Asemic writing by Satu Kaikkonen

Spring 2011

Cover image: "Dreaming of Darragh" by contributing poet Star Black

FEATURED IN THIS ISSUE:
Poetry by Vesselin Hanchev, translated by Hristina Keranova
Poetry by Martin Walls
Fiction and translation by Heinz Insu Fenkl

CONTENTS

FICTION

SHORT FICTION
Ajay the Lover by Sameer Pandya
So Much To Do by Patricia Schultheis
Sangre de los Santos by Heinz Insu Fenkl

FLASH FICTION
Rain Checking by Lucia Stacey
Missing by William C. Blome

POETRY
The Lattice of Otherwise and Sallying by Star Black
Catching Bears at Night by Kyle Hemmings
Sixteen by J. Tarwood
~ghost~ by Barry Anderson
Gibbous Moon and At Dike Bridge by Kirby Wright
Sometimes poets fail us by Sweta Srivastava Vikram
The Diary of Virginia Woolf and Lost Change by Askold Skalsky
O Happy by Bruce McRae
Small Engine by Martin Walls
Sacrament of Naps by Mark DeCarteret

NONFICTION
Conservation by Rachael Button

TRANSLATION
Paris Rain Sung by a Hurdy-Gurdy by Vesselin Hanchev, translated from the Bulgarian by Hristina Keranova

PLAYS
Excerpt from "In the Territories" by Mark. R. Jabaut

COMICS
The Wild Pigeons of Clearwater Cliff translated from the Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl

FICTION

SHORT FICTION

Ajay the Lover
by Sameer Pandya

That summer, the first woman he met had spent the previous three years on tour with Cirque d’Soleil. During that time, she created and performed a piece inspired by her training in classical Indian dance. Neela had recently left the Cirque because she was tired of touring and was now applying to law school. But there was a problem even before they met: she lived in New York and he lived in San Francisco. She was in the Bay Area visiting some friends. In the days leading up to their date, Ajay kept imagining her perfect dancer’s body. The thought aroused him until he remembered his own body, which had never been in ideal shape. He was a fat kid and he had grown into a tall, well-built man, but he could never get rid of the little rolls on his belly, no matter how much he tried. And in pictures, he thought his face looked fat. At dinner, she took off her jacket; she was wearing a tight, black tee-shirt that showed her flat stomach. She was taller than he expected. They met for Italian food and they talked through the courses. She ate well and drank half a bottle of wine. But he fixated early on the hoop through her right nostril. He loved nose rings on some women, but on her, it was unattractive. It induced a scowl on her face.

“Conversation was good,” Ajay said.
“And?”
“And, well, it made her look like a dyke.”
“I thought you liked nose rings.” Vikram was Ajay’s oldest, most patient friend and they had talked extensively about the things Ajay liked.
“I do, but it’s the first thing my mother will notice. She will take me to the side and ask me why I have brought that home.”
“You can ask her to take it off.”
“And she lives in New York. When am I ever going to move to New York?”

A pattern had emerged over the course of Ajay’s twenties. He’d go out with a woman, and around the one-month mark, he’d decide on their long-term potential. He said he needed one month to determine if there was enough passion and mutual understanding to carry them into a relationship. While he thought he had an effective formula, he remained unmarried as the rest of his friends paired off. Every once in a while, his parents asked whether he had any prospects.
When he passed thirty, the expectation that Ajay should get married sooner rather than later became more explicit. His parents never came out and said it, though his mother did begin to offer to set him up with the daughters of various friends. His parents had been married for more years than he realized, his older brother was married, and most of his cousins were either married, close to marrying, or in the closet. He’d noticed that his father treated his brother more as an adult after he got married. As long as he stayed single, Ajay remained a student or, at best, a young man. For his family, marriage, more than a good job and home ownership, marked the beginning of manhood.
He sent word out that he needed help. He requested introductions. Among his friends, there was a growing competition about who could best set Ajay up. Most of them didn’t really believe they had the perfect woman, but a competitive spirit had spread and everyone lobbied for their candidate. Vikram didn’t know any single women, at least any that would interest Ajay. He just wanted his friend to be married.

One night Ajay went to a club to meet a friend of a friend. The woman he was meeting brought along her older sister who had come because she wanted to see the club scene. At one point in the night, away from the noise of the bar and the dance floor, Ajay sat in a booth with the two sisters. The younger sister was nice, but they had little to say to one another. Perhaps there would have been better opportunity to talk if the older sister had not been there. But she was and she and Ajay did most of the talking. She had come to see the club, but seemed impatient with the loud music and the drunkenness of carefree twenty-five-year-olds.
She was in her early thirties and worked as an architect. Ajay had always wanted to be an architect because it seemed to him the perfect blend of art and practicality. He knew a little about the stars—Gehry, Meier, Eisenman, Foster.
“You know that Tadao Ando is finally building in America,” he said.
“Yeah,” she replied. “In Fort Worth. It’s a step up for Texas.” She didn’t show any surprise that he knew something about her world. Ajay thought that she should have been delighted. How many guys did she meet in bars who asked her about Tadao Ando?
Soon, the younger sister slipped away and he ordered them beers.
At first, neither of them said very much. He was there, after all, to meet her sister. But then a song came on that sampled a beat that they could not place.
“Rick Springfield?”
“No,” she said. But she did smile.
They tried to remember the original song and then they talked about the music they liked. She said she had been listening to a lot of Neil Young lately. The more she talked, the more comfortable and expressive she became. Her white teeth seemed perfect to him. She was the type of woman who never got cavities. They talked about movies and travel—easy topics for a first meeting. They had traveled around Spain and Portugal the same summer. She said how much she disliked romantic comedies. He would have agreed either way, though he disliked them as well.
He asked about her job.
“I worked at a large firm for several years with bad pay and a lot of apprentice work. But for the past year, I’ve been working for a smaller firm where I have a lot more responsibility. We also do a lot of public projects. I was a getting a little tired of designing people’s homes.”
“Can you at least do my house?”
“You can’t afford me,” she said and took the last sip of her beer.
They talked about the different architects she liked as they had another drink.
“Why are you so interested in all this?” she asked.
“I can’t draw a straight line so it’s nice to talk about people who can.”
Later they moved to the dance floor, and at one point, he was dancing with both sisters. He had his fantasies.
At the end of the night, the elder sister gave him her card: Sara Khalid.

“She’s smart, we had a fantastic conversation, and we have a lot of the same tastes. But it can’t work.”
“Why?” asked Vikram.
“Her family is from Islamabad. It would be fine for six months. But it can’t work in the long run.”
“Does she practice?”
“I don’t think so, but even so. You know I can’t be with a Muslim. It doesn’t feel right.”
“But she doesn’t practice. You’re not a practicing Hindu.”
“But it’s in the soul. She has a Muslim soul.” Ajay knew that this made no logical sense, but Vikram provided him the space to be illogical, to feel and not to think.
“Any other problems?”
“She’s too old and knowing. I don’t want anyone my age.”

In a booklet sent to all members of their subcaste, in India and abroad, Ajay’s parents wrote down his profile: 5’11”, fair complexion, BA and MBA. His mother called him at work one afternoon and said this one could not be missed. He had resisted set-ups by his parents before, but now, doubting his ability to find a woman on his own, he did not object. Madhuri was visiting California with her parents and they contacted Ajay’s parents after seeing his name in the booklet. She works in the movies, said his mother. He did not trust her ability to read between the lines. “Works in the movies” could have easily meant that she was an assistant on the set or was a script copier. When they met, he was glad he had allowed his mother to meddle. Madhuri was a knockout in the way that rich women from Bombay are knockouts: she had red lips, unblemished skin—quite a feat considering she lived in the tropics—and a fashion sense that was some mix of Bombay and LA. She was wearing a hat with the bill off center. They met at a nice Chinese restaurant. She came with her older sister and her brother-in-law.
He had taken to watching Hindi movies lately. She looked familiar and could easily have been one of the stars in the films. Her name—Madhuri Bhatt—was very filmy. But if she was one of those stars, why was she looking for a husband in California? Bombay had plenty of handsome men who were rich, worked out and wore earrings.
Once again, Ajay found himself talking to the other sister. Madhuri was shielded away and only spoke to her sister, and occasionally to her brother-in-law, and they conveyed her answers to Ajay.
Ajay began by asking about her involvement in the movies.
The sister answered: “Madhuri has been in a couple of small films, but there is a big one coming up. She starts shooting in September.”
“How exciting,” Ajay said. “What movies were you in?”
Madhuri whispered in her sister’s ear. “Madhuri’s disappointed that you don’t know.”
“I’m sorry, but work has kept me really busy.” He tried again: “What movie are you going to be in?”
“She can’t talk about that. It’s part of her contract. But it’s going to be big.”
Ajay gave up trying to ask Madhuri questions and started talking directly to the sister and the brother-in-law. She wrote for a movie magazine and he was a banker and they both lived in Bombay. Ajay and the brother-in-law talked about their jobs. He asked Ajay about management consulting because consulting opportunities were growing in Bombay and he wanted to move away from banking.
Finally, Madhuri asked a question. “Ask him,” she began, “whether he’s interested in living in Bombay.”
He knew the answer she wanted and he didn’t want to give it. She didn’t seem so pretty anymore. Of course, he liked the prospect of marrying a Bollywood film actress. What young Indian man didn’t? But he couldn’t get past the absurdity of this exchange. Was the process of only speaking to each other through intermediaries supposed to be coy, a method of creating interest? “I could see myself having a flat there, and spending three or four weeks a year and maybe a full winter now and then when I get the time, but nothing permanent.”
He assumed that eventually he’d find somebody, but as he was driving home from his meeting with Madhuri, he began to question that assumption. His life was a farce.

Ajay wanted to find someone long term, but he had short term needs.
At a party one Friday night, he started talking to Priya, a woman he had seen at various parties over the past year. She was part of his large circle of friends and acquaintances. When they finally talked, there was some spark, though she seemed more interested than he was. He knew she had asked a common friend of theirs about him. But as the night wore on, his interest grew. They slept together that night, but he didn’t call her for several days after. They met again the next Saturday night, had dinner, and spent another night together. In a bout of honesty the following morning, Ajay told her that he wasn’t interested in a relationship.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Neither am I.”

“Did you spend the night again?”
“Shut up.”
“You did.”
“Shut up,” Ajay said again. Though he’d enjoyed his evenings with Priya, he felt quite a bit of shame that their meetings were based on simple desire. He saw her several more times, but he didn’t tell Vikram.

At work, an attractive Jewish woman named Rachel joined his group. He didn’t know that Rachel was Jewish until she told him.
“We’re nominally Jewish.”
“Nominally?” Ajay was well-educated. He went to Berkeley and prided himself on reading widely, from The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal to biographies and histories. He loved to demonstrate his knowledge, but his intelligence could be dull at times. It was hard for him to handle nuance.
“I’m not religious and neither are my parents. No Sabbath for us. We’re just Jews.”
He knew about the Sabbath, but he didn’t know its exact significance for Jews. He didn’t ask.
They had this conversation in the first month they knew each other.
And in the months that followed, he talked her through a break up with her boyfriend of two years. She said she was convinced all along that he was the right person, and then one day, after he had been away for a week on a hiking trip with his college friends, he came back and said it was over. He said he was uncertain about her.
Rachel stopped eating and began to lose weight. Ajay started bringing her little snacks—a muffin in the morning, biscotti in the afternoon. He insisted they eat lunch together and he made sure she ate. They never talked about the fact that she was not eating. She was the slow crush that he’d not had as an adult. He found himself thinking about her in the evenings. A couple of mornings a week, he was excited to figure out what breakfast treat to bring her. For a while, he brought her croissants and muffins and other delicate pastries.
And then one morning, he brought her hash browns from McDonald’s. While he was getting them, it seemed like a fun idea. But as he was walking towards her desk with the bag in his hands, he felt he had made a mistake. He opened the bag and saw that the little bag they had placed the hash brown in was soaked with grease. He was going to throw it away, but he wanted an excuse to see Rachel. She always looked perfect first thing in the morning in her well-pressed suits.
“It looked much better at McDonald’s than it does now,” Ajay said as he placed the bag on her desk.
She opened up the bag and looked inside.
“You really don’t have to eat it.”
She took it out and had a bite. They chatted for a few minutes about a project they’d both worked on. “Are you traveling this week?” she asked. Management consulting required a lot of travel.
“Phoenix. Are you?”
“Tucson,” she said.
She finished the hash browns, carefully wiped her mouth with a napkin so that she wouldn’t smudge her lipstick, and slowly folded the bag several times before throwing it away.
“Have you ever been to the Grand Canyon?” she asked.
“Once with my family a long time ago. I think I was ten.”
“I don’t know how far it is, but maybe I’ll stop by after I’m done with Tucson. I’d like to see it.”
She’d left him an opening that he had been waiting for and now with it in front of him, he couldn’t move forward. He was scared of her. They were the same age, they liked the same kind of movies, they were both the middle of three children; they even looked alike in the way that Semites and Indians can look alike. And there was plenty of attraction. But he was scared because they were ideal for one another and because he had a good feeling about their long-term possibility.
“Yes,” he said. “You should check out the Grand Canyon. It’s a really nice place.” They talked about her client in Tucson and then he walked out of her office.

Vikram wanted to meet Rachel.
“They don’t marry outside their group. What’s the use of starting something if it isn’t going to go anywhere?”
Vikram asked what it mattered if it went nowhere. There would be some fun, and wasn’t that enough? Ajay said that it wasn’t. Vikram thought that if they started small, they could build up to something bigger.
“Has she said she won’t marry a non-Jew?”
“She doesn’t need to say it. I know.”
Vikram had found love easily. He and his wife often talked about how they fell in love. Being Indian helped initially—they had similar pressures from their parents; they took an Indian history class together. But they thought they fell in love because they experienced the intensity of college together. And Vikram remembered some friends of his parents who boasted, “Ours was a love marriage. Nothing was arranged for us.” Vikram had reached that ideal. His wife just happened to be Indian. He couldn’t understand Ajay’s insistence on being able to love only an Indian woman.
“You experience the same intensity because you are both Indian,” said Ajay.
“It helped, but it wasn’t everything.”
They were at Ajay’s place, having a few drinks.
“It’s in the soul. You only fall in love with a woman whose soul is like yours. You can only feel intimate if she breathes the world in the same way you do. I can’t explain it. There is a core that brings you together and language and the place you come from creates that core. Talking in Gujarati gives me an intimacy that I can’t have in English.”
“Your Gujarati is horrible. You butcher it.”
“It’s not that bad,” Ajay responded quickly and then continued: “Knowing that we come from the same place matters. She has to have an Indian, Hindu soul. Rachel and I look like we can get along, but we can’t. The essence is not the same. I know this sounds silly, but it’s the way things work.”
“Ajay, you’re drunk.”
“No,” he pleaded. “I’m serious. There are a lot of mixed marriages, but most people stay close to themselves when they get married. I just want to be like most people.”
Until recently, Ajay hadn’t questioned his parents’ decision to move to America, partly because they’d never questioned it. But now that he was an adult, responsible for his own happiness, he had been thinking about the move. From how his parents described it, and from the little memory he had, they had a pretty good life there. He tried to imagine the details of his alternate life had they remained in India. In a country with a relatively high level of poverty, his family’s upper middle-class status would have given them a good life—a large apartment in central Bombay, help around the house, a driver. And he’d been rethinking the possibility of an arranged marriage. For years, he thought such arrangements were old fashioned and unromantic. The men who willingly entered such marriages were wimps, unable to create their own social lives. Now thinking of them simply as introductions, the whole thing didn’t seem so bad. “If we’d stayed, my parents would have found a perfect match for me, letting the planets do the work. No running around, no searching in bars.”
“That’s right,” Vikram said. “That recent introduction went so well.”
Ajay believed in the importance of being with a particular type of Indian woman, and that he’d find the right one. But at that moment, it was hard to push away the confusion the search had created. Perhaps he would not find the woman he was meant to marry. Perhaps he would never get married. He hadn’t really worked through these thoughts fully because they scared him. And to defend against going too far down this path, he took another sip of his drink and said: “It would have been easier for us if our parents stayed in India. America has fucked us.”
Ajay looked at Vikram, with his goatee, his well-fitting jeans, and his beautiful Indian bride. Vikram caught Ajay looking at him.
“What?”
“You know you’re lucky.”
“With what?”
“You’re in a solid relationship. It must help you deal with anything that goes wrong. Bad day at work, but warm body at home.”
“It’s nice,” said Vikram. “It doesn’t solve all my problems, but it makes life easier. My parents are comfortable with the situation and so are Sejal’s. It’s comfort all around.”

The summer ended. For the next two months, he saw nobody. Partly he was sick of going on dates, but mainly he had already met or gone out with most of the women his friends knew. Now nobody was calling. There had been rain, cold rain, and now it was quiet. But then, as the holidays were nearing, he made another effort.
Ajay was apprehensive about many things in his life. He didn’t do things that he thought weren’t in his best interest. But there was adventurousness in him and he would try anything once. Vikram had told him about speed dating. Indian speed dating.
Ajay paid his thirty dollar reservation fee and learned that the event would be held in a Pacific Heights bar. How it worked became clearer once he arrived. There were fifteen men and fifteen women all between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-five. He walked in and talked to the “host” who gave him a score card and a badge with a number. There were fifteen tables set up for two. These were the rules: he would spend three minutes talking to the woman across the table from him, and then a whistle would blow and he would move on to the next table and talk to the next woman. After each conversation he would circle yes or no next to the number allotted to the woman he had been talking to. The host insisted that the circling be done discreetly. At the end, the host would collect the cards, marking the end of the evening. The next day, they would tabulate the score cards, and each man and woman who had met and talked, and who both circled yes, would receive each other’s email address.
The bar had a nice vibe—Nusrat on the stereo, generous bar drinks, and the lights dim enough to see clearly the person across the table, but not bright enough to scope out everyone in the bar. Though he recognized the irony, he thought the men were there because they were socially inept. He didn’t want to talk to any of them and no one made an attempt to talk to him before the event started. At eight p.m. sharp, the speed dating began.
The first woman, Mala, was a South Indian doctor. A pediatrician. He wanted her to be a heart surgeon, or a surgeon of any type. He wondered if she wore clogs. He found doctors in clogs very sexy. They talked about her practice and, as with other doctors he knew, that was all they talked about. Then the whistle blew, and Ajay circled no.
The next woman was getting over a divorce; she was not yet thirty. “You need to know sooner or later, and what’s the use of knowing later? It’s a waste of time for both of us.” Ajay liked her and he liked her unusual green eyes, but he didn’t like her divorce. Whistle and No.
Bela was next. She was a corporate lawyer who looked like she made a lot of money. He noticed her Cartier and her nice black suit—she said she came straight from work. She was born in South Africa, but had lived most of her life in California. She was beautiful. He wondered why she needed to come to such an event. They talked about the law and Ajay knew that he was going to circle yes. And for the first time that night, he began looking around to get a sense of his competition. Who had she talked to already and who was she going to talk to next? The whistle blew and he moved on.
The next one made his heart sink. It was the architect, Sara, whom he had not called. He sat down and they both started laughing. Ajay laughed partly because of the circumstance of their second meeting, and partly out of the guilt of not having called her. She laughed with her whole face. Right then, he felt very attracted to her. She had not laughed like that at the club. He asked her how her work was going. She told him she was working on a project to design an elementary school. Her firm was figuring out ways to make the classrooms and the play areas feel connected to one another. They were going to use steel beams and glass to make the school seem airy and light. That night at the club, Ajay had loved the way she talked about her work. And he loved the way she talked about it now. He wanted to ask her so many questions. Of the many first meetings he had with women that summer, his conversation with Sara had the greatest ease.
There was a second of silence after she was done talking about the school. “I was looking forward to your phone call,” she said.
He gave himself a couple of seconds. There was an easy way out of this. “I just didn’t think it would work.”
She moved her right hand back and forth between them, as if to draw a line in the air. “What about this can’t work? I am laughing and talking to you about my job. They are the two things I like most.”
Ajay had no response, at least none that he could say to her. The whistle blew. “I am sorry,” he said as he got up from the table. He felt sad, but resolute in his turn away from her. No.
The next six women were unmemorable, or memorable for the wrong reasons. One had a mole right below her left nostril, another had yellow teeth. He realized that most of the women that attended these events were not very attractive. He thought that this was one place where he was allowed to be completely shallow. This was, after all, a completely superficial event—in three minutes, all you had to go on was some physical chemistry, and then maybe, if you were lucky, one person said something that struck you as being interesting.
As he was going through the line of women, he felt a little bit of a panic. He had spoken with ten women and he had circled yes for only one of them, and she was the prettiest of them all. All the other guys would pick her as well. He didn’t really care, but he wanted some dates out of this event. He needed a bit of a boost to his ego. The panic continued until he got to the first of the last three women.
Her name was Stacey. It was an initial turn-off—either she had changed her name or she had the type of parents who would give an Indian girl a name like Stacey. But she improved. She was close to being done with her doctorate in biochemistry. “I want to make a lot of money working for a pharmaceutical company.” Ajay laughed. “I’m serious,” she said. He appreciated a woman that spoke freely about money. Whistle and Yes.
The next was Uma. She was short and nice enough and by the time Ajay had made it to her table, she was completely sloshed. She said she had had two glasses of wine to numb her nervousness and it was two glasses more than she regularly drank. She started making fun of some of the guys she met that night. She did not whisper. Ajay liked this spirit. The other women were so careful about how they came off. Whistle and Yes.
And finally there was Kavita. There had to be at least one Kavita in the room because one didn’t have to go far to find Indian parents who thought their child was a poem. She was pretty—thick black hair, high cheek bones, long, thin fingers.
“Nice cuff links,” she said when he sat down.
He tugged at the ends of his sleeves. “Thank you.” She was the first person that night to give him a compliment. She moved forward and looked at them closely. There were several different shades of blue stones set against a silver back.
“You’ll have to let me borrow them sometime,” she said. Whistle and Yes.
Then Ajay turned in his score card and fled the bar.

For their first date, Kavita insisted they meet during the day. Was he somebody who looked threatening to women? But by the second date, she was ready for the evening. For their third date, they went to see the extended version of Apocalypse Now that had just come out. Kavita had never heard of the movie, but she said she was willing to see it. He suggested it because he wanted to see something a little artsy. He knew that artsy could be pretentious, but he wanted to impress Kavita.
As they were waiting in line at the food counter, Kavita asked, “What is the movie about again?”
“Vietnam.”
“What goes with a war movie?”
“What goes?”
“In terms of food.”
This seemed an absolutely absurd thing to ask, but it made Ajay want to go into the movie theater and start making out with her the second the lights went out.
Ajay looked at the options, but could not come up with anything.
“Nachos?” asked Kavita.
“No. No serious food. Candy might be better.”
“Candy it is,” she said. When they got to the counter, she ordered Twizlers and Skittles and she asked Ajay to get some popcorn for himself in case she got a little hungry.
In the middle of the movie, after a particularly tense scene when Chef and Willard go looking for mangoes in the jungle, Ajay and Kavita looked at each other and Kavita maintained eye contact for a second longer than necessary. Ajay went in to kiss her, but Kavita said, “Shh. Later.”
But at the end of the movie, neither was in the mood for kissing.
“Wow,” said Kavita. “That was a horrible date movie.”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s fine,” she said. “I really liked it.”
They went for a drink after and they spent some time talking about the movie. Mostly they talked about Marlon Brando. “Did you see his hands?” she asked.
Ajay had not noticed them.
“They were enormous. He could crush a baby’s head with them.”
Ajay didn’t know how to respond.
“I mean that in this character, you could see how his hands make him seem so monstrous.”
“Have you seen him lately? He’s become really fat. He can barely move and he breathes real heavy.”
“Yes,” she said. “He reminds me of Shashi Kapoor.”
That may have been the moment when he first began to be seriously interested in her. Shashi Kapoor was an icon of Bollywood film in the seventies and eighties and was, like Brando, very handsome as a young man. But in his later years, he gained a lot of weight. Ajay had made the comparison once himself, and was quite proud of it.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you something,” she began as they were leaving the bar. “How many names did you get in your email?”
Ajay was embarrassed and thought about inflating the number. “One,” he said. “You were the only one.”
“How many yeses did you circle?”
“Four.”
“One out of four? That’s dismal, Ajay.”
“How about you?” he asked.
“I got four names, but I circled the other three before I got to you. I wouldn’t have circled yes for the others if I had seen you first.” She turned away as she said this, seeming surprisingly shy.
At the end of the night, it was Kavita who pulled Ajay to her and kissed him. Between kisses, she said, “If you wanted to get in my pants, you should have taken me to a comedy. That movie is going to set me back for days.”
They were together for four months, and he thought he had finally found the right woman. At first, they saw each other only on the weekends, but then they began spending weeknights together too. She was perfect in many ways: a high caste Hindu, a few years younger than him, a beautiful haiku. Her Gujarati was better than his. They went dancing together and played tennis on the weekends. It didn’t bother him much that she was a better tennis player. He felt justified in his insistence on waiting all this time for the right woman. He even gloated a little in front of Vikram.
But then Ajay got restless and a little tired. There was something overwhelming about her directness and her quirkiness. She was direct about what she wanted for dinner (“I hate sushi”) and she was direct in bed (“That smells a little”). At parties, she chatted with everyone. Ajay would still be hanging up their coats while she was already in the middle of a conversation, halfway through a beer. And then there was the drinking. She was a drinker—lots of whatever was available. If she started with beer, she ended with it. And if she started with martinis, well, she would end with martinis in the bathroom, over the toilet. Kavita was the type of woman he knew in college—they could drink with you, they were on the intramural soccer team, but you couldn’t go out with them. They were buddies. And Kavita had become a buddy, a beautiful buddy, but a buddy nevertheless. He had stayed with her so far because her directness and quirkiness were charming. She was a very funny woman.
He was a little scared of talking to her directly, so he wrote her a letter. He convinced himself that writing the letter was the better, classier way of ending their relationship. It would give him the opportunity to articulate his feelings fully. He wrote that he was confused, uncertain about the direction of their relationship, and thought it was best they spend time apart. It was not an easy letter to write. He had really grown to like her, but he couldn’t deal with her high energy.
Two nights later, she came over unannounced. He had been expecting her. “This is bullshit, Ajay. What the hell are you saying? This letter says nothing. I like to be upfront about things and I think I deserve at least that from you.”
Ajay tried to restate what he had written in the letter, but she stood there unconvinced. She had the power, somehow, to know when he was saying the truth and when he wasn’t. The only thing that would satisfy her was the truth.
“Okay, Kavita. You’re not the type of person I want.”
“Good,” she said. “What type of person am I?”
“You come on, well, you come on strong.”
“What does that mean? Please just say what you want.”
“Kavita, you’re a little too … I am looking for someone a little softer.”
“Softer?”
Ajay knew he shouldn’t say it, but she had been pushing him harder and harder. “Someone a little more feminine.”
He was done. Her face no longer demanded answers. Ajay moved closer to her because he thought she would want a hug, or something. But when he got closer, she popped him right below his right eye. It came quickly and ended quickly. It took him several seconds to realize what had happened.
“You fat pig,” she said and then turned around and walked toward the front door. He stood dazed for a few seconds. He didn’t know whether to be angry at Kavita for hitting him or at himself for being so insensitive. She had insisted on the truth and he had been honest. He was not to blame.
“Kavita, please wait.” As much as he liked the feeling of being a rogue right then, he thought it was not who he was. He wished he could just let her walk out the door. But they’d had too nice a thing together to end on such an abrupt note. “Please wait one minute.”
She turned around and waited by the front door.
“I didn’t mean it like that,” Ajay began. “It’s just that you and I are a little too different.”
“My parents are different from one another, but they’ve been together for thirty years.”
Kavita said this to show Ajay that difference was not the deal breaker, but all he heard was thirty years. “That’s a long time.”
“How long have your parents been together?”
“I don’t know, but somewhere around there. Thirty-five I think.” It was hard for him to imagine that long of a period with another person.
They were silent for a moment. He’d told her to wait to make himself feel better, but he had nothing to say.
Before Kavita turned to leave, she said, “I really don’t care that you think I’m not feminine enough. But it’s fucked up. You’re fucked up.”

Vikram came over a few nights later.
“What the hell happened?”
“Nothing.”
As he told Vikram the story, he kept touching around his right eye, encircling the sore area. It had turned an ugly shade of black and blue and gray. Finally, he placed his finger on the bone right below the eye, harder than he intended. He felt a sharp pain. And perhaps because of that pain, Ajay started crying. There had been a few times when thinking about his fear that he would find no one, he had come close to tears. But those times, he had resisted.
“This is not what I was promised,” Ajay said.
“What were you promised?” asked Vikram.
Ajay thought for a few seconds: “An end to this looking.”
“You can end it the second you want. But you won’t because you like it too much.” There was a sharpness in Vikram’s voice that hadn’t been there before. The phrase fell out of his mouth like he’d prepared it before hand.
“What do I like so much?”
“You know. The whole drama of looking around and the disappointment. You don’t really want anybody, you just like the process of wanting.” Vikram paused and then continued. “Things might be a little easier if you realized this.”
Ajay went to the bathroom to blow his nose and thought about what Vikram had said. He stayed there longer than he needed, trying to work through the various explanations for his continued failure. Perhaps he hadn’t allowed himself to practice being in long- term relationship. Or he hadn’t met the right woman. Maybe it was something deeper that he was a little scared to consider. But he could come up with no clear understanding of his situation. When he came out of the bathroom, Ajay asked, “If the lecture is over, can we go get a drink?”
They went to a place near Ajay’s apartment and sat down at the bar. Vikram’s wife Sejal was going to meet them there later. A woman, tall and attractive with dark blonde hair, was tending bar that night. They recognized each other from the times Ajay had come in on his own, but they had never gotten past the small talk in those moments when she was making his drink.
“Hey,” she said and placed two napkins in front of them.
Vikram ordered a beer and Ajay ordered a scotch.
She got them their drinks. But instead of going back to the other side of the bar, she stood near them and turned her head to the TV. She had never lingered like this before. The Giants game was on.
“Do you guys watch baseball?”
“Sure,” said Ajay.
They talked about Barry Bonds and the prospects for the team. It was early in the season. She introduced herself and offered her hand. “My name is Eileen.” They watched the game for few minutes until she was called away by someone at the other end of the bar.
Ajay leaned over to Vikram and whispered: “Women like injured men.”
Ajay watched her as she prepared drinks and leaned down to remove a few bottles of beer from the fridge. Of course, she wasn’t his type. But that didn’t matter right then. He liked the nervousness he felt around his shoulders and he liked the challenge of figuring out what he would say to her next. Come on back, he thought. Come on back here. And every time she seemed to be coming his way, Ajay could feel his chest constrict.
“Maybe you’re right,” he said to Vikram.
Vikram took a sip of his beer, smiled, but didn’t say anything.
“I really tried with Kavita, but I just couldn’t do it.” He heard his mother’s insistent inquiries, getting less gentle as he grew older. And he heard his father say without much irony: “Please, please don’t let me die with you still unsettled.” He pictured the many weddings he’d attended in the past several years. He was so tired of those voices and images. He was tired of the expectation he’d placed on himself. “I can’t produce the intimacy she demanded. And I don’t have patience to work through all the problems every day.”
“That’s fine,” said Vikram. “Some people aren’t meant to be in a relationship. I function better in one and you function better without one.” Vikram held up his glass to toast Ajay. “Here’s to uncertainty.”
Ajay took a long sip of his drink and then another. He wondered what happened to men like him. He couldn’t get Kavita out of his mind.
He got up and went to the bathroom. When he came out, he saw Sejal enter the bar. He stood back and watched them. She had a big smile on her face, as if it had been much longer than that morning since she’d seen her husband. Vikram got up and hugged her. They fell into some conversation and they both looked like they were genuinely interested in what the other was saying. Ajay had always envied the ease between them. He continued to watch as Eileen went over, took Sejal’s order and grabbed a bottle of beer from the fridge. And then she went and stood at far end of the bar from Vikram and Sejal.
This wasn’t about Ajay’s inability to commit or to love. And it wasn’t about him being a bit of a cad, though he liked the idea that someone might think that of him. This was about being selfish and feeling that it wasn’t such a bad thing. He felt free. And a little frightened of what lay ahead.
Ajay walked up to Eileen, ordered another drink, and as she was preparing it, asked, “Do you know anything about cricket? It’s a much better game than baseball.”

back to top

So Much to Do
by Patricia Schultheis

Lorna wasn’t the sort of mother to fling herself down on the couch as soon as the school bus left. She lived by her lists. Even after having moved to Maryland a year ago, her time sluiced away with trying to find the WalMart, the plant nursery, the Post Office, the pediatrician, the orthodontist.
But this morning a hurricane named Freddie was chewing up oceanfront highway in North Carolina, just three hundred miles down the coast, and she needed to know what to do.
At the bus stop, mothers had been talking about the storm but not with alarm. They had simply chatted in that sunny, East Coast way Lorna had noticed most of the women outside of Annapolis had. Tanned and lipglossed, they dropped the name “Freddie” casually, as if they were telling each other about a new wine shop or child restraint system. The extent of their concern being Freddie’s possible impact on their Labor Day plans.
Lorna had tried to listen ─ she’d never been through a hurricane and didn’t know what to expect. And her husband Eric was away in “Kosovo,” the code he used for wherever his company sent him somewhere so remote, or dangerous, or nameless, he couldn’t tell Lorna where in the world he was.
She’d tried to hear what the other mothers were saying so she could gauge how concerned she should be, but then the bus had come and she’d had to untwine Timmy’s fingers from hers and assure him again he’d “have a super day,” and call “Bye, Honey” to her daughter’s sullen, departing back. And, then, the bus had pulled away, and the other mothers hadn’t resumed speculating about Freddie. They’d simply waved to each other, leaving Lorna to climb the hill alone toward her own cul de sac without knowing what to expect.
Now she pressed herself into the fat arm of the family room’s couch and bent her knees so the soles of her tennis shoes hung over the henna-colored rug’s stylized glyphs. Her left fist cradled her right, which aimed the remote at the flatscreen where Freddie’s red circular saw blade spun behind a bald weatherman.
The weatherman’s attitude kept switching between exaggerated gravitas to forced jocularity, making Lorna feel she was swinging on a pendulum. How was she supposed to react? One minute he was cautioning that Freddie was a category four and warning about a possible storm surge, then, the next, saying, “Don’t cancel your Labor Day plans yet, folks. It’s the last blast of summer, so enjoy.”
Lorna wished he told people what to do. She’d been a communications major at Western Illinois University and knew the weatherman was just twinkling at the camera’s red light, but the sense of commiseration radiating from his eyes was so convincing. As if he and his viewers had managed to get through hurricanes together before and knew they’d do just fine if they just stuck together. But Lorna didn’t feel a part of the TV’s confraternity. If she and Eric went out to a restaurant and she saw the weatherman in person, she wouldn’t be able to go up to him and ask to have her picture taken with him like she suspected the other mothers could.
She’d grown up in the Midwest and seen how tornadoes can drill a hawk’s head through a barn roof. And from the time Eric’s company had them living in Monterey, had experienced the terror a wildfire can spawn, and, then, when they had to move again, this time to Duluth, how during a whiteout, life and death can depend on the brightness of a child’s snowsuit.
When she clicked the TV off ─ the weatherman was just repeating himself ─ a swath of black flooded the flatscreen, and she stared at it as if the darkness held some secret she needed to decipher. The TV’s sleek lines seemed twinned with the glyphs on the henna-colored rug, together expressing the yin and yang of the same phenomenon. The opposite aspects of a supreme indifference.
Lorna wished the storm had been named Frank or Fritz of Fernando, anything but Freddie. Freddie had been her father’s name, and she had always thought of “Freddie” as identifying a good man, a gentle man. A man with a tender soul. Even after her father was enfeebled by what was referred to as his “accident” and her crimped childhood of farm chores and school turned into one of relentless uncertainty, Lorna had clung to her belief that “Freddie” and a loving nature were essentially the same. Her brother Shawn, she knew, thought otherwise, and so did her mother, but for Lorna her father’s goodness was the pinnacle from which she surveyed the rest of the world.
And now, if Freddie pushed his surge up the Chesapeake, that name would forever be linked to loss and destruction, meaning one thing to everyone else and another to herself.
Out the living room’s Palladian window, she saw leaves hanging like sleeping, green bats waiting for some remote signal before flapping into life. Above them the sky was almost inviolate blue, a seemingly impossible home for a category four storm. But Lorna knew the blue wasn’t real.
One morning, when his company had them living in Monterey and she had been pregnant with Katie, she and Eric had munched doughnuts on the pier and watched the silly otters crack abalone on their stomachs.
“Look at that sky,” she’d said. “It gives you faith, doesn’t it? All that true clear color.”
“You know it isn’t real, don’t you?” Eric had told her. “You see blue only because sunlight hits the Earth’s atmosphere. Beyond that everything is black.” The wildfires came a month later.
She got off the couch and went into the kitchen. On the granite counter were the remains of uneaten breakfast, a soggy jumble of cartoon characters in Timmy’s bowl ─ nine and school still knotted his stomach, making him beg every morning, "Walk with me, Mama. Walk with me." And a bright, gaudy lipstick ring circling Katie’s unfinished egg-sausage burrito. Twelve and she already left lipstick rings. She’d come downstairs with a cosmetic clownface and a streak of artificial purple woven into her hair, but Lorna hadn’t had the energy to tell her to wash off the make-up and take out the streak, just as she hadn’t the strength to coach Timmy to greater independence.
With every move Eric’s company had them make Lorna sensed she was leaving more of herself behind, until she’d reached Maryland feeling she was vanishing altogether, disintegrating into a walking, talking shell, who shopped, cooked, and waited at bus stops. The companionship of solitude was becoming her greatest comfort and she didn’t want to unshroud herself from it to dig for the root of her little boy’s anxiety, or her daughter’s anger. She shoved the burrito down the disposal.
And, when she flipped the switch, the appliance growled like a creature wakened from a millenial slumber.
When she switched it off, a solid block of silence settled into her kitchen. Cleared of clutter, the room looked uninhabited, almost as if the four members of the Collier family could blow away without leaving a single imprint. She needed to make a list.
She clicked on her computer on the breakfast bar, but the list provided by the National Hurricane Center seemed self-evident. Water, blankets, games, precooked food, a non-electric can opener. Cash in small bills. But “Freddie” was a category four, and the level of preparedness he demanded was no greater than a category one did. Still she copied it down and then wrote “ATM,” “GAS,” and “Air Pressure.” Outside the window, a gust of wind grabbed the backyard trees, turned their leaves silver sides up and gave them a good spank, then flipped them right side up, leaving them looking as if nothing at all had hit them. Maybe that blast had been Freddie’s opening salvo. Or maybe it was just a random gust. Or maybe the leaves silver side up were just an illusion. Everything outside now looked so normal.
She printed “PILLS” in block letters on a separate piece of paper and stuck it under her birdhouse magnet on the refrigerator. Pills for herself and her children were as routine as grace before meals had been back on her parents’ farm. She zippered her list into her handbag’s inside pocket. She wanted to rest, she felt she just needed to stop, to close her eyes. But she couldn’t. She had to prepare.
In the garage, she was about to turn the key when she took it from the ignition and got out of the van. In the back corner near the riding mower was the generator Eric had bought in Duluth. If the power went out, she’d need it, but she didn’t know if Eric had put any gas in it. He was like her father that way ─ careful, so careful. Before his accident her father could spend two hours prying frozen muck from the tractor’s tread. Eric, in his thoroughness, probably had emptied the gas out of the generator before the movers in Duluth had loaded it for Maryland, but she didn’t know if he’d refilled it.
Since his company had them move closer to the security installations around Annapolis, he’d been so busy ─ this was his fifth trip to “Kosovo” since the move ─ that details like refilling the generator sometimes slipped passed him now. She didn’t know if he’d called anyone to clean the gutters either.
She unscrewed the cap, and a wave of gas fumes surged out. But they could be residual and not a true indicator that the generator had gas. She looked around. The garage was like the rest of the house, so new it hadn’t had a chance to get cluttered. Nothing random to use for a dipstick. No paint stirrers. No tomato stakes. On a wall hung Eric’s tools, some of them still coated with WD40 as protection from Duluth’s cold and damp, but she saw nothing that would work as a dipstick. The fumes grew thicker, until she could almost see them rising and falling in ribbons of green iridescence. Like the breath of some reptilian, metallic creature.
Both children had been so small when Eric had bought the generator for her ─ Timmy not yet two. There had been an ice storm and Eric had been away so Lorna had been alone with them without power. And Timmy had croup, but, of course, his vaporizer couldn’t work, and he only got worse from the fireplace, but Lorna had to keep the fire going because that was their only heat, and the temperature was below zero. And there had been no one to help because her mother and Shawn had the farm. Plus, there was her father and all the care his condition demanded. So when Eric finally came home, she’d been nearly catatonic with stress and exhaustion and he’d gone out and bought a generator so she’d never be without power again. But they both had known that a generator wasn’t what she needed.
She screwed the generator’s cap back on, but stopped herself from getting into the van. One spark was all it would take. One spark from either the garage opener or the van’s ignition and everything could ignite. Could go in an instant. Ever since her father’s accident she’d known that catastrophe could strike in a second. One tiny thing changes and forever onward, life is split into before and after. Or maybe into being and not being. She closed her eyes. If you’re not being, she thought, can you feel yourself resting? Or are you simply gone? She opened her eyes. She had so much to do.
To air out the garage, she opened the door to the back yard, but the wind swung it shut. She had to find something to hold it wide.
Up in the rafters, a two-by-two with a tiny platform nailed to it held her eyes with all the gravitational force of childhood memory. The platform was for a Noah’s ark birdhouse her father had given her. But the birdhouse had been lost in the move from Duluth.
“Where’s the rest of it? There was a Noah’s ark on that. Where is it?” she’d screeched at the mover offloading the two-by-two with its empty platform, but the man had only held it away from himself like a scepter and looked at her as if she were jibbering nonsense.
“Maybe they’ll find it when they take out the rest of the stuff,” Eric had said. But when the movers were done, she’d been upstairs with Timmy, trying to assure him that the tree out his new bedroom’s window wasn’t full of “scary birds,” and Eric had let the van pull away, taking the ark, if it was still inside, with it.
Now all she had was this empty two-by-two, and she didn’t know if Eric had saved it because he’d known that even this remnant was important to her, or if he just didn’t want a good piece of wood to go to waste. She opened the stepladder and reached for the rafters. Tall enough to play forward in high school before she had to quit, she still couldn’t stretch to the rafters. The two-by-two was over the van, and even if she got it, she might drop it and smash the windshield. And then, if Freddie hit, what would she do?
She got down and moved the ladder to the van’s other side and this time reached blindly for the end with the empty platform, feeling in its nail holes the Braille of her past. How improbable life was. To be beneath the rafters of a garage in Maryland, touching holes made by a man who had died before her own children had been born. And knowing, too, at this moment, those four holes, whose only presence was absence, held a memory stronger than any thought of her son and daughter sitting in classrooms not three miles away.
The rafters above her seemed sturdy, and oddly inviting, like a snug roost where a weary bird could tuck its head under its wing and escape into long, dreamless oblivion.
The silence of the garage was as deep as any she could wish for. It was inviting, not hostile and tense. Not the sort of brittle quiet that had risen with the grace of her father’s empty thanks in the kitchen every night at dinner even before his accident. Lorna had sat in her place at that table and watched Shawn pushing his food around his plate, and her parents, exhausted from everything undone, chewing mutely, until her father would get up and go into the little shed he’d made against the side of the barn. There, alone, he’d built birdhouses. Ingenious, inviting constructions: a crenelated castle, a log cabin, a Tuscan villa, a New England lighthouse, a fairy cottage, even an old undersea hotel with pink and green fishes swimming in and out the windows. And, of course, a Noah’s ark.
“A hundred things needing to be done around here,” her mother would say as she and Lorna washed the dishes, “and he spends his time out there on that nonsense.” And Lorna would wipe the chipped plates and wish for the courage to stuff her ears with the towel. Her mother wouldn’t let her father put up more than six of the houses because she didn’t want the yard looking like “some sort of crazy person’s place,” and she wouldn’t let him try to sell them in town either because he’d “look like a laughing stock.”
Still, after his accident, selling them had been just what she had tried to do, taking them all except for the two belonging to Lorna and her brother. Lorna beside her, she’d driven into town, saying when they reached the outskirts, “I should burn them, but we need the money. So we’re going to tell people they’re yours, hear, Lorna? Tell people that you made them. What he did, it’s all over town. Whatever they think of him, they’ll feel sorry for his daughter, and buy these stupid things. You hear me. Lorna?”
Krasmick’s Feedstore, The Broadstreet Café, and The Western Auto shop had each taken a few, although when she got older and could drive into town herself, Lorna never saw a single one of her father’s birdhouses anywhere.
She got down from the ladder, opened the door to the back yard wide, and wedged the two-by-two between the jamb and the step. Now, the leaves were flipping from green to silver and back again as if they were being jolted by a steady, alternating current. But the sky still looked calm. Except for a few late morning clouds tumbling across it, nothing about it looked like it was the home to a force eating up chunks of North Carolina coastal highway.
Lorna went back into the van, got her bag and took out the special phone Eric had given her. It was soft and flexible and, lying in her palm, it looked like a common facial tissue. She touched her thumb to its center. It read her print and a keypad and screen with a small red dot appeared.
They’d just moved to Maryland when he gave it to her. It had been their fourteenth anniversary, but Lorna hadn’t known who to call for a sitter, and they had never made a big deal about their anniversary anyway, so she’d gotten a new game for the kids’ Xbox while she and Eric shared a rotisserie chicken on the patio.
“Other numbers, like your brother’s, you’ll have to program in, but for me, just press the red,” he’d told her. “The agency let a few of the company’s employees have them. They’re not like anything available commercially. So try not to use it in public. Someone might ask you about it, and the less you have to explain about what I do, the better.”
She remembered looking at the stars and not knowing how to answer him. Not knowing why he couldn’t understand that she had almost no idea of what he did. Or why a security firm needed a physicist to go to “Kosovo.” Or how hard it was to connect to anyone when you had to move so much. Even after finding her almost mute with worry after that winter in Duluth, he still persisted in thinking her big bones and farm-girl perseverance meant she was resilient. Maybe for him, imagining another Lorna was too much effort. Just as it was for her to imagine whatever he did in Kosovo. With each return he seemed to just materialize, as if he had been teleported by some means beyond the limits of ordinary time and distance.
She’d just taken the phone and programmed in her brother’s number back on the farm, and her mother’s in the nursing home. The other numbers, the ones from the women in her Monterey book group and Duluth knitting circle, even while she was entering them, she knew she’d never call. The effort to fit in, to belong in those past places, had cost her the parts of herself she hadn’t managed to pack up and bring to Maryland where she had no numbers for anyone at all.
She pressed the red dot and listened to electronic signals triangulating into space and then back somewhere along the Earth’s wide arc.
“Lorna?”
“Eric?”
“What’s up?”
“You sound sleepy. Were you asleep?” Lately, fewer and fewer of her signals to him, or his to her, seemed to bend themselves to the Earth’s curve. Whole strings of meanings sailed off on trajectories of their own.
“No ... no ... you didn’t wake me. It’s just that ... What is it?”
“I just thought you should know ... they’re saying we might get a hurricane.”
“A hurricane?”
“A category four.”
Between every exchange she heard a silent beat filled with all they didn’t know about each other: Where he was ... the true circumstances of her father’s accident ... so much silence. As if quiet was the natural order of the universe, and sound served only at the pleasure of silence.
“I saw it, we get special bulletins here ... but that storm’s still down off the Carolinas.”
She knew better than to ask where “here” was. Knew he’d have to say he couldn’t tell her and she’d hear his disappointment that she still wasn’t comfortable not knowing. They lived by an unspoken pact not to prod, not to burden each other, but now she felt crushed by the weight of upspoken words.
“But it seems headed this way,” she said. “Up the bay. There might be a storm surge. That’s what the weatherman says.”
“We live two miles inland, Lorna. On a hill.”
“Not that big a hill, Eric. This is a category four. And we’ve got all these trees.” Even while his hands were moving over her, her body felt separated from the woman in her mind, the woman who turns to her husband and asks, Who am I to you? Tell me who I am to you. Tell me who I am. She wanted to grab one of the electrical impulses that carried her voice and sail to him.
“You’ll be okay, Lorna. Plus, with all those security installations, they have terrific emergency management now, especially around Annapolis.”
But she knew some emergencies defy management. Some emergencies transpire in an instant and split your life forever. “I know, but I was wondering if the generator has gas. I tried checking, but couldn’t tell.”
“Lorna, you’re not going to need the generator. And if you do you can always get gas. Siphon it out of the mower if you have to.”
“So it doesn’t have any? ... the generator?”
“I never got it filled. Sorry. But, listen to me, I honestly don’t think you’re going to need it.”
“I know it sounds crazy, but I wish they’d named this storm something else. Something other than Freddie,” she said.
“Why?”
“It was my father’s name.”
“So?”
“Even Fred wouldn’t have been so bad, you know. Just plain old Fred. I could handle that. It’s crazy, but I don’t want to hear ‘Freddie ... Freddie ...’ every time I turn on the TV, and if the storm hits here that’s how it’ll be.”
But as soon as she said them, she felt a cosmic wind stripping her words of their meaning, so that they’d arrive in “Kosovo” as only sounds, devoid of history of that shot she’d heard on an early September morning not unlike this one. A September morning when her father had walked past her sulking self with a shotgun to the shed where he made birdhouses. And fired it. Badly. Managing to blow out half his gut and spine, but not his head.
Nor would Eric ever really hear the echoes resounding afterwards through the bitter winters when the pipes froze and her mother had cried and kicked the washer. Nor would he know the moans of the cows on the dark mornings when Lorna had to do milking before the school bus came, or her stuttering explanation to her coach when she had to quit the basketball team because Shawn wanted to play and one of them had to be home to help their mother. No words could carry the weight of that history. And no other person, no matter how much they loved you or said they loved you, could ever receive that burden fully.
“They had to name it something, Lorna.”
A reasonable reply spoken in a reasonable tone. The tone of a voice, despite originating in “Kosovo,” that had the confidence it would land safely in a cul de sac outside of Annapolis in a community where self-assured women waited at bus stops and made plans for the last weekend of the summer.
For twenty-five years she’d carried the sin of her silence from that morning on the farm. She wanted to unburden herself of it, but she trusted neither herself to give voice to its import, nor Eric to fully understand. She couldn’t give it to him now. Not when he was working so hard to give her the safety of his reasonableness.
“Maybe it will all blow over,” she told him.
“It probably will.”
He asked about the children, and she gave him vague accounts, skidding over Timmy’s clinging to her at the bus stop and Katie’s stony moodiness, because she thought a gloss was what he wanted to hear.
And because she couldn’t find the strength tho give voice to her deepest horror: that her children carried within them the echo of that shotgun blast. As if its reverberations had reached them when they’d been only single cells in her womb even before she’d been old enough to bleed. As if that faraway sound still resounded in their innermost selves because she’d been helpless to stopper their ears. She looked up at the rafters. They looked so sturdy, sturdy enough to hold a dead weight.
“Lorna, did you hear me?”
“What?”
“I said our anniversary is coming up. Do you want to go somewhere?”
“Oh, I don’t know. Just let me get through ‘Freddie’ first.”
“I don’t think it’s going to hit, Lorna. I really don’t.”
She leaned a little in her seat and saw the generator in the corner. Its fumes had been so thick. How long, she wondered, do you have to burn before you don’t feel anymore.
“Eric, I have to go.”
“I bet you’ve got your list. Right?”
She wanted to give him something playful as a memory, something that wouldn’t distract and endanger him while he was in “Kosovo.”
“How’d you guess?”
“I’ll call tonight. Okay?”
But their signal was fading and when she said “okay” back, she didn’t know if it reached him. She got out of the van and went to the open door, where discordant bird cries split the air’s steady thrumming. She took the two-by-two out of the jamb, and ran her fingertips over the platform’s holes.
“Why didn’t you stop me,” her father had said the first time she’d brought Eric home to see where she’d grown up. But after admiring her father’s latest birdhouses, Eric had gone out to the barn with Shawn, and she’d been alone with her father in the little room off the kitchen where her mother had put him during the decade it took him to die. From his wheelchair, he had grasped her hand and looked up at her.
“Why didn’t you say something to me, that morning, Lorna?” he’d asked. She’d pulled her hand away, not knowing what to say.
She ran her fingers over the holes, and heard the ugliness of his question. the awfulness of his question ─ “Why didn’t you say something to me, that morning, Lorna?”
What was she supposed to have said while he clutched her hand and squeezed her fingers against her new ring. Was she supposed to have told him that she had been eleven and she had wanted the bird hotel. But he had given it to Shawn and made her take the Noah’s arc? Didn’t he remember that she had sulked and said that his birdhouses were stupid, and how he’d slapped her? Was she supposed to say yes, she’d seen him with the shotgun on that September morning, and, yes, she’d seen the deepened darkness in his eyes. But she had been eleven and couldn’t bring herself to say anything. Couldn’t bring herself to say, “Can I trade the arc for a castle?” Or “I didn’t like the hotel, anyway.” Or “where are you going with the gun, Dad?” .
He had been her father, and she had been eleven, and somehow the weight of her own anger and the awfulness of his gun had rendered her mute.
And now in this garage she saw that his dream of himself and hers of him as a good man had been a terrible fiction. She couldn’t have stopped him anymore than she could stop the coming storm. But if goodness wasn’t in her father, was it anywhere? And if her father was a false imagining, what was real?
She closed the door, and all the outside noise of the thrumming wind and bird cries died away. She got into the van and put the key into the ignition. But before she turned it, she looked out the window of the door to the back yard again. The clouds were tumbling into each other, merging into a mass nearly solid enough to block out any trace of blue.
She had so much to do. So very much to do.

back to top

Sangre de los Santos
by Heinz Insu Fenkl

1
On the horizon, night shimmers
like a mirage of inky squid.
—Elizabeth Spires, “Flashback”

2
Dreams were worse after my inquisition. Before they interrogated me I’d had flashback nightmares of the Santos Campaign, impressionistic jigsaws of things I wanted so badly to forget that they had become indelible on the black screen behind my eyes. But then, in the self-absorption that followed my release, I spent most of my time trying by various means to recover my lost memories. I had little time for other things, and if I had not promised to find her—if I had been less in love with her before her disappearance—I would have put those particular memories out of my mind as another bad turn in the karmic wheel and left it at that. Mourning, an extended period of self-destructive loneliness, and things would have gone on. But Lara was always unusual—she lingered even in her absence.
If I could tell it all the way a guilty man spills his sins in church, I would begin at the beginning and wind my way to the end; but the fibers have all dissolved, the wire pathways blocked, the paper singed at the edges and the ink blurred, bleeding. I discovered the things I tell as if they were a lost place in some dark continent when there were still dark continents on this world. I strained for metaphors by which to comprehend my story. Layer upon layer of writing over the palimpsest that is memory.
This is a confession, reconstituted of the memories, dreams, reflections, and hallucinations I’ve borne for that interminable time since I met her. This is the confession my unconscious makes to my waking self, the tale I tell myself, and it begins again, as it always does, with Lara.

3
I remember the skies above Santos black with smoke that obscured the evening sun, and in the distance a swarm of Army thoppers hovering—not so much hovering as vibrating—over a tree line, picking off stragglers with silent red and green triangulation lasers trailed by white blasts of energy. The thoppers looked like some Biblical plague of insects so far away; the air rippled with the sound and motion of their dragonfly wings, and the multicolored lights of lasers, fires, and energy beams reflected out from their bulbous cockpits as if they were mirrored globes above a dance floor.
We were making our way out of the city into the barrios that encircled Santos the way pus rings the scab of an infected wound. We were already careless. Some of us played local music over our ear transceivers, bopping the muzzles of our anti-personnel rifles to a paranoid and macho beat. We were cocky. Nothing short of a bullet in the head could have done us in, and we knew all too well that the locals were low on projectile rounds. Occasionally I’d see a dark face under a baseball cap stealing a quick look-see from around the corner of a shanty, and I’d squeeze off a blast that sliced right through the walls of the house. No one bothered to check for survivors or match limbs to torsos. That reckoning was for later, when the missionaries and social workers came to make their protests.
It was that stone numbness, I think, that made what happened possible.
Rhee was playing squad leader that day—he was the only one wired and yet sober enough to make tactical decisions on the spot. He gave the quick hand signal that stopped us all in our tracks, and we didn’t move, even when we felt the barrio sewage trickling over our boots. I shut off my music in the middle of a song, and the abrupt quiet left me tingling, my ears suddenly tuning for local noise and getting only deadness, natural feedback. Wilkes, the point man, was already around a corner.
Rhee motioned again, and we moved to whatever cover we could find. Then another hand signal: All electronics off. This was odd. We only switched off when there was a danger of being traced by other technology. We’re in a barrio, I thought. These people can’t afford bullets, and Rhee’s afraid of being exed by local tech? I switched my weapon to manual, eased it up alongside my body so I could reach down for my knife.
They appeared then—six of them—walking like corporate men and talking to each other in some muffled Eurolanguage. German? French? They were too far for me to make out individual words, but they were close enough for me to see that their uniforms were strictly non-reg—our colors, but like nothing we’d seen before—and they carried some type of modular devices that looked like detonators or electronic beacons. The two at front and end were toting standard anti-personnel rifles, but they were oddly casual about it, as if they didn’t expect ever to use them, as if the weapons were a mere formality, part of a costume.
They didn’t move like soldiers who knew their lives hung on the placement of each footprint on uncertain earth; they walked as if they were strolling through a training exercise that had ended, and now they were relaxing, taking in the scenery, looking for odd details behind the Potemkin facades of a false village. Their eyes, even at this distance had the look of idle curiosity and not caution.
Rhee gave the signal to put an end to their military innocence. They could not possibly have known what hit them, and yet they fell as if they had carefully rehearsed that part of the charade. Or maybe dying is a role that comes naturally to us all.

4
I remember calling in the medivac request for the single survivor and getting laughter on the line. “You wanna lift out a fuckin’ beaner? We’ll send a guy with a burro, pronto.”
“It’s a uniform,” I said. “Foreign. We can’t ID him.”
“Ain’t wearing a blue UN helmet, is he?”
“Fuck you.”
“Your sector’s strictly low priority, man. You got a chopper dust-off comin’. Hang on.”
“A chopper?”
“Helicopter. ‘Swat they fly down here, muchacho.”

And so we waited for the helicopter to come. We rummaged through the strange uniforms for some sort of ID that might tell us how these people were aligned. Nothing.
I noticed that their skin was not the skin of soldiers, their hands uncalloused, their faces unburnt by sun and unblemished by chemical rashes. Even in death their eyes were somehow clearer than ours—less red, less harsh—their lips fuller, their muscles less wiry.
Montoya slowly cut the uniform off one of the women, checking for transmitters or other electronics hidden in the fabric. Her undertunic was a plain synthetic weave, though an expensive one. And she wore a piece of lingerie under that—a black lace bra that Montoya sliced away as a matter of course, exposing her pale breasts.
“Oooweee!” said Phillippi. “I wish I coulda’ had a mouthful of that when she was still jouncin’, man! Bouncy bouncy.”
“Shut the fuck up, P.” Montoya continued cutting the uniform away, and then he moved the woman’s naked limbs, turning them this way and that, feeling the upper arms and armpits for implants. Nothing. He turned to us, his expression rather puzzled. “Where would they keep it?”
“I hear they got these transferable data pods you can interface with through your pink tissue.”
“Ain’t no pod workin’ in this bitch,” said Montoya.
As he peeled away the bottom part of her uniform I saw the extent of the damage and turned away.
“I seen worse from anti-personnel flechettes,” said Montoya. “This shit looks like needle rounds. See—what looks like wire shrapnel here and here. That’s the round. Ultra hi-V designed to go unstable when it hits density like water.”
“Well, fuck. She ain’t no puddle,” said Phillippi.
“You, P, I’d say you’re mostly made of shit,” Montoya replied.
“Fuck you.”
Rhee nudged Montoya out of the way, leaned down, and pried out one of the woman’s molars to read her ID filling. What he found, instead, was some sort of bad joke. “This is some fucking product registration,” he said. Up close, we discovered that the uniforms were tailored, and the things they carried were also tailored, but in ways that we could never have hoped to understand at that moment.

5
We all crouched instinctively when the helicopter alighted, shrugging our necks down into our shoulders though the rotors were so high there was no danger. The air was thick with the beat of the blades.
I jogged towards the chopper, expecting a medic, but the woman who emerged was a soldier, an infantry grunt like the rest of us with nothing—no special insignia—to distinguish her as belonging to the medical corps or to a medivac unit. She lugged a portable emtek unit down from the bed of the chopper and looked in my direction, saying something that was lost in the frantic pulses of sound as the rotor wash blew her words away. I read her lips: “Where is he?”
She wasn’t wearing a transceiver, so I walked all the way up to her and shouted into her face. “We wanted medivac! Who the hell are you?”
“You’re low priority!” she said.
“What’s this low priority bullshit? How low? You at least a tek?”
“I’m good enough!”
Instead of replying, I helped her hump the emtek unit back to the dying man, open the casing, lay out the console. She looked up at me to say thanks, and the moment I saw her eyes I had a premonition of death. Not mine—no one’s death in specific—but the idea of death, the sensation and process of death. It was as if a Thanatos impulse had suddenly washed over me, and I imagined what it would be like to stop in the middle of drawing breath, for the lungs and the heart to shut down in mid-rhythm without warning, for the vision to go black, for the sound to die into black silence—for all sensation then thought to cease.
I remembered suddenly waking one night to find my father leaning over me, his face dangerously close and looking startled, as if I had interrupted him in the middle of something secret. “I’m sorry,” he said before I could speak, “I was trying to determine whether you inhale or exhale as you fall asleep.” Do we inhale or exhale at the precise instant of a natural sleep, a natural death?
Lara wasn’t a medic or a real tek, but she was competent. That evening in the barrios outside Santos, she was our personal angel of death.

6
I remember the look of concern on her face, the short vertical furrow between her thick brows, the slight downward turn of her lips, the liquid look in her dark eyes (which I took to be empathy). She injected the man with a speed syringe, right through his chest, and she had him hooked up to the portable emtek machine in the interval between my nervous glances at the shadows lurking in the shanties around us. She didn’t even look at the readout on the machine, but I knew she could tell that the man wasn’t going to make it back to the medivac hospital.
“I hate this shit,” she said. “Why did you even bother?”
The man whispered something, and she leaned her head down until his lips were brushing her ear. I watched his right fist slowly clenching and unclenching as he spoke, mimicking a dying heart, I thought. She was looking away from me, but then she turned her head to place her other ear against the man’s lips, and he seemed to speak more lucidly for a moment, leaning up the tiniest bit, straining the tendons of his neck and opening his pale blue eyes just a little wider, catching the last light of day in the tears that were leaking down out of their corners. She nodded, and he moved his right hand up, clutching her wrist for one final squeeze as he said his last words and coughed a mouthful of bloody froth against her cheek. I expected her to jerk her head away, but she didn’t. She remained in that posture, looking towards me. A sort of energy seemed to pass between us at that moment, as if an invisible beam of particles had linked our gazes and those two parallel lines of energy had transmitted the essence of the dead man’s soul between us. I cannot remember anything else from that moment but her eyes, two points of darkness. That is my memory of Lara.

7
“You stay here,” she said. “Watch him.”
“He’s dead.”
“Watch him!”
I shrugged and lit a cigarette as she paced off with Wilkes to where the other bodies lay.
“I don’t like this,” said Rhee. “I just got an order from the top to secure this area till help arrives. What do you think, Herzog?” He was mouthing to me, speaking without sound so I had to read his lips, meaning that he didn’t want his ear transceiver catching any of it. “They say not to look or touch, even if it’s a survivor.”
“Want me to stop her?” I mouthed back.
“Got the message after she went for it. She takes the flak.”
I nodded. “I want to know, too.” I pointed at my temple with my cigarette. “Inquiring mind.”
Rhee laughed, the smoke from his nostrils vanishing instantly in the prop wash. He ordered a perimeter, but waited until he had finished his smoke before he moved over to intervene in what Lara and Wilkes were doing.
Even from my new position I could see that something was not right. We had all expected her to examine the bodies, but she was looking at the equipment they had dropped. Over the channel, I could hear Wilkes’ murmurs of incredulity—inhalations of surprise—noises that told us he lacked the words to express what he felt. The light was poor now. Shadows had stretched across the street and engulfed everything in a thin layer of darkness, and the barrio was deathly still even with all the nearby shanties trembling to the pulse of the chopper blades.

8
“I don’t know why she did it,” said Wilkes. “I think it was some classified shit we weren’t supposed to know about.” The chopper was gone and we were waiting in the dark for our own late dust-off to arrive.
“Did she know what it was?” said Rhee.
“Yeah. She knew how to open and close the cans. There was one with some stuff leaking out like meat juice. Fish sauce. Smelled like rotting fish. She put some of it in a sample tube and snapped the can shut. Just like that. Click.”
“What was in it?”
“I don’t know. The can had readouts on it like temperature and stuff like that. Like a vital signs monitor in the hospital, you know?”
“You were making some pretty funny noises,” I said. “Looking at surprise presents?”
“Fuck you, Herzog.”
“Why the surprised sounds?” said Rhee.
“She started fuckin’ around with the cans. She changed some of the functions on the indicators and read them out loud like she was trying to remember them but she stopped when she realized I was there, too.”
“Remember any of it?”
“Kelvin temperatures, some list of different proteins, a bunch of different chemical names. I think there were organs in those cans. ‘Hepatic’ is something to do with livers, right?”
“Yeah,” I said.
“Then I think there were livers and kidneys.”
“What about the stiffs?” said Rhee.
Wilkes smiled. “I’ll trade you this for a smoke,” he said, holding out a coded plastic ID card.
Rhee took the card and held it under the beam of his flashlight, turning it over, then over again. There was nothing particularly remarkable about it—it was like the cards we all carried, with a photograph, a coded hologram, and a couple of microchips embedded in it. The front of the card showed a rather sallow and slack face, the face of a scientist or a lab tech, not a soldier. Under the photo, there was no name and number as there were on our IDs. It said, “T310332 - BZL.” “BZL,” said Rhee. “Brazil? Or would it have to be BRZL?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s never that consistent.”
“Why no name? This is against the latest Geneva Convention unless he’s got numbers for a name, ungh? And this hologram isn’t any unit designation we’ve been briefed on for this operation.” Rhee tossed Wilkes his last pack of cigarettes. “I don’t like this at all.”
“Thopper,” Phillippi called from the darkness. “Due north.”
Rhee made sure all of us still had our transceivers off before he called everyone together. “None of you knows anything,” he said. “You let me explain the situation and take the heat. All you know is we surprised a bunch of amateurs and blew them away. We don’t know who they are. That’s it. Got it?”
Our answers were drowned out in the vibration of thopper wings, and before we knew it we were sleepwalking through the routine of clearing the Landing Zone, loading up, counting off as we were suddenly looking down on the few tiny lights of the receding barrio beneath us. I was shivering from the cold air, feeling light with the possibility of life once again. From the thopper we could see the moon and the stars that had been invisible from the tree line. As we rose higher we could see the mass of the jungle stretching out beneath us like a black ocean, the serpentine veins of glinting light that were the rivers, even the gentle curvature of the earth. The ugly become beautiful, the awful become mystery.
“Hey, Wilkes!” I said. “Bum a smoke?” He made a pinching motion with his thumb and forefinger and I tossed him my cigarette tube, almost losing it in the wind. He filled it from his pack, lit it from his own smoke and passed it back through the squad so that I had less than half a charge when it finally got back to me.
Rhee was hunched between the pilot and copilot, his head bobbing up and down as he agreed with something. Phillippi and Hernandez were taking turns naming constellations from the other side of the thopper. I could barely hear their voices ticking back and forth: “Ursa Major, Andromeda, Scorpio, Orion, Cassiopeia.” Laughter. “You stupid fuckers, we’re in the southern hemisphere! You can’t see any of that shit from down here!” “Sure as fuck can!” A pause. “Yo, everybody,” said Phillippi’s voice, “check out that falling star. Looks like a fucking comet!” I craned my head around to see out of the other side. I saw Rhee pull back out of the cockpit. The pilot turned his head. “We’ve got blind spotting on the tactical,” said Rhee. “Look out the por—”
Suddenly, the thopper lurched down to the right and we were all scrambling for handholds, our gear sliding across the floor and disappearing into the night. Past the silhouettes in the open doorway I could see the beautiful falling star growing larger and larger, filling the frame of night with its brilliant tail of fire until everything flared white.

9
My nose was full of clotted blood, and the pressure in my head told me I was upside down, dangling by my legs. I slowly raised a swollen arm, moving it upwards, against the fierce pull of gravity, and wiped the blood from my eyes. Green light. Green shadow. Intermediate greens in infinite gradations, subtle and distinct, as numerous as all the names of God. Upwards, at my feet, a black silhouette with a rectangle cut through it, and in that rectangle the brilliant light of the sun. Down past my head the world was shadowed and noticeably cooler, more humid.
Hanging in the gardens of Babylon. Swaying upside-down in a warm and pleasant breeze. They say that life begins high in the jungle canopy, that dead things fall to the bottom and feed the voracious living. I realized I was alive, and that thought was enough to lapse me back into unconsciousness.
It was the noise that woke me the second time—not the wild chattering or the hysterical shrieks of a thousand different birds—those had blended into a comforting background resonance with the pounding of my own blood. It was the odd noises, just within my range of hearing, ones that sounded like some bodily creak or rumble, that cut into my sleep and opened my crusted eyes again.

10
The river coiled out in a great empty silence. The jungle along either bank was a chaos of flora and fauna chattering with sound enough to drive you mad, but the surface of the river was absolute order, the order of emptiness. As our improvised raft drifted in the silent current, alligators slid into the water, almost as an afterthought, and swam toward us, appearing and disappearing amongst the muddy ripples. We were lost on that river as surely as we would have been lost in the jungle on either side. We were floating at the whim of the current just as we might have followed some irrational whim dying of thirst in a desert. All day, as time grew distorted with the terrible sameness of everything, the raft bobbed up and down in the water, tracing the contours of an unraveling sine wave.
The copilot lay outstretched in the center of the raft, his head pointed downstream. We had given up trying to remove his helmet; now, in his blood-crusted flight suit he looked like a giant goggle-head dragonfly only partially emerged from its larval body. I had pried off the panel in front of his mouth, so he could speak now, in a low, distorted voice, and be heard by anyone who wanted to listen.
“Hurts,” he said. Then he made some unintelligible noise. He said it again. “Hurts. . . .”
I wiped the stuff that was oozing from the neckline of his helmet. I was about to say some sympathetic thing when I realized he was trying to say my name.
“Hey,” I said. “Sorry we couldn’t save the med kit.”
“We won’t find the channel,” he whispered. “Hurts.”
“It’s Herzog, bro.”
He whispered again, so I leaned close enough to his face to smell the festering inside the helmet.
“Somebody cursed us,” he said. “We been cut off forever. From everything. We’re far away from everything. Might as well be in some other existence, Hurts.”
“We’ll make it out,” I said with false confidence. “If we’re lost, then they’ll find us, right? You’re a navvy, aren’t you?”
“Yeah. I got a chip in my helmet they can track anywhere on the planet. But that’s not where we are today, is it?”
“Then where are we?”
“We’re in hell, man. We’re on the back of the snake that’s takin’ us to the devil’s asshole, and we ain't’ goin’ nowhere else.”
At the moment, Rhee casually leaned over and pulled the visor over the copilot’s face. “Don’t listen to this shit, Herzog. Things are bad enough without the mood he’ll put you in.”
A buzzing sound came from under the visor. In a moment it turned into a bubbling noise and I opened him up again. The copilot smiled, squeezing a line of blood and mucus from between his lips. “They give us these drugs, you know? To help us visualize when the system goes down. Ups our seratonin and melatonin and screws with our cognition sometimes.”
“Yeah, we all got stories about nice drugs, bro.”
“Sometimes weird shit happens. Some of us can navigate by goin’ to where we’re goin before we get there. That make sense to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You guys do CRV?” said Rhee.
“Yeah. But after a while it’s all bullshit, and we just do the Remote Viewing freestyle.”
“Why are you telling us this classified shit?” Rhee said.
The copilot looked directly up at the empty sky and closed his eyes. “Sometimes my past comes back to me when I should be payin’ attention to something else. But it’s all mixed up with stuff I imagine. Like now, you know. The jungle. I know it’s all alive, and it’s waitin’ to get us. It wants revenge. But after a while you get used to it and you don’t see it anymore. There’s no time.”
“It’s just paranoia,” I whispered to Rhee.
“No,” said the copilot. His eyes flickered open momentarily. “When I was a kid I used to lay down on clear days and look up at the sky like this. When it fills your field of vision—no clouds—you feel like you’re flying through space and you can feel the world spinning under you. You go places without realizing.”
“You’ve been somewhere? Where we’re going on this fucking raft?”
“Yeah. But it’s a big bandwidth. Lots of different channels. You have to keep guessing at first, you know? Mostly trial and error. But after a while you can choose. You get to pick which channel.”
“Which channel did you pick?” I asked. “You see a happy ending with R & R in Grenada?”
“Yeah. Sure. You just look out for the hidden stuff. I already kept the lookout for you guys, and now I’m just dead wood.” His eyes grew a little wider, as if he were concentrating hard on something high above us, directly overhead. “Sometimes you get to choose the channel, right? Click.” He stopped talking.
“Hey, what about the ending?” I said. “You didn’t tell me the ending.”
The copilot’s expression didn’t change. I leaned over his face and noticed his eyes were still open, unblinking.
“He’s dead,” said Rhee. “Doesn’t it piss you off when they go like that without finishing the story?” He reached over and pulled the visor down once again and snapped it shut. I wanted to roll the body off into the river, but Rhee pointed out that the dead weight kept the raft more stable. “You want to say a few religious words, go right ahead, Maurice.”
“Never mind. He picked his own fucking channel, so we’ll leave it at that.”
“I’m guessing things don’t look good for us where he’s been.”
“Can’t be any worse than this, can it? I keep trying to imagine all the signs I must have missed. I keep trying to remember and read through stuff so I can see what must have been hidden underneath, but then my imagination gets in the way.”
“Concentrate on the surface, Herzog. On the mundane. Don’t worry so much about who’s watching or your mind might leak into the landscape and you’ll end up feeling it all the same.”
“Feel what, Rhee? I’m not feeling nothin’ at the moment. I’m hypnotized to keep the fucking pain away because we used all our morphine on Satan’s asshole over here.”
Rhee smiled. “Paranoia. It clouds the mind. A Polish guy wrote a book about the Congo a couple hundred years back. He didn’t know it was a Buddhist book. Boatload of guys looking for a madman, going crazy themselves on the river. He said ‘you become part of that mysterious stillness watching yourself at your monkey tricks.’”
“Monkey tricks?”
Rhee lifted an arm and pantomimed an itch, but the motion caused him to wince in pain.

11
It was all a charade, of course. We were low-end infantry—just grunts—and unlike HQ and intelligence units, we didn’t carry brain implants they could detonate remotely. But without a fully-equipped surgery to cut out the other telltales the Army had intruded into us, there was nothing we could have done to escape the surveillance satellites. They could have done us the honor of infiltrating a squad to hijack us out while we were on the river, but it was cheaper just to monitor our vital signs and mark time until we straggled out on our own. No casualties, then, beyond the attrition to nature, and if we all vanished in the jungle, what the hell. They’d blown our thopper in the first place.
A camouflaged Marine hovercraft intercepted us as we drifted out of the jungle where our black river collided but didn’t mingle with the muddy brown water of the main tributary. The grunts who arrested us didn’t even bother manhandling us. We were too far gone, tortured by the river in ways far crueler than what they could engineer.
In Manaus a Marine captain checked us into the infirmary and did us the favor of treating our major injuries. Two days of convalescence before they marched us to the CO to beat us half to death. I’m certain they were assured we would feel more pain that way.

I’m told that she had seen something she wasn’t supposed to see, that she had glimpsed something secret and knew that it was taboo. During the campaign we all walked on the thin ice of privileged information each moment of our waking lives. Some of us could skate that ice and others often looked down through the transparent patches—but only momentarily—and did not want to know what they had seen. That’s the way it was with us, but for Lara the gaze had more meaning. She would have failed Major Yamamoto’s test of the three ivory ministers.
By the time they brought us before Yamamoto sixty days later, Lara had disappeared. I recollect that meeting now with relative calm: Even before it begins, Rhee and I both know it will be disaster. The room is thick with power and authority, laden with the sickening scent of corporate smugness and superiority—the things that were bound, more than anything else, to get on Rhee’s bad side.
Yamamoto was a lean but somehow corpulent man, with a glassy sheen of cologne and sweat on his face. He liked to sweat; the temperature in the room was turned high, and I could feel an unpleasant dampness on my own flesh, as if something about Yamamoto himself was contagious. “Sit down, gentlemen,” he said, motioning with a pair of red lacquered chopsticks. Simultaneously, Rhee and I noticed the plate of food in front of him—a heaping dish of what looked like King prawns under a glaze of Szechwan garlic sauce. Yamamoto put one of the prawns ceremoniously into his mouth and bit down soundlessly. I could see his jaw muscles tense for an instant as his teeth cut through the meat. “Gentlemen,” he said, speaking, this time, around the wet contents of his mouth. “Gentlemen, I am glad to see you, finally. We have very much to discuss.”
“We don’t have much to discuss,” said Rhee. “Let’s get to the point.” His lack of protocol startled me. Rhee was usually polite and formal in situations like this one; he had a lot of what he called nunch’i about conducting military business. But Yamamoto was an independent security contractor who worked for the Criminal Investigations Department.
“Then by all means we shall get to the point,” said Yamamoto, resting his chopsticks on a small ivory stand. He motioned to a box standing on one side of his desk. “Please, open the box while I recount a small but significant tale.”
The box opened like a shuttered window, and inside we found three identical ivory figures, each about thirty centimeters tall, packed in straw.
Major Yamamoto leaned back in his chair and spoke to the room: “This is a story of the wise king who saved his people by solving the riddle of the three ministers. The invading armies had stopped at the border of his kingdom, and an envoy came to the city with a beautiful box. Inside, packed in straw, were three ivory figures like the ones you see before you. ‘Your highness,’ said the envoy, ‘my master instructs me that I am to ask you to select the wisest minister from among the three. I shall return at dawn for your answer. If you have chosen correctly, my master will withdraw his armies, but if your choice is wrong, then you must surrender, or my master’s armies will attack and leave not a stone of your city standing upon another.’
“This was back in an age when wisdom and honor amounted to something,” said Yamamoto. “The king knew that the envoy’s master would abide by the terms of his challenge. He spent a sleepless night in despair, comparing the figures in every possible way, but he could find no difference between them. And then, in the morning, as he was about to admit defeat, he found the secret and chose the right minister. He saved his kingdom.”
“You want each of us to choose one, or one between the two of us?” said Rhee.
“It is not that sort of test, Sergeant. I am far more interested in the logic that guides your choice than the choice itself. A disease is more significant than its mere symptoms.”
Rhee carefully picked up one of the ivory figures and turned it in his hands, studying it, I thought.
“How would you go about this riddle, Corporal?” Yamamoto said to me. “You are faced with exactly the same parameters as the ancient king.”
“I don’t know,” I said. I removed the second ivory figure and compared it to the one Rhee held. They were hand-carved, not exactly identical. But it wasn’t the depth of a cut, the smoothness of a contour, or even the finesse of facial expression that would distinguish the right minister.
By looking for such differences, I knew I would fail Yamamoto’s test, and with Rhee lost in thought at my side, I felt a crippling sense of inadequacy and guilt for something I knew I had never done, could never do, and I glanced quickly from Yamamoto’s flashing eyes to Rhee’s clouded face, to the tranquil expression of the ivory minister in my hand; and as the once living substance warmed to my touch I thought I saw something remarkable, something truly significant about this thing, as hard as stone, and as I turned towards Rhee to tell him the beginning of my thought, I saw his arm rise slowly up, his ivory minister pointed at the ceiling like an offering, and the sudden blur of motion as he swung the figure down and smashed it to pieces against the corner of Yamamoto’s desk.
“There’s my logic,” said Rhee.

12
We got to the terminal too late to stop Lara from transferring onto the flight, just in time to hear the call in our rented van and go down, following the wake to the crash site where they were carrying the pilot’s body away in an opaque bag. The others were unrecognizable as human remains. From where I stood near the shattered bubble port to as far as I could see, the hovercar had left a trail of metallic wreckage like tattered fragments of black cloth.
“This way,” said a fireman. I turned around, wiping ashes from my hands. Smoke drifted from the direction of the smoldering engine, stinging, and my eyes flooded with tears.
Rhee patted my shoulder. “Let’s go now, Maurice.”
“First I want to know which one is her,” I said. I couldn’t bring myself to call her by name.
“You’ll know later after the inquest. Did she have her ID filling removed?”
I shook my head.
“Then let’s go home.”

13
I didn’t resist them when they came, as I knew they would come. I didn’t resist because I knew it would be pointless to give them reason to hurt me, pointless to pretend I didn’t know the reason for their coming, pointless to let them savor the crumbling of my initial resistance under the first jolt of the electric cuff.
A high amperage. 300 volts. A centimeter or two out of place and it could fry your brain like bacon. I merely watched the three CID men inventory my set up, noting every item by snapping its image with a digitizer. I said nothing, only motioned with my fingers for a cigarette, and one of them lit one for me. CID brand. Marlboro.
“Hello, Corporal.”
Without turning to face that voice, I knew, already, that terrible things were about to happen.
“Please say a few phrases for our voice stress records. You know the routine by now.”
He stood in the doorway, half in and half out of the room, suspended there as if he were a vampire that couldn’t come in without a welcome, or perhaps a man deathly afraid of earthquakes. He didn’t pretend to disguise himself as did the other CID; he wore his Special Investigator’s uniform as if it were a corporate suit, his nametag, Yamamoto, like a designer’s label. He still favored the octagonal glasses, although his Intel Corps eyes were as sharp as an osprey’s. “Say something we already have in our files,” he said. “You enjoyed My Fair Lady in the past.”
“The rain,” I said, blowing a plume of smoke his way, “in Spain.” I paused. “Is a pain.” Another plume of smoke. “In the brain.”
“Where is she? It’s not a squad-level inquiry this time, Herzog. The stakes are very high.”
“She’s gone.”
“We know.”
“I won’t bother lying to you, Major Yamamoto-san. I don’t know where she is.”
At that, the CID with the Blaupunkt data deck laughed and his two companions exchanged amused glances. Yamamoto smiled at me. I had heard stories about him since our last meeting: they said he studied the Mona Lisa to perfect that smile, that he had ruminated over its many meanings, examined its brushstrokes, dissected its hidden layers of contradiction in order to understand it. His smile was the enigma of a man who painted himself as a woman, a woman who knew she was a man, a lover who understood that she was both subject and object, a human being who accepted, without confusion, that there was no such thing as the truth, that knowledge and belief were only two facets of a beautiful, glittering, dangerous jewel. So Yamamoto smiled, and I knew that soon, if they left me enough will, I would prefer numbness to sensation, darkness to light, death to life; and I hadn’t resisted, but because I knew that all things, being equal, would be the same in the end, I made my choice then, while he still left me a choice to make.

There was enough equipment on hand to perform most of the manual torture Yamamoto could come up with in the short time he had. I remembered to scream in anticipation just before the pain, and to concentrate on the sound, but when I lapsed, when my timing missed, I fell into the pain again and again until I lost what remained of my consciousness.
There were brief moments when I woke and saw the oozing scabs where my fingernails used to be or felt the acute throbbing of the network of electrical burns. I answered everything to the best of my knowledge, but it was their policy not to believe anyone until the appropriate time. They continued.
And I remember—even now—that with most of my brain shut off, I did everything Yamamoto ordered. At times it felt as if my eye sockets were windows and I was staring through them at a holo show in which a stand-in played my part. But one memory has a layer of extra vividness.
After I had recovered from the manual regiment, I had expected them to take me into a room full of infernal machines, esoteric paraphernalia left over from medieval Spain, retrofitted for contemporary use. But I found myself in a comfortable contour seat with my arms strapped to the arms of the chair, my hands protruding directly forward, fingers splayed out, each one strapped down in its own glove splint. The room was a bright yellow that left afterimages when I closed my eyes.
Yamamoto and two observers sat in front of me like a jury. I expected them to ask me things, but Yamamoto turned to the others and said, simply, “Let’s begin.”
I must have been unconscious for some time before they brought me into the room, or more likely, I have simply lost the memory. I was surprised at that moment to find that they had already treated me for whatever damage had been inflicted by Yamamoto’s earlier questioning. I felt the itch of skin adhesive on various patches of my face, my ribs no longer hurt me when I accidentally breathed deeply, I could see beyond the swelling of my left eye. Again, for a moment, I had the feeling that I was recovering in a hospital; I almost expected to hear a voice beside me, telling me that everything would be fine, that the surgery had gone well, that they had removed something malignant from my body to make my life easier.
One of the observers adjusted something on my scalp. I looked up by straining my eyeballs—my head was immobile—and saw the net of wires leading down onto my skull. They had shaved my head. I tried to say something, but the words stumbled behind my thick lips, which I remembered were new ones.
“Activate the holos now. The playback will automatically bring up the proper associations. What we see is simply the visual reinforcement. Not very exciting.”
The lights dimmed and a holo show began. Pictures of Lara, the squad, the barrio outside Santos, the lightshow of the thoppers in the distance, close-ups of the strange uniforms, bubbles of blood, the glint of a knife, unknown satchels, a cluster of cigarette butts before they were ground into the dirt, the leads of an emtek unit, the half-visible rotors of the helicopter, landing skids, Lara’s face up close, Rhee mouthing something, a finger tightening on a trigger, muzzle flash, the left profile of a man. I watched intently as the scenes flashed slowly, one after another, like short segments of memory.
“Enjoy yourself now,” said Yamamoto.
I looked at him out of the corners of my eyes and then down at the wire things that rose out of the bottom of the padded armrests and swung into place like gloves over my hands. There were more electrodes there; the contact points began to itch all over my body.
“Start the recording.” The room grew completely dark, making the holos more vivid as they continued to flash, more quickly now and redundantly, on the far wall. Yamamoto and the two observers vanished into the borders of my consciousness as I began to remember things—chronologically, I realized, in the order I had recalled them during the official interrogation.

Lara climbed out of the trench, almost unrecognizable under the dirt and blood that caked her face. Shrapnel had cut her helmet cover to shreds, and a piece of her fatigue shirt flapped open under her left arm, exposing torn armor mesh and bruised skin. She looked dazed, as if she had been staring through a nightsight for too long. I watched her, but I was gone somehow, as if I were seeing her from a great distance. When I turned my head and scanned the remains of the platoon, I became even more distant. The medkit I carried dangled from one shoulder strap and beat against my hip with each of my labored breaths. I recognized Phillippi’s arm by the tattoo on the back of the hand; Phillippi himself lay five meters away, on his stomach, reaching forward with a stump that had been cut with almost surgical precision at mid-bicep. Two bodies lay crushed under a collapsed recon skimmer, their bloody limbs jutting out at odd angles like the smashed legs of an insect. Brown and yellow smoke billowed from the shattered skim drives, and where it met the border of foliage, the leaves bobbed up and down, slowly changing color. A piece of someone’s helmet, thick with hair and dried blood, lay at my feet. Another fragment of the helmet jutted out of my calf, but it did not hurt at all. I coughed, spitting three teeth laced in mucus, saliva, blood, into my palm. Something touched my shoulder. Lara, saying something. I couldn’t hear. She turned me towards the supply car we had piled with Brazilian bodies earlier. The upper part of the stack looked like.... Lara was mouthing words: ”Booby trap.” The bodies had become unrecognizable in the explosion. The mangled pile blurred and focused into the black marble monument of the San Salvador massacre. We were on leave. Lara was hiding her face against my shoulder as I stroked her hair, her polysilk jacket so bright it left afterimages when I closed my eyes. Rhee grimly pointed out the number of victims listed on the stone and, with his voice barely under control, he chanted a Buddhist prayer. “Let’s go,” I said. I lisped because of the stitches on my new lip. Rhee’s jaw muscles rippled under the tight skin of his face. He looked up at the silhouette of the U.S. Army hovercar that glided silently over the city slums. “We are all numb forever,” he said. The soldiers inside waved hello to us. And now a quiet acid rain drummed against the bathroom window just as Lara shut off the shower and stepped out to dry under the lamp and blower. Water trickled from the dark locks of her hair, down the small of her back. “I’m going to New York,” she called to me over the hum of warm air. I had known of her decision already. Sitting hunched over in the suspension chair, I was startled out of the memory and then pulled back in by its vividness. The droplets of water that beaded on the matted tips of her hairs grew slowly larger and larger as if they were inflating, and on their surfaces, my own reflection was amplified again and again. Lara’s hair was the color of burnt wood. Her voice sounded natural, as if she were mentioning an everyday fact: “I’m going to New York.” Emotions coiled inside my chest; I couldn’t relax the tension in my gut, and in a moment I shuddered involuntarily, suddenly feverish. “I can’t join them,” I said. My voice broke. “You’ll see me again,” said Lara. And they carried the pilot away in an opaque body bag. They couldn’t find the ID in her teeth.

The wave patterns on the tape set off more memories as if those snippets were rocks skipping across the surface of still water, leaving many-ringed, growing circles in their wake. I couldn’t understand why they were doing this. It was pleasant at first, like dreaming; but then, with each image on the holo screen, my entire body spasmed with some complex pain, something for which there is no analog, and as the jolts grew stronger and stronger, I lost much more than consciousness.

from Mimosa Sector

back to top

FLASH FICTION

Rain Checking
by Lucia Stacey

Sitting on the steps, leaning forward and rejecting the protection the roof’s edge offered you from the summer storm, you said, the rain is making us lemon drops! Get it? Acid rain! You pushed your tongue out into the day, catching rain like it was holy water and not the shitty runoff water from the nearby streets, polluted with crinkled Doritos bags, beer cans and decaying hot dogs. I smiled at you and thought of the plane ride back from the center, and how I hadn’t told you where I’d gone, and the four or five Bloody Marys I’d drunk on the way back, and how they hadn’t had lemon drops (your favorite) on the plane.
The porch and the air and the wind were all grey and as we sat on the second step, we silently scrutinized the grass and how the blades seemed to dance as the rain hit them, moving them from side to side as they glimmered green in the stone-colored light. You said, I wish we could sit here forever, and I said nothing because I knew what you didn’t know. About the exam and the MRI and the way the giant white machine had pulled me in and magnetized me (the way your eyes always magnetized me) and let positive and negative poles stretch across my body, searching, finding. I knew about the bluish-white blurs that colored outside the lines of organs and bones. I knew about the weight that I’d imagined and then they’d imagined and then the machine had proved, all black and blue lights and pictures in the negative, showing the negative, the worst.
So when you’d asked where I was gone to for three days I’d said a business trip to New York, because it was true, because I had been in New York dealing with business. I’d been referred to the center there, because the center in Chicago didn’t specialize in these types of things, and apparently they did in New York. Everything’s better in New York, you’d have said, if you’d known. So I was sent to New York, like some sick transaction, a toxic asset, the worst kind of business, but still it was a business trip, only I was the business.
You said, let’s get ice-lollies, and we usually did what you wanted when you wanted so we set off into the summer rain towards the newsagent. On the way we passed a man selling umbrellas, orange, blue, and green, and he said, Sir, sir, buy an umbrella, sir! You’ll catch your death of cold! And you laughed and said, no, I’m all right, thanks, it’s too warm and the rain cools me down.
Your brown hair stuck to your head and the nape of your neck like mud, thick and wet. I tugged one lock out of place, and you spun round and playfully shoved me, but I was taken aback and fell onto the grimy sidewalk. You knelt down next to me, laughing quietly and said, Alex, Alex! Get up, silly! So I got up but you didn’t know how much it took for me to get up, the way my limbs drew every morsel of energy from every muscle and the way every muscle sucked every spare drop of calcium from every bone and the way each bone ached as I stumbled to my feet and tried playfully to shove you back.
I remembered the first time we’d made love, and how I’d been full of energy, rushing blood, heat. Skin and tangled limbs and laughter in the aftermath because you’d told me you’d lost your virginity in a blur of orange and yellow and confusion to a girl on a merry-go-round when you were fourteen. You’d boasted that after that debacle, you’d never questioned yourself again, never again needed a girl to feel like a man. I had felt like a man just knowing you. Knowing you and knowing the ways you knew me, emotionally, mentally, biblically! you’d laughed.
When we got to the newsagent you got a strawberry lolly and I got a Cornetto (Yuck! I don’t see how you eat those things! you jeered at me). You sucked on the lolly and smiled at me and your teeth were dyed pink like the strawberries and I laughed at you. You laughed back and said I had chocolate in my teeth, and I quickly shut my mouth, embarrassed. You said, here, I’ll get it for you, and you kissed me, running your tongue along my lips.
You drew back, yuck! I fucking hate Cornettos! and you laughed as I held still, stunned because I realized that soon I’d have to tell you about the MRI and those ugly X-rays, and you might not want to kiss me again because I hadn’t told you, and soon I might not even be able to kiss you even if you wanted to kiss me, and then Cornettos would be the least of your worries. But then I smiled, because in that moment all you were worried about was the artificial flavoring on your tongue, and that was all I wanted to let you worry about for a while.

back to top

Missing
by William C. Blome

You rode in a coach to Brussels, a night coach, and no one I’ve ever known would fault you for losing Andrew’s knives, but lose them you did. Distracting, detailed conversations don’t often occur on night coach journeys, passenger discourse where, as you say, your brain’s synapses engage not like moist, overlapping strands of spaghetti, but like opposing fleets at sea, firing their big guns at one another. We all know enough about night trips to believe you’re right when you say your mind was not involved in anything like attention-focusing thought or banter such that the package beside you could have been easily stolen or momentarily forgotten.
I can tell you your several inquiries have never produced anything but a standard confirmation of receipt from the Belgian railway people, and I think the central question for you now is what exactly are you going to tell Andrew.
You start with the fact that Andrew’s love for his knives is rather deep. You next have to consider to what degree offering up some excuse or excuses might vitiate the anger you expect to come from Andrew as surely as midday heat emanates from an August sun. At this juncture I would only proffer the advice not to mention beans about the lion cub you say was announced as missing from the baggage car when the trunks and crates were offloaded in Brussels. Go with me on this when I tell you that regardless of the obviously tempting speculation to link out-of-sight/out-of-mind knives with a little lion gone missing, there’s probably not a jot of actual or suggested proof, and any conjecture of this sort might well appear to Andrew to be desperate reasoning for his loss.
No, while offering up an excuse is out of the question, you could, however, relate to Andrew the unsettling atmosphere that undoubtedly existed in Brussels the day you arrived and stayed there. I’ll get a copy of the following day’s Le Soir, and as you tell Andrew in an out-of-breath voice about his vanished knives, you can increase the gravitas of your sincerity by guiding his forefinger along the newspaper text of each of the three stories you say prove how strange a day it was the day you were most recently there in Brussels. You do this right, and I’m betting Andrew’s anger takes a hike; at the worst, I see it softening in something like a mist of understanding. But to be on the safe side, I’d still stay mum about the lion cub, unless, of course, you can find an account of it in Le Soir.

back to top

POETRY

The Lattice of Otherwise
by Star Black

Scrambled by pillow talk, half-deaths aside,
I see you strangely motionless at sunrise,
overtaken by coordinates and fed up.

The scripted curves of mock-orange,
wiry in a disconnect of mirrored light, intrude.
Listlessness rises and loses its place on the map.

I climb out of bed. A hand sinks
through bubbling rims of foam into slushed sand –
the pivoting brightness is the day itself.

back to top

Sallying
by Star Black

Lingo, its brawny volubility,
lends chiaroscuro a mufti’s immediacy,
a prescience behind the climate,

not uppish but quick, the dayshift a padded flume.
I guess you knew I’m like a viaduct, you’ve got your greaves on.
It is sunny and bombinating.

The eftsoons are jiggled halogen.
The yoga associates are skateboarding
and the pleasant buzz of comet-tails feels at home.

back to top

Catching Bears at Night
by Kyle Hemmings

Don't speak,
just pretend
you're not the precious mink or otter
I've trapped along shallow water
living your life skipping stones
dreaming of a soft catch.
When I was young, before I bought
coon cuffs or bandit busters from
arctic renegades, tundra-shifters,
I could reflect someone's hunger
underwater and spent Canadian
sunsets with trachea closed,
hands tied and labeled.
I too fell prey to a padded jaw.

I could have designed a trap
to kill you quickly
but that kind no longer exists.
Just pretend I was hunting
golden bears at night
and wound up with a piece
of my own flesh.
By morning, I'll have lost
our appetite for wild honey.

back to top

Sixteen
by J. Tarwood

Beached in a cramped room,
Jack jams horn rims back,
The Sun Also Rises in his lap
like a mothballed wedding dress
stroked by a dreamy daughter.
On yellowed pages, its words
promise shyly as a smile
when the dance is slow.

Sundays are a dead sea.
Jack could kick beer cans through the county junkyard,
car hoods crunched like a wet perm,
wild onion spicing the wind.
One way out is a '57 Chevy,
loud weepy music from the radio,
"Two-Lane Blacktop" blasting through winter wheat
to hunt down the vanishing point.

Jack might slouch in a coffee shop instead,
blackening fingertips on the Tribune
while he tracks sharpshooters on water towers
& the bright simple life of cartoons.
His way out may need words most of all,
packed like a girlfriend's snapshot
for the long hike to croaking ponds.

back to top

~ghost~
by Barry Anderson

drifting across wintered grasslands
out of silence, out of time –
so cold even the birds are frozen
locked in their dives
until spring thaw – when they will drop
one by one
into the soggy marsh, their memories of worms

long since forgotten.

back to top

Gibbous Moon
by Kirby Wright

The waxing gibbous moon
Forces the sky blue,
Erasing planets and stars.
Venus and Mars

Have become ghosts.
I am haunted
By the dull ache
Of a childhood

Nearly forgotten,
The time of moon trips,
Star Trek in black and white,
Backyard telescopes.

My father watched
The Twilight Zone
And told me, one day,
He’d become invisible.

I thought he was joking.
Now my mother
Rarely mentions him
In polite conversation.

His footlocker
Out in the garage
Has disappeared.
“Salvation Army,”

My mother whispered.
She is pure magic
When it comes to
Making him vanish.

back to top

At Dike Bridge
by Kirby Wright

You were the best of the Boiler Room Girls.
This view from the railing exposes the marshes.
Poucha Pond is a bright blue channel.
Brackish waters whisper into the sea.

This view from the railing exposes the marshes.
Knee-deep man casts his lure for herring.
Brackish waters whisper into the sea.
Blonde stones bottom the channel.

Knee-deep man casts his lure for herring.
I crush crab shells, scatter fragments over the water.
Blonde stones bottom the channel.
Decking creaks under my weight.

The bridge humpbacks towards the dunes.
Poucha Pond is a bright blue channel.
I smell the grapes on Chappaquiddick Road.
You were the best of the Boiler Room Girls.

back to top

Sometimes poets fail us
by Sweta Srivastava Vikram

When some poets unzip in public,
only filth falls out from—
underneath their tongues,
behind the gums,
pores of their hands,
the silhouette of their feet,
the nib of their pen.

Maybe I expected too much
from poets, people who hold weapons—
ink and words in their veins,
verbal charm sown in their lips
creating an illusion of a perfect world
where they drink
societal pain, rub healing verses on wounds.

Sometimes poets fail us.
What else would you say
when a pen condones death at a reading,
holds the floating bodies responsible,
nicknames tragedy, payback for Pearl Harbor,
applauds the plague of tsunami
in a room full of zombies wearing blindfolds?

If you can’t fold your palms
and whisper silent prayers
for those killed and the living dead,
seal your mouth with sand,
relinquish letters that preach bigotry.
A true poet doesn’t hate,
ignite a fight, then run away.

back to top

The Diary of Virginia Woolf
by Askold Skalsky

I should like it to resemble some deep old desk …

a profound Hepplewhite with the sorting power of a thousand suns,
a synchronistic wonder bouncing off its parts like the many-angled jewels
of Indra’s net, its mirrored panels fracting and refracting—
ranging, labeling, transforming ….

What sort of chronicle would it produce? a ricordanza of tight dreams,
like slack-knit spiders hauling their quick rumps, loose-hung and supple-dropped,
entangling anything that comes to mind in spunflexed webwork—
grave-frowned, angel-faced,

some relic escritoire, a jumbo hold-all into which one hurls one’s sloven
patchwork podge, God’s hectic gob, without so much as a glad-eye squint,
then doubling back after a year or two to find the unholy mass has pegged
and tweaked itself, interfused and coalesced

into a tranquil reprismed brew to resurrect the glim glims of our life,
a protoplast, to hell and back, with the detachment of an artifact, written
without restraint, in mood or out, a flush haphazardry shut up within
a magic drawer, sub-and co-partmented

like the multisectioned babble tower of Bosch, its walls denebulized
in a mysterious significance, Pandora’s retrobox where all’s recrammed,
reblossomed, rectified anew, a broken urn submerged within a sea—
scud foamed, surf tossed, sifted free in the rhapsodic waves,

time’s waterball of drifting bones.

back to top

Lost Change
by Askold Skalsky

I pick up pennies. No matter where or with whom.
I scoop them up from the ground, never letting one
lie in its flat-eyed paltriness. I do it for my father,
remembering him after he once, unabashed, in the middle
of a city sidewalk, bent down, his black hair blowing,
greatcoat flapping, for a solitary cent. And today,
seeing one traced under a membrane of thin mud,
I remove it, a corroded wafer, from the puddle’s edge,
and wonder whether it’s a sign that you will call,

or do anything at all, now that it’s been two weeks
since I stamped in fury from your house, not looking back
out of my boiling spite, then steadying myself
against a wall, feeling my insides pulled out slowly
through the skin into the emptiness to come.

back to top

O Happy
by Bruce McRae

A breeze squirming between houses.
Dust confessing in the ugly-box.
The cat turned to butter in the midday sun.

Over the Earth a quiet ascends,
a quiet without purpose or name,
cloud shaped, with smoke on its hands,
the windows of the world coming up,
then slamming down hard . . .

You see, people crave a little hullabaloo.
They dwell among the dramas of kinesis.
They go to the theatre, dream of other lives,
wear another’s expressions.

Once, it was always snowing in our town.
There was a dark breakfast.
Bloodhounds dozed in their kennels.
Goons roamed naked in the railway yards.
Until the Rapture displayed her frenetic charms
and our children adopted interpretive art.

So now everything is the color of honey.
It tastes like a treasure chest around here.
Glory, even the butterflies are excited.

back to top

Small Engine
by Martin Walls

My neighbor, a small engine mechanic,
Shows me how his two-stroke weed whacker works:
Throttle goes one way, choke the other, prime
The mixture, pull just so on the crank line,
Tickle back the choke when the motor sparks,
Then ease the throttle down. I follow his words
And lose it all, but he’ll be home all day
Cutting & epoxy gluing landscape brick,
Painting shingles, rewiring a spotlight.
We do these jobs because we don’t want to die.
To repay him I walk over ripe beetroots,
But he’s not seen one & doubts his sweetheart
Knows how to cook them. Our forgetfulness
Haunts the mastery of what might save us.

back to top

Sacrament of Naps
by Mark DeCarteret

I’m laid out and splayed
into an X on the rocker where
my grandmother sang me

her Lithuanian lullabies.
At that hour even water
reminds one of sacrilege

it is time to sign off on
those pads where your spine
disappears when its flipped.

So fish me out of the sun, Lord—
yes, Your words are in red
but my tongue is still stumped

by the onus of wine drinking.
For in between East/West
the head’s genuflecting again

and the body’s still keeping to itself.
Was it sleep or was it sighing
she said the great equalizer?

Only I have her speaking this way
as if her mouth would form air into notes.
Blest are the souls rounded off nearest 0.

back to top

NONFICTION

Conservation
by Rachael Button

Three plywood tombstones stand on the beach at Whitefish Point. They’re wedged into three mounds of sand and surrounded by smooth Lake Superior stones. Thomas Bentson. Random Cundy. Bruce Lee Hudson. All three men worked on the Edmund Fitzgerald, a ship that disappeared from the radar in less than ten seconds. A Canadian fisherman found the lifeboats, shredded like metal cans, sides peeling from the center, exposing egg-shell cracked skin. No bodies were found. The memorial on the beach doesn’t mark remains, it marks what is missing.
When I was little, my family used to drive north to Whitefish Point on windy days to watch the water snap against the shoreline. Gusts of sand made it hard to move along the beach, made our eyes dry and our lips tight. I liked the way the lake felt on those wild weather days.
The summer after Jared and I broke up I drove thirteen hours to the Upper Peninsula to live in the woods for three months. I drove seventy-five miles further north to Whitefish Point on a Sunday to see the steel sky reflected in the lake. I applied for a summer job at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum because I needed to be at the Point more often—to memorize Whitefish Point’s history, to see the lighthouse at night, to take my lunch breaks on the beach, to be there every day to watch the way the lake changed moods and shapes.

Lake Superior doesn’t give up its dead. The eighty-mile stretch of the lake between Pictured Rocks and Whitefish Point Lake is known as Superior’s shipwreck coast. The Graveyard of the Great Lakes—home to over three hundred shipwrecks. The water is too cold for the microorganisms which make bodies float. Instead of bobbing along the surface, Superior’s deceased stay beneath the water or wash up on the beach—sometimes twisted by gale force November waves, other times perfectly preserved by cold.
The founders of the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum were Lake Superior divers. Men and women who swam through cold water to see ruins of wrecked ships, sifting through the artifacts that remained. They wanted to recreate the experience of wandering through Superior’s burial ground. They brought up beams from the bottom of the lake—they built benches from hundred year old shipwrecked wood. They placed bottles, teacups, spoons, and pocket watches scavenged from sunken ships in Plexiglass cases.
A case beside Whitefish Point Shipwreck Museum’s entrance exhibits artifacts from the Edmund Fitzgerald’s lifeboats. A blue lantern with the ship’s name painted in capital letters, still-packaged red flares, a matchbook with a print of a baseball player on the front. Beside the display there’s a photograph of the ship’s captain, Ernest McSorley, one of twenty-nine men killed when the Fitzgerald sunk. Face angular and weather worn, he looks directly at the camera.

Twenty-three years old: I spend my summer at the Shipwreck Museum observing people my boyfriend and I might have become. I watch a ruddy-faced father pause at each plaque, bending down to explain the significance of the artifacts to his seven-year-old son. His wife wears a backpack. She brushes back long hair, pushes up glasses, and asks me about the book selection in the gift shop. “Books are better than clothes to me,” she whispers.
What if Jared and I hadn’t broken up? If I’d married a weekend history buff with a masters degree in electrical engineering? Jared wanted to have children and would have taken them here. I picture him with a kid on his shoulders, walking through the museum then wandering out toward the Whitefish Point lighthouse.

At the museum I sell tickets. I give tours. I clean. A red binder under the museum’s cash register gives detailed instruction for polishing each artifact. Inside there’s a handwritten note: “If you’ve been sitting still for more than ten minutes there’s cleaning to be done! If you don’t know how to clean something—ASK!!”
Using the wrong cleaning product causes corrosion. I learn to match cleaning products with artifacts. Glass Doors: Klear-View. Plexiglass: AR-19 with (extra soft) Viva paper towels. Brass: pink feather duster. Mannequins: Black Feather Duster. By the end of the day my hands smell like window cleaner, brass polish, and floral scented sanitizer.
Like the lake, the shipwreck museum preserves the dead. It orders their stories, keeps the past buffed and archived. The inside of the museum feels like a chapel—a dimly lit tribute to the lives lost on Lake Superior. Blue lights drift over the displays. Gordon Lightfoot plays on a looped pre-set stereo. A second order Fresnel lighthouse lens hangs in the center of the museum, reflecting light beams on the blue carpeting.
I read once that as church attendance goes down museum attendance goes up—secular chapels of conservation. I wonder about our obsessions with history. Jared knew capitals, presidents, battles, and dates. I don’t. Instead, I sift through my past and try to understand my history.

Jared had a scar on his wrist—a line of small dots where a surgeon stitched the skin. Jared ate his food clockwise, finishing one pile on his plate before moving onto the next one, not drinking any of his drink until he had completed his meal. When Jared was stressed from studying, his curly hair stood up in front from pressing his palm against his forehead. Jared called doing laundry “doing wash”; a creek: “a crick”; dinner: “supper.”
When Jared came to visit me for the last time, he brought flowers for my birthday. Four purple tulips, packaged in white paper with plastic tubes around the stems, to ensure freshness. I nearly knocked him over when he came to my door, wrapping my legs around his waist. We ran water over the tulip’s stems and clipped the ends with kitchen knives. I looked for a vase while Jared read the directions on the plant food container out loud.
Jared and I never officially broke up—we decided to take a break. After two-and-a-half years of dating we just stopped talking. I kept the flowers on my desk. I watched the water turn brown and the petals flake and wondered if everything eventually decays---if I am even capable of sustaining a relationship. When I finally dumped the water, I clipped one of the flowers to dry and keep as a reminder. I removed the photograph of Jared and me from the frame beside my bed but left the crumbling tulip on my bookshelf.

Bill, who works in the museum’s boathouse, was a watchman on the Arthur M. Anderson, the ship that corresponded with the Fitzgerald the night it sank. He saw the oil-slicked water above the wreck. He helped gather unused life jackets from Lake Superior.
“Between you and me, I think McSorley knew the ship was going down and was just trying to make it to Whitefish Point to save his crew. Fifteen more miles and he would have made it.”
When Bill’s wife listened to the radio report about the Fitzgerald sinking she heard only that an ore tanker disappeared on Lake Superior. The broadcast didn’t give specifics. Bill retired from shipping the following spring because the possibility of loss had become too real for his young wife and their young children. When I met him he told me that the Fitzgerald was only famous because of the Gordon Lightfoot song. He said the Bradley sinking on Lake Michigan in 1958 had been just as big a deal. But I heard him tell the story about the Fitzgerald sinking and his role in the wreck almost every day this summer. He’d talk about the Fitzgerald during his lunch break. He’d bring it up to strangers on the beach.
There’s a photograph of Bill’s captain, Bernie Cooper, hanging beside the Edmund Fitzgerald exhibit at the Great Lakes Shipwreck Museum. In the image he stands on the Anderson, holding a pocket watch. His eyes don’t meet the camera. He looks down at the clock. In my mind, Captain Cooper, Bill, and the Anderson’s crew are bound to time—to 1975, to November. To the hours they spent corresponding with the Fitzgerald and to the time that’s passed since its sinking.

Sometimes it surprises me how little of Jared I have to hang onto: a handful of petals, a couple of Christmas cards, a note he wrote me on my birthday. How can someone slip in and out of your life without making a permanent mark? We moved on easily, and now, it’s the way Jared and I slid in and out of each other’s lives that haunts me. We could have ended up together but didn’t. We changed routes.
Jared came to visit me in the Upper Peninsula twice, both times with our college cross country team. Last summer Jared and I ran fifteen miles along the coast of Lake Superior. We ended at Chapel Rock beach where we sat in the rapids, letting the river run over our legs before collapsing on the sand. We ran trails during the day and built bonfires on the beach at night. Once, after we went water skiing, Jared and I beat the rest of the team back to the cabin. He caught my hips in his fingers and told me that I looked good in my bathing suit. I leaned back against his collarbone. We remained this way without moving for minutes, still damp and smelling like lake.
My first week in the Upper Peninsula, I drove to Pictured Rocks because I wanted to run the route I’d run with Jared alone. I stopped at a spot where the trail winds out onto the cliff’s edge and crouched along the crumbling surface. I sat down, swung my feet several hundred feet above Lake Superior, and watched the turquoise-blue water crash into the cliffs. A seagull swooped, sailing down toward the water, and my stomach lurched. I stayed for almost an hour: listening to the whomp of lake being sucked into the crevices of the stone and watching the waves run over Superior’s rocky bottom.

As a child, I thought Whitefish Point must be a kind of Great Lakes Bermuda triangle. It wasn’t until this summer that I realized the Point and the lighthouse were beacons, the last major turn on the way to the Sault Locks, the checkpoint that hundreds of ships failed to reach.
Great Lakes historian Frederick Stonehouse speculates that all lighthouses are haunted, surrounded by layers of tragedy. Some visitors to the shipwreck museum claim contact with the paranormal—unexplained brushes against their skin as they walk through the lighthouse, cold prickles when they stand in front of the exhibits. I attribute these occurrences to a place wrought with memory.
Maybe we’re all haunted by history. By the short distance that separated us from safety when we changed courses. So we try to understand the past, to order it; we place it under glass with a brass label.

In the summer of 1995, the Great Lakes Shipwreck Society, the National Geographic Society, the Canadian Navy, and the families of the men on the Edmund Fitzgerald came together to raise the Fitzgerald’s bell from Lake Superior. Divers cut the bell from the pilot house using an underwater torch and replaced the rust covered relic with a new bell—one engraved with the names of the twenty-nine missing men. The old bell broke through the water at 1:25 pm, July 4, 1995. Crew members’ families watched from aboard a boat called the Northlander.
In a photograph taken by Detroit Free Press photographer Al Kamuda, a series of cords holds the bell just above the water. Sun beams off the surface of the lake, which looks clear and blue like a swimming pool. A man in a yellow diving suit floats just below the bell, with his arms extended upward.
The photographs didn’t show the families, but they brought roses, wreaths, and letters and released them into the water after the bell surfaced. When the Northlander pulled back to shore it left a layer of petals and paper floating on Lake Superior.

This summer, I imagine skinny-dipping in Lake Superior—slipping off my clothes and letting the lake sweep over me. But I never strip past my sports bra. The cold waves cut red lines above my belly and I can’t let go the way I want to, can’t take my feet off the ground and push my body forward into the waves. Instead I stand waist deep in Lake Superior wearing my running clothes, shivering. Later, I take a hot shower and watch my torso turn from white to pink to red as the water stings over the surface of my skin.
My last night at Whitefish Point, I go back down to the beach, not to swim, but to sit by the three tombstones, on the crest of the dune grass, back from the water. Thomas Bentson. Oiler. Random Cundy. Watchman. Bruce Lee Hudson. Deckhand. I wonder if I’ll ever find something that defines me enough to write beside my name on a tombstone. Bruce Lee Hudson, the deckhand, is the youngest of the three men commemorated on the beach. An eight-by-eleven-inch photograph of his face hangs below his name. The sun-faded ink makes his skin look yellow. He has shoulder-length dark hair. One strand falls loose just above his eyebrow. He’s unshaven, stubbled, serious. “1953-1975.” Twenty-two years old—one year younger than me. Today he’d be fifty-six.
I lean back in the sand near the memorial, legs bent at the knees, hair spread flat around my head. The ground feels cool and wet. I watch the light from the Whitefish Point lighthouse comb the driftwood-snarled shore. When I get up the imprint of my body is still there, marking my shape in the sand.

back to top

TRANSLATION

Paris Rain Sung by a Hurdy-Gurdy
by Vesselin Hanchev
translated from the Bulgarian by Hristina Keranova

This is an old, old story
As old as Paris it is
An artist on the sidewalk
was painting a girl with flowers

Farewell, was her word of departure
I'm leaving.
We have no more love, bread, or canvas
From the paints, we have only black
From Paris, streets that lead only to the Seine.
Stay, was the artist's reply
From the paints
I kept the three colors of your face
Gold, blue, red
From Paris, the whole luminous sky
and a sidewalk
where big coins fall
generous coins

This is an old, old story
As old as Paris it is
An artist on the sidewalk
was painting a girl with flowers

Mr. Sidewalk, whispered the artist
and kneeled
Let me draw on your big canvas
a petite girl
I'll paint her in blue, gold, and red
with my three colors
And to keep her
from the cold of your bed,
bring in the Paris sun to shine
all day long
Bring feet, eyes, and hands
throwing big coins, generous coins

This is an old, old story
As old as Paris it is
An artist on the sidewalk
was painting a girl with flowers.

He placed his hat on its back
and ordered it, Beg!
Then, very carefully,
he drew on the sidewalk
golden hair, heavy and thick
then blue eyes
and then lips, saying goodbye, and a hand
the fingers
clasping flowers
asphalt-scented flowers

Stay ... said the painter
softly caressing
his fair girl
I'll buy you a bed, better than this
and flowers, much prettier than these
And tonight
When the black barges
drag the sun down the Seine
we'll be rich
We'll have many coins
big coins,
generous coins

This is an old, old story
As old as Paris it is
An artist on the sidewalk
was painting a girl with flowers.

Shadows fell, of birds and clouds
Shadows of people
quickly crossing the drawing
Dead leaves fell and banana peels
Then the rain fell
unexpected

Oh, that Paris rain!
That prankster rain
merrily tapping and sparkling
Shiny and black

Only the rain paused and started to pour
its big coins,
its silver, generous coins
Stop! whispered the painter. She'll leave.
She will leave, his heart moaned, terrified
And the girl bitterly wept
tears of gold, red, and blue
as she went toward the Seine.

This is an old, old story
As old as Paris it is
An artist on the sidewalk
was painting a girl with flowers.

back to top

ПАРИЖКИЯТ ДЪЖД, ВЪЗПЯТ ОТ ЕДНА ШАРМАНКА
Веселин Ханчев

Това е история стара, стара,
стара като Париж и тя:
един художник по тротоара
рисуваше момиче с цветя.

- Сбогом - бе казало то на прощаване.
- Аз си отивам.
Няма веч обич, хляб и платна.
От боите остана ни
само черна боя.
От Париж - само улици, водещи в Сена.
- Остани - бе отвърнал художника.
- От боите имам трите бои на лицето ти
- златна, синя, червена.
От Париж - цяло небе светлина
и един тротоар -
дето падат едри монети,
щедри монети.

Това е история стара, стара,
стара като Париж и тя:
един художник по тротоара
рисуваше момиче с цветя.

- Господин Тротоар - тихо каза художника
и коленичи.
- Позволи да рисувам върху твойто голямо платно
едно малко момиче.
Ще го рисувам в синьо, в златно, в червено
с моите три тебешира.
И за да не му е студено,
когато на теб се намира,
доведи ми парижкото слънце да свети
през целия ден,
доведи покрай мен
стъпки, очи и ръце,
хвърлящи едри монети,
щедри монети.

Това е история стара, стара,
стара като Париж и тя:
един художник по тротоара
рисуваше момиче с цветя.

Той постави своята шапка встрани
и й каза: "Проси!"
После, много внимателно,
сложи на плочите златни коси,
тежки и гъсти,
после - сини очи,
после - казващи "сбогом" уста
и ръка, стиснала в своите пръсти
цветя
с аромат на асфалт.
- Остани - каза той и погали едва
своето русо момиче.
- Ще ти купя легло, по-добро от това,
и цветя, по-красиви от тези.
И когато довечера
заедно с черните шлепове
слънцето слезе
надолу по Сена,
ние ще бъдем богати.
Ние ще имаме много монети,
едри монети,
щедри монети.

Това е история стара, стара,
стара като Париж и тя:
един художник по тротоара
рисуваше момиче с цветя.

Падаха сенки на птици, на облаци.
Падаха сенки на хора,
зачеркващи бързо рисунката.
Падаха мъртви листа и кори от банани.

После падна дъждът изведнъж.
Ах, парижкия дъжд!
Шегобиеца дъжд, който весело чука и свети,
черен и лъскав!

Той единствен се спря и започна да пръска
своите едри монети,
своите сребърни щедри монети.
- Спри - тихо каза художникът. - Тя ще замине.
"Тя ще замине" - сърцето му страшно простена.
А момичето тъжно заплака
със сълзи златни, червени и сини
и тръгна към Сена.
Това е история стара, стара,
стара като Париж и тя:
един художник по тротоара
рисуваше момиче с цветя.

back to top

PLAYS

An excerpt from “In the Territories”
A one-act play by Mark R. Jabaut

CHARACTERS

Lazarus: A middle-aged cowboy. He is noisy and opinionated.

Emmitt: Another cowboy of the same age as Lazarus. The two have been partners for the past twenty years. Emmitt is quieter and more thoughtful than his partner.

Charlie: A young man from Boulder, timid, inexperienced.

SETTING

In the wilds of the Colorado and New Mexico Territories, the American West.

TIME

An evening in the second half of the 19th century, and the next day.

Scene One

Curtain opens to reveal a western outdoor scene – rocks and scrub pines. It is dusk. Emmitt and Lazarus enter stage left carrying an unconscious Charlie, and drop him on the ground with a thud. They are not gentle and it may appear to the audience that Charlie is dead.

LAZARUS: (Fans face with hat) Whew! Lordy, he’s starting to stink worse than ever. Why did I ever let you talk me into bringing him with us, Emmitt? (Walks to far side of stage and sits on a rock.)

EMMITT: (Begins gathering wood.) He paid us to bring him with us, Laz. We had an obligation.

LAZARUS: Well, this was an ideal opportunity for a refund, then, I think. We didn’t need the money that bad, Emmitt. Hell, I can still smell him over here. He’s getting riper by the minute.

EMMITT: You think I can’t smell him? I’ve got a nose. Since when do we desert someone because they smell? Hell, we’d of never had any friends in our entire lives if we held ourselves to that particular standard. We would have spent the last twenty years riding the Territories alone.

LAZARUS: I suppose you’re right.

EMMITT: In fact, with the notable lack of lakes and streams in certain parts of the Territories, we would have had to split up a long time ago if odor was our standard. When you get more than a week between baths, Laz, you get pretty ripe yourself.

LAZARUS: Alright, Emmitt. I take your point.

EMMITT: It’s like riding with a dead grizzly sometimes.

LAZARUS: I take your point. (Gets up, walks to Charlie and prods him with a toe.)

EMMITT: Did I hurt your feelings, Princess?

LAZARUS: Well, you didn’t need to get personal.

EMMITT: (Pauses, smiles. Sets gathered wood in a pile.) What say you build us a fire while I go check on the horses?

LAZARUS: (Turns and looks at Emmitt.) And that’s another thing. Who put you in charge? For twenty years it’s been “Laz, build a fire,” or “Laz, do this, do that.” We’re supposed to be partners. How come it feels like you’re always giving me orders?

EMMITT: Twenty years and you bring this up now?

LAZARUS: “Laz, make us some supper.” “Laz, get some firewood.” “Laz, shoot that Indian.” I can make decisions for myself, you know.

EMMITT: It was a suggestion.

LAZARUS: Well, then, you’re the one always making the suggestions.

EMMITT: Listen, it don’t matter to me. It was just a suggestion: you build the fire, I’ll tend to the horses. You want to tend to the horses?

LAZARUS: (Pause.) No, I’ll build the fire.

EMMITT: You’re sure then?

LAZARUS: Yeah.

EMMITT shrugs and exits stage left.

LAZARUS: (Calls after him.) Make sure they’re hobbled good! (Stares down at Charlie for a moment. Then addressing Charlie:) We rode all day in the hot sun draggin’ your stinkin’ carcass along with us, and why? For a lousy few dollars? There was vultures followin’ us for the last few miles. Vultures! What do you have to say to that? (Pause.) Yeah, that’s what I thought.

(Lazarus wanders to Stage Right and begins collecting wood, and then starts to build a campfire. After a moment, the silence is broken by a loud groan from Charlie, who rolls over and loudly begins vomiting. Lazarus is surprised by the sudden sound.)

LAZARUS: Good Lord! So, you’re awake, then?

(More loud vomiting from Charlie.)

LAZARUS: Only most people say, “Good Mornin’,” or “Howdy,” or something when they wake. Where are your manners?

(More loud vomiting. Eventually Charlie sits up, leaning heavily on his hands.)

CHARLIE: Where am I?

LAZARUS: That’s an improvement, but it’s still a far way from “Good mornin’.”

CHARLIE: (Grudgingly.) Good mornin’. Where am I?

LAZARUS: Well, as best as I can reckon, you are in the Colorado Territory, about a day’s ride south of Boulder. And it’s dusk, not dawn, so “howdy” woulda been a more appropriate choice.

CHARLIE: South of Boulder? (Pause.) Why?

LAZARUS: You mean why are you south of Boulder, or why are we south of Boulder as opposed to some other direction, or is it some other question that I haven’t yet fully divined?

CHARLIE: Why am I here?

LAZARUS: Oh, it’s a spiritual discussion you’re after. I’ve never been one for those high-minded, thoughtful discourses. I have opinions on many topics, and I wouldn’t be adverse to sharin’ ‘em with ya, but I’m afraid that the topic you’ve chosen is not one of my specialties. Now, if it’s whores you want to discuss—

CHARLIE: (Groans.) No, I’m sorry. Wait a minute. (He pauses to think, and then slowly says:) Why—have—you—brought—me—here?

LAZARUS: Why, we’re your tour guides! You asked us to bring you with us, paid us, in fact. Ten dollars apiece. My partner Emmitt and I.

CHARLIE: (Nods slowly.) Emmitt. Yeah, that sounds familiar. Who are you?

LAZARUS: (Frowning.) I’m Lazarus. Lazarus Jones. But of course you wouldn’t be expected to remember me, only Emmitt, he’s the memorable one.
(He begins to light a fire by striking flint taken from his pocket.)

Course, I was the one wanted to leave you drunk in the street this morning, paid or not. But your hero, Emmitt, he wouldn’t hear of it. You paid for passage and we was honor-bound to take you with us. I woulda stuffed your money back into your pockets and left you laying there snoring and farting in the dirt, but my opinions don’t count around here.

(Pause as fire starts.)

Of course, I had spent most of the ten dollars you gave me at the saloon last night. But I still thought we ought to have left you.

EMMITT: (Returns from stage left.) Well, howdy, sunshine.

LAZARUS: You see there, Charlie? That’s a fine hello.

EMMITT: How are you feeling this evening?

CHARLIE: Like a rabbit in a coyote’s mouth—my future prospects are shit.

LAZARUS: You need to learn to handle your liquor, boy.

CHARLIE: Please don’t say “liquor.”

LAZARUS: Hey, Emmitt, it sounds like Charlie here is preparing a list of words we can’t say. (To Charlie.) Can we say beer? Whiskey?

(Charlie rolls over and vomits some more.)

EMMITT: Aw, let him be, Laz.

LAZARUS: The first rule of drinking is to know your limits. You got to know when to stop, or if you’re going to get falling down drunk, you got to know when to fall. Plan ahead, so you don’t spend the night in the street, sleeping in your own sick.

CHARLIE: I had some things on my mind.

LAZARUS: Oh, you had some things on your mind. Emmitt, Charlie here had some things on his mind.

EMMITT: I heard ‘im.

CHARLIE: I—I done something that—hey, what is this, this crust all over my coat? What did you fellas drag me through?

LAZARUS: Oh, that’s rich.

EMMITT: We didn’t drag you through nothing, Charlie. You were so passed-out drunk that we had to tie you over your saddle. You emptied your stomach in the first hour of the trip. I’m surprised to see that you’ve got anything left.

CHARLIE: Ugh! (Stands and removes coat awkwardly, and throws it away.)

LAZARUS: That’s a significant improvement.

EMMITT: It gets pretty cold out here in the evenings, though, Charlie. You might wish you had that coat back.

LAZARUS: I won’t.

CHARLIE: I’ll survive, I guess.

back to top

The Spring 2011 issue continues with a comic by by Cho Hak-Rae and Pak Chang-Yun, translated from the Korean by Heinz Insu Fenkl: The Wild Pigeons of Clearwater Cliff

Main Navigation

Spring 2011