Spring 2010

T. Koelb
SIX OF HALF A DOZEN
An extract from the novel Bad of Country                          

The story of that night was one of several that she would often make Michael tell. He would murmur them to her when they lay in the dark on the uneven little bed, the rain sounding against the windows and the streetlamps pushing wedges of light up through the glass. She would sigh her assent as she fell asleep, the jerking of her body as she passed into dreams always causing him quiet alarm; or else in the morning she would tease him, challenging his interpretations as she watched naked over the little hotplate to be sure the coffee didn’t burn.

Michael was shocked by her nudity, May says. She tried once to comfort him: “I’m not completely naked,” she argued. “Look, I have three fillings.” Head back, mouth wide, she invited him closer, said ah; but her large regular teeth revealed no secrets in the uneven electric light of his room. After the fumblings of college, unzipped blue jeans pulled to the knee, girls in tee shirts, sweatshirts, nightshirts, even despite the drawing and the anatomy classes, he still found, contrary to all his expectations, that he was shocked. He was shocked by the colours, the proximity, shocked by the dark, furrowed scent of hidden flesh that slipped uncontrollably away from them and off the bed’s edge, floated out into the little room, immediately noticeable whenever he came through the door. Would it take over the building, he wondered? He was amazed at how May remained herself without her clothes – and was shocked again when she redirected his fingertips to a short, full ridge of muscle and whispered, mouth so close that his ear was filled with a riotous whistling, “Did you know this rips when you have a baby?”

She read the distress on his face, ran her fingers over his eyes, pressed his head to her chest. Even now, her breasts seem barely to have developed beyond the fresh budding swell of puberty. Glimpsed briefly it’s only her nipples, too high on the chest for a man’s and too big, a rising as thick and fleshy as a fingertip, the broad, soft landscape the raw colour of a bruise, that distinguishes her torso from a young boy’s; but it’s soft. Her breath must have had a sweet comforting smell of pale tobacco and chewing gum. “Why don’t you tell me a story?” she asked him, but at that moment he couldn’t think of one.

“How about, what are you doing in Brussels?”

“Right, Brussels,” he shrugged. “Well, it’s the poor man’s Left Bank, I suppose. Paris was too expensive, so here I am.”

“You compromised.”

“I guess I did. How about you?”

“I was banishèd.”

“Banishèd?”

“You know, like in Romeo and Juliet? ‘All are banishèd!’ The teacher read that part out loud in class. It made us laugh. That and ‘out, out, damn spot.’ Which one is that?”

“I think it’s Macbeth.” She pulled herself from under him, rolled away and lit a cigarette. The bed’s metal mesh squeaked loudly. She exhaled a few times before she turned and asked, “Why do you do that?”

“Do what?”

“You don’t ‘think’ it’s Macbeth. You know it is, I can tell. Why don’t you say that?”

“All right. I know it’s Macbeth.”

“Good.”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

The bed protested again when she got up. She moved calmly through the room full of trinkets and talismans, examining the postcards and flyers on the wall, the flimsy orange and gold paper with Chinese characters, the little things salvaged from the street.

“Okay,” said Michael uncertainly. He lit a cigarette as well. “So, banishèd.”

“Uh huh.” She ran her finger along the line of her scar. In those days it skipped lightly across her face, dissolved neatly beneath her thick eyebrow before emerging again on her cheek, a misplaced stroke, a touching flourish. It lay so smooth, so tenderly thin, that it was hard to imagine it was once an open wound, that it gaped and bled, its red lips spread to reveal the meat inside her, the innermost whorl. “My father said I got into too much damned shit. Too many bad influences, blah, blah, blah, the twins, blah, blah, blah.”

“So you have brothers and sisters.”

“Half brother and sister, the twins. And a stepbrother. The twins are great, the most incredible little rug rats. They get in so much trouble, it’s adorable. I mean, they’re going to be spoiled as hell, but they’re really gifted. You’d love them.”

“And your stepmother?”

“She’s okay. Sometimes I think she likes me more than she likes my father, you know, like we really get along, but she has to look after her family. She’s like, I’m sorry, but that’s the way it is. It’s cool, though. I can respect that, I guess.”

“And so here you are.”

“Here I am.”

“ ‘Out, out, damned spot’?”

“Dat’s me. But if you call me Spot in public, I’ll kill you.” She touched her cheek again where it creased. “Tell me a story,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, pulling her knees to her chest. He told again the story of how he met her at the party, about the loud talk and the bobbing heads, the music and dancing, the long drunken walk he took with me through the empty streets to the funfair – just as tonight, when it is dark and the apartment is silent, detached from the world and afloat on the sea of fog, I will tell the story of our first meeting, of how she stumbled and I caught her, felt the soft thickening surge of her breast beneath my fingers. I will chronicle what she said, how she looked; I will tell it in as much detail as I can, try to recall each thing just as it had been, to recall myself as I was, to recall May. Sometimes she will breathe a quiet “no” when she thinks I have got it wrong, but it is too late, she is fading, her eyes won’t open. As she falls asleep she twitches gently, her breathing changes, and everything is calm.

•

This, then, was history: as if it were a poem, a great epic, Michael would recall for me that first night, remember how she smoked, what she said, how she had defended her enormous shoulder bag. “What? This is a great bag. I got it second hand for four dollars and ninety-five cents.”

“With or without sales tax?”

“Shut up. It holds as much as I need it to and everything in it is vital and essential to my life. Including my favourite lighter.” Michael could describe her smile, and would name the change that came over her as they approached the doorman, when her stride shifted, swinging wide, elastic, her head bobbing, jaw cocked. “A jelly walk,” he called it, and I know what he meant. I have seen her roll forward with the same loose-kneed ease, disarming, generous, a little suggestive.

“Ça va?” she asked in a gravely stage voice. She showed all her teeth. The boxy, thick-necked Franck eyed her approvingly. “Ça va,” he agreed, and where another would have been jealous or annoyed, even challenged, Michael was pleased. There was a beauty in her appeal, in the simplicity of her performance, in seeing it reflected from the doorman’s eyes, that he appreciated. In the moment he felt chosen, somehow – and indeed there was an odd lack of agency in his movement towards her, something of the subject beckoned by the hypnotist. She held his hand as they walked away from the bar through the dark, wet, indifferent city, showed him how awkward it felt if the man’s were underneath.

“Isn’t that weird?” she asked. “It’s always like that.”

“I hadn’t ever noticed. Wait, let’s try it again.” With their fingers netted tight, she banged her shoulder against his, looked at him sideways, gave his arm a tug. “Well?” she encouraged.

“Well, what?”

“Well, young man.” They stopped walking. She pursed her lips. “Am I going to have to seduce you?” They went to his apartment because of her mother.

•

There had been other women who, whether lacking May’s force of will or whatever else the difference was, had failed to act, and so lost Michael again to the bewildered love he had for the world at large. Even Michael could be surprised by how quickly these associations came and went. “Who’s Gina?” he asked me one day, holding up a postcard. He was going through the piled shoeboxes in which he hoarded special things, letters, little gifts, mementos, ticket stubs, all loose and confused.

I thought about it. “I’m pretty sure I don’t know anyone named Gina.”

“Neither do I. She wrote me three postcards to this address. Just ‘Gina’. No last name or anything. ‘Much love, Gina.’ ” He contemplated the pictures charting Gina’s summer crossing Europe: Eiffel Tower, French coast, San Sebastian. “God, that’s weird.”

It might have been the threat of May’s indifference that made him work so hard, as he did with the ever dry and distant Vandermal: Michael was nothing if not eager to please. May both drew Michael and pushed him away so that he was suspended, taut, between opposing forces both of which were her, her feelings for him at once proprietary and dismissive. He became suddenly as fascinated with May as he had been until that moment with the whole of creation, and swiftly replaced the one with the other. As they lay in his little bed that night he let his face slide close to hers. With his finger he followed the route of her scar: he would capture it, draw its short trajectory from memory.

She rolled to an angle on one arm. “You don’t mind banging damaged goods?” Michael touched her face again, gently, as if worried it might break, his voice low now when he said, “It’s really not that noticeable.”

May was brisk. “The secret is vitamin E. It’s amazing. Do you have any?”

“Um. Go fish.”

“That’s funny.”

She leaned down as if to kiss him, gently bit the tip of his nose.

“That wasn’t at all bad for. You know.”

“Thanks.” He smiled. “Wait – for what?”

“You know.” She painted her face with mock disbelief, whispered: “A homo.”

Michael shook his head, and there was a noise, not quite a laugh. May’s surprise now was genuine. She sat straight up. “What?”

“I’m not gay.” It wasn’t the first time someone had made the mistake, although I suspect it had never been a lover. It happened all the time at bars, especially when he was with Lowell, who almost certainly chummed the waters with his friend’s youth and looks. I try to recreate in my mind the tone of Michael’s voice at those sorts of moments: he is taken off guard, but determined not to show it, more unsure than insulted; prepared at any moment to get the joke.

“You’re not?”

“No.”

May stood. I can picture her hair, released from its ponytail, haloed by sex, a style she has named “hump head” (“It’s a scientific phenomenon,” she insists) and for which she is always on the lookout when we see couples out walking. With her back to him she squatted to search in her bag for cigarettes and asked, “Really?” without looking around.

“No. Really.”

Her lighter snapped and she smoked. Head to one side, she made her way around the edge of the room, examining. “I don’t mind, you know. You can tell me.”

“I’m really not.”

“Oops. Then I guess I’ve got a mouthful of foot.” She looked in turn from each of the small windows.

(As I imagine them now I can’t help but think of their ages as reversed: it is May who seems older, Michael timelessly adolescent. In a drawer which I open privately, surreptitiously, there is a photo of the two of them, arms around shoulders, laughing, faces too close to the camera, so that it’s the wall behind them, the blanket of their shadow, that is in focus. In the wash of the flash bulb their features melt; it is hard to tell them apart. I look at it to fill in the blanks: May as she is today, Michael as he was then, will forever be.)

May folded herself onto a chair and for a while neither spoke. “Are you angry?” Michael tried not to stare at her double-jointed nudity, parted lips between pretzelled legs; but he didn’t want to be seen to flinch, either, so he looked her in the eyes when he answered. “Of course not. A little confused. But not that way.”

“Most guys would be angry. They’d probably want to sock me. I feel like I’d be more convinced if you got pissed off.”

“Why would I be pissed off? I’m straight, I’m not some kind of jerk.”

“If it makes you feel any better, that’s why I got with you in the first place, really.” The little room with its pockets of electric light is quiet except for the sound of May smoking, the brisk exhale, the soft breathing of the little gas heater.

“Because you thought I was a homosexual?”

“Because I think you’re attractive, and you were funny. Nice. You didn’t seem interested in me for just my body, either, which is a nice change. And then, you’re a buddy of Lowell’s, if you see what I mean.”

“Is that like being a friend of Dorothy’s?”

She wants to laugh at the expression, but is intent on remaining serious: she has made a pact with herself. “So, I thought, if you were up for it, we could have some fun without a lot of trouble. I figured, a gay guy won’t drag in all the messy stuff.”

“What’s the messy stuff?”

With loose wrists she drew an appeal in the air. “Oh, you know: falling in love and shit. I don’t want any of that. I figured we could screw, and then you could find yourself a nice boy. Fall for him, instead.”

Michael didn’t move. “Why would that be better?”

“Because you’d make someone a wonderful wife. And anyway, me and you, if it’s a thing, it’s just going to end in tears. Always does.”

“Oh. Heartbreaker.”

“Sad but true.” She put out what was left of her cigarette and then looked him in the face. “It’s because I don’t fall in love.”

“Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever heard anyone say that. I mean, I’ve heard of people saying it, or at least somehow I’ve known that it could be said, if you see what I mean, but I’ve never met anyone who said it. Or at least, well. No one ever said it to me.”

“Do you?” she asked.

“What?”

“Fall in love?”

“I guess I don’t really know. I think I do. I feel like I could.”

“Well. Then you do.” They stayed as they were for a while, looking at anything but each other as the night withdrew gently outside the window. Against the vis-à-vis an explosion of birds raced to kiss their blooming shadows in the half-light. May watched them and smoked another cigarette. “That’s good,” she said finally. “I feel happy for you.” She stood up, weaving slowly towards him, moving her head as if to see him from different angles, wearing an offer on her face as she lowered herself towards the protesting bed. “Will you see me again now that you know my terrible secret?”

“We’ll see,” he laughed – but his hands were on her body.

Afterwards he ploughed low into the pillows and slept; she quietly dressed. “He was like a puppy,” she often tells me. “He’d get so excited about something he’d have to pass the fuck out. I left him a note, though. So he wouldn’t wake up alone.”

Michael alone: what does that look like? I can’t imagine the animal unobserved, the behavioural ecologies obeyed in his nest of carefully recovered detritus. It is not that I don’t know his measure. I after all take note of it every night: it is the empty space that’s lodged between us beneath the piled blankets in the dark. Even as I resent it I try to recognize something of it in myself. After all, is there any difference between his little room and ours, the bedroom in which we keep the photos of our past, the old letters, the long nights of speculation during which we, or I alone – but for her sake, though, always – try to reconstruct a living past from disparate purloined limbs of memory, from stories stitched clumsily together and brought lurching to life only by the power of conjecture? There is after all no experiment that can test our hypotheses, which anyway change and shift, fluid in the darkness, and then dissipate with the inevitable return of the pewter-grey morning, but we accept this, understand that one theory is as good as another. “Six of half a fucking dozen,” as May puts it: between two imaginary things, there’s no real difference.

“What did the note say?” I ask her.

“ ‘Homo.’ ”

Adrian Stumpp
ALL THE VARIABLES

When my older brother, Brandon, told us he was getting married, he wouldn’t look anyone in the eye. He looked at his feet, mumbled, and couldn’t sit still through it. I had recently discovered the power of brutal honesty and cut down everyone around me with it, the unnerving authority of it.  Just the night before I had told my mother I was going to a party and she asked if there would be alcohol.  The next morning I told her I smoked a couple bowls, drank til I puked, and got laid.  All day she refused to speak to me, which was all I wanted in the first place.  People talk to you less when they know you’ll tell the truth, I had decided, and then Brandon came home with a funeral on his face and said he had to tell us something.  The unnerving authority of it.  The unflinching helplessness, yes, that’s what I like.

I had never seen Brandon anything less than confident, or at least aggressive, and I gotta say, to hear his voice like that made my ears ache.  He sat like he had no spine, just a pool of himself in an overstuffed recliner.  He told us about an accident—too much air in the tip it must have been, and a break—and another time when Sheila in the hunger for him wouldn’t let him pull out.  I seriously doubted both counts but wasn’t stupid enough to offer commentary.  Mom gasped at the confessions.  Dad said, “Go to your room,” and it didn’t seem to matter to him that Brandon was twenty-years-old. Brandon looked surprised. His brow furrowed like it used to when we were kids and Dad would threaten to take off his belt, and he left the room.  Mom put her hand over her mouth and cried. 

“What do you think of this?” Dad asked me; then he bellowed down the hall after Brandon, “Your whole goddamn life!”

I was overwhelmed.  I only sat in the living room listening to Dad mumble for a quarter of an hour, until I noticed the time and jumped up to get my car keys.  On my way out the door Dad said, “Where’re you going?”

“Michaela.” 

Dad nodded.  “Hey, Kyle, just be careful, huh?”  

 “Sure.  I’ll wear my seatbelt.”

“Good man,” Dad said, but he didn’t seem to believe me.

*

It was Michaela I had been with the night before.  I hadn’t intended to sleep with her so soon, I guess out of respect for Brandon, our being brothers and all, but it was just as well.  It was going to happen sooner or later anyway, no use fooling myself about it. 

The party hadn’t been nearly as crazy as I made it out to be. I wouldn’t have bothered getting drunk or stoned if I hadn’t already promised Mom.  Afterward, Michaela had driven my car around town, parked in an abandoned lot, and went straight for the button of my pants. 

“None of that tonight,” she said when she got in my car.  “I’m at great risk of becoming one of those girls who doesn’t make you miserable before putting out.” We went to a billiards hall to shoot pool and drink Cherry Cokes, and I told her about how Brandon was getting married because his rebound girlfriend was Mormon and pregnant.  “Of course she is,” Michaela sighed.  “Brandon doesn’t want to get married.  How’s your dad taking this?”

“Ornery, same as with everything else.” 

I was graduating from high school soon and was looking forward to a lifetime of starving in the name of art, the only thing I’d ever cared about.  Until now this had made me Dad’s biggest headache.  Brandon had a rocket-launcher for a right arm and had been a three-time All-State third-baseman in high school.  Now he played for Salt Lake Community College.  He had a tryout in two months for a minor-league slot on the Kansas City Royals’ farm system, which was fine for him, but made me the problem case.  Dad had a soft spot for baseball but not art.  He wanted me to be a real man with a real job who made real money and lived in a real house, which meant he wanted me to be as miserable as he was. 

“I envy you,” Michaela told me.  “How self-absorbed you are. I wish I had the courage.”

I never understood what she wanted with Brandon.  She was so individual and comfortable being herself, and he was so whatever-people-wanted-him-to-be.

Brandon had been a junior when we were freshmen, and he and Michaela dated for three years before Michaela broke up with him last summer.  “I’m not in love with him,” she had told me when we started seeing each other.  “He wants so badly to be in love, and I just don’t feel it.  I love him, but I’m not in love with him.  I don’t know.  I don’t think everyone was meant to be in love.  The whole idea doesn’t appeal to me.” 

“That’s fine,” I had said.  “I don’t care if you love me.”

My mother had warned me about girls like Michaela.  So had my father, although he had been much more enthusiastic.

*

Brandon waited in the living-room for me to come home.  “Where’s Dad?” I asked.  I needed a bodyguard. The house was dark except for an end table lamp.  I had no idea how long ago Mom and Dad had gone to bed, and I wondered how long Brandon had been waiting for me, how long he had brooded. 

“How’s Michaela?” he asked, “Did you have sex with her?”

“Not tonight.” 

Brandon blew air out his nose and said, “Kyle, why don’t you get down on your knees and beg me to kick your ass?”  Dad banged on the wall and told us both to shut the hell up.  We waited in silence until we were sure that was it from him, and Brandon pulled me up by the throat.  Brandon and I are of similar build, except that I’m a little taller and he’s a little stronger.  This always left my body exposed but gave me an excellent vantage point to witness the seconds before he let into me. 

*

It’s a heartless thing to say but true enough: if Dad weren’t my father I really wouldn’t have anything to do with him.  Randal Brackett, my dad, used to be a slight, well proportioned man, much like his sons.  But somewhere between twenty-five years of fighting tyranny and twenty years of exemplifying tyranny, and twenty-two years of the industrial park, and twenty years of the same woman, all of his experience had welled up inside him and bloated fetus-like.  Like a fetus, but it wasn’t; it was beer and meatloaf.

Dad came into the kitchen and sat at the table beside me.  My lip was still split, and he was pissed at me cause I refused to turn Brandon in.  The wedding was just a month away, and Dad had it out for Brandon. He usually looked the other way when Brandon beat on me—violence being the healthiest expression between brothers—but now Dad wanted anything he could hold against Brandon. “How’s school?” he grunted, and spread the morning paper on the table, “Bringing up your grades?”

“No.” 

He looked at me for the first time since sitting down.  “You piss me off sometimes, you know that? When is graduation?”

“Next month.” 

“Are you going to graduate?” 

“Barely,” I said.

“Why?” 

“Because when I realized if I stopped doing anything I would still have enough credits to graduate, I stopped doing anything.”

He closed the newspaper and looked at me hard.  I hated when people asked questions they didn’t want to know the answers to, started to say so, and thought better of it.  He said, “So what do you plan on doing after graduation?”

“We’ve talked about this already.” 

“Right,” he said, “the art thing.  I meant, what are you going to do with your life?”

“I don’t know.  I guess I’ll take it one day at a time.  That’s all you really can do.”

“Today then, hot shot.” 

I wrinkled my forehead and thought hard, out the window, far away.  But nothing came to me.  I got up, rinsed my coffee cup in the sink, and started to leave.  Dad said my name, and it stopped me cold because his voice trembled. 

“Am I a bad father?” he asked.  He displayed his fingers on the table before him, all ten, straight as matches.  He wouldn’t look up.  “Sometimes I wonder if I haven’t done the worst job for you boys.  But I tried hard.”

“I know,” I said.

“I want to tell you, Kyle, so you understand.  I gave up every chance I had at happiness to give you boys a decent life.  You make sacrifices thinking they have some meaning, that they serve a good purpose.  So I worked for twenty years at a job I hated every day of to give you and your brother a chance at a decent future, and now I have to watch you both throw it away.”

Listen, everything made sense to me after Dad told me that, and how he said it, so scared and bitter, and truly asking if he was a bad father, like I could answer for him, like I was the one who would decide if his life had been worth it.  I’m telling you the world aligned for me that day, through the opaque lens of my youth. I believed my relationship with my father had never really been troubled at all—it was only an equation with missing variables. That day, I filled in the variables: Dad never did a single thing he ever wanted.  He didn’t want to be a father.  He did it because he had to, and he wanted to save Brandon from that. 

*

It would be a shotgun wedding of the first order.  The pink lines on Sheila’s pregnancy test weren’t a week old when the invitations went out, mostly by telephone.  The date was now three weeks away.  “A May wedding,” Mom lilted.  “How exciting for both of them.”

With graduation coming fast the only homework I bothered to do anymore was my art portfolio.  I had two more canvases I wanted to add to it before school ended.  They were gritty kitsch scenes of Brandon swinging a baseball bat.  The angle of perspective in my favorite was so you couldn’t tell if he was swinging at a ball or the catcher’s head.  Both paintings had slight problems of proportion I wanted to perfect on a sketch pad before messing with the canvases.  I never really cared for baseball, but I understood Brandon better when I saw him absorbed in the game, playing or watching, the effect was the same.  He loved a little boy’s game the way I loved painting.  The smells of mulched grass and chalk dust were his turpentine and linseed oil.  Joy made us comrades-in-arms in this one respect.  I sat in the bleachers smearing charcoal on paper and watched the team practice until Brandon noticed me. 

I tried to explain about Dad, but Brandon didn’t take it that well.  I told him what Dad told me, how Dad didn’t want Brandon to end up like him, how Brandon could do what he wanted with a clear conscience because he could say it was what Dad wanted, but somehow I screwed up the delivery.

“Just because you’re screwing my girlfriend doesn’t mean you can tell me how to live my life,” Brandon said.

“She’s your ex-girlfriend,” I whimpered.

“How many times a day do I have to threaten your life?” 

I told him I didn’t mean anything by it, that I was the last person to tell people how to live their lives.

“Good,” Brandon said.  “You should be.  You’re a loser, you’re so pathetic it’s shameful.”

I didn’t know what to say to something like that or why I deserved to hear it.  Brandon asked what the hell I thought was going to become of me, did I really think I would be discovered by some bigwig pansy art dealer or something.  He said I was so selfish it was really too disgusting for elaboration and my head was so far up my own ass I couldn’t even appreciate it.  He called my paintings shit.  “I want to play ball,” he said, “but I’m not counting on it.  I’m going to school, and I’ll get a real job so I can afford a real life so Mom and Dad won’t have to worry about me all the time.”

“I never asked Mom and Dad to worry about me,” I said. 

Brandon rolled his eyes.  “You think Mom and Dad aren’t worried about you?  Think they can just stop like that?  Get out of here before I hit you.”

My hands shook and my face burned with shame.  I cried, I admit it.  Later I wanted to tell Michaela, but I couldn’t be sure my voice wouldn’t break, so I kept it to myself.  It ate at me. I didn’t know how much of it was Brandon’s spite and how much was the unflinching truth.

I wanted to talk to Michaela about it but I was shaken the whole day.  We could hear my parents arguing upstairs, and I couldn’t tell if it was me or Brandon they fought about.  “He’s a loser, “I heard Dad say, “Still daydreaming … taking care of him his whole life … I can’t talk to him; I’ve tried … I don’t know, Carol!”

Michaela asked if I was okay. It didn’t matter. As soon as school was out I was getting the hell out of here.  Mom caught me on the stairs after Michaela went home.  “Your father,” she said, “I know he wouldn’t say this to you—but he just wants you boys to be happy.  He’s worried.”

*

Mom once told me Dad stayed with her because of Brandon.  Seriously.  He was going to break up with her; then they found out she was pregnant with Brandon, so instead he married her.  It had been enough to save their marriage for twenty years. 

My grandparents divorced when Dad was six.  His father was a truck-driver, and it was easy for him to relocate to the other side of the country.  He never missed a child-support payment, and every year Dad and his sister received Christmas and birthday presents of the most generic variety—five and ten dollar bills—but Dad never saw his father again.  It never occurred to Dad that he may have been better off without what he never had; Mom said my grandfather had been a raging bastard—an alcoholic, womanizer, and child-beater. She said Dad didn’t marry her so much because he thought he owed it to her as because he didn’t want his son to grow up without a father. Mom must’ve been doing something for him, though, because I would still catch Dad singing “In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida” and frying eggs in his boxer shorts on Sunday mornings. 

As the wedding day neared it became increasingly clear what a travesty the whole thing would be, and not just the wedding, but every day for the rest of Brandon’s natural life, or at least until he couldn’t take it anymore and abandoned her.  Clean through it was a bad situation. 

Sheila’s family was one of the oldest in the Salt Lake Valley.  Her great-great-grandfather had been the lucky shepherd of fourteen wives and nearly a hundred children. Sheila was a fallen girl, marrying a non-believer outside the Mormon Temple to compensate her shame, and that Brandon was willing to marry her was hardly a reason for celebration; it just kept a bad situation from being worse.  No one in her family liked Brandon, and he came home dejected every time he went over there. 

Every sidewise glance of Brandon haunted me, my boisterous older brother who never spoke anymore unless he was spoken to.  When he would come home from Sheila’s there would be an unsettling quiet between the garage door humming and the click of the kitchen door marking his entrance.  He would sit in the stale dark of the garage all that time thinking God knew what.  It seemed everywhere I went I was confronted by rumors of girls I had heard of now getting pregnant on purpose to trap boyfriends I had once known.

“That’s ridiculous,” Michaela told me.  “Brandon isn’t stupid.  He knows he doesn’t have to do anything he doesn’t want to,” but I wasn’t so sure.  Brandon didn’t want to have a kid, he didn’t love Sheila; looking at him it was obvious.  He aged with every passing day; for him the wedding march would be a funeral dirge, and his marriage was doomed already. 

The resentment Sheila’s family felt for Brandon extended to Mom.  She went over there one day to offer her services in planning the wedding.  She came home almost immediately. I don’t know what they said but Mom had obviously been rebuffed.  She whispered something pleasant about how they had everything under control and didn’t need any more help, but she was visibly upset—she’d wanted to be part of her son’s wedding, grave an occasion as it was.

Suddenly I was very scared for Brandon.  I kept thinking about the rare times in our lives we had been buddies and a gorge rose in my throat.  The finality of it seemed morbid to me.  Sure he was a bully, but I couldn’t bear thinking of him suffering with no end. 

I became certain it was I who would have to convince him.  He just had to let it all go, that’s all there was to it.  Once he knew all the variables he could plug them in and it would be easy. He didn’t love Sheila. If she wanted to have the kid on her own, it was her business. It would be better for him to pay child support than to marry her. He made a mistake and he would have to answer for it; but he didn’t owe her anything, let alone his whole life; he didn’t have to be a meal-ticket; making a mistake didn’t have to disqualify Brandon from chasing his dreams.

The next time I saw his car pull into the garage, I gave him a few minutes and went out there.  He sat with his forehead on the steering wheel.  I knocked on the passenger side window.  The wheel left a deep groove tattooed on his forehead. When he recognized me he looked genuinely disgusted but unlocked the door anyway.

“I hate you,” he said calmly. Spooky calm, like he’d stopped struggling and accepted it.

“I haven’t done anything yet,” I said.

“It isn’t fair,” Brandon told me, “You don’t do anything right, and things always go your way.  I do everything I’m supposed to, and nothing ever works out for me.”

“That’s not true.” 

“Shut up.  You want to be an artist, so you go against everything Mom and Dad and common sense say, and do it anyway.  You ain’t got a job, you ain’t applied to any colleges.  You got nothing but a pipedream and my girlfriend, but you ain’t even nervous cause things have a way of working for you.”

“That’s because I do what I want and don’t care what anyone else thinks of me.” 

“We can’t all be as selfish as you, Kyle.  Some of us have to do what’s right.”

“What about your tryout for the minors?” I said, “You got that.” 

Brandon grimaced and looked out the driver’s side window, away from me.  “I ain’t going,” he said.  “Sheila wants me to finish up my Associates, ASAP.  Get a job with insurance for the baby.”

“Don’t do it.” It’s all I could think to say.  “If you do it, you’ll die of regret.  You can’t.”

“Kyle, get out of my car or I’ll hit you.” 

I started to argue with him and he popped me.  I threw the door open and jumped out before I was sure he connected, but walking back to the house my vision blurred and my skull sang like grinding metal.  My eye was puffy blue where the socket met my nose, but Michaela held ice on it for a while and it was fine. She shook her head, face pale with worry, “I told you to leave him alone.”  It didn’t bother me that Brandon hit me, though—he’d been doing that my whole life.  But he hadn’t said he hated me in years, and never with so much resolve.

*

Michaela and I arrived for the wedding at ten o’clock in the morning.  I wore a suit because I refused to wear a tuxedo, and Michaela wore a sleeveless white summer dress I longed to peel off her.  Dad had asked me not to bring Michaela in the interest of tact. I told him, tough, she was my girlfriend, maybe Brandon ought to concentrate more on his wife and less on Michaela. 

The wedding was held at the bride’s house, a big tacky tiptoe affair on the hill with a backyard twice the size of ours.  There were lilacs and forsythia in bloom all about, and a cobblestone path that followed a little stream along the back of the property.  The path wandered under a wooden arch painted white which would be the sight of the happy union.  The bride, forbidden the virgin’s white, wore a peach-colored gown and a sallow blush.

My cousins, uncles, aunts, and grandparents came from four states to see Randal Brackett’s oldest son get married.  Most of them didn’t like Randal Brackett; they thought he was ornery, materialistic, fat, basically a bastard.  They didn’t know his oldest son—the last time most of them saw Brandon he was twelve. 

It would have been a silly occasion if not for the unspeakable.  This was not a day to celebrate. It was tedious to my family; Sheila’s stood in mourning on the other side of the confetti-riddled No Man’s Land that would join my brother in legal matrimony.  There were hordes of them, and they looked horrified in their Sunday best.  Most of my family came in t-shirts and jeans. The plan was to end with a reception line of all four parents, me, the bride and groom, the bride’s five siblings, two sisters-in-law, and a brother-in-law.  Sheila’s niece was the flower girl, her nephew the ring-bearer.  There was no best man.

Mom had been the only one to honor the creed that the groom shouldn’t see the bride before the holy hour, but her illusions of a classical wedding quickly deflated in the somber atmosphere.  She overheard Michaela ask me to get her a soda and told me to find Brandon while I was at it. 

“Mom’s looking for you,” I told Brandon.  I found him sitting on Sheila’s bed softly crying. 

He wiped his nose with the cuff of his sleeve.  “I can’t believe you brought her here.”

“Michaela cares about you and wanted to come,” I snapped.  “You got some stuff to sort out and not much time.  Because you can’t be married like this, hating me for Michaela.”

“I’m in love with her, and she doesn’t want me anymore!  Why?  Because she likes my fucking gets-everything-he-wants brother!  There’s no baseball for Brandon Brackett, no, but my child will have a father.  At least there’s that.”

I’m telling you in that moment I saw my brother for the first time.  I saw an idiot boy with the entire world before him walking the plank because everyone around him said it was the right thing to do.  I felt a pure, pounding, spiteful rage toward him. 

I hit him.

He stumbled back, shocked, and I hit him again square in the chest with two fists.  He toppled over and I was on him, pinning him square to his back on Sheila’s down comforter.  My mind raced.  I felt sick to my stomach.  I said, “Don’t lay down and let them eat you and say you owe it to them.  You don’t owe anyone.  Don’t do this because you’ve been taught your whole life it’s the right thing to do.”

“It’s not right,” Brandon pled.  He was crying hard now.

“It’s not right that you get a girl pregnant and then don’t marry her?  Is it right you marry a girl you don’t love?  Is it right to make you raise a kid you conceived by accident?  Is it right to make you give up your dream, Brandon, is that right?”  I could hear myself getting hysterical.  My voice cracked and rose.  I was scared for both of us, of a future in which every action was to be half-doubted, a time when nothing was certain and men like Dad were mortal.  We stared at each other, both of us stunned.  “If you’re still single tomorrow morning, you will have earned all my respect,” I said, “but I don’t think you have the balls to do what you want.  If you want to play baseball, do it.  If you want to marry her, marry her.  Just don’t do it because it’s the right thing to do.”

I told Brandon to collect himself and come see what Mom wanted.  Then I got Michaela a can of root-beer and rejoined the jury.  “He’s coming,” I told Mom, and positioned myself next to Dad against the back fence.  Fifteen minutes passed and Mom asked me what Brandon was doing.  I didn’t know how to explain so I just shrugged.  A few minutes later she asked me again to go get him, but I told her he’d be out in a minute, cool your jets. 

Half an hour after I’d come outside they were ready to start and Dad volunteered to get Brandon. He came out alone, shrugging as he crossed the lawn.  “I can’t find him,” Dad said, “he ain’t in there.”

“Did you try Sheila’s room,” I offered.  He nodded.  Sheila’s brother asked who saw him last.  Mom told him, and everyone looked at me.  “What?” I said, “He was sitting on Sheila’s bed buttoning his cuff-links.”  Sheila’s older sister yawned. 

Half a dozen calls were made to his cell-phone but went directly to voicemail.  Both immediate families were on the hunt, and soon everyone in attendance was looking for Brandon. Sheila noticed his car was gone.  Mom called the house. No one answered. Dad drove home and came back alone.  He didn’t bother to call ahead—by then it was apparent what had happened.  

The children were restless and games of tag and kick the can broke out in the yard.  Sheila and Mom cried together, Sheila’s mother cried apart.  Sheila’s sisters in their matching peach bridesmaid’s dresses took turns squeezing the crying women.  The men on Sheila’s side congregated together to pick lint from their suits, preening like birds in the pre-gloaming light.  Sheila’s dad stood apart, arms folded, jaw set mercilessly to seethe.  My dad paced, and from time to time wrinkled his brow like a bloodhound, huffed, ran his hands through his thinning hair, took a deep breath.  He looked around like he didn’t know where he was and paced some more.  I could tell he was trying not to feel sorry for himself.

At sunset my relations started filtering out and I felt less and less welcome in the yard.  Dad apparently felt it too because he told me to get my mother, we’re going home.

Dad had stocked ice-chests of cold beer throughout the kitchen. The plan had been for our guests to leave around this time and come back to our house for snacks and beer and the unofficial family reunion.  A handful of people showed up, but no one was really in the spirit. Nevertheless, they felt obligated to eat pepperoni and crackers and make awkward small-talk for an hour or so before departing.  Dad cleaned out his ice chests and stacked untouched six-packs in the garage while Mom cleared the table of finger foods. Michaela, Mom, and I sat in the living room and didn’t say much of anything until ten o’clock when Michaela went home and Mom stopped crying to declare she was thoroughly exhausted and couldn’t stay up one more minute.

I found Dad sitting on the front porch with a six-pack of beer.  The light above the door was on, and I thought this was as it should be.  Dad and I would keep the home fire burning.  I sat down beside him and he offered me a can.  We sipped our beers and I said, “Do you think Brandon’s okay?”

He shrugged, “I’m sure he’s fine.” 

I thought about what it must be like to have Dad’s life.  I tried to imagine being married to Mom, having a job I hated, kids like me and Brandon.  All at once I was Dad, and he was me.  My wife was Carol Brackett, whom I had grown to love but was never in love with. My oldest boy, cruelly fated to follow me, had just left his pregnant fiancée standing at the altar, and I was sick with worry for him. My younger son was on the verge of graduating high school without a clue to bet on, and I was scared the coming world would leave him so quickly broken he might not survive.  I knew I had fought the good fight and come up short, that I had failed these boys. I was sick with worry, scared in my heart and tired all over, because I couldn’t see a future for either of them. I knew it was on me to figure it out, to fix things, to keep it all going.  I caught a glimpse of what it felt like to have life happen to you.  I had been on a rebellious streak and was due to be humbled, and that did it well enough. 

Sitting on the front porch drinking beer with the crumbling hulk of my father, I was overwhelmed with the desire to protect him.  I understood it was Dad’s life, and he would have to live it. But I wanted to wrap him in my arms and take his burdens upon myself.

CREATIVE NONFICTION

Gregory F. Tague
ORPHANED BIRTH-DAY

Morning

Invisibly-stained concrete umschlagplatz – market-place where the Nazis stifle-stiffen supple-robust lives. Railway-station families meat-packed, rancid. Vacant Warsaw ghetto, memory-warm.  No stately monument – nothing: just synchronous tangibility of children’s sun-blue laughter, coffee-brown baking, shop-bells dangling – permanent activity breaking still.

Watching – imaginary Pietà – her small unfamiliar snow-hands temper ours.

Quick-sharp eyes, coordinated movements reveal a forest creature captive: ravenously aloof.  Big-busy toy-store, items mechanical and whimsical intrigue – how do things work – how are they put together?  Silky whiskered-green cat mask beckons.  Existential consternation and malaise – dusking her expression with some other impression, illusion. Not wanting to be seen, yet seeing, welcoming incognito. Hiding behind and ushering forth.  Encrusted pupa emerging.

Mums linksmi? – nod-quick head affirms unexpected skeptical happiness.


Afternoon

Strangers in desolate doorways and run-down shops.  Suspended estrangement, days waiting for American visa, immured.  Down the Plaza Konstytucji, grand hotels: ours: graphic advertisements for prostitutes slipped under our door.  Lost enforced.  Bundled in hunger; a restaurant-affable greeting, dzien dobry.  Urged to the shadows of a coat-rack, bodies retreated together, backs pressed against musty-smelling wool, tiny Kucia stands in front, protected by our dangling shield-arms, marble still.  Diners fattened with hot satisfaction of pork and pastry, coffee and wine, limbs grab anxiously past and between our invisible inconsequentiality.

Waiting – feast at center, impenetrable somewhere, sometime.


Night

First wintry bath and Vilnius washed away, orphanage dirt-dust scenes no longer tasted, scents no longer tested on the tongue but packed in mind-secret burden.  Fingering hands clutched the orphanage railing, lingering departure imprinted with past hands; impressions dissolve – bubbly swirl down the Warsaw drain.  Essences simmer-steep in Europe’s ancient firmament, mingling for eternity in consanguinity with molecular remnants of medieval peasants, heroic knights, and war-ravaged victims. Tree-insect bits buried in amber.

Icicle-tiny limbs, birch-branch white-hard from years of lonely deprivation, starved on porridge smears and potato parts, koše ir bulves. Reluctantly-fading kitchen-familiar flavors.  Language stales, crust chips drop.  Past melds into the present; present drips back to the past – how much memory vintages into the future? Chrysalis-ripened wine.  Secular baptism frames strangeness – entry into parenthood – the shivered darkness that came before: no baby photographs, no history – consuming questions: From where have I come – Who am I – What do I have to remember.

Airplane aloft: refulgent-glimmering Baltic Sea stone-splashed: glint-texture, flint-granite, cliff clod-smell not forgotten – sculptured in memory, justness in nature.

HEARSAY

Shrikant Verma

Translated by Gagan Gill & Arlene Zide                                        

Sir 

please listen 

The Patliputra 

You and We 

are fighting for 

is just hearsay 

in other people’s eyes 

Haven’t you heard? 

It’s not even worth    

sticking to  it. 

They ask: 

which Patliputra?1 

Sir 

Now only you can answer

Please explain  —

This is the same Patliputra 

for which are fighting 

Ajatpatru,  Bimbisar 

Chandragupta,    

you and we 

Did you explain that? 

Sir 

did you hear their comments 

“Fools,  they’re fighting 

  over hearsay!” 

Translators’ notes:

Patliputra: Ancient city underlying what is now Delhi. 

Ajatpatru, Bimbasar,  Chandragupta: Ancient warriors and kings.

Original text:

THE BLOOD

by Adina Dabija Sângele   

Translated by Claudia Serea

I am thirty and I have known the blood

I am Ana’s second daughter,

Ana, who stuck a spindle into her uterus

to get rid of the baby.

That’s when I first saw blood.

I tasted it: it was warm and sweet.

The blood of my unborn brother tasted good.

After my mother died, my father took me to the city

to my uncle’s house, burdened by another story of blood:

after an abortion, my aunt couldn’t get pregnant anymore.

All my childhood, they gave me to drink

a thimble of red wine at dinnertime

to help me make new blood.

At twenty, I started to lose the blood:

on the bed sheet where I first made love,

on the bed sheet where I had my abortion,

on the operating table from Jacoby Hospital,

then in the maternity room at Columbia,

or on that June evening, when I was walking

through Bucharest’s downtown

and someone dipped a knife in my back.

I am thirty and one can trace my life

through several blood stains.

Each one carries a heart at its center,

tied to other hearts and blood stains

through millions of red threads

that weave between me and the shooting victims

at Lincoln’s emergency room.

Everywhere, there are pipes

that collect the blood of mutilated children

together with the suicides’ blood,

and pour it into the earth’s hungry mouths

where millions of worms are waiting.

The blood makes them fly like butterflies

in millions of colors, dancing under the starlight

through all the possibilities

of the flesh and soul.

Original text:

Am treizeci de ani i am cunoscut sângele.
Sunt a doua fiic a Anei
care i-a bgat fusul în uter
ca s  scape de copil.
Atunci am vzut eu prima oar  sânge
am pus limba, era cald i dulce, era bun
sângele fratelui meu nenscut.
Dup ce a murit mama tata m-a dat la ora,
la ni te unchi grei de o alt  poveste a sângelui
- dup avort mtua mea nu mai r msese gravid
toat  copil ria mea mi s-a dat s  beau la cin
câte un degetar de vin rou
ca s  fac sânge
la douzeci de ani am început s -l pierd
pe cear aful pe care am f cut prima dragoste
pe cear aful pe care am avortat
pe masa de operaie de la Jacobi
i apoi în salonul de nateri de la Columbia
sau într-o sear  de iulie în care trecâd pe strad  
în centrul Bucuretiului
m-am trezit cu un cuit înfipt în spate
am treizeci de ani i viaa mea poate fi trasat  în câteva pete de sânge
în centrul crora palpit  o inim
legat  de alte inimi i de alte pete de sânge
milioane de firi oare roii se es între mine i
împucaii de la urgene de la Lincoln
sunt conducte peste tot
conducte care colecteaz sângele
copiilor mutilai laolalt  cu sângele sinucigailor
i-l vars  în gurile fl mânde ale pmântului
unde milioane de viermi ateapt  
s  se desfac în fluturi multicolori
i s  danseze la lumina steleleor
întru posibilit ile crnii i ale sufletului.