by Courttia Newland

I’ve got this tattoo on me palm. Only a small one, an all black spider like a smaller version of the one on that super hero’s costume. Had it done when I was eighteen cos I was too scared to a get a big one like my mate Billy Sirus. He got his whole back done the crazy bastard, a multi-coloured portrait of Poseidon rising from the sea. Looks wicked mate; Sirus says the girls love it, and I believe him even though I dunno why. Me, I’m just content with the tiny spider on me palm. I promised us both I’d get a bigger one eventually, but I reckon me and Sirus both knew that was a lie.

Funny thing is, this spider turns out to be special. It only itches when I’m about to come into luck. Most people don’t believe that, but I don’t give a shit, it’s not for them to believe. Sirus does, cos he’s seen it on many occasions.

It was itching then too, the day me an him were both taking time off working the stall to watch Wimbledon. Now we wouldn’t usually do that when there was money to be made, but we were both dying to see Henman play and were even hoping to catch Serena Williams against one of them saucy Russian birds, the stone-faced ones with all that flowing blonde hair. Happy days, eh? Anyway, we’re both sitting in my flat watching McEnroe go on about his glory days and that tattoo on me palm just wouldn’t stop itching. I was only paying it half a mind, even though it had paid off in a big way over the years; I’d met birds, found money, my horse had come in first, so I wasn’t dismissive about being lucky that day either. It was more like I was concentrating on other things; namely watching tennis. I had a cold beer in me hand and a joint of hash in me ashtray. Like I said, happy days.

Next thing I know there’s a knock on the door. I couldn’t be bothered to move, so Sirus says you gonna get that? All sarky, like he does. He didn’t look like he was movin so I get up and open the door and there’s a deliveryman standing there. Had the whole thing, the little grey jump suit, the peak hat, the clipboard and name badge, the lot. Delivery for Mr Dino, he says. Nah mate, I tell him, I didn’t order anything. He says, that’s not what it tells me on this delivery form, and he shows me so I can see me name. There it is, bold as brass, Mr Terence Dino. Print and sign here, he says, pointing a skinny pen at the little black crosses. That’s when I see the two other geezers standing behind him with a box taller than all of us. Am I supposed to be paying for that? I ask the deliveryman, who was actually more like a boy. Nope, it’s all paid up, he tells me. Then I’ll take it, I say, and sign.

They wheel this massive box in, and I can see the sticky tape they’ve used has COMET all over it. Who the hell bought me a fridge freezer from COMET? I’m asking myself, cos it’s the only thing that monster of a box could be. Sirus is sitting there trying to hide the joint, but it’s no use cos the flat stinks of hash and the blokes wheeling the monster box in couldn’t give a shit anyway. They dump it in the kitchen and leave with a nod and a wink at me. I shut the door and crash onto me sofa.

That you an your fuckin itchy spider? Sirus says, sparking one up.

I s’ppose, I tell him. I’m still a bit shocked.

Thought I saw you stratching away, lucky git, he says, grinning now. Do you know what it is yet?

I think I’ve got an idea Rolf, I reply. It’s probably a fridge freezer innit?

That’s Sam then, don’t you reckon? Daft cow’s lost the plot and bought you a fridge freezer.

Yeah, I say, the thought only sinking in just then that he was probably right.

You’re bound to get admirers in my line of work. Dealing with the public like we do, it’s only natural. Me and Sirus have been selling antique goods on Portobello Market for 15 years, so everyone knows us and everyone who don’t wants to. It’s a great gig, setting up bright and early every Saturday and Sunday, having a laugh and a cup ah tea with all the other stall holders, nattering with the public and getting on with the real business. All the years we’ve been at it, running the stall never feels like real work, especially with me old pal Sirus by me side. We piss about for the most part, have a bit of a dance to the music coming from the CD stalls, chat up the birds and make money. Happy days.

The only thing is, you can’t get away. People know where to find you and often do, and they use you like some kind of agony aunt or shrink, telling you all their woes. The amount ah people that come to me in the early hours of the morning saying they got six months to live. Or they’re having an affair with the wife’s sister. Or they’re tried to chuck the coke but they can’t do without it. Terrible it is, the things you hear, not that I’m complaining cos I believe I’ve seen the rich tapestry of human life in all it’s colours, but Jesus; you see some things.

Samantha was one of those things. She come to the stall with her husband wanting to buy this huge statue of Ganesh I brought back from Thailand last year. Made from iron this thing was, an fuckin heavy too, could sit on your matelpeice if you had space for it. Anyway, hubby wasn’t having any of it, thought the thing was ugly and un-Christian, but she wouldn’t give in, so they spent half an hour going at it in front of everyone, arguing in that middle class way, whispering at each other with red-faces; I’m not being unreasonable, you are – stuff like that. Cos I’ve seen a lot of couples come and browse my stall I can more or less tell whether a relationship’s good or bad from how they shop. If they can discuss their differences and decide to buy or not to buy through mutal agreement, they’ll do well. If they can’t, they won’t. Young, budding relationships can be more giving. Older couples often find it difficult to communicate, as though the years have stretched their patience to breaking point. Gay couples of either gender are usually better than both, and say stuff like; What do you think? No, what do you think? No, you…

Sam and her husband fall into the second bracket. They’ve been married as long as I’ve been running the stall, have four kids, and fell out of love ages ago. Sam’s husband clearly wants to wear the pants and I think that grinds her down; she just wants to live. So they argued back and forth until he put his foot down and stormed off. She shrugged her apology at me and Sirus and went away. Two customers later, we’d forgotten ‘em.

Next day, I was standing on the stall scratching me palm when Sam came back on her own. She marched right up to me, pointed at Ganesh and said I’ll take that please. She seemed so different I hardly recognised the woman; her shoulder length blonde hair was loose around her shoulders, and I’m not the type of man that can usually tell, but I could’ve sworn she was wearing make up. It made her big blue eyes seem even bigger. Sirus was on lunch so I couldn’t even ask him whether I was right as soon as she left; though as it goes, I suppose that was for the best. I wrapped and bagged Ganesh for her and when she give me the money she kissed me on the cheek. We said our goodbyes and when I was putting the money in me pouch I saw she’d slipped a piece of paper between the notes. Call Me it said, next to her mobile number. Being a smart geezer, I followed her orders – when a woman asks you don’t think twice. The day after that, while hubby was at work, we did the wild thing all over my flat. Happy days.

That was a month ago. Sam had been round mine once a week every week since then, and, much as I’d enjoyed myself something didn’t feel right. My spider hadn’t itched until that afternoon watching Wimbeldon, and that kind of freaked me out. It made me think that what I was doing with her might be wrong on some level. I’m not usually such a moral soul, but there you go.

You keepin it? Sirus asks, passing me the joint. On the TV behind him, there’s a grunt and the Umpire yells Juice.

Let’s take a look and I’ll see, I reply.

So we get up and strip the box away to reveal a brand new shark grey Zanussi, with an icemaker an a water dispenser and enough space to stick a side of beef inside it, if I ever wanted to. The thing was huge. I kinda resented the COMET men not installing the whole thing, but having the type of job I did meant I had most of the tools to DIY. We spent the next few hours removing my old fridge freezer and replacing it with the new ‘un, which we wheeled into the kitchen with a metal trolley I kept in me attic. We exchanged all me foodstuffs, connected her up, switched her on, then stood there with satisfied smiles when the Zanussi started to hum.

Very Notting Hill Gate, says Sirus. Pimm’s ah clock I think.

I agreed one hundred percent.

Sitting on the sofa with our glasses of Pimms and lemondade on the rocks, courtesy of my brand new icemaker, I realised we needed to get rid of me old fridge. It was an old model I’d found on the street and liberated for me own use; now it was time to set her free. I wanted to throw her back onto the street, give some other lucky local the opportunity of experiencing her charms. Sirus was having none of it.

Take it to the dump, he tells me like an order. You can get rid of the rest of this junk.

I wasn’t really happy with his use of the word junk, but I had to admit he was right; my flat was more like our antique stall, mixed with a bit of car boot sale, mixed with a bit of bric n’ brac. There were VHS videos, and lamps, and books, and chest of drawers, and clothes and a single bed matteress leaned against the wall behind the sofa. Broken chandeliers and fake marble statues in a corner. Futon frames and miscellaneous boxes I hadn’t peeked inside for months. Every nook and cranny of that room was inhabited by some item waiting to be sold, or chucked out; I liked it that way, no one else did. Even though I was enjoying the Pimms and the tennis on my telly, I knew a clear out was well overdue. I drained my glass until the ice was touching my lips, and slammed it on the coffee table.

Right then, I said.

That was how we found ourselves motoring towards Wandsworth and the biggest commerical, industrial and household tip in that part of London, the Western Riverside Waste Authority. When I got started in the game you’d often find the big junkyard dealers wandering the outskirts of the tip, looking for bargains. Inside, there were guys who spent years sifting through the rubbish people threw away and selling what they found to the people that sold to you. Many an antique, or even some humble second hand item has been liberated from that stinking mass of dirt and grime to find its way into the homes of Portobello, or Camden Lock. These days the council cut the trade down to a minimum, but if you’re a dealer with the time and the van space, Western Riverside’s the place for you. I hadn’t been there for many years, so I was feeling pretty excited. Even as a kid, I’d loved to wander around the local tip, burrow into rubbish and find that special object some idiot had thrown away.

Sirus thought I should phone Sam right away and thank her, but I was having none of it. I appreciated the gesture, and I loved my new fridge freezer but I still thought she was going too far. Last thing I wanted was to get involved in breaking up her marriage, yet a feeling told me things were heading that way. I liked her a lot, and the sex was great, but I didn’t want to be with her. I wasn’t sure how she felt about me, although the appearance of me new fridge freezer was a clear indication that it might be time for us to talk.

We paid our toll at the gate and trundled through amongst the rubbish trucks, lorries and vans around us. As soon as we were inside I knew how an insect must feel in a mansion. There was rubbish heaps twice the size of my van in that place! It didn’t really smell of anything other than old dustbins, but Sirus rolled up his window all the same. We drove around looking for the smaller heaps where people dumped their household goods. The sound of hydralics, air brakes and reverse warning messages echoed all around us.

Once we found the right place, getting rid of the stuff, including my old fridge, was easy. It didn’t take longer than fifteen minutes. Sirus was looking at me with a gleam in his eye by then.

Wanna take a butcher’s? He says. That’s what I like about old friends. They know what you’re thinking before you do.

Sure. See you back ‘ere in twenny minutes?

Make it twenny-five, he says with a wink and walks off towards the big rubbish piles. I picked around our heap for a bit, but there was nothing but broken TV’s and metal chairs, clock radios and stained bed mattresses. I looked at my watch. I’d already killed five minutes. I took a wander around the back of our heap, where the medium sized piles are. Of course I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, I was just enjoying the atmosphere and the feeling of space and the cloud-filled sky above me. It’s rare to see an uncluttered sky in London, unless you go to the park. There were small puddles of rain created by tyre-treads in the rust coloured dirt that made up the road between the rubbish heaps. Swarms of buzzing insects floating above the water. Barking dogs from somewhere far away, and cats lazing on black plastic bags, or prowling the dump looking for mice. Although it wasn’t hot, whenever a cloud moved away from the sun I could feel the warmth on my skin. It felt good to be out and about. Away from the ‘Bella, in the relative quiet. It felt peaceful, and reminded me of when I went rambling by myself in the little bit of woodland left in North Acton, the bit that was now a housing estate.

At the bottom of one of the rubbish piles I saw something that made me smile. A huge, industrial freezer like the ones you see in Iceland, about the size of my Zannussi, only lying horizontal. God, that brought back memories. Playing with me mates in the dump, pretending to be vampires, using the freezers as coffins and weaving a game of tag around our imaginations. Daft thing to do, right? Yeah, we’d seen the adverts but we also saw the ads that said don’t play on the train lines, or mess around with fireworks, or take drugs; never stopped us from doing it anyway. I walked closer to the thing, ran my hands along the smooth surface. It must have been a recent dump; it looked almost brand new. The glass wasn’t smashed and there was no rust. I moved the door back and forth, testing it out. It squeaked a little, otherwise it was fine. I was grinning by then. I would’ve put it in the van but Sirus would’ve killed me. I had absolutely no need for another freezer, I just had the urge. I remembered something; that was why I’d stopped coming to the dump in the first place.

Before I could second guess meself, I was going around the other side of the freezer, climbing in. I know, I know… Very stupid of me, but what can I say? I wanted to relieve my childhood? I was feeling the chill now the clouds had covered the sun? I was a lunatic? All three? I clearly wasn’t thinking, because I the next thing I knew I was throwing my legs over the side, getting in and laying back. I’m not the tallest of blokes, so I could stretch my legs out pretty easily. There wasn’t really the space to move my arms, and I soon discovered there wasn’t much space at all, not like when I’d been a kid. There was that strong smell of plastic you get from the inside of fridges I’d forgotten about too, although it was soothing to look up and see the clouds whizz past in the sky, a random bird swoop past, wings outstretched. I tried to take a deep breath, but the smell was stifling. I tried to turn so I could get out, an bumped the side of the fridge. The glass door trembled, and fell closed.

Instant panic. That was the first thing that hit me, as I pushed and struggled to get the door back open. I had a flash of memory, when one of me mates had been stuck that way, in an ordinary household fridge freezer. We’d left him for a bit, laughing and calling him names from outside, then let him out when we thought he’d had enough. He was red-faced and gasping, the tears staining his face. We’d been in hysterics, thought it was a great laugh, and we were still curled up on the floor when he ran home. Poor sod never came out to play with us lot again. There’d been about five of us that day, and I only had Sirus, and he was probably somewhere miles away.

It was already getting hot. The air was stifling. The glass began to grow cloudy. I tried to sip thin breathes between my lips but it was a difficult job. I banged on the glass, only to imagine me actually breaking it and huge shards peircing my belly, my groin. It made me thump lighter than I would’ve done otherwise, although the way my air situation was going in a matter of minutes I probably wouldn’t care. Nothing I did made any difference, that bloody door stayed put. Sweat rolled behind my ears, from my armpits and down my back. My hands were prickly with heat. I started to kick and yell as I felt my lungs begin to burn, reaching down with and unconcious hand and starting to scratch. It took me a moment to realise what I was doing.

It was me itchy palm. The bloody spider was at it again.

I let me head fall back, allowed meself a long wheeze, even though I knew I shouldn’t. But I trusted it. The spider had never done me wrong. It only took another minute or so before a grey-haired bloke looked into the glass, worried and shaking his head. Hands wrestled with the clasp on the door, then it opened and sweet, fresh, cool air was flooding into my nose, my mouth and lungs. An arm thrust into the fridge in order to pull me out. I ignored it, not out of malice, but because my limbs were weak beside me, paralysed by my relief and fear. For the next few seconds, all I could do was scratch me palm and suck in air like a baby taking its first taste of the outside world.

I thought I’d only been trapped in the fridge a matter of minutes or so, but when I went back where I’d parked the van, Sirus was gone. I looked at me watch. Twenty minutes had passed like two. Lucky wasn’t the word. I should’ve been dead, although I tried not to dwell on that. When I looked around, the silence of the dump felt like a cemetary. I felt goosebumps on me arms and me heart pumped like mad.

I thanked me saviour, an old bloke in a fluorescent jacket over orange overalls with Western Riverside Waste logo stitched into the breast pocket. He nodded and stared at me like I’d just escaped from St Mark’s Mental Ward. I was a little embarrassed, though I didn’t blame him, and he watched me all the way out the dump.

It was a long walk from there to the bus stop that would take me back to the Grove. I was glad I had some change in me pocket for the fare. It was only when I felt in me jeans that I realised I’d had me moby on me the whole time. Despite feeling like a first class pratt, I had to laugh. I’d scared meself for nothing. At first I was gonna phone Sirus and ask why he’d left without phoning me, but then I thought I’d make another call. Scrolling through me address book, I found Samantha’s number and dialled with a hand that shook. Something told me I owed her that much.

Courttia Newland published his first novel, The Scholar, in 1997. Further critically acclaimed work followed, including Society Within (1999) and Snakeskin (2002). He is the co-editor of the anthology IC3: The Penguin Book of New Black Writing in Britain (2000) and has short stories featured in many anthologies including The Time Out Book of London Short Stories: Vol 2 (2000) and England Calling:24 Stories for the 21st Century (2001). His latest books include a novella, The Dying Wish (2006), and a collection of macabre short stories, Music for the Off-Key (2006). In 2007 he was shortlisted for the Crime Writers’ Association Dagger in the Library Award. For further information go to Courttia Newland

by KJ Kabza

The Weston H. Dawley who is worse off than the rest lives alone, and has been unemployed for 4 years.

He begins each day in a shitty apartment, moaning “Christ on toast,” as he awakens. (Other Westons say this too, but with those Westons it is because the Q3 reports look bad, or because a girlfriend has frolicked inappropriately where the press can see.) Our Weston rubs his eyes (as another Weston in a separate Beijing kicks back with a beer) and wobbles to the bathroom, where he ignores the dirty laundry and carpenter ants.

He faces the toilet, tugs down his sweatpants, and experiences a mediocre piss.

(Weston the astronaut, on Space Station Kiev II, carefully urinates into a bag.)

Our Weston gives himself a shake, pulls up his sweats, and flushes. He looks in the mirror reflexively. In some other universe, another Weston wakes in the arms of his wife and smiles; another Weston rides the disoriented high of the insomniac, grading philosophy papers and gulping down decaf; another Weston (a.k.a. DJ Scratchet) mixes his ninth record.

Our Weston washes his hands.

He also wonders if he will ever be anything other than this.

KJ Kabza writes fantasy, horror, science fiction, and the occasional regular-type fiction piece. He invites you to google him to find more of his work archived on the web, and suggests that you purchase the anthologies Fried! Fast Food, Slow Deaths and The Best of Every Day Fiction 2008 if you’d like some of his work concretized on your bookshelf.

by Carolina De Robertis

She had nothing to write that day, and so she didn’t. The computer screen glowed in front of her, the only light in the room. White bare document and a blue, indifferent background behind it. Words had appeared out of the cursor, then deleted, appeared, disappeared again. She had nothing to write that had the staying power it needed to survive more than a moment on the screen. The keyboard was a loom with no wool in it. She had no wool. Nothing to say. Words that turn to chatter in the mind of their creator have no reason to stick around. She let the screen go dark, and the room with it. In the dark the walls disappeared. She listened to her own breathing. Listened to silence. In the silence, she could feel them coiling around her, swirling slowly, darkness coiling through the dark. She did not know that they were, but she knew she could not write without them. Traces of presence; traces without which she was not herself. Maybe they would tell her what she needed, what she longed for, what to say. She wanted to lean into them, but leaning too hard made them fade. They must be approached the way a feral cat is approached: slowly, not too aggressively, not too hungry for contact, approached carefully if at all.

She had tried, before, to write without them. She had dutifully pulled words from her mind, strung them together. Typed. Anyone can type. Anyone can write, too, she supposed, but still it was not the same. When writing happened it was larger than herself, larger than the cognitive functions of her mind. It had happened before, this writing. She had made a book. She had listened and let a book fall together, fall through her, sentence by sentence, in terrified exhilaration. It had taken years. And it was done. Over. Gone. No more book. It was possible she would see it in the future with a cover of someone else’s design, pages filled with its words, shelvable, holdable, flippable, burnable, but even then she would not have it in the way she did before—she wouldn’t be inside it, shaping it, letting it take shape, slowly, soft and wet like clay under her hands, a supple clay you live and move inside of, each step and breath a gesture toward form. For years she had longed to be finished. Now she was finished and she longed for the book.

It was dark. The walls were invisible, and so was the ceiling, five feet above her head. She wanted to write. She had nothing to write. She missed the people in her book. Missed listening to them, loving them, wrestling with them in their invented worlds. Missed her own repulsion and her tenderness, the rope those two emotions made together. She wondered where they’d come from, the people in the book. If they’d stepped through some kind of door, perhaps she could go knocking? If they’d risen from the water, could she dive? In public she would say, of course, the word imagination, but the public had a bizarre meaning for that word. Imagination was supposed to be a private thing, individual, the acrobatic feat of a single human mind. This was not her experience. Imagination blurred beyond the boundaries of herself, down into reservoirs she had never seen the bottom of, out into the darkness without walls. Out into the darkness full of coiling presence. Imagination was surrender, it was terror and delight in their purest forms, it was everything but private; it exposed her; it was not in her control, just as winter storms were not in her control, even though they touched her, soaked her, made her shiver, made her sing. She had no way to fabricate a storm, and even if she did—the tricks of Hollywood, clouds on demand, sprinklers with their metallic gusts of rain—it surely wouldn’t work, surely would produce writing as artificial as its source.

She did not understand the writing life. It did not have a function in the strictest sense. It was like beauty in the words of D.H. Lawrence: a mystery, that one could neither eat nor make flannel out of. Useless—yet essential. It saved no lives and paid no rent (and she needed, daily, ways to pay the rent). And yet, without her writing, her world went out of balance. She became capable of sudden rages, snapped words, bouts of television. She became a beast, or, worse, much worse, she became a machine.

So she should write. She should keep writing. She touched a key on her keyboard, and the screen lit up again. V, it said. Nothing more. An accidental letter, not enough to start a book with. Perhaps a sentence. Vicinity, she wrote, but it meant nothing to her. She deleted all the way back to the V. She wrote, Volatile. Volatile words are shaking in the air, stripped of their meaning. She moved to delete the sentence, then stopped. Deletion could be its own addiction.

In the glow of the screen, she saw her bedroom in low light. The loom of her bed, her closet doors, the hamper with its mouth stuffed full of laundry. Dirty laundry. She should have washed her clothes instead of sitting here, trying to write. Trying to write into the emptiness. There is no try, said Yoda. Only do. Clearly she was no Jedi.

So what was she? A person who longed to write. Who had finished a book—just the writing of it, not the sending-into-world—and missed it, mourned it. Who feared that there would not be anything else, no more doors, no more creatures from the deep, no more gales of imagination to half-drown in. That was the great fear: that she had nothing else to say, nothing to write that was worth writing, nothing new to rise from the vast emptiness. Was it true? Could it be true? Perhaps it could, except, of course, they were still there: the traces, coils of darkness, wisps, plumes, presence. So-subtle presence. They could lead her anywhere, forward, back, inside, shooting up through sunlight, reeling down in wells. And inside her, too, there was still something, in the emptiness. A hunger. Not a hunger for words—more than that: a hunger for the alchemy of word and vision and that greater force sweeping right through her; a hunger for that terrified delight.

And when it started, anything could rise up in this room beside her: men, women, dragons, naked couples slick with sweat, houses full of shouting, houses full of silence, beetles, races, crashing cars, the smell of baking bread, gutters where coins glitter, gutters where shit mingles with the rain, bodies dancing naked, bodies exploding under bombs, bodies strapped to gurneys, bodies leaning lazily on balconies, bodies opening their mouths or other parts, old songs sung from lying mouths, new songs sung by radios, arias, dirges, lullabies, deaths, births, afterbirths, weddings, jilted brides, drunk brides, lusty brides, brides who smell of baking bread, brides whose bodies are exploding under bombs, peaches, pineapples dripping sweetly onto hands, sticky fingers sucked by a wet mouth, ships, storms, mountains, towers, brothels, priests, monks, hot-minded monks, soldiers, boots, children, windows where geraniums grow, windows with iron bars, sun that strokes the windows, rivers, whips, laughs, screams, dreams, whispers, families huddled around tables, families pushed together, families blown apart, people moving though the dark, people wandering and crashing and slowly coming undone, people droning through the hive of daily life, secrets, longings, murders, sodomy, feasts and hungers, thefts, bridges, buildings, cages, halls, walls, nails, doors, rooms, big rooms, small rooms, cluttered rooms, empty rooms, darkened rooms, rooms a lot like this one, where she sat, wanting to write, reaching for it, teetering, on the brink of words.

Carolina De Robertis’ first novel, The Invisible Mountain, is forthcoming from Knopf in August 2009, and from publishers in ten other countries. Her writings and literary translations have appeared in Zoetrope: Allstory, The Virginia Quarterly Review, ColorLines, and elsewhere. Her translation of Bonsai, a Chilean novella by Alejandro Zambra, was named by Three Percent as one of the 10 Best Translated Books of 2008. She received her MFA from Mills College in 2007, and is currently at work on her second novel. For more information, visit her website

by Michael Boylan

It was early in the afternoon one day when Henry came to the park. We were just a bunch of guys engaged in our weekly game. The air was chilly, but not cold. You know, late October before the grip of winter has taken hold: the end of autumn. Each Saturday, after our chores were done–around noon, a few of us from the neighborhood would head over to the park, which lay just across the freeway, to play touch football. Sometimes we’d see some people already there and invite them to play in our game. At other times it would be just the six or seven of us.

But none of us, save Mucho Pani, had ever seen Henry before.

On this particular day Eddie Meyer was already running routes with Billy Washington. Billy is the only black guy in the neighborhood. He teaches up at Jefferson High. Eddie was, I guess you could say, the best friend Billy had in the neighborhood. Eddie didn’t have any pretensions. He said what he thought and was not self-conscious about living in the smallest house while having the largest family on the block. He was a foundry worker, I think, and I’m quite sure he never finished high school. Still, there was something dependable about Eddie.

I came down to the park with Lincoln McCrae and Angelito Domingez. We were going via the northern bridge over the freeway. It’s only three blocks to the park, but you have to enter it from one of two gates. The rest of the park has a high fence around it for security. The park itself is about two miles around with a lake in the middle. It is pretty nice, I guess, for an urban park. There isn’t much violence, and there are often games of baseball in the summer, and soccer and football in the early fall. Lots of kids use our park. Why there’s even a group of Latinos (our area has the second highest concentration of Latinos in the city) who play a game that resembles volleyball except they kick a small wicker ball over the net.

On this day there wasn’t anyone in the park except Eddie and Billy. We could see them from atop the hill that overlooks the north gate to the park. What an odd combination. Fat, little Eddie was running out for passes while the tall, nearsighted teacher (who never wore his glasses to our games) tossed him arching offerings. I almost laughed aloud except that I didn’t know what Lincoln might say. Lincoln was always so involved with things, you know: serious. Lincoln had been a member of the civil rights commission and the ACLU so that I didn’t feel comfortable making light around him.

Angelito didn’t say much.

I began to wonder if we would have enough for a game. We always required at least three-on-three. It made for a better afternoon. There didn’t appear to be any people in the park this afternoon who we could ask to play with us. At that moment we only had five.

“Maybe we won’t have a game,” I ventured to Lincoln.

“Don’t forget Mucho and Tattler. One of them is bound to show. Those two egos couldn’t both miss together.”

Angelito nodded and so we made our way down the hill. The field on which we played was field number one. It was designed for both soccer and football. On each side were smaller fields which served the same purpose. On Friday afternoons there were always three games going on from two until seven. Our park gets lots of use.

As we made our way down the hill I saw no one. The lowland basin, with its two baseball backstops and five-tiered bleachers, looked as bare as the trees were becoming. There was a ‘nippiness’ to the air, but it wasn’t cold. At least not yet.

“Hi Eddie,” I yelled when we got to the bottom of the hill.

“Send one over here,” cried Lincoln to Billy Washington who had the ball. Billy sent a wobbling pass to the senior member of our group.

Lincoln muffed it, but laughed it off as he generally did by declaring that it took his forty-five-year-old-bones awhile to warm up. Lincoln was like that. Said that a person should bide his time and wait for the opportunities. Who am I to disagree? Lincoln was a lawyer and, I didn’t even finish college.

Soon the four of us were tossing around the pigskin (or more precisely cowskin) and were feeling the sweat begin to flow when we heard the loud car stereo of Jimmy Tattler. Jimmy, who hated any other appellation, was perhaps the richest among our group. I use the superlative guardedly because though Jimmy certainly wanted us all to believe this about him, I’m not all together sure that this was actually true. What a man wears and what he drives can often be deceiving. Revolving charge plans on credit cards make it easy to become over extended. I never use credit cards.

We were tossing the ball pretty well. It was time to begin the game. But even as we were dividing up, there suddenly appeared, at the top of our natural green amphitheater, the forms of Mucho Pani and another, unknown man. I don’t know why, but we all looked up at the same time. They hadn’t called attention to themselves. But for some reason we were all transfixed.

“Have you started yet?” yelled Mucho as he glided easily down the hill. And without waiting for a response he added, “We would have been here sooner, but we tried to get through the south gate. It’s closed. Some road work, I guess.”

Mucho walked with a confident stride of a man who felt he was among friends. I think Mucho always feels he is among friends–wherever he is. Anyway, as the two approached, Angelito turned away and began to pace off the field. We usually do this as a group after the teams are formed, but the rest of us were still standing there and Angelito wanted to get things going.

“Where’d you pick-up that one?” began Jimmy in a needling tone.

I laughed, though no one else did. Jimmy was right that the stranger had a peculiar look about him. He reminded me more of a machine–a computer perhaps–than a being of flesh and bone. Though flesh and bone he had in abundance. He must have outweighed any of the rest of us by forty pounds. I was glad we were playing a friendly game of “touch.”

“This is Henry,” said Mucho. “He’s going to play with us today.”

There was a note of authority in Mucho’s voice. Mucho was the manager at the supermarket on Capitol Court. He sometimes forgot who he was talking to. I suppose it’s easy to mistake your friends for a couple of stock boys.

Everyone except Lincoln and I walked away to help Angelito. It was up to the four of us to choose teams.

I suggested that Eddie, Billy, Lincoln and I stand Angelito, Jimmy, Mucho and Henry. The others agreed except Henry. He scowled.

The first two possessions went all right except that Henry didn’t seem to be doing much. He appeared to be studying us. At the time I thought he was trying to get the hang of our style of football. I wouldn’t find out until later that I was totally wrong.

The score was one touchdown to none when we had the ball about midfield with a good chance to increase our lead. It was then that Henry declared sharply, “Rule change!”

“What’s the matter?” asked Lincoln.

“The defense should be able to use their hands,” was his mechanical reply.

“There’s nothing against that,” said Lincoln, “provided that you don’t grab someone and that it doesn’t get too rough.”

Henry muttered something and the game went on. We had driven down near to the other team’s goal when Billy Washington went out for a pass and Lincoln threw him a perfect strike. Billy had it for a touchdown when suddenly Henry sent his hands, as though propelled by pistons, into Billy’s back. The play should have been over. Billy was unprepared for the blow and was thrown to the ground.

All of us were stunned except Tattler and Pani who chuckled at Billy’s misfortune. I think Tattler is a closet racist.

“What you think you’re doing?” cried Billy as he pugnaciously arose. “The play was over. You don’t hit a man after he has made a touchdown.”

“All I did was ‘two-hand-touch.’”

“It was pretty hard for two hand touch. Besides, that was a late hit.”

Henry didn’t respond but walked down to the other end of the field with his team for the kick-off. Billy was muttering to himself. I was in some confusion. Billy never played roughly at all. He was a finesse player depending upon speed and agility. To change the style of our game would not be to his advantage. But there was more to it. This outsider was coming in and trying to run our game for us. I resented this. I also resented Mucho for bringing us this bore. He made Mucho seem like a decent kind of guy. Still, no one wanted to make a big thing of it, so we went on.

In the next series the other team had gotten halfway down the field when Henry picked up the snap himself and ran right over Lincoln and Billy. Lincoln was knocked over by Henry’s shoulder hitting his ribs. Billy had taken the full brunt of Henry head-on.

Billy lay flat on his back. The soft-spoken schoolteacher looked hurt. A bunch of us ran to his aid. But Henry kept us away.

“I’ll see to this,” he said in a flat voice. There wasn’t any great loudness to his speech, but somehow it seemed to carry great authority.

Henry helped Billy to his feet. He only had the wind knocked out of him. None of us did anything. All we did was stand there and watch.

“Billy better play on my team for awhile,” he concluded.

This seemed like a logical arrangement so we left it at that. We got Jimmy Tattler in the exchange. In the next play Henry gave Billy the ball. The nearsighted schoolteacher followed Henry’s block which flattened me and Jimmy.

I felt something hot and flowing. I had a nosebleed.

“I think this is getting a little rough,” said Jimmy.

Billy, who had just made a touchdown, said, “How does it feel being on the other side of it? You seemed to think it was pretty funny when I got it.”

“Get screwed, sambo,” said Jimmy quietly, but so that Billy could hear.

Henry didn’t say anything. He gathered his men and kicked off. The kick was right to Jimmy who got it and was instantly flattened by Billy.

“What in the name of shit are you doing?” yelled Jimmy as he got up hot and ready to punch Washington. “You nearly ripped my $300 Carabinni body suit.”

Billy’s eyes flashed. He wouldn’t have minded laying into Jimmy right there. Then Henry intervened.

“Rule change,” proclaimed Henry. “From now on tackling is allowed.”

“Just a minute,” Lincoln put in. “We play touch here. We’ve never played tackle.”

Henry stepped up to the lawyer. “We’re playing tackle now.”

“I’m not. I’m leaving.” Lincoln turned around to go when Henry stretched out his left arm and grabbed Lincoln by the shoulder and turned him around. The lawyer’s eyes showed a fear which I had never seen. He had faced many important cases and had stood up to all odds, but now the threat was physically immediate.

“Let me go. I don’t want to play anymore.”

“You have to play. The game depends upon your presence.” Henry’s voice seemed almost to echo. There was a quality to it which reminded you of a loudspeaker system sending out its message to some crowd.

Then Eddie Meyer stepped forward. “You can’t do this. If Lincoln wants to go, then so be it. I’ve had enough of this myself. This isn’t football; it’s butcher ball.” Eddie stood up to Henry. There were two of them in front of this man and his dictatorial output. If only we had all taken that opportunity to rush him just then. We had our chance, but we muffed it. We just watched–myself included.

Henry wheeled and stared at Eddie a moment, and then with a terrible swing, he knocked Eddie’s head at the temple with such a force that the stocky foundry worker fell to the ground. Eddie didn’t get up. I rushed to Eddie’s aid, but Henry told me to get back in my place.

Why hadn’t we done something? Even then the six of us could have subdued him. But even Lincoln seemed impressed with what Henry could do if he wanted to. Henry could kill, and none of us wanted to be next.

“The game goes on. We play tackle.”

None of us wanted to continue. Even Mucho seemed to lose that air of self-confidence he always tries to affect. But continue we did.

It was with a different feeling that we resumed. Henry was now making more and more changes in the rules. Lincoln whispered to me that we should watch for our chance to jump Henry and so effect our escape.

This seemed like a good idea, but I could not help going over in my mind the fact that we had had the opportunity to jump Henry and we hadn’t taken it.

Henry was now making up all the plays. He assigned Mucho and Angelito to tackle Lincoln. When the lawyer had taken several jarring tackles he began to send sharp punches to the bodies of his hunters. After this had occurred three times Angelito sent a fierce blow to Lincoln’s jaw. The lawyer went reeling. Angelito didn’t stop there. He tackled the former civil rights activist attorney, and pushed Lincoln’s face into the dirt. Lincoln fought back.

Jimmy yelled to Lincoln, “Take care of that wet-back, Link. It’s time we got the garbage out of here anyway.” As he said this he looked back to Billy who responded by putting the salesman and his designer athletic costume down to the ground. Mucho went in to help Jimmy against Billy. I didn’t like to see two against one so I got in to help Billy.

I’m not sure how long we were on the ground, but it wasn’t long. Soon Henry stopped it. We had fought with passion, but for some reason we did not turn our violence against Henry. He had intervened. We obeyed.

“The game must proceed,” he said.

We stopped fighting. Billy had a puffy ear and a cut over his left eye. Jimmy was suffering from abdominal pains. Mucho seemed pretty good except for shoulder stiffness. My nose was bleeding again. This time it was broken.

The teams were rearranged again. Lincoln, now without two teeth, was playing alongside Angelito. None of seemed to same. We just kept doing what Henry said.

I looked around hoping someone would come and rescue us. The park is normally very busy. But today it was completely vacant. I hoped someone would come and stop Henry. If only we had acted earlier when we had had the chance.

Now Henry ran every play. We did what he told us to do. I kept waiting, as Lincoln had suggested earlier. But now, none of us were allowed to talk to each other so that organization would be difficult. The only one we could talk to was Henry. I felt he could be stopped, but I couldn’t do it alone. I needed help. But how could I get it when everyone was so badly divided? No one was himself anymore.

If only someone would come. We continued with the game. Each of us waited–waited for a way out. In the center of the field was the body of Eddie. It was getting stiff by now. Strange, we all seemed to ignore it. We shut it out. We played the game. We waited, and we played the game.

Michael Boylan (Ph.D. University of Chicago) is professor of philosophy at Marymount University and a Fellow at the Center for American Progress (a Washington, D.C. think tank). His most recent book, The Good, The True, and The Beautiful (2008) is a popular application of his worldview theory to many of the traditional problems in philosophy. The Extinction of Desire (2007) is a bold experiment in narrative philosophy. A Just Society (2004) is his manifesto on ethics and social/political philosophy (and the most complete depiction of his normative worldview theory and is the subject of a forthcoming book of exploratory essays by scholars from seven countries: Ethics and Morality: Reading Boylan’s A Just Society, March, 2009). He is also the author of Basic Ethics (2000, 2008, 2^nd ed.) an essay on normative and applied ethics, Genetic Engineering: Science and Ethics on the New Frontier (2002, with Kevin E. Brown), Ethics Across the Curriculum: A Practice-Based Approach (2003, with James A. Donahue), and Public Health Policy and Ethics, (ed. 2004)/ International Public Health Policy and Ethics, (ed. 2008) along with 13 other books in philosophy and literature and over ninety articles. He is the general editor of a series of trade books on public philosophy with Basil Blackwell Publishers and another series of books with Prentice Hall as well as being the ethics editor for the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Presently, Boylan is working on an extension of his worldview theory to international problems Global Ethics (2010, forthcoming) and further exploration of the relation of narrative to philosophy with Charles Johnson, Philosophy Live (2010, forthcoming). Read more at Blackwell Public Philosophy

by Jennifer Natalya Fink

I.

It’s everywhere, all over uptown and the remains of downtown, printed on everything from silk to chenille, on everyone from the mayor’s mistress to our hippie cat-sitter. On a do-rag arranged like a pirate’s, cocked to one side. Printed big on a too-tight sweater, clearly acrylic. Spread across gym shorts, worn with nothing but sneakers. And don’t forget those horrible pins, like old ladies wear when they want to jazz up their pants suits.

A plague of flag.

II.

You wear blue jeans that are too short and a rayon scarf that is too long. On Fifth Avenue, you do the impossible: you stand out. This is not the seventies.

You wear impossibly big earrings, glittery half-moons that pull your ear lobes to your shoulders. In Detroit, this is considered punk rock. You will not kiss and you will not swallow anything except diet soda and speedballs. This is not the eighties.

You wear both a nose ring and a ponytail. You play in a garage band that rhymes “dismay” and “day.” In a restaurant in L.A., you hum your dismay song as you fill up the ketchup jars and wait to be discovered. This is not the nineties.

III.

I close my eyes and open them and you are standing over me, as if you’ve come upon an animal already stripped of meat and are wondering what to do with the skin. You kiss me on the cheek without looking at me, fulfilling the minimum requirements for a kiss.

“Where should we go for dinner?” You have killed the ponytail; there’s a small dot that remembers the nose ring.

“Kono’s?” I touch where a watch would go, feel your pulse. Is it fast or slow? I don’t know how to read a pulse, but I like to pretend.

“Okay.” You are tired. You are already in your jacket.

We talk animatedly on the way to dinner, but fall silent after we order. You are watching your weight, no steak. The street is jumping tonight. It’s only Thursday, but everyone wants to find some spring in their evening. We both like these jittery city nights. We like our streets crowded and our pulses racing.

IV.

Nobody talks about it. It’s like in those old WWII movies where someone walks down the street and everywhere are flags with enormous swastikas, uncommented upon by our heroine. A club kid with magenta hair and green platforms has made a skirt of it, barely nipping below his crotch. A fluffy bow, tricolored, in a little girl’s long ponytail of gold. All done up in stars and stripes, red white and clashing blue. I prefer the old New York uniform, black on black, a pirate’s plain flag.

V.

The hot water is coming out green and frothy. I lean into the tub to investigate. This is it, I tell myself as if I’m the heroine of a post-Cold War thriller: they’ve poisoned the water. I put a glove on, an old red mitten missing its mate. The water even smells green, herbal. Herbal? Unless the terrorists are using Herbal Essence shampoo as their weapon of choice, it’s just a backed-up drain.

You like this story. You like my mistakes. You take off my glove and call me The Nose and swear my sense of smell is canine. You touch my back without thinking and if you did it again I’d be yours until the drain goes dry.

VI.

Subject: Support our troops!

I’m on every liberal hit list in the country, and still I get this shit. I open the email; who can resist? The flag is placed at the center. It looks like a frosted cake, the colors thick and blurry, and for $4.99, it can be mine. Fits right on your American car, but I have no car, American or otherwise. I don’t even drive; surely an act of treason. Special deal: three for $12.99—Buy one for your home, one for your car, and one for your neighbor. And one for the little boy who lives down the lane. The money goes to the families of the victims of the World Trade Center. They leave out the word ‘bombing,’ as if the building itself were the perpetrator.

VII.

I’d like to be dead, she says, but just for, oh, let’s say a month. To test-drive death, take her for a spin around the block.

That sounds very… American, you say. You are not alarmed. You and she have lots of conversations like this. You notice her jacket, a tight black wool number, boat-necked. It accentuates those thin bones on her neck. You smile at her neck.

Or to do it scientifically: here is a month dead, here is a month alive. She is animated now, the bones are dancing. We could watch both, she says, split-screen. Compare and contrast.

Like a ghost?

No, like a person who is dead and not dead.

It sounds tiring, you think as you nod. And boring, like one of those early seventies college films with an extremely pregnant naked woman jumping up and down on a tatty bed, while “Strawberry Fields” played at 35 rpm in the background. There were three record players, two screens, and one joint. She was in blue on one screen, and I think red on the other. Watch too long and you get a purple headache.

You steal a sip of her coffee as she keeps talking, turn the strawberry film off, and imagine yourself lining her coat, cloth on one side, skin on the other, and you feel her neck stretching out of you.

VIII.

Hey, remember that stupid war? How there were fucking flags everywhere, and we felt like we were trapped in a bad WWII movie? How everyone pretended George Bush was smart? Remember how right-wing and scary and just plain unsafe everything was? Remember being scared to open your Visa bill for a reason other than your balance? Remember seeing all your childhood fears on T.V.: planes exploding into buildings and people falling out of buildings and buildings crumbling until they’re not buildings anymore?

IX.

After you pop your father’s Viagra, examine his FY 1990-2000 tax returns, eat the vanilla almond Tofutti that’s dying in the fridge, and wash it all down with the most expensive cognac in the hall cabinet, what else is there to do at 4 a.m. at your parents’ house when you’re 33?

You explore under their bed, of course.

Now what?

You sit naked at the kitchen table in your father’s leather jacket. What time is it? They are in New Mexico California Montana, the larger of the retirement states. And you are here. What to do? Add shoes.

Your father is good for hiking boots. All the spoils of an upscale sporting-goods store are yours. Running shoes, all-weather nylon pants, and those goddamn boots, cleated heavy as clogs. Everything comes in small and large, no medium. Your father’s house is fully equipped for a father/son hiking trip.

You put on his boots without socks. They don’t go with the jacket. So take a tour. Pick up the pieces of dirt that fall off the boots as you clomp across the shiny hardwood floors. If this house was yours, you’d ban varnish. If this house was yours, you’d lose the vaguely Mexican rugs, kill the brass hall lights, retile the bathroom floor in something less arts-and-craftsy, and mix yourself a nice vodka-and-Prozac tonic. If this house was yours, you’d go to sleep.

X.

During the Stalinist era, the present vanished. Or, more precisely, it was erased. I’ll explain: in 1937, they printed a new map of Moscow for the first time since 1927, but instead of putting what actually existed on the map, they put the future: everything that was supposed to be built in the city according to the coming 5-year plan. So to find your way to the grocery store to buy some carrots, you had to use the map of the past and the map of the future, and figure that the produce of the present lay somewhere in between.

XI.

You want the ambulances to come like racehorses on speed, swerving over the yellow line to get to you. First you have to….faint? fall? No, something with a ‘c.’ Convulse? First you faint dead away, then you fall on the hard floor, then you convulse. A blanket is put around you, a blue polyester thing. Who chose it? Someone calls for the horses, we have a situation here, and still swaddled in blue, you drift from the scene, slipping away like a forgotten ghost.

XII.

We squint down Fifth Avenue. I notice there are others, also squinting. It’s hard work, looking for what’s not there. I hold your hand; I forget how warm flesh is, how solid you are. Let’s buy scarves, you suggest, and yes, this is exactly right. Something warm, something to tie, something to help us find this disappearing world.

Jennifer Natalya Fink is the author of BURN and V (both from Suspect Thoughts Press). She is a professor of English at Georgetown University, and the founder and Gorilla-in-Chief of The Gorilla Press.

by Scott Doyle

Casey announced to her father she was going into her office, her voice cool, flat, unsmiling. She leaned against the oak jamb framing the entrance to the living room, hip thrust out, a half-eaten bar of chocolate at her side.

“Hold my calls.”

Harold Benson watched his daughter turn and pad down the hall to her room. This was not what he had in mind when he accepted the firm’s offer to work four-day weeks after tax season rush. He thought about letting it ride. But then he remembered the two of them, Casey and his wife Millie, talking and laughing in the kitchen that morning, their voices dropping as he entered. Millie put a hand on Casey’s shoulder and leaned in to her. She had a way of doing that—leaning in and creating a world apart. Casey laughed, the toast popped. Millie greeted Harold and buttered the toast, laughing herself. There they were, two sorority sisters. Millie knew sorority sisters. At UCLA she counseled them. It was an unfair advantage.

When he heard the door to Casey’s room close, Harold began a slow walk down the hall. It was like heading to a job interview, one that never ended. You interviewed for it fresh nearly every day. Hi, I’m Harold, I’d like to be your father, I’ve been preparing for this job my whole life.

He stood before her door, considered, knocked.

“A knock on the door is a call, Dad. I’m in the middle.”

In the middle. She had become the master of the truncated sentence. Maybe it was the new thing.

“I was just hoping we could spend some time, the two of us, before your mother gets home. Don’t you need a break?”

“School is boring. School is the break.”

“Two minutes. Two minutes for the old man. Then it’s back to the grindstone.”

He heard Casey exhale. “You’re on the clock.”

Harold eased the door open as his daughter snapped shut a thick notebook and pushed her chocolate bar to the far corner of the desk, its silver wrapping reflecting the shifting light falling through the mobile hanging above. The overhead light was dimmed low and the blinds drawn, the room lit mostly by a handful of lamps topped by Casey’s collection of odd shades, like hats in a Dr. Seuss cartoon. The shifting, dappled light, which reminded Harold of the garden in late afternoon, lent a sense of motion to the Japanese comic art and the blown-up frames from graphic novels hanging on the walls. No Spiderman or Wonderwoman here. Serious stuff, about Bosnia, the Holocaust, weird brainy kids.

Casey swiveled around in her chair and motioned him to sit on the bed, palm extended like a seasoned business executive. An executive teenaged tomboy in low-riding jeans and Dodgers tee-shirt. Harold sat but just as quickly stood and paced the room.

“What’s on the front burner these days? Are you still doing that Japanese manga?” He scrambled for a combination of words that worked. “Which has nothing to do with the fruit called mango?”

Casey spit out a quick laugh, the small gap in her front teeth flashing like a wink. Then her eyes narrowed and she spoke with thin lips, “Dad you are so square your corners are going to poke somebody’s eye out. I’ve hit a wall on manga. I have some good ideas. I should probably go to Japan for a semester when I get to college.”

“That could be fun. The future is in the Far East, everyone says so.” Casey tapped her Converse sneakers on the wood floor, and Harold turned from the poster he was studying (Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth!). “Sent out anything new lately?”

“A few comics.” Casey stretched her legs and crossed her feet. “A story.”

“Which one?” Harold stopped and stood with his hands behind his back, trying not to fidget. He thought of the way Millie had leaned in to her.

Casey slouched low in her chair and rattled it off. “The one where global warming floods the planet and poisons the sky and there’s a race to colonize the deepest parts of the ocean where the water is still clean and the map of civilization becomes the opposite of what it is now.”

“Yeah, that’s a good one.”

“Yep,” Casey said, dragging out the word. She turned to the clock, sat up and reached behind her for the chocolate. “Time.”

Harold stared hard at the bar of chocolate as Casey brought it to her mouth and snapped off a perfect square with her teeth. It was no candy bar he’d ever seen.

“Where’d you get that chocolate? What’s wrong with a Hershey bar?”

“Gourmet shop. Cocoa butter. Time.”

“I’m happy you can afford gourmet chocolate now.”

“Would you rather I spent my chore money on designer jeans like the other girls? Would you rather?” This was the new refrain, the rhetorical question that allowed no comeback.

Casey spun in her chair, her back to Harold, her hand flat on the closed notebook, waiting.

“Thanks for the time,” Harold said as he closed the door behind him, slowly releasing the knob and allowing the catch to slip into place, the click sounding like a safe.

Harold drifted into the kitchen, needing to do something with his hands. He opened the refrigerator door, looking for clues about dinner. Lasagna. He could rinse spinach, that he could do. He had finished with the spinach and had started chopping onions when Millie walked in, her work satchel in one hand and a baguette in the other.

“Am I a good father?” Harold asked her, pausing with the knife. The burnt orange of her silk scarf set off her curly red hair. She was lovely in that fresh-faced librarian way of hers, and he knew he should tell her; but the question had been forming itself on his tongue all afternoon. “Am I doing a good job?”

Millie stopped and blinked slowly, looking startled and naïve even though she was neither. She set down her bag and the bread, came up to Harold and pecked him on the cheek. “It is a nice afternoon. You can go a little smaller with the onions.” It was not the way she had leaned in to Casey.

Harold put the knife down. He was not a walk-and-chew-gum guy. He pressed on as Millie sat at the small, tiled table where they had breakfast and read the paper in the morning. “This is my only shot. I’ve got to get it right.”

“Yes, this is your only shot.” Millie laced her fingers together on the table. “But your job is not to get it right. There’s no getting anything right.”

Harold scrubbed his hands, dried them, smelled onion, scrubbed them again. He turned and kneaded the dish towel in his hands. “How long is this chocolate thing going to last?”

Harold sat across from Millie and gazed at his wife, his eyes a question mark. He was tall with long restless limbs and he sat uneasily in the small chair. “Do I tell her she’s beautiful? I’m sure I do.”

“Benson, she’s fine. She’s healthy and can outrun most boys her age. She has a good breakfast, she has a good dinner. In between she snacks on chocolate. She’s fine, she doesn’t have food issues.”

He would concede her authority on that point. It settled nothing. “Maybe not,” he said, pushing his chair back. “She doesn’t have friends, either.”

“She has a few.”

“Not many.”

“Kids like her. They’re drawn to her. Someday she’ll come across people who hold her attention. For now she has her projects. You,” Millie said, reaching across and patting his forearm, “you need a hobby. You have too much time on your hands. You make up problems. You organize things in columns and make sure they add up. Life isn’t like that.”

“Casey has enough hobbies for the three of us.”

“Speak for yourself.”

It was true. Millie always had her hands in something, she never just sat and brooded. Or maybe she just didn’t let him see. He was seeing so much from a distance, or not at all.

“I’m going out back,” Harold said. “I need some air.”

As he passed into the living room Harold was conscious of his long legs, how his knees rose up when he tried to take shorter steps, how his feet slapped down in a funny way no matter what he did. He knew Millie was looking at him. She didn’t brood, but she looked long and hard at people, not trying to figure them out, just taking it all in. It was what he had first noticed about her, the way she noticed. He remembered walking along Venice Beach and thinking he could see it all, see the whole passing spectacle of it, just by looking at Millie, watching her watch.

Harold stepped out into the back yard and took a deep breath, like the air there was different, less crowded; and it was. Slices of red-tinged sunlight barely cleared the clay-tiled roof behind him and struck the yellow blossoms of the acacia against the far brick wall. Below the sun line, its leaves gleamed silver in the shadows. Lately he’d been helping Millie with the yard and the garden, and he found it satisfying. Even on a hot day the cool of the earth shocked and pleased him. He liked plunging his hands in, feeling the bite of the soil under his fingernails.

In the garden, for once, his hands felt nimble and useful away from a keyboard or calculator. His long fingers extracted weeds and grass, maneuvering safely around buds and stems. A tender transplant, its fine mesh of young roots clinging to bits of earth, looked safe and protected in his hands.

It had started with hands, nearly ten years ago, on Casey’s sixth birthday. He was squatting before her, bent-kneed, holding her hands lightly at the fingertips, allowing her to stand two inches above him and feel herself to be the big girl she now was. He told her she was the best present anyone ever gave to him, birthday or no birthday, and pulled her hands forward to kiss them. A few neighborhood kids were out back with Millie. Harold had snagged Casey on her way out the door, and she didn’t seem to mind, seemed to like being alone with him for a moment.

“Would you look at these fingers,” Harold mused out loud, more to himself than to her. It was one of those moments when you see something familiar, and see it new.

“What?” Casey giggled.

“How long and slender they are. You have an artist’s hands.”

The freckles on her forehead crinkled. “What’s an artist?”

What indeed. What did Harold know about being an artist. He was an accountant. Though he could lead Millie in a waltz, he couldn’t draw or carry a tune. He read, but mainly detective novels. He tried to read literary fiction but he would find himself reading the same paragraph twice, looking up and into space for a minute, then returning to the page to read the paragraph a third time before giving up. He knew nothing of being an artist. He knew about looking on artist types from afar. At Bard he had lingered as he passed the coffeehouses and the co-ops, staring at the hippies with their long hair and acoustic guitars and thick black notebooks. Something was welling up inside of them and had to come out.

Harold looked out the window at Millie and the other kids. They had stopped at one. Casey looked at Harold, awaiting his answer. “An artist is someone who has something inside of them, something that needs to come out. Ideas, visions, songs.” Harold knew he was failing to translate adult concepts properly, but he plowed on, carried away. “They may be a painter, a writer, a sculptor, a musician. But it has to come out, and it can only come out through their fingers.” He stopped, unsure what he’d just said. Harold kissed her hands again and jumped to his feet. “Ready for cake?”

After cake Casey grabbed a pad and new set of markers she’d been given and sprawled out on her belly in the middle of the living room and started drawing. To his knowledge she’d never looked at the comics but here she was telling a story in a sequence of frames. A cake split open and a handful of stick figures crawled out. They climbed on the candles and rode them like rockets. Casey stopped paying attention to the neighborhood kids. One of them asked her what she was doing. “I’m an artist,” she said. “Things are coming out of my fingers.” Birthday parties tend to peter out after cake, it didn’t seem a big deal.

He had set something in motion, that much was clear. Ten years later, Casey was on some days an ordinary kid. Other days she was in a hurry to get somewhere. Sometimes she talked and bubbled; then there were stretches of absorbed silence and furious creation. She snapped at her parents. Mostly at Harold. Like it was his fault for telling her she had artist’s hands. As Casey seemed to need him less and less, he imagined Millie did, too. They were a pair.

Harold could remember, clearly, the last time he and Casey really laughed together. It was nearly six months ago, back in May. It was his second Friday at home, and Casey seemed glad to have someone to talk to when she walked in the door. She was excited about the school year coming to a close. It meant summer and three weeks at art camp; and it meant next year she started high school, which had to be better, had to be more interesting. She listed the comics and stories she was hoping to finish and send off to magazines. She wondered if she was too young to get an agent.

“That’s what college is for, making connections. You haven’t even started high school. Don’t be in such a hurry to grow up.”

Casey sat up on the couch and mimed making a checkmark in the palm of her hand. “You’ve hit five hundred on that one, Dad. I’m afraid I’ll have to add it to the list of banned phrases.”

“Hey, who’s in charge here anyway?”

“That was banned months ago,” Casey said, rolling her eyes.

Harold leaned back in his favorite chair, his hands folded quiet in his lap. Sometimes he worried about Casey not having a brother or a sister, but for that moment it seemed perfect the way it was, a perfect equation. Brothers and sisters never added up right, in the end somebody always came up short.

“An artist has to strike while the iron’s hot,” Casey continued, the flat line of her mouth wise and matter-of-fact. “You never know when the well’s going to run dry. I have to keep pushing. I know I can do better than a lot of the crap out there.”

“You could just say ‘junk’ you know.”

“Dad…”

“I know.”

“Remember,” Casey started, then covered her mouth, holding in a laugh. “Do you remember the first time I really swore? I didn’t even know how. Jason Ellis was teasing me, relentlessly, about my diastema,” she said, pausing to pose a wide smile that showed the gap in her teeth, “and when I got home from school I was still mad and I said he was a dumb shitter, a stupid dumb shitter. Do you remember what you did?”

“What? No.”

“You sent me to my room. ‘To your room, young lady.’ And Mom said, ‘For God’s sake, Harold. For God’s sake she’s upset, give her a break.’ And you turned on her, your face all red, pointing, and sent her to her room, too.” She covered her face with her hands and then opened them. “You tried to send Mom to her room!”

Casey was heaving with laughter, tears streaming down her face. Harold was laughing almost as hard, a laugh sounding sharply at the roof of his mouth, filling his head.

That was six months ago. High school was not the promised land; Casey was moody; Fridays at home were a bust. He was almost looking forward to the long weeks that would start after the New Year.

Dusk was nearing and the distended bar of light from the kitchen window took on definition in the deepening shadows of the yard. Harold watched his wife move calmly about the kitchen. To watch Millie prepare dinner in that square of light framed by darkness was both intimate and distant, like watching a movie or a play in a quiet dark theater. Casey, too, with her notebooks stuffed with visions, was worlds away. He was on the outside looking in, in his own house. Harold watched Millie and felt something turning inside of him, a wondering, a question, he could not put a name to.

Millie was Zen Mother. She shouldn’t be that way, she’d seen bad parenting up close. When they met she was the neurotic one, anxious about being a mother. Harold was obsessed with parenting. He trained for it: working at summer camp as a teen, in college at a home for troubled boys. Here he was now, with one daughter, and over his head at that. What had he been thinking?

Millie was rinsing off the lasagna noodles when Harold strode into the kitchen.

“I’m going to ask her how I’m doing.”

“What on earth?” Millie turned off the water and stood still with her back to Harold.

Harold paused as he noticed the cream sauce bubbling on the back burner. There was something sweet about it, was she adding a dash of nutmeg? He would have to ask her later; for now there was no going back, the thing must be stood up to and faced.

“At school she gets report cards. At work we get performance reviews.” It was easier addressing her back, she couldn’t interrupt him with her eyes. “It’s a way of checking in, taking stock. Next year she turns sixteen. You know what that means, all hell could break loose. If there’s some festering issue, I want to know. While there’s time to nip it in the bud.”

“What are you going to ask her?” Millie asked in slow even tones.

“How’s the old man doing, I’ll ask.” His hands flapped in the air. “Overall, scale of one to ten. Good points, bad points. Areas for improvement, goals for the future.”

“Do what you need to, Benson,” Millie said over her shoulder, not quite making eye contact with him. “Or not. And or not is probably the better option.”

She turned and shook her hands, flinging droplets of water at him. Harold wound the tape back to Do what you need to do and decided he would do just that.

As Harold entered the living room Casey was coming down the hall from her room, eyes far away, lips moving slightly as if reciting a silent chant.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Hey. I’m going to see if Mom needs help with dinner.”

Another round to Millie. “Good idea.”

Harold sat in his chair and saw The Economist open to an article about China’s monetary policy he thought he should read.

He remembered a day at the beach as a young boy. While his older brothers tossed a Frisbee at the edge of the surf, Harold dug a moat in the sand. He could build up the castle only so far without the top crumbling, but the deeper the moat, the more impressive the castle, he reasoned. “What are you trying to do, Harold?” his father asked. “Dig your way to China?”

Casey walked out of the kitchen, shrugging her shoulders. “Mom says she’s good.”

“She is good, isn’t she?” Harold said flatly, a dart of sadness hitting him in the side.

Casey laughed. “You’re a funny guy, Dad.”

“Am I?” He didn’t feel funny, not one bit.

Casey grabbed a baseball cap off the coat stand by the door and pulled it on, backwards, tucking her hair under the visor in back. “I’m going for a walk.”

Harold jumped up. Time to face the music. “I’ll join you.”

Casey didn’t say anything.

“We’re going for a walk, the two of us,” Harold called out to the kitchen.

Out on the street, Harold had nothing to say. He concentrated on matching his gait to Casey’s. She moved with an easy athleticism that reminded Harold of his older brothers. Genes were funny, receding some generations, popping up in others, and disappearing, too.

It had been a dry November and some of his neighbors were out watering before dinner. People in Westwood kept tidy lawns and well-tended gardens. He and Millie had a plain front yard and put most of their energy into the garden out back that few people saw. The air was cool and the fronds of the palm trees lining the street stood out sharply against the blue-black sky.

“How’s school?” Harold asked, startled by his own blandness.

“Did you like high school?”

“It was a long time ago. I think I liked it OK.” He had loved it. Loved its structure, the march from class to class, each with its own thick textbook, its own fresh set of puzzles. College, with its sprawl of people and choices, was another matter.

Harold counted his steps and racked his brain.

“So what is cocoa butter doing in your mother’s hand-cream? What’s it do for your chocolate?”

“I have no idea what it’s doing in mom’s hand-cream.”

“And in your chocolate?” Harold asked, at the end of the block.

“You really want to know?”

“I’m all ears.”

“It’s a perfect crystal, for one thing,” Casey said, slowing. “To get it to crystallize right they heat it and then cool it to very precise temperatures. A good chocolate will dull a chef’s knife like nothing. And it snaps—just so.”

“You pay extra so it will snap and ruin your knife?”

“Clueless. No, you pay for mouth feel. Cocoa butter melts at ninety-one degrees—literally, in your mouth.”

“Not in your hands.”

“What?”

“Nothing.”

“American chocolate, your Hershey bar, has only twenty percent cocoa butter. Belgian chocolate has forty. They have laws in Belgium about cocoa butter.”

“Now there’s enlightened state-craft.”

“We have laws about ketchup. It’s what’s important to you.”

Am I important—to you?

“I don’t know where you come up with this stuff. I always thought chocolate was chocolate.”

“It’s not. A premium chocolate has more good brain chemicals, too. Until I’m old enough to drink coffee it’s the best way to get up to speed.”

Speeding away. Far far away.

“Chocolate is banned in horse racing.”

Who was this girl? Where had she come from? How did anything turn out like it did?

“Cool knowledge, huh?”

“I’ll say.”

“You asked.”

“No, really.” Harold reached out and placed a hand on her back, knocking her cap to the side. His hand fell away. Casey straightened her cap; they continued walking.

They rounded a corner back onto their street. Millie had put on the light over the front door. What was she doing now, right now?

Harold looked up. A few stars sputtered high above. Casey was a stranger. At the center of the known universe, creation turning around her. Finding hidden worlds. Flashing her gap-toothed smile and happy to teach the world the right word for it.

The buttery smell of the cream sauce filled the house. Casey headed off to her room.

“Hey, Casey.”

“Yeah, Dad,” she said, turning, already lost in the dark of the hallway.

“Keep up the good work.”

Casey tilted her head, seemed to nod. Maybe she smiled. He couldn’t be sure. “Will do,” she said, and continued on down the hall.

Millie was pressing the top layer of the lasagna into place and turned her head as Harold came into the kitchen.

“Tell me you didn’t ask her.”

He had no idea what she was talking about.

“You heard me. Tell me you didn’t ask her.”

“Oh,” Harold said and sat down. Millie rinsed her hands and picked up the lasagna pan. Harold stood and opened the oven door. “Smells good.”

He leaned against the oven after closing the door. Its warmth was pleasing. Millie stood near him, arms folded, waiting. She could wait with the best of them.

“She’s a good kid. Like you said, she’s fine,” Harold said finally.

Millie’s arms dropped to her side and her expression softened. “Hey, sweets… you alright?”

She placed a hand on his shoulder, then the other.

“Hey,” she said, her head close, her voice in a different register. “Talk to me.”

It was one of the things he had first loved about her, the way her voice dropped to a low hush, like a bucket whispering down a rope to retrieve something. It was one of the things he would miss, terribly, if anything ever happened.

“We’re OK,” he was able to say. “I think we’re all OK.”

Scott Doyle has stories online at Night Train and Sotto Voce, and in print at New Madrid and River Oak Review. Last year an evening of his stories was presented in the New Short Fiction Series, Los Angeles’ “live literary magazine.” He lives in Los Angeles and blogs at Lit Scribbler

by Myra Sherman

My stomach rumbles when the beefy guy with KFC in his backpack sits next to me. The fried chicken smell makes me crave juicy breasts and succulent thighs, creamy potatoes, biscuits. Hoping no one hears, I put my hand on the skin between my jeans and cropped tee.

“This is the Acute Outpatient Program and our check-in group,” Dr. Peters says. Sometimes he reminds me of my father, although there’s no physical resemblance.

My father was a big man, until he got sick. He went down to ninety pounds before he died. His skin was yellow from liver cancer and just thinking about him, even after three years, makes me want to cry.

Dr. Peters is middle-sized and middle-aged. Except for his blue eyes and deep voice, he’s nothing special. But I want him to like me. I want him to care.

My empty stomach rumbles again, even louder than before. The problem with chronic dieting is you’re always hungry. Growing up, my mother cooked fattening Filipino food, even though my father hated it. I was chubby in grade school. My thighs rubbed together, my arms were fat. I could be overweight in no time.

“I’m Dr. Peters, the program director.”

The room is beige, dull and stuffy. Amateur artwork is on the walls. The overhead fluorescents simulate daylight. Eighteen people have said how they’re doing and what they want to work on. The half hour check-in is almost over. There’s just Lisha and me left.

“Lisha, we missed you,” Dr. Peters says.

“I had appointments,” she snaps. Lisha is a tall African American. Before AOP she jumped in front of a BART train. Everyone worries about her, but she makes it hard to like her. She’s angry and quick to take offense.

“How are you?” Dr. Peters asks. His forehead is creased with concern.

“I am totally fine.” Lisha’s forehead is beaded with sweat.

“You’re sure?”

“You can move on.” Lisha’s hand wave is imperious, the Queen of AOP, mistress of the nuts.

Dr. Peters sighs, but doesn’t answer. Time’s going by. I want my turn. I need my turn.

“He’s trying to be tactful,” I blurt out. “You are so far from fine. Girl, that wig, and your lipstick looks like you did it on a rollercoaster, plus…

“Perla, that’s enough.” Dr. Peters coughs and drinks from his water bottle—everyone in AOP carries water, just like the gym—then turns to Lisha’s case manager. “Marsha, can you take Lisha to your office?”

Strangely Lisha doesn’t resist. She follows Marsha from the room head high as an African queen. I wonder what she’s thinking, what psychosis feels like. She’s taken all the time. I don’t know if Dr. Peters will end the group or let me talk. I’m embarrassed by my outburst.

“Sorry,” I say. “It’s just…I really need to be here.”

Dr. Peters raises his eyebrows, like he doesn’t believe me.

I know he’s thinking I look too good for AOP. It’s the same old story, being judged by my appearance.

People say I resemble Mariah Carey. I don’t see it. Maybe the hair and skin tone, but she’s a lot older. Plus I’m Filipina-Italian and I’m not sure what she is, but definitely something else. If she had a drop of Filipina blood my mother would know. My mother’s into things like that.

“I still can’t sleep, or concentrate. And last night for no reason, I had a panic attack. My husband got really upset.”

People discount my problems. Like being pretty and depressed isn’t possible. Doing my hair and nails, exercising and keeping up with fashion, doesn’t mean I don’t have issues. But I try not to dwell. Be present and positive, is my motto. At least it used to be.

“Upset?”

“I mean worried.”

What actually happened was Joe accused me of fabricating symptoms. “You want to be sick,” he kept yelling. It’s an understatement to say Joe doesn’t understand me. Sometimes I wonder if he ever did.

When Dr. Peters says to meet with him during break, I get this sinking feeling. “I was done,” I say.

I stay in my chair and watch people leave. It doesn’t seem fair to single me out. If it’s what I think, he’s going to talk discharge. He’s been hinting all week, smiling and looking at me, “So, who’s ready to graduate?” Like it’s an academic program where you get a degree and people aren’t kicked out before they’re ready to make room for new patients.

Dr. Peters clears his throat and sits next to me. He starts looking through his clipboard of papers. All the AOP forms are green. As opposed to the regular psych clinic, where they’re pink, or day treatment which has yellow. I know about the forms from volunteering at the clinic, after I lost my job, but before I was a patient.

I only volunteered two weeks, helping in the waiting room. I’d direct people to the right line, help the ones with canes and walkers, get drinks for staff.

In my family we talked to each other or not at all. But listening to the patients, hearing how therapy helped, decided me. I stopped volunteering and started treatment. If I exaggerated my symptoms a little, who could blame me? I couldn’t stand staying home, worrying and doing nothing.

Of course, now, I don’t have to exaggerate. If anything my symptoms are worse, the anxiety and panic, the incapacitating depression.

“I’m sure you expected this,” Dr. Peters says.

Some people won’t attend AOP, because of the stigma. It’s for patients who need daily treatment and are too disturbed for regular groups. Not disturbed like schizophrenics, there’s day treatment for them, but disturbed like persistently suicidal, or out of control bipolar. I keep telling everyone I’m bipolar II, the kind that’s more low key and not as obvious, but still just as devastating.

My fingers tremble as I take the green AOP discharge plan. My eyes fill and splotch the blue ink with mascara-tinged tears. I hiccup loudly.

“Are you okay?” Dr. Peters asks, moving closer.

I take a deep breath but feel like I’m choking. He smells like Lilac Vegetal, the aftershave my uncle Mike used. Be present and positive, I tell myself. You’re an adult now, a married woman. The diamonds on my wedding set sparkle, but I don’t feel like a wife.

Joe and I have been married five years. He’s third generation Mexican-American. He’s good-looking, in a Benicio Del Toro kind of way. We had a big Catholic wedding. We both come from large families. We seemed to have a lot in common.

“Dr. Peters said I could have another week,” I tell Joe.

We’re having dinner at Black Angus, salad for me, top sirloin for him. He’s on his third Corona. I’m sipping a Pinot Gris, thinking about a second glass. There are 100 calories in a glass of white wine.

“Why would you even want to,” Joe says. He has heavy-lidded eyes that are hard to read. Although he’s never been violent, sometimes he scares me.

After six years with the Sheriff’s Department, Joe just made Lieutenant. He doesn’t get how awful I feel since losing my job. My confidence destroyed, my nerves shattered. Everything’s upside down. I used to be the successful one, giving workshops in communication skills, even without my degree, when he was just a deputy at the jail, doing shift work.

What my company did to me was terrible. The harassment, stress, saying I wasn’t qualified, demoting me to a glorified clerk. It took all I had, just as a matter of principle, to fight them. We used the settlement for the down on our new house. Which was all good, but now I have a workmen’s comp claim on my record.

Sometimes Joe acts like he hates me. Like I’m a burden he can’t shake. I worry about him and all those young female deputies. I’ve heard what happens at the jail, people hooking up, getting divorced, getting married.

The waitress asks about dessert. I want the Chocolate Ecstasy Cake, but shake my head no. Joe orders another Corona. “For the road,” he says.

“I need to stay in treatment,” I say after the waitress leaves.

“You’d be better going back to school.”

“I need help.”

Joe narrows his eyes and looks disgusted.

I’m in Marsha’s group, headachy from lack of sleep. We’re in the smallest room, sitting in a tight circle. The gray carpet is stained brown in the center. It looks like dried blood, but probably is coffee.

When we got home from Black Angus, Joe kept haranguing me, saying I was too afraid of life to live. “You make yourself sick,” he kept yelling. I ended up sleeping in the extra bedroom, while he drank himself to a stupor. I didn’t hear him leave this morning and he hasn’t called.

“Where’s Lisha today?” I ask.

“She’s fine,” Marsha answers.

“I printed this article for her. About Japanese businessmen jumping in front of trains, it happens all the time, during the commute. They announce there’s been an accident which is their code name for suicides, and then the family pays the costs for stopping the system, with everybody being late.”

“That’s supposed to make Lisha feel good?” Betty asks, shaking her head. She has white puffy hair and wears pastels. I never know whether to pity or admire her, in her eighties and still coming to treatment.

“I thought, she wouldn’t feel like the only one.”

Marsha sneezes. She’s short and wears black-framed glasses. It’s my first time having her for group. It’s my first time with all women. “Let’s get started,” she says.

Some people are afraid to talk, some talk too much. I want my turn but don’t want to seem greedy. In check-in I brought up the fight with my husband. I’m ready to start when Ann raises her hand.

She’s this older saggy-faced blond who was fired from her job. Like me, but worse, because she was there thirty years, and didn’t get a settlement. Now with her benefits gone, all her vacation and sick days, she’s trying to survive on state disability. I’ve been in group with her before. It’s always the same, no way to feel better and no solution.

“I’m thinking of getting a lawyer,” Ann says sniffling. “Age-ism.”

“You should,” I say.

“What’s age-ism?” Betty asks.

“Discrimination because I’m older,” Ann explains.

“Just wait,” Betty snorts. “You have no idea.”

Ann’s been in the program three months, twice the time I have, but no one says she should be discharged. I can’t help thinking if I looked worse, was old and overweight and plain, the staff would take my issues more seriously.

Suddenly I realize no one’s talking. By the clock, I lost ten minutes. When Dalisay cracks her knuckles, the loud pop-pop is like a gunshot.

Dalisay tries to be friendly with me, because she’s Filipina. Actually, she’d have more in common with my mother, same generation, except she’s really manic, sometimes to the point of craziness, and my mother isn’t. Today she looks especially weird, with her buzz cut growing out in gray-black patches and thick fuchsia lipstick.

“I’ll go,” I say.

Marsha nods. There are twenty minutes left.

“It’s my husband.” I tell them about the night before, how sometimes I feel my marriage is a terrible mistake. “I’m so depressed. Lots of mornings, I have to pee, but don’t have the energy to get up. I just stay in bed and hold it in, until my bladder’s ready to burst.”

“I’ve done that,” Ann says.

“You don’t look depressed,” Betty says.

Dalisay nods sympathetically.

No one understands.

Until I was four, I was skinny. There was a Pantene commercial on TV, Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. The model had long wavy brown hair. My uncle Mike, who was staying with us, said I looked like her.

Uncle Mike looked like Sylvester Stallone with a shaved head. He was a Gulf War veteran, my father’s younger brother. When he pulled down my panties and touched between my legs, I liked it. He made me feel special. He said I was beautiful and would have lots of boyfriends. He made me promise not to tell.

Joe complains when we have sex. He wants me to do things I can’t. “You’re too inhibited,” he says.

“I have my reasons,” I say.

I have an appointment with Dr. Reed, the AOP psychiatrist. My first visit with him didn’t go so well. “Medication should be a last resort,” he told me. He even asked why I was in AOP instead of regular outpatient. “I have serious symptoms,” I told him. “I can’t even function.”

This time he seems friendlier. I purposely dressed down, just tights and a baggy shirt, hardly any make-up, hair pulled back.

“How’re things going?”

He has family pictures on his desk, next to a flat screen computer monitor. His degrees and qualifications are on the wall in matching silver frames. He’s not at all attractive, with a weak chin and sharp nose. In the family pictures his wife looks pampered, blond and beautiful.

“My symptoms are worse. I can hardly sleep, and I’m depressed, and I have panic attacks.”

“Panic attacks?”

“Sometimes I black out and lose time. It happened in group yesterday.”

“Sometimes in programs like this, if you’re suggestible…it’s not uncommon to pickup new symptoms.”

“You think I’m faking?”

“Not exactly. Not intentionally. More like avoidance.”

“Why won’t you help me?”

He touches his tie. He looks at me funny. He looks funny. The grain in the oak desk looks like its moving. I feel dizzy, nauseous. My chest tightens. When I close my eyes, I fall, bumping my forehead. I see black and gold spheres, silver light rays, twilight stars.

“Perla, can you hear me?” Dr. Reed’s voice sounds far away.

The carpet feels scratchy where my shirt’s pulled up. I’m on my stomach. Dr. Reed and Ralph, the program nurse, are standing over me. I don’t know what’s happened. I feel vulnerable and exposed.

Ralph helps me up and into a chair. He drapes a blanket over me and takes my blood pressure. Before I leave Dr. Reed prescribes Ativan and Zoloft.

I want to feel good. I’ve finally been taken seriously. I have medication. I can stay in the program. Instead I feel devastated and empty. Like I’ve lost something I didn’t even know I had.

The image of the model in the Pantene commercial comes to my mind. I never looked like her. My skin was too swarthy, my hair too curly. My uncle lied.

I’m at my mother’s, visiting after AOP. She still lives where I grew up, in the old section of Carquinez, overlooking Hwy 80. As a kid I didn’t mind living over the freeway. The traffic outside my bedroom window was like the ocean, noisy but soothing, lulling me to sleep. I always thought I’d move to San Francisco after high school, just forty miles, but a different world. Of course, that never happened.

After my father died my older sister moved in with her twins. When the boys get home from school and my sister is off work, the house will be noisy and busy.

With just me and my Mom, sitting in the kitchen, it’s a peaceful reminder of childhood. The same yellow Formica table, kitten salt and pepper shakers. Coconut rice served in pale green dessert dishes, too many calories to count.

My mother has short black hair and a Filipino nose. She’s gained weight in the last few years and wears long loose blouses.

“I’m starting medication,” I tell her. “I guess that’s good.”

“You had problems, remember before. Thinking people were staring, that you were too fat, nobody liked you…”

“I was just a kid then.”

“You got over it without medicine.”

“This is different.”

“My beautiful, unhappy daughter,” my mother sighs, reaching across the table to stroke my cheek.

I’m writing a book about my life. The title is “Pretty Girl.” Everything’s going in it, my family, my uncle Mike, Joe, all the treatment I’ve had. It’ll be done in a week or so. If I can write all night and Joe doesn’t interrupt me every minute.

“When are you coming to bed?” he keeps asking.

“Not tonight,” I tell him.

My home office is white and gold. Sitting here, with my fingers flying, I watch the sky turn from black to lavender to pearly pink. I can’t stop to eat or drink, or even use the toilet. What I have to say is too important. People are desperate to hear my story.

I’m printing my latest pages, numbers 30-40, when I hear Joe behind me. I recognize his step, his breathing, his meaty smell. I don’t have to turn around to know he’s in boxers and a wife beater, preparing to give me a hard time.

“Okay Perla,” he says. “Enough.”

“What’s your problem?”

“I’m taking you to the doctor. You’re not right, since the drugs.”

“My prescribed medication, taken faithfully and to the letter.”

“Three weeks…”

“You’re keeping me from writing.”

“Writing garbage.”

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“What the fuck, Perla. What the fuck.”

We’re in the waiting room, for my emergency appointment. A bundled-up woman is crying in the corner. A toothless long-haired man in stained clothes is talking to himself. Joe is in off-duty cop clothes, jeans and cowboy boots with a logo-less tee. “This is worse than the jail,” Joe says. “Look at these people.”

“Shiny, happy people,” I say.

“Perla…”Joe shakes his head.

“From third grade, REM.”

“Don’t even explain.”

For a so-called emergency, we have to wait a long time. When I get out polish to touch up my nails, Joe explodes. “What’s wrong with you?” he yells.

“You,” I say.

I have time to do both hands, two coats of bronze pearl, my trademark.

“The smell,” Joe keeps muttering.

I could run away, or maybe kill Joe. Rat poison seems especially apropos. I imagine Joe clutching his throat, choking. I picture myself at his funeral, dressed in black.

I’m writing in my notebook when I realize Dr. Reed is standing in front of me. The pimple on his nose makes him even uglier.

“This isn’t my idea,” I tell him.

“You’re her husband?” he asks Joe.

We walk single file to his office, first Dr. Reed, with me following and Joe in back, like I’m a prisoner.

Dr. Reed stares at his computer. He asks obvious questions, “What’s the day, date, year? What do people mean when they say a stitch in time saves nine? How are a peach and a pear similar?” He says numbers and asks me to repeat them. He asks about hallucinations. Finally he says my medications are wrong.

“The way you got manic from the antidepressant is diagnostic.”

“For what?” Joe asks.

“Bipolar, probably II.”

“Like I always said,” I tell them.

“Depakote and Zyprexa,” Dr. Reed says, nodding.

I always knew I was Joe’s trophy wife. I used to wonder what would happen if I lost my looks. Now I don’t have to wonder.

In two months I’ve totally deteriorated. Joe thinks it’s the medication, but I don’t know. Maybe this is how I’m supposed to be, the real me. The ugly me. My skin’s sallow, my hair’s dull. I’m reduced to sweats that pull tight on my butt and thighs and expose my stomach flab. I took off the gold belly-ring Joe bought for my birthday. There’s nothing uglier than body jewelry on a fat girl.

I know I disgust Joe. He staggers in at 2:00am, drunk on El Jimador. One time he had lipstick on his collar. I didn’t say anything. If I gave him half an excuse, he’d bolt. He might anyway. He doesn’t love me and probably never did. It was all about my looks, nothing more.

My life is day by day. I’m still in AOP, one of the regulars, too disturbed to get rid of. More and more, I’m in Marsha’s group, instead of Dr. Peters’. It took awhile before I realized Marsha works with the sickest patients, the ones without hope. I was so demoralized. Since I’m not supposed to drink alcohol, I bought fudge at See’s and finished the entire box. I felt nauseous after, even stuck my finger down my throat, but couldn’t throw up.

After AOP I go to my mother’s. She hugs me and kisses my forehead, but she’s worried. She’s stopped the fattening desserts and serves fresh fruit. A few days ago she said she was starting Weight Watchers.

“Maybe we’ll go together.”

“No. I don’t care.”

“I care,” she said.

“You just think so,” I said.

Marsha’s group is small today—just Dalisay, Betty and me. “How come just us,” I say.

“Let’s really use the time,” Marsha says.

“That’s supposed to make us feel good?” Betty asks.

Three months ago, when I talked about the Japanese suicides, Betty asked the same thing. That’s supposed to make Lisha feel good?

“I was just wondering, whatever happened to Lisha?” I ask.

“She’s in our Transition group,” Marsha says.

“Shouldn’t that be confidential?” Dalisay asks.

Marsha sighs.

“I didn’t mean…” I apologize. The Transition group is for program graduates. Funny Lisha would be there, while I’m still in AOP.

Last night was the first time Joe didn’t come home. No call or explanation. The disappearing husband, the ending marriage…

“Who wants to talk first?” Marsha asks.

“I will,” Dalisay says. “My husband finally understands.”

Dalisay’s husband is in his seventies and very traditional. He wants her at home, taking care of him, or at her nursing job, making money. When she’s manic, Dalisay thinks every man she sees wants her. She dresses bizarrely and attracts attention. Her husband threatens to throw her out.

“He’s a good man,” Dalisay says. “Everything was my fault.”

“There’s no fault involved,” Marsha says. “Just keep on your medication.”

I raise my hand. “My husband didn’t come home. Probably he’ll leave soon.”

“I’m not surprised,” Betty says. “You’re like a different person. Maybe you should see the doctor, get your medicine checked. Unless you like being like this.”

“Maybe you should get your meds looked at,” Marsha says.

When Dr. Reed sees me, he looks surprised. His complexion is clear and he has a fresh haircut. He looks fit and healthy.

“Everything’s wrong,” I tell him.

“Cognitive impairment, weight gain, depression. You should’ve come sooner.”

I’m too tired for anger, even when he decides I’m on the wrong medication. “The second time,” I say.

He checks the computer. “Antidepressants made you manic, mood stabilizers caused depression. It almost seems you were better before.”

“You look really good,” Dr. Peters tells me in small group.

“Twenty-six days without meds.”

“Your mood?”

“Okay. Not great, but normal. I’m getting back to myself.”

There’re new people I don’t know. Like the guy with the shaved head who winks, then asks, “What did you used to do, before treatment?”

“That doesn’t matter now,” I say. “I’m moving forward. Yesterday I went to Voc Rehab and got tested. The counselor said they’d fund me for finishing my degree.”

“Excellent news,” Dr. Peters says. “You worked in Human Resources, right?”

“I was a Psych major.”

“Guess you got the real skinny, here. All us looney-tunes,” the same guy says.

When he winks again, I realize it’s an involuntary twitch. Maybe it’s his shaved head, or the way he looks at me. Smiling, nodding, licking his lips.

I’m four years old, lying in bed, watching my uncle. He pulls off the covers. He pulls down my pants. He licks my belly button.

“There is something,” I say. “My uncle Mike…” My heart races, my stomach twists. “He used to touch me.”

I surprise myself. The forbidden, the unspoken comes pouring out. As I talk about my uncle, I remember his funeral. A motorcycle accident when I was nine. It was raining when he spun off the road. It was raining when we buried him.

“Child molestation,” a wrinkled woman with fuchsia hair says. “I know how that is.”

“When he wanted to stop, I wouldn’t let him.” I picture myself at seven, naked under my pink fleece robe, sneaking into my uncle’s bedroom. “I wouldn’t let him, even when I knew it was wrong. The last time was the day he died.”

“Filthy pervert,” the fuchsia haired woman snaps.

“For years I’ve felt guilty.”

“All his fault,” Betty says.

“Yes,” Dalisay agrees. “You didn’t know.”

“It’s affected me sexually, with my husband.”

“The two of you should go to couple’s therapy. It really helped me,” Dalisay says.

“Or sex therapy.” The new guy winks and nods.

“The important thing is getting this out. Acknowledge the guilt, but don’t let it define you,” Dr. Peters says.

After group Dr. Peters hugs me. I feel his approval and satisfaction. Like good work, a job well done. If he’s wearing aftershave, I can’t smell it.

Myra Sherman lives in Lake County, CA. Her fiction has appeared or will appear in: The Blotter Magazine, Fifth Wednesday Journal, Workers Write-Tales from the Couch, 10,000 Tons of Black Ink, Another Sky Horror Anthology, Thuglit, and others.

Lilac Vegetal is from her recently completed collection of linked jail stories. She is now working on a novel.

by Renato Escudero

Tony Miramontes wanted to be a country superstar in tight Wranglers. Before he made his journey al Norte and signed with Talent International, before he got Jimena pregnant, he worked at a resort in Cancún, where he served margaritas to visionaries, like Jimmy Buffet and Kenny Chesney and other renegades that ran from the Texas Rangers, or just insisted to lose their fame in the waves of the Gulf under a Mexican sun. Some of these Artists took their guitars and Stetson hats everywhere, even snorkeling. Tony watched them swim, strike some chords, sing verses to a circle of bikinis, and jot down notes on used cocktail napkins.

“What do you think, Amigo?” a skinny guy in black silk once asked him. He was a dark fellow, and Tony at first had thought he was a paisano.

“Muy bonito, Don Walker, el coro está bien pegajoso.”

“Don’t you think there’s too much beer in the chorus?”

“Ni mais, hombre, la Corona es buena cerveza.”

It was the morning after that worried Tony, because when Jimena went to clean their rooms, they gave her CDs and offered to take her for a ride on their tour buses.

“Qué te dijo el gringo guey?” Tony would ask her in linen closets, as he hugged her, kissed her and yanked the CDs from her apron pockets. Later he would listen to every note in his boom box. The jealousy ran two ways: jealous of the Artists’ drunk eyes on Jimena, jealous of their talent encrypted on silver discs.

“Ay mi amor, he jus give me his autograph.”

“En las pantaletas otra vez?”

“No mi cielo, ju think I’m a puta?I tole him my boyfrien’s un singer too, and then he say he must to catch a plane.”

Karaoke night came once a week without fail. Tony sang “Should Have Been a Cowboy” in perfect English. One would think he spoke the language. In fact an American in a jogging suit and a hole in his throat asked him if he had any material of his own.

“Jimena!” Tony yelled across the smoky lounge. “Jimena!”

She showed up with daisies in her hair and said to the American, “Tony Miramontes sings what ju put in front of him. He jus can’t speak the Englich.”

“Would he be willing to audition for us?” the man asked her, giving her a glossy card.

Tony intercepted the card and said, “Si patron, con mucho gusto.”

One day he would open for George Strait with his first and last top ten hit, “The Sparrow in Me.”

When the sparrow flies,

And gets lost in northern skies,

All that he can do

(Is sing) ‘Coo-coo-roo-coo coo.’

But that would be much later. Tonight he had to go home and help Jimena fix the old water heater and ask her how many more CDs she had hidden away in linen closets.

Renato Escudero received his MA degree in English (Creative Writing) from San Francisco State University, where he has also taught and is currently an MFA candidate. His stories have appeared in CIPACTLI, REED MAGAZINE, SLAB and THEFANZINE.COM. Renato is the winner of the 2008 John Steinbeck Award for the Short Story, and was selected as a finalist in the INDIANA REVIEW 2008 Fiction Prize and the NEW LETTERS Literary Awards 2005. He’s working on his first novel. He lives in Alameda, California, with his family and new baby boy.

You can see more of his work here and here

by Orman P. Day

From the laundry room, Ricky reached into the garage, turned on the dangling lightbulb and called, “Dad, you in there?” His dad grunted, so Ricky squeezed his gangly body through a narrow path between boxes, broken furniture and other junk stacked practically to the ceiling. Ricky gasped when he found his dad in a clearing, lying nearly naked inside the long aquarium the two of them had salvaged from the ruins of Yun Ching’s. No water, thank God for that. Just Dad with a rug of grass between his legs and some plant life and dirt scattered around. His hairy round belly and his scraggly beard and the grass reminded Ricky of the hillside park where they used to fly kites and eat homemade doughnuts.

Hovering above him, Ricky asked, “Another one of your wacky experiments?”

“Didn’t you read my note?” His dad’s voice sounded dry, like it did when he’d been chain smoking.

“Note? Got too impatient, so I jumped to the end, ‘You’ll find me in the garage.’ You’ve done some wacky things before…” Ricky shook his head.

“You’re home early. Didn’t expect you for hours.” Dad was staring at the ceiling. “Cut school again?”

“I was up in the hills, dirt surfing.”

Dad glanced sideways at Ricky’s dirty trousers and raw elbows. “Looks like you wiped out. The dirt was gnarly, was it?”

“Just because there aren’t sharks and rips…” Ricky frowned. “What’s with tearing up the lawn?”

“You wouldn’t want me to be X-rated, would you? Wouldn’t want me to shock your schoolmates, would you, with only a wilting fig leaf covering my crotch?”

“Schoolmates? Why would they see you?”

Dad took a deep breath that fogged the scratched glass. “Since you didn’t read my whole note…”

“I was going to. I just wanted to shower first and pluck out the nettles. The letter looks pretty complicated….and you know me and reading.”

“I know all about you and reading and writing. That’s why I tried not to use a word a sixth-grader wouldn’t understand. It’s not easy writing a letter using words with only one syllable.”

“Dad, don’t,” said Ricky. “Remember what the counselor said about building up pride in myself.”

“Speaking of the counselor, Mr. McGill called me in for a private talk this morning.”

“What’s on his mind?”

“Your senior class project.”

“Oh.” Ricky twisted his mouth to one side.

“You realize you can’t graduate without it?”

Ricky looked downward, shook his head and then nodded it.

“Not to be a bearer of bad news,” said Dad, “but it’s due tomorrow you know. You’re not doing it on dirt surfing, are you? Maybe what happens when you hit a stretch of mud, and the difference between sliding across gravel and sliding across sand.”

Ricky flopped his top lip over his bottom lip.

“Or did you have another topic in mind?” asked Dad. “Maybe you’re doing something on poultry to prepare yourself for a lifetime career frying tenders and fries at Chick-fil-A.”

“I’m still thinking about it.” Ricky popped the brittle cane on an old rocking chair that Dad had lifted out of someone’s dumpster. “I don’t want to rush into anything.”

“You’re gonna think yourself right out of graduation. Mr. McGill told me that some kids get senior-itis, but it’s a rarity to get sophomore-itis, junior-itis…actually junior-itis twice…and senior-itis. I tried to convince him of the benefits of social promotions…but he wasn’t buying it. No senior project…no diploma…no graduation checks from Uncle Jon and Aunt Jenny”

“What am I gonna do, Dad?”

“That’s why I’m lying in the fish tank on a bed of potter’s soil.”

“This has to do with my project?” asked Ricky. “I thought you were testing some kind of tanning booth without a light.”

“It’s all in my note. And your papers are all written.”

“Are you gonna clue me in?”

“It’s a stretch,” said Dad, “but I put that you’re interested in a career in landscaping…growing things…because your dirt surfing has given you an appreciation for nature.”

“Isn’t landscaping where you mow the lawn and yank weeds?” asked Ricky. “And edge…I hate edging. Can a white kid even get hired as a gardener around here? People think we’re too lazy.”

“Take my word for it,” said Dad. “You WANT to be a landscaper and your project supports your school-to-career transition.”

“So why are you bare-assed in the aquarium?”

“Because I’M your senior project.”

“What?” asked Ricky.

“I’m going to turn myself into a terrarium.”

“What’s that?”

“When we die,” said Dad, “we melt away and things start growing out of us…you’re fertilizer, see? Now if you planted seeds in yourself and on yourself…you could become a small garden…a terrarium. Or at least, that your project’s hypothesis.”

“A garden like with Adam and Eve?”

“Eden was pretty tidy,” said Dad. “There was a snake, but I don’t remember maggots.”

“So what things are gonna grow out of you?”

“That’s where the research part of your project enters in. You’re going to find out which seeds sprout and which vines wither.” Dad reached beneath his buttocks and grimaced.

“Hemorrhoids?”

“I’ve got an acorn in my anus,” said Dad.

“What?”

“An acorn up my wazoo. That’s one of the seeds you’re testing. I’ve already swallowed poppy seeds, radish seeds, sunflower seeds…all sorts of seeds. They’re all written down in your research paper, which—I should note—was nicely typed on the Selectric that your mother said was useless. You’ve got your hypothesis, your experimental design…everything you need is there. Wrote it in your limited vocabulary and tossed in some typos so no one’ll think you plagiarized.”

“Are petunias gonna pop out of your pores?” asked Ricky.

“Things aren’t going to grow until after I’ve been dead awhile.”

“That could be a long time from now,” said Ricky. “Decades.”

Dad held up a plastic bag and rattled it. “Barbiturates. Swallow the pills. Pull the bag over my head. Tighten it with a rubber band. Next thing: I’m a terrarium.”

“You’re nuts.” Ricky frowned. “Have you been taking your meds?”

“Don’t like the side effects. Missed the highs.”

“I’m gonna call the doctor.”

“By the time he gets paged on the golf course…”

Ricky sighed. “What would I do without you? Who’ll cut my hair? Who’ll drive me to the mall?”

“I’ve figured it all out. With your high school diploma, you can get a job….maybe one without a future…but a job anyway. You’ll get my car and you can drive it when you get your license back, although I wouldn’t drive it far, not with the cost of oil. If you can find your mother, maybe she’ll let you move in with her and Randy, although he thinks you’re a loser because you wouldn’t try out for football.”

“What am I gonna do for sodas and fish tacos?” asked Ricky. “Walking around money?”

“People made fun of me for collecting all of this stuff.” Dad wagged his finger back and forth overhead, so that Ricky could see an ivy cutting and a seedling taped to his armpit. “They called me a packrat. A compulsive obsessive. But these are your inheritance. All treasures to the right people. Hold garage sales, take things to the swap meet, go to eBay. Thousands of dollars here. I gave a month’s notice to the landlord, but my deposit will take care of July. After that…sink or swim…but I think you’ll find some water wings here.”

“How am I supposed to haul your carcass to school without shattering the glass?”

“And getting a pane in my ass?” Dad laughed at his own pun. “Uncle Grif’s got the pickup. I’ve already alerted him to be here early tomorrow morning. He brought the aquarium here and now he’s going to take it away, only with me inside. You’ll note the aquarium’s resting on plywood, right? And the tarp? Don’t let Uncle Grif look under it, for cripes sakes. Or anyone else until you unveil me at school during your oral presentation.”

“Got ya.”

“Here’s how you do it,” said Dad. “Open the garage. Pull down truck tailgate. Have Uncle Grif back up. Lift, push in the whole kit and caboodle.”

“What’s a caboodle?”

“Forget it.” Dad scratched at his backside. “Damn acorn.”

“You’d do all this so I can graduate?”

“Nothing much in life has worked out for me,” said Dad. “Patents didn’t make me rich. Schemes fell apart. Jobs failed to materialize. You’re a dim bulb, but you’re all I’ve got. And I want you to succeed, even if I haven’t.”

“You’ve been a good father.”

“A better father would’ve bought you a real surfboard and taken you to the beach for vacations, maybe even to Hawaii.”

“I like surfing on dirt.”

Dad sighed. “See the sheet of Plexiglas over there. That goes on top. Notice I drilled ventilation holes into it.”

“But you won’t need any air, will you?”

“Oxygen for the plant life. It’s all in your report. The holes are too small for the flies to get out. Wouldn’t want your classroom to become infested, would we?”

“What flies?” asked Ricky.

“As I ripen…now here’s a word you might want to remember…into compost, I’m going to host all sorts of things, including maggots, which’ll turn into flies.”

“Dad, this is too weird.”

“I could step in front of a train. Then what? An autopsy. Cremation. My ashes scattered to the wind. This way I can give my body to science and get you an ‘A’ in the process. Look, you need to prepare yourself for what’s going to happen to my corpse. The terrarium may fizzle. I may turn into more of a cesspool than a garden.”

“Why?” asked Ricky.

“The roots might die. Toxicity from some of the fatty acids in my body. This is my final experiment and I’m giving it my all. But I can already see some flaws. I wonder if I should’ve packed some manure in here so the bacteria would break down my tissue? But then you barely passed chemistry, didn’t you?”

“This is so creepy,” said Ricky. “No one’s gonna want to go dirt surfing with me anymore.”

“They’re a bunch of dumb shits anyway. Hey, one more thing, when I’m dead…open my mouth and pour in that jar of marsh water and polliwogs.”

“So you’re doing this just to help me graduate?”

“There’s something else,” said Dad. “Vengeance.”

“Who you pissed at?” asked Ricky.

“The whole damn educational establishment. The kids who bullied you and goosed you. The principals who wanted to turn you into a zombie.” Dad’s speech was gaining speed with each sentence. “The teachers who insulted you because you couldn’t understand their poems and theorems. The politicians who want to measure you with their dumb-fuck tests. I want to stuff their damn nostrils with my stench. Fill their brains with nightmares.”

“Calm down, Dad. You’re getting manicky.”

“I hate their guts so I’m going to show them mine. When they see you marching across their damn platform in your cap and gown, I want them to retch into their mortarboards. And then you take your diploma and get the hell out of town and make yourself a life somewhere else. Find yourself a girl who can see you’ve got something special inside.”

“I don’t know.” Ricky scraped at his buzz cut. “It’s just too strange. I don’t know if I can pull this off with a straight face.”

“Damn it, Ricky.” Dad rose naked out of the aquarium like Neptune, shaking his head, scattering seeds from his hair, beard and bushy eyebrows. “I got a better idea.” Firmly he set his hand on Ricky’s shoulder and said, “Why don’t you get inside.”

Orman Day, a resident of Durham, NC, has had short stories, non-fiction and poetry published in such journals as Zyzzyva, Creative Nonfiction, Third Coast, Oyez Review, Red Cedar Review, Ascent, and Portland Review. He is currently writing a book about his backpacking travels in 90 countries and the 50 states.

by Suzanne Scanlon

One: A Moody Story

The day after Donald dumps her in a booth at Denny’s 24-hr Family Restaurant, Margot is sitting in the office of Dr. Alda Moody, MD, one psychopharmacologist she has known now for almost three months, and whose particular compassion and/or interest in her care has never been particularly apparent. She knows not to take this personally of course; these are the days of in-and-out check-ups, managed care, and don’t-call-us-we’ll-call-you!

“How’ve you been?” Moody asks, friendly-like.

“— ”Margot tries to say, but instead begins to cry, and it doesn’t stop for a long time. Moody’s nice about it, gives her a Kleenex. Margot tells her, then, what’s going on.

“I am…and…he….” Etc.

Until finally,

“He was my Professor.”

Moody is nodding, a look of heavy compassion on her face, and Margot is more relieved than she’d imagined possible with the Moody, who after all she can afford to see only once every few months. Her relief’s so remarkable, as the mostly one-sided conversation continues, that she doesn’t even mind where Moody takes it next:

“It’s sexual harassment, you know.”

“It’s not.” Margot tells her in reply, and as if to say “unfortunately”—as if this is just another fact of the situation. She goes on to say instead (and rather naively, it’s seeming to the Moody),

“I mean—we talked about it. About that. I mean he knew it.”

“Of course he knew it!” Moody can’t stop herself from blurting out, and at the same time projecting incredible disdain: “Everybody knows about it, now—

“It doesn’t matter.” Margot says finally, and hoping to end the discussion in these specific terms, “because I’m the one who’s screwed. Not him.”

It comes out a little angrier than she’d expected.

“Yes.” Moody says, nodding, and again Margot feels inordinately grateful for the Moody.

“Well. I’m not suggesting you initiate a lawsuit.” If in spite of herself, Margot is both buoyed and comforted by this bit of rhetoric—rightfully indignant, protective, smart. It’s unfortunate, she thinks, that the women most able to offer her this sort of sympathy seem to be overfull with their own agenda(s). It was one—an agenda, say—which Margot shared, or liked to think she shared, at least in practice or theoretically speaking…but right now it seemed—too easy? She wasn’t sure. All she knew was that in practice, she found herself in this sort of position far too often. Which made her at the very least, less sympathetic. Which left her, at most, utterly implicated.

Two: Pop Quiz

Q. If A, a self-identified Feminist, sleeps with, and falls-in-love with B, a self-identified Misogynist, is A really a feminist or just:

a. lonely
b. angry
c. sad
d. typical
e. hungry
f. there
g. all of the above

Q. If B, S.I. Misogynist, eventually does humiliate A, S.I. Feminist, how might A feel?

a. tired
b. broke
c. stupid
d. nervous
e. hungry
f. all of the above

Q. Why does B choose A? Is it because A is:

a. hot
b. sexy
c. a feminist
d. there
e. all of the above
f. hungry

Three: Things She Knows About Herself

Now that it was officially over and the gap was widening: the gap between what it was (True Love) and how it would be understood and eventually recalled (a serious breach of professional ethics and/or proper standards of professional behavior), Margot, expecting to see him, composed a list entitled: “Things You Should Know”. She knew she’d be sorry if the Last Day of their Acquaintance, so to speak, and thus her last chance to offer herself—if only verbally—went by without certain topics broached, certain ground covered. He needed to know, for instance, (and in no particular order) that:

1. She is heartbroken, currently and since the time of their breakup and it’s likely she will be this way for a very long time to come.

2. She is (alternately, concurrently) angry, ditto above clause.

3. She regrets more than anything taking the Incomplete; namely, allowing herself to be so foolishly distracted by his romantic attentions to the point of being unable to finish the work of class.

4. Regrets too ever going out with him. (Regrets in recall from moment of first phone call, in which she asked, “Would you be my thesis advisor?” and he answered, “I’ll be your Second Reader but you can’t tell anyone because I’ve said no to people and they will be jealous.” She understood even then that this was the kind of thing he said when granting special favors.)

5. Wished it had never occurred (may ask, too: ‘Why did you ever ask me out?’), in retrospect—and given current and imminent consequences—which he might have considered, might have calculated probability of it ‘working out’, and—given the odds—decided to spare, if not himself (what did he have to lose?) then, perhaps, (out of empathy?) spared her.

6. Telling him of these (see above) considerations is in no way, however it appears prima facie meant to induce guilt or evoke any sense of responsibility on his part. She, after all, might have considered possible outcome of relationship, and avoided this—her current position and its attendant affect on her emotional health (i.e. by saying No in reply to his initial request for “a Date?”) This, she is aware in retrospect would have been The Smart Thing To Do. (Something she has been, if in an I-told-you-so sort of way, reminded of, from advice previously proffered from her Smart women friends and sister. (Smart because #1 she was here because she absolutely admired the guy as a writer, wanted to learn from him, etc. #2 Smart to avoid any involvement, risking potential subsequent dissolution of affair, and (in addition to normal relationship-ending requisite sense of loss) a feeling that she was treated quite inappropriately by Prof., who was after all in a professionally and interpersonally higher-up, superior, unequal sort of position. As in: consensual is a slippery term when it comes to relationships of unequal.)

7. (Though considering it as the requisite loss of the love object—she feels bereft and deprived, treated inappropriately and poorly by one who was in superior position i.e. Professor/Writer–whom she obviously (even gushingly) admired and appealed to. Thus, given the imbalance of power between the two, her sense of loss is necessarily greater than his could possibly be. (However ‘hurt’ he claims to have been by one particularly insensitive comment of hers, which according to his Final Word(s) for her, precipitated his ‘reevaluation of the relationship’ and wish to ‘no longer see her’ (ever again, she pretty quickly came to understand).

Four: Rhetoric

Not angry. No. Not at all. It’s not my thing. Not the type to play the victim as it were. Not in my nature. I am fine.

Q.

The emotional dissonance, which now exists between us—is the state of our present relationship—that bothers me. It bothers me. Not a strong word, right? But neither is it neutral. I have a sound, definite stand on the matter; I’m capable of considering such things rationally. It is my sense—and hence the crux of my bothered state—that he might (should) have been blunt on the matter, and from the outset. For a man so aware of his own complicated emotional palate, his inherited imago, his psychic shit, a man who has been in countless ‘relationships’ before this one—surely he was capable of doing the right thing, surely the considerations crossed his mind. How many times did it cross his mind, I wonder, and how did he confront such oppositional (to his lust, that is) thoughts? Did he say, oh who cares if she’s my student, I want to get laid? Or did he not even articulate so thorough a rejoinder as that? Were his selfish self-deceptions occurring on a level beneath his consciousness? Is that how he managed to deceive me, to lead me on, ‘put the rush on me’ so thoroughly?

Q.

He should have been frank with me—and beyond the should have, I’m guessing (not having access to his psychic structure/interior solipsistic discourse) that he was able to be frank with me, and from the outset. That is, I believe that he was so aware of the complicated, compromising professional restrictions on our relationship, to have considered—and as suddenly as he felt certain carnal attractions to me—that this might be an absolutely ethically wrong thing to do. To pursue, for personal interests, a student. Ethically wrong indeed because students undeniably carry certain transferred emotive baggage. Toward a professor, that is. Thus, the student—having slept with the Professor—might (and very likely would) feel a number of things, the vagaries of which he could not imagine, given his lack of certainty re how long the relationship might last.

Q.

You want an example? Okay fine. For example, Professor B. might have said to me—putative attractive female student enrolled in his Sp. 2001 Nonfiction Workshop–might have said for example: “I’m going to give you some options, given my attraction to you and desire to seduce you. I’ve considered the obvious complications of such a relationship, and too the subsequent complications and hurt feelings given various potentialities. Various eventualities. None of which might occur, of course. But it is only fair that I—given my position here, and taking your own into account (I recall being a student myself, not so long ago)—consider such things, and pose them from the outset. It is the only way this might work, in my considerations of the matter. The only way to avoid such ugly eventualities, ranging from hurt feelings to ugly malevolent exaggerated lawsuits. I just want to be frank here. I’ve encountered the juggernaut of 20^th c. Malevolent Separatist Feminism. So I just want to be clear. Because the fact is—and this is it, really—the only thing I need to say and wanted to say—I think you’re hot. Damn hot. Fine looking. Gorgeous. You hear me?

Okay. So we’re on the same page. We’re on the same page. So I want to lay out the options here. I want to pose them for you to consider so to speak.

Option number one is that we date—the connotative meaning of ‘date’ in my lexicon is—I’m being frank with you here, see? Meaning is: to have sexual intercourse. Certainly there is more to it, including financial transactions, but that’s usually where it all leads, the transaction—the what shall we do? Where shall we go? What night? What time? Okay? Okay I’ll pick you up, etceteras. It’s about—not entirely but in my experience reflectively it’s more or less effectively so—getting into bed together, our bodies touching in a myriad of delightful and even unexpected places, my body wanting to have intercourse with your body—your body hopefully reciprocating —I’m admittedly going out on a limb here, see? Hoping for yr. reciprocal desires. So OK? So that’s the first option.

Q.

Well I’ll tell you that I don’t know. I never know. In such circumstances, and you’re smart to ask because the reason I bring it up at all is because you are my student and I think it is wise, given the potential for professional complications, hurt feelings—

Q.

Yes, yes on your part. But on my part too. Do you not think my feelings might be hurt in this whole thing? I have feelings too—I may be in your eyes the master teacher, professor, famous and successful writer, I might seem all this in your younger, less experienced eyes—

Q.

Of course you have experience. What I am saying is that I am not, in my own eyes, I am ashamed, I am no better than the next guy, I am a—and you’ll forgive the heaviness—sinner. This is why I am trying here to avoid repeating past mistakes, past sins if you will, by so to speak laying it on the line for you—this is not something we can ignore, and if we do it may come back to haunt one of us sometime down the road in the future—

Q.

No. No I’m not trying to scare you—and I don’t mean to even imply—what I want to tell you is that the first option, which is definitely in my opinion the more desirable option here—there are no guarantees, is what I’m trying to tell you.

Q.

Don’t look like that. What I mean, and maybe it’s too soon to talk about this—maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up in the first place—

Q.

No just that it could end in some state of—and it might not end in any state, it might go on for a long time who knows you never know right? I go in, and I’m being straight here, I’ve learned this by now, with no agenda. I don’t have time. I’m too old. So what I’m saying you never know. Sometimes yes in my experience it’s been one two weeks—Tina you’ve heard me mention our thing, which was really nothing at all—and sometimes it’s you know a year. Two years—I don’t know is what I’m saying.

Q.

How often is it one week? Is that what you’re asking me? I don’t add these things up.

Q.

Yes, okay, more often it is less than a month—less than a week. Yes I have one night stands. I don’t like to I’m not proud of it—that I’m almost positive is not what I intend our relationship to comprise of—

Q.

Now you’re not saying anything. Why are you quiet? I don’t know what it means when you get quiet all of a sudden. Are you mad?

Q.

No I—well sometimes when I’m quiet it’s because I’m mad. Look. I shouldn’t have brought this up. I’m sorry, maybe it was a big mistake once again I’m trying to be different for once to be honest to begin with honesty—you know to avoid problems, and necessitating further dissembling down the road. For once I wanted to try it and now I’ve made it worse. I’m just going to say—

Q.

Yes I was going to tell you that. The second option. Of course. The second option is that you remain—we remain teacher and student—an artifice, which works in certain respects, but necessitates certain severe boundaries. But we can do this, if you’d like. We can remain; keep so to speak what we have now.

Q.

I can see how it might be better for you at least—you might you know wonder about asking for my help, my recommendations down the line—I should tell you that our dating—first option connotation et al—would not obviate these potentialities however. You would still be able to get my help…I would still support and encourage etc.

Q.

Yes you might not want to. I can see that. But it would be for your own reasons I assure you and not because I would change my high opinion of you as a student —and yes I see it might be worse for you given certain eventualities (i.e. see option one) and yes. That is why I’m laying it all out for you here huh? Okay. Even if it was a bad idea probably. I’m sure now I’ve made everything more complicated than it ever might be. But those were my intentions here as I said to be honest for once. That’s what I mean.

Q.

Excuse me—I’m having a problem here. This is my monologue—my interview, is it not? My interview. What’s going on with the subjective voice here? This is about me, my point of view. I’m having a problem.

Q.

I’d like to speak, please. I’d like to be the author of this narrative. What I mean is that I don’t want to hear him—I don’t want his voice—even his authorial voice—invading this text in any way, not directly, nor symbolically. And yes I understand I have invoked, created as it were this very problem…I realize this…through the form and yet—

Q.

What I need to say is that I am—it bothered me. I mean. It hurt. I know that doesn’t sound like much. I know it’s really very pathetic at this point. I know too that I was warned, regard readily my severe repetition compulsion—

Q.

From my mom. From my—when I was a little girl.

Q.

My understanding—post her death—of why she died. My child-logic, which lodged itself as Truth in my Psyche during that sensitive/fatal period of pre-adolescence, and thus has become the symbolic bête noire of my adult life.

Q.

That she died because of me. That it was my fault—that I was somehow a bad—an undeserving person—that I somehow caused her to leave me. Inspired rejection.

Q.

And thus, in my adult intimate relationships I manipulate events to somehow prove to myself again that this is the Truth of me. So to speak.

Q.

Either by getting involved with someone who, you know, can’t be there—or someone who you know, is very likely to reject me, or someone who isn’t but in that case manipulating events to sort of make the person leave me. To give the person some really good solid reasons.

Q.

Well it may be. But what’s wrong with wanting to control it? It’s my story.

Five: The Sense of an Ending

Q. How does it begin?

A. Over coffee. In a diner. They share war stories. He’s like her, she thinks, only more so. Insists aggressively upon his dominant position, physically and rhetorically. It’s fine with her. She hates him but is drawn to him. Decides it’s out of her control.

Q. How does it end?

A. One night in bed. Guess who is on top. She makes the mistake of Talking In Bed–feeling too completely in that space so far from isolation and still unable to find words at once true and kind, or not untrue and not unkind.(1)

Q. How does it end?

A. a. see The Sense of an Ending by Frank Kermode
b. see The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
c. see Liars in Love by Richard Yates
d. see To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf(2)

Six: Dating the Dead(3)

For so long it bothered her—and so much really that she could not deal with it while dating him and so had eventually forced herself to place two of his books (and later a third) in a box which she put underneath her bed. It was too difficult to consider actually dating him and having the books in her apartment (even if that’s where the books had always been). Not that she would necessarily read them, nor open them, nor refer to them ever again; but she was not about to get rid of them, either. No date was worth that.

Beyond the books however, there existed too her past experience of having read them and having been moved, perplexed, intrigued, provoked, and bothered by their contents—in a wholly admiration-filled way for the author. The books then, even in their mostly unopened state along her bookshelf—represented to her, or signified something very large—something directly connected to the Author of the books, however Dead he may be.

And so she could not deal (was how she put it)—now that she was getting to know the writer, and thus the Author, alive, of these very books—she could not deal with having him in her head, or her life, or (most difficult of all) her apartment along with (at the very same time) the large signifiers of the dead Author himself, too. She decided pretty quickly that the two—Author, Real Person vs. Author, Dead—were in no way related, and would have to remain that way. That is, there would be no references to the writer, Real Person, when referring to the books of the Author, Dead thing. Or vice versa. This did not mean that she didn’t at the same time understand how very related the two were: and this raised another whole set of ontological problems along the lines of: Would it be more honest not to have any of the books on my shelf, or to have all of the books on my shelf? The latter choice seemed too sycophantic, even if it was probably more honest, as it required less dissembling.

On the other hand, the former option seemed offensive, and blatantly dishonest—because in fact, she had read the books, and did own them, and so to hide them would be, you know, mendaciously going out of her way to protect herself from the vulnerability she’s feeling now, given the ‘connection’ so to speak, of the man she’s dating to the Dead Author himself, whom she so admires and whose talent and prose have moved her many times to states of out-loud laughter, deeply-felt identification and sheer delight. The books have articulated for her (more than once) worlds she would not have known were her very own worlds, without having read them there, in a voice not her own. There were things which might have come from her mouth—but never would have, had she not lived in the world of the book, and traveled with it, and found a comfort in the utter identification to its entirely separate world.

She took one of the books, the big one, and put it under her bed. Another she put on the bottom shelf of her bedroom bookcase (least available to his immediate perusal). She took another and placed it rather prominently out of place, in the main hall bookcase. She did not concern herself with the periodicals and essay collections that contained his work alongside the works of other dead authors. (Though among these were two Paris Reviews, two Iowa Reviews, one Best Essay collection, and one B.A.S.S. collection.)

After all this, it still didn’t feel right to her that she was dating someone who was so nearly related (which was as far as she could explain it to herself) to the Dead Author who’d made such a lasting impression on her. It didn’t feel right (she came to understand and finally admit to herself, though it was initially an unarticulated thought) because she suspected herself (but could not identify it, or did not want to identify it) of feeling an attraction based largely upon the very experience of having been so deeply moved, provoked, delighted, and made to laugh out-loud by, if not the Dead Author himself, then some extremely close relative who wrote the books now placed on her various shelves. And at one point she came to know pretty surely, unequivocally so, that if this Dead Author was not exactly the same person as the someone she was dating (who happened to be a fiction writer) then he was at least that extremely close relative.

There were clues. Maybe it was the night he tried to convince her that the woman her ex-boyfriend was now dating (whom he had dated some months prior) was an amputee with a stump-leg. Maybe it was an accumulation of things: things she came to identify as certain aspects of her attraction. She could identify, for instance, the way that this man, who was something very much like her favorite dead author, was an extremely smart man. She loved that about the dead author—the demonstration, in an occasionally show-offy way, of an exceedingly high intellect. Intellect as in IQ. His books offered, without fail–one after another word to add to her New-Big-Word list (words she would note and immediately or later on look up in her American Heritage Fourth Edition), which she been compiling for years now. Her favorite dead authors were the ones who could offer her words for this list. Maybe the list began with Nabokov. She was young, reading Lolita and keeping a list in a notebook with every word she promised herself to later look up and incorporate into her vocabulary. It embarrassed her a little to look at that Lolita list now—ten-plus years later—and to see how deficient her vocabulary had been. It was as embarrassing to see how many words she could define, and yet had never quite incorporated in the manner prescribed by her ambitious if confused 18 year-old self.

She had found herself delighting in Nabokov’s easy use of undervalued but crucial words, and she can see herself underlining and highlighting. She can even recall parts of the list she had memorized (if not incorporated) that summer: “acridity, manqué, coeval, perineum.” Some she memorized in context: “a glorified pot-au-feu, an animated merkin.” There were other phrases: “inveigled fructuate” or “such coruscating trifles” and “a favonian week” or “her phocine mama.” They were wonderful words, you could taste them, eat their syllables. Words she would long recall in these Nabokovian incarnations.

An orchideous masculinity.

She’s thinking now of Lolita, pt. 2, chapter 3—and too, still (madly) of the dead Author she is somehow dating. It was at the University last Spring, in the class he taught, that she came to know what she had expected (having read the close relative/dead author): that he had an exceedingly high IQ, and, too, an extensive available knowledge of vocabulary, syntax, and mechanics. His intelligence, as evidenced in the class, was revealed especially in his rather long considerations (mostly epistolary) of the workshop material of the week.

But also in class (something which made his intelligence nearly secondary she thinks) was the human incarnation of the dead author, complete with the understanding of and insistence upon the certain impossibility and pain of human relations—the heavy knowledge of what it means to be alive. Something Nabokov himself knew, she guessed. Because he was, as evidenced in the class, a human being simply and absolutely—under pressure and not always able to hold the knowledge that one day one will die—and it solidified the attraction she felt to him—who he was in her imagination.

On the other hand, she feels false, trying to break down the reasons and aspects of the attraction this way.

Eventually it ends. Like that.

And because it is ends, it becomes less clear. Her former knowledge of what it was begins to fade.

While it is happening—nearly from the day they meet, and certainly from the day she sits next to him in class, and feels him next to her, hears him breathing in her ear and inside of her, below her stomach she feels the attraction—it has nothing to do with these things she is able to consider now. Now that it is fading. She considers them now because it is no longer in her body.

While it is happening—from that first day she is able to be close to him to the last day that they spend together—the whole thing is in her body. When it is over it becomes less alive in the body. Slowly it begins to live in her mind, until eventually it is not in her body at all (even if she can occasionally recall the utter visceral feel of how it did live there) but is now in her mind, which is why she can do things like this: break down the attraction; break it down physically, intellectually, and replete with references to Nabokov. She can do this because it is leaving her. It is becoming something less alive in her body.

As it begins to live in her mind, it becomes a question: why was she attracted to the Dead Author, and thus to the live incarnation and/or extremely close relative (who seemed to possess many if not all of the qualities of the Dead Author)?

Sometimes she will want to answer the question. She will want to say that the attraction had more to do with something pure toward the man she is no longer dating, who happened to be the closest living relative(4) of the Dead author. And sometimes she will want to say that it had not so much to do with the Dead author at all (or her theoretical, acknowledged attraction to Him).

In the end, it will be difficult to know the dead thing. She will think it was the person himself, she was seduced by him, the living person—but she will also think that it was troubling (as seduction can be) to be seduced by him, the living person. It had been this way, she will think. She will think that she was flattered and drawn in, or toward; she will think she was offended. Who knows what she will think? For a while, she will try to answer this question and others. She will think about the now dead thing which for a time both drew her in and pushed her away—and then she will come to an ending, or the sense of one, and she will neither think about the Dead Author nor those books on her shelf at all.