Jen Rouse is the Director of the Center for Teaching and Learning at Cornell College. Her poems have appeared in Poetry, Gulf Stream, Parentheses, Cleaver, Up the Staircase, Southern Florida Poetry Journal, and elsewhere. She was named a finalist for the Mississippi Review 2018 Prize Issue. Rouse is a two-time finalist for the Charlotte Mew Prize with Headmistress Press. Her first chapbook with HP is Acid and Tender, and her forthcoming book is CAKE. The Poetry Annals published her micro chap, Before Vanishing. And Riding with Anne Sexton, Rouse’s second chapbook, is recently out from Bone & Ink Press in collaboration with dancing girl press. Find her at jen-rouse.com and on Twitter @jrouse.
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12/1/2018 0 Comments Shit Happens by Hannah Storm tubb Flickr CC Shit Happens Sometimes, I dream I am back there. I’m not sure if the dreams are worse at night or in the day, when the nightmare becomes reality. The earth rolls and the toilet bowl rocks and I watch as the cockroach scampers across my foot and under the door. I am trapped. It doesn’t matter how loud I shout, nobody can hear me. I’m left, not even a roach for company, gagging on the smell and planning my own epitaph. It’s weird to be scared of toilets, don’t you think? I mean I’ve googled what the name for a fear of loos is: ‘coprophobia’, in case you’re interested. I even found a ‘toilet anxiety’ document I could buy off the internet for £1.50; I mean I’ve heard of spending a penny, but that really takes the piss. My shrink says it’s probably something to do with feeling trapped. No shit Sherlock. Train toilets and plane loos are some of the worst, up there with those fancy new cubicles where you step inside and press the button and the whole door seals and you feel like you’re in a tardis, only all you’re trying to do is pee while hoping that the green button will still be working when you pull up your pants and wash your hands. These are the kind of toilets I try to avoid, but you can’t avoid peeing forever, especially when your bladder is the size of a peanut like mine. Sometimes I ask my daughter to come in with me, especially when the door closes all the way to the bottom. She humours me with a look that says, I’m still young enough not to be completely embarrassed by you. I wonder when that will change and what I’ll do when she starts saying ‘get a grip, I won’t be your toilet attendant’. If I knew for sure I could get out, I’d be fine. If I didn’t have to lock the door, I’d be fine. Don’t get me wrong, I’m no exhibitionist, far from it. However, I would much rather drop my pants around the back of a bush somewhere than run the risk of getting stuck. What scares me is that sense that when I close the door, I might not get out, that I might be trapped for ever in this small, airless cubicle, where the water is close to overflowing and the waste is so near the top of the bowl that one more flush and I’ll be covered in this stuff. And if I die here, this is what my epitaph will say: 1977-2010; killed Haiti: shit happens. Hannah Storm is new to writing flash, although she's been telling stories as a journalist for almost 20 years. Today her writing is her way of keeping up with some of the extraordinary people she has met and places she has visited, while juggling a busy job and two young children. 12/1/2018 1 Comment CNF by Monique Kluczykowskiferal, 2a: not domesticated or cultivated He chose our house to die at, a dubious honour. I’d seen him once, months before-- a black & white cat limping across the street to disappear. “District health officials said in a news release that feral cats born in the wild shouldn’t be treated like domestic animals and that no attempt should be made to capture or feed them.” ~AJC, 21 Dec. 2016 But how can I not? when he curls up next to my concrete stoop, a fragile comma of decay. I offer wet food, cautious, on a paper plate. Rheumy golden eyes watch. He moves forward but at such cost—the front leg is broken, misshapen, it has been like that for months. I make calls, animal control refuses to come—he is famous for eluding everyone. What is the worth of one maimed cat, once beautiful? Starvation wins. I shove food in my cat carrier, watch from the porch, push in his backside, wincing. On the way, he makes no sound. The shelter people are kind. I offer to pay—perhaps the leg can be amputated?-- but they say they have funds. We all know the deal here. synonyms: wild, savage, unbroken. Yet he came to my house. Hoboes once left signs—food, shelter, welcome here. In the end, the death of one broken/unbroken cat changes nothing. TSA will pat me down every time, spaghetti will continue to be served on Mondays. I will clean up my own cat’s vomit on random days. But those slitted golden eyes—defiant, fierce—for that one moment, we both understood what a good death is. My Eldest Daughter and I Visit the Korean Veterans’ Memorial and the Vietnam Veterans’ Memorial, Washington DC Stainless steel pale grey men in the equally grey light, drizzle, their raincoats shimmer as they move out towards something I cannot name. They are stepping forward, away from the wall down the mall, down the incline, where my fingers trace incised letters: HILLARD EVANS WILLIAMS The wall website provides the facts: PSGT - E7 - Army - Regular Length of service 20 years His tour began on Apr 10, 1967 Casualty was on Nov 28, 1967 In QUANG TIN, SOUTH VIETNAM HOSTILE, GROUND CASUALTY MISADVENTURE Body was recovered Panel 31E - Line 2 That is the Army. Everything can be reduced to facts, words, numbers. I was 8, then. He was 42. I am older than the sum of both of us now. I can almost hear their voices. The red rose someone has thrown at the feet of the point man. Perhaps he didn’t come back. My father did come back. Different. At night he would scream the Chinese are coming! Get down, goddammit! He was silent in the daytime. It all comes back, memory returning like morning glory seeds nicked open to speed germination. What comes up is often a surprise. My father’s best friend. My father telling me of loading him on the chopper. His pretty German wife taking a knife to the funeral home, unscrewing the casket lid because she refused to believe he was gone. A mortar to the chest leaves a mess not even an embalmer can hide. Tears and snot gush out of me. My daughter does not understand though she is kind. My father said the medics were kind. No one survives without a heart. Then. Now. Time folds in on itself like the wings of the wall. They’re just stone, after all. Letters on marble, gleaming figures marching through the mist towards something I cannot name. Monique Kluczykowski is a first-generation immigrant who was born and raised in Germany. She has lived in Texas, Kentucky, and California, has worked as a band roadie, waitress, warehouse picker, and taught English for many years at Gainesville College in Georgia. She now makes her home in Iowa City. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and her most recent poems appear in Belletrist, Sierra Nevada Review, StepAway Magazine, and RabbleLit. Her most recent creative nonfiction is forthcoming in Blue Earth Review (2018 Flash CNF contest winner) and has been published in The Examined Life Journal. tubb Flickr CC
The Decay of Lying The first time I saw Hymie after his Florida tour, he was sitting on one of Edgecombe Avenue’s many park benches, smoking a cigarillo, the picture of the Harlem Renaissance – a middle-aged jazz drummer with high ideals, lounging along a street lined with boxed trees, their boles fluffed by flowers. A strong September sun beat the block like high noon in midsummer. Still, Hymie looked cool in his garter-stitch turtleneck and high socks, unshod, surrounded by a sleek rucksack and New York-brand tote-bags. He greeted me as he always has, with a big smile that pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “My man,” he drawled, skipping the handshake out of respect for the two dogs on my arm. I’d seen him last at his usual haunts: sitting on a plastic chair posted outside a dental clinic but a few blocks from my apartment. Always with the dogs on my arm, upon whom he never failed to dote. He’d told me of his forthcoming trip to Florida, all the guys he was going to tour with down there – a string of players beneath my scope of influence, which is comprised of jazz giants like Miles, Thelonious, and the like. Hymie’s guys had names like Phil, or Ike, or the “guy who wrote the jingle for that Lotto commercial.” Guys who’d almost made it, if only they’d been born in another time. We fell into our usual banter like old chums. Meanwhile, a drug deal was going down across the street, where the sidewalk was less tended, cracked, its boxless trees thrust up from dust and weeds. The deal’s casual disposition revealed New York’s progress on what crimes require law enforcement – and that Harlem’s homegrown still seek equal opportunity, which gentrifying incomers now flaunt, even if unwittingly, across the streets we share. Hymie has always pushed money over race as America’s greatest source of discrimination. Regardless of whether I agree, I’d feel justified in saying so only because he said it first. That’s just the way race works in America. But today, Hymie wasn’t just a cool jazz lizard estivating on a park bench, enjoying a cigarillo after a long and hot tour of America’s dangling participle (in more ways than one). Put bluntly, Hymie seemed strung-out. Above his garter-stitch turtleneck, his head boasted a whack-a-mole of angry boils and feral pustules raging in ceremony with the second summer’s sun. Despite the insouciant repose, his hands were twitchy, his feet shifty. Every few moments he leaned over to pick at the skin under his high socks, which seemed dotted – evidence of track marks. * The fireworks had scared Rosetta, our lab-corgi mix – there was otherwise no explanation for why our skittish rescue, who distrusts everyone she meets, would hide under Hymie’s legs as he sat in his plastic school chair outside the dental clinic near my apartment. (I’d later discover that he worked at the clinic in the capacity of performing ‘odd-jobs’.) Thanks to Rosetta, we got to talking. We then bonded over his name – Hymie is historically Jewish – and then jazz, and then general life items. We must’ve talked for an hour that first night – with Rosetta under his legs the whole time and our other dog, Yankee, grinning at passersby, hoping for a pet. Worried that my partner would fret over my extended absence, I bid Hymie farewell, not conscious of the likelihood that we’d meet again. Of course, we did. During the day this time. He was sitting outside the clinic with his cousin, a kind and reticent woman near my age. It was then that Hymie first held forth about money’s unparalleled capacity for dividing people into fractious classes. Guiltily, I questioned whether he meant to appease or forgive me for being white – neither of which I believed so much as feared. We’d speak also of existential matters, like the primary emotions that define our lives’ distinct decades (the anxiety and hope of our 20s, the surety and ambition of our 30s, the triumphs and crises of our 40s…), or the correlation between genius and despair. Over time, I sensed something specious about him. Some of his stories began to contradict themselves during future iterations. He evaded questions that might’ve required too much detail, which might’ve been to preserve a sense of privacy, but I suspected he was trying to avoid said contradictions. One day, Hymie invited me to see him play at The Shrine, a small bar and venue on Adam Clayton Powell. I brought my partner and a friend from my block. We watched two bands play well past the hour Hymie had told me he’d be on. Satisfied that he was a no-show, we caroused our way down the strip and ended up at a bar where, if you’re not black and over fifty, you’re going to make a lot of acquaintances based purely on standing out – a testament to the denizens’ hospitality. My partner ended up involved in a dance-off. The night turned out fine. The next time I met Hymie outside the clinic, dogs-on-arm, he deflected his no-show at The Shrine: in a few days he’d be leaving to tour Florida. I truly thought it was the last time I’d see him. That, as abruptly as he’d come into my life, he’d make his exit. * In the Oscar Wilde essay from which this one takes its name, Oxford’s finest satirist creates a conversational dialectic between two characters, Cyril and Vivian. The dialectic hashes out Vivian’s draft of an article-in-progress, titled ‘The Decay of Lying: A Protest’. Distilled through their dialogue, Wilde argues that, contrary to common convention, Art does not imitate Life, but quite the opposite; that we only see what we’ve already imagined; and that Life and Nature would be utterly dull without Art’s aesthetics and abstractions, around which mold we cast our interpretations of Life and Nature. Roughly three years ago, I published an excerpt of Emerald City, my then novel-in-progress, in Potluck Mag. The excerpt follows one of the novel’s three protagonists, Julia, an undergrad at a fictional college in Seattle. Stricken with grief, Julia goes on a walk one morning – which, strangely enough, sets up a chance encounter with a genial street musician with a bad case of scrofula. Ironically, noticing Julia’s puffy features – that she’d clearly been crying earlier – the jazz busker jokes that she must’ve had a bad reaction to collagen. The joke permits him her confidence, and they take seats on a nearby bench, where she confesses to having recently lost her father to addiction and her now ex-boyfriend to the underworld of dealers and drug mules. After listening to her story, he tells Julia that he once played with Miles Davis, way back in the day. He tells her how Miles sat second chair to him out of respect for his venue. The busker admits that he was just good enough to know he’d never be one of the greats. Though entirely unrelated to Julia’s dilemma, the admission serves to limn his message that we all have problems, but we also have a choice: to persevere, or not – a simple spin on Shakespeare’s timeless entreaty. Put in plain words like these, Julia would’ve distrusted him – and despite his tacit finesse, she still does. Just as Hymie’s blackness, in my eyes, allowed him to speak on discrimination’s orders of magnitude. But there’s a deeper motive as to why Julia distrusts the busker, who appears to the reader as an otherwise honest and open character. His advice that she must simply persevere, as clean and clear as it is tacit and somewhat glib, contrasts starkly with Julia’s obsessive, spiraling thought process. Therefore, to trust his advice would be to admit the corrosive nature of her grief – which wouldn’t necessarily be true, despite that the busker is right in the most practical sense. Then again, in the most practical sense, we’re all fated creatures. So where would bare facts leave Julia, if not worse off than she already is? * Of course, I did see Hymie again, on that park bench along Edgecombe – just a few days after he’d ‘gone on tour’. To be painfully honest, his sordid state paralleled so many of New York’s homeless population, save for the clothes. Still, I couldn’t help but see in him something of a Kerouac, a Dylan, a Burroughs – any of those beatniks who absorbed the first volley of stigma so the rest of us could live peacefully outside convention. Of course, Hymie is a black man, a jazz man, a Harlemite. My associating him with white literary types seems a projection on my part, pouring much of myself and my experience into what I see in him – synthesizing those subconscious value judgments we’ve so cogently dubbed as implicit bias. Then again, unlike the beats – save for Burroughs – I was quite fond of Hymie. Furthermore, I trusted him. I trusted him despite all the reasons he gave to make me distrust him. Mostly, I trusted him because I saw myself in him, and if I couldn’t trust him, I couldn’t trust myself. I wanted to ask what he’d been up to this past month – really. But I’m no Frank Abagnale Sr. – no Hollywood representation of an abandoned father. I’m just a fellow artist whose work thrives on adorning my existential trials. Not long after we’d begun talking for the last time – before we’d even gotten a chance to catch up – Hymie rendered impotent my desire to tease out of him the truth about ‘Florida’. “Never seen you away from that clinic,” I said. “We just didn’t jive,” he offered, in defense of no formal accusation. “That’s life.” “You still playing shows?” “Trying to line up a few gigs.” “Any luck?” “Well, I’m busy right now moving into a new place…” …And after telling me where he was moving, Hymie’s eyes flitted. His voice, at first calm, if a bit unsteady, grew anxious and hurried. “Now listen, don’t tell nobody about where I’m at. I’m trying to stay off the radar, you understand?” It was suddenly entirely reasonable – if not probable – that he’d just copped from one of the dealers hanging out along the other side of the street. But how to have a frank conversation about something he’s too ashamed to speak about? This, I learned quickly after bidding him farewell for the last time, was a question equally suited for myself. * At the start of my three-year stint in psychoanalysis, my analyst and I agreed that I’d stop taking any drugs – except alcohol, in moderation. I did. My analyst believed that people take drugs because they’re sad. I find this highly reductive, like an economist who bases their theories on the ‘rational consumer’, which does not exist. We often seek or are exposed to things we don’t need, or even want. And need and want are themselves loaded terms. Then again, about two-and-a-half years into analysis, Rosetta was hit by a car. I felt responsible, and within the next 48 hours I was self-medicating for my guilt. I’d already been using Kratom for over a year, but now I’d picked up pot again. And marijuana is the drug I choose for my reset button, my escape. Anyone looking from the outside would have a difficult time labeling me with a substance problem. Then again, I’m afforded a coterie of close friends, two of whom are themselves doctors, with whom candid discussions about substance use allow us to lend nuance to absolute phrases such as ‘recreational use’, ‘self-medicating’, and ‘substance problem’. Hymie, I would wager, does not. I’d also wager that his capacity as the resident ‘odd-jobber’ for a dental clinic didn’t afford him great health insurance, if any at all. If he did, how would it have altered his trajectory? Because the reality is, drug use is motivated by many factors, but no matter what, people will get hooked on anything they take every day. So what differentiates an addict from an upstanding citizen prescribed Adderall is largely a matter of circumstance. That is, if we call a kid with a daily Adderall regimen an addict – which in many ways they are – we must call the psychiatrist their dealer. Hence the opioid crisis, which has gained attention from President Trump only because of the targeted demographic’s (i.e. white folks’) endemic transitioning from prescribed use to illicit use. This did not happen during the crack epidemic, despite that it was state-sponsored, because of implicit and explicit bias against blacks. Perhaps Wilde puts it best in another of his essays, ‘Pen, Pencil, and Poison’, in which he writes, “Crime in England is rarely the result of sin. It is nearly always the result of starvation.” And then there’s the matter of honesty. Over the two years since I first finished a feasible draft of my novel, I’ve been guilty of adjusting reality to suit my perceived image. Two summers ago I began working with a junior agent to Susan Golomb at Writers House. I told people I had an agent, even though we’d yet to sign official paperwork. Alas, a few months later, that Susan’s assistant left the industry altogether, and with him an agent for my book. I’ve had countless close calls akin to this one, when it appeared all but certain that I was about to enter an agreement with this agent or that editor. Though I never outright lied – e.g. I truly thought that junior agent was locked in – I did say whatever I subconsciously felt would best suit my interests. Whether or not he knew why, on some level Hymie understood that lying about his jazz career and dissembling his drug use helped quiet his problems – just as embellishing my novel’s progress and self-medicating helped quiet mine. You might even notice how I softened the language when it came to my habits, which parallel Hymie’s in all but their severity and impact. I can’t help but attribute this to my circumstance, which allows me to veil drug use behind phrases such as ‘self-medication’ and ‘recreation’. * Upon reaching this point in the essay, I called the dental clinic. It was then that I confirmed with the receptionist that Hymie worked there in the capacity of completing various odd-jobs. Though curious about this specious-sounding title, I didn’t press her for details. “Are you looking for him?” asked the receptionist. “Yeah,” I lied. “Last I heard he was in Florida.” “He told us Georgia,” she said with notes of exhaustion. My novel’s trumpet busker was right: to play with Miles – or the guy from the Lotto commercial – requires incredible talent. The correlation between ability and success in this world, however, is hardly perfect. I’ve learned this the hard way: there seemed an inverse correlation between how many prominent writers, influential agents, and editors praised my novel and the probability that my novel would be acquired by a reputable press. Yet here I am, with a release date set for Emerald City, a new lease on a lovely apartment, and a healthy Rosetta – whose accident, thankfully, revealed a tumor on her spleen, which we were fortunate enough to be able to pay to have removed. My novel’s busker might’ve chalked this up, at least somewhat, to perseverance. And Hymie persevered too, as we all must. But his brand of perseverance didn’t come with batteries included. That is, Hymie’s didn’t come with public schools boasting top-five SAT scores, or houses with pools in their backyards, or a family business that could tack school loan repayments onto his starting salary. All of which, you’d think, should’ve been more than enough to power up my perseverance mechanism, and yet I’ve spent thousands of hours with mental health professionals, been bailed out of jail twice (the third time was on my tab), and have been prescribed Adderall – I’m not sure I have to unpack this irony again. * I wouldn’t be breaking philosophical ground in saying that deception and dissolution aren’t ideal. However, they are real. As in, they’re inside us all, to varying degrees of latency and expression, and they do facilitate our lives at times. Understanding these motives, as has been proven by studying unsavory phenomena such as serial killing and addiction, is far more productive than shaming and humiliation. Such tactics imply that we can root out the ‘bad apples’ – which, as often as not, is dog-whistle phraseology for the disenfranchised and traumatized. The results of our empathetic double-standard are evident across the board. Just look at the sentencing disparities between ‘white-collar’ and ‘street’ crime. In the original version of ‘The Decay of Lying’, Oscar Wilde deployed his inimitable brand of satire, flirting with the axis of ambivalence, only to pull away at the last moment, thus holding forth in stark relief his essay’s central irony: that our reality is the greatest lie of them all; that Art steeped in unbending realism reveals merely our dullest similarities, which we call human nature. Ethical stalwarts might call Wilde an amoral fop. In some ways they wouldn’t be wrong. However, on the whole, I can’t help but commiserate with Wilde’s definition – and attendant denigration – of realism. Never has there been an age like this one, in which so many versions of truth are being cultured under so powerful a microscope – as if we still can’t accept, as a society, that we lie not only to gain advantages, but also to try and make things better and more beautiful; that the masks we wear out in society are made from the stuff of this benign or even expeditious mendacity; that we embellish and dissemble our words, conceal or lend flourish to our acts, not only in service of greed, but also to adorn the mundane fatalism at heart of our existence. Wilde taught me that lying is perhaps the most honest thing an artist can do. After all, what is fiction but a well-drawn-out lie? Furthermore, meeting Hymie was Life’s way of imitating my Art. And being that friendships are an art form, a constant curation of our interpersonal experience, saying the right thing isn’t always the most honest thing – or rather, saying the most honest thing isn’t always the truest thing. Far from standing in direct opposition to ethics and prosperity, understanding this truth about human nature – that we lie with the intent to make our lives better and more beautiful – seems as indelible from as it is imperative to our hopes for social progress. Brian Birnbaum received his MFA in fiction from Sarah Lawrence College. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in The Smart Set, Atticus Review, LUMINA, 3AM Magazine, The Collagist, Political Animal, and more. His debut novel, Emerald City, which deals heavily with addiction, is forthcoming in 2019 with Dead Rabbits, whose NYC reading series is spinning off into a literary press funded by a former Amazon dev manager. He is an only child of deaf adults (CODA), and he works in development for his father's deaf access company. tubb Flickr CC Beautiful Blur On the morning of my grandmother Delle’s funeral, the vestibule of Grace Episcopal reeked of overbaked lilies-of-the-valley and the onion-tinged funk of armpits. A few times I choked back the rise of bile in my throat at the assault of smells. The air conditioning was on the fritz again. The minister, his face pink and tight like a balloon, apologized to Aunt Kat over and over again. “Sorry for your loss” battled “Sorry for the broken air conditioner” for the most useless apology of the day. Aunt Kat, her hair pulled back in a bulletproof salt-and-pepper bun, breezed by him, nodding in response, but not stopping. Never stopping. She had been in perpetual motion since she, with her family in tow, stepped through our door the day after Daddy found Delle. After the services and the minister’s syrupy tribute to Delle, surely made briefer by the fat beads of sweat rolling down the sides of his face, Aunt Kat arranged us in a line by the door. “This is just for kin,” she said, shooting a look at Daddy. She stuck me next to Daddy at the end of the receiving line, like a trashcan to collect all the scraps the mourners, the prune-faced polyester color guard in black, tossed our way. Delle was such a stalwart of the community, a woman of her principles. Translation – Delle owned a few acres of land in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. When the men in suits came sniffing around her door, talking mineral rights and drilling, she didn’t even open the screen door. Doors had been opening up and down RR 20. Parcels of the Blue Ridge Mountain foothills promised like pre-teen daughters to cult leaders, only with more paperwork. But not Delle. Never Delle. Delle was always there to lend a helping hand. In the form of an armada of grocery bags filled with her homemade canned corn, green beans, and tomatoes that she made me drag from the pantry at Christmas to donate to the Cane’s Mill food bank. When she got too out of breath to walk to the pantry, much less boil jars for canning, she tucked a hundred-dollar bill in an envelope and sent me on a hike to the church basement, the home of the food bank. The lady who opened the envelope smirked. “Give Delle my love. We’re gonna miss her beans this year.” She was a real fine lady. I pictured Delle spread out in her chair in our living room, the light from the TV illuminating the blue-gray wreath of smoke around her impassive pink face. The spray of tight curls framing her face made the square cut of her jaw more severe, like a cactus in a rose garden. Her chair, with the wooden arms rubbed blonde from her leathery elbows and the faded Carolina blue cushions sagging beneath the puddle of her hips, was her true home within the home, where she spent the hours of her day until she limped down the hallway to bed at midnight as the TV image sucked into a dot in the middle of the screen. Her lips were a slash of bright red, her one concession to beauty. I guess that was enough to be classified as a lady in our nothing town. The rest of their words were all more garbage to be thrown on me, burying me until I smothered under the weight. Or combusted. In the receiving line, my family gobbled them up with two-handed grasps of papery old lady hands. “Thank you, thank you, that’s very kind,” Aunt Kat smiled, slipping into our accent like it was a robe that she donned whenever she visited Cane’s Mill. After she left for college she never came back, except for three visits a year. Her daughter, my cousin Heather, hovered at her hip breaking into a fresh round of sobs at every new visitor. Aunt Kat clamped an arm around Heather while my uncle held her other hand. In the stifling stillness of the church, a chill circled my shoulders, a phantom of what I didn’t have. Had never had. Since Kat and her family arrived Wednesday they’d taken over everything, the funeral, the coffin, the post-funeral luncheon which required some advanced accent work from Aunt Kat. She slipped “reckon” into the conversation at least five times. Kat cleaned our house, Delle’s house where Daddy and I had moved when I was nine. She tossed out all of the ashtrays, pulled down the yellowing curtains, and opened the windows as if she was trying to blow all traces of Delle out of the house before she could be buried in Grace Memorial Gardens. I guess someone had to take charge. Daddy proved to be useless enough. He stood next to me, tottering nervously from foot to foot. His paw of a hand smoothed the thin fingers of hair carefully arranged over the expanse of his pink bald spot like a threadbare blanket on a shabby couch. His suit, purchased on Aunt Kat’s orders from the J.C. Penney in Hartville, was both too large and too small. The pants gapped at the waist and were held up with a belt like a rubber band around a bottle in a paper bag. The jacket drew taut around his shoulders. He wrapped every person who came into his orbit in a bear hug that threatened to rip the jacket before the words could leave their mouths. She was a real fine woman. She was so truly herself. Behind Daddy, his girlfriend Gretchen hovered like a gnat. She had already tried to slip into the role of concerned wannabe step-parent with me. Before the mourning assembly line stuttered into action, she slipped her arm around my shoulder almost drowning me with the sharp smell of her perfume. “How you holding up, sweetie?” She cooed. I lowered my shoulder and edged closer to Daddy, squeezing her behind us. She had no place in this line. Aunt Kat’s “Just kin” was for Gretchen’s benefit. Gretchen could barely contain her glee at Delle’s death. She wrapped it in tearful brown eyes and pursed frowns, but I knew she’d been secretly celebrating since the words left Daddy’s lips. Delle passed last night. In her sleep. At least that’s a blessing. No more competition for Daddy’s heart, for his time, for his loyalty. Since Daddy met Gretchen, there hadn’t been much competition. Six months ago, he took our old hound dog, Missy to the vet where Gretchen worked as the receptionist to see if Missy had enough life left in her to save or if Daddy should take her to the spot in the woods behind our house. Since that day, Daddy had barely been home enough to let his boots dry. Gretchen with her tight spiraled perm and swinging hips had become his home. At least she had convinced Daddy to let the vet put Missy down. I always hated hearing the echo of the gunshot in the woods behind our house, hated worse when I came upon the rock riddled with divots where he took our dogs or any creature that needed to be put out of its misery. Today Gretchen wasn’t sucking up all the attention. She was Daddy’s Brave Little Soldier, bringing him Dixie cups of water and handkerchiefs to wipe away the sweat dripping from his forehead. She was his support. I was, as always, his afterthought. There was a break in the line. Daddy cupped my elbow in his rough palm. “You and Heather want to drive to Hartville later? Catch a movie and get away from this mess?” I ignored him. I stole a glance of Heather. She was a faucet of tears spilling onto the old ladies who offered her tissues from the hiding places in their sleeves while Aunt Kat rubbed circles on her back. Cousin Heather, who barely tolerated visits to our house, was acting like she lost her best friend. The only time her blubbering halted was when our neighbors, Camille and Curtis stepped into line, trudging behind their mom who had surely forced them to come. Heather ducked over to me. “Does Curtis have a girlfriend?” she whispered. “Why? You want to go on a date?” I asked loud enough for Aunt Kat to throw a look our way. Heather rolled her eyes at me. “I don’t know. Just hang out or something. Not like there’s anything to do.” When adults were around, Heather was a brooding granddaughter bereft at the loss of her beloved grandma, but I saw through her. Since she was a bratty ten-year-old peppering me with stupid questions about Delle--Is she your mom? Who is your mom? Do you even have a mom?—I saw through her charade. The first thing she asked when she rolled into town for Delle’s funeral was if Delle had a liquor stash that she could raid. “Peach Schnapps would be delightful,” Heather had said. “Delle don’t drink,” I answered. “Sure. Okay,” she said. Delle had, in fact, drank. In stolen nips during trips to the bathroom. Daddy and I pretended not to see. She wasn’t supposed to. Her prescription bottles warned against alcohol. While Daddy made calls to spread the word about Delle, I relocated her bottles of gin and schnapps to the pantry where they were only in danger of being found by the mice that made a home in the tunnels behind the walls. In the vestibule, the line of mourners kicked back into action as the stragglers, the ones with walkers and limps, spilled from the rectory. Aunt Kat motioned to Heather to return to her side. Heather stared at Curtis like he was a bottle of schnapps. I avoided his eye like it was an infection. Camille started to make her way down the line. I dug my fingernails into my palm. She loved her family so much, especially her grandchildren. She was a treasure. I bet you girls are missing your grandma something fierce. I never called Delle “grandma,” not even when I was a half-pint banging around her living room and knocking over vases of the dahlias and roses Grandpa Willy used to raise. He died when I was still too young to form any memories of him beyond a bald man in a scratchy sweater who smelled of fertilizer and dirt. When Daddy and I moved in with Delle after my mother went away, I didn’t let myself curl into Delle’s shoulder and murmur “grandma.” She wasn’t that kind of grandma. She was Delle. Always Delle. And she never told me to call her anything else. Your grandmother was so lovely, so gentle. I don’t know what Cane’s Mill will be without Nordelle Rockford. My stomach lurched. Since Delle died last weekend, a constant nausea had settled in my stomach. It had a form, a particular scratch in my throat, almost a crunch lodged behind my teeth. I was constantly swallowing it back, trying to stuff it down with crackers and toast, but it kept rising up, souring inside of me. The choking smell of the flowers, the people, the tang of wet wood and all the words swimming around me threatened to drag me to the carpet. And Camille. She was almost close enough to smell. To reach with an extended arm. Aunt Kat’s scrambled eggs were close to finding their way out of me. Are you okay, sweetheart? Camille, the only person I’d known as long as Daddy and Delle, the only person who knew me, stood a few yards away in the shadow of her mom. Camille’s eyes darted to me then she quickly looked away. She wore one of her mother’s navy-blue shifts. Her arms looked like twigs poking from cavernous armholes, her body an absence in the billowing dress. My mouth grew sour. Camille hadn’t even cared enough to buy a dress for Delle’s funeral. That was how much of a nothing I was to her now. Before she and her family could snake their way to us, I ducked out of line, almost running over Gretchen. Daddy called, “Libby, girl. You okay?” “Let her go,” Gretchen said. I pushed through the heavy wooden door. I let myself be absorbed into the thick heat of the May afternoon, let the chirr of crickets drown out the murmurs from the departing mourners as they slogged around the back of the church to the cemetery. Hearing Camille utter some false sympathy under the stern gaze of her mom would be the spark that lit me into a bonfire. Or at least made me puke all over the lily bouquets. **** Delle didn’t ever say it, but I knew she was glad I lived with her. Since she lost her license two years ago, she didn’t leave the house much. When Daddy wasn’t at whatever construction site coated his overalls in dust, he was tracking his mess into Gretchen’s plastic covered living room, not ours. Delle lost her license after a wrong turn sent her careening into the pigpen on our neighbor’s property. If it hadn’t been for the pen, she would’ve plunged into the pond. The neighbor heard the crash and came running. “Fit as a fiddle,” he said when Daddy and I arrived to pick her up and take her to the hospital. “She’s made of tougher stuff than that dirty old pen.” Daddy had said. Her scrapes healed, but her license was taken away pending further testing. Delle waved away the possibility of more driving tests. “I don’t need them to tell me I can drive.” Delle had loved driving almost as much as Daddy and Aunt Kat hated when she grabbed the keys from the top drawer of the rickety wooden table by her chair in the living room. “I dread that creak,” I overheard Aunt Kat telling Daddy. “She’s a lead foot. If she doesn’t watch out—.” I didn’t know what a lead foot was, but I knew the tickle in my stomach when Delle hit the open road beyond the turnoff to Camille’s house at the end of the gravel driveway. The orchards and fences, cows and horses blurred outside the windows of Delle’s gray Caprice Classic. The wind roared through the slit in the back window that wouldn’t close all the way. The trunk door shuddered. When she went over the small hills by the edge of Camille’s family’s property, I could swear the tires left the pavement like the General Lee. In the car, Delle became a different woman. Although her eyes pinpricked in concentration, never leaving the bends and valleys of the road, the rest of her relaxed. Her face settled into something I would call pretty. Handsome was what Daddy said when he showed me pictures of her younger self, stern and unsmiling from astride a horse or next to Grandpa Willy on their wedding day. The edges of her smoothed on the road, blurred in the whizzing freedom that held us in its thrall as we drove. “Delle, you should’ve been a racecar driver,” I said. “Now why would I want to do that?” Twice a month, Delle had driven me to visit my mother at the hospital two counties over. Two hours round-trip over winding country roads, through a two-mile long thicket of forest that separated what they used to call the Blue Ridge Sanatorium from the road. Daddy said he would come the next time and the next but when Delle’s keys jingled, he was always too busy. He divorced my mother a year after she left, more accurately a year after he committed her, when it became clear to everyone but me that she wasn’t coming home again. The first visits to see my mother after the divorce had ended in screaming, my mother hurling accusations at Delle. “You always hated me. You always wanted to get rid of me. You did this! You poisoned the well! You stole my life.” Delle and the staff shuttled me out while my mom collapsed in a heap in the corner of the visiting room, a cold bare room with a table and purple plastic chairs and a small pile of Highlights magazines that grew more spare and ratty with each visit. But after another few months, a year, we fell into a rhythm. My mother would show me the pictures she drew for me over the course of the month, her eyes searching my face, practically pleading with me to say they were good. So I did. She had been an artist, adept at sketching little cartoon dogs and cats that made me giggle when I was little. “I like this one. It’s pretty.” I told her about school while staring at the dents and scratches in the table, feeling the eyes of the staff on my back. Sometimes she asked to brush my hair, told me to bring a brush, but I never did. I was afraid that the shield keeping me from collapsing into her would chip away at the prickly tug of bristles through my tangle of hair. The day after my thirteenth birthday, Delle waited in the car after signing me in at the front desk. I was old enough to go alone now. “Your mama wants to see you, Libby girl. I’m afraid, I’m just a bad memory,” she said. As the staff led me down the hall, I stole a look over my shoulder. Delle shuffled back to her car. On this day, my mother’s hair was cut short in a pageboy. The tight braid that she’d worn since I could remember was gone. I had an urge to run my fingers under the bobbed ends. They curled under like they were trying to tuck back into her. Her eyes were red. Most of our visits were stuttering and awkward. She asked me questions, “How’s school? How’s Camille? How’s the house? How are the pigs?” until she ran out. I didn’t ask her anything, afraid of what would spill from her chapped lips, which looked hemmed in by her puffy cheeks. I tried to remember the moments from before she left, the times we danced around the kitchen with tambourines, when she threw me onto the bed then tickled me until I cried, when we covered the kitchen table at our old house with drawings of the sun. But the day when she held my new bike over her head and launched it down the side of the hill at Delle’s house popped up, like a response. The feeling of her ropy arms cradling nine-year-old me like I was a baby again while hysterical sobs racked her body and shook mine. The drop onto the bed of crunchy leaves when Daddy barked at her in a voice I’d never heard before. The knife she held to her throat. Daddy howling her name into the night as she tumbled after the bike, a miracle that the knife hadn’t punctured more than her leg. What was. What is. Crossing back over an impossibility. In the visiting room, my mother’s voice was low. “What are you doing for your birthday?” “I don’t know. Camille’s coming over. Daddy rented a movie. No big whoop.” She smiled. “Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you.” “Thanks.” I said. “It’s no big deal.” Her eyes flashed. Sudden life behind the dull film put in place by her medication. “Oh sugar, it’s such a big deal, it’s the biggest deal. My baby girl is becoming a woman.” She reached and pinched a small hank of frizzy hair that curled onto my cheekbone between her fingers. “A woman and a woman and what a woman she will be.” Her eyes skittered over my shoulder. The staff was watching. Always watching. Just in case. My mother withdrew her hand. It dropped to her lap, suddenly dead weight at the end of her arm. I didn’t want to be a woman. Being a woman had never done anyone any good from what I could tell. A rhythm of monthly pain and underpants carnage that handcuffed you until you were hobbling around with dead eyes, sucking on cigarettes to dull the disappointment that your life had become. Growing body parts that made bullseyes of all the pieces you wanted to hide. My friend Camille and I joked that we would find a way to stop time the moment either of us got our period and find a way to live in the frozen world. That’s what most of my life felt like anyway, a wasteland that only came to life when Camille and I were locked in her room spinning stories of all the lives we would live once we left Cane’s Mill behind. The closer the inevitability of womanhood came, the more we pretended it never would. We locked ourselves away from all the junior high school gossip that seemed to enmesh the rest of the girls in our grade. And then there was my mom. My mom had been perfectly normal until I came along. Giving birth to me had driven her crazy. In the room with my mom, the air turned tingly. She kept looking up at me then looking back at her lap. “I wanted to get you something but I didn’t know what. I don’t know what you like. I don’t know—” Hair raised on the back of my neck. Her body contained a stillness that seemed more like a cage while her eyes darted around like they were trying to escape the prison of her body, which had bloated to almost double her size during her four years in the hospital from the medication and starchy food. “It’s okay. I don’t need anything,” I said. I remembered the art projects she had given me two years ago, the sad drawings of the two of us holding hands that I had tucked away in my closet as soon as I got home. I heard the clatter of the chair on the ground before I felt her fingers digging into my shoulders. “I don’t know what you like! I don’t know what you like!” Her eyes were frantic, like a piece of the mother from that day at Delle’s house had somehow broken through the fog of who she had become in the hospital. My heart took alight in my chest. Blood thrummed through me but my body went limp at her touch, at the dig of her fingers into the bulb of my shoulder. Words caught in my throat. A word. The word I hadn’t said since she left. “Mama.” Delle didn’t make me go to visit her anymore. Around the time I turned sixteen, my mother was released from the hospital and went to live with her sister in North Carolina. “Stabilized,” Delle said. But not cured. Still, Delle grabbed her keys the same time every weekend. And we drove. **** Across Delle’s living room, across the murmur of the post-funeral luncheon, across the table of grease-spotted tubs of cold fried chicken from the Golden Skillet, Jell-o molds speckled with pineapple, mayonnaise slick salads, and casseroles that smelled of creamed mushroom soup and dill, Camille hovered by the window as if trying to escape through a crack in the blinds. Since the day at school when our friendship started to disassemble before my eyes, I hadn’t looked at her so closely. At her new careful haircut, her glossed pink lips, the black lined eyes, a little fuzzy from not having the years of expertise that her new friends, the Barbie Army had tried—and failed—to impart to Camille. Since the start of our freshman year, four years ago, they had been trying to claim Camille as one of their own because of who her parents were, because of their money. Delle didn’t have enough money to spark their interest in me or I had too much baggage. Too much dust from Daddy’s construction business. Cane County High was split into two groups, the farm kids and the small circle of kids whose families had deep roots in the county, who owned the orchards and rolling hills and stables that made the area a getaway for people who couldn’t afford Charlottesville. Not rich-rich, but country rich. The unraveling of Camille and me began at school the first week of April during our senior year. One of the leaders of the Barbie Army, Meghan talked loudly in the front hallway near the school entrance. Meghan, who Camille said “acted country club instead of country.” “I got in, ohmigod, can you believe it?” Meghan’s voice cut through the thrum of before school conversation, the sleepy-eyed trudge to classes. Her eyes lingered on mine. “Today is going to be so fun, Miss Libby. Full of surprises.” Already I’d had one surprise—Camille didn’t need to catch a ride with me. I showed up at her door. Her mom, still in her silky flowered robe, answered. “Oh darling, she didn’t call? Her daddy got her a little surprise when she got the news. Isn’t it wonderful. She was so excited she didn’t even make Curtis walk.” She smiled. Camille was forever trying to shake her little brother, Curtis. But he was too thick-headed to take the hint. I drove to school alone, her mom’s words clunking around my brain. A little surprise. A little surprise. When I heard Meghan’s pronouncement in the hallway, my stomach lurched. I felt like I was in a photo that had been set on fire, the edges curling in on itself slowly while everything warped and crackled. Camille wasn’t in the same homeroom as me. I sat alone in the corner. Before the bell, the tiny swarm of rich kids buzzed on the opposite side of the classroom. “Did you get in? Oh shit. That’s my safety school. You going? I ain’t going. My mom’s pissed. Daddy’s going to make some calls. Did you hear about Camille? No shit.” My ears perked up at her name. I looked over to the corner. Meghan’s mouth spread in a slow smile. Loudly, she said, “Yeah, we’re totally going to be roomies. It’s going to rule.” I caught up with Camille in third period history. She didn’t look up when I slid into the desk next to her. I slammed my books on the desk. “You decide to hitch this morning?” I asked. She shrugged. “My dad got me a car. Sorry I didn’t call. I got up late. Curtis was being a dick about it.” “Your dad got you a car? What did you—” Meghan swooped between us. “Hey, girl. We on for lunch?” The pink stitches of her Jordache-clad bottom almost grazed my face. Camille said, “Yeah, whatever. Sure.” “What do you think about magenta? I know it’s a bit much for a dorm, but we want to really make an impression.” Meghan said. “I don’t think they let you paint the walls.” Camille said. Meghan waved her off. “Screw that. We’ll just do it and pay for damages later. My daddy always says ‘Don’t ask for permission, ask for forgiveness.’” “Sweet motto. I’m sure you’ll go far,” I said, swallowing back the dread that was rising. The story that was being built from Meghan’s squeaky voice, her knowing looks stacked like a wall between Camille and me. “Going farther than you,” Meghan said over her shoulder, then to Camille, “You tell her the good news?” “You found Jesus and you’re going to be raptured at lunch? That is good news,” I said. Meghan swiveled around to face me. Her face was a mask of Cosmopolitan makeup tips fighting for dominance. Her lips were caked in bright pink, her lashes thick like claws. She straddled the perilous border between southern woman and RuPaul. “So, where’d you get in?” Meghan asked me. “Harvard? Yale? Bumfuck Community College?” I held her stare, not daring to blink. At the start of senior year, I’d gathered a few pamphlets at Delle’s insistence, but they quickly mixed with the junk mail and Sears catalogs on the table by the front door until I slid them into the wastebasket. Aunt Kat sent me more brochures. “Do you see anything you like? If you do, we’ll make it happen,” Daddy said, sounding unsure. “I’m still thinking about it,” I said when they asked. It was all a game, a play. I couldn’t get into a college with my grades. I couldn’t believe Camille could either. I wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good student. My English teacher gave it a shot at the start of the year, calling me into a conference and telling me that she could tell I was smart, that I just needed to show everyone else I was smart enough to get into a college. I blew her off. Like I blew off the guidance counselor in junior high. Like I blew off the few adults that saw something in me that wasn’t content to coast through the required years of school. What did it matter anyway? It would all break apart at some point when whatever talons had ripped my mom from us came to claim me. Hereditary, I had read in the papers Daddy had printed off about what my mom had. Genetic. Typically manifests in the early twenties. And another word, postpartum, that cemented my role in my mother’s slip into madness. Camille had said it was all bullshit. “They don’t know shit. Brown eyes are hereditary and mine are blue. Life’s a real fucking mystery.” And she had passed me a joint. But maybe Camille had been watching me, biding time, waiting for me to show signs of the inevitable breakdown. She had started to tuck me away while she secretly prepared for this new life of Meghan and college. Since Delle’s health had started to decline, I assumed that I would be staying home with her after I graduated high school, running her errands, buying her cartons of Virginia Slims and chasing off all the men in suits who appeared at her door every few months with promises of money and security if we’d only let them drill on our land. “A legacy, ma’am to leave to your future generations.” I’d overheard Daddy talking to Delle. “Maybe we should hear them out. We could use a little more coming in.” “Stop talking that nonsense,” she had said. As her coughs grew raspier, her breath more labored, I wondered when the men would start asking for Daddy instead. Not that he was home much since Gretchen had sunk her claws into him. Sometimes I wondered if Gretchen was the reason he wanted to open the door to the men in suits. I hadn’t considered that Camille had carted those college brochures to her house, had bothered to send away for the applications advertised under pictures of smiling faces superimposed over clock towers and limestone buildings. She had made fun of the brochures, coloring in the teeth of one of the smiling blonde girls and laughing, “Maybe Curtis can find a girlfriend after all.” I especially hadn’t considered that Camille was somehow pulling in grades good enough to make those buildings her future. In the classroom, Meghan smirked. She turned back to Camille. “I got some paint samples. You wouldn’t believe how many shades of magenta there are.” She sauntered back to her desk. I stared at the pressboard top of my desk, the jagged “Judas Priest” carved into the edge. My mouth was dry, too dry to form words. “I got into Ferrum,” Camille said. “It’s the only place I got in, but I got in and my dad’s going ape shit crazy about it.” “Congraduations,” I mumbled. Her eyes flashed. “You don’t have to be a bitch about it.” “What?” “I mean, what did you think I was going to do?” “Not go off and be roomies with the Commander of the Barbie Army.” “She’s nice.” The teacher cleared her throat. I looked up. Even the teacher looked traitorous now. Had she written Camille a letter of recommendation? Had everyone known that Camille was getting out but me? At first, I was the one to ignore Camille. That day after school. The next morning. All her tries to reset back to who we were before the thick envelopes arrived in everyone’s mailboxes on RR 20, were met with the smart-ass retorts I previously had reserved for everyone who wasn’t Camille. “You want to check out my new wheels? A Peanut Buster Parfait calls my name,” she said as she plunked down her tray on my table at lunch. “I’m sure Meghan has the need for speed.” Or in English when she smirked at the teacher’s repetition of Moby Dick. “Somebody’s thirsting for some Moby,” she whispered, and I looked away. After a week of fielding my cold shoulder, she gave up. She retreated to Meghan and conversations about magenta walls and their new exciting lives at Ferrum College, which, as I discovered, had the easiest admission requirements in the state. If you had a pulse and thousands of dollars to throw around, you were welcomed with open arms. I didn’t have a Meghan at the ready. Nobody there to slide into the spot left vacant by Camille. The days that I didn’t skip, I edged through the school halls, counting the hours until I could slam the doors shut for good. But I didn’t sleep through class. I didn’t sneak out to smoke after lunch. In the classes where I wasn’t hopelessly behind, I did the reading. I handed in homework. I wrote a paper on symbolism that made my English teacher ask me to stay after class. “Where was this Libby the last eight months?” she asked. “This is nice work.” She thrust the paper into my hands. Red pen slashed through punctuation and spelling mistakes, but beside the slashes were cursive comments: “Good idea” and “I never thought about it this way.” I slunk away, biting back a smile until I remembered. My paper didn’t matter. None of it did. I would barely graduate and after I did, all I had to look forward to were episodes of Hee Hawin Delle’s smoke-clogged living room with not even the promise of time with Camille to get me through the days. *** Camille didn’t invite me to her party. Nobody did. News of the bash passed through the halls like a cloud, sprinkling invitations to everyone, even the farm kids who were usually excluded from the rich-kid parties. Now that graduation was a month and a half on the horizon, the borders loosened. Past rivalries were turning hazy as the end of our forced confinement snapped into focus. The night of the party I snuck a bottle of Daddy’s Wild Turkey from the pantry and threw back as many gulps as it took to loosen my shoulders, turn my tongue thick and foreign in my mouth. Camille’s parents were out of town for the weekend. They had asked Daddy and Delle to “keep an eye on things,” but Daddy was at Gretchen’s and by eight o’clock, Delle was snoozing in front of the TV. I tiptoed out the back door, tucking the bottle inside my zipped sweatshirt and clamping it under my arm. The late April night still had the chill of winter clinging to it. I navigated the dark gravel road with a flashlight in one hand, my other jammed in my pocket for warmth as the liquor sloshed in the bottle with each step. Around me branches crackled in the woods, tree trunks sighed with the gathering wind. An earlier rainstorm had left everything smelling like wet wood and grass. A fire burned in the distance, probably at the farm that sat between Delle’s property and Camille’s. They were always smoking something in the shack behind their house. Some piece of pork or cow. By the time I stumbled up the long driveway to Camille’s house, there was already a spray of puke clinging to her mom’shydrangeasby the front porch. Inside, lights were on in every room. Music thumped. I stepped through the front door to a sea of faces, the entire high school jammed into Camille’s living room. When had Camille decided that everyone wasn’t a loser? I felt like I’d gotten up to use the bathroom at a movie then returned to find an entirely different film on the screen. Camille’s brother Curtis bumped into me. “Watch it, dumbass,” I said. Curtis clamped a hand on my shoulder. His overgrown mullet clung in sweaty clumps to his forehead. A caterpillar mustache had sprung from the top of his lip. “You’re lookin’ mighty fine for a stone-cold bitch.” His lips snaked into a lazy smile. I felt like if I leaned away he would slide into a heap on the beer-puddled hardwood floor. “Slow down, partner,” I said, pulling back each finger from my shoulder, bending them back far enough that he rubbed his knuckles. “Damn, girl.” He threw me a goofy smile then lurched back into the throngs of tanned arms and acid-washed jeans. The faces around me were the loosened, drunk-distorted versions of the kids in the high school hallways. We all knew each other, but Camille and I had walled ourselves off from them. We had our own world of her bedroom, the woods behind my house, the rocks by the stream where we stripped to our underwear in the summer and splashed ourselves with cold mountain water, the tangle of branches where one day we pretended to make out, our lips meeting firm until they melted into something sweet and soft. Camille had laughed and pushed me away. “Now that’s a lot of fuss about nothing.” But it was different when it was a boy, she said. I thought my heart was going to explode. Now the walls were erected between Camille and me. I had been cast out. Camille had joined the rest of them, invited them into her house. She let them drape their bodies over her mother’s doily-fied version of Southern Hospitalityspreads, smoke cigarettes in the daffodil-colored kitchen, raid the liquor cabinet, and descend like flies on a carcass, feeding off every bag of chips, every beer, every half-eaten block of cheese they could find. “Camille must be freaking,” I muttered under my breath. Camille liked trouble, but she usually stayed out of it where her parents could see. Meghan yelled in my ear. “Camille don’t give a rat’s ass.” Her eyes floated in their sockets. Mascara smudged at the corner of her cheek. She was a smear of a person. Camille appeared beside me. Meghan raised her hand, “High-five roomie!” Camille ignored Meghan’s raised hand and drank deep from whatever caramel-colored liquid pooled in her mother’s daisy printed glasses. “Roomies! Woo!” I screamed. “That sounds amazing! You’ll be best friends forever and pledge Kappa Alpha Fuckoff together and go to all the mixers and take all the same classes. Amazing!” “You don’t have to be here if you don’t want to be.” Camille said. “Do you want me to stay? Or do you want to ditch me for good and get it over with?” “Ditch you? Jesus, Lib. I’m not your fucking boyfriend.” Meghan cooed. “Oh, but Libby is your boyfriend, girl. She’s your little puppy dog. Whatever will she do without you?” “Shut up, Meghan. Go blow your boyfriend.” Camille said. Meghan laughed, dropped her plastic cup onto the rug and then wove through the throngs towards the kitchen. I hated the heat of the eyes on Camille and me, the sudden stage that we had stepped onto. I almost felt blinded by a spotlight. They were waiting for me to explode, to morph into the disaster they had heard about. A knife to my throat, a lit cigarette burning my wrist. My manifest destiny to finally manifest in a public spectacle that would bring a jolt of excitement to our dirt brown lives. I fixed my wobbly gaze on Camille. “You don’t want to make your roomie mad.” She turned and pushed her way through the crowds to the kitchen. I cupped the carved bulb at the bottom of the banister and pulled myself up the stairs to Camille’s room, a room I knew as well as my own. I turned out the lights and locked the door. The lump of the liquor bottle slid onto the floor at my feet. I dropped beside it and unscrewed the top, unsure if the sigh I heard came from the bottle or from my throat. I took great gulps until I sputtered the burning liquid all over my sweatshirt and cut-off shorts. Time started to bend and warp. Had I been there all night or a few minutes? From the dim light of Camille’s nightstand lamp, I catalogued the pictures jammed in the corner of the mirror that lined her dresser, the perfumes she had collected but never worn, the reproductions of paintings that her mom chose for maximum tastefulness even though Camille hated them and wanted to replace them with posters of AC/DC, Poison, and Cinderella. A thump against the door almost made me lose my grip on the bottle. “Who’s in there?” the voice slurred. I crawled over the rough carpet and unlocked the door, twisting the knob so Curtis could stumble into the dark room, staying on his feet long enough to land onto Camille’s bed, his arms spread wide like the people craving refreshment in iced tea commercials. His head bounced against the mattress. “Curtis, you dumbass. What’re you doing?” He mumbled unintelligible blobs of sound into the weave of Camille’s quilt. “Get up. Camille will whip your ass if you puke.” I pulled myself up from the floor and eased onto the edge of the bed next to his hand. He lifted his head and looked blind into the dark. “Who’s there?” The words blended together into one. We were both past the stage of words having borders, beginnings and endings. “You know who it is.” I slapped my palm on his. He rolled over and pulled his hand to his chest, like an injured cat. His head lolled to the side, his eyes flickering open and closed. Something took root in my body, my limbs moving on their own, an idea that started somewhere in the pit of my stomach and spread. I crawled over to Curtis and climbed on top of him. I wove the fingers of one hand into his outstretched palm. “You a virgin?” I asked. He roused from his stupor, his eyes focusing on mine. “No, no man. I ain’t a virgin.” “Who did you screw then?” I asked, lowering myself onto his hips. They were surprisingly plush for a boy, the bones were lost treasures in the cushion of his pelvis. “You don’t know her,” Curtis said. Curtis was only a freshman, three years younger than Camille and me, but there was a whole world of backseat blowjobs and stolen sex that percolated around us. Maybe he had stuck his dick into one of the girls who lingered by his locker. I leaned close to him, planting my lips over his and pushing my tongue through the slack gateway of his mouth. He tasted sour like he had probably been the one to puke in his mom’s hydrangeas. I felt myself start to retch, but I continued, moving my tongue over his teeth until he started to wake up, his lips softening beneath the press of mine as the surprise of me filtered into his reality, our reality. I’d never done it, never gone all the way. Everyone thought I had. My freshman year a boy from my science class pulled me under the bleachers with promises of pot. After he took a hit off the joint, he leaned towards me. He said that we could share the smoke and get higher off of each other’s exhales. Our mouths locked together. Our tongues mingled while the smoke swirled in our mouths. Above us feet clomped along the bleachers. The squeal of laughter, the drone of the cheerleaders broken by claps. I let him feel my chest, let his hands round the curve of my butt. I was part paralyzed, part curious. It didn’t feel like anything. Just body parts touching body parts, no rush or joy. No transformation. Not like at the creek with Camille. I pushed him away. Afterwards, he told his pack of losers that I put out for pot. The news spread around our small high school like dandelion spores. Camille said I shouldn’t care. “Like we’d mess with any of those scumbags anyway,” she said. I let their eyes linger on my chest, covered myself in flannel shirts and saggy Levi’s. I had Camille. She knew the truth. We didn’t need them. Kissing Curt was like kissing a slab of beef hanging from a meat hook, wet and flaccid but still skin. As my hands started to range over his body, he pulled me to him. My arms buckled and I tumbled to the side. He rolled on top of me and started to find the parts that the boy touched under the bleachers. Like that day, I felt like a doll being posed into positions that had nothing to do with me. The only thought that sparked any feeling, a tiny explosion in my chest was imagining Camille walking in on us, finding me under her brother. I rose above my body and watched myself roll down my jeans, unpeel the underwear that was stuck to me with sweat. I watched Curtis’ hips move over mine, felt the poke of him as he searched for an opening, my opening. I watched my face recoil as the sensation of tearing, ripping in half cascaded from my center down my legs. He humped me like the pigs in the pens at our neighbor’s farm, grunting and determined. I didn’t want it to happen and I didn’t want it to not happen. I wanted it to have happened and be over, to see Camille’s face when Curtis blurted, “I fucked Libby.” To watch her eyes if she opened the door and found us. He finished in a spasm and a whimper. He rolled off of me, murmuring a dreamy “Thanks, ma,” before falling into a snore. I ran my hand between my legs and came up with bloody fingers. I was surprised there wasn’t more. I wiped the blood onto Camille’s quilt, leaving a rust smear, before I rolled my pants back over my hips. I sobered up enough to navigate the fallen lamps and clumps of bodies splayed around the hallway and living room. Camille was in the kitchen, still awake and smoking one of her dad’s cigars while her roommate-to-be cackled too loudly at her jokes. I slipped out the front door, leaving it open a crack so the music still pumping from the stereo filtered into the silence of the dark night. I weaved my way home, tripping over sticks and almost falling over the side of the hill where Delle’s house sat in a bald patch carved out of the forest. My legs carried me past the front door, around to the side yard, and into the woods. I crackled through branches and brush. I had dropped my flashlight somewhere along the way. A sliver of moon provided enough light so I didn’t break my nose stumbling into an oak tree. My hands stretched in front of me, and I felt my way to the spot, the place where Daddy took our dogs when they got too sick or too old. When their legs started to falter, their eyes clouded over, their whimpers grew weak. I found the rock where he set them and curled into it like it was a pillow, like it was the belly of the dogs I had loved, and I slept. **** Aunt Kat stood at the head of the table. She surveyed the buffet and waved me over, probably to rotate out one of the decimated casseroles for another bubbling dish of macaroni and cheese. Camille hovered by the door, her eyes on her mom’s back, practically begging to go, to leave this final luncheon in honor of Delle. Graduation was next week. Was this my last chance to ever speak to her again before she was swallowed into the world of sororities and English classes and Meghan’s paint samples? The smells of the casseroles, the cold fried chicken, the lingering sweetness of the pecan pie hit me in a wave. The churning in my stomach, a feeling of hollowness tinged with nausea propelled me away from the table. Aunt Kat, whose expression had surely fallen to a resigned disappointment, watched me stumble away. Everything I did proved to her that I was exactly what she thought I was even though she pretended I could be more. I had overheard her and Daddy talking in the hall the night after she got into town. “What about Libby?” Aunt Kat had whispered. “What about her?” “What’s next for her? Did she even apply--?” “She didn’t want to mess with any of that stuff,” Daddy said. “She’s got her people here. We’ll take care of her.” “Maybe she wants to take care of herself.” Daddy breathed loud through his nose, always the first sign that he was trying to contain the wave of anger that rippled through him. “She’s not yours to bother with, Katherine. I’m her daddy.” “I’m just saying she could give it a try. The school is five minutes away. We have a spare bedroom. We don’t have to talk about this now.” “Then why are you?” he asked and stalked back to his room. I wasn’t sure if I was mad at Aunt Kat for thinking we couldn’t take care of ourselves or grateful that she found a part of me that had something I couldn’t see. What all the teachers had been saying since Camille and I stopped talking and I started doing my work. Potential. At Delle’s luncheon, I rounded the corner from the dining room and caught my breath. Since the morning we found her, I had a lump in my throat I couldn’t swallow, a throw-up that never made its way out. This morning when I woke up, a retch escaped my throat so loudly that Heather flew upright from the bed beside me. She lay back down. “Are you bulimic or something? I wish I was bulimic,” she muttered, half-awake. I wasn’t bulimic. And I wasn’t sure why this feeling of nausea clung to me. I rushed to the bathroom at the back of the house. I slammed the door behind me and spat a glob of bile-flavored saliva into the toilet bowl. I dropped to my knees and watched it float in a circle in the rust-stained bowl. The scent of the flower air freshener Aunt Kat had installed in the bathroom overwhelmed the smell of food that floated into every corner of the house and for a moment, I felt the knot inside of me unravel. There was a knock on the door then Camille’s voice, “You okay, Lib?” I unfolded myself from my hunch over the toilet. My breath caught. Until my name came alive in her mouth, I hadn’t realized how much I missed hearing it. The armor of the past two months of ignoring her in the hallways, eating my lunch alone at the corner table, of pretending she didn’t exist, we didn’t exist, started to crack. Just one word. Three letters. Lib. I caught myself, tried to sew the breastplate back together. How could I be so weak? To succumb so easily? This wasn’t the girl Delle raised me to be. “I’m fine. You can take your little act back to an audience who gives a shit,” I said, wiping my hand over my mouth. “Whatever, Lib. I’m just trying to help.” I flushed the toilet and splashed water on my face. In the mirror, the eyes that blinked back at me were puffy even though I hadn’t shed a tear all day. My cheeks were mottled with pink blotches. Delle’s lipstick had sunk into the cracks of my lips, leaving only chips of her signature red. I wiped the rest of the red off with a scratchy square of toilet paper. Outside the bathroom door, the floorboards groaned. Camille was still there. I opened the door. Camille lifted her nose and sniffed. “Were you like taking a dump or something?” “Yeah, mourning gives me the shits,” I said. This time I was dissolving the armor. I craved something easy, someone who knew me, who knew what Delle was to me beyond the platitudes about a grandma’s love. Even though the anger was a deep, essential current that ran through me, I needed to build a dam, if only for the day. Just for today. Camille raised an eyebrow. “You didn’t eat any of Miss Roach’s Jell-o Surprise, did you? That will give you the shits that stink to high heaven, mourning or not.” “She means well,” I said, imitating Delle. She means wellwas only second to Bless her heartin Delle’s vernacular when she spoke of the women she couldn’t stand. “What’s the deal with hotshot bun lady? She got all pissy when you left. ‘I guess I gotta do everything myself,’” Camille said in a perfect imitation of Aunt Kat. “Aunt Kat, bless her heart.” I said. Camille snorted. “A lot of blessed hearts packed in Delle’s house today.” I led Camille down the hall. We snuck through the guest room where Aunt Kat’s suitcase lay open-mouthed in the corner and through the back door to the kitchen. I felt like we were kids again, sneaking through Delle’s house while Daddy tried to find us in a game of hide-and-seek. We were never allowed to go into the pantry that sprung off the kitchen by ourselves, but today we tiptoed over the yellow linoleum and passed through the door to the pantry. Unlike the rest of the house, the pantry wasn’t air conditioned. I opened the door and wave of heat and odor hit is in the face. The smells leftover from Delle’s past canning efforts mixed with the mold that had crept into the cupboards since she stopped washing them down with bleach. The churn in my stomach rekindled. “What died in here?” Camille asked. “You don’t want to know,” I said. Her eyes widened. “Like a million mice,” I said. “Oh good, I was hoping you hadn’t turned psycho in the last couple of months.” Camille had been keeping track too, logging the days of ignoring me in the hall and huddling with her group of college-bound girls. They barely went to class anymore. Their futures were sealed, gilded. Even though my teachers tried to hide their amazement at my recent burst of scholastic competence, of grades that weren’t on the wrong side of the curve, they let it slip. I guess you had a lot more going than I thought. Where were these grades six months ago? I wish you hadn’t kept your light under a curtain. You could have gone to Ferrum at least. Camille sailed along, unaware of my one-woman renaissance, on the current of her college acceptance and still seemingly unaware of what happened between Curtis and me on her bed. He didn’t act any differently towards me, didn’t come sniffing around me like the guys did when that boy told everyone I blew him under the bleachers. I wondered if Curtis didn’t remember, if he thought the apparition of me crawling on top of him was a dream. He was the kind of guy who meandered through a padded maze, unconcerned with reaching the end because he was constantly stumbling across pieces of cheese. I doubt he’d get as lucky as Camille did when it was time to apply for college, but his parents owned orchards, land. Curtis didn’t need to worry about escaping the maze. The maze was good to him. I found the bottle of gin I had squirreled away after Delle died and pulled it from the cupboard. It was warm, but not undrinkable. I took a swig and handed it to Camille. Hearing that she had noticed the months that passed filled me with a jolt of warmth separate from the slow spread of the gin in my stomach. Maybe she had missed me too. “I didn’t say I wasn’t a psycho killer,” I said. “What kind of psycho chops up their prey in their granny’s pantry?” Gin sprayed from Camille’s nose. “Granny’s panty?” “Pantry!” I said. She gasped between gulps of air and swipes at her running nose. “Granny’s panty.” I grabbed the bottle from her hands and took another swig. I was doing what the others were—relegating Delle to a category. A label. A funny name. Granny was inadequate to encompass her. She was a presence. A monument almost. Always there, smoking her cigarettes, snorting approval at the stupid Hee Hawjokes, and letting me cry when I needed to cry those months after my mother left. Delle didn’t say a word or make me talk about my feelings like the counselor at school had insisted I do when she learned about “this big change in your situation.” Delle had told the counselor to back off when Daddy couldn’t find the strength to stand up for me. And Delle had driven me on those visits to my mother. But when people said, “You’re like a mother to that child,” she was always quick to correct them. “Libby has a mother and I’m not it,” she had said more than once. I always felt a stab at those words, unsure if she was trying to be honest or didn’t want to claim me as her own. But calling her “granny” was disrespectful. I wanted to make Camille laugh and I had, but now that warmth gave way to an emptiness. The nausea returned, as tangible as a cracker I could bite. Camille caught her breath. The sleek commas of her eyebrows knit together. “You don’t look so good.” “Do I ever?” I snapped. I took another steadying drink from the bottle and slid onto the floor. My black jumper pooled around me, like I was the most pathetic of princesses. I bent my knees and curled into myself. I looked up at Camille. “Why did you even mess with me if you just wanted to be with them?” Camille put a hand on her hip. “God, you’re being such a drama queen. What are you even saying? Are you drunk? We’ve known those girls all our life.” “Yeah and we said they were stupid Barbie bitches.” “You can’t just write off everyone for the rest of your life because they like pink lip gloss.” I swallowed hard, tried to dull the edges of the scratch in my throat. “You’re my girl, Lib, but it’s not like this is forever.” Camille’s eyes scanned the pantry. I saw the room through her eyes, the peeling cabinets, the rust-ringed sink caked with dust and dotted with mouse turds. How could I have thought this would be a future? My future. The door swung open. Aunt Kat was a shadow silhouetted against the yellow light of the kitchen. “Really girls? Is this the time or the place?” Camille rolled her eyes and shifted her weight to the other hip. “Party’s over,” she mumbled. “Is that what this is to you? What would your grandmother think about you sneaking booze at her funeral?” Aunt Kat’s voice fought to stay quiet, but people were amassing behind her, taking in the spectacle at a safe distance. “She loved you like a daughter. You were—” her voice wavered. She stopped and clamped her fingers at her temple like a sudden headache had gripped her head. “Never mind.” I couldn’t swallow it any longer. It all came up at once, the pine burn of the gin, the bites of chicken skin I’d nibbled at Daddy’s insistence, the grapes I’d plucked from the fruit salad tray. The mix of it spilled from my mouth in a violent spasm. My head throbbed. Camille put a hand on my back, but it quickly fluttered away. She reared back in disgust as the smell spread to fill the room. “You okay?” I saw Camille’s lips move but the sound was absorbed into a throb, a pulse that flooded my ears. By the time I looked up again, Aunt Kat had already left and returned with a mitt of paper towels. My cousin Heather hung back behind her, burying her face in clueless Curtis’ shoulder like he was the knight saving her from the evil marauder, the dark cloud that was me. I rolled onto all fours and pushed myself to standing slowly. The throb commandeered my entire body. I stepped forward and slipped when my heel caught the edge of my pooling barf. The puddle was small, inconsequential for how it felt rippling up through my body. Everybody stopped, quieted like they were frozen in an episode of the Twilight Zone, but their eyes followed me as I stumbled through the kitchen, past the dining room table, around the corner and into the living room where Delle’s chair sat empty yet still arrayed with the accouterments of her life: remote control, silver lighter engraved with her initials, even a half-empty pack of cigarettes that had somehow evaded Aunt Kat’s sweep. Or maybe she couldn’t bear to put them away. I jerked open the drawer in the table next to Delle’s chair. Her keys were still on the silver keychain I gave her when I was ten. A hand closed on my wrist. “Sweetie, I don’t think you’re in any condition—” With my other arm, I shoved Gretchen aside, knocking her into the arm of Delle’s chair. She gasped. My legs moved quickly beneath me as I wove through the mourners, daring any of them to stop me. Daddy stood at the corner of the screen-enclosed porch, sneaking a cigarette. He only got half my name out by the time I’d burst through the screen door and started to run across the lawn, the blades of grass slashing at my ankles. Delle’s car was under the pine tree at the corner of the lawn. The gray Caprice Classic was sprinkled with orange pine needles. I jammed the key in the lock and slid into the seat, Delle’s seat. It smelled like her, of schnapps and cigarette smoke and the rose water she dabbed behind her ears and on the wrists of her cardigans. Her driving glasses straddled the middle of the bench seat. I pulled them onto my lap and cradled them there. The key turned easily in the ignition. The car shuddered awake. Delle hadn’t been able to drive since she drove the car into the neighbor’s pigpen a few years ago. Daddy was supposed to take it out on the road once a month, to keep the engine in shape, but he had lapsed in his duties. In the rearview mirror I saw Daddy charging down the center of the lawn, his face full and red in the glare of the afternoon sun. The rest of the crowd hung back, clustered on the porch. What’s Delle’s fuck-up granddaughter doing now? Who does she think she is? Another wave of nausea roiled my guts. I caught it this time before it could escape and destroy the delicate ecosystem of Delle’s car. Now in the rearview mirror, Camille appeared a few paces behind Daddy. I imagined her breaking into a run and passing him. She would swing open the door, roll down the window then clap her hand over mine. “Where to?” I would ask. “Everywhere,” she would say, her voice husky and full of destiny, as I jammed the accelerator to the floor and squealed out of the car’s resting place, kicking up a cloud of gravel dust in our wake. Like Delle and me before, Camille and I would drive and drive, windows down, worlds rushing past us in streaks of greens and browns, orchards and horses and the decrepit barns crumbling back to the earth. Engulfed in the hum of the engine, the click of the tire that never got fixed correctly so it tapped out a song of our escape. We would hit the valley beyond the mountain where Delle’s car radio finally got reception and it would crackle to life. Camille’s favorite band would scream through the speakers: You shook me all night long. No words would pass between us, nothing to ruin our harmony, our motion, our lives unfolding mile by mile. In the rearview mirror, the reality. Daddy held a hand up and halted Camille. She tugged off her high heel shoe and shook a rock onto the ground before jamming her foot back inside and turning back to the house. I wasn’t worth the stone in her shoe. After everything she was one of them. Daddy was still coming, a tank, shoulders stiff and face red. My foot pushed the petal to the floor. The wheels spun out before finding traction as the car lurched forward, narrowly missing a collision with the tree that Camille and I had climbed when we were kids, making a fort in the branches. The gas tank was almost empty. I couldn’t go far. But I could go far enough to relieve myself of this tangled reality, if only for a moment of the beautiful blur. Katherine Sinback’s work has appeared in The Rumpus, daCunha, Gravel, Foliate Oak, Clackamas Literary Review, The Hunger Journal, Cabildo Quarterly Online, and Oyster River Pages. She publishes her zine Crudbucket and writes two blogs: the online companion to Crudbucket, and Peabody Project Chronicles 2: Adventures in Pregnancy After Miscarriage. Crudbucket was featured in the 2007 Multnomah County Library “Zinesters Talking” series and was included in the 2016 Alien She exhibit at the Pacific Northwest College of Art. Born and raised in Virginia, Katherine lives in Portland, Oregon with her family. She can be found on Twitter @kt_sinback. Please Just Disappear In 1981 I moved to San Francisco, where I stayed in the apartment of a guy I knew in the Richmond. I'd just gotten out of detox and had that trembly, anemic look to me like I'd spent the last decade locked in a broom closet. I signed up with the Kelly Services over on Geary, which found me a job at UCSF typing into a computer terminal. The head of my department at Parnassus, a young woman named Sherry Wheeler, called me into her office not too long after I'd started working there. When I went in she was seated casually behind a desk cluttered with the usual papers and clerical paraphernalia. I stood awkwardly before her, fairly confident I would be let go for one reason or another. But instead Sherry told me what a nice job I'd been doing and that she was giving me a raise. A few weeks later, though, due to the tedium of the work, I began diverting myself by typing random instructions into the command line interface. Anything that came into my head which had an informatical ring to it. I had no idea what I was doing but soon got wind of the fact the IT people were baffled by certain minor glitches that were cropping up here and there. One day Sherry found me out. She sneaked up behind my chair as I sat ostensibly working in my cubicle while some illicit garbage scrolled down my screen. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Nothing," I said. My heart pounded. She'd startled me. Sherry went out but then returned about five minutes later to tell me she wasn't comfortable having me around anymore and that I should leave. I felt embarrassed like I'd been caught committing some solitary act of perversion and exited the building with relief. It wasn't the first time I'd gotten into this kind of trouble on the job. In Santa Cruz I'd done some data entry work for a DDS. He had an office set up in his basement. It was during yet another period of self-imposed abstinence. I typed names and addresses into a database of patients on one of the first IBM PCs. After a while I grew bored and began fooling around recklessly as a mental diversion and the dentist informed me a day or two later half his database had been deleted. I'm not saying it's your fault, he said, but you're going to have to reenter all that stuff. He kept green bar paper hardcopies of everything. I guess he'd never heard of digital backups. As he was paying me an hourly wage for whatever I did it wasn't exactly cruel and unusual punishment. But I fell off the wagon before I could undo the damage I'd done. A job seldom survived one of my drinking sprees and I stopped showing up at the dentist's. I used to ride the bus up there. He had an expensive house in a hilly residential area that looked as if it had sprung out of the earth the day before yesterday. Instead of working I hung out at the mall downtown not feeling that guilty. There were some serious bars in the neighborhood, no-nonsense watering holes that opened early in the morning. I remember one incident, about a week into my bender, it was around 10:00 a.m. I'd already been drinking hard liquor in one of those dives. I stepped outside to take the air. I sat down on a bench under a tree in front of a clothing shop. A blonde was opening the store for business. She was putting out a sign at the front entrance and I said hello. She said hello too and returned inside the store and shortly thereafter two cops pulled up in a black and white cruiser. They had me perform a field sobriety test, which I passed. They asked me to move along anyway. I hitchhiked into Capitola, where I bought a quart of Rainier Ale at the market, which I consumed brown-bagged on the beach. After Sherry fired me that day in San Francisco I wandered through Golden Gate Park in the direction of the apartment. It was a clear, windy spring morning and I ended up lying in the grass in front of the Botanical Garden absorbing sunlight. But I couldn't enjoy myself and went home. When I got there I paced the floor and began thinking I had the right to a little something to drink under the circumstances. I was lying, of course, but that didn't stop me from going down to an Irish pub nearby and settling in for the duration. Wheeler came through the door in the early evening. I wouldn't have thought her the kind of woman to frequent this sort of establishment, but then again she seemed no different from any of the other patrons. She was alone. I was way past caring whether she spotted me or not and when she did I only gestured vaguely and looked elsewhere. However she made a beeline for my little table in the back, where by this time I'd drunk about seven or eight Dewar's rocks. She leaned over with her hands on the table and her human breath in my face and said how sorry she was to have had to let me go but that there'd been no way around it. This generous apology risked taking the steam out of my drinking, so I nodded my head and mumbled no problem before staring off blankly into space hoping she'd disappear. Please disappear, I kept saying to myself. Please just disappear. Curt Saltzman was born and raised in Los Angeles. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Gargoyle Magazine, Sou'wester, The Bitter Oleander, Into The Void, Epiphany, and elsewhere. He lives in France. 12/1/2018 1 Comment Allister by Barnaby Hazen Allister I shot him in the thigh with a wrist-rocket—a fancy sling-shot from the army surplus store. I can’t think of having done such a thing to anyone else. I don’t remember how I came to attack him, other than that he could on occasion annoy me terribly, and I suppose that morning, on the school bus, had been one of those occasions, crossed with the ownership of a new weapon I was eager to employ. Allister was socially cursed in many ways—his voice was nasal, his face outlandishly craterous, his dark hair curly with oil, pants climbing up his shins—but most importantly, he had no fighting skills, yet presented incorrigible defiance at the face of tormentors. As a K-9th-grade performing arts magnet school, kids were bussed across Los Angeles from various districts. I couldn’t begin to tell you where Allister was from, or how it was that my bus would pick him up along the way from my neighborhood, to Silver Lake, to South Central Los Angeles but as soon as he was on the bus and throughout the day, he was a target. It was the early 1980s, and surf culture—modeled after Sean Penn in Ridgemont High--had been the heart of the school’s infrastructure since before I enrolled. A central group of white kids from Venice Beach ran all social aspects of the institution, as had those students with real gang or drug affiliations in my previous schools. I came from a very tough neighborhood in East L.A, and I guess I thought that might carry some weight for me at 33rd St. Performing Arts. One morning, soon after enrolling I found myself surrounded by a relatively harmless batch of older kids wanting only to throw me in the dumpster by the cafeteria as a manner of welcoming me to the school. I was a small kid in eighth grade, but athletic. I played all sports available to me, with older, streetwise youth. During one football game, someone considerably larger than I surrounded my waist for a tackle, and I proceeded to drag him two or three yards, then, when he hadn’t let go, I quickly pivoted my body to slam him against the fence, and he fell off. This won some cheers, laughter and respect from older Latino kids who might on other days have beaten and humiliated me. Similarly did I evade the 33rd Street hazing. There was no chasing, nor fighting back per se—I recall simply dropping my body weight with every attempt to lift me, then squirming with all my will. Eventually I outlasted my attackers, earning an initial free pass against abuse. On another occasion, I was taken too far off guard to protect myself. I don’t know what possesses a kid to think he might start a new trend, or bring upon himself admiration by wearing something out of the ordinary at the middle-grade levels, but I had the idea to combine fashion concepts very much out of place at 33rd: kids from my neighborhood often wore bandanas, and Kim, a Vietnamese friend from the same neighborhood, had been obsessed with the movie Apocalypse Now, since watching it with an older sibling. This meant we took frequent bike trips to army surplus stores so he could gear up with all kinds of military paraphernalia. From these two influences—young gang affiliates who had been terrorizing me most of my life, and a Vietnamese boy fetishizing the Vietnam war—I landed on what seemed a cool hybrid expression: a camouflage bandana, wrapped loosely just over my eyebrows. Within minutes of the item’s debut on campus, a tall, lanky, erratic kid from the Venice crew named Justin approached me with crinkled eyebrows and a quick hand: “What’s up, Jeremy? You think you’re all bad with your stupid bandana!” and he grabbed it, jerking my head back and forth. It was not particularly painful, just a little traumatic to my neck, but this was the type of bullying prevalent at the 33rd street school—domination in passing. I didn’t respond, kept walking, though I was choked up about it, as much disappointed that the bandana had brought shame to me as I was ashamed of having been throttled. It was unpleasant, and I don’t remember if I continued to wear the bandana in defiance of Justin for the rest of the day, but nothing more came of it, and I certainly did not try wearing it again on any other day. This isolated incident for me was what Allister had come to expect from his life at school generally. I don’t know how many times I saw someone grabbing at his backpack to swing him in circles after making fun of some aspect of him, such as his acne, the way he spoke, or an item of clothing. Maybe sometimes kids would go as far as to kick him in the butt or keep something away from him without any instigation to speak of. Had he done as I had—walked on, ignored it, maybe cloaked himself after the first time, with some small adjustment in garb or behavior—he might have seen a little less abuse. Instead he provoked his attackers with protests, such as “Leave me alone!” or “Let go of my backpack!” He would even call them names sometimes, pushing members of the Venice crew into more violent tactics, such as punching him in the stomach or face. These were mild beatings compared to my previous school, but troubling when one witnessed the process of escalation, hoping he’d take an easier way out. I feel I ought to remember something more about him, apart from his being bullied, but I do not. Was he clever in class? Had he played an important role in the Dungeons and Dragons games hosted by the drama teacher at lunch? Might he have even outscored me romantically, with an awkward date at one of the dances? These all seem plausible, likely even, as I consider his great interest in academics, the likelihood of his involvement with role-playing games, and his unyielding optimism, despite all that was working against him, for living a normal social life from day to day. That he could have taken this optimism to the point of asking one of very few likely candidates out and securing a date, I wouldn’t doubt—I’m even calling up memories of seeing him dancing with someone, though I know my mind is capable of filling in blanks with images when the actual memory lacks substance. Yet the pictures I have of Allister are all during acts of violence and ridicule against him, including the day I hit him with a projectile. I want to say I did so out of outrage, following an argument. I hated New Wave, or pop keyboard music of the 80s—had he been singing the praises of Duran Duran, and disrespecting bands I was fond of, like Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath? I don’t recall, but I think it’s just as likely a neighbor dared me into it, since I had just bought the wrist-rocket at the same store where I purchased the camouflage bandana, and I was itching to try it out. No picture of male-perpetrated middle school abuse would be complete without the mention of homophobic accusation. It’s strange that the higher up one went on the chain, the more he could jokingly insinuate in himself elements of homosexuality without fear of losing status. The Venice Beach crowd proved this by mockingly provoking one another with pantomime and promises of favor, yet they could turn around in the same breath with derogatory language against people outside the circle to imply the greatest insult employable. The most extreme act along these lines I can’t confirm, but wouldn’t doubt. One winter, before Christmas break, Justin and a few others had reportedly created a batch of cookies to give out by taking turns ejaculating into the batter the night before. They were sure to give one to the History teacher, a rather flamboyant man assumed by the student population to be gay. “How did you like it?” they bragged of asking him, afterward imitating his enthusiastic response and smile. Allister also had to have been at the top of their list for giving these out, and this is where their cruelty seemed most severe—when playing off his optimism and acting kindly toward him, which he seemed to never stop believing might be sincere. For myself, having only participated in his abuse the one time, I feel no less ashamed. Though I had never caused him any suffering before, the day I shot him he said nothing about it, nor acted any differently toward me for the rest of the school year; as if it had come to be expected that everyone would hurt him at one time or another and if he let that change his worldview, his fiber would crack and there would be nothing but injury left of his being. As vague as my recollections of Allister may be, I will never forget the last I saw of him. It was his graduation ceremony—meaning he must have been a year ahead of me, as I did not graduate that day. Outside the huge auditorium at a neighboring university with which we were affiliated, I came to hear his name from a growing number of circulating students, passing on the urgent message that everyone in the school ought to cheer loudest for Allister when it came time for him to accept his certificate. I hadn’t put together entirely what to make of this, nor thought much about it. I had become increasingly introverted following a party at my own house; there I got into a fight, with boxing gloves, taken insult one too many times by a Venice kid named Eric, who was closer to my size than his friends from the beach and attending without the rest of his crew. I ended up beating him until he broke into tears; then I turned away and started crying as well, feeling I had gone too far. A girl from the neighborhood named Silvia took me aside and angelically assured me that I had every right to have done so; he had been, “asking for it,” she said. “You even had gloves on—it was all…civilized and shit!” Still I found no pleasure in what should have been a moment of vindication, and from this, my detachment from the social order and pecking tactics of the world fell into such a state that the plan to cheer sarcastically for Allister had no impact on me until I heard them all, in thunderous applause and over the top cheers and whistles. Then I saw the look on Allister’s face—pure surprise, genuine delight. With sickness in my stomach, I applauded languidly as I had for all but my few close friends, not wanting to consider what might happen if Allister were to find out nearly everyone at the school had been convinced to insult him with inauthentic enthusiasm. Later, outside the ceremony, where many were signing yearbooks and clinging to each other with promises of lifelong friendship, others of us watching, waiting for parents, I saw Eric and Allister bickering in a familiar line of argument. Eric was imitating Allister’s voice, “Shut up, Eric!” then with deadly seriousness, claiming freedom from future relations between them: “I am so glad I won’t ever have to see you again after this. Do you know how glad I am I won’t be seeing you, like ever again?” Allister, having spotted his ride, answered just before dashing away: “Well at least I got a bigger round of applause than you did, Eric!” Barnaby Hazen is an author, musician and aspiring anarchist. His work has appeared in Jerry Jazz Musician and won for fiction categories in The Independent Press and Beverly Hills Book Awards. Originally from Los Angeles, he now lives with his wife, Sarah, in Taos, New Mexico. 12/1/2018 0 Comments Mom Sent Me by Tom GumbertMom Sent Me With trembling hand on the doorknob I’m transported thirty years into the past, a seven-year old returning home from school, eager to change from my school clothes and play outside with my friends. I can hear Mom’s warning—“Don’t wake your Father!” I enter and stand just inside the door, the roar of silence deafening until broken by the sound of a single drop of sweat falling from my chin and exploding on my shoe. He doesn’t move and immediately it feels as if the air, stagnant when I entered, has been sucked out. I unbutton my collar and breathe through my mouth, trying to force oxygen into lungs that feel squeezed by the hand of an invisible giant. I glance at the bed and he’s there, eyes closed, lying on his back, the quilted comforter folded down below his knees. “Dad?” I whisper. No response. It’s been ten years since I have set foot in this room and my eyes drink it in; same mint green walls, same pictures of my sedentary siblings and their offspring—but none of me, adorning those walls. Even the furniture, double bed, circa 1965, blonde wood finish with bookcase headboard, and Mom’s sewing machine are exactly as I remembered them. I hear shuffling feet and muffled voices downstairs, reminding me that Mom sent me to do a job. I walk softly to the closet and open the door. Mom’s clothes are on the left, Dad’s on the right, everything has its place, their universe one of order, built from over fifty years of marriage. New are the nylon pants with matching jackets, the slacks with elastic waistbands and on the shoe stand, sneakers with Velcro straps. Missing are the blue work shirts with his name tag on them. I remember as a kid, being so impressed with those shirts, equating name patches with importance. I shake my head at my naiveté. Next are the shirts, all of them buttoned to the top with buttons facing left, and I run my hand across them causing them to sway, the plastic hangers clinking softly against each other. At the end of the shirts are a dozen pair of pants in various shades of blue, black, and gray, and finally in the corner, pushed back behind the bi-fold door, are three suits covered in plastic dry cleaning bags. It hits me without warning, and I teeter. The blood drains, and the black curtain descends, temporarily blinding me. As my vision slowly returns, my heart races, taking its turn at punishing me. I slump against the bed, wincing and clutching my chest. With practiced measure I inhale sharply, hold it for five seconds, then slowly exhale, feeling the rhythm return to normal. After a few seconds I stand, test my balance and satisfied that I’ve recovered, let my eyes return to the room, looking anywhere but at him. I spot something new on the dresser and cross the room to get a better look. A group photo, with him in the middle, smiling. I pick it up and it feels unnaturally heavy, like a block of lead in my hands. Behind him a banner proclaims, “Happy Retirement, Jim! Thanks for 45 years of service!” With the precision of a watchmaker, I set it back in its original place. Forty-five years…longer than I’ve been alive. “Loyalty and commitment,” I remember you telling me, “that’s what’s important in life.” I return to the closet and my task. I give him a sideways glance, not sure what to expect. Did his eyes flicker, or was that my imagination? “Mom sent me,” I tell him as I pick out the blue suit and inspect it. “She said we should pick out your clothes for your big event. You always liked blue,” I remind him as I set the suit at the foot of the bed. “The gray one looks nice. I like the lapels and the boutonniere. Classy.” He says nothing. Is he angry; giving me the silent treatment, or is he stunned that after ten years of self-imposed exile, the prodigal son has returned? “And what about black? It’s dignified and will look nice with almost anything.” I place it next to the others and shift my gaze between each and him. I try to conjure images of him in each—this exercise evoking memories…and I smile. “I remember the first time I was aware of you in a suit. I was maybe five, and we were going to church for Easter service. You were wearing black trousers and a gray sport coat, not technically a suit I suppose, but certainly our Sunday best. Mom dressed me in black trousers and a striped red, black, and gray jacket. I protested that it wasn’t the same as yours, but Mom insisted it was the best she could do. This was years before I could appreciate working class family budgets. Man, you were so handsome, and I remember how proud I was holding your hand as we entered the church.” I savor the memory and wonder if he is doing the same. “Did I ever make you proud?” My voice is much smaller than I expected, and I realize that I’m clutching the comforter as I wait for his answer. He remains silent. “I know that you wanted me to be an athlete, and instead I joined the band; that you wanted to teach me to work with my hands—repair cars, build things, like you. Instead I wanted to read or write. I know this frustrated you, but it was not an act of rebellion, it was just me wanting to be who I am. Did you take my need for self-identity to be a rejection of you?” When I get no response, I rephrase my first question. “Did I ever bring you joy? Mom, well, she made it obvious that a good report card or a band award made her happy, but you…I could never tell, and you never told me.” When it’s obvious I’ll get no answer, I stand and return the gray suit to the closet and pick up the blue suit. “You wore a blue suit to my high school graduation and I overheard you telling Mom that blue was your favorite color. You grabbed her hands and pulled her to the center of the room so you could dance. “How does it feel dancing with a man dressed so snazzy?” you asked her. “Snazzy. You actually said that. Who on earth other than you says that?” I chuckle, stopping when I realize you did not. Placing the blue suit back on the bed, I pick up the black suit. “I have to tell you, I really like this one. Nice cut, classic look that’s easy to accessorize.” I hold it up to his chest and allow my eyes to travel to his face. It’s serene, which surprises me. I expected sternness. How many times had he railed against my use of ‘fancy’ words, and to him, ‘accessorize’ would qualify. “Mr. Bigshot trying to show off his big vocabulary. So, Mr. Bigshot, are you embarrassed by your parent’s lack of education? Is that why you try to beat us down with your fifty-cent words?” Those conversations irritated me and any attempt to explain myself ultimately led to a shouting match. In the end, it seems that’s all we did, shout at each other. Politics—shouting match, Sports—shouting match, Mom—shouting match. We could never find a subject where we could have a normal, respectful conversation. He always had to be right, and I always wanted the last word. So, when I told them that I was leaving, moving across country to work in marketing for a solar energy company, he replied, “Figures, I always knew you would abandon us.” “I’m not abandoning you, I’m pursuing my dream, working to make a better life for myself and for the world.” “Oh, so Mr. Bigshot liberal is abandoning us to save the world. I guess that makes it okay.” “Whatever, Dad. I’ll see you at Christmas.” “Don’t bother, we don’t need you here. Your brothers and sister will look after us. Have a good life.” “Right, I said, picking up the suitcase.” I let the screen door slam behind me, and satisfied that I had the last word, climbed into the taxi bound for the airport. Ten years ago. “Let’s see what shirts and ties you have, maybe that will help in the decision making.” In the closet I go to the dress shirts and see that he has five—all white. Well, that makes it easy. I find the tie rack and remove it, noting three variations of red, two blue and one blue-green striped. I lay them on the bed on top of the suits and return to the closet, reaching to the shoe rack to select his black wingtips. As I hold them, I feel the stirring of a memory, something Mom had written in my Memories book. “He took his first steps trying to get his daddy’s shoes. It was as if he wanted to walk in his daddy’s shoes.” A soft knock comes from the door and Mom opens it. “All done? It’s time for him to go.” I look from her to him and back to her. “One minute.” She nods and pulls the door closed. I set the shoes next to the blue suit, return the black one to the closet and remove a white shirt. I take the blue-green striped tie and drape it over the shirt hanger. “This is it Dad, your cerement. I hope you like it. I hope I made you proud.” I take his hand, cold and stiff and hold it as tears spill down my cheeks. “All my life, that’s what I wanted—to make you proud, to walk in your shoes, to be as good a man as you were. I’m--.” The words are stuck in my throat, mixing with thick saliva and choking me. I swallow several times. “I’m sorry I could never tell you…I honestly don’t know why. But I love you Dad. Always did and always will.” Operations Manager by day and daydreamer by nature, Tom co-authored the anthology, “Nine Lives,” and is the winner of The Sunlight Press 2017 Spring fiction contest. Tom’s work has appeared or is forthcoming in fine publications, including Riggwelter Press, Figroot Press, Dodging the Rain, Porridge Magazine and formercactus. When not reading or staring at the Ohio River, Tom works on his writing. The Undertaker’s Apprentice “I’m gonna need you to pick up a body,” said Grim, settling the features of a young woman. Settling the features. The term made it sound so inoffensive, almost pleasant, like an appetizer to keep you sated till dinner. I hoped I had somehow misheard. “What, today?” “No, Mort, next Christmas. That’s why I’m asking you now.” Grim positioned a little plastic cup over the lifeless, milky orb of the young woman’s eyeball. It looked like the miniaturized version of an egg cup, or perhaps a thimble, endowed with tiny spikes that would dig into the tender underside of her lid and prevent the sunken eye from popping open during the viewing. For the living, eye caps would make nifty torture devices. “Well, why can’t mom do it?” I pointed out. “It’s supposed to be my day off.” Grim’s reply wasn’t quite audible over his Van Halen music. “Look, if we’re gonna talk, can you please pause that? Or turn it down, maybe?” “Sorry.” Grim fiddled with his iPod with a latex-encased hand. “Hot For Teacher” went temporarily silent. “Mom’s at Grandma’s for the weekend.” It didn’t surprise me in the slightest that she had left without telling me. Even when we were kids, she was more akin to an aloof yet agreeable roommate than any kind of parental figure. She’d slowly transitioned to our aloof yet agreeable employer. “Doing what?” “I dunno. Old white lady stuff. Making couscous facemasks and shit.” Grim was allowed to say things like that, because his father was Dominican. He’d inherited his smooth, hickory complexion and the thick, untamable cowlicks that his many romantic partners, for whatever reason, seemed to find irresistible. It helped that he had our mother’s eyes, splashes of oceanic, grayish green. I was mildly resentful. Both my parents were Irish as bagpipes, and the most noteworthy features I’d inherited were my mother’s carrotty hair and my father’s gawky height. Despite being half brothers, Grim and I looked about as related as a young panther and a baby giraffe. “She took the Good Van, right?” “Well, she sure as hell didn’t take Bessie,” Grim scoffed. Bessie, of course, being our hearse. “Grandma’s getting on in years, you know? It would be callous.” I was somewhere between relieved and annoyed. Our other van – affectionately dubbed the Sex Offender Van – was an ancient, unsightly death trap, and it was incredibly easy to imagine my mom and grandma dying in a fiery blaze on their way to get couscous facemasks. Conversely, that meant I would have to ride in the ancient, unsightly death trap myself. I took a deep breath, trying not to slip into Petulant Adolescent Mode. Working with family, it was easy to feel trapped in endless pubescence. “Her daughter is a funeral director,” I said, slowly and calmly. “You’d think she’d be comfortable with mortality.” “So? Grandpa was a funeral director, too, and she banned him from even mentioning it in front of her. Some people just don’t have the stomach for this line of work.” Grim took a step back, cocking his head and examining the young woman’s face with the discerning eye of a sculptor. “Tell me something. She look like she’s sleeping to you?” The young woman had an unfortunate pageboy haircut that didn’t at all flatter her rotund face, somewhat emphasized by her slightly bloated skin. The pale, ashen clay of her complexion made her resemble the moon. “She looks dead,” I stated. Grim rolled his eyes. “Well, she won’t when I’m done with her, smartass. Just look at her eyelids, okay? If all you saw were her eyelids, you’d think she was sleeping, right?” “Yes, Grim. If, somehow, I saw just her eyelids, I’d think she was sleeping.” I leaned back, and the aged office chair that had somehow migrated to the prep room groaned in protest. “So, about this body. Where is it?” Grim’s upper lip curled in a slight grimace. “Valdemar Nursing Home.” “Ugh. What the fuck is up with that name?” I remarked, for the hundredth time. We’d gotten quite a few clients from the Valdemar Nursing Home. “I know, right? Better hope none of their residents read Poe.” Apart from the shared bizarrity of our upbringing, one of our rare unifiers was a love of literature. “Anyway, Mom left the info in the glove compartment of the Sex Offender Van. I’d get to it myself, but.” He indicated the moon-faced woman. “Gotta be a polite host, you know? It’s rude to leave company unattended.” I groaned, a little more audibly than intended. Transporting the deceased was my least favorite aspect of my budding career. Apart from the obvious unpleasantry of lugging two hundred pounds of rigor mortis, I always felt I was breaking the law; I had my apprentice license, but I still looked and felt too young to be transporting the dead alone. And then, there was the elephant in the room, the thing Grim didn’t know about and hopefully never would. The thing that made this the worst day possible to get an assignment. “Oh, you poor baby. How you must suffer,” cooed Grim, mouth downturned in an exaggerated frown. “Please, do stick around. You’ll get to see me wire her jaw shut and stuff cotton up her –” “I’m leaving.” # # # The outside door to the prep room closed behind me. “Fuck,” I remarked. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.” The surprise pickup could not have popped up on a worse day. What the hell was I supposed to tell Evelyn? I’m sorry, raincheck on our first and only date, a literal dead man is more important than you are? I couldn’t say that. She’d probably understand, sure – she knew full well what I did – but I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d be throwing away a chance to be with her. I could call her, at the very least, ask if she’d be okay with that. No. No, a phone call would be too impersonal. I wanted to see her, even if the date didn’t pan out. I’d stop by her place. With a corpse, in the back of my Sex Offender Van. Fuck fuck fuck, this was a bad idea. I considered going back into the house to fix my hair one last time, but Ines the cleaning lady was in there. She looked like a witch from a vintage picture book and spoke only rapidfire Portuguese, and set of a fight or flight response every time I saw her. I decided against it. I was both relieved and concerned that Grim hadn’t noticed the effort I’d put into coiffing my hair, into painstakingly ironing each and every wrinkle from my daily uniform of dress shirt and slacks. In the funerary business, there was never any shortage of dress shirts and slacks. Our house, and place of business, was a hulking, angular, Victorian monstrosity. It was painted the sugary sweet color of pink lemonade, and surrounded by a fragrant mote of multicolored flowers, thrumming with bees. The rectangular sign hanging over the front entryway was painted to look like a sunny day. In the middle of the lemon-yellow sun was, The Smiling Undertaker! Beneath it, each on its own fluffy white cloud, were the words, Funeral Planning, Embalming, Cremation, and Green Burials. It was tempting to blame my family business for my lack of romantic success, but then, just look at Grim. Grim seemed untouched by human concern or vulnerability, and seemed to enrapture any partner – male or female – with nothing more than a flash of his perfect smile. On one occasion, I went down to the prep room to find him with some leggy forty-something, half naked on a dressing table. Evelyn – Evie – would be the first person in forever who I actually wanted, who might actually want me back. The opportunity wasn’t likely to pop up again any time in the near future. There was a good reason the old van had been dubbed the Sex Offender Van. That’s exactly what it looked like. The Good Van was a breezy shade of cerulean blue, with The Smiling Undertaker! painted in cheerful, loopy cursive on each of its flanks. The Sex Offender Van was an ominous dark red and unmarked, aside from a prominent dent in the driver side door. The only thing missing was Free Candy sloppily spray painted on its side to complete the look. I ambled into the driver seat, but didn’t close the door until the air conditioner had been blasting for a solid minute. It was almost October, but the dwindling summer seemed determined to go out with a bang. When I switched on the radio, the song playing was “Don’t Fear the Reaper.” The universe had a twisted sense of serendipity sometimes. # # # “He has a boner,” said the nursing home employee. “Is he supposed to have a boner?” “Well. I wouldn’t say he’s supposed to,” I said. “But it’s not uncommon. It’s called a terminal erection, or angel lust. It was typically seen in victims of hanging, but it can occur after any kind of termination.” I was impressed with myself. I made it sound like I had bountiful experience with this sort of thing. In reality, I’d only heard accounts of it from Grim and Mom, and it was, quite frankly, disturbing the fuck out of me. The gaunt, elderly gentleman lying in the hospital bed was already a shade of lifeless off-white, like wilted romaine lettuce. He looked decidedly dead, apart from the distinctive tent at the apex of his thighs. He was, apparently, well-endowed. “Poor fucker. His kids dumped him here.” The employee was a short, beefy juggernaut of a man with ham-pink skin and a tight blond crew cut. His nametag dubbed him Nick. “They wanted his house and boat and money, I guess. He’d rant about it a lot, especially towards the end.” “Well, he’s at peace now,” I offered. “He was ninety-one, right?” “Yeah. He’s been here for ten years, give or take.” I shuddered. A decade, spent in this urine-scented graveyard for the living, days bleeding together under the flickering, fluorescent glow. Autonomy, ambition, and human dignity ripped away, till the only thing left of life was waiting for death. He’s at peace now. Peace, my ass. In all likelihood, he was a seethingly vengeful spirit. Nick clapped his hands together, making me jump. “Alrighty then,” he grinned. “Let’s get this puppy out of here.” I gave him a look, even as I wiggled on my latex gloves. “I think we should wait till his...erection goes down, to avoid upsetting the residents.” Somehow, it didn’t feel professional to use the word boner. “And in the funerary business, we kind of try to avoid referring to the deceased as ‘puppies.’” “Huh.” Nick appeared to consider this, scratching the cleft of his chin. “Unless they’re actually puppies, right?” “Officially, we don’t usually deal with actual puppies.” “But if you did, you’d call them puppies.” I stared at him, searching his eyes for any hint he was joking, and noted that they were decidedly pink. “Yeah, Nick,” I conceded. “If I worked with actual puppies, I would probably call them puppies.” I added, for the sake of clarity, “But I don’t.” Nick grinned, showing the gums of his teeth. “Duly noted, my man. Duly noted.” He punctuated the statement with finger guns. I let my eyes flutter closed, wishing desperately that Grim could have come, or even one of the mortuary students we sometimes hired as an extra set of hands. Apart from Grim’s natural gift for dealing with both the living and the dead, I really just longed for an ally, with whom I could make silent, judgemental eye-contact. Are you seeing this? But here I was, alone, and about to transport a dead body with a minimum wage worker who was clearly high out of his mind. # # # In my mother’s office, there were two large oil paintings. One was of a recently deceased Ophelia, still floating in the pool in which she’d drowned herself, plush lips slightly parted and wet clothes clinging to every lifeless curve. The other was Saint Sebastian, writhing erotically, his facial expression orgasmic, despite the countless arrows piercing his toned, barely-clothed body. As a kid, these pictures scared me, the sort of thing you’d stare at for hours in morbid curiosity. As a teenager, I wondered why they were so damn erotic, seeing as both parties were dead or dying, and there wasn’t anything particularly sexy about that. As I entered adulthood, I found the answer. Sex and death shared an unsung, eternal friendship, both universalities that kept the wheels of life turning. I first realized that the day a grieving, slightly intoxicated, sixty-five-year-old widow went fumbling for my belt buckle, right next to her husband’s freshly dug grave. “I, I have to thank you,” she stammered, with the taut, quivering desperation of someone utterly lost. “Please, just. Just let me thank you.” At the time, the only thing I could do was grab her wrists and stammer a polite, “No, thank you.” And then excuse myself as quickly and unceremoniously as possible. I told Grim about it the next day, still traumatized and hoping for an explanation. “Death, Morty,” he explained, cheerfully wiring shut the jaws of a beak-nosed, blue-lipped young man. “World’s best aphrodisiac right there. They’ll be on you like casket climbers, but you gotta say no. It’s like roofies, you know? It’s not consensual if the judgement’s impaired.” “Oh, I don’t know if I can resist the temptation.” I did my best to manage a sarcastic drawl while still hugging my knees in the office chair. “You know I can’t resist a woman who’s eligible for medicare.” And yeah, that time it was indeed easy to say no, even without the moral iffiness of sleeping with the bereaved. But Evelyn – Evie – was different. She wasn’t insane with grief and desperate for connection with another living human. In fact, she’d hardly known the deceased at all. “Mom cut things off with my grandmother a long time ago,” she told me, while Grim consoled her sobbing mother in the next room. “They had an awful relationship. She never talked about it much, but from what I can tell, it was very abusive. Physically and emotionally. I don’t know why Mom’s so destroyed over it.” Evelyn was a freckled, deerlike girl with a heart-shaped face and molasses dark eyes. Her sleek, inky hair shone in the afternoon sun like oil. I nodded sympathetically. “I’m afraid that’s a common reaction,” I assured her, in that calm voice Grim and my mortuary science degree taught me to use. “There are many reasons why children grieve their abusive parents. Often, they mourn the relationship they now know for certain they’ll never have.” “Well. You’re helping her a lot, you know.” Evelyn smiled, a dimple forming on her left cheek. “You’ve been amazing. I don’t know what we would without you and your…” She waved her hand towards the room where Grim had escorted her mother, giggling a little. “...Coworker? I don’t really know what you call it in this business.” “Coworker works fine,” I assured her. “Or, you know. Brother.” Her eyebrows arched a little, which was to be expected. I had grown accustomed to such reactions when people found out Grim and I were related, ever since we were children. “We have different dads,” I offered, by way of explanation. “I think my mom’s addicted to signing divorce papers.” Evelyn actually laughed at that, a salty sweet crackle that made me think of fall. I’d been using that joke for a long time, to alleviate the awkwardness of explaining my relation to Grim, but I’d never been so charmed by a reaction before. “Oh, I feel that. My dad was half Pakistani and half Japanese, so people never really knew what to make of me, either,” she said, tucking a fine lock of hair behind the delicate shell of her ear. She tilted her head in foxlike observation. “You’re an interesting person, Mort. Can I call you Mort?” I could feel myself turning red, and I searched my mind for a witticism. The best I could come up with was, “Shu, sure.” “Well.” Evelyn smiled, showing teeth as white as polished bone. “In that case, you’ll have to call me Evie.” # # # There were certain aspects of the funerary business that were rarely to never depicted in media. Or rather, that were never depicted as anything other than outlandish, slapstick comedy gold. One of those was angel lust. Or the fact that when embalming, generous amounts of cotton are shoved up the anus, vagina, and nose of the deceased. Or the fact that morticians literally vacuumed out any remaining shit and urine that wasn’t expelled at the time of death. On one occasion, I saw my mother splattered with it after her aspirator clogged. She looked like a walking Jackson Pollock painting. But the reality that frightened me the most was the fact that, if you make a large portion of your living moving dead bodies, sooner or later, you will almost inevitably drop one. Grim and Mom told horror stories at the dinner table, about corpses flopping unceremoniously to the ground in front of the wailing bereaved. At the moment, high-as-a-kite Nick was holding the gentleman’s shoulders, while I held his feet and backed carefully down the unreasonably narrow, perilously steep flight of emergency stairs. Two bored-looking nurses waited with the gurney at the distant bottom. If it was physically possible to fight an elevator for picking this particular day to be out of order, I would have eagerly done so. “Hey, you, uh, know what they say?” Nick was asking. “About how your hair and nails keep growing after you die?” “What about it?” I grunted. My arms were starting to ache, but I was grateful Nick was finally talking about something other than the corpse’s erection. “Well, is it true? Like, I’ve seen dead dudes before, obviously. But I’ve always kinda wondered.” “No. No, it’s not. Umph!” I misplaced my heel, briefly, on the edge of a step, giving me a miniature heart attack before I regained my footing. “The bodies sort of shrivel up as they become dehydrated. It gives the false impression of longer hair and nails.” “Sick,” Nick remarked, like a true philosopher. “You know, this dude is heavy.” “Don’t worry. We’re almost there.” I had no way of knowing if we were almost there. I was walking backwards, and wouldn’t risk looking over my shoulder. But I hoped to God we were. With nothing to look at except him and the corpse, I wondered how Nick would die. He seemed like a hedonist, so a heart attack or diabetes weren’t unlikely candidates. But then, he also didn’t strike me as particularly bright. Drunk driving seemed like a likely way to go. “Huh.” Nick scowled in a manner that made him look like a giant baby who had just messed his diaper. “Just a sec, man. My nose itches.” It seemed to happen in slow motion. I was helpless to do an anything but stammer a futile warning as Nick attempted to balance this poor man on his knee while bringing a stupid, thick finger up to scratch his stupid nose. The corpse wobbled, and fell. His skull hit the step with a sickening crack! before he began to slide. “FUCK!” The word left me involuntarily, like a punch in the gut. I jumped to the side, out of the way of the tobogganing cadaver, and couldn’t bring myself to look at anything buck Nick’s dimly horrified face as it smack, smack, smacked its way to the bottom. By the time I could finally bring myself to turn around, the deceased was lying, face down, at the foot of the stairs. The nurses, who had been waiting with the stretcher and discussing the sociological implications of The Sopranos, were staring up at me as though they’d just discovered I was doing fetish pornography with their grandmothers. “Well, at least we don’t have to carry him anymore,” Nick remarked. I turned to look at him, slowly, and tried to convey with my eyes alone exactly how much I wanted to send him hurtling down the stairs faster than the corpse. “You’re sure right, Nick. We don’t.” # # # “I’m sorry, there’s a what in the back of your van?” “Look, I understand completely if you want to take a raincheck. This was completely unexpected.” Evie, leaning against one side of her opened doorway, feigned seriousness. “Oh, of course. Unlike your other clients, right? I’m sure they all planned their deaths meticulously.” I sighed, my shoulders slumping. “That’s not what I meant.” “Mort. It’s a joke.” She put a hand on my shoulder. Cool electricity fizzled through my veins. “God, you’re entirely too tense, you know that? And weirdly sweaty. Why are you so sweaty?” I grimaced at the recollection. “I sort of carried him down the stairs, like, fifteen minutes ago. It took a lot out of me.” I ran a hand through my disheveled hair. So much for all this morning’s primping. “Anyway, if you don’t feel comfortable with this, I understand, completely.” I was using the word completely a lot in this conversation. “But I wanted to come tell you in person, just so you knew I wasn’t blowing you off or anything.” To my surprise, Evie swatted me in the arm, with otter-like playfulness. “Shut up. You think I’m sending you home now? I want to hear how you lugged this body down the stairs.” My facial expression was evidently comical, because she once again crackled with laughter, the corners of her dark eyes crinkling. “Mort. My mother is an emergency room doctor,” she reminded me. “I grew up hearing about the dead and dying. I’m not exactly squeamish.” “But –” I felt strangely inclined to protest on her behalf, but Evie was already shouldering her pocketbook. “Mom!” she called, into her house. “I’m heading out now, okay? I’ll be back in a couple hours.” There was no reply. Evie shook her head. “Sleeping. Again,” she explained. “Since Grandma died, all she’s been doing with her free time is sleeping.” I nodded. “She’s grieving. It’s a natural part of the process for some people,” I said. “With love and support, it will pass.” Evie giggled. “You know, it’s cute when you do your undertaker voice.” “Was I?” I hadn’t even realized I was doing it. “Yeah. You go all calm and soothing, you know? Like you’re on a TV drama.” Evie shut the door, looping her arm through mine. I shivered at the contact, my dress shirt seeming entirely too thin. “Now, let’s get going, shall we? I want to meet our third wheel.” # # # My passenger in the back of the van was causing me a lot of misery, for someone who was already dead. Another frequently unreported fact about funerary work: corpses could flatulate. A lot. I stared at the road in wordless, abject horror. The pleasant weather was incongruous with my emotional state, the clouds tufts of wool floating on pale blue water, the road ahead a seemingly endless stretch of golden brown. In the passenger seat, Evie was struggling not to laugh. “You, um,” she managed, lips pulled tight with effort. “You can turn on the radio, if you’d like. You know. Drown it out?” I nodded, vigorously. “Good idea. That’s a great, excellent idea.” I switched on the radio, and the chorus of “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor” filled the car. I switched it off, muttering profanities as she cackled. “Sure, laugh it up.” I jostled her lightly. “This is going to haunt my dreams till I’m in the ground myself. Maybe after, if it’s possible.” “Oh, shut up! You’re an undertaker, for gosh sakes,” said Evie. “Where’s your sense of humor?” “Technically, I’m an undertaker’s apprentice. And I don’t really see the correlation.” She rolled her eyes. “You need a sense of humor to be an undertaker, Mort. If you don’t learn to laugh along with death, its crippling inevitability will consume you.” “Wow. You must be fun at parties.” “I am, actually,” she grinned, wiggling her shoulders suggestively. “And turn here, please.” “Here?” She was indicating a slightly overgrown side road. I wasn’t sure why she wanted me to turn this way – the cafe was about an eighth of a mile ahead – but I obeyed on instinct. “We need to find someplace shady and isolated to park,” she explained. “You don’t want to explain yourself to snoopers, right? Or cops? And besides, the van will stink like crazy if you leave it in the sun.” “I’m beginning to suspect you’re an extremely charming serial killer,” I informed her. Then immediately felt my neck go hot as I realized I just called her extremely charming. “If I was, we’d make an ideal couple. I’d bring you the bodies, and you’d bury them.” Just as I was searching my brain for some appropriately witty response to that, the van went over a sharp bump. The body gave a muffled groan, a remaining pocket of air evidently jogged from its lungs. There was a moment of silence as Evie and I made silent eye contact. Then, almost simultaneously, we both burst into laughter. “They,” I managed, “they do that, sometimes.” Evie cackled, knocking her head into my shoulder like a baby goat. “Well, I should hope so. Otherwise, we’re both in a lot of trouble.” I pulled up under the outstretched arms of a beech tree, and Evie shifted to face me. “So,” she said, with a sly, conspiratorial expression, “let’s talk about death.” I gave a high-pitched, surprised sound. “Jesus. Are you this forward with all your dates?” “Only the cute ones.” Evie, I was starting realize, was not an especially coy or bashful person. “But anyway, I’m getting my Ph.D in psychology, as I may have mentioned. The emotional implications of your profession fascinate me. So does death in general, to be honest: the mechanics of it, the beliefs surrounding it, the possibility of reincarnation. Ghosts. Have you ever seen a ghost, Mort?” Talking about death, she came alive, cheeks flushed and sunlight freckling her skin. She was the most fascinating creature I’d ever encountered. “Well,” I began, suddenly feeling extremely boring, “my mom has a, um. Medium come in, from time to time. To, uh. Clean the house, if you know what I mean.” “Clean the house?” “Of ghosts.” I tried to sound as matter-of-fact about it as possible. “Spirits, energy, whatever you want to call it, of people we bury. If we go too long without a visit, weird things start happening: the cats start staring at nothing, we randomly walk through cold spots. Doors, opening and shutting on their own. Occasionally we see, um.” I shifted in my seat. “Figures.” I’d never told anyone about that before. It was a profound source of embarrassment for me growing up, especially because everyone I knew already thought I lived in a haunted house. The medium herself, Pam, was the polar opposite of anything you’d expect from a medium, a plump, middle-aged woman with a pleasant face and a minivan full of children. My mother had met Pam about fifteen years prior, at one of Grim’s little league games. Evie was practically vibrating with excitement at the prospect. “You’re kidding! And you’re a believer, I take it?” “A reluctant one. I’m a natural skeptic, honestly,” I admitted. “But when you live in a haunted house, it’s kind of hard to play Dana Scully. Even if I have the hair for it.” “Wow. You live in a haunted house, you work with the dead, and you watch X-Files.” Evie shook her head. “Will you please just marry me already?” I cleared my throat. “I’ve never met someone so enthusiastic about death before,” I remarked, feeling inclined to change the subject. “How can you be an undertaker if you’re not enthusiastic about death?” she asked, clearly bemused. “The living,” I said, simply. “I wanted to help people who needed help. And who needs help more than the grieving?” “Mortimer, you’re the sweetest creature I’ve ever encountered.” I really wished she’d stop saying things like that. I had the complexion of an untoasted marshmallow, and I flushed red at the slightest provocation. It was really conspicuous. “Death, though,” I went on, changing the subject. “Death, I’m ambivalent about. For my mom and Grim, it’s really just an employer. Maybe even an old friend. For me, it –” I wet my lips. “For me, it just sort of weighs on me sometimes. The inevitability of it. The fact it’ll happen to everyone I love. That we have no idea what happens after.” I rubbed a hand over my neck, strangely embarrassed. I’d never said that to anyone before. Somehow, in a house full of death, death had become a taboo. “It just weighs on me, sometimes,” I reiterated. Evie regarded me with narrowed, pensive eyes. “Did you ever talk to them about that?” “Well. We don’t really talk about death in my house.” Evie stared at me, and I realized how stupid the statement sounded. “Outside of work, you know? It’s like talking shop.” I paused, thinking about whether or not I wanted to disclose this, then added, “Anyway, I don’t think they’ve ever really worried about that stuff. I might be the spitting image of my mom, but Grim got her personality. Everything just rolls off of them, you know? Even death.” “Everyone needs companionship, Mort. Especially the ones who seem untouchable.” She reached out and smoothed my dress shirt, where it was rolled up at the elbow. “My mom was that way, when she divorced my dad. He was an abusive ass to both of us, and the divorce was hell, but she kept her chin up the whole time. I used to hate her for that.” “Why?” I tried to ignore her fingers, which were lingering on the hem of my sleeve. “Because she was always so damned cheerful – always smiling, while my world came apart in front of me. She didn’t seem to care.” She circled the button with her index finger. “Then, late one night, I walked by her bedroom, and I heard this, this noise, that didn’t sound human – the sort of noise a cow or a horse would make after it had just been shot. I’d never, ever heard her make a noise like that before. And I realized she was crying.” Evie shook her head, eyes obscured beneath the delicate fans of her lashes. “It never occurred to me, in all that time, that she was suffering too. Her courage was the greatest gift she could ever give me, and I hated her for it.” Those eyes looked up at me, each glistening like an oil lamp. “Talk to your brother, Mort. Talk to anyone who cares. You of all people know we don’t have forever.” Her cool fingertips brushed my forearm, goosebumps pebbling my flesh. I swallowed, the sound uncomfortably loud in the silent car. I couldn’t stop staring into her face, at the constellation of coffee brown freckles dappling the bridge of her nose, the spots of sunlight freckling her skin. “People need people, Mort,” she murmured. “It’s how we know we’re alive.” She was so close, I could taste her breath. How had she gotten so close? I was leaning towards her, I realized. Our faces were inches apart. Centimeters. I glanced down to her lips. She had a lush, expressive mouth, now parted like a sliced strawberry. Her eyes flitted down, following my gaze, and then back to mine in silent, playful invitation. Champagne bubbles fizzled in my chest as I let the gap close between us. Our noses brushed, her breath tickling my upper lip. Only as our mouths touched did I remember to close my eyes, her lips warm, and inhumanly soft. It was the kind of kiss I could drown in. I put my hand, tentatively, on the side of her neck, and could feel her pulse fluttering like the wings of a moth. Each breath she drew was the crash of a tide. She was so alive. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched something so alive. That was when the body groaned again, more loudly this time. Death’s indignant reminder of its eternal presence. Evie giggled, smiling against the side of my face. “Um. Okay, we should probably…” “Yeah.” I cleared my throat, reluctantly drawing away. “This is. Unprofessional.” “You don’t say,” she cackled, tucking her hair behind her ear. “If I’d known you shacked up in front of the deceased, I’d have taken my grandma elsewhere!” “If I were in my right mind, I would have taken offense to that,” I said, reaching for the door handle. “But, as I just proved, I’m not.” I opened the door and stepped – rather, tumbled – from the van, with all the grace of a drunken yearling. The kiss had taken more out of me than I had realized. Evie strolled around its front. Her sleek black dress fell to just above her mid thigh, a purple silk scarf tossed carelessly about her shoulders. “My God, I’m lucky.” Evie shot an inquisitive look over her shoulder. “Beg pardon?” I cleared my throat. I hadn’t really intended to say that aloud. “It’s just a nice moment, you know?” I offered. “Sometimes...sometimes I feel like I’m so surrounded by death, I don’t appreciate life enough.” “Huh. And here I thought being surrounded by death would help you appreciate life more,” she remarked. “Well, it’s never too late to start. A lifetime is infinitely divisible, you know. Each second is an eternity, all its own.” “I’m really starting to believe you’re fun at parties.” # # # “Next to her husband’s grave?” I nodded – pardon the expression – gravely. “Jesus with a popsicle, Mort.” She stabbed her pumpkin bread like she was piercing a hay bale. “You must have been scarred for life.” “Oh, I was. Fresh out of mortuary school, too. I was not prepared for all the crazy I was about to be hit with.” I stirred my pumpkin spice latte. Evie and I, it turned out, shared a borderline fetishistic love for pumpkin. “Like, this is going to sound like a total cliche, but the living cause more problems than the dead ever could. I mean, I get that it’s stressful – losing a loved one, planning the funeral, dealing with people you hate. I get it. But Evie, these people do the stupidest things you can possibly imagine.” “People don’t really need an excuse for that,” she shrugged, taking a bite. “I worked retail for four years as an undergrad. I’ve seen stupid.” “No, no. You think you’ve seen stupid. But you haven’t seen stupid till you’ve seen a friend of the deceased show up, absolutely sloshed, and start yelling about fifty dollars he owed him.” “Okay, that’s pretty bad,” Evie conceded. “But you haven’t had a mother of three come in, upset that we didn’t explicitly mark the bath balms as inedible.” I leaned forward. “He tried to take off the corpse’s shoes for compensation, Evelyn. His shoes. Grim and, like, five guests had to drag him off.” “Still doesn’t beat Hot Dog Guy.” She did not, apparently, feel inclined to elaborate on who that was. “Does that sort of thing happen a lot?” “Oh, yeah. Grief makes people crazy.” I thought for a moment. “Or maybe it just brings the crazy to the surface. I don’t know. What I do know is, I’ll never forget the time a brother of the deceased thought it would be a hilarious idea to bring a mariachi band to the funeral. To, quote unquote, ‘liven things up.’” “Doesn’t sound like a bad idea.” Evie sipped her own hot cocoa. “A mariachi band can improve any situation.” “A noteworthy exception being –” I held up my spoon for emphasis – “when neither the other mourners, nor the funeral directors, have been informed that said mariachi band is arriving. It also came as quite a surprise to the other funeral taking place in the next room.” Her laugh crackled in the air, which was finally beginning to feel appropriately crisp and fall-like. The late afternoon sun saturated her complexion, making her look gilded. “You know, he probably loved his brother more than anyone else there,” she remarked. “You have to love someone a lot to do something that crazy for them.” Something like leaving a dead body in your van to go on a coffee date. The thought surprised me. I didn’t love Evie yet. I couldn’t. That wouldn’t be reasonable. But this felt like the beginning of something. I wasn’t sure what, but I felt it in my bones. “Yeah,” I said. “You really do.” # # # “Anyway,” Evie was saying, “my personal theory is reincarnation.” “Pretty sure Siddhartha beat you to that one.” “Shush. I have a whole logic to it,” she scolded, swatting me in the shoulder. “As far as we know, the universe is boundless, right? So that means, everything we can imagine, provided it obeys the laws of physics, probably exists somewhere. Similarly, eternity, as far as we know, is also boundless. So the circumstances required to support your consciousness have probably occurred before, and will occur again.” “Evelyn, you are a walking existential crisis.” “Oh, you men folk and your flattery,” she cooed, batting her eyelashes. “Mom and I made sort of a game of it growing up. We’re both ghost enthusiasts, and very spiritual. We called ourselves the neighborhood thanatologists – people who study death, that is.” I stared at her, fascinated. Never had I met someone with such a comfortable camaraderie with death. It was simultaneously inspiring and, frankly, a little terrifying. The back of her hand brushed my own, as cool as the late September air. After a moment, to my surprise, she laced her fingers through my own. “I just realized you weren’t going to take the hint,” she explained. “Ah.” I considered it. “Yeah, no, I definitely wouldn’t.” Walking hand in hand with Evelyn, the moment was closer to perfect than anything I had ever experienced. The trees, drying leaves fringed with wine red and auburn, looked submerged in amber light. Sun seeped through their branches like liquid, freckling the ground. In that moment, it felt as though God was speaking to me. “Mort, look.” Evie jostled my arm. Only when I followed her gaze did I notice the vultures, a few yards ahead, in the shade of a beech tree. “What are they eating?” They were so grotesque, they were almost beautiful, the marbled, raw pink flesh of their heads like internal organs, pebbled with tiny black feathers. Their bodies were like ragged feather dusters. My first impulse, of all things, was to snap a picture for my mother. She’d always shared an affinity for carrion birds. “Mortimer,” Evie repeated, with more urgency this time, “what are they eating?” What they were eating appeared to be a canvas bag. The exact same kind of canvas they used to store bodies for transportation. It was ripped in places, to reveal something that looked like red meat. Something that looked like human flesh. Freezing water surged through my veins. “Oh. Oh, God,” I breathed. “Oh, God. This is exactly where we left the van.” Evie swallowed, audibly. “Well, shit,” she remarked. One of the vultures beat its wings, attempting to pull away a stubborn strip of flesh. The nauseating sound of tearing brought me back to reality. With an inhuman squawk of horror, I charged the birds, forcing them to flap away in noisy, indignant retreat. I peered cautiously down at what remained of my abused client. A fly alighted on a still-glinting, exposed eye socket. I ran for the nearest shrubbery, my mind a wall of white noise, just in time for my stomach to empty into the tall grass. I stood, panting, with my hands braced on his knees, mouth biting with the tang of bile. In my periphery, Evelyn approached. “Oh, Morty,” she murmured, placing a cool hand between my shoulders. “Morty, I’m so sorry. Are you alright?” I couldn’t meet her eyes. She was sorry? “I’ll call you a cab,” I croaked. # # # Grim pulled up an hour later, the hearse a drop of ink against the darkening, flaxen landscape. He got out still wearing his embalming scrubs, now splattered with a few rogue droplets of blood. They made him look like a mad scientist, or a handsome yet sociopathic young doctor from one of those soap operas he loved so much. I waited, perched upon a rock and feeling like the world’s most depressed guardian angel, making sure no more scavengers returned for an evening snack. Grim strolled over to me, arms folded behind his back. He regarded me coldly, his eyebrows drawn together and lips pursed. “Nice job losing the van, you fucking dumbass,” he growled. “I oughta make you pay for that.” “You’re not going to cheer me up, Grim.” I looked off towards the horizon, hoping it would come loping back any minute now, like the collie from Lassie Come Home. “It was just so unexpected, you know? No preamble, no explanation. One minute it was here, just like it always was. Then it was just.” I gestured vaguely, like I was wiping clean an invisible window. “Gone.” Grim put a gentle hand on my shoulder. “This must be a very difficult time for you,” he murmured. “Oh, fuck off.” I swatted his hand away. “Don’t use your undertaker voice with me, Grim. I’m not grieving the van.” “Well, you sure as hell seem to be.” I sucked in my cheeks. “He’s behind the bush,” I informed him, gesturing with my thumb. “I dragged him over there, so I wouldn’t get arrested.” Grim huffed a laugh, which he masked with a cough when I shot him a wounded glare. “Ahem. Right.” He briskly clapped his gloved hands together. “So. Let’s go assess the damage, shall we?” “I would rather jump into an active volcano,” I informed him, but hefted myself to my feet all the same. Grim gave me a supportive, almost motherly pat on the shoulder as we ambled through the ditch and over to the shrub that was providing the corpse with some minimal amount of modesty. I tasted bile for the second time that day. The vultures had pecked at the man’s midriff, intestines protruding like rising bread dough, but the most upsetting portion was his face. His left eyelid, and the skin of his left cheek, had been stripped away like tree bark, showing pink muscle and the wet glint of bone. Where the eye had once been was now a dark, empty crater. The van was supposed to be safe. It was supposed to be a sanitary vessel, in which the dignity and the memory of the deceased could be preserved. But then, none of us were safe, were we? Not in death, and not in life. Without rhyme or reason, anyone I loved could end up just like him: rotting, and mutilated beyond repair. “Nothing we can’t fix!” Grim declared. He tossed me an extra pair of latex gloves, which flopped flaccidly to the ground at my feet. I blinked dumbly. Grim grinned, sea-colored eyes crinkling merrily. “Let’s get this puppy in the hearse.” # # # I stared down at my cell phone with the self-pity of a Byronic hero. On the screen, like a rectangular lantern of neon light, was my last text to Evie. Sorry for a terrible first date. I was having a great time until I accidentally showed you a vulture-ravaged body and then puked. Why did I write that? I’d been coming out of my adrenaline-addled haze of mortification, and I wanted to apologize for the situation in a humorous, self-deprecating manner. But it summed up the situation with a little too much accuracy. I wished I’d written the quintessential, Thanks for a great time this afternoon! :) Maybe if I had, she would somehow forget that I had, in fact, shown her a vulture-ravaged body and then puked. “Hey. Why the long face?” Grim jostled me with his elbow. I’d given him a sanitized version of my date with Evie, but he seemed to sense I didn’t want to talk about it. “The Sex Offender Van was living on borrowed time for years now. And like I said, we can fix the vulture damage. He’s got nothing on Cat Dude.” I shuddered. “Okay, yeah, Cat Dude was bad –” “Preaching to the choir, honeybuns. I’m the one who had to re-construct his entire face.” “– But Cat Dude wasn’t my fault, Grim. I didn’t cause his pulmonary embolism, and leave him in his apartment for a week with his goddamn domestic shorthair. This is my fault. I fucked up, worse than I ever have.” “Yeah, and you’re gonna fuck up way worse than that,” Grim assured me. “Mom’s had the wrong person cremated before, on more than one occasion. She gave people the wrong ashes. And do you remember that time the casket exploded?” “It took several people to fuck those things up. This was just me.” “And this was back when you were in mortuary school, but I once lost an eyeball.” My facial expression must have conveyed my disbelief, because he nodded emphatically. “Yeah. Dude died in a car crash, eye popped out. They had to give it to me in a ziplock baggie.” “And you just...lost it?” “I prefer to think of it as temporarily misplaced, minus the temporary. I think one of the cats might have got it.” Grim shuddered. “Fucking cats, man.” I groaned, sinking down into my seat and rubbing my hands over my temples. “See, this. This is why.” At Grim’s questioning look, I explained, “This is why I was so embarrassed by what we did, Grim. Back when we were in school. The family that touches dead people. That seemed like the most fucked up thing in the world to me.” “At some point, all kids think their family’s the most fucked up family in the world. It’s normal.” “You didn’t,” I pointed out, trying not to sound resentful of that. “You sure as hell didn’t seem to, anyway. You were so good at...leaning into it. Cracking jokes about it, letting other people laugh with you. You made it seem like just another cool, unique thing about you.” Grim was silent a long time, long enough to prompt me to look up. He was eyeing me peripherally, as much as he could without turning away from the road. “What? Do I have something on my face?” I scoffed. “A bit of dead guy maybe?” “Mort, did it ever occur to you that I might’ve had a reason for that? I was ashamed of what Mom did. I was so fucking ashamed. Maybe even more than you were,” said Grim, with a kind of blunt, ungarnished honesty I wasn’t accustomed to. “And the kids didn’t help, with all their jokes and rumors. Calling me Gomez and shit. It’s stupid, but it used to hurt.” “...Seriously?” was the only response I could think of. It didn’t seem possible that my godly older brother could have grappled with something so human. “I know, right? Gomez is awesome,” Grim remarked, sagely. “Anyway, I eventually figured my best bet was claiming it, you know? Joke’s not at your expense if you’re the one making it.” “Grim, I. I never knew that.” He huffed out a chuckle. “Well, that’s good. Means the mask worked.” The engine thrummed, headlights illuminating patches of tawny road. I was glad Grim collected me when he did, just before the melancholy twilight gave way to dark. If the hearse was a drop of ink, the world was now an inkwell, saturating the formerly vibrant landscape. Evie’s words rang out in my head: Talk to your brother. You won’t regret it. I took a deep, steadying breath, and jumped. “Grim. I haven’t met anyone – no one, for as long as I can remember – without thinking about how they might die.” I waited for him to answer, but the only sound in the hearse was the soft thrum of the engine. I took a breath. “The kid at the nursing home. Who, uh, helped me carry the body. I saw him getting rammed by a truck, drunk driving,” I continued. “And I went to the corner market the other night, to get some Cherry Garcia. There was a big guy behind the counter, reading a magazine. I saw him having a heart attack. The lady in front of me, choking to death on her toblerone. And all of them, gray and stiff on the dressing table.” I didn’t tell him about Evie. About how she was the first person I’d met in years whose life hadn’t been eclipsed by their prospective death. And then, there was the corpse, lying on the roadside. A friendly reminder that the vultures were waiting for all of us, and we had no say in when or how they would feed. I didn’t tell him that. I wasn’t ready. “And the worst part, Grim,” I went on, “is that the same goes for you. And Mom, and Grandma, and pretty much everyone I love. Every time you go out to dinner with Lenore, or Edgar, or whoever it is you’re dating now, I think about you dying of some horrible allergic reaction with your airway swollen shut. Every time Mom takes one of the vans, I think about her going out in a flaming wreck.” My eyes stung, and I blinked away moisture. I kept talking, hoping he wouldn’t notice. “It’s second nature to me now, Grim. I feel like we’re already dead.” Well, that didn’t work out. My voice cracked on the last word. I fell silent, to spare myself the indignity of any further emotional expression. Why had I said all that? I felt like I’d cracked open my own chest like an oyster shell, exposing the fluttering, tender flesh. I’d never felt so vulnerable in my entire life. Grim was silent for a minute, his face a smooth outline in the dim light, expression unreadable. “Mort,” he said, eyes still fixed on the road ahead. “Do you remember, back when you were at college? Your freshman year? It was a few weeks before your semester ended, and I, um. Gave you a phone call, sort of out of the blue. I kind of just rambled on for a while, about everything I wanted to do with you and Mom and Grandma over winter break.” He was changing the subject, I figured, trying to lessen the awkwardness and the blow to my pride. “Yeah,” I sighed, relieved. “Yeah, I do.” “Well. I never told you exactly why.” He adjusted his grip on the steering wheel, lightly. I got the feeling he was psyching himself up for something. “See, as you know, we sometimes get kids. Babies, even. And, as you also know, it sucks, even more than you’d expect death to suck. I used to have dreams about their little blue hands, their, um. Little white faces.” He swallowed. “Still do, sometimes.” He’d never told me that. “So do I,” I admitted. “But, you know, it’s work. And I’d remind myself, it’s not a kid anymore, it’s just a body, and I need to fix it up so their family can honor it and say goodbye. And I could always do it, you know, I could put my feelings aside and do my job. But, this one day. This one day.” He drew in a breath. “There was this, this kid, little kid, who drowned in a swimming pool. Five, maybe six. White all over, with freckles, like old blood on snow. Thick, red hair.” He inhaled again, a little wetly. His lips were a tight line. I realized, with bafflement, that he was trying not to cry. “And I looked down at that little boy, Morty,” he said, “and I saw you.” I stared at him, trying to make sense of the situation. Never in all my life had I seen Grim cry, and I never expected him to. “Like. Me in my childhood?” “No. Like, you in general. I have this, this mental image of you, that never really got older. Even now, I still picture you as a kid.” Under normal circumstances, I would have been offended by that. That could wait. “And I – you know, I’d never met a corpse I couldn’t work with. I’m not the sort of person who gets scared or weepy about death,” he went on. “But this time, I just. I broke down, sobbing. And for the life of me, I couldn’t stop.” He paused for a minute, like he was collecting himself. I realized he was having a hard time admitting this. That he was cracking open the oyster shell of his chest, too, and it was every bit as painful. I felt like I should say something, let him know I wasn’t judging him. “How long?” was all I could think of. “I don’t know. Long enough for Mom to find me like that. She was concerned, obviously, in her, her aloof, sphinxlike way. But she understood, somehow.” He shrugged. “Said, ‘go on upstairs, don’t think about it anymore. I’ll take care of it.’ And she did. And that’s when I called you. I just needed to hear your voice, to know you were still there.” I thought about it, going back to that phone call. Finals had been coming up, and I’d felt like I was clinging tenuously to a life raft on an ocean of stress, away from home for the first time in my life. I was relieved to hear from him, relieved he hadn’t forgotten about me, that he was still waiting for me back home. But I never would have suspected he’d just gotten through crying over the body of a child. “We talked, about stupid shit, like winter break, and finals, and Christmas dinner. Everything we were gonna do,” Grim continued. “And the whole time, I was so, so relieved, so grateful, that you’re here. That we’re still living and breathing, still on this rock together. And I realized, Mort: we don’t know how this journey began. We don’t know when or how it’ll end. We don’t even know if it has a beginning or end. But, we’re on this journey together,” he concluded. “And that’s a goddamn miracle.” I stared at him in silence. All this time, I had thought I was solitary, the lone prisoner of my fears and doubts and insecurities. But this whole time, he was here with me. The only thing isolating us was our mutual silence. “Thank you,” was all I could think to offer. More than anything, I felt grateful that he’d chosen to break the silence with me. He understood. “Don’t mention it.” I felt like I should say something else, that I wanted us to keep being this honest with each other, that for the first time in years, he felt like my brother again. But just then, I heard the ding! of a text notification. It was a text, from Evie. It read: I can’t wait to see what our next date will be like. Just after, I received another: Hope our third wheel is doing alright. Even though he was a massive cockblock. Grim’s elbow jostled me. “Told ya,” he grinned. I realized I was grinning, too. I must have looked like an idiot. “You didn’t tell me anything!” “Not verbally, no. But I knew you’d hear from her,” he said, sagely. “Don’t doubt my wisdom, young Skywalker.” “You suck, Yoda.” Grim’s mind was already elsewhere. “We should watch Star Wars tonight,” he said, apparently thinking aloud. “It’s been too long since we’ve watched Star Wars.” I texted back, Can’t wait either. I thought for a moment, then added, Our third wheel won’t be invited next time. Two’s company, but two plus a corpse and some carrion birds is a crowd. Then I tucked my phone away, breathing a deep sigh. “Thank you.” I’m not sure who I was addressing. All I can see are the twin orbs of the headlights, but for the first time, I’m not afraid of the road ahead. I’m not alone in the dark anymore. I’m alive. Accepted into college at the age of fifteen, and into graduate school at nineteen, Brooksie C. Fontaine is currently studying with the Newport MFA in Creative Writing. She lives and works in Rhode Island, where she is writing for her university magazine and drinking her local coffee shops. Ten Years Sober 26/01/2018 10:57 Ten years ago, at about this time, I woke up after a night of heavy drinking... 26/01/2018 10:59 I was on a pile of clothes the floor, because I’d pissed my mattress again... 26/01/2018 11:02 After propping the mattress up against the open window, I took a shower, had a few cups of tea and a bite to eat... 26/01/2018 11:05 No problem. It was a Saturday. I didn’t have to work at the restaurant until Monday... 26/01/2018 11:05 I was going to be okay... 26/01/2018 11:11 Dieu du Ciel was opening at 1pm... 26/01/2018 12:55 I stood outside the pub, waiting for them to open. It was cold... 26/01/2018 13:06 I sat down to my first pint... 26/01/2018 13:25 Second... 26/01/2018 14:05 Third... 26/01/2018 14:45 Fourth... 26/01/2018 15:30 Fifth... 26/01/2018 16:16 Sixth... 26/01/2018 15:16 Seventh... 26/01/2018 17:50 Ate some food... 26/01/2018 17:56 Eighth... 26/01/2018 18:30 Ninth... 26/01/2018 19:11 Tenth... 26/01/2018 19:26 Eleventh... 26/01/2018 19:45 Twelfth... 26/01/2018 20:08 Thirteenth... 26/01/2018 20:15 After that pint, I bought a six-pack and headed to a party... 26/01/2018 21:47 Finished four of the six and had had enough of the party. Called up my buddy to meet me at Cock and Bull... 26/01/2018 22:41 Got in the cab and drank my way over the mountain... 26/01/2018 23:06 Into the Cock and pitchers were ordered... 27/01/2018 00:48 It was about now that we left the Cock. On St. Marc, my buddy tried to get me home in his car. I refused, and spat on him. They left. I wandered east on Lincoln... 27/01/2018 01:32 Picked up off the street and put into an ambulance... 27/01/2018 05:02 Woke up around now in a hospital bed, wearing only a green gown. IV line in arm, heart monitor on chest. I sat up. I was in a hallway. A nurse was nearby. I asked her if I had to stay. She said it wasn’t a good idea if I left. I asked her if I HAD to stay. She said I didn’t. I thanked her. Took off the monitor. An oval patch of my chest hair had been shaved. I plucked out the IV, and got down off the bed. My clothes were in labelled see-through bags underneath: Hôpital Royal Victoria. I took my clothes and wallet out and they were soaked—stinking of piss. I took off my gown and there were bruise patches down the left side of my torso. I put my clothes on and walked down the hall. I had to pee, so I found a washroom. After, I saw myself in the mirror: there was a massive bruise along my left temple and eye. It didn’t hurt. I made sure to say goodbye and thanks to a doctor on duty. He didn’t seem to know who I was. Down five flights of stairs, I walked out into the night. The cold slid under my jacket and coated my piss-soaked clothes. I walked down Pine as fast as I could, watching out for cabs, and for ice. I reached Parc. Wind tore down the mountain, up toward the blue lights of the Transat building behind me. Some cars drove by, including cabs with their signs off. I waited, shivering. No cabs. A sound came out of my mouth from somewhere within me: a moan. It made me feel warmer, so I did it again, louder. And again. And again. And again. Louder and louder. It had turned into a moaning wail. I wailed. I was all alone. Adam Kelly Morton is a Montreal-based husband, father (four kids, all under six), acting teacher, board gamer, filmmaker, and writer. He has been published in Black Dog Review, (mac)ro(mic), Soft Cartel, Spadina Literary Review, Fictive Dream, The Fiction Pool, Open Pen London, Talking Soup, and Menda City Review, among others. He has an upcoming piece in A Wild and Precious Life, an addiction anthology to be published in London, UK. He is the editor-in-chief of the Bloody Key Society Periodical literary magazine. |
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