CLA: Ivory Tower

By Daniel Weispfenning

When I was sixteen, my mother decided to give me “the talk” as part of Sunday school curriculum instead of at a private, only partially-mortifying venue. My first assignment was to draw a car which would represent me as a sexual being traveling down the road of life until I parked in the driveway of a committed heterosexual relationship and gave my mother some damn grandchildren. I drew a unicycle. At the time, I thought I was just being goofy. Once I had become a gay, twenty-year-old virgin, I realized I was actually being clairvoyant.

It was summer. A month beforehand, I had successfully masturbated for the first time. Since most people started in their early teens, I had to make up for lost time. My pace would have been blistering were it not for Vaseline. Emboldened by my success at self-stimulation, I made a summer goal—get laid.

I didn’t want to contract Herpes until at least the third time I had sex, so I made a point to stop in the medical section of Rainbow Foods while grocery shopping. Rainbow had recently changed their logo to something that would make sense only if they also changed their name to Dark Green Foods. My theory on the logo change was that a rainbow logo was too gay for Middle America. By changing the color, they could pretend they were founded by and named for Thaddeus H. Rainbow.

Looking at the packs of condoms, I faced a conundrum. They all touted their abilities to please “her.” The class Comparative Orifices was not a part of my Catholic sex education. I didn’t know if pleasure ridges or bumps were more suited to anal cavities. I briefly considered asking a passing employee which brand he’d recommend for butt sex until I saw that he was seventy. He could have been the keeper of the greatest secret anal sex techniques, but due to his age, I wouldn’t have minded if they died with him.

Eventually I bought a three pack of what seemed to be the most basic variety. There would be time for experimentation later. Two were lost the moment they touched the nest of papers and debris around my mattress. The survivor was put into my coin purse. The coin purse had a Japanese cartoon penguin on it, but it was an evil Japanese cartoon penguin which I believe butched it up.

At that point, I didn’t have any specific plans as to with whom or where I would get laid. The condom was merely a good-faith gesture. It said, “Hey world, I’m ready for whatever sexual adventures you want to throw my way. Don’t hold back because you think I’m not ready.”

In July, a sexual adventure was thrown squarely at me. I had begun my first semi-relationship. We were on our second faux-date. The first one involved us walking around campus realizing that without chemical inducements we had no interpersonal connection. For our second sort of date, he came to my apartment, watched the first half of a movie, lost interest and started feeling me up. At first, it tickled, and I would laugh uncontrollably, forcing him to retreat. Once I was able to will myself out of being ticklish, he gave me a glorious boner. It pressed against my jeans so hard it hurt. This was when I was supposed to relieve the pressure by unzipping my pants. Then we would have segued into a light blowjob and then full-on sex.

But if that happened, I wouldn’t know exactly what to do. I had a general idea of the theory behind butt sex. I knew the prostate was something I should be looking for. However, I didn’t know any of its distinguishing characteristics. I feared that I would have to spend a lot of time rummaging around in him playing “hot” or “cold”. I should have done my research.

Instead I nervously laughed at the movie, hoping to divert his attention back to it. When that didn’t work, I tried to figure out what I should do with my hands. It didn’t seem right that I was experiencing the most spectacular hard-on I had ever had while giving nothing in return, but I was worried my attempts wouldn’t be as effective.

The movie ended, and the sex had not happened after thirty minutes of aggressive hinting. There was still a small chance we could become the best of fuck buddies—unless I was bad in bed, which I probably was. I said goodbye. I walked him to the door with the crotch of my jeans still taut. We had no further pseudo-dates.

For the rest of the summer, I came no closer to losing my virginity. The start of classes would mark my official failure. I planned to celebrate by inflating my condom. The balloon would symbolize my hopes for the summer. It would be popped.

My last chance to meet someone was an end-of-summer party I attended with a friend and her boyfriend. The men at the party were overwhelmingly straight, as evidenced by the non-ironic beer pong table. On the walk back to my house my friend received a phone call. It was from a girl back at the party, a blonde from Iowa. Valiantly I offered up my condom. My friend whisked it back to the party. The blonde probably enjoyed it more than I would have.
One day I’ll be ready to learn to ride that unicycle . I know the pharmaceutical aisles at Dark Green Foods are waiting for me.

Posted by beart004 at 6:22 PM | Permalink

By Ana Staska

Escaping the humidity at last, I collapse on the sofa, dead weight melting into the cool white leather. She brings me water and sits on the stone ledge of the fireplace, lighting a blue American Spirit, handing it to me, and lighting another. She waits for words.

I tell her I hate life. I’ve gained weight. None of my clothes fit, and what I’m wearing is filthy. I quit my job, grandma. I have no money, no air conditioning in my bedroom, and I haven’t slept for three days. I tell her that he says it’s over, but he’s lingering. He slept on the couch the other night. On the couch. I can’t even take a shower. It’s been on my to-do-list for a week. I actually have to write “shower” and “get dressed” on my to-do-lists these days.

She snuffs her cigarette, sips from my water glass, and asks if she can wash my feet. The way she did when I was a little girl with long snarled hair. She sits cross-legged on the carpet by my feet with a steaming bucket of soapy water, a rag hanging over the side. I close my eyes. Sigh. Legs dangling over the edge in her thin soft hands as she pulls away layers of negativity, slowly, out through the soles of my feet, the dirt wrung into murky water. She smoothes rose oil into my arches, my ankles, between my toes.

She talks to me about Jesus, and this time, I don’t mind.

Posted by beart004 at 6:21 PM | Permalink

By Scott Long

14:20. As I stare blankly at the clock on the computer I hear the incessant tick. 14:21. I spin my chair enough times to keep the room spinning after I stop, distracting myself for one patron-less minute. 14:22.

I wonder why a digital clock ticks. I close my eyes and watch it melt. It’s my dream of the number two hidden amongst lines of binary code causing a complete system failure. It’s the absence of every repetitive job requiring buttons and screens. It’s freedom.

I reach for a rubber band beckoning me from my desk in the small booth. I bite the rubber band, and it becomes a rubber string. I bite small chunks off the string and spit them across the booth until the rubber string becomes small rubber rectangular cubes scattered across the floor. The clock ticks 14:23.

I haven’t been here for half an hour, and I want to leave. I want to go home. I want to listen to the voice of my love. I concentrate, and I hear her moan. She draws it out long, and I notice the car next to me has squeaky breaks.

An old woman rolls down the window of her car. She’s tied a purple scarf over her head, like a bonnet. She’s wearing what looks like a wedding ring.

I slide her ticket into the rectangular, money-grubbing machine. It screeches at me, and the clock reads “$6.00.” I punch in a code stamped on the back of the ticket, which informs me she was visiting the dentist today, and the clock reads “$5.00.”

“Five dollars,” I say as if I too have been programmed. She hands me a ten. I realize the ring is on her right hand. She fumbles a little, but has a sweet demeanor about it. I imagine her life.

She grew up during the Great Depression. She didn’t know that cheddar wasn’t supposed to crumble until after the war. Her sweetheart was a soldier. When he came home, he was cold, distant, and callous. She stuck with him. They had two kids, but he was a drunk, and would yell at them and even hit them. When their oldest was twelve, she divorced him. She got a job as a secretary at a law firm in Minneapolis and put her children through the University of Minnesota. Now she’s retired, lives in a small house in Fridley, and calls her kids often.. Today she told them about her visit to the dentist. I hit the enter button. The machine screeches at me again. I give her a five-dollar bill and wish her a good night. The clock reads 14:25.

The sign on my window says, “Attention Patrons. Validation stamps from Fairview Medical Center and The Radisson Hotel are not honored at University of Minnesota facilities.” The sunlight bleeds the image of the words and the letters backwards on my side of the window. I read it several times and find it difficult to retrain my brain to read forwards.

I tap my fingers. I should be doing something constructive, but every time I try, another patron interrupts. A co-worker once said, “This job would be great if it weren’t for the customers.”

In the often short periods I have between one patron to the next, I have just enough time to daydream about my bed. I meditate on the comfort of my down blanket. I imagine the body of my bride-to-be, warm and naked, pressed against me. The soothing red glow of the lamp casts a greenish silhouette of her face over me on the wall. She smiles. I smile. The room melts. The walls drip. The drips become ones and zeros. Lines of code interrupting my perfectly organic daydream. A car has blocked my escape route. I think it’s a Lexus.

The man in the car probably isn’t thirty yet. He’s wearing a black suit, a white collared shirt, and a red tie. His dark hair is slicked back. He tries to identify with me by using some generic college student colloquialism; “Hey, dude,” or, “’Sup, man.”

He was born into an upper class suburban family. He thought he was cool in high school, because he sold (and did his fair share of) all the great recreations known to suburbanites: weed, coke, and ex. He got a job at a bank and made some extra cash on the side by keeping up the old high school business—until he got caught with a gram of cocaine when he was high and speeding. He found himself a high-priced lawyer who got the charges dropped to a misdemeanor. This guy’s never seen a consequence in his life. How does he get off trying to identify with me?. He asks for his receipt. His company will reimburse him. I hit enter. The machine screeches at me. I smile robotically, give him his credit card and his receipt, and wish him a good day. The clock ticks 14:27.

Big brother is watching. Little brother is in the upper right corner of my booth. I look at the center screen, and I’m watching me too. Is that what I look like? I look so mechanical. I’m bolted to the chair. I move with the utmost efficiency. I wave to myself. Okay. I am still human.

I count my fingers. Ten. Good. They’re all there. I test the stamp I use to endorse the checks on my forearm. It works. Good. I test it on the palm of my hand. There’s still ink on the pad. I test it on my neck. I test it on my forehead. I test it on my leg, my stomach, and my chest; anywhere that won’t offend the camera.
I call her Noni. It’s a childhood nickname of hers. I look at my hand. She drew on it last night. It says “NONIOIOOIIOOIOIIO” starting from the back of my hand near my thumb, wrapping around my palm. I imagine the Ns turned on their sides and it says “20210100110010110.” She stands inside the binary code. She offsets the program and brings me my freedom. She melts the clock.

The honk of a car horn to my left sets off a series of ones and zeros in my brain. A middle-aged man with a handlebar moustache laughs loud and warm and cracks a dim-witted remark about daydreaming. Everything is blurry as melted forms harden and regenerate. I smile. He seems like a nice guy. The plaid shirt and the truck tell me he works for maintenance of some sort.

“How are ya?” I say with as much cheer as I can muster.

He says something like, “Great! I get to go home,” and he laughs.

The machine screeches at me as I feed it his ticket. He asks if he can have a receipt. He’ll be reimbursed.
He grew up on a farm. He learned the value of a dollar and a hard day’s work at a young age. He was ecstatic when he was old enough to get a job that paid minimum wage. In high school, he drove a Trans-Am he bought from a local junkyard, and fixed up himself. When he graduated, he sold it and got a truck. He then moved to the big city and joined a workers union as a machinist. He never scabbed off a strike. He married and had a son. When his son started going to school on a full scholarship, he got a new job at the University so they could meet up and have lunch sometimes. Movement is sometimes all one needs to be free. A one talks to a zero talks to a zero talks to a one somewhere behind the enter button as I poke it with my middle finger and the machine screeches at me. I give him his change, a receipt, a smile, and wish him a nice night. The clock ticks 14:29.

A distressed woman leaves her mini-van to yell at me because the line is too long, and she needs to pick up her kids. Her car is behind only two others. She says she’ll just give me the money and her ticket if I can let her out in front of everyone else. I tell her it doesn’t work that way, but still she insists. I tell her there’s a weight sensor, and that it’s literally impossible for me to do that. She is not listening. She starts yelling louder. Then, finally, there’s the number two. I snap. I call her a bitch (among other things), and she stomps back to her mini-van.

I do a ticket and money exchange with a University professor. He zips past. I collect toll for a young travel agent, and he’s on the go. I awkwardly take the money and the ticket in complete silence from the bitch who, less than a minute ago, was three cars back. She sneers. I roll my eyes. She zooms out of the garage. The clock ticks 14:32
I am the robotic arm. I am the almighty gatekeeper. I am the clock that is almost impossible to melt. I need the number two.

Her real name is Norah. When I am at work, she’s NONI; she’s 2021. She’s my freedom.

A car pulls up to my window. It is decorated in stickers. There’s a five-point star in a circle on the windshield and an Obama sticker on the back passenger window. Inside is an older man covered in piercings and wearing a fishing hat. His name is Gary. Unlike every other patron, his book is open and full. Other patrons, I have to write the book when I meet them. But Gary’s book is already written. He’s one person out of hundreds, probably thousands of people who ever gave a damn about what I think. The first time he came through, he said, “I’m sorry, what was your name again?” as if we had been introduced before. Astonished, I told him.

We discuss the recent election. We talk about why I’m in school, and why I work at the parking garage. We talk about his job at the hospital. He looks at me square in the eyes and squints slightly. He pushes his head forward slightly, and he imagines my life.

Scott was born in Minneapolis. He didn’t live there long enough to remember anything important about it, because his family moved to the suburbs before he was in school. He never got along with his classmates. His closest friend was his neighbor and was only his closest friend because they were neighbors. When the family moved to the country in fifth grade, he thought everyone there was a dumb, redneck yokel. He left high school early to go to college. He did well enough until he transferred to the University of Minnesota in the Twin Cities. At that point he became reclusive and depressed: a combination of homesickness and finding his place in a new habitat. He failed once, but got back on his feet. He met a woman. Skepticism left over from past disaster relationships made him skittish, but he soon realized she was the woman he would marry. She became the most powerful motivation he’s ever experienced. She is his place in the world.

I give Gary his change. There’s a long line of people behind him. They’re angry and honking. I don’t give two shits about them. He wishes me a good day and drives off. I don’t even glance at the clock.

Posted by beart004 at 6:20 PM | Permalink

By Kasandra Solverson

I telephoned to play you a song. Lying in a bunk, surrounded by volunteers in New Orleans, you whispered hello from the breathing silence of the church on Dryads Street. I planned the call well ahead. The song I picked from the heart of songs. When you answered I thought you said, “I’m sleepy.” (You really said, “Sing to me.”) The lights went out in the church and everyone was asleep except you, suddenly alone on one end of a dropped line. I put my guitar back in its case and curled up in a cot in the cold, snowy North.

You didn’t call me back. I suppose that’s because we were old inside, which is a thing to be understood straight away. The song I did not play was played more beautifully by the possibility of music, and became unparalleled inside all the other sounds. You insisted on this—when, as the months passed, you refused to answer my calls, missing me so much that you did not want to hear me. No, you didn’t call me back, to hear the song, or for any other reason. I imagine you laid back into your pillow that night and dreamt a dream, which you remembered in the morning for a moment before anything else, before dressing, and then forgot as you drank your coffee. I imagine things continued in an ordinary way, except that now you were old inside, as I was, for putting the pulse of a night so deliberately away, wild beams of light in our ears.

As the summer approached I made plans quickly. I acquired an acre of soil from the farm I grew up on in Wisconsin and planted a small-scale vegetable farm. Five feet from the basil bed, I built a hut out of scrap materials and sod to live in, so close that some nights I stepped out and walked the black ground to scare deer away. The first night after planting corn, I lay awake in bed with Carl Sandburg’s poetry spilled across my chest, my hands keeping the shape of the hoe, listening to the dirt scrape the blade, feeling the give of the loose stuff and the stop of the old tobacco roots. I wrote to you about my field of sky, where I planted the sunlight and threshed the moon. Your words came back to me warm in the envelopes, shucking their timid husks every mile from the Gulf Coast to my field. Our signatures convinced me of something powerful, and I trusted it. In September the frost came. In October, you finished your volunteer term and returned to Minneapolis for school. I boarded up the windows on my hut and moved to the frosting metropolis to live with you, to save no money and belong to our rent.

I pinched my bus transfer between all of my fingers. Most everybody else did, too, out of cold desperation. It cost two dollars during rush hour to ride the bus, and it usually took more than one bus to get to the right place, so the transfer was for keeps and kept close, a person’s own sort of hallelujah ticket. I paid for mine every morning with twenty dimes from an old salsa jar I kept at home; that transfer got me to my job at the hardware store, and it took twenty more dimes at night to get home. It was an hour down Lake Street before my stop. Often, because it was winter, the things my mind woke up with—dreams, the objects of the morning—froze and became completely still. Sometimes I made my transfer in time, sometimes I didn’t. At 39th street I pulled the yellow cord and rose to the bright, alarming ding, watching my step as I pinned my name crookedly to my red shirt. I clocked in and took my place in the aisles of things, and a camera shutter closed around the hours.

As per the company’s employment philosophy, everybody learned how to do everybody’s job. I ended up a jack-of-all-departments. I worked hard because it felt busy, and while I did that I thought of our apartment, number four at the end of the hallway. I wrote letters to you on the receipts customers didn’t want, and on leftover sales ads from the previous week: “$29.99 Yellow Water Can Gerbera Daisy,” which read on its back, “I want to be your hard-headed woman.” When I greeted customers with “What can I help you with today?” there were fives and tens of sales advertisements in my pockets covered with pieces of “my dear,” “there are words,” “If I could tell you.” I wrote when the store wasn’t busy, no pipes to thread, ladders to climb. No one knew, not the store cameras, nor the customers staring at my name tag, asking for the price of things, things I could care less to buy, things you and I have never needed. We got by without these things.

March brought an early thaw. You got a job at St. Stephen’s shelter on Clinton Street and went to classes. Across the street from the shelter we rented a small garden plot and learned how to plant onions the Mexican way from Regino, the man fixing his bike on the sidewalk. One evening we wound up in the alley behind our house, washed by the midnight. A kiss in the rain, a few of your New Orleans stories, and then back into the apartment where it was warm, back to your school work and to my writing. We hurried into our clothes and caught buses in the mornings; I adjusted my nametag.

On an evening in May, I closed my e-mail and stared into the glow of your computer. Beans simmered on the stove, slowly becoming ready for you to arrive back home from the library. I thought of the books stacked around you there. I thought of the desperation of the city. Half listening for the sound of your key in the door, I typed “college in the woods” into Google, and clicked “search.”

Because it was a town with a University; because the manager of a food co-op agreed to interview me for a job; because the Minneapolis hardware business made my bones ache for beds to lie down in; because buses charioted me into redundancy; because apartment four became our cells unto ourselves; because the fountains of another city might rinse a person better, on a June afternoon I flew to Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and you came with me, carrying a big red bag on your back. We made appointments to meet professors at Swarthmore College, agreed to consider the change of geography in our own individual ways. You put off your registration at the University of Minnesota for the next semester and I took off a few days from the hardware store. We changed our footing and stepped into the wind.

I knew no one who could pick us up in Pennsylvania at two in the morning, so we prepared to sleep in the airport until the trains started up again. I had never flown, never saw the lines of tired people. If it weren’t for Mrs. Payne, your friend’s mother, who agreed to pick us up, we would have slept in the terminal. We would have curled up on the floor behind some chairs; would have leaned vaguely against each other for a few hours, the plane engines in perpetual language, the baggage carts waxing us to sleep, the five a.m. train to Philadelphia pulling in like a piano crescendo, bells rung, seats filled. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have to, in the end, because on the way out of the airport we pointed out the spot we would have claimed until the sun rose on our faces.

She drove us to her home in Media, a few miles outside Swarthmore. You talked to her about volunteering with her daughter in the Gulf Coast; I had never been so far away from home. Mrs. Payne’s street was quiet. We followed her up the stairs to a room we could sleep in, and she showed us the bathroom: “We’re going to take out these yellow tiles and put down new ones,” she said, and then left us alone to quietly undress and fall asleep. I listened to you drift off.

I wanted to disappear before the sun came up. The room still dark, I woke up on my belly and stared at the clock on my phone, clicking the light back on, clicking it again. I didn’t have much time to learn about Swarthmore College, the co-op, the east coast. As the room filled up with soft, blue light, your eyes opened on me, and I recognized, even in Pennsylvania, the bold emergence of your body, and then the straightening of your long back—bendable stone, the statue I slept with, the long red hair like a flame. You yawned and said, “We should go, huh?” I nodded and went to the bathroom.

I sat on the edge of the tub as I brushed my teeth and spread my toes on the tiles of the family’s home, trying to push myself into the grain of it so that when I left and the tile was removed to make way for something new, I would feel the change in my bones. Sun washed my feet as I gripped, and you came in with a towel. We had an hour to catch the train to Swarthmore College to make our meetings on time.

The first plant I saw on Swarthmore’s campus lawn was labeled with its common and scientific name. Every plant was labeled. Swarthmore was three hundred acres of catalogued, studied vegetative life. As we walked, I read; as I read, I became lost. The names were unfamiliar to me, or I forgot them in the heat. I tried to rehearse everything I knew about plants, but things around me being so labeled and clear, I lost intrigue. You left me to find the Sociology Department, and I wandered the grass, receiving silence all around me.

When we separated, I stood in front of the big wooden doors of the Biology building and looked at the handles; I noted how heavily the door must rest on its hinges. A student pulled it open and sunk inside the academic fissure, and as the door came shut, I saw myself in the glass. Who wears bright green pants to meet a reputable professor, I thought, and then I thought, who sits there with her legs crossed in the office of a reputable professor pretending her pants are not bright green, but dark and serious brown? It was a mistake, coming here, assuming this role of risk-taker, wearing all the wrong clothes, not knowing the names of their plants.

Passing slowly by the doors of Biology professors, I read the cryptically meaningful sayings they’d posted for students to read. One of them, a handwritten excerpt from a J. D. Salinger book, roped my attention, and while I had expected it to be from Catcher in the Rye it was from Seymour, an Introduction: “Seymour once said that all we do our whole lives is go from one little piece of Holy Ground to the next. Is he never wrong?” I shifted my feet and stood shapelessly in Dr. Vollmer’s doorway.

I sat, she paced; her hands flailed as she talked about Microbiology. The back of my neck dewed. I forgot about my bright green pants. Goosebumps swallowed my body and my mouth opened, saying nothing initially, and then saying everything: Sustainable Agriculture, Dr. Vollmer. I described my farm, what I understood to be botany and the poetic intricacies. Tossing my bag on the floor, I leaned forward and tried to explain to her that absolutely everything was leaning on everything else. She leaned forward and said, “If you don’t wake up in the morning and yearn for textbook, you’ll stick out here like a sore thumb, because our students love to learn more than anything.” I couldn’t imagine. “You don't learn until you’re out of your comfort zone,” she said, and gave me her card.

In the basement I found a small room with a window looking out at a Japanese garden. Water stood still in a pool where fish lived, silvered and orange. I looked into the room painfully. Were I a student, I would stack my textbooks there, like sacred things, and pray to my homework. Down the hall I heard a group of people. I took my bag from my shoulders and sat at the table, touching the grain in its surface; sunlight cracked open the room, and satisfaction ran down my face. After a few moments, I left and found you in the rose garden, circling the flowers in such a way that said, “The Sociology Department failed to impress me.”

The manager of the Swarthmore Coop stacked goat cheese with one hand, holding coffee in the other. His name was Gerry. He poured me a coffee, and we sat outside on the patio, trading stories. I talked about my farm, and he told me about the meat deli he used to run upstate. The merchandise surprised me for an organic co-op: blue rows of Oreo cookies; Chiquita bananas; tomatoes from cheap labor farms; oh yes, and the tabloids. He asked me what I thought. I pointed out one of his employees scrubbing the produce bins with Windex, generously spraying the produce besides. I also pointed out the unusual placement of the produce, a small supply of vegetables and fruits shoved into the back of the store. “You’ll make an excellent lead for my produce department if you decide to move out here.”

I walked to the train station where I found you reading, looking sadly into a book like someone who had forgotten something important, waiting to see who would come first, the woman or the train. We caught the 4:30 back to Media and bought dinner.

We had been two people always. The tea orders came in pairs of cups, saucers, and spoons. We had sipped separately, cordially yours, I love you too, etcetera, etcetera. We were in Pennsylvania with each other’s strange foreign minds. The summer precipitated through my shirt and dampened yours; we walked to the rhythm of train departures, train arrivals.

After leaving Swarthmore, you phoned an old friend from New Orleans living outside Philly. He picked us up at a bookstore somewhere in Valley Forge, took us to his home, and fed us. You met him at the church on Dryads Street. Unlike most volunteers flocking to New Orleans, Scott went there alone. He was there for the first house you gutted for hurricane damage; he jogged along St. Charles Ave. and drove other volunteers around in his car so they could get out, see the city, walk the French Quarter.

After dinner, he gave us a ride into the heart of Philadelphia, and the three of us went for a midnight walk. You and I slipped into a theatrical pairing, pretending not to be intimate in order to remain private in the company of your friends and these new cities, with their dangerous capability to separate us forever. We walked unattached through the historic district as I admired Scott’s autonomous life, wishing I had met you gutting a house, wondering what our letters had meant, what music meant. I stared into all the famous windows as if the Declaration would be signed again, and Betsy Ross would stare back from an old wooden chair, stitching her flag. We passed some music bars and clubs. I bumped into a famous country singer outside a bar, and she didn’t look too great. I looked up at the oldest buildings in the city. I couldn’t look hard enough at every brick because I had never known anything like this.

What makes a person search for the antithesis of her own life? What I mean to say is, why do people long for the sea in the old ballads, and what makes us sing those ballads as if they were our own, as if those were our own boats bobbing on the oceans, like fools, like dying, unhappy poets and sailors and fry cooks and clowns? It was the possibility of a different life held tightly inside Philly’s grain. It was the fear of that possibility, and the nerve to consider it at the expense of a life that was already good.

My mind fell asleep in the aesthetic of nightclubs and lamplight, and we started to walk in circles. Even with the attention to detail; even though the humidity focused my eyes on everything in front of me; even with your body beside me; even in the calmness beside that black iron gate around Benjamin Franklin’s grave, his body wrapped and covered in stone, folded deep in the ground with his wife; even though the clean, white sheets at Scott’s house waited like an altar to host our blessed forms; even despite the hours until then, the hours after—I could not for your sake or mine find a way into our happiness.

We went up the stairs to a bed. I asked you if I could sleep in it with you, and it was a question meant to tell you that I was disappearing into the locations, getting used to the changes in the skyline. I crawled into the sheets and wished I had lain down somewhere else so that I wouldn’t invade your dreams as I slowly slipped out of them. Neon lights flickered me to sleep as I recalled them in bed, the bright, glowing “Bank Street Hostel” burned in the muscles behind my dreams. Your arms made a circle around me, and I pulled away because my ribcage was a glowing crescent. The moon emptied itself into the room and illuminated the gesture of my pulling out and your pulling-in.

In the morning, I forgot where we were, and my hands found you under the sheets. When you reached for me, I remembered our discontent and faced the window. I thought to myself that we had been walking for three days in the pastures of Pennsylvania, boarding the sidewalks of our lives, and had grown too exhausted to function properly. For a moment before I turned a delicate sort of happiness picked me up and held me so close I could hear the hole in its heart. I pinched the edge of the bed, letting a bus transfer fall away. An exquisite fear filled me, and I thought I would ask you to leave your school and move; but then I turned and saw the throbbing moon inside your mouth, “Are we on your terms?” I dressed and couldn’t hear all of your words as you explained the pain I’d given you; they went through my ears, and I opened the window to let the world in. You rearranged your bag to make it fit your dirty clothes, took out the educational pamphlets you got from Swarthmore College, and flipped through them. You would not go to that school; you could not live in that town.

I sat across the table from you on Samson Street, drawing you into my notebook. You thought the streets looked European there, in University City, Philly. Your figure proved difficult to render as you sat quietly in the chair across from me with your tea, telling me about the cities in Germany, Scotland, and Ireland, about the time you pretended to be a student at the University in Galway. I drank some cold water and tried not to think. Your lips curled and your eyebrows bent in disgust as the group of professors next to us criticized all the Quakers at Swarthmore College, the people we had met the few days before. I wanted to fix my drawing, because now it was wrong, now that you had rearranged the graces in your face.

We didn’t smell good anymore. The sun fell on the city and heated up the urine people could not seem to keep off the sidewalks, corners, streets, sculptures. As we walked through the city, I looked but could not find a holy ground to step on. The moonlight had dried away and left a hardness. You kept your eye on the clock so we wouldn’t miss our train to the airport, and we wandered more, hungry but stubbornly not spending money. We lay in the grass in Rittenhouse Square, lay with the hundred others, and imagined our lives to ourselves. I saw myself in an apartment by the Liberty Bell, propped up in bed, writing, engulfed by my books. In the context of those moments, while we waited for our train, words seemed so much more possible, my hands so much more capable, my heart peeled open. You looked at your clock. I closed my eyes. In the context of autonomy, my Philadelphia apartment was in the corner of an old building and got all the afternoon sun.

I was in Philly with you, and the letters I wrote to you in my mind didn’t leave with us on the train. “I threw them into the river,” I want to say, but I didn’t. They are flung somewhere else, tucked into something different. My own discontent gave me the words to ruin us, and I put them quietly away. The east coast opened up its ground and groaned. Possibilities screamed in the air like birds and perched in the archways of universities. Strangers pissed on the city and did not explain, while the torrents of urine polished your face and polished mine.

What belongs to me in Philadelphia lies there on the ground, in the grass, incomplete and abandoned. I did that for love—I chiseled the torso of our broken togetherness and left the stone in the University lawn to sink and be eaten by the wind. We waited two hours for our train and left Pennsylvania.

Posted by beart004 at 6:18 PM | Permalink

By David Peterka

Barreling down the beach in a beat up old brown Chevy Silverado, past an ever-changing landscape of obstruction and peril, Colorado Kurt shoots me one of his insane, coffee-fueled, crack-headed glances that penetrates the roaring, coughing unreliability of the dilapidated truck and the hazy Alaskan darkness that we both know won’t last for more than a few hours, and you know what he says to me? He says, “DAVE!” hoarse and hollering, “IF WE DON’T MAKE THIS…WE’RE FUCKED!” as we haul ass bouncing down into one of the many stream beds that haunt this endless stretch of beach, split the water wide open, slam into the opposing bank, lurch and crawl, and every last horse under the hood belching and blaring and begging for reprieve, pressured by two thousand pounds of dead and dying salmon. We emerge relieved, weary, but far from victorious because it’s been a long day and it’s a long way to the processor, and we’re riding in that same damn run-down disaster truck whose vital organs hit the dirt just the other night while Kurt navigated the same lonesome route, humbled locomotive innards rigged in place by an awkward combination of rope and duct tape—details lost in the tumult. An hour later, Colorado Kurt pounds the door and wakes the young guy from Washington who is stuck working the station, and he replies with grinding hydraulics, jarring forklift advance and retreat driven under the influence of that same burning “What the fuck am I doing out in Bristol Bay?” question that rots the mind at four in the morning, and a Sprite for the ride home.

We make our return in silence, move down the beach with care, absent-minded exchange of words just to keep our eyes open. Kurt tells me about his wife, beginning with “I ain’t gonna lie to ya, Dave,” and ending with some rambling story about how she’s not too pretty, but to him she’s the most beautiful woman in the world. I hang on his words in the flickering dawn, drift-boat spotlights dot the water by the millions, and we’re losing sleep by the second, when it spills over me warm and fleshy that this whole Alaska thing sure isn’t pretty, but right now it’s the most beautiful thing in the world.

Posted by beart004 at 6:17 PM | Permalink

By Billy Mullaney

So they say to us.
Yet the imagination
Invents some machination contrary:
Every day they just
Simultaneously
Thrust both legs within
Their trousers.
Who can count the hours lost in
Flamingo posture
Pondering this paradigm
While the pants elite
Floor their feet in half the time?

Posted by beart004 at 6:13 PM | Permalink

By Zachary Binsfeld

I finally said what I hadn’t wanted to say,
but a hairy green man in stockings ran between us waving
an insect net meshed small enough to catch words.
He got all the good ones so I sounded like Mrs. Donovan

during that time of the month. It would not
have been better had the wordflies landed on your ears,
anyway.

Posted by beart004 at 6:12 PM | Permalink

By Katelyn Dokken

1.

I have a longing to burst open a globe, to see the insides

because what’s in there but blue liquid

anyway. Running down into heels of our shoes--makes the socks

stick. Or miles of plastic?

Or one hundred lost love songs sent to an overseas stranger.

I want to burst the tiny globe in your mouth. Roll it between your lips and mine.

I would open my teeth to it. Suck on it like a jawbreaker, dance with your Russian tongue.

Lick your closed eyelids, make them sticky with whatever glues the

continents to the sea.

Write so many things on your face with the Ukrainian ink.
Place names: Moldova, Kiev, St. Petersburg, Bemidji, Minneapolis.

2.

We could take the globe outside to every town’s ice rink,
listen to our string instruments under wool caps while

sharing the orb, back and forth trading it between the silver

blades of our feet.

Keeping divided the territories between you and I.

3.

I want to swallow the globe.

Wait for it to take root, vines planting me wherever I may be

then, a deep-seated star on the old maps. Old globes.

A capital.

4.

Maybe I’d call for you like a bird calls goodbye.

You would come and I’d kiss you. I’d un-swallow cleanly our

proof of place. Existence of east and west. Our northern states.

I’d place it in your hands and watch you crush it

beneath boot soles like a little black beetle.

I doubt there would be much blood, just a little sticker

made in the U.S.A., in the transatlantic between, in

all the places you are not.

Posted by beart004 at 6:05 PM | Permalink

By Scott Sundvall

She does not know

the Promethean ache

the midnight collapse

of Hyperion

she calls at 3am

calls it the milk

thistle blues. She is

no hyacinth plucked

from Apollo’s bow

and sleeping in

thornberry bushes

next to temporary

gods. Or for him

who can whisper

“i carry snake-oil

baskets of fever

to cure it.” And

holding a tattered

parasol she thinks

this a broken

melody (for) who

wouldn’t? With skin

you can’t peel she eats

an orange. And scrubs.

waiting under the

pier, between the page:

a scrape without

a scratch. Junk is

the garbage you don’t

throw away.

Posted by beart004 at 6:04 PM | Permalink

By Scott Sundvall

Chasing shadows

in the darkness,

takes for granted

the movement of

photons. She bleeds

liqourice sticks.

As a kid she

danced with

little ponies.

Where was her

dinner date now?

Her pasta would get cold.

She was the reason

men loved torn dresses

She hated herself

for that. She won’t

drink white wine but

she’ll break your lips

with her glass. She won’t

break bread

over prayer or

forgiveness or any name

of a mother’s death-bed

gift. Her own

omen is this:

in the cage, under

the bed sheets

you will find

the scared lioness

A wall that wants

to crumble but won’t

let you pass. Even

if you say please,

feign to know the

password. A dusty whisper

screams when you turn around.

Posted by beart004 at 6:03 PM | Permalink

By Kaylord Hill

My son clasps his hands together each night as an admirer; he dons your Halloween mask. Your status has flirted my son away from my heroism. But you have given my fatherhood peace. My son didn’t step through the vineyards of struggle, but that has made his legacy all the more triumphant. His black and white playmates have destinies sewn together in a social fabric unknown to them.

Your poster envelops my son’s room. He walks by and smiles as if he has obtained some secret friendship. Tears begin to sashay down the smooth slopes of my brown history—
and woo me to sleep. I witnessed you define the goal of MLK so when I awoke. . .

My son was the President.

Posted by beart004 at 6:02 PM | Permalink

By Tim DeYoung

There are bunches of them and they are busting with corruption.
The one with the watermelon head has put on a fake mustache
and the others are rolling on the floor, hands dug into their fat and
sordid stomachs, laughing like dumb people.

Cackling with a fistful of dry-erase markers,
the tall one, a ginger, writes “slut” across the board
in all caps before running the markers down
the face of a boy she calls Gay Bobby. He’s a lamb
and watches the green ink drip from a hair on his lip.

The fraternal twins are in the back closet in their underwear
chomping on capsules of fake blood. They can’t stand the starch
so they spit the red on the floor. The oldest one, by two minutes,
slips on the tile and his back smacks the floor like a wet basketball
while the younger one makes a joke about parting the Red Sea.

It is an unhealthy frenzy. All exhausted, they sleep
on a pile of fluorescent boas and tweed pea coats,
the dumbest one having a most brilliant dream;
God is there, well manifested in a burning shrub,
and tells him that the holy spirit is infused in everything
and you only have to squint to see it.

The boy’s exhale smells like pumpkin spice. And across the room
a girl with grey hair has woken up and is getting too warm while
sifting through wigs, she stands erect to let her heavy cotton sweatshirt
fall slowly to the floor, almost not falling at all, more like capsizing.

Posted by beart004 at 6:01 PM | Permalink

By Tim DeYoung

Intimacy (noun):

1. The tender things that occur between individuals being close.

*often used euphemistically

2. Each touch to the nape of the neck or thumb to the base of the ear
that is applied with care, much the same as a person’s mother
in pressing a small black spider against a wall.

*and feeling the spider press back through the white napkin

3. Alternative to kissing, just two mouths resting on one another;
pressed together like two musty caves, a breeze inside slowly blowing
back and then forth again.

*whistling through the teeth

4. Each time a strand of hair happens across one's mouth
and the tongue reaches out to it, pulling it down like a dark well
swallowing a loose kite.

*followed by a shallow cough like a sleeping kitten

5. State of lying still like two creased pieces of art covered in a film
of soft white from a street lamp, like from the flashlight held
by a burglar peering through a museum window.

*neither party is afraid to sleep

**Because sleep is the water
turning the powder to concrete.

Posted by beart004 at 6:00 PM | Permalink

By Britta Bauer

My cousin Cale and I used to play on the beach. A lake beach. A clear lake. So clear that as I leaned over the bow of my grandfather’s fishing boat, I could see the pontoon plane that crashed through the water twenty feet below me. I saw the outline of the cockpit window and the propeller blades and thought that doesn’t belong down there.

Cale and I ran along the shore, between my dock and his, throwing fistfuls of sand at the lake. A thousand tiny pieces of earth crashing into water, the inverse of rain. And rain called us in. Gray threads stitching sky to water on the opposite shore, lightning cutting through the fabric, sending us sprinting, kicking up sand behind us like comet tails, leaving tiny divots like craters.

Posted by beart004 at 5:59 PM | Permalink

By Alexandra Riley

the meager warrior stands atop the crest of the hill

i think there were buttercups

he then suckles at the boo boo on his index, and shouts plainly

"thou concurrently forthwith vanquished foe!! something something...what do i say here??"

nevermind this meager warrior. i liked the buttercups.

Posted by beart004 at 5:59 PM | Permalink

By Vadim Lavrusik

I was thinking about apples,
how I always bring them to you
and on occasion they are ripe,
or sometimes rotten from being neglected
in the cool of my fridge and I know you like
them ripe but not too soft, juices oozing
from the edge of your mouth with every bite,

remembering how I first studied you in New Orleans,
later discovering you under a small-town
sky and how I learned to love you in
the little apple, but how each morning after
learning you loved apples, I delivered you one,
sometimes blood red and maybe pale green,
you accepted them,

and now you save them
and say they are crowding you, and they are
too ripe and how I still bring you apples
every day hoping to change your mind.

Posted by beart004 at 5:58 PM | Permalink

Studio One

Posted by beart004 at 5:55 PM | Permalink

By Katelyn Dokken

Don’t ask me nothing about nothing, I might just tell you the truth. Remember how they took her bloody clothes out of the car, ripped locks of hair. Outlaw souvenirs to sit on the pantry shelves. Well it’s like this, you and

me—we could cut a path clean across Kansas and Missouri and Oklahoma and everybody’d know about it. You listen to me. You listen to me.

Something switched inside. My flood within: to rip up riverbeds, to deliver warm dirt elsewhere, to grow things like magic. The red body of water of which we pull garbage trucks and catfish net full after net full. Split buildings downtown, this is what love feels like: spreading electric fires because the water enters in through windows, lets the sparks swim until

you go home and sit in your room and think, when and how will I ever get away from this? And now you know

how it is that I can tell you—I am followed by drowned men, dripping. A saw toothed morning glory stands at her grave and I stuff wildflowers in your mouth so that you will look at my face, take hostage the light, my taconite mouth. Reduce the fever. Please just

listen to me. You listen to me.

My surrender song, plea bargain being: don’t you see I show my inclination, this fire in the belly, by attempting not to love you? Opposite of white flags instead I’ve got my Browning drawn and I can’t speak the last words: Oh, the things I would do to you.

Don’t kid yourself, Baby. Bonnie and I fired every shot.

Posted by beart004 at 5:52 PM | Permalink

By Mark Brenden

America? Is that you?
I’m surprised by you, baby. Fifty-three years since Ginsberg addressed
you and now look at you.
You’ve put on some weight, which is curious considering you have us all
constantly chasing that orgastic green-light at the end of that high-speed
treadmill you call the American Dream.
America take off your make-up; I believe in natural beauty.
America show yourself naked. I swear I don’t care about the size of your
cock.
America enough small talk.
America one time I put a Qur’an in the Bible section of the bookstore,
don’t get sore.
I read the Qur’an, don’t scold me.
I know what I’m doing.
This isn’t A Doll’s House, don’t treat me like Nora.
America the city upon the hill is being bombarded by bursting bombs and
sky-bumming buildings surrounded by smothering hazes of simmering smoke.
America you say freedom isn’t free. Do you take credit cards?
I’m afraid my life is beyond my budget.
America my sacred duties aren’t to you, they’re to myself.
America if you could see what I think in my head I would be in the electric
chair faster than you can say Habeas Corpus.
America my sacred mind thinks through things
My sacred mind sings softly but smugly under a smothering surface.
My sacred mind cracks cool whip for kicks.
My sacred mind through things thinks
My sacred mind burns with indignation while slipping on ice on the
pavement, twice, twice.
My sacred mind thinks things through.
My sacred mind plays “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” on repeat with boundless
sentimentality.
My sacred mind has page 67 of Catch-22 embedded in the back realm for
whenever I need it.
My sacred mind thinks not of nothing never.
My sacred mind is mine, mine, mine.
America I left you for awhile, did you miss me?
I missed you. I still miss you.
America let’s hug again; become one again.
America don’t you see?
America beneath the roar of your hallowed engine, I sing for thee!

Posted by beart004 at 5:45 PM | Permalink

By Megan Borgert-Spaniol

When I went for my interview at InterCo. Loans I followed a gray-jumpsuited man down the long hallway that led to the door that led to Reception. He was carrying a rug. The three of us squeezed through the door (him, the rug, then me) in a confused and cumbersome dance. The receptionist said “Doreen?” and he said “Yes,” and she looked apologetic and I followed him because I was to have my interview with the woman named Doreen.

—

I’m not really sure what I’m doing here. I’ve been here almost two weeks now—so, about nine days, roughly 72 hours—and I can’t let myself get comfortable. I’m in the wrong ecosystem, this is such foreign territory, these people, I can’t relate, I can hardly breathe—

“Hon, could you fax these for me?”

I will not. Never.

“Sure.”

— it’s like they’re one species, I’m another. I’m not in my element. I have no room to flourish. I have no idea how to send a fax.

-

What I DO know about InterCo. Loans:

1. It consists of a bunch of scanners, a handful of photocopiers, hundreds of computers, and too many fax machines. Of this, I personally use one scanner, one photocopier, one computer and, if I can help it (and I think I can), zero fax machines.

2. Over 400 people work here, in this one building. That’s 400 people who walk through one set of doors every morning, 400 who walk out every night. (When I walk down the street, I’m wondering how many coworkers I’m passing. When I lock my apartment door on my way out, I’m wondering if the man down the hall doing the same thing is headed for the same place as me. When I’m at a stop light, I figure everyone turning left with me could only be going where I’m going. Anyone. It could be anyone.)

Of these people, I know two: myself, and Doreen. Which brings me to my next point.

3. It is home to Doreen, who, out of all 400 InterCo. employees, may very well be the most thrilled to be here. And so it would follow (naturally) that Doreen is my supervisor.

Things Doreen loves:

1.) Heart-shaped post-it notes
2.) Baking “treats” for the office (Brownies. Lemon bars. The like.)
3.) Inter-Company Loan Requests
4.) Sanitizing, things that are sanitized, people who offer to sanitize
5.) Rugs. Oh god, the rugs.

What I DO NOT know about InterCo. Loans:

1. What it does, i.e. what its purpose is, i.e. why we are all working here, Monday through Friday. Nine to five.
And I don’t want to know. I refuse to know, actually. The more I know, the more I am connected to this place. I will close my eyes and cover my ears; I will kick; I will scream; I will refer to it only as InterCo. Loans and never as ICL because ICL is an acronym and acronyms are chummy. And the fax machine—I am dedicated, I’ll do whatever it takes, I’ll have to use the bathroom every time someone asks (“Tom, could you send this fax?” “Oh, you know, I was about to run to the bathroom, so…”)—I refuse to learn how to use the fax machine.

“New rug!”

Oh god. I’m much too busy right now, surely you can see that, look at my posture, I’m clearly immersed in scanning these documents, I’m in the zone, I mustn’t be bothered—

“Tom, new rug!”

I didn’t hear that, see, my brow is furrowed, I’m squinting, you can see that what I’m doing requires immense concentration and certainly no disruptions, maybe you should—

“Tom? Would you mind giving me a hand, sweetie? I have a feeling this is the one!”

Since I’ve started working here, five rugs (five!) have made their ways into this office; five rugs have been examined, scrutinized, felt up, and judged; five rugs have gone back to where they came from. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Apparently, Doreen has been in search of the perfect rug since long before I started here. So, I don’t just scan and photocopy and avoid the fax machine,; I help Doreen haul in and unroll rugs. She tries to make me feel included, like I have a say in the decision (even though it’s clear that I am not and I do not). But I refuse to take part in the charade. I’ve made it my personal goal to get through this job without having ever stated any kind of opinion about any rug. That, and the fax machine thing. It’s actually a pretty fun challenge; by now I am beautifully primed by past Rug Exchanges, and I have gained the tools needed to handle all future Rug Exchanges with awe-inspiring ease.

The latest:

Rug Exchange #6: New Rug that Doreen Feels May Be The One

[Doreen and I have just unrolled rug. She dissects rug with eyes, fingers tap cheek, hand rests on hip. I stand opposite her, hands on hips, weight shifting awkwardly from leg to leg. I look anywhere but at rug.]

“Hmmm….”

“ – ”

“It’s a bit shaggy…”

No. Never.

“…don’t you think?”

I will not.

“A little shag is okay, but you hit a point where it’s unprofessional, you know? Do you think we’ve crossed that line?”

We? No. But you… “It’s a fine line.”

“Right, it really is….”

“Fiiine line….”

“And the color…”

Bring it on.

“…how do you feel about the color?”

“You know that’s funny, because I’ve been meaning to ask you how you feel about the color.”

“You know, I don’t know! I like the contrast, but at the same time it’s not very mellow, and I’m very mellow, and I think mellow might work better for an office environment, you know?”

“Mmmm….”

“Hmmm….”

“Alright, well I’m going to go eat lunch.”

“Oh, of course, right. Thanks for your help, darling.”

“Sure. You bet.”

fin

At lunch I share the break room with two men. One eats Doritos from a Ziploc sandwich bag, the other warmed- up lasagna from a Tupperware container that probably isn’t microwaveable. I walk in on what sounds like a heated discussion:

“I’m just saying, I’ve been here for three years, I’ve done this thousands of times….I think I would know which is better.”

“And I’m just saying that faster isn’t necessarily better….”

I’m curious. I start listening in unabashedly— –

“The stick model is much more efficient.” At this point, man with Doritos picks up a staple remover and frantically showcases the tool. “It’s the simplicity of the design. The staple comes out clean-cut, no ripped paper, no….”
— – and then I stop.

That’s it, I think.

That’s it. That is it. Back to the temp agency. I’m done here. God take me now if I am ever to become the man who uses a staple remover on a daily basis. No. Not me. No one wants to be that guy. Doritos over here didn’t want to be that guy until he became that guy. I’m giving my two weeks notice. This isn’t happening. Not to me.

I jump up from my chair, then stop. My eyes are wide and unblinking as I wrap my head around what I’m about to do; the two men flinch and stare from my panicked movement. I unlock my eyes and look, actually look, from Doritos to Lasagna.

“Nothing,” I say.

I fumble with the door handle because my hands won’t stop shaking. I’m not even thinking this through! I’m quitting without thinking because I don’t want to be either of the men I just walked away from. I reach Doreen’s office and my stomach burns because the door is open, telling me that I can do this, I can do this now. Doreen is at her desk eating a sandwich, and I take in some air, and I raise my fist to tap the door, and— –

And I stop. Doreen is eating lunch in her office. She isn’t eating out, or in the break room where everyone else eats. She is sharing her meal with a small, silent room. I stay outside her door, unable to move at the sight that says everything to me and very little to anyone else. Doreen takes a bite from her sandwich and chews with her eyes glued to the meeting place of two walls. After swallowing, she takes a deep breath and lets out a long, quiet sigh.

“She looks back down at her sandwich before taking another bite.”

This is when I forget about my two weeks notice. This is when I realize that Doreen probably wants more than InterCo. Loans.

When I was eight years old, I harbored a desperate longing to be... a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. It’s funny, because my main concern wasn’t that the TMNTs (this acronym I use affectionately) were fictional; I think I figured I’d cross that bridge when I got to it. No, that wasn’t an issue. What did occupy all of my precious eight-year-old brain power was the simple question of how I would get discovered by the TMNTs. I imagined this happening in countless scenarios, dreamed a different one up every day. Two of them:

1) I go to Italy on vacation with my family. We are eating lunch at a pizzeria when all of a sudden, the suited Italian Stallion sitting alone in the corner booth rises, revolver in hand. He moves it back and forth to cover the area of the dining room, like an oscillating fan that relieves all inhabitants of a sticky, hot room. Panic and gasps rise from the tables and take control of all air space, spreading to corners and seeping through crevices. I rise immediately, coolly. The smirk on my lips and calm arrogance in my eyes say, “Really, Black Tie? Are you really going to try and pull something? While I’m here? That’s funny! No, really, it’s funny! You make me laugh, Black Tie.” At that point things get blurry because I never actually took the time to figure out what exactly I would do to help the situation with Black Tie. I favored the idea of talking to him, calmly conversing with him, while the other patrons cower in their booths, pizza sauce left idle on their chins. I wanted very much to be that guy; the witty, suave smooth-talker. I would walk empty-handed, my weapons would be my words—chilling, mind-blowing words that I would string together to form even more chilling, mind-blowing sentences, leaving the culprit of the day at a loss. Anyway, I do my thing, give my speech, and Black Tie is taken care of. (You’re welcome.) I sit back down at my table and the locals cheer, then resort to excited mutterings:

“Chi è?”
(Who is this?)

“Ma è troppo giovane!”
(But he is so young!)

“Lui è un ragazzo savvy.”
(That is one savvy boy.)

Then, they emerge. Out of the kitchen, donning sauce-spackled aprons, the Turtles come forth. Donatello is tapping a flour-dusted rolling pin against his palm; Raphael has a thin circle of pizza dough draped over his closed fist. They file out, one by one, and take their places in front of my table. The rest is history: they tell me they saw everything unfold, witnessed my poise under pressure. Leonardo presents me with a yellow mask, and that’s it. I’m in.

2) The TMNTs take on a paper route that goes through my neighborhood. They are in the middle of hand-delivering my news when I open the door and strike up a conversation. I’m charming as hell. Leonardo presents me with a yellow mask, and that’s it. I’m in.

When I get to work the next day, something has changed. The office is different; it feels different, and I feel different in it. Then I realize what it is: the New Rug is still here, unrolled on the floor; the plastic is gone; all tags have been clipped. My heart starts racing before I understand why it’s racing. I try to calm myself, to be rational about this. But then it happens: Doreen stands up from her chair, grabs a stack of papers, and walks across the rug. She walks across the rug. Doreen has never stepped on a Rug in Consideration. You do not step on Rugs in Consideration.

She sees me staring from the doorway.

“Oh Tom, look! It’s official— – we have our rug!”

“Oh, well…wow, so you decided….”

“Yeah, I was a bit iffy at first, with the shag, and the color, but when I walked in this morning I turned on the light and it just worked. Everything just worked and that was it! Just like that!”

“Just like that?”

“Just like that! Do you like it?”

I blink. I’m baffled.

She found The Rug? The new rug is The One?

I look up at Doreen, who is taking in this new addition as if she can’t get enough of it, as if everything will be right with the world, so long as The Rug remains in view.

“Yeah, it’s…good. It’s nice.”

“Good, good. I’m glad.”

After a pause, Doreen breaks her Rug trance and steps toward me.

“Now, I have this fax that needs to be sent out before noon. Would you mind taking care of it?” Doreen holds the fax in front of me, at that unassuming distance that makes no demand. The Rug below laces the paper in a deep orange fringe.

—

When I left ICL a year later, I was carrying a rug. The receptionist smiled, and I waved, and The Rug burst through the door before me in all its faded orange glory. The new supervisor hated it, was turned off by the matted shag. Its final destination was still an uncertainty, but InterCo. Loans was no longer an option. You do not keep a rug in a place where no one will appreciate it.

It’s unprofessional.

Posted by beart004 at 5:40 PM | Permalink

By Deniz Rudin

If you cut open a cloud, the cross-section looks like a gigantic ant farm with an intricate network of tiny pathways. In this way each cloud in the sky is a city. In each unnamed cumulus metropolis, rainwater flows through these corridors like blood through veins. To us, the cloudlife of raindrops seems like it must be a gestational period, and in a way it is. The way that warm, dark cloudflesh surrounds and envelops rain in the sky is womblike. However, the life of a drop of rain inside a cloud is not the same as the mindless growth and development of a mammalian fetus. It is altogether more like school.

Citizenship and community are important to rain; after all, raindrops can literally merge with each other to become larger entities, though the base unit of the drop always retains control over itself. It is in puddles that rain shares information, and in the cloud-cities there are myriad recesses of varying size in which raindrops gather and learn. In one such classroom, drops are told that the collective Rain should always be valued above the individual droplet. In another, they learn of the cycle of rain: falling honorably and gracefully from clouds to replenish the Earth, then rising back to the clouds to fall again. In another they hear tales of the soil and seas that await them at the end of their fall, and in yet another they are told to be proud of their home-cloud, as there are many lesser clouds hovering in the sky. After a drop has learned its lesson, it separates from the teaching puddle and is whisked away by the streaming hallway to the next classroom. Such is the cloudlife of a drop of rain. Naturally, some take to it more than others.

When every drop has visited the majority of the countless classrooms in a cloud, the city becomes dark and heavy with their collective knowledge. New pathways are eroded, pathways that lead not to any classroom but to howling wind. The first to jump are the malcontents, the disbelievers, and those that just want to get it over with; the thrill-seekers; the zealots all too eager to begin their transformation. They drizzle down toward what is below while those left in the cloud make snide little jokes in their puddles. But before long the time for mass exodus comes, and the cloud is evacuated in dozens of somber processions.

Quite a lot about the nature of any raindrop can be learned if you simply watch the way it falls. Some show that they never completely believed in the cycle by the way they spread themselves flat, trying to fall as slowly as possible. On the other hand, you can tell a true believer by the way it shapes itself into a sleek bullet to get to its goal as quickly as possible. Others simply take pleasure in the fall, swooping rambunctiously around other drops, knowing that whatever happens will happen and so why worry? Their exuberance annoys some but is contagious to others. Some drops find another drop to merge with, and lessen the fear of the upcoming ground by sharing it. And some just fall, glistening globules, at peace with what they are and what they are to do. What none of them know, not the frightened nor the fanatical nor the playful nor the affectless, is that they are the last rainload of the last cloud, and what they fall toward has neither soil nor sea, but only concrete for miles and miles and hundreds of miles, the Earth a newly-paved parking lot for its satellite, the fantastically glamorous casino-moon.

Posted by beart004 at 5:39 PM | Permalink

By Patrick Anderson

Lt. Miner sat alone under the awning of a small coffee shop. The angle of the sun didn’t permit any shade, so he sat exposed to it. It hung low on the southern horizon, just above the graveyard on the top of the hill. That was the direction Lt. Miner faced: toward the sun, toward the graveyard, toward the hill.

Lt. Miner drank his coffee and drifted. The sun was damn hot. It moved in a slow whirl to the west.

Lt. Miner started to daydream.

“There was one point, when we were young, that I hated you,” he said to his wife. “The summer of 2004. I hated you, then.”

A rivulet of sweat formed at Lt. Miner’s right temple. The sweat was damn annoying. It bubbled across his forehead. It dampened the small of his back and the armpits of his dress shirt. What a bastard, that sun.

Lt. Miner, under the heat of the sun and the heat of his coffee, could see the red armchair he was sitting on, his wife on the couch to his right.

“There was one day, one morning. I woke up and went to the bathroom. On my way to the bathroom I saw you naked on the floor. I walked down to that coffee shop on the corner and sat there, drinking coffee. That was in fucking August, and for some reason, probably because I was stupid from shock, I ordered a coffee. I sat there, sweating like a maniac. Couldn’t even cry. Drinking a near-boiling cup of coffee and just sweating the shit right out through my pores. And in my head there was a three ring circus: God, Christ, You. I called you a million names.

Whore. And then I imagined marrying you and being married to you, and I felt like a fucking schizophrenic.”

“And then you did marry me,” his wife said.

He broke from the dream, stood up, and walked away with his coffee in hand. The lake was three blocks away. He headed in that direction, thinking he might go for a small walk.

Posted by beart004 at 5:38 PM | Permalink

By David Watson

Do you remember Abraham? Yes, that Abraham, the one God ordered to take his son up the mountain and make him a sacrifice. Do you remember Abraham? The thing I wonder and that I guess everyone wonders when they hear that story is this: what if God hadn’t intervened in the last moment to stop Abraham from cutting the boy’s throat? I guess this is a moot point when you are talking about someone who is all-powerful, but what if there had been a snag in the plan? What if the angel had been waylaid like the angel in Daniel who was kept at bay by the Prince of Persia for twenty-one days? I guess I don’t really know what would have happened to Abraham then. I suppose he would have tried to explain to his wife why he left on a camping trip with their son and came home alone. Maybe he wouldn’t have gone home at all. I mean, maybe it would have been better for him to hit the road after a stunt like that. Light out for Ur of the Chaldeans and never look back. Maybe there are some tests that you simply can’t pass.

There was our man and he was standing in the rain outside of a bus depot. He wore a gray raincoat, executive cut, and he carried an attaché case and smoked a black cigarette with a little gold ring just above the filter. He had dark hair and pale skin and those deep craters under his eyes that looked like he had smudged eyeliner pencil into sunken little half-moons with his thumb. He was staring at the multicolored chart on the wall of the depot that tells all the places that the buses run and all the times that they arrive and depart. In three days this man, sitting on a California beach, would open the fingers of his right hand into a V and use those same fingers to mash out both of his eyes.

The depot was a building made of gray bricks so big that they looked like cinderblocks, all stained from people extinguishing their cigarettes and cigars on the side in ugly black smears that never quite seem to wash off in the rain. The roof was slightly inclined and there were tin rain gutters that were supposed to direct the water toward the down spouts into the big forty-gallon plastic barrels. But it had already been raining for two and a half years without ever even once showing the slightest sign of letting up. So the gutters were filled up and the barrels were filled up and the water was just pouring out like soldiers going over the top at Verdun or the Somme and splattering away on the ground in deep old puddles, flowing away in little rivulets carving their way across the parking lot. Doesn’t that just beat everything straight to hell? Two and a half years. That’s nine hundred and twelve whole days, plus one very soggy morning. He was wondering if there was a bus going somewhere that the sun was shining.

A lady sidled up to him. He couldn’t hear her over the sound of the rain and the water pouring down out of the gutters and anyway he wasn’t really listening for any ladies sidling up beside him. This lady was very tiny. So tiny that when he finally did notice her he wondered to himself how it was that she hadn’t been sucked away in one of the parking-lot rivers. She was wearing a yellow slicker and had big horn-rimmed spectacles and her hair was wrapped in plastic sheeting to keep it dry. It was a cold day. Autumn was turning into winter and the days were getting shorter and the wind was starting to take on a serrated edge. He coughed and the little lady turned to him.

“You shouldn’t smoke,” she said. She smelled like damp baby powder and mildew.

“I know,” he said.

“It’s bad for you,” she said.

He nodded. “That’s the idea.”

“Huh?”

“Gradual suicide.”

She didn’t say anything after that for a moment and then she asked him where he was headed and he said that he didn’t know.

“What do you mean?” she asked him. “How can you come to the station without knowing where you are going?”
“I hadn’t really thought about it. Somewhere sunny.”

“Is that supposed to be a joke?” she asked. “Because it isn’t funny.”

“No. I guess not. Still though. Wouldn’t a little sun be nice?”

“I am going to see my grandchildren in Topeka,” the tiny woman said. “I’s my grandson’s birthday and I’m going for a visit.”

“That’s nice.”

So he got on the first bus bound for California and it took him all the way to San Francisco. Three thousand miles and he sat by the window the whole way. You know what he saw? Ruin. Everywhere they went there was nothing green or growing anywhere. Everything was dead. They drove through huge stretches of what had once been wheat fields (green grass, gold and amber stalks, rich soil, all beneath a blue sky, green tractors, and red irrigators) and all those fields had become enormous playa lakes that reflected rain clouds and any headlights passing on the freeway. They drove through the mountains. There used to be trees in the Rockies, big fir trees and oak trees and ash trees and birch trees and all kinds of trees. But now the trees were all rotted away beneath tangled heaps of moss and lichen because moss and lichen are just about the only things that can grow in the constant damp. Every stop along the way he saw more people dressed in wet clothes, wearing wet shoes over wet socks. It isn’t right, he thought, that a man could get jungle rot in Nevada. But sure enough.

“I guess I thought it might be different here,” he said to no one in particular as the bus turned south toward San Francisco. “But it really is just the same everywhere.”

He got off the bus somewhere between L.A. and Frisco. It doesn’t matter where precisely, just somewhere along the way. It was a rinky-dink town. You know the type: a gas station rusting out from under itself; a diner whose sign is missing letters; a no-tell motel with rooms for nineteen dollars a night; several bars that might be dive bars but aren’t because dive is a concept of relatives and here in Podunk, CA, everything is a dive, a warsh, the tried and true walking nightmare of a mad somnambulist. Everything was gravel and soot and the aching, backbreaking odor of despair. It was the kind of place where noir things happen on rain-swept nights and even the rich banks of clouds can’t protect a body from the deep-down crazies brought on by the obscured light of a full moon. The kind of place where a car breaks down and its owner moans, “No…anywhere but here.”

But there was a beach not far from the bus depot. The last twenty miles into town he could see it from the highway: the gray sky, water that moved like lead in a crucible, whitecaps churning up on the beach, driftwood and seaweed scattered like a net in whose grommets lay decaying fish, caked in sand, picked at by the birds.
He left the terminal behind, crossed the street, waded through the mud and muck of the embankment down to the place where the soil turned to sand, and he kicked off his shoes and pulled off his socks and walked barefoot onto the beach. The rain had darkened the sand and left it cratered with minute pockmarks as if an ant army had loosed its miniature artillery and made no man’s land of the dune. Several yards ahead a fish, gray-scaled and white-bellied, flopped in one of the shallow pools that the rain had turned into small, isolated seas. He walked along the beach, looking out towards the horizon. In the distance the sky and ocean faded together into a single ashen thing, an elemental merger of water and air. A taut breeze was rolling off the waves and it carried with it the smell of brine, kelp, and ice. He rubbed his hand along his face and felt the three-day stubble beneath his fingers.

About fifty yards down the beach he saw a man sitting and watching the waves. This stranger wore a brightly colored shirt with no sleeves, a pair of Bermuda shorts, and had his hair bound back behind his head with a handkerchief that was white and red. His hair was golden, as if it had been gobbling sunlight for the course of his entire life, storing it against the day when the sun would disappear. Now, in the never-ending, rain-soaked gloaming his hair blazed out like the sun’s reflection in a polished mirror. His feet were buried in the sand. The stranger turned and saw our man coming down the beach towards him and he raised a well-muscled arm and waved. The golden haired stranger was sitting on a long tow board with a high fin and a blue stripe that ran the middle and ducked away around either end.

“Out for a stroll?” the surfer asked.

“You might say so.”

“What’s your name?” the surfer asked. Our man raised his shoulders and let them drop. The surfer looked him over top to bottom and then nodded.

“Yeah. I dig. I know why you’re here. You thought you might find a sliver of sunlight. Isn’t that right, traveler?”

“Yeah. That’s right.”

“You should know by now,” the surfer said. “There isn’t going to be any sun ever again. Those days are over.”

“You still come out here to surf?” our man asked. The surfer looked at him for a moment as if he had not understood the question.

“You’re sitting on a surfboard.” He pointed and the surfer turned and then his face broke into a wide smile.

“Oh,” the surfer said, “I don’t surf. I found it right where it is now. Seemed like as good a bench as I was going to find down here.”

“So why are you here?”

“I’m here every day,” the surfer who was not a surfer said. “I like to watch the ocean.”

“In the rain?”

“It rains every day,” the surfer who was not a surfer said. “I don’t see how you can let it stop you forever.”

“It’s depressing.”

“So it is.”

They sat in silence for a long time. Waves broke on the shore, seagulls glided through the rain and called out to one another in voices that seemed to come from a great distance, and from the road came the sound of cars and trucks shifting down to stop at the traffic light on the corner by the bus station. Our man looked at his watch. It was a quarter to noon. Behind the clouds the sun should have been almost in the center of the sky.

How do you remember something like the sun? How do you pick out a single sunlit day to rest the mind upon when every day for a lifetime and for a thousand lifetimes the sun has been the world’s one constant? That was the trouble that plagued our man. He could remember the sun, but only as an abstraction. Now that it was gone it did not take a definite shape in his memory, remaining, instead, a general theory of light and heat as divorced from the reality of the sun as Planck’s constant is divorced from the cooking of a marshmallow over a roaring fire.

What might have been different for our man if at that moment the sun had appeared--if the clouds gave way, as the Prince of Persia gave way to Daniel’s angel, and there had been a moment of illumination? Would even a single ray of clear, unfiltered light have been the hand of God staying Abraham from the terrible sacrifice? But the clouds did not break and for a little while the two, our man and the strange Kuebiko, sat side-by-side staring out over the water.

Posted by beart004 at 5:36 PM | Permalink

By Marlene Moxness

Once she was outside of it, Happy didn’t really pay much attention to her box. When she and the other hippos were arranged around the playing field, she was all business. Happy knew that there was no real skill involved in her work, but she liked it just the same. Then one day she found herself positioned next to the box, staring at an artist’s two-dimensional rendering of a fat pink hippopotamus. “My God,” she thought. “Do I really look like that?”

It started out small. At the next game, Happy munched slower than the other hippos, more methodically. She chewed each marble 27 times. Her competitive side ached play with the same zeal as the other three hippos. She had always been one of the guys, in the thick of things, chomping furiously. Happy began counting the number of marbles she ate. Appalled at the huge quantity she was consuming, Happy decided to eat only every third marble that came her way. This worked out perfectly because three cubed was 27. Three was the perfect number.

Happy was wallowing. In a moment of clarity brought on by her newly ascetic lifestyle, the full burden of her absurd situation weighed down upon her. Her life was meaningless. She spent her days eating as many small white marbles as she possibly could, and for what? For sport? Was there any logic behind this game in which she found herself? All her self worth was wrapped up in the futile effort to gorge herself more quickly than the other three hippos. Three males, against her. She was constantly surrounded by males, one on each side and one across the field. Her whole world was this stupid game with three males, and she’d never even had a boyfriend. Happy was going to die fat, sad, and alone. She had to make a change. After she saw that picture, she knew what she had to do. Everything else in her life was beyond her control, but within the sphere of the game, Happy had a choice. She could say no to marbles. She could clamp her teeth down every time one came her way, ricocheting it back across the field. If she could handle this, then maybe, just maybe, she could finally live up to her name.

Happy turned her head to the left, but she still could not see her backside. She couldn’t decide if this was a good omen or a bad one. The contortions made her dizzy. She lowered herself to the ground. With her eyes closed, she took three deep breaths.

“Hap, are you okay? You look sort of ill.”

She leapt to her feet with all the grace one would expect from a hungry hippo. “Homer! What? No! I’m fine. What’s your problem, anyway?”

“Are you feeling okay? You didn’t seem to be playing at your peak today.”

“What? No! I’m fine. I’m great! I’m just trying to be more ladylike, that’s all.”

Homer raised one green eyebrow suspiciously. “Ladylike? You’re, like, the only lady in the game!”

“I know!” Happy snapped, her pink cheeks darkening. She didn’t want to be having this conversation. “I’m just trying to get healthy.”

“I suppose we are starting to get to that age. Thirty already. It sounds so old when you say it out loud.”

“Come on now,” she said, nudging him with her shoulder. They had been friends since ages four and up. “You’re still nimble! Your neck is as fast ever! Now, I’m going to go lie down. I’ll see you later though, right?”
Homer gave her a half smile and went to find the others. It was time for a little chat.

In the middle of the next game, Homer signaled to Harry and Henry. They stopped what they were doing, and all heads swiveled in Happy’s direction. Homer spoke for the group. “Happy, who do you think you’re trying to fool?”

“Whhff?” Her words were muffled by the marble she held in her cheek.

“I said, who the hell do you think you’re trying to fool? You haven’t won a game in weeks and you haven’t eaten a single marble all day!”

She felt all three pairs of eyes. Without meeting them, she spat her marble towards Homer’s feet. “What on earth are you talking about?”

“There! You didn’t even eat that one! What’s going on, Happy? Are you sick—”

“How many times do I have to tell you? I’m fine! It’s none of your damn business what I eat!”

“But Happy, you’re not eating. It’s not right. Hippos like us are supposed to eat marbles. It’s our, I don’t know, our destiny.”

“It’s ridiculous, Homer! We’re hippos, for god’s sake.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Forget it, Homer. Don’t even talk to me about destiny. Get over yourself!”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about! Look, Happy, I’m worried about you.” He gestured towards the others, and they nodded in orange and yellow unison. “Happy—”

He stepped forward as she started to cry. “Happy….”

“I’m…I’m just so…hungry! Hungry!”

“You’re going to be okay,” he said, nuzzling her with his long neck. “It’s going to be all right. We’re going to get you the help you need. It’s going to be okay. You’re going to be okay.”

She wiped her eyes, long lashes matted together with tears. “I just wanted to be pretty, pretty…” she whispered.

“Happy, you’ve always been pretty. No, no, hey now, I’m not just saying that. Look at you! You’re pink and shiny. You’re a gorgeous hippopotamus.”

“Really? But—”

He shook his head. She sniffled again. After a long minute, he spoke, his voice low and firm. “You are beautiful.”
Another long minute.

“Would you like to play with us?”

Happy shot him a damp look, her pink brow furrowed. Henry and Harry had already taken their positions on the field.

“Come on,” Homer coaxed. “The only way for you to get over this is to be plunged right back into the competition. It’s for the best.”

Happy sniffled one last time and slogged over to where the others were waiting for her. She could do this. She was perfect the way she was. She was going to get over this. She just needed to get back in the game, and everything would be back to normal. This was the best way. Homer knew what he was doing.

As the marbles ricocheted around the field, Happy felt the thrill of the game run down her neck. She could do this. Homer lunged for a marble, but it caught on his front tooth and shot her way. Happy readied herself, blinking to focus her eyes on the marble coming straight towards her. The blood pounded in her ears as she quickly analyzed the velocity of the marble with her known jaw speed and the slope of the field today. She could do this. She had done this a thousand times. With a loud crack, she chomped down on the marble. She felt its cold plastic and moved it along her mouth. As it reached her throat, Happy made a conspicuous effort to swallow. She could feel Homer’s eyes on her as the marble worked its way down her long neck. With a hollow plunk, the marble came to rest. Happy met Homer’s eyes. He smiled. She smiled back at him. The other two hippos returned to their frantic marble munching as soon as the tender moment came to a close, and Homer shifted his attention back to the game. Happy continued to smile, wondering how long it would be until she could sneak away and throw up the marble. No one would ever know. They say the most fun is playing together, but Happy knew this was one game she would need to keep to herself.

Posted by beart004 at 5:33 PM | Permalink

By Kalen Keir

Apart from the echoes of white noise sifting through the tall wooden doors, there was not a quiver of motion outside the pillars of the great hall; not even the flag swayed from its place halfway up the pole. The day’s drizzle had retracted into a brittle glaze of ice at the corners of the pavement. The air was just as thin and somewhat electric, a burning cold stillness in its breath.

A mile or so away in any given direction, there were people—deep within the insulation of their dwellings, wrapped in sleeping bags, in front of the television, alive—but there, in the blackness of the old downtown, the only sign of light or life radiated from within the auditorium.

Anxiety roiled in each and every stomach inside the hall, though few paid the feeling any mind; acknowledging one’s dreams had long held consequences, and despair threatened to spill from behind the blinds one might draw in search of brightness. Nevertheless, it was the anticipation of the music which had compelled them to brave the streets on that frigid November evening, and which now fueled the hushed excitement that grew as the people shuffled toward their musty velvet seats.

William Clark, a forty-year-old critic, sat crossing and uncrossing his legs near the aisle of the second row. He was becoming impatient. From this close to the stage, he would be able to see and hear everything: each pious strum and every unpredictable lyric, uttered against the grain, a challenge to the forces of oppression, a rebirth of the passion—he stopped himself there. It was going to make for a rich write-up. For the first time in over thirty years, the man known as Peter Frye was to emerge from the abyss of anonymity, to play a single show. No one quite knew what to expect.

This was the city in which the troubadour had found a voice, first by singing the songs of the poets who had come before him, and later by molding them into his own. His raw voice pierced any pretense; his lyrics captured the subtleties of the common citizen’s life while it growled at the privileged; his bright and heavy guitar sound was unforgiving; and always, his harmonica rang with a youthful cry. That was one winter before the first trenches were dug. In a violent blur of time that hardly resembled a year, Frye was immortalized on the screens of the media, swept into the centrifugal whirlwind of the growing counterculture. That autumn, when the momentum reached a head, there was a march on the capitol city, concentrating around the government building, which was dubbed the “White Mountain” amongst the crowd. Millions chanted “Brave the tide, shake the Mountain”—it was half defiance and half reverence, an obvious allusion to Frye’s song, “Are the Tides on Your Side?”

The country had adopted Peter Frye’s voice as its own. His face became the ever-changing face of the people, his song the symbol of a nation. He was called by several names— Troubadour of the Tracks, the Thracian Challenger; he would be the one, above all others, to demolish the mountain, and with it the threat of war. But while his reputation preceded him wherever he went, while his image was omnipresent, the mortal being became reclusive, and before anyone noticed, the world lost track of Peter Frye. Stories spread of how he’d been killed —stabbed and drowned by fanatics or swallowed by the Mountain, as good as dead—they might as well have been true. His disappearance was baffling to most, although ceaseless speculation attempted to demystify it. In the depths of February, the first launches were ordered, to the nation’s horror. Its voice was silenced, the wind swindled from its sails, and the face of its savior all but forgotten. The man was gone, and the people, abandoned, interrogated his ghost.

William Clark had not made a reputation out of writing about ghosts or gods. Sure, to most people Frye was either a runaway or an exile, but tonight he was a man with a responsibility, a destiny which he had returned to fulfill—but he was late, and the audience leaned ever closer to the front of the hall. Clark’s pen found a beat on his notepad sixty times, his heart forty, before at last the curtain jerked, swayed, and parted. The house lights cut out as if they had been swiped by a wave, and a dim glow followed like smoke from the stage. People heard the music’s first gesture before they could see anything. But it was neither a chord nor a note—it was the dull crash of a symbol. It rang twice, and then a third time.

Clark was beside himself. A band? This was Peter Frye, playing with a—a fourth crash interrupted. Then all at once, a clamor of strings rang out; bass, guitar, steel guitar, mandolin, banjo. The progression began, a folksy ¬one, two, three chord strum, then falling back to the tonic, each time lingering there a few beats longer. The writer could now make out six figures on stage, each draped over their instrument. As best he could tell, Peter Frye was in the middle of them, his head toward the floor; with a tilt of his neck, the shadowy musician sang into a black microphone. The voice resonated from a distant place within the man’s twisted, aging body; by the time it stretched over cables, squeezed through the huge speakers, and trickled into William’s ears, the words were nearly unintelligible. Pondering what he could put together of the verse, he realized it was a song he knew—not Frye’s at all, but a plain, authorless traditional! Not a masterpiece charged with inspiration, but “A Wind in the Clouds:”

Would I could, I’d be a wind in the clouds,
Would I could, I’d be a wind in the clouds,
Yes, a wind in the clouds, ain’t no more mountain now…
Fly high away from those mountain towns

Absorbing what he heard, Clark was as dazed as he was angry. Belligerently he scribbled to himself. What meaning could he derive from this? “A flop, a fraud! Spineless performance, inscrutable, washed up—and this trivial song, why? Where is the voice, the command? Where is Peter Frye?”

He pieced together another verse:
Would I could I’d stand on my hands,
Would I could I’d stand on my hands,
I would rest my calloused bones, I could stand on my own,
Join me a steel-pickin’ band…

Not a word had been rewritten, not a syllable reimagined. This was nowhere near the performance Clark had envisioned: it was supposed to lift people’s heads from the slump of hardship. ¬His leadership was supposed to return expression to a faceless nation, one person at a time. Instead he was mocking himself, mocking a need. Nothing would come of this, any way William looked at it. Not a spark. Forever, the verses seemed to drone on, until he realized that nearly twenty minutes had passed.

Oh I ain’t no hammerin’ man
No I ain’t no hammerin’ man
He’ll hammer what he can, there’s nowhere left to stand
He’ll die with just a hammer in his hand

He lifted himself from the seat, and resolutely made his way toward the exit, so dismayed by his inner void that the idea of the frozen air outside could not deter him. He would go on to write a review which would be noticed scarcely more than a fire in the sun.

Clark did not see the face of the man sitting above him as he passed beneath the lip of the balcony. Nor could he have seen it, had he tried: the face belonged to a hardened, older man by the name of John Lunsford, who did not occupy the same room the young man had just left. As far back as he sat, John couldn’t make out any words, and his eyesight didn’t help either; but none of that mattered to him.

John Lunsford had lived in a small town most of his life, where Peter Frye was the name of something which existed in a mythical place, along with the great poets and the people of folklore. When he came to the city for work, along with countless others, Frye’s music was everywhere, as the troubadour had only just vanished. John had no personal acquaintance with the man behind the music, but had felt that they were, somewhere along the line, related. Now, as the memory of those first years in the city began to take on a faded amber hue, his own hands cracked from years of labor, John had finally reached that place of myth, where men breathed the same air as legends. Tonight, the auditorium was the only place he could be.

The band strummed away at the same song, verse after verse, tireless. The singer’s voice was twisted and inscrutable. His face, sunken with age, was not the same as the one which had been stolen for the posters of revolution. His guitar sounded distant, the wood dry. Everything about him seemed to be covered by a thick film, as if he’d walked for thirty years through a desert to come here and sing this song.

Then he raised a harmonica to his lips, drew a long breath, and blew a shining, dissonant chord that illuminated the room. Instantly, all the dust and obscurity fell aside as the hall began to change; the high ceiling and walls swelled and fell away, and the icy sidewalks and skyscrapers beyond evaporated. John felt long grass underneath, even longer than it grew at his childhood home. Still one could hear the harmonica’s wail, rising and falling, but where Frye had stood was no longer a dilapidated old man: to see him was impossible, for one could not capture a clear image. John looked and saw a dark man in ragged coveralls. He had never seen the man before, but all the same he understood that this was the author of “A Wind in the Clouds.” Straining for a better look, he discovered not a man, but a woman, wearing heavy coats and a black veil over her face. Even through her moth-bitten layers, John knew she was the Russian painter and revolutionary Adriana Amatova, who had been imprisoned and executed. Then, his eyes burning with curiosity, he thought he glimpsed someone he knew better than all the rest: he saw himself, dressed in a long, white robe. But while the man onstage seemed to be the mirror image of John Lunsford, the figure was Orpheus, the ancient poet, lyre in hand, his body whole. Just then the harmonica reached the end of its breath and subsided, catapulting John Lunsford back into his seat with the rest of the crowd.

All at once the song ended on the same chord with which it had begun. The symbol hissed, and the room stood firm around once again. Everyone sat in silence for a moment, before surging to their feet with applause. It was for John as it was for everyone else in the room. The Thracian Poet had never fully existed until that moment; he had truly become the wind, and for a short time lifted the people with him, above the oppressive steel city and the world around it—away from fear, away from the White Mountain. An old man stood motionless on stage, in the middle of the band, and what appeared to be a smile passed over what once again resembled a face.

Apart from the echoes of applause sifting through the tall wooden doors, there was not a quiver of motion outside the pillars of the great hall. Suddenly, a lone figure broke the stillness. His strides, steady and swift, resounded on the concrete, heading straight for the great hall. Behind him followed a strong wind, born from the loins of an autumn long past. The figure was William Clark, and he brought with him the knowledge of the momentous events which had come to pass since he had exited the same doors not thirty minutes before. As he passed the flagpole before the steps, he thought of how he would break the news. He imagined how the relief of the war’s end would sweep over the people like a rushing tide. But they already knew.

-After Ovid, Akhmatova, Yevtushenko, Lunsford, Dylan, and those voices which are never heard.

Posted by beart004 at 5:30 PM | Permalink

By Amy Nelson

Grandpa’s vintage black Cadillac pulled up on the parkway in front of our small yellow house, and I watched him from the front window as he rearranged stacks of papers, bowling balls, and trash to make room for me in the passenger’s seat. He already looked warm in the black polo that pulled to cover his paunch, and his silver comb over was starting to melt. As he walked up to the house, he blew his Danish nose in a handkerchief, and I was so excited to spend a day with Gramps.

We were going to the zoo because he wanted to visit its newest edition: the African elephant. The newspaper said it was sick, and Gramps figured we should check on the big guy.

Gramps bought us hot dogs when we walked in the gate, and we ate them while sitting on the train that circles around the entire zoo. I never liked eating with him because his teeth were so old they didn’t seem to work. Dad always told him to seriously go see a dentist, but Gramps always thought he was doing okay. I must have had mustard and ketchup all over my face when we get off the train, ‘cuz Gramps threw his handkerchief my way as we walked to the elephant.

Personally, I liked to look at the polar bears: dangerous and endangered. A polar bear’s skin is black, but in the same way that a white cloud is made up of clear water, the bear’s fiber optic fur is really only the color of ice. The sign under the thick Plexiglas also told me that all polar bears are left-handed. I looked over at my grandpa standing downwind from the elephant, but I was having more fun trying to make my Arctic friend wave back to me with his left hand.

In sickness or in health, Gramps just wanted to hang with the elephant, and he even chatted with the cage attendant about the African beast. He looked so lovingly at the scary face, with its big ears and all of its tragic muddy majesty. I wondered hard at my grandpa’s fascination. On his coffee table in his house there was a picture of a few men in uniform in front of an elephant. Grandpa said that was when he was in Germany. He had been a military man, so he had traveled more places than I could name. Not that I could name many, because, as I realized, I didn’t know much of anything about his past.

He didn’t notice as I wandered away to start my own zoo-venture. I skipped around saying “hi!” to all the rest of God’s creatures. I watched the tiger that was getting a part of his back shaved so an animal doctor could treat a rash. The cool thing about tigers is that they have striped skin, not just striped fur. As I walked from the tiger’s den to the snake pit, I saw an ostrich following me on the other side of the fence. I stopped to measure him up, but I didn’t stay long because the giant feather duster had too much anger in his eyes. There was a mongoose in the zoo, too. I had a puzzling time with him, because a mongoose isn’t a goose, but more like a meercat, which isn’t really even a cat, but more like a prairie dog, which isn’t even a dog, but more like a ground squirrel.

My head was swimming with useless animal trivia, so I decided to check on Gramps. He was a very old man, and I knew I shouldn’t trust him to be alone for too long. There he was, smiling a semi-toothless smile at his friend the big African elephant. The beast was standing right next to Gramps, who barely measured up to the tower of thick grey skin that was the elephant’s front leg.

I stood beside my grandpa, with my fingers laced through the fence and my left foot up on the zoo street curb, a smaller mirror of his stance. At that moment I overcame my little lump of fear, turned to him, and asked, “Gramps. What’s with this elephant?”

As he turned to smile at me I could see that it took him a great deal of effort to pull his watery old eyes away from the hypnotic pendulum of the elephant’s swinging tail.

“Ahhh…” My grandpa has this way of taking forever to start a sentence, and there is nothing more annoying to an anxious little girl. “Well, um, elephants, you know.” But I didn’t. I thought again about the picture on his coffee table with an elephant in it and expected a story about Germany. “Did you know that I grew up in Tennessee?” Well, I did know that, and I told him so. He paused, picked me up, and set me on the railing so I could see the elephant better. I just wanted to hear the story. “The first time I ever saw a real elephant was in 1916. I was fifteen years old and my dad took me to the circus.” I tried to picture my grandpa as a kid, smaller with a full head of hair. I couldn’t imagine it at all.

“Except that elephant—her name was Mary—she killed a man, and crushed the brains out of his head with her foot. So the circus, and the state of Tennessee decided that the elephant needed to be executed. There was a big spectacle, because they didn’t know how. I mean, she was colossal. So they took a huge crane and marched Mary out to the train tracks. And in front of everyone they hanged her by the neck from a derrick car.” My chest got really tight, and I didn’t notice the animal smells anymore.

“The first time, because she was just so big, she fell out. She sort of wiggled out, and I heard her hip crack. So she just sat there, upright and sad while they got a stronger chain.”

By this point I think my grandpa noticed me pouting. He sighed as he jingled the change in his pockets. “So yeah, I saw an elephant hanged. They took her tusks and made them into dice.”

Posted by beart004 at 5:27 PM | Permalink

By Jade Bove

Craig woke up with his head on a rock in the middle of the woods. It was getting dark, and there was a small fire in front of him. His head was foggy—he couldn’t hold on to a memory for longer than a few moments before it blurred into obscurity. The name “Macy” kept echoing in his brain, along with an unknown symphonic that he could only half-hear, like the remnants of a dream. Each time the name reverberated against the walls of his skull, his chest tightened and his eyes moistened. There was a strange taste in his mouth and an afterimage of crimson.

He looked down to check for injuries. He stretched his legs and flexed his arms and scratched his behind. His hands were dirty. A rusty brown substance stained the wrinkles of his hands and lined his nails. He hated dirty hands. Everything else seemed to be in order. He looked around for a water source so he might freshen up.

He was wearing his favorite suit, the one with large shoulder pads and the sleeves permanently rolled up to his elbows. It was wrinkled. He hated wrinkly clothes. The ash grey of the suit and salmon pink of his shirt betrayed his sense of fashion. Despite this small flaw, he was attractive by anyone’s standards.

He reached up to wipe the sweat from his forehead and found he was wearing a helmet. He took it off. It was a football helmet wrapped in aluminum foil. “Why the hell am I wearing this?” he thought. As he looked at it, something inside his chest started punching at his ribcage; something else was pushing the boundaries of his skull. Panicking, he shoved the helmet back on his head, and the stress subsided.

Craig gazed at the dancing flames and tried to remember. Several minutes passed. He decided to wait here—wherever “here” was—feeding the fire with his thoughts, and possibly some wood, until morning. He was so busy thinking about his situation that he didn’t notice the Administrator had shown up.

The Administrator was a short man, gnome-short to be precise, and round like a plum with beanpole thin limbs. He emerged from the bushes dragging a small soapbox behind him. He swore mightily as his conical red hat became tangled in the shrubbery. The little gnome stopped across the fire from Craig, stood on his little soapbox, took out a little pipe, took a few little puffs, and cleared his little throat.

“Ah-hem!”

Craig’s shrill scream took all of the birds and squirrels in the trees above him so completely by surprise that they simultaneously loosened their bowels upon the quaint campfire and its immediate area. Craig didn’t want to think about the cost of dry cleaning.

“Hmmmm, yes. Thank you, Craig. I have had better introductions, but that will have to do,” said the Administrator, wiping some berry- and nut-scented goo off his shoulder. “You don’t exactly have all the time in the world.”

Craig’s nice suit now looked like a baby-sealskin dyed orange from the firelight. “Who are you? What am I doing here? Where am I? Who’s going to pay for my suit to get cleaned?”

The gnome, irritated by all of the questions, exhaled a small cloud of smoke. “I am the Administrator. I greet new travelers in this land. My name is Seamus O’McMally. Everybody who comes to this land stops here at my campfire first. I help them figure out how they got here and which way they need to go to get home.”

Craig wrinkled his brow, and tugged thoughtfully at his ear. “What are you? Some kind of elf or fairy or something?”

“No!” the Administrator replied hastily and rather defensively. “The elves are a bunch of stuck-up pricks who think just because there were a couple famous plays written about them that they are hot shit. We prefer to be called Supernaturally Endowed Vertically Impaired Mineral Workers. Jerk-offs, like you, would call us gnomes. To be precise I am a Rather Plump Rolling Hill Gnome, of the Hill Rolling clan.”

“What does that mean?” asked Craig.

“It means that me and my kin are rather plump,” he gestured to his midsection, “and in our spare time we take great pleasure in rolling down hills. Try it sometime if your anus ever unclenches.” He paused. “The name really says it all; most things here are named literally by what they do and what they are. Honestly, why do you mortals insist on complicating everything with meanings? May I continue?”

Craig nodded, taken aback by the gnome’s annoyance.

“Good. Now according to protocol we need to find out what it was that led you here before we can send you back to whatever world it is that you came from.”

A sudden thought struck Craig: So far none of this had seemed too far out of the ordinary, which was odd because by any rational reckoning it should seem very strange indeed. Craig decided to just roll with it.

“What do you mean whatever world I come from?”

Seamus stuck the pipe back in his mouth sharply. Craig could almost see the numbers going backwards from ten inside the gnome’s little head. After what seemed like hours, Seamus exhaled a billowing cloud of smoke. “Anyone ever tell you that you ask too many questions?”

“I am a lawyer,” Craig said sheepishly.

“That explains it, then. Look, we don’t really have time to get into the whole Multi-Dimensional Entity Existence thing. Right now my job is to find out how you got here. Tell me everything that you remember.”

Craig felt nervous. For the first time in his life he was unsure of what to say. He decided it was best to start at the beginning and see where that led.

“Well, uhh. . . . My name’s Craig, as you know. Um, how did you know that, by the way?”

“That’s not important right now. Get on with it,” snapped Seamus.

“For being a cute, plump gnome you’re kind of nasty.”

“Fucking get on with it!”

Craig cleared his throat. “I’m 28, and I graduated from Princeton Law in ‘83. I recently made partner at a very prestigious law firm in New York City and work closely with the investment banking firm Pierce & Pierce. One of my primary clients at the firm is a man named Bateman. He’s an odd guy, but I’m paid well for my services. I’m on my way to becoming a wealthy man.”

He paused to take a breath and scratch an itch under his helmet. Seamus puffed on his pipe and nodded for Craig to continue.

“I’ve been working for the firm for just over a year, and my girlfriend and I recently moved into a nice penthouse apartment on the Upper East Side. Her family is from the Garment District just off Fifth Ave. I was at the office late last night, trying to talk Mr. Bateman out of hysterics. He thought he was a serial killer or something. I told him to lay off the cocaine and get some sleep. I packed up my briefcase and went home. Macy was going to be leaving the studio around nine—she’s a fashion designer. I was going to propose to her that night. Everything was ready when she got home: the china, the candles, the red-checkered tablecloth. I even had time to slip into something more comfortable, if you know what I mean.”

The gnome rolled his eyes.

Craig could feel a veil lifting from his memory as he talked. It was almost as if someone—some omniscient being of incredible power and authority—was putting the words directly into his head, and all he had to do was open his mouth.

“I love her more than anything.” He was speaking faster now. “She’s kind, funny, and smart.” He paused. “I was positive that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her. There were still questions. You know, cold feet kind of questions. As I sat there waiting for her, I went over them again. What if she says no? What if she loves someone else? What if she is secretly psychotic? What if she has a hot sister? Would they be into that sort of thing? Am I doing the right thing? Does she torture small animals? Will she eat olive loaf?” Craig loved olive loaf.

“She walked through the door at 9:30 and was completely surprised by the romantic dinner I had prepared. She sat down, and her face—her face was absolutely radiant. I stared deep into her eyes.” Craig smiled and corrected himself. “Her one eye actually, she lost the other one playing lawn darts.” He sighed. “The candlelight shone off her freshly waxed scalp. God, she was so beautiful. I reached over and took her prosthetic hand.”

Seamus looked a little pale.

“‘Macy, I love you….’ I said. ‘Will you...’ and then I had to stop. There was a strange music coming from somewhere. Violins or something. I hadn’t turned the tape player on. I tried to ignore it. Said, ‘Macy, sweetheart…will you be my…’ then I had to stop again. I couldn’t concentrate; all I could hear was the music. It was building. Getting louder, straining to reach the crescendo. ‘Do you hear that?’ I asked her. She shook her head and smiled, and her dentures fell out onto the table. I carefully—lovingly—put the teeth back in her mouth. The music was getting louder. Something weird was happening. Something was moving inside me. It was pushing at my ribcage, trying desperately to get out. I thought it was my heart, so full of love.”

He paused to wipe away a tear.

“I said, ‘Macy, I love you….the music, I love the music!’ The beautiful song had changed me in a way I didn’t understand. When I looked at her now, I didn’t see my beautiful angel.” Craig readied himself for the confession. “Instead I saw a giant turkey leg with an eye patch. And it looked delicious. I started to feel kind of hot. Hot, and itchy. The music was still playing. I looked at my hands to regain my composure, and I saw claws—savage claws—the claws of an animal. My arms were covered with thick orange hair. I felt my mouth begin to lengthen into a muzzle. The music was changing me into some sort of beast. I looked up at my beloved and thought, ‘Damn, I want you, Macy…with a side of chipotle ranch sauce.’

“Through the fangs I tried again to say what I wanted to say. Said, ‘Macy, I love…will you… I want…ah fuck it.’ I gave in to the music, the beautiful violins, cellos, violas. I lunged across the table and—devoured the one woman I loved more than anything in the world.” Craig was crying now, unashamed to let the tears flow for his beloved.

“I came to several hours later in the dining room. Guts, blood, and bodily fluids decorated the room. I remembered what happened. I was still a beast of a man, or maybe a man of a beast. I howled at the moon. I cried a little. I knelt down and ate her leftovers.” Craig wiped the tears from his cheeks, and Seamus tapped out his pipe.

“After that I loped out of the house and off into the darkness. I passed out sometime after—I dunno—three in the morning. When I woke up, I was here.”

It was silent around the campfire. The ruddy orange glow played with the two men’s features, making them into gargoyles or demons. Seamus refilled his pipe and lit it with a twig from the fire.

“This fire is getting low. Grab a few of those logs behind you, Craig, and toss them on. We have to be on the lookout for the Vicious Black Tree Cows and their masters, the Rare and Timid Tree People. A nice campfire usually keeps them at bay until morning.” Seamus noticed Craig tense up. “Hey, relax, buddy. We’ll be fine. Now why don’t you tell me about your nifty little helmet there?” He didn’t try to mask his condescending tone.

“Well,” began Craig, “when I woke here there was this strange man sitting on that log. His face was shadowed by a deep cowl, and his body engulfed in a long black cloak. He was wearing black nylon socks with flip-flop sandals, which was a little strange. My bestial instincts were still raging, and I wanted blood. I lunged at him. With one fluid movement the man produced a silver aerosol can. I was stopped in midair by a cloud of sticky, amber liquid, then I landed in a heap at the man’s feet. Whatever he sprayed me with was starting to sting.

“The man said he knew what had happened to me. He said he had temporarily immobilized me with a special potion. I was still a beast-man-thing, and my tiny brain could barely make out the meaning of the words. The man stood up, and his cloak fell open to reveal his complete and utter nakedness. It was disgusting. His man-boobs sagged, and the paunch of a belly hung low and pale like…like a gibbous moon kissing the horizon.” He paused. “Unfortunately it did not cover his manhood, which was shriveled and small. His white legs were scrawny and hairless. I threw up in my mouth a little; it leaked through my fangs and dribbled onto the ground. It was embarrassing. I tried to ask him what he knew, but it sounded like I was speaking through a blender.

“The hooded nudist said, ‘You, my friend, have fallen victim to something very foul and insidious. A force has been loosed upon the worlds that drives individuals completely mad.’” Craig’s voice had taken on an elevated tone. “‘I am talking, of course, about the theme music, the music that plays when the mood is just right. It makes scary moments truly terrifying, causes tension to become anxiety, turns happy moments into pure bliss. In your case, it made romance blossom into unconditional love. However, you are not supposed to hear it. To hear the theme music is to enjoy an opera performed by the sirens of myth. It drives one completely mad.’

“I looked at him, dumbfounded. That was the stupidest thing I had ever heard. But why, I asked, why had I turned into a beast? Was I some kind of werewolf now? My animal noises were silenced by a dismissive wave.

“The man went on. ‘There is a man in this world who has found a way to control the theme music and bend it to his will. He wants to take over all the worlds. He has issues, deep psychological and emotional issues. In fact he is quite insane. I’m not sure how this man is able to control the theme music, but I assure you I will know soon. Until then, you must wear this special insulating helmet.’

“I have absolutely no idea where he was hiding it,” Craig explained, “but he placed the helmet on my head. He told me it would keep me from turning into the beast. I was starting to feel tired. The repellent combined with the helmet was sapping my energy. Through a haze I heard the man say, ‘I have to leave you now. When you wake up, you will see a campfire. Wait for the Administrator. He will make all of this clear.’ The naked man then gathered the cloak around him and melted back into the forest.”

Seamus looked irritated, as if he were engulfed in a cloud of gnats buzzing the tune to “The Song That Never Ends.” “I thought that jackass had been kicked out of this place.”

“Seamus, who was that guy? And what about the music he was talking about?”

Seamus paced in front of the fire, jabbing at shadows with his pipe. “That guy is a menace. He’s part of the reason people end up here. He makes my job difficult. Nobody knows his name. Most of us just call him ‘Wee Willie.’ He has been roaming the worlds spouting this half-cocked notion that someone is controlling the theme music in order to conquer countries. It is true that there is theme music, and that you mortals do go a bit coo-coo when you hear it, but it is rarely as severe as what happened to you.”

“Well, is there a guy who controls the theme music?” Craig asked.

“Of course there is, dummy. Everything has some sort of moderator or administrator or distributor; an avatar if you will. Juan is a director, but not a very good one, and he was feeling depressed about it, so we gave him the theme music. But we keep tabs on him. He shouldn’t be able to manipulate it, merely guide its flow like a small stream.” Seamus was visibly worried.

“Juan…?” Craig struggled to keep up.

“Juan Sanchez. He is the dictator of a land whose people won’t take him seriously. It’s south of this one.” Agitated, Seamus pulled his hat off. The firelight reflected off his balding head. He looked to the west and saw that the sun was coming up.

“Okay, chief: Here’s what we’re gonna do. I have some things to check out. Don’t move from this campsite. Keep your helmet on and try to get some sleep. Once I come back, I’ll have a plan, and we can work on sending you home.” Seamus grabbed his soapbox and started dragging it back into the bushes, muttering about menaces and depressed dictators and how the whole lot of creations was going right down the drain.

Craig listened until the voice trailed off into nothingness.

He decided to heed the little guy’s advice. He added a log to the fire to coax the flames from their hiding places. Curling up next to the glowing coals, he was soon fast asleep, dreaming about Macy.

The park police were aware that the homeless and deranged regularly camped in Central Park. As long as they didn’t start any fires and kept to themselves, the police were content to leave them be. Officer Sanchez was on the Sheep Meadow to East Green circuit when he smelled the smoke. He followed it to its source: a thicket walled by large shrubs and sheltered by low-hanging elms. He wasn’t surprised to find a homeless man. He was a little curious about the battered lawn gnome perched on a wooden crate surrounded by candles, and the broken mannequin wearing an eye patch. The man was wearing a badly chipped Raiders helmet and using a large stone as a pillow. The area was littered with empty Coors Light cans. A dog-eared copy of Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho lay next to the sleeping hobo.

Officer Sanchez didn’t want to, but he had to give the guy a citation for an open fire. It was unfortunate—these guys never paid their tickets and sometimes got violent. He sighed as he bent over to shake the sleeping man awake.

“Seamus? Is that you? Have you figured out what Sanchez is up to?” said the homeless man, who was covered in pigeon shit and dirt and fleas.

“Sorry, buddy. I’m not Seamus; I’m Officer Sanchez, and I need you to put that fire out.”

“I can’t let the fire go out—it isn’t safe yet,” cried the confused man. “I have to wait for Seamus to get back, so we can stop Juan Sanchez from taking over the worlds with theme music!”

Officer Sanchez wondered how the man knew his name. The poor guy couldn’t possibly know that he moonlighted as a composer. “Look, buddy, I just had an unpleasant conversation with your naked friend in the hoodie and sent him downtown. If you don’t want to join him, you’d better put that fire out. Now.” Sanchez felt bad. The bewildered look in the man’s eyes appeared genuine. Sanchez often pondered whether these people, the homeless and seemingly crazy, actually inhabited a world of their own design—one that just happened to intersect with his own from time to time.

The two stared at each other for a few moments, Sanchez sizing up the man in case he got violent, the other clearly trying to decide if Sanchez were trustworthy. “Alright, pal,” conceded Sanchez, “why don’t you take off the helmet and tell me your story. Then put the fire out.” That seemed to placate him.

The man removed the helmet. “I can’t be held responsible for any harm that comes from taking this off,” he said nervously, eyes darting around the clearing.

The man talked, and Sanchez listened until the sun had risen above the eastern horizon. From a distance, Sanchez thought he could hear a string quartet playing a glorious ode to the rising sun. Suddenly the man doubled over and howled in agony. Sanchez rushed to his side. The man convulsed and kicked the helmet over by the gnome. The man was trying to say something, but what came out were grunts and growls.

“You’d better get that helmet back on his melon, Chief.” The voice came from behind Office Sanchez. He whirled around…and nearly soiled himself when the ceramic gnome stepped off the crate, retrieved the helmet, and waddled over to him. “Go on, put it on him, and I’ll bring you up to speed.”

Posted by beart004 at 5:21 PM | Permalink

By Erin Poljanac

He didn’t know, he would never know. The cake twisted and curved, the icing like caterpillars squirming around the edges. Charles’s wife would never know either. She preferred the heroics, the stories of the march down the Champs Elysée as the whole army followed a glimpse of De Gaulle’s head, and best of all, the sight of Charles in uniform on his way to her house. Charles had left De Gaulle’s near assassination out of stories for her sake since she loved that man in all his exoticism. Yet she loved Charles, more than heroics, and so she stuck her square hand behind his back, pulling him towards her. They agreed with the first stiff swing of the hammock that they would get married. Many years later, yards from that hammock, their house sheltered four boys, named after his brothers and himself (Mike, Matt, Frank, and Charlie).

All four sat across from him now, tossing their fingers across the wood table, watching the cake and their father’s eyes glittering. He smiled at the mark of life in each candle.

“Make a wish. Need help blowing out the candles?”

Matt had always been the sensitive one.

“He’ll be fine.”

Mike denied things (he still refused to accept that his first girlfriend dumped him and not the other way around).

“I’m going to count to three and then I’ll take a picture.”

Frank wanted memories in all forms except those that were permanent inside his head.

It was Charlie’s turn to offer a word of gratitude or forecast the impending happiness for the next year of his father’s life. Instead Charlie sank in his chair, silent, his brown eyes forced further back. He remembered the vestiges of love. The memory appeared to him, initially, unfocused, like the clutter of Uncle Mike’s house. None of the uncles had children to share except Uncle Mike, who had only one child of his own, a woman in her early thirties who worked as an accountant in Colorado. The only time Charlie saw her was at Uncle Mike’s house on the day of Grandpa Heller’s funeral. Her mahogany hair, trimmed into a combed pixie cut, reminded Charlie of old black and white movies. This sole cousin skated out of the house before any deeper knowledge could come of the experience. The rest of the kids were left to scavenge for themselves. His brothers’ whereabouts could not be determined (it was probably the night of their first real drink, a stolen trip to a curb a block away with other equally rebellious mourners and a cup of vodka to share).

During the funeral reception, Mom and Dad separated at first to deal out sympathies to relatives who could barely remember their faces, but they drifted back to each other within half an hour. Standing on her toes, Mom raised her long makeup-less face to Dad’s black collar. He allowed her to whisper a comment directly into his ear, words that required a close proximity due to their inappropriate nature. As Mom crushed her block of yellow hair, biting her natural lips into color, Dad laughed privately with his hands in his pockets, diving his head down in shame to smother the noise. Charlie’s imagination tossed possible conversations:

“Aunt Virginia’s skirt is see-through. She’s on your left. Don’t be obvious. I’ll look right and you get a quick look.”

“Why do I need to see this?”

Then the laughter.

Or: “I need a fucking drink. I mentioned us living together before we were married to Great-Aunt Emma.”

“You didn’t see her giant cross? She’s 90 pounds. It takes up her entire body.”

“I was too distracted by her death stare. I didn’t see it until after the fact.”

Then the laughter.

The vestiges of love—not marked by the quasi-religious symbolism of a ring on a finger or children resembling both of them. Charlie had basked in the attention as he nibbled on a ham sandwich and leaned against the couch, which scratched his back. There was a tide of comfort, like the tucking in of sheets, that set in with the apparent happiness of his parents. Actually, they never tucked him in except when he ordered them one night to do so, and even then he received blank eyes and scrunched noses. Dad trod solemnly to Charlie’s bed as if he was performing a coronation under order of death. Mom hung on the other side, angular hands intertwined, her almond eyes half shut to strategize the next movement. No one needed to talk; they would build on each others’ silence like the creation of a story passed along the campfire. Charlie’s covers mummified him; Dad ensured any mobility impossible, including the ability to unravel in the shiftless morning. Charlie exempted them from further ceremonies, insisting it was the best for all of them—including the covers.

The family gathered, tucking themselves nearer around the table. He didn’t know, he would never know, Charlie thought as he eyed his father, a laughing mop of wrinkles. Vietnam. Saigon. The search for his hometown friend, ending, as always, in vain—he’d searched every shrub, every place a friend could be hidden except under the ground. His father blew out the candles, sputtering a cold breath across the table towards his sons. He enjoyed this moment between the wish and the cutting of the cake; Charles would always belong to the era of birthday parties, Truman and Normandy (a won battle, all of them). His was the generation that built tanks from melted spoons—or so Charlie dreamed when he was a boy overhearing war stories from everybody but his father. Outside, a bird chirred, gravely alone. The veterans had warned him: “Every time you hear a bird chirp and leaves rustle…” But Charlie had told them, “I’m a different breed.” What did he think he was, a golden retriever? Ten years later, he still sunk lower in his chair whenever he heard a damn bird.

“Who wants a piece?” the wife and mother asked, holding the knife above the cake in the art of surgery. It was a beautiful cake. It danced. They would all eat it, fall under its spell, and talk again like before wars and attrition. She had packed away the hammock (its skeleton was weaker than hers), but she would put it up tomorrow. Perhaps all by herself, she might make it a surprise for all of them, waking in their old beds, restored, a hammock waiting outside for them to sleep or read on.

He didn’t know, he would never know; the father complied, recalling the Champs Elysée and the German snipers nesting above in the grooved, ancient rooftops. The Vichy collaborators shot, as many as the candles, hurling upwards in smoke. Charles and Charlie stared across the table, silent against the chatter that sounded around them. But, as Charles accepted a piece of cake with a nod, that would be all right.

Posted by beart004 at 5:17 PM | Permalink

By Michael Daniel Lee

Church steps sit
4 steps from the god step
as wind steps gently
through my bones
carrying my skin to the heart center
of a breath breeze
flak jacket
lung smoke and rib meat
are meeting
each other for the first time
as gusts of god
cover us gently
me and my
smoke cloaked brother.

Nothing embraces us
and his children smile gently
as god whispers through their
hair
respiration
is beautiful
when you know it exists
and you sit inside of it
letting it swallow you whole.

Posted by beart004 at 5:26 PM | Permalink