Prose

Taylor Nam

How to Make Fire

I turned ten yesterday, so my Mum made me a cherry chocolate cake. She didn’t burn it or anything. It was good, it was fine, but I told Mum: wow, this is amazing, thank you!

The frosting was the best part, super thick like frosting should be. Mum bought it at the store. She said she got it 50% off regular price, so two good, two amazing things in one day: my birthday and 50%. Mum had crazy eyes whole time she cut the cake and she cried a little, too, and Cole asked her why she was crying. I got a little mad at him, even though it was my birthday. Cole forgets things, like even really big things. He’s little. He is allowed to forget things. That’s what Mum says.

I never forget things. I’m really smart, everyone says so, especially Dad, and I know things. I’ve always known things. Like, last year, when I wasn’t even ten years old yet, I knew The Jungle Book straight the way through, even the songs. I could do all the voices, too, especially King Louie’s:

Bu-ba-do-do-do-be-do.

So I knew the cake was from Sue’s recipe book. Sue was Mum’s friend. She lived really far away, even past the McDonald’s. Sue played on the church kickball team with Mum and she had a dog and she let Cole and I call her “Sue” and not “Miss” or “Missus” anything, which I thought was weird, but I kindof liked it, too. Everyone said that she was dying. Scary, right? Everyone said so. And everyone said she was a great, an amazing cook.

Sue could cook anything from anything. Like, when it got cold, Sue made soup with big fat wormy noodles for potlucks and parties. The soup was a magic bag, full of tricky purple vegetables that she said were roots and sprouts and Mum used to say you really couldn’t have a party without Sue.

Sue was younger than my Mum, but not by much because my Mum is very young. Sue cried when she watched those commercials with the pretty lady singing songs about angels with a bunch of dogs in her lap. She laughed at the other commercials, the ones with fat babies crawling around in diapers and making messes. I liked Sue and I liked Sue’s dog, so I didn’t mind going to visit her every single day, even if it was the longest drive ever. If Dad drove, we stopped at McDonald’s. If Mum drove, we didn’t.

There were always a lot of adults at Sue’s house: nurses, church people like the kickball ladies, and Mr. Jay, Sue’s brother, was there, too. One time, even the preacher was there and he wasn’t even wearing his preacher clothes. He was wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt that said, Jesus Is My Superhero. “You can read?” he said when I told him what it said.

“I’m nine,” I said. It was an almost-truth. I guess that’s the same thing as an almost-lie. I should’ve felt bad for almost-lying to the preacher, but how did he think I couldn’t read? Even Cole could read Sam I Am and I’m way bigger than Cole. So I didn’t feel that bad. Mum lied all the time. The same day I told the preacher I was nine, Mum said, “It’s going to be okay” and that was maybe the biggest lie I’ve ever heard said out loud.

There were lots of snacks at Sue’s house. Roasted seaweed crackers and Cheez-Its and dried up squid legs and loads of candy. No one cooked anything. Everything was in plastic bags or soda cans. Dad gave Cole and I peanut-butter pretzels and jellybeans in plastic cups and told us to go to the basement and play with Sue’s dog. He always said it would a quick visit, only an hour or so. (Another lie. My parents are very good at lying.)

When I would go upstairs to the bathroom, there were always a lot of people in Sue’s kitchen. I’d hear them say things about “late stage” through the bathroom door. When I’d come out of the bathroom, they’d be like, “Hi Tessa, are you and your little brother having fun with the dog?” but I didn’t know them at all. They had eaten the entire box of Cheez-Its by the seventh day. That was really annoying. Grown-ups shouldn’t be allowed to have kid food, but when I told them this, Dad was suddenly behind me and telling me to go downstairs.

Mum liked Sue the most out of everyone, so she always talked really loud over people who said stuff about the “late stage”. Mum was always reading and clicking on her computer. I think she was trying to find something to make Sue better. That’s how much Mum liked her. One day, I found a magazine about Chinese medicine on Mum’s desk. The magazine had a bunch of pictures of grass and flowers, but Mum said that Sue was the wrong kind of Chinese, so none of it would work. Mum forgot to make dinner that day, but that was okay, because Dad got us McDonald’s on the way to Sue’s house, later.

I caught Cole sharing his fries with Sue’s dog. Sometimes I feel like I’m always being the big sister. Cole was six and still so little. Sue’s dog threw up chunky potato pieces later, because, like grown-ups, dogs aren’t supposed to eat kid food. Sue’s dog flopped his ears like, it’s okay, you’re just a baby and then ate his own throw-up which was fucking gross. Mum told me not to say that word. I said it in my head, so it doesn’t count.

Now I’m the king of the swingers, whoaaah the jungle V-I-P.

Last year, at the women’s kickball league championship game, Dad and Cole and me made signs that said SUE # 42 and MOLLY #41. My mum’s name is Molly, but no one calls her that. I call her Mum and Cole calls her Mummy and Dad calls her Molls and Sue calls her Sis, even though they aren’t actually sisters. I only have one name. But Cole used to call me ‘Essa, when he couldn’t do T’s.

The game took forever, so Sue’s dog and Cole and I played in the grass behind. We played hunters and we were right about to catch Sue’s dog, but then Cole stepped on a snail, crushing its shell. Cole started crying, saying he had killed the snail’s house. Cole’s more baby than kid so he didn’t mean to. Cry, I mean. Sue’s dog ate the crushed snail and I told Cole that the snail had gone to heaven. It’s what Mum would’ve said. Sue’s dog licked up Cole’s face and you couldn’t even tell that he had cried at all. We laid down on either side of Sue’s dog, Cole and I. He was a good dog, maybe even amazing. Fat-ish, mostly yellow, smelled like dirt, especially around his stomach.

Then Sue and Mum’s team won the championship. They screamed–happy screams like people who had never been that happy ever– and flapped their arms around each other and jumped around with their poochy parts jumping around in opposite directions. I wondered if I would be poochy when I got old, too, although Sue and Mum really weren’t very old. Dad kissed Mum on the mouth, Sue kissed Cole and me, but not on the mouth, and Sue’s dog barked and barked and barked until Cole and I chased him around the bases.

Dad took us to Applebees that night. Sue’s dog couldn’t come with us, because he was a dog. It was a really, really good dinner. Probably the best dinner I’ve ever had, because Mum didn’t make me get broccoli with my pasta. Mum ordered dessert, which was not on her diet, and she said calories don’t count when you’re a champion.

Cole fell asleep in Sue’s lap so she couldn’t reach her ice cream. Sue wiggled her eyebrows at me. They were painted on, or tattooed, with some kind of ink that had turned purple. “Want my ice cream? You’re a growing gal. You need it more than me.”

“Mum says I won’t ever wear a sleeveless dress,” I said. I had heard her say to Dad one day. They talked in the car a lot. I pretended not to listen, because that is what you’re supposed to do.

Sue patted my face. It was very nice.  “Nobody likes those kinds of dresses anyway.” 

I’ve reached the top and had to stop. And that’s what botherin’ me.

We were always driving to Sue’s house, even before she got sick. Mum went back to work when Dad lost his job. Mum was the smallest bit mad at him for it. I know because I know Mum and I heard their secret car conversations and she always sounded the smallest bit mad. Even though Dad eventually got another job, Mum kept working too. So that left Cole and I without anyone except Sue. We took lots of walks around the lake with her dog.

Sue had about ten million bowls and lots of spoons and her hair bunched around her face when she cooked. She made lots of things, even when there wasn’t a party: red bean buns that puffed when you touched the tops, some kind of rice porridge smashed up with spam and onions, and, my favorite, burnt sugar moon cookies. Sue made the moon cookies into fish shapes, mostly, because she said fish were good luck and it was a shame that our nasty frozen, nasty swampy lake didn’t have any fish.

When I told Mum about the fish and how maybe if there were fish in the lake, then we would be lucky enough to get Sue better, Mum said that was a nice thing to think about. Then she forgot to make dinner again, Dad came home and we got in the car to go to Sue’s house.

I’m tired of monkeyin’ around!

We went to see Sue every day that whole summer. On the tenth day, Cole found the TV remote in the couch and pushed the buttons until the TV bounced awake. Cole didn’t know better. The Jungle Book was already in the player so we watched it twice that day.

There were a lot of things different, now. Kickball had been over for a long time. It felt like forever since we went to Applebees or the mall or the grocery store or anywhere except to Sue’s house. We skipped a lot of things. We skipped church. Dad had a job and Mum still had her job, but they skipped. Cole and I skipped art camp most days. Mum said we’d make it up later. We drove through Montgomery County every day and it was the longest drive ever.

It got really hot. The lake got sludgy and muddy and the wind smelled weird if we drove by it with the windows down. I thought about walking along the lake and catching a fish for Sue, if fish even lived there, which they didn’t. I thought about walking along the lake with Sue. I thought about walking, somewhere, anywhere, really.

Cole and I played hunters with Sue’s dog and we made forts with the leather couch cushions. Cole cried when he was tired, because he was more baby than kid, and I’d have to make him stop crying. We watched The Jungle Book a lot, probably close to a bazillion times. Cole would just fall asleep on the leather couch cushions or on Sue’s dog. I guess I would fall asleep too, sometimes. Dad would carry Cole out to the car, but I walked myself.

Mum and Dad never talked much on the way home, because it was a really long drive to talk the whole way there and the whole way back. So Mum just cried, but she didn’t make any noise. Her shoulders moved against the back of her seat, that’s how I knew she was crying. Dad kept both his hands on the steering wheel. He didn’t say anything or cry or anything. 

I was only scared one time in my entire life. I’m really brave. I’m really big and brave and smart and I’m not usually scared.

When Sue and Mum won their championship game and they were yelling and bouncing and screaming like happy people, Sue pulled off her cap. She threw it into the air, and her hair came away with it. I mean, it got stuck in the Velcro on the back of the cap, so it just came off. A whole chunk of it. Sue looked at me and then at the hair and then at me again. “Oh shit, she said, “my head doesn’t like hair anymore. Oh shit.”

That’s it. That’s what she said.

Now, don’t try to kid me. I’ll make a deal with you.

So, Sue had this one big-huge painting in the living room. It was big-huge. Like, not big and not huge, but both: big-huge. And, it wasn’t a real painting, just a lot of red, yellow, and orange brush strokes in thick paint. It was like someone melted Starbursts, a lot of Starbursts. Every time I saw it on the way to the basement, I tried to figure it out and later, when I was falling asleep or even blinking, it would appear on the backs of my eyelids. It still does that sometimes.

On the forty-first day, it was all normal, except that the kitchen smelled like Cheez-It’s and flowers instead of noodle soup and moon cookies. Sue’s brother, Mr. Jay, had a weak faith in Chinese medicine, Mum said. I said but I thought Sue was the wrong kind of Chinese. Mum said, shhh, be good. Dad asked me if I wanted to see her. Mr. Jay nodded at Dad and Mum and me and stirred a mug with flower tea. I followed Mr. Jay upstairs. Cole sat on the steps with Sue’s dog and didn’t even ask to come with us.

Sue did not look right, but I guess I should have known that. She was the same color as her bed sheets and I had never seen bed sheets that color—grayish and yellowish, like her dog’s throw-up after he ate Cole’s fries. I won’t lie: I really hated, I fucking hated looking at her, she looked so bad.

And the room smelled bad, really bad, too.  Mum told Sue about art camp, that I had made a watercolor painting and a painting with fruit juices and how my fish looked almost real. I felt funny hearing Mum talk like that. Not funny. That’s the wrong word. It felt amazing, but amazing in a bad way. I keep saying things are bad, because I don’t know how else to say them.  The preacher was there, wearing his Jesus Is My Superhero shirt again, and his face had pulled down on the edges. Mum squeezed my hand. A mushy tissue nestled between her fingers and I thought about the laundry piled up, how I had to wear my sneakers without socks for days now. I decided to tell her later that it was okay and that I know she didn’t mean it. Mr. Jay drank the flower tea he had made for Sue. Or maybe he hadn’t made it for Sue. Maybe his weak faith had given out or maybe he didn’t believe in Chinese medicine at all, which would be right, because Sue was the wrong kind of Chinese, but how could there be a wrong kind of person who just wants to get better? The nurse was everywhere, saying that Sue had to take her pills and drink water and roll over so she didn’t get bedsores. Dad sighed into the air above my head, and no one heard it except me. Mr. Jay cried silently into his tea, which didn’t help anyone. Mum squeezed my hand harder, the tissue pressing into my hand lines. Somewhere, below us, outside us, maybe even around us, the bad smelling air turned glue-y, the pasty kind for building bookshelves. It really smelled so bad. I thought about really bad messes, like that one time Cole spilled milk and flour when we were making cookies. Not moon cookies. Just regular chocolate chip ones. Sue’s dog ate the milk and flour goop off the floor. He eats everything. Sue didn’t even get mad, she just popped open the chocolate chip bag and we ate the whole thing–me and Sue and Cole and when Mum came to pick us up, she said we all had crazy eyes.

I stood by Sue’s bed for a long time. Then, Dad made me pray for her and I do not remember what I prayed. Mr. Jay cried. Mum said I did a good job. There were too many people in the room, everyone breathing in glued up air above my head. It wasn’t okay that we were just looking at her die like that, but Mum said, shhh, be good Tessa. Then I patted Sue’s face and the nurse gasped because I hadn’t washed my hands and I said, “Amen stupid shit late stage fucking cancer,” and then I left.

But I don’t know how to make fire.

Cole was still on the stairs with Sue’s dog. Cole said, “I want to see her, too. I’m big enough.” I patted his face. We took the cushions off the basement couch and jumped on them until they got squishy and then we watched The Jungle Book. Cole sat next to me and Sue’s dog sat next to him. He listened to me say the lines and do the voices. Cole was barely a kid, still more like a baby, so I didn’t mind that he fell asleep on my arm.

Break it down boys, break it down boys, break it down
Break it down boys, break it down boys, break it down

Mr. Jay was a nice man, even if he did drink the tea that was supposed to be for Sue. A sad, nice man. We saw him at the memorial service and he didn’t say much. Mum said some stuff at the memorial service, about how she and Sue were best friends, more like sisters, and how she had taken care of us when we had no one else. And I didn’t even know this but Sue actually got Mum her job when Dad lost his. Mum cried a lot and I think Dad did, too. It was a crowded memorial service, lots of people, and lots of food afterwards. I asked Dad why everyone brought food and he said that sometimes eating makes sad people feel better. I said that was fucking stupid and he didn’t slap me like Mum had slapped me the last time I said those words. He just kindof cleared his throat and nodded three times. We ate the food. It was mostly noodles, as if people thought they could make noodles like Sue.

After the memorial service, Mr. Jay was standing by a table that had a picture of Sue when she was a baby. There were a couple vases of flowers, too, orchids and sunflowers and baby’s breath. Mum said those were Sue’s favorites, even if they did look funny together.

I pretended to look at the pictures when I said, “Don’t worry, they’re not amazing, they’re not even good.” I said it real secretively, so no one else would hear me and get offended.

“Oh?” Mr. Jay’s words said, above my head. It was like his words and his voice were not together. His words said “Oh?”, but his voice did not say anything.

“The noodles,” I said, “I tried them. They’re not good. Hers are way better.” I thought this might make him feel better even though we both knew it was over and we would never walk around the lake again. Sue and me, I mean.

Later, Dad took us to give Mr. Jay the leftovers from the party. It felt different walking up the stairs to the Sue’s door. Mum had to work, so it was just Cole and Dad and me. Mr. Jay invited us inside and I saw that big-huge-Starburst-red-yellow-orange painting in the hallway. A sunset, maybe. Or a flower. Or the inside of a person’s blood, maybe. Something like the inside of something, I knew that much.

Dad told Cole and me to thank Mr. Jay for letting us come over and watch stuff on his TV. It was his TV now, I guess. I said thanks and Cole said thanks. Cole said he should get more movies. I said that we really did like The Jungle Book. Cole said, yeah we did, but you could try other movies sometime, too. I said, yeah, you could, maybe movies about girls and not just boys. Dad said we had to go.

Before we left, Mr. Jay said some stuff about how much Sue loved us, Cole and me, and that she would be watching us from heaven. I said I knew that, I knew she was in heaven. Then Mr. Jay said that I was very good at praying. He said I shouldn’t feel bad that it hadn’t worked to make Sue better. So now I knew the difference. Between good and amazing, I mean. Amazing works.

So give me the secret, clue me what to do.

I turned nine. So Sue had been gone for a long, long, time. Like, almost whole year. We had gone to lots of parties without her and they weren’t great (not even close to amazing), because how could you even have a party without noodles or burnt sugar moon cookies or Sue.

Dad was out of a job again so Mum left us at home with him when she went to work. Dad took us to the arcade. We couldn’t bring Sue’s dog, because he was a dog. Turns out, dogs aren’t allowed in Applebees or in arcades, which seems kindof unfair. It should be one or the other. Dad bought a newspaper and gave us the change to play games. We watched other kids ice skating until Dad finished reading the paper. He bought us hot chocolate from the YMCA Kids Club even though he said he didn’t believe in the YMCA. I wondered what Sue’s hot chocolate would taste like, if she made hot chocolate.

Because it had been a year since Sue died, Mum and the church kickball ladies pooled together some of their money and rented a condo at Myrtle Beach. They were going to do it every year in her honor, get the whole team together. When she got home, Mum told me that they walked a lot and talked a lot and they remembered Sue, told stories, that sort of thing.

Later, I heard Mum tell Dad that the trip was the worst ever. She said she kept crying herself to sleep, that she is always crying herself to sleep, and why, why why? Dad said, “I know” and he hugged her, which didn’t seem like enough, especially because Dad would have to tell her that Mr. Jay was dead. They found him two days ago, the day Mum left for the beach. Mum would cry again, drip down her face and hands, and Dad would not cry, at least not very much.

I went out to the backyard. Cole and Sue’s dog were looking for worms. I had told them that I would ask Dad to take us fishing. Maybe the best fish live in nasty lakes, the luckiest fish, the fish that get made into fish-shaped mooncakes. I thought about everything, which is really hard. It’s really hard. Even for someone who is really smart and knows a lot like I know a lot, it is really hard to think of everything. It is really hard to be big enough for Cole and me both, even when you’re really smart like me. It doesn’t matter how many things you know or whether you’re nine or ten or a baby or a gazillion years old, because some things don’t work out and some things just aren’t lucky or amazing at all.

Taylor Nam is an optimist and a doer. She never leaves the house without a book. In the late afternoon, she can most often be spotted running through the park with her dog, Leo, or drinking a glass of pink wine. This is her first literary magazine publication.

Alex Atkinson

What Happened at the Barber Shop

1

He was being good, that was the hell of it. He was actually cooperating, for once. He hadn’t screamed, hadn’t cried, hadn’t tried to stay in the car. Off the top of her head, Erica could only think of one other occasion when the kid had just let it happen – and that time he’d been half asleep. Cohen hated haircuts. He said they hurt.

“They don’t hurt, buddy.”

The kid nodded, but you could see he didn’t believe it.

“They feel good.” A bit of a stretch, but…

“Okay.” I’ll eat the poison, mommy. If you say so.

“You wanna see mom get a haircut first?”

“No.”

Erica didn’t know what else to say, so she repeated: “They don’t hurt, buddy.”

“Okay.” Head down, accepting it. It was out of character for the kid – Cohen usually dug in, and wore you out. Fought for every inch of ground, even when it was clear that he wasn’t sure what he was fighting for. Difficult, that was what her husband called him. Strong-willed, the doctors put in all his charts. A bit of an asshole, Erica sometimes joked, which always earned her a look from any other mothers in earshot. It hurt a little to see the kid so broken. So civilized.

Erica had been talking to the kid in the rearview mirror, now she popped out of the car, and opened Cohen’s door with a flourish. “Come on – it’s gonna be fin.”

“Fun,” Cohen laughed. He was new to words.

“Yeah? What did I say?”

“Fin.”

“Nooo. A fin is on a fish.”

“You said fin!” Cohen squealed – too loud, and too delighted for the parking lot.

Erica put a finger to her lips, smiling. “Are you sure?”

“YES!”

“Aw, man, ya got me. Oh well. Come on then. Unbuckle. Let’s go get this done.”

2

“I think about it every day,” Erica said. “A hundred times a day. How ‘bout you? The sound of that bell. Do you remember that bell? When you opened the door… I do.”

3

A bell went off when they opened the door, and a stylist poked her head around the corner. It was one they’d had last time, who had been so good with Cohen, and Erica allowed herself to hope that they would get her again. “Hey there! We’ll be with you in a sec. Sign in on the computer, if you haven’t already checked in online.”

“We did,” Erica said. She had learned her lesson the first time they had come here. Walk-ins were welcome, and maybe even encouraged; but waiting thirty minutes for a haircut – or fifteen, or five – with a restless toddler, who didn’t want to be there anyway, was something that Erica only wanted to experience once. “We checked in earlier, and the thing said it was time. So, here we are. This is Cohen.”

“Hey Cohen!” the stylist exclaimed as if she didn’t remember him at all. Cohen clutched Erica’s arm, and only stared at the woman; but the stylist went on undeterred: “Grab yourself a lollipop, kiddo, and have a seat over there,” she said, and then disappeared back behind the partition. “We’ve got you coming right up.”

Still a wait, Erica thought. No way around it, I guess. It shouldn’t be that long, though. At least, it hadn’t been that long last time. “You want a lollipop, bud?”

Cohen shook his head.

“Okay then…” Erica led her son to the row of the folding chairs lined up against the wall, Cohen dragging his feet the whole way like they were chained together, heavy and awkward.

Like he knew.

4

“Like he knew,” Erica said.

5

 They had barely touched their asses to the flimsy cushions on the chairs, when a man’s voice came from the other side of the partition: “Ready for Cohen.”

Good, Erica thought. “Come on, bud, let’s go get this over with.” She inwardly winced at this framing of it. She had to stop making it sound like this was some kind of horror the kid had to endure, instead of normal grooming which was entirely painless. It could even be fun. “Hey, you want me to tell him to give you a mohawk?”

“No.” The kid had no idea what a mohawk was.

“How ‘bout a faux-hawk?”

“No.”

“How about a mustard?”

“Mustard is yellow,” the kid said to his shoes.

“Mustard is yellow,” Erica confirmed. “Come on, let’s get those feet on the floor, kid, whaddaya say?”

“Okay,” Cohen said. So unlike him, he actually did it.

6

“My first thought when I saw you was—”

7

Uh oh. I think Cohen can take him. She would send that to her husband as a caption, if she could sneak a picture. He would laugh. He would worry.

Is he being bad, he would ask, meaning Cohen.  

No, he’s being perfect. That was how she would have described it.

Two stalls over from where the stylist they’d had last time was finishing up with another customer, stood a man who looked like he had crawled, starving, out of a 1950’s time capsule. He was about 5’4”, and rail thin. The kind of thin which almost had to be the result of sudden illness. Head too big, shoulders too broad. He wore a short-sleeve, white button-down over institutional slacks, and black no-slip shoes; breast pocket stuffed with combs, and what could only be a pack of cigarettes. He kept his hair high and tight, but longer on top – and this was slicked hard to one side with Brylcreem, or whatever the cool kids were using these days. He waited for them to cross the room with all the dignity of a butcher. Slouched, not looking at them. Just a man there to do a job. He took no joy in it.

When he turned to look at them, his eyes—

8 

“I don’t give a shit what he was on,” she said. “If he was on anything… I’m sorry.”

9

—were hard, little marbles set too deep into his cheeks. They darted over her and Cohen as they approached, and then resumed an intense study of his workstation: scissors, and hair dryers, those magic jars of blue.

He didn’t speak, even though they were only four paces away.  

Cohen’s grip tightened on her arm again, and the kid missed a step. Here it comes… A familiar little flutter. The PTSD of mothers who have difficult boys. She knew what was going to happen next. Hadn’t she known? She knew. No way around it. Every time. He’s gonna scream. He’s gonna fight. He’s gonna embarrass the shit out of me, and make me look like a terrible mother. And at the end of it all, they wouldn’t even get a haircut. Not from this guy. This guy looked like the type, she had seen it before, who would just stare at them, and shrug.

What the hell do you want me to do, lady?

Take charge, you fucking idiot, Erica would want to say. He’s not afraid of me, but he’s afraid of you. He’ll do what you say. Just try. No one got it. No one understood. No one but the mothers of other difficult boys—

But Cohen wasn’t fighting. He was coming along, just slower than before.  

“You okay, bud?” Erica whispered.

“I don’t want it.”

“Want what? A haircut?”

“Uh huh.”

“But we’re already here. It’s our turn.”

Cohen shrugged. What did he care? He was just a kid. If there was any awkwardness, it wouldn’t be on him to smooth it out. That would fall to her. And probably to her pocketbook, as well. She would have to tip the guy, graciously, for doing nothing. She wondered if it wouldn’t be rude to wait until the woman who had helped them last time – who had been so good with Cohen, so firm, yet understanding, even though Cohen had, frankly, been a nightmare – finished up with her other customer, and decided it probably would be.  

“Come on…” Erica said. “Mom will be right here.”

“I wanna go home.”

“No.”

 10 

“Go. That’s what I want to scream at me. Go. Grab that fucking kid, and run, you stupid bitch. Go home. I’m sorry to curse… You stupid, fucking, dumbass b—”

11

“Hop up in the chair, kid.” Flat. Robotic.

How ‘bout a little charm, pal, whaddaya say? “This is Cohen,” Erica said out loud. See? This is how it’s done. She introduced herself, as well; and offered him her hand for a shake. How do ya do, and all that good shit. Come on, dude, don’t mess this up – he’s BEING SO GOOD. Just go along with it. It occurred to her as the guy flapped her arm up and down exactly twice – staring at it the whole time like he was trying to count the hairs on her forearm – that she had a kind of hostage mentality when it came to Cohen. Desperate yet accommodating. Murderously impatient with people who didn’t get with the program right away. He had a gun to her back, and that gun was his willingness to flip completely the fuck out at any time, under any circumstances, excepting all considerations, with little, or absolutely no notice.

She wondered if all mothers of difficult boys were like that.

“You want to say hello?” she asked Cohen, a risk.

“I want to go home,” he pleaded. He spoke too low for her to catch all of it, even bent down as she was, close to his face. “Hurt me.”

“No, buddy. It won’t. I promise. Hop up in the chair, huh?”

“Get in the chair,” the barber said, a littler sterner this time.

12

“I should have left right then.”

13

 But she thought, maybe, the guy was just trying to assert his authority. And maybe that was a good thing. A little awkward. No bedside manner on this dude. She imagined there weren’t many customers who requested him for the conversation. But maybe it could work. Something about a man’s stern voice, it got the kid moving in a way hers couldn’t. And maybe he was just hungry, this man, this barber. Maybe that was what his attitude was about. Erica got like that sometimes, too, when her blood sugar was low. Pissy. Short.

Sometimes even at work.

“Hop on up, buddy,” Erica said again. “Come on: 1-2-3.”

It wouldn’t be unusual for her to have to say it twenty times, and effectively to count to 60. She had done it before. Many times. But this time, instead of fighting, Cohen stepped up onto the silver rung, which was there for just that purpose – she held his hand – and climbed into the high seat, made even higher by the thick cushion that the barber had put there to bring her son up to a height where he could work. He knew, that cushion told her. He knew. Knew he was going to be working on a little kid. How could anyone who knew a thing like that not be trusted? To do their best? To do the right thing? Always?

14

“I was so fucking naïve.”

15

“How do you want it?”

“Shorter, that’s for sure.” She wondered how often he heard this joke.

Often enough for him to feel like he didn’t even need to acknowledge it, apparently. “How do you want it cut, big guy?”

And that sealed it. Whatever misgivings she might have had about this man, about his attitude, his demeanor, vanished with those two little words: big guy. They spoke of a man who had a soul. Who perhaps loved children, maybe even had kids of his own. And if she’d had any left – misgivings, that is – deep seeded and stubborn, those too would have disappeared when her son answered: “Ummm, mohawk.”

And the barber threw his head back, and bellowed laughter. Deep and infectious. Lusty. Unselfconscious. The laugh of a lounge singer who’d had one too many whiskies. When he laughed, the lines around his eyes made him almost handsome. “I think your mom might have something to say about that!”

“If that’s what he wants,” she said.

He got this joke, too. “Oh-kay, mom…” As if he didn’t believe her. As if they’d known each other for years. As if they—

16

“I was completely disarmed, by this point.”

17

“Just a boy’s cut,” she told the barber.“Whatever that looks like to you will be fine.”

“Like this?” the man asked, pointing at his own head.

Erica smiled. “Sure,” she said. “Why not?” It would look at little different – who was she kidding, it would be a whole new aesthetic for the kid – but that was the point of getting haircuts, right? The barber wrapped a black cape roughly the size of a queen-sized blanket around Cohen’s shoulders, fastened it in back, and got started. Cautiously, at first – a snip-snip here, and a snip-snip there – slowly building up steam.

Cohen shut his eyes, and squenched his little face, as if he thought someone was about to throw an egg at him; and Erica braced for the inevitable freak-out. It didn’t come. So, after a moment, she cautiously took a seat in the empty stall next to them, and started fiddling with her phone. It was nice to take a break for a minute. To let go, and let someone else deal with him, at least for a while. The other stylist rang up her client, and disappeared into the breakroom. Erica snapped a picture of Cohen, and sent it to her husband. “Proof of life,” she put as the caption, no longer amused by the barber’s height, and frailty. Proof that he’s cooperating, was what she really meant. Her husband worried when she went out with Cohen all by herself. It sounded silly; but Cohen really could be so difficult, sometimes.

The reply came back right away: “Is he being good? Send me a video.”

18

“He was always doing that. Worrying about me. About us. Tying to protect us. Trying to keep us sane, and happy. He’s doing it now; even though I told him, specifically, not to come.”

Erica waved. “Hey, David…”

19

He’s being perfect, she decided she would send with the video. Because he was. Maybe she would write it in all caps. Cohen hadn’t even screamed when the guy clipped around his ears. His head was on a bit of a swivel, moving around, the guy had to keep holding it; but you expected that, when you were working with a boy his age.

Can’t sit still. Cohen never could.

She switched her camera over to video, and pressed record, still trying to be sneaky. She didn’t want to make the barber nervous. Didn’t know how he performed under pressure. Didn’t know if he was some freak who didn’t want to be filmed because he thought the government was watching him, or Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg (or some wicked combination of all three). She might have asked, but that was a risk. He might actually say no.

And what she was doing was harmless.

She stopped her first take after seventeen seconds. She’d been moving the camera too much. She hated when she saw videos like that. They made her nauseous. And right towards the end, Cohen had moved his head, and the barber had told him to “Knock it off,” a little darkly.

That didn’t fit the narrative.

She tried again, bringing her phone up to her chest, and holding it with both hands to keep it steady. She centered Cohen, and pressed record. She figured would let it go for about thirty seconds. That wasn’t too long. You could send a video like that without any bother at all. But around fourteen seconds in, the kid moved, and the barber jerked his head back into position. Too rough. Her husband wouldn’t like that. She didn’t like it, either.

She would need to say something.

Her thumb drifted toward the red stop icon; but before it could get there, before she could stop the recording, or even look up from her phone, the scissors turned in the barber’s hand—  

20     

“I can’t picture it, for some reason” Erica said. “That little move. That little flick. The rest of it I see too much, all the time, but that part of it…”She shut her eyes. “I can’t make it make sense. It’s like a magic trick. I know it’s not. It’s something we do every day, a thousand times a day. Simple. I’ve tried watching myself, filming myself; but I can’t get the action to absorb into my brain. You know what I mean? But I could do it for you right now, easy, if I had a pencil, or a pen, or a pair of scissors. Just turn them around in my palm. That’s all…

“So fucking weird,” she finished, opening her eyes.

“Ma’am, I’ve asked you five times—”

“I know,” Erica said, cutting off the judge. “I know, your honor. I’m sorry.”

She drew a breath, hot and ragged, and continued. “The scissors turned in his fist, and he raised them up over his head, and he brought them down—

21

 “Cohen!” Erica shouted, like she was mad at the kid. Like he was being bad. She had a lot of practice barking his name like that. Maybe that was why, when she opened her mouth, that was what came out. It wasn’t what she meant. She dropped her phone, and surged toward them. Surged was a perfect word for it. Like a wave. Like a bomb. Like lightning rushing up your cords to fry your circuits. An unstoppable force. The muscles in her arms and legs, back and torso, didn’t seem to have much do with it. She moved through that little distance faster than she would have ever believed. Faster than she had ever moved in her whole life.

Not fast enough.

Cohen’s arms and legs writhed under the black barber’s cape as he started to fight. So lively. Kicking – screaming. Erica was fiercely proud. Now you’ve got to deal with Cohen, you poor bastard! Did she really think this at the time? Or was that just her memory trying to set it all into neat little lines: this and then that; this and then that; and, oh yes, the analysis? She was never sure. See how you like it! See how you like it! Get him, Cohen! GET HIM!  He could be so difficult. So stubborn. Such a little asshole, sometimes – but that was just because he was so strong. Willed. Armed and legged. All of it.

GET HIM!

“I said don’t move! I said don’t move!” the man was ranting – right up until Erica barreled into him. She shoved him against the wall – a distance of maybe four feet – like he was nothing. A leaf. A blade a grass. Weightless.

He bounced off, and came right back. Scissors raised above his head. A movie monster on a mission. His scream was just as lusty as his laugh. So full of everything: pain and rage, surprise, grief, health, sickness: “I SAID DON’T MOVE!”

22         

“It’s not like I am a superhero, or anything. Or a boxer. Or an MMA fighter. I had never even really been in a fight. What happened was, my hand just flew up and swatted him away, like his head was a basketball that was flying at mine. All instinct. Lucky shot. I wanna say I threw a punch, but I think I actually hit him with my palm. There was a lot of force behind it. His momentum. Mine. I remember the way his jaw felt when—

23

She felt a snap, and thought: Good, I hope it’s broken, you twisted fuck. He went down, legs flying bonelessly out from underneath him, and he cracked his head, hard, on the linoleum floor.

The barber groaned.

“What’s going on? Is everything okay?” This had to be the other stylist, just now coming out of the breakroom. “Oh my God! Oh my—”

Too late, lady. I got this.

Erica fell on the man, raining blows. She had never been in a fight, but she had seen enough videos on the internet to know that the winner was usually the one who never stopped, no matter what. He brought his arms up, weakly, to try to defend himself – so Erica pinned them to the ground like grade school bully. They felt like little bird bones under her knees.  

At some point, she got an idea: I could crush his windpipe. That would ruin his day. She wasn’t sure if this would kill him or not, but right then she didn’t care. I’m probably gonna get arrested, anyway. Might as well get my point across. She tried – bringing her palm down again and again, putting all her weight behind it – but his chin kept getting in her way. So, maybe that was what broke his jaw, ultimately.

That’s enough, part of her thought. But another part knew that it would never be. Knew that she would fight this man for the rest of her life. Forever. For always. Until the end of everything. Right there. Right then. She would never stop.  

But eventually, someone did pull her off of the guy. Too strong to be the other stylist. It was the first cop on the scene, though she wasn’t able to process that information at the time.

Erica fought him, too.

“It’s okay. It’s okay. Stop,” the cop kept saying. “Listen to me, it’s okay. Stop.”

24

“Hold on,” the man’s attorney broke in. “I think you’re leaving something out.”

“Your honor!” the attorney for Erica’s side was scandalized.

“Don’t you think the jury has a right to hear, from her, how she plucked out my client’s eye? How she did it? What she used? What state my client was in at the time? If we’re gonna sit here all day, and let her work the jury, we can at least have her tell the whole story, can’t we?”

The judge was irritated. “Counsel will approach the bench.”

But Erica looked at him there, the former barber, with his little eyepatch, and decided she wasn’t bothered at all. “I used my thumb, actually,” she told the jury. “And it was more like a scoop than a pluck.” She tried not to smile. A smile would be inappropriate. “Like a little pop.” She popped her lips. Her attorney was trying to get her to shut up, but she went on: “I thought it wouldn’t work, you know? At first. Because I don’t have long fingernails.” She showed them. “But it worked just fine. Came right out. No problem. I think he might have been knocked out, by that point; but, boy, that woke him up. And he screamed. That had to be what brought the officer in off the street…” The judge was bringing her gavel down again and again, so Erica paused just long enough for the court to silence. What she said next earned her a look from her attorney. “They always scream so loud, don’t they? The crazies…”

25

“Listen. Listen to me.” Eventually she would. Not now. Not yet. “Stop. Please. This isn’t helping.” He was right, though. This man. Whoever he was. He smelled like he was sweating Kung Pow Chicken, but he was right.

And Erica suddenly remembered what she’d forgotten.

“Cohen!” He would run to her now, and she would hug him. Cohen gave the best hugs. “Cohen!” Where was he? She couldn’t find him. The room was too huge all of a sudden, too full of screams, too full of people. A vast ballroom in a fading strip-mall. “Cohen!” He would come to her. He had to. How could he not? She was his mother.“Coooohennnn!”

“Over here.” A woman’s voice. The stylist.

As Erica moved in her direction, she tried not to look at all the blood. The blood was meaningless. There was blood in every little boy and girl. Bloody knees, bloody noses. Blood at the doctor, when they pricked their fingers. Blood blooming into every bandage. Blood in every operating room. There was blood in men and women, too. Blood in all the birds and fish. Blood in cats. Blood in dogs. Blood in everything that moved.

But Cohen didn’t.

Erica shoved the woman out of the way, and scooped him up. “Cohen!” she barked like she was angry. Had that been the last thing that he heard? Had he thought his mom was mad at him, because of what that man did? She spoke softer. “Cohen…” Startle awake. Kick. Fight. He would do it. She was sure. Her son was so lively. So difficult. Cohen never sat still. But the kid was little bird bones, all at awkward angles. “COHEN!” Erica bellowed, shaking him. “Mom’s not mad! Please…”

26

“Is there anything else?” Her attorney handed her a tissue. With poor grace. He was still mad at her. For him this was just a trial, a job. He wanted to win. Not because he really cared, but to further his career. Life in prison for this man, this monster, would look good on his resume.

Erica thought about it. She might have told them how she had prayed. Asked God to put it back. Blood in all the birds and fish; but none in her Cohen. Not anymore. Wake me up! Wake me up! she demanded, but no one had been able to. She might have told them how she felt relieved, sometimes. Actually relieved that she didn’t have to deal with her son, who could be so difficult. No more having to hold him down at the doctor, as he fought and squealed like a captured boar. No more dragging him out in public, the way he’d forced her to drag him to his own murder. No more gun to her back, the kid’s willingness to flip the fuck out at any instant.

She might have asked them what that said about her.

But she already knew.

So she said: “That’s all I’ve got…” She looked at him then, the former barber. Sitting there in his tiny suit. He’d put on a little weight, but not enough to make him look healthy. Eye down. Face impassive. “I hope you get the help that you need,” Erica told him.        

Another little jump from her attorney. Barely perceptible.

The defense then got to cross-examine her. Erica didn’t mind. She had lived through worse things, after all, and the facts were undeniable. What happened at the barber shop was not in dispute. In addition to her video, which had caught the stabbing itself, the shop had been wired with security cameras, so it was all on tape.

The only part that really mattered was: “So, what do you think should happen next?”

“I don’t know,” Erica lied.

“You said you hoped my client got help.”

“I do.”

“Do you think he needs it?” The barber’s attorney had just wrapped up a monolog about his supposed mental illnesses. Health problems. His horrible life. How all that had caused him to have a break – just a tiny, little break – from sanity, from sense, and therefore from responsibility.   

“I don’t know.” This time, she was telling the truth. “I’m not a doctor.”

“Neither am I.” He left it open to imply that none of them were, here in this room. Except, of course, his expert witnesses. “That’s all I need, ma’am. Thank you.”

The trial went on for another couple of days, and in the end, the jury decided that they thought the guy needed help, too. He would be confined in a mental health facility. Not a prison. Erica tried not smile, as they handed down the sentence.

A smile would be inappropriate.

She hurried from the courtroom; dodging questions from the peanut gallery; ignoring David, and most of all her former attorney. The District’s attorney, Erica reminded herself. He had never been hers. Not ever. Not once.

She had meant to cross the street to the parking garage, when she got outside; but decided she needed to take a walk, instead. “I won,” she said when she was sure she had thrown off all her tails. Reporters looking for a react. David looking for comfort.

She had none to give.

Erica only had her own. “I won. I won,” she kept repeating to no one in particular under her breath. Just another crazy talking to herself in the park. If they had sent him to prison, he would have stayed in there for the rest of his life. That was what the DA wanted; but it was unacceptable. They would have never let him out.

This way, they probably would.

“And when they do, I’ll be ready.” She would find out where they were keeping him. Move there. Take a job. Maybe David would join her, eventually. Maybe not. Probably it would be better if he didn’t. She wasn’t sure he would understand. Wasn’t sure it was really helpful. Erica knew that it wouldn’t bring him back. Their son. Knew it wouldn’t wake her up from this nightmare. No more embarrassing trips to the doctor – but no more seeing the kid smile, either. Exclaim over a toy. Laugh at the TV, or one of David’s stupid jokes. No more hugs. Cohen gave the best hugs… And she was aware she might be kidding herself, might be wrong – about him, about the justice system – but she would move there, anyway, and she would wait. Wait until he was well enough to know what was happening to him.  

No matter how long it took. She had time.  

A line by Walt Whitman occurred to her. She’d had to write a paper about his life in Eighth grade; and apparently she still remembered it. It came to her suddenly, bright as fresh blood on a linoleum floor. With a little editing it seemed to fit: “I am thirty-seven years old, and in perfect health,” Erica whispered. “And I promise to wait until I die. Waitand watch. And when they do let him out…” She would cut him down like grass.

And maybe scoop out that other eye, just for the hell of it.

Erica smiled.                                                                

Alex Atkinson is a Writing and Linguistics major at Georgia Southern University with short stories in Crack the Spine’s The Year Anthology 2019; Running Wild Anthology of Stories, Volume 4; and Volume Three of Fearsome Critters Journal. For inquiries, he can be reached at alex@accesscms.com.

Stephen M. Feldman

Abortion Provokes

Abortion provokes, but Professor Frenchy Shaw never expected this.

“Let’s try again, Mr. Vogler. What do you think of the Court’s reasoning in Roe v. Wade?” Frenchy gazed from the lectern up and across the amphitheater, eight rows of tiered seats. The walls were white, the carpet brown. The bearded Vogler sat in the last row on the left.

“I already said I pass.” Vogler peered out from under a green John Deere baseball cap.

“Everyone in here knows I don’t allow passing in Constitutional Law.”

Vogler whispered to the student sitting to his right, Mr. Jones, who snickered.

A clunk vibrated from the ceiling, and the air conditioning switched on, blowing cool air at Frenchy’s back. She inched her blue blazer higher on her neck. “I’m wondering about the right of privacy the Court found in the Fourteenth Amendment.” She clicked the Power Point remote, and a slide displayed the constitutional provision. “Does that right encompass a woman’s interest in choosing whether to have an abortion?”

“You mean that Fourteenth Amendment?” Vogler pointed to the nearest overhead screen. A few students chuckled.

“That’s the one.”

“Reading the text,” he said, “there’s the Equal Protection clause. And a Due Process clause. But no, I don’t see any right of privacy mentioned in it.”

“Interesting point, Mr. Vogler.” She slipped her shoulder-length black hair, thick and frizzy, behind her ear. It popped back out. “So you’re a textualist when it comes to constitutional interpretation?”

“I read the text of the Constitution, if that’s what you mean.”

Jones, on Vogler’s right, snickered again, as did the other three men in their clique. They sat together in the back row and acted like high schoolers, whispering and laughing. Frenchy wouldn’t be surprised if one were to shoot a spit ball.

Vogler wanted to challenge Frenchy, as had many other students—usually men. She didn’t enjoy these classroom conflicts. She preferred to think of herself and the students as colleagues working together to understand the materials.

Frenchy stepped back, away from the lectern, while starting to cross her arms. But she stopped, not wanting to appear weak or closed to student input—however ridiculous or disrespectful. She returned to the lectern and grasped its edges as if behind a steering wheel, relaxed and in control, rounding a fat, lazy curve. “Can anybody respond to Mr. Vogler’s argument? Look again at the Fourteenth Amendment language.”

None of the ninety-five students responded.

“Is there no constitutional right of privacy because it isn’t explicitly delineated in the Fourteenth Amendment?” Two women raised their hands to half-mast. “Ms. Warren?” Frenchy nodded at the woman in the middle of the front row.

“I’m not positive, Professor. But I think the Court found the right implied in the Due Process clause.”

“Thank you.” Frenchy looked back to her left and up to the top row. “What do you think, Mr. Vogler? An implied rather than an express right.”

He sat up straighter. “If a pregnant mother has an implied constitutional right of privacy, then her unborn child does too.”

Frenchy lifted her water bottle from the lectern, flipped open its spout, and sipped. Icy cold. “Let’s suppose a world-famous virtuoso violinist is suffering from a life-threatening blood disease.” She looked up and left. “Are you with me, Mr. Vogler?”

He squinted at Frenchy.

“Good,” Frenchy said, taking another sip and snapping the bottle closed. “This violinist has a rare blood type, and just your luck, you’re one of the few individuals with the same type. In fact, only your blood can save the life of our virtuoso. The problem is that you must remain tethered to him for the next nine months, having your blood slowly but constantly pumped into his veins. For at least the first couple of months, you’ll feel sick. Over the nine months, you’ll gain around thirty-five pounds. And you might never return to your prior body weight and shape.”

Vogler hunched his shoulders and pulled his cap lower.

“Should you have a legal duty to sacrifice your blood for the violinist?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Does the law ever force a man to give a blood transfusion for the sake of another’s well-being?”

Vogler didn’t respond. The air conditioner clunked off, the air stopped blowing, and a disquieting silence settled on the room.

Jones, Vogler’s clean-shaven neighbor, shook his head and said, “This is ridiculous. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“Yes, Mr. Jones?” Frenchy said. “Please explain.”

“You can try to dress this up with hypothetical fantasies any way you want.” Jones pushed his wire-rimmed glasses higher on his nose. “But we all know what you’re talking about.”

I’d be thrilled if you understood what I’m talking about, Frenchy thought. But she forced a smile. Her job was to teach, not use Socratic questioning as a weapon. “What’s that, Mr. Jones?”

“Murder.” Several students groaned while others nodded in agreement. “Abortion is murder—”

“Thank you, Mr. Jones. That’s—”

“It’s murder of the grossest and cruelest kind!”

“I said that’s enough.”

Frenchy pressed her eyes closed, then opened them. Other students were yelling at Jones, some encouraging and some rebuking him. He raged on, “The innocent babies are either dismembered inside the mother’s womb or torn to shreds by vacuum suction.”

“Oh, gross,” a woman called.

Frenchy, her face hot, marched up the aisle toward the back row. The farther she advanced, the quieter the room grew, except for Jones. “The babies are then thrown into a dumpster. Their souls—”

“Mr. Jones! Either you stop, or you leave.” Frenchy halted at the penultimate row. Jones stared at her. The room silent. “Do you understand?”

“Yes.” He turned toward Vogler, who grinned and fist-bumped him.

Frenchy’s body trembled as she returned to the front of the room. She grasped the lectern to steady herself. “All constitutional cases,” she said, “are partly political.”

Jones snorted loudly.

“We can express our politics,” Frenchy continued, “but within the language of the law. As the justices themselves do.”

She glared in Jones’s direction, then looked around the room. “There’s a difference between partisan posturing and politics expressed through legal arguments. Does everybody understand?”

Nobody said a word.

“Mr. Jones, do you understand?”

He nodded.

“What’s that?” she demanded. “I expect you to apologize to the class.”

“You’re joking, right?”

Frenchy cemented her face into a scowl. “Do I look like I’m joking?”

“Sorry,” he muttered.

“What?”

“I’m sorry.”

Frenchy checked the clock. Class should have ended two minutes earlier. “Okay,” she said, “that’s it for today.”

The class erupted into a cacophony of books slamming, notebook computers clacking closed, and students standing and talking.

Frenchy looked down. Had she been unfair to demand Jones’s apology? If she allowed students to proselytize, class would devolve into a face-off between Fox News and MSNBC. She needed to take a stand, but what was the point of humiliating him?

Frenchy gathered up her materials while berating herself for losing control of the classroom. Cradling her papers and tome-sized book in her arms, she hooked a finger through her water bottle, then turned to leave. Ms. Warren, the woman in the front row, stopped her but didn’t speak.

Frenchy smiled. “Ms. Warren, that was a good answer you gave today.”

“Thank you, Professor.” Warren looked past Frenchy’s shoulder, toward the blank blackboard.

“Do you have a question?” Frenchy asked.

“Sorry. I just wanted to say I appreciated how you stood up to Mr. Vogler.”

Stephen M. Feldman is the Housel/Arnold Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Wyoming (sfeldman@uwyo.edu). He has been an NEH Fellow and a Visiting Scholar at Harvard Law School. Professor Feldman has published a short story in the J.J. Outre Review as well as non-fiction books with Oxford, Palgrave-Macmillan, Chicago, and NYU presses. The idea for the protagonist’s classroom hypothetical involving abortion and the violinist is derived from Judith Jarvis Thomson, A Defense of Abortion, 1 Philosophy & Public Affairs 47 (1971). Professor Feldman is currently working on a novel, The Family Law, and a nonfiction book on court-packing.

Joseph Charles Mollica

The Always Wet World

Leaking again, the upstairs people text me. The biggest bucket is out. Grandmother looks cold and needs the extra blanket. I retrieve it from the pile under the tarp and cover her legs to stop the wet air that gets between them. On it, I text back. She has lost her will to speak, but at one time she was good value on the subject of the rain. She called the rain blood and said the Arcs they were manufacturing in secret bunkers and packing with pretty people and animals and vaccines were just cheap knockoffs that would never convince the blood to stop. Grandmother watched the news and gleaned little bits of information from my phone conversations, but I couldn’t say for sure that she understood what was happening. Before she stopped talking, she told me she was no longer concerned with the after-life. She’d lived in lower east side tenements, survived WWII by recuperating her investment in the form of the soldier to whom she was engaged, forty years plus of Catholic-house-wife drudgery, four good-looking and thus quite insufferable children – my dead mother included – and the attendant abuses perpetrated by these siblings upon her sensitive and aching heart, a hundred thousand migraines, bunions that needed surgery twenty years ago, the protracted death of her youngest grandson, Al, the knee and the hip replacement, and now this, the blood. The doctors told her the rain was good for her. She complained about them (silently) because they had a different name for the new times – they called it the umbrella world, or the always wet world. I know she is watching me check my phone, moving the buckets under the trouble-spots. You imbecile, I can hear her thinking. Just put on a new roof.

Joseph Charles Mollica was born and raised in Queens, NY. He is a teacher, a former newspaper reporter, and a graduate of the New School MFA program. His short fiction has appeared online. He lives with his wife and daughter in Sag Harbor, NY. Reach him here: Josephcharlesmollica@gmail.com.

Mark Hall

Talismans Against Our Next Meeting: Search for a Mysterious Lost Love

Days before his death, from his hospice bed, my friend Julian made a handwritten change to his will, entrusting me with his personal papers—manuscripts, photos, and correspondence. Among them, Julian directed me to a cache of faded love letters, tucked inside a small wooden box, buried beneath a jumble of papers in the drawer of a dust-covered planter’s desk. After his death, I became captured by these letters, searching them for a way to know Julian, to bring him back to life. In these letters, Julian is very much alive, but a person I did not recognize. In the twenty years I knew him, Julian never spoke of Michael, the author of these letters. In fact, he never spoke of any love relationship. What made him trust these letters to me? What window might they open onto Julian’s life?

In his first letter, Michael writes to Julian:

I sit at a worm-eaten desk by flapping brocade curtains and realize, Julian my dear, that I love you. It is no use sending you vague insinuations or philosophic hints (which I am incapable of anyway). I hope I know you well enough to believe what you told me. . . . [A]t the time . . . I was living so intensely, so quickly (and so much without sleep!) that I was aware only of the joy, only that suddenly everything was right. . . . But now, suddenly without you and indeed without anyone—for you know there is no one in Wien—I realize Julian that you are . . . I am sorry I am getting corny . . . I’ll say only that I love you and that everything I said was true and upon reconsideration. . . . My syntax is bogged down—I shall go to bed now and very likely destroy this letter tomorrow. But for tonight—I shall think only of you . . . and go to sleep more convinced than ever that I am in love for the first time.

In love for the first time. Michael’s letter sent me right back to that same moment in my own life. From the first, I was drawn in by his gift for description, captivated by the intensity of his feelings, his candor, his unabashed affection. Unlike so many men I have known, Michael is eager to express his feelings, both passionate and self-aware.

Having come of age in the mid 1980s, as AIDS—in those early days, a terrifying mystery—ravaged the gay community, I was reminded of how hesitant and afraid I had been as a young man. Yet here was Michael, only 21 years old, I learned from another letter, proclaiming his love for Julian with such boldness and confidence, which I could never have imagined at his age. Unfettered by fear, this love from a time before sex could kill was foreign to me, yet rich with possibility. While I identified with Michael, at the same time, I could also imagine myself in Julian, bolstered by Michael’s frequent reassurances:

The time element is not so important to me, as I told you I have known your prototype since I was thirteen but never expected to actually meet you (did you realize during those ten years that someone was seeking you?). Having found you I have no intention of losing you. I never cease fantasizing about our next meeting, whether it is for a week, a summer, or a year. I shall try to teach you the trust that comes so easily to me, when you are here my faithfulness will not be in fulfillment of a demand, but a consequence of loving. In letters I can only hope to indicate the tenacity of my affection: the proof will come later. You need not tell me how difficult it must be to accept noble words and rosy vision; you make love rather shyly, you know. It is one of your charms, but I shall be glad to see the intensity born of confidence.

Some readers may find Michael’s letters over-wrought, “corny,” as he puts it, but I find them charming, smart, funny. While I lacked Michael’s fearlessness, he reminds me, at times, of myself at his age. Baffled by casual, brief encounters, I fell madly in love with every boy I met, then wrote them fervid love letters, like Michael’s, and so, I understood the intensity of his attachment to Julian. Eager to learn more, I read on.

* * *

My back to the door, I was slow to feel a pair of eyes on my neck. Taking a break from a long afternoon of grading papers, as dusk fell and shadows lengthened across the quad, I gazed out my office window at the small college in the Carolina Piedmont where I taught English. A rustle of clothing snapped me back to attention. When I turned, there in the dim light stood a dark figure, dressed all in black, including a long, elegant herringbone cape. Hanging from a shoulder, clutched in a bone-white hand, was an old-fashioned black patent leather purse, like one my grandmother might have carried in the 1950s. In the other hand was a cigarette, clasped in a glossy, black Bakelite holder. With long, dark hair, dyed an unnatural shade of walnut, this mysterious visitor’s gender was not immediately apparent. Then, in an unexpected crisp British accent, like a stern English nanny, Julian introduced himself.

He had once taught French and German at the college, he explained. He’d learned from a mutual friend that I owned a pickup truck, and wondered if I might be available to transport his book collection to the college library. Now that he was retired, he planned to donate his vast library, and then visit his books on campus, where he spent his days studying Russian.

This was my first pickup truck. I’d only had it a few months, but already I understood that owning a truck came with certain obligations. A truck was a magnet for anyone with something to move, and its owner was expected to be obliging, especially in a small Southern mill town like Greenwood.

At the time, my students were reading Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. A recent class discussion had focused on a minor character, Mr. Fruit, as in “fruitcake,” or crazy person. The lovable, crazy Mr. Fruit directs traffic at an intersection in Conroy’s fictional town of Colleton. Conroy’s narrator remarks that one can take the measure of town by the way its people treat the town eccentrics like Mr. Fruit. On first meeting, I recognized that Julian was one of Greenwood’s Mr. Fruits, a real character. With scant opportunities to haul anything more than a stack student papers, I was pleased to offer him my assistance. We made arrangements to meet on Saturday. Following his directions, I recognized Julian’s house right away, an old, tumbledown mansion on Main Street, not far from the Uptown Square. Tucked back from the road, screened by an impenetrable thicket of sweet viburnum, his was the house I called “Boo Radley’s Place.” Cloaked in the deep shade of overgrown sasanquas, with its knee-high grass, the dilapidated structure betrayed no indication that it might be inhabited. 

At the appointed time, Julian invited me in through the kitchen. For several minutes, I struggled to adjust to the dim light inside. Heavy, dark drapes covered the windows. All the walls and even the ceilings were painted the same dark pea green. The house was like a cave. Its rooms were piled high with boxes, books, newspapers, furniture, and clothing. In one upstairs bedroom, I counted nineteen rocking chairs of various styles and designs. In another, dozens of lamps of assorted description. It was a hoarder’s paradise, like one of those storage lockers you see on TV, packed to the rafters, with narrow paths for navigating. With every corner I turned, I felt more lost and claustrophobic. Julian, however, appeared unfazed. He led me to a rich magnolia-paneled library filled with books, then pointed to an assortment of liquor store boxes to pack them up. 

While I worked, Julian talked. Though reared in the deep South, Julian spoke the Queen’s English. His British accent, which would have seemed an affectation on anyone else, was, I came to understand, utterly authentic on Julian. It had seeped deep into the bone. In conversation he switched seamlessly from English to German, French, Italian, Russian. He expected his listener to keep up. 

In addition to teaching at the local college, Julian had taught English decades earlier at the Berlitz School in Vienna, Austria. This after years of studying music. A child piano prodigy, Julian had travelled as a teen from South Carolina to study at the Royal Academy of Music in London, then later to Paris to the Académie de Piano with the famous Marguerite Long. But a mental breakdown, his “loo-loo,” as Julian called it, had put an end to his career as a pianist.

As he talked, Julian fingered a worn, black prayer rope. In time, I would learn that Julian was never without this prayer rope, worrying it constantly, a nervous tic that had found its purpose. Julian was deeply religious, devoted to the Russian Orthodox Church. His cave-like dwelling was a monk’s cell, its walls crowded with dour icons.

Never without his dead mother’s black patent leather purse, his cigarette holder, and his prayer rope, in the weeks that followed my help with the books, Julian found new reasons to call on my pickup truck and me. I made countless trips to local charities, hauling all manner to things out of his house, among them, a truckload of his mother’s shoes, most of them decades old, never worn, still in their dusty, faded boxes.

* * *

Michael’s letters raised so many questions: How and where had he and Julian met? What had sparked their relationship–and what had ended it? I searched his letters for answers. In one, looking forward to their reunion, Michael recounts how he and Julian met:

I am delighted to read that I become more important to you . . . but please don’t allow me to alter in your fantasy to someone I am not. It is easy enough to do this with people whom we see from day to day, and almost impossible to avoid in the case of those separated by an entire ocean.

I certainly do agree with your idea of totality. I am not sure what your sexual vorstellungen have been, but mine, thanks to my eccentric upbringing, have always been rather healthy. I could quite cheerfully enjoy sex without any other features, just as I could love someone in a basically platonic way. You, of course, are one of the first people with whom both were consolidated, reciprocated and consummated. And it has made anything else seem inadequate and a bit depressing. But unlike yourself, it has not been nearly so difficult for me to express this sort of family affection, love, friendship, and desire all rolled into one, which I feel for you. Everything was so perfectly natural and almost inevitable. Of course, it all happened in a marvelously hoch bürgerlich way—I mean in that I did not pick you up on the street, say, or in one of those mass meeting places called bars. The order of our friendship could scarcely have been slighted by Emily Post. I even vaguely remember that with true Victorian spirit I asked you if I might kiss you. This, of course, is all very nice but it doesn’t really matter. If I had met you while on a gang rape, a banana boat cruise, a bar mitzvah, or a Sunday school outing it still would have happened. I am so lucky not to need “emotional camouflage” and that you don’t, either. It would be rather a pity if either of us believed a) he was or ought to be completely straight b) affection and/or dependence is a sign of weakness. But as neither apply to me, and neither apply ich nehme an, to you, we can rejoice in knowing each other, as you say, totally. So if I visit you in a few months you may be prepared for Comradeship, Understanding, Long Talks, Scintillating Wit, Profound Discussion, and (if I am not mistaken, a fortnight has 14 nights, count them, four-teen) S*X.

Through his letters, I came to know Michael, as Julian must have done. His self-possession made me wish to know him better. I imagined myself the recipient of such ardent love letters. To me, Michael’s devotion was electric. At the same time, through Michael’s eyes, a very different Julian than the one I had known began to take shape.

* * *

A few months after he first visited my campus office, Julian traveled to London to celebrate Easter at a Russian Orthodox Church there, his church, as he described it. While he was away, he asked me to look after his house for him. He hoped I would stay the night, but I never did. The pea-green walls and ceilings, the heavy drapes, the religious icons, the dim lights, it was all too spooky for me. Added to this, one evening, while Julian instructed me on how to make an authentic Hungarian goulash, I startled as a black racer slithered under the refrigerator. With a wooden spoon, Julian airily waved away my concern, then topped off his glass of wine. 

During his absence, late at night, I’d sometimes take friends over, after a few drinks, to tour Julian’s house. We’d peer into closets and riffle through drawers. The rambling structure was like a museum, a time capsule. Whatever entered, wherever it landed, remained. On a chair inside the front entrance was a worn satchel, dropped, as though someone had put it there on returning home from school that afternoon. Inside were a biology textbook and a neatly typed lab report, written by Julian’s mother, when she had been a Master’s student at Emory University in the 1930s. Open a chest of drawers, and inside you might find three dozen pairs of women’s white gloves, still wrapped, not in plastic, but its precursor, cellulose. 

My favorite object in the house was a portrait of Julian as a young man, painted during his time in London. The artist, Alfons Purtscher, I learned after Julian’s death, was a prominent Austrian horse painter, an illustrator of children’s books. Indeed, the young Julian, dressed like an Edwardian schoolboy in a Merchant Ivory film, has a certain horsey look about him, a beautiful mane of glossy, chestnut hair.

* * *

In all there are nine postcards, two Christmas cards, and 32 letters, most written on thin sheets, folded inside pale blue AirMail envelopes, with their distinctive red and blue striped border. There are context clues, but ordering the letters with complete accuracy is unlikely. The postmarks are long-faded, impossible to decipher. Their sequence is further obscured because dates written inside are idiosyncratic, often vague: “Saturday,” “Monday Morning, Wien,” “Berg Bernstein, Midnight.” One envelope may contain multiple letters, composed over several days. My best guess is that they begin after a five-day affair in August 1969 and end with a Christmas card the following year. I have only the one-sided communication from Michael to Julian. Of this correspondence, Julian told me only that he hoped I would “do something,” as he put it, with the letters, something to honor the legacy of love they detail.

To decipher their narrative, I created a spreadsheet, numbered each letter, then set about cataloguing their contents, trying to discern the order, looking for significant patterns and themes, an arc to the story. Together, the letters are a window, albeit opaque and incomplete, into the past, into a friend who, only after his death, I longed to know better. 

* * *

For all my assistance clearing out his house, Julian was generous, pushing this chair or that lamp on me to take home. Inertia, rather than attachment motivated Julian’s hoarding. He showed no interest in things. Julian’s mind was elsewhere, filled to the rafters, like his house, but with ideas—about language, literature, art, philosophy, religion. A self-described hermit, Julian was sociable, yet he kept mostly to himself. Highly educated, an accomplished pianist in his youth, having lived abroad as a young man, with mastery of a half dozen languages, Julian was out of place in the tiny mill town in South Carolina where he had grown up next door to Senator Strom Thurmond’s nephews. There Julian was one of Greenwood’s most conspicuous eccentrics. While he lived a life of voluntary solitude, Julian was obviously lonely. As we became better acquainted, he’d show up at my house at all hours of the day and night, always in search of a drink. Quickly, I learned that opening a bottle of wine was O.K., but whiskey turned Julian maudlin. Often, I was impatient with him. I avoided him. I was busy, a new teacher, in over my head, still finding my footing with a heavy course load. As often as not, I pretended not to be home when Julian came calling. When I moved to another state a few years after meeting him, I was relieved. Julian had become, increasingly, a burden. He would be easier at a distance, I thought. By phone, I could keep Julian at arm’s length. 

* * *

As I read on, I learned that his father’s illness had prompted Julian to return to the U.S. soon after meeting Michael. His father’s death a short time later prevented Julian from returning to Vienna. In his letters, Michael is plagued by the separation. In spite of the distance—or perhaps because of it—Michael is eager to prove his faithfulness. In recounting a conversation with a friend who was contemplating ending a relationship of her own, Michael tells Julian:

She spoke of the inadequacy, indeed the grave danger of a correspondence. It is easy to allow the person to whom you are writing to assume fantastic proportions, she said, and easy to say things in a letter that stick in the mouth when the person is once again standing before one. . . . I do not do this with you, I don’t think, for I remember all your weaker points with stunning clarity and I was just as enchanted then as I am now. But don’t let it happen to you, Julian, for your psyche is more sensitive than mine and more prone to fantasy. Our relationship must be one between two human beings (flawed yet gorgeous as we are) and not an ephemeral correspondence between our ideal selves. I love you as a person not as an idea and I hope it is in this way that it is reciprocated. With the warts dear, with the warts.

No correspondence, however, could sew up the divide that separates these two lovers. Even so, Michael continues to write, to use his words to forge, as best he can, an authentic connection with Julian.

* * *

On first reading a few of these letters, I began to search in earnest for Michael. At the time of their meeting, Julian would have been 36 years old, Michael, 21. If he had been 21 in 1969, then in the year of Julian’s death, Michael would be only 66. He might still be alive. But with a common first and last name, Michael would be difficult to track down. I began compiling a list of details. Both Julian and Michael had taught at the Berlitz School. Perhaps they had met there. Several of Michael’s letters, he explains, were written while his students were taking exams. Michael might still be a teacher or professor. Perhaps he now taught at an Austrian university, or somewhere else in Europe. In his letters, Michael speaks of dual citizenship in both the U.S. and Great Britain. By now, he could be anywhere.

* * *

Writing often of the concerts he attended, Michael shared Julian’s deep knowledge and love of classical music. Perhaps Michael had taken up an academic career in music. This notion led me to write to a professor of Sound Studies at a British university. I could see from his photo on the university website that he was handsome, about the right age. This could be the Michael I sought. But I worried that he would think I was crazy, this stranger tracking him down after so many years, with news of a lost love, now dead. Anxiously, I awaited a reply. He was kind enough to email quickly. He was sympathetic, but no, he wasn’t the Michael I was looking for. And so I continued to scour Michael’s letters, searching for clues. 

Occasionally, Michael repeats back, by way of reply, something Julian wrote to him. These moments provided me the food of friendship I craved, tantalizing flickers of insight into the lover Julian had been. Through Michael’s adoring words, the dashing young figure in the Alfons Purtscher portrait sprang to life, the object of Michael’s desire. Of Julian’s third letter, Michael writes:

As much as your first two letters were appreciated it is this one, which has brought me happiness for it is pure Julian. The imagery is so lovely it was on the third reading that I noticed the meaning; you know I react sensually first and intellectually only as an afterthought. Thank you for the line “more than romantic proportions” which is what I feel myself. And the line “Perhaps because our meeting and parting were synonymous, we were not forced to see beauty fall like a confessional screen between us, to lie stranded beside one another and love in effigy like a fish stranded upon a mirror” is a complete statement, an entire letter, a poem in itself.

Michael fell in love with Julian, the poet. Along with his correspondence, Julian left behind piles of unpublished manuscripts. But I found his poetry, much as I found Julian himself, opaque. I couldn’t make heads or tails of it. In life, Julian sometimes shared his poetry with me, but I struggled to respond. He was frustrated that I didn’t understand. For Julian, this was a symptom of a larger problem. He never tired of expressing his dismay and disappointment in me regarding my inadequate education, as he saw it. In his view, I had not read the right books. I had not listened to the right music. I was always lacking, in need of schooling. But Michael not only understood Julian’s poetry, he loved it.

* * *

Michael’s letters prompted me to revisit Julian’s poetry with new eyes, to imagine the author Michael held dear. Julian’s verse took on new meaning for me. I don’t know if Julian had Michael in mind when he wrote these lines, for example, which open a lengthy poem titled “The Spying Glass Peacock,” but I like to think that he might have:

Lost in the park I find you
playing court to a peacock
Flawless cut-rate David
sheathed up fit to kill in illustrated
Levis all peacock-eyed
with looks enough to spare
me the rod of your beauty
for life
or spar with 
And Sirrah
you stone
me on

Later, in another letter, Michael remarks that he prefers Julian’s poetry to his prose. He is elated when Julian composes poems for and about him in particular. He relishes his role as Julian’s Sirrah, his younger man.

* * *

While his poetry stokes Michael’s affection, Julian’s words are too few and far between. Too often, it seems, Julian fails to uphold his end of the correspondence. Just after the New Year, in 1970, Michael writes with evident frustration, pleading with Julian to write more frequently. Because Michael is young and in love, a novice in the romantic arts, he recognizes that this puts him at a disadvantage with a man fifteen years his senior:

You once asked me how many affairs I had had—I believe this was driving out of Hietzing on Monday morning—and I failed to answer. But this seems an appropriate time for you to contemplate that one’s third affair involves a little more emotionalism and a few more traumas than what must be, in your case, a __th affair. All by way of saying that I do not ask for long letters or flowery protestations, just a regular flow of one-line messages to reassure me that you are neither ill nor dead nor victim of a barber. You can understand how important this is to me, only if you recall yourself at 21 and imagine how you would have felt had you had the divine good luck to know Julian.

Later in the year, Michael explains a lapse of his own, attributing it to an affair he began shortly after his first letter of 1970. But, in the meantime, the slightest crumbs nourish Michael’s affection, especially near midnight, after a few glasses of wine:

When you said you loved me and that I must not think otherwise, when you said I lay every day in your heart . . . all the romantic nonsense, which has never touched me, which I have all my life held in disregard, came flooding over me like a slightly disreputable sentimentalism. Except it wasn’t sentimentalism, which tends to die off in time. It was a bad case of love, which I had better face up to, and so had you, for it has certainly hit me, and is obviously here to stay.

Like Michael, I was beguiled by the idea that Julian might have said, “You lay every day in my heart.” Each of his letters made me more and more desperate to find Michael.

* * *

Continuing my search, everywhere I looked, promising Michaels appeared. He was bound to be an academic of some sort, I was certain. Another candidate was a professor at a university in Adelaide, Australia. He was an expert on the social organization of lizards, in particular, a slow-moving skink, called the sleepy lizard, or the pygmy bluetongue, also known, apparently, as the shingleback, the stumpy tail, the pinecone lizard, and the bob-tail goanna. But by the time I located this Michael, he had collapsed and died one day during his morning workout. From all I could gather about Julian’s Michael, herpetology seemed an unlikely career path. I couldn’t imagine someone so fond of reptiles laying every day in Julian’s heart.

* * *

Beyond the story of this particular pair of lovers, Michael’s letters provide a glimpse into a slice of gay culture of the time, not only in Vienna, but also for a man who’d grown up, as I did, in the rural Southern U.S., to leave behind its confines for a continental life. As a gay man myself, I wondered what a relationship might have been like for Julian in 1969. In one letter, Michael reflects on the back-and-forth with Julian concerning money, each offering at different times to fund the other’s travel to reunite:

Dear boy, don’t be embarrassed about the cheques. It is I who should be. . . . Stupid boy, dare you be embarrassed to tell me something? Brother/lover/friend—that is what homosexuality is and there is no place for embarrassment in it.

In another letter, Michael describes, at length, a visit to a gay bar in Vienna:

It is a bar I never go in, as it is more an underworld gathering place than anything, but it attracts the seamier type of gay person as well as a great many perfectly pleasant tourists, as it is “listed.” Anyway, people have been shot there and not being a very bar-ry person I avoid it. . . . I sat at the bar and the next person was a thoroughly mean looking young tough who was too bland to be a hustler yet too well dressed to be a tramp. Soon the row was joined by a fat, or rather stocky, middle-aged American, who immediately began to speak to, or at, the Austrian boy. “See Spreching English?” “Ik love Wien-a, See spreching a little English?” It was really rather sweet. . . . So when I was asked if I spreched English I nodded. Soon I was translating for the two of them, changing a word here and there to make it more interesting. The American was doing awfully well, had bought everyone several rounds of drinks and had managed to hold hands with and nuzzle the Austrian once or twice. I felt like Dolly the Matchmaker. The American thought my English was great. . . .

“Not only do you pronounce well,” he said, “your grammar is wonderful.” I immediately began to make some more mistakes. Soon it was time to play the professions game (we had to guess his in twenty questions. Whee.) It was then that I discovered that the Austrian was a pimp. . . . [A]fter seeing the photos of his “girl” and noticing the etchness of his answers, I tend to believe it. The American’s eyes nearly exploded, of course, while I chatted amiably about prices, working conditions, difficult hours, etc. I felt ever so outre, never having met one before. 

The American stopped the occasional nuzzle. He tried to save the conversation by speaking about the terrible narcotics problems in America. Understanding this word only, Franz’s eyes lit up like a reefer and he hopefully tried to sell us both some. Actually, his specialty was heroin. . . . This cooled the little affaire very quickly, indeed, and I really can’t believe the boy was a good enough actor to be lying, and of course the bar is frequented by these types anyway and so it was not really so amazing. 

But I did feel sorry for the American . . . I was glad at least that he did not suspect I was making fun of him, and he thanked me very much when he left the bar. “I was lonely,” he said, “it was nice of you to be so kind.” The saddest thing he said was when the pimp said that he slept with his girlfriend from 5 o’clock to 12 o’clock, “He must be bi-sexual,” said the American with a crestfallen frown, “I thought this place was just for gays.”

Although a frequent topic of Michael’s letters is his constancy, this, apparently, doesn’t mean monogamy. In time, Michael becomes more comfortable visiting gay bars. Here he tells Julian about picking up a young man one night:

Near the end of the evening I met a quiet, sensitive looking young blond. He asked me to leave the bar with him, which I did. After a few minutes chatting in his car, I realized that he had, as he shyly admitted, a “Friend.” At this moment his slight resemblance to you, which I had not even consciously realized, became overwhelming. And I, overcome with inspiration, began a long tirade on how damn lucky he was that his friend lived in the same city and that he ought to be ashamed of himself for looking around elsewhere. Then followed a thumbnail sketch of you in which you emerged like Galahad being born on a scallop shell across a Brueghelian seascape. With a triumphant conclusion I contrasted my wicked fate in not being with you with his glorious luck in being near his friend. The poor boy, unused to such theatrics, obviously thought he had a madman in the car and either out of conviction or fear that I would go violent, agreed to drive me home immediately and return, well chastised, to his friend. I felt wonderful after that, a sort of Florence Nightingale of Greece.

With an ocean separating them, Michael and Julian appear to have a tacit agreement about relations with other people, a sort of don’t-ask-don’t-tell discretion.

While Michael frequently goads Julian about the interest women pay to him, of other men, he is usually less specific. But by November of 1970, this discretion has worn thin: 

I tried, with Parsifalian fervour, to maintain a virtually monogamous affair by post, which worked for a surprisingly long time but caused me stupid guilt complexes when day-to-day emotions began to assert themselves.

Foolish, I know, for our relationship is too permanent for such things. But I always wanted you exclusively, and when I had a brief but passionate affair last winter/spring it was difficult to write with the sort of honesty and detail I was accustomed. Never mind, I am a bit more mature now, and have begun to sort out priorities. But I am still nebulous about a concept of love, for there are so many different states and stages and types. But mine for you seems to be very reliable and so I suppose we can rejoice in that.

Michael goes on, with uncharacteristic detail, to describe a tryst with one of his language students:

I was discreetly invited to teach an attractive male model English last week, and appeared at his door at 8:30 p.m., Berlitz book in hand. It seems he was typically Viennese—shy, and the lessons had been more or less a ruse. I left, ohne Bezahlung, but with a very nice breakfast, at nine o’clock the next morning. What a hotbed these English lessons are.

What, I wondered, had Julian made of Michael’s romantic adventures? And what other loves may have occupied Julian himself in the meantime? During the time of Michael’s letters, Julian taught at a college in Vermont. One of Julian’s poems, titled “Vermont Interlude,” provides a tantalizing hint:

It was snowing
the souls of statues.
Through the frosted 
glass of my window
I spied a man
playing a viola
in a field
in the middle of the snow storm.
We became
winter lovers
and carved our initials
into a frozen
waterfall.

I could easily imagine Julian falling for a man who played the viola in the middle of a snowstorm. I would have too.

* * *

Initially, I found Michael’s handwriting a challenge to decipher. But, over time, as I read and re-read his letters, Michael’s prose became more legible to me. As with tuning one’s ear to an unfamiliar accent, with careful listening, the words came through and eventually began to sound more natural. For clues to Michael’s identity, I looked for the names of other friends and acquaintances mentioned in his letters. Perhaps I could find someone who had known Michael in 1969 to help locate him. A constant friend throughout the letters is someone named Marge, but Michael never mentions her surname. Another possibility is a young woman, just sixteen at the time, named Nada. But as hard as I looked, I could not decipher her last name. Something Eastern European, with lots of consonants. Nada what? Something beginning with a k, but the next letter was a mystery. An n? A u? I couldn’t tell. I continued to read, looking for a similar mark elsewhere in another letter, whose context would provide the key to unlock the mystery name. Finally, I found it: an r. And then, with a quick search of the web, in an instant I found Nada. She appeared the right age and still just as beautiful as Michael had described her at sixteen.

I dashed off an email to Nada, explaining my search for Michael. No reply. Perhaps she was on holiday from her position as a university researcher. I tried again, this time composing a note on university letterhead, hoping this might lend credibility to my mad search. If Nada confirmed that Michael was still living, I decided, I’d board a plane immediately to meet him. His letters had made me feel that I knew Michael already. I could understand Julian’s attraction to him. His letters stirred a deep affection in me. The more obsessed I became with finding Michael, the more elaborate my fantasy of meeting him became. Once I connected with Michael, he would reminisce in loving detail about Julian. This, in turn, would reunite me with my dead friend. Finally, I would know and understand him. Nada was my last best clue to locate Michael. Months went by, but no reply came.

* * *

As I probed Michael’s letters for news of Julian, for a tie that would bind him to me, I came to understand how their letter writing had done the same for Michael. Four months after the start of their romance, Michael writes:

Reach out to you? With how much happiness I read this line. Julian, I do, daily in spirit and attempt it badly in letters. Tell me what I can do for you and I shall do it. Your need for me is the brightest gift you could ever offer me. I accept it and give you the promise that I shall never betray your trust. Believe this.

Even though our letters are of necessity only shadowy shouts from our isolated cells, they serve to bring us closer, to help me touch you, even though lightly. So they are lovingly preserved as talismans against our next meeting.

I have never felt more confident of your love than now, nor more in love with you.

Michael’s letters, these “talismans against our next meeting,” allowed me to touch both Julian and Michael, “even though lightly.” For Julian’s part, I can only guess about his feelings regarding love. Alongside Michael’s letters, Julian’s poetry provides a possible clue:

Love
the gladiator-sport
we wager with the mutual prayer
that both of us will lose

Early in their romance, Julian admonished Michael not to make him into his “unicorn.” From time to time, Michael refers to Julian as just that, a unicorn. In what appears to be Michael’s last communication, he includes only a handmade Christmas card, with a beautifully drawn unicorn on gold paper. To Michael, Julian was no town eccentric. He was a gentle, timid, handsome lover, a gifted poet, a unicorn. With no letter, no more beautiful words, only “Love, Michael,” this holiday card has an air of finality about it. Placed in sequence, it led me to conclude that theirs was a love that was not meant to be.

Once I latched onto what appeared to be the end of their relationship, I found foreshadowing of it everywhere I looked, even in Michael’s earliest letters. In one, Michael relates two dark images from the haunted Bernstein Castle, where he vacationed with his mother. To me, these images portended a doomed end to his romance with Julian. The first image is of an equally doomed mouse:

A young cat, tiny amid the towering furniture of the ancient salon, pursued a mouse, small and grey, under Gothic table legs and Renaissance stools. Having adored rodents always I tried to save it but failed. Injured and bleeding, the mouse could never have much enjoyed life again so I left it (him? her?) to its natural end.

The second image is that of an empty crib, no infant to mature into adulthood, only a ghost, a shadow, like their brief romance. While walking about the castle grounds on holiday, fleeing a summer thunderstorm, Michael and his mother retreat to their dusky apartments:

There are three rooms, furnished curiously in dark and decaying furniture, some of it very good (a baroque desk, some Delft china, a Renaissance stool) some of it dreadful (great green stoves, hideous old oil paintings of hunting scenes, vast, high tasseled walls of cracked plaster). But I adore it all. Down our corridor is a haunted room—wuwu—where an empty wooden crib gives Mama tremors when she sees it and whose somber dark chairs remind me of an 18th-century Rosemary’s Baby.

Michael’s description of Bernstein Castle provoked in me a longing to walk in his shoes, to stroll the castle grounds, to explore its corridors myself. I spent the better part of an afternoon searching the web for images. Though it has since been remodeled, the great green stoves, the ornate furnishings, the oil paintings remain just as Michael describes. I could imagine visiting there with Julian. Like Michael, he would have adored it all too. 

In May of 1970, Michael writes to Julian in an uncharacteristic “nasty state of depression,” after his planned trip to Vermont to visit Julian is unexpectedly thwarted. On going to check his health records in preparation for travel abroad, Michael discovers, to his horror, that because he holds dual citizenship in both Great Britain and the U.S., he would be immediately subject to the draft upon re-entering the U.S. After proclaiming his love for Julian again, Michael laments:

My god, it is all sounding so dreadfully trite and second class… where are all those suave, bitter sweet lines I can normally conjure up? Never trust an elegant love letter, Julian, they can only be show. Real ones are too painful to write well.

The Vietnam war, it seems, kept Julian and Michael apart for good.

* * *

Soon after his death, while I combed the letters for news of Julian from a past I did not share and searched the web for evidence of Michael, one night I had an unusually lucid dream, in which I asked Julian to tell me about Michael. In my dream, Julian handed me a letter that he had carried with him all these years, addressed only, “To Whom it May Concern.” The letter explained that Michael had died long ago. Also in the dream, I saw one of Julian’s prayer cards from his Orthodox Church, which are divided into two columns, one for prayers for the living, the other for the dead. Among Julian’s papers, I had found one of these prayer cards with my own name listed among the loved ones Julian prayed for daily. In my dream, Michael’s name was listed under “Departed.” Not only did Julian pray for me every day, but for 45 years he also prayed for Michael. This dream was so clear and emphatic, so settled that I woke feeling that I had my answer. Julian’s dream words to me were explicit: “I’ve already told you what happened,” he said. “Let it go.” But I didn’t let it go. Not yet. Upon waking, with the help of a librarian friend, eventually, I tracked down an obituary for Michael. 

During the time I knew Julian, I saw him as single, solitary, and strange. Initially, I searched Michael’s letters for some explanation. What had led to Julian’s life as a weird recluse? Why had his romance with Michael failed? In time, however, Michael’s letters made me see things differently. Michael’s letters paint a fuller picture of Julian as much more than simply another small-town Southern character. What’s more, the very existence of the letters is evidence, not of a failed romance, but of a love sustained. Julian and Michael may never have met again after their five-day romance in 1969, but their love is no less diminished because of this fact. Their love was. In contrast to the negative stereotypes of gay men that overshadowed my own coming of age, of men who trick with one anonymous partner after another, never forming genuine attachments, Julian and Michael’s love was real, substantial. Through Michael’s letters, love persists. Love endures even now that Julian and Michael both are gone. Lines from another of Julian’s poems come to mind, as I reconsider my failed search and Michael’s letters, now tucked neatly away again inside their wooden box:

Love
survives the lover
like a treasured
hand-me-down
wedding gown
Stashed away
in a cedar chest

Mark Hall teaches writing, rhetoric, and digital studies at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte. His creative nonfiction has appeared in Flashquake, JMWW: A Quarterly Journal of Writing, Chelsea Station, The Timberline Review, Lunch Ticket, and The Sandhills Literary Magazine. He can be reached at rmarkhall.com.

Celia Kim

We Make the Deer

When the spring rains finally cease, it is dusk. Mist fills the forest, seeping into the buds of the flowers my sisters and I use to adorn our hair. The buds swell, glistening and yearning to be touched, to bloom. But we don’t touch them, not yet, for there is work to be done.

Yeong-eun, the eldest of my sisters, sings the nectar awake, rousing wet, florid scents that lure the rest of my sisters to their task of pressing lips to each quivering bud, slick with the nectar that spills with the spell of my sister’s voice. Slowly, they bloom, velvet petals opening as the bright yellow stamens inside them shudder, heavy with seed.

My mother, Yeong-ja, touches the withered bark of dying sandalwood trees, searching for the silver cords that anchor them to life. There are always those that cling on longer than they ought to, unable to sever their cords from the One Mother, and my mother’s touch helps these find release, quietly and honorably. They fall to dust at our feet, grey ash mingling with black mud, and this my mother spreads around the base of the mugwort plants, keeping them fresh.

I, the youngest, who has yet to receive my blessing from the forest, collect the tears of man. I lure the bravest and boldest of men, and lead them deep into the woods. There, the forest brings each man to ruin, shaking fear into their hearts. When their spirits break, the mist parts and the trees lift their branches to let the moon wash us with her light. Then, I begin the chase.

I run the men into the woods, watching as their tears water the roots of the sandalwood trees, each drop shimmering a bright and silver light when they hit the forest floor. With every flash of light, a hollow ring echoes, and soon the forest fills with the sound of a thousand silver bells, drowning the harsh pants and cries of man in its ethereal sound. A tailwind flits behind me, its current a guide that spurs me on. My men, once so proud, are rendered flighty, haunted by the forest’s sights and sounds, and choking on the thick, musky scent of man. I watch as their fear twists their spines and pulls at their limbs, as their sprinting hastens and their jumps turn to leaps, as their bodies shift slowly in the light of the moon.

When dawn breaks, my men are men no longer; they have forgotten what has chased them into the woods, remembering only of man’s scent and their mad dash between trees. They huddle together, as deer, lost and afraid. I herd them to my sisters, who welcome them with song and sweet nectar, flowers in their hair, and feed them mugwort until they are drunk on the forest, forever fearful of man.

Celia Kim is a Korean-American writer and public school teacher in New York City. She teaches her students that history is written by those who are bold and daring enough to speak out, in whatever medium that best satisfies the soul. She can be reached via Instagram (@writerceliakim) and email (writerceliakim@gmail.com).

Visnja Kaleb Majewski

Bea’s Escape

Central Coast Airfield, Sydney, 1985

Fluorescent bodies wrapped in black ropes and cords drop from the sky and plunge like tea bags below rainbow-coloured parachutes. Bea Smith hits the ground with a thud and a scream of delight.

‘Did you see me?’ Bea shrieks, running to her husband Terence, trailing multi-coloured silk behind her. As Terence photographs her, a group of teenagers land one by one behind her on the airfield.

‘I can’t believe I did it! I was the first one out of the plane. Terence, did you get it on video?’ Bea says hopping with excitement, her features dancing in time to her hands, while Terence tries to photograph the boys behind her.

‘Yes, Bea. Please, just give me a moment. Here comes Mark. Uh-oh, was that him? Oh crap, I think I missed it.’ Terence manoeuvres into a spot between Bea and the oncoming teenagers.

Mark’s scowling figure approaches them, tearing off the safety suit as he strides. His long limbs are in full flight looking for something to smash. Five friends emerge slowly from the field behind him, hanging back with round eyes and mouths. When Mark passes his birthday cake on the table in the pavilion, he carelessly extends a hand and swipes it to the ground. Bea runs up and sees ‘Happy 18th Birthday Mark’ splattered across the concrete in cracked fondant icing.

‘Typical.’ Mark hisses under his breath as he disappears into the car park.

***

Theodore, Sydney, 2016

Bea Smith steps over a pile of newspapers into her living room, turns and steps back into the hall. She’s determined to sit and play her piano today, but something beyond the haphazard maze of boxes keeps her away. Usually she has no trouble crawling around and under her furniture like a circus performer to reach her slightly charred Steinway Baby Grand. She remembers her excitement when her mother revealed it beneath its satin cover on her thirteenth birthday. That was 1953. And it has sat in the same place since then. But no one else knows that, hidden as it is, behind piles of old clothes, boxes of books and her plastic bag collection.

On any other day, Bea takes delight in the secret that is her lost piano and immersing herself in her music. She equally adores losing herself in her front room, while enjoying the hazy sun from her front windows. Smudged with soot, her windows hide her activities from the people on the street.

A mouse flicks its tail at her as it disappears into the rotted skirting board by her foot.

She finds a seat on a stack of magazines near the back door. Rummaging through the shelves of the open cupboard next to her she pulls out her Merck Manual, her trusted medical reference, letting manila folders fall to the ground like paper airplanes.

What will it be this time? She thinks of the For Sale sign on her front lawn just beyond her beloved piano. It appeared last night. She cringes, thinking her son may be up to his old tricks.

Closing her eyes, she flicks the pages from beginning to end with her right thumb, allowing her left index finger to fall where it may.

Glaucoma, she reads to herself, leads to progressive, irreversible loss of vision. ‘Mmm.’

***

‘Mum!’ calls a voice from the front verandah as a fist pounds her front door. ‘I know you’re in there!’ The church bells chime, signalling it’s nine o’clock on a Sunday morning.

Bea raises her head from her pillow and, as is her custom, reaches for her beige moth-eaten cardigan and crawls out of a bedroom stacked high with the detritus of her life.

Stepping out onto the crumbling pathway by the side of the house, she meets her son. She catches sight of his long legs in his freshly pressed navy wool suit, then remembers her Glaucoma and lowers her eyes.

‘I’ve been standing here for ten minutes,’ Mark says. ‘The agent called me. We’re showing buyers through tomorrow.’

Bea avoids looking at the gaudy black and yellow For Sale sign in front of her elegant white federation house.

‘Sorry, I can’t. I’ve got Glaucoma. I’m in a terrible state. My vision is just dreadful,’ she says, averting her eyes.

‘What are you talking about! It’s all organised. I’ll see you here at five tomorrow,’ he says, his face colouring.

‘Well un-organise it. I’ve got doctors to see at the hospital. I won’t be back for days,’ she says.

Backing down the path as she speaks, she then scurries to her bedroom, locking the door firmly behind her. She peeks through the net curtains at her window. Her son is clenching his fists, grunting and clasping his head with one hand.

So, all of a sudden Doctor, I can’t see. She practises her lines. But really, it’s been coming on for months. I noticed it first in my peripheral vision. And then this fall! I think I’ve sprained my ankle. I can’t be on my own.

She dials 000 for an ambulance.

***

Later that afternoon, Bea tucks herself in at Sydney Shore Hospital and presses the ‘Do Not Disturb’ button on the handset by her ear. Her eyes mist as she looks at the tapestry bag on the floor by her side, her mother’s from just after the war.

There’s a reason to keep everything in my house. She inhales the scent of hospital ammonia, appreciating the clean smell she rarely experiences at home and lets her fingertips slide along the freshly washed cotton sheets. 1000-thread count, she guesses.

I need this rest. I’ve earned it.

Her head lolls on the pillow as she falls into a deep slumber.

She startles when a nurse, on her two hourly rounds, presses some pills into her hand.

‘These are for the pain in your ankle!’ shouts the nurse into Bea’s ear.

‘I can’t see, I’m not deaf!’ Bea yells back.

As the door closes softly behind the nurse, Bea pulls out a pink Tupperware container from beneath her bed and adds the pills to her small but growing collection. She then starts ticking her menu selection for the next three days. Since her last stay, the usual English style meals are now interspersed with Italian, Chinese and even Thai. When was I here last? Oh, that’s right, when Mark first started talking about moving me to a nursing home.

Her last hospital stay had changed the topic of moving for a good three years. Bea wonders how much time she has bought this time. Glaucoma. I can’t pack my things with bad eyesight, she rehearses.

There was another ambulance visit she would prefer to forget. It was night at Christmas time, when the summer was in full swing and the front room was bedecked with tinsel, baubles and twinkling lights. The night her world changed forever and she never let one more thing leave her house.

***

Christmas Eve, 1985

‘You’re in the way, Mum—I can’t find my gift from Dad,’ nine-year-old Neve says, knee deep in gift boxes. Glossy curls frame her rosy cheeks on the balmy night.

Bea continues to sit cross-legged beneath the tree, dreamily admiring the Christmas decorations and stringing lengths of tinsel across the lower boughs. She begins humming ‘Oh Come All Ye Faithful’ and ignores her eighteen-year-old son’s grunts of irritation when he slumps on the lounge next to his dad.

‘Mark, why don’t we invite your friends over on Boxing Day? I’ve got all their numbers here by the phone. It would be great to see everyone again.’ She glances at Mark and his trademark scowl. ‘And how is Simon going? With the new girlfriend? He was so worried how his parents would react about her being Muslim.’

‘Typical. You know more about my friends than I do,’ he says under his breath.

He then speaks up, ‘Where are your friends spending Boxing Day, Mum? With Neve? Let’s invite them round to the cubby house in the backyard.’

‘Now now Mark! That’s not warranted. A get together isn’t a bad idea. It would be good to see your friends,’ replies Terence, nursing a glass of red wine on his belly.

Mark jumps up and pegs a pillow into the leather lounge like a baseball into a glove. Terence shudders when Mark slams the door to his bedroom. The force sends the baubles skyrocketing on the pine tree. Bea beams as she packs away the last empty decoration box, ignoring her son’s outburst. She picks up a sleepy Neve, settles her on the lounge and sits down next to Terence. Together they gaze dreamily into the shining lights.

‘This is just perfect, Terence,’ whispers Bea. ‘Remember when we moved in and I couldn’t wait to have kids? I told you it would be wonderful—and it is!’

She kisses Neve on the cheek.

‘Yes, I remember. But you had such a lonely time here! You must have felt a sense of…’

‘Relief, but also pure excitement! You don’t know what it’s like being on your own every holiday. With Mum and Dad travelling, it was just the nanny and me!’

‘Two beautiful kids.’ He pauses, turning to Bea. ‘It was a surprise to hear Mark plans to move to Perth for Uni next year.’

Bea’s brow furrows. ‘We’re a real family now,’ she says brightening and ignoring him.

‘And to Perth of all places! It may as well be to Africa. Why would he want to move away?’ says Terence.

‘Terence, how about we buy an apartment in Fremantle? That way we can visit Mark and stay as long as we like,’ says Bea.

Footsteps sound in the hallway, but then silence.

‘Good thinking 99! I’ll look into it tomorrow,’ says Terence.

Bea kisses Terence goodnight and guides a drowsy Neve to her bedroom.

She tidies the kitchen to well past ten that evening. Usually she can’t bear to be alone, but tonight, when the last cup on the draining board is dried and put away, she returns to the living room to admire the tree once more.

The white French doors are open to the front lawn inviting in a breeze on this stifling December night. As she pulls them closed and turns the key in the lock, she reflects she’s done this every night for the last eighteen years since Terence moved in on their wedding day. A warmth fills her chest.

Her bedroom is alive with the snores and thrashing of her husband—a sailor by heart, but stockbroker by day. Such are the pressures of his job that he often can’t sleep and instead relives the events from the trading pit each night.

Tonight, Bea can’t face a bed that is like a stormy ocean and finds refuge in the kitchen, brewing herself her favourite Earl Grey tea in her mother’s Royal Doulton teapot.

The heirloom grandfather clock strikes ten and Bea tiptoes down the darkened hallway to the spare room facing the back garden, hoping for a good night’s rest before tomorrow’s fun.

***

In the early hours, just after midnight, she hears a thump at the front of the house. Thinking it may be one of the children finding their way to the bathroom, she falls back asleep.

Sometime later—and she was never clear how much later—she feels an extraordinary heat and crackle coming from the front of the house. Grabbing her robe, she runs down the hall to find the pine Christmas tree ablaze. Her ancient lights have fallen and caught fire!

At first, she sees no one, as the smoke is so thick. But as the smoke shifts in the breeze, she sees dark figures disappearing across the lawn.

Why is the door open?

She looks back to the tree and sees all the Christmas gifts are missing. When she detects the rotten egg odour of gas, the blood begins pumping in her ears. As though on automatic pilot she watches herself running to her children’s rooms.

In her mind she’s screaming—the gas bayonets! Immediately behind the living room in Neve’s bedroom, she crumples onto her knees when she sees her daughter passed out on the floor. Shouting for Terence she holds Neve tight, rocking her and patting her cheeks. She gets up, runs to the kitchen and dials Emergency before checking Mark’s room. His bed is empty and muddled. She realises with a thumping heart her son is missing.

***

Sydney Shore Hospital, 2016

After a restful first night, Bea sits buttering a warm bread roll for breakfast, watching television in her private room at the hospital.

‘Good morning. Mrs Smith,’ says the doctor as he enters her room. ‘How was your evening?’

‘All good, thank you, Doctor,’ Bea says, pretending to search for the remote.

‘Our tests have come back and there are no signs of glaucoma,’ he says. He pauses, glances at her records and furrows his eyebrows. ‘Is there anything worrying you, Mrs Smith?’

‘No, not at all. Just my eyes. I’m worried I can’t see very well these days,’ replies Bea.

‘I checked our records, and this is the second time you’ve visited us. Even though you seem well. I would like you to see a specialist consultant. He’ll be here mid-morning.’

‘But, how do you know I don’t have Glaucoma?’ asks Bea.

‘People with Glaucoma can’t read menus and order food,’ says the doctor with a sigh. ‘Let me organise an appointment with our ophthalmologist to check for cataracts.’

Bea’s hand releases the remote control onto the floor with a clatter. He has discovered her ruse, and now he’ll send her home.

***

After her doctor’s departure, Bea buttons her dress and fills her pockets with rolls, butter and jam.

She packs her toiletries, Tupperware container of pills and the hospital newspapers in her tapestry bag. Checking the hallway and finding it deserted, she tiptoes out of the ward and takes the lift to the foyer. Here she collects handfuls of brochures from each holder along the wall and slips them into her bag. In the taxi outside, she asks the Indian driver to take her to Theodore train station.

Theodore train station is a miniature one by Sydney’s standards. Twin single-story red brick buildings straddle the double railway line like a toy train set. Fifty-foot pine trees line the pathways that take passengers up to the street. Bea alights the taxi opposite the station and not knowing what else to do, walks down the path to the station, past the dark and sagging housing commission flats.

Finding a seat on the platform, she lets the screech and whirr of metal battle the turmoil in her head. Group after group of men and women in business suits; young people with loud outfits and piercings; mothers with prams holding children by their hands. They appear from and disappear into the train doors as though into and out of a vacuum. All of them have somewhere to go. She continues to sit alone on the platform in her creased clothing. But there’s no one to return to at home. And there’s nowhere for me to go except home. There I’ll likely be found by Mark and forced to sell my house.

The smell of smoke from the annual back burning registers in her nostrils, flooding her mind with memories of a distant fire and an ambulance siren.

***

Christmas Eve, 1985

The ambulance screams to a stop next to the fire engine. Two white-coated officers enter her living room through the French doors.

In her blackened living room next to the charred Baby Grand piano, Bea sits by Neve, who is motionless on the floor, holding her cold hand. Three ambulance officers lift Neve onto a stretcher. Neve’s face is serene. Bea feels as though she will break into a thousand pieces if she lets go of her hand. The ambulance officer zips the body bag closed over her head, and part of Bea shuts down like a vault. Nine years of cuddles, smiles and kisses she will never experience again. Gone to join her parents, along with the love she felt she never had. She watches them carry Neve out on the stretcher for the last time and grabs hold of her own forearms to hold herself together.

‘Are you alright?’ says one ambulance officer, placing his hand on Bea’s shoulder.

The firemen continue extinguishing the flames behind her, filling her living room with foam and blankets. Terence had complained of a headache, blurry vision and pain from his burns before he lost consciousness. Bea is aware of his body in a blanket by the front door—she wrapped him herself with all her love—but she’s terrified to look at him now, in case he never returns.

‘Your husband has some minor burns. We’ll have to take him to hospital to get them looked at,’ says the ambulance officer. ‘I’ve called the police,’ he says looking closely into Bea’s face.

Bea’s face is blank. She doesn’t register his words. She sees his mouth moving but isn’t interested in anything he has to say. Unless it is that Neve and Terence will come back.

When the lights of the ambulance and fire engine fade away, Bea continues to sit in silence in her charcoal living room watching the sun’s journey up and down her walls. Detectives arrive in pairs and knock on her front door periodically, but she doesn’t answer or let them in.

Dawn creeps in and yet Bea doesn’t move. She feels she can sit here for the next hundred years, her feet growing roots into the ground and nothing will ever shift her. Beside her is her phone. She listens to the answering machine messages from Mark’s friends, claiming they haven’t seen him.

Her mind sifts the night’s events again and again looking for a clue as to how such a perfect Christmas Eve could become such a tragedy. She can only think she was unlucky. Thieves passed by and admired her Christmas tree. She considers the housing commission flats. The police seem to have their own parking spot out front. Or perhaps some young people coming home from the city passed by and helped themselves? But she locked the doors herself, so why was the door open, unforced? Her tired mind grinds to a halt when a shocking thought blocks its path.

Some hours later she glances at the clock on the mantelpiece and discovers it’s past midday.

When the French doors open at two o’clock that afternoon, she realises what she’s been waiting for.

‘Mum!’ Mark exclaims.

She watches him as he turns and absorbs the damage in the room.

‘Why are there scorch marks on the wall? What’s happened?

Bea continues to sit and stare.

‘Mum—what have you done?’ Mark drops his bags on the floor and stands stock still in the middle of the room, surveying the burnt, wet blankets on the ground. His head swivels in slow motion from one side of the room to the other like an open-mouthed mannequin at the fair. ‘Where are Neve and Dad?’

Bea sits in silence wrestling with an urge to scream. With a voice devoid of expression, she asks, ‘Where have you been?’

‘I dropped in at a friend’s place.’

‘Late last night? Did you by chance leave the front doors open?’ She doesn’t recognise her voice.

‘I…I…’ he stammers, his face falling. ‘Why, what’s happened? Mum?’

***

Theodore Train Station, 2016

Mark was always an enigma, Bea thinks, watching the trains go by. She understood Neve implicitly. Every gesture, thought and word made sense to Bea; it was like their own secret language. But Mark? He’s very private, sensitive and independent. It drives Bea mad as it makes her want to get inside his head even more. And the more she tries the more Mark pushes her away. It seems strange to Bea to have a son she hardly knows.

And now, in her most fragile years, he wants to sell her house and move her into a nursing home, after leaving her alone for thirty years.

When her daughter was taken away Bea found it difficult to let go of anything that came into the house. It could be a pencil or a used Styrofoam cup, but mostly it was newspapers, magazines and clothing. It occurs to her now, perhaps it’s a way of pushing Mark away as well.

Bea cradles her tapestry bag in her arms, shuffles up the pathway to the street and crosses the road to her family home. But instead of using the front door, she continues down the back lane to the back gate.

Just as the debris of her life is not allowed to leave her home, Bea decides she will equally stay in the house for as long as she wants.

The phone rings on and off throughout the afternoon. She knows it’s Mark, but refuses to answer. That night, she unpacks her tapestry bag with the Tupperware container of pills, which she adds to the piles in her living room and considers her options.

The next morning is just like any other. Bea rinses her dishes in a sink full of dirty pots and pans, shooing away the cockroaches. She cuddles her Persian cat when it seeks her out by wrapping itself around her legs. She fishes a tin of chocolates from the pantry beyond the crates of broken kitchen appliances. Perching on a stack of newspapers in her kitchen, she waits for the pounding on her front door.

‘Mum! I know you’re in there. Open the door this minute!’ Mark shouts.

‘I’ve been waiting for you,’ Bea calls. She invites her son inside for the first time since that dreadful night in 1985.

She stares at him as he takes in the wall of boxes behind her in the kitchen.

‘What is that smell?’ The corners of his mouth turn down.

‘Come on in,’ she replies.

For a split second, she sees herself pouncing on him and tearing his hair out, but she’s just as satisfied at seeing his horror at the state of the house.

‘I’ve wondered if I could ever welcome you here again.’ She wipes her hands on her dress seeking the right words. ‘You see, I haven’t thought about that night in years. But now, I know, I need to tell you how angry I am,’ she pauses. ‘You left our house on Christmas Eve, leaving our doors open to thieves. And I lost Neve.’

She sits down with a thud, holding her head in her hands. She doesn’t care how he responds. She lifts her head. A darkness lifts from her shoulders and in her mind her boxes are flying out her open French doors.

‘I don’t think blaming me is fair. They could have come in without me leaving the doors open.’ Mark stammers.

‘I don’t think so. We would have heard them. You know you’ve never apologised, or shown remorse for losing me my baby. You seem to have simply…’ Bea spits out the word, ‘forgotten.’

‘She was my family as well, Mum. I’m not made of stone,’ he says. His hands are shaking.

‘Then why didn’t you come to her funeral?’

Mark finds a seat on the floor next to the cat litter and hangs his head. Bea doesn’t expect an answer to her question.

In the silence, a thought that was buried somewhere beneath her boxes looms large in her mind.

‘I always thought it an incredible coincidence that on the one night you chose to go out, we would be robbed. At first, I assumed it was because we lived opposite a train station and you made a mistake by leaving the door unlocked and a deviant passer-by took advantage of it. But we rarely have robberies around here. I thought, did he do it on purpose?’ she addresses the air above him.

Mark sits staring at the floor.

‘Could he have invited his friends to rob us? And then I thought, why? Why would my son do something like that?’ She throws a dishcloth onto a crate of toasters.

He stares at his shoes. The silence invites in the sound of a braking train. She looks down to see if he’s still there.

‘I felt stifled,’ he mumbles.

Bea holds her breath, her head pounding.

‘I wanted to escape.’

Bea’s stomach stings with a sudden surge of acid.

‘I was gutted to hear you telling Dad you wanted to buy an apartment in Fremantle. I had to get some air…I called some friends. We met at a pub and had a few beers. I was talking loudly and mentioned I couldn’t lock the door to our house from the outside. Will asked if my house was the white one opposite Theodore station? Later I realised we were sitting next to a table of travellers. I ignored him, and told them how you’re all obsessed with Christmas and the piles of gifts. Even as I said it, I knew it wasn’t too bright. It wasn’t until years later, when someone asked me why I didn’t go to Neve’s funeral, I realised why.’

He pauses.

‘I felt I had done it on purpose.’

Bea clutches her head, her damp hand slipping down her cheek. Her baby girl fills her mind; her beautiful curls, rosy cheeks and rosebud lips. Her youngest. Gone, through her son’s thoughtlessness. She can barely look at him.

Why? It just doesn’t make sense.

‘How can you hate me, hate us so much to be so careless?’ she asks, her eyes wild.

Mark winces. ‘You’re a control freak mum. And you don’t listen!’

He touches a nerve. She was in love with having a family but felt she never nailed the role of Mum. The house often played tricks on her. Some days she didn’t know whether it was 1985 or 2016.

Bea straightens up and kicks the boxes on the floor between them.

‘That’s ridiculous. How can you say that? I brought you up. You were happy!’ she bellows.

‘I was NOT happy!’ he says. ‘You competed with me, tried to control me, manipulated me, monopolised my friends——’

‘But I’m your mum, Mark!’ she cries. She crouches on the floor opposite him and sees again the baby boy she held in her arms the night he was born. ‘You don’t know what it was like being an only child. And when you and Neve came along, it was like a dream come true. But now I see I could have been…’ Bea’s voice trails.

‘I wanted my own space but you were always in it. Forcing yourself into my friendships. On my birthday, you pushed me out of the way to jump out of the plane before I did! It was humiliating.’

‘I just wanted to be with you and enjoy you every day,’ she says. ‘I loved you so much, but you stopped coming.’

‘I couldn’t believe what had happened. I never wished anyone harm. I was eighteen,’ he says, spreading his hands toward her.

‘You know what I realised today? I hold onto everything in this house because I’m afraid of losing one more thing. I lost my parents, Neve, you and then your dad passed away. I have no one again. Just like when I was a child.’

‘See, you’re doing it again. It’s always about you. It’s so frustrating. I get you were lonely, but I was unhappy. Can’t you see that?’

They stand looking at each other, appalled, like a trick mirror has just been pulled away and all the years of distortions have gone. The scowling boy and the happy clown are gone, leaving a tired-looking middle-aged man and a forlorn woman in her senior years. Both stand blinking at each other, unmoving. The tick of the grandfather clock intrudes and prompts them on.

Mark sways as a thought hits him like an ocean wave.

‘Why didn’t I have a key to the house, Mum?’ he asks.

Bea shudders, sensing him narrowing in on her fault line. She knows the reason he didn’t have a key. She didn’t want him to be able to leave when he wanted.

Mark looks at Bea, waiting.

‘It’s a miracle I’m still here,’ Bea the clown pops up again avoiding reality, as she always does. ‘This place is a demolition site!’

She surveys the room with raised eyebrows as though seeing it for the first time.

‘You know you really are nuts,’ Mark replies, blinking and shaking his head.

Bea senses she is losing him. She feels torn between an urge to manipulate him to make him stay and an urge to push him away. She notices his sunken eyes and stooped shoulders for the first time and registers a pang of shame. As he turns to go, she puts her right hand up like a stop sign.

‘You know, Mark, I’m sane enough to know mouthing off doesn’t mean you’re a murderer.’

She pauses, afraid if she’s honest, she’ll lose him forever. Taking a deep breath, she decides to take the risk.

‘I should have had those bayonets serviced before Christmas. And you should have had a front door key.’

Mark’s eyes grow round and large.

‘You know I’ve saved everything from the last 30 years for you,’ she says, extending her hand behind her, as though offering a game prize.

‘Don’t put all this on me!’ he says.

‘Then you’re going to have a hard time finding me,’ she says, as she dives into a narrow space between the boxes.

‘I don’t know why I came.’ Mark hisses under his breath and walks out the door.

She reaches her front window in time as he rips the For Sale sign off its post.

Visnja Kaleb Majewski lives in Sydney, Australia. She completed her undergraduate degree in Fine Arts at the Australian National University. Her final year work was awarded First Class Honours, the University Medal, and the Mitchell Guirgola and Thorpe Award. Visnja then studied creative writing at the Centre for Continuing Education, as well as scriptwriting at the Film & Television Academy on the Gold Coast. For the last five years, she’s written short stories, a novella, and a novel with a writer’s group at the Stanton Library in North Sydney. She’s a member of the Author’s Guild in New York. Visnja can be contacted at visnja.majewski@gmail.com.

Gavin McCall

Pidgin Lessons

One day, halfway through fifth grade, I went learn what it means for speak pidgin – what it really means, yeah? I white, is why, and at home I speak proper English, not like pretty much everybody else in Pahala. Is one small sugar plantation town, and the other kids there no speak pidgin because they like; they speak because they gotta, because is how they speak, yeah? Anyway, was five minutes before lunch recess was done, and I went go sit outside the classroom. I could have play dodgeball but with only little bit time left I figure no make sense for join, so I just went sit down instead, even though I never like look like one teacher’s pet that rather wait for class than play games.

Was all good, though, because Joel was the only one I went see before class. I think he my best friend now, but hard for tell since I only went come to this school last year, and everybody else was born here, and get plenty friends and cousins in class already. Maybe Joel, he just lonely, I think sometimes.

“What, Ms. Bennett no stay?” Joel went ask, even though was pretty obvious, me sitting in front the closed door.

“Nah,” I went answer, trying for make straight face, “she stay, she just no like let me in.”

“How come?” Joel, he smart, but he never learn when I stay bullshit him, yet.

“Bra….” Only then I went smile, and I went shake my head small kind for let him know he being dumb. Was the kind unspoken code we went make, the kind friends get, yeah?

Joel just went sit down next to me. “Eh bra, you did your homework or what?” he went ask. Had history next, and yesterday Ms. Bennett went tell us for ask our parents what news went happen the day we was born.

“Was easy,” I went say. “My mother, she went keep the newspaper. Never really have nothing, though. Had one hurricane by Texas and somebody on the county council went quit, that’s all.”

“So what you going say?”

“Just that,” I said. “Not like really matter though, yeah? How much people you think actually went do um?”

“That’s how many people, Lance,” Ms. Bennett went say from above me. 

For one old lady in high heels on one wood hallway, she pretty sneaky. I was thinking that, so I no could say nothing else but “huh?”

“You say how many people, not how much people.” She went put this funny accent on much, saying um all deeper than the rest, like she was trying for sound like one guy. She went sound dumb that way, I thought. Then I went think maybe that’s why she went say um like that.

One more time I no was really thinking so I just went say, “Oh, ok,” like she just went teach me something I never know.

Then Ms. Bennett went open the door, and me and Joel went go inside play cards until first bell. Ms. Bennett never say nothing after I went go tease Joel for losing, using all the wrong kind words, too. Afterwards I went go look at her but she was reading our math quizzes, so maybe she never hear, I thought.

When class went start again and Ms. Bennett went ask everybody for raise their hand if they had their history homework, I went smile. I was right, that’s why – plenty people never have nothing, and some went look like they never even remember what the homework was supposed to be. Cheyenne went go first, but she never really have anything; she just went go find all the celebrities that was born the same day as her. That no was even the assignment, but Ms. Bennett never say nothing about that, only small kind correcting her when she mispronounce something, like say ‘da’ instead of “the,” or the wrong kind, pidgin kind words.

Afterwards, when she went ask who else wanted for share, only couple others wanted for go, because everybody went see Ms. Bennet no was marking anything down after Cheyenne. No make sense go, yeah, if you not going get credit. Still, I went take some good notes, since my mother never let me bring the newspaper and I had for copy down the headlines. I never like waste them. At least, that’s what I went tell myself, right before I went raise my hand.

I went read from my notes like the evening news guys read, with everything all exaggerated, trying for sound like Dan Rather, with my voice all deep and pausing, and every word pronounced as much as can. I thought everybody was going laugh, but only Joel did, and he went stop when Ms. Bennett went go click her tongue and look sharp kind at him. But since I already went start reading um like that, I figure I had for finish, so I just went keep on reading like that.

At least, at first I did. But after like two more headlines, I went start for hear how I actually sound reading like that. I went sound haole, like the real kind, white kind haoles, like on TV. Just like Ms. Bennett, I went sound, saying words like although and however. Then I went start for read more fast, and I went start slurring the words together again, just let them flow up and down like that, the way Joel and everybody else always talk when they not answering Ms. Bennett’s questions.

Was more easy too, but that’s not why I went do um. I just no could handle letting everybody hear me reading those kind words like that anymore. I never even care that Ms. Bennett went repeat couple of my words the right way; I just went keep going until I went finish all my notes. Then I went put my head down, and afterwards when we went read the history book I just went look at the book like I stay reading along, and even though I went feel Ms. Bennett watching me I never look up for make sure. The whole rest of the class I went spend like that, head down and pretending.

When the last bell went ring and everybody was grabbing their books, Ms. Bennett went come and stand by me. She went go start closing the windows, even though that’s the janitor’s job and I never did see her do that before. Joel went notice too, because he went go outside already even though we was going walk together for play video games at his house.

“Lance,” Ms. Bennett went say, and I went stop throwing my books in my bag. I just went look up at her. She had the same face she had when she went tell me how for say many. “I noticed your reading has suffered a little.”

I never say nothing.

“It’s good that you’re getting along with everyone now, and I know how hard it can be being the new kid in school, but don’t let them be a bad influence on you,” she went tell me.

“Ok,” I said, because I never know what else for say. I was too busy hearing in my head how she went say them. Just like when she went say many, outside the class – just like she wanted me for know them was wrong, too.

“Ok.” She went smile then. “Have a nice weekend.”

“Ok,” I went say again.

Ms. Bennett went walk back to her desk, leaving the windows half closed, half open. I went throw the rest of my stuff in my bag real fast and leave the classroom so she no could say nothing else.

“Shit, why she care how I talk?” I went ask Joel on the way to his house. He was waiting outside the door for me so he knew what Ms. Bennett went say. “Why she gotta bother?” I went ask. “No matter, ah, so long I can still yet read the purple-level SSR’s, so long I can still yet answer the questions at the end of the history chapters?”

“The teachers no like anybody talk pidgin, I think,” Joel went say.

“She no scold you, though. Only me.”

Joel never say nothing for a while. We went duck under the hole in Mr. Wong-Yuen’s fence for take the shortcut through his yard. “You know why?” Joel went say when we was almost past the house. “You new, that’s why, and she no like us teach you nothing, only her.”

“Uh. So what you then, one lost cause already?”

Joel went laugh, and I went laugh too, but the whole time, the whole way to his house I could hear Ms. Bennett’s voice, saying them, them, them. Long time now from then but still yet I can hear it. Still yet I remember.

Gavin McCall grew up on the Big Island of Hawai‘i, where he currently lives, writes, and teaches, after a decade of doing the same on the mainland. He earned an MA in Honolulu and an MFA in Fresno and found a dog in New Orleans, which he’s just brought back to Hawai‘i. He’s a fan of literacy in all its forms, in all its functions.

Charles Booth

Dog is Love

If you want to talk to God – I mean really talk to that white-haired, blue-eyed Lord Almighty – then take a big snort from the red gasoline canister by the lawnmower. That’s what Gopher Spivey, Bethlehem High School’s resident shaman, told us in 1993, shortly before he blew up. Gopher’s quest for a divine conversation, fueled by shrooms and LSD and Exxon’s regular unleaded, propelled him through a kaleidoscopic stargate that skirted the edge of Heaven, but his holy ascension ended abruptly one February afternoon when he accidentally splashed gasoline against the hot water heater’s pilot light. The Mormon missionaries who saw his squat, fiery body sprinting down the sidewalk said he kept screaming for Jesus. Coming from a family of non-believers, I admired his faith, and when our soccer team decided to wear black armbands that season in honor of our fallen teammate, I hoped Gopher’s bipolar God – waffling between destruction and salvation – would be swayed to let him live.

But as I slid on the loose armband before our first game, I suddenly remembered how much I hated Gopher. I had to pinch the cloth and safety-pin it in the back because, at fifteen, I was a boney kid without much fat or muscle on my biceps. The other players – some of my best friends – called me “Soup,” because whenever I took off my shirt in the locker room, they laughed at the way my upper torso sank inward, prompting Gopher to claim he could eat a bowl of gumbo out of my chest. That nickname always riled me, but not enough for me to forsake my dying teammate. So, on a bitterly cold March evening, after we lost to those pimply farm boys from Henry County, I embarked on a pilgrimage to Forest Avenue in search of Beauregard – a canine poltergeist that Gopher kept prophesizing about before he combusted.

“He’s got to be God’s dog, and the fucker kept ogling me, pumping gobs of love into my chest,” Gopher once said, wiping his teary eyes. “Hell, I had to go beat off twice just to get my head back right.”

That year, Gopher and I were both midfielders for the Bethlehem High School Wildcats, but while he was a starter with aspirations of playing for the Church of Christ college in Nashville I pretty much kept the bench planted in the secular dirt along the edge of the field. Everyone on the team got a kick out of Gopher’s perverted sermons, and even the Wildcat coaches tolerated his strange homilies while they considered me and my deformed chest a pestilence, destined to infect the entire Wildcat pack. That winter afternoon, while he talked of Beauregard, we sat on the sidelines, removing grass-stained socks and shin guards and tossing them into rank-smelling Adidas soccer bags.

“You jerked off to a ghost dog?” I asked.

My teammates picked at the mud clinging to their hairy legs, as if they were embarrassed by my question. Gopher closed his eyes in that ancient, solemn way of all holy men. “Shit Soup, Dog is love.” He shook his head at the mistake. “God is love.”

After he exploded, I sometimes held my palm to a candle flame and tried to image the resulting pain consuming my entire body. When I yanked my hand back, marveling at my inability to tolerate such a minor agony, visions of Hell poked at my brain. If such a place existed, how could any soul endure its endless misery? As a heathen, I comforted myself with the reminder that damnation was temporal, not eternal, but that didn’t stop the nightmares of me running through Gopher’s neighborhood, begging for water to douse my own fiery body. In the predawn hours, I’d wake up dry and trembling – the sheets bunched around my ankles – and after I wrapped myself back into the warm embrace of my comforter, I quietly chanted “Dog is love,” as if this prayer to Beauregard would somehow protect me.

Good ole Beauregard, in his healthier, earth-bound days, was some kind of pit bull-mix who lived a typical dog’s life off Forest Avenue, chasing squirrels, pissing on mailboxes, and scaring the hell out of angsty people with his giant, bowling ball-shaped head. But then, shortly before his fifth birthday, Beauregard jumped a chain-link fence and began wandering the street with a pack of mangy followers. I never met him – he died years ago – but according to Gopher, he was a holy mongrel whose over-eager tongue could heal the deepest of lacerations. The dog’s heavenly powers always reminded me of a rumor that floated through our school’s noisy hallways, of how Gopher was caught spreading peanut butter on his privates to entice his own family pet into some elicit interaction, but I never asked him why faith and lust seemed so closely intertwined. Instead, I let him continue with his gospel about the canine Christ.

“I suppose you can’t have a god running loose, performing miracles.” Gopher swatted at the air like a kid fighting off a spoonful of vegetables.

“A god?”

“A dog! Shit Soupy, you know what I mean, you fucker.”

 Maybe I said something smart and lacerating in return, but I probably just went back to picking wild onions off the soccer field like a meek son-of-a-bitch with a dented chest. As for Beauregard, his unsupervised good works eventually came to the attention of our town’s wise and intolerant leaders. Gopher was right; neither gods nor dogs can run loose these days, performing miracles. Late one afternoon, as his fellow mutts dozed around him, Bethlehem’s animal control officers nabbed our canine savior and took him back to their makeshift Golgotha on a hill overlooking the bypass.

“They didn’t wait for anyone to come claim the poor bastard,” Gopher said. “They euthanized him that day and then tossed his body into the incinerator.”

But like all good Gospel stories, this one ended with a resurrection. Gopher answered our calls of bullshit by challenging us to drive down Forest Avenue on a clear night. At the mailbox with an old milk canister beside it, the one used as a vase for spring flowers, we were instructed to flash our car’s high beams and see the holy dog in all his redeemed glory.

“He’ll stare until you have to look away,” Gopher told us. “His body is a silvery mist that dissolves if you get too close, but he’s there. Anyone can go see it.” Gopher paused, his fingers trembling as if they were trying their damnedest to keep up with the rush of words in his head. “God’s there. I mean, Goddamn Soup, he’s God’s dog. He’s just standing there, waiting to answer all your crummy prayers.”

Beauregard was my last hope. That same winter, months before Gopher’s accident, a holy fire consumed my entire heathen family. Its flames burned each of them, but I somehow remained just beyond its warm glow, desperately trying to comfort myself with its distant light. But all my fingers touched were a few glowing embers, too weak to give off any real heat, while the rest of my family sat rosy cheeked and penitent before this divine inferno. They eagerly stoked its flames because of the Christmas miracle that swept through our house that December. It all had to do with Sarah Beth, my older sister and the object behind Gopher’s spiritual wanderings.

Sarah Beth would rightfully object to being called an object, reminding me with an easy, patient, exhausted half stare that she was a goddamn human with all sorts of complexities secretly tangled in her long, chestnut hair. I guess none of us really listened to her complaints, to her desire to be more than a daughter, a sister, and a recipient of lewd, longing looks from people like Gopher. If we had heard her, she never would have slipped away one August night, leaving her bed neatly made and the rest of us wondering where the hell she’d gone. During the long, autumn months that followed, I often heard my parents moving around the house at two or three in the morning, flicking on all the outside lights or stuttering through the dusty, forgotten prayers of their youth. They didn’t want to believe in a god, but with their little girl missing – she’d just turned seventeen – what choice did they have? And I guess he delivered because a few days before Christmas, Sarah Beth called collect from Atlanta, asking if she could come home. When she walked back into our house, I hardly recognized my sister with her choppy, bleached blonde hair, her bruised left eye, and her bulging, pregnant belly.

“Who’s the father?” I whispered one night.

“God,” she said, offering me a nun’s charitable smile. “Raped me like he does all the virgins.”

On Christmas morning, the family gathered around Sarah Beth, staring at her belly as if the baby Jesus rested inside her on a bed of straw. Throughout the fall, my father’s blue eyes had dimmed, and I swear he lost a good two or three inches off his once six foot frame, but he resurrected a bit of his youth that holiday morning as he handed Sarah Beth present after present containing talking Big Birds and onesie outfits embroidered with phrases like, “Grandpa’s Gal.” With each gift, my sister inched closer to that divine fire.

After the Christmas break, when Gopher found out Sarah Beth was still alive, the whole team saw his boner pushing through those slick Umbro soccer shorts, but the news of her pregnancy sent him straight home to huff his first gasoline fumes, as if a meeting with the Good Lord would ease his heartbreak. That January, I often caught him driving by our house late at night – the lights out on his Ford Escort as it slowly rolled along the street – and once, when I thought I heard Sarah Beth crying in her room, I found him spread across her bed while my sister’s naked, pregnant body writhed above him.

The next morning, Sarah Beth sat in our father’s recliner, fingering the giant-beaded children’s rosary he’d bought his unborn granddaughter for Christmas. While my sister mumbled through the “Hail Mary,” I asked if she and Gopher were together. She pretended not to hear my question.

“I saw you two. In your room last night. I saw what y’all were doing.”

Her fingers pinched the holy necklace’s beads as if she wanted to crush them. “We’re not together.”

“I think he loves you.”

“He loves God like a fanatic. With me, he’s just horny.” She leaned forward, looking as if she were about to spit in my face, but then, with a suddenness that took the air from my lungs, her lips softened into a smile. “She’s hiccupping.” Sarah Beth massaged her stomach. “Did momma drink too much water, little girl?”

“Can I feel?” I asked, reaching my hand forward.

“Don’t touch me.” My sister brought her fist, still gripping the rosary, to her lips to hide her smile. Somewhere in the quiet words that I followed, I heard her whisper things like “blessed are thou amongst women.”

I sat there for maybe a minute too long because when Sarah Beth looked back at me, the joy drained from her face.

“Once this girl arrives, Gopher’s going have to start wearing a rubber. I hope he hates it.”

The night I went searching for Beauregard, my father picked me up late from our loss to Henry County. I stood shivering by the metal bleachers, wondering if my future wife would let me keep my shirt on during sex so I could hide my concave curse, while my father parked his dented Chevy in the gravel lot by the locker rooms. Instead of waiting for me to join him, he shut off the engine, stepped into the cold, and stood stretching his lower back. His graying, wind-swept hair made him look like an old man – much, much older than his forty-two years.

“You guys win?” he asked.

“Yes sir,” I lied. “I scored off a cross from Mitch just before the final whistle.” I’d actually spent the entire game on the sidelines, jumping and stomping my feet to keep warm, but my father didn’t look like he needed the truth at that moment.

“That’s great,” he said after a long pause. “Good for Mitch.”

He had more to say, his mouth gaping open and his eyes looking everywhere but at me, but nothing passed through his dry lips. He’d had that same expression two weeks earlier when he made Sarah Beth and me sit at the kitchen table. Our father worked as a copy editor for the Bethlehem Chronicle, which suited his bashful, hermit-like disposition perfectly. The job let him hide in the back corner of a newsroom, quietly fixing other people’s errors without drawing attention to himself. That day in the kitchen, the idea that he had to be the focal point, the all-important bearer of bad news, hassled him like an aching tooth.

“I heard something terrible today.” He played with the sleeves of his Oxford shirt, rolling and unrolling the wrinkled cuffs. His newsroom badge still dangled from a lanyard around his neck, and his being home at 5:30 – he usually worked until the paper was put to bed at 11 – made the approaching bad news seem that much worse. “Your friend Chris had an accident. Got burned pretty bad.”

“Gopher?” I asked.

“Is he dead?” Sarah Beth said.

Our father shook his head and told us Gopher was alive but that his chances weren’t good. He’d spilled gasoline while filling up the lawn mower – not mentioning that it was too cold for yard work – and the poor kid was now fighting for his life.

“He was probably sniffing it,” Sarah Beth said, giggling through her words. The laughter took us by surprise; it shook my sister, as if she’d heard a mildly funny joke, but then it overwhelmed her, and my father and I watched Sarah Beth bend forward and wipe her eyes at this sudden, uncontrollable merriment. The fingers on my father’s hand curled inwards into a red, shaking fist, and I thought for a moment he might actually punch my sister. When he stepped toward her, I stood to intercept him, but then we both saw how her hands clawed at her cackling lips, as if she were trying to rip them off. And then, the laughs changed straight into screams, loud painful screams that probably caused the baby in her belly to recoil, to doubt whether she wanted to leave her safe warm nest within her momma.

Now, my father paced along the soccer field’s white painted lines, nodding his head and repeating “Good for Mitch” so that no other words could intrude upon his thoughts. When he finally saw me watching him, he winked a wet eye and said, “It’s ok. It’s all going to be ok.” I struggled over his mutterings as he drove us out of the school grounds. At the stoplight next to McDonalds, he asked if I was hungry, but I just shook my head; the smell of fast food suddenly made me queasy. Neither of us spoke for the next few minutes, even though I wanted to ask where we were going – he drove west, away from our house. When my father pulled into the church parking lot, we sat quietly, staring at the small clapboard building with mold stains on the white siding.

“Are we Catholic now?” I asked.

“We’ve always been Catholic,” my father said. “We just took a little break from it.”

 “Can dogs become saints?” Somewhere in that growing dark, beyond this holy house, was Forest Avenue, home of Beauregard. I wondered if my father knew of this miraculous mongrel.

Instead of answering, he took a pipe and a packet of Captain Black from his blazer pocket. Within a few seconds there came the soft crackle of tobacco catching fire. He’d started smoking a pipe back when he was a soldier stationed in Germany, and my mother said he kept it up to trick people into thinking he was sophisticated, or at least college educated.

“Like Saint Peter,” I said. “If a dog performs a miracle, can he be…” I struggled for the word.

“Canonized?” my father asked. He opened the door. “No. Dog’s don’t have souls.”

“Do they go to Hell?”

At the church steps, my father took his pipe and beat it against the heel of his loafer, sending a small hunk of tobacco onto the grass, where it smoldered. Then he put an arm around me. “Just be quiet for a bit, got it? When we get in here…” He let his words trail off.

“Is Gopher dead?”

My father didn’t answer me. We entered the church, where rows of empty pews led to an altar with a giant crucifix hanging behind it. The cross’s bearded victim appeared to be sleeping peacefully, his tan skin glowing as if he’d just returned from a beach holiday. If Jesus had left an uglier corpse, I wondered, if they’d burned that young, muscular body, would we still be worshipping him all these centuries later? I almost asked my father this question, but he knelt in a pew and clasped his hands. I sat next to him, closed my eyes, and tried my hardest to feel something. If there was a god, if there was a dog, was Gopher up there with them, staring down at us? It all seemed so silly, but what was the alternative? Gopher extinguished, Gopher gone forever. The pew in front of me smelled of wood polish, and I thought how my friend would never sniff this sacramental odor, never move his fingers over the rough grain, never get high or beat off or rub my sister’s pregnant belly again. For a moment, I wondered if I said that last part out loud, because my father paused in his prayers.

“Do they teach sex ed at your school?” he asked. His eyes remained closed tight.

“What do you mean?”

“Reproduction, anything like that?”

“We watched a film on gonorrhea once. And there was an assembly where a guy with AIDS warned us about sex.”

My father rolled his neck, making all sorts of popping sounds. “Do you know what stillborn means?”

Stillborn. The word circled my sunken chest like a marble spinning its way down a wide-mouthed funnel. Where was God? Where was Beauregard? For me, all that existed was the sound of my father beating his forehead against the pew in front of us.

“It means if Gopher lives, he’s got to wear a condom from now on.”

I didn’t hear my father move. Suddenly, we were on the ground, rolling across the thick carpeted floor until my face pressed against the side leg of a pew. He sat on top of me, pulling my arm behind my back.

“You’re hurting me.”

“You’re a shit.” My father pulled my arm further, as if he intended to break it. “An ungrateful, evil little shit.”

Eventually, he slid off me, crumbling onto the floor to mourn the grandchild he never knew. During the commotion, his keys jangled out of his pocket and sat before me on the red carpet. I grabbed them and without looking back, decided to go find that fabled ghost dog to see if his miracle-making tongue could put all this back right.

Forest Avenue – a rundown street with no sidewalk or streetlights. It looked just like the other roads in that part of town, but when I saw its name on a green street sign, my stomach tightened the way it sometimes did before big soccer games. This was the Garden of Gethsemane, Beauregard’s last stand. There was the milk canister. I stopped my father’s car, inhaled, and then hit the high beams. The street was empty. My headlights only illuminated chunks of broken asphalt along the edge of the road and a McDonald’s bag in a ditch. Why did I feel like crying?

“He’s God’s dog. The fucker kept ogling me, pumping gobs of love into my chest,” Gopher had said. And later, “Shit Soupy, Dog is love.”

I swung the car around and hurried back to the mailbox from the other direction. Without fanfare, I hit my brights again. And there, in the middle of the road, my high beams revealed a silver, translucent dog – more Border Collie than pit bull-mix.

“Shit,” I whispered through the pinpricks tingling across my body. Beauregard. He stared directly at me while my mind tried to untangle all the threads of thought worming their way through my brain. Beauregard. He was just a dog, but he was also a ghost, a real ghost, and suddenly all the horror stories I’d ever heard, all the Bible stories about God and Heaven and Hell, all the stories about salvation and damnation, became real, and the weight of that knowledge was too much for a kid with a sunken chest.

I stepped on the gas, but the Chevy shuddered and then went dead. Without the rumble of the engine, the silence of a late winter night made it seem as if something had torn through this world’s flimsy fabric coating, letting the void beyond spill inside.

I turned the key, and the engine tried but failed. In the street, illuminated by the faint low beams of my stalled car’s headlights, a small, white cloud floated where the dog had been. I tried the key again, and this time the engine did start. Beauregard materialized in my high beams. I put the Chevy in reverse, and as I backed away, he dissolved, leaving no clouds lingering in the dark.

I spun the car around, and at the stop sign, I noticed an older man, probably in his early sixties, chasing after me. Another ghost? A prophet maybe? He banged on my window until I rolled it down.

“I want you bastards to quit coming out here.” He poked a muscular finger at me. “There’s no goddamn ghost dog. You hear me?”

“I saw it.” My voice was loud, the voice of a born again disciple. “I saw Beauregard.”

“You saw a ghost dog because you got shit for brains,” the old bastard said. “When you turn your brights on, they reflect against the front window of my house. It’s a reflection. Maybe it looks like a dog if you’re stoned or stupid.”

I looked back at the street, but the old man wouldn’t let up. “You come back, I’m calling the cops.”

And just like that, the flash of light within me dimmed. Gopher joined my niece a week later and the fire of faith that consumed my family went out completely. We embraced the cold, letting it harden our joints and quiet our mouths. The years passed softly, like a light winter snow, but whenever I came across a red gasoline canister, I wondered if there was a god hidden like a genie within. And now, late at night, when I dream of Beauregard licking Gopher’s fire-scarred face – the saliva bubbling like hydrogen peroxide – I wake up with my hand in the air, reaching out to pet the nothingness, while my lips form the quiet words, “Dog is love.”

Charles Booth won the 2017 Alligator Juniper National Fiction Contest, and he earned second place in the 2014 Playboy College Fiction Contest. He received his MFA from Murray State University, and his fiction has appeared in Alligator Juniper, The Greensboro Review, The Southampton Review, The Pinch, The Roanoke Review, The Heartland Review, Booth, and SLAB. He lives in Clarksville, Tennessee, with his wife, Danica, and his son, Reynolds.