Author: Post Road

Mine

Darina Sikmashvili

Everything in this house was first another’s. I am tired of our bedsheets, frayed from endless wash. I am tired of the green carpet crawling up the hallway, rubbed dull from stains never removed. The owner is a witch, her hair in thick black rubber coils around her eyes. Her crooked mouth, the blistered Romanian it spews. She is hiding the blood and the piss and the ash of this crippled boarding house in the carpet threads. I’ve never once, never once heard a vacuum go off in here.

                        So what is mine? My thoughts, my time to gorge on.

                        The kitchen is a slaughterhouse. The owner keeps the precious cleavers in her room, the blades wide as my thigh and sharp, you needn’t wonder. Always stewing flesh, coaxing the marrow to surface. The patience of a low, slow burn. Blood trapped and blinking beneath oil, blood in the air all afternoon. She spices by smell, by instinct; only a lesser woman would take notice. I ruin a runny egg, serve steak cool to the touch. Over-peppered, undercooked, else scalded to anonymity. My talents must lie elsewhere.

                        I seldom linger past the kettle’s boil and less if she should enter. You and I have so little, so yes, we steal, but what we steal is little. Careful as mice. Still, signs crop up, and endless warnings:

WRITE YOUR TEA AND DONT DRINK ANYONE TEA
KEEP SUGAR ON THE SHELF INSIDE. RATS!
NO GUESTS NO DIRTY PLATES NO TALKING LATE

            It is only a week, you say. Two at the most. Only a little longer, bunny. Trust, won’t you?

            Where do you live all day? In interrogation rooms and bars, in ashen women’s dressing rooms. The breast pockets of suits. The alleyway below a fire escape, leading to the detective’s dirty office. Murder, ache, revenge. The keys march on your typewriter, letters pounce on paper, and you live there.

            But I’m out here, pacing a dirty box with a mattress on the floor and a dresser missing the bottom drawer. I rattle in the smoky room while you whisk yourself away. Blinders are a writer’s luxury you have taught me.

            In bed at night, our routine: I listen as you recall the day’s pages. The fantastical detective struggles now with not just the object of his affection but with a brother who has cropped up from the past.

            There’s tension. You’re a marvel to yourself. There’s finally tension.

            All morning nausea threatens up my throat. Retreats. You are perfectly fine, you tell me, though what we have we share down to the crumb. In my illness I am alone. Out of our bedroom window, a plain white sheet of sky.

            A brittle little woman, the house’s only other tenant, has taken a liking to you. And you, you see material. Nothing more tempting than a ruined woman. Sherry in the evenings and late into the night. She is impressed as you predicted she might be:

            A writer! A writer in our little home! Who doesn’t love a mystery?

            You fetch me comfort we cannot afford: mineral water in tiny Italian bottles. Salts to settle the stomach, the brittle woman suggested. An Old-World trick, you’re told. Even the witch owner agrees. The bottles become vases for the daisies you dot our awful room with.

            Settle, bunny, settle. I brought you a book.

            Writer, you are the gestural equivalent of a whimper.

            Midnight I sit in the scalding shower until steam chokes the room. I won’t be doing that again: glancing in the mirror at a woman I want to hide from. Did you notice her? Me but not quite, come with the aching in my stomach, come with the scraping in my throat.

            The money won’t last. You coo—you say we’ll float right through to a parade made in our honor, but I know better. I was to myself before you came, hungry but free. Now, the sound of mice like paper crinkling in the walls. The echo of the telephone in the hallway. Never for you, but hope in the writer is unwavering. Soon they will call. You’ve sent your pages, left your name. Soon they’ll come begging for your book. The money, the fruit.

            Stay, bunny. You will see.

            The pink curtain blooms at night. This is our favorite time. We can see the big orange streetlamp like our very own woozy moon. We take turns keeping one leg on the other, we thank the fan. At night I have your minty mouth against my forehead, your hands, intent. The hammer of the typewriter rests. Cats screech beneath us in the garden, long abandoned. Heat in their bones, the sound of want.

            At night I remember why I agreed to follow you. The way you looked tenderly at me those months ago and said, Don’t hide in these decaying bookstacks, don’t be your mother’s daughter. You are the only person I have ever met who is devoid of armor and I had then more than enough to spare.

            I found a book this afternoon. I sat in quiet and I read. That was your remedy, remember. I learned that Old World women would grind glass and mix it into salt to serve to their malicious husbands. Patience is a weapon. 

            What could have caused my illness? I hiss at the owner’s signs, I see the snake of her. What sense in keeping me around? Shards settle in my stomach, in my lungs. I know what I feel; this house is a crime scene, this woman is a murderer.

            When you return with bread and milk, your face flushed like a cherub’s, I drag you to the foot of our bed and whisper my discovery. But you laugh at me as if in the company of others. Your head turns from side to side, your eyebrows carve upwards in disbelief. I know that you are spineless like the weasels in your stories. I know you are afraid that she will kick you out and keep your money.

            Gin bottles grow like wildflowers every morning outside of the brittle woman’s door. You have seen her at night, you tell me, with her heels in her hands, fishing for the lock with her key. Guided her hand, guided her in. A sour room, big and fit for a wilted queen, your eyes took notes, always working:

            Slips, cherry and nude, hung from a dull brass bedpost like shriveled ornaments.

            You type and type, weave her into your pulp fiction. Everything is material, you tell me. I’d like to give you something.

            I take the bottles and a sharpening stone from the kitchen. The hallway closet is full of boxes, the foreign labels I strain all morning to decipher. The owner’s daughter’s baby clothes, her little life packed neatly here. I once belonged to someone in this way. Swaddled, my progress mattered. A doorframe to track the miracle of my bones stretching me upwards. Age four, age six, then nine, a burst. A girl.

            Nightly I crawl behind the boxes and bind my hands with kitchen rags to grind the glass down to a whisper, flakes trapped beneath my fingernails. The owner’s daughter, I know, comes rarely, to reach her mother’s ceiling fans with rags and send dust shrieking into the air. To bicker, to shove old clothes into the closet. When called, the daughter’s husband comes, a handyman. Silent and practiced like prized machinery.

            I watch him in the kitchen, I like to. To press my back against the doorframe, to push against the splitting wood with the heel of my foot until he senses me, and then to busy myself, make like I’m working. His hands are big. A comfort, the way they tug at valves beneath the ancient sink. Wrenches, smutted with his fingers smutted with the pipes’ insides. At the stove, I peek over my shoulder and catch him thinking: running his tongue along the wall of his mouth, see his cheek puff out as if a bug were scattering in there.

            I come with empty glasses and loiter, needy, tuck my hands in my sleeves. An excuse to watch the swell of his ribcage as he breathes the diver’s breath when he is on his back beneath the kitchen sink, squinting at rot.

            No water, he tells me. Wait.

            Yes, I linger. I like to. He lets me. Once, a tiny mouse—brazen, else foolish—had wandered into view and he slammed quick his boot down on the floor. Blood pooled beneath. He flushed an exhale, proud. And something hummed up past my thighs. A terrifying man, a trap built into him.

            He said then, before lifting his boot, look away, and I would not.

            We are both of us now deep in our work. I lace the owner’s salt. Her sugar too. The coffee she takes, ground to powder, the tea she gulps all afternoon. I lace it all and hide my ravaged hands beneath your maroon sweater. My clothes too light, too thin to mask the blood. In your novel you describe a woman, incriminate but irresistible. An implicating creature. What is the detective to do? She’s a poison, a fatal woman. That’s how you tell it and you are sure.

            The owner groans into the phone in feeble English. The weeping daughter stalks the halls and carries bowls of broth, the rank of boiled bone in the kitchen. Even you have grown uneasy, looking over your pages at the door, toward the endless noise. But I race the morning, I let the sun come hobbling up to me, I betray sleep and you don’t even notice. Grind glass inside the bathroom until the doorknob trembles and knocking starts. I work with meaning; I have that now.

            Where we first lived, do you remember? Somebody should have seen us. We were living in a shed in your brother’s backyard. He wouldn’t let us near the warmth. You’d gotten sick and he was scared of what you had, do you remember? The neighbors threw apple cores at us over the fence. You were sick to tears. Sweating and shivering, sweating and shivering. A fever punctured your thinking and you mistook me for another woman then, shouted another woman’s name in your sleep. I draped soaked towel after soaked towel across the rusted lawn chairs and felt my recklessness. Love looked like this: like quarantine I had to break. And still I held your frightened hands. But you won’t look at mine.

            Come night you’re drunk and stewing, a roadblock in the book, right at the curtain draw; an undefinable, mystical pause in your brilliant thinking, a curse on your good fortune. The owner screams like a split pig. Who is supposed to sleep like this? Soon she will cave and ambulances will howl through empty streets. You hover near the typewriter, circling it like a dumb dog on a short leash.

            I roam the house. It’s mine. I roam in night light. The husband comes and takes my hands; I terrify a terrifying man.

---

Darina Sikmashvili was born in Lubny, Ukraine and raised in Brooklyn, New York. As of fall 2020, Darina is pursuing her MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan. She’s writing a book. Contact her at darina@sikmashvili.com.

Salt Of The Earth

Vi Khi Nao

Sleep is a place where the soul goes to die.

And, sometimes it gets lost on its way to its own funeral. And, this is why we don’t always wake up.

The passenger has recently given a five-star rating to a relatively young Asian man an Uber review, “On time…very nice car…salt of the Earth!” And, half of his life, his sisters did not know that he has always been salty, can’t consume salt, can’t dance in the rain with salt. The brother has atrial fibrillation and has five years to live. After his application for disability had been disapproved, his youngest sister took upon herself to employ him. She took half of her annual check bonus and brought him a relatively brand-new white car. His old car was rusted and old. After he got out of the hospital, he purchased the old Nissan for a grand from the winnings he got at a casino during a family vacation in Florida. Every day he texts his sisters his earnings. In his free time, when he was Ubering people around, he spends his time babysitting his stepbrother. He even got a certificate from the National CPR Foundation for his CPR/AED/First-Aid qualifications. The certificate is valid for two years, which meant, with a life expectancy of five years, he would need two more renewals. His oldest sister lived far away, near a black mountain in the middle of the desert. Once in a while he would send her a link to a few jobs in the vicinity of where he lives. Mainly, jobs that she wouldn’t be qualified for such as being a principal. She has never been around kids and certainly she didn’t know how to be a leader of a specific community nor how to supervise janitors, teachers, students, babysitters, or develop any curriculum. But, he wants her close and she is afraid to be close to him. After all, of all her siblings she felt the closest with him. His mind works differently than the rest of the world: almost like a car that could move or drive backward. He could see the world through the rearview mirror. He could see his whole life behind him and before him. The angle is fixed and steady. Yet, he never academically excels in school. His intense dyslexia makes reading difficult and painfully laborious. Language becomes a jigsaw puzzles except all the edges have been eaten away by an algorithm of shyness and hesitancy. For a long time, he used to be a semi-driver, hauling raspberries and lemons from a distributor to Walmart. His sisters used to ask him about his life on the freeway and how he copes when the road was icy or windy or deadly. He replies, “I hate driving in California. The traffic! The load would take forever.” His sisters asked him once if he liked transporting goods in New York and in hindsight, he couldn’t recall how he responded. He recalls brushing his teeth once. But then ten minutes he would brush again. He doesn’t want the passengers to think that he was not hygienic as his high ratings were very important to him. He is the most on time person he knows.  Not too long ago, his father told his little sister, the one who got the car for him, that she should eat more vegetable and the sister responded to their father with a cold shoulder. Later, in private, he turns to his sister and says, “Out of water, a fish that doesn’t sleep in salt will become spoiled. Just like a child who doesn’t listen to her parents will as well.” And, his sister who has a firm grip on life and its consequences turns to her brother and retorts, “But, I am not a fish. I am bicycle.” Years ago, she used to ride on his back like a bicycle. Her small, chubby legs kicking back and forth, rubbing the shirt of his sides, creating a tenderness that makes him fond and fonder of her. As it seems it is easy to be fond of her. She is kind and generous and understands the law of inertia and the law of commerce really well. Rarely does she fall into the trappings of poetic poise or impulse, which is not fiscally sustainable. Members of his own family may know what salt may mean, but he understands it in a way that makes him want to be a fish grilled from a charcoal smoker: salt and ash of the earth. 

---

Vi Khi Nao’s work includes poetry, fiction, film, plays, and cross-genre collaboration. She is the author of the novels: Fish in Exile and Swimming with Dead Stars (Spring, 2022) and the story collections: The Vegas Dilemma & A Brief Alphabet of Torture (winner of the 2016 FC2’s Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Prize) and of five poetry collections: Bell Curve Is a Pregnant Straight Line, Human Tetris, Sheep Machine, Umbilical Hospital, and The Old Philosopher (winner of the 2014 Nightboat Prize). She was the fall 2019 fellow at the Black Mountain Institute. https://www.vikhinao.com

Louise Marburg

Double Happiness

Gretchen didn’t know anyone at Evan’s party, and hadn’t expected to, but she’d hoped she might meet some new people, fresh friends to enliven the long winter. She searched for an amiable face in the crowd as she crabbed her way across the wide loft, encountering mouths and noses, necks and shoulders and backs, scents of perfume and stale breath. She hadn’t been to Evan’s place before and was startled by how large it was. They’d met on Tinder two weeks ago. She hadn’t spotted him here so far.

            Her mother had once told her that a good way to start a conversation with a stranger was to ask him or her if they’d met, so when she reached the bar table that had been set up by the kitchen, she blindly turned to the nearest body and said, “Hello, do I know you?” 

            “I don’t know, do you?” said a ruddy-skinned man. He wore a chartreuse silk vest and matching bow tie. Dapper Dan, Gretchen thought. Waiting for a drink on the opposite side of him was another guy whose fine-boned face had the silken quality of Wedgewood figurine. 

            “Oh, maybe not,” Gretchen said, raising her voice above the din. She tried to move toward the Wedgewood guy without being obvious about it.  

            “I’m Bob,” the chartreuse man said. His eyes were small and watchful, the blue of the sea on a sunny day.  She guessed he was in his late thirties.  Older than her, anyway.

            “Gretchen,” she said. She saw the Wedgewood guy pour himself a glass of wine and join two women near a potted ficus tree whose leaves were turning yellow.  He, too, wore a tie, and the women wore dresses. Gretchen had one fancy outfit, a sequined sheath from a vintage store, but the sequins were falling off of it in sparkling strands, and she hadn’t been able to reattach them. The combat boots and artfully torn leggings she’d chosen to wear tonight made her feel like a disaffected teenager.

            “What can I get you?” Bob said.

            Someone else to talk to, she thought. “Just a beer, no glass. I’m Evan’s girlfriend, by the way.”

            “Ah.” He studied her. She wondered what he thought he saw. “How long have you two been an item?” he said.

            “A while,” she said as she accepted the beer. 

            “What’s ‘a while?’” he said.

            “‘A while’ is an amount of time.” 

            He laughed, exposing an overbite. “You’re a cheeky one, aren’t you.”

            Gretchen looked at him for a beat before saying, “I’m not anything, as far as you’re concerned. You don’t know me at all.”

            He raised his hands in surrender. “I’ve been told I’m an ass.”

            “And do you think you are?” she said.

            “Yes, probably, but I have good qualities as well.” He glanced over her head. “I could tell you wished you were talking to that handsome guy who just walked away. I know him, I could introduce you, if you’d like. He’s gay, but that wouldn’t matter to you, since you’re involved with Evan.”

            For a second, Gretchen was speechless. She was pinned where she stood by a woman on one side of her and a man on the other, both waiting to get a drink at the bar. “Touché,” she said. “So how do you know Evan?”

            “We’re brothers,” he said. 

            “Really?  You look nothing alike.” 

            Bob reached out and caught the arm of a passing woman whose red lipstick bled beyond the boundaries of her mouth. She looked at him as if without recognition before bestowing a slow smile. “This young lady doesn’t believe I’m Evan’s brother,” he said.

            “Who else would you be?” she said, and was carried away on the current of the crowd.

            “Why hasn’t Evan ever mentioned you to me?” Gretchen said.

            “You’d have to ask him that,” Bob said.  

            “Well, I would, but I can’t find him in this mob.”

            “He might not be here.”  

            “Of course he is, this is his party.”

            Bob shrugged. “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

            All of a sudden she felt defeated. The party’s chaotic atmosphere had developed a sinister edge in her mind, as if a violence of some kind was bound to happen, irrevocable and dire. Evan had told her the party would be casual and small, with only close friends invited. Why had he lied? He’d made her look like a fool. She wouldn’t call him again, she thought. If he called her, she wouldn’t pick up. Their relationship didn’t amount to much, as they’d only slept together three times, but she thought she had a right to be angry. “I’m leaving now,” she said. 

            “Good idea,” Bob said. “I know a bar that’s a lot of fun. We could go there.”

            How did I become we? she thought. “What’s so fun about it?”

            “It’s called Double Happiness, in Chinatown—do you know it? It looks like it’s been dug out of a cave, and they have a flaming drink called a Dragon’s Breath. They serve dumplings and things, too, if you’re hungry.” He turned his head slightly and looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “My treat,” he said.

            Gretchen was in fact very hungry, but only had six dollars, thirty-two cents, and a maxed-out credit card in her wallet. She barely made ends meet as a freelance graphic designer, a career she’d come to New York to pursue, starting as a lowly assistant at a design firm and eventually going out on her own. She was failing at it in increments. Fewer jobs came her way every year. But she had become so bored with the work that it didn’t matter to her anymore. “Sure, why not,” she said. 

            “Fantastic!” Bob tucked his arm into hers. She hesitated, scanning the crowd one more time for Evan. “I won’t tell Evan,” he said. “We hardly ever talk anyway.”

            “Maybe that’s why he never mentioned you,” she said. But she hadn’t told him anything about her family either. They really hadn’t talked much. So far, all they’d done was meet for a quick drink somewhere and go back to her place for sex.

            “He and I don’t get along very well,” Bob said. He made a boohoo face, like a clown’s. 

            She almost accused him of using her just to piss off his brother, but so what if he was? Double Happiness awaited. 

The taxicab stopped beside a waist-high berm of gray snow pocked with yellow melts of pee. Gretchen climbed over the snow like a goat, holding her arms out for balance; Bob got out of the cab on the opposite side and made a careful detour through a clear space in the curb. He took them down an iron stairwell to an unmarked door where the odor of urine combined with disinfectant cleaner was nearly overpowering. 

            Inside, the place was dim, lit only by glowing candles. The walls appeared to be made of rocks—real or faux? Gretchen wondered—and the ceiling was a low, mud-colored dome. Several small tables and mismatched chairs surrounded a long chrome bar. A number of alcoves, obscured by bead curtains, appeared to have been gouged out of the facing wall. A tall Chinese man wearing a tuxedo led them to an alcove with a red, soda fountain-style booth inside that looked like a relic from the fifties. Drawings and initials and random words were carved into the Formica surface of the table. From a speaker above the bar came a woman’s voice singing a twanging, plaintive song.  

            Bob murmured something to the man, who nodded and disappeared. There seemed to be no one else in the place. Maybe it was an after-hours spot, Gretchen thought. It was only half past nine.

            She reached out and touched the wall. It really was made of rock. “How do you know this place is called Double Happiness if there’s no sign outside?”

            “I know because a friend said so,” Bob said as he shucked his wool overcoat. “It’s a phenomenon known as word of mouth.” He gave her a bright look. “So. Here we are. Tell me everything.”

            “Everything about what?” she said. 

            “About yourself!” he said. “Let’s start with where you’re from.”

            “Here,” she said. “New York.”

            “No, you’re not.”

            “How can you tell?”

            “You have a Midwestern accent, for one thing, and you don’t look like a New Yorker. There’s something wide-eyed about you.”

            “I’m not wide-eyed. I’m almost thirty.”

            “No, that kind of look never goes away, even when you’re old and jaded.”

            “Okay, I’m from Cleveland, but I’ve been living in the East a long time. I went to art school in Philadelphia.”

            “But you’re not an artist, are you,” he said with a certainty she found annoying.

            “I am, too. Sort of.” She told him what she did for a living. 

            “Sounds as if you hate it,” he said.

            “What I hate are clients who don’t know what they want,” she said. “I show them designs and they don’t like any of them, but they can’t ever tell me what they do want. It’s infuriating.”

            “Most people don’t know what they want.” 

            “I know what I want.”

            “Oh, yes? What do you want?”

            She traced the marks on the table with her finger. “To be happy.”

            “That’s too generic. Everyone wants to be happy, or so they say. What, specifically, do you want?”

            There were so many things she wanted but couldn’t have that she had to take a minute to search the inventory stacked up in her mind. “I want a leather jacket I saw in a boutique in the Village.”  

            He shook his head. “Objects don’t count, particularly clothes. I’m talking about things like wanting to be a doctor, or wanting to live abroad, wanting to build a house with your own hands.”

            “Build a house with your own hands?”

            “I had an uncle who talked about doing that. Sadly, he never did.”

            “So, what do you want?” she said.

            “I’m not going to tell you until you tell me.”

            She regarded him through narrowed eyes. “Maybe it’s none of your business.”

            “Meaning you don’t know,” he said. “I have a friend who tells fortunes. She’s scarily accurate. You don’t have to know what you want; she tells you what you’ll get.”

            The bead curtain parted with a muted clatter. The Chinese man put a wide-bowled, long-stemmed glass on the table and produced a sparkler from his breast pocket. He lit the sparkler and touched it to the pink liquid in the glass. The surface of the liquid flickered yellow before the flame gathered momentum and flared. Even as she leaned away, Gretchen could feel its warmth.

            The flame died as quickly as it had come to life. The man handed them long plastic straws and disappeared once more. Gretchen dipped her straw into the drink. It tasted like raspberries and lemonade. 

            “Oh, it’s cold! I didn’t expect that. Delicious, what’s in it?” 

            “Cointreau? Vermouth? Lighter fluid?” Bob said. “Some things should remain a mystery.” 

            Again, the bead curtain parted. The man put a bamboo dumpling steamer on the table and gave them each a small bowl of noodles. Hungrily, Gretchen dug in with a pair of chopsticks, holding the bowl up to her chin. Bob toyed with his food, sucking up noodles one by one.  When Gretchen’s bowl was empty, she took a draw of the Flaming Dragon. She smiled at Bob. “Good stuff. Packs a punch.”

            “I knew you’d like it here,” he said. “Not everybody does.”

            “No, I can imagine, it’s not exactly the Plaza. Anyway, we just met, so how could you have known what I’d like?” She was hoping he’d say something complimentary. She couldn’t remember the last compliment she’d received. She wanted to be told she was special in some way by a man other than her father, who had believed since her birth that she would conquer the world and refused against all evidence to be convinced otherwise. Bob asked her questions, at least. Most men only wanted to talk about themselves. She checked her phone. There were three texts from Evan: where r u, where r u, and an angry face emoji. The first text had come in an hour and a half ago, the emoji in the past three minutes. Oh, fuck off, she thought as she put the phone back in her purse. 

            The man brought another Flaming Dragon just as Bob finished the dregs of the first one. Again, the flame whooshed up.

            “It’s less exciting the second time,” Bob said. “But the third time is absolutely thrilling.”

            Gretchen felt the familiar elation, bright and crisp, that preceded the slide into drunkenness. She took the lid off the steamer and maneuvered her chopsticks around a dumpling. “I like you,” she said. “You’re nothing like Evan.” 

            “You didn’t like me at first,” Bob said.

            “I can’t remember if I did or not. That was a long time ago.”

            Bob checked his watch, a thin gold disk fastened around his wrist by an alligator band. “Oh, yes, ages ago. But the night is still young. What shall we do next?”

            She took a long sip and left a swallow in the glass. “I’m not sleeping with you.” 

            “No, of course not. I wouldn’t presume. I have a girlfriend, anyway. Anemone Villeneuve. She lives in Far Rockaway, in a house on the beach. She’s visiting her aunt in St. Lucia for the week, or she would be sitting where you are right now.”

            “I don’t believe a word of what you just said. Anemone Villeneuve. What a preposterous name.”

            “Jean Smith, then.”

            “Too plain. How about Maya? I’ve always liked that name.”

            “Maya Fiorello,” he said. “Italian on her father’s side, Mexican on her mother’s.”

            “She sounds nice,” Gretchen said. “I hope you’ll be very happy.”

            “Hey, there’s a stand of Citi Bikes a block away,” he said. “Let’s get a couple of them and ride over to my friend’s, have our fortunes told.”

            “It’s like two degrees outside,” she said.  

            “Oh, don’t be a sissy,” he said.

            “Okay, but can we have another Flaming Dragon first?”

            As if he’d heard her, the man reappeared.

            “Woo hoo!” Gretchen said as the drink flickered, then flared.

She hadn’t ridden a bike since she was a teenager and felt wobbly on it at first, but after a couple of blocks she found her bearings and cruised along behind Bob through the deserted streets of the Lower East Side. Metal shutters had been pulled down over the shops, though the windows of the apartments above them were bright. She had lived in New York for almost eight years, yet she was unfamiliar with this part of town. They passed fabric stores and lighting wholesalers, a small museum devoted to the history of tenements; every now and then she caught sight of a bridge, either the Williamsburg or Manhattan, she didn’t know which. The streetlights seemed dimmer than they were uptown, the darkness between them deeper. A rat scurried in front of her bike, so big she mistook it for a cat.

            “I’m freezing!” she shouted. 

            “I know!” Bob said. “Isn’t it great?” He took his hands off the handlebars and crossed his arms over his chest. The end of his scarf fluttered over his shoulder. He looked like a boy showing off. Then he grabbed the handlebars again and pedaled standing up. Gretchen breathed heavily as she tried to keep pace, sweating inside her parka. Finally, he pulled up in front of a narrow brownstone and took his phone out of his coat pocket. “It’s me!” he said in a delighted voice. “Yes, right downstairs.”

            A window three flights up slid open. “Hiya!” said the silhouette of a woman’s head as a tin can on a string descended. Bob caught the can and fished out a key. Gretchen followed him up a flight of steps and waited for him to open the building’s door. The foyer was lit by a flickering fluorescent tube, but the stairway was almost too dim to see. She hung onto the banister, watching her step as she went. The key in the tin can business had seemed like something out of an old movie. She lived in a building where you buzzed people in.  

            “Maybe I’ll go,” she said. She turned around but was afraid to walk down alone.

            “No!” Bob said. “This is the best part.”

            “The best part of what?” she said.

            A woman leaned over the banister above them. When they reached the landing, Bob said, “Elaine, meet Gretchen. Gretchen, Elaine. Elaine is one of my oldest friends.” Elaine was very fat. Her flossy platinum hair framed her face like a cloud. She wore an orange terry cloth bathrobe and a pair of cheap terry scuffs. 

            “Welcome,” she said with a regal sweep of her hand. Coming in from the dark landing, Gretchen squinted against the yellow light cast by a globe-shaped ceiling fixture. The furniture, what little there was, looked as if each piece had originated from a different house. “You sit there,” Elaine told her, indicating a red leather ottoman. “You,” she pointed at Bob, “can sit anywhere you like.” She waddled over to a kitchenette and busied herself with something. Gretchen could hear her humming. She returned a minute later with a demitasse of coffee held on the flat of her hand. She offered the coffee to Gretchen. Puzzled, Gretchen took a sip. The cup was only half full, and the coffee was lukewarm and bitter. Elaine took the cup from her and turned it over onto a handkerchief in a saucer. The remainder of the coffee seeped through the fibers of the white fabric, staining it brown to its edges. She sat down on a filthy chintz-covered chair, turned the cup upright and peered inside it. 

            “What are you doing?” Gretchen said. Everything about being here was too weird to be fun. She wished she hadn’t agreed to come.

            “I’m studying your grounds,” Elaine said. “Isn’t that why you’re here?”

            Bob stood at the window, spying on the people in the apartment across the street. He turned and said, “Elaine is a psychic, I told you that. She reads coffee grounds.”

            “I’ve never met a psychic,” Gretchen said. “How do I know you’re real?”

            “I’m sitting here in front of you,” Elaine said with a laugh. “How much more real do you want?”

            “I mean a real psychic,” Gretchen said.

            “That you can’t know,” Elaine said. She gazed inside the cup. 

            Gretchen was fascinated by Elaine’s lack of vanity, the way she sat like a Sumo wrestler with her gigantic legs spread, the crotch of her white underpants displayed.  There was a full-length mirror on the wall by the door.  Did she check her reflection before she went out?  How much would a person have to eat to get so fat? 

            “Ah hah,” Elaine said. “I see a man with a mustache. He’s all right, but you’ve had a misunderstanding. A missed connection. He likes you more than you think.” Gretchen frowned. Evan had a mustache, but so did a lot of men. “You won’t be here much longer,” Elaine went on. “I’d say less than a year.”

            Gretchen gasped. “Why? What’s wrong with me?”

            Elaine looked up. “Nothing’s wrong with you. I mean you won’t be in New York much longer.”

            “Where will I be?”

            Elaine shrugged. “Somewhere you’ve lived before.”

            “I don’t believe you,” Gretchen said.

            “Suit yourself,” Elaine said. “So, the mustache guy. You’ve misjudged him. No, not him, exactly, but something around him.”

            “Why do you keep talking about him?” Gretchen said. 

            “I don’t know,” Elaine said. “I’m only reading what I see. Home! You’ll be going home.”

            “No way,” Gretchen said. She put her hands over her ears.

            Elaine looked at Bob. “You’ve brought me a doubter.”

            Gretchen felt her face go hot but resisted the urge to cry. In her mind’s eye she saw her mother doing laundry in the laundry nook at home—efficiently separating the lights from the darks, measuring out fabric softener—then saw herself dragging a bag of dirty clothes down to her building’s basement laundry room only to find that the machines were out of order, or she didn’t have the right change, or she’d forgotten the detergent. She could easily get work in Cleveland. She’d have the élan of coming from New York. Whenever she went home for a visit, her high school friends treated her like a celebrity. 

            “I don’t know what I want,” she wailed. “I used to know, but it didn’t work out. Why doesn’t anything fucking work out?” She had at one time imagined herself as the owner of a successful design studio. She would have worn dramatic eye makeup and mannish black clothes and had a “partner” rather than a husband, because being married would have been one of the many conventions she would have thrown off like an unfashionable coat. Her fantasy even extended to what breed of dog she would have: an Italian Greyhound, delicate and sleek, outfitted with a silver collar. She wiped her nose with the back of her hand. “Evan has a mustache. Do you think I’m meant to be with him?”

            “Hard to say,” Elaine said. “It might be too late.” 

            Bob sat on the couch and rested his elbows on his knees. His dust-colored hair had been flattened against his head by his cap. “Gretchen, listen to me. Evan wasn’t at the party tonight because he didn’t give the party. It was given by a friend of mine.”

            “But why would Evan say it was his party?” Gretchen said. 

            “He didn’t,” Bob said. “You went to the wrong party.”

            Gretchen attempted to absorb this. “That sounds like a riddle. But where is Evan?”

            “Presumably at his place, wondering where you are,” Bob said. “Give me your phone. Do you have his address in there?”

            “Why would you need his address?” Gretchen said as she handed over her phone. “I don’t understand at all.”

            “Here it is,” Bob said after scrolling through her contacts. “The party you went to was at 420 West Broadway. Evan’s address is 420 East Broadway.”

            “Fourth floor,” Gretchen said.

            “Yes,” Bob said. “But the wrong address. Do you understand what I’m saying? Why don’t we go there now.”

            “What are the odds of that happening?” Elaine said. “What are you up to, Bob? This poor girl is too drunk for your shenanigans.”

            “But you and Evan don’t get along,” Gretchen said. “I don’t want to be involved.”

            Bob bit his lip. Elaine examined her fingernails, which were a rich vermillion and unusually long. 

            “Gretchen, I’m not really Evan’s brother. I only said I was, I don’t know why. It seemed funny at the time. I’ve never met the guy.”

            “Ha ha, sure,” Gretchen said.  She looked at Elaine. “No, wait, seriously?”

            Bob took her hand and pulled her to her feet. “Thanks, Elaine,” he said.

            Elaine heaved herself out of her chair. “Yeah, okay. Bring someone sober next time.”

Leaving the Citi Bikes in Elaine’s foyer, Bob hailed a cab on Delancey, where the traffic whizzed back and forth on two lanes. “Call Evan,” he said, handing Gretchen her phone.

            “I think I need to throw up,” she said.

            Bob rolled down her window. “Do it out there, if you have to,” he said. “But for God’s sake keep quiet or the cabby will kick us out.” He took her phone and tapped Evan’s number, then handed the phone back to her. 

            She frowned. “Says the voice mailbox is full.” 

            “Fine, we’re almost there anyway.”

            “Why does this cab smell like bubble gum?” she said. “Hey, do you like me, Bob? Can we be an item?” She leaned into him and put her head on his shoulder.

            “Why not,” he said in tired voice. “But let’s find Evan first. Right here is fine,” he told the driver. “You can leave us at the corner.” He handed the driver a twenty, and hustled Gretchen out of the car. 

            “But if we’re an item, I don’t need Evan,” she said. “I don’t care about him anymore.”

            “Then you should tell him that,” Bob said. He took her arm and began walking. The street was dark and deserted except for a cafe at the end of the block. Far beyond, the lights of uptown cast a halo in the sky.  “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have lied to you.”

            “Why did you?” Gretchen said.

            “Because I’m an ass,” he said. “I told you that.”

            “Listen, why haven’t you said anything nice to me? You haven’t said one nice thing.” She stumbled on a break in the sidewalk. “Stop, you’re going too fast.”

            He stopped. “What nice thing do you want to hear?” 

            Every nice thing, she thought. An avalanche of compliments. “Obviously if I tell you it doesn’t count.”

            After a moment’s thought, he said, “You’re a good sport.”

            “Are you kidding me? You can lie your head off about everything, but you can’t bring yourself to give me a better compliment than that?  I don’t think you’re so great either.” 

            She pushed his gloved hand off her arm and walked away without him. The neighborhood was many blocks from her own, in a corner of the city she’d never known, but she knew she would recognize something eventually, a street or a building: a landmark.

---

Louise Marburg is the author of two collections of stories:, No Diving Allowed (Regal House Publishing, 2021), and The Truth About Me (WTAW Press, 2017), which was named by the San Francisco Chronicle and Entropy as a best book of 2017. Winner of the Independent Press Book Award for the short story, The Truth About Me was also shortlisted for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing. Her stories have appeared in Narrative, Ploughshares, STORY, and elsewhere. She lives in New York City with her husband, the artist Charles Marburg.

The Diptera

Douglas Mac Neil

Dear God, 

            I have thought about writing to you for some time now. The problem I keep coming back to is that you are omniscient. You have read this letter before I have written it. But I think also, that you knew Saint Augustine’s Confessions before he wrote them down, before he made them. In the world of the flesh, sometimes the need of the restless heart overrides the intellect of the brain. Beyond the needs of the heart there exists a place in my mind where I feel that you have been waiting for me to write this letter to you, and it is with this in mind that I do write to you. I have so many questions, but that is not why I am writing to you. You have heard my questions. You have listened to my petitions in my days gone past. As you listen to them in this very moment. And I know that you will hear them in the days that have not yet dawned. And I am so grateful for that.

            Today I am sitting here in this Jesuit house by the north Atlantic thinking about you in all I see, in all I hear, in everything I touch, and in everything that touches me. I am here on a spiritual retreat. The entire world is waiting with bated breath for better days in 2021. We are more than a year into the Covid-19 pandemic. The political turmoil within the nation seems to be coming to a breaking point. In it all I am getting older, but I am not sure if I am getting wiser? This January the 17^th will mark the 30^th anniversary of the first Persian Gulf War. To mark this anniversary, I am taking a vow of silence to last from the beginning of the conflict to the end. It is a total of six weeks of silence in the dead of winter in New England, in the midst of a pandemic. God, what am I thinking? Part of this journey in silence and memory has brought me to this retreat. Here is a house transformed in contemplative silence. The voice of Father Bob at Mass is the only human voice that I hear each day. 

            Seasons of darkness are in full bloom. The ground blanketed in white is resting under the gunmetal skies that flow unceasingly over the earth in this revolution of winter, and I have come to you for help. I knew this day was coming but how it dawned took me by surprise. It is the month of my father’s birth, now passed from this earth. It is the month of my parents wedding anniversary. This year it would have been 57 years, if Dad had not died in March. Mom, trapped in her small apartment in an elderly public housing complex for the poor, marked the absence of the anniversary alone. And in all this season of darkness my mind returns to the war, to my youth, and to the journey in faith that you have witnessed. Arriving to this destination, I am consumed by a poverty of spirit, broken in grief, stricken and trapped in depression, and circling defeat in the self-imposed isolation of silence. And if it ended today, how would I end?

            It amazes me, God, how I have been so convinced at various times that I was right, that I was making the right choices, and that I was doing the right thing. Only to later find out that I was so wrong. Wrong in my thoughts, in my ways, and in my choices. It has been 39 days since I have spoken to anyone outside of work. I was going to start my vow of silence on the anniversary day when the war started, but you brought me to silence on January the 12th to coincide with the anniversary of the earthquake in Haiti. As always, you were right. I will never forget the feel of the ground moving under my feet on that day. Nor, will I ever forget the sound as thousands of voices started to cry out to you. If I had not been running out of a building at the time that sound would have frozen me still. The thing is that it not only echoed across the island in that moment, but it continued through the night a chorus of terror, prayers of pleading, screams of grief. Natural destruction unfolding in front of me, around, and under me. Balanced against the designed destruction through the war all of those years ago, and I have not forgotten how you delivered me out of the fires of Kuwait and how you have held me safe ever since. In my thoughts right now, it is occurring all over again. And all I can offer it is the silence of my voice in contrition for the suffering my eyes have seen.    

            And as we enter into the season of Lent, I think of how Jesus was driven into the desert after hearing your voice, God. Days of temptation and silence repeat. I recall how I lost myself in a desert all those years ago. And now silence is returning to me. In the quiet, I meditate on those desert days in a winter war. I think of the path of Christ and where I have found it and lost it. It is a choice of faith and I have chosen to believe. It is in my belief, in this faith, that I have found the only true comfort that I have ever known. God, I do not know what is right and what is wrong anymore. I fight the doubt that breathes in my chest. Knowing the sideways spin of the world in sin and my hand in it all. I continue to wander this world searching for the redemptive moment, knowing I will never find it. The conflict in the human journey leaves no one untouched. Knocking on the door of the church, God, hear my heart, pity this sinful soul who has been so right and so wrong in so many ways, and please, God, hear my prayers that seek understanding and forgiveness for all these failings of mine.  

            Last night as I wrote, this fatigue was overtaking me. I made my bed in the Jesuit House.  A single bed on a simple frame with a crucified Christ over my head. With ocean waves breaking in the near distance, I found sleep.

            God, this morning I watched the sun rise over the eastern shores. The play of light and noise in the waking dawn of silence is really something to behold. In the last week, I struggled about coming here. The anxiety of traveling has risen, and I can’t suppress it. I thought about the quote from Hunter S. Thompson: “Buy the ticket, take the ride.” I thought about it when I was driving here, wanting, desperately wanting, to turn around, but I am taking the ride. Sitting this morning in a solarium, I watched the waves move to the shore, noticing some rolling in softly, quietly, and disappearing. I watched others form in the distance, raging towards the coast. The sea rose blue to white with an aqua green crushed between the waters, coming apart at the height. And I think of you, God, in all of this. I see the waves moving in visible motion. The clouds currently in imperceptible motion. The sun rising over the planet spinning around it, time passing, and where am I in it all? I feel like I am perceptually moving in it all. But under and in what direction am I traveling and to what destination? God, am I on the right course? Am I doing the right thing?

            Watching the waves in the solarium, as I was eating breakfast today a fly landed on the table directly in front of me. We are far into winter, and I have not seen a fly in sometime. Like many people, I have an aversion to them, with a default reflex to try and swat it and kill it, but not this time. The Diptera stood on the table rubbing its front legs together and then washing them over its head. The visit lasted for all of one to two minutes before he took flight. The faint buzz, the sight of this insect, brought my mind back to Basra. In the marshlands of southern Iraq, we had found them, or rather, the Diptera had found us. I would never have been able to understand the power of this insect without that experience. Thousands upon thousands, likely hundreds of thousands of them, populated and controlled the marshes. At night, if you were brave enough to enter the tent in the red light of war, you could see the ceiling was covered with the Diptera and it was moving. The sound was not a buzzing, not a humming; it was an operated chainsaw with an amplification of madness and soon the sound of fear enveloped me. As they covered the tent, so too did they cover my body. I recall trying to eat one of the MREs, and as I removed a spoonful of food from the package, ten flies were on top of it. I shook the spoon, shook them away, and brought the spoon rapidly to my mouth, but not before two or three of them had returned and landed on the spoon. I ate them. It was unavoidable. At first, I tried not to. I tried to separate them with my tongue and then I tried to spit them out. That effort only made me feel sick. With the next bite, I shooed them away with my other hand, but they returned by the time the spoon made it to my mouth. I placed the food very close to my mouth and tried to cover the food with my hand, but it made no difference. They are on it, crawling on my hand and on the food package, and getting inside of it. I started to eat faster and the next bite the same thing, until I just started chewing and swallowing. Worrying, irrationally that they would lay maggots in my stomach if I did not kill them in my mouth, I started chewing them thoroughly.  And God help me, I asked for you to help me in those moments as I ate them, and as I kept on eating them. And I recall how the nausea would lessen with each day. At night, if I could sleep, and we tried, I often woke with them walking across my closed eyelids, crawling into my open mouth. I would wake up spitting them out, slapping my face, screaming, especially when they were crawling on my ears, but it made no difference. Ten seconds later more were landing on my face. We stayed in the marshes for weeks. We stayed until we no longer heard them, until we no longer saw them, till we no longer tasted them. I think now that it was one of the first acts of penance for our part in the war. We consumed the Diptera that fed off of us.  It was a special kind of hell in this world, manifest in the burning oilfields of Kuwait and now in the plague-ridden marshes of southern Iraq. The bill of violence was coming due. My body nourished by the tasteless, dehydrated food as my soul filled like an empty shell in blackness that lies beyond description. And this morning, this simple, beautiful creation of yours, God, brought me back to the marshes of Southern Iraq. And I was reminded, and I remembered, and for that I am so grateful.

            I am trying to focus on the presence of you in my life, God. It is part of the reason why I am here in this Jesuit house. It is also a search for peace with the past, with the present, with the future. The capacity to focus in silence is difficult. My mind drifts. Until a simple fly brings me back into the heart of madness in the marshes of Iraq, and maybe it is okay. I think that it is okay. I keep rechanneling my thoughts when I go off track, but I fall back. As I think about it all, I see that you were with me in the marshes, as you were with me in Haiti. In all of this I look for you, as I have looked always for you. I see you in ways and places that are only visible to an eye of faith. I recognize the designer in the design. I hear your voice in the voice of man. I see blessings in deliverance, in perseverance, in tests of faith provided from you to me. God, as I close this letter I want to say thank you for not abandoning me in my hours of need. Tonight, I sleep with a less restless heart knowing that you are with me.

---

Douglas Mac Neil is an ER Nurse Practitioner and Gulf War veteran. This is his first published story.

Actaeon at the Movies

Eric Lundgren

A trenchcoated man staggers toward the marquee. The secondhand coat is only a slightly different hue from his mottled skin, rumpled and creased as parchment. He attends every screening at the revival house.

            The same film twice a night, plus the matinee on weekends. Upon arrival, after flashing his monthly pass to the bored teens in the booth, he proceeds down the counter to exchange a few wrinkled dollars for the awaiting tub of buttered popcorn.

            He arrives half an hour prior to showtime to avoid encounters. This is part of his arrangement with theatre management, which has deemed him an “unsettling presence.” But they are in no position to turn down the revenue from his monthly pass, paid on his behalf by a trust fund in Greece. Technically, by now, his picture should be enshrined with the other patrons of the theatre along the hallway leading to the art-deco ladies and gents bathroom doors. But if you’d seen him, you’d know why not.

            It is a single-screen, neighborhood cinema of the kind that no longer widely exists. Figures from the margins of society take refuge here, while their compatriots stream the latest programs to their home plasmas. Its lobby is lined with period mod furniture and its walls adorned with smoked-glass sconces.

            Some nights, it is nearly empty. He doesn’t mind in the least when management schedules a thorny subtitled art film or a bleak documentary. He’s happy to take in these obscurities ten to twenty times with a sparse assortment of film snobs, whose talk tends toward self-congratulation, with gestures and mannerisms that remind him of the philosophers strolling the agora in Athens. On such nights he can spread out.

            Despite his best efforts, his chair, isolated in a short accessible row near the back, is always coated in a fine gray dust.

            He’s grateful to be far from the screen. Even at his advanced age, his vision remains painfully perfect—unlike the heap of his numb, claylike flesh, assembled into a rough approximation of face and hands outside the trench coat. He can barely feel a thing anymore, but his eyes are two bright orbs, as sharp as they were that day in the forest long, long ago.

It is April in the cold northern city that he inhabits, and while the temperatures have warmed for his evening walk to the cinema, there are still residual traces of snow along the curbs. The residents of his neighborhood walk the streets with a light step, trailing their terriers, their beagles, their hounds and retrievers. The dogs look back at their masters, tongues askew, and strain at leashes to sniff the first signs of new growth, looking slightly crazed.

            It is a “dog-friendly” neighborhood, and they are allowed inside more or less everywhere. Not the cinema, however.

            Living here, he has developed a preference for winter. The cold gives a certain brittle integrity to his limbs. In the winter months, his back corner of the theatre is pleasingly chilly, and his sartorial choices give no one pause. If the brown nubs of his legs should collapse during the screening, he can massage them discreetly back into place without too much embarrassment.

            Cruel April also brings the Hitchcock Festival, an annual tradition that stretches back to the limits of his memory, such as it is, and encompasses several theatres in the city, each playing different highlights from the master’s oeuvre. Some years he gets off relatively easy, if his cinema plays Rope or Shadow of a Doubt.

            But this year it is a double feature of his two most feared films, Rear Window and Vertigo. He has been dreading them since the schedule was first announced, and for the past month, during previews, has been reminded of them twice every night, three times on weekends. Even the trailers can cost him a finger or two, which he must fish out of the bed of his buttered popcorn and reaffix to his hand.

            This could be almost as bad as the Rita Hayworth retrospective. Don’t even ask.

            The children on the street take furtive glances at him as he passes, tentatively, teeth gritted, toward the cinema in the lilac-scented evening.

He is not alone in the cinema—that is to say, alone among the mortals. The popcorn sellers, the moviegoers who come in, hand in hand or solo, for a nostalgic evening of immersion under the silver screen, are all a part of the temporal world where 7:00 PM or 9:40 PM are significant numbers to keep in mind. Likewise $8, the cost of a ticket (up to $12 for the Hitchcock Festival), and $6 the cost of a large popcorn. In the mortal world, these numbers must add up to a sufficient number to keep the theatre in operation.

            The theatre has kept its prices low. He can only hope that the theatre’s financial mismanagement and strange scheduling choices will lead to it being condemned and shuttered. Now that a bronze plaque affirming the theatre’s historic status has been affixed to the side of the building, it seems unlikely. But he still dreams of release.

            He and the others who share his condition.

            For the usher is always waiting there when he arrives. She was captured well in Edward Hopper’s painting New York, 1939. Her downcast elegance and symmetrical beauty just starting to pale, very much in line with the surrounding décor of the cinema, she stands on the threshold, back to the screen, handing out programs.

            No one seems to see her as they come in. Perhaps to mortal eyes she is nothing more than a rack, an inert container holding programs. No one thanks her for the program she places in their hands, nor responds when she tells them to “enjoy the show.”

            He spoke to her once. He asked her quite bluntly what she had done in her past life to bring her to this place and fate. She stiffened immediately in her pressed maroon uniform, raised her eyebrows in alarm, sure signs that he had violated protocol. They would both likely be punished for this, but he had to know.

            “I don’t remember anymore,” she whispered after a long pause. “But I think I was a cruel person who excluded others. That is why I am always outside, with my back turned to the show.”

            He reached to touch her hand. Numb as he was, he could still sense the coldness of her skin. Behind her, the screen trembled with ghostly whiteness. 

His existence is not all bleakness and repetition. There are the hours, after all, when the cinema is closed, and nothing is showing. At these times he obtains a sort of freedom.

            He has tried to skip the screenings—this is also something he is technically allowed to do, although when he steps outside, a light breeze blows him in the direction of the cinema, and his much-reconstructed body finds it hard to resist. It has been years now since he last tried to avoid the cinema, and when he does, his circumstances turn against him in a vague but thorough way. His pipes clog, his mattress begins to sag, birds fly in through the open window, roaches scuttle across the floors of his studio apartment, the landlord starts knocking angrily at his door, etc.

            For a while he even audited a few extension classes at the city’s university. He took a course called “Classical Backgrounds,” intended mainly for retirees, so he could revisit some of the old scenes and characters. Memory lane. The professor, himself retired, who looked quite at ease in his slim-cut blazer, bounced past the chalkboard in his jeans and New Balance sneakers and expostulated:

            “Think of Sisyphus, even! There’s that moment when he’s pushed the stone up the hill and it rolls back down yet again. You think he doesn’t draw that out a bit, stop to savor the moment?” And the professor mimed a man at ease, strolling down the hill to retrieve the stone, but mainly enjoying the hillside, the sun, the grass, the sheer aliveness.

            He fit in well with the retirees. A couple people even asked him to join their book club. But he declined. He had conflicts. 

            What he does now in his free time is, he follows his nature. He hunts. Goodwill, Salvation Army, St. Vincent de Paul, Half Price Books. Being on a fixed income he must mind his budget. But every day he brings home little adornments for his studio apartment a few blocks from the cinema. He finds worn paperbacks on film history and theory on the clearance shelves.

            He found a nice reading chair of pink velvet for $5. A lamp. He is on the lookout for a new trench coat but these are not frequently available in his size. Sometimes in the afternoons, he puts on 45 rpm records of 1940s popular tunes and dances around his room imagining that the usher is dancing with him. He sometimes dresses up as if for a party, but the scratches and fuzz of the records remind him it’s a party for which he is decades late.

            From the film books he picks up an occasional useful scrap: Hitchcock, for example, used the green hotel neon in Vertigo because green light had been used on the British stage to signal the appearance of a ghost.

He doesn’t bring his penis to the cinema anymore. It’s always the first part to detach, and it is more of a distraction than anything. He doesn’t need it to process the buttered popcorn and small complimentary plastic cups of water the theatre provides to sustain him. He keeps his penis in a small glass display case on the windowsill, where it gestures grayly toward the light outside in a state of semi-erection. He spritzes it with water every few days.

If you were to ask him how many times he has seen Rear Window, he would say “about 300,” but this comes with a caveat—he has seen the first half hour of Rear Window about 300 times. He has read about the remainder of the film, the mystery that unfolds in the stage-set apartment courtyard backdrop, but this is not something he can experience firsthand in any way, much less “watch.”

            The way Grace Kelly descends out of the darkness, pure goddess, with almost no warning. No matter how many times he sees it, he is never prepared for it. Her slow motion descent to kiss the hobbled Jimmy Stewart in his wheelchair detonates him, though sometimes a stray eyeball can still focus sufficiently to watch her circle the room, turning on three floor lamps in succession while reciting her name, “Lisa . . . Carol . . . Fremont.”

            But that is all. At this point, one of his eyes is fixed on the ceiling of the theatre, which features a large trompe l’oeil rendering of the muses, and Apollo, and the skull of Zeus disgorging Athena, and other defining moments in the pre-history of cinema: these early movie theater designers were so grandiose! They’ve got little winged Mercurys up there, and cherubs strumming lyres, just throwing everything together haphazardly!

            His other eyeball, unfortunately, has rolled several rows forward and now rests at the dirty heel of a young woman in flip-flop sandals who is flexing her foot in a repetitive motion which tenses the slim curves of her calf.

            His “reconstitution procedure” involves a visualization of his own body sitting comfortably in his cinema chair. The work is intensive and slow. He must fill the stained and spattered trench coat gradually with the parts of his body that have gone astray. When the stitch job is complete, he recalls the eyeballs with an intense concentration that exhausts his will. Rolls them back up over his knotted legs, over each fold in the trench coat, up the ruts in his neck until they settle back into the dry sockets.  

            It is a shame because as cinema heroes go, he relates quite strongly to L.B. Jeffries, as played by Jimmy Stewart, the hobbled war photographer who must expend his voyeuristic energies on his neighbors while recovering from injuries received in the field.

Even Ovid had to admit: “But if you look closely, you will find that it was the fault of chance and not wickedness. What wickedness was there in error?”

            But then at the conclusion of his tale, the exiled poet hedges his bets. 

            “The debate is undecided: to some the punishment is more violent than just, merely for seeing the face of a goddess, while others approve it and call it fitting because of her strict vow of virginity. Both can make a case.”   

            If only he had been turned into a tree or something, gnarled branches groaning in the wind.

Vertigo is a different story. 

            While there are moments throughout the film that cause him to collapse slightly, such as when Kim Novak wakes in her bathrobe and realizes that “Scottie” Ferguson (again played by the necromancer, Jimmy Stewart) has seen her nude after rescuing her from the water under the Golden Gate Bridge, the pivotal moment does not come until late in the film.

            When Kim Novak reemerges, after being painstakingly reconstructed from the painfully Midwestern Judy by Jimmy Stewart, with the blonde bun, and the gray suit, in the green hotel neon through the window, and the full swell of Bernard Hermann’s score singing out. 

            The goddess moment.

            So for a full two hours he is a more or less normal spectator, allowing the strings of his anticipation to be pulled taut, in the slow gradual and dreamlike build.

            The experience of watching Vertigo folds back on itself, so it is impossible to say how many hundreds or thousands of times one has seen it.

            He has read that at the end of the film, Kim Novak throws herself from the clock tower in fear, leaving “Scottie” i.e. Stewart trembling with fear on the heights, reprising his unprocessed trauma—one could see the film just beginning again from here.

            We could say, with Ovid, that to some the punishment is more violent than just, while others approve it.

            This is not to even mention the scene in Muir Woods, one of the most dreamlike in all cinema, where Stewart and Novak descend into deep time, the centuries written in rings on the severed and opened trunk of the sequoias, always green, ever-living. Kim Novak tracing an inch with her finger: Somewhere in here I was born . . . and there I died.

            It comes to him at night sometimes, in his narrow studio bed, his punishment redoubled by his own subconscious. And in his bed, upon waking, he must reconstruct himself.

            His surprise at seeing a more or less intact, recognizable human face in the mirror, rather than a Picasso assemblage of features jumbled together. The dogs had not really eaten his face, because there was not much meat there. Just scratches, really.

The thing was, he had just been going about his business that day, wiping the blood off his spear with the edge of his tunic as he took an afternoon walk.

            The dogs were finishing off the stag that he and his buddies had roasted for lunch, and a few of them were already napping in the shade. Blanche and Wingfoot, always the closest of comrades, were getting comfortable side by side in the grass.

            The light filtered through the trees prismatically to touch his skin. He felt warm, abundant, blessed. He followed the light’s spidery suggestions through the forest, going no direction in particular until the laughter of his buddies and the sated grumbles of the dogs feasting on stag guts faded away.

            In its place, something sweeter and airier, like lyre strums. The water lapping at the edges of the reservoir, light tipping the little waves as they collapsed on the rocks. The musical, lilting sound of laughter and water splashing.

            Nymphs! he thought.

            With his hunter’s silent footsteps he crept to the water’s edge and positioned himself behind a large olive tree with trunk splayed at eye level. He saw blonde hair cascading over a creamy shoulder and a toothy giggling smile. Plump white swells of flesh glistening in the clear water. 

            But as he positioned himself for a better view, he discerned something in the background of the scene: a grotto, which Ovid refers to as “something not man-made,” with an arch-like entrance leading to a dark void in the rocky shore, a precursor of the theatres in which he has spent his long centuries. 

            It was then that the nymphs dispersed, revealing the naked goddess and her black stare of pure hatred that pierced him across the water, even at this distance. Looking down at his reflection, he saw not the splayed tree trunk but two stag horns jutting from his head at the exact same angle.

            Behind him, his friends calling out his name, and closer, the barking of the dogs. It was no surprise to see Dorceus (Quicksight) and Dromus (Racer) at the head of the pack. But it was little Asbolos (Sooty) who took the first bite. Playful, the way they wrestled around the fire when he was a puppy. Until he felt the searing pain and saw the bloody hunk of flesh between Sooty’s teeth.

            The eyes that had gazed at him with love and devotion now contained nothing but the black and immortal hatred of Artemis. Sooty grinned with his cute little crooked tooth through mouthfuls of blood.

Perhaps we have overlooked the organist. He takes the stage most evenings to play a few tunes before special events (i.e. the Hitchcock Festival). The organ is installed on a platform that rises out of the stage somewhat magically—a fine reward for those who have made it to the cinema this early. And he is always early. The old man wears red suspenders over a white shirt that seems large for him, that might ripple uncontrollably were it not for the suspenders. His thick glasses and bald pate gleam in the stage lights.

            With great enthusiasm, he plays songs that no one recognizes—at best vaguely familiar to some of the older cinemagoers. The songs speak of people and places that have long vanished, and so it is better to let the sounds wash over you with a warm nostalgic glow without working too hard to place them.

            He has seen no signs that the organist is in the process of training an apprentice, and it is hard to say who the cinema could find to replace the old man, as he seems to be the only one who knows how to operate the organ’s elaborate system of pedals, knobs, and buttons. If or when the organist dies, the organ will have to stay permanently concealed in the stage on its sunken platform, vibrating slightly with the memory of these old, forgotten songs.

            Still, when the organist plays, he allows himself a few moments of happiness, even though he knows what is coming. So maybe the professor was not entirely wrong. He is descending the hill to collect the stone. He crunches his buttery popcorn in his gums and taps the nubs of his feet on the cinema floor, sticky with a residue of spilled soda. He looks over at the usher, her programs ruffling in the breeze from the lobby, her back turned to the spectacle as it always must be—swaying slightly to the music.

            The old man turns around at the end of his performance, faces the audience through thick-rimmed glasses, and receives a scattering of applause. Latecomers are still making their way in. The organist stands weakly as the platform descends back into the stage, and when the old man waves goodbye to the crowd, Actaeon always feels he is waving to him. 

            As the organist descends out of sight, he wonders what the wrinkled hand has touched and what the deep-set eyes have seen. Then the old man is gone, the curtains judder and part, and the lights go down.

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Eric Lundgren is the author of the novel The Facades, published by The Overlook Press and named a fiction finalist for the William Saroyan International Writing Prize. His work has appeared in Tin House, Boulevard, The Los Angeles Review of Books, and The Millions. He lives in Minneapolis and works for the University of Minnesota Press.

The Dog Doesn’t Die

L Favicchia

I had nightmares long after Father had drained the marsh, and it was a while before I could hold frogs again, afraid they may try to avenge themselves on me, bubble up through holes in my back, leave me always open. The Suriname toad gives birth this way, burying her young in her own flesh, releasing them through skin that looks like it would forever whistle if she walked through a windy forest in her aftermath, and I was always afraid of that kind of love. But my mother brought him to me, an admirably sized toad, one who had earned his place here but had fled to our grassy yard with the marsh filled and gone. 

            His face was half mowed away but still sputtering. My mom was too weepy with guilt to fully form words, but she trusted me at ten. I watched the abandoned lawn mower rolling by itself, the vibrations from its own popping motor carrying it slowly forward. I took the toad in my hands, an unexpected puddle, brought it to the garage and placed it in the straw-lined box where the one-legged infant chickadee hadn’t made it through the night—I had buried its soft, motherless body but left the box where it was. The toad tipped over and kicked its legs until I sat it back up, blood-damp hay matted to its missing face. Father’s small, agile hammer lay out in the open on his anvil. 

            My mother had corralled the mower, and it sputtered for a moment before remaining silent, leaving the front yard half pinstriped. The soggy remnants of marsh were left in limbo, too water-filled to ever cut, a protest against my father who had drained it, expunging many years of myths about drowned surveyors, of moaning slippery elms dropping branches upon wayfarers, of long, low groans and corn knives hidden beneath burial mounds, and many generations of leopard frogs. Sloped and dried, the water was slowly growing back beneath straw and forcibly planted grass that threatened to sink tires. It never wanted to grow there, and most of the seeds resisted germination, though a few were forced into life. I took the frog to the rocks by the black drainage pipe, set it on quartz and steadied my hand—it had no eyes to look at me. 

Father was a farrier and spent most of his days making and fitting horseshoes, pounding steel, hammering it into something like a fingernail. It was a family trade—he had been raised to efficiently bend and shape iron with therapeutic effect, but he hated horses and, working with files, hammers, a forge heating steel white, and, of course, large, easily startled animals, he frequently injured himself. 

            He came home from work that day with a cauliflower thumb blooming in every direction with splintered nail and finger gut. He sat down on the couch complaining of back pain while our dog licked the sweat from his face. He didn’t get stitches. Instead he groaned in the bathroom as he sliced away the ballooned flesh with a dulled pocketknife and shoved the rest back inside, wrapping it hard with gauze to make the cells remember each other. He let the nail turn blood blister and was back at the forge the next day. He took me with him to the barn where I handed him horseshoe nails while he stooped under a large, chestnut mare frothing with sweat, the thumb of his free hand too swollen to pick the slender metal slivers from their small box himself. 

            He drew his hammer swiftly back toward his eye each time he landed a blow, driving steel into a space as wide as its own margin of error. The horse blinked. Swatted flies with coarse tail and stomped—Father punched its gut and swore, pinched its heel and forced its leg back between his. Told me to hold its head. I swatted flies away from her damp forehead with her long bangs. Tickled her beard, left untrimmed in the off-season. Father always startled everyone with the swiftness of his hammer, how closely and quickly he drew it back to his own face.

            Father came home one day with his eye blown wide, iris silvery against scarlet. The pupil in that eye would remain forever dilated disproportionately, as if someone had hooked it and was always gently tugging. The hammer claw left a long scorch on his lower eyelid that singed everything away but a bright, pale lip. From then on his eyelashes grew inward, fine and see-through, but sharp into egg-white flesh. 

On the way to an optometrist, Father glanced at me with that one, oblong pupil and I chanced a look back from beneath thick bangs that grew thicker every time my mom cut them, allowing titmouses and blue jays to carry away a little more chestnut to build their nests with. Father slammed on the breaks when the vehicle in front of us lurched and a deer, a large, antlered buck, burst through its rear window and tumbled lifeless, my father said, until it stopped just beneath our scorched brake pads, his trailer jackknifed. Father got out, said stay, and went to the small pea-green car. 

            Hair, silvered and frizzed, sat in shock at the wheel, over and over saying it’s still in the car, it’s still in the car. Father pulled her out, clammy and broken, and sat her on the gravely shoulder. When he reached back inside past the front seat for her purse, he saw the black hoof and muscular, blood-blown thigh. An ambulance probably came, but I’d only remember so many sunken eyes. That night I dreamed I met a buck in the marsh, staring at me with its many-tiered horns. It hooked the lowest bough around a mossy slippery elm and pulled the spiny antler from his head where it landed in beds of orange pine. He lifted it with his soft, whiskered mouth, extending his neck gently toward me, waiting for my open hand. 

            I spent the next day rearranging square-cut box nails of varying lengths that had jumped into the wrong drawers, pulling CU 5 slims from size 6 city-heads, and fishing Capewell 4.5 racers from Mustads. Years later my father would ask if I remembered organizing his trailer, saying that was his favorite story to tell his friends, what a good job I did. 

Back then, my only companion was my dog, an old shepherd who would follow me around the yard as I placed acorns and leaves in the low crooks of trees. I believed deer would come to eat them and would become ecstatic when I’d return on occasion to find them missing, never suspecting the wind. But I was always careful to avoid the black drainage pipe. We went happily along like this, neither of us allowed beyond the old cow wall, careful never to cross its borders even in the places where rain and time had worn it down so that in one near-accidental step you could cross to the other side.

            One day, sometime after the deer dream but vague, like all my memories, my dog and I sat at the base of the small hill I sometimes liked to sled down in the winter. He suddenly began barking at the knoll—an alarming sound from a silent shepherd with no job to fulfill anymore. I ran in time to see it, black-bodied and bull-headed, slinking through fresh grass clippings. It disappeared in a ripple before I could retrieve the blue plastic bucket I used to catch all my living things, but my dog still saw the ghost snake when I couldn´t. I followed as he chased it down to the patch of quartz by the raspberry bushes I was not allowed to pick, because they were dangerously close to the corroded mouth of the black drainage pipe, full to the brim with bees. 

            My dog let out a rapid series of pained squeals until he fell silent, out of sight from where I stood in the brambles. I threw my small handful of raspberries against the bleeding quartz to drag him to the house. I sat with my mother in the oak kitchen as she spoke softly to me, the loud, fruity wallpaper behind her; cartoon lemons, cherries, small bunches of grapes. But while she was talking and rubbing ointment on my one sting, my mind was still back at the black drainage pipe, crawling through on hands and knees, mud-sleek, until it became dark, until I could no longer feel my limbs, lured by the scent of honey, the mouth of the queen still thick with saliva. I dreamed I could go to where the pipe let out on the other side, of rebirthing myself from its slick black body far beyond the old cow wall, out of sight of the stained quartz. 

            The next day my father ripped up all the raspberry bushes and paved over their corpsed roots, a place for him to park his trailer. When he was finished and not looking, I surveyed the remains. Everything had been mowed away except for one tender stalk where the old brambles used to give way to the woods. One raspberry with only three small pods still clung to its easily startled stem. I took it to softer ground and buried it whole without understanding that not all things can be coaxed from the ground. 

My father had never given me permission to forage through the woods beyond the old cow wall behind our house, but that day he let me so I could see where he buried my dog. He led me over the mossy stones, dried and crumbling flecks of mint green catching on worn corduroys. Stumbling through piles of forgotten leaves, clutching the sparkly pink guts of a hula hoop I brought to decorate his grave, I imagined families of deer ticks crawling up beneath my loose pant leg, over the rim of my sock and down to my warm ankle and blue veins. 

            Eventually my sneaker, bought floppy to grow into (though I never would), caught on something and gently nudged it up above the leaves—shiny like ivory or a tusk, it was a freshly-shed antler. Turning, seeing what I had found, my father rushed over to pick the antler up by the base—the rough, bony tendrils seemed to reach, like they had not yet forgotten the young velvet forehead they so recently fell from. My father held the antler mockingly to a corner of his forehead, his own receding hairline, at its toothy root. Suddenly no longer fearful of copperheads disguising themselves beneath the rust of displaced water and oranged pine, he ploughed through the leaves hoping to find another. For some reason words wouldn’t come to me, and I couldn’t say I wanted to go home to check my ankles. That antler had been sharp, not yet dulled by tree bark like the pair I encountered years later, still attached to their quivering body.

I’d eventually grown past the days of trying to leave treats for deer in trees, of believing that any good could come from that place anymore where everything else had fled. I’d grown anxious and quiet like my surroundings and drove nervously at night. Driving home one evening, I slowed to a stop as a family of deer crossed the street ahead of me—a mother, two daughters, and a son. They moved leisurely across the pavement but were close to the other side now. Only the large buck still remained in the road. 

            As I watched, I saw a sudden stream of light moving fast up the other side of the hill. The buck’s thighs and flashing tail were still passing over concrete and onto the grassy shoulder. My hand hovered trembling over my wheel but would not honk, though I would tell my family later that I had. The drunk driver rode fast and blindly and I had taken too long to decide between confrontation or the small, foolish hope that I was wrong, that the driver knew the buck was there and had everything perfectly timed to stop or to just miss. 

            The driver’s headlight caught the buck’s flank so hard that glass and fluorescent bulb tore away and violently split, flying through the air and hitting my windshield from the other side of the road. The driver kept going, seemingly unaware that anything had even happened, no doubt surprised later in a hungover haze to find his car destroyed, blood and fur matted to what was once his bumper. 

            Inaction was something else I had learned gradually, as gradually as the marsh gave up its fight. Though still damper than the rest of the property, the toads, frogs, water bugs, and twisting vines never returned. The yard was left instead as a soggy plot of slender, sparse grass next to a long, winding, concrete driveway that ran away from the woods.

            After driving a little way, I would eventually decide to turn around, hoping not to find him there, or that he could be helped. Instead I returned to watch him die, larger than I ever thought he’d be, so close I could have touched him—I wanted to touch him, to soothe like a little ointment and a Band-Aid on a single bee sting. This I was right not to do, and it was right that I watch as shock-stricken eyes dulled, the stilling of rippling fur over ribs.

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L Favicchia is a PhD candidate in creative writing at the University of Kansas and is the Editor in Chief of LandLocked. Their work has appeared in The Rupture, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, and Hobart, among others.