Author: Post Road

Delivery

Olivia Worden

Three hours ago he had been a child. His thin cotton shirt fused to his skin. It was raining. It was his only shirt. He kept it clean by washing it at night in the public restroom. Cleanliness had always been important to him. He would not smell like the others. He held the package, wrapped in a stained hotel bathrobe, beneath one arm and tried to keep it dry. Twenty American dollars were pressed into his palm. The folded bill smelled like cheap perfume and skin bleaching cream. A flimsy curtain, a faded shade of mud, was drawn between them. Her lips were the color of Coke cans. He would never see her again. In the distance, he could hear the river.

His father called him Bulhaengah, the word for unlucky. His birth name was Suk. In Korean it meant hardness. He was born feet first and blue. It had happened by the Geum River and was followed by a funeral. His father couldn’t afford to bury his mother on the mountain of her ancestors. She was buried in a dust plot next to strangers. His father contracted syphilis on Suk’s first birthday. He claimed it was a curse from the restless spirit of Suk’s mother. She had always been vengeful. His skin blistered open but he refused to see a doctor. He jumped off a bridge when Suk turned two.

His uncle calls him unlucky hardness. They live outside of Okku-Silver Town and sell all things American to soldiers from places called Milwaukee and Amarillo. His uncle is a man who never smiles. He only has five teeth. He will not pay for dentists. Every week he goes to the massage parlor in Okku and pays for a pedicure. He will not go at night because he believes nail clippings will turn into a spirit that will kill him. He does not like Bulhaengah Suk, but it is his familial duty to care for him. He feeds him rice and kimchi and on Tuesdays ballpark hotdogs without the buns. He does not like Americans but they like his cigarette selection. He is always five cents cheaper than his competition. This is what makes for good business in A-Town.

It happened quickly. B had not anticipated this delay in his schedule. Her floor was covered in bazooka bubblegum wrappers. He closed his eyes and envisioned his bike propped against the alley wall. It was rusty with a leaky front tire. It bothered him that his uncle had not replaced it, especially after the accident. The scar on his chin looked red and angry. It was not his place to question his uncle.

The wrappers crinkled under their torsos shifting. The sound reminded him of stepping on cockroaches. He was suddenly concerned about the apples. He had left the sack in the cart on his bike. They were small, the ones with wormholes and brown bruises his uncle couldn’t sell. There were twelve in the bag. Some were golden and some were red. Her hair smelled burnt and her eyeliner was smudged. The nun they were going to was colorblind and the children had teeth that were rotting. They didn’t care about wormholes as long as their food was soft. Her hand was soft against his mouth, her painted nails chipped and broken. The room smelled faintly of fish. The nun’s hands were large like a man’s. She would invite the boy behind the gates, but he always declined. They did not believe in the same God. She slapped him. The dust that fell smelled like men from foreign countries.

Do you think I’m pretty?

He wiped himself on a towel next to the mattress. She squinted at his bowed legs and lit a cigarette.

You’re just a boy. What do you know?

The button on his pants was missing. She flicked ash in his direction.

You’re ugly, too. Lucky I’m feeling generous today, huh?

B pulled out the extra pack of Marlboro Reds from his jacket pocket. There was a belt mark on the back of her thigh, long and purple. She thrust her hand out and waited. He placed the box in her palm and went out the door. He was no longer a virgin.

The soldiers from the base could not pronounce his name. They called him B instead. B means nothing but in America names do not have meanings.

B, my man, what do you have for me today? The redheaded soldier stuck a freckled hand out for a high-five. It was always the same.

What kind you want?

What kind you got? The soldier raised an eyebrow and gave B a wink.

B was short for his age but he was not a child. He was sixteen. Not much younger than some of the Americans. But he was not their equal. He was hair to tousle and a shoulder to punch. They taught him American swear words and showed him pornographic magazines. He lied and said he had been with many women. They called him Casanova, which meant something funny in Italian.

The redhead ripped the package and tipped the contents into his mouth. B could hear the fizz as the candy met saliva.

Cherry’s my favorite but grape’s a close second. He tore the second package and consumed it. Your uncle always has the best selection. Where is the old bastard anyway?

Out for beer.

Left you in charge, huh? The redhead balled up the candy wrappers and shot them at B’s head. B shrugged his shoulders. The redhead dug into his pocket and put fifty cents on the counter. Try to stay out of trouble, motherfucker.

Okay, big asshole. The soldier laughed and threw up a hand as if swatting a fly. B bent down and picked up the wrappers.

Soo Yun was born in a hospital in Seoul. Her father sold insurance to wealthy businessmen from the city. He liked ties with stripes and gold plated cufflinks. He laughed easily and often whispered in Soo Yun’s perfect ear that he loved her more than her mother.

Her mother had been a singer in A-Town when she was sixteen. She was from a village she didn’t like to speak about. She didn’t come from options. She sang in a club that served drinks the color of wiper fluid. They hung tiny monkeys from the rims of plastic cups. Her mother sang in English to make the soldiers happy. They told her she sounded like Olivia Newton John. She dreamt of singing on a stage in America. She made it as far as a nightclub in Seoul. This is where she met Soo Yun’s father. They were happy for a while.

When Soo Yun was born, her mother’s hair turned white. She was still beautiful, but her eyes grew red from crying. She had always been vain. At eight, her family vacationed in Busan. It was snowing. Her mother crashed their car. Soo Yun remembered the way the snowflakes melted on the tip of her tongue. The officer who held her said it only snowed six times a year. The newspapers reported that it wasn’t an accident. She cannot remember their funerals, but the lines on the nun’s hand that walked her into the orphanage are imprinted on her right shoulder. Soo Yun got to keep her father’s gold plated cufflinks. They were made in the shape of a lotus.

Bulhaengah ran deliveries every Wednesday. His uncle complained that his back was too twisted to ride the bike.

You are lazy and stupid. What a burden your father has left me. The least you could do is run deliveries for your elderly uncle. Have I not been like a father to you? Have I not kept you from begging on the streets? His uncle rocked on his heels as his voice grew louder.

Bulhaengah had heard this speech many times. He knew to keep his eyes on the ground and his head bent low. He knew that there were many things he was, but stupid was not among them. He would do as his uncle told him and then one day the shop would be his. It was a tiny speck of a dream, but Bulhaengah allowed himself to dream it.

The air was sticky on his face. Busan had been enveloped in the damp towel of a surprise October heat wave. The street cats and dogs peacefully shared the shade, panting in unison, stretched out as far as their limbs would allow. Babies cried tearless wails, dehydrated and exhausted in their mothers’ laps. Bulhaengah peddled slowly; trying to conserve the energy he knew he would need to get through all the deliveries. This was a new business plan his uncle had come up with. Once a week they would run groceries to customers who couldn’t walk or drive to their store.

People pay for convenience. We offer them something no other shop in A-Town does, store to door delivery. Your uncle is a smart man. You will see. I will be rich.

It hadn’t quite turned out the way he had imagined. They only had four or five customers who asked for the service. They were mostly older locals who were loyal to Bulhaengah’s uncle and a couple American wives who didn’t like to leave their houses unless in the company of their husbands. But the delivery runs were simple and allowed Bulhaengah time to dream.

He hadn’t realized what was happening until it was too late. The delivery truck had been driving parallel to him on the road. The world had gone quiet except for the sound of wings from the flies in the alley. Lying in the hospital, Bulhaengah would recall the color orange from the side of the truck. He could not say whether the image was a peach or the sun. The truck was going too fast, the roads too narrow through A-Town. Bulhaengah had to concentrate to stay out from under the wheels. And there had been blue. The flash of blue silk, billowing in dust. The woman had looked to the sky, opening and closing her mouth with words he couldn’t hear. He tried to steady the bike. The truck was going too fast. The woman held something to her chest. Bulhaengah heard the sound of wings. The truck was going too fast. The woman looked to the sky. A tiny hand touched her face. And she jumped like falling, out and under spinning rubber. Bulhaengah heard screaming. His mouth was open. He saw orange and blue and red. Then nothing.

His uncle came to get him the next day. He asked first about the bike. Miraculously, it had been spared. Bulhaengah had avoided any life threatening injuries, though purple and blue bruises covered his skin. A gash on his chin had required twenty-four stitches. The scar would heal red and this part of his face would not grow hair. The scar would become his most distinguishable feature, even as an old man.

A week after the accident Bulhaengah dared to ask his uncle what he already knew.

Of course she is dead. Why do you ask such stupid questions? To kill yourself and your baby too-I pray she has no family for her spirit to haunt. And I pray you have not brought her spirit home with you, asking such stupid questions.

Bulhaengah heard from the redheaded soldier that the woman was a prostitute. She had had the baby of one of the soldiers.

Bring us to America. She thought that he loved her. The soldier laughed. He was married. No one wants a whore with a baby in the room. She was seventeen.

At night, Bulhaengah dreamed in blue.

Soo Yun watched the man inspect the cufflinks under the light.

100,000 won. Gold plating, not the real deal. The man stared at Soo Yun’s swollen stomach, letting his eyes wander to where the fraying hem of her dress barely grazed the top half of her thigh. She had no money for clothes that fit.

They are worth more. Soo Yun shifted her weight, leaning over the counter to expose her breasts. The man averted his eyes.

Free to take them elsewhere. Soo Yun felt her mouth dry up, the burn of acid creeping up the back of her throat. Eight months ago he would have given her what she wanted.

Fine. I take it in American.

B watched the girl squeeze out between the iron bars of the gate. Her left knee was skinned pink and raw. She bent to scratch her ankle, nervously scanning the empty street. She reminded him of the rats that came out at night, sniffing the air, searching for jaws of feral cats. B tucked himself deeper into the alley, straightening his spine against the wall. His heart crashed against breastbone. She paused, listening, cocking her head a little to one side. And then she was running; tangled hair in the wind. Five years later, they would meet again.

B would imagine she recognized the sound of his heartbeat.

She beat her womb with palms holding stones. She left bruises, the pattern of river bottom across her skin. She filled herself with alcohol and fistfuls of parsley. Yet, it persisted, growing to hands that beat back and legs that kicked. Soo Yun whispered hateful words, wishing twisted spines and malformed skulls, clouded eyes the color of faded blue paper.

The redheaded soldier stared blankly.

It’s yours. What you gonna do about it? She had grown too round to hide it under clothes. She had fucked men on her stomach, pressing umbilical cord and half formed organs against secondhand lingerie and sweat-stained mattresses hoping they wouldn’t notice.

I don’t believe you. Anger crept up his neck and spread out across his face in blooms of heat.

It broke. Remember? You say no problem. You call me a liar? She pushed herself up on her elbows, a rocking motion, propelling her upright.

You fuck men for a living. He was shouting. Shouting like this was information the neighborhood didn’t already know. How many? His jaw clenched and unclenched. His hand rested on his revolver.

Yeah? I fuck you. What you gonna do about it?

Do not go in. You leave the package at the door. Bulhaengah’s uncle picked at a sore above his lip. Bulhaengah kicked at the floor. We all know you are stupid. This is not your fault. Your father was stupid too. Fools bearing fools. But she, she is paid to fool. If you look her in the eye you will be lost. This is fact.

Bulhaengah picked up the paper bag, peeking in to see its contents. A six-pack of beer, Marlboro Reds, and a pink box that read Tampax. His uncle’s palm met Bulhaengah’s head.

You just deliver. Remember that.

She woke up screaming, the taste of snow in her mouth. For a moment Soo Yun wasn’t sure where she was-behind the tall iron gates of the orphanage, in Seoul wrapped in the musk of her father’s aftershave, or the floor that she rented, covered in shells of cockroaches and streaks of petroleum jelly. The rancid scent of week-old fish invaded her nostrils. She turned and vomited. She remembered.

There was something familiar about the delivery boy. There was something familiar about his hiding, the negative space he embodied, his smallness. She had been that once, squeezing out between metal. Her face had once been clean, her tongue uncoated. But you don’t survive by being clean. Clean does not feed you.

Girls don’t survive on the streets of A-Town . The nun had held her by her elbow, catching her mid-crawl out the window. Twelve-year-old Soo Yun pouted, folded her legs back over the ledge, allowed the nun to lead her back to her cot in the row of sixteen cots, each belonging to a child with no parents or parents who had forgotten them.

The nun should have told Soo Yun the truth: the body survives. Five years beyond the walls of the orphanage had taught her this. Every imprint, every invasion, hundreds of fingernails and tobacco yellowed teeth, they all left scars. Wounds healed despite their festering. The body can be marched on. The body can be spoiled and rotted. But the body survives.

Soo Yun’s legs opened and allowed the boy to climb in unsheathed and trembling. It was an act of searching. And for a second it felt like wholeness.

The redheaded soldier took out a matchbook, lighting the tip of the cigarette in a single strike. B watched the tip burn orange, a wisp of smoke curling, grey bits of ash falling like snow.

B had noticed the soldier was redder than usual. His eyes were bloodshot, his forehead flushed, his hands raw from massaging ruddy stubble that covered his neck and chin. He paced in front of the counter muttering under his breath, shuffling his boots, leaving scuffmarks in black across the floor. B stood still and thought of things that were quiet and invisible. He closed his eyes for a second.

The redheaded soldier grabbed B’s wrist, yanking him so forcefully, B’s face hit the countertop. The redheaded soldier dropped his hands, backing away from B, shaking his head back and forth, and filling his lungs with short, shallow breaths. His cigarette rolled on the floor, the orange tip still burning.

I’m sorry. I’m sorry. His freckled hands knotted into his hair, pulling at the roots. B swallowed the familiar copper taste of blood.

You…you not right. The soldier looked at B, slack jawed, sweat rolling down his face. He stomped on the cigarette but did not pick it up.

Fuck this place, man. Fuck it. Didn’t even want to come here! He slammed his palms against the counter, the coins in the register clinked. And my folks! My folks! What am I supposed to tell them? He threw himself backwards, twisting his arms around his chest, his feet stumbling over themselves in an awkward side-shuffle. She’s a whore, you know? And it’s not a puppy. It’s a fucking kid. A slanty-eyed, half-breed – Jesus! The soldier started laughing, doubling over, holding his knees, rocking. For once, B wished his uncle was there.

The soldier stood upright, trying to catch his breath. He looked at B then, looked at B like he was seeing him for the first time.

Tell me what I’m supposed to do?

The redheaded soldier’s face had gone from the color of tomatoes to the flesh of steamed fish. For the first time, B noticed the soldier’s eyes were blue. Blue like silk billowing in dust. Blue like falling. B’s chin throbbed. His mouth opened before he could stop himself, a finger pointing to the sign in the storefront window.

Delivery for cash. I deliver.

The old man slowly made his way to the bench by the river. His feet shuffled across the ground, the sound blending into the rush of the water. Each day a new part of his body made known its protest, a creaky knee, shoulders stooped like crumbling plaster of an abandoned building. It took more and more of an effort to get to this place but still he came. It was a compulsion he could never explain to his wife or children.

At night he would come home with wet cheeks and a heavy tongue, stuffing forgotten names Bulhaengah and B into damp coat pockets. He had lived many lives. But had returned to hardness, feet first and blue.

Those nights Suk would wake, holding his chin in his hands, feeling for stitches that were no longer there, hearing the familiar fizz and pop of candy meeting saliva. Those nights he would wake feeling a weight in his arms, soft breathing that smelled faintly of milk, rain rolling down his nose and onto pink lips opening and closing like the mouth of a fish.

Maybe he had always known she was his. There had been nothing red about her. He had looked, cataloging and memorizing every inch of her body, looking for the parts that would somehow tell him there was no other way. That this was the only.

Then, maybe it was the way that Soon Yun pushed the newborn into his arms, holding Suk’s gaze for a moment too long before abruptly turning, the back of her hand against her mouth, holding in a sob. Maybe he just wanted it to be true so that the hole that grew inside him could have some meaning. So that the emptiness he felt years later at the birth of his first son wouldn’t be so shameful. Maybe he wished it so he would no longer feel regret.

Fools bearing fools.

Bulhaengah pushed it between iron bars, the package wrapped in a hotel bathrobe, an enveloped stuffed with American bills, a tiny hand opening and closing, catching raindrops. It didn’t take long for the wailing to begin. A high pitched sound like sirens.

He waited in the alley. Waited to hear heavy footsteps of the nun with large hands. Waited to hear her call for help, to hear the hands pick up the package. Waited for the wailing to become a hiccup, to become a mew. Bulhaengah waited until the sky cleared, his spine pressed against the wall, his face to the stars.

Night expanded around him, illuminating the dark with shards of moonlight. The old man closed his eyes, arms outstretched, trembling. He held the weight of the river. He held the expanse of the sky. Life had never felt so long. He closed his eyes and wept.

---

Olivia Worden is adopted from Seoul, Korea and grew up in Dartmouth, Massachusetts. She holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She has taught creative writing and diversity/inclusion training at Roger Williams University, Sarah Lawrence College, Andrus and the Westchester County Correctional Facility. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in CutBank, Dark Phrases, The Sarah Lawrence Literary Review and Point of View Productions. She lives in the Bronx.

The Tapping in 1L

Alicia Schaeffer

Loretta thought she could-no-should live rent-free. She wasn’t going to make good on a bit of overdue rent until her building’s superintendent got rid of that tapping sound.

“It can’t be the heat, Sammy,” she said, standing over the super.

Sammy, kneeling on her apartment floor, obliged by withdrawing his head from the open vent.

This was in the single room in which she lived. Where she worked, too, teaching private music lessons in a corner she kept sectioned off with a rice paper screen divider.

“Remember, Sammy?” she said. “Those pipes aren’t pushing your measly heat anymore. Remember, you said ‘if you want the heat, you get the noise.’ But the heat’s not on anymore.”

Sammy remained on his knees. With a shrug of his shoulders he said, “It’s fixed.”

Loretta slammed her foot. The weak floorboards rattled the base of her upright piano.

He piled his flashlight and screwdriver into a steel toolbox.

At every bang, click, and hum she begged him to come downstairs from his apartment on the top floor. He had been to her apartment ten times in less than eight months. And whenever he stepped inside, the two watched each other, waiting for a sound as the city shifted outside her street-facing window.

She stepped closer to his hunched body.

“You never hear anything. Never see anything. You’re the g.d. Helen Keller of building maintenance,” she said.

He waved a hand at her and stood up.

Her mouth opened, but she did not speak. Did he remember that her closet door still flung off the track? The lobby buzzer rang for days at a time then stopped working altogether. That this was no place to raise a child, if her life eventually led to that. Not that her life had led to that, yet. She’d felt the urge to have one, at least then she could say: I made something. The rest of it, what I really wanted to contribute to the world, didn’t quite set right, wasn’t good enough that anyone wanted it to exist. But, hey, world, you get joy out of seeing this kid smile, play his first recital, dance on stage, give your legs a hug. If she had a kid, she thought, he’d grow up and it would be his burden to put something into this world, something people would want. A kid, she thought-the thoughts tumbling around her mind without reaching her voice-is our last gasp at redemption.

On the other side of the wall, Sammy’s grown son, Ron, kept his hands at his sides. Ron hid half his body inside the wall. His head, arms, and chest barely fit, sandwiched in a sliver of space behind Loretta’s bed. The rest of Ron’s body, from the belted waist of his jeans down to his sneakers, balanced on a rusted icebox in the building’s basement. He heard the metal latches on his dad’s ancient Union Chest toolbox, the ring of building keys jingling at his dad’s waist, and Loretta’s pleas, muffled yet drilling through the thin wall. Then came a sudden bang and his enclosure quaked. A powdery breath of plaster fell on Ron’s nose. A silence followed, and he assumed his dad had left. He tried to shake off the dust but the space was too cramped for more than a muscle twitch.

Alone in her apartment, Loretta sat on the bench in front of her piano. She closed her eyes. In a tiny yolk of lamplight, she sat in an emptiness of her own making, never touching the keys. The upright partially blocked her only window, through which the goings-on outside came into focus. Chipmunk hiccups, a car buckling into a pothole.

A knock jerked her out of the ritual. Then a succession of taps clawed across the room. When it stopped, she heard only the lamplight’s thin, ragged buzzing. But another tap shuddered from her wall. Another thump, twitch, and beat-a pulsating force flocking over her like desire clouding over sight. Loretta opened her eyes and stood up from the piano bench. She watched silence tick across the dust, floating higher and higher out of reach.

Clumps of insulation hung in tatters, corroded by vermin and neglect. Bending his elbow, Ron closed his fist and rapped his knuckles against the inner surface of the wall. Splinters peeling off a wall panel nicked the thin skin under his forearm.

He stopped knocking and heard the soles of Loretta’s piano bench rub against the wooden floor. He tapped again. Inside his plaster womb, the taps echoed in short burps, like frog ribbits.

In Loretta’s studio, the knocking bloated to the size of her room. An inexhaustible beating assaulting her solitude. Her collection of read and re-read books, stacked dopily on top of one another to various heights along her studio’s walls became the bound paper rungs of a ladder her eyes climbed. Once her closest allies in life, the tales had transported her into paranormal romances and biochemically-wrought dystopias, now they did nothing to distract her from the noise. Nor did they help her locate its source. She watched each book spine hoping one might show a tremor from the vibration and give away the precise spot from where the noise originated. The books sat still.

She turned on the television. Clicked off the lamp.

Through the din of nightly news, Ron recognized the sighs of Loretta’s mattress, and imagined the bed’s cushions holding her in places he could only long to. A gridlock of clangs and creaking and he decided she was settling near her iron bed frame. He rested his fingertips against the crumbly inner surface of the wall and kept them there. He thought about how she must look resting on the other side of the wall.

While walking in and out of the building, she layered herself; her fleshy peaks usually concealed behind the folds of ruffled tops. He felt drawn to the unknown of her body, her thick legs shielded by skirts that fanned out like an umbrella. Her clothing was a collage of pink, ice cream green, and candy purple. She walked through the neighborhood like a cupcake, or rather a stack of cupcakes. He wished to someday lie at the base of her bed, to open his mouth, and swallow the morsels that would naturally undo themselves from her cupcake tiers.

Loretta curled on top of her comforter, folding her knees into her chest. She closed her eyes. Flashes of TV blue and yellow streaked against her eyelids.

“I need you. I neeeeed you. Make it stop,” Sammy said in a high-pitched voice.

He stood beside the kitchen table, waiting for breakfast. He imitated the Loon, as they called her.

His wife, Carol, nudged poaching eggs to roll over in a pot of boiling water. She glanced at him, then looked back down at the stove. “Funny,” she said.

Sammy stopped waving his hands above his head. He stopped his eyes from blinking and blinking in imitation. His theatrics failed to dissuade his wife’s suspicions about the Loon’s intentions. For weeks now, she’d been accusing Sammy of making it up, the complaints, the phantom noise, to be alone with the woman.

He leaned on the back of a chair. “Where’s the boy?” he asked.

Carol dove a fork into a slice of raw ham. She lifted the meat and laid it in a hot pan. “Sleeping, where else?”

Sammy knew his son had come in late last night. He had felt the wind in the room change as Ron walked through their railroad apartment. “Maybe he was up all night partying. Got himself some friends.”

“Funny,” Carol said.

On the opposite end of the hallway that connected the rooms of their apartment, a thin curtain hung in place of a door. Through it, the smell of morning cut into Ron’s bedroom. He imagined the egg whites stiffening and pig skin caramelizing.

He sat up and took off his shirt, which was speckled with filaments dredged out of the first floor wall. He crumpled the shirt under his bed and changed into a cleaner one.

Recently hitting his nineteenth birthday, Ron continued to half-ass his way through maintenance jobs his dad threw his way. Mostly, though, he slept in or listened to Loretta through her wall; occasionally he passed time talking to the cashiers at the deli up the street. As a kid, he’d found access to the first floor apartment, but had little use for it, until Loretta had moved in.

Ron’s mom’s laughter shot through the apartment like an exclamation. He pushed aside a corner of the curtain. He saw his father’s back. It was bare. His mom’s arm curved around Sammy’s torso like a lock of Medusa’s hair. Ron watched his mom’s hand reach up to the back of his dad’s neck, and her fingers gently scratch the base of his head.

Ron transferred from the crosstown to the uptown line. He stood near the bus’ back door with his head down, not needing to count the stops. He’d know when the bus got close to the museum.

Walking through bright halls of half bodies-muscular warriors and round breasts-he moved with force through the thin crowds. There wasn’t much time. He’d waited until early evening, when the rooms were quiet and the schoolchildren gone.

In the gallery on the second floor, he sat on the museum floor and touched, with his stare only, a sculpture of an old lady. He had first seen the sculpture in middle school, during a class trip. It might have been the unblemished corners that amazed him at first. The old woman was intact, from the scarf wrapped over her hair down to her stone slippers.

The gallery was not empty, so he closed his eyes to sound out the surrounding chatter. But he had to open them, of course, to see the unchipped curves of the sculpture’s veined skin. He turned an ear toward the noise and saw a group of adults, two men and two women, lined up in front of a bronze cupid. They spoke in a language other than English, and their hands poked and threshed at the air between one another. Pigeons on a telephone line, he thought. He collected their movements and pieced together each gesture to create a version of their conversation, like watching foreign television without subtitles.

“Museum’s closing in five minutes,” a guard whispered to the group.

The guard lifted his chin up at Ron.

Ron stood. He stepped closer to the statue. His cheeks warmed, not from exertion, but by something inside of him he’d be embarrassed for others to see. He took another step, planting both feet side by side in front of the statue. The heat on his skin intensified and tickled. His fingers hovered above the old lady.

He let his finger drop toward her knee and brush by, barely touching the cool surface. He smelled his mother’s cooking on each heaving breath he exhaled.

A click sparked in his ear. Ron cocked his head to find the guard poised beside him. The guard asked him to make his way out.

Loretta had re-read the entire book. She checked the time. Nearly two hours had passed since she’d plucked the novel from among the paperbacks stacked up her walls. How had she come across such luck, such silence?

Loretta replaced the paperback and sat at her piano. The keylid was down and her hands rested on its smooth lacquered surface. Her doorbell would ring soon, she knew. She looked out the window, saw her neighbors drifting through the mild spring evening, taking their time. And she spotted beyond them, beyond the window and steel bars, her super, Sammy, across the street. It was nearing dark, and he walked back and forth over a small stretch of sidewalk. Near his feet, a portable radio and a six-pack of beer.

She watched Sammy smoke a cigarette in quick drags. His head leaning down to meet the filter. Behind him, the evening clouds darkened the rusted metal fence of the park’s small baseball diamond. Sammy continued to pace and smoke, paying no mind as the field lamps lit. Within the frame of her view Sammy’s son appeared. He stood on the sidewalk and stared at his father. His father stared back. Then the son picked up the portable radio, and the two men walked into the park together, toward the baseball diamonds.

“It’s in the wrist,” Sammy called to his son. Ron might learn. It was a miracle the boy had agreed to follow him across the street to the field. Now it seemed anything was possible, even his son mastering a simple pitch.

A portable radio sounded out the emptiness of the decaying park. When Sammy had found the stereo on their curb, its tape player was jammed up with a mangled cassette and the antennae needed to be replaced. After tuning the necessary parts, Sammy had it all: music, ball, and a pack of beers.

“Aim at my shoulder,” he called out.

Meanwhile, Loretta watched as her super and his teenage son played catch. Their behavior looked stilted and posed, as if each were a different species: bear and kangaroo or penguin and wolf forced together by a circus or theme park.

Ron threw the baseball up instead of toward his dad. The ball spun high above Ron’s head and fell into his hand. He continued to throw and catch with himself.

“Pitch it at me,” Sammy yelled. “Don’t look at my face this time. Aim for my shoulder. And keep your wrist loose.”

Ron threw the ball up again, caught it. He looked at his father’s face.

For a moment, Loretta lost sight of them. The neighborhood’s slow-moving homeless man lumbered by, carrying his hefty-sized black bags of reekiness, his sour odor sliming into her ground floor apartment. It was the first time she’d seen him walk by in months. He must have relocated during the winter.

“How about we bowl with it?” Ron asked, and he knelt down and rolled the baseball towards his dad.

“Come on, Ron. Just fucking try,” Sammy said. The ball wobbled over discarded scratch off cards. Sammy fought the temptation to pick up the scratch offs and check their luck. Instead, he picked up the ball and chucked it back at his son.

Ron let the ball land in the distance behind him. Then he sat on the dirt in protest.

Watching their interaction, Loretta felt less compelled to consider parenthood. At thirty-five, she still believed in a future with a husband and children, but in reality, she didn’t even know another woman she could call her best friend. She liked people, just not enough to be with them.

Her buzzer rang.

Ron sat on the building’s stoop. He lit a menthol. He’d stolen it from his dad’s pack. He held the cigarette between his fingertips and pictured all the tiny movements his dad made. Sammy’s inhales were so quick Ron was never sure if his dad took in smoke at all. His whole life he’d been watching his dad smoke in this amusing way. It was as if right at the moment Sammy put the cigarette to his lips he realized he had something important to say and the smoking would have to wait. Ron put the filter to his mouth and took a deep breath. He felt tobacco and tar bite the moisture out of his throat. He threw the cigarette at the curb.

Standing on the icebox in the basement, he slid inside the wall. In the small space, the cigarette odor climbed up from his shirt. He held his breath, but a cough barreled up from his chest. He drummed his knuckles on the wall sooner than he had planned to in order to hide his wheezing.

When the cough passed he ceased knocking. He stiffened when he heard her voice. No matter how many nights he’d spent chaperoning her, he always felt a trickling of surprise at the first sound she made.

The rhythm and tone of her murmuring fluctuated, as if she were in discomfort. Ron stood still and listened. The sounds of her suffering grew. He suddenly imagined an attacker inside her apartment. He considered jumping up the stairs, breaking open her apartment door, and saving her.

A cry came loudly. Or a moan. He pictured her on the floor, bleeding from a hurt that she might have inflicted on herself.

Then another voice came through the wall. In the first split second Ron thought a dog had growled. His old BB gun sat in one of the boxes in the basement. If he could tell for sure that Loretta was in danger, that a robber or a dog held her against her will, he’d knock over all the boxes and grab it and run to her.

But he listened and, for a very long minute, received silence.

He knocked again, harder than he had ever before. He scraped his forearm on the insulation. He pounded as much as he could. A pair of voices met his eavesdropping. Their sound grew, bellowing over the calls of his fists. The voices formed into a woman’s laughter and a moaning, not of a dog, but of a man. Their pitches crystallized into the familiar sounds of Loretta and Ron’s dad.

Then came an unyielding truth that broke open the deepest vault of Ron’s pain.

Out. He wanted out. Out from the wall. And he inched back in the inch he had. He steadied himself down, lowering his leg off the icebox.

He didn’t think what to do next. His body made decisions without his conscious knowledge. He found himself on the street in front of their apartment building.

Spinning in the heart, he walked and walked. Pain invaded his gut and mind. The possibility of someone seeing this failure on his face made his fingers tremble, so he tried not to imagine his father and Loretta’s joint soundmaking.

The uneasiness in him had to be expelled before he could go home. He couldn’t take these feelings upstairs to his bedroom. They would seep into the fixtures. He’d be forced to look upon the memory of this night forever, alive in the carpet and paint. He followed his feet.

Around dawn his eyes opened. He awoke on the top step of his building’s stoop, curled against the iron railing, the bridge of his nose resting on his hands and knees. He thought of his mom who might already be awake, spooning out clumps of ground coffee. Not long ago, she had asked to set him up on a date. There was the daughter of a woman she gossiped with at Bingo. He had said maybe. And when she’d brought home a piece of paper with the daughter’s phone number on it, he’d told her he was too busy preparing an application for the nearby community college. “Why not a real college?” she had asked. He hadn’t thought on it much then.

Ron scratched at dashes of dried blood on his arm. Someday, he thought. An alien color crept into the sky. He knew he would. He’d go to a real college, get an office job. He’d live in his own apartment with a fish tank.

---

Alicia Schaeffer holds an MFA from Sarah Lawrence College. Her writing has been published in Word Riot and is forthcoming in the collection Beyond Service.

Sad in New York

Elise Juska 

The bell had rung an hour ago and I was sitting with the rest of the Scouts in a sloppy circle by the hot lunch line, wrinkled green sashes thrown across our chests. The room smelled damp: damp stacks of plastic trays, damp piles of utensils, damp linoleum the custodian had mopped into dry islands around our feet. From where the fourteen of us were sitting, the cafeteria looked vast and deserted, chairs propped upside-down on tables, spiky metal legs pointed toward the ceiling. Out of sight, I could hear dishes rattling, lunch ladies talking, sometimes unleashing coarse bursts of laughter. At lunchtime, this place was chaos; it felt strange to be there after-hours, like we were privy to something we shouldn’t be.

“Girls,” Mrs. Tedesco, our troop leader, announced. “Time to sing.” 

Mrs. Tedesco ended all of our meetings like this. We held hands, and under the humming fluorescent lights, offered our closing anthem of praise to the trees. Mrs. Tedesco sang with gusto, like always. She was wearing her usual uniform—baggy blue jeans, untucked plaid shirt, and sockless moccasins—her only concession to scouting the red kerchief tied loosely around her head, tail flapping at the nape of her neck. 

A few girls snickered at her, including Carrie, but she was Mrs. Tedesco’s daughter, so she could. Most girls sang along dutifully, earnestly. I whispered the words under my breath. I liked the idea of being a Girl Scout—a girl like the ones on the cookie boxes: cheerful, friendly and fearless—more than actually doing it. I’d struggled my way through gardening and knot-tying. I liked eating the cookies but dreaded selling them, ringing doorbells and standing on people’s porches, subjecting myself to awkward conversations and barking dogs. My strength was rule-following: I liked the sense of accomplishment that came with earning badges, folding down the pages in my handbook and ticking tasks off a list. Some girls (Carrie) were too disinterested to have acquired more than two or three of them. Others, like my friend Aimee, had sashes so heavy with hardware they drooped into their laps. I had ten, the same number as my age. I gravitated toward the less athletic ones: Music, Child Care, Creative Cooking. I’d even managed to complete Wildlife, though I was afraid of most animals (in theory, I wanted a guinea pig, but mostly so I could name it). “Indoor scouting,” my dad said, and I humored him with a “Very funny,” while Mom patiently sewed the next badge onto my sash. 

When the song ended, we rose to leave, but Mrs. Tedesco raised one palm. “Hold your horses,” she said, reaching into her giant tapestry bag. The bag sagged by her feet, and she rummaged in it like a junk drawer, emerging with a stack of pale green composition books. “An assignment. For next week.” 

There was a single, elaborate groan—Carrie, of course. Mrs. Tedesco gave her a warning look, and Carrie blew her bangs off her face, a move I envied. Carrie’s bangs were blunt and choppy, as if cut with kitchen scissors, grazing the tops of her purple glasses. When she aimed an exasperated stream of air directly upward, they fanned out like a wave.  

“Girls,” Mrs. Tedesco said as the books made their way around the circle, “being a Scout means having character, compassion, and courage.” We knew. Not that anyone was really listening. “To build character, you need to know what you think. Express what you feel.” She seemed slightly winded, as she often did, from emotion or exertion I wasn’t sure. “This week, you’re going to keep a Girl Scout Journal,” she said—at this, I perked up: finally, something in my wheelhouse. “Each day, girls. Fifteen minutes. Thoughts and feelings. Cough them up.”

---

Mrs. Tedesco was not only my troop leader but also my neighbor, which made it even harder to take her seriously. She lived at the bottom of our block of Lyle Road. If I was ill-equipped to be a Girl Scout, Mrs. Tedesco was equally unsuited to be a leader. She could be sarcastic with us, even sour. She didn’t seem in good physical shape, and her hair and clothes were in constant disarray. Her front porch was hung with spindly, dying plants in macramé baskets. She had a bumper sticker that said I’M NOT DEAF I’M IGNORING YOU.  

I understood that Mrs. Tedesco had reasons to be unhappy. Her son, Miller, had “a problem with anger,” according to my mom. Three years ago, he’d been kicked out of the junior high for fighting with a teacher and sent to a special school. Shortly after, he was caught trying to rob a Radio Shack, and went to juvenile hall. Now he was living with an uncle somewhere in—New York? San Francisco? Carrie never mentioned Miller, though we spent enough time together; she was always showing up at my house to play. Which was funny, since we weren’t in class together—I was in fourth grade, Carrie was in fifth—and we never talked on the playground or at lunch. She was in Scouts, of course, though we didn’t interact there either. Our friendship existed apart from school, born of convenience, the proximity of neighbors. She’d show up—after school, on weekends—and hang around my house until five-thirty, when my mother would gently say that her mom must be wanting her home, and Carrie would shrug, fan the bangs off her brow, and wander back down the street. 

We never played at Carrie’s. For one thing, after school, Mrs. Tedesco wasn’t home. This was the reason for the housekey Carrie wore around her neck on a white shoelace, an accessory that struck me as tough and cool. Mrs. Tedesco worked 9-5 as an assistant manager at Thriftway, every day except Tuesdays, when she left work early to run the Scouts. “I told my manager, I need to do this for my daughter,” I’d heard her tell my mother, and it bothered me that she said this—like she was pretending to be a different sort of mother, like she and Carrie were close, like Carrie even cared. That the reality was so different didn’t deter Mrs. Tedesco, or it had escaped her. My mom, of course, just nodded, being kind. I assumed she was thinking about the day Mr. Tedesco died. Eight years ago, he was walking in from work and had a heart attack on their front porch stairs. Miller, six years old, had been watching out the window, waiting for him, and saw him collapse. When Mrs. Tedesco rode off in the ambulance, frantic, it was our house where she dropped her kids—“never dreaming he wouldn’t make it,” my mom said. It was a story she referenced surprisingly often. “No warning,” she said, every time. “Those children—” She shook her head. “Life can change in a day.” 

I had only a vague recollection of Carrie’s brother. I remembered him as skinny, not the kind of skinny that signaled wimpiness but the kind that signaled mischief, bony and lean—or else I remembered him that way because of the trouble he got into later. I felt sorry for Mrs. Tedesco, losing her husband and then her son like that, though I was also kind of glad a robber wasn’t living down the street. At least, though, with Miller around, Carrie had had a partner. Without him, she glued herself to other parents, teachers, kids, me. She was loud and irreverent, her voice perpetually hoarse, as if she’d spent all night screaming at a concert. She knew all curse words and parts of the anatomy and was happy to explain them to any interested parties. Elaborate arrangements of friendship pins clotted the laces of her sneakers, in different meaningful color combinations—yellow for friend, red for crush, green for enemy—even though friendship pins had been way more popular when we were younger. Not that Carrie cared. Her popularity seemed less about being trendy or “in” or having true friendships than other girls wanting to align themselves with her, out of fascination or fear. 

I didn’t like playing with Carrie, and found it confusing that she liked playing with me. I wasn’t bad or cool or popular. To her, I should have been boring, and maybe I was, considering the games we played. Carrie’s favorite was one she’d invented: Sad in New York. In it, she was the advice columnist, Dear Diana, and I was the person writing in with problems I needed her to solve. I assumed the name Diana had been inspired by Carrie’s obsession with Princess Di. My letters were all signed by someone who called themselves Sad in New York (a place, Carrie claimed, lots of sad people lived). Dear Diana: My friends are dying to go to the school dance but I don’t want to. I’m hopelessly uncoordinated! How do I gracefully back out? Anti-Socially Yours, Sad in New York. Or: When my boyfriend and I argue he always wins. It isn’t fair! How do I get my way? Desperate, Sad in New York. Or: Everyone has designer jeans but my parents don’t believe in labels. What do I do?? Feeling Uncool, Sad. 

Carrie always traveled with her purple backpack—overstuffed, festooned with rabbit’s foot keychains—in which she carried the notebook we handed back and forth. I put sincere effort into my letters. I was trying to capture the tone of advice columns I’d seen in the paper, an over-punctuated bounciness that seemed at odds with whatever the letters were about. Carrie would always read what I’d written and frown, as if impatient with these “problems,” then dash off her reply: Dearest Sad, Lighten up. Don’t you know how to have fun? Or: Sad, Get a new boyfriend and then get a clue. Or: Tough luck!!! When we weren’t doing this, we were playing Queen, in which I was the servant and she was the queen. 

I was always relieved when Carrie went home. Still, I felt an obligation to play with her. Maybe it was because my mother always referred to her with an oblique sorrow. “Why don’t you have Carrie over?” she would say, meaningfully, sometimes adding: “It would be nice.” 

---

I took my Girl Scout Journal seriously. That week, I worked on it every day. If Sad in New York’s letters were moody and depressing, the Girl Scout Journal was hopeful and earnest. I listed boys I had crushes on. I mused about what it would be like to someday kiss one. I wrote about worrying my period would never come, my chest would never grow. With the exception of one crush (Paul Shin) none of this was true. I was in no rush to grow up; the prospect of my period terrified me. I was attempting to sound like a dreamy girl in a novel, the kind who confesses her secret thoughts and worries and they’re private and embarrassing but also somehow girlish and charming. I’d had a similar experience when I made my First Confession, inventing sins I’d committed because I couldn’t think of any real ones. 

“What have you got there?” Dad asked. He was sitting on the other side of the dining room table, pencil scratching in his sketchbook. Dad and I could sit in a room together, serious but quiet, which I liked.   

“Homework.”

His chin was bent over his sketchbook. “More specific?”

“A journal,” I said. 

“Huh.” Dad made an approving sound. “For what class?”

“It’s not for school. It’s for Girl Scouts.”

“Scouts assigns homework? Don’t you already get enough homework?” My father, unlike most parents, felt I was being overworked by our suburban public school system—“plenty of time for being chained to desks,” he would complain. Mom usually ignored comments like this. She was going back to school to be a guidance counselor; she was good at staying calm. Dad was an insurance broker but, at night, was working on a children’s book. In it, a girl named Juanita Bonita boards a magic carousel and ends up roaming around Philadelphia having eye-popping adventures. For reference, Dad sometimes had me pose like Juanita, pretending to gaze out windows or stare at tall buildings. Occasionally I caught him studying his own face in the mirror above the living room couch, wearing exaggerated expressions of confusion or horror or surprise. 

“It’s not like regular homework,” I said. “It’s fun.” I paused. Fun wasn’t the word. “It’s a scouting diary,” I told him.  

Dad frowned. He wasn’t a fan of the Scouts. “‘To serve God and my country,’” I’d heard him say, quoting the pledge. “What is this, a cult?” During the Vietnam War, Dad had been a conscientious objector. A year ago, he’d stopped going to church. My mom still went every Sunday, dragging me with her. I missed having Dad there, but also felt proud of him. Confusingly, between my parents, Dad was the more outspoken, but from what I could tell it was Mom who called the shots.

“Is that different from a regular diary?” he asked. 

It was, though it was hard to describe exactly how. A scouting diary required an extra openness, candor, and girlness—but I hesitated to explain. “I guess not,” I said. Dad returned to his drawing, and I returned to my journal. I don’t understand my parents, I wrote, with a deep internal sigh. And my parents don’t understand me. 

---

That Sunday, when I heard a knock on the front door, I was upstairs journaling about how I wished I were more popular, and Mom was in the office, studying. Dad was doing yard work. It was possible neither of them had heard. I hoped the person—Carrie, I was certain—would just go away. Then I heard a longer, harder knock, followed by the doorbell, the creak of the office door, and Mom’s footsteps on the stairs. “Oh, hi, Carrie,” she said, and my heart sank. “Jess! Carrie’s here!”

I pressed the tip of my pen into the page until it left an inky blot. I am not in the mood to play with Cathy—but alas, I wrote. Grudgingly, I made my way downstairs. Mom was by the front door, chatting with Carrie, who had assumed her usual pose—eyebrows raised slightly, hands folded, as if gracing me with her presence—even though it was her who had showed up at my house. As usual, her bulging backpack was hooked on her shoulders, as if she were prepared to move in. “There’s fruit in the kitchen,” Mom said, then retreated upstairs, shutting the office door. 

“Guess what?” Carrie greeted me. 

“What.”

She smiled. “I’m going to visit my brother.”  

“Really?” Carrie was prone to exaggerating, but this seemed too important. 

“Easter vacation. My mom and me are going to Florida,” she said.

“Neat,” I allowed. “Where is he?” 

“Um, Florida?” Carrie said, drawing out the word to underscore my stupidity.

“I know, but—where?” I didn’t want to spell out the alternatives: special school, uncle’s house, jail. I was trying to be nice. “I mean, where’s he living?”

“With my aunt,” she said. “Aunt Mimi. She’s not really my aunt. She’s my mom’s friend. She lives in Miami.”

Aunt Mimi from Miami—it sounded potentially invented. 

“She’s really cool,” she said. 

“I thought you said you never met her,” I replied, then felt badly. Carrie never talked about her brother, and she seemed genuinely happy. 

“I talked to her on the phone.” Then she scanned the room and frowned, as if dissatisfied with her options. “We can play queen, I guess.”

Like that wasn’t a game we always played, the game Carrie always wanted to play—but I let it slide. Through the bay window, I could see Dad trimming the forsythia bushes, listening to his Walkman, and thought how much I’d rather be out there with him. 

Carrie got right into character, plucking the afghan from the back of our couch and perching it, cape-like, on her shoulders. “Fetch me my tea,” she commanded. Playing queen, Carrie’s caustic streak came in handy—she could level a servant with a single verbal blow. She was equally skilled at berating her royal subjects, who assembled in the backyard outside the living room window. “Once again, you all disappoint me,” she proclaimed, with a flick of her hand. Then she lowered herself to the couch and slid off her glasses, the better to drape one hand across her brow. I carried around a tray on which I served her tea and cookies, occasionally fanning her cheeks with a TV Guide. 

After about fifteen minutes, the back door slapped and Dad came in, stopping in the living room doorway. “Hi, girls.” 

I glanced up. “Hi, Dad.”

He was looking at us with a funny smile. “Hi there, Carrie.” 

She blinked at him from where she lay on the couch. Without her glasses, her face looked younger. “Hi, Mr. Seward.”

“How are you doing?” 

“I’m doing fine,” she said. Then she smiled and added: “I mean, great.” 

My dad lingered another minute, looking toward the window. Finally he said, “Have fun,” and went upstairs. A minute later, I heard the door to the office open and close. 

Carrie sat up, rubbing her elbows. “That was weird,” she said. It was a little weird, but I wasn’t giving her the satisfaction of agreeing. She let the afghan slump from her shoulders and pushed her glasses back on. Then she looked around the room, blinking, as if it were a store where she’d been considering shopping but changed her mind. “I think I’m done,” she said, which was a first. 

“Okay,” I said, but Carrie was already gone. The front screen door slammed. From the couch, I saw her cut diagonally across the front lawn. The entry practically wrote itself: Cathy was acting weird. She wanted to go home, which she never did—secretly, I was overjoyed. I picked up the afghan and wrapped it around my shoulders. Then I heard Mom’s office door open, and both my parents came downstairs, Dad saying, “Was that Carrie leaving?”

“Yeah,” I said. 

Mom sat beside me on the couch. Dad stayed standing. They wore the looks of a serious conversation: Mom concerned, Dad mildly annoyed. 

“We need to ask you something,” Mom opened. 

My first, panicked thought was that they’d read my journal. Mentally, I went flipping through the entries, looking for anything potentially inflammatory. My parents don’t understand me—I didn’t even feel that way, not really. I’d just written it because it felt right.

“What?” I said.  

She looked at Dad, and sighed. “We think Carrie might have stolen something—”

“We know she did,” Dad said.

This news was startling, but felt immediately possible. I believed that Carrie had done it, could do it. I was more confused about how and when she’d pulled it off. “When?”  

“Dad saw her,” Mom said. 

“When I was in the yard. She stuffed it in her pocket. And now—” He gestured toward the window. “It’s gone.” 

“What is?”

“Just—” Mom shook her head. “One of the bells.”

Mom’s bell collection sat along the narrow ledges of the bay window. She had twenty or more: antique brass schoolbells, hand bells, sleigh bells, a copper dinner bell from an eighteenth-century farm. She’d been collecting her bells since she was a little girl. I could see where the stolen one was missing: a small one made of etched crystal. It was one of Mom’s favorites. That this was what Carrie had stolen—something belonging to my mother, who was only ever nice to her, something she couldn’t have really wanted—made me furious. I cycled back through the past half-hour, thinking of times she might have had the chance to take it—when she was facing the window to dismiss her subjects or I was in the kitchen making her an imaginary cup of tea. 

“You didn’t see her take it, did you, Jessie?” Mom asked.  

“What? No!” I said, offended. “If I had, you don’t think I would have stopped her?” 

Mom studied me, and nodded, as if deciding to let me believe this. “Did anything happen between you two today?”

“Like what?”

“I don’t know,” she said mildly. “Anything unusual? An argument?”

“She told me she’s going to visit her brother.”

Mom’s eyebrows rose lightly. “Is she?”  

“Supposedly. But it’s possible she was making it up,” I said. “And then she bossed me around. But that’s not unusual.”

Dad interjected, “What does that mean?”

“We play this game. She’s the queen and I’m her servant.”

He frowned. “And you agree to this game why?” 

I didn’t say anything. It hadn’t occurred to me I had a choice. I looked at Dad. “Why didn’t you say something to her when you came in here?”

“I—” he began, then stopped. “I thought I’d better talk to Mom first.”

“It’s complicated,” Mom said. 

“Why is it complicated?” I looked at her, at both of them. “You’re telling Mrs. Tedesco, right?”

Neither of them replied, but both their expressions seemed to deepen. Dad’s grew more indignant; Mom’s face looked traced with pain, like it did sometimes in church. I knew what had happened: Dad thought they should tell, Mom didn’t. Mom won. Of course. Carrie had stolen from us and was getting away with it. 

“I really think you should tell her,” I said. “I think she’d want to know.” 

Mom paused, then gave me a sorrowful smile. “Carrie’s been through some hard things,” she said. “We’re going to let this one go. But if it happens again—or if you see anything—we will.”

---

Tuesday before the meeting started, I watched Carrie like a private eye. She was laughing and joking around with the other Scouts like nothing was different and I felt a seed of resentment growing in my chest. I couldn’t imagine doing something so blatantly wrong and just carrying on, guilt-free, unaffected. I thought about how lucky she got that my mother had decided to spare her. How she’d been caught in the act and didn’t even know it. Aimee was talking to me about the spelling homework, and I pretended to listen. I hadn’t told her what happened, not because I was protecting Carrie but because I didn’t want Aimee thinking less of my parents for letting her off the hook. The night before, I’d vented my frustrations in the final four pages of my Girl Scout Journal, a storm of emotion, cursive loose and sprawling. Cathy is a THIEF. She stole right from under our noses and I have no idea why mom let her get away with it. Nobody even likes her. I for one despise her and her stupid friendship pins. I only put up with her because my mother makes me. What choice do I have???  

“Girls,” Mrs. Tedesco said. “Journals, please.” 

Talking slowed to a dribble as the Scouts reached into their backpacks and retrieved their pale green books. It was only then, handing mine to Aimee, that I felt a simmer of nerves. I wondered what Mrs. Tedesco would think when she read it, if she’d know who Cathy really was. I watched my journal travel around the circle, hand to hand, stopping at Mrs. Tedesco, who shuffled the book to the middle of the pile like a card in a giant deck, and dropped it into the big tapestry bag that she would carry out of the cafeteria and into her car and Carrie’s house.

---

Carrie didn’t come over that week. I tried to let myself enjoy the hiatus, but I was worried. That she’d found my journal in her house and read it. That she was mad at me, or hurt—but so what if she was? I tried to tell myself the likeliest scenario was that she was afraid my parents had figured out she’d stolen and was lying low. 

Then, on Saturday, there she was: a measure of her boldness, or obliviousness, or maybe desperation. “Carrie, hi,” I heard my mother say, inviting her inside. Her tone, I thought, was way too generous. When I appeared in the living room, Mom was smiling like everything was fine. “It’s a beautiful day,” she said. “Why don’t you girls play outside?” 

It was true that, outside, there was nothing much for Carrie to steal from us, though I doubted that was motivating my mother. It was nice out, the first day that really felt like spring. Carrie and I filed out to the backyard, where we sat on the lawn by the forsythia bushes. She pointed out that she’d rearranged her friendship pins again. 

“I don’t know anyone else who still wears friendship pins,” I replied, picking at the grass.

Carrie merely shrugged. She seemed no different than usual, and I resented the time I’d wasted assuming anything different.

“Queen?” she said.  

“I’m not really in the mood,” I said. “I kind of hate Queen, actually.”

“Since when?” 

“Since always.”

She shrugged again. “Suit yourself.”  

We sat in silence for another minute. I shredded a blade of grass into confetti. But we had to do something, so I proposed a few rounds of Sad in New York. Carrie dug the notebook from her backpack and offered me a pen.

Dear Diana, I scribbled. I had a dinner party and my guests stayed forever. Is there a polite way to make them leave? Feeling Annoyed, Sad in New York. 

I passed it back to Carrie then waited. Another kid might have seen the letter as a cue to leave, but Carrie wouldn’t notice. Carrie didn’t notice anything. I stared at the living room window, picturing her picking up that crystal bell and stuffing it in her pocket. Today, the sun was too bright to see inside the house; the light bounced off the glass.

Carrie handed back the notebook. 

Dear Sad: Every party has a pooper and that’s you! 

I stared at the page, my face growing warm, and grabbed the pen. 

Dear Diana: I did something very very wrong and no one knows. Should I tell??? Feeling guilty, Sad in New York.

I shoved it at her and waited. My heart was skipping lightly. But Carrie returned the notebook instantly, saying, “I can’t answer this.” 

“Why not?”

“It’s totally lacking in detail,” she said, in the same haughty tone the queen used to address her subjects. It occurred to me that the queen and Dear Diana were essentially the same person. “What wrong thing did she do?”

Carrie squinted at me through her glasses. In truth, the question was not unfair; the letter was too vague. But Carrie never critiqued my letters, barely seemed to read my letters. She must have been wondering if I knew about her stealing. I wanted to blurt out: My dad saw you do it! Then the back door opened—my mom, coming out to water the flowers, like she had some of tension radar. 

“I don’t know,” I said. 

She laughed. “How can you not know?”

“I meant, I don’t care. I didn’t even feel like playing.” I swiped torn grass from my knee. “Just make it up. Whatever you want.”

Carrie thought for minute then declared: “Kidnapping.” She huddled back over the page and scrawled: You stole someone’s kid? Return them, you sicko! 

After one more half-hearted round, I told her I didn’t feel good, and when my mom called after me as I ran upstairs, I didn’t stop.  

---

The next week, the air in the cafeteria was still and stuffy. The wide brown shades were yanked down halfway, blocking the sun, but the windows were sealed. The heat was amplified. Everything felt amplified. The smells of fries and burgers from that day’s hot menu. The buzz of the fluorescent lights. There were shadowy spots on the linoleum, damp patches where the mop water hadn’t dried. 

“Girls,” Mrs. Tedesco said. “I read your journals.” She heaved a heavy sigh. “Most of you really dialed it in.”  

A few girls, Carrie included, rolled their eyes. Mrs. Tedesco lifted the stack from her bag, wrapped in a thick rubber band. 

“But there was one journal that was exactly what I was looking for,” she said, peeling one green book off the pile and waving it in the air. The journals were identical, so it was impossible to tell whose it was, but I knew that it was mine. I felt a mixture of pride and dread. “This,” she proclaimed, turning to give me a wide toothy smile, “is what a Girl Scout Journal should sound like.” Then she opened up my journal and began to read. 

It was so terrible, so incredible, that it didn’t immediately sink in: Mrs. Tedesco was reading my private thoughts out loud. That they weren’t true, for the most part, didn’t make it any less humiliating. Everybody knew the journal was mine. My shock turned to something like repulsion as I watched Mrs. Tedesco’s mouth moving. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever kiss a boy,” she was saying. She was smiling. I could tell she thought my journal was harmless, sweet, like a little kid who’s naked and dancing.  

The other Scouts were gracious enough to be mortified on my behalf. They understood that if her intent was to praise me, and shame them, the opposite was true. “Will my chest ever grow?” Mrs. Tedesco continued. Some of the girls were looking at me with awe, or pity. Aimee mustered a supportive smile. Other girls wore expressions of mild disbelief. None of them had been dumb enough to take this seriously. 

When I glanced at Carrie, she was watching me from behind those purple glasses, wearing the smug look she always did, and I wanted to explode. Why did she get to sit there with all her secrets hidden? Real secrets? Actual, wrong things? That I was being exposed but she wasn’t—I was filled with a shaky rage. 

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tedesco was still reading. Maybe she was going to read the entire thing. I cared so much I almost didn’t. I stared hard at the cafeteria windows, at the deserted playground. Eventually, Mrs. Tedesco would get to the part about Cathy stealing. Even if she was clueless enough to not recognize her own daughter, the other girls no doubt would. Good, I thought. Let them. I hoped Mrs. Tedesco read to the end. “I don’t understand my parents,” she was saying, and I fought back a sudden well of tears, for my parents getting dragged into this, for writing about them in the first place. They struck me then as the greatest people in the world. 

Then Mrs. Tedesco abruptly shut the book. “That,” she said, “is a Girl Scout Journal.” She scanned the circle, her expression chastising, triumphant. I stared furiously at my knees. I’d been spared the last few entries, but so had Carrie. Aimee leaned over and wrote in pen down my forearm: NOT THAT BAD ☺. But this was Aimee. She was always positive. She was the perfect Scout. 

Meanwhile, Mrs. Tedesco had hoisted herself from the chair to return the journals. When she held mine out, I snatched it from her hand. She was saying something but I stood and ran out of the cafeteria, down the wide damp aisle and past the empty tables, out into the hallway and through the lobby doors. Aimee’s mom was supposed to drive me home, but I ran the seven blocks in the purpling dusk. When I reached my house, I was breathing hard. My chest burned. At the back of the driveway, I opened the metal trashcan by the garage and untied a bag of kitchen garbage. Awesome, it said on the cover of my journal, thick marker with three underlines. I stuffed the book in the trash, along with my sash, and jammed the metal lid on top. 

---

Carrie hadn’t been lying about her vacation. She and her mother went to Florida over Easter break. I knew this not because Carrie reminded me—she hadn’t been over since I ran out of the meeting, and we hadn’t spoken at school, not that we spoke there anyway—but because my mom said Mrs. Tedesco had stopped by.

My head snapped up from the couch, where I’d been watching TV since getting home from Aimee’s. “Why?” 

I had skipped the last two Scout meetings and hadn’t told my mom. My dad, I thought, would have applauded this act of rebellion, even though it didn’t feel that rebellious. The two hours I should have been in Scouts I’d spent wandering around the neighborhood near the school, staring at strangers’ houses, reappearing just in time for my mom or Aimee’s to pick me up.

Now, though, I worried that Mrs. Tedesco had told my mom about my absences. About my journal. Maybe she’d finally figured out I was writing about Carrie—it occurred to me that may have been the reason I’d done it.

“She wanted to know if you’d feed their cat,” Mom said. 

“What?” I didn’t even know Carrie had a cat. 

“They’re away for a week, in Florida—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know.” 

Mom paused, surprised at me. 

“Sorry,” I mumbled. “It’s just that Carrie already told me.”

“Well. Okay.” She nodded, as if that meant we were on the same page. “So they need you to feed the cat while they’re away.”

“But why me?” 

“They must think you’re trustworthy,” Mom said, as Dad walked in asking, “Why me what?”

“June Tedesco asked if Jessie would feed their cat while they’re away.”

“And I don’t want to,” I said, childishly. I was hoping Dad would take my side. 

“Maybe it was that Wildlife badge,” he cracked. 

I was too upset to laugh. Mom was looking at me closely. “Well,” she said finally. “They already left. And I said you’d do it.” She fished in her pocket. “They dropped this off,” she said, putting Carrie’s key in my hand. 

---

I walked down Lyle Road with Carrie’s shoelace tied around my neck. It was officially spring. Flowers were popping up beside neighbors’ walks and fences. A distant lawnmower droned. Cardboard rabbits and Easter eggs were stuck on people’s doors and windows. The key felt warm against my skin.  

Carrie’s house was identical to my house—same shape, same layout—except hers was geranium blue. It had no Easter decorations. The porch was covered with sagging wicker chairs, sickly-looking plants. As I climbed the steps, the wood creaked and sagged. I thought about the fact that these were the very steps where Mr. Tedesco collapsed, how strange it must be for Carrie and Mrs. Tedesco to walk up them every day. To the right of the door was the window Miller must have been looking out of when it happened. A heart-shaped suncatcher was suctioned to the glass.

I pulled Carrie’s shoelace from around my neck and ground the key into the lock. The door needed a little extra push to open, the rubber flap on the bottom stuttering against the rug. Inside, it was dark. The shades were down, the curtains closed. When we went away on vacation, Mom left lights on timers so it looked like somebody was home, but the Tedescos’ house was so lightless it felt like stepping into the cave. I pulled the screen door shut behind me so the cat didn’t escape. An indoor cat, my mom had relayed. Be sure not to let her out. I tried to get oriented, feeling for a lightswitch, and when I found one I gasped. 

The couch, chairs, and living room floor were all piled high with junk. Stacks of mail and magazines, mounds of clothes and books and records, cat’s toys and baskets of yarn. The coffee table was covered with dirty dishes, stained juice glasses, mugs with dried teabags inside them. The curtains looked like heavy brown tweed. For a minute I stood paralyzed, then I stepped gingerly around the piles, not wanting to disturb them. In the dining room, chairs and table were buried in the rubble. Some of the junk at least belonged in a dining room—candlesticks, placemats, dishes—while other things were random: a crate of mason jars, a rolled-up doormat, a guitar with broken strings. 

I was shocked, and also nervous, to realize people lived like this. To realize that Carrie did. As I neared the kitchen, I could smell it. I turned on the light and found two open bags of garbage sagging in the middle of the floor. One had leaked something brown; ants swarmed the puddle. Unwashed dishes crowded the counter, crusted with dried spaghetti sauce, drips of jelly, pizza crusts, an icing-covered fork. It occurred to me then that Carrie never had birthday parties. On the window, dead fruit flies stuck to strips of sticky tape. I spotted two empty bowls on the floor beneath the telephone and realized I hadn’t seen the cat.

My heart was thumping close to my skin. I didn’t want to go upstairs—was tempted to just fill the bowls and leave—but I needed to at least set eyes on the cat first. What if it was crushed under something? Or I’d let it slip when I opened the front door? As I climbed the stairs, the heat was thickening. Things were crystallizing: No wonder we never played at Carrie’s house. No wonder Carrie never wanted to be there. No wonder she carried that getaway backpack. And, less clearly, no wonder Mrs. Tedesco had loved my journal so much. 

The hallway upstairs felt swollen with the heat and the quiet. I walked on tiptoe, because it felt like I was trespassing, even though I’d been invited inside. It was shocking, actually, that Mrs. Tedesco had knowingly asked me in there. Maybe she felt bad for humiliating me at the meeting. Maybe she was making some kind of amends, trading one private embarrassment for another. I crept down the hallway, carpeted in dirty orange, until I turned into a doorway and flipped on the light in Mrs. Tedesco’s room. I tried skating my gaze across the surface, poking at cat-like lumps in the bedcovers and toeing piles of clothes on the floor. From somewhere, a clock was ticking. It occurred to me that staying so quiet wasn’t actually in my best interest so I called: “Here, kitty!” My voice sounded hollow and strange. 

I cleared my throat, trying again—“Kitty, kitty!”—as I continued down the hall. The next door was plastered with decals: a skull smoking a cigarette, the Pink Floyd rainbow prism, the words KEEP OUT. Miller’s room, I thought. The door was shut, as if he’d died or something, and I didn’t open it. I at least knew the cat couldn’t have walked through a closed door. “Kitty!” I called again. My heart was banging. I felt something like fear as I approached Carrie’s room. Guilt, too—I’d hate it if I knew Carrie was poking around my stuff without me there. But when I snapped the light on, the room was just messy, normal messy. Clothes were tossed on Carrie’s bed and carpet, shorts and T-shirts I recognized from last summer, things she must have rejected when packing for her trip. On her bedpost hung the Girl Scout sash with its three measly patches. Puffy pillow letters spelled CAROLINE on the wall above the bed. I’d never known this was her real name. On her dresser, piles of friendship beads were stored by color in one of those plastic pill counters. It was the most organized thing in the whole house.

I felt a deep, dizzying sadness, and walked quickly back out to the hallway, drew a teary breath. I needed one of my parents. Needed my mother. My impulse was to run home for her because I didn’t want to use the Tedescos’ phone—but this made no sense. I forced myself back down to the kitchen and the phone by the refrigerator and dialed my number. “Mom?”

“Jessie?” 

“Yeah.” My voice trembled. 

“Jess? What is it?” 

“I don’t know,” I said, suddenly on the verge of tears. I started to say more—that something here was wrong, that people didn’t live like this unless there was—but I didn’t know how to explain it. “I can’t find the cat,” I said. 

“Hold on,” she said. “I’ll be right there.”

The living room felt like the safest place to wait, so I stood on an exposed square of carpet by the door. I stared at the mantel above the fireplace, a row of pictures in cheap-looking gold frames. One of them was Miller as a little boy. He was smiling, but distantly, with his mouth and not his eyes. I wondered if it had been taken before or after his father died. There was Mr. Tedesco, holding one kid in each elbow, like sacks of groceries. He looked like Carrie, I thought. I didn’t see Mrs. Tedesco. She must have been the one taking the pictures.

I heard footsteps rush across the porch, then Mom shoved open the front door. Her eyes went to me first, as if scanning for injuries, then she paused and looked around the room. I watched as her gaze moved over the piles, resting briefly on the mantel, and resettled on my face. We stared at each other for a long minute. Her expression was grim, close-lipped, but she said only, “Cats are good at hiding,” and shut the door.

Without discussion, Mom took the lead as we picked our way across the living room. I noticed she, too, refrained from touching the mess, as if out of respect for whatever awful thing was at its root. In the dining room, she made a kissing sound, but the cat stayed hidden. When she reached the kitchen, she stopped for a minute, taking in those leaking trashbags, but her expression wasn’t pained, like I’d expected. She looked almost angry. She ventured into the kitchen and made the kissing sound again, then her face changed, softening with affection as she leaned toward the window and picked up her bell. 

The crystal bell had been sitting on the sill with other random trinkets, vases and bottles and seashells, tooth-shaped bits of green glass. Mom held it up, peering at it closely, as if confirming it was hers. Then she raised it above her head and rang it—the sound was high, long, jarringly loud. Within seconds, the cat was scampering down the stairs, sliding past my ankles and tapping across the kitchen floor, where it hunkered by the bowls. 

“There,” Mom said, with a single nod. There was sweat on her nose. She set the bell on the counter. I wondered if Carrie had stolen it to help find her cat. The cat was yowling now, looking at me as if it knew I was the one in charge. “Better feed the beast,” my mother said. 

I poured out some dry food, swapped out the hairy water for fresh water, opened a tin of wet food with a rusty can opener left in the sink. Mom washed and dried the opener, which seemed absurd, given everything. She looked around once, as if considering doing more—would it be insulting, I wondered, for her to clean up after them? Maybe she was asking herself the same thing, because she just dried her hands on her jeans. She bent to pet the cat, two quick strokes along the spine, then picked up the bell and returned it to the window, and I knew that we were leaving it, not just knew it but understood it, even if I couldn’t have said why.

Mom snapped off the kitchen light. Silently, we retraced our path, back through the stifling dining room and living room and out onto the porch. I took the shoelace from my neck and pulled the door shut, locking it. Mom put a hand on my shoulder and gave it a light squeeze.

As we started back up the street, I kept Carrie’s key in my hand. I didn’t want to wear it. The air was light and cool and I felt like I could breathe again but there was a heaviness in my chest. Mom and I didn’t speak. The sun was setting. Smells of dinner drifted from the neighbors’ windows. As we approached our house, I saw that all the lights were on downstairs. There was my dad, standing in front of the living room mirror. He had his head thrown back, mouth gaping, trying to capture exactly how it looked when the girl in the story stepped off the ride and looked up.

---

Elise Juska‘s short fiction and nonfiction have appeared in The Gettysburg Review, Ploughshares, The Hudson Review, Prairie Schooner, Electric Literature, The Missouri Review, and several other publications. She is the recipient of the Alice Hoffman Prize from Ploughshares, and her stories have been cited as distinguished by the Best American Short Stories and Pushcart Prize anthologies. Juska’’s novels include The Blessings, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection, and If We Had Known.

Hope

Rebecca Pyle

Nothing would save her except a long sleep. 

Hope? There was a place on their way which looked as happy as sleep. Large gold-framed paintings were on its golden walls. The floor was laid with alternating black and white porcelain tiles. The lamps in the ceiling made the light of captured suns. 

A river, which she had not seen yet in this town, ran below somewhere. There would have to be persisting and hopeful boats. A long-held belief persisted also in her that a person could throw herself from a bridge into a boat and that boat might merely bob up and down a little, she would be fine, perhaps even landing on her feet, and people on the boat would immediately decide she was the person they had been waiting for, who would draw wry sketches of all the people aboard, somehow suggesting, in the drawings, their life stories. Their destinies. 

In every town and city near a river she imagined this. She was already also thinking of paintings she could fashion from memories, just memories, of how the surface of water keeps splitting and resplitting like silk. The Seine was made of green silk and intricate shrubbery and trees at the borders of the water, and the best boats had simple and large panels of insulated glass, cooling systems for summer, and a captain who could take you down to the Musée d’Orsay, with its grand clock at the front, and back again, at twilight. He wouldn’t talk to you unless you felt like talking. There were musicians who would come on board and play for guests and you knew they were good because they also were not interested in talking at all, only sensing how the music sounded near water, and looking for swans in the summer; the sudden sight of them could almost make them break away from the music. But they played on. And as they looked at you as they played you could tell they knew that nothing you would say to anyone would make much difference, but people had to pretend there was a chance of a difference. Speech did not do much; unless exceptional, it was weak, meandering. Only great or good paintings, music, writings, preserved well. Her underwater career, however small it would ever be, would require a pen name, at least for a time, till she was done with the niceties/horrors of a career in government. Today she would think of a pen name, and she would proceed to write as a person with that pen name would write, if she had the right to a boat. A writer should have her own boat, which she had paid for herself: she still dreamed of dropping onto a boat on which she knew no one but would be listened to and cared for and on which she could be given that magic new name.

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Rebecca Pyle’s forthcoming work is “ A Frost Fate” (fiction) in Scarlet (Jaded Ibis Press); “River” (fiction) in Writer’s Block Magazine (the Netherlands);  “A Record” and “For the Falling” (poems) in Kestrel, and The Hungarian Apartment with the Red Nespresso Machine (a drawing) in Silk Road Review. Rebecca studied art and lit at the University of Kansas. Over the past two years she has been living in Europe, mainly in France and the United Kingdom. See rebeccapyleartist.com.