Keyhole 4

Issue Four Summer 2008

Keyhole Magazine, Issue Four Summer 2008

Copyright © 2008 Keyhole Press. All content: rights retained by contributors. No part of this journal may be used or reproduced in any form without written permission from the authors except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. Editor Fiction Editor Poetry Editor Associate Editor Assistant Editor Reader Cover Design ISSN 1941-5362 ISBN-10: 1-4382854-2-6 ISBN-13: 978-1-4382854-2-9 www.keyholemagazine.com

Peter Cole Jonathan Bergey Brandon Schultz Micah Ling Andrea Hinds David Cole Sarah Stanley

Contents From the Editors

5

Poetry

Michelle Orange

Fear Self

7

Fiction

Jessica Hollander

Fantasy Land

9

Poetry

Eugene Gloria

James “Willie” Brown (The Early Years) Safeway The Brightness Interview

20

Poetry

Jason Huskey

A Roll in the Hay Crux of Habit Under the Rotor’s Whir Slick Day’s Sunset

30

Fiction

Jason Jordan

My Better Half

36

Fiction

T.J. Forrester

Random

46

Fiction

Jon Gingerich

The Migration Patterns of Insects

48

Fiction

Noel Sloboda

Opacity Honest Self-Assessment Mouthful Pet Project Scaled

Jeff Wallace

Slate

62

Fiction

68

Fiction

Ilan Mochari

A Loss to the Stuffed Animal Kingdom

Kevin Wilson

Steak and Eggs, Cow and Chicken

82

Fiction

103

Poetry

Karen Neuberg

The Entire History of Your Fires The Bird What Returns Won’t

106

Contributors

110

From the Editors… I recently overheard a conversation about books that a couple of guys were having while sitting in a local coffee shop. Specifically they were talking about the re-reading of books. “I’ve never read the same book twice,” one guy said. “It’s a waste of time. I read a book thoroughly the first time so that I know it and have no need to read it again.” Aside from the arrogance that exudes from the notion that one could memorize a book to the point of never needing to reference it again, in my gut I found his opinion to be troublesome. “So,” I wanted to interject, “do you only listen to a song once until you’ve memorized it and then never listen to it again? Have you never seen a movie more than once?” I suppose that most people would argue that these are apples and oranges, which is a somewhat valid point. But only somewhat. The Guardian recently (or actually a year ago) featured a blog post belittling the act of re-reading (“Why re-reading is a crime”). And, like the guy in the coffee shop, the author made some reasonable observations about re-reading taking away time from discovering new authors. Fair enough. Now, I generally do not read a book more than once. In fact, there are only about six or seven books that I have read more than once. As The Guardian expressed, there are so many books waiting to be discovered that I don’t have time to read the same book twice. But I believe that the great books, the truly great ones, warrant repeat readings on a regular basis. Why? Well, a few reasons… For one, just like one of Bach’s concertos or passions or one of Picasso’s masterpieces, one viewing/listening/reading is rarely enough to uncover all of the depth, all of the subtleties, or all of the underlying themes and melodies in the work. How often have you seen your favorite movie multiple times only to discover something new upon yet another viewing? And what about a book like James Joyce’s Ulysses? I don’t care how smart you are, no one can possibly glean all the amazing things that Joyce is doing upon one reading (or even two, for that matter). The best passages of a good book are capable of making a lover of literature shutter with ecstasy. For instance, Kerouac’s 5

famous mad ones/exploding spiders passage from On the Road— “mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved…” Every time I read that passage I think about the joy of the first time I read it and how it made me fall in love with literature in the first place. But, just like the crescendo of a powerful symphony, to experience a passage like that in the full context of the book is much more powerful than to simply re-read the line over and over. And finally, like a great pop song, what’s wrong with rereading a book over and over again just because you love it? Many great authors have stated that they partake in a yearly rereading of their favorite classic. If this article makes it to print, it likely will be over the objection of Peter (our editor) who shares the opinion of my pal in the coffee shop (although as I write this, his brother is sitting across from me re-reading East of Eden a year after reading it for the first time). Hell, in this day and age many people find it hard to find the time to even read a book or two a year. Nonetheless, if you are passionate about literature, I say let’s pull that dusty, spine-broken, page-torn copy of The Catcher in the Rye off the shelf once again. —JB

6

Fear Self by Michelle Orange

A man I know asked me a question the other day— something about, what I most secretly feared myself to be, and if I could sum it up—the mortifying, paralyzing visage, the curdled sock of junk and jingle where my heart of hearts should be. I thought he had a lot of nerve, asking me something like that— or very little. Either way, I calmly clipped it—the question, not the answer, hardly the answer— to the dossier, the intelligence being gathered to support or deny the premise that a person like him could love a person like me. It was the way he asked—flippant, unscathed— the way he gave his own response, without prompting, by way of example. As though he could slip such a thing past my ear—a dry kiss— with one hand on the door of a cab, the other jerking out a few bills for the driver, both eyes cast five minutes forth to the hotel bar, where we would down a hideous, throat-searing drink, then rise six floors and fuck slowly, with our eyes closed, on an enormous white bed. I patched up something routine, rigged, as we walked— something about, fatuous, empty-headed, empty, emptiness. Bogus, suburban white girl— something he could have come up with on his own. Something Liz Phair said, that I read once and stuck with me, for whatever reason.

7

Something not even close, though it may have been, in that moment—big deal— when those words came out, instead of the ones in my head, the ones always in my head, when either of us speaks lately: You don’t love me, I’m sure of it. The next day I was seated across from another man I know and I asked him if he could sum up, say, in two words what he secretly most feared himself to be, that thing that visits in the dark, the deep dark, the dark night— whatever. I offered the other man’s response, without prompting, by way of example. I posed this question deliberately, just to let him know that I didn’t love him, I was sure of it. But his hands dropped from his drink and his fingers fell in two round piles, his knuckles peaked white with surprise, his forehead flushed a miserable red. He stammered and stymied through an apology as the blood lit across the table and flared up hot around my ears. He couldn’t answer that question, he said, without great discomfort, immense confidence, multifarious excavation. And perhaps it was better to just continue talking about our Netflix queues. His face said—she’s got a lot of nerve, asking me something like that. And I thought—or very little. But I said nothing, I sat silent in my shame and filth, until I could look him in the eye, until I could tell the difference between a man who loved me and a man who expected me to believe, who insulted me by insisting, that his fear self, his repugnant, intractable, insupportable essence— the worst thing discoverable by him, or anyone else— could be contained in a couplet and some catchy alliteration.

8

Fantasy Land by Jessica Hollander

The Florida sun marks me for its own, branding my skin with scarlet fury. Chris and I walk toward our hotel room past a guitarshaped pool, a piano-shaped pool, and dozens of shrieking and laughing kids. “My part hurts,” I say. “God, I hate the sun.” “There’d be no life without it,” Chris says. “My hair must be burning.” He places his hand on my head. “Lightly toasted at best.” We arrive at our room, laden with bags, damp and achy from standing in line at the airport, the bus terminal, the hotel lobby, and climbing two stories on a staircase resembling a giant red microphone. Chris rattles the door open and pauses in the doorway. “Two beds.” I push past him and drop my bags on the carpet, letting the cool air erect tiny crystals over every pore of my body. The first serene moment of my vacation. I am glad there are two beds. Chris throws his bag on one of them and begins emptying his pockets into the wall safe. “Pee and let’s go.” “It’s so hot though. Don’t you want to relax awhile?” My plan is to stall every day, to leave the hotel as close to mealtimes as possible. “Relax, huh?” He swoops in and nuzzles my neck, slips his hand up my shirt and over my stomach. “Alright, alright.” I push him away. “I’m moving.” 9

The bathroom wallpaper is mauve with boxed headshots and portraits of famous pop musicians. It has the musty feel of a room overlooking an indoor swimming pool, even though the only pools are outside and several yards away. My jeans stick to my thighs as I wiggle out of them and look longingly at the shower. Chris talked me into this vacation when he found a deal: “We pay for the hotel room and theme parks, but get our flight and all our meals free. We can eat nearly anywhere in Disney: lunch, dinner, and a snack every day, absolutely free!” He bought guidebooks claiming several restaurants within the parks were the best in the country. He printed out menus detailing the sautéed shrimp with lime and ginger chutney, coconut curry chicken soup, banana leaf wrapped sea bass, caramel apple torte, and chocolate lava cake. And so I agreed to come. “Epcot first,” Chris says as I walk out of the bathroom. He stands with his hands on his hips, bent over a brightly-colored map he’s spread across the bottom of one bed. I run my thumb along my sweaty wedding band and the indented skin of the surrounding digits. We’ve been married three months and the thick gold has not yet ingratiated itself to my middle and pinky fingers. “This is irritating me,” I tell him. “I’m taking it off.” Chris rolls his eyes and opens the safe, and I place my wedding band on top of the credit cards and loose change already there. I leave my engagement ring on. “That’s your bed.” I point to his dirty lime and forest green duffel bag lying open with his t-shirts and boxers and guide books exploding across the multi-colored comforter. “I thought we’d share a bed,” he says as we walk to the door. I am just feeling normal again when platoons of heat attack my skin, digging in, as though they wish to drag my insides through my pores and parade them in victory ceremonies. “I need more room than that,” I tell him. He sighs. “I guess that’s what happens when you agree to one of these deals. Everything’s wrong and there’s nothing you can do about it.” ***

10

Epcot is full of strollers, kids, and distracted parents, weaving across the paths. Everywhere I look objects sparkle painfully in the sun; the sky’s too blue to look at. The giant Epcot ball appears shiny and crumpled like a giant mass of tin foil. A flute melody plays from speakers hidden in bushes so perfectly green and streaked with light they have to be plastic. Each brightly shining attraction elicits yelps of excitement and loud, disjointed conversation all around us. A fountain sprays designs in time to the music and people stop in the middle of the path to watch and ooh and ah. A large plastic character who reminds me of Raggedy Ann ambles by, and kids squeal and rush to grab at her skirts, until they are stopped by the man in brown walking beside her. As the kids line up behind the man, I squint at her until I am certain she is not Raggedy Ann, but maybe a Disney version from a new movie I haven’t seen. The Raggedy Ann I knew would need no man to save her. Chris and I yell to hear each other. “I need shade!” “Isn’t this fun?” “Shade!” He leads me toward our first ride and I turn away from him because I don’t care where it originated or how good the reviews have been. Several families pass and swerve in front of us. A boy in a pinched pirate’s hat punches his sister and she yells and chases and punches him back. Two little girls walk by hand in hand, exchanging loud nonsensical words, and behind them the mother sobs and the father crosses his arms and looks the other way. Off to the side a stroller is parked on the grass and a woman smacks a screaming, red-faced boy on the bottom. I take Chris’s hand, feeling desperately voyeuristic. I run my hand along his sweaty forearm, elbow, upper arm, searching out the familiar grooves, the rough hair on the front, the smooth skin in back, the coarse scar on the ball of his shoulder. Maybe there are people around who do not have families, but I am blind to them. So far in the World of Disney, all I can see are families, painfully happy ones, or those determined to kill each other, and the only distraction I have is someone who wants to be a part of the madness. *** 11

I am satisfied to wait in line for hours because at least we are in air-conditioning. “I think you’re going to like this,” Chris says. “It was so scary!” a boy in front of us tells his mother. “And did you hear that boom? It shook the whole cart, and I screamed the whole time!” She nods. “It feels good when you scream.” “Yeah,” the boy says. He squirms around and scratches his legs. “He’s cute, Catherine, isn’t he?” Chris whispers. “He’s okay.” Chris examines the boy, and I watch Chris, amazed he wants to have a family already. He was so reluctant to get married, and now that he’s made the commitment it seems he can’t wait to be sixty and retired with hordes of money-sucking children and screaming grandchildren running around the yard in a giant game of softball where he’s the pitcher and they refuse to let me play. In all my visions of life with children I am left sitting alone on some desolate porch, knitting or peeling potatoes while everyone has fun without me. I follow the boy and woman onto the ride and fasten my shoulder harness, and with a gust from a high-powered fan, we rise from the floor and are sky-gliding over Northern California. Although they spray nauseating scents as we fly over orange groves and pine forests, I enjoy having my legs dangling in the air with nothing to support them. And despite myself I enjoy the exclamations of the small boy to my right every time the scene changes. “Woah! Do you see that mom? A sheep down there, over there!” Chris sits on my left and makes no indication he can hear the boy, and then I enjoy it even more. After a few rides, the sun has set and we make our way to the Japanese part of Epcot where we have reservations at a Hibachi grill. “Hibachi means ‘fire bowl,’” Chris reads from his guide book, “and is misused by North Americans to refer to Japanese cuisine that uses an iron grill. The correct term for the cuisine is Teppanyaki.” 12

“Fire bowl,” I repeat, picturing the sun setting into a giant wooden bowl and bursting into paprika-red flames. “Teppanyaki,” Chris says. “Teppan means ‘iron plate,’ and yakki means ‘grilled.’” We climb the steep steps of a faux-Japanese temple and are led to a long wooden table with a sheet of steel down the middle. The hostess orders us to sit in the center of the table, and two families are seated to either side. “It’s too hot in the middle for the kids,” the hostess explains. “I want steak,” the girl to our right tells her mother. “You’ve never had steak before,” the mom says. “You won’t like it.” The mother is overweight with a slight double chin that scrunches against her neck when she looks at the menu. The father and daughter are stick thin with large gray eyes and pointy noses. “I do like it.” The dad chimes in, “Let her get steak.” “She won’t eat it!” To our left a short, broad man is telling his heavily made-up wife to ask the waiter if there is imitation crab meat in the California roll. Why he can’t ask the waiter himself is a mystery to me. He tickles a small blonde girl in the highchair next to him. The girl who wants steak is sobbing. “I know I like it.” “What’s going on?” I whisper to Chris. “The little girl says Scooby Doo likes steak and that’s why she likes it too.” He smiles as though this is the cutest thing he’s ever heard, and a storm brews in my stomach. I nearly double over from laughter and pain, it’s all so hilarious and horrible. “Is there imitation crab meat in the sushi?” the woman to my left asks our young Japanese waitress. “I don’t think so,” the waitress says, “I’ll check.” “I can’t have any!” the man says to his wife, hugging his daughter close to his chest. “I’m allergic.” “He’s allergic,” the wife tells the waitress. The mom to our right orders steak for herself and chicken for her daughter and will let the daughter try her steak. I order steak because I can. As the cook sautés the meat and vegetables in front of us, smoke spirals off the hot silver sheet. The blonde girl shrieks from the highchair next to her father, while the mother leans 13

away, probably afraid of what the smoke will do to her caked makeup and clumpy mascara. The smoke curls toward me and pushes at my neck, threatening to wrap around it. At the same time both mothers do, I push my chair a few feet from the table. *** After dinner Chris and I sit on the temple steps. “We will never be like that,” he says. “God I hope not.” I shake my head and grin, out of contentment or exhaustion, I can’t tell which. His smile widens. “What?” “Nothing.” He shrugs and leans closer. “It’s just good to see you, you know, smiling.” “What, this?” I point to my mouth. “Yeah, this.” He laughs and cups his hand around my chin until I push him away. The food was bland and a disappointment, but I don’t say so. It’s nearly 10:00 pm, and from our high perch we watch families mill slowly around, as though drunk and determined not to leave until a bartender kicks them out. Kids are dragged by their forearms or lay asleep in strollers. A boy down the street by a coffee stand cries: “No, no, no, no, no!” “How much time per day do you think the average family spends together?” I ask. “A lot.” Chris shrugs. “Several hours.” “My family had dinner together every night, but then we’d all separate into different rooms or maybe watch television together, which doesn’t really count. On vacations our family probably looked a lot like those in there.” “I believe it. One ice cube falling to the table probably sent your mother into hysterics. We would be different though.” He takes my hand and strokes from my knuckles to my wrist. I pull my hand back. “We’re too young to worry about that.” “Come on.” He laughs. “What are you afraid of? We both have stable jobs and enough saved to get a house in Columbus. We’d be great parents.” “Maybe you.” Chris sighs and stands up. “Those people were crazy though, 14

weren’t they? I loved seeing that girl eat all her mother’s steak.” I nod and say the words I’ve been waiting to utter all day and all night. “Let’s get back to the hotel and go to bed.” *** The next morning I wake to Chris’s ice-cold body pressed against my pajamas. I moan. “Go away.” “I’m freezing from the air conditioning.” He shivers and the cold seeps in deeper. “You’re making me cold.” “Warm me up.” “Stop.” I turn toward the window, not ready to get out of bed. “You’re cold and you’re getting my sheets all dirty with your gross body.” “Fine, I’ll shower.” “Hmm. Maybe tonight you should sleep in more than just your boxers.” Sleep dances sluggishly across my eyelids and the shower pattering a few feet away is like dreaming of rainfall, of a place where the sun won’t come out for weeks. But even with the light burning through the slit in the curtains I’d rather get up than risk Chris climbing back in bed and trying to have sex with me. There is always pressure for sex on vacation. I forgot about that when I agreed to come. Once we’re showered and dressed and slathered in sunscreen, Chris opens the safe to take out our passes and holds up my wedding ring. “You going to wear this today?” I shake my head no, and he sets it back down. On the bus to the Magic Kingdom Chris sits next to a small girl with pink glasses. She is wearing a yellow sequined dress with a white sash, one of the many costumes sold every five feet in the parks, and her two front teeth are so crooked they are nearly perpendicular. “Hello,” Chris says. “Hi,” she says quietly. “What’s your name?” “Christopher, what’s yours?” “Carlie.” 15

“Carlie, I like your dress.” “My mom got it for me.” A woman in dark sunglasses smiles at Chris. “Where are you from?” “Columbus, Ohio.” Nobody so much as glances at me. “And you?” “We’re from Connecticut,” Carlie says. “We’re visiting Grandma after this.” And on they go, chatting the whole way about the weather here and there, and which snacks to try, and which parks to spend the most time in. I watch them laugh several times and I never join in. I tell myself to be happy Chris has a way with children. But I feel I will never be a part of it. “Go to Splash Mountain first,” Carlie says as the bus pulls into the park. “We will. It was nice to meet you.” The bus jerks to a stop and all around us people rise and get off. The mother stands and waits for her daughter. Carlie glances at me and leans close to Chris. She whispers, “Your wife is very pretty.” Chris laughs and the girl looks at me with her eyes wide behind her glasses. I smile, and I tell her, “You’re very pretty too.” *** The Magic Kingdom is crawling with more hopeful little girls dressed like princesses and fairies, and at first I am sad for them, but then realize they are happier than me and carry themselves with a dignified air I have never known. I try to believe being a princess is appealing to these girls because they want to have confidence and be satisfied, and not because they wish to wait around for a man to save them. Of course the only men they know are their fathers, and if there’s anything Disney movies teach us it’s that mother figures all die or hand out poison apples or take away your voice. “So what do you think,” I ask Chris after we’ve gone on a few rides and sat through several shows. “You think they’re showing us women need men to save them?” He shrugs. “Maybe Disney’s just tapped into the truth and in 16

the end everyone wants someone else to save them because it’s easier than saving yourself.” For lunch we have fish and chips because all Chris’s guidebooks tell us there is nowhere good to eat in the Magic Kingdom. We go to the Swiss Family Robinson Treehouse and get stuck behind a man taking pictures of all the carefully crafted plastic displays. “You’d think he believes this is a real historical monument or something,” Chris mumbles. To get to Tom Sawyer’s Island we take the ferry and bake in the sun, smashed between sweaty people and knobby strollers and wheelchairs. There is no breeze packed tightly in where we are, and even though people talk and laugh and argue around us, it feels like the world is frozen and the space around me and the space inside me start sharing things, passing things back and forth until the dizzying heat is as much inside of me as outside. It is impossible for me to think about anything but getting off this ferry. We go to the only snack shop on the island and I sit on a rock in the shade of a giant tree, maybe real, maybe fake, while Chris stands in line to get us smoothies. I watch him put his hands in his back jean pockets and lean his weight on one hip. His brown hair is a curly mess and he’s wearing his maroon Moe t-shirt with the frayed bottom and hole in the armpit, but from this distance I can’t see it well enough to be sure. From this angle I can almost pretend I don’t know him, that he is a guy I know nothing about. But he is mine, in this whole "World" where I know no one else, he is mine, and I am glad. Later, we are alone for a moment in one of the cool, damp caves and I lean against his arm. He backs me into one of the corners and he is so tall that I cannot see past him and do not worry about anyone seeing us. I keep my arms behind me as he works his hands around my body, and I push into him and he pushes back and we kiss until our lips are sore, and then we stop and return to the hot sun where I worry we can never be as happy as we want to be. ***

17

We take a bus to the Animal Lodge for an African buffet dinner and eat rich and fabulous food until we are so stuffed we cannot sit down. We walk around outside for an hour in an attempt to feel normal and stand beneath burning torches to watch zebras over a chain-link fence. Kids roam the area, but Chris does not look at them wistfully as I expect him to. All night it seems he does not take his eyes off me, and for once I am not the one to suggest going home. He sits very close to me on the bus, squeezing my hand, and I am excited and uncomfortable. It has been months since I have been interested in sex, and now I don’t know how to act. I inch away from him. “Calm down,” I finally whisper. “We’ll have sex when we get back, alright?” He frowns and loosens his grip on my hand, but I feel better hearing myself sound as reluctant as usual. The hotel room is frigid and we climb into Chris’s bed, not mine because I don’t want the sheets all dirty. I get comfortable on the pillow as he pulls the covers down and then lies fully clothed on top of me. It feels nice, like I’m draped in a lead vest, about to have my entire body explored and x-rayed. My jeans scratch against my thighs as he tries to push them off beneath him, and he finally gets up, grabs the waist, and pulls them off inside out. We throw off our shirts. He loosens his belt and his pants are off too, and he is back on top of me and then there is contact. He’s going for it. “Okay.” I push his hips, the bones jutting out like arrowheads. “Condom?” “I forgot to bring any.” He pushes closer, his hips digging into my palms. “You’re kidding.” He pushes his lips hard against mine, and I want to keep going, but I can’t. I can’t let it happen. “Okay, stop. Chris, I’m not joking.” His palms hit the pillow on either side of my head, and then he is up, naked, and walking toward the window. The blinds are open and the dim gray light accents the creases of his body. I imagine some little kid walking by, seeing him naked, and screaming, and in a way I want that to happen. I want something else to happen. But nothing happens, and I reach down and pull the blankets 18

over me, shivering and wishing for some light and for some heat. “God, you really want a baby that bad?” He leans his forehead against the window. “We’re married but nothing’s changed. You’re still not happy.” I push off the covers and jump from the bed and open the wall safe. “Look.” I slide the ring on my finger. “Things have changed.” He turns and frowns at my hand. “I just feel like if we’re going to do it, let’s do it. Let’s try it all and see if it works.” “And if it doesn’t work?” “Then we’ll know. And we won’t be fifty years old just figuring it out.” I sit on the edge of the bed, the comforter scratchy on my skin, and wonder how many other couples have fought in this room. How many have had this feeling of not really knowing someone they’ve spent years of their lives with. “I don’t think I’m ready to be happy all the time and I don’t think I’m ready to have a family. Maybe that’s the problem, all these people having kids before they’re really happy.” He turns back to the window, and I watch him and spin my ring and wonder if I am even willing to try. It seems the past always tangles into the future and the present is just something to get through, something that floats with no purpose. Then my heart pounds and I realize something could happen here; in our apartment in Ohio nothing will change, but here in this room we are different, here in this room we could end. But when I feel ready I can’t bring myself to say it. So I sit on the bed and hope he will turn around and say it for me.

19

Eugene Gloria James “Willie” Brown (The Early Years) Safeway The Brightness

James “Willie” Brown (The Early Years) I have seen angels drinking milk on our porch. I’ve even heard one fall down on his pants, becoming a street on a Sunday morning. At Hank’s 500 the chameleon tree is all white, then yellow, green, red, and all white again. The nurse’s hair cut short makes her unpretty. Her hemline hangs stiff above her knees. She’s petite, daikon legs, a pug nose. Raised in the barrio of Tondo, she is a handsome immigrant with a switchblade in her purse. Who knows how they met, how Willie recoiled; the stiletto, friendly-like and all. How the nurse wiped the knife with a hanky and shut the blade back into her pocketbook. Willie, lacking sweet talk, studied the skirt and the nurse’s slight frame. Better let the knife do all the talking. “See, Willie, all he wanted was to feel good. Willie all he wanted was to get a process, shop for shoes. Willie saw the nurse in front of Hank’s underneath a neon glow, then licked his chops.” When the knife told him to go to hell, it plunged into a funnel of greens and bright yellows, the sweet cacophony of blood clots and the street’s dour gray.

21

“If you listen closely, you can hear a white flag flapping in the wind, a man down on his pants.” The knife pauses and checks himself in the mirror, then continues, “He’d recover. A lounge act in alligator shoes and brilliantined hair…” My tractable neighbor the nurse has a switchblade for a brain. Think of it, a river glistens in her purse.

22

Safeway How strange the power of recall, my father remembering 1918 at the Safeway parking lot, but not the thing he came there for. Pity him for remembering what is distant and unimportant, Mindanao and his father’s wounding from the Moro’s blade slicing his left shoulder. I exhale a cloud of smoke and conjure my grandfather in his room where anger was fat as church litanies. A room, blue of his pajamas and the smell of piss and Vicks Vapo Rub. I am that achy stink of cigar plume that scratches my throat, coughs that wake me in the middle of night. Then a snowstorm blew across our town. Vernal Equinox’s all choked in winter stuff. My father wades through his complacency, a living ghost returning to the scene of battle. I fear an ambush. At Safeway, my father is adrift in suburban lullabies. Cradled in fog, same earth that familiar locution for heaven.

23

The Brightness Our dog was dumb, deprived of walks and sacks of Puppy Chow though we fed her our scraps: pork and leftover rice, sometimes with adobo. Our dog was a beauty when she was a pup. Part Doberman, part Alsatian. Probably you’d guess by now where this is heading. The pup grew up to be a troubled teen. She was a kept thing, never allowed to drape herself on our couch or lounge on the living room carpet—forbidden in the house. Her chore: to patrol the perimeter. We cared just enough for her, gave her baths and played with her in the backyard. Of course you’re right. Nothing good would come of this. She chased a car one afternoon during a soapy bath. She broke free, darted through the gate, and had her stupid head crushed by the rear wheel of a passing car. That was one stupid dog chasing after the car’s chrome bumper, that other light moving faster and farther away toward something unlike her own. So hot outside that I searched the sky for a thunderstorm. You could say that I had “visions.” The sky became a horse with patches of black spots. My lips were moving as I looked up. My older sister cried and cried. The front of her blouse still wet with soap and water from the dog’s bath. I stared and stared at a speckled horse that was really a slow moving cloud against brightness and sky.

24

Mapping the Landscape of Imagination Eugene Gloria Interviewed by Micah Ling

I completed my Bachelor’s degree at DePauw University, where I first met Eugene Gloria. DePauw allows students to travel during the month of January for a Winter Term. During my junior year, Gloria led a literary trip to San Francisco, and I had the opportunity to hike all over the city with him, learning about the Beat Poets and the rich culture of the Bay area. Gloria graciously agreed to act as the judge for Keyhole’s first chapbook contest. We are pleased to present a closer look at Eugene Gloria and his poetry. LING

Can you tell us a little bit about your background? You completed your BA at San Francisco State, your MA at Miami of Ohio, your MFA at the University of Oregon, and now you teach creative writing at DePauw University in Indiana. Where do you consider “home” and how does "place" play a role in your poetry?

25

GLORIA

I was born in Manila, Philippines and my family immigrated to the United States when I was eight years old. I grew up in San Francisco where I had most of my formal education from elementary school to college. So when people ask me where I’m from, I usually say that I’m from San Francisco even though most people who ask me that question are more curious to learn where I was born and not where I grew up. One’s sense of place is important especially for poets. I think of Phillip Levine whose mythic places for a long time were Spain, when he wanted to write about heaven and Detroit when he wanted to write about hell. Lately I have been writing about the provinces in the Philippines. Being there recently to attend a family wedding brought me back to my earlier visits 15 years ago when I lived in Manila for almost two years while researching for my first collection of poems. But I think to answer your question, we write from our private obsessions, or perhaps more truthfully, from the landscape of the imagination. LING

For your second collection of poems, Hoodlum Birds, you traveled to Spain to complete the famous pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela. Can you talk a bit about that trip and how you decided to do it? I remember that you once told me the story of Saint Christopher, the Patron Saint of Travel. How did you learn about Catholicism? GLORIA

Thanks for reminding me about our conversation about Saint Christopher. That reminds me, I’ve been meaning to visit Krieg Brothers in Indianapolis to buy a St. Christopher magnet for my car. I grew up knowing about saints from my father who kept a copy of Butler’s Lives of the Saints on his desk. I loved thumbing through that book whenever I visited. Both my parents and my two brothers are devout Catholics. I attended Catholic schools from first grade until I graduated from high school. I went to a Jesuit high school in San Francisco. One of my favorite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins, was a Jesuit priest. There was a time when I had to write above all my papers the letters: AMDG which is the acronym for Ad Majorem Dei Gloriam, (for the 26

Greater Glory of God), that is, everything we make, including our English papers are for AMDG! The pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela was an opportunity for me to think deeply not so much about Catholic saints, but more about my Catholic identity. Although I am not a practicing Catholic, I am nostalgic about the sacraments and rituals of the Church—many of those paintings and sculptures we study in art history are inspired by religion. I wanted to be immersed in that drama and the more I read about this ancient pilgrimage, the more I felt it necessary to attempt it on my own. I walked the requisite 100 kilometers to be an official pilgrim unlike the more ardent pilgrims who began walking from the Pyrenees in the French border and hiking westward to the Galician province in the Northwest of Spain. To do that would’ve taken me months, which I was not able to do at the time. My abbreviated journey lasted roughly ten days and I slept at refugios, or official hostels for pilgrims along the Camino. I would rise early and hit the trails after a modest breakfast. Galicia is a breathtaking landscape on foot. You walk through small rural villages and occasionally charming towns with fabulous local eateries like this one town known for their pulpo, or octopus. I traveled light and my meals were generally modest ones with a few exceptions. When I first set out, I arrived in Sarria very late in the evening by train. Since I hadn’t started walking the Camino, I decided to stay at the only hotel I could find, which turned out to be a four-star hotel. The next morning when I set out on the road, I met a newspaper reporter who took my picture and asked me a few questions like where I’m from and where I stayed the night before since I mentioned that I was just starting out. The next morning while having breakfast in Portomarin, I saw a picture of myself in the local newspaper with the caption “Peregrino de Lujo,” which means, “Pilgrim of Luxury” and I was made an example of these foreign travelers who stay at fancy hotels and eat lavishly, in contrast to the true pilgrims who are motivated by faith, penance, or sometimes both. I admit my purpose weren’t entirely pious ones, but my journey did allow me to think less about myself as a poet or teacher and more as a traveler, a fellow pilgrim along the Camino. In some way, that was enough to make the trip worthwhile. Writing the poems for my second collection, Hoodlum Birds, came later that summer when I had the space and time to write at an artist colony in the 27

Santa Cruz Mountains in Northern California. LING

What is your writing process like? Has it changed over the years? Is your process different, in rural Indiana, than it was in other places/times in your life? GLORIA

My writing process has shifted somewhat over the years. It has mostly to do with time rather than place. I can write anywhere. Time to write, however, is more of a luxury for many of us who are teaching full time. The summer months are blessed periods of writing bursts, especially when I am fortunate enough to secure a fellowship to an artist colony. There I find myself writing with greater efficiency and attention. Time to write also means making room to read and developing a private dialogue with the work I’m reading. I believe that writing poems is a collaborative process with one’s literary and cultural influences. Louise Glück, I believe, once said that writing poems is finding the right context for our ideas. I tend to believe that about my own work. LING

If you could sit down for a meal with anyone at all from history or the present, who would it be and what would you eat? (I’m sorry that this is such a cliché question, but I really would like to know the answer, and it seems a little less corny than “who do you admire?” because I don’t know that I’d necessarily like to eat with the people that I admire most.) GLORIA

The first person that pops into my head would be Gertrude Stein. Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, I learned from Monique Troung’s novel, The Book of Salt, had a Vietnamese chef in Paris. So imagine having lunch with them at their famous apartment at 27 rue de Fleurus. We would probably have a light lunch of fresh Vietnamese spring roll with shrimp, barbecued pork bits in rice-stick noodles and basil leaves. We might also have a bowl of crab soup with boiled quail eggs. I love Vietnamese food and although Gertrude Stein is not necessarily 28

my favorite writer, I think it would be fascinating to be in her company and learn about her private art collection and her thoughts on Picasso and Hemingway and other artists who frequented her salon. And what about that Vietnamese chef? I wonder what stories he would tell. LING

Thanks very much. I really appreciate your time. GLORIA

You’re most welcome and thanks for the opportunity to talk poetry with you.

29

Jason Huskey A Roll in the Hay Crux of Habit Under the Rotor’s Whir Slick Day’s Sunset

A Roll in the Hay The square baler's been by Matty Lou's all week, boys cutting what survived the dry season. She sits out there now, just stares at the old pond like it owes her money or something. A long time ago, when she had arms and two legs— down to just the one leg now— she'd sit by that pond with an old cane pole and a couple snuck cigarettes from her mama's purse. The few fish they had enjoyed the bacon bait she used— Matty Lou only ever caught three of them. But she'd go out there every day during the summer, toss out her line five or six feet from the bank, and watch the old cork bobber dip and jerk— lost in the stream-fed ripple—thinking about boys and sex and getting out of her hell— dreaming up a guy to exchange kisses and more with down by the pond at the hay's edge. At twenty-five, she still had those thoughts. She'd relearned to swim in that pond, her cropped arms kicking at the cool water like tiny oars. It was cold that winter; the pond froze up thicker than the mildew in a bachelor’s bathroom, as her mama would say. Some kids down the way came over with brooms and a frozen bottle of water like they'd always done— poor kids' hockey on a Sunday afternoon. The children were children that morning, nasty and sneering and cruel, but Matty Lou understood— she didn't know how she'd react at that age, 31

seeing a person with no arms smoking a cigarette. The sun broke about noon; chased brave birds with a southern breeze; sopped a slick into the ice that took a swipe at Danny Byrd out in the middle where her daddy used to catch bass before his mid-life stroke. Something about the 'thermia and bite burned her black, the doc prescribing amputation and insult safe behind his mask. Matty Lou passed out to thoughts of the Byrd boy and the taste of his grape-flavored Bubblicious, as she administered life, on her tongue. The old baler sweeps by for another pass, engine dragging up a slight incline. There's a boy her age on there, pulling bales for six-fifty an hour. Sometimes he comes up to the house for a sip of water, and Matty Lou swears he isn't affecting his smile when he passes her on those shortening days. She can feel it in her stomach and between her one-and-a-half thighs.

32

Crux of Habit The dusty theater is crowded again, children gathering for a summer escape into the streaky blips of celluloid. The projectionist is a heathen clown, an old coot from Kurdville; but the children love him anyway. They watch the four-meter widescreen with wonder, wet eyes lost in the black & white flicker, ears embraced by the old hi-fi speakers on the walls. Old Cagney on 'top of world' dubbed badly, but the children love it like the Americans' candy. Midway through the second reel, the grid shuts down, bringing the film to silence and the children to clamor. The deafening buzz around me swarms, the sound of restless bodies in the warming room; they've gotten used to the blackouts by now. A boy sitting next to me asks me to help him pray to gracious Allah (Peace Be Upon Him), so the jingo-man may play once more. He doesn't know me. In a moment now, my body will flash in clamor. The dust will rise with spraying blood. The children brought to silence in offering. 'Made it, Allah! Top of world! Top of world!' screaming in resolve.

33

Under the Rotor’s Whir The air is so calm above the trade of arms, feet dangling out on the landing gear as thoughts flash of death searching for my newbie flesh, scared to make the statistic of our initial days. Our hot LZ lights like the surfaced-sun, where wild men with aimed guns come from— Jane Fonda’s foot patrol out hunting green again. I keep an M-79 shell just for her up the Ho Chi Mihn. The hell of it is, I cannot tell North from South, friend is foe and foe is foe; they all look the same. They even put the damn gooks in our base camps; dinks, like Tseng, doing nothing but slowing our progress. Another recon through the jungle, another pull of point, Harvey Grant and I sweep side to side; we dip into a small gully and set up camp. I set up a perimeter—plastic spoons on a hair of death. A war dragging in the darkness, my watch is O-three to O-four, and I loathe it. Night after night, my eyes so heavy— every sound used to jolt me, but I’ve been here too long; I don’t frighten anymore—a lie, but it works so far. Before I know it, I’m getting short and death’s closing in— I see him all around me—feel his bayonet jab at my body, sense his slant-eye staring down at me through open sights, lying beyond the next stump, sleeping with stolen claymores.

34

Slick Day's Sunset He worked for the state, asphalt and summer speckled his skin, worn tread of a face hiding behind eight years of red whiskers; the baby grays sprout early to the tune of eight months and due for her final checkups before the retching, the pissing, the splitting, the crowning tearing all the good bits to hell. He turns his sign to slow as three college girls mock him with fake advances, nipples barely visible in the shadowy haze of heat. Eight months of carrying on, day and night, always when he's on the cut of sleep, life splattering in the soft spots between them, leaving him the question of what it takes to be a man anymore.

35

My Better Half by Jason Jordan

Exam Name: _______________ Date: ________________ The following essay examination will test your reading comprehension skills. Read the excerpt below and then answer the essay question to the best of your ability. You will have 30 minutes to complete this. *** I’m in Wal-Mart® looking at guillotines because I need to cut myself in half. Some assembly is required no matter which one I buy, of course, since they’re all in boxes, but I think I can handle it. There are a bunch of different models that vary in size, color, and name, and I like the one called The Big Son-of-a-Bitch™. I’m sure it’d have no trouble slicing me right down the middle so I’d finally have time to multitask in the truest sense of the word. I’m considering this purchase when I notice an employee, clad in a blue vest that has a nametag with Brian and a smiley face on it, walking towards me. “Excuse me, sir,” he says. “Can I help you find something?” “Um, I was just looking at this guillotine here, but I was wondering if there’s a better way for me to cut myself in half.”

36

“Well the guillotine has its advantages, but you might wanna think about getting a big saw. It’d be a lot cheaper. Craftsman® has a new line of saws out, so you could always go with the biggest, which would probly be the easiest.” “What’s it called?” “The Large Son-of-a-Bitch™.” “Mind showing it to me?” “Not at all. Follow me.” He leads me to the saw aisle where I inspect the saw, and ultimately decide to buy it since it doesn’t require any assembly. I figure I can get Doug, my next-door neighbor, to do the actual sawing. “We’ve been getting a lot of people who’re doing this lately— ever since they broadcast that story about it on the news. I guess you’ve been taking your regenerative medication.” “Yep. I’ve been on it for about a month, so when everything’s said and done, each half will regenerate back to normal.” “That’s good. That way you won’t have to worry about making sure your other half has its fair share of organs.” “Right.” “Do you want me to call the shuttle to take you back to the front of the store?” he asks. “How far is it exactly?” “It’s probly about a mile.” “Yeah, that’d be good. I took the shuttle to get here, so I might as well ride it back. Thanks.” Brian summons a shuttle with his walkie, tells me to have a nice day, and walks off. The shuttle picks me up, as it does several people along the way back to the front, and I check out before I leave the store. Afterwards, I return to my apartment to get started. *** The Large Son-of-a-Bitch™ is long and heavy, so I have to set it down while I unlock the outside door to my apartment complex and again when I unlock my own door. Luckily I’m only a couple floors up. I place the saw on the floor of my living room, take care of a few things, and then walk across the hall to 37

Doug’s door. I knock several times to be annoying, cover the peephole with my thumb, and wait. I hear Doug unlatching the locks before he swings the door open. He’s in his usual garb: a coffee-stained wife-beater and jeans. His shoulder-length, black hair has been tucked behind his ears so it doesn’t dangle in his face. “Lose your razor?” I say, alluding to his scraggly beard. “Nope. So what’s up?” “I’ve got a proposition for you.” “Shoot.” “Wanna cut me in half?” “With what?” “A saw. A big saw. A large saw.” “When? Wait, why?” “I just need to start multitasking,” I say. “There’s not enough time in the day to get everything I need to get done done. And right now, if you can.” “Sure, I guess.” In my living room I’ve spread a few towels on the carpet to soak up the blood, and while I do this, Doug closes the blinds and then inspects the saw. “So, is this gonna hurt?” he asks. “Nah, it shouldn’t. A little bit ago I injected enough Fentanyl™ to numb an elephant. I doubt I’ll feel anything. You’ll know if I do. Work fast, though.” “How do you want me to do this?” “I guess it’d be best if you just cut me straight down the middle.” “You’re on regeneratives?” “Yeah,” I say. “So couldn’t I just cut you in half at your waist and the bottom half would grow back a top half and the top half would grow back a bottom half?” “I’m not sure it’d work that way. I wanted to do it down the middle so that my organs are evenly distributed between the two halves—at least the ones that are symmetrical.” “Okay. That makes sense. Did you sterilize everything?” “Yep. Ready to go.” I strip and stand on the towels. Doug hoists the saw up to my head and begins. At first I can feel something happening to me, 38

but I don’t feel any pain. I know blood is gushing out of my wound, which makes me think that I should’ve put down more towels. Once Doug reaches the spine, he has to exert all his strength sawing his way through it. He’s sweating profusely, but I try to keep my eyes closed the entire time, so the procedure won’t be as awkward. It takes about an hour, which I discover when I check the clock after Doug says, “All finished.” “Thanks, man,” I say, holding my organs to keep them from falling out of my body. I’m the half on the left. “No problem. How long do you think it’ll take for you to heal?” “Not too long, I bet. Was it gross?” “Yeah. It was okay, though. Well, I’ll see you around.” “Okay, Doug. Put the saw in the closet. See ya later.” I glance over at my other self, noticing that he’s beginning to grow his other half already. I feel something happening to me, too. “We should probably rest. You want to?” I ask him. “Yeah,” he says. I gather more towels from the closet, spread them out over the comforter of my—our—bed, and we lie on our sides until we fall asleep. *** I wake up from my nap to discover that my other half isn’t next to me. I glance around the room, still kinda out of it from the meds and surgery, but don’t see him. It looks like I’m healed, and it’s dark outside, which means I’ve slept several hours. I touch random spots of my body, feeling the new flesh that formed when I was asleep. I’m back to normal. My other half is reading a book (Donald Barthelme’s Snow White, in fact) in the recliner in the living room. We look like identical twins, and I immediately notice that he’s fully healed, too. Our eyes lock. “Hey,” I say. “Hey,” he says. “How is that?” I nod toward the book. “It’s not one of his better ones. There’s this questionnaire in the middle of it, though, which is really funny. How was your 39

nap?” “Good. How was yours?” “Good. Looks like you’re better.” “Looks like you’re better, too.” “Yeah,” he says. “So listen,” I say, “I’ve got to work third shift in a couple hours. I’ll fill you in on what we need to do tomorrow, okay?” “Sure.” I fix a frozen dinner and sit down on the couch to eat it. I pick up the TV remote and almost press the power button when I catch my other half staring at me. “Bother you?” I ask. “Yeah. Sorry. I’m fine with everything except TV. For some reason, it really distracts me.” “Right. Me too.” I move to my desk to get on the Internet while I eat. When I finish, I take a shower, dress, and head out the door for work. I work eight hours at a gas station five nights a week. There’s so much I could be getting done when I’m at work, so I plan to introduce my other half to his new responsibilities tomorrow. I get home in the early morning, but when I go to unlock the door, I twist the knob and it opens. Hmm, that’s strange. All the lights are off, though the sun is peeking through the closed blinds, and I walk over to the coffee table where I see a piece of printing paper. I pick it up and study it for a second. Why the fuck did he type it? It’s a note, which reads: Went out with some friends. Be home late. Might stay at someone else’s house if it gets too late. I fix a bowl of cereal for breakfast and go back to bed after I eat. In the early afternoon, I wake up to see my other half in bed with me. He must’ve slipped in unnoticed, which I find unusual except that, since he’s me, he knows how to maneuver without waking me up. I shake my head in annoyance. “Hey, what’s goin’ on?” he says when he enters the living room a couple hours later. I’m on the couch with a notebook, writing out a list of what I want him to do when I’m at work tonight. I think about asking him who he went out with last night, where they went, and what they did, but I know he went to a bar with one of my friends because if I were him, and I am, sort of, I wouldn’t go out alone. “Not much. Hey, did you leave the door unlocked when you 40

left last night?” “Uh, yeah.” “Why? You know I have a key.” “Yeah, sorry. I guess I just forgot.” “That’s okay,” I say. “Don’t make a habit of it, though. And another thing, while I’m at work tonight I need you to get some stuff done so I don’t have to do it when I get home.” “Like what?” “I made a list, but I’ll read some of them. Wash the dishes, do the laundry—” “So have sex with the laundry?” “No. Take out the trash, vacuum, dust, and some other things.” “Okay.” He walks away, into the kitchen, to make his first meal of the day. Once it’s ready, he sits on the couch with me and we both watch whatever it is that’s on TV, not really saying anything. *** As usual, work is uneventful. I return home in the early morning, but when I approach the door, I hear the TV blaring. He must’ve left the TV on. I’m about to take out my keys when I remember he left the door unlocked yesterday, so I turn the knob and sure enough, it’s unlocked. He’s playing videogames, and there are empty beer bottles strewn on the coffee table. I walk over to the TV, turn it off, and turn the console off, too. “Hey!” he says, flustered. “Have you been up all night?” “I haven’t saved in, like, an hour. Now I’ll have to do it all over again. And yeah, I have been up all night.” “Did you do all the stuff on the list?” “Yeah.” “Okay,” I say. “Sorry.” I turn the TV back on, and then the console. I’m hungry, so I drape my coat over one of the kitchen chairs before I open the fridge to see what I feel like eating. When I don’t find anything appetizing, I turn around to a bunch of dishes piled up in the sink where they’ve been stacked for days. I walk back into the living room. 41

“Hey. Where the fuck did those dishes come from? I thought you said you did everything on the list.” “Nah,” he says. He smiles. “You’re not the boss of me.” “What?” “You can’t tell me what to do.” “Yeah I can. That’s the whole point! You’re supposed to help me out.” “I don’t want to and you can’t make me.” I sigh, shaking my head in disgust. I grab a box of cereal from the pantry and eat a bowl of it while leaning against the kitchen counter. From there I get ready for bed, lie down, and hope that I’ll be able to fall asleep soon. How can I get this jerk to mind? It’s not like I can do anything to him because he can turn around and do the same to me. A few minutes later, while I’m drifting off to sleep, I hear silence in the living room followed by the noise of him in the bathroom getting ready, I assume, for bed. He slips into bed— probably thinking I’m already asleep—and lies on his side facing the wall. I’m on my side, too, facing his back. If I concentrate my efforts, I can push him out of bed with my arms and a leg, which is exactly what I do. I pretend I’m asleep, though, so he can’t get mad at me. He yells in mid-flight, but groans when he hits the floor. “Ow. That hurt, you idiot. You did that on purpose, too, I bet.” He pulls the covers over him, settling in to get some sleep. I kick him out of bed again. “Quit!” he says when he gets off the floor. This time my eyes are open. We stare at one another, perhaps wondering why we’re the same yet so different. “If you don’t do what I tell you to do,” I say, “then it’s war.” “So be it,” he says. He opens the closet and flicks on the light. He grabs a box off one of the shelves and pulls out a quilt that’s been in my family for generations. “You can find me on the couch from now on,” he tells me. “Go screw yourself,” I say. “And by 'yourself', I don’t mean me.” He slams my bedroom door on his way out. *** 42

When I wake up in the early afternoon, my twin is still asleep. In fact, he stays asleep until I leave for work where I sit all night with little to do except ring up the occasional customer who buys gas, snacks, or both. It’s about time I go back to school. Maybe do something with my life. In the early morning, once I’m back at my apartment complex, the first thing I do is check my mailbox since I forgot to the past couple days, being preoccupied with the cloning process and all. As I’m sifting through various bills I hear footsteps from above, which I figure are headed in my direction. It’s Doug, who smells kinda bad and looks like he hasn’t showered in a while. “Hey,” I say. “What are you still doing here?” he says. “What do you mean? I just got off work, as you can see.” I look down for a second, indicating that I’m still wearing my uniform and nametag. “But I thought you were leaving?” “Doug, I have no idea what you’re talking about.” “Dude, I helped you load that truck a few hours ago. You should be on the road by now.” “Oh shit. Where’d I tell you I was going?” “You didn’t say. You hadn’t decided yet.” “It was him. Fuck.” “What do you mean?” I drop my mail and run upstairs to my apartment. I almost try the doorknob, but I suddenly stop and think, Please let all my stuff be here. I twist the knob, close my eyes, and swing the door wide open until it bangs against the wall. I open my eyes to find my place entirely gutted. “That son of a bitch,” I say, noting the irony. I remember that Doug was supposed to put the saw in the hall closet, which is what I check next. The saw’s still there, with a Post-It® attached to it. If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, it reads. “That son of a bitch,” I repeat, not knowing what to do next. Not knowing what to do at all. ***

43

Thinking about what you just read, use the space below (NOWHERE ELSE) to write a short essay (10,000+ words) focusing on the overriding theme of the excerpt. Support your essay with examples from the text. Also, you may find it beneficial to incorporate outside sources, except that you aren’t allowed to, plus you have like three minutes to finish the exam so you better start writing. Lastly, do NOT use complete sentences. Only fragments. *** ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ 44

___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ ___________________________________________________ 45

Random by T. J. Forrester

Study those books and you can be president one day, his mama said. Her name was Tyesha and hair fell over her ears in black ringlets, framed a gaze that hardened when she looked through the screen door at the men who lounged on the corner. Study those books, his mama said, and you can be anything your heart desires. You can be a professor, a doctor; I swear, Dwayne, one day you can run a company and make a million dollars. They lived in Detroit, on a street bordered by three-story buildings rising into pale white sky. The air had a moldy smell, the decay of something long forgotten. His mama said the long forgotten was pride. She said it was spirituality. She said it was self-worth. She said if the niggas had any sense, they'd go back to school and earn their degrees. She said many things while she stood in the kitchen and fixed his favorite suppers. He liked green beans and meatloaf, macaroni and sweet pickles, ice-cold Pepsi. Cut back on that caffeine, his mama said. My boy needs his sleep so he can get into Harvard. Harvard? If you're gonna dream, you might as well dream big. Despite his mama's protestations, in the evenings he chose to sit cross-legged in the dirt in the front yard and do his homework. He never told her why he liked the outside more than the inside, that it put distance between him and her dreams. He felt them 46

consciously, the weight of a hopeful generation, a mass and gravity that wore on him like a lead mantle. The bullet came in late October, two weeks after his birthday. There were no shouted words, no squealed tires, no crack deal gone sour; none of the precedents that predicted chaos on the street. Neighbors stopped and offered opinions. Random shot. Missed by an inch, might as well be a mile. She thanked the neighbors for their kind words, went outside and sat where he had sat. Through the window, Dwayne watched her shrink until she looked like nothing at all. He felt her dreams falter, felt the weight of them fall from his shoulders and dissolve into the night. She came, at last, to the kitchen where she rattled through a stack of pots and pans. His mama seemed insignificant, a first in his world, and realization swelled his heart. We don't need no college, he said. She inflated before his very eyes, sucked air from the room until she was fully erect and ferociously before him. Bullets don't mean nothin', she said. Dwayne waited for the slap. And when it came smiled slyly against the sting. He felt the weight on his shoulders, prepared himself for what lay ahead.

47

The Migration Patterns of Insects by Jon Gingerich

Until that summer, bugs never bothered the boy. He had put together an insect collection the year before, a wooden box containing whatever specimens the backyard offered. The box had a glass lid and the insects were encased inside it, beetles and moths lined up in neat rows like studies of a crucifixion, meticulously studded on black mounting board with pins driven through the thorax. Sometimes he’d add an insect to the collection only to realize it was still alive, and he’d watch in horror as the bug wiggled its antennae in moribund tics against the pin until death came in a slow, unwinding repose. His compulsions in rogue entomology were driven more by a child’s want of collecting than topical knowledge. He’d misspell and misidentify the genus names he typed on paper slips and aligned carefully at the base of each bug. Though for a short time he found himself fascinated with them, by fall the insects had become all but a faint memory, supplanted with coin collecting, origami, chess, or some other passing fad. The box was left to sit in the back of his closet where it added to the sedimentary shelf of another year, its populations forgotten like a lost city. Then a cockroach crawled onto his foot. He’d been sitting on the bed with his dog Simba, when he noticed the pill-shaped visage of a bug making its way across the rubber tongue of sneaker. It ambled in exploratory curves, movements marked by the pattering of armored appendages, before making its way onto the floor. It continued there in a straight line across the length of 48

bedroom, legs scurrying in synchronized steps like the moving pins of a typewriter, until it disappeared in a small crack of drywall near a stack of board games. Catching a glimpse of the bug, Simba leapt off the bed and made a mad dash toward the wall, where he began barking wildly at the crack, claws kicking against the floor in frustrated spasms. In the kitchen he found his mother standing over the stove. She was still in her bathrobe and a towel was wrapped around her head in a crooked cone formation. There was coffee brewing, and the boy could smell simmering sausages. “You need to quit riling that dog,” she said. “I heard him barking from all the way down here.” “I wasn’t. He was trying to get a roach.” “A roach—in your room?” She set the knife down and turned to face him. Each expression could be read in the patchwork of folds that grew around her eyes and mouth. Family photos revealed that she had been beautiful at one time, but the years had left her tired, replacing the warmth in her cheeks with sallow hues and grays. “Disgusting,” she said. He sat down and began reading the back of a cereal box. *** That summer had started just like every one before it. For a boy in the sixth grade, summer break is something to look forward to for months, maybe all year, but two weeks into it he had found himself at a loss for anything left to do, having bicycled, hiked, and swum over every conceivable patch of terrain his small Ohio town offered. The boy loved this time of year around his home, everything fat and green, the way the cottonwood and sugar maples grew up and around him like a dark, botanic cage. The surrounding forest and rolling hills of countryside swelled up into grassy plumes that seemed to encroach upon his family’s doorstep, as if they too would soon be overgrown with a delicate layer of moss. The air was thick, heavy and generous with its subtle fragrances of honeysuckle, sod grass, and potting soil. Their Victorian home, stifling in the humidity, had become reacquainted with the seasonal accoutrements of box fans, bug-encrusted window screens, and the smell of citronella. They subsisted on iced tea and popsicles and they slept on sweat49

tethered sheets to the symphony of the cicadas, a haunting susurrus that echoed through the foothills along with the roar of the nearby derby races like ghosts on the Appalachian highway. *** The boy’s father came into the kitchen. His collar was turned up, and his jacket was folded neatly over his arm and briefcase. He set the briefcase down, put on his jacket, and patted the boy on his head before reaching into the cupboard for a coffee mug. “Have you seen my tie?” “Which one?” the boy’s mother asked. “The red one. The one I always wear.” “It’s at the dry cleaners. You can’t wear the same tie every day.” He poured a cup of coffee and picked at a piece of toast, tearing around the edges as if it were an inedible rind. “I need you to be home tonight,” she continued. “You can’t stay at work late. “I’ll see what I can do.” “You have to be home,” she said. “I’m making a quiche.” He gave her a peck on the cheek and then he was off. The boy heard tires turn on gravel and then there was silence. “What are you going to do today?” his mother asked. “I don’t know. There’s nothing to do.” “Then you can help me at the store. Just give me a few minutes to get dressed.” Ten minutes later he was standing at the front door, waiting for his mother to come downstairs. He was peering out through the thin glass slats of window in the foyer when he looked down and saw another cockroach. It was tan in color, about an inch in length and almost identical to the one he had seen in his room. This one was dead, lying supine on the hardwood floor near the doormat. Afraid that Simba would discover the roach and eat it, he went into the bathroom and got a wad of tissue paper. He picked up the roach and flushed it down the toilet. *** The boy’s hometown was like a lot of small towns. Built in 50

the shadow of the post-war industrial complex, it recalled all the rustic idylls of an America you don’t see too often anymore, a place of paradoxes, a place that preserved the scenes of a bygone era yet appeared timeless all at once. Homes were scattered clusters of Victorian, Ranch, and the occasional Colonial, built on large plots of greenage that predated modern zoning laws. Front yards were manicured to the point of anality. The courthouse and veteran’s hall were built close to the street, adorned in a fauxdeco that paraded function and form as inseparable. Citizens were husky and denim-clad, politically conservative, and bargainsavvy. Riding in the car with his mother, he was always surprised at how many people would wave to them from their cars or front porches, people he didn’t recognize but assumed were clients of his father’s law firm. “Your father helped that family keep their home,” his mother would say. “He’s a good man,” she would continue, as if asking for reassurance. The town was located about fifty miles from the city, and each year the two grew inexorably closer. Local jobs were lost, replaced with different jobs that brought with them a new breed of resident—families who settled in the town for the sole purpose of working in another. The town grew and its façade began to change: new buildings began cropping up and larger, box-shaped developments began lining the interstate. Few noticed as each passing year the downtown square began resembling the farming community that had left them decades before, their empty grain elevators that dotted the edges of town like a mass grave, the mangled, walnut-colored spires that stared upwards into oblivion, waiting to be rezoned into strip malls and parking lots. *** They returned home from the grocery store and began unloading the car. Simba met them at the front door and followed the boy into the kitchen. He was putting the groceries on the counter when he looked over at the breakfast nook and saw that the table was covered with dozens of cockroaches. They were crawling up the legs of the table and chairs; they were on the placemats and the utensils. They were clustered around the 51

cereal bowl the boy had used for breakfast that morning, devouring its remnants in a wild, feeding swarm. Simba began to bark. The boy turned and looked to his mother, who was standing behind him in the doorway. She cupped her hand to her mouth and then she screamed. *** His father was late coming home that night. They waited up for him in the living room with the TV on. The boy flipped through the channels with anxious clicks of the remote. Earlier that day, the boy and his mother had killed and disposed of the roaches together. She had found a can of pesticide in the garage and used it to kill the bugs. He scooped up the carcasses with a dishrag and took them out to the trash. He suggested putting the placemats in the washer but she just wanted to throw them away. In case of eggs, she said. She called an emergency extermination specialist in the area who said he could be at the house first thing in the morning. She was even too disgusted to make food so they went to McDonald’s instead. This was fortuitous: the boy never did like quiche. When his father came home the boy knew well enough to make himself scarce. The man walked through the doorway in sheepish, silent steps, taking off his coat in the foyer before folding it over his arm. He came into the living room, knelt down beside the boy, put his arm around his neck and gave him a curt hug. “Hey pal, up a little late, dontcha think?” He moved over to the chair where his wife was seated and he gave her a kiss on the cheek. She jerked her head back from his touch. “I’m going to bed,” the boy said. He gave them both a hug and then he went upstairs with Simba and closed the door. Already he could hear them yelling; the words were inaudible but he had an idea of what they were saying. Her tone was shrill, sharp, and combative. His was defensive, calming in tone but ineffectual. He lay down on the bed and buried his face in Simba’s coat. The room was dark. He put his ear up to Simba’s chest and listened to the sound of the dog’s panting. He looked up at the bay window and peered out, 52

over the green patch of lawn and into the dark street. The neighborhood remained quiet and still, heedless and empty like the shadows that drifted behind the groves, asleep. The rest of the world seemed oblivious to their unrest. It may as well have been a million miles between the walls of their house and the next. Every home is different; every home has its secrets. This was theirs. *** The exterminator was at the house bright and early the next morning. The boy’s mother answered the door. He tipped the brim of his baseball cap, uttered the perfunctory “ma’am” and sauntered into the foyer, where he turned on his heels and panned his head over the perimeter of the living room. He walked up to the doorway that divided the living room and kitchen, where he picked off a loose fleck of paint with his fingers. He held it up, turned it over, and inspected it assiduously as if he were looking into a microscope. “M’hhhmmm.” He had long brown hair that stuck out in straw-like tufts from under the tattered brim of a cap. He was wearing sunglasses that seemed better-suited for a child or a clown, with bright, fluorescent-colored rims that were large, round, and appeared much too big for his head, as did the thick moustache that draped over his mouth, obscuring his upper lip and gum line like an illplaced third eyebrow. His jeans and matching denim jacket were torn, faded, and covered with splotches of paint. His tennis shoes were bulbous and white, resembling two large pillows. He had an olive military-style bag slung over his shoulder that he carried with a marching esteem as if it were a rifle. They walked through the kitchen together and listened as he rattled off enthusiastically about cockroaches. “Most cockroaches are nocturnal,” he said. “Whenever you see one in broad daylight it’s a safe bet to assume there are at least ten times that somewhere else in the house.” The boy thought about the dozens he had seen on the kitchen table and imagined walls infested with teeming thousands. When they reached the basement the exterminator set down his bag and removed his jacket. Underneath it he was wearing a t53

shirt that said “I go from zero to horny in 2.5 beers.” “Usually these lil’ sombitches like to hide in the basement, where it’s nice and dark,” he said. “A lot of people don’t know this, but cockroaches are a distant cousin of termites. You have an infestation bad enough and it can eat you out of house and home.” He reached into the bag and pulled out a large red canister that resembled a fire extinguisher. He hoisted it over his shoulder and descended into the basement. There were kicking sounds, then a few seconds of cursing, then there was the flick of a light switch and the faucet-like release of a nozzle. “That should do it,” he said, appearing in the doorway minutes later. He told them to make sure no food was left unattended in the house, not even dog food, and he also advised them to repair any leaky pipes in the bathroom and kitchen. A cockroach can live without food for more than a month, he said, but their life expectancy drops to less than two weeks when there isn’t a water supply. He recommended they buy bait stations and put them under the kitchen sink, where roaches are prone to come up from cellars, and he told them to make sure all jars in the pantry were sealed tight. “We’ve thrown them all away,” the boy’s mother said. The exterminator tipped his hat and left. The boy and his mother stood in the doorway and watched as the man’s white van grew infinitely smaller down the road. The sounds of heavy metal music blaring from the van’s interior were still audible as it roared onto the country highway. *** They didn’t see a cockroach for the next three days. They went on with their lives and they adapted to the changes surprisingly well. They washed their dishes immediately after every meal, they kept the trash cans in the garage, and the boy’s mother caulked the bathtub to stop leaks. It wasn’t until the forth day, when the boy was eating lunch at the kitchen table, that he saw a cockroach scurrying across the floor. He was listening to his parents argue in the next room and the roach had caught him by surprise. He was still quick enough to kill it, smashing it against the floor with a newspaper. 54

“Mortgages don’t pay for themselves, Mary.” “I’m aware of that. I’m the one who pays the bills every goddamn month, remember?” “Then you know I can’t just quit—” “You don’t have to quit anything, Paul. You can get a job at the Wal-Mart after you’ve given them everything else.” The boy looked down at the carcass. It was flat and covered with a postmortem goo. He noticed it was different than the roaches he had seen before, lighter, almost golden in color, its body encased with the shiny veneer of an orange marbling. On its legs were tiny brown claws that looked like miniature rose thorns, and it had a long, horn-shaped ovipositor that ran the length of its abdomen to the hind legs. Even though it was now flattened against the floor, he could see there was something else different about the roach: a strange marking on its back, a black Rorschach pattern that looked similar to the silhouetted outlines of a human face. He walked over to the kitchen sink and opened the cabinet underneath, where he saw the sticky trap, knotted in a thick clot of dead bugs, their bodies lined up along the strip like victims of a firing squad. They looked identical to the roach on the floor, and he could see the mark on their backs clearer this time, the ominous death’s head that stared back like a clown’s painted mask. *** They hired more exterminators. They brought a company all the way from Cincinnati this time, a professional team that normally worked pest control for housing projects and commercial buildings. They wore matching florescent outfits and respiratory masks and they drove a large truck that looked like an ambulance, covered with hoses, aluminum tanks, and industriallooking nozzles. The family evacuated the house for a day while they sprayed the basement with chemicals. Two days later, the roaches came back. The exterminators came out again, this time with two trucks, and they stayed even longer, fumigating the entire house from top to bottom, caulking the walls of the basement and even spraying down the grounds surrounding the house. The front yard turned brown, the shrubbery shriveled into a thicket of knotty twigs and the grass yellowed into thinning 55

patches of peat and dirt clumps. Their home now appeared set back and removed from the world around it, sealed off in a death perimeter as if its soil forbade life. *** The roaches were back in three days. They would always appear in single numbers at first; the family would see one crawling across the floor in the kitchen, in the hallway or the bathroom. They’d see clusters under the sink or in a corner of the basement. Then their numbers would grow, first by a handful and then into full-fledged swarms. The boy killed so many after the first week he lost count. They threw away all the food in the house and they placed sticky traps, roach hotels, and paste baits in practically every room. They began carrying fly swatters and the garage floor became cluttered with empty cans of pesticide. The house began to smell with a foul, earthy odor. The boy’s mother couldn’t sleep and the stench, along with the July humidity, brought her to vomiting on at least one occasion. At night the boy would lay awake in bed and listen to the rasped sounds of scurrying in the walls. He’d think about their house as if it were rotting from the inside, succumbing to a cancer that slowly ate at its foundation. *** The boy went into the closet in his room one day to get his baseball mitt. He pulled apart the curtain of clothes and began digging through the pile of assorted junk, the years of sporting equipment, baseball cards, and stacks of comic books, when he heard the limbic rattle of moving insects. He pulled his arm up and away from the pile, unveiling a clearing in its mass, and saw an army of roaches tearing their way through his insect collection from the previous summer. The box was brimming with moving bugs, hundreds of them, pressed hard against its glass face, devouring the hardened meat spiracles that hung impaled on the pins. He jumped back and away from the mouth of the closet and fell into the rack of clothes that hung above, causing a brown swarm to rain down onto the carpet. Some of the bugs fell onto his shoulders and arms, and he began brushing them off in 56

panicked swipes. He felt the cool coil of their segmental appendages clasp around his fingers, legs moving against the grain of his fingertips, tiny claws pulling on the hairs of his arms as he peeled them from his skin. He screamed in a high-pitched, girlish howl. He pulled his arms in tight around his chest and fell back onto the floor, where he began rolling in possessed fits. He began to feel the bites, their teeth stinging flesh like hot needles. He began to hyperventilate; he was screaming, crying for help but not aware of the sounds that came out, a language reduced to pained, febrile tongues. His mother ran into the room and pulled him away from the swarm. She picked him up and carried him to the bottom of the stairs, where Simba lay cowering under the staircase, whining as if it were the onset of a violent thunderstorm. *** The boy’s father came home to find him sleeping on the couch in the living room. The boy’s mother came into the room and then they both stood over him like a team of doctors. They began to argue. Wanting to listen in, the boy didn’t open his eyes at first. He finally feigned waking when curiosity drove him to run his fingers over the welts on his arms. He didn’t know roaches could bite. “Why don’t you do something about this?” she screamed at her husband. “What am I supposed to do, Mary?” “Well, spraying them and swatting at them isn’t working.” “And neither are the exterminators. They can’t kill them all. We’re just going to have to ride this out. Until winter.” “Ride it out? Jesus Christ, Paul—they’re biting your son!” *** That night the family moved into a motel. A few days later the Cincinnati exterminators came out again. This time they brought a team of researchers from the university to study the infestation. The group analyzed the home and decided how they would handle the problem. The most common pesticides are nerve poisons, they said, chemicals that induce muscle spasms 57

and eventual paralysis when physical contact is made. While the team would continue using these chemicals just as before, they would dispense another chemical with it, one that doesn’t kill but renders cockroaches sterile. Using this cocktail, roaches that escaped contact with the former would be exposed to the latter, thereby eliminating any chances of further breeding. Because many infestations resume once insecticides dissipate, the team also spent a large amount of time working in the area around the house. Roaches leave a chemical residue in their feces, they said, a sort of breadcrumb trail that signals moving points of migration. Roaches follow these trails to popular food sources and it’s for this reason that infestations usually worsen with time. The university team brought in a new chemical that mimics this migratory feature and spread it on land away from the house. They then tilled a circle of earth around the house into a crude moat formation, and they irrigated this soil with a potent pesticide. The theory, they said, was twofold: it would stop any roaches trying to enter the house in their tracks, and it would serve as a sort of pied piper for any remaining populations living within the house, luring them outside with the presumption of a larger feeding area. *** The family moved back into the house a week later. Two days went by, three days, weeks without a cockroach sighting. They restocked the pantry and began cooking meals at home again. Simba stopped hiding under the stairs. Things settled down with the boy’s parents. One night his father came home from work early and they went out to eat at Shaw’s Steakhouse in the town square. They talked and ate and laughed and his parents drank wine and important-looking men in suits crossed the room to come up to their table, where they shook the father’s hand and made small talk using words the boy didn’t understand. The summer went by and they turned their attention to different matters. His father put up bird feeders in the backyard, and the hummingbirds came from miles around to drink the sugar water they made on the kitchen stove. The boy bought a book on birds and a pair of binoculars and spent long August days on the back porch naming the different types of cardinals and sparrows that 58

would dance around the seed feeders. In the evenings they’d settle down on the couch and watch TV together, the sitcoms and game shows mostly, and they’d talk about what was going on in the news, like Ollie North or the New Coke debacle, their conversations guided by a world moving forward, set to the hum of the cicadas that stirred in the night outside their window like wild creatures at sea. *** Several weeks passed without incident. One night they were seated at the kitchen table, where they had just finished eating dinner. The boy’s mother had made a stew and Simba’s chin was rested across the brim of the boy’s chair waiting patiently for handouts. The boy had been discussing the pros and cons of joining mock trial in the fall when his father stood up and grabbed his keys from the counter. “Where are you going?” his mother asked. “Back to the office. I told you I have to work on the city auction.” “You—you can’t go back to work,” she stammered. Her voice was needy and hoarse. “It’s seven thirty. We were supposed to unpack the telescope tonight.” “Mary, please don’t do this. It’s the town square auction. I’ve been working on this for weeks, you know—” “I can’t believe you,” she said. “This is just like you,” he said, banging an open palm against the counter. He looked over at the boy and his face flushed red. He ran his hand through his hair and looked down. “You know,” he continued, softer this time, as if the boy wouldn’t understand hushed tones, “how long I’ve been working on this. The city is selling off the town square to a new developer and I’m entrusted to—” He stopped and his eyes transfixed back onto the floor. The room became silent and they followed his gaze, across the kitchen floor and toward a strip of tile near the wall, where a single brown cockroach was making its way to the kitchen sink. The boy’s eyes went back to his father and he watched as the man stared at the roach with an unwavering, obsessed fixation, as his face grew puffy and red like a balloon, swollen, flustered, and 59

childlike. The roach continued across the floor, completely oblivious to its audience, to its own grand impudence, as it rambled across the plates of Spanish tile before finally disappearing in a small opening in the cabinet door. The boy’s father moved quickly to the coat rack near the basement. He grabbed his jacket and hoisted it over his outstretched arm. He walked back into the kitchen in familiar, self-regulating steps, shoulders arched toward the ground, body billowing forward, legs sweeping like there was no bend to the knees, the kind of movements you’d mistake for efficiency if you didn’t understand surrender. “Everybody get in the car,” he said. “We’re going to Dairy Queen.” “Dairy Queen?” the boy’s mother asked. “Dairy Queen. We’re going to Dairy Queen for ice cream.” “But your work—” “C’mon, let’s go,” he said, motioning to the garage door. They walked out to the garage and got into the car. The boy’s father said he wanted Simba to come too. Why, the boy didn’t know, but he didn’t argue and Simba jumped into the backseat willfully and settled in between the boy and the window. His father went back into the house to get his wallet. They waited for a minute, then for two and three minutes more, before he came back into the garage and told the boy’s mother to take the car, that he would meet them there shortly. No big deal, he said, just need to get some papers from the office on the way. No sense in dragging everyone to the office. His mother didn’t argue. She got out of the car and moved over to the driver’s seat and they were off, down the stretch of county road and onto the highway that headed into town. They arrived at the Dairy Queen and waited for nearly ten minutes in the parking lot. When they grew tired of waiting any longer they went inside and ordered sundaes. They sat down in the restaurant and ate their sundaes together. The boy’s eyes began to wander, across the rows of orange counters and then to the teenage girls who stood behind the register and stared back from under tall helmets of hair. The boy’s father arrived several minutes later. He ordered a sundae and they continued eating. Their conversation remained sparse, none of them really saying anything more than what was necessary. The boy looked up at his 60

father and noticed for the first time how short he was, small, almost prematurely developed, like a young boy dressed in men’s clothing. His movements no longer seemed as reflexive as they usually were. Instead, his eyes darted in nervous tics at the two seated on the opposite side of the booth and then back down to the floor before settling on the shaky hand that held a silver spoon, its bowled stem striking the side of the plastic dish with terse, anxious scrapes. When they finished eating they walked out to the parking lot. The boy fed Simba a piece of banana through a crack in the window when his mother wasn’t looking. They got into their cars and made their way back through town and onto the highway. They arrived at the house just behind the streaming line of fire trucks, their street alive in the opulent glow of lights and sirens, their house ablaze in a perennial bloom of orange and yellow. All the recognizable features were gone: there were no windows, no doors or wood siding, or even a roof. All that was left was a wailing wall of flames, a kindling arcade that licked in hungry wisps over a blackened frame. Neighbors and firemen stood on the lawn and watched as the house was consumed. The family exited their cars and met each other on the lawn, the boy and his mother running, the father following in slow steps behind them. They stood together, the three of them, forming a sort of ashcolored vignette against the conflagration. They watched in a tacit, familial approval as the home they had built was consumed in the maelstrom like a sacrificial lamb. At that moment the boy thought again about the roaches. He thought about the roaches and he wondered where they would hide now, as his home disappeared in the effulgent glow of the fire, sending caustic ripples of red into the surrounding hills, turning colors in the Ohio countryside before evaporating into the August night.

61

Noel Sloboda Opacity Honest Self-Assessment Mouthful Pet Project Scaled

Opacity Karl was sure things would have turned out differently if he had been wearing regulation safety goggles instead of sunglasses on the day of “the incident.” He’d been warned about the sunglasses by the lab’s head, Dr. Georgia Spacks, on three separate occasions. Code called for clear lenses: to protect the eyes from potentially toxic materials and incidental splatter from test subjects, without impeding a technician’s sight. “But I can see well enough,” Karl insisted. He paused before adding, in a softer voice, “Sometimes I don’t like to look too closely at what we do here.” Georgia said she didn’t care and warned him he’d be docked a week’s pay if he wore sunglasses again “You make enough sloppy mistakes as it is, Karl. It’s like you’re not even a trained chemist. With those damned glasses on,” she added, “you might not be able to view your workstation properly, and the results could be even worse than what you usually produce.” Karl could see quite well on the day he mixed chemicals for the flash bomb that blinded everyone else in the lab. Afterwards, he found his vision good enough—he just needed to wear tinted lenses when looking at mirrors.

63

Honest Self-Assessment After Larry learned from a Myers-Briggs test that he was extremely “intensive,” he decided he didn’t need to talk to anyone. It was in his nature to take solace in privacy, so he sealed himself away. He lasted two more years as a White House spokesperson before he was forced to change fields and took a job teaching.

64

Mouthful Not particularly well known today, Fezzlechompiwag enjoyed a dazzling but remarkably brief career as a monster—less than a day, the one after Halloween of 1992, before he became just another five year old boy. Fezzlechompiwag’s candy corn teeth proved less horrifying— and far less durable—than he’d hoped when he launched a surprise attack against his little sister Susie.

65

Pet Project The mastodon had changed things permanently. Richard’s parents had kicked him out before: after the wild boar he brought home gobbled up the Easter ham; after the geriatric hippopotamus tried to mate with Thomas, his mother’s blue heeler. His parents hadn’t even let him through the door with the giant striped parrot on his shoulder. But they had welcomed him back as soon as he returned the bird to the pet store—just as they’d forgiven him for the rabid fire voles and the perpetually shedding wolverine, once he’d gotten rid of them. The mastodon wouldn’t be as easy to relocate as his other pets—not with a new dishwasher, the good silver that had belonged to aunt Agnes, his father’s Sony video camera, and Richard’s little sister Samantha all rattling around inside it. No, Richard wouldn’t be going home again anytime soon.

66

Scaled Flushed with the success of self-publishing his first chapbook, a young poet opened up an independent press. It was to serve as a beacon for all those who aspired to produce great literature. The poet gave the press a name that captured the scale of his ambition: Imperial Mammoth. It took more than fourteen months for him to land his first client, by which time he had sold just three copies of his chapbook. Only because the young poet had so many bills to pay did he begrudgingly undertake the commission for a packadermist’s scratch & sniff book.

67

Slate by Jeff Wallace

Kyle’s grandfather, Ovel, looks out from underneath the hood of his truck. The truck is faded red, gone almost to orange, and strips of rust run the length of it. Ovel is thin and old and blind in one eye. His face is filled with the ridges and valleys of where he lives and the work he has done. “Where you been, boy?” he asks. He puts his hands above his head, onto the raised edge of the hood. The plug wires lie around his feet like headless black snakes. “I’ve been making money,” Kyle says and glances down at his torn and chewed fingers. The nails are chipped and broken. He closes his eyes as he remembers the sound of them dragging across the slate. He looks up, quickly. “More like drinking it away.” Ovel shifts his weight from one foot to the other. “Kyle, I don’t even wanna know what you been doin’. Don’t even say; I know it’s no count.” He looks down into the guts of his truck, his hands working their way back to the plugs. One set of knuckles is busted wide. “There’s coffee in there for you,” he says. “Thanks, Papaw,” Kyle says, but the only acknowledgment is the ratchet and the labor—a series of ticks followed by a grunt and pull as he breaks another bolt loose. Kyle knows he should stay, should help him, but he is too tired. ***

68

Kyle steals shingles off the roofs of old barns. He has to keep driving farther and farther out so that no one suspects him. In the beginning he would be gone only a few hours, but now he is gone all night long. But he believes it is worth it. The wealthy farmers, those rich enough to hold onto their land from the mining companies and land-grabbers, those farmers with the expansive ancient estates and fifty thousand dollar tractors, they can afford to replace them. His best friend, Anthony Radabaugh, told him about the shingles as the two were drinking and playing horseshoes. It was the end of summer, and the day was creeping into the gloaming. The two were looking to the sky, judging the darkness and how much time they would have before it settled, reckoning if they could continue to play or if they should go sit on Anthony’s family’s porch. The Radabaugh home place watched over the valley, the sloping and rolling hills of this northern end of Appalachia were green and softening to a low blue in the dimming light. Anthony pointed to the top of his barn. It was not really his barn; it was his family’s barn. Nothing like that, not here, ever really belongs to just one person. A few days before, Kyle had walked off from his job with Larry Adkins' Logging. He had gotten the job as soon as he turned eighteen, only a week after high school graduation, and he had been running a skidder, loading logs into trucks, ever since. The Wednesday before, his skidder had tipped and rolled down a short gully. He had been unhurt, and seemingly unshaken. He left at lunch though, and had never gone back. He told no one, never said a word to his grandfather about it, he just never went back. “Those shingles,” Anthony said. His arms and fingers were short and stubby. “They’re worth more than that whole barn.” “Bullshit.” “Those are genuine slate shingles,” he said, scratching at his thick arms. “People pay good money for ‘em. And those ones are old. They were there when we bought this place seventy years ago.” Bats were beginning to swoop and circle on the hilltop. “That don’t make them worth a goddamned thing,” Kyle said. “That just makes them old rock. And every rock is old.” He picked up a pebble from the ground and tossed it into the air. One of the bats careened down from above. For an instant, Kyle could see his father on the porch of the trailer having him toss up 69

pebbles. His father held a .22 rifle. Kyle saw the swift, smooth motion of his own curving arm, the stone making a lazy arc in the air, the tip of the rifle slipping to his father’s shoulder, the sound of the powder cracking in the dusk. “Did you or did you not see those folks selling shingles at the Apple Festival two weeks ago? Selling them for sixty or seventy bucks a pop.” Anthony said this as he bent his squat body over, picking up a horseshoe. His red hair made him look like an orangutan. “Tony, those were painted,” Kyle said. “How much work is it to stencil on a Welsh Dragon? It’s the rock that makes it worth selling. A person could sell shingles to those flea market artists for twenty or thirty bucks apiece.” He was still crouched, his squat body a thumb. Kyle smacked at a mosquito on his bare arm. “People don’t even know what they’re worth, but I thought you might want to. Since you’re out of work and all,” he said, grinning up at him, his thin lips peeled back, ready to laugh. It was something, and it seemed like the right thing. There was an element in it that Kyle had been seeking. The component of action and direction, of him on his own moving and making things different, the element of claiming something out of nothing. All he had to do was take it. The two talked about how to do it that evening, planning like boys building a fort. And for Anthony it was just that kind of dream, but to Kyle it cemented into reality. He settled into it quickly. He would go out once a week and tear up shingles, keeping them in the bed of his truck underneath a tarp, the load pushed back against the tailgate. He had at first only wanted to steal a few hundred shingles, enough to hold off the inevitable. But he tired of thinking of the inevitable, of plotting and worrying about those around him. *** Kyle walks into the kitchen, catching the toe of his boot on a torn up piece of flooring. The boards show from underneath, the yellowed plastic vinyl peeled back more and more as time passes. It is an old house; Kyle’s grandfather bought the land fifty years before and raised the homestead on his own. He built the house 70

when he was 23, Kyle’s age, and had never previously laid nail to hammer to wood. Kyle doesn’t know if Ovel was ever taught how to do such a thing, but believes he must have been. Kyle doesn’t see the unleveled floors, the walls that do not quite meet ceilings, as mistakes, as lessons. He sees them as a result of age. He knows that his grandfather had just been married, and had a good job at the brickyard. Kyle knows that he had bought the land with an intention to farm, but that a family had come too quickly. He thinks that it is, was, not a bad life. Not really. He believes in the simple joys of it. But he sees it changing. Now, often, he walks around the edges of what was their property and hangs old barbed wire. Their neighbors are hewing at the skirts of it. One in particular moves the property stakes and changes the property lines. Kyle doesn’t have the money, at least not yet, to hire a lawyer and get their land back. He feels like Robin Hood on top of the barns. Kyle gets his cup of coffee, no sugar, no milk, he is too tired to bother, and looks out the kitchen window over the little patch of yard they’ve kept clear. He can see the bulldozers sitting quietly, waiting for direction. They are rusted. Their paint is faded and chipping away. Malcolm Evans is greasing them. He is the one who changes the property lines. He is the one who moves the steel stakes in the ground and buys off the local engineers and surveyors to redraw the lines. He buys land too, when it is cheap, and then logs it. He grades in a gravel road, laying trailers and selling plots. The ridge where Kyle and Ovel’s home-place sits has just had county water run through, and the land is selling fast. Evans is as old as Ovel, but much wealthier. Evans climbs up on the tracks of one of the dozers and hunkers down. He holds his grease gun in one hand and uses the other to prop himself up. He’s not fifty feet off their property, but he’s working like he must ride the dozers through their home before dark. Kyle feels him crashing through, tearing down the walls, spilling the insides out. He can see the pictures and the clocks, his Mamaw’s dolls spread out and chewed up under their steel treads. Malcolm climbs off the tracks slowly and wipes the end of the grease gun in the grass. He looks back towards their house and Kyle sees his face. He doesn’t even look hot or worked. He moves slowly and carefully, so much so that Kyle wonders if the man ever sweats. 71

“Kyle,” Ovel says. He had entered quietly and quickly, seeing the boy staring out. “You just as well sit; lookin’ at ‘em ain’t gonna change it.” Kyle refocuses his eyes to see the reflections in the old glass of the windows instead of Evans. He sees his own face, pale and freckled, reflected back into the dark with his grandfather. The glass doesn’t show the old man’s lines; it smoothes him out like wax paper. He looks young and vital, much more so than Kyle feels. The blurry distant shape of Evans leans into both of them. He turns to face his grandfather, whose overalls are covered in grease and oil and the busted knuckles are caked and stopped with it. His grandfather wipes his hands on his pant legs, gauming more grease onto his hands than he gets off. Little black flecks of rolled up grease fall onto the carpet. He is staring straight through Kyle. “I know it, but I still hate it,” Kyle says. “It’s just land, son, we got plenty more.” But they both know that it isn’t true. There used to be just brush and trees around them. But the paved road, now cared for by the township, and the city-fed water, lures in trailers and doublewides that grow overnight like false morels. They never owned all the land; it only felt like it. Kyle walks towards him and again hits his toe on the wound in the floor. The hot coffee splashes out and burns his fingers, running into the ripped nails. He drops the cup and it bounces across the shabby yellow carpet. “Shit,” Kyle says. “Watch your mouth,” Ovel says. There is a sudden flash of anger in him. Kyle forgets sometimes those first days here, those right after the fire. He forgets the old man’s anger and bitterness. But it is still there, only put away, and the sudden violent venting of it always makes Kyle wonder if it is age or weariness that has left it dormant. Regardless, it still has the same effect that it has always had. Kyle is silent and hurries to get a wet wash cloth. He stands waiting as he watches his grandfather clean it up on his hands and knees. Ovel hands him the rag to wash out and bring back to him. “You’re twenty-three, Kyle. You’ve got to stop loafin’ all the time.”

72

*** The rooftop is slick and Kyle is not wearing boots. It’s warm, the sky overcast, and dew has settled. There is no moon and no stars, which is good, but there’s no breeze, and his sweat gathers on him, greasing him. He feels the long arrowhead he keeps in his pocket for luck press against his thigh, a silent and firm reminder of the land on which it was found. He lies flat against the roof, and works his ripper under the edge of each shingle, prying out the nails that hold them down, his bootless feet and toes adding leverage and grip. The ripper looks similar enough to a crowbar that no cop would think to ask, but it’s flatter and sharper at the prying end. He tries not to break the shingles, but doesn’t struggle with them. He didn’t worry at all at the start. He’d simply toss them down the thirty or forty feet into the grass. If they landed flat against each other, they’d clap together like a leather strap that had been looped and jerked, or they’d tink and shatter like china if they hit on an edge. He likes when they hit on edge, the sound easy and quiet, like silver-tipped steam. But he has gotten more serious as time has gone by. He now slips each piece into a burlap sack he carries like a satchel on his back. This makes his descent a bit more difficult, especially if there is need to rush, but it is better, he figures, than throwing each piece off of the side. He’s crawled far up the steep angle of the barn, his bootless feet and toes digging into the rock. He has already cut a first line into this roof. In weeks previous, he used to try to clear out a large round hole, to let the rain come in heavily. He didn’t stop this meanness from concern for the farmers. It was simply an issue of safety and economics. Straight lines up and down the roof broke fewer shingles. And slate lasts so long the roof can rot out from underneath large sections. He only stopped when he had once pulled up a large section and realized nothing but the tensile strength of the strands of shingles was holding him from the barn floor. But still, he knows that it will cost ten, maybe twenty thousand dollars to replace these roofs. And he does not feel bad. He checks names and locations before he chooses a barn. He follows the Welsh byways. He was taught in school that the Welsh founded these counties, but he’s never been convinced. His family is a clear mix 73

of Scotch-Irish and German as far back as anyone has ever cared to trace. The Irish and the Germans and the Scots were here first, he believes. In his mind, it was his family who raised these barns, who built these farms, and then the Welsh came. He was taught that the Welsh were poor when they arrived, but if that’s the case, he wonders how they started the foundry and the mines. They used their money to buy out the stores, to start banks and buy the farms. Now they raise the corn, the hay, and the horses. He feels like he is missing something, like there is a piece of the story that has disappeared, and that no one will ever say what really happened. He slips as he works the ripper under a nail. He focuses his weight and pushes himself flat into the slate, trying to disappear into it. He feels the arrowhead in his pocket snap. He is forty feet off the ground, with two bare lines of roof behind him. He shimmies backwards down them, gripping with toenails and palms of fingers. The toenail of his big toe on his left foot catches on an upraised piece of wood. The nail folds back, separating from the skin and pulling away. The pain rolls his stomach, and he turns a sweating pale. But he keeps moving, his foot curled like a fist. The ladder is raised up out of the bed of his truck, propped up against the cab and the bed. He eases his way onto it, the weight of the rock on his back swaying him. He turns on the ladder and faces out away from the barn, taking two scared steps down. He shrugs the bag onto one shoulder and then, letting go of the ladder, spins back towards the barn, the ladder bending underneath his weigh. The movement is small in the bed of the truck, but it is noticeable. He pushes the bag farther up onto his shoulder and climbs down as fast as he can. He collapses the ladder, banging it against the bed of the truck. The sound doesn’t echo, just dies in the dark. From the house, there is the creaking of a screen door and the hammer of it shutting. Two dogs barking and bawling. He hops into the grass barefooted, nearly slipping in the dew. He wipes at the sweat in his eyes with his forearm, but it just smears in the heat. It is nearly daybreak and he is fifty miles from home. He opens the door of the truck and, startled by the brightness of the dome-light, he reaches blindly for his boots. He stomps them on, a bloody smear streaking the light leather of his boot, 74

grimacing at the pain. He reaches back inside, and shifts the truck into neutral. He doesn’t hear anyone coming. No cars start, no shouts. And then, exploding into the night, the blast of a gun. He stops cold, expecting the sting of birdshot, or at least the whistle of them going overhead. There is only silence. Kyle realizes that the farmer would have to shoot around the barn to get to him. Kyle prays that the shooter is standing in the driveway. Kyle had driven through the fields below, cutting a line that crossed and recrossed itself, with no clear entry or exit points. With the old Chevy in neutral, he pushes the truck from the open door, coaxing it down the hill, gaining momentum. He waits until he almost slams into the corn, then leaps inside and forces the gearshift into fourth. The truck, against its will, sputters to life. He lets it idle until the ground begins to level out, then downshifts and guns the throttle. He burns through the field, mashing the corn flat in a path slightly back towards the old man and his gun. The husks are full and the ears bounce off the window. The road can’t be seen through the high stalks and Kyle guesses its location—there is no time to loop and circle. The law, he knows, is coming. He hears the barbed wire snap across the grill of the truck and turns away from the house, cutting against his own angle, headlights off. It would feel better if he had a radio on, but it’s too serious for getaway music. He rolls on towards home, hoping no one will notice tags from another county. *** On the top of his ridge, he feels a pop in the rear of the truck and hears a clacking like cans behind a wedding car. He knows in an instant that the universal joint has broken, weakened in the run from the field, and broken on this last high and hard final pull. Silently, he thanks God that he is close enough to coast the quarter mile to home. The truck skims across the gravel and down the last patch of road. Neighbors’ lights are coming on; folks are getting ready for work. The fog is a cold heavy mist that might turn to rain or snow. He turns off the headlights and slows in the dark, turning into the driveway. He squeezes the breaks and, hearing them 75

squeal, wonders how he ever got away with anything in the old truck. Tired and heavy as the fog, Kyle forces himself out. He tucks the tarp over the stone, and then looks under the truck. The driveshaft lies on the ground. There is a line in the gravel behind it that runs underneath his feet and up the driveway. He pictures a line between here and tonight’s barn, the barn before that, all of them. It is thin and yellow and twists like a snake, like a creek, through the hills and hollows, always leading back here. It coils around this patch of land, twisting tighter, the loops getting longer, deeper, more real. And for a moment, he feels guilty, but only as he looks out and away. Turning back, the throb of guilt on him, he sees the dozers of Evans out there in the dark. *** Kyle sets the phone onto its cradle, holding the world tight within him. The county engineer had explained the cost of surveying his land, of what it would take to redraw the lines, and he doesn’t have enough slate. It will be five thousand dollars to survey all forty acres, and nearly a thousand just to get them to look at the corner that Evans is perched on right now. It has turned colder and finally feels like fall. Kyle takes his heavy brown Carhart and orange toboggan from the top of the cedar chest in the living room. He wants to walk the property line, at least what he knows as the property line, and check the barbed wire he’d strung the week before. He limps out through the field, his boots getting heavy as they soak up the water in the high grass, the rusty stain of blood turning black. He had tried to save the nail, but there was no use. He had pulled it the rest of the way out this morning, sponging it with cotton and rubbing alcohol. He’d bandaged it lightly but tightly before he’d called. He moves slowly towards the bulldozers then turns right, disappearing into a woodlot to find the wire. It runs along the property line for seven acres then turns back to the right, but before he walks a hundred yards into the woods, the line is cut slack. He walks back, kicking at the dirt, looking for the spikes that were used to mark the land years ago. Now there are only freshly covered holes. He pauses, looking at the leaves, and then turns to the hollow 76

that is theirs. The edge of the land drops off steep not twenty feet from him, down to a thin creek. Big locust trees grow like pointed fingers from its banks. No limbs, just solid. His grandmother’s family used to own this land. His grandfather bought it from her father on the promise not to take the family north. Kyle’s parents died in a trailer on a corner of this land, burned up in the middle of the night. Kyle was with his grandparents across the hollow. Trailers will burn in minutes, he knew. Their doors and windows will melt and seal, leaving nothing but ashes and twisted metal. The fire department came out a month later and finished burning it. It was autumn then, only a few weeks after his seventh birthday, and Kyle had begged to go see the men finish the job. His grandmother didn’t want him there, but Ovel had agreed to go with him. Kyle kicks more leaves, revealing more holes, and he works the heel of his boot into them, spinning it, digging them out. He had watched the shell of that trailer get doused and set aflame; the white outside of it that hadn’t burned turned yellow, then brown. He could see over his family’s land behind the flames and smoke, out towards the west where the sun crept down, slowly drawing the light down with it. The smoke burned his eyes, but he didn’t cry. It burned into the night, the fire department there in case it spread into the fields, and the smoke smelled like fall— like sorghum and leaves. He felt the heat against his skin, warming him like the sun even as it set. He feels it now, that same heat, the heat of being tied to a patch of land, tied to a family, the heat of earth and God, and he knows it is in him. And he knows that these people, with their bulldozers and crooked surveyors, will never understand. *** That night, Kyle goes to the Jericho. It is the only bar within thirty miles, stationed just across the county line. He was supposed to have called Anthony, but had decided, after the walk, that he would rather be by himself. The building is small and confined, the walls made of cinder blocks; the six picnic tables, painted a primer gray, are bolted to the floor. There’s no jukebox, just a home stereo propped up next to the liquor behind the bar. 77

The floor is poured concrete with a drain in the middle, and there is nothing on the walls but vinyl beer advertisements. Kyle knows every face, every voice. The Jericho feels like a favorite shirt. He has been watching Malcolm Evans for the past hour. Evans walked in just as the crowd started to pick up. He took a table at the far end of the room, and hadn’t moved since. Two other men came with him, and Kyle supposes them to be Evans’ logging foremen. Evans’ hands are grease stained, the dark under his nails visible from across the room. The roar of two big engines thrums outside, the cold of the night making the sound carry directly through the walls. The road outside is the straightest in three counties. It runs next to a railroad, the ramshackle tracks lying just on the other side of the Jericho. Young men come speeding out of the hills to drag race that single stretch over and over during the night. It is not quite midnight, and the stopping and starting rain has subsided, but it threatens to freeze. The cars continue to run. Loud, bragging talk fills the room, but Kyle tries to hear Evans and his crew above it. It is Evans who is talking. The two men, one on either side, nod and grin from time to time in agreement. Kyle knows them, two Jenkins brothers. These ones are nearly fifteen years older than him, but they have brothers his age. The brothers, there are eight spread out across a generation, are big and mean, towering over nearly everyone in the county. But one would never guess the violence inside them. Plain pale faces, a splash of freckles across their nose, common brown eyes and dark hair. They seem soft, gentle almost, and maybe they were once, at least some of them. These two are the oldest. Kyle is staring, looking at the movement of Evans’ lips, trying to read the silent words, and Evans catches him. He smiles and waves him over. His arm is straight up like he’s calling for his check, and he smiles and nods more. Kyle knows the motion, the look. He has had bosses call him just the same way, saying “Yes, you. Come into my office, we gotta talk.” The other two men are watching him now, still grinning, and the sight of them at first makes him want to walk away, to push open the door of the Jericho and just go home. But his hate for Evans moves him like a pendulum towards their table. Someone has put a heavy yellow plastic chair next to the wood burning stove that heats the place, and Kyle moves it to the 78

head of Evans’ table. He makes sure to keep a distance between him and the old man, defying him by refusing to sit with him. “Howdy, Mr. Evans,” Kyle says, the legs on the chair bawling on the concrete as he makes room at the table. “Evening, Kyle,” Evans says. “This is Taylor and Tommy Jenkins.” He points to the two men. “These boys both work for me.” “How you doin’ tonight, fellas?” Kyle asks them, shifting in his seat. They don’t say anything, just nod and smile. Kyle can tell now that they’re drunk, and he wonders if a Jenkins is more dangerous drunk or sober. “We was just talking about the robberies that have been going on lately,” Evans says. He’s looking down at his beer, turning the bottom of the bottle on its edge. “Somebody’s been taking the shingles off barn roofs.” “I’ve heard about that,” Kyle says. “It’s an awful strange thing to be stealing.” “That’s just exactly what we were talking about, wasn’t it boys?” Evans looks at the silent men, and they nod like a pair of dummies. “Yeah, we can’t for the life of us figure out what that feller’s up to. Slate’s just about worthless for anything but roofing.” Kyle looks down, sucking in his bottom lip. He pushes backwards in his chair with his toes, tipping it away, feeling the pressure and the pain of the injured one. “I seen folks selling it at fairs,” he says. “They paint pictures on them and do pretty well.” “That’s true, I reckon,” Evans says. “The last farm that was robbed, the farmer saw the truck. Green Chevy’s what he told me.” He’s still looking at his bottle. The Jenkins boys are drunkenly hovering on Kyle. “Don’t you drive something similar?” “Yeah,” Kyle says. “It wouldn’t be you of course, I’m sure,” Evans says. “Couldn’t be.” “No. I don’t reckon it would be.” “Good. But just so we’re clear, the rock that that man is stealing is worthless. Fools buy those pictures. Fools buy that rock. And it’s a fool who’s stealing it.” He stands up and both the Jenkins boys stand with him. He puts his hand on Kyle’s shoulder as he walks past, and his hand comes up and roughs his 79

hair like a child’s. Kyle lunges at him from the plastic chair, leading with his fingers and nails, determined to scratch and tear at the old man’s face and eyes, the guts and fire of his rage leaping from him. He is stopped by the knife-edge of a hand striking him in the nose and mouth. To which Jenkins brother it belongs he does not know, but it stops him and knocks him to his knees. He feels himself slipping and tumbling, again in the skidder, he smells the woods and the smoke around him, and then he is outside. The Jenkins boys have propped him against the rear corner of a black Buick. Evans stands in front of him, one hand on Kyle’s face, the other, tenderly, and lovingly pats him on the stomach. But his pat turns into a thump as he balls his hand into a fist. His voice is stern, and Kyle sees that his glasses are broken. One side is missing a lens where Kyle’s fingers lashed. Like a father, he says, “What you’re doing, it ain’t right. You’re hurting a lot of hardworking people. I know you hate me, and you should, but before me that whole ridge was nothing. Just some locust and scrub pine.” Kyle feels him move away, not watching. But Evans stops. Without turning back to him he says, “I can give you work son, if you ask. I heard about how you quit on Adkins, but I can always use somebody to run skidder for me. I know you’ll work.” Kyle allows his eyes to close fully, and listens as the men move off towards Evans’ car, climb in, and drive away. The outside of the bar is dark and cold. The clay and gravel has turned to a paste, smelling like a mine dump pond, heavy and slick and a little bit dead. Kyle’s father had brought him here when he was young, had told him that the Jericho had once been a post office, and before that it was someone’s home. His father had remembered both. He’d sat at the bar and talked with the bartender. He had drank cans of red and white Budweiser, his movements thick and weary from cutting tobacco. Kyle hears a squirrel bark in the trees. He opens his eyes to the bank rising on the far side of the road. More locust trees here, so straight they could be made into posts. The leaves that are left thrash and break off in gusts of wind. Kyle can imagine the squirrel’s nest, a ball of leaves and twigs in the high-up branches. He sees the squirrel, a dark shape, a shadow, dart and jump from branch to branch. He feels the heaviness of the rock, the past here, the slate, the sack, and tastes the blood from his lip and 80

nose. There are two sets of headlights sitting quietly at the end of the straight. When they gun their engines he sees the lights point upwards, steel bodies twisting under the torque. The light reaches into the trees in an instant, and the squirrel is outlined in it. It skitters, terrified, across the thin limbs deeper into the wood. The sound of the engines reaches Kyle a second later on a blast of cold wind, a swarm of bumblebees. Their lights grow and grow on him, around him, and the sound gets louder, shaking him in his chest. He imagines himself in one of them. The thin red needle bouncing off the 120 post in the dash, and he’s not sure then how fast he’s going, only sure of the going. The thrum of the engine, the charge of it, carries him along the spine of his ridge, two of the tires in the gravel at the edge. The cars then are on him, neck and neck, and then they are past. The light blinks and the darkness floods in. It drowns him. The sound fades and the taillights wink out. He feels himself tumble back into his own body, the moment returning. He listens closely for the squirrel but it too is gone, its chatter now just wind. The Jericho behind him casts a dim light, and inside the music plays

81

A Loss to the Stuffed Animal Kingdom by Ilan Mochari

In a rented two-bedroom ranch on Spruce Street in the town of Plainview, a divorced mother of one named Maribeth Steele vacuums her couch. With the hose, she digs into corners and explores the armrests, scrutinizing each angle, each surface, like a dentist probing a molar. Then she inspects, her eyes inches from the brown leather. A few crumbs remain. “Jesus fucking Christ,” she mutters. On the television, the 5:30 evening news displays a graphic of the wintry five-day forecast. According to the meteorologist, snow will continue until 8:00, amassing six inches. Maribeth gazes out the living-room window. Car after car drives by. The flurries are thick and visible in the glow of headlights. The car she expects hasn’t arrived yet. From the kitchen she fetches two wine glasses. She places them on coasters on the spotless coffee table. There’s a jingling of keys at the front door, followed by squeaky footsteps on the hardwood floor. Doug is home from ice-skating. Maribeth returns to the kitchen and retrieves a mop. She finds herself at the doorway of his bedroom. He’s sprawled on the futon that serves as his bed. His snow boots, jacket, and backpack are still on, sullying the New York Islanders sheets that Maribeth has recently laundered. There’s dirty slush on his floor. There are workbooks and notebooks, coloring books and pencils and pencil sharpeners and crayons, scattered along his red desk. There are heaps of clothes, 82

long-sleeve shirts and boys jeans and sweatpants, all over the floor. And his stuffed animals are everywhere. Four of them—a red dog, a raccoon, a beaver, and a white bear—are next to a pile of shirts. Alongside a heap of pants are another dog and another bear, staring up at the pants as if considering a climb. A Snoopy replica rests sideways on the red desk, staring at the pages of a coloring book. On Doug’s bed, beside a rumpled dark blue blanket, is yet another bear: Light brown, eight inches high, and in a seated posture. This bear wears a gray t-shirt that reads “Hershey Park Bear” in chocolate brown letters. This bear has torn fabric at its shoulder. Teeny white beads of Styrofoam stuffing spill from the tear. For weeks, Maribeth has seen the beads of stuffing on Doug’s floor. She has urged him to dispose of the messy bear. But Doug has insisted on keeping the bear, which has been his for five years, dating back to a family road trip to Hershey, Pennsylvania. Doug has claimed that he will take the Hershey Park Bear to school and have his fifth-grade teacher, Ms. Aarons, stitch the shoulder. “Doug,” says Maribeth. The startled boy snaps into a sitting position. “How many times do I have to tell you to wipe your feet?” “Sorry, mom,” he says. “And that bear,” she says. “If you don’t get it fixed, I’m going to throw it out. It makes too much of a mess. And I think ten is a little too old for stuffed animals.” “Okay.” “Doug, I mean it. Fix it before you go to your father’s for Christmas.” She steps into his room, holding the mop, and begins tossing the clothes and stuffed animals onto his bed. “And when are you going to clean your room?” she says. She turns to his desk. “These coloring books. Do you still want them?” “I don’t know,” he says. “When in doubt, throw it out,” she says. “That’s what my mom used to say.” Doug listens, but his light blue eyes are locked on the round black eyes of the Hershey Park Bear. “I won’t let her throw you out,” is what he tells the bear, in a telepathic whisper. 83

“Doug, I’m throwing out these coloring books.” “Okay.” “Doug, your room is disgusting,” says Maribeth. “Ryan is coming over tonight. Did you shovel?” “No.” “No?” “It hasn’t stopped snowing yet.” “Do it.” “But why?” he asks. “I’m just going to have to do it again tomorrow morning.” “Do it,” she says. “And you better wipe your feet on the way in.” “Okay,” he says. Doug wriggles out of his purple backpack, which falls to the bed. He tucks the Hershey Park Bear beneath the blanket. While tucking, he pinches the bear at the shoulder so none of its stuffing spills out. Meanwhile, Maribeth starts mopping. Outside, the temperature holds in the high 20s, with almost no wind. Doug lets the screen door slam behind him. In an instant he is chilly, but he keeps his hat and gloves in the pockets of his black ski jacket. Snowflakes land and melt on his forehead and bare hands. To his left he hears a shovel rasping against cement. It’s their next-door neighbor, a gray and grandfatherlylooking man, clearing his front walk. The old man, steam coming from his nostrils, wears gloves but no hat. The old man, Doug recognizes, provides a plausible excuse, should Maribeth criticize her son’s hatlessness. At first Doug works with the cold metal shovel in his bare hands. But after a few minutes he puts his gloves on, sacrificing grip for warmth. His shovel scrapes the driveway gravel. The next-door neighbor hears the grating and looks at Doug as if Doug is doing something incorrectly. “You digging for gold over there, son?” asks the neighbor. Doug puts his head down and continues. The flurries keep falling. Doug finishes the driveway, and then the sidewalk, and then he proceeds, at length, to the front steps. An orange-yellow light, hanging above the front door of the brick house, illuminates the steps and small porch area. By the time Doug finishes the steps there’s a new dusty 84

coating on both the driveway and the sidewalk. Doug knows he should shovel and scrape one more time. Instead he sits on the wet pink brick of the steps, indifferent to the moisture soaking the seat of his black jeans. He holds the shovel across his lap. He watches his breath for a minute: Smoke steams from his mouth as if his mouth is a manhole. He packs a bite-sized snowball and gulps it, throwing it right down the manhole to cool it off. It tastes icy, like a flavorless snow cone. A black Mercedes turns left off Spruce Street and into the powdered driveway. Doug rises and pretends to be absorbed in shoveling. The car door pops open and slams shut; there’s the double-crunch sound of footsteps on the driveway. The footsteps pause; they turn towards Doug. “How you doing?” says Ryan, running his hand over Doug’s flake-filled, dark blond hair. Doug looks up at the tall bald man in the dark black suit. “Fine.” “You don’t mind that I parked in the driveway before you could finish?” “No,” says Doug. “So I hear you’re flying to Florida for Christmas.” “My dad lives there,” says Doug. “What city?” “Tampa.” “Tampa? Home of the former Stanley Cup champs?” “I guess,” says Doug. “How long has he lived there?” “About a year,” says Doug. “Ever since the divorce.” “Your mother’s home?” Ryan asks. “Obviously,” says Doug. “Yeah, I guess that’s pretty obvious,” says Ryan. Ryan turns and trudges up the steps. His black loafers imprint the new layer of snow dust. As soon as Ryan enters the house, Doug resumes his effort. When he’s done he stands still. He watches his breath. He holds his shovel straight up like a pitchfork: Scoop in the air, handle on the ground. He waits until no cars are coming, and then he trudges toward the middle of Spruce Street. Standing directly on the yellow lane line, he looks back at the house’s lighted windows. This spot provides the best vantage point of the living room. Through the window he sees his mother and Ryan kissing on the 85

couch. His mom is holding an empty wine glass behind Ryan’s bald head. It’s nothing he hasn’t seen before. Doug stands in the street and ponders his mother’s attraction to Ryan. He has never been able to understand it. On one occasion, he asks her: “Mom, do you think Ryan is handsome?” To which Maribeth replies: “Compared to dad?” “No, just in general,” says Doug. “Don’t be fresh, Doug,” she says. “I wasn’t being fresh.” “We’ll see what your wife looks like, Mr. America.” Going forward, Doug and his mother refrain from discussing Ryan’s physical attributes. Another car approaches on Spruce Street, wheels pushing through slush. Doug moves aside and waits for the car to pass before returning to his vantage point in the middle of the road. Again he looks into the living room. Now Ryan is on top of his mother. Her legs are wrapped around his waist. Doug relaxes, because he knows that this—a horizontal embrace, clothes on— is as far as they go on the couch. Soon they will rise from the couch, enter his mother’s room, and shut the door. At which point Doug can safely re-enter the house without feeling as though he is disrupting a private ritual. *** Doug removes his snow boots and places them beside Ryan’s size-14 loafers. He hears the television in the living room but understands that his mother and Ryan are no longer there. Doug walks back to his room and flops onto his bed. He’s still wearing his black ski jacket and wet jeans. He slides in next to Hershey, who is tucked beneath the dark blue blanket. Doug and Hershey debate whether to undergo surgery, or to let the bear’s shoulder heal naturally. Ms. Aarons, the fifth grade teacher, who has a sewing kit with threads in several colors, will possibly perform the surgery. The problem with surgery is that Doug will face embarrassment. First, he’ll have to admit to Ms. Aarons that he owns a stuffed bear—a bear in need of medical attention. Second, he’ll have to bring Hershey to class, ensuring he will be teased by the guys. 86

Doug knows that if he can get past all of this—somehow sneak Hershey into class and beg Ms. Aarons to perform the surgery—then maybe everything will work out. But he has to act soon: Next week there are only two days of school. Then he flies to Tampa for Christmas vacation. Doug decides to invite Hershey to Tampa. The warm climate, he believes, will facilitate healing on the bear’s shoulder. “Do you want to come to Tampa?” asks Doug. “Yes,” replies Hershey. “It’s too scary staying here with your mom.” “Any decision about surgery?” “I think I need to see Dr. Aarons as soon as possible. That way I can heal in Tampa.” “Sounds like a plan,” says Doug. Doug puts Hershey inside his knapsack straightaway, so he won’t forget to bring him to school. He pinches the light brown fabric at the shoulder so that none of the Styrofoam specks spill out. But there’s too much wiggle room in the backpack. Hershey will bounce up and down during the bus ride, and his stuffing will pour out. Doug pulls one of his long-sleeved shirts from a nearby heap. He withdraws Hershey from the backpack and tubes the bear within a shirtsleeve. The pressure of the sleeve staunches the flow of Hershey’s Styrofoam. Hershey’s round head protrudes from the sleeve’s cuffed wrist. After layering the inside of his backpack with two more shirts, Doug nestles Hershey inside. He leaves the top unzipped so that Hershey can breathe, and so that he and Hershey can continue to chat. A few minutes later Doug falls asleep on the futon in his jacket and wet jeans. *** The class sits on the carpeted floor and listens to Ms. Tirone, the librarian, who’s perched on a round, orange table. There’s a stack of books by her side, from which she selects The Great Gilly Hopkins by Katherine Paterson. After reading the first chapter to the class, Ms. Tirone explains how to give a book the “five finger” test: You read the first page of a book, and you put a finger on every word that you don’t understand. If you use all five fingers, then you know that the book is too difficult for you. 87

She demonstrates the five-finger test on The Great Gilly, and the only words the entire class doesn’t know are “cautious” and “maneuver.” Ms. Tirone instructs everyone to find a book for Christmas vacation—a book passing the five-finger test. A few kids wander toward the black rack containing popular serialized books, with titles like Goosebumps, Encyclopedia Brown, and Choose Your Own Adventure. Others remain near the orange table, sorting through the pile that Ms. Tirone has culled from the shelves. Doug stands behind his classmates at the orange table, content to choose among what they leave behind. At a nearby table sits Ms. Aarons, in her square-framed reading glasses, grading spelling tests with a red pen. She writes left-handed, and her check marks slant to the left, like the letter “L” leaning back in a recliner. Ms. Aarons has gray hair and wears a pink cardigan over another gray sweater. Her corduroy pants are faded-gold and have white marks of wear near the knees. There are rumors around the school that Ms. Aarons will retire after the school year. Doug considers asking her about retirement as a means of broaching the subject of Hershey’s surgery. But Ms. Aarons sees him coming and says, “Do you need help finding a book, Doug?” She catches him off guard. “Ms. Aarons, could you do me a favor?” he says, blushing. “Maybe,” she says. She puts down her red pen and removes her reading glasses. “What did you have in mind?” “I was wondering if you could help me sew something.” “I think I can do that. What do you want to sew?” “It’s a secret.” “I won’t tell anyone.” “I have a teddy bear with a broken shoulder. I brought it to school today.” “Why don’t we take a look at it during lunch?” says Ms. Aarons. “Okay,” says Doug. “Thank you.” He turns from his teacher and steps towards the orange table. The only remaining book is called Do Bananas Chew Gum? by Jamie Gilson. Doug reads the blurb. “That’s a good one, Doug,” says Ms. Tirone, right beside him. “Are you going anywhere for Christmas vacation?” “I’m seeing my dad in Tampa,” says Doug. 88

“You’re taking a plane?” “Obviously,” he says. “Are you going by yourself?” Doug nods. Ms. Tirone tousles his dark blond hair and walks over to the checkout desk, where a line of Doug’s classmates is waiting. *** Ms. Aarons’ sewing kit is out of threading needles. Doug offers to visit the other classrooms on a needle-seeking mission. But Ms. Aarons insists that she has plenty of needles at home. “So you’ll sew him tonight?” Doug asks. They are alone in the classroom. The other students have rushed to the cafeteria for lunch. Ms. Aarons sits at her desk, holding Hershey and her kit on her lap. Doug stands near her chair, stealing glances at her open ledger. The ledger contains the grades for recent spelling tests. Doug finds his name and observes the numbers, in red ink, listed beside it: 75, 85, 70, 85, 80, 75. “Will I sew him tonight?” says Ms. Aarons. “Aren’t you being a little bossy for someone who wants a favor?” “Sorry,” says Doug. “Maybe I’ll sew him tonight,” says Ms. Aarons. “I really want to bring him to Tampa,” says Doug. “I’ll bring him home tonight,” says Ms. Aarons. “So you’ll do it?” says Doug. “I’ll do my best,” says Ms. Aarons. “Thank you,” says Doug. “Now go to lunch,” says Ms. Aarons. Doug takes a long look at Hershey. The bear sits plaintively on Ms. Aarons’ worn pants, its light brown fur a shade darker than the faded gold of her corduroys. Doug waves goodbye, seemingly to Ms. Aarons but secretly to Hershey. *** Ms. Aarons tells him, the following day, that she has forgotten Hershey at home. She expects Doug, who is generally well behaved but sometimes smart-mouthed, to react bitterly to the news. And indeed: Doug’s light blue eyes glisten with 89

subdued anger. He stands by her desk, merely looking at her, as if he’s waiting for her to say something else. “I’m really sorry,” she tells him. “But I sewed him up nicely, with dark yellow thread that’s only a little different from his fur color.” “Okay,” says Doug. “Thank you very much.” “When are you leaving for Tampa?” “Tonight. My mom’s picking me up from school and we’re going straight to the airport.” “Well, I promise I’ll bring him the first day we’re back.” “Okay,” says Doug. He waves at his teacher and goes to lunch. Ms. Aarons flips to the front of her ledger, where she keeps a list of all the students’ street addresses. She jots Doug’s address on a piece of scrap paper. After school, she drives to her home, which is in Plainview, about three miles from the school. She retrieves Hershey, all sewn up, from her kitchen table, and heads to Spruce Street. She parks her blue Camry by an almost melted snow pile in front of the Steele residence. She leaves the car running. From her conversation with Doug, she knows that neither he nor his mother will be home. She’s more comfortable that way, because Ms. Steele’s comportment on open-school night—curt, superior, borderline bossy—still disturbs her. In Ms. Aarons’ view, Ms. Steele’s behavior would’ve been understandable—rude, but at least understandable—if Ms. Steele had been, say, the superintendent of another school district. In reality, Ms. Steele was only the administrative assistant to a local superintendent. But still, she was downright snippy regarding Doug’s unimproved spelling scores. Ms. Aarons wonders just what, besides her blondblue appearance, Maribeth Steele has to recommend her to a widowed, professional man like Ryan Mariotti, whose twin daughters—now in college—had passed through Ms. Aarons’ classroom only a decade earlier. Ms. Aarons opens the screen door. Behind it is a wooden door. There’s a narrow mail slot covered by a silver flap. The bear’s seated posture makes it impossible for Ms. Aarons to jam the bear through the mail slot: It is anatomically farfetched, like squeezing a forearm into a vending machine. The bear’s legs fit through the slot but the rest of him does not. She settles on 90

leaving the bear’s legs in the slot. She closes the screen door, so that it supports the bear’s back. From her purse she pulls a pen and scrap paper and writes a note: Ms. Steele: I promised Doug I would sew his bear. But I forgot to bring it to school today. So here it is. Happy Holidays!—Selma Aarons. She wedges the note between the bear and the screen door. She gets back in her car and drives home, wondering what she will do that night for dinner. *** At the airport Maribeth and Doug sit in a row of black plastic chairs. Doug’s lone suitcase, a rugged black Samsonite with round corners and metal straps, is checked in. Jordan Steele, Maribeth’s ex-husband and Doug’s father, will meet Doug at the Tampa airport and help him find the suitcase at the baggage claim. It’s the post-9/11 era, but Maribeth has managed to clear security and accompany Doug to the gate, explaining to airport personnel that she’s Doug’s mother and flashing her New York State driver license to prove it. One guard empties her purse while the other asks her to remove her black boots. She smells her left shoe before putting it back on, a gesture that leaves Doug grinning. “What?” she asks. “Do your shoes smell?” he asks. Restoring order within her purse after the inspection, she hands Doug a $20. “Can you pretend you never saw me do that?” she asks. “Thank you, Mom,” says Doug, hugging her and pocketing the cash. Besides Maribeth and Doug, there are about 30 waiting passengers. Doug has no carry-on items except his copy of Do Bananas Chew Gum? He sits Indian-style on the black chair, absorbed in the paperback, his boarding pass sandwiched between the back pages. Maribeth looks through the long glass window along the wall. Men in bright orange vests drive a cart toward the silver-gray jet, a colossal 757. They begin loading it with luggage. 91

She turns to Doug. His face is practically within the book, his eyes an inch away from the pages. “Did you clean your room?” she says to him. “Everything’s off the floor,” he says. In truth, he has solved two problems at once by simply gathering the heaps of clothes from his floor and stuffing them into his suitcase. “Did you pack a bathing suit?” Doug keeps his eyes in the book. “No, I forgot,” he says. “Well, maybe your father can buy one for you,” she says. Seated across from Maribeth and Doug is a young married couple. They are early 30s, holding hands, each dressed in formal business attire. “See if you can sit next to them,” says Maribeth. “They look like nice people.” “I’m in row 22,” Doug says. “What if they’re in the front, or in first class?” “Well, if they’re in first class you’re out of luck, but if they’re in the front you can just ask the stewardess for a seat next to them. You’re allowed to sit wherever you want if the plane isn’t crowded.” “Okay,” he says. “Now tell the truth: is your room clean?” “No,” he says. Maribeth pauses. “Well, I guess you think I’m supposed to be less angry because you’re being honest,” she says. “Right?” They hear the first-class boarding announcement for the flight to Tampa. “Saved by the bell,” says Maribeth. She approaches the young married couple. “Excuse me,” she says to the wife. “My son,”—she gestures toward Doug—“is flying alone to visit his father. I was wondering if you could just keep an eye?” “Sure,” says the woman, smiling at Maribeth, then at Doug. Soon there’s a boarding call for rows 20 and higher. Doug looks to his mother. “Go ahead,” Maribeth says. The married couple is right behind him. Doug offers Do Bananas Chew Gum? to the ticket taker. She removes his boarding pass from the pages and ushers him aboard. By the time Maribeth gets home, daylight has faded. But in the glimmer of the orange-yellow porch light, she catches sight of Ryan, standing by the front door. He’s holding something small in his hands, something he transfers into his left hand as he waves to her with his right. She takes her time getting out of the 92

car, hoping that Ryan will approach the vehicle and greet her. But he remains by the front door, holding whatever it is he’s holding. “A gift for me?” she says, climbing the steps and smiling. “You’re gonna have to wait until Christmas morning,” he says. “But Ms. Aarons dropped this off for Doug.” He hands her the seated bear and the note. She reads the note, quickly crumpling it into a ball and stuffing it in her jacket pocket. “Did you still have stuffed animals when you were ten?” she asks. “I never had stuffed animals,” says Ryan. Tucking the bear under her left arm like a loaf of bread, Maribeth keys open the white door. Inside, the house is dark and silent. Ryan slips out of his black loafers, places them in the corner by the door, and goes to the kitchen. Maribeth removes her own shoes, crouching to place them squarely beside Ryan’s. On the floor she notices a few white granules of Styrofoam. She holds the bear in front of her and examines its stitching. Ms. Aarons, it turns out, has done a decent job of sewing but a lousy job of knotting. At the top of the bear’s torn shoulder the thread is woven tightly; Maribeth can barely even see the thread. But the final two stitches, for whatever reason, are loose. Tiny loops of the dark yellow thread, smaller than baby nostrils, protrude from the bear’s fur. There’s a small hole in the bear’s skin, where the thread is untied, from which the bleeding has resumed. Maribeth puts on her shoes and steps back outside, carrying the bear. She walks to the side of the house, past Ryan’s car and toward the garbage pails. She twists off a tin lid and unknots the same white plastic garbage bag that she had transported to the pail that morning. The bag reeks of orange rinds and coffee grounds. She stuffs the bear and Ms. Aarons’ note inside and reknots the bag. When she returns to the house, she hears the television. Ryan is reclining on the couch, watching the news with a brown bottle of Sam Adams in his hands. “Where’d you go?” he asks. She removes her shoes in the hallway and joins him on the couch. “Just outside for a minute,” she says. “Can you be more specific?” he asks. “I tossed the bear in the trash. I think ten is too old, and it makes a mess, and I’m just sick of looking at it, and I think he needs to learn a little more about life’s harsh realities.” 93

“That’s one way to teach him,” says Ryan. Maribeth considers asking him what the other way is. Instead, she rises from the couch to fetch a drink for herself. *** Doug sits on a pool chair in shorts, sandals, and a New York Islanders t-shirt. All afternoon he has been sitting, reading Do Bananas Chew Gum? There are pinkish creases on the skin behind his thighs from the plastic strips of the chair. In the pool, an Olympic-sized rectangle in back of his father’s apartment building, his father, Jordan Steele, splashes water on Tina, who lives downstairs but remains with them all night on Christmas Eve. “You sure you don’t want to come in?” says Jordan. “I don’t have a bathing suit,” says Doug, his face immersed in the book. “So what? Swim in your shorts. It’s not a rule that you must have a bathing suit.” Doug puts down the book. “Just give me a few more minutes,” he says. His father looks at Tina, and they both seem puzzled by his request. “Suit yourself,” says Jordan. Doug has been in Tampa for five days, and he has yet to send a postcard to Hershey. His plan is to ask his father to find Ms. Aarons’ address on the Internet, and then to send the postcard to Ms. Aarons' house, where Doug believes Hershey is recuperating. That way, the postcard, in addition to sending warm regards to Hershey, will have the ancillary effect of reminding Ms. Aarons to bring Hershey on the first day back from Christmas break. Doug does not have an actual postcard, or even a piece of paper. But on the chair next to his, there’s a pen on top of a folded Wall Street Journal. Jordan Steele has been solving the crossword puzzle. Doug looks to the pool, where his father has his hands under the shoulder straps of Tina’s red bathing suit. “Dad,” says Doug. His father looks at him, his hands still under the straps. “What?” “Can I borrow your pen?” “Sure.” 94

Doug decides to write Hershey’s postcard inside the back flap of Do Bananas Chew Gum? In doing so, Doug knows he is breaking a cardinal school ordinance: “Thou shalt not write in library books.” On the first day of Library each school year, Ms. Tirone sits on the orange table and proclaims, “Thou shalt not write.” Her reasoning is always as biblical as her use of "thou shalt": “Do unto others as you’d have done to you,” she says. Or: “How would you feel if you took out a book, and there was writing all over it?” Doug is uneasy about disobeying Ms. Tirone, but he is more uneasy about entering the pool just now. He knows that the simple act of writing will make him seem overtly occupied to Jordan Steele. He knows that writing will make his father less likely to request, at least for the next few minutes, that he come swimming. Inside the back flap of his paperback, Doug writes: Dear Hershey, 12/26/07 I miss you. Tampa is warm, which is a relief, but otherwise it’s kind of boring. I’m trying to get my dad to take me to a hockey game. My dad has a girlfriend named Tina. She stayed with us on Christmas Eve. We just listened to music all night and played Taboo. I said I was tired so I could go to bed early. But then I just stayed up reading this book I got at the library the day before vacation. I hope your shoulder is better. See you soon. Love, Doug Doug closes the book, puts it down on the lounge chair, and advances toward the pool. Jordan Steele and Tina have their hands on the ledge, arms extended. Their bodies are floating at the surface. “You ready to join us?” says Jordan. “Ready,” says Doug. He takes off his t-shirt and steps out of his sandals. “What were you so busy writing?” asks Tina. “Just notes for a book report,” says Doug. He braces himself for the shock of cold water and jumps in. *** 95

On the flight home Doug has an aisle seat. To his right is an elderly couple. They keep the window shade down. The older woman has reading glasses similar to those of Ms. Aarons. She reads the Sunday New York Times and recites the highlights to her husband, who is by turns snoring and reading a spy thriller called The Fist of God. “A vaccine’s come out for the AIDS,” says the old woman, pushing the glasses up her nose. The husband nods. Doug naps during the flight. His posture droops to the left and his legs inadvertently stretch into the aisle. The flight attendant rams the drink cart into his ankle. She offers to make him a Shirley Temple. “No thanks,” he says. He re-reads his note to Hershey. He recalls changing his mind: Deciding, in the end, to not send Hershey a postcard. Finding Ms. Aarons’ address—or procuring a stamp—would’ve required admitting to his father that he’d written a letter to his stuffed animal. The first person Doug recognizes when he gets off the plane is Ryan. They shake hands. “Hey Doug,” says Ryan. “You came back just in time for some great weather.” Ryan gestures toward the long glass window along the airport wall, which provides a view of the just-arrived plane. The afternoon sky is cloudy and snow is falling, white and puffy. The thick flakes fall on the men with orange vests who are driving a cart and fetching the luggage. “Is my mom here?” says Doug. “She just ran to the bathroom,” says Ryan. Doug nods. They wait by the exit of the women’s restroom. In a few minutes Maribeth emerges. After finding Doug’s Samsonite suitcase in baggage claim, they climb into Ryan’s car and ride home. Flurries decorate the windshield. Some melt, while others last until the rush of the wipers sweeps them away. Doug expects his mother to ask the usual questions about his father’s love life and financial health. But Maribeth is quiet during the entire ride. Doug winds up just talking to Ryan, first about playing Taboo on Christmas Eve, and then about the hockey game, which he and his father and Tina had attended on New Year’s Day. As they turn onto Spruce Street, Doug assesses the snowfall on the driveway. There are, by his reckoning, four inches piled up. Ryan’s tires crunch over the driveway’s snow and gravel. Doug gets out of the car and waits behind the Mercedes, with the 96

flurries falling, for Ryan to pop open the trunk. But the trunk is not opening. Ryan and Maribeth are still in the car. It looks to Doug like they are fighting-talking, because each of them stares straight ahead at the flakes landing on the windshield instead of at each other. Maribeth bolts from the car. She steps quickly toward the house, her boots retracing the footprint path that she and Ryan had created on their way out. Ryan pops the trunk and opens his door. He swivels in his seat, so that his feet are resting outside of the car, his loafers sitting on the snowy driveway. For a minute, Ryan just sits and lets the flurries fall onto his face and into his car. Meanwhile, from the open trunk, Doug pulls his heavy Samsonite by the handle. The suitcase falls out of the trunk, thwacking the rear bumper and thudding against the snowcovered gravel. Ryan gets up to retrieve the fallen suitcase, but Doug reaches it first. “I can carry it,” says Doug. Doug trudges up the steps, hauling the suitcase not at his side but in front of him, with both fists gripping the handle. Ryan opens the screen door and lets Doug pass through. Then Ryan steps inside. They both remove their shoes. What is strange, to both of them, is that Maribeth has not removed hers. She has tracked snow into the house. A trail of crunched ice runs across the hardwood floor from the front door, through the living room, and to her bedroom, where the door is closed. Doug goes to his room, lugging his suitcase. Ryan goes to the living room, and turns on the television. Maribeth sits on her bed. The source of her anger is not anything Ryan has done but a comment he has just made in the car. In her head she replays the conversation. She had asked, “Did you even stop, for a second, to think about how your greeting him without me would make me feel?” “No, but I thought how Doug would feel to come back and have no one waiting for him.” “Let me worry about how my son feels,” she says. “Frankly, Maribeth, I’m not sure that’s always the best idea.” The remark envenoms her, even though she knows that she asked for it, sort of, with her nitpicky line of inquiry. She’s sorting and separating Ryan’s airport actions from his behavior in general. The airport stuff, she realizes, is acceptable, 97

and even thoughtful. What is not acceptable is—she cannot put her finger on what, precisely, it is that bothers her about his overall behavior. But she knows that what bothers her is typified by how he will fetch a Sam Adams for himself but not for her. Doug, meanwhile, has returned from Tampa and she has not yet spoken to him. She steps out of her shoes and walks to his bedroom. She ignores the slush on her own floor and ignores Ryan as she passes through the living room. Doug is on his futon, organizing his stuffed animal kingdom into an assemblage on top of his black suitcase. Snoopy sits atop the Samsonite, facing the other six stuffed animals like a teacher faces a classroom. In the first row, also sitting on the suitcase, are the raccoon, the white bear, and another bear. In the second row are the beaver, the red dog, and another dog. Snoopy, as it happens, is providing instructions for the upcoming welcome-back Hershey party. To welcome back Hershey, the stuffed animals plan to have a four-against-four hockey game. The game will take place on the smooth surface of the Samsonite suitcase, which—because of its round corners— very much resembles a hockey rink. The game will pit the dogs plus the beaver against the bears plus the raccoon. Regulation hockey rules will apply, except that no checking will be allowed, in order to prevent a possible injury to Hershey’s healing shoulder. Snoopy is explaining all this to the other six animals when Doug hears his mother’s voice. “Hi,” she says. She’s standing in the bedroom doorway. “You want me to shovel, right?” says Doug, looking up at her. He removes the stuffed animals from the top of the suitcase and places them on the bed. He snaps open the suitcase and begins sorting through the wrinkled clothes inside. “You don’t have to shovel yet,” she says. “What were you doing before I came in?” “I don’t know.” “It looked like your stuffed friends were having some sort of meeting.” “They were,” he says. “What was it about?” “Why?” “Why?” asks Maribeth. “I’m just curious.” 98

Now Ryan appears outside the doorway of Doug’s bedroom. He touches Maribeth’s arm. He remains one step away from her. But he’s close enough so that he can peer into Doug’s room and join the conversation that his arrival has halted. All three wait for someone else to speak. Maribeth says: “I threw out your bear with the broken arm.” Doug’s face becomes taut. His blue eyes glint like high beams. He looks down at his bed and the seven disappointed hockey players. “How could you have thrown it out?” he says. “Ms. Aarons dropped it off,” says Ryan. “The day you left.” “Fuck you, Ryan,” says Doug. “This is none of your business.” “Watch your mouth,” says Maribeth. “And don’t blame Ryan. I’m the one who did it. I’m sorry that I did it and I apologize to you. I made a mistake. But I still did it, and you’re just going to have to live with it.” Doug looks down at the wrinkled garments in his suitcase. Not wanting to look up again at Maribeth or Ryan, he begins unpacking, one shirt at a time, building a new heap of apparel on the hardwood floor. He’s staring at the clothes, and thinking of how he can leave the house, just leave, and leave immediately. He’s not going to cry. He’s not going to cry in front of Ryan. He walks past the adults. “I’m going to shovel now, okay?” he says. The ‘okay’ escapes with a wet squeak. Doug sits by the door and puts on his boots. He believes, for a moment, that his mother or Ryan will attend to him. Perhaps one of them will rush to the doorway and urge him to stay inside a while longer. But soon he realizes that neither adult is coming. They are standing still. They are whispering strategies to each other outside of his bedroom. Doug watches as the snow gently paints the screen door with soft specks of white. He steps outside and crunches around to the side of the house. He picks up the shovel, which is leaning against the house beside the garbage cans. In the driveway sits Ryan’s black car. A shimmering, white coating has formed upon the hood, roof, and trunk. With his gloves on, Doug grips the shovel like a hockey stick. He holds it, poised, above his head and shoulders, and then he rears back and crashes it into the windshield with one savage swing. In a piercing burst the glass cracks and cleaves. A puff of 99

snow flies up as the shovel smashes down. A spiderweb of fractures forms in the lower right corner of the glass. An instant later there are flurries falling on top of the spiderweb, concealing it from view. Doug watches, his breath expiring in misty puffs, his hatless ears reddening from the cold. He leans into his shovel as if the shovel is a walking cane and wonders whether his mother or Ryan heard the noise. A passing, wishful thought enters Doug’s mind. He places the shovel on the white ground and inspects the garbage cans. He opens all three of them, twisting off the tin lids one by one. There are no white plastic bags inside. He cranes himself over the edge of the garbage pails, lowering his face and shoulders inside, his eyes scanning the dirty silver bottoms like a searchlight. But there is nothing at the bottom except for dry, brown leaves and pungent orange rinds. Doug replaces the lids and grabs the shovel. He trudges toward the front of the house and waits for two cars to pass. He stands in the middle of Spruce Street, a few feet away from his mother’s Accord. Flakes collect on his hair, eyelashes, and face, melting almost on contact. He gazes into the living room. His mother and Ryan are on the couch, watching television. They are talking but they are not embracing. They seem comfortably seated. If they have heard the din of the windshield, then they seem in no hurry to investigate it. Now Ryan stands and walks toward the kitchen. Maribeth looks outside the window and spots Doug, standing in the street. Doug puts his head down and shovels for a few seconds, as if he’s trying to dig out the snow surrounding his mother’s car. He glances up again to see whether she’s still looking out at him. She is. She waves, continuously, and Doug, rather than putting his head down to shovel, waves back. He knows from the loosearmed way she’s waving that she has no idea about the windshield cracking. Which means, in all likelihood, that Ryan has no idea either. Doug is relieved. He knows now that they will not discover the spiderweb until tomorrow morning. He knows now that he can simply deny any wrongdoing, if indeed they think to accuse him at all. And he marvels at how they can be deaf to a din so piercing and immediate to him. 100

When he enters the house, one hour later, his face is slick. Ryan and Maribeth are in Maribeth’s bedroom, so Doug does not have to explain the slickness to anyone. He would have attributed the moisture to melted snow. *** Doug and Snoopy are under the dark blue blanket with the light on. They are planning a memorial service for Hershey at the Samsonite hockey rink. Snoopy will deliver the eulogy. Then the other stuffed animals will take turns sharing their thoughts. “And Ms. Aarons?” asks Snoopy. “What are you going to tell her?” Doug doesn’t know how to answer that one. He supposes that on Monday morning he will thank her for sewing and delivering Hershey. And then he will tell her that Hershey is doing just fine. Because that’s what adults want to hear. “I’ll take care of it,” Doug tells Snoopy. There’s a knock on the door. Doug hides Snoopy under the blanket. Doug rolls onto his side, shuts his eyes, and waits for the door to open. It’s Ryan. He’s wearing flannel pajamas. He stands in the doorway, and he tries to determine whether or not Doug is feigning sleep. Ryan takes three steps into the room before retreating back to the door. “Want me to leave the light on?” he asks. Doug opens his eyes a crack, his light blues peaking out in half-moons. “It’s up to you,” he whispers. “I’ll leave it on,” says Ryan. He waits a moment, and says: “So you’re okay with everything?” “I’m fine,” says Doug. “Sorry I cursed at you.” “It was brave of you to go to Florida by yourself,” says Ryan. “It was easier than staying here,” says Doug. Ryan nods. “Good night,” he says, shutting the door. Doug gets up, and scans the room until he finds his copy of Do Bananas Chew Gum? The paperback is on the red desk, near the spot where Snoopy usually sleeps. Doug brings the book into bed with him and rejoins Snoopy under the dark blue blanket. He knows that he might just stay up all night reading. He knows that if he finishes the book again, he’ll see his never-sent 101

letter to Hershey on the back flap. He knows that he’ll never return Do Bananas Chew Gum? to the library. He’ll tell Ms. Tirone that he left it in Tampa. He knows that he might cry again before the night is through, when no adults are awake and only the stuffed animal kingdom is watching. *** The next morning Ryan drives into town to get bagels for breakfast. He notices the windshield damage at the first traffic light. He’s clueless about its source. He calls Maribeth on his cell phone and asks whether he can get the windshield fixed immediately, even if doing so means he’ll be late with the bagels. Maribeth is pleased he has called to ask. She tells him that it’s okay to fix the windshield; after all, she is not starving, and Doug is still sleeping anyway.

102

Steak and Eggs, Cow and Chicken by Kevin Wilson

The steak and eggs man knocked on the door just minutes after Carla’s husband had left for work. “Steak and eggs, cow and chicken,” he said, sweat pouring off his face, his t-shirt dark and drenched like he’d been wounded. “Breakfast, lunch, and dinner,” he continued, “together or separate, steak and eggs.” Carla found it hard to concentrate, kept staring at the opened cooler filled with strange cuts of meat, the unorthodox cartons that held nine or fourteen or five eggs. Then she looked at the busted-up, rusted-out car in her driveway, windows rolled down, no signs of air conditioning. Then, finally, she looked again at the steak and eggs man, sweating, smiling, showing no signs of leaving. “Farm fresh,” he said, “totally organic.” Carla held out a fistful of cash like it was a hand grenade with no pin in it. “Whatever this will buy,” she said, “hand over to me.” That night, her husband was dismissive of the transaction. “We have steak,” he said, opening the freezer. “And we have eggs,” he said, opening the refrigerator. “Farm fresh,” Carla told him, “totally organic.” She fixed the steaks, covered them in butter and wine, and after one bite, her husband fished a piece of tendon, finger-length, out of his mouth. “The steak and eggs man just lost a customer,” he said. She forked the tendon off his plate and swallowed it, tears coming to her eyes. “That was totally unnecessary,” he said, making a face like he’d just eaten a fingerlength piece of tendon. That night, the dishes cleaned, the steak an irritating reminder 103

of her lack of horse sense, they had sex. It was the kind of sex that was better for one person than the other but neither one of them could figure out which one of them was coming out ahead. The entire time her husband moved inside of her, Carla thought, “Cow and chicken, cow and chicken, cow and chicken…” *** The next day, Carla took out the triangular carton of eggs, nine in all, and began to crack them open in order to make an omelet, a chance to prove that she hadn’t been totally taken advantage of by the steak and eggs man. Her husband stood behind her, drinking a giant, almost novelty-sized glass of cranberry juice. The very first egg that she tapped against the lid of the bowl split open and spilled its contents, blood red and flecked with black. There was no egg. There was no yolk and no white, just a thick, blood-like substance pooled in the bottom of the white ceramic bowl. “Holy god,” said her husband. “What?” she responded, trying to whisk the egg into something that resembled breakfast. “Are you kidding me?” he said. “Are you kidding me?” he said again. “It’s a blood egg, for crying out loud. It’s an egg that is nothing but blood.” She remained silent, the egg frothing and angry in the bowl, her arm tired from handling the whisk. “From now on, I am going to keep all of our money on my person,” he said. “You have to provide me with a written request for any and all financial assistance and then I will consider it and make my decision. If you have access to our finances, you will spend it on magic beans and gourmet popsicles and half-donkey, half-human babies.” “It’s one egg out of nine,” she said. “The rest are probably fine. We’re looking at eight good eggs to one bad egg. You get into the hall of fame with that average.” He looked at her like she had just taken her dick out of her pants and revealed that she was really a man. Or maybe he just looked at her like he couldn’t believe he had married someone so goddamned dumb. “It’s fine,” she said, pouring the bloody egg into the pan, hissing and coated with butter. The egg spread out slowly, bubbled, and then cooked to a point that suggested doneness. She slipped the egg out of the pan and onto a plate. Her husband 104

picked up a pair of tongs and pointed them at her in a threatening manner. “Don’t you do it,” he said, his voice cracking. The egg looked like a smear of sour cherry preserves. Using a spoon, she scooped up a small piece of the egg and slid it into her open mouth. Her husband began to gag, dry heaving, tapping the tongs against his heart. The egg tasted like nothing, not a trace of any discernible flavor. She took another bite and another and another until her husband was out of the house and the plate was empty. Carla picked up another egg, held it over the bowl, and squeezed it until it cracked open in her fist. Yellow and clear mucus splattered against the walls and her clothes and then dripped into the bowl. Farm fresh, totally organic. She tried it with the remaining seven and each was a normal egg. She took the bowl and walked to an air vent in the living room. She slipped off the grate and poured the eggs down the vent, watching them slide out of sight. She replaced the grate and sat on the sofa. She imagined the smell that would develop over time, something rotted and unmentionable distributed evenly throughout the house. Her husband would eventually come back to her and the smell would hit him when he walked inside the house, but he would pretend not to notice. And weeks would pass, the steak and eggs man carefully removed from their history, and they would eventually grow accustomed to the toxic state of the air that they breathed. It would sit comfortably inside of them until, like all things, it faded away and they forgot that it had ever existed.

105

Karen Neuberg The Entire History of Your Fires The Bird What Returns Won’t

The Entire History of Your Fires The entire history of your fires wedges between green logs and ashes. Stale smoke ascending into chaos scrapes alongside you in sleep. You’ve seen desire turn into an old woman, seen it turn into twenty songs depicting your entire story. Dreams caught strolling up the sides of memory, as if memory was nothing more than just a chimney emptying your past into anonymity of sky.

107

The Bird This particular fragment—I’m ten— seizes Spring outside my window—a yard of grass, hedges, trees—three birch, a white oak, and a black—captures these as how it always was: verdant and warm and full of so much surprise. This day, I saw a bird fall from the white oak. I rushed from my room, down the flight of stairs, through dining room and kitchen and out the back door. Little bird lay still upon new grass. I bent to touch, to feel for any sign it lived, my hope to nurture back to health in tissue-lined shoe box, to feed it with a dropper, to one day have it fly away. I touched blue-feathered back and wings and turned it over. Out from within what had been breast, a mass of maggots crawled. Backing away, I fled. I did not bury it. Burying was something I learned later.

108

What Returns Won’t What returns won’t take you back to anything—not the fields you ran, not the sun, not your father or mother younger than you now on the path ahead. Their words won’t reach your ears—didn’t then, won’t now— though then you knew for sure their words encompassed past and present and included you and your brother grinning and bickering behind. And even if you should return to that moment and begin from there, you would have no cognizance of the you now; and you would rush again ahead of it all, to be out of it all before it was even done.

109

T.J. Forrester's fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Harpur Palate, Ink Pot, The MacGuffin, The Mississippi Review, Night Train, and Storyglossia, among others. He's had several stories nominated for the Pushcart Prize and is working on a novel-in-stories about sex and murder on the Appalachian Trail. He is the editor of Five Star Literary Stories. Jon Gingerich lives in New York and is editor of O'Dwyer's magazine. He previously wrote for a daily newspaper in Columbus, Ohio and was also publisher of a line of comic books. He can be reached at [email protected]. He has a news blog that he updates daily, www.TheOwnersManual.org. Eugene Gloria is the author of two books of poems Hoodlum Birds and Drivers at the Short-Time Motel, which was selected for the 1999 National Poetry Series and the 2001 Asian American Literary Award. He is an associate professor of English at DePauw University in Greencastle, Indiana. Jessica Hollander is currently pursuing her MFA at the University of Alabama. She graduated from the University of Michigan in 2004 with a BA in English and Literature, and in 2006 received a United Arts Regional Artist Grant for her writing in North Carolina. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Emerson Review, Hayden's Ferry Review, Hobart, and Barrelhouse, among others. Jason Huskey holds a B.A. in English Literature. His work has appeared in 34thParallel, Perigee: Publication for the Arts, Red River Review, and Word Riot, and is forthcoming in Aoife's Kiss. He currently resides in central Virginia. Jason Jordan is a writer from New Albany, Indiana, who always says he's from Louisville, Kentucky, because people actually know where that is. His fiction has appeared in The2ndHand, Hobart, Pequin, Pindeldyboz, VerbSap, Word Riot, and many other publications. Jordan is also editor-in-chief of the literary magazine decomP. He is currently in the MFA program at Chatham University, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he is working on his first novel. You can visit him online at PoweringTheDevilsCircus.blogspot.com. 111

Ilan Mochari (www.IlanMochari.com) is a novelist and journalist living in the Boston area. His short story, "The Father I Knew (and Still Do)," was a finalist in Glimmer Train's 2007 Family Matters competition, and his erotica has been published by Ruthie's Club and Oysters & Chocolate. Karen Neuberg's work is published or forthcoming in 42Opus, Poems Niederngasse, Barrow Street, and Free Verse, among others. She is a Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee and holds and MFA from the New School. She and her husband live in Brooklyn, NY and West Hurley, NY. She is an assistant editor of Inertia Magazine. Michelle Orange is the author of The Sicily Papers and the editor of From the Notebooks: The Unwritten Stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, a collection found in issue 22 of McSweeney's. She lives in Brooklyn and is at work on a travel book about the history and future of the family name. Noel Sloboda, originally from Massachusetts, currently lives in Pennsylvania, where he teaches at Penn State York and serves as dramaturg for the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival. His writing has appeared in venues based in the United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland, Australia, and New Zealand. The press sunnyoutside recently published his first poetry collection, Shell Games. Jeff Wallace received his MFA in fiction from Indiana University. He currently lives with his wife and dog in Lexington, Kentucky, where he teaches writing, literature, and works as a baker. Kevin Wilson was born, raised, and still lives in Tennessee. His fiction has appeared in Ploughshares, One Story, Greensboro Review, and elsewhere. A collection of short stories, Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, is forthcoming in 2009 from Ecco/HarperCollins.

112