingling pinpricks climbing her shin until her entire leg fell asleep and she had to punch it back to life.

Billy wrapped his arms around her waist. He massaged her belly, slid a hand up her shirt. His fingers felt like clammy little tendrils. She slid off her stool and moved to the other side of the counter.

Billy sighed. “I know it must be hard.”

“What?”

He gave her a pitying look. “You know.” He placed a hand back on her stomach.

“Don’t you have tires to rotate? Oil to change?” she said.

“You have to talk about your feelings, Vicky.”

“What feelings?”

“I’m just trying to help you. You could meet me halfway here.” His irritation was palpable. A hot white light radiated from his body, but it was hard for her to care. She plucked a strawberry from a plastic stem. It tasted like ashes. She spit it out, covering her hand in a stringy mess of red entrails.

“Jesus, what’d you do that for?” Billy said.

She held out her hand. “Taste this, will you?”

“That’s got to be the grossest thing you’ve ever done.” He forced a smile to show he was only joking. He wiped her hand clean with a paper towel.

He took a fresh strawberry from the bouquet, sniffed it. Poked it with his tongue. Nibbled off the end. His expression lightened. He popped the rest in his mouth. “It’s good,” he said with his mouth full, garbling his words.

Victoria braved the chocolate-covered banana. The banana tasted just as ashy as the strawberry, but the chocolate casing was smooth and velvety. She wondered if maybe it wasn’t the fruit. If it was her. This strange, new body.

◊

Everything the living would consider healthy—the kale spinach smoothies she used to blend every morning, the medley of squash, carrots, and onions she’d roast for dinner—tasted repugnant to her now. The only things Victoria could stomach were peanut butter cookies, potato chips and onion dip, popcorn doused in a stick of butter—things she’d long avoided.

No matter what she ate, she didn’t gain weight. She remained light and buoyant. She didn’t even need to exercise anymore. She could spend the whole day curled up on the couch with a bowl of popcorn, reading the books lining her walls that she’d been meaning to get to since college: The Brothers Karamazov, Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights. She’d sit for hours, getting lost in worlds of heightened emotion that seemed so much more meaningful than hers ever did, oblivious to Billy puttering around the apartment, the neighbor kids squealing outside as they chased their barking dog, the phone ringing and ringing and ringing (“Don’t you hear that? The accident didn’t damage your ears, did it?”). When Billy asked Victoria if she was up for a game night with their friends, she didn’t even glance up from her book. “I’m reading.”

“I don’t mean now, I mean in a little bit.”

“I’ll be reading then too.”

“Don’t you want to see our friends?”

“I just want to finish this chapter.” She’d played Apples to Apples a million times. She’d never read Moby Dick.

She used to read all the time as a kid—The Boxcar Children, Goosebumps, The Magic Treehouse, transposing words into vibrant movies in her head while her classmates turned every boring facet of their lives into a game: pretend grocery store, pretend doctor, pretend dinner. But after college, marriage, the marketing firm, she never could seem to find the time or the energy to read as much as she wanted. It often made her angry, losing so much time to things that seemed so pointless—watching Billy’s intramural soccer games, reviewing ad copy for products no one needed. “You’re being ridiculous,” she used to tell herself. “You have to live in the world.” Still, the thought nagged at her, burrowing deeper and deeper, its roots taking hold and spreading as far as they could go.

It was the reason she finally acquiesced to Billy’s guilt trips about having a kid. Her boss wouldn’t make her come in for six a.m. website launches, stay until nine p.m. for client feedback, attend product launch parties over the weekend. She only realized what she was doing when it was too late. She couldn’t bring a kid into the world for a terrible reason like that. How selfish that would be. How cruel.

◊

Victoria walked straight at the bedroom wall. The limitations of the physical world she’d grown so used to for twenty-seven years overpowered her, so that instead of going through the wall, she collided with it. Her supposedly injured arm, locked in its sling, was the first point of contact. Her arms were turning into a mosaic of purple and blue splashes.

Billy called from the hallway. “I’m picking up tacos for lunch. You want fish?”

“Chorizo,” she called out. “Make it a chimichanga.”

She charged ahead again, faster this time, full of purpose. She willed herself to keep her good arm down by her side. To forget her old body. Still, she collided with the wall. She bounced back like a spring and fell to the floor.

“What the hell, Vicky?” Billy said, appearing at the doorway.

“I thought it might be one of the perks,” she said. He helped her up, inadvertently smashing an ice pack against her shoulder.

“You need to rest. You need to get better so you can go back to work.” He tucked her into bed and pressed the ice pack to her head, securing it with a long pink ribbon.

She loosened the ribbon under her chin. “Why would I go back to work?”

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Dead people don’t go to work.”

“Is this a bit?”

“I’m hollow inside, Billy. I float.”

He crossed his arms. He opened his mouth like he was about to say something, his chest filling with air, but then he released it in one big whoosh.

“You’re lying in bed, Vicky. You just walked into a wall.”

“That’s just an illusion.”

“So what then? Is your spirit really in the bathroom?”

She sighed. “I’m still trying to figure this body out. I realize I’m not a ghost, but I’m some sort of in between. Maybe a ghost with a human costume.”

“If you’re dead, why do you need to sleep? Why do you need to eat? Tell me that.”

“That’s the nice thing about being dead. You don’t have to do anything. You can do whatever you want whenever you want as often as you want. There’s nothing inside of me. No organs. Nothing to sustain.”

Billy put a hand to her breast. “I can feel your heart beat.”

“That’s just part of the costume.”

Billy shook his head, incredulous. “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, Vicky.”

“Don’t do anything. I don’t need you.”

“You don’t need me.” His voice sounded so cold, edging on anger. That’s when it hit her—there was no way he could possibly understand what was happening to her. She should’ve known, but her new head made everyone else so cloudy, so that she’d been doing and saying whatever she wanted without considering how it might be received, which was nice for a change, but it also meant she’d have to contend with consequences she used to be able to sidestep. Had she realized this before, she wouldn’t have said anything. “I’m sorry, Billy,” she said now. “I didn’t mean to hurt you. I’m really tired, that’s all. I should rest, like you said.” She curled up on her side. The ice pack slid down her forehead, covering her eyes.

He sat there for a while, staring at her. She could practically see his body through the back of her head, the way it pulsed and blazed.

Finally, he left the bedroom, yanking the door shut behind him so it slammed. She squeezed her eyes tight, pulled the blanket over her head.

◊

Victoria perched on the edge of the exam table, her jeans crinkling the paper lining.

Billy sat in a nearby chair while the doctor checked her blood pressure, heart rate, the dilation of her eyes.

“Your husband tells me you think you died in the accident.”

Victoria sighed. She rubbed her face with her hands. “Would you believe me if I said I was kidding?”

“Were you?”

She stared blankly past the doctor at the wall. An anatomical chart of the human body hung there, illustrating stringy muscles she was glad she no longer had to worry about. “It doesn’t really matter what I say, does it? You’ve already decided.”

“She’s never this brazen,” Billy said.

“A miscarriage can be very traumatic,” the doctor said. “We might come up with all kinds of ways to cope.”

“It was the size of a centipede. People squash centipedes all the time,” Victoria said.

The doctor placed a little blue pill in the palm of her hand. “I want you to try this.”

“Why?”

“It’ll help you feel more like yourself.” He handed her a cup of water.

“But I feel better than ever.”

“Please, Vicky?” Billy pleaded. They both stared at her, a manic orange pulse radiating from their bodies, consuming the entire room until it engulfed her too. They weren’t going to let her leave until she took it.

She swallowed the pill, trying to assure herself that it couldn’t affect her anyway.

They both relaxed, and the orange receded back into their bodies.

“Wonderful,” the doctor said. “I’m going to have a word with your husband.” He and Billy stepped into the hallway, closing the door behind them so she couldn’t hear. Like she was a child, she thought. Maybe this was how the dead were treated. Patronized.

◊

At first, she didn’t feel anything. But after a while, she felt weighed down. The left side of Victoria’s body, the side that had been most banged up in the accident, now felt heavier than the right. She hobbled lopsided around the living room, her swollen leg crashing into the floor with each step. She walked too quickly and fell over, her bad arm breaking her fall. She rolled over on her back and rubbed her tingling arm. Shapes began to form on the stucco ceiling—Billy, her friends, her clients and coworkers and boss. She needed to go back to work. She needed to exercise. She grabbed her belly and felt soft flesh—too much flesh.

She remembered with painful clarity the tree speeding toward her, the flash of bark, the rush of anxiety, and it hurt suddenly, even though it was weeks ago, it hurt. She felt the tree bearing down on her, crushing her, crushing the baby. She squeezed her belly, empty now. It was her fault. She was careless. She was reckless. She was selfish.

◊

When she woke the next morning, before she even opened her eyes, she felt her body levitating above the mattress. All the worry was gone. She remembered that none of those things mattered. Why couldn’t she see it before?

You could work somewhere else, Billy used to say. Write for a nonprofit that helps the homeless.

And make my entire purpose and livelihood dependent upon their misery?

I’m just saying if you’re not happy, do something, don’t just bitch about it.

Well she’d gone and done something about it alright. She felt so lucky not to have commitments anymore. She refused to let Billy manipulate her back into her old ways, the ways of the living.

When she went to the bathroom, she flushed that day’s pill.

Later, when Billy said he needed to take her to a therapist, she smiled sweetly and climbed willingly into the car.

She tried running out the clock by reading The Grapes of Wrath in the drab pink waiting room, but people kept asking if she had an appointment. So she hid in the bathroom. She locked herself in a stall with her book for the rest of the hour, not even minding the open toilet seat crawling with bacteria, the smells wafting beneath the short, thin walls.

When exactly one hour had passed, she went outside to wait for Billy.

“How’d it go?” he asked.

“Fantastic,” she said, smiling extra wide for good measure.

◊

Billy walked in circles around the living room, straightening books, folding throw blankets, fluffing pillows—something she’d never seen him do before.

“You can go back to work you know,” she said, looking up from Anna Karenina. “Clearly you’re bored. I’ll be fine.”

He put on a record. The Temptations’ Greatest Hits.

He shimmied over to Victoria. “Hey, let’s dance,” he said.

“I thought I was injured.”

“Think of it as physical therapy.” He took her hand and pulled her up from the leather armchair.

They swayed in the small space between the coffee table and TV, her feet hovering above the ground. She could feel the music pulsing through her costume. Was it fun? Maybe. When she was alive, she used to enjoy dancing with Billy. Was even the one who’d put on records and rub up against him to make him laugh.

He pulled her closer, smashing her arm in the sling between their stomachs. He rested his head against hers, breathed her scent in deeply. “Remember when I used to sing to your belly?” He kissed her neck, then moved his mouth to hers. He ran his hand down her side, across her hip, between her legs. She didn’t push him, but she pulled back so his hand got stuck in the waistband of her underwear.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I’ve been trying to tell you. This body is all show.”

“You still think you’re dead?”

She sighed. “I know it’s hard for you to understand, but I need you to accept it.”

He grabbed her shoulders. “What’s the matter with you? I’m your husband.” He started to shake her. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you? Don’t you care?”

“Billy, you’re hurting me!”

“Now you can feel pain?”

Then suddenly, like a switch had been flipped, his anger turned to fear, to guilt.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry.” To her relief, he rushed out of the room.

◊

The windows had frosted over, sealing them in a hazy bubble.

Victoria curled up on the couch beneath a throw blanket, reading The Stranger.

The phone rang but she ignored it. Billy picked it up without looking at her. He’d been avoiding her the last couple days, but she preferred it that way.

“Andy, buddy! No, I don’t think I can make it to soccer. I need to stay with Vicky a while.”

“You should go,” she chirped.

He moved to the kitchen, where she could still hear him mumbling earnestly.

She felt herself floating above the couch, her body filling with helium. She could float all the way up to the ceiling if she wanted to. She could float away. While Billy was preoccupied, she went to the sliding glass door.

Winter had arrived early, burying everything in snow, sealing streets and sidewalks beneath slick sheets of ice.

She glided out onto the porch without a jacket or shoes, but it didn’t matter because her socks hovered above the snow. She floated to the top of the railing. She wanted to float all the way up to the sky, but she felt invisible tethers tying her to the earth. She lifted her arms and closed her eyes, the helium tugging her up, up, up. Soon, the tethers snapped. They flapped loosely around her ankles as she rose above the house, the electrical wires, the tops of the bare trees. She knew she’d plunged into a cloud when the light filtering through her eyelids darkened and a soft, pillowy substance kissed her skin. When she was high enough, she stretched her arms out in front of her and flipped sideways, the better to soar across the great expanse of sky.

“Vicky, what are you doing!” Billy’s voice called from far below.

She would’ve ignored him, would’ve kept soaring until she could no longer hear him, but she felt herself being tugged back down, reeled back in like a kite. She floated down to the earth, landing softly in the snow.

When she opened her eyes, she was laying supine on the snowy lawn in front of the porch. She stared up at the sky. No clouds obstructed the sun, yet there was a dullness to it, as though it had spun farther away in space.

Billy towered over her. He must have yanked the tethers, pulling her back down. He picked her up and carried her like a baby up the porch steps.

“Put me down,” she said, but he didn’t listen.

He carried her inside and set her on the living room rug. He began peeling off her wet clothes. “Do you think you broke anything? How’s your arm? Christ, you’re soaked. You could have hypothermia. I better take you to the doctor.”

“I can’t get hurt, Billy. I told you.”

“You’re bleeding!”

She touched her head. Her fingers came back wet with red. She licked one. It tasted sweet, like corn syrup. “It’s not real blood.”

He stared at her, mouth agape. “For Christ’s sake, Vicky, we can’t go on like this!”

She looked at him thoughtfully, relieved that he finally acknowledged it. “You’re right. We can’t.”

◊

Victoria packed a bag. There were no clothes in it, only snacks and books, as many as she could fit. Don Quixote, Pride and Prejudice, As I Lay Dying. The bag didn’t feel heavy at all.

Billy had finally returned to work the day before, maxed out on vacation days. She only had an hour before he returned. She left a note so he wouldn’t go looking for her. It wasn’t right for the living and the dead to be together, she wrote. He needed so much, and she needed so little. She hoped he found someone who could give him the things he needed.

Victoria didn’t mind being in limbo, but she never expected limbo would reside on Earth. Maybe it was the ones who loved you in life that kept you in limbo after death, she thought, with their insistence that they owned you, that you belonged to them, belonged to anyone at all beside yourself. Without Billy’s demands weighing her down, maybe she would’ve already floated up into space. She needed to find others like her, others who needed nothing.

Despite the snow, she didn’t put on a jacket. She didn’t put on mittens or a hat. She did put on boots, but only because it would be easier to traverse the ice if levitation failed her. She walked out into the cold. Of course, it didn’t feel cold to her. It felt invigorating.

Melissa Brooks author photoMelissa Brooks is a Chicago-based writer with an MFA in Fiction from the University of San Francisco. Her work has appeared in The Matador Review, Arcturus, Gravel, and elsewhere. Her short story “Closed Casket Calling Hours” was included in Wigleaf’s Top 50 Very Short Fictions. She currently works in marketing at the University of Chicago.

Cover Photo by amy chung from Pexels

MATRYOSHKA by Marion Peters Denard

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Marion Peters Denard
MATRYOSHKA

When Mom died Rachel started asking questions. What did Mom make for Christmas morning? Egg casserole. When did Mom go back to school? I was fourteen, you were eleven. The questions got smaller and bigger, as though by their specificity they were magnified. What did she smell like? She wore Chanel No. 5. I know that, Tabbie. But what did she smell like? She smelled like orange honey and coral lipstick and bright green breath mints. What did her hugs feel like? They were nice. Tabbie. Like she was bringing you in and keeping you out at the same time.

You see, I remember everything. Rachel says I’m the only person who truly loves her because I know everything she ever did. She is my sister, my friend, and still—I lied to her.

Mom had a set of matryoshka, Russian nesting dolls, that she kept lined up on her bookshelf. I can see inside people like the inside of those dolls, each self tucked inside the others. Much like a mother sees all the ages her child ever was: the baby in the toddler, the toddler in the teenager, the teenager in the thirty-year-old. Mom told me once that when I stood in the sunlight she could squint and see twelve-year-old Tab, five-year-old Tabbie, and Baby Tabitha deep inside. Matryoshka means “mother” in Russian. Maybe that’s why.

I realized I was different on Thursday, January 9, 1992. I was thirteen. I was riding the bus home from school, staring out the rainy window. Greg Saunders was sitting nearby and I was thinking about how he pushed me at recess back in sixth grade. It was March 7, a Wednesday. I’d had cottage cheese in my lunch and Sarah T. said that was weird. I told her she was weird. Then Stephanie started talking about her slumber party and we both shut up because we wanted to go. I remembered Stephanie’s slumber party. We watched The NeverEnding Story. I wore my pajamas with the dancing toothbrushes and my dad was twenty minutes early picking me up. I rushed to get my sleeping bag and I forgot one of my socks. It was Saturday, March 10, 1991.

This is weird, I thought. Does everyone remember like this? I started asking.

I’m fascinated by other people’s memories: What do they keep? What do they forget? How are those decisions made? My husband, Danny, tells me people don’t make decisions about what to remember. Just like I don’t choose to remember every detail, he doesn’t choose to remember only certain events.

But Danny is a person who forgets. After we’d been dating six months, I asked him what he thought after we had sex the first time. He stammered, searching. I could picture little men walking up and down his brain, looking for a file that had been misplaced, mislabeled, or recycled. They muttered to themselves: sex with Tabitha, first sex with Tabitha.

He said, “Oh, it was nice.”

He didn’t remember.

It makes me feel small, to remember these forgotten things. That’s why I lied. These memories are suffocating. They pile up on me and I cannot breathe.

The day Mom left us was a Tuesday. December 6, 1990. I was twelve and Rachel was nine. It was a school day, but a heavy snow came through in the night. Mom paced the kitchen listening to the DJ read the list of school closures. “Closing school?” she said. “Ridiculous—it’ll be melted by noon.”

She was showered and dressed when we came downstairs for breakfast. Most days she was still in her bathrobe, packing our lunches. Mom had a part-time job at a dentist’s office, doing the books. But she was home when we left and home again when we got off the bus in the afternoon so what she did during the day was invisible. She wore a cream turtleneck sweater, dangly gold earrings, and her camel church slacks. Her blonde hair was swept up in a twist. Dad had already left for work, leaving early to shovel out the car, and make his way through the snow to the office. She made pancakes, a rarity. She made too many at once and they sat in a cold pile on a plate by the sink.

“Eat up, girls. Then go play. We’ll go out in a little while, when they get the roads cleared.”

“No school!” We shouted, “Snow day, snow day!” We jumped up and down and held onto each other’s hands. At this age I was as likely to trip Rachel as I was to paint her nails. We were tight in the love-hate hug of sisterhood.

We went outside to play, but after a few snowballs the novelty wore off and the cold set in through my wet mittens. Rachel wanted to build a snow fort. I tried to tell her it was impossible, that the snow didn’t make ice blocks like it did in the cartoons.

“Fine, Tabbie,” she said. “Don’t help. I can do it.” She took a handful of snow, which crumbled in her hands. She shook the frozen clumps of snow from her mittens and set about pushing the snow into a mound. She’d find a way, maybe, but I was going inside.

The house was dark after the sunshine on the snow and quiet, like no one was home. I walked into the living room, my snow pants heavy and wet around my ankles. I stood at the bookshelf and looked at Mom’s matryoshka dolls. The biggest doll had a red coat with small blue flowers and pink painted cheeks and a mouth painted in a small red bow. Her black hair peeked out from her red kerchief. Her blue eyes glinted with a dot of white at the pupil. I pulled apart the belly with a satisfying pop. Inside, I found the next doll with a green coat and the same blue eyes, the same black hair, the same bow mouth. Underneath her, a doll with a dark blue coat, and then the orange coat, and then the light green coat, then the light blue coat, and, finally, a baby, wrapped in a painted pink blanket. Her eyes were closed, little painted half-moon lids, always asleep.

I heard my mother call. It was almost time to go. I put the baby in my pocket and went to change. I left the dolls open and scattered along the bookshelf like a series of unanswered questions.

Once in the car, I asked, “Where are we going?”

“The mall,” Mom said.

But when we got close to the mall, we turned left into the parking lot for Garcia’s, the Mexican restaurant. Mom took us each by the hand, walking in the middle, linking us together. I kept one hand in my pocket, rolling the small, egg-shaped baby doll between my fingers and palm. The restaurant was almost empty.

“Girls, I want you to sit right here. I’m going to go over there, at that table by the window. I’m going to have lunch with a friend. I’ll be able to see you. It will be your very own special lunch date. Just you two.”

She smiled. Her coral lipstick shined against her white teeth. She bent down and kissed each of us, hard. She stood up and straightened her sweater, smoothed her hands over her camel slacks, rubbed her lips together to redistribute the lipstick. She walked to a table by the window and she sat down across from a man.

The man wore a dark suit. I saw him only in profile, but I was sure I didn’t know him. He was losing his sandy-colored hair, but it puffed above his ears hopefully. He wore glasses. I had never seen him before.

Rachel kicked her shoes on the legs of her chair. “What are we doing? Are we gonna eat?”

I kicked her shin under the table. “Shut up. Stop it with your feet, ok?”

I was trying to listen to my mother and the man in the dark suit. They were too far away; I couldn’t hear what they were saying. The waitress stopped at their table, glanced over her shoulder at us, then took out her pad and pen. She brought chips and salsa to our table without stopping. I kept looking over at Mom and the man.

“Tab, what are we doing? Who’s that guy?” Rachel asked.

“Shut up. I’m trying to hear them.” Mom was talking using her hands. The man looked serious. He kept nodding. He’d say something—break into Mom’s talking—and her hands would flurry to a stop. They would fall, like birds shot out of the sky, into her lap, limp and still.

The waitress brought us two Sprites. She told us our mom had ordered lunch for us and it would be here in a few minutes. There was a TV in the bar somewhere over my shoulder and Rachel kept looking past me and zoning out. I bobbed the straw in and out of my Sprite, watching the bubbles push it up to the top. The tiny little bubbles shot the straw up into the air when my finger released the pressure. Rachel’s eyes looked glassy; her mouth was partway open.

Lunch came. Mom had ordered us each two chicken tacos, with a side of rice and beans.

“Plates are hot, ok, kids?” The waitress told us. The plates were white ovals and the rice and beans were gooey, melted together with orange and white cheese. Rachel asked the waitress for another Sprite. Mine was only half-gone. Mom and the man weren’t eating, but they drank coffee.

Mom was crying now. She had a Kleenex out of her purse and was dabbing her eyes with it. Her nose was red. The man in the suit reached out and covered Mom’s hand with his. Mom slipped her hand out from under his to steady her coffee cup to her lips. She sipped, nodded, then put her hand back on the table like an invitation. His big hand covered hers again.

The waitress came and got our plates. Rachel was still watching TV with that stupid look on her face.

Mom and the man stood up. They hugged. She turned toward us and smiled. The smile faltered like it wasn’t sure it could balance on its own.

“Who was that, Mom?” Rachel asked.

“A friend,” she said. “Get your coats, ok?”

She took our hands again as we left the restaurant. She walked briskly across the parking lot toward the movie theatre.

“Let’s see a movie, what do you think? Huh, girls? There’s that new one out. Alone at Home or something? Want to see that?”

“Home Alone,” I said. “It’s called Home Alone.” And yes, I wanted to see it. Jenny had seen it last weekend and said it was the funniest thing she’d ever seen in her life, she laughed so hard she almost peed her pants. But I was vaguely angry. What were we doing? Why was she acting like this was normal?

Rachel jumped up and down, still holding on to Mom’s hand. “Yes! Yes! Please?”

Rachel didn’t understand you didn’t have to beg when something had already been offered.

It was cold and the guy at the ticket booth wore red earmuffs. “Two for Home Alone,” my mother said. “One for… Dances with Wolves.”

“That one started about ten minutes ago.”

“Oh, that’s fine,” she said.

“You’re not coming with us?” I asked.

“I’ll just be next door. You two are getting so grown-up, my goodness, we can do things like this now.”

Rachel asked for popcorn and Mom nodded. Rachel squeezed my hand like she’d just gotten us something really good. What’s wrong with her, I thought. Why doesn’t Rachel see how weird this is?

We got our popcorn and Mom walked us to the door of our theater. “I’ll be right next door, ok? I’ll be here when you guys get out. I’ll be waiting right here.”

I remember everything about that movie: the bit parts, the jokes that didn’t quite work. I remember more than just his hands on his cheeks in that mock scream. I remember him being forgotten as his family rushed out the door. It didn’t seem funny at all, to be left at home by yourself. To be forgotten.

When the movie ended, I was sick to my stomach from the Sprite and the popcorn and the wondering. I rolled the baby matryoshka in my sweaty pocket. We walked out of the darkness of the theater into the lights of the lobby. Mom was standing right there, just where she said she would be. I could tell she’d been crying. The man in the suit was walking out the door.

What had they done?

Mom drove us home. Rachel bounded into the house in front of us.

“Who was that man, Mom?” I asked.

“I told you, Tab. A friend.”

“Does Dad know him?”

She turned her head so fast a piece of hair slipped from the pins and slapped her on the cheek. “No,” she said. “No, your father doesn’t know him.” She walked into the house and left me standing on the steps.

Later that afternoon, I stood at my bedroom window and watched Rachel make snow angels in the front yard. She stood on the bank of the driveway and fell back, a trust-fall to no one. She was chubby in her snow pants, awkward as she tried to get up without ruining her angel. She waved at me in the window, but I just crossed my arms.

Mom walked out to the driveway and pulled a blue suitcase from the trunk of the car. She carried it to one side with both hands and the weight of it bounced up and down on her thigh. Rachel paused and looked up at our mother, carrying the suitcase. Rachel must have seen her, but she didn’t speak. The late afternoon light was thin, the shadows dark and cold. Again, Rachel fell back into the white drift, so sure the soft snow would catch her.

I listened as the suitcase was hauled up the stairs and then dragged down the hallway carpet. It must have been heavy. I heard my mother close her bedroom door. I walked the short hallway to my parents’ room and knocked once. I opened the door before she could answer.

She stood over the bed pulling out her green sweater from the suitcase. She had changed out of her camel slacks, back into jeans and a sweatshirt. She held the sweater by the shoulders like she was trying to decide whether to try it on.

“Tabbie, you’re supposed to wait for come in.”

“I know.”

“Want to help me?”

She handed me sweaters and I put them back into her bureau. She didn’t explain. I didn’t ask. Maybe she thought I wasn’t old enough to understand or I was too young to remember. Maybe she was trying to show me that she had decided to stay. I helped her put away sweaters, jeans, her fancy black dress. She put her mother’s pearls back into her jewelry box.

When we were done, I walked downstairs to the abandoned matryoshka dolls. I took the baby from my pocket and carefully recreated the shells of the dolls that held her. When they were complete, I took the mother doll with the red coat and kissed her little bow mouth. I put her back, safely, at her place on the shelf.

Over pizza that night, Rachel told Dad about going to the movies. Dad asked Mom, “What did you see, honey?”

“Dances with Wolves. The one with the guy and the Indians.”

“Oh,” he said, disappointed. “I wanted to see that.”

“Well, you should. You should go. I’m sorry—I just couldn’t do a kid movie today.”

“No biggie,” he smiled.

Years pass that way: being polite and passing the breadsticks. I read once that there are years that ask questions and years that answer. But some questions are never answered, and the years pass anyway.

◊

I never discussed that day with anyone. I grew up, left home, married Danny. Mom got sick, and sicker, and smaller, until she was so thin her passing was like fog burning off in the morning sun. Rachel grew up, too, in her way. I never outgrew being the big sister. She started asking her questions about Mom. I answered them, faithfully. Until I lied.

Rachel was over and Danny was making paella. It was a Friday night and we were already on our second bottle of wine. Rachel sat on the counter next to Danny as he chopped green beans. They were talking about Spain. Rachel told him about a little hotel in Ronda she visited in college that had a theater room that played old movies. She watched Casablanca there, her favorite.

Rachel turned to me. “What was Mom’s favorite movie, Tab?”

“Out of Africa.”

“No. No—it was that other one. Kevin Costner. The one where he’s out on the prairie and there’s that Indian woman. What’s it called?”

“Dances with Wolves.”

“Right. Dances with Wolves.”

“That wasn’t her favorite movie, Rach.”

“Yeah, it was.”

“She never even saw that movie.”

“What do you mean? Of course, she did. I remember her talking about it.”

“No. Dad loved that movie. That’s Dad’s favorite movie. He went to see it by himself. On Saturday, January 12, 1991.”

“Really? Are you sure?”

“Yes. Really. God, Rachel. You know I remember these things. Why would I be making this up? He went to go see it by himself after my basketball game. I scored eight points and Megan Parker twisted her ankle. And then Dad went to go see that stupid movie. By himself.”

My heart was racing. My cheeks were slapped red from the wine and I could hear my voice getting higher, like bubbles fighting their way to the top of a straw.

“Sorry. God, you’re touchy.”

“No. No, I’m really not, Rachel. It’s just you don’t remember these things and then you ask me and you expect me to remember everything but you don’t even believe me when I tell you. It’s annoying.”

“Sorry. I won’t ask you about anything. Ever.”

“Good. Because I could tell you things you couldn’t even believe.”

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“You have no idea, do you?”

I told her how about the snow day and going to Garcia’s and the man in the suit and Mom in her camel slacks and her with her stupid mouth open watching TV. I told her about seeing Home Alone just the two of us.

Then I lied. I told her we came out of the theater and Mom wasn’t there. She wasn’t there waiting for us like she said she would be. We waited and waited and she never came back. I told her we finally walked through the snow-drifted parking lot and into the mall where we held hands and walked the long mall, looking into each of the stores hoping for a glimpse of her twisted blonde hair, her cream sweater, but nothing. We found nothing. She wasn’t there. As it was getting dark, we walked back to the movie theater and sat huddled together on the floor next to the popcorn machine. The teenage clerk asked us if everything was ok and when we said yes he shrugged and walked back to rip tickets. How Mom finally walked into the theater, her blonde hair now down around her shoulders and covered with a fine blanket of new white snow. How she took us by the hands and told us to never, never, never tell our father that she was gone all day while we wandered around the mall.

I lied so she would know the truth.

I told her everything that mattered. I told her about the blue suitcase thumping up the stairs. I told her how I helped Mom unpack and put away Grandma’s pearls.

“Where did she go?” Rachel asked.

“She was gone, Rach. She was gone with him. And I would see him, all the time, growing up. He would come to my basketball games and wave to Mom. God, we had him and his wife over for dinner.” I heard my voice climbing higher.

“Who?”

“Dr. Tillman, her boss.”

“Tabbie,” Danny said, looking at Rachel who had started to cry.

“She has to grow up—she has to grow up sometime! I know this. Why should I be the only one who knows this? Why should I be the only one who has to carry all this around? All she and Dad do is talk about how perfect Mom was. All Dad can say is how much he loved her. Well, I remember. I remember the fighting, them screaming at each other. She never came back, Rachel. She never really came back. She left us. Just like she left us at that movie theater.”

I stood up and walked out the front door, into the cold night. It had started to snow while we were busy in the kitchen, chopping vegetables, sorting memories. I hadn’t stopped to grab a coat and it took just a moment for the chill to set in. I wrapped my arms around myself and watched the snowflakes fall in the circle of the streetlight. The snow settled on the street in a quiet blanket. Each unique snowflake landed silent and anonymous.

I heard the door open behind me, but I didn’t turn. I knew it was Rachel. She stood beside me with her hands stuffed into her coat pockets. She leaned into me, nudging her shoulder into mine.

“Tab, I know there’s a lot I don’t know. I know I don’t have your perfect, photographic memory—or whatever it is. But I know Mom loved us. I know she wasn’t perfect. I know I only talk about the good stuff. That’s what I choose to remember. Maybe she left us at that movie theater all day. But she came back. She was there for us after school. She was there at our graduations. She was there to watch you play basketball. She loved us. Your memories don’t change that.”

I nodded. My throat swelled with the pressure of words I couldn’t predict.

“You’ve got to be cold,” she said.

I turned to Rachel and my tears touched her cheek before anything else. I wrapped my arms around her. I felt her shoulder blades fold, like frail wings, under her coat. I saw her, a little girl again, making snow angels, falling back, trusting the soft snow to catch her. I held my little sister like a snowflake on my tongue.

Marion Peters Denard author photoMarion Peters Denard facilitates writing workshops at Writers’ Room, a creative writing studio located in Jacksonville, Oregon. She studied writing at the University of Puget Sound and Dartmouth College. Her poetry has appeared in Adanna, Peregrine, and Arc Poetry Magazine. She is currently at work on a novel for children.

Cover Photo by miram Oh on Unsplash

UNDONE by Elaine Crauder

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Elaine Crauder
UNDONE

The banana bread would not bake. Maddy had followed the recipe to a T, only substituting canola oil for half the butter, honey for half the sugar, skim for whole milk, and nutmeg for cinnamon. Putting on long oven mitts and pulling the door open, she checked the loaf again. Three hundred and fifty degree heat swept into the kitchen, already filled with late summer swelter. Not wanting to take the time to lift the single bread pan onto the top of the stove, she pulled out the rack, took off one mitt and stuck a toothpick into the loaf. Raising it straight up, it was plain to the naked eye—her reading glasses were sitting idle on the kitchen table—that raw batter clung to the sliver of wood for dear life. If it had been at all cooperative it would let the toothpick withdraw, leaving no trace on the twig, as if untouched by the experience.

She knew that there was a brief moment between when the middle was raw and when the entire loaf was done, but dry as August crabgrass. It was a narrow window and she wanted to catch it, having missed the moment between seeing her husband standing next to his suitcase—mouthing words, dropping keys on the kitchen table—and when he stepped out of the front door. He had looked at her, holding his duffle bag in his hand. His briefcase leaned against his leg. A large roller suitcase rested by his rear. “My keys.” He held them out as though in full explanation.

She wanted to say, What? You’re leaving? Leaving me? But she looked at him quizzically instead, not reaching for the keys.

He cleared his throat, as if disgusted to have to explain. “I was on a ski lift and fell, tumbling airborne. Afraid of falling, of hitting hard. Then I realized—you know you can realize things in a dream—that the snow was soft and I let myself go. Falling. Free.” He nodded. When she didn’t respond likewise he continued, “I woke up and caught myself almost rolling out of bed. Then I knew: it would be okay. I’d be okay.”

She wanted to say, That’s what you want to tell me? That you’ll be okay? But what came out was, “Ung,” and another, “Ung?” She would have given anything to be someone else—a woman in a sitcom, perhaps, with a smart answer followed by a laugh track and a younger boyfriend. “Ung,” she’d said again. “Ung.”

Now Maddy rechecked the bread. She flipped the finally golden-brown loaf onto a cooling rack on the counter, next to Tad’s first letter. It had been nine days and four hours since he’d left. She skimmed the first apology— “it’s not you”—and the second one—“it’s me.” Near the end was what she had waited for, and didn’t want to know, and didn’t want to go on not knowing. No one else. She didn’t believe it but appreciated the effort. Maybe four years hadn’t been completely wasted.

The spacious Philadelphia row house that they had shared sold quickly in early fall, before the housing market completely dropped. She would have felt bad for the young couple who bought high, but they were both lawyers and should have known better. The street that was now her street—with the narrow row house in her name only—was in walking distance of the old place. Maddy once ran into the buyers at the Italian Market. They were bargaining with a merchant, offering half the listed price for bok choy. She turned into DiBruno’s slip of a shop, inhaling pungent molecules of cheese and olives, heavy and thick as ricotta in a cannoli. She’d bought a quarter pound of one of the specials and determined that she should have asked for—that she and Tad should have asked for—more when they sold. Let the lawyers swim underwater.

A surprise October snow brought slush to her cobblestone street and ice to the front stairs. The slush turned brown and, in spots, black with hints of hunter green. Her boots came to her knees and thankfully so, for the brick sidewalk was pocketed with dips and trenches of the icy mix.

The next day was her thirty-ninth birthday. Feeling both industrious and a bit lonely, she joined a Tuesday night knitting club, admiring the creations of women who had been knitting and talking together since before she met Tad. She stitched a couple of scarfs and came to the realization that the women let her sit with them—let her knit with them, accepted her contributions of every other item for Appalachian orphans—and talked as though she wasn’t there. Not a question about her life.

At first, she appreciated being around new people and not having to say anything. When she shared a story or added a comment the others seemed to enjoy her anecdotes about her first-grade students. The knitters listened and nodded, as they twisted alpaca and mohair and worsted wool and clacked titanium needles in a rhythm steady as a cow chewing its cud, hour in and hour out. Their even rows grew with inattention, from balls of yarn into sleeves and backs; knit skirts with silk linings; and what might have been ordinary gloves and hats and scarves, save for a contrasting splash of orange or red against chocolate and navy.

Maddy also joined a papermaking class that met on Wednesday evenings and it wasn’t long before trees trumped sheep. She loved the rough textures, and draining color from carrots and beets and spinach to make dyes. After a few more weeks, however, she realized she had both a scarf and a set of note cards for her entire gift list.

Christmas came and went, with her gifts appreciated—though no more than store-bought—which confirmed the rightness of moving on. There was no future in wool, no tomorrow in paper.

◊

Decisions became more rather than less bewildering. She stuck with cereal for breakfast, yogurt for lunch, cereal for dinner, with an occasional candy bar thrown in when hunger appeared between meals. Evenings of industry devolved from arts and crafts into weeknights of dinner for one in front of the TV, which evolved into lost weeks, then months.

She noted all her anniversaries, but couldn’t bring herself to celebrate any of them. The original one—her wedding day? When he left? The day they sold the house? The date on the divorce papers? Her friends took note of none of these. They came in two varieties. Her oldest ones had known her growing up. They never had liked Tad, naming him JustaTad after the first time she introduced him over a barbeque and he wore loafers without socks. Just a tad not like them, and not trying to fit in. Her newer friends, from college and work, were concerned about the breakup and wondered if she’d considered counseling.

Spring was lost on her. The tulips could have saved their petals of yellow and red, the azaleas bypassed their blossoms and turned their brown twigs into coverings of green leaves without pausing to show off in pink, red, and glittering white. She saw none of it, and was surprised to see flyers advertising strawberry festivals at churches. June, she thought, It must be June.

Back at school on the teachers’ last day, the janitor had vacuumed each classroom but by the time he reached the end of the first-grade hallway the canister in his machine was full and he gave her room more of a symbolic cleaning than an actual one. Using her own supplies, she swept and mopped the linoleum; wiped the windows with vinegar and crumpled newspaper; sanitized the desktops and chairs; and lovingly rinsed the green board of layer after layer of chalk dust. After four rinses the water ran clear and there were no streaks on the board.

Alone in her classroom, Maddy spun around in the middle of the room, her arms reaching for the walls, then the windows, and admired the way the room sparkled. Catching her breath, she pulled a fresh box of colored chalk out of her desk. WELCOME MAPLE LEAVES she printed neatly across the top of the green board. YOUR TEACHER IS MISS JONES. She read the words aloud dramatically and made a large sweeping motion as though it were fall and the new students were entering her room for the first time.

“Why thank you. Don’t mind if I do,” the other first grade teacher, Annie, said, stepping into the classroom.

“I thought I was the only teacher still here.” Maddy laughed self-consciously. “Don’t you love the way the room smells, clean but with a hint of chalk?”

“Incorrigible,” Annie said, and also laughed. She waited while Maddy closed up her room and they walked down the long hall. The cement walls had been hastily painted and were waiting for fall artwork. “Beading,” Annie said as they approached the parking lot.

“The kids would love that,” Maddy said. She had a vision of a classroom full of six-year-olds stringing beads that they’d made out of clay into bracelets and anklets and necklaces.

Annie pulled Maddy away from her future students. “A bunch of us—” Annie said. “I promised I would get you to come. All year you’ve begged off joining us for a sushi Friday or a Saturday matinee. Tonight, you’re coming. It’s Chinese and I know you like it.”

Maddy thought about Annie’s group of single women in their mid-thirties, hanging out while they waited. Too old to be laissez-faire, too young to give up: determined to be single and happy, whether they were or not.

“Dinner’s at seven,” Annie said in her no-nonsense teacher’s voice.

Maddy decided she’d go once—and kept on going into July, enjoying the low-key momentum of idle drinks and afternoon movies with tubs of buttered popcorn. Returning from the outings she would hesitate with the key in the lock, bracing herself. Her rooms had taken on the stale bouquet that she remembered from her grandma’s musty apartment, though Maddy had no mothballs.

Weeks into her newfound social life, Maddy paused, unlocked, stepped inside and quickly relocked. This time there was nothing, no aroma of aloneness, of having been left. Maybe they’re onto something, she thought, though the admission cost a little pride.

Approaching forty had been fine when she was married, but she didn’t like being on the old side of Annie’s group. She wasn’t sure if she belonged. Her quiet apartment told her she did, her dinners for one drove home the point.

She’d been busy trying on marriage—as if it were a jeweled necklace that looked desirable through the window, but upon closer examination was far too expensive, and made with stones that weren’t precious at all. While she’d been tied to Tad, the others had formed tight friendships, vacationed together and worked out whose homes to go to for Thanksgivings and other holidays.

As much as she wasn’t sure that she belonged in the singles group, the singles group seemed unsure if she was one of them. She felt like an in-law: included all summer out of obligation because she was Annie’s friend.

The group always rented a house at the Jersey shore for a week in the middle of August—perfect timing for Maddy, before the school year started—but no one invited her. Maddy was okay with that until she found out there was an empty room. She said to Annie, “That week sounds fun. I’d love to go. I can pay for the extra room.”

Annie looked away. “We save that in case Katy’s sister can come. She came once, a few years ago. The lease is in Katy’s name, so she keeps it in reserve. I’m sorry.”

Katy’s sister lived in Milwaukee and the odds of her coming to the Jersey shore seemed as likely that week as Philadelphia being pleasantly cool with low humidity. Maddy knew where she stood, which left her almost as low as when Tad left. This felt bigger: if the single women’s group wouldn’t let her into their inner circle, there was no inner circle left.

◊

Maddy hadn’t gained over the last year but her weight had redistributed in a way that said Single and Not Caring. She took to wearing pants and tops with sleeves even in the late July sauna of downtown Philly. With a scant month remaining of her lush summer vacation, she was determined to make a pattern that she’d follow throughout the school year. Work out. Buy fresh vegetables. Cook.

She started by taking an afternoon to make a grocery list and leisurely shop. Heading home, she’d accumulated a cloth bag bulging with eggplant, zucchini, tomatoes, and fresh mozzarella under one arm, and a petite basil plant under the other. She leaned down to sniff the velvety green leaves. The licoricey scent made her close her eyes and inhale deeply.

“Maddy!”

She looked up, saw that it was Nick—flashed what she knew about him—fourth grade teacher, kids liked him, thick brown hair—and stepped into a pothole in the sidewalk. In the moment it took to hit the ground, she’d clenched her arms around the bags, which kept her upper body protected, but her right ankle immediately sent distress signals.

“I’m fine,” she said, trying a smile, as Nick ran to her.

“I got it.” He reached out, grabbed her packages and placed them off to the side, then knelt next to her. The first few pedestrians—who had seen her fall—walked around her, but the next few walked right up to where she sat before curving sharply to avoid her, as though wanting to be sure to communicate their disgust at the way she’d inconvenienced their passage. “I didn’t mean to startle you,” Nick said.

“Not startled at all.” Maddy looked at her ankle, which felt like it had swollen into the size of an acorn squash, but was in fact normal-sized. “It’s not purple yet or huge, so I don’t think it’s broken.” Mandatory first-aid training at school came in handy.

“Ice, that’s first,” Nick said. He’d taken the same first-aid class. “Let’s get you up.”

She leaned into him, and shrieked a bit and winced a lot on her way to upright. He asked if she wanted him to take her home. Grateful, she hobbled the couple of blocks, focused on keeping as much weight off her ankle as possible and wishing she’d already started her exercise program. She was pretty sure that his arm, which was snug around her to keep her up, and his hand, which was securely around her waist and pulling her up and toward him at every step, communicated to the rest of him that she was not recently acquainted with the gym. “I’ve been thinking of joining a gym,” she said.

“Might as well wait until your ankle’s healed. Don’t want to waste your money.”

When they got to her row house, Maddy stared at the front steps as though she’d never seen them before. She sat on the second step, facing the street. Propelling herself upwards using her good foot and hands, she scaled the six steps as though she were mounting the summit of Everest, backwards. Winded and in pain, she rested on the landing for a moment before Nick eased her to standing. Limping into her hallway, Maddy said, “Thanks, then. I can take it from here.”

Nick laughed. “I’ll get you iced and put these away.”

The Valium she’d been prescribed—but not taken—after Tad left were almost expired, but came in handy now. Nick found the bottle in the kitchen cabinet, nestled between the thyme and vanilla.

Maddy awoke in the night, stretched out on the sofa with her feet resting on a pillow, with both her foot and head throbbing, and a light on in the kitchen. Tad? She knew that wasn’t right. “Ice,” she called out. “Please?” The freezer door opened, then shut.

“Thought you’d never wake,” Nick said.

“Nick.” That’s who it was. “I fell.”

He pulled up a chair and sat next to her. “I was there.”

“I know. I didn’t hit my head.” But she was disoriented and tired, and didn’t want him to leave. “Thanks for helping me home. And staying. And the ice. I’m okay now. I’m sure you need to go.” She thought he was married or had a girlfriend or maybe a boyfriend—someone who would be waiting and wondering, even if he’d called to say that an uncoordinated colleague had tripped and he was being a Good Samaritan and would be home as soon as she woke up. Not that she’d kept him on purpose. The last thing she wanted was to be needy or seem needy. She stood on one foot and held onto the arm of the sofa.

He smiled and shook his head. “I know when I’m not wanted.” He made sure she had her cell phone handy and helped her to the door. “Lock up behind me. Can you get back to the sofa?”

She hadn’t thought of that. “Of course.” She could always crawl.

Ice, compression, anti-inflammatories, elevation. Repeat. In a few days she was able to get around with an ace bandage and a limp, as long as she wasn’t carrying anything. She composed a thank-you email to Nick, wanting to get the right tone. Grateful, not groveling. Hard to convey that in an email. But a call would be too much. A text was not enough. Immobilized by doubt as much as by her tender ankle, she wrote nothing. Thank you would have to wait the three weeks until teachers started back to school.

Annie—it was Annie, back from the shore with a peeling sunburn—who raised her eyebrows over coffee in Maddy’s living room. “He brought you home, found your Valium, and waited for you to wake up.” Maddy shrugged and Annie continue her gentle scolding: “We’re four days later and you haven’t said a word?”

Maddy nodded, silently appreciating Annie’s unhealthy pinkness. She would have happily sat there with her lips and heart clenched shut, but Annie was waiting. Maddy sipped delicately, barely parting her lips. “I got stuck. ‘Thank you for getting me safely home’ sounded cold—and too short. ‘Thank you for saving me from permanent humiliation on the sidewalk and an evening alone in pain’ sounded pathetic. Even desperate.”

Annie shook her head and smiled. “Try ‘thanks for helping me. I really appreciate it.’”

“Oh.” Maddy inhaled deeply. “That could work.”

“You’re like Goldilocks—only you stopped before ‘Just right.’”

Maddy composed and sent. A correspondence ensued: emailing a couple of times a day. Still unsteady on her ankle, Maddy took out a gym membership. She knew to avoid the treadmill until her ankle was healed, but she hit the weight room, lifting light barbells up, across, down, and back in burning sets of ten. She was surprised that her body responded eagerly. After only one week and three workouts her biceps reverberated with more of a ripple than a wave when she made like Popeye. Though it was possible that only she could tell the difference.

Annie, who’d been offering running advice for Maddy after each email exchange, was ecstatic when Nick suggested coffee on Saturday afternoon. She advised, “Beans to You, that’s the perfect place. Not a chain and you can sit as long as you want.”

Thrilled but cautious, Maddy said, “It’s a cup of coffee, not forever.” She could bring up how the first and fourth grades might work on a project together. Which she’d thought of but hadn’t mentioned to anyone, let alone Annie, one of the other first-grade teachers. Besides, Annie would wonder why Maddy had to have a topic to talk about with Nick, but Maddy knew herself, and she did.

◊

Saturday morning, Maddy rose early and developed a new recipe for banana bread, with a touch of vanilla. Once again, her loaf refused to bake in the allotted time. She experimented with a second loaf: keeping vanilla, adding a sprinkle of cardamom, and doubling the bananas. She took the changes into account to calculate extra baking time. When she slipped the heavenly-scented loaf out of the oven the testing toothpick emerged clean and the top was a gorgeous light brown, with a slightly cracked crust.

Maddy checked her phone for directions. She wrapped the warm bread in a dishtowel and cradled it under her arm, excited to meet Nick and discuss her idea of class collaboration. Maddy knew where the conversation would begin; she did not need to know the ending.

Elaine Crauder author photoElaine Crauder’s fiction is in Scoundrel Time, The Running Wild Press Best of 2017: AWP Special Edition, The Running Wild Anthology of Short Stories, Volume 1, Cooweescoowe, Penumbra, The Boston Literary Magazine, and The Eastern Iowa Review. Another story earned The Westmoreland Award. Ten of her short stories are finalists or semi-finalists in contests, including finalists in Bellingham Review’s Tobias Wolff Award Contest and in the Mark Twain House Royal Nonesuch Humor Contest. Read more at www.elainecrauder.com.

Cover Photo by Whitney Wright on Unsplash

CLEAN LINES by Caroline Curran

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Lined notebook with coffee mug ring on page

Caroline Curran
CLEAN LINES

Adrienne lay on the floor of her apartment, thinking that her life had become what she wanted it to be, when her phone began to ring. Sophia sat next to her, cross-legged, with a glass of wine, flipping flashcards and nodding when Adrienne said the right answer. Grassy late-April air drifted through the open window and the sound of crickets came to a swell outside. Neither Adrienne nor Sophia reached for the phone, letting the sound of fluttering bells continue.
…….
As she put down the last card in the stack, Sophia said, “Crazy that you’re studying for this.”
…….
“Maybe,” Adrienne laughed, picking up her phone. She didn’t recognize the caller, but it was an area number, so she answered it, still laughing.
…….
“Hello?”
…….
“Hi, is this Adrienne Perry?” It was a man’s voice.
…….
“Yeah?”
…….
“This is Emmanuel Barnett, the chair of the English department.”
…….
“Professor Barnett, hi,” Adrienne said. “I’m sorry, is there something wrong? I wasn’t expecting a phone call.” Sophia looked at Adrienne, head cocked to one side. Adrienne opened her mouth and shook her head.
…….
“I apologize for calling so late—I hope I’m not bothering you.”
…….
“No—not at all.” Adrienne’s mind shuffled through a catalogue of possibilities. She didn’t complete all the proper credits, she plagiarized, she couldn’t graduate, she accidentally sent her nudes to the listserv, someone died and it was her fault.
…….
“There’s a situation that has recently arisen regarding Professor Avery, who I understand is your thesis advisor.”
…….
“Oh,” she said.
…….
“The department has received a complaint about unprofessional behavior.”
…….
After a few seconds Adrienne realized that he was waiting for her to say something.
……
.“Okay.”
…….
“We’re taking this allegation seriously. We’d like to speak with you. Off the record, if you prefer. We’re just trying to understand the situation.”
…….
“The situation?”
…….
“We’ll explain more in person. I think that’s best.”
…….
Adrienne ran her tongue across her top teeth.
…….
“Sure,” she said. “I could come in tomorrow morning. To your office?”
…….
“That would be great. How is ten?”
…….
“Okay.”
…….
“Okay, Adrienne. Then we’ll speak tomorrow. I’ll see you then.”
…….
“Alright, bye.” Adrienne wished he hadn’t said her name. She hung up the phone and looked at it, then up at Sophia.
…….
“What was that?” Sophia said.
…….
Adrienne tried to explain.
…….
“Unprofessional behavior? That’s what he called it?” Sophia asked.
…….
Adrienne nodded.
…….
“Well, it’s definitely sexual harassment,” Sophia said. “I mean, right? What else would it be?”
…….
“I don’t know.”
…….
“But—well, this is going to sound really stupid. But you didn’t, like, suspect anything, right?”
…….
“No. Not at all. I mean, I asked him to be my advisor. He was always appropriate. In every way. Don’t you think I would have said something if he hadn’t been?”
…….
“Yeah, no. Of course. I don’t doubt you.”
…….
“And we’re speculating. We don’t even know what the allegation is, let alone whether it’s credible at all.” Adrienne stared at Sophia, who held her gaze for a second before looking at her hands.
…….
They decided to watch television. Sitting on the couch, her knees pulled up, Adrienne cleaned under her fingernails until the ends were pristine and white and, inspecting her thumb, she bit at the stray skin of a hangnail. When she finished, she held up her hand and admired her work.
…….
The next morning Adrienne showered. When the fog on the mirror cleared, she put on makeup and watched herself in the mirror, turning her face to its best and sharpest angle and practicing mild reactions. She wore her hair in a ponytail that flicked across her shoulders when she turned her head. On the walk across campus, she smiled at people she knew because she had her big sunglasses on, the ones that Sophia said made her look intimidating. On the ground were the pink petals of cherry blossoms, crushed little tongues lining the curb.
…….
It was the Friday of reading week, and so there weren’t many people around. Most students wouldn’t start filling the libraries until Sunday. There were a few people on the lawn playing frisbee, looking like paid actors. Adrienne watched them, and as she did she realized her time in college felt like a discrete event in her life, something that had happened some time ago.
…….
Adrienne pulled open the wooden doors of the English building and thought for a second that she should compose herself in the bathroom but then realized she didn’t really need to. Inside, Adrienne’s shoes on the tile were the only sound in the hallway, which made things feel unnecessarily ominous.
…….
Professor Barnett’s office had high ceilings and windows that looked over a memorial garden for a student who had died in a car accident a few years earlier. Adrienne had been in the office before, when Barnett had called her in to congratulate her for receiving a prestigious research grant. When Adrienne knocked he came to the door, stepped aside and motioned for her to sit on the green velvet sofa. He smiled like he was sorry. He probably was. There was a woman sitting in one of the armchairs, frowning. She held her phone in one hand and dragged her pointer finger across the screen. On her chest sat a large necklace. Barnett shut the door behind Adrienne.
…….
“Thank you for coming,” he said. “This is Maura Rollins, from the Title IX Affairs Office, which deals with these sorts of situations.”
…….
The woman looked up and put her phone in her purse. Adrienne smiled at both of them as she sat opposite on the sofa. “It’s no problem,” she said.
…….
“This is obviously not an easy conversation to have,” Barnett continued. “And we want you to feel comfortable and safe telling us anything. Obviously, you are not in any kind of trouble.”
…….
“Okay.”
…….
“Professor Avery, who I understand you know quite well, having had him as your advisor this past semester and having conducted research for him throughout your time here—several students have come to us expressing discomfort—that his conduct with them was inappropriate.”
…….
Adrienne nodded.
…….
“And as you might have heard by now—I know how information can spread around here—we wanted to give students the opportunity to come to us. We reached out to you because we know your relationship with Professor Avery was particularly close.”
…….
“I understand.” Adrienne crossed her legs. Maura Rollins did too, and Adrienne wondered if this was a tactic. Adrienne bit her lip—thoughtful, like someone in a screenplay—and inhaled.

“The truth is I never experienced anything I would call inappropriate,” she said. “I don’t know exactly what the allegations are. I suppose you can’t tell me?”
…….
“Unfortunately, no. It’s confidential. Out of respect—for the accusers.”

The meeting wasn’t long because Adrienne didn’t have much to say. She talked about Professor Avery, who she accidentally called by just his last name a few times, as she normally would. She had taken his class on British Poetry her sophomore year. He called her essays “profound” and her comments “astute,” and she relished the praise, and began going to office hours without much reason at all. He told her department gossip that he shouldn’t have, and she knew she was his favorite. He talked about his wife, who was a professor in the biology department, and Adrienne would often imagine their dinnertime conversations and what type of wine they drank, or wonder whether they had satisfying sex. Adrienne didn’t say all of this. She wasn’t groomed one way or the other. She said that Avery was impressed with her writing, and that he asked if she would be interested in helping him with his forthcoming book. Then, at the beginning of her senior year, she asked him to advise her thesis, which he had called “ambitious.”
…….
While Adrienne spoke, Maura Rollins wrote things down in a notebook. She wrote in a tight, quick scrawl and periodically shifted her hand across the paper like a machine on an assembly line. Her pen ran out of ink at some point and she made a few frustrated scribbles on the paper before reaching into her purse for a replacement. Barnett asked questions in euphemisms. He seemed to be pressing for something, but eventually he knew he had wrung Adrienne dry. Adrienne looked out the window and then back at him, and that was all.
…….
When she got home Sophia was spreading peanut butter on a bagel. Sophia looked up and took out her headphones. “How did it go?”
…….
Adrienne opened a drawer to grab a spoon. She dug it into the jar of peanut butter and pried it out, and the spoon bent a little at its neck. “Fine. I didn’t have much to say.”
…….
“Who was there?”
…….
“Professor Barnett and some woman from the Title IX office.” Adrienne sat on one of the kitchen stools.
…….
“What did they ask?”
…….
“They just wanted to know if I knew anything,” Adrienne said, licking the peanut butter off the spoon, coating her tongue smooth.
…….
Sophia nodded. She washed her dishes, singing bits of songs and making a little sound of annoyance when the water got too hot. Adrienne took out her phone and read Twitter for a few minutes. Once she tasted only the spoon’s slick metal, she held it in her mouth suctioned to her tongue.
…….
“Did you tell them about me?” Sophia said, breaking off her hum.
…….
Adrienne took the spoon out of her mouth. “About you?”
…….
“Yeah.”
…….
“No,” Adrienne said. “Why would I?” Sophia had never met Avery.
…….
“Maybe it makes sense that whatever Avery was doing he wouldn’t do to you.”
…….
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
…….
“I just mean that you wouldn’t be, like, an outlier. If you’re the student he was closest with, and you never suspected anything. Maybe he didn’t try anything because he knew you were gay.”
…….
Adrienne looked at Sophia for a moment.
…….
“Or maybe he didn’t try anything because he never did with anyone.”
…….
Sophia jumped. “I knew it. You’re taking his side.”
…….
“God, Sophia. I’m not taking sides. I only know what I know.”
…….
“You’re an Avery apologist.”
…….
“Did you just coin that term?” Adrienne stood and dropped her spoon in the sink.
…….
“It’ll be a thing.”
…….
“Fuck you.”
…….
“You don’t get to abandon all your principles just because someone you like was accused of something.”
……
“You understand how the real world works, right? Life isn’t one big political statement.”
…….
“You sound like a Republican.”
…….
Adrienne walked out of the kitchen and into her bedroom, closing the door behind her. She knew she had some time before Sophia would decide to either apologize or demand an apology. Alone, Adrienne looked around her room to calm herself down. Stuck to the walls around her, propped on her dresser, arranged on her desk, was the paraphernalia of her life. She collected things from the world: triangular rocks in a line on her windowsill, four leaf clovers pressed flat inside act three, scene two in her paperback Othello. She kept bird feathers in a plastic bag in her desk drawer. When Adrienne noticed things, plucked them from obscurity, and ordered them, she gave them value.
…….
Avery was forty-three. He had gone to Brown, and when he talked about it Adrienne could tell he had done a bunch of drugs there. He had had his fun. Now he was reformed, an intellectual. Wore thin ties and Doc Martens, assigned Audre Lorde, referred to his wife as his partner.
…….
Adrienne was proud of how articulate she was around him. Words fell out of her mouth and once they were in the air she listened to them and thought, okay, that’s what I sound like. Okay. She liked the way Avery squinted at her and nodded, and sometimes opened his mouth to say something but was so taken by the twists in her conversational logic that he would just sit back in his leather chair and nod, and when she was finally finished he would tell her she was really quite something.
…….
They talked about graduation sometimes, what real life would be like. Avery said he was happiest when he was thirty-one. When he was thirty-two he got married, but that wasn’t why he wasn’t as happy, he had said. Avery had succeeded in the way that Adrienne knew people didn’t anymore. Things fell into his lap. He was a staff writer at a print magazine at twenty-four. The world had pushed and pulled him into the right station, where he could be wild then tame, drifting then settled, just as people like him were meant to be, and everyone loved him for it. Now there were too many people funneling for the same thing, you couldn’t count on anything to get you anywhere, it was all a game of strings to pull and cards to flip.
…….
Last fall, in his office. The tree outside was the yellowest on campus and in the wind its wet leaves stuck and unstuck to the window. Books stacked horizontally and vertically on the bookshelf, more on the desk. Adrienne’s umbrella leaned against the wall by the door, dripping into a small puddle on the wooden floor. She wore a turtleneck.
…….
“There’s not enough time for anything,” she had said. “If we’re hurtling toward environmental disaster, how are we supposed to try for anything? Or want things? None of it’s worthwhile. And it’s all really selfish, too. Who am I to feel like this? When have I ever suffered? You know? And the absolute worst thing about all my problems is that none of them even matter, like, at all.”
……
Adrienne wondered where Avery was right now and if he was afraid his career was over. Maybe it was. She thought about the plants on the windowsill of his office. Two small cacti in glass pots, prickly bodies, a visible web of white roots. A fiddle leaf fig tree, waxy, beaming. Was someone watering them? It seemed unfair that they should die too. Not that any of it mattered. But she still wondered.
…….s
In her bedroom Adrienne could hear music coming from the outside, periodic shouts. She looked out at a girl laughing so hard she leaned on her friend like she might melt. They were having a barbecue, celebrating not having to care for a day. Adrienne really didn’t have anything to do, but she didn’t want to leave her room and run into Sophia so she propped up her pillows on her bed and typed up some notes for her exam next week.
…….s
She was copying lecture outlines when she received a text from her mom, asking about lunch reservations on the day before graduation. Adrienne had planned everything. Her parents were going to meet Sophia’s parents for the first time at a restaurant downtown and pretend to have things in common over plates of hummus. But now Adrienne’s uncle wanted to bring his new girlfriend, so she called the restaurant and changed the reservation for one more person.
…….s
Her focus lost in open tabs on her computer, Adrienne checked her email. There was one new message in her inbox sent a few hours before. Subject line: Interview Inquiry, from a name she knew in a friend-of-a-friend kind of way. The little skip her brain did at any notification died as her mind computed pixels into words into semantics into the understanding that the school newspaper knew about Avery and her name was inevitably attached to his. She opened the email and saw what she expected: the tired polite words of student journalism, the assurance that victims could stay anonymous.
…….s
She didn’t reply to the email. Adrienne knew that anything she said would calcify into search-engine results later on, and she also knew that anonymity was impossible, laughable. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked around. She stood up and looked at her reflection in the mirror, not because she cared how she looked, but because she wanted to understand what people saw when they looked at her. Up close, looking into her own eyes, she noticed a few zits and she squeezed them.
…….s
The concept of outside was overwhelming, but staying inside felt pathetic, so Adrienne decided to go for a run. She put on a sports bra and shorts and running shoes and wore headphones and listened to music she knew she liked. This would be good, she thought. A healthy thing to do. But when she had run just two blocks she saw a classmate from Avery’s class sophomore year. She didn’t have time to turn around so she just nodded at him and he gave her a pretty normal reaction but she couldn’t be sure. After she passed him she grew anxious and each person she passed after she felt like was whispering or thinking about her, or was on their phone to text their friend, hey guess who i just saw? Everyone knew and was in on the same joke, winking at each other in the blind carbon copy thread. Or at least they would be soon. Adrienne turned around and ran home.
…….s
When she got back to the apartment, Sophia was sitting on the couch painting her toenails orange.
…….s
“Hi,” Sophia said, without looking up.
…….s
“Hi.” Adrienne was out of breath and sweating.
…….s
“Can we talk?” Sophia said, screwing the cap back on the bottle.
…….s
“I was about to shower.”
…….s
Sophia got up from the couch and walked over to Adrienne’s doorway, her toes lifted from the carpet. “I’m sorry that this happened to you,” she said.
…….
“Nothing happened to me.”
……
“I’m just saying, I know he meant a lot to you. That this can’t be easy.”
…….
“He’s not dead,” Adrienne said. “You make it sound like he’s dead.”
…….
“Adrienne, he took advantage of his students. It was wrong.”
…….
“I need to shower.”
…….
“Can I kiss you, at least?”
…….
“No. Sorry. It’s just that I’m gross right now.”
…….
Adrienne didn’t linger. She walked to the bathroom to shower and opened Facebook while the water was heating up. Once the page loaded, her first thought was that the algorithm had worked, because at the top of her feed was the article. They must have wanted to publish as soon as they could. They really didn’t need Adrienne, anyway.
…….
Avery’s professional face smiled up at Adrienne from her phone. He looked smug, she thought, for the first time. He just had that sort of face. She didn’t click the article yet. She scrolled down to see what the comments said. Most were negative, from former students expressing disappointment in the university administration. She scrolled further and saw that a few friends had shared the article. She saw Sophia’s name there, without any additional comment. Adrienne wished she would cry but her mind went back to the graduation lunch.
…….
The shower ran hot for a while and Adrienne stepped in without testing the temperature. She washed and rinsed, then turned the shower off and twisted her hair until it didn’t drip anymore. When she toweled off she realized she was still overheated and sweating from her run. She walked naked to her room, shut the door, sat on her bed, and skimmed the article on her laptop. In it, there was a link to another article on Avery’s research on nineteenth-century novel manuscripts, in which Adrienne’s name was mentioned.
…….
She was quoted in that article: “It was really rewarding to work with Professor Avery. I’ve learned so much, and I feel prepared to take these skills and apply them to my own research.”
…….
Adrienne looked up from her laptop. In the dim afternoon, and with her shades drawn, her room was dark. In the mirror hanging from her door she saw herself illuminated by the computer’s bluish light. Her hair was tangled and messy and her skin still blotchy pink.
…….
Adrienne knew that this blip in her life would eventually be fine and forgotten. She was barely a witness to something barely exceptional. But it would always be there. Even once she graduated and moved to a new city and walked new routes and talked to new strangers, she would still think about this one thing sometimes and each time she did she would feel a thin fire of shame just beneath her skin. She wanted clean, deliberate lines. She wanted to trace in ink and erase the pencil underneath and hold her work in the light and nod, thinking: Yes, this is exactly how I wanted it.

Caroline Curran author photoCaroline Curran is a senior at the University of Pennsylvania studying English and creative writing. She is from Alexandria, Virginia and plans to move to Los Angeles after graduation. She’s currently working on a collection of short stories and a screenplay.

Image credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

ANISCIA by Andrea Ellis-Perez

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Andrea Ellis-Perez
ANISCIA

When I come home from school, Papa is pruning the roses. His back hunched, an oval of sweat creasing his white shirt that la Señora Francisca had pressed this morning. He isn’t wearing the gardening gloves that Mama bought him because he insists that it doesn’t let him talk to the roses. They can only hear him through his skin and the rough canvas of the gloves offends their delicate temperament. 

I watch him as he goes from stem to stem, and snaps up the flowers. Even the buds, shy against the noon-day sun go tumbling into his hands and are tucked into his basket. I frown. “Papi, what are you doing?” 

He scowls. “It’s them,” he says and he jerks his chin to the concrete wall blocking us from the facility next door. It’s a home, the only one in the province, for the viejitos whose children are too selfish to keep them in their houses. “They keep taking them.” 

I follow his gaze to the wall. His roses have a mind of their own—they always have—and they’ve pushed through the concrete, their thorns cutting ribbons into the gray scrape of the wall and the buds blooming out of the holes their stems created like bubbles bursting. When Papa cuts them at the base of the head, they weep golden sap onto your palms. If you drink it, Papa says, you can extend your life by months. But it’s an empty promise. Time that can’t be spent except in sadness, your tears sticky like the sap of the flower. 

I leave Papa to his task and take myself inside. La Señora Francisca is in the kitchen with a bag of shrimp. She has two bowls in front of her and, one by one, she takes the shrimp from the bag, rips off its tiny head, slides a thumb under its shell and pushes off the hard exterior into one bowl, and puts its frail shrimp torso in the other. I offer to help her and she looks up from her task, a smile on her lips, before waving me off to watch TV or do homework. 

It is a silly offer, a private joke between us, because I cannot touch the food. My fingers carry poison like the spindle in Sleeping Beauty’s loom. When I was little, I fed the canaries my father kept in a cage in our backyard. It was a Sunday and I had watched my father pull their feed out from the laundry room to fill their bowl. I buried my hand in the same sack of grain and pulled out a handful, carried it to the canaries singing in chorus. By morning the next day, they were all dead. My father had to burn the feed. 

Papa comes in at dinner time to the smell of fried shrimp and yellow rice. La Señora Francisca is just pulling the sweet plantains off the skillet and placing them on a paper towel-covered plate to soak up the oil when Papa takes off his boots by the door and changes into his house slippers. He smells like soil and sweat-tainted cologne. “Did you get all the roses?” I ask. 

His brows come down, make a V on his forehead. “For now.” 

The roses grow fast. They have the conviction of a much less delicate flower. Tomorrow, Papa will have to cut them all over again after he gets home from work, but by then the viejitos could have taken them. 

The next morning, I am walking out the front door when I see a woman bent over one of Papa’s rose bushes. She has white hair and a long blue dress that covers her like a sack. Her arms tremble as she tugs on the head of one of the roses and, when it snaps and the syrupy ichor starts to spill, she bends her body down slowly to lick it up. 

“Señora!” I call, “Get out!” I feel strange, having never said those words to an older person. My tone sounds wrong and I can’t figure out what to do with my hands besides wrap them around my backpack straps. 

She turns back to me and gives me a smile, her teeth dripping gold. “You have so many,” she says and holds up the bloom she tore. “Why can’t you just spare one?” 

I don’t know how to tell her that it isn’t worth the effort. That she’s better off with the time she has left and that borrowed time will only make the end that much worse. 

But I don’t have the authority to make it sound real so I clench my fists instead. “I’m going to tell my Papa.” Papa is a towering man with an empty holster at his belt that does most of the job that his gun—tucked away in a locked toolbox in his truck—would do. I wish he were standing beside me so the woman could understand my threat. 

I don’t have to worry. Her face falls and a drip of sap leaks from the side of her mouth as she hustles out of our yard, to the front gate, and out onto the sidewalk. I watch her backside swish under her dress, her age bearing down on her like a thickly woven blanket.  

Mama has only pins and needles on her tongue for me when I come in the house. “Put your backpack away, Aniscia! Y tu tarea? Ay, niña, look at those shoes. Have you been tramping through mud?” She is a flurry around me, yanking off one thing after the next and shooing me off into the shower. When I spot a bowl of pear slices on the kitchen table, I reach for one and she slaps my hand away. “Toma,” she says and pops the pieces in my mouth, her manicured nails scraping my skin.  

At dinner, Papa is a tempest. He blows in the front door and slams into his chair, rattling the tea cup with his espresso. “They’ve done it again.” Mama purses her lips and sips at her water. “They rip them, tear at them, their blood soaks the thorns,” he shakes and I can hear the grind of his teeth. “No me respetan.” 

I sit up straighter in my seat, look at Papa with an anger I hope matches his. “I saw one of them this morning. She came into the yard.” 

He slams a fist onto the table and it sets off his place mat. “That’s it. Ven, Aniscia,” Papa stands up and wraps a hand around my wrist. I scurry to keep up with his pace and tumble out of my seat, my feet skipping under me to stop me from falling. 

Outside, the sun is sitting low in the sky and the mosquitoes pounce on me as soon as I’m out the door. Papa swats at them as he leads me to the tea roses—his favorites—and points. “Touch them. All of them.” 

I shake my head. It doesn’t count, it’s not food, but Papa reads my mind because he crosses his arms. “If they want to eat, let them eat.” 

I don’t want to argue with Papa. I don’t want to think of the viejitos falling to the ground like the canaries. I run across the yard as fast as I can with my hands outstretched. By the end of it, I’m covered in beads of red where the thorns have pricked my skin, a bite reminding me they don’t want this any more than I do. 

The next morning I wake to the sound of hushed voices in the kitchen. Papa’s baritone and Mama’s alto toying a line between a quiet song and the hiss of a snake. “It’s their own fault. I’m not responsible for an old woman trying to cheat death and failing,” Papa says. 

Mama’s anger, cutting crisp in her consonants. “El veneno fue tuyo.” 

“And what am I supposed to do?” 

“End this madness.” 

I hear the click of her heels and huff of air that sounds like Papa’s, then the door to the house, with its distinct, heavy kuTUM, slams shut. 

I see Papa when I’m heading off to school later, the knees of his slacks sunk deep into the grass and his back in a hunch that I recognize as something like defeat. The yard is empty, brown circles of solemn soil where creeping stems once flowed into nature’s vainest beauty. Piles of uprooted roses lay in Papa’s basket. “Where are you putting them?” I ask. 

“La basura.” 

A twitch in my chest and I think about the part of me that lives in them now, the small bit of venom I passed into each of them that they carry like a shield. Would it waste away as they sat at the bottom of the trashcan? Or would it poison everything they touched like a plague?  

I think about taking them from the trash in the night, after Papa has gone to bed, and replanting them. I could claim that he left some part of the root and they fought to come back to the surface. But I don’t have Papa’s hands. The roses would never grow the same—or worse, they would wilt in plain sight without the dignity of privacy. They would be bodies buried upright. Papa’s garden would be a graveyard. 

I squeeze Papa’s shoulder instead. He places a hand atop mine, his callouses rough against the baby hairs of my fingers. Tomorrow he will plant bougainvilleas, he says, and he will let them crest and trough as they please and they will be less headstrong, he thinks. More temperate. 

I picture them now. They lie low to the ground like a hound and blanket the concrete wall in a tuft of color, shades of pinks and purples glinting off the sun, eagerly crowding each other. They have that vague, lovely scent of flower that fades as soon as you’ve smelled it and, underneath it all, the near-distant memory of roses.  

Andrea Ellis-Perez author photoAndrea Ellis-Perez is lots of things, but mostly she is a writer of several published stories, an MFA student at Stetson University, and a lifelong lover of the stories her mother told her of her childhood in Venezuela. She lives in Florida with her wife and cat and works at the library, where she takes advantage of her proximity to books to read constantly.

Image credit: Ashkan Forouzani on Unsplash

LA LINEA by Beth Alvarado

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Cacti against a blue sky background

Beth Alvarado
LA LINEA

Even though she sometimes wanders off on her own, which is strictly forbidden, of course, especially now that she is pregnant and about to pop, the Good Samaritans need people like Jillian. Well, they need all the help they can get, but especially from people like Jillian—those who have a second sense about where they can find the nearly-dying-from-thirst even if they are hiding. They want to find them or provide them with water before they become “human remains”—way before that, way before their muscles start cramping from heat stroke and dehydration, before the nausea, before the dizziness and delirium, before their brains start to sizzle in their skulls, before they try to drink sand, before. . . and, here, Jillian always stops herself from thinking, for no one likes to think about what happens to the human body in such heat. The Samaritans want to find them before they become bones. Pure and simple.
……
There are places to hide, Jillian knows, especially when a person is afraid of coyotes, both human and animal. This desert is not barren. It can be as beautiful as it is dangerous. There is the occasional mesquite tree, its leaves velvety green in spring; only a mesquite might provide enough shade. There are fields of ocotillo, their skinny fingers orange-tipped and reaching to the sky, thickets of cholla whose thorny joints will fish-hook in the skin, the ubiquitous acacia, the spiked pads of the prickly pear, and the tall dry grasses rustling. There are, Jillian has been told, over 2,000 miles of unmapped trails and that’s just in the tiny area the Samaritans call the tip of the pinky finger, trails that have been used, probably, for thousands of years and that wind down into and through steep, rocky canyons. There are giant boulders in whose shade a snake might sleep and arroyos filled with sand but that rage like rivers after the monsoons.
……
But the sun. The sun, in summer, is so bright. Relentless. It bleaches the sky of color, it bakes the skin, makes heat radiate from the ground as if from an open oven. It is a dry heat that sears the nasal passages and parches the tongue, dries even the tissues of the throat and lungs. And most of the time, there is no water. As quickly as it falls from the sky, it evaporates or seeps through sand to ancient aquifers. Even someone who has a gift for hearing water will hear only the faintest of whispers far, far below. There are reasons the snakes hunt at night. Reasons this land was not inhabited, not even by those, like the Apache, whose warriors, they say, could run through the desert all day without carrying water. Maybe they carried a miracle stone in their mouths, Jillian had always thought, and from it sprang trickles of cool water.
……
Jillian knows she makes the Samaritans nervous, and she hates to do that to them, especially her friend who has taught her to dance, but she needs silence if she’s going to hear lost or escaping souls. On this day, a cool day in early November, while the other Samaritans are leaving bottles of water and flats of cans of beans, she finds a man squatting in a tiny circle of shade. He is a small man—when he stands as if to run, she sees how small—his clothes are torn, his shoes, they have been taped together.
……
She holds her hand up, wait, and then puts the palms of her hands together as if to pray. Really, she thinks, she must seem strange to him, this very tall, very pregnant woman wearing a cowboy hat, appearing from nowhere, especially since she is saying nothing. She must look like an apparition, she thinks, but surely she does not look dangerous. She takes off her backpack. Offers him a jug of water and the sandwich she had packed for her own lunch. They share an orange because she thinks maybe his blood sugar—and maybe hers, too, now that she thinks of it—might be low.
……
His skin is much darker than hers and when he speaks it is a language that is not Spanish or English. She shakes her head and shrugs, holding her hands out to indicate she doesn’t understand. Then she holds her fingers over her lips to indicate that she cannot speak, is mute. He says Guatemala. She nods. He gives her a piece of paper with an address in Salt Lake City. ¿Donde? he asks. Where? So he does know at least a little Spanish.
……
She holds her hand up again, wait, to indicate that he should watch. She draws a line in the dirt with a stick. ¿La linea? he asks. The border? She nods. She points with her stick in the dirt. ¿México? She nods and then walks about six paces in the direction from which he has come and makes another line and an X and points at him. ¿Guatemala? She nods. Then she walks back to the Mexican border and makes another X just above it and looks pointedly at him. ¿Aqui? She nods. Yes, this is where we are. She takes two more large paces to the north and makes another X. She points at the paper with the address. ¿Utah? She nods again.
……
He is about three-quarters of the way there, she guesses. One long quarter to go. He retreats back into his puddle of shade and crouches on his haunches again. She can see his face has fallen. He takes another sip of water, but a very small one. She gives him his piece of paper. If she could speak, she would say, It is still so far, yo sé, muy lejos. Lo siento. Lo siento mucho. But she isn’t sure he would understand or that her sentiments would help. Her heart feels as if it is resting right on top of the shelf the babies make.
……
By then, two of the Samaritans have found them. They put extra tape on his shoes and give him two pairs of fresh cotton socks—because the feet are so important—and a sweatshirt because it is starting to get cold at night. They give him a bag with food and a medical kit and more water. One of them gives him some cash. Jillian eats the second sandwich she had packed for herself, feeling with each bite, piggish, although she is suddenly ravenous. The babies, she thinks, must be hungry. She watches as the Samaritans try to explain to him how to get to Tucson, where the Border Patrol Stop on the highway is and how to avoid it. Maybe hop a train in Tucson, they say, but even though they are speaking in Spanish, the man seems to understand very little.
……
Plus, Jillian sees, he is dazed. He is so alone. She knows, in the same way she knows how to find people—it comes to her maybe in the memories that are escaping them as they begin to let go of this life—she knows he has not always been on this journey alone, many of them started together, but then, suddenly, men with guns came. Long guns. Masks. Maybe los zetas. Who can tell? Maybe the Mexican police. Somehow, for some reason, he is not in the group when the men come, he is off in the trees, maybe taking a piss, and so he sees everything through green and as if from a distance. He wants to cry out, to run towards his friends to help them, to stop the men from tying their hands behind their backs, from loading them into the backs of trucks, but he must be very quiet. Even his memory is like a nightmare that awakens him, his heart pounding, then that momentary disorientation when the fabric between sleep and waking, this world and that, is tissue thin. And yet here he is, in this even newer world, still disoriented. He feels at once grateful he escaped—his head is still on his body, after all—but guilty, guilty to have left them behind. He has been so alone since then, so alone in his grief, so weary, for even when he joined small groups of other travelers, even when they were kind and shared what little they had, they did not speak his language. Like with these large white people, their mouths moved until here and there a word would come into focus. La migra. El tren. La bestia. Riding on top of la bestia at night. The woman who fell off and lost her leg. Another thing he does not want to remember.
……
Jillian takes out her small notebook and tries to draw a future for him, a way to the people in Utah who are waiting. She draws their faces, their welcoming arms. She draws tamales and tortillas. Water. She draws plenty of water. Roads for him to avoid and smaller roads to follow. A train. Yes, a train might be good. A kind person in a car once he is well past the Border Patrol point, she draws that, too. Finally, maybe most importantly—how could she have forgotten?—a tiny angel up in the corner to watch over him. Before they leave him, she folds up her map and tucks it into his hand. At this point, the point of leave-taking, she feels the sadness wash over her. This? This is all the help they are allowed to give? What about loving the stranger as you love yourself? But, yes, by law, she knows this is all they can do, and staying with him or walking with him might only draw attention. She puts her hand over her heart in parting. She gives him another orange.

Beth Alvarado author photo“La Linea” is excerpted from Jillian in the Borderlands: A Cycle of Rather Dark Tales, by Beth Alvarado, forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press in September 2020.  Alvarado is the author of three earlier books: Anxious Attachments (finalist, Oregon Book Awards, and long-listed for the PEN Art of the Essay Award), Anthropologies: A Family Memoir, and Not a Matter of Love.

Image credit: Mickey Dziwulski on Unsplash

SQUEEZE by Nick Kolakowski

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

SQUEEZE by Nick Kolakowski

Nick Kolakowski
SQUEEZE

The infection needs ten hours at most to take your life, the doctors tell you. Nothing will buy you more time: not pills, not potions, not prayers, not even amputation. The fungus forms a second body under your skin, shadowing your veins, wrapping around your bones. Its spongy mass smells like roses, if you slice a bit free of the host and hold it up to your nose.
…….
If you want to live, never hold any part of it to your nose. One stray spore in your lungs is all it needs to colonize your meat. In our homes, we keep the windows shut at all times, even in the moist-blanket heat of deep June. When we step outside, most of us wear surgical masks and goggles. How did Ron and I ever think we could bring a child into a world that’s rotting like this?
…….
We didn’t think about it. We just loved, and that was gone too soon. Two hours after we said, “I do” in our living room and exchanged our plastic panda-bear rings, someone rang the bell at the top of the hill. Ron left our reception with a couple guys from his guard shift. “There’s just one down in the culvert,” he said, picking up a plastic can of gasoline and his favorite machete as he headed out the door. “You’ll see the fire when we’re done.”
…….
Swamp Things, Ron always called them. My mom, when she was still alive, preferred the term Flower Heads, because she thought it sounded funny. Sometimes all you can do when confronted with grinding horror is laugh. I refuse to give anything related to this fungus the dignity of a name, even if it has the power to kill everyone I love, or transform them into something awful.
…….
The patrol in the culvert went wrong, because more than one of those things had found their way up from the basin, drawn as always by our lights. They crept from the humming night and wrapped their hands around Ron’s friend Billy and tore him apart like overcooked chicken. We burned what was left of him the next day. Before Ron could retreat up the incline with the rest of the crew, one of the creatures swiped his forearm, leaving three shallow scratches from elbow to wrist. Barely broke the skin, but it was enough.
…….
At first, everyone smiled and said everything would be okay. And every time they did, I bit my lip to stop myself from screaming in their faces. Nothing is okay. Not anymore.

II.

When the infection first swept the city, a military platoon turned our sleepy neighborhood into a fortress, boxed by high fences topped with barbed wire. When the troops pulled out, following new orders, they left behind enough weapons and supplies to keep us self-sufficient while the power died and the surrounding hills burned. We learned how to use the rifles, and took turns at the gate that bisected our main avenue. We set up a field hospital in a ranch house beside the fence, after clearing out the furniture and draping every inch of the rooms in plastic.
…….
Following the bloodshed in the culvert, the other guards took Ron to the hospital and burned his clothes and strapped him naked to a bed in one of the rooms. (Two years into this mess, we all know what to do when anyone’s wounded.) He was already feverish, his body slippery with sweat. When I arrived, the nurses on shift refused to let me through the plastic sheeting that covered the doorway. So I struck a bargain with Jill, the nurse in charge: three gallons of fresh water—a small fortune that hot summer—in exchange for two hours in her Hazmat suit.
…….
“Take it from someone who’s lost someone,” she said as I suited up. “Getting closer won’t make it any better for you.”
…….
“We’ve all lost someone,” I told her, my voice muffled through the filter-mask, and unzipped the plastic that kept me from my husband. The hospital bed stood against the far wall; the only other furniture was a folding chair for visitors, a propane lantern for light, and a five-gallon plastic bucket for vomit. On a tray beneath the bed sat a long blade in a scuffed plastic scabbard, in case things went bad, because a gun might send a bullet through the plastic or a wall.
…….
I took a seat and reached for Ron’s hand. My heart thundering with panic. My throat tight.
…….
“Don’t touch him,” Jill called out, as she zipped the room back up. “He’s highly infectious, he’s about to start bleeding everywhere. We might have to burn that suit, and it’s not your suit, it’s mine.”
…….
“Got it,” I said, letting my hands dangle between my thighs. The suit was too big for my body, loose as a tent around my thighs and belly, and cooling sweat pooled at my waistband. The filter, cobbled together from cardboard and melted plastic and other spare bits, made my rushing breath taste like a charcoal grill.
…….
“Sweetie?” I asked Ron.
…….
“I hear you,” he said, and swallowed hard. His face pale, eyes wide and black, his cheeks shiny. I kept remembering the first week after the electrical grid failed, when we spent nights in our enormous claw-foot bathtub because it was the coldest place in the house, keeping the fear at bay by dredging up our grade-school jokes about farts and diarrhea and death. I remembered the way we held hands as we walked the neighborhood’s empty streets in daylight, squeezing in code. I love you. I’m here for you. We’ll get through this together.
…….
“Good, because this thing makes me sound like Darth Vader,” I said, before deepening my voice into the world’s least-convincing James Earl Jones impersonation: “Luke, I am your father.”
…….
“That was horrible,” he said, grinning now. His front teeth flecked with blood.
…….
“Oh, I know. But at least it made you smile.”
…….
“It did,” he said, and his eyes closed.

III.

A few days after the electrical grid collapsed for good, we saw the first Flower Heads. They came only at night, slinking on the roads toward the brightest lights. Beneath their mossy veils, sprinkled with bright petals, we sometimes recognized the eye or lip or tattoo of a lost relative. They weren’t zombies, at least not in the George Romero sense. When they bit us, we realized they still felt hunger. When we shot or cut them down, and they bled over the pavement, we realized their hearts still beat.
…….
“This fungus, or whatever it is, I bet it gets in their brains,” Ron said, after we killed a herd of them at the gate. “Plays them like a joystick. I remember watching this nature show a couple years back, it said some insect parasites can do that, control the host neurologically.”
…….
“But most of the people who get infected by this stuff,” I said, “they die. Why do some of them keep moving around?”
…….
He shrugged. “I don’t know, genetics? Who knows anything anymore?”
…….
“Any more beer in the cooler? I could use about three.”
…….
Around that time we had started drinking heavily, breaking into empty houses and grabbing every bottle we could find. Can you blame us? Sometimes we would fall asleep so drunk Ron pissed the bed, and neither of us noticed until the next morning. We spiked our orange juice with vodka at breakfast and filled our water bottles with bourbon before we headed out on patrol.
…….
After too many nasty hangovers we decided to quit, but with sobriety came insomnia, and as I lay in bed at night, my traitorous brain kept imagining its own hijacking. Did it hurt, as the fungus wormed its way inside the house of your skull, or did you just get delirious and sort of fade away? And after the takeover, did a part of you continue to exist, deep within some buzzing void? Could that part of you still see out your eyes, as you shuffled and moaned?
…….
Curled against Ron’s sleeping back, I wondered again and again if I could drive a blade through his infected head. Or would I hesitate, as so many people did? Could I keep living after taking steel to flesh I loved, stopping it for good?

IV.

When I turned to the doorway again, Jill stood on the other side of the plastic, making a show of staring at her watch. I rose from the chair, shaking the numbness from my legs, and walked over. “I need a new suit, one I can touch him in, because I’m going to treat him,” I said, struggling to keep my voice level. “And also painkillers, bandages, bottled water, whatever you have.”
…….
“There’s nothing we can do. You know what’s happening here.” Jill spoke so loudly I worried Ron would hear. “You need to stop thinking about this like a fixable situation.”
…….
“Just get me a suit and supplies,” I said. “I know you got crates of that stuff.”
…….
“I’m not handing anything over for a helpless case. Not when I have to treat all sorts of injuries, curable illness.”
…….
“But the rest of this hospital is empty.”
…….
The demon part of me wanted to tear through the partition and grip her by the throat. “Let’s make a deal. What do you want?”
…….
It was impossible to read her expression through the shimmering barrier. “You live in that white house on Marigold? The one with the blue shutters?”
…….
“Uh, yeah?”
…….
“It’s a big house,” she said. “It’d be nice to move away from the fence a bit.”
…….
“You’re not moving in. Not for any length of time.”
…….
“Well, it didn’t hurt to ask. You got sugar, coffee, preserves, anything sweet?”
…….
“Yeah, canned preserves in our pantry, made them myself.”
…….
“And let me guess: your pantry’s locked, right?”
…….
Who didn’t keep their supplies secure, or hidden? “The lock’s a keypad. Code is one-oh-five-five,” I said. Doesn’t really matter, I told myself. It’s not like I had much left in there, anyway.
…….
Jill nodded and disappeared from the doorway. Beneath the rustle of plastic and the hiss of Ron’s breathing I could hear her speaking to the other nurse in hushed tones, probably explaining why she had to leave for a bit.
…….
While I waited, I turned to check on Ron. His eyes closed, arms and legs trembling slightly. I wondered if the red petals would burst from his skin before he died. Do I have what it takes to kill you, baby? Do I kill myself afterwards?
…….
Jill reappeared, snapping off her gloves as she angled for the decontamination shower bolted to the ceiling of the foyer. “I promise I won’t take more than my fair share,” she called out as white liquid gushed from the showerhead, soaking her suit on its way to the drain-hole cut in the floor. “And don’t leave that room. The supply closet is locked, and Sarah won’t let you in until I’m back.”
…….
Her sterilizing complete, Jill stripped off her protective gear, changed into a pair of cargo pants and a long-sleeved shirt, snapped on a respirator and swimming goggles, and left. I took a seat again, wondering if she would keep her word about not taking too much of our stuff. Maybe it was an illusion, but I swear I could feel the heat of Ron’s fever baking through the thin plastic of my suit.

V.

Over the next eight hours my husband alternated between sweaty dozing and calling my name over and over again. His fingers and toes turned white and waxy, the skin cracking. The paleness crept up his forearms and shins like a creeping ice floe, the hair falling out along its path. At one point his back arched, rising high off the bed, and I saw the topsheet coated with hair and bits of skin. The cracks followed the paleness into the deep meat of his arms and legs and he began to bleed, little spots that quickly became black rivulets in the flickering light from the lamp on the floor.
…….
I would have given anything to heal him, but all I could do was daub at the bloody cracks with my rolled-up cloth. When the cotton soaked through I tossed it in the nearby bucket and fetched a fresh one. I thought about us walking along hot roads, our sweaty fingers entwined. Squeezing messages. I love you. I need you.
…….
By the ninth hour, Ron began to cough up his insides. His lips bloody. His face had the telltale patches now, faint webs on his cheeks and neck that gleamed against the paleness before shading into pink. I waited for them to deepen into red. At that point, my husband would start sprouting flora like a damn terrarium. He would have laughed at that comparison.
…….
Whether or not I had to put him down, I knew what would happen after he died. Our burial brigade always moved with the grace of a well-rehearsed chorus line: four men in Hazmat suits stripping the corpse, wrapping it in a large plastic bag like a piece of dry cleaning, stuffing it into a scorched metal box. The brigade carried every boxed body to the ash-pit beside the highway off-ramp, where they set it to burn atop a pyre of gasoline-soaked wood. It took six or seven hours to reduce an infected body to sterile ash.
…….
I had no idea if Ron wanted us to burn him in his two-piece black suit, or one of his favorite t-shirts. We had never talked about funeral plans. Maybe we thought it would jinx our chances at living. What did it matter what we dressed him in, anyway? I would never get to touch him again, and that was the worst part. The thought of forgetting the smell of his skin made my stomach cramp, hard and fast, as if someone had punched me.
…….
As I bent over, sucking air through my miserable filter, I noted that my new Hazmat suit was spattered with blood from Ron’s dying. For the first time I hoped Jill had taken whatever she wanted from our home, because I had wrecked this precious outfit. Sorry, Jill.
…….
Ron stopped coughing. His breathing hitched. I sat up and willed my quaking knees to hold steady. I kept my eyes locked on his face, telling myself that it was my duty to bear witness. That after he passed, I would become the sole keeper of our shared memories, all the quiet moments that formed us.
…….
I leaned close to his leaking ear and said: “I’ll keep the ring on.”
…….
“You’d better,” he whispered back. Or maybe I imagined it. The eldritch light had cast his mouth in deep shadow.
…….
I glanced toward the doorway, which framed darkness. I hoped the nurses on the other side had dozed off.
…….
As quietly as I could, I peeled away the tape that covered the seam between my right glove and the sleeve.
…….
All that matters in this life is what we give each other. That I felt your presence in the dark, and that you felt mine in return.
…….
Pulling off my right glove, I reached over and took my husband’s cold, slick hand. “I love you,” I said, and squeezed.
…….
Ron squeezed back.

Nick Kolakowski author photoNick Kolakowski is the author of the thriller novels Maxine Unleashes Doomsday and Boise Longpig Hunting Club (both from Down & Out Books). His poetry and fiction have appeared in Cleaver Magazine, North American Review, McSweeney’s, Shotgun Honey, 7×7.la, Carrier Pigeon, and other venues. He lives and works in New York City.

Image credit: ian dooley on Unsplash

WELCOME TO TRAIN WRECK by Catherine Parnell

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

person sitting on a train

Catherine Parnell
WELCOME TO THE TRAIN WRECK

You cannot cross train tracks without holding your breath, nor can you drive over a bridge without a lungful of air. Your children witness your fears, think it’s a game, and they, too, hold their breath going over tracks or bridges. You would like to tell them it’s not a game, like Duck Duck Goose or Red Rover, but you decide that the universe will drop its own bomb of terror on them, and what possible good would come of your own unburdening?

At the playground you circle the swings, hoping to find an old wooden seater, but no such luck, so stop living in the past, please. These days everything is built for safety—full buckets for babies who can barely hold their heads up, half-buckets for toddlers with wobbly balance, swing and slide seats for the brave and daring under-tens, because no one wants to get caught dead on a swing after that. Your five-year-old son and seven-year-old daughter screech as they run to the blue rubber swings, kick off, and hit high velocity. You did this when you were their age. There was a time when you believed you could fly if only you pumped high enough. You still believe this, but it has nothing to do with swings. You aren’t sure if you need wings or stronger legs.

Although she has been dead for a very long time, Donna peers down at you from the blue and green hard plastic climbing structure topped by a fort big enough for four and no more. You tell your kids to keep swinging as you climb up the ramps and ladders toward Donna. What are you doing here, you ask, and you’ve got one eye on her and one eye on your kids. You’re a little happy and a little unnerved—she’s still following you around, but you’re as used to it now as you were in first grade.

Donna’s wearing a plaid skirt, a white blouse with a Peter Pan collar, frilly socks, and scuffed saddle shoes. Her black barrette is askew and she’s sucking on a dark strand of her hair. You’re not supposed to do that, you tell her, and she spits the hair out of her mouth.
…….
Oh, grow up, she says.
…….
Yes, you say wearily. I’ve done that.
…….
Aren’t you the lucky one, she says, licking her finger and rubbing at a scuff mark on her shoe.
…….
You think so?
…….
Nyet, she says.
…….
Your son and daughter run up the ramp and ask who you’re talking to. Your ripped jeans and baggy sweater make you look like an itinerant, and you’re pretty sure you haven’t washed your hair in a few days. You make googly eyes at your kids.
…….
Myself, you say.
…….
You’re crazy, says your son.
…….
You are crazy, Donna says.
…….
Maybe, you say, and your son laughs. Donna looks mad, like the time your first-grade teacher told her she’d never get to second grade if she didn’t learn to read. Mrs. Piasecka paired you with Donna for reading time that day and every day thereafter until spring dropped by for a seasonal hello, and you all went outside to eat lunch, and Donna announced she could read, and everyone clapped, because everyone loved Donna, especially you. Then you all sat on the warm green grass pulling food from your lunchboxes (yours had a tractor on it), and when you’d all eaten, Mrs. Piasecka passed around homemade molasses cookies because you were wonderful children.
…….
You never hated molasses cookies before, but you sure do now.
…….
When the playground loses its thrill, you and your children walk to the supermarket to buy milk and Smiley Face Fries. Donna sits in the frozen food aisle, eating cookie dough ice cream. Now what? you ask. Your son turns to you and says, I want ice cream. Donna grins. It’s really good, she says. You ought to buy some. You never know, do you?
…….
You put your arm around your son and walk away. How about a candy bar? you ask, and your daughter wants one, too, so you let them pick and they get big chocolate bars and they eat them on the way home, and then you have to wash their dirty little faces, but you don’t mind so much. You serve them hot dogs and fries and big glasses of milk, and your daughter spills her milk, and you sop it up, telling her not to cry. It’s just milk you say. Your daughter asks if there are enough cows in the world so that everyone gets milk. It’s not that simple, you tell her. Milk can be expensive. Some people can’t buy it.
…….
Your son announces he wants a cow. That way he will always have milk. You tell him he has to learn to milk a cow first, and you promise him a trip to a dairy farm. When you were in first grade a local farmer brought a cow to the playground, and everyone in class learned to milk a cow, but Donna was the only one who squirted milk right into her mouth. Mrs. Piasecka gave Donna three gold stars on her pink construction paper balloon that was taped to the Look At Me wall. Your balloon was blue and you had just as many stars as Donna, mostly from getting high marks on class handouts and clapping dusty erasers. If you’d known you could have earned stars for drinking milk straight from the cow you would have done it, even though the cow smelled like shit and hay. Even then you knew the value of awards, especially public commendation.
…….
Donna never had milk money, so you shared your milk with her. The two of you sat in the cafeteria with two straws stuck into one carton and counted the number of slurps it took to drink all the milk. Now you can’t remember how many, but you do remember Mrs. Piasecka telling you how nice it was to share, and she stuck a gold star on your blue balloon. Your mother let you give your old play clothes—overalls and t-shirts from Sears—to Donna, who was a size smaller than you—that was a kind of sharing. Your mother was big on charitable causes, but not so big that you were allowed to go to Donna’s house. When you wanted to play with Donna, your mother insisted Donna visit your house. Your father just shrugged. Your mom rules the roost, he said. Now you get it—your mom was a chicken. Or a cow. Probably a sheep.
…….
Donna sits in the rocking chair by the kitchen’s bay window, watching your children eat. Your mother was a product of her time, she says.
…….
What time? you ask, and your daughter says, Daddy? Dadeeee?
…….
You remember your mother looking at Donna and telling you she was just off the boat, which you were sure was not a good thing in your mother’s eyes. Your father was right, your mother ruled with an erratic iron fist, which is something Donna, had she grown up, would have told you is exactly what she and her family were fleeing from when they left the USSR or Russia or whatever it was then. Donna always whispered U-S-S-R in your ear and then looked around to see who was watching. You thought the USSR was a battleship like the USS Wisconsin or something, but your father, home on leave, said it used to be a country, more or less, and not a great one at that.
…….
Every country has its ups and downs.
…….
That night as you’re reading to your children, Donna sits beneath the window and clutches your son’s red and white striped monkey. Let me read to them, she demands, but you shake your head. When the story is finished you tuck the children in and kiss them goodnight, leaving the nightlight on.
…….
They should say their prayers, Donna says as you walk out of the room and shut the door, and you say, Look where it got me. The two of you sit down in the hallway and she starts in on what she tells you every time she shows up, that she was in the back seat of the car next to the picnic basket, her father was driving and the train hit the car hard like a Batman punch Pow! Blam! Her mother called Jesus Save Us, and then the car spun off the road, hit the arch of the bridge and nosedived into the water, and was it ever black, Donna says, but we hit the river bottom and the water came in and you grabbed my hand and we went out the window.
…….
Donna, you say. She stands up and shakes her head, already denying you.
…….
You know I wasn’t in the car, you say.
…….
I have to go now, she says.
…….
Jesus, you say. I wasn’t there.
…….
Eleven, she says. That’s how many sips it took to empty the milk carton. And she’s gone.
…….
You wanted to go on the picnic with Donna’s family, but your mother said No.  Your father said the world was a big place and you’d better get used to it, so go have some fun. But there was no answer when you telephoned Donna to say you were allowed to go. When news of the accident spread your mother took you straight to church and told you to pray for Donna’s poor soul, so you bowed your head and asked God to bring Donna back, and he did, and now you are stuck with her and her stories, which have grown old and maybe even a little boring, but it would be a lie to say that you wished Donna would go away. She is the last time God answered your prayers, and he has a lot to answer for, not that you’re asking. So you hold your breath when you go over train tracks and bridges, and you let your kids think it’s a game instead of telling them to get ready for a world full of sad stories that don’t mean a thing unless they happen to you.

Catherine Parnell author photoCatherine Parnell teaches at Southern New Hampshire University in the MFA program and at Grub Street in Boston. She is the editor for Consequence Magazine, and her work has appeared in The Brooklyn Rail, The Rumpus, Tenderly, TSR: The Southampton Review, Post Road, Baltimore Review, Redivider, and other publications. Parnell also works as an independent consultant in communications, writing, and the arts, and is the author of The Kingdom of His Will.

Image credit: Vincent Guth on Unsplash

GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS by Tatyana Sundeyeva

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS by Tatyana Sundeyeva

Tatyana Sundeyeva
GASLIGHT AND SHADOWS

It starts with a ring you buy at an antique shop in your neighborhood which you hadn’t noticed before—a dusty little place of creaky floorboards and a name to match: Gaslight and Shadows.

When you see it, gleaming at you from behind a pane of glass covered in fingerprints long left behind, you’re not sure why it feels familiar. Something about the tarnished silver and the large pink stone haloed by small green gems reminds you of a lily pad on a cool still lake.

The shopkeeper sees you looking. She sidles up and offers to open the display, to which you’d normally object. I’m just looking around, you’d say. Passing time while I wait to meet a friend, you wouldn’t add because you’d want to create the illusion that you might possibly buy something, that you’re not just looking for a place to stay out of the chill for fifteen minutes.

But your lily pad sparkles from its stand, a slim halved finger of blue velvet.

You point to it—so unlike you to be so direct, your husband would say—and with a jingle of keys, the shopkeeper leans in and pulls out your ring, your lilypad.

You’re not sure why it would fit. You’ve noted with some shame that your fingers are of above-average girth. It’s not flesh, you told your husband when you went to try on wedding bands, it’s the bones. The knuckles are wide and knobby, inelegant. A washer woman’s hands, you joked and he laughed and you stared at the things with distaste.

But you slip it on now and your lily pad glides over bone to settle firmly against your skin, its band nestled in the soft pad of your ring finger.

The shopkeeper unpacks her array of compliments and backstory, Rare piece, 18th century engagement ring, you won’t find a better price, it looks like it was made for you, but you hold out your blossomed hand before you, twisting it a little to watch the light bounce off the stone.

When you meet Sonia, you are cradling a cup of English breakfast tea in your hands, peeking every now and then at the gem that has temporarily displaced your engagement and wedding rings to the opposite hand. You watch it scintillate—catch the light and echo it—on the cup’s dull grey porcelain.

Sonia seems nervous, fidgeting with her phone lying face down on the table. You’d noticed she’d been swimming religiously but now that she appears in a tight new athletic ensemble, you appreciate how thin she’s gotten, how slim and light. How the bones in her face push at taut skin.

She talks about the usual: the office intrigues you’ve missed out on, the questionable parenting choices of mutual childed friends, and men. She hasn’t been dating much lately. Nothing juicy to report, she laughs, a peculiar note in her voice, her mouth strange with secrets.

She asks, How are you doing? and her eyes finally cease flitting about to focus on yours.

When she asks about the ring, your lips curl into a smile, and you tell her, It’s new, kind of. And when she asks, New to you? you just laugh and grip your cup tighter until your tea grows cold.

When you return, Dave is sitting on the couch but the TV is off and you are surprised to find him home at dinnertime because his meetings with Japan (or was it Australia?) now take him later and later into the night.

He asks, Had a good lunch? And when you don’t reply he follows up with, We need to talk, his eyes still focused on the dark screen, a window onto a black moonless night, and all you can think about is how he still prefers to be called Dave. How he’d introduced himself that way in college and how it had been fine then, if a little conventional, and how you’d imagined the man he’d become, the David he’d grow into: strong, proud, fertile.

There’s something you should know, he says, as you pull the long cool needles out of your bag, relishing the way your lily pad gleams even in the gloom of your twilit living room. Taking a seat on your favorite armchair, the one you tell yourself you’ll use to breastfeed, you begin to knit—something tiny and blue, for the someday future—because that’s always helped you focus in the past and he says, Since when do you knit, and Look at me, trying to find your eyes with his, but you are elsewhere now, fixated, watching the gleaming needles respond to every move of your wrists.

How undignified to take a name like David—a king’s name, a warrior’s—and break its legs, turn it into the sound of groveling.

The needles click, sharp and efficient, and your lily pad flashes as your hands move deftly, of their own accord now, perfectly synchronized, transforming blue yarn into something real. Turning nothing into a form, a shape of your intent.

I didn’t mean for this to happen, but it’s gotten serious, he says, as though he believes it, as though it could’ve been anything but deliberate, as though a heart can beat by accident.

Still looking down, your eyes shift out of focus as you settle into the pattern, the needles working at the speed of muscle memory.

But you were wrong then, in college. He is no David and never will be, and she is no Bathsheba, and as your needle sinks in, meeting soft flesh, your laugh is not your own, but familiar. Your hands rest, the needles warm where the grip is tightest, the stone somehow still gleaming in the dimness of the room and you remember something the jeweler said when you were choosing an engagement ring, how light can pass through a diamond in two ways, either as white light or as fire and you wonder is that what this is? Is this fire?

Tatyana Sundeyeva, author headshotTatyana Sundeyeva, originally from Chisinau, Moldova, is a Russian-American writer and novelist living in San Francisco. She has just completed her first novel. Find her online at TatyanaWrites.com and on Twitter @TeaOnSundey. This is her first published fiction.

Image credit: allison christine on Unsplash

THE ART OF MAKING ANGELS by Marilee Dahlman

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Blurry black-and-white chair

Marilee Dahlman
THE ART OF MAKING ANGELS

I’ve seen two angels and both were named Reginald.

The spirits appeared as a consequence of my life’s work: dentistry. I came by the profession naturally, as my father was a blacksmith in a small Missouri town. Before heading west, people needed help with their teeth as much as they needed wagon axles. And Pa was no butcher. As a child, time and time again, I witnessed his God’s gift with pliers.

“Nice ‘n slick,” he’d mutter from the side of his mouth, one hand gripping a customer’s jaw, his other hand wielding the steel tool. I’d have both palms on the customer’s sweaty forehead, pinning the head back against the high-backed chair. Pa’s knuckles would whiten and I’d close my eyes tight. Seconds later, I’d hear the pebbly sound of a tooth hitting the concrete floor, and the rattle of the pliers landing on the workbench. I’d tilt the head to let the blood stream down the chin.

I’d asked once, “What happens if the bleeding won’t stop?”

“They become angels,” Pa said. “Most of them.”

I was about twelve when I saw the first angel, Reginald Cooper. He had a wide head, a sandpaper voice, and eyes darker than a rabbit’s. When he sat back in the chair, he spit a stubby cigar to the floor. I tried to avoid touching the wart on his sweaty temple.

“I want it done quick,” Reginald said.

But it must have been a sticky one because Pa wrestled with that tooth for a while. Reginald fainted dead away after eleven minutes. His head felt damp and heavy. I held him until Pa grabbed my shoulder and said, “Leave him be, now.”

Mrs. Cooper showed up and so did the undertaker. Mrs. Cooper gave a few coins to the undertaker and a few more to Pa, even though Reginald had already paid. Pa flipped me a silver three-cent piece. That evening, I walked into town and stopped in front of the undertaker’s. Slowly, above the building, Mr. Cooper himself appeared, his outstretched arms shimmering, his whole body floating straight up to the stars. It was late and I’d had no dinner, but still, I saw what I saw. The next month, Mrs. Cooper married my father.

I must have turned the three-cent coin over in my pocket a thousand times, but I never spent it.

Five years later, I secured a position with the Army, Union side, assisting a doctor. Afterwards, despite my considerable skills and experience, the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery rejected my application. I reckoned I could set up a shop anyway and make a success of it. I settled in Chicago, and found that I didn’t mind a big city where I could blend in like a drop in a river. My trade card said: “Painless, perfect, prompt tooth extractions! Always reasonably priced! Patients treated like angels!”

When I first started, I employed a strong lad who held down my patients. The patients were mostly stockyard workers, women from factories, and prisoners in chains. I took advantage of scientific advancements, experimenting with laughing gas (never worked well), ether, oil of cloves and a cocaine solution injected directly into the gum. Such products made it easier to work alone. I bought a drill operated by a foot treadle. I imported the finest gold leaf to push into cavities after extracting rot. I acquired a reclining chair, the latest design, a pump-type hydraulic.

My customers became wealthier. Some fathers, on the occasion of a daughter’s 18th birthday or wedding day, would pay to have all of her teeth removed and replaced with beautiful false teeth that would never give her trouble. I gave them exactly what they wanted.

I regularly advertised in the Tribune—Enjoy gentle dental surgery by polite professional!

Other dentists fill their offices with carnivore taxidermy, scientific diagrams of blood vessels and nerves, and even human skulls. Not me. I have oak-framed pictures of Apollonia, the patron saint of dentists, and keep fresh-cut flowers in painted porcelain vases. Vials and instruments stay locked in a cabinet until my patient is in the chair. I do keep a variety of books on the shelves, to lend my office a scholarly look, including my favorite text, Skinner’s Treatise on Human Teeth. The metalwork is all matching bronze—the handles on drawers, the gaslight sconces on the walls, and the lock on the door.

Last spring, a new Reginald—Reginald Dupree—opened a dentistry across the street. His advertisements claimed that he graduated third in his class from the University of Michigan’s dental school. One day, Reginald Dupree visited my office, a hand to his cheek. No warts on him; his young skin would feel smooth to touch.

“Can’t do it myself,” he said.

“I’ll treat you like an angel.” I smiled. “Now?”

“Ha! Too many customers today.” Reginald patted a gold watch into his vest pocket. “I’ll set an appointment for tomorrow at two.”

Before leaving, Reginald tapped the doorknob a few times, and turned back to me. He tilted his head and smiled, like an adult might if he sees a child do something wrong. “You practice without the proper education, madam.”

I didn’t answer.

“There’ll be laws soon. And no exceptions.” Reginald put on his hat. The ring on his pinkie flashed. “But perhaps I could use you in my office. We’ll see.”

That evening, I walked along the lake. I enjoyed the weight of my wool suit against the night cool, and the way a copper nodded politely as he passed. I rubbed my thumb against the old three-center, looked at the stars, and thought about throwing the coin into the water. Pa was no butcher, I decided; nor was I. It was just that, now and then, you meet someone who’s better off an angel.

Marilee Dahlman author photoMarilee Dahlman grew up in the Midwest and studied English at the University of Minnesota. She spent ten years studying and practicing law in New York. She currently lives in Washington, D.C. When not writing or working, she enjoys movies, art museums, and getting outside on the hiking trails or her bike. Her other short stories have recently appeared in The Colored Lens, Five on the Fifth, Metaphorosis, and The Saturday Evening Post.

Image Credit: “Historic Dentistry” by Clive Varley on CCSearch

YOU’VE GOT A TALENT by Stefani Nellen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

female runner on a sidewalk

Stefani Nellen
YOU’VE GOT A TALENT

Another 5K, another easy win. With about half a mile to go, Shanna knew she had first female. Time to overtake some guys. This one, for instance, with the long hair and the Union Jack shorts. She surged past him, already eyeing the next target: the red-haired geek in the Hash House Harriers shirt, no idea what his name was, they’d raced each other before but they’d never spoken. She passed him at the finish line.

Once she could walk again, Shanna handed in her timing chip and picked up a banana. The harrier ambled past her, and they acknowledged each other with a nod.

People crowded the lawn next to the finish. A band shredded through Walking on Sunshine, and the Children’s School sold pancakes. Pink ribbons and healthy living information were on display everywhere.

Shanna walked to the curb to watch the other runners coming in. She hated the moments between the finish and the podium, when the adrenaline drained away and the soreness set in. Her desire to win embarrassed her as soon as it was satisfied. Once she’d made the mistake of looking at the finish photo provided by the race organizers as part of the registration swag; she’d looked like a boiling, contorting lizard.

As if on cue, Meghan arrived. Perfectly decked out in pink-and-black running gear, she shot out of a group of walkers and strode towards the line in photogenic agony, raising her fists to show that she had Overcome. As soon as she’d passed the photographer huddled on the ground, she dropped her arms.

Shanna hadn’t expected her. Sure, a few weeks ago, Meghan had announced that she had taken up running, too, that she had to find out what kept Shanna pounding the pavement for hours each week without going nuts, but she hadn’t mentioned wanting to run a race, let alone this one. Yet here she was, pointing a finger at Shanna with a gesture between threat and favor. You. Don’t move.

Once she was next to Shanna, Meghan said, “Man, this was brutal. So brutal.”

Shanna wondered whether she should tell Meghan that she had won the race.

“Where’s that husband of mine?” Meghan said.

“I haven’t seen him.”

“Typical.” Meghan put her foot on the curb and leaned forward. The sight of her legs and butt contained in shining black fabric made Shanna think of a scorpion.

“I had an idea for us,” Meghan said. “A friend of mine can get us entries for the Chicago Marathon. He works for a charity, I forget which.” Before Shanna could say anything, Meghan continued. “I know I’m slow. But I’ll work so hard. And besides, it’s about doing this together, right?”

Shanna felt lonely at times, but never during running. On the contrary, running was the one thing she wanted to keep for herself. She could try to explain, but it was hopeless.

“What do you say?” The question was a ritual. “You and me?”

◊

Shanna and Meghan had met as teenagers. Shanna had been the new girl in class, and Meghan knew everything about bras, boys, and beyond. Every once in a while, Meghan singled out a girl to make fun of. Not often, not excessively, but there was always a moment when Meghan stood with her hands on her hips, a bunch of people behind her, and the victim scrunched up her face trying not to cry. When Meghan asked her to hang out after school, Shanna was terrified and expected Meghan to drop her quickly. Instead, Meghan kept her.

With Meghan as a friend, Shanna didn’t need to talk to anyone: Meghan spoke for both of them. Her voice was deep and clear. You wanted to listen to her.

A few weeks into their friendship, Meghan would sometimes close her eyes as if she were asleep, and become smaller than before, more fragile. It happened after parties, when they sat in the back seat of Meghan’s car, music playing softly on the radio, or when they lay next to the pool and toasted on hot stones, screams and the smell of chlorine, hot dogs and sunscreen all around them. When Meghan opened her eyes again, she’d whisper: “Hey. You and me.” The words were Shanna’s treasure. They proved how important she was—more important than anyone could guess.

◊

Meghan spent her first post-grad year volunteering and shopping around a children’s book about gay marriage. She herself married an older man named Kyle, who played the cello for the Pittsburgh Symphony. They quickly had a son, Leo.  Shanna moved into a one-bedroom rental with a view of the Giant Eagle parking lot and worked as a research assistant for the Psychology Department. The part of her job she hated most was cold-calling potential research participants; she memorized a script to work through her list as efficiently as possible, and not a few people became irritated with her droning voice. Some thought she was mocking them. Her strong point was data analysis, and the professor she worked for regularly asked her to talk him through the statistics she’d used so I can sell it to the funding agencies; she’d been co-author on quite a few papers. The professor kept encouraging her to apply to graduate school, but the thought of teaching classes or presenting at conferences was too intimidating. “As you wish,” the professor said. “Remain our secret as long as you want.”

◊

Shanna became a runner by accident. One evening, after a whole day inside, she put on sweatpants, a fleece sweater, and an old pair of sneakers and started to jog around the block, not expecting to last longer than half an hour. She came home long after dark.

As a girl she used to dream of having her pack: friends that accepted her without words, recognized her like a long-lost sibling. She found them in books about running: The Lonely Breed, Young Men in a Hurry, The Perfect Mile – grainy black-and-white pictures showing young men running on grass tracks and in Scandinavian forests and in the dunes at Portsea. She was running, too, on the hills in the park and on the public track. Over the months, her hard training sessions started to feel easy. She shed the cocoon of her daytime self and became a new person – but only in her mind. The fewer people she met while running, the easier it was to imagine she was in the grainy black-and-white world of her books, so she made it a habit to run early in the morning or late at night.

Only at the races did she briefly show her face, her body, and—most intimate of all—her speed. With each race, she moved up in the local hierarchy, until she was one of the fast girls. At first she competed in baggy clothes, but eventually she switched to “professional” running sets she would never dare put on anywhere else. During a race she spat and groaned and fought to beat as many others as possible, as if she were in one of the legendary races she read about at night instead of a harmless footrace for weekend warriors.

It was as if Meghan had leapt from behind a black-and-white tree in one of the pictures in Shanna’s books, shouting, “Hey! Did you forget about me?”

◊

The Chicago Marathon was in October, which left them about five months to get ready. Their first official training run took place on a hot and humid Tuesday. Meghan planted her feet with rhythmic concentration. Shanna ran as slowly as she could.

At the picnic area, Meghan splashed water on the back of her neck, sliding her fingers inside her shirt.

“How are Kyle and Leo?” Shanna asked.

“Don’t get me started.”

Shanna waited.

“All right,” Meghan said. “I might as well fill you in. Kyle moved out.”

“Oh my God. What happened?”

“It’s been building for a while. He hasn’t been sleeping, and he’s been saying really strange things. He’s in Boston now. His mother knows a psychiatrist there.” She wiped her hands on her thighs. “He said he needs to get away from me—as if I’m some kind of monster.”

“That sounds scary. Is there anything I can do?”

“You already are. Being out here makes me feel so much better.”

◊

As spring turned into summer, Meghan and Shanna built mileage. Their long runs became their short runs. Kyle was crying every time they talked on the phone, Meghan said, and they’d talked about divorce and dropped it. Kyle was so incoherent it was hard to tell what he wanted. Leo took it the hardest: he was only two and half years old and kept asking for Daddy.

“Wait,” Meghan said. “Side stitch.”

They stopped.

“Put your hand there.” Shanna tapped a spot above her own belly button. “Maybe move your hand around a bit so your muscles can warm up. ” She demonstrated.

“Where exactly?”

Shanna put her hand on Meghan’s belly. “Here. Try to breathe into my hand.”

“You’re my savior,” Meghan said. She moved into the touch, and Shanna felt her warmth through the wet nylon.

“You and me,” Meghan said. “Once more.”

Shanna pushed back against Meghan’s weight.

◊

September brought cold rain, muddy trails, and the return of Kyle.

“He’s stable,” Meghan said, and left it at that. She and Shanna were meeting for coffee to discuss the charity that sponsored their marathon: the American ALS Foundation.

“How does it work?” Shanna asked.

“They bought race entries and sold them to runners like us, who agree to run in their name—wearing t-shirts and stuff. There will be a bunch of us in Chicago. Team ALS. Most importantly, they hope we’ll tell our friends that we’re running the marathon, and inspire them enough to make a donation.”

“Why should they?”

“It works, you’ll see. We can post our training runs and share pictures on social media. What do you think?”

“It sounds fake. I thought we were going to train and try to run a good time. I didn’t know we need an audience.”

Meghan looked up in surprise. “It’s a charity, you know? Don’t be such a bitch.”

◊

With Kyle back in town, Meghan started to skip training. Kyle needed a ride to therapy, the mortgage person had promised to call, she needed to search for jobs to apply for.

When the time came for their most important workout—a twenty-mile long run—Shanna arrived at Meghan’s house to find her sitting on the porch in black jeans and a sequin top, smoking a menthol cigarette as she sometimes did after a really bad day. “Look, I’m not feeling it tonight. Join me for drinks, okay? Tanya is coming too. Remember her? From Pitt.”

“We can’t run a marathon if we don’t train.”

“I don’t have time for this. The sitter’s with Leo, Kyle’s with his mom, and I’m partying tonight. Join me or don’t.” Meghan brushed past Shanna and started walking towards her car.

“You call this inspiring?” Shanna called. She hadn’t meant to.

Meghan turned around. “Cute. I know you have nothing better to do on a Friday night than run loops in the park. And you know what? You’re damn lucky. My family’s on the brink. We’ll have to sell the house, my kid is biting his friends, and I’m married to someone I don’t know anymore. And I will not run twenty miles tonight. End of story.”

Shanna stood still, aware of her tight clothes and the sweat drying on her skin. Up and down the street, windows were lit; people could probably hear every word.

Meghan flexed the fingers of her right hand, then got her keys from her purse and opened the car door. “Are you coming?”

“No,” Shanna said.

◊

Instead of doing the 20-miler on her own, Shanna entered a small marathon one state over. She was one of fifty participants. The course went out and back along a riverbank, and the field strung out quickly. Very far ahead of her, she saw two men reach the turnaround point marked by an orange cone, and start back. When they passed, they raised their hands in greeting. A thin layer of ice covered the water, and her cheeks felt hot and fresh in the cold. Afterwards, they ate chili in the boathouse to warm up. One of the two men who had greeted her pulled up the chair next to her. He was young, with a full beard.

“You’re a hell of a runner,” he said. “What was your time?”

“Three oh six.”

“Nice. Ever thought about trying to break three?”

“Not yet.” She glanced out the window, at the pebble trail along the water. She didn’t want to talk, but she loved the young man, and all the runners here, for their tacit agreement that they were not crazy doing this.

◊

It took them hours to get their race numbers at the marathon expo because Meghan had forgotten her confirmation letter and got into an argument with the volunteers. When they finally got to their hotel room, Shanna wanted to lie down and sleep off her headache, but Meghan had scheduled dinner with the rest of Team ALS and insisted Shanna couldn’t leave her to go alone.

They ate burgers and pasta at an American food place. Meghan talked non-stop. Her eyes were bloodshot; she’d put on clumps of mascara, the way she used to as a teenager.

“Just think about what we’re going to do tomorrow,” she said. “Twenty-six point two grueling miles!”

Everyone except Shanna acted disgusted. Weren’t they all so crazy?

The woman next to Meghan was drawing the course in the air with her finger. “And here’s the wall. Right here. It’s us versus the distance.”

“I’ll drink to that,” her husband said, and they all raised their glasses of alcohol-free beer.

Back in the hotel room, Shanna and Meghan picked everything they needed for the race the next morning from their suitcase: their gels and drinks, socks and shoes, numbers and pins. They were both dressed for bed in drawstring pants and tank tops.

Meghan spread her race day outfit on the desk, on top of tourism folders and a laminated room service menu. On top of her race number she had written GO MEG. Below it, she had written STRENGTH.

“I’ll bonk so hard tomorrow,” she said. “It’s going to be embarrassing.”

Shanna put a hand on Meghan’s back and started to massage her shoulders. The muscles felt like caramel; they promised softness to someone with patience. Shanna circled her thumbs, and Meghan sighed.

“I was such an asshole the last couple of weeks,” Meghan said. “I was, like, an evil puppet.”

“You’ve got every excuse.”

“Tomorrow’s going to be hell.”

“We’ll do this together.” Shanna was still kneading Meghan’s shoulders, settling into the rhythm. “I’ve run a marathon before.”

“You did?”

“After you bailed on our twenty-miler.”

Meghan closed her eyes. “How did you do?”

“It was okay.” She slid her arms down Meghan’s side. “You would have liked it.”

“I would’ve spoiled it. One more beer, and then to bed?”

Shanna got a real beer from the mini bar, and they sat down on Meghan’s bed, knees up, backs against the pillows. All the lights were out, except the spots above the night tables.

“You know what?” Meghan passed Shanna the bottle. “ALS is giving me the creeps.”

“I know,” Shanna said. “Me too.” She drank and passed the bottle back.

“You know something else? I started running because someone told me they saw you run at like five in the morning. I was jealous. To have something like this all for yourself.” She turned to look at Shanna. “And now look at us. We’re here together.” She put down the empty beer bottle on the night table, and Shanna laid her hand on Meghan’s belly. Breathe here, right here. Slowly, she moved her hand down. When her fingertips reached and lifted the elastic of her pajamas, Meghan slid down on the bed so she lay flat on her back, and pushed down her pants. “That’s better.” She reached for Shanna’s hand again, leading her between her legs.

Shanna closed her eyes and felt the pubic hair shaved down to a precise triangle, the smooth, cold skin around it, the warm slipperiness further down, the lips so different from her own. She heard Meghan’s moan like a soft breath in her sleep, the hiss of her heels against the linen, a croak inside her throat. Shanna moved only her fingers, mere twitches in exactly the right place.

Meghan rammed her elbow into Shanna’s ribs and sat up.

“What?” Shanna whispered.

Meghan started to rub her crotch in a way that made Shanna think of scraping ice off a car window. After she had finished with a series of dry, efficient screams, she lay back again, sprawled out and kneading her breasts.

“Okay,” she said, “you want me to return the favor?”

Shanna palpated the sore spot where Meghan’s elbow had struck her. “No,” she managed.

“Okay.”

Shanna got up and lay down in the other bed. Within minutes, Meghan slept.

◊

The next morning, they stood next to each other in front of the bathroom mirror in their matching red ALS running tops.

Meghan waved at Shanna in the mirror. “Are you ready to rock this?”

“No.”

They brushed their teeth, looking at each other. They spat out the foam and rinsed.

“Last night hit the spot,” Meghan said. “I slept like a baby. You’ve got a real talent.”

Shanna saw and felt the familiar blush spread on her neck and forehead, but forced herself to speak anyway. “Why did you push me away?”

“I like to finish by myself.”

“I guess,” Shanna said. “I’m sure Kyle appreciates it.”

Meghan put her toothbrush into the plastic cup. “Fine. Be that way.”

“You and me, right?”

Meghan leaned on her hands and looked at her reflection. “I always felt responsible for you. You never had anyone else.”

“You’re not responsible for me.”

“At least I’m watching the time,” Meghan said. “We’re late for the start.”

◊

Thousands of people were looking for their corral, and it took them a long time to find theirs. Each charity had a different color: red for ALS, purple for cancer, gold for Parkinson’s. The start shot had already gone off, but it took another half hour before Shanna and Meghan crossed the starting line, bumping elbows and feet with strangers. The runners around them were chugging Gatorade and taking photos of each other with their cell phones. Some stopped to hug friends and family along the course. Discarded paper cups stuck to their shoes. At seven miles, the course freed up a little. Meghan was limping.

“Do you want to take a break?” Shanna said.

“Do I look like a quitter?”

One of the spectators heard her and shouted, “You’re a hero!” Meghan pushed out her chest and pointed at the ALS logo, pressing more cheers from the crowd. And so another slow mile crept by, and another. Shanna’s legs hurt from being reined in. At mile ten, she screamed at herself: Just run! Every time she sped up for sheer pain relief, the familiar voice called her back: “Hey! Wait!”

Between miles ten and eleven, Meghan’s limp got worse. When they passed an aid station, the medics trained their eyes on her like vultures. “Are you all right, ma’am?” Meghan gritted her teeth and pushed on.  Once the aid station was out of sight, she stopped. “I can’t do it. It’s too much.”

“Where’s the pain exactly?”

“My foot.”

“Let’s sit down. Over there, on the curb.”

Meghan took off her shoe. Her sock was drenched in blood. Shanna took a band-aid and gauze from her pocket. “Just look away for a sec.” She squeezed open the blister. Meghan groaned, and Shanna cleaned the blister with water from her bottle, dried it with gauze, and covered it with the band-aid. “If you have some painkillers, take them.” Meghan pulled a strip of pills from the back pocket of her shorts and took two with the rest of Shanna’s water. “How do you know how to do this stuff?”

“From my long runs.”

Meghan moved her jaw. Mascara was drying on her cheeks. “What was your time in the other marathon?”

“A little over three hours.”

Meghan put her shoe back on and tied the laces with great accuracy. “Hey!” she called to everyone close enough to hear. “Being fast isn’t important, right?”

“No!” someone shouted back. “It’s not!”

She pointed her thumb at Shanna. “My friend here just told me she’s faster than I am!”

Shanna looked down at the asphalt. She felt the spectators’ laughter like slaps to the face.

“But we’re all winners!” Meghan yelled. “No matter how fast, no matter how slow!”

“Right! Go Meg!”

“That’s all I’m saying.”

They started jogging again. To Shanna, it felt like running in place. She was sick of the toy-train speed of this run, and of Meghan. She thought about the swish of turning the pages, of the burned smell rising from her books, of veined necks and thighs and the snap of finish tapes in the fifties. Of sucking frost from her tongue during her solo marathon, and of crunching the pebbles under her toes with each step, as if she could push herself forward forever.

“Try walk-breaks,” she said to Meghan. “That’s your best chance to finish.” Then she took off.

At first, the spectators booed her for leaving her friend behind. This changed as soon as Meghan was out of sight.

“Looking great!”

“Way to move!”

“Get it, girl!”

The sun was high and she started to sweat, but she didn’t care. She was one of the fast girls, and if she was empty where the night before she had opened up and closed around another person, she preferred it—the lighter she was, the faster she could run. And she ran as fast as she could, because it felt good.

Stefani Nellen author headshotStefani Nellen’s short stories are published or forthcoming in Guernica, AGNI, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, Bellevue Literary Review, PRISM International and Web Conjunctions, among others, and have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open, the Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Alexandra Kleeman), and placed as the runner-up for the Wabash Prize (judged by Adam Johnson). She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the Bennington Writing Seminars, and is also a graduate of the Clarion Science Fiction and Fantasy Workshop, where she had the opportunity to work with Neil Gaiman and Kelly Link, among others. A psychologist by training and originally from Germany, she now lives in the Netherlands with her family. She’s at work on two novels and a collection of short stories.

Image credit: Stage 7 Photography on Unsplash

A FAMILY MAN by Theo Greenblatt

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Picture of a victorian style house behind a white picket fence

Theo Greenblatt
A FAMILY MAN

[TW: This piece includes sexual assault scenes that may be triggering for some readers.]

Many times she had imagined, graphically and in slow motion, the bullet penetrating the pale, soft flesh of his temple; she knew intimately the faint indent, how it was edged with a line of graying strands slicked back with a dab of Brill cream, the shadowy crater of a chicken pox scar between the hairline and the eyebrow. She saw the skin parting and gently enveloping the smooth, hot tip of the metal missile, as if the bullet were melting its way in, as if the flesh itself welcomed the intrusion. This was the extent of her fantasy. She had never imagined the bullet exiting, or the blood. There was so much blood.

She went to the kitchen for a bucket and some Mr. Clean; took a sponge from the sink, a yellow one with a green scrubbie side, and a roll of paper towels. When she returned to the den she set the bucket down on the floor and began to sponge the blood—and other matter, she noticed—from the wood-paneled wall behind his chair. She worked carefully and methodically, but not with any thought as to “covering her tracks” or destroying evidence. She had no intention of hiding, it was just that she could not bear the mess. She wanted the room, the “scene,” to look clean and well-kept when it was examined. She sponged the entire wall, where sticky flecks of blood glistened as high as she could reach, and down to the floor where it had seeped into the crack between the molding and the patterned carpet. It had a particular gamey odor that wasn’t entirely dispelled by the industrial tang of the cleaning fluid. She almost liked that smell; it reminded her of hunting trips she had gone on when she was small, tramping through cold woods in gray morning light, her hands warmed by the ham and egg sandwiches packed in foil which she was charged with carrying.

She had to change the soapy water in the bucket three times before the wall was clean. She used Windex and paper towels to wipe down the pinkish spray that by now had dried onto the computer screen and keyboard. She winced as her touch on the keys produced an electric crackle and an image came into focus. She spread her hand so that the paper towel hid this image from her view. She could do nothing about his clothes or the blood soaking into the papers on the desk where his head now rested. It created a slowly changing pattern as it oozed and dried across the pages. She did not want to disturb the position of his body. There was a satisfying irony in the way his left arm seemed to point at the hinged picture frame (all the family members in separate frozen moments), his right arm palm up in his lap, head directly face down on the blotter. Not a sleeping pose, not restful, but the grace of arrested motion, a dance collapsed. She felt that the mess was acceptably contained in that small area, limited to his person and what might be considered his personal space. This was, after all, a deliberate act, rich with intent, not some out-of-control crime of passion. This was justice, this was necessity.

◊

It had never occurred to Frank that he could be aroused by the product of his own seed. True, he had felt repulsed by his wife’s body, hard and bloated like a badly upholstered sofa, but he thought that was a man’s natural reaction to pregnancy, and did not seem connected to what came later for him. When, as a young father, he noticed his reaction to the innocent touch of his small children he assured himself that this too was natural. For a long time he did not acknowledge that he moved around them in ways that resulted in their contact with his genitals; carrying them at a particular angle, holding them on his lap just so. When his son Tom was five, six, seven, he was entranced by the way the boy’s small penis evoked the shape of his own member; he could remember touching himself secretly when he was that size, thinking he must be the only person who could feel this because no one had ever spoken of such a thing to him. The two-fold thrill of touching Tom—feeling himself and the boy respond at the same time—was a pleasure he could not bring himself to forego.

As Tom grew older and more like him in size, more adult in his physique, the excitement diminished for Frank. His daughter Karen was beginning to appear less childlike at this time, too, but her maturing body had the opposite effect on him. She was not becoming womanly in the way that his wife Louise was womanly. Instead Karen had a spring-like newness, everything budding and blossoming at once. Her breasts were small and delicately formed, not heavy and pulpy like his wife’s; her limbs were smooth and ropy from outdoor play. Slowly Frank’s desire veered away from Tom and he sought time alone with Karen. At first he only touched her, held her against him for what he knew to be too long, and then secluded himself in the bath or bedroom to relieve his tension. He imagined over and over again the pale almost hairless triangle beneath her bathing suit bottom, and her slim legs parting like a cheerleader’s V.

The anticipation he created with this fantasy eventually became unbearable to him. Finally one night, fetching Karen from a late babysitting engagement, he consummated his need for her in just the way his imagination had detailed so many times. She had been asleep when he picked her up and he had suggested she lie down in the back seat of the Taurus on the way home. She didn’t question his pulling off the road or his clambering in on top of her. He avoided looking at her frightened face, pressed his mouth against her neck instead, feeling his own hot breath create a wet patch on her shirt collar. He drove the rest of the way home in red-faced silence, grateful for the solid seatback between himself and his daughter.

After the first time with Karen he could hardly bring himself to caress his wife. Louise was not unaccommodating, but he found her body grotesque in comparison with Karen’s. He developed the habit of staying up late to watch the news and Louise went to bed uncomplainingly without him. Nightly he would enter Karen’s room and, in the muffled dark beneath her flowered duvet, whisper hoarsely his love for her until he spent himself there.

Frank declined to examine this behavior in depth. He was sure he was a normal man with normal needs and desires. Just as no one had ever spoken to him as a child about the pleasure of touching himself, he assumed now that other men gave in to this uncontrollable urge and simply didn’t discuss it. Now that it had become part of his routine, he was able to set aside his thoughts of Karen during the day; it was a part of his life that simply didn’t touch on the rest.

When Karen started high school, he forbade her to date; she was allowed out only with groups, and kept to a strict curfew. Louise concurred unquestioningly with this. For Karen’s safety, it was understood. During these years Karen’s body changed, became hardened to him, and when at last she left for college, Frank had steeled himself to the loss. By this time he had outfitted the den with a home computer, and was finding his consolation online. Here in the privacy of his home office, while Louise assumed he was paying bills and poring over sports scores, he was able to find hundreds upon hundreds of pictures of boys and girls like his children had once been—gentle, delicate-looking children whose bodies appeared soft and compliant. He gazed with unstinted longing at their tender private parts, imagined their small hands running over his flesh, and was content to massage himself to climax this way rather than resort to relations with Louise.

For several years Frank looked no further than his computer screen for fulfillment of his sexual desires, and the period of his nightly conjugations with Karen faded into a blurry, unreal memory. It was easy to pretend it had never happened since he was certain that he shared the secret with Karen only. Karen herself never alluded to it, although relations between them were always distant and a little formal. He was not close with Tom, either, although no real animosity ever surfaced, and he had truly forgotten the extent of his earliest preoccupations with his son. Occasionally it occurred to him that this was not the sort of father he had set out to be, aloof and forbidding, but he did not really feel that he could have done anything differently.

When grandchildren came into his life, Frank allowed himself to be carried away by the same sense of fatefulness, of life’s inevitable course. At first when Tom and Karen visited with their own young families, he stayed out of the way, allowing Louise to sponge up the milky pleasure of having babies in the house again. But as they grew into toddlers and older, he felt the children sought him out. Louise’s attention was not enough for them, or it was different. They asked him for things—candy and pencils and piggy-back rides. They bumped into him, they snaked their slightly sticky fingers into his sweaty palm with no hesitation, they hugged him, pressing their faces to his corduroy-covered thighs, causing him to swell inside his briefs. It was like a rerun of his early parenting years and when the first cloud of guilt had passed he began to feel rejuvenated by these new stimulations. Clearly this was not something he controlled, this reaction of his, he was just wired this way. He allowed his anxiety to dissolve into enjoyment but at the same time he was careful in the presence of family and noticed that he was not often left alone with the children.

Louise had given him a digital camera for Christmas and it occurred to him that he could take pictures of his grandchildren and look at them whenever he chose. Frank became the family chronicler, taking pictures at every gathering and on even the smallest occasions. Many of these photos he sent out to Karen and Tom but there were some he kept to himself as well. Since everyone was so accustomed to seeing him with a camera, no one noticed his attention to particular details as he documented the children on film. He had countless images of his grandchildren at the beach, in the bath, getting ready for bed—images that fed his desire and held him nearly captive at his computer, with one hand pressed into his lap.

◊

Lying in bed he thought he heard a sound like a firecracker, but it was muted by the comforter he had pulled up over his head. He wedged himself further into the corner where the mattress met the wall and tried to silence his own breathing so he could hear what was happening downstairs, or if anyone was coming up. His sister was snoring lightly in the bed next to him, making little “puh” sounds when she exhaled. He had trouble falling sleep with her in the room. At home he had his own room, and he would always be alone when his father came in late at night. Last night his grandpa had come instead, and he had been nervous that his sister would wake up. He thought he understood that this night-time thing was something grown-up men did just with boys—at first he thought it was only his dad, but now he knew that grandpas did it, too. He also knew it was supposed to be a secret; probably because girls spoil everything, that’s what his dad would say, only half-joking.

He couldn’t make out any people sounds from the rest of the house, so he carefully eased the blanket down just past his ears and turned his head toward the door. A line of light shone along the bottom; not all the grown-ups had gone to bed. He couldn’t distinguish between their footsteps here because all the floors were carpeted, so he didn’t know who was still up. Everyone stayed up later when they visited at his grandparents’ house, he had noticed. He did hear a door close and someone moving about in the kitchen, which was directly below him.

At home he knew all the night sounds: the creak of every stair, the squeak of the floorboards by the bathroom, the furnace going on and the steam tapping in the radiators. Here everything was different and the unfamiliar noises made him anxious—the metallic knocking of the blinds against the window frame from the wind outside, the humming and clunking that he now knew was the refrigerator making ice. A lot of things were making him anxious, not just the noises, but the worst was that he really didn’t want his grandfather to come in again. It was different with his dad, he knew what to expect, but his grandfather was shaky and smelled of old man sweat, and it scared him. Also his father wouldn’t come in unless he was alone, but his grandpa clearly didn’t know the rules.

He shifted his head to look at his sister and watched her lips puffing rhythmically in and out for a while. He decided if he heard someone coming, he would reach over and pinch her to wake her up. She would cry and his grandpa would not touch him. Once he had this plan firmly in mind he felt better and relaxed his grip on the edge of the blanket. He waited a long time and finally someone was coming up the stairs. He tensed his whole body, ready to lurch forward, his fingers clenched to grab at his sister’s flesh; but the footfalls went past his door and there was a soft click as the hall light went out. Still he waited, lying flat on his stomach, watching the door, until it had been quiet for a long time. At last he felt sure his grandpa wasn’t coming. He pulled the blanket back over his head and began the slow drift into sleep.

Theo Greenblatt headshotTheo Greenblatt’s prose, both fiction and nonfiction, appears in The Normal School Online, Tikkun, Salt Hill Journal, Harvard Review, and numerous other venues. She is a past winner of The London Magazine Short Story Competition. Her collection Rescue and Other Relationships was a finalist in the recent Autumn House Press Full-Length Fiction Contest.
Theo teaches writing to aspiring officer candidates at the Naval Academy Preparatory School in Newport, RI.

Image credit: Scott Webb on Unsplash

4:44 by Leland Cheuk

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Black-and-white Citizen watch on patterned rug

Leland Cheuk
4:44

I died Sunday, for sixty seconds, at precisely 4:44 p.m. Novel and beer in tow, I strolled over to my armchair and tottered. Nausea somehow morphed into this buttery light that bled over the edges of my vision. There were my parents. There was my childhood, my friends, and my lovers, all these thoughts tinged with forgiveness (though there was nothing to forgive). And then I was down, and then I was up, wheezing, gasping for air.

My memories of how I’d gotten to where I was (floor, apartment, city) were slow to return, as if I’d been concussed. I’d been gone for a long time—years—only to be reborn. Picking up my spilled beer and splayed-open book, I checked the time: 4:45 p.m.

“I actually died,” I told my oncologist the next day.

She prescribed a full day’s worth of scans. CT, PET, MRI, tests without acronyms. Nothing new was wrong with me. While the EKG tech gelled up electrode patches and applied them one by one to my bared chest with the feathery touch of a Jenga player, the wall clock’s minute hand shifted to forty-four after and I flatlined, spasming up a minute later, choking on the dense waft of the tech’s shea butter-scented hair product as she hovered over me, debating whether to administer CPR or fire up the defibrillator.

So-called experts had never seen anything like it. The cardiologist, who himself was centrally obese and labored audibly to breathe, said it “must be” a new type of arrhythmia even though I’d passed all the heart stress tests. The oncologist fondled her silver bracelet as she shrugged and said, “I’m deferring to the heart guy.” They recommended I wear an event monitor and hire a daytime caretaker. “Event monitor”! What a phrase! I couldn’t afford one. I was officially in remission, so I had to return to work. The company’s healthcare coverage was the only reason I wasn’t impoverished already. The doctors reluctantly cleared me.

Death was perfectly manageable. I was a marketing director at a credit card company, so at work, I blocked off my daily schedule between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. and jury-rigged my own event monitor: an alarm on my phone that gave me a two-minute death warning. Every day at 4:30 p.m, I’d go to the bathroom, sit in a stall, lean back, and try to get comfortable. Pants down (so no one would think I was just shirking work), I’d wait to die. Weekends at home, I’d sit in my armchair and make sure I wasn’t eating or drinking anything that might cause a mess, then I’d face the window, stare up at the sky, and safely pass away. At night, after rising from the dead, I’d pop half an Ambien to fall back asleep quicker.

I’d never felt like I was owed an average lifespan. I’d never had any huge goals. I wasn’t disappointed about the many things I hadn’t experienced. I’d loved and lost. I’d traveled. I’d met people I treasured and hated. We’re all just animals, imminent dirt. That we can experience love and heartbreak and hate is an existential bonus.

When I saw the yellowing light again and felt myself sinking, I tried to hold the memories of loved ones appearing in my dying flashes so I could recall them when I was reborn. First, it was my immediate family, but as the months went by, there were others:

Ed, my college roommate and childhood best friend. He lived out west and was a veep at a toy company. We only spoke to each other every year or two now. Kristen, my best friend when I studied abroad in Madrid. I’d been madly in love with her, an impossible love. She now had three kids in a small town in R—. Jennifer, a peer with whom I’d worked at a startup for five years. She was a Republican and I, a Democrat. We sat across from each other in an open floor plan and would spar about politics. I found myself thinking about her more often than I liked to admit. She lived in S— now.

I wished I were closer to them. I was alive but not the same type of alive I was when healthy. When you become seriously ill, you never rejoin the ranks of people who take health for granted. You feel one hundred percent but you know you can feel perfectly fine and have tumors eating you alive. A life-threatening illness forces both a constant awareness of mortality and estrangement of mind from body.

I wrote to the people I saw before my “death minutes.” I told them they’d made an indelible mark on me, as if I were previously a blank canvas.

“The thing I like about you, Ed, is that you were always so loyal to me,” I emailed. “I’ll forever remember what you said about me at your wedding. That you wanted to be like me. Articulate, creative, funny. I’ve never felt like I had any of those attributes.”

“Hang in there, bud,” he replied. “I know this cancer thing’s thrown you for a loop. You’re not losing hope, are you?”

To Kristen: “I loved that you hated everything. Just like me! You were so cool, so skeptical, so cynical about life. When you’re nineteen, all you have to be is cool. God, how I’d wished you had feelings for me. After a while, it fucking hurt to be so close to you and know you didn’t feel the same way I felt about you.”

“I did have feelings for you,” she replied. “Maybe not those feelings. But you were the only reason I didn’t go out of my mind with loneliness while we were abroad. I just didn’t express my feelings well back then. We were all so preoccupied with being cool.”

When I told Jennifer how much I still thought about her, ten years after we’d worked together, she refused to take the emotional bait. She didn’t write about what she’d been doing for the past decade. She only said she’d visit soon so we could “hang out.”

But she started writing me every couple of weeks with funny stories about her current boss at the bank where she worked.

I’d write back and joke about the many different ways I played the cancer card in the office. I frequently took Fridays off, pretending I had doctor’s appointments. I’d call in sick complaining of ridiculous ailments, blaming my weakened immune system—the more absurd and obscure the illness the better (UTI, hemorrhoids, shingles, hard-to-pronounce diarrheal diseases). If I sensed that some higher-up doubted my proposals, I’d cite that compared to beating cancer, any of our top initiatives were easy, and they’d be reassured by my intestinal fortitude and suddenly believe in my ability to make my proposals reality. I told Jennifer that business would take me through S—, even though that was untrue. Would she like to meet up? Yes, she would.

My oncologist informed me that after conferring with several doctors, she thought my “death minutes” could be fixed by implanting a simple pacemaker.

“What does the heart guy think?” I asked.

Her gaze dropped. “He passed away last week.”

I blurted a wow. As a seriously ill patient, you assume your doctors are masters of their own health and somehow impervious to mortality.

“What if I don’t want to do it?” I asked.

“You’re risking death daily.”

But I wasn’t ready to stop dying.

“You’re young,” she said. “You should lead a normal life.”

A normal life meant you let things pass you by. You lost touch with people. You allowed the routine to distance you from your loved ones. You forgot the feeling of genuine connection.

The oncologist’s lips parted, her breath held—for an instant, she looked dead. “I suppose we can try beta blockers or something,” she muttered. “Let me check with the heart people.”

I rented a car and drove five hours to S— because when I flew now, I almost always got sick. When I got to the hotel, my phone battery was dead and I discovered that I’d left the charger at home. Jennifer had agreed to meet for a late lunch and was already on the way from the suburbs. The surly concierge requisitioned my phone and agreed to charge it in the back. (Later, I’d find a fee of $14.99 for “Electrical Services” on my bill.)

I’d have to wrap up my reunion with Jennifer before 4:44 p.m.

We met in the hotel lobby. A decade ago, she’d worn knee-high boots and expensive blouses, and designer sunglasses, even in winter. Now she wore Birkenstocks, khakis, and a white, long-sleeved wicking shirt. Still, I could see the twenty-three-year-old I’d known.

“You look terrific,” she said, inspecting me up and down.

“Cancer works wonders!” I’d lost fifteen pounds in the past year.

“I…didn’t know what to expect.”

“You expected worse.”

“Am I terrible for thinking that?”

“Of course not,” I said. “You’re healthy.”

We went to a brunch place a short walk from the hotel. Jennifer was an animal lover. She owned a dog and a cat. She volunteered and helped raise money for animal shelters. She enjoyed her job managing technology projects at a large bank. She had a gaze that could stare even death into the ground.

And she’d been partnered with a woman for eight years.

“What about you?” she asked.

“I was with someone before the diagnosis,” I said. “Together four years. I was going to propose, but then she was offered a job in Hong Kong. I wasn’t going to go there and do nothing. So she left.”

“Do you regret it?”

“Now? No,” I said. There we were, sitting across from each other again, this time in a restaurant instead of an office. Why was I playing games, trying to woo her with my death-sparked soulfulness?

“Hong Kong would’ve been amazing,” Jennifer said. “I’d have figured out the work thing later.”

“Had it happened after the cancer,” I lied, “I’d have gone with her.” I’d recently written Mika, my ex, opining that our split was for the best because we didn’t truly love each other.

Jennifer smiled with furrowed brows. “Are you sure?”

“No,” I admitted.

“You seem like a stay-in-one-place type of guy,” she said. “You’ve never left the City. You watch the river go around you. I can’t. I get restless. I’m, like, two different people. There’s the dutiful bank employee who loves animals and the adventurer who moved to the City at nineteen with nothing but twenty dollars.”

“So, like, the Democrat and Republican in yourself.”

Jennifer laughed. “Which is which?”

“The lesser of two evils!”

Jennifer laughed, which made me laugh, which made her laugh.

Later, walking with Jennifer through the cypress groves of S—, I learned there was nothing she wouldn’t try. Ribbon dancing. Sky diving. Trapeze. The old me would’ve been intimidated by someone so up for everything, but the post-death me was emboldened. I was now like Jennifer—restless and in search of adventure too! Maybe she’d be up for cheating on her long-time partner! With a man, no less!

Storm clouds gathering, we passed the gates of the town’s famous cemetery, which looked alive, ironically, the wind its breath, the trees stretching and bending, like giants doing calisthenics. The headstones looked like a child trying to wriggle out of a sweater. I realized I had lost track of time; my death was likely imminent.

“I should go,” I blurted, interrupting Jennifer’s story about a recent trip to Bhutan.

“Is everything okay?”

“I have a work call.”

“On a Saturday?”

“Yeah, my boss is a dick,” I said, spinning around. “How do I get back to the hotel?”

Jennifer gave directions I was too agitated to absorb. I saw the yellow light. She smelled of pine needles. She said my name. I said hers. I considered asking if I could kiss her. If not in the moments before death, then when?

I thought I could see her thinking: The next time I hear about him, it’s going to be because he’s dead. She hugged me so tightly that I squeezed harder to match her force. We seemed to embrace for a long time. I worried I’d die at any moment in her arms. But then Jennifer let go. And I had done nothing. I was indeed the stay-in-one-place, watch-the-river-go-around-me guy.

“I’m glad you got back in touch,” she said, professionally, as if to erase what had just happened. “Keep me updated on your health.”

I said goodbye and bolted. Rounding the nearest corner, I died.

When I came to, my cheek was on the sidewalk, badly abraded. I tongued a salty gap in my gums. I’d lost a bicuspid. I staggered back to the hotel, spitting blood along the way. The doorman eyed me suspiciously and didn’t offer any help. The concierge returned my phone (only half-charged though I’d been gone for hours). I went to my room, cleaned myself up, checked out, bought a car charger, and drove back to the City.

◊

Soon after I returned, I began to die for two minutes twice a day. A few weeks later, three minutes. My oncologist warned that, according to “the brain lady,” after six minutes of heart stoppage, the brain begins to die. And yet, when my deaths surpassed six minutes, I continued to rise undamaged. That’s when the doctors requested my consent to be studied. I refused, having had my fill of hospital time.

Now, after about a year, I die for a full hour daily. One down, twenty-three to go! I did make one concession to my oncologist and agreed to wear a CPAP mask during my times of death to ensure some oxygen flow to the brain, and at work, where I had blinds put up over my office window, I frequently extol to my colleagues the many virtues of afternoon meditation. I block off more and more time, telling anyone who will listen that our lives are borrowed on credit, the interest rates are variable, and we’re all headed for zero balance.

Mika returns from Hong Kong tonight to celebrate my birthday. We’ve been corresponding daily for the past year. She’d recently said recovery had changed me, that I’d been given a new life. Not new life but death, I hadn’t said.

◊◊

Leland Cheuk author photoLeland Cheuk is the author of three books of fiction, including the novels The Misadventures of Sulliver Pong and most recently, No Good Very Bad Asian, forthcoming from C&R Press in October 2019. His work has appeared in Salon, Catapult, Joyland Magazine, Literary Hub, among others. He has been awarded fellowships at The MacDowell Colony, Hawthornden Castle, Djerassi, and elsewhere. He runs the indie press 7.13 Books and lives in Brooklyn.

Image credit: Karen Rile

KINDNESS WOMAN by Michelle Ross and Kim Magowan

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Michelle Ross and Kim Magowan
KINDNESS WOMAN

Kindness Woman has been working here barely seven months and already we hate her. This hate is of a different flavor than the antagonism we feel for Faye, who takes so many damn smoke breaks over the course of a day that even her emails reek of cigarettes—emails that often include full sentences in all-caps, sentences that bend and break with her scorn like the cigarette stubs she twists and grinds into a tin coffee can behind the building.

Kindness Woman’s brand of obnoxiousness sits on the opposite end of the spectrum as Faye’s. Her emails contain rainbows—each sentence a different color and a different font. Her emails invite us to help ourselves to the cake or brownies or homemade cranberry-walnut-unicorn bread that she has baked for our enjoyment on this beautiful day. Her emails always end with the word, “Enjoy!” It’s a command. As if that isn’t enough, some days she will walk around the building hawking a platter of brownies or a jar of lollipops. She stops at every desk. She says, “A brownie to make your morning sweet?” or “A lollipop to brighten your afternoon?” The price: only your dignity and having to endure her self-satisfied grin.

Kindness Woman won’t just anonymously leave her baked goods in the kitchen, like everyone else around here who wants to kill us slowly with sugar. Kindness Woman wants credit for her kindnesses. She wants applause.

“The thing about her is she never matured from high school,” says Terry, who works in HR and maintains that HR will turn the sweetest, most extroverted person into a misanthrope, so it’s not her fault she hates the world. “She’s still on the hunt for Senior Superlatives. Cheeriest Demeanor! Most Spirited!”

“Most Likely to Fill Up Your Email With Exclamation Points!” I say. Terry and I exchange a meaningful glance. Exclamation points are to us the splinters of punctuation marks. We share a deep disdain for those rows and rows of exclamation points in Kindness Woman’s emails, stiff and spiky like the barbed hooks of a stickabur. We share a disdain, frankly, for enthusiasm. Sometimes the only words Terry and I will exchange over the course of the day are “Shoot me now.” And yet—and I am being completely sincere here—we communicate so much with those three words, depending on where emphasis is laid. “Shoot me now” means seriously, it’s my turn to moan. “Shoot me now” conveys urgency, this level of bullshit is surpassingly dire.

Now Terry says these words, and she emphasizes all three. Her use of emphasis is so extreme, it brings to mind Kindness Woman’s exclamation points, but I don’t point this out to Terry. Kindness Woman is the reason for this bloated, bloodshot “Shoot me now.” Because Kindness Woman filed a complaint to HR against Faye for being mean to her.

“There’s a form for meanness complaints?” I say.

Terry squints at me. Then she says, “And who do you think Pamela tasked with the joyous assignment of investigating this complaint?”

“What’s an investigation entail exactly?” I say. “Do you tap their phones?”

Because we’re talking in the break room, we both eye the door constantly.

“Why doesn’t anyone file a complaint against Chad?” is what Terry says.

“Hard to prove a man is consciously looking at your breasts every time he talks to you?” I say. “Could be like being cross-eyed? He could say he can’t control his eyes?”

Terry sighs. She says, “For starters, I have to talk to these women. I have to sit down at a table and have conversations with the two most intolerable women in this lunatic asylum of an office. I have to get their sides of the story. I have to take the complaint seriously.”

“Don’t take this the wrong way, but I’m kind of envious. I want to be a fly on the wall. Maybe you could record your interviews? Just surreptitiously turn your phone face down? I’d love to hear Faye explain why she’s mean to Kindness Woman. What do you predict? ‘Because she’s fucking annoying?’”

Terry does not crack a smile. She folds her arms over her chest and looks at me bleakly. “Do you know why I got into HR?” she says. “I thought I could do some good in the world. I thought I could have some kind of influence on, say, diversity of hires. On practices of inclusivity. Bringing in good people and, okay, slapping the bad people, because dudes like Chad deserve to have their lives made uncomfortable. But no one utters a peep about Chad! Instead I get complaints along the lines of, ‘Faye said, Get those blondies out of my face, I do not give a shit if they have butterscotch chips.’” Terry bites her lip, then passes her hand across my forehead. “Obliviate. You didn’t hear me say that.”

Terry is always doing this, letting confidential things slip and then wiping my memory clean. I let my tongue hang out and glaze my eyes in response, performing successful memory eradication, but there is no cheering Terry up today.

“I think I’ve finally hit bottom,” she says. “I think this is the bottom of the goddamn well. The ninth circle of hell, here I am, getting chewed on by fucking Satan.”

“Here’s what I don’t get,” I say. “Isn’t this against Kindness Woman’s whole ethos? Isn’t lodging an official complaint pretty much the antithesis of kind?”

Terry looks at me pityingly. She says, “Isn’t our company motto, ‘All for one, and one for all’? Yet you remember how Pamela said to Julie when she found Julie using Isaac’s office when Isaac was on vacation, “You’re not on an office-level paygrade.” And then Julie came to me about it, me in my little cubicle five feet outside of Pamela’s office! All I could do was laugh until my face hurt. I said to her, ‘Julie, when the president of the company is also the director of HR, and your complaint is about said president, what do you expect me, who is also not office-level paygrade, to do about it?’”

Pamela enters the breakroom then, so I quickly switch the subject. I say, “Yeah, I started buying the generic sparkling waters. They taste the same but they’re nearly half the price.”

“Which flavor?” Terry says.

We try to look like we’re not monitoring Pamela out of the corners of our eyes as she slices a chunk of Kindness Woman’s latest will-you-please-be-my-friend bribe: something crumbly and weirdly white, like it might just be made entirely of sugar. That or cocaine.

“Lemon,” I say, “though the coconut is pretty good, too.”

Normally, I take pride in my ability to quickly come up with inane shit to talk about in Pamela’s presence, but right now, for some reason, I feel this sickening sadness. A lost-every-tooth-in-your-mouth kind of sadness. And that’s when I remember that I had this weird dream last night that I was excruciatingly depressed. Weird because normally I dream out-of-this-world shit, but a dream about being depressed is dreadfully of-this-world. In the dream, I was walking very slowly through a putty-colored landscape. I was on my way to buy Cascade liquid-powder combination dishwashing capsules; my shoulders were slumped. When I first woke it wasn’t immediately clear to me that I had been dreaming, or was now conscious, or what, if anything, distinguished the two states. I actually said out loud, “Wait, what?” and rolled over to my left. But of course there was no Karl lying next to me.

“Anything wrong, Grace?” Pamela says. She’s watching me narrowly with her bulbous eyes.

“I was just remembering this incredibly boring dream I had,” I said.

“Hmm. People say they have interesting dreams, and when they describe them, they’re incredibly boring. I wonder if that would make a description of an incredibly boring dream interesting? Or would it just be that much more boring?”

Pamela’s affect is so flat and deadpan that it’s impossible to distinguish between her philosophical observations and her jokes. Terry takes a gamble and laughs, and Pamela smiles graciously, so we know Terry guessed right.

“Well, I’ll leave you two to your dreams and sparkling water,” Pamela says, and departs holding aloft her powdery square of Kindness pastry.

Terry raises her eyebrows. “Now I know how to get Pamela to make a fucking fast exit. That was even speedier than when Sam starts telling stories about the latest accomplishments of her twins!” She looks at me more closely. “Hey, what’s up with you? You look like someone hit you with a hammer.”

There are a lot of things I could say at this point, but what I latch onto is what I woke up thinking, what made me so sad my reflection in the bathroom mirror shimmered and blurred. “I miss Karl.”

Terry looks at me, just looks at me, then nods. I’m pretty sure I know what Terry’s thinking but not saying—that I was the one who pushed for the separation, that I said Karl lacked the introspection to really love someone.

We hadn’t yet separated when Kindness Woman first showed up, and I told Karl about that woman’s damn emails and her peddling her treats around the office, and he said, “You sound like that Faye woman. It’s like you’re allergic to kindness. It’s like you want to be miserable.” I tried to explain to Karl that that’s the thing: it’s not kindness if you’re constantly begging for credit for your actions and if you’re pissed off when people don’t give you the thanks you believe you’ve earned. I said, “Maybe she believes she’s being kind, but that’s not kindness. It’s phoniness.” I’d talked before that point about us separating. I’d already said many times that I didn’t believe he really loved me. I’d said to him that I believed he believed he loved me, but that I didn’t feel genuinely loved because I was constantly having to ask him to be thoughtful towards me, and that on the rare occasions he was thoughtful, he made a big fuss about wanting me to praise him. When I called the Kindness Woman phony and manipulative, that was the turning point for Karl. That’s when he said, “You know what? I think you’re right. We should separate. Because you’re impossible to please.”

That’s when I thought, shit, he really doesn’t love me.

“Shoot me now,” I say.

Terry, who passed me Kleenex six months ago and said, “But Grace, isn’t the point that you didn’t really love him either?” nods again, turns her fingers into a gun, and takes aim. I’m standing there waiting for that too-slow, invisible bullet to pierce my heart when Kindness Woman enters the kitchen. She looks at me. She looks at Terry. Then she turns around and leaves, as though she couldn’t remember what it was she’d wanted.

◊◊

author photo michelle ross and kim magowanKim Magowan lives in San Francisco and teaches in the Department of Literatures and Languages at Mills College. Her short story collection Undoing (2018) won the 2017 Moon City Press Fiction Award. Her novel The Light Source is forthcoming from 7.13 Books this July. Her fiction has been published in Atticus Review, Cleaver, The Gettysburg Review, Hobart, New World Writing, Smokelong Quarterly, and many other journals. Her story “Madlib” was selected for Best Small Fictions 2019 (Sonder Press). Her story “Surfaces” was selected for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2019. She is the Fiction Editor of Pithead Chapel. More at www.kimmagowan.com.

Michelle Ross is the author of There’s So Much They Haven’t Told You (2017), which won the 2016 Moon City Press Short Fiction Award. Her fiction has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Alaska Quarterly Review, Colorado Review, Pidgeonholes, Electric Literature’s Recommended Reading, SmokeLong Quarterly, and other venues. Her story “One or Two?” was selected for Wigleaf‘s Top 50 2019. She is Fiction Editor of Atticus Review. She lives in Tucson, Arizona. More at www.michellenross.com.

Image credit: Alexander Krivitskiy on Unsplash

EXPECTING HIM by Natalie Gerich Brabson

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Little girl drawing with markers

Natalie Gerich Brabson
EXPECTING HIM

Maite and her daughter Pala arrived home only minutes ago, and already Pala’s settled in. She’s plopped in front of the TV, watching an inane show on the cartoon channel, all done telling Maite how she ate a cupcake at snack, that Lucy wasn’t playing nicely during recess. Maite hasn’t yet had a chance to change her shoes or chug a glass of water. Her feet ache like hell.

It’s quarter to six. Maite’s father should be here by now, should have beaten them home. Maite pulls back the curtains and scans the street once, twice, before acknowledging he has not arrived. She steals a moment to go into the bathroom, pull off her work shoes, and wash her swollen, sweaty feet. Hair strands and dust gather on the tiles; she hasn’t had time to clean for weeks. Sitting on the rim of the tub, she tips her chin up and shuts her eyes as she holds her feet steady under the cold stream. She pretends she is elsewhere, imagines she is smiling, then laughing open-mouthed.

Back in the front room, she peers through the window, and still her father’s car isn’t on the street. Pala has come to expect his visits. Every Friday afternoon, after Maite finishes her shift at the restaurant and picks up Pala from aftercare, he arrives at the house at 5:30 to take Pala to the neighborhood park. But it’s nearly six and he’s still not here. Maite’s throat tightens. She wants to huddle next to the window and press her face against it, watch until his car pulls up, just as she used to.

Word travels fast in their too-small town. When her father returned last fall, after many years gone, he soon learned of Pala and tracked down Maite’s number. He called and left a voicemail. He called again. She promised herself she wouldn’t pick up. She didn’t have to. When she did, he told her, “I’m different now. I wouldn’t have left you, Maite. Or I’d at least have visited. I wish I could do it all over again.”

She said nothing. Eventually he cut through her silence. “Can I meet my grandbaby?”

No, no, Maite thought. Pala. But should she deny any relationship? And if he was, as he averred, in town to stay, and if he really could be in Pala’s life…

Half a year now, every Friday. He has never been this late. Maite stands clutching the curtain—she wants to curl up, and, if his car doesn’t appear soon, hide her face in her knees. But she cannot, not in front of Pala.

Pala tugs at Maite’s pants, and Maite steps back. Pala wants to look out the window too; already she’s resting her chin on the windowsill. Maite places her hand on Pala’s head and guides her toward the kitchen, where she prepares Pala’s snack, apple slices alongside a dollop of peanut butter. Pala eats noisily, looking around the room, squirming in her chair to look at the door.

“Soon,” Maite says. “I’m sorry.”

Pala nods. She puts an apple slice flat on her plate and squishes it until a drop of juice emerges. She licks the drop off the plate, looking at Maite as she does so, but Maite doesn’t correct her behavior.

Maite notices the emptiness in her own stomach. Most days, she doesn’t eat lunch because the restaurant where she waitresses makes her pay for any food she takes, and it’s too expensive. Now, she fixes herself her own apple and peanut butter snack, the two munching in silence. Then Pala asks, “Can I watch my show?”

“I think it’s over by now.” The clock shows a quarter past six. Maite checks the voicemail, but he hasn’t left a message. She thinks, This is the time, this is when it will happen. He’s not coming for her.

“I want to make sure,” Pala says, glancing back at the front room.

“Your show ended.” Maite doesn’t want Pala checking for him again by the window, nor discovering that the cartoon channel plays endless reruns after new episodes air. “You can draw here.”

Pala scowls at Maite, but she finds her markers and paper and returns to the kitchen table without complaint. Soon she’s immersed in her artwork. Pala’s expression is strained, betraying her worry, but Maite doesn’t say anything more to her. Maite chomps into her second apple, this time without cutting it up first. She dips the skinless wound into the peanut butter, then takes another bite, gooey.

Finally, his knock. Maite opens the door, and he stoops right on the porch, stretching his arms wide. Pala leaps from the couch, and runs into his embrace.

“My sweet little bee girl,” he coos. He kisses her head only once, his eyes meeting Maite’s.

“I’m so sorry I’m late. Traffic, you know. Hi, honey.” He rises to hug Maite. She lets him, but she goes stiff, moving away from his body until he releases her.

“How was work?” he asks.

She shakes her head and turns away, toward Pala. “Well, your grandpa is here for you,” she says. “Do you want to show him your drawing?”

Pala crosses her arms behind her back, and softly says, “Later.”

“Let’s get going,” Maite’s father says to her.

“Hold on,” Maite tells him. “It’s 6:30. Maybe the park’s not a good idea anymore.”

“It’s safe. It’ll be light out all evening,” he says.

“Let me finish this apple,” Maite says. I’m almost done.”

“You don’t have to come with us. Rest. I’ve got her.”

“I’m coming.”

The park is down the street. Maite’s feet still hurt, and she drags behind her father and Pala. Her father glances back once to smile at Maite, saying to Pala, “Your mother should be like me. She shouldn’t work so hard.” Maite can’t get herself to smile back.

She speeds up, walks close enough to overhear their conversation when her father turns again toward Pala, who’s chattering away, no longer, apparently, distressed at her grandfather’s lateness. He’s good at talking to Pala. He’s better at responding to her tangential conversation style—new since she turned five—than Maite.

“What did you like about school today?”

“It was Ella’s birthday.”

“Did she bring any treats for the class?”

Pala nods. “The cots in kindergarten are bad.”

“What makes you say they’re bad?”

“We have to nap every day.”

“You’ll be missing that in a few months, when you grow up and go to first grade.”

It’s early June, and near the park, cottonwood seeds float everywhere. The wind gusts and releases more from the trees. There’s a gully alongside the path, filled with a few inches of water. Some seeds have been blown by the wind into the runoff. They form clumps on the surface as they are carried away in the slow-moving water.

A seed catches in Pala’s hair.

“Snow,” Maite calls to her, but Pala doesn’t hear.

They step through the park’s gate. There are already children on the playground, and Pala studies them before reaching for her grandfather’s hand to walk over to the hill. Maite follows them to the top and finds a tree trunk to lean against. From this tree, she’ll be able to see Pala all the way down to the edge of the park, and on the playground too, if Pala leads her grandfather there.

Pala pitches forward, briefly on all fours, then sprawls on the ground.

“Are you going to roll down the hill?” Maite’s father asks.

“You roll, please,” Pala responds.

He shakes his head. “I don’t know how. You have to show me.”

She springs up. “You know! You know!”

“I don’t. Teach me how to roll down the hill.”

Pala lies at the top of the hill again, and tips into motion. Her limbs are loose, and her roll is clumsy and slow. She’s not yet halfway down when she stands and falls again, trying to roll faster. Her white leggings, new, are streaked green and brown.

Maite’s father trails Pala’s path, only a few steps behind her. Maite hopes he’s keeping an eye out for rocks that Pala could bump her head on. She wants to look out herself or take her father’s place behind Pala. If she saw any danger ahead, she’d pick Pala up, run. She could run fast, even on her work-swollen feet. She could run faster than anyone for Pala. She imagines running with Pala all the way down the hill, gaining momentum, and flying her out of the park, across the street and beyond, to the good side of town. They’d go to New York, somewhere big, a place where Pala could do anything, where she’d be unharmed.

If they left now, Pala might forget these early years, the last few months. They would have to leave soon, though—her memory is getting stronger, and she’s beginning to track patterns. She knows when Friday is coming, when Friday’s here, when to expect his car in the driveway.

Maite takes off her shoes and socks, folds the socks into a ball and places them in one shoe. She lets herself feel the soles of her feet on the bristly grass. She pulls the grass up with her toes, then gathers the blades and throws them into the air. They do not hover—they fall before the wind can catch them. The blades of grass don’t have the magic of cottonwood seeds.

Pala is tumbling down the hill again, but the hill isn’t steep enough, and she comes to a halt every few rotations. The late afternoon light, glaring, hits Pala’s hair, makes it glow. Momentarily she lies still, belly-up. Her hair has fallen in front of her face, tangled and wild. Watching, Maite holds her shins and pulls her legs close, huddles, hugs.

Pala jumps up to catch her grandfather’s hand, dragging him to his knees. He calls, “Mind yourself! Log coming through,” and waits until Pala backs away, safe, before he begins to roll. Pala takes another cautious step backward, then springs into motion and runs after him.

Maite won’t admit it to him, but she remembers her father took her to this same park, before the playground equipment had been replaced. It must have been only a few months before he left. She was twelve, and was reluctant to play, believing she was too old to be at the playground with her father. She remembers too well.

Watching Pala chase her grandfather down the hill, Maite feels a tickle on the bridge of her foot: an ant. She is momentarily fascinated by its steady crawl, how it wields its antennae like windmills. Then she reacts, shaking her foot violently to free herself from the ant. It falls to the grass, and soon disappears.

Her father has not yet led Pala back up the hill. If Maite called to Pala now, her voice would not carry. She digs her feet into the earth and pushes her back against the tree trunk. She scrapes her heels furiously, and the dirt loosens and allows her to hollow out depressions. She cannot root herself enough.

The sun has not yet neared the horizon. It’ll be light for another couple of hours, but there are fewer children on the playground. Those remaining are much older than those Maite noticed when they entered the park. She can’t see any adults among them. The teenagers cluster near the swings. Their laughs are loud and movements loose. One boy has his arm hooked around the swing’s pole and hangs back carelessly. He looks toward the hill. Pala might not be visible to him. Maite hopes he won’t lead the teenagers any closer to Pala.

Finally, Pala races her grandfather up the hill.

Maite calls to her. “Let’s go home!”

Pala glances over briefly but pretends she doesn’t hear. She bows her head as she runs, her eyes directed to the ground, serious.

Maite cries, “Let’s go! Let’s go!” She pronounces go like goo, as if she’s joking.

“We just got here. Let’s stay a little longer, Mom,” her father says. “Maite, it might be the best day of the summer. Let her play.”

Maite throws her head back to the sky, too blue, and doesn’t argue. Pala recognizes that she has more time, and she pulls her grandfather toward the teeter-totter, which is thankfully far from the other playground equipment and the teenagers. Maite’s father walks slowly, and Pala hangs on his arm, dragging him, giggling, shouting, “Faster, Papa!”

He slows down, and says, “I can’t! You’ll have to leave me behind.”

Pala’s overtaken by peals of laughter. She’s clutching his arm too tightly, refusing to release her grasp. Maite thinks, Let go, let go. One day you may not have a choice.

Maite will tell him he can’t come late for Pala. No, she will tell him it is best if he doesn’t come at all. She fears that his disappearance will repeat, that it’s inevitable.

She’ll tell him today, she promises herself. She’ll send Pala to her room to clean up her toys when they get home. Pala doesn’t clean yet, but she pretends: she will get caught up with playing and won’t try to overhear. Maite will tell him then. She’ll say it doesn’t matter that he is Pala’s only grandfather—she can’t let Pala get attached to someone who eventually won’t be there for her.

But when they arrive, Maite is slow to take off her shoes. Pala immediately leads her grandfather to the kitchen, hands him her drawing, and beams at him as he studies it. Maite can’t bring herself to interrupt their connection. She lets go of her breath, remains silent for one more moment.

“It’s beautiful,” he tells Pala. “Is it a cheetah?”

Pala shakes her head.

“A lion? An ocelot?”

No, no.

It’s a housecat, Maite thinks. It’s the only thing Pala ever draws, for years now. But her father is patient with Pala, and he plays her game and keeps guessing until he gets it right. And when he does, he tries to hand the drawing back to her, but she tells him, “You can have it.”

He bends down to hug her, not apologetically as he did when he greeted her, but fully. Pala steps on his toes to hug him back. She looks toward Maite, waits for her grandfather to pick her up.

◊◊

Natalie Gerich Brabson author photoNatalie Gerich Brabson is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s MFA program, and holds a BA in Hispanic Studies from Vassar College. Her fiction has been published in New World Writing and Eunoia Review. In 2017, she received the Go On Girl Book Club Unpublished Writer Award. She lives in Philadelphia, and is at work on her first novel.

Image credit: Rudy and Peter Skitterians on Pixabay

CONSTANCE COMES HOME by David Priest

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

living room with sofa, plant

David Priest
CONSTANCE COMES HOME

Danielle hated her feet. She hated that the knuckle at the base of each big toe bulged out like a Ping-Pong ball. She hated that if she pressed the pad of her finger against, say, her right foot, it would leave a little oblong mark for full seconds before blood seeped back in. They were always cold, too, but sweated continuously. This was the worst part. It was the reason she wore socks in her own home. Otherwise she’d leave moist negatives of her feet on every hard surface in the house.

But now Danielle was barefoot. She was walking slowly, allowing each foot to light on each tile, one at a time, in Constance’s house. When she closed her eyes Danielle was Constance, with her white pants that boasted a runner’s lithe confidence, confidence that rendered the usual socks unnecessary. Of course, neighbor Constance was really at the gym—Monday/Wednesday/Friday—and daughter Harmony was at school and husband Dorian was working till five-thirty. She had the house for hours.

Here was Danielle—walking tile-by-tile, sitting at the kitchen island, perusing Fitness Magazine, sauntering to the fridge and pulling out a futuristic glass cylinder of sparkling Norwegian water, drinking it luxuriously, savoring the carbonation tickling down her throat. Danielle straightened a picture magnet of the pert young Harmony gripping a platinum-blue tennis racket and resting it on her shoulder—the sinews of her forearm pronounced as if she’d been perfecting her backhand only moments before the photographer had snapped the shot.

Danielle turned, screwed the metallic top back onto the water bottle, and gazed at the rich cream tile floor. In the bay window light, her damp footprints tracked from the front hall to the kitchen like soft gold islands. The tracks led to ten wiggling toes, nails colorless.

Danielle turned to the clock as Constance had probably done countless times while making dinner, waiting for Harmony and Dorian to come bursting in, poised to smile and laugh—activities catalyzed by Mother’s wonderfully aromatic food. Spaghetti and meatballs, a classic, magically infused with joy. Dorian would cup one breast while Harmony looked away, embarrassed by her parents’ carnality. He would nibble her neck in just the way to make her shiver. Danielle shivered.

◊

Danielle’s daughter Julie had screamed the night before. She’d been standing in the center of her pink room, Danielle in the hallway looking in. Husband Bob was downstairs on the couch. In the silence right after Julie’s first shriek (“You’re such a bitch!”), Danielle thought she heard the volume on the television downstairs tick up.

Danielle made herself small. She felt apparitional in the dark hallway. Julie was standing splayfooted, hair mussed, the ceiling light above her purging the room of shadows. One side of her head was shaved.

Danielle didn’t fully understand why Julie was screaming. Mother Danielle had simply expressed concern for her daughter’s romantic possibilities with such a haircut. Dark purple tears were tracing parentheses on Julie’s face, around the “o” of her mouth. It was like some indecipherable text message.

“Why do you even care?” Julie had screamed, fists balled at her sides and torso tilted forward. Danielle thought her daughter looked cartoonish, a mannequin donning adolescent fury.

The teen curled her upper lip—experimentally, Danielle thought. “You’re going to die alone, you know.” Now the girl was aiming for cruel. “But you don’t know. You have no idea. I almost feel sorry for you.”

Be the adult, Dani, Bob had chided some years before, when Danielle had shouted at Little Julie to go to her room. Little Julie had said dinner tasted like dog shit.

The casserole wasn’t worth a fight, he’d said. Be the adult, Dani.

“Julie,” Danielle said now, arms folding, “don’t you think you’re being a little melodramatic?”

◊

By this time, Danielle knew Constance’s home intimately. She visited twice per week, on Monday and Wednesday, since schedules seemed a bit more fluid on Friday, what with Harmony returning home early to pack for weekend tennis tournaments, and Constance of course pumiced and made-up to drive her daughter counties or states away, as needed, always smiling.

But today (Wednesday) fell in the middle of the workweek when, Danielle knew, most men of the subdivision would be preoccupied amid the routine of eat/work/sleep, and most women’s to-do’s would dwindle to kiddycare, hubbycare, and bodycare. She and Bob were no different, only he stayed late most weekdays now.

Wednesdays were Danielle’s favorite, because she felt the safest in others’ homes. Less chance of being interrupted, of having to slip out a sliding glass door in back as she’d had to do twice before—neither time a Wednesday. But today was not just any Wednesday. Today was special. Danielle could feel it.

◊

The back stairway hair-pinned, a strip of plush carpet rolled directly down the middle of each flight, hugging the contours of each stair, attached with a line of heavy-duty construction staples under each wooden flange and at the crook of each step. Danielle knew the staples were hidden in the carpet’s abundant pile because she’d examined them closely the first time she’d explored Constance’s home.

Danielle was proud of her eye for detail. She went barefoot on these expeditions to memorize the feel of each carpet, laminate, tile. She laid her cheek to each countertop, watched how her breath stayed or dissipated from the marble, the soapstone, the quartz. Danielle could write a book on the empty homes of Court of Spruce, a book only for her.

First floors, for example, tended toward the immaculate, with untouched sitting rooms and wife-kept kitchens. The only rooms that occasionally showed some wear were those the men inhabited—shoes congregating in the corners, plates with crusted-on unidentifiables slid halfway under the couch, video game consoles in the middle of the floor with bundled cords slithering out and toward the televisions. When one visited another’s home (socially, that is), one was almost guaranteed a brief tour, including the controlled mess of the male-inhabited living room (which sometimes even boasted a live specimen before he fled upstairs).

On Wine Wednesdays, for instance, Ilana Burkins made a habit of clicking her tongue in gentle reproof at her eighth-grade twins finishing a shooting game on the TV.

“Boys,” she would say knowingly, and the other women would sigh and roll their eyes.

Boys, men, and their mess were to be displayed, within reason. Danielle knew this, because she’d often seen Ilana’s house six hours prior to Wine Wednesdays, and she knew which rooms were tidied, and which weren’t.

At first, Danielle had found first floors to be of great interest. She discovered pornography stashed in cardboard boxes and external hard drives, sometimes in plain sight. She quickly came to understand that most men on the block watched pornos, and many women were either fully aware or in denial. Bob was one of the few who seemed not to masturbate daily, and Danielle had secreted in her chest both a bud of pride at this revelation and a flowering, prurient captivation with the unfulfilled sexuality in other husbands. Like animals caged, she thought.

With time, though, Danielle tired of the performance of the kitchen, the living room, the entryway. The clearest windows into the life of each house were in the bedrooms.

The second time Danielle had visited Ilana Burkins’ house, she’d found a large, purple and elaborately textured dildo tucked snugly between the baseboard and the mattress of the master bedroom. She looked at Ilana differently for weeks.

While Ilana was out of town, though, Danielle made the discovery that Ilana Burkins wasn’t the one who utilized the tool. It had been moved, recently scrubbed with lavender soap, midway through her vacation. It had to be Husband Alex. Danielle seriously doubted that Ilana was unaware of its presence, and would smile to herself while making dinner, imagining that Alex may in fact have asked his dutiful wife to penetrate him with it. Danielle had to fight back the titters imagining it. She was certain Ilana would comply with any such requests.

The drama reached its pinnacle, though, the week Ilana and Alex celebrated their anniversary in the Caribbean, when Danielle had found the dildo missing from its usual spot. Instead it was tucked haphazardly under the bed of one of the twins. The boy must have fantasized about his vestigially pretty mother using it. The families on Court of Spruce all had such secrets that only Danielle knew.

◊

Constance Jones’ home was the first Danielle visited. This was a year ago now, after Bob had asked whether Danielle still used her gym membership. Realizing he truly wouldn’t notice, she canceled it, leaving two hours of every weekday suddenly unoccupied. She began by reading, picking up a stack of books—mostly romances—from the library and flipping through them while cradled in the front window seat. But she couldn’t concentrate, and so found herself watching the other homes around Court of Spruce. It was like a miniature society, so slickly routined Danielle could unfocus her eyes and the day would pass in moments.

It was nothing at all that started it. Constance’s daughter, Harmony, the last to leave on Tuesday mornings, left a cup of coffee on the roof of her car—a cute European toy made life-size. It slid off the roof, smashing on the street as she raced away.

Danielle walked out to the street, gathered the porcelain shards, and gingerly carried them to Constance’s front door. She knocked, though she knew no one was home. She tried the knob, found the door unlocked. Then, without knowing why, she entered. Closing the door behind her, Danielle realized suddenly that she hadn’t taken a full breath all day, maybe all week. She inhaled the lingering essence of Constance, and discovered it to be the same Sweet Pea perfume Danielle had worn in high school. She recalled holding her wrist to a friend’s nose, the friend breathing and sighing. I like it. When had Danielle started wearing more “adult” perfume, and then just deodorant? She couldn’t remember.

Danielle started testing the doors of all her neighbors, at first bringing long-forgotten borrowed eggs or cups of sugar, then bringing nothing. Only two of the women on the block worked. One, Charlene, had a maid. The other, Breena, couldn’t keep her home clean. When she made it to Wine Wednesdays, she would half whisper her contentment to the other women, her confidence that Husband Barry fully supported her law practice. But Danielle knew Barry didn’t even delete his laptop’s history, which boasted video of busty maids after video of “lonely wives,” grinding against various cleaning and cooking tools. There were no videos, Danielle noted, of sexy lawyers.

The stay-at-home mothers like Ilana had their secrets, too, their weaknesses. Danielle would remind herself of this while staring in the mirror after the evening she hosted Wine Wednesday, where Katerina Fuchs averted her eyes from the kitchen sink, empty but still streaked with grime. How had Danielle forgotten to scrub the sink? Well, thought Danielle, how had Katerina allowed her daughter to get pregnant in college?

Yet in all her time inspecting Constance Jones’ home—two days a week for a year now—Danielle never found anything out of place. Nothing to suggest sexual kinks in Constance and Dorian’s room. No drugs or alcohol or even condoms under Harmony’s bed. Closets were in order, desks were work-only, and computers practically sparkling.

◊

Danielle stood in the center of Constance and Dorian’s room. The carpet was beige, the walls white, the bedding brown with ornate, crème stitching. In one corner of the room a door led to the master bathroom—all marble and frosted glass. On Dorian’s side of the bed (right) lay a short stack of police novels, edges flush. Constance’s side was furnished with a vanity. A gold carousel of jewelry and a makeup bag rested on top.

Danielle felt something click inside her chest, like a clock’s hour hand locking into place. She picked up a glass bottle of Crybaby-Pink polish and hopped onto the bed like she was at a slumber party. She’d always wondered how the bottle would feel in her hand, how Crybaby-Pink would look on her toes. She’d always wanted to lie in this bed. The perfect bedspread broke pleasantly underneath her. She rested her chin on her knee as she layered thick polish in even stripes onto her toenails. She sat back against the pillowed headboard and stretched her toes, worming them in the gentle draft of the A/C.

Danielle could breathe out, reclining on Constance’s bed. This house was calming her. She could always count on that, from the first time until now. Everything was organized, proper. Everything was soft. She pulled the lump of her cell phone from her back pocket and dropped it on Dorian’s pillow. She turned toward the open closet door and began planning the outfit she would put on when her toes dried.

Lying there, Danielle fell asleep.

◊

Last night, Mother Danielle had pulled Julie’s laptop from her backpack and sat in the living room. She decided to read some of Julie’s school assignments. Maybe there she could find some sense in the girl’s behavior. It’d only been a few months of this, of new music, new clothes, new makeup—all darker. Maybe it was just a phase. Or maybe, she thought, mousing through folders on the desktop, it wasn’t.

“Not a good idea,” said Bob, feet on the coffee table, hand on the TV remote.

It’d been a few months since Danielle had inspected her own home, let alone Julie’s laptop, but she quickly found a folder called “School.” She skimmed an essay on the Civil War, on democracy. She read the introduction of an essay on an author she’d never heard of, tried to bite her imaginary tongue, failed, thought, Well, it’s not grabbing my attention. She deleted a comma, exited without saving.

Julie’s door opened upstairs, and Danielle slid the laptop back into place, pulled her knees against her chest, and hugged them.

◊

Danielle’s phone was vibrating beside her head, floating across the pillow as though trying to creep away unnoticed. It was an unknown number. She picked it up.

“Hello, this is Constance.”

“Hello?” A man’s voice. “I’m sorry, I’m looking for Mrs. Danielle Kimpan.”

“I’m sorry,” said Danielle, yawning the sleep from her voice. “This is she.”

The clock beside the bed said 2:20. Constance should’ve been home by now. Danielle stood, surprised by her own calm.

“Your daughter is Julie Kimpan? This is Principal Quinn.” The man covered the mouthpiece of his phone and spoke to someone on the other side. He returned. “I’m sorry to call you, but Julie’s in my office right now. A teacher found her smoking marijuana in a school bathroom. Can you come in today?”

He sounded bored. Danielle could empathize.

“I can’t,” she sat on the bedside, gazing down at her new toes. They looked nice, and for once, Danielle didn’t mind her feet. “Actually, can you call back another time?”

She hung up. After a few moments the phone vibrated again. She silenced it.

Where was Constance? Danielle wondered again at her cool, wondered if it was simply this home, so perfectly composed, that made Constance herself so perfectly composed.

Another part of Danielle nagged. Something was wrong. Then again, Constance was often late. If she met up with friends for a post-workout brunch. If she stopped at the bank or grocery.

But maybe something else had happened. Maybe, maybe Constance was in an accident. Maybe she’d gone to the hospital. Maybe she wasn’t coming home at all.

Danielle yawned again, stretched, and felt her whole body expand. Why worry? She tossed her phone back onto the bed. Who cared where Constance was? She was here.

◊

That morning, Bob had been eating breakfast in his dress shirt and boxers, daubing flecks of egg from his plate with a too-small bit of sourdough. His fingertips were yolky. With the other hand, he scrolled through headlines on his phone, reading them aloud the same way he read signs and billboards as they drove, to fill the silence.

“South Carolina man dives off waterfall trying to save dog,” he said. “New Jersey mom strangles newborn, throws her in garbage.”

Danielle sat beside him, taking slow bites of yogurt, setting her top teeth to drag against the curve of the spoon, her tongue to hollow it out. Suddenly, she realized it’d been weeks—maybe more—since she and Bob had made love. Finishing another bite of yogurt, she scooted her chair toward Husband Bob, and slipped her feet under his thigh to warm them.

“Entitled parents are hurting their kids.” He lifted his leg, pushed her ankles with his yolky hand. “Jesus, your feet are clammy. Put on some socks.”

Danielle waited until Bob left for work, then she went to his desktop to watch porn—perhaps just to leave a single blemish on his history. When she clicked on the browser, a window was already open—an icon for an online document, connected to Bob’s work email. It was titled, “Dear Danielle.” For a moment, she couldn’t think who would’ve written it. To Julie, she was “mom,” and to Bob, she was “Dani.” Yet there it was. She hesitated a moment, then clicked it open.

Dear Danielle, We’ve been married for a long time and it has not been an unhappy marriage but not a happy one either.

Danielle cringed at the punctuation.

I think it would be best if we took some time apart. Julie says it is better to grow up with divorced parents than miserable ones, and I think we are both miserable if I am being honest.

Danielle felt her jaw pop, and realized it was locked shut. She tried to open it, failed.

Next steps might be hard but they are what we must take. We both contributed to the house but I think whoever Julie decides to stay with should keep it.

Son of a bitch. Of course Julie would pick Father Bob, because Father Bob—soon to be Bachelor Bob—let her do whatever she wanted. Fifteen years ago, they’d used Danielle’s inheritance from her dead aunt to put a down payment on this house, and now—now what?

The room began to spin. Danielle gripped the arms of her chair, felt their edges dig into her palm. She squeezed her eyes shut, lowered her forehead between her knees. She tried to breathe, found her lungs weren’t working properly, and ran outside, across the street, into safety.

◊

Constance’s closet was organized by season and color. Across from the monochromatic tones of Dorian’s suits, Constance’s blouses (top rack) and pants (bottom rack) opened up like a box of pastels. On one end of the pants rack was a bureau with the top-drawer half open, bras carefully folded inside.

Danielle shed her clothes in a small pile and walked to the dresser. No pushup bras, she knew. Constance was pragmatic. She fished out a lacy bralette Constance didn’t wear enough and pulled it over her head, cupping her breasts into place one at a time. The underwear drawer remained, as usual, unopened. Danielle slid on a pair of white jeans, sucked in her belly, and buttoned them. She couldn’t wear them as low on her hips as Constance, but she could wear them.

For her top Danielle already knew the tunic she wanted. It matched her toes—a pink, loose fitting, button-up whose translucence whispered of the bra underneath. On Constance, the top hung loose with subtle swells at her breasts and over her bottom. But as Danielle buttoned up in front of the mirror, she thought it fit her better. The buttons at the bosom looked eager to unclasp, revealing a hint of black lace and soft flesh underneath.

Constance’s summer heels were still under the bed. When Danielle looked for them, she realized they had migrated closer to Dorian’s side over the cold months. She circled the bed, knelt, and stretched, hooking two fingers over the straps of a pair of toeless heels. Suddenly she noticed the tearable fabric under the mattress falling strangely: the faint shape of an envelope. New since last week.

Sitting on Dorian’s side of the bed, heels beside her, Danielle turned over in her hands what she’d found. Thick paper. Plain white. Written in tiny, exact print on the front: open alone. The flap looked to have been torn open hastily. She pushed it open and pulled out the card. On the white front, a glittery gold print read Happy Birthday, Daddy! Inside the card was one line, penciled by the same hand as the envelope front: 10:30 in the copy room. -Catie.

That was all.

Danielle’s throat tightened. Dorian didn’t have a second daughter. Little dark-eyed Catie—an intern, Danielle was sure—waiting in the copy room. One lamp would be on in the corner. Her highlighted hair would be teased, playing at her collarbone. A little diamond stud would be tucked in her bellybutton, under that fitted dress shirt and high-waisted pencil skirt.

Danielle snapped the card closed and strapped on her heels, a perfect fit. She stood, a little wobbly at first, and walked to the bathroom. Danielle stared in the mirror at her red-rimmed eyes. She slapped herself, just once. A sharp sting radiated on her cheek before receding into a dull warmth—a cute half-blush, she thought. Danielle turned on the faucet, cupped water, and washed her face.

After she finished, she walked to the bed and picked up the letter, sliding it back into the envelope. As she tucked it into her pocket, she noticed how sexy her heels looked. They were nude leather, and her toes poked out like a pink bouquet, like roses.

She walked down the front stairway, pulling her hair back into a tight ponytail. Someone had left the door cracked, so she closed it. Her heels clicked tile-by-tile down the front hall to the kitchen, Crybaby Pink gloss shining in the light. A glass water bottle was sweating, puddling on the counter. Dorian was always leaving the kitchen such a mess, she thought. She put the water in the fridge.

She walked to the pristine sitting room—where she’d wiped the coffee table and pounded the couches two weeks ago for spring cleaning. The curtain rings squealed on the rod as she let in the sun. Dorian would be home soon. Constance sat on the couch. She folded one leg over the other, reversed them, and set the envelope on the coffee table in front of her, in full view of the front door. She folded her hands. She waited.

◊◊

David Priest author photoDavid Priest is a journalist and a 2018 International Regional Magazine Association (IRMA) Gold Award recipient for Nature and Environmental Writing. His stories and essays have appeared recently in The American Literary Review, Salon, Arkansas Life, Reservoir, Transect Magazine, and elsewhere. He lives in Louisville, KY with his wife, Lindsey, and two sons, Idris and Atticus. In his spare time, he can be found playing board games with his family.

Image credit: Bernard Hermant on Unsplash

LEAVE NO TRACE by Geri Ulrey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Woman Hiking in forest in California

Geri Ulrey
LEAVE NO TRACE

Sam and Viet stand in his small blue kitchen. Viet has stopped stirring his chard lentil soup while Sam tries to figure out what to do: Three nights a week on the mountain, leading small groups up Whitney, or sleeping out in Alabama Hills, climbing.

I’m doing ok, she says. It’s just I think I should find a room or something, short term.

Viet says, I see what you mean.

Renewing my one-year lease, don’t you agree it’s financially a waste?

Viet says, Yes. It seems that way.

Unless I can be sure I can find a subletter.

Viet says, Move in here.

He keeps stirring, watching the chard shrink. He adds cayenne.

Sam can hear it before he says it: You have practically been living here for two years anyway. We spend nearly every hour together, when you aren’t guiding. Or when I’m not out there searching with my team.

But Viet just stirs the dark green leaves, making sure they get smothered by the hot liquid.

Viet, let’s not—

It’s practical.

He smiles at her, charmed with his own logic and that he got her this time.

He says, Wasn’t that your New Year’s resolution?

Viet, I’m not moving in here.

She says it like it would be succumbing to disease.

Sam moves in close trying to smooth over the hurt and wraps her arms around his middle. She wishes she could take it back.

Sam, what are we doing here?

She nuzzles the back of his neck.

Having fun.

Five years of fun?

Viet, let’s not do this.

She steps forward. If they hug tight enough, they won’t have to talk about this again.

He pushes her away. Then snaps.

Fuck you, Samantha!

Viet picks up the heavy blue pot and moves to the kitchen table where his industrial sized dehydrator sits. He begins to scoop the soup onto the plastic liner of the top tray. He smooths the lumpy soup like he’s spreading pancake dough on a griddle.

◊

Deep on the trail, Sam thinks about that moment. Replays it. Sees it. Hears it.

Fuck you, Samantha.

It’s been four days, and the words still roll around in Sam’s head. With each step up the mountain, her ears still hurt. It’s 9,000 feet up ridges and another 6,000 feet descending down trails. Long feathery pine needles underfoot the entire way.

Firmly, decisively, a warning of sorts, the way a parent tells a child not to do something that might hurt. Don’t go near the edge. Stop right there. Put that down.

Sam breathes out, Fuck you, Viet Tran. Fuck you. She says it out loud. Her words, even the ones in her head, are more sinister than Viet’s words ever could be. In her mind, she hisses, trying to hurt him.

She likes her nomad life.

But what she really wants is to erase Viet’s words from her mind.

Scattered needles crisp and crack under the tread of Sam’s boots. She finds a spot that is neither hidden nor exposed. Perfect. Sam always laughs whenever Viet calls digging a six inch hole into the ground, a cat hole, “the facilities.”

Sam squats all the way to the ground and digs. The underlayer pushes back against her bright orange trowel. Stumps get in the way. She knows the hole must be six inches deep, so she muscles each scoop of pine and gently places the under layer a few inches away from her. The deeper she gets the more hard earth she finds. Pebbles. Tree branches. Twigs. It’s all hard and clumpy.

When Sam pulls her pants down to her ankles, she can hear and then see a shape of a person in the shadows, between the rocks and trees. There’s a bend and a dip before the mound of rock, some fifty feet away on the ridge. Her eyes flutter up it, like a pilot tracing a line of attack, a path in the sky. Then she catches a flash of movement; she knows he or she probably can’t see her; she or he is probably just a weekend backpacker trying to find a spot of privacy.

That’s all Sam wants to find out here too. Privacy.

◊

As soon as a client confirms their trip by making a payment in full, Sam sends an email with a two-page list of needed gear. Nothing is extra. She also sends all her clients one-sheets of the most important technical aspects of using or buying gear. Each sheet describes one important component: how to layer your clothes, how to pack your backpack, how to set up a tent, how to filter water, how to dig a cat hole, pack out your trash, use a wag bag, and the luxury and usefulness of a courtesy bag. When she meets up with the client, she goes through their gear and throws out everything that is unneeded as they bargain with her. All seasoned backpackers know that items worth carrying on the trail, anything worth the weight on your back, cutting into your skin, must have more than one use. You are allowed one luxury item.

Most of Sam’s clients are women, and she resents this. More women request Sam than her fellow senior guides, the male guides. Women like sharing the trail and the summit with other women. They are more comfortable. But they are also more inspired; they like seeing Sam’s superman strength. Sam is a tiny woman and she suspects men don’t like sharing the trail with her because they know she’s stronger than them. She can out-carry, out-climb, out-summit most everyone on the trail. And men, even the novices, the guys from places like San Diego and Burbank and San Jose, who fly in for their Mount Whitney excursions, these men who took days off for their adventure vacation don’t want to be surpassed, helped, encouraged by a woman. Viet likes this part of Sam. Why won’t he accept the rest?

At the bottom of last page of the gear list, marked with asterisks, Sam writes, Nothing on the trail should have only one function.

◊

Sam fills the cat hole with pine needles, pats the ground with her trowel then places a slab of rock on top. She packs out her trash, the toilet paper, wrapping it onto itself and carefully dropping the bundle into a Ziploc, then uses a stick to push it down, making sure to not brush finger to paper. Then she drops the Ziploc into her odor proof NyloPro bag, just a fancy version of a turkey roasting bag, twisting its end, tying it. Even though the cold temperature makes this last step unnecessary, she double bags it. Then she buries the NyloPro deep inside a dark plastic shopping bag with handles, a bag she got from the liquor store in Lone Pine when she bought vodka to drink back home, alone.

Sam stops and listens, watching the sky go dark. She thinks maybe she can see some clouds forming wide sheets. She thinks maybe that storm is coming a little early.

Sam is pulled back and remembers she isn’t alone. Scanning the ridge above she sees the shadows move again and wraps her fingers tight around her black plastic bag. It crinkles loud. She hears needles breaking under her feet.

◊

At camp Sam heats water to a boil and pours it into a Ziploc pouch that holds dinner, dehydrated chard and lemon lentil soup, Viet’s famous recipe. Fresh chard and garlic from Viet’s garden, lemons picked from a friend’s tree in Los Angeles, and organic brown lentils from the Lone Pine market. She remembers the night Viet made this particular batch. They laid in bed for hours, tangled, as a storm came through town.

She scans the sky for more clouds forming.

Sam makes a cup of green decaf tea then heads to bed. She bivvies it tonight, as she does most nights on the trail. She doesn’t like to carry the extra weight of a tent and brings the ultralight shapeless bag instead. She crawls into her cocoon like some animal burrowing into the ground, making a perfect depression into the hard earth. The sack presses onto her, not even six inches from her face. She can smell the nutty green tea aroma on her breath; it reminds her of straw. She falls quickly asleep imagining she is buried deep in blankets, like she did as a kid, under the forts she constructed in her living room.

The sounds of the night swallow her up; tree limbs cracking from marmots or birds or maybe squirrels and of course, the occasional backpacker looking for a spot to pee. She unzips the bivvy hood, keeping it slit open, pulling cold air in. Then she tucks the hood close, wrapping it around her head, snuggling tight, so only her mouth and nose and the very bottom of her cheek bones are exposed. She can feel the waterproof shell against her closed eyelids, scratching her cheeks, burying her chin.

She wakes to what she thinks is someone shining a flashlight on her. What are they doing? Then she thinks, Have the lights been turned on?

No, she opens her eyes and sees through the slit in the bivvy. Millions of stars have come out to brighten the Sierra sky. It’s brilliant. She squints. Then she hears the deep groans of a man snoring. Guttural gasps and grunts that start baritone and rhythmically escalate into a high wheeze, only to start over again in the lower register of grunts, a grumpy old man turning in his bed. Sam knows that sounds near a ridge can play tricks on you. What feels like someone, something, twenty feet away, can very well be over a hundred. She closes her eyes tight and just listens. The grunts are moving. It must be a bear. Snorting. Puffing. It sounds like a zombie making its way through and near her kitchen, the spot where she left her stove and bear canister. Most backpackers know this should be fifty feet away from your tent, so when a bear, like this one, traipses through your camp, it isn’t right where you sleep.

Sam sits up. If someone turned the lights on, for real this time, it would be a comical scene. A grown woman in her bivvy, strapped inside a bag. Helpless, peeking into the darkness, looking for a bear.

There it is. Batting her bear canister with its paws like it’s a soccer ball.

She calls out, politely at first. She doesn’t want to wake any sleeping backpackers that might be nearby.

Shoo. Get. Shoo.

The bear turns and looks at her. Its eyes pick up the light from the stars and sparkle. Two little lights shine back at her.

She yells. Go away Bear. Shoo. Shoo.

The bear makes a low grunt, deep like he’s clearing his lungs from smoking two packs a day. Then he rolls a bit on the sides of his paws, back and forth. He leans forward. Getting the momentum he needs. He finally moves.

Sam remembers the first bear she saw on the trail and how she felt so afraid. That seems so silly now.

Get out of here.

She’s firm. Like a parent to a child.

He takes two slow steps, defiantly. Then jaunts into the dark, forgetting himself. He’s graceful but clearly annoyed. The bear canister was a bust.

Sam sits listening to the cracking earth and tree branches, the far scrapes and grunts, until she imagines the bear settling into some other spot that is more hopeful. So she thinks.

Then there is the rustling of earth behind her, back up the ridge, just ten feet or so away. Her ears are hyper alert. Human steps. Sam twists around, still bundled, and sees two sparkles further from the ground than the bear’s eyes.

What the fuck does this guy want?

Sam is still. Her breathing has stopped and she sits for what feels like ten minutes, watching the eyes. Counting the steps she would need to take to get to her backpack. She imagines where her knife is, in the outer pocket at the top. Then the shiny spots disappear and Sam can see the back of a head moving away from her. She makes out a blue beanie. A green puffy jacket. Sam thinks, Just using the toilet.

Sam waits until she can’t see any more movement or hear any more steps, struggles to unzip the sack at the top, pulls her legs to her and scoots out. She stands, barefoot, wobbling, and takes the five steps to her backpack. She unzips, finds her Swiss Army knife, tucks it into the pocket of her sweater, and bundles back into her cocoon.

Fuck you, Samantha.

At 5:30 a.m., the sun shoots through the thin blue Gortex of her bivvy. Sam stirs for a few minutes. Once she is awake, she quickly pulls her legs out of her cocoon and automatically starts to pack. Everything has its place, and she is nothing if not efficient. She’s packed her bag a thousand times, practicing as if it was a sport, in the dark, half asleep, with altitude sickness, with thick gloves.

She almost forgets about the bear until she gets to the center of her pack, the place for her canister. Sam scans the woods. The backpacker from last night is gone.

She starts thinking she will have to head back earlier than she had planned. She had hoped to spend five nights on the trail; that’s how long it takes for a fight with Viet to rub off.

She can picture her oatmeal at the bottom of the canister, the pita and dried fish Viet made for her last week. It will be a long day back to town without any breakfast or lunch or dinner.

She gives up looking and cinches up her pack, and heads down from where she came. Then, a hundred feet down the ridge, she sees blue tucked inside a brush like a sprouting flower. She feels lucky she spotted it and annoyed with the bear for getting her off track with her day. Today was going to be twenty-five miles with 5,000 feet of gain. She climbs down the hill.

When she gets to the canister it’s slimy as if some alien swallowed it whole and spit it back out. It’s foul but there is food inside.

The mouth of a bear is like a garbage truck, with slime and rot inside his muzzle. It helps Sam that there are animals on the trail more wild than she ever could be. It’s good for her to remember that she’s more than a beast. Sam uses her bandanna and some water, to try to clean the smell away. Her hands are strong, calloused and weathered, and not easily distracted by pain or cold. She rubs harder, rinsing her bandanna between the scourings. She can see bits and pieces of evergreen and dark brown and grey on the transparent blue plastic. Bears put their snouts on everything.

Sam makes quick time to her first break. It’s one of her favorite spots; she calls it the Lazy Boy Junction. She’s a fast, strong hiker, and happily, today, she’s carrying only twenty-five pounds. When she guides she often carries three times this weight. Arriving at an open area overlooking Golden Bear Lake, she takes a seat on one large boulder and puts her feet up on another. She pulls out her stove and pours water into the pot; this time she brought her Jetboil, an all-in-one stove and pot. The sound of the flame is startling in the cold air, a scream in contrast to the silence, the lack of voices except for the one inside. Just as Sam starts to pour the water over the maté she got in Argentina, a head appears from below. It’s a young man, not more than twenty years old, smiling at her. Then another face, not smiling but looking hard.

They stand taking her in. Sam doesn’t move; instead she looks down at her frothy maté then sips long and full, through the silver straw. The young men don’t say anything.

Then the smiling one says, Hey there!

Sam sips once again, still not looking up. Then, deliberately, she meets the friendly man’s eyes and smiles. His face makes her feel more open than she’s felt in days.

Sam says, Hi.

She holds her smile, listens to the wind blow out of her lungs and waits.

The friendly one, he smiles big at her. She notices him look up and down her legs. She can’t tell if he’s checking her out or counting the bruises that pepper her browned skin. Either way, she can tell he’s impressed. When he realizes he’s staring, he politely looks away. She decides he probably assumed, correctly, she’s a climber. He seems to decide this will be a short break with packs. His buddy looks like he will lose steam if they settle in for too long of a break. The friendly one leans against one of the boulders.

The friendly one asks, Where you headed?

I’m not sure. What about you two?

Back over Kearsarge Pass. We’re from the Bay Area, at the end of a two-week trip.

That’s fantastic.

Sam is just as enthusiastic as if he told her he climbed Everest. There is nothing Sam admires more than anyone doing anything in the wilderness.

He adds, You’re the first face we’ve seen in over a week. It’s been awesome.

Sorry?

Oh, no. I think we are both ready for some company. Right?

He gestures to his friend. His friend barely nods.

He asks, You out here alone?

Yep.

Cool. I love solo trips.

Sam watches the less friendly one struggle to pull out a snack from a pocket on his hip strap. He pokes his fingers into the compartment, searching. He finds it, a Cliff Bar, then struggles to tear open the packaging. It’s cold and she can tell that his fingers are unresponsive.

The friendly one looks at his friend with irritation; Sam senses that they’ve been on the trail together longer than even the friendly one can tolerate.

Are you thinking of summiting Mount Keith?

She says, I don’t have a plan yet.

You might see our friend Muir up there.

Muir?

Yeah, John Muir. He’s a bonafide Mountain Man. We met a few days ago. He’s an odd one. From LA.

She smiles at him, charmed.

Well, stay safe out there.

I will.

The less friendly one barely nods goodbye.

Sam listens to the crunching earth of their big boots ripping up the trail.

Then she hears the friendly one shout in her direction.

If you spot Muir, tell him Mike says hello and that he owes me a beer.

Sam says, How will I know it’s him?

The guy with a beard down to his ankles.

Sam watches as Mike and the less friendly one bop away, their heads becoming no more than dots on the horizon.

◊

Sam gets to the summit before dark. Whitney feels like she can touch it. It’s a particularly windy afternoon, and colder than she had anticipated. The clouds are forming broad sheets in all directions. She wonders if it will snow tonight. She pulls out her puffy jacket, feeling glad she brought it, even though it was extra weight. Everything on this trip has been extra. The weight is all luxury items. The silver trimmed maté gourd cup and silver straw, the puffy jacket, the extra two meals, the sea salt chocolate, the red wine. She wants to eat her way up the mountains and feel good, comfortable. She feels desire for something more than what she needs.

She sits on the ground, pulls her legs in tight, wrapping her arms around herself like she’s a little kid, and watches the sunset this way, without moving a muscle. She contemplates staying here tonight. Otherwise she’ll have to scramble back in the dark, but she doesn’t mind. This sunset will make it worth it. She promises herself to make camp the minute it gets too tiring.

Just as she starts to fixate on the light turning pink, a head with a long greying beard comes up over the ridge.

The man’s in his late forties, tall, thin, sunken cheeks, carrying only a clean just-bought lumbar pack, clasped high on his hips. She is stunned; he looks just like John Muir but bright and brand new. His boots are lightweight trekkers. His jacket, shorts, all tell her that he recently got outfitted for this trip. He stands like a metal coat hanger, his gear and layers of clothing draped and hanging on his bones.

He stops, full frame. Center. He’s the first to smile.

She waits for the view to clear, sitting, still. But the man won’t move, he just blocks her view. She can’t tell if he’s catching his breath or waiting for her to be happy to meet him. She makes an effort to smile but wants to be alone.

Once he gets a smile from her he moves out of the way and takes a seat on another pile of rocks. They’ll share the summit and the sunset.

Finally he says quietly, You don’t get this for nothing; you have to work for it.

You sure do.

The spot of gold is getting lower, almost falling behind the highest peak.

You made fast time, didn’t you?

How so?

Well, I saw you back down, packing up this morning. I was probably no less than a hundred feet behind you. Yet, here I am, coming in what? From the look of your feast an hour or so after you? You, such a small thing.

He pulls out some snacks of his own.

He sees she’s got her bivvy out and her sleeping bag an arm’s length away.

You gonna crash here?

Um, I don’t know.

It’s a beautiful spot. If you don’t mind, I’ll join you.

Sam watches him pull out his store-bought dehydrated meal. Some remote form of a bean enchilada. He pours water from a Nalgene into his Jetboil. Turns the igniter. The flame roars into the cold air.

You’ve got a Jetboil too, huh? Thought someone like you would hunt along the way.

Sam doesn’t like all the talk.

He asks, Any chance you’ve got a bow and arrow in that tiny pack?

Sam smiles politely.

Then she closes her eyes, getting lost in the last rays of warmth that hit the skin of her cheeks. It’s going to be a cold night and this is the last bit of heat she’ll feel for ten hours. The best part of being on the trail is knowing that weather will always change. That you can count on.

When she opens her eyes the sun is at its most pink-blue-purple display. That’s why she is here. The sky is always more spectacular after the little gold blob of light passes through the mountains. Once gold is gone, she quickly starts to pack up. There is nothing more for her to see or feel. She wants to be alone.

Leaving?

Yeah, I don’t want to hike out in the dark.

I thought you wanted to camp at the summit. Why else would you arrive so late? Great minds—

I’m taking off.

With the sun gone, Muir bundles up in his fleece sweater, pulling it tighter to his chest.

Then he pulls out his beanie from his pocket.

As Sam throws her pack over her shoulder she says, Well, enjoy your night.

He says, Who knows, if the wind picks up, maybe I’ll see you later tonight, back down on the trail.

She just nods.

He says, I didn’t catch your name?

Sam.

They call me Muir.

Good night.

The light is dimming fast. She doesn’t look back at the grey figure of the man they call Muir. He’s still sitting on the rocks, where she left him, his legs crossed like a child sitting on the ground at school, watching a movie, the movie of the sunset. He uses an orange lightweight spork to shovel store bought, prepackaged dehydrated food into his mouth.

He calls out, Be careful of the bears out there; you’re headed to Bear Alley.

Then he adds, You know how curious they can be.

Sam is usually unafraid of darkness on the trail, but tonight, even as she leaves Muir further and further behind, Sam feels a little skittish. In her ten years of serious backpacking and mountaineering, she’s met some characters, but this Muir stands out. She can’t get the image of him standing on the summit, blocking the sun, out of her mind. She wishes Viet was here. They’d have a laugh. Make jokes about pre-fab food. Viet would know just what to say to take her mind off of today’s creepy John, John Muir.

Sam misses Viet with an ache so strong she thinks, Viet I love you. First she says it quietly in her head, then out loud. Then a yell. Who yells I Love You into the dark?

Without a moonrise, Sam struggles to see her feet on the ground and her hands at her face. She worries she’ll trip on a small boulder protruding from the earth, so she slows her pace to a crawl. Tired of waiting for the moon to rise, Sam bivvies it, nearly a hundred feet from the trail. If Muir decides to come down tonight, he’ll have to work to find her in the dark wood. She figures he’ll get bored and carry on.

Sam falls asleep listening for crunches, snaps, and pops.

In the morning, she wakes when a cloud covers the warmth of the sun. Sam opens her eyes and sees it isn’t a cloud at all but a wall, a tall wall standing above. It’s Muir, the bearded man from Los Angeles who likes to section-hike on the weekends.

Really? she thinks.

But instead of screaming, Sam calmly says, Hello.

Muir smiles big. Hey there, good morning.

Sam rolls away from him and pulls her legs out of her bivvy. She’s wearing neon-blue long-johns. Her torso peeks out, exposed. She peers up at him and tilts her head.

He holds his Jetboil in the air. It looks like a hot air balloon blocking out the sun.

Want some hot water? I made extra.

Her brain clicks on. She scoots away from him.

No, thanks. I’m good.

You were so far off from the trail, I had to really look to find you.

She begins to quickly pack up. She opens the top pocket of her backpack and feels for her knife. It’s right where it should be.

Getting an early start?

Yeah, should head out. Meet my friend. He’s expecting me midday. You know how boyfriends can get worried.

He watches her as she tightly shoves her soft belongings in the bottom of her pack.

He says, Don’t want to set you off track or anything.

Then he says, Ok then. Have a great day.

He starts to walk off, away from her. She feels a sense of relief.

Just as her insides relax, she turns to see the man reach into his pocket and pull out his blue beanie. An alarm goes off inside Sam’s gut. She remembers the blue beanie in the dark, the first night on the trail.

She doesn’t even finish packing. She gathers what she can in her hands and just shoves the rest in her pack and the pockets of her pants. Back on the trail, she travels in the opposite direction of Muir. Once she gets several hundred feet between her and him, she picks up her pace.

Sam moves swiftly, sucking in thin air fast.

◊

Sam arrives at a clearing where she can see Golden Bear Lake further down. She thinks, This is far enough. He’ll never catch up now.

Aquamarine blue water lies below. Closer, it’s even more beautiful. A crater on another planet with gold and yellow rings of mineral deposits. For the first time, she pulls out her camera and snaps a few photos. She thinks about how she’ll show them to Viet. Muir is a fading image. So is the blue fleece beanie on his head.

It’s so calm. Peaceful in the Sierras. A red streak of embarrassment shoots through her. She thinks, Sam, you overreacted.

She marches on towards the alpine lake. The trail gets looser and looser, until it’s just scree. She starts to foot plunge down the side of the mountain, off trail, like she’s skiing on rocks.

Once down the mountain, Sam heads to the edge of the lake and follows the use trail for half a mile. Then she takes a sharp turn off trail and meanders deeper into the wilderness, into the thickness of the trees. Viet will have to wait. She’ll head home tomorrow.

◊

At dusk Sam decidedly heads into the densest patch of forest. No one is around. No crackles. No pops. She makes camp, crawls into her bivvy, pocket knife in hand, open, just in case. She lies awake thinking about Viet in his kitchen saying, Fuck you, Samantha.

Her Swiss Army knife presses against her thigh as she drifts asleep feeling Viet’s arms wrapped around her middle, wishing she hadn’t said what she said. Wishing Viet hadn’t said what he said.

Suddenly she feels something scratchy on her cheek. Hair? Fur? Fuzz? Maybe this is a marmot? Or a bear? Or a squirrel? A fox? Something she’s never felt before yet familiar.

She doesn’t move. Or open her eyes. Just scratch. She says a prayer deep inside her head, a prayer that this will go away. A dream. A fantasy. The space between waking and sleeping. Then she feels warmth under the fuzz, then skin. She hears the breathing. Every exhale is more warmth. She starts to scream, but a hand covers her mouth. Even if she could, no one would hear her. She focuses on the warmth. She only sees black. Two darts of white pass next to her, out of focus and surreal. Why?

Weight on her. Ground pressing up. She can’t breathe. She scoots deeper into her bivvy. She’s protected, for now, by three layers: Gortex shell, fleece and wool.

Wet tongue licks. More scratchy fuzz.

Then, Sam feels the hard metal of her knife, pressing against her thigh. She remembers that she went to sleep clutching the thing, worried about any unwanted visitors.

She starts to writhe, involuntarily, but focuses her mind on the hard metal next to her. She is trying not to squirm. She doesn’t want to give it away. Big hands grope at her breasts. She focuses her full attention. This moment has become the most important activity of her thirty-five years of life. Why didn’t she practice this before now? His breath smells like whisky. She tastes salt. It’s his skin. She’s repulsed and then surprises herself. She bites. Down. Hard. Feels warmth. Tastes metal. This last step, she has practiced before. Sparring. And in the first self-defense class she took, as a teen. He flings his face away from her. Just far enough. She finds leverage. Hits with her arms from underneath the bivvy. Hard. She gets a good blow in with her elbow. Her hand grips tight on the knife. Plunges. Stabbing past the shell. Softness. An arm? His side?

Muir cradles his middle. She doesn’t know what happens next, but the two of them are rolling, fumbling, scratching. Contorting. She pulls her legs out of the bivvy, somehow, and gives him a good judo kick. How dare he. Then another, until he’s crawling away from her, like an animal. He makes a deep sound like a beast in a trap, moaning, trying not to spill his pain. She keeps kicking him, conscious of the edge of the hill with the loose ground.

Muir twists and she’s not sure if he is retreating or losing his footing. Then he slips and falls, almost off the side of the hill, and trips a few feet downwards but manages to hold on.

The scene erupts into stillness. She watches him. Shadows and movement crawling on the rocky ground, just a few feet below the edge, a hurt animal, pulling itself to the curb of the freeway as the car drives away. He is crawling his way back up to her. On all fours. Clutching his arm.

Sounds pierce through the low hissing wind, scratches, like a rat scraping on the insides of a cave.

Sam still feels warmth and tastes metal in her mouth.

She spits.

Muir struggles to stand. The cliff is just behind him.

Fuck You, Bitch!

And then he slowly teeters, like a tree swaying in the wind. Falling. The man rolls away. Over the ridge. She watches in disbelief. She rushes to the edge and watches as his form is swallowed by the shadows. She hears the rustling of rocks and body hits against dirt and boulders.

It’s an easy incline, but still definitely the side of a mountain, and Muir is lost from her view. She finally hears what sounds like a mass toppling down far, far below. Slowly. Surely. She squints her eyes and sees a round figure that looks like a bag of laundry, slowly tumbling. Big chunks of rock dislodge. Small boulders. Dirt. The hillside shifts and moves, follows him down, like trains of a coaster. Then quiet except for the sound of his gurgled breathing, but sound travels far in the quiet Sierra night. It’s as if he is breathing in her ear. Then there is nothing at all but the low hiss of wind in the trees.

For the first time, she hears her own breath. It is fast. Shallow. As if she sprinted a 100 and left it all on the course.

The mass below starts to move again. Then stops. Sam’s chest expands. Contracts. Muscles in her middle get away from her. She can’t slow it down. She sucks in thin air as if through a straw. Is she hyperventilating?

Then Muir is quiet. She waits. Listening. Nausea shoots through her stomach into her throat. She might throw up.

Instead she runs. For how long, she’ll never know, but when she stops the air is suddenly cold. It’s too dark to see. She only can smell musty browns and greens, damp dark earth, listens to the owl in the redwood above her, feels a bed of pine needles prick and cut into her naked toes.

Geri Ulrey author photoGeri Ulrey’s creative nonfiction has been published in Gulf Coast and The Carolina Quarterly. Her essay “13th & B” was a Notable in Best American Essays 2016. Geri is a writer, filmmaker, and educator living in Los Angeles and is currently at work on her first novel. Author photo by Thouly Dosios.

Image credit: Ivana Cajina on Unsplash

FIRE HAZARD by Patrick McNeil

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

red fire hydrant

Patrick McNeil
FIRE HAZARD

Hot, back in the corner of the coat closet you find it, right where you knew it would be. Pull it out with both hands, it’s a lot heavier than you expected. Dad said never to touch it, but who knows when he’s coming back this time, and what else are you supposed to do on a day like this? Show it to your sister, how it gleams in the light let in through the screen door. Stand it up, it comes up to her chin.

“Dad’s giant wrench. Can I hold it?”

Laugh at her. “It’s bigger than you are.”

“So are you, but I could still toss you.”

She’s been a brat all morning. So have you, kind of. The AC is out again and the heat makes everything a lot less bearable, even yourselves. Especially yourselves. She’s nine-and-a-half. You’re eleven. And two inches taller.

“Just get the door.”

Nellie gets the door and follows you out, barefoot. You’d think she would learn. Don’t remind her about the street.

It’s so heavy you have to stop on the porch to catch your breath, and to wipe the sweat off your forehead before it runs into your eyes. Out here there isn’t even a breeze. You look down the steps a second too long and Nellie doesn’t miss a beat.

“Having second thoughts, big guy?”

“Shut up. Help me down with it.”

Walk it down awkwardly together and across the front yard. Putting her first foot down onto the street, though, Nellie yelps and hops back to the sidewalk, dropping her end banging onto the ground.

“I told you get your flip flops.”

“You did not.”

And who is it walking up to you now but Barbara’s old, newsy self from two doors down. She’s wearing the same fuchsia swishy jumpsuit she always wears, whatever the weather. It could be snowing or it could be a hundred and two with the heat index, like they said it was today. Even so, not a bead of sweat is coming down from her hairline. How is that possible?

“And just what are youse thinking of doing with that?”

It’s Nellie who has an answer, of course it is.

“We’re thinking of minding our own business with this, thank you, Miss Barbara.”

“You little bad-behind kids. That’s a fire hazard, you know.”

“This whole day’s a fire hazard,” says Nellie.

“You know that’s how the house on Cedar burned down, don’t you? Youse kids need to take a walk to the pool.”

“You need a grownup for the pool,” says Nellie. “You want to take us, Miss Barbara? My brother doesn’t think you swim in that swishy suit, but I think you do.”

Yell at her now to go inside. “Get your flip flops.”

Nellie smiles wide at Miss Barbara and then runs back up the steps.

Miss Barbara waits till she’s gone to give you a long look. “And just where, now, is your mother? On a Saturday, too.”

Tell her your mom works Saturdays now. There’s another moment then, and inside of it she decides not to ask about your father. What does she know? More than you, probably. The sun is hitting you hard on the top of the head and the sweat is starting to drip into your eyes. It’s you that blinks first, then.

“Well here’s what I’ll say. I’m off to run a errand. But if youse are still out here with all that when I get back, I’m calling in a report. Your mother doesn’t need that, you know. That’s the last thing she needs, we both know that.”

That’s what makes up your mind, the threat in there, against your mother. That’s the thing that, once she’s gone and you’ve carried your father’s enormous wrench across the street and fitted it onto the nose of the hydrant, when Nellie says to wait a second, what if it really is a fire hazard like Miss Barbara says—that’s the thing that makes you say, “Fuck Miss Barbara.”

Nellie covers her mouth at the word.

Crank down on that thing with all your weight—it’s just enough, you can feel it when it gives, when the water rushes up and bursts out the nose and sends the wrench clanging across the street. Within ten minutes every kid from the neighborhood is out running through the spray, no way to put it back now.

And if the unthinkable happens? If later that night it’s your own house that catches fire, and the firemen can’t save a thing because the hydrant’s tapped dry? If Miss Barbara was right? If your mother comes home to the blaze and pulls out her hair and calls you the exact son of your father.

“He would burn down our home tomorrow to play hero for today.”

Swallow back the thing in your throat. Breathe, think. Could you even close the hydrant now, even if you wanted to? With all that water bursting out? With everyone out and playing in it now? A lot of the kids are older than you, and everyone’s laughing and all of a sudden it’s enough to make you want to cry, but you can’t do that. Watch the way it rainbows in the sunlight, feel the mist on your face. The way Nellie runs through it again, watch until she’s shivering in it, till her lips are blue, and breathe. There. Whatever comes next, at least there was this. There will always be this, how every time another kid shows up, Nellie makes it a point to brag to them through chattering teeth who it was that opened up the water.

“It was my brother.”

See her point?

“See him there, the one with the huge wrench? That boy is my brother.”

Patrick McNeilPatrick McNeil is the organizer of Philadelphia’s own Backyard Writers Workshop and the founder of the Writers Retreat in Tufo, Italy. His fiction and nonfiction has appeared in The Fourth River, Philadelphia Stories, The Head and The Hand’s Chapbook Series, and more.

Image credit: Pixabay

A LOVELY AFTERNOON by Tom Lakin

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

New England white church in autumn

Tom Lakin
A LOVELY AFTERNOON

We sat three abreast in hard white pews. At our backs, an open door laid rectangles of sun on the salt-smoothed pine floor. It was an old Puritan church—Built in 1772, read a small plaque by the door. You could tell: the ceiling was crossed with bare beams, the floor was hard and cold. As a boy, I’d been brought to the church from time to time for a service, usually the wedding or funeral of a summer neighbor. I recalled the starkness of it, the chilly severity. Across the street, at the base of a hill that sloped down to the ocean, my mother’s ashes lay beneath a weathered stone.

The pastor climbed to the pulpit. He was a short, round man whose redly perspiring face put me in mind of a carnival barker or the proprietor of an adult video store. I pictured him sweeping back a curtain of beads, beckoning me into a dimly lit room. We waited for him to speak. He labored over a sheath of papers; the pages stuck to his fingertips, caught and tore. From the chancel a portrait of my father, whom I hadn’t spoken to in years, regarded me with stern blue eyes and a curling grin.

“Well,” the pastor said finally, cupping the back of his neck with a fat red hand. “I don’t quite know what to say. I knew John, but not well. Frankly, I was shocked by the invitation to speak today—”

Here he paused and shuffled his papers. One page slipped from the lectern and floated to the floor.

“Like I said,” he said, adjusting his glasses, “I don’t really know what to say.” He trailed off.

The fifteen of us gathered before him—cousins, a brother and sister, a couple of my father’s summer friends—stared with open mouths. Into mine flew a mosquito, buzzing hysterically. Up front, my aunt stood in a rage, harrumphing into her program, the pew door swinging shut with a clack.

It was then that the first ghost appeared—my father’s older brother Steven, wearing a dentist’s white coat and a pair of polished loafers. He stood by the open door, shimmering slightly, his face vaguely drawn and lacking the ruddy flush he’d had in life. My aunt sat down.

Sneering, Steven strolled to the pulpit, shuffling the pastor aside.

“If no one else is going to say it, I will,” he began, his chin jutting, glasses low on the bridge of his narrow nose. “My brother John was a royal prick, as all of you know. Let’s not pretend he wasn’t now, just because he’s dead.” A brief moment of stunned silence gave way to assenting murmurs and a few vigorous nods.

“There wasn’t a kind bone in his body,” Steven went on. “When we were boys, he used to torment me in all sorts of different ways. One time, here at the shore, we were swimming out by the dock and he held me under until I thought I would drown. When I came up in a shower of spray, there he was, bobbing nearby like a seal, laughing his head off. I don’t think there was anyone in all the world who really liked him.”

As if to answer his claim, there came then a parade of ghosts, some familiar and others unknown to me, materializing with a kind of fizzy static, like an old TV turning on. One by one they ascended the chancel and took the pulpit. There was Chet, our old gardener, wearing coveralls and a work cap. John was the cheapest sonofabitch I ever met,” he said, shaking a trowel at us. “He used to tip me with handfuls of change. Change!” Jeffrey, my father’s longtime driver, said they’d never exchanged more than a couple of words in all their years together. “He’d just sit there in the backseat, reading the newspaper and grunting that low grunt of his. Occasionally I’d ask him a question, just to break the silence, but he’d peer at me over his glasses and shake his head.” A woman, who introduced herself as Mrs. Watson and claimed to have taught my father in the first grade, said he was the worst student she’d ever had. “His spitballs were monstrous. He picked on all the other kids and once peed in the broom closet.”

“He was a horrible boor,” said Cynthia Mix, a neighbor.

“A crook,” said Neil Coughlin, a customer at the bank.

“The worst kind of drunk, that man,” said Jimmy, who tended bar at a club in the city. Nobody knew his last name.

The ghost of the family dog trotted to the pulpit then, limping a bit on his left side. “He used to kick me,” the spaniel growled, gesturing with a hazy paw. A gasp went up from the crowd. “He’d shout and swat at me with the paper.”

I stood to offer my own take—a story had come to me in the pew, a long-ago memory of my father cursing at me on a sailboat—but just then a particularly lanky ghost glimmered into view by the open door. We all turned to look, and I was shocked to see my younger brother Tim, wearing khakis and a flannel shirt, a pencil behind his ear. He was tall and rangy, just as he’d been in life. He looked like a ballplayer, a shortstop with three-day stubble and a dirty uniform, a gaggle of bright-eyed gals waiting for him after the game. His shirt hung open at the neck, his shoes were loose at the sole. He’d been killed in a car accident at nineteen. Drunk, he’d missed a turn and crashed into a tree. My father had showed up soused to the funeral, his blazer wrinkled and his breath sweetly stinking.

“It’s strange,” Tim said in a sort of windy voice, faint and much lower than the one he’d had when he was alive. We leaned forward in our pews, straining to hear. “I’ve forgotten all the bad things. All of ‘em. It’s only the good stuff I can remember now.”

He walked toward us, palms hanging open at his sides. “Dad at Christmas, tinsel draped over his arms, the strands glittering like slivers of glass. His back to us, that broad, sloping back. He’s dwarfed by the tree, its boughs sagging under the weight of gold and silver balls. A drink in his hand, he sways, dances a little jig, laughs—a sound like pealing bells. That’s the kind of thing I see.”

He was looking at me now, his eyes soft. I fidgeted in the pew. The other ghosts grew quiet; the dog slunk toward the door.

“I see him in his workshop,” Tim went on, “bent over an elegant figurine—a fisherman in a pair of painted yellow waders, a toothpick rod at his side. A bare bulb casts the room in a copper glow. Dad’s canvas slacks are covered in shavings. Little curls of wood litter the concrete floor. You—” he raised a flickering hand in my direction—“are beneath him, playing by his feet. From time to time you sneak a shaving into your mouth, and, silently, without glancing up from his work, Dad reaches down and plucks the curl from where you’ve hidden it in your cheek.

“I see him on the boat, sunglasses hiding his eyes, a gust tugging his hair to the sky. I see him in the yard, at the hardware store, striding up our brick front walk. I see his work gloves hanging from a nail in the garage—the coarse leather, that close grassy smell that never seemed to wash off.”

“I can see him on the night I was born, Danny.” Tim was talking directly to me at this point, as if nobody else was in the room. “Isn’t that strange? I can see everything now. It was a cold night in October. You’re all at the hospital. Mom’s in bed. You’re in a chair outside the door. Dad’s pacing the hallway, his hands in his hair. His shirttail’s hanging out, there’s a dark oval of sweat across his back. He’d come straight from the office; Jeffrey ran three red lights and nearly wore out the horn on the way. Suddenly there’s a commotion in the hospital room. The doctor is hollering, a pack of nurses streams through the door. You can’t see anything from your chair, but you can hear the tinkle of medical instruments, the bark of raised voices. You press your ear to the door, straining to listen.

“After a time, the clamor dies down, replaced by cries of another sort. Then the door opens, and you feel a warm hand on your shoulder. ‘Danny,’ Dad says, ‘come meet your brother Tim.’ Dad’s hand trembles; his shirtfront is soaked with sweat. Inside, you creep to the bed, where Dad scoops me from Mom’s chest and hands the bundle to you. Our parents watch as carefully you rock me side to side and attempt a small kiss on my damp forehead. You grin, the nurses applaud, Mom’s doctor claps Dad on his huge back. He looks at us there and softly shakes his head. His eyes are wet with tears.”

Tim’s face flickered then, but still I could see his sad smile, his tender eyes. His words had torn loose something inside me; I felt it as a kind of jangling in my belly, a thawing of innards I’d let chill a long time. I leapt to my feet and ran to where he stood. I wanted to hold him, to clutch his stubbled neck, to shout that I remembered, I remembered, oh, I remembered it all!

The night Tim died, I was home from college on spring break. I’d come home the week before, and we’d spent most of our time together fighting over one thing or another: his clothes (shabby, unwashed), his hair (long), his cadre of shady friends. Mostly I chided him about his recent decision to drop out of the local community college he’d been attending for the past couple of years. Not once did he get angry with me; in that way he was the opposite of Dad. Instead, while I ranted and raved, carped and cajoled, he merely smiled that curling little smile of his and shrugged, eyes twinkling, and sidled toward the nearest door.

That night he’d fled an argument about laundry, of all things. He’d been throwing his clothes in with mine, and as I was the only one of us who actually knew how to run the machine, I’d grown sick of finding his ratty jeans tangled with my pressed khakis. I told him so by depositing a pile of still-wet clothes on his pillow, and then trailed him into the kitchen when that failed to elicit what I deemed a sufficiently contrite response. I harangued him all through dinner, and by the time our mother brought out the dessert—chocolate pudding, Tim’s favorite—I’d all but chased him out of the house. “Okay, okay,” he called finally, waving his napkin in surrender. “I give up. Uncle. No more laundry. I’ll do it myself, I promise.” Then he peered at me strangely, squinting at a spot on my chest. “Wait, Danny, I think you’ve got something on your shirt—” He pointed, and when I looked down, he catapulted a spoonful of pudding onto the collar of my cable knit sweater.

It was a footrace to the door. Always the faster runner, he beat me by an arms-length and disappeared laughing into the night. I heard the car start, and watched from the doorway as he pulled onto the road with a whoop. He idled at our yard’s edge, one arm slung out the window, a grin on his face. For a moment he simply sat there, smiling at me through the open window. A streetlight washed him in a silver glow. I said nothing, just crossed my arms and glared at the bright bar of his teeth. He opened his mouth as if to speak, then seemed to think better of it and instead leaned back and laughed—a buoyant, boyish sound. He threw a little wave, then he gunned the engine and roared off into the dark. I stood awhile in the doorway, wondering what he’d been about to say. When the streetlight clicked off, as it did each night at nine, I turned and stomped back into the house.

The knock came just after midnight. A young officer, his cheeks frosted with peach fuzz, blue cap in hand. In a splintering voice he told us. The car, the tree, the bottle of Wild Turkey found in the grass. His eyes, fringed with dark lashes, were aimed at the ground. My mother’s wails drew neighbors into the side yard, where they stood huddled in terrycloth bathrobes, slippers slick on the dew.

We slept that night on the floor of Tim’s bedroom. We dragged sleeping bags to the foot of his bed and tossed fitfully beneath posters of Miles Davis and John Coltrane, Jack Kerouac and Billie Holiday. My mother and I on either side of my father, his enormous arms hugging us close. At some point in the night I awoke to the sound of him weeping—great heaving sobs that caused his chest to tremble under my reclined head. I stayed absolutely still, listening. It was the first time I’d heard him cry. My own undershirt was wet with sweat and tears, but his sorrow—fierce, elemental—seemed another thing entirely.

Back in the churchly gloom, all at once I realized I too was crying. Tears soaked my necktie, chilled the bare skin at my collar. By the open door, Tim’s ghost stood quivering in the spilled daylight, his edges already beginning to melt away. I became frantic, desperate to keep him from leaving. I leapt for his hands, for his waist. I threw myself at his vanishing feet, shouted for him to wait, to stop, to stay, but my hands passed through his retreating body like vapor.

“Tim!” I screamed as he withdrew toward the doorway, his form now little more than a flickering disturbance in the heavy air. “Tim, what was it you were going to say that night in the car? Before you left, before you—before you drove away. You were about to say something. What was it?”

I’d wondered for so long; it haunted me, that pause, that wordless empty void. I had to know, I’d never stopped needing to know.

Tim turned, and his face fizzed back into focus for a moment. I could see his eyes, vivid and gray like new nickels. A kind of hush came over the church. Even the birds outside seemed to stop their chirping. Total silence descended. I implored the line of his mouth to fill it with sound.

And then, before I could take another breath, there it was: that slanted grin, that brightly curling smile. No noise, not a word. Simply the smile—the same one he’d beamed at me that night in the bedroom, at the dinner table, from the idling car. The same one I’d seen so many times on his face, on the face of my father. The same smile I wore now, kneeling on the hard church floor, grinning up at a ghost.

We stayed like that for an oddly frozen moment—it seemed timeless, eternal, but was probably only a couple of seconds—and then Tim turned and whistled for the spaniel, and it rose from its spot by the pulpit and trotted to his side. My brother waved and the dog gave a hollow bark, and then together they stepped through the doorway and were gone.

The other ghosts filed out then, in a cloudy curving line—Steven and Jeffrey and our cranky neighbor Cynthia Mix. At the doorway each vanished with a little fogburst and a sound like a pulled zipper, leaving a wake that smelled of woodsmoke and the sea. The rest of us stood and followed them out. The day was bright. Bells chimed from the steeple, gulls called to each other across the sky. It was a lovely afternoon.

Tom Lakin Author PhotoTom Lakin is a writer from Boston. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Narrative, Pleiades, Ruminate, Pembroke Magazine, and Lunch Ticket, among others. He is the recipient of Pleiades’s 2018 G. B. Crump Prize in Experimental Fiction, and his work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Tom holds an MFA from Emerson College, where he was a full-tuition fellow.

Image credit: Public Domain Pictures

GHOST PRINTS by Emily Lackey

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

multiple exposure image of a woman against an outdoor background with a silhouette image and flowers

Emily Lackey
GHOST PRINTS

Children always follow the mother. That’s what my mother always used to say. And it was true for my sister Kelly and me. Every time our worlds fell apart, we would end up in our mother’s kitchen, washing the dishes and sitting at her pockmarked table until light returned to the world, sometimes just at its edges. Even after so many years, what my mother said was still true. How else could I explain why I visited my mother every day once she moved into a nursing home? How else could I explain why my oldest daughter, April, followed me there too, coming every day after her twelve-hour shift ended and refilling my mother’s cup with water and thickener so she wouldn’t choke? We took turns, the two of us, stirring the pureed food the underpaid dining staff delivered on plates, adjusting my mother’s legs on the pillow we propped under them, and righting her head that, lately, seemed too heavy for her neck.

What my mother’s adage didn’t explain, however, was why my youngest daughter, Caitlin, had decided to move three states away to go back to school and really invest in her work as an artist. Caitlin would say that she moved away because her therapist, Rebecca, said she needed to start making decisions for herself for a change, but who knows. What Rebecca said to my daughter in the privacy of her vanilla and cinnamon scented office was doctor-patient privilege, so I don’t know if any of that was true.

“Do you think I should call Caitlin?” I asked April. She was spooning pureed turkey into my mother’s mouth, opening her mouth wide as if to demonstrate. “She looks worse today, don’t you think?”

“She looks fine,” April said, scraping a spill from my mother’s chin and bringing it back for a second try.

Before the nursing home, I barely saw my mother. She was always out of town or busy running errands or hiking in the woods or, toward the end, letting the phone ring and ring forever without picking up. But all it took to finally convince me that she needed help was one surprise visit and a hole burned through the door of her microwave. When I asked her what had happened, she said she didn’t know, that she lost a few days in there somewhere.

The decision was easy after that. It was easier having her here where I knew she was being taken care of. Plus I could see her whenever I wanted, which very quickly became every day, partly out of guilt and partly because I liked making her room feel like home, lugging bins of seasonal decorations into the nursing home every few months and sitting with her during craft time so she wasn’t so alone.

Craft time was my favorite time. After a few years in the nursing home, my mother had stopped participating, but I would still cut out the orange leaves and pink hearts and blue eggs and spread the backs of whatever holiday-themed shapes we were making with glue so that all my mother had to do was hold them in her hand and stick them just about anywhere. Most of the residents left their art projects on the table when they were done, but I took each of the things my mother made home. I lined them up in every room, until, eventually, my house was full of snowmen made from painted tomato cans and turkey headbands cut into the shape of my mother’s hands.

I didn’t know why April couldn’t see what I saw—how my mother’s physical state was getting worse every day—but it was the thing we fought about the most. Some days I asked April more than once if she thought today was the day, if I should call Caitlin and tell her to come home, because it was really happening this time, wasn’t it? My mother was really dying.

“She’s still eating,” April said. “People who are dying don’t eat three meals a day.”

“She’s barely eating,” I said, which was partly true, because she had been losing weight consistently ever since she moved into the home, even though she sometimes devoured an entire plate of dessert without ever seeming to chew. The other day April brought a chocolate milkshake from McDonald’s that my mother sucked down without stopping to breathe.

But the next day the nurse handed me my mother’s weekly report and it said she had lost 2.7 pounds.

“That’s almost half a pound a day,” I said to April when she arrived, holding the paper out like some sort of proof. “I’m calling your sister.”

“Fine,” April said, tossing the report on the radiator. “But she’s not going to come.”

“Why wouldn’t she come?”

“It’s mid-terms,” April said. “She’s busy.”

April didn’t have to remind me how busy Caitlin was. Every night I scrolled through the column of unanswered text messages on my phone that I had sent her in the weeks since we last spoke. Some nights I would calculate the time in between timestamps like a checkbook that wouldn’t balance.

“She’ll come,” I said, lifting a forkful of mashed peas to my mother’s mouth. She kept her mouth firmly shut.

“Here,” April said, bringing a spoonful of cherry pie to my mother’s mouth, and my mother’s blue eyes widened when she wrapped her lips around it.

◊

It had been fewer than twenty-four hours since I called Caitlin and left a message telling her that this was it, that she needed to come, and then there she was, standing in the doorway to my mother’s room while April changed her sheets, looking too afraid to come in.

“Mom?” she said. It wasn’t that long ago that Caitlin called me “Mommy,” but when she started seeing Rebecca every Tuesday at 1 p.m. that all changed.

I rushed over to her and wrapped my arms around her full waist. “You still smell the same,” I said, burying my nose in her neck. Caitlin always smelled like line-dried laundry and a specific kind of fabric softener that I never could find. One Saturday I spent an entire afternoon in the detergent aisle, unscrewing caps and trying to find the one that smelled exactly like her.

Caitlin pulled away.

“Mom,” she said. “Please.”

I stepped back.

“How’s grandma?” she asked.

I gestured toward my mother who was sitting in her chair, more shriveled and frail, I thought, than ever before. Last week they determined she was a fall risk, which meant now there was a cord clipped to her shirt that sounded an alarm every time she tried to stand. “Doesn’t she look terrible?”

Caitlin didn’t say anything. She took a step into the room.

“Hi, Grandma,” she said.

“She can’t hear you from there,” April said, waving Caitlin over to stand by her side.

It was rare to see April and Caitlin together. How long had it been? Four months? Five years? That was probably my fault. Wasn’t everything the mother’s fault? I imagine that’s what Rebecca said in her sessions with Caitlin, even though she didn’t know that it was really because of the age difference—seven years—that they were so distant. That and the fact that they had spent so much of their lives living apart. They were never close like my sister and I had been. Until the day she died, Kelly and I were inseparable, inextricable.

I didn’t know what was worse: thinking about how much better my sister would have been at caring for my mother if she were still alive, or thinking about how much my mother would have preferred to be cared for by my sister. It was true, I was sure of it, because on the rare days that my mother spoke, she always called me by my sister’s name.

“I’m not Kelly,” I’d say loudly in her ear. “I’m Laura. Kelly died, remember?”

One time, when I was running late, I found April and my mother in the reading room, talking up a storm.

“Remember that time we drove to Syracuse in that snowstorm?” I heard my mother say. Except it hadn’t been April she had driven with, it had been Kelly.

“I do,” April said, putting her face close to my mother’s.

“What was that play you were in?” My mother squinted her eyes and tried to remember.

I walked over to them quickly and put an end to it.

“April, stop it,” I said. “She thinks you’re Kelly.”

“So?” April said.

“So you’re confusing her.”

“What does it matter as long as she’s talking?”

Caitlin had always reminded me of Kelly in so many ways, which was why it confused me to see her like that, still standing in the doorway to my mother’s bedroom, still refusing to come any closer.

“Don’t be such a baby,” April said, pushing Caitlin toward my mother. “It’s just Grandma.”

◊

Caitlin arrived just before arts and crafts time, which was perfect, because almost every day I told Rhonda, the woman who ran afternoon activities, that my daughter was a painter and that she probably got it from my mother, because would you look—just look—at the amazing work she did today.

It amazed me, really, how talent could be passed down like that: the smallest inkling of artistic ability in my mother making its way down through Kelly, who became an actress, and then into Caitlin, whose work I hadn’t seen in person lately but always liked when she posted a picture of it on Instagram. Artistic talent must be some sort of recessive gene, because instead of blue eyes and blonde hair, Caitlin inherited the ability to make sense of the world in a way that April and I never had. Sometimes it seemed like Caitlin was living a version of my mother’s life—or maybe Kelly’s—that she couldn’t anymore: traveling to France and Florence and some place in Germany—or was it Holland?—to study the thing that she loved. At least that’s what I told myself every time I felt that sick feeling, picturing Caitlin’s body so far away from mine or suspended over an ocean for eight hours at a time.

Rhonda was standing in the middle of the room, the tables arranged in a large square around her so that all of the residents could hear and see as she explained the day’s project.

“Rhonda,” I said, waving her over as April wheeled my mother into the room. “This is my daughter, Caitlin. The one I’ve been telling you about.”

“Oh, the painter!” she said, leaning across the table to shake Caitlin’s hand.

“Actually,” Caitlin said, “I’m a printmaker.”

Rhonda blinked.

“It’s sort of like a painter,” I said quickly. “She paints things, but just on plates.”

“Like dinner plates?” Rhonda asked.

April was pushing my mother over to the far side of the table where there was space for us to sit.

“No,” Caitlin said. “Not like that at all.”

I didn’t know why Caitlin was being so difficult, but sometimes she got like that, defensive of her art and her decision to go back to school and the specifics of how she spent her time as an artist. I blamed her father, really, who was always talking to her about her work as if it were a hobby.

“Are you really still doing that art stuff?” he apparently asked the last time she visited him in Boston. After that, she told me later, she couldn’t see him anymore.

“You know how dad is. If it isn’t something that contributes to a capitalist society, it isn’t real work. Until he can respect how I choose to live my life, I can’t respect him.”

If you asked me, that sounded like something Rebecca would have said, not Caitlin, but when she reported the conversation back to me, I did my best to be supportive, nodding my head and telling her of course she was right.

“That’s just like your father,” I said, putting my hand on her shoulder and rubbing the curve of her collarbone.

Rhonda was back in the center of the tables, holding up a carton of hardboiled eggs. “Today,” she paused for effect, “we’re going to have an Easter egg hunt!” She brought the egg carton close to each of the residents. “But first we need to paint our eggs.”

“Did you hear that, Caitlin?” I asked. “Painting Easter eggs.”

“Mom,” she said. “We’re Jewish.” She pulled one of the chairs back from the table so that she was sitting outside of the circle.

“It’s still painting,” I said. “Come closer. Come sit next to Grandma.”

Caitlin shook her head and stayed where she was. She was watching Darlene then, the woman who always refused to sit still during craft time and would wheel herself around the room aimlessly with her feet. That day she had gotten herself stuck in the corner and was calling out, over and over again, “Help, help, help, help, help.”

April was on the other side of my mother, holding an egg close to her face and speaking softly into her ear. “What color should we paint these, Grandma?”

“Green,” my mother said, the word catching in her throat so that it sounded more like a groan.

“That’s Darlene,” I said comfortingly to Caitlin. “If you try to help her, she’ll just wind up back in the corner in a matter of minutes.”

Caitlin kept staring.

“First things first!” Rhonda called. “We have to get our brushes wet!” She demonstrated dipping the brush in a Dixie cup.

“Here, Mom,” I said, bringing the cup of water to her brush so that she wouldn’t miss. April had already wet it, though, the oval of green watercolor paint already a puddle. April was always jumping ahead during activity hour, letting my mother start before all the other residents had their supplies or not following the directions so that she ended up with an Easter bandana instead of a bonnet.

“Let Caitlin help,” I said, pushing April’s hand away. I leaned toward my mother and raised my voice. “Caitlin is a PAIN-TER, Mom. A PAIN-TER. Can you believe that? Another artist in the FAM-I-LY.”

“Why are you talking to her like that?” Caitlin asked from behind me.

“Honey, she can’t hear,” I said.

“No, I know she can’t hear,” she said. “But she’s not stupid.”

I stared at her for a second and then turned back around so fast, I spilled the green water across the table.

“I’ll get it,” April said, getting up for paper towels, but Rhonda was already there with a rag.

She picked up the cup and wiped the table beneath it. “You know what I always say,” she singsonged. “There’s no use crying over spilled paint!”

◊

“Want to come over for dinner?” I asked April in the parking lot. “It will be fun,” I said. “Like old times.” I was smiling at my two daughters, but April was looking down and searching for her keys. I offered the eggs my mother had painted to Caitlin, but she waved them away.

“Grandma made these,” I reminded her. “You should keep them.”

“She didn’t really, Mom,” she said and slid her leather coat over her shoulders.

Before we had left, I wrapped a sweater around my mother’s shoulders and put a knit hat on her head. From the doorway she looked so small, like Kelly when she used to sneak into my room at night or Caitlin when she’d beg me to sit at the foot of her bed until she fell asleep.

Caitlin wouldn’t demand anything of me now, because when I asked her at dinner that night how she thought grandma looked, she took a sip of her wine and looked at April.

“What?” I said.

“Nothing,” April said.

“Have you two been talking? Tell me.”

Caitlin put her wine glass down and folded her arms across her chest.

“It’s just—“ April said. She stopped. She looked at Caitlin.

What was it with those two?

“We want to say this in a way that respects your emotional perspective,“ Caitlin said, and I felt it instantly: that feeling that felt as if we were being watched, as if Rebecca was in the room with us, taking notes on our every move, her tortoiseshell glasses low on her nose. I pictured her straight bob swaying as she turned her head to hear each of us completely. I hear you, Laura, she would probably say, but are you hearing each other?

“You can say it, sweetie,” I said, keeping my voice low.

“It’s just that,” she tried, “Grandma doesn’t look any different than she did the last time I saw her.”

“Caitlin,” I said, trying to stay steady. “Grandma is dying. You may not be emotionally prepared to accept that fact,” I said, using language I thought Rebecca would be proud of, “but it’s true.”

“I know she’s dying,” Caitlin said. “But not anytime soon. She looks the same as she did in September.”

I placed my hands flat on the table. “Maybe you can’t see it. You don’t see her every day like I do. You don’t see her losing weight. You don’t see her not eating. You don’t see her wasting away.” I took a long sip of my wine. “Maybe if you were here more,” I said gently, “you would see it.”

“April’s here,” Caitlin said, pointing in April’s direction. “Do you see it, April?”

April didn’t move. We both stared at her.

“Well, she’s not getting better,” April said cautiously.

“Oh, don’t be so diplomatic,” I said. “Pick a side.”

“See?” Caitlin said, turning to April, and I knew it then: they had been talking.

There was a minute where no one spoke, and I could feel that feeling that I sometimes felt when I was all by myself. It came out of nowhere most of the time, and most of the time I thought it was just me missing Caitlin. I’d be driving to Costco on a Sunday or sorting the mail on a Monday, and I would feel it, that sort of disbelief, yawning open beneath me, that something I loved that much could be gone.

But Caitlin was right there, which meant it couldn’t be her.

“Maybe you’re the one who can’t see it,” Caitlin said. “It’s difficult to see beyond the stories we’ve grown emotionally attached to.”

“What does that even mean?” My voice was getting higher.

“She’s your mother,” Caitlin said. “You love her. And you’ve made taking care of her your entire life.” She pointed to April. “But April tells me. She says you go there every day. She says you spend every free minute taking care of her.”

“That’s what good daughters do,” I said.

Caitlin waved her wine glass across the room, gesturing to the things my mother had made. “Oh, come on, Mom,” she said. “Look at this place. You’re treating her like she’s your child. You don’t think it’s a problem that you’re infantilizing your own mother?”

“Is that what your therapist says?”

“Mom,” April said like a warning.

“I’m trying to help,” Caitlin said, steadying her voice, trying to stay calm. “I know it must be hard without Aunt Kelly. All of the emotional labor of caring for an older parent has fallen on you. But I just—I don’t get it. We barely saw her when she was well, and we lived in the same town. Wasn’t she a terrible mother to you guys?”

It stunned me for a second, like the arc of electricity that shot through my body that time not long after April was born when I touched a still-live wire. Did that just happen? I thought. Am I still alive?

No one had ever said that before—I had never said that before. My mother was not perfect, but she was not terrible. Besides, what did Caitlin know about taking care of anyone but herself? She had never been a mother. She had never been alone with two girls who seemed to always need something from her that she never had to give. She only knew what her therapist told her a mother should be: selfless, free of judgment, a port in the storm. But Caitlin didn’t know about trying to be those things when it felt like the entire world was the storm. If she had asked me, I would have told her: all you can do when times get terrible is batten down the hatches and save whatever is closest to you.

“Your grandmother did the best she could,” I said, my voice shaking, and then Caitlin was the old Caitlin, the soft Caitlin, and she was trying to take it back.

“I’m sorry,” she said. She stood up and came over to my side of the table. “Of course she did.” She squeezed in next to me on my chair and rested her head on my shoulder. She knew exactly what I needed. She always did. She was so sensitive like that. So sweet and selfless and good. I could feel her entire torso against mine then, and I thought, Please. I thought it, but I didn’t say it: Please don’t leave. Please stay here forever.

◊

Later that night, after the girls thought I had gone to sleep, I heard them in the kitchen. April was washing the dishes while Caitlin dried, but it was Caitlin who was talking. She was telling April all about something called a monotype, how you cover a glass plate with paint and press it onto paper, and even though most printmakers use the first print because it’s the most vivid, she found it to be too illustrative. I listened to her put the emphasis on the second syllable, not the third, and it took me a second to realize what she was saying.

“Honestly,” she said, “I prefer the second print or third. Plenty of artists consider them to be inferior, but I like them more. The edges are softer. The colors are more muted.”

April didn’t say anything. It was quiet for a minute except for the sound of the water moving across the back of the bowl April was washing.

“Mom is nuts, isn’t she?” Caitlin said then, and I drew in my breath and tried not to move.

April didn’t say anything for a while, and I watched Caitlin watching her sister. She always did that, even when she was young. See me, her eyes always seemed to say when she looked at April. Love me. Never leave me.

“She’s not nuts,” April said then, shutting off the water. “She’s just Mom.”

I stood there for a second and tried to remember how long it had been since we had all lived under the same roof. Ten years? Fifteen? I was losing track. Even in this moment, I didn’t know who was who and which decade I was in and where everyone was. Was this my house or my mother’s? Was that April and Caitlin washing the dishes or Kelly and me? Those were my children, weren’t they, moving on without me? Or, if they weren’t, then it must be me. I was the child, wasn’t I, still trying my best to move on.

Emily Lackey HeadshotEmily Lackey’s stories and essays have appeared or are forthcoming in Glimmer Train, Prairie Schooner, Post Road, The Rumpus, and Longreads, among others. She lives and writes in Western Massachusetts.

Image credit: bohdan palahai on Unsplash

A KNIFE TO A MOTHER by Jessie Glenn

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

A folding knife against a pink neon background

Jessie Glenn
A KNIFE TO A MOTHER

Shhhk. The knife blade flicked up. Shhhk. The knife blade flicked down. I can’t remember who gave me the knife but I’m pretty sure it was my brother. He certainly had a knack for knowing what I liked, having later picked my favorite husband of three. I kept both sides of the blade razor sharp. For a time, I loved it, unduly.

In those days, I carried the knife everywhere but mostly to work at Satyricon, legendarily the oldest punk bar on the West Coast, where I sat in the raised booth to the right of the door, collecting IDs and money, flicking the knife up and down, rolling and chain-smoking cigs. On an average night at Satyricon, Everclear, The Wipers, Floater or some other 90’s PDX band blared into me for hours, music becoming a wall of sound and me a vibrating sheetrock screw. But shhhk. I could still hear my knife.

In the 80s, when George Touhouliotis bought Satyricon, and into the 90s, when I worked there, Old Town Portland was a dangerous area. Dealers walked by with excellent side eye whispering their code words, “Chiva. Soda.” Luckily, I never got busted for my chiva street buys. Back on the East Coast friends had told me, “No white drugs, the rest is ok.” So when I moved to the West Coast and heroin was black, I figured, no big deal.

A couple of decades later, Old Town has been rebuilt shiny and clean and people have to find their drugs elsewhere. Satyricon is gone and chiva probably just means goat instead of sticky little black balls of heroin looking like goat shit, wrapped in colorful balloon skins.

Before I got my gig as a doorgirl, but after I realized shooting up heroin was not so great, my friend Laura and I would go to Satyricon to watch shows and buy coke from the former weekend doorgirl, Kiki. I saw Floater way too many times and Dead Moon not enough. At the time, I was crushing hard on the weeknight doorgirl, Cynthia, so we’d go on those days too. I thought we were lucky, getting into the bar with no ID, but later I heard George say, with his magnificent bellow, “IF SHE GOTS A PUSSY SHE GETS IN.” Then Cynthia got another job, and improbably, the week I turned 21, George hired me as Satyricon’s new doorgirl. George looked at the manager, Dan, with his thumb stuck back at me. “She gotta ID yet?” Apparently, it took more than a pussy to work there. But the knife was fine.

Any character flaws I had at twenty-one were roundly celebrated at Satyricon—my shady, unformed ethics were saluted; my dips into mental illness and drug-enhanced mania were collectively regarded as adorable. Not being a chicken shit was more important than staying alive, and everyone cool had the same code in this dark, comforting world.

Out of the blur, a few moments stand out. Shhhk. I would flip up my knife while asking people for their IDs. If they flinched, I would call them pussies. If people were super drunk, I’d ask if I could draw something on them. If they said yes, I’d write, “FUCK ME IN THE ASS IM WASTED” on their forehead. In Sharpie. Shhhk.

Once, I flicked up the blade and the short white dude in front of me looked approving and poured a bunch of (seriously good) coke behind the edge of my doorgirl booth. Later that night, his taller friend asked if I could help them with an errand. The junky girl bartender fluttered her eyelashes and asked to join. I was a little nervous but thought, who wouldn’t want to be helpful?

I followed the little guy in my car to a big house in SW Portland, not far from downtown. When we got there, the tall guy offered me and the bartender some heroin.

“No thanks,” said I. Even then, it was not lost on me that addiction had nothing to do with intelligence or willpower. It’s just a cruel and simple lottery that I had managed not to win.

“For smoking then,” he said.

“Eh, no,” I said. The bartender looked relieved and tucked in for two.

The two men loaded some bags into a crappy little car in front of the house and asked if I would drive. I got in the driver’s seat, fastened my seatbelt, turned on the ignition and the two men sat in the back, giving directions like people do in mob movies before the driver is garroted.

“Right! Right, here! Get in the other lane.” I flipped on my turn signal.

“Wow, that so good. She use her turn signal,” the big guy said to the little guy. Pretty sure that’s the only compliment I’ve ever had on my driving to this day.

We pulled up to an apartment building and the tall guy ran in while we waited in the car. A short muscly guy came out of the building, saying nothing but taking all the bags. All four of us drove back to the house and the bartender asked if there was any more heroin.

“You know how to get that, puta,” the tall man said, laughing.

“I gotta go,” I said.

“OK! Excellent job tonight! Thanks for driving! Sorry you don’t like heroin! Want some pills?” the short man was enthusiastic.

“Sure,” I said, tucking them in my pocket. Got back in my car and drove home to Ben, my husband. It didn’t in any way occur to me that I just participated in a major drug deal. It was just another night after work.

The next week at work, shhhk. Napalm Beach, wall of sound. I flicked the knife open while asking a scary-looking dude for his ID. “You like knives?” he said. “How about this?” He pulled a handgun out of his pocket and held it to my head. I laughed. “Nice,” I said. “It’s 10 bucks to get in tonight.” When I was twenty-one, I was never gonna get two for flinching.

Sometimes I spoke in a French accent all night. Everyone counted their change twice. When I spoke in a southern accent everyone spoke slowly and used simple words. “I’mmmm Savaaaanna,” I told them. “Hi Savanna!” Shhhk.

The best nights were when Jake came in. Being married at twenty was weird. Being married was the sum total of life when I was home, and I forgot about it when I wasn’t. Ben and I were friends, and I loved him, it just never occurred to me not to be looking for someone I loved better, and I’d been situationally in love with Jake since we were both 18, when I met him at my friend Adeline’s house. He was one of those super cute boys who didn’t talk, which made him seem extra interesting. I fell in love easily and unregretfully for the first 30 years of my life.

Jake worked around town at various restaurants and, at some point, started working at Genoa. Arguably, Genoa played a significant role in me getting pregnant. Genoa is still legend in the Portland restaurant scene. Genoa started the Portland restaurant scene. Their food was like eating heaven if heaven was made of meat. And sauce. And lovely bits of stardust I couldn’t identify. Every time someone walked in the door to Satyricon, my pulse would speed up for a second: was it Jake? Was there food?

I don’t remember the first part of that Friday in early November, 1996 at Satyricon. Probably The Mentors or Poison Idea playing. I remember wanting to love the music, but it always hurt my ears too much. Likely I was stealing a fair amount of money out of the till, out of which I paid off the side door guy, the sound guy and the bouncer. I had nailed Peter Pan, why not be Robin Hood, too?

Forty-five minutes before last call, Jake walked in with something wrapped in foil. I salivated before even knowing what it was, because I knew it was from Genoa. Lamb chops. I can still reconstruct the mouthfeel of the crisp fat on the sides of my tongue, the juices salty, the meat yielding to my teeth.

Dan opened the till to pay me. “You want cash tonight or…?”

“Not cash,” I said. “$15 of not cash.” Which meant, pay me partly in coke. “The rest in cash.”

Jake rolled his eyes in the most subtle of ways. I could only tell how he was feeling by paying complete attention to him all of the time. He was subtly miserable a lot and I tried to distract him by convincing him to be entirely, obsessively in love with me. This was not particularly successful, but he continued to come to see me at Satyricon while continuing to be miserable, so it wasn’t a zero-sum game.

“Want a shot of whiskey?”

“Sure,” he said. I finished the lamb chop.

Last call came and I took my cash and did a couple lines. I asked Jake if he had a ride. “Want me to drive you home?” I staggered when I stood up.

“Sure,” he said.

At Satyricon, as in many bars, we got a free post-shift drink after the lights came on when everyone looked weird and blotchy and we’d kicked out anyone who wasn’t working or playing. I also got a pre-shift drink, and most times (usually) a few during-shift drinks. I was very proud of my hard-won tolerance for whiskey, my toughness, my knife. Start heroin, quit heroin, get married, fall in love, never get two for flinching again. I had been the sensitive kid my whole life. Who says you can’t just decide to be different? It’s easy if you find the right world to live in.

We drunk-walked to my 70s Thunderbird, both still holding our beer cans. It started to pour. I crossed the river from Old Town to Southeast and stopped at the Plaid Pantry for cigarettes. Pulling out, I went the wrong way in traffic. I went through a signal and the cop behind me turned on her lights. As I turned onto the shoulder, we pushed the beers as far under the seat as possible.

“Do you know you went the wrong way on a main road and ran two lights?” the cop asked. I half closed my eyes tragically.

“It’s raining so hard, I got turned around and flustered, ma’am.”

“Yeah, it sure is raining hard. I can see how that would happen. I do need to give you a ticket, though.”

“I understand, ma’am. I will be very careful on my way home.” I worked hard at not slurring. Or using a French accent. Or kicking over my beer.

“You do that,” she said, ripping the traffic ticket off the pad and handing it to me.

She walked back to her car and Jake whispered, “Don’t drive till she’s passed! How can she not tell you’re wasted?”

I fiddled with my keys, waited till she passed to turn the ignition, and looked at him. “What the fuck was that?”

“No idea,” he said. “You’re lucky.”

“Lucky. Yeah.”

We started kissing like kids do, then, like you want to consume something, like desperation. Like it’s the last chance ever again to eat a lamb chop from Genoa. At every stop light on the way back to his house we smashed our faces and chests together but it wasn’t nearly close enough and when we finally parked outside of his parents’ house, it took about 10 seconds to wriggle out of our clothes, fulfill our bright consuming of each other and be done, pulling clothes back up and around ourselves, lighting a cigarette, chucking the two cans of beer out the window. He got out and walked into his parents’ house and I drove back home and got into bed with my husband. I told him about the cop and Jake and the beer in the car. I didn’t tell him that I screwed Jake. But he knew. It was the 90s.

A couple weeks after that, I drove Ben’s truck to work. Not sure why I didn’t drive my Thunderbird, maybe Ben was using it. Maybe it broke. We went through a lot of old cars. The huge ‘65 Ford was hard to drive without power steering and the brakes weren’t that reliable. My brother borrowed it once and the brakes went out on a hill and he crashed it. “You’re supposed to pump them when you go down a hill,” said Ben.

I didn’t drink much that night. I felt like any store of luck I might have had was annihilated when the cop let me go while I was driving wasted the wrong way up a street. And running lights. And screwing cute boys. And chucking beer cans.

And playing with knives.

At the end of the night, I took only cash from Dan. Shhhk, I flipped the knife back into its sheath and shoved it in my back pocket for the last time. I walked out into the three a.m. autumn air, my shoulders pushed as far back as my childish bravado would let them.

The ride home could be broken up into several stages: first out of Old Town to the Burnside bridge, than over the Willamette River to the south side, then as far south as Portland goes until you get to the somewhat rural suburb of Milwaukie, then up River Road past the first old folks home and just past the second one. I drove pretty slowly as I got close to my street. Both of the windows were rolled down because I was smoking while I was driving. I put the blinker on, and it did its slow old man tick, tick, tick and… SMACK. Something hit me in the head.

I yelped as I turned left onto my street and pulled into my driveway. I turned off the car and rubbed my head. I had what felt like a little scratch on my cheek. I patted the wide aqua bench seat next to me to see what it was. Feathers. A body. A warm body. A bird. An owl. It had flown through the passenger side window and hit me in the head. I picked it up carefully and brought it inside in case it was just stunned rather than dead.

I woke up Ben and he agreed. The owl’s neck was broken. “What the actual fuck,” he said, and went back to bed.

I sat with the little owl for a moment longer, not sure what to do. What did an owl mean? Death. Wisdom. A message. What did it mean for wisdom and death and a message to break their neck against my face?  I pulled my knife and my wallet out of my back pockets with my keys and set them on the kitchen counter next to the little owl.

In the morning, I went to the pharmacy and bought a pregnancy test. My pee made a plus sign. There was to be an addition.

A premonition folded in over me. This is the end and this the beginning. The dark, comfortable world I had found was no longer mine and it was time to invent a new one. I tucked my knife onto the top shelf of the kitchen closet and closed the door.

I told Ben. I told Jake.

I put the owl in the freezer.

Jessie Glenn Author PhotoJessie Glenn’s essay exposé about ‘MasterChef’ was ‘Best of 2018’ in Salon Magazine. They’ve also had essays in NYT Modern Love, Washington Post, Toronto Star, and elsewhere. They are currently writing a memoir. Glenn teaches book publicity at Portland State University in the Masters of Publishing Program. Jessie and spouse have a blended family with five children.

Image credit: Jimmy Chang on Unsplash

DAISY’S BOY by Allison Dreier

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Young man with an arrogant expression on a fire escape

Allison Dreier
DAISY’S BOY

Daisy has this boy that none of us like. She says they aren’t boyfriend-girlfriend but he sure acts like it’s more than a hookup when he texts her things like, where are you? and i miss you much right now baby.

Daisy tells me she likes the way he takes control. Like on their first date, he put his hand on her chest and she pushed it away cause she’s “not that kind of girl,” but then after a few more minutes he tried again and she let him.

“I wouldn’t like that,” I tell Daisy.

◊

Daisy spends the party in the bathroom and she’s not even drunk.

Phoebe and I try to get Daisy to come out, but she won’t and she’s locked herself in the stall with her feet pressed flat against the door so it won’t even budge when Phoebe tries to kick it open.

“What did he do to you?” Phoebe asks.

◊

Phoebe calls me and asks if I know where Daisy is and I say no I haven’t seen her since they broke up. She says that Meg told her she saw them together at Commons and we decide to run there and see for ourselves.

Daisy looks like a puppy caught chewing up the couch and he doesn’t even look at us. We make up some excuse of why she needs to come home, but she looks at him when she says she’s not leaving.

◊

Daisy asks me if my boy ever pressures me to have sex. She’s also wondering if it’s normal to start crying after.

I tell her a half truth, because I don’t want her to feel so alone like she does, so I tell her, “It’s normal to start crying cause it’s an emotional thing, ya know? But I don’t think it’s right.”

She asks if my boy ever does things that I say I didn’t wanna do, and I say, “No, cause he’s not a rapist.”

I know I shouldn’t have said that, cause she gets all quiet.

“I was just wondering if it was normal.”

◊

Daisy says his heater’s broken so he’s gotta live with us for a while. Phoebe tells me that being around him makes her want to throw up, so she’s gonna be spending a lot more time in coffee shops.

Meg asks us why we’re letting him live with us if we hate him so much, and we just shrug our shoulders.

“We aren’t the ones who would deal with him if we say no.”

◊

Daisy tells me, “This is it. This is really the end,” cause she spent all night looking after him cause he tried coke and thought he was gonna die.

She calls her mom crying, and her mom gets all worked up and says, “What did you expect, Daisy, you let him treat you like shit. I told you, Daisy, I told you.” Daisy keeps saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

◊

Meg tells Phoebe that his roommate told her that the heater was fixed weeks ago. Phoebe and I decide not to bring this up with Daisy at first, but when we get back to the apartment and he’s there, and she’s got her head on his shoulder, I look him straight in the eyes when I say, “You can’t live here anymore.”

I don’t wanna look at Daisy, her arms hugging her waist, curled up and folded until she is small enough to get lost between the couch cushions.

◊

Daisy’s boy opens the door to the apartment, which makes all of us jump. Daisy says she’s sorry a million times, and tells us not to pause the movie, cause she’ll be right back. I tell Meg to pause it anyway once they’re in Daisy’s room, cause I wanna hear what he’s gonna say.

But all I can hear is Daisy’s boy crying, which I find strange cause I’ve never heard a boy cry so hard before, and all she keeps saying is, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

Meg says it’s her fault cause she told Daisy to stop texting during the movie, and I kind of agree cause Meg should have known what would happen if Daisy stopped, but Phoebe says, “No it’s not,” and Meg doesn’t say anything more. We sit there doing nothing for a while but then we play the movie cause Meg says she doesn’t wanna listen to him scream anymore.

◊

The next morning I must have shown the disapproval on my face, cause Daisy gets all defensive and says, “You know I can’t leave him.”

“That’s not true.”

“I’ve tried to. I can’t do it.”

“You could leave him,” I say.

“I’m stuck.”

“You aren’t.”

“No matter what I do I’ll go back to him. I always do.”

“Daisy—”

“It’s cause he loves me,” she says, “You think I’m crazy. Do you think I’m crazy?”

“No.”

“I would,” she says.

“You’re not crazy.”

“Remember when I locked myself in the bathroom?”

I nod. “If he hit you,” I say, “you’d break up with him, right?”

But Daisy doesn’t answer.

Allison Dreier author headshotAllison Dreier is a rising junior at the University of Pennsylvania studying the Biological Basis of Behavior with a minor in creative writing and chemistry. She is the recipient of a Gold Medal and two Gold keys in the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards in short fiction.

Image credit: kevin laminto on Unsplash

VICTORY LAP by Tommy Dean

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Purple, white, and blue firework in the sky, with the title of the piece on the bottom right

Tommy Dean
VICTORY LAP

The ticker tape dropped from the unseen buckets perched high above the swarming city streets. If this was victory, the boy didn’t want another second of the crush of people, the taste of ash and paper on his tongue. His mother gripped his hand and though he couldn’t see her face, he knew she was crying. He was bounced by hips and knees, that little rubber ball at the end of the paddle until his fingers ached and he found himself alone at the mouth of an alley, struggling to breathe, sound, not air, filling his lungs. A soldier kneeled halfway down the trash-strewn pavement. The rifle that had surely kept him alive rested in a pool of murky water, the shoulder strap a sun-shriveled snake resting near his boot. The boy approached slowly as if trying to collar a witless sheep. He touched the man’s shoulder, but it was several seconds before the man turned from the oily, cracked cement. His eyes weren’t dull or drunk, but sparking, his shoulder quaking like the boy’s dog during a nightmare. The dreams had led to a hemorrhage that had leaked from the dog’s ears like a nosebleed. The boy didn’t want this man to die, not at the parade for his honor, not after surviving. The roar of the crowd pummeled the space at his back like the growl of the tractor engine, his father swatting him with his hat every time he stalled the choke, grinding the gears. His mother was out of bounds, past his imagination, probably frantic, but here was this man, saying something, his spit rippling across the puddle. The boy bent closer until his knee wobbled against the gritting road, paper shedding from his jeans, seedlings bullied by the breeze of the passing parade, thousands of people celebrating.

“I just need to find North,” the man said, his skin grey in the twilight. The stubble on his cheeks was black, a rash of pimples across his chin.

The boy felt in his pockets, but there was no compass, no map, just rocks he had been pretending were bullets or, if thrown in a handful, a grenade.

“If we went back to the street,” the boy was saying, when the soldier stood abruptly, body rigid, legs pumping, a colt bucking, and the boy was scared, so he picked up the gun, a crowbar too heavy to swing. The muzzle dragged across the ground, metal rattling.

“Wait,” the boy called, his voice bouncing around the narrow walls.

The man stopped at the mouth of the alley, gave a lopsided salute, before merging into the flow of bodies, their noise a flock of crows scattered.

The boy felt desperately alone, the gun a weight he didn’t think he would ever escape.

Headshot of Tommy DeanTommy Dean lives in Indiana with his wife and two children. He is the author of a flash fiction chapbook entitled Special Like the People on TV from Redbird Chapbooks. He has been previously published in BULL Magazine, The MacGuffin, The Lascaux Review, Split Lip Magazine, Spartan, Pithead Chapel, and New Flash Fiction Review. Find him @TommyDeanWriter on Twitter. His interviews with flash fiction writers can be found at www.tommydeanwriter.com

Image credit: Julie Tupas on Unsplash

AMANDA IS MOVING BACK TO MONTANA, ALTHOUGH SHE VOWED SHE’D NEVER DO IT by Raima Larter

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

The starry night sky above a yellow house in Billings, Montana

Raima Larter
AMANDA IS MOVING BACK TO MONTANA, ALTHOUGH SHE VOWED SHE’D NEVER DO IT

Snapshot One: Graduation, Three Forks High School. Amanda wears a dark blue cap and gown with honor cords. The photo is out of focus and off-kilter since it was taken by Daddy who was probably drunk at the time. The principal is handing her a large envelope, which will turn out to be a full-ride scholarship to Mountain Valley State College in Billings. Granny is impressed, but Mama will say she doesn’t understand why Amanda would accept such a thing, since the money is from people they don’t even know.

Ways In Which Amanda is Like the Moon

  • The moon does not shine on her own; she only reflects the brilliance of that around which she orbits.
  • The moon was, they say, torn from her mother, the earth, by a great, cataclysmic event.
  • The moon circles the earth, both of them tugging at each other with a force strong enough to move oceans.
  • The moon’s role is simple: reflect the sun’s glory, but never, ever outshine it.

Snapshot Two: Family photo, Daddy’s funeral. Amanda, age 19, her sister Megan, 10, their Mama, their cousin Darlene, 21, and Brian, Darlene’s father. Uncle Brian wears an off-white cowboy hat and string tie. Amanda wears a light-colored calico dress. Mama is in a too-tight and too-short black skirt. Mama never dressed that way when Daddy was alive. The casket sits in the aisle behind them and is closed, since the body was mangled when the tractor Daddy was driving tipped over and crushed him. Granny is not in this photo since she was the one who took it. The photo is crisp, clear and perfectly centered.

Pros and Cons: Should Amanda Marry Jack Morgan?

Pros:

  • He’s smart, handsome and makes her laugh.
  • He’s not from Montana.
  • Amanda felt a jolt of electricity from his hand to hers when they first met, and when she told him this, he believed her.

Cons:

  • She may or may not love him—how is one to know?
  • He’s not from Montana.
  • Jack was engaged to someone else when Amanda met him. He refused to call it an affair. She wants his version of events to be true, but Granny doesn’t buy it.

Wedding To-Do List

Something Old: Jack’s paternal grandmother’s wedding ring—soon to be Amanda’s

Something New: Amanda’s wedding dress, which she made herself to save money

Something Borrowed: White strappy high heels, borrowed from a friend

Something Blue: Amanda, although she denies it whenever Granny asks

Snapshot Three: Family photo, Granny’s funeral. Amanda, Darlene, Megan, Mama, and Uncle Brian, who has now also become Amanda’s step-father. Amanda’s son Elliott, age eight, sits on her lap, looking sad. Amanda’s husband Jack is not in the photo since he was supposedly at a conference that day. He was actually with his lab tech, with whom he was having an affair, although Amanda will not find that out until she arrives home. Tucked under her arm is a folder holding a copy of Granny’s will, leaving Granny’s home along the Gallatin River to Amanda.

Things Amanda Will Miss if She Does Not Move Back to Montana

  • The meadowlark’s song, since that bird is a western bird and you’ll never find one east of the Mississippi.
  • The sun still being up at ten p.m. in the summer.
  • Snow in July.
  • Seeing Mama and Brian grow old and die.
  • Darlene’s little boy, who she’s never met. He’s the same age as Elliott and they could be cousins, just like she and Darlene were. Are.

Snapshot Four: Amanda and Jack with Elliott on their front porch in Illinois. It’s supposed to be a family photo. Amanda and Elliott are smiling at the camera, but Jack is looking at his phone.

Amanda’s To-Do List

  • Get the front porch of Granny’s house repaired.
  • Register Elliott for school at Three Forks Elementary.
  • File for divorce.
  • Buy two fishing rods—one for Elliott and one for Amanda.

Headshot of Raima LarterBefore moving to Washington, D.C., Raima Larter was a college professor in Indiana who secretly wrote fiction and tucked it away in drawers. Her work has appeared in Gargoyle, Chantwood Magazine, Mulberry Fork Review, Linden Avenue, and others. Her first novel, “Fearless,” will be published by New Meridian Arts Press in early 2019. Her second novel, Belle O’ the Waters, will be published by Mascot Books, also in 2019. Read more about Raima Larter and her work at her website raimalarter.com.

Image credit: Alan Labisch on Unsplash

JUST YOU WAIT by Stefani Nellen

Cleaver Magazine Posted on by

Two girls with curly hair

Stefani Nellen
JUST YOU WAIT

Malu’s daughter Lotte and Lotte’s friend Charelle were playing their favorite game: Mutant Vampires. They pressed their arms against their ribcages underneath their tight, glittering t-shirts so only their hands stuck out of the lacy sleeves, and stumbled through the kitchen groaning blood, blood, blood. They were both eleven years old.

“Blood, blood, I need blood!” Lotte banged against the fridge and tore open the door. “Frozen blood! No! There’s no frozen blood!” She banged the door shut, bugged out her eyes and spun in place, so blood-deprived she was hallucinating. Malu sat at the kitchen table and tried to focus on her laptop screen. She worked at a call center for the Belastingdienst, helping people with their taxes. She had taken the job when Lotte was six months old; now she was a manager who trained the new agents. She also worked as a freelance writer when she could get assignments. Lately, she had started looking at other options. Maybe she could go to the university and study literature, as she’d wanted to before she got pregnant in her last year of secondary school.

Charelle collapsed on the floor, twitching and moaning and arching her back. Lotte wrapped her arms around the bag of groceries still standing on the kitchen table. “Blood, blood, blood,” she groaned.

“Damn it,” Malu said, hitting the table with her palm. Lotte let go of the bag. Charelle got up and tugged her t-shirt into shape.

“There’s butter in there,” Malu said, pointing at the bag. “Milk. Yogurt. I told you to put away the groceries.”

“We were just playing, Mom,” Lotte said.

“Funny game,” Malu said. “Blood. Blood.”

Lotte stared at the floor. She was growing again; her pants were too short. The stick-on butterfly tattoos were starting to peel off her knuckles. “Your hands are rotting,” Malu said. “Is it part of the game?” She had been a girl, too, once. Not a Lotte, chubby and blond and pretending to be too old for Barbies while hiding them in a box underneath her bed. Malu had been a Charelle: straight long hair always falling into her face, shoulders she could drop in a way that grown-ups found irritating, long legs in carefully torn jeans. The stubborn set of her jaw.

“Just keep it down, okay?” Malu said. “I’m trying to finish an article.”

“Mom wrote a book about torture,” Lotte said. “She wouldn’t let me read it.”

“I only edited a book chapter,” Malu said.

“Cool,” Charelle said. She let a strand of hair glide through her fingers. “Real writers don’t have kids, though.”

“You know what, darling?” Malu said. “I think it’s time you and Lotte play at your place for a change. I’m sure your mother has time to entertain you.”

Charelle glanced sideways at Lotte, like a girl who had misbehaved and knew it. She lived in a big house next to the park; she had a trampoline, a cat, and a stylish black bike, and her parents were chaotically cheerful academics. Still, the girls usually played here. Tomorrow would be Saturday, so Charelle would sleep over.

“We’ll go to my room,” Lotte said. “Okay, Mom?”

“All right.” Malu put away the groceries and stepped on the small balcony, one of many identical balconies in her apartment building. There was no shade at this hour, and the stone was hot. She started stacking the empty flowerpots that were taking up all the space. Her mother had given them to her for her birthday, saying that the balcony would be perfect as an herb garden; the seeds were still in a drawer somewhere.

Real writers don’t have kids. Malu wrote whenever she could, early in the morning or late at night, or next to the TV while dinner heated in the oven. Stupid text for fashion catalogues or tourism websites or a restaurant’s homepage. She wanted to show the world that she could be both, a working mother and a writer. She would not become a welfare mom who collected a check each month so she could stay home with the baby and transform her place into a giant playpen. Or the kind of student mommy who brought the children to grandma before biking through the city, lunching at a café with her friends, and attending classes on Proust.

Living in a small flat with a baby, with occasional help only from her parents (who were not rich either, and who had hoped for something better for her), and the official resources available to any single working mother: it had felt romantic at first. She was living a story. The more boring her job, the darker the stairs up to her echoing hallway, the weirder the neighbors sitting and smoking next to the building entrance all day, the better for her. She would use it all in her writing. But after more than ten years, she understood that her life, apart from raising Lotte, had consisted mainly of staying on top of her job and short relationships that usually ended with the man telling her he felt overwhelmed by the idea of fatherhood. (“I see a theme here,” Malu once told her best friend from school, the only one she was still in touch with.)

Lotte’s father had been almost two years younger than Malu. She had been his first girlfriend. His awkwardness in bed and his blushing attempts at being a gentleman (he insisted on washing her afterwards, apologizing for she didn’t know what) had made her feel more experienced than she was; a real woman. Maybe he really had been in awe of her, but she lost any control over him once she was pregnant. There was already a mother in his life, and she swooped in to rescue her young. She sent her boy to live with an aunt in Amsterdam, and soon she and her husband followed. Lawyers negotiated financial details and visiting rights. Lotte visited her father once a month; she always brought back expensive presents: a new watch, clothes, a pair of suede boots. Whenever Malu refused to buy her something, she said, “Fine, I’ll ask Daddy.”

When Malu was done stacking the flowerpots, she swept the balcony, took a pizza from the freezer, and started to chop a head of lettuce. After dinner, she turned in early; she felt a headache coming on and asked the girls to be quiet.

◊

Malu woke up. She was hearing giggles through the open window, intimate and rough. It was still dark outside. She checked her watch: three a.m.

She put on her robe, walked down the hallway and into the kitchen. The door to the balcony was closed, but Malu could see the girls through the glass. They were sitting opposite each other on a blue-striped picnic blanket, both wearing pajama pants and white tank tops, bending their spines to look at some small thing they were both touching. Malu had never seen her daughter so grown-up, and Charelle so innocent. She came closer, crushing breadcrumbs under her naked feet, and took a sip of cold coffee from an almost empty cup on the counter. Charelle handed something to Lotte: a cylinder, irregular, almost a cone. It was glowing at the end. Lotte pinched the thing between thumb and fingers and lifted it to her lips.

Malu stood still. This was the ugliest, largest joint she had ever seen, and her daughter was smoking it. After a few moments, she opened the door. A black candle stood on a turned-over flowerpot, and an ashtray and a white saucer with dark crumbs sat between the girls with their smooth arms, faces glowing in the candlelight, and their small breasts pressing against white cotton. Malu knew she should punish this. She should tear the joint out of Lotte’s hand and drag her inside for a good and righteous talking-to. Do you have any idea what this is doing to your brain?

The candle flickered, the moon was almost full, and the girls were sitting in their blue striped nest like birds. The joint looked as if it contained seedpods or walnuts. It was held together by a piece of thread, or no, what was it? A wire? And it smelled different. Not like weed at all.

“What is this?”

Charelle leaned back on her arms and let her hair fall back just so, her face a mockery of sultry seduction.

“We’re getting high.” She pulled up her knees and giggled.

Lotte carefully put down the joint in the ashtray, turning it to remove the ash. The butterfly tattoos were still visible.

“We took some herbs from the kitchen, Mom.”

“We didn’t inhale,” Charelle said.

Malu picked up the saucer and sniffed. Oregano, basil, and thyme. She sniffed again. “Mind if I join you?”

“Sure!” Charelle said. Malu felt clumsy sitting down, like a giraffe among antelopes, but she didn’t want to go back to her bed and put foam plugs into her ears. She had earned her membership in the up-all-night club a long time ago.

“I’m curious,” Malu said. “Give me that.” Lotte hesitated, and then handed her the oregano joint and a lighter. Malu lit up and tried to inhale. She didn’t manage much. The smoke tasted like ciabatta bread at first, but quickly became bitter. She exhaled, lightheaded. “Whoa. Not bad.”

Charelle laughed, showing her sharp teeth. Lotte scrutinized her knuckles and the peeling tattoos. “These are pretty gross,” she said.

Malu noticed her cigarette papers next to the saucer. “Let me show you how to do this properly.” Lotte looked away. Malu knew she was going too far, but she couldn’t resist. She took two sheets of paper out of the flat package, licked one, and glued them together. On the paper, she mixed the herbs with her fingertips, pushed them down and wrapped the paper around them. She rolled it into shape, and licked the rim. “Voilà.”

She handed the joint to Lotte, who didn’t move to take it. Charelle did, her fingertips hard and cold. She admired it from all sides. “It’s beautiful. How did you do it?”

“Fast. The faster you do it, the better.”

Charelle rotated the joint and regarded it from each side, her eyes large, the tip of her nose moving a little when she said, “It’s perfect.”

“Thank you.” Malu took back the joint. “It is.”

“See,” Charelle said to Lotte, “I told you your mom knows how to get high.”

“Shut up,” Lotte said. “She doesn’t.”

Malu tucked her hair behind her ear. Charelle was facing her, inviting her to exchange a knowing smile that would exclude Lotte. A knowing smile—as if this girl knew anything.

“Is this why you’re here?” Malu asked. “Because you want to get high?”

“What? No,” said Lotte, and Charelle hung her head like a sad puppy.

Malu wanted to shoot them a sharp reply, but her personal time slowed a fraction, and she had to smile at what she saw. Charelle was too young to be a bad girl, no matter how hard she tried. And Lotte was the type who lifted snails from the bike trail because she couldn’t stand to see them split and mashed.

“There are more herbs in the kitchen,” she said. “Only herbs. Understood?”

“Understood,” the girls murmured.

“Stay away from the seeds, they’re for the balcony. And now I’ll go back to sleep. That’s my bedroom window right there. So keep it down.”

“Sorry we woke you up,” Lotte said.

Malu got up, still dizzy, and steadied herself against the wall. A breeze lifted the hem of her robe, and she wanted to open it and spread it like wings.  “You know what?” she said. “I am going to write a book. About torture and vampires and getting high and everything. Just you wait.”

◊

In the kitchen, Malu put the coffee cup in the sink and turned around to look through the glass door again. Lotte had wrapped herself in a green fleece blanket, holding it closed from inside. Charelle carefully stubbed out the joint and again lifted and admired it. Malu envied them their friendship, and their being out there together. It felt wrong that she should sleep alone. But maybe she could change this, too. It was time.

Stefani Nellen author photoStefani Nellen’s short fiction has been published in AGNI, Glimmer Train, Third Coast, the Bellevue Literary Review, Web Conjunctions, Cosmos, and Apex Magazine, among others, and anthologized in Dzanc Books’ Best of the Web and Flash Fiction International (W.W. Norton, 2015). Her stories have won the Glimmer Train Fiction Open and the Montana Prize in Fiction (judged by Alexandra Kleeman) and been runner-up for the Wabash Prize in Fiction (judged by Adam Johnson) and a finalist in the Iowa Review Awards. Originally from Germany, Nellen now lives in the Netherlands with her family.

Image credit: Ani Francisconi on Unsplash