Author: Post Road

Brandon Hobson: The Cherokee Novelist Who Quietly Kicked Off the Fifth Wave in Native American Fiction

Erika T. Wurth

Like myself, Native American author Brandon Hobson was quietly publishing novels with independent presses for years, to very little fanfare save a few glowing reviews in places like The Atticus Review, Electric Literature, and Green Mountains Review. The only Native author folks cared about for two decades was THE Sherman Alexie, and for years, he was all anyone would talk about when it came to Native literature.

            To be fair, when Hobson’s first nove Deep Ellum was published in 2014, it, like the rest of his early work, did not (directly) address Cherokee identity—a rarity in Native letters. With the exception of Pueblo author Martin Cruz Smith, Native American work by Native people has historically been filled with more bombastic expressions of identity, something that American audiences became accustomed to—and which Alexie certainly exploited. (And as a sidenote, after publishing The Indians Won and Nightwing, Cruz went on to publish novels that only occasionally addressed Native identity, an interesting choice when you think about the success of his first novels—which certainly spoke to his cultural heritage, published in 1970 and 1977, right in the midst of the original Native American Literary Renaissance.) In any case, in Hobson’s Ellum, the plot revolves around a boy named Gibson who comes home to Dallas, after his mother overdoses. Similarly, in his second novel, Desolation of Avenues Untold, there is no (outward, or overt) expression of Cherokee identity. It’s set in a fictional city in Texas, focusing on a search for a pornographic film made by Charlie Chaplin by a man named Bornfeldt Chaplin, a divorced guidance counselor. Additionally, the aesthetic of both are mainly postmodern; Ellum, “rip[ing] apart the diction into poetic stanzas of absurd animalism and literary panache, creating a somber tone…supported by a surreal air of drug-induced hallucinations” while in Desolation “…the POV shifts frequently. Some chapters are articles, or overheard conversations, evoking a multimodal pastiche.”

            It is at this point in his career where Hobson decided to depart fairly radically, in form and content, from his previous work. In Where the Dead Sit Talking, published with Soho—while still an independent press,a massive step up), Hobson begins with several traditional Cherokee stories, and a main character, Sequoya, who identifies as Cherokee early on. The novel is mainly in the tradition of literary realism, as it is primarily narrative and linear. Dead’s protagonist is Sequoya, whose mother has ended up in jail. Subsequently, he’s forced into the foster system, ending up in a home with an older white couple and foster sister Rosemary, who is also Native American (Ponca), and who shares a similarly tumultuous past. A killer of a novel, one that addresses urban Indian life with subtlety, and its dark subject matter with grace—a novel that in terms of language is simply a lyrical masterpiece—Dead touches on something that deeply affects Native people, but is rarely talked about: Native children that end up in the social work system. Additionally, Sequoya and Rosemary—his well-wrought characters—are complicated, disturbing, tender, and so very, very human, and yes, absolutely Native, without resorting to the bombastic.

            Though a clear departure from his first two novels, and in my estimation his strongest work at the time, Dead seemed doomed to its predecessors’ fate as a well-regarded novel in small circles, but one which was unable to garner a larger audience. The Native American author people were talking about, after they stopped talking about Alexie’s transgressions, was Arapaho/Cheyenne writer Tommy Orange, who seemed to be taking the singular baton from Alexie’s tarnished hand. Represented by top agent Nicole Aragi, Orange had garnered immediate and immense acclaim for a novel that in form wasn’t all that unlike Hobson’s early work, with a lyrical essay sandwiching postmodern slices of life from various urban Indians from the Oakland area, inspired by a video project Orange had done himself in previous years. Additionally, though generally loathe to praise any of his fiction writing peers (with the exception of his predecessors), Alexie backed Orange before his fall, adding to Orange’s singular boost.

            Both books—Dead and There, were published in 2018, mere months apart—and a year after Alexie’s last book. As was expected, There was longlisted for the National Book Awards. But, to my great pleasure and surprise, so was Dead. Dead, though not taking the final prize, was then shortlisted, and what I had seen the minute I’d discovered this book was soon seen by so many—and which had the lovely effect of disrupting the idea that there could only be one prominent Native writer at a time. Immediately after this, the science-fiction/fantasy work of Pueblo writer Rebecca Roanhorse began to explode—garnering a second look at Blackfeet literary-horror author Stephen Graham Jones (Blackfeet), who had also been toiling away for years. And, as an author who’d garnered commercial success, and like Hobson—was a Cherokee citizen not highlighted as such—science-fiction writer Daniel H. Wilson. Soon after, Cherokee citizen Kelli Jo Ford’s work came out (realism/literary)—with two reviews in The New York Times. And in crime fiction, no one is beating it up harder than Sicangu Lakota author, David Heska Wanbli Weiden.

            Without doing anything more than continuing to write, writing better each time, Hobson created the second Native American Renaissance—or Fifth Wave—that I had been hoping for, for more than fifteen years.

            At this point in time, Roanhorse has shot into the literary stratosphere, with a number of books out. She’s also the first Indigenous author to win a Hugo. Jones has moved house to the big presses, and has accrued numerous awards. Weiden, also nominated for every crime award in existence, is under contract for his next—and his fan base is salivating. And though Orange has both a highly anticipated collection and novel coming out, Hobson has a novel coming out, too—and Ford is hard at work on her next. This is a time for celebration, a time in which none of us have to be the only one, or the singular explainer of Native culture via our art. We can all simply write about our tiny, sometimes quietly imaginative—sometimes wildly imaginative—corners of the universe, with the kind of artistic freedom our predecessors (many of whom were and are richly talented, and worked hard for those to come) could only dream of.

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Erika T. Wurth’s publications include two novels, two collections of poetry, and a collection of short stories. A writer of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, she teaches creative writing at WIU and has been a guest writer at the IAIA. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in numerous journals including Buzzfeed and The Kenyon Review. She will be faculty at Breadloaf in 2021, is a Kenyon Review Writers Workshop Scholar, attended the Tin House Summer Workshop, and has been chosen as a narrative artist for the Meow Wolf Denver installation. She is Apache/Chickasaw/Cherokee and was raised outside of Denver.

Joy Priest’s Horsepower

Chet’la Sebree

There are writers you know and writers you know. Some of the writers you know because you navigated an MFA together or bonded over meals at a residency. Other writers you know from a nexus of people with whom you are connected through one-off encounters at conferences and readings or—commonly, in our increasingly digital and remote world—through the internet.

            I cannot remember how I became acquainted with 2021 National Endowment for the Arts Poetry Fellowship recipient Joy Priest and her work—perhaps through our mutual connections, perhaps through reading her work in Virginia Quarterly Review or Wildness. I don’t know. But I do know I had been eagerly awaiting the release of her debut poetry collection Horsepower, selected by Pulitzer Prize winner and former US Poet Laureate Natasha Trethewey as the winner of the 2019 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. What I also know is that the book did not disappoint—gripping me in a way that made me want to know her and her work more.

            Horsepower is a propulsive collection that takes us into the complicated hearts of people we love as it navigates not only the speaker’s community in Kentucky but also larger conversations surrounding race, class, gender, and girlhood. The collection feels timely. To say that, however, almost feels like I’m selling it short, as this collection also feels as though it will withstand the test of time. There is an endurance not just tethered to the force of horses that populates the book or the enduring reality of racism in our country, but in Priest’s language and formal attention. As I arrived at the collection’s closing poem “Pegasus”—wherein the speaker stands nose to nose with the mythical creature seemingly prepared for takeoff—I found myself wanting to stay on the ground a little longer in these poems whose rich textures and lush Louisville landscapes make me ache.

            In “Junker,” Priest writes, “Nostalgia is a tease / like honeysuckle. The scent / never lasts”—an apt description for how we try to hold tight to our skittering memories of the past. Priest, however, is able to sustain that scent throughout the collection, making me feel at home in a region of the country that is foreign to me. I was entrenched in the speaker’s visceral memories of the streets and smells of a personal history. Even still, I felt their wispiness, felt how at any moment the threads of the past could come undone and leave me hungering for them. Horsepower is “obsessed with / What’s phantom,” as Priest writes in “The Payphone.”

            As previously mentioned, I’m drawn into the collection not just by the conversations but by Priest’s craft. I am drawn in by the book’s intricacies and woven structure. On my most recent read, I was delighted by the different forms of “spark” (“sparks,” “sparkle,” “sparking”) which appear across Horsepower’s sections and the pollen that pollenates different moments. These reemergences feel like little Easter eggs tying together the larger narrative arc. They reveal an intentionality and craft on both macro and micro levels, in the arc and in the language. Although the book is laden with a grief, an ache, a longing, I am constantly delighted by the beauty of the language, by how “the skunk pulled back / to its muscles” (“Junker”) resonates as much for me as a halo of hummingbirds in “Self-Portrait as Disney Princess.”

            The craft in this book is immediately apparent with “American Honey,” which opens the first section and takes the form of an inventive sestina. I mean, the sestina form itself is a complicated patchwork consisting of six six-line stanzas—in which the last word of each line of the first stanza repeats in a varying order as the last word in each line in each of the subsequent five stanzas—followed by a three-line stanza, which features all six words as well. Priest takes it a step further to augment some of the words along the way—allowing “star” to become “sparkle” and “sparking” and allowing “girl” to be “girlhood” and also “granddaughter.” This poem immediately follows the lobby poem—which comes before the first section and opens the collection—which also happens to be the title poem. Often, title poems are buried somewhere deep in the body of a book, reminding us of its weight, of what we’ve done to arrive at that poem. For me, there is a confidence and immediate intimacy achieved by Priest’s decision to have “Horsepower” appear first, as she revs her engine and lets us in.

            The collection as a whole embodies what Priest writes in “Girl 6”; it occupies “an intense state of longing punctuated by quick sparks of contentment.” As the book looks back on the complexities of a family, of a community, of a life, there is a tenderness coupled with an enviable candor. As a reader, I feel the urge to run toward and away from the “West Coast sound bubbling into a night otherwise country & silent” (“Ghost Ride”). I, too, feel the dichotomy of “I’m leaving / & being left” (“Pegasus”).

            Horsepower is thoughtfully wrought and compelling. Although I felt the “splitting” and “coming apart” Priest writes about in “Pegasus,” I felt a hopefulness at the end of this collection. And even though I wanted to stay with Horsepower, with Priest, with the speaker a little longer, I, alongside the speaker and Pegasus, felt the power of flight.

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Chet’la Sebree is the author of Field Study, winner of the 2020 James Laughlin Prize,and Mistress, which was nominated for an NAACP Image Award. She is the director of the Stadler Center for Poetry & Literary Arts and an assistant professor at Bucknell University. For her work, she has received fellowships and awards from the Academy of American Poets, Hedgebrook, MacDowell, and Yaddo. Her work has recently appeared in Dr. Ibram X. Kendi & Dr. Keisha N. Blain’s Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019.

Way of the Dog

Douglas Silver

Clark Rodney moved into Piper Mansion during the summer I walked dogs. Technically, it wasn’t a mansion—a granite three-story colonial with porte cochère and wraparound porch that reminded me of commercials hawking powdered lemonade—but this was Axle Junction. A boil on the wrist of Michigan that hadn’t manufactured a car axle since before I was born, when there was still profit to be reaped from technicalities.

            Anyway, a mansion makes for a better story. That’s one conclusion I’ve drawn over the many years contemplating how to tell my son about losing my right eye: he’d show more deference for a mansion. Particularly one built by a titan of the automotive revolution. A man, Archibald Piper, whose hard-knocks fortitude and serpentine cunning transformed a nugget of hardpan into a bustling factory at the turn of the twentieth century. A factory that mushroomed into a town—the spirit made flesh—inhabited by thousands who embodied Archibald Piper’s quest to wed every car in America with a Piper axle. A vision that endured for nearly seventy years, until the morning he plugged his mouth with an heirloom Smith & Wesson revolver and turned his bedroom headboard into a Jackson Pollock.

            With this, too, I’d take liberties. I have no idea the make or model of gun, or the room in which he ate it. I have envisioned the firearm as a Ruger 9mm, a Colt .45, a Beretta shotgun. However, it’s the heirloom Smith & Wesson revolver I’ve settled on. Something about the grisly specter of that notched, patinaed cylinder bunching Old Archie’s wilted cheeks. The rosewood grip jutting over the mantel of his desiccated lips. The subliminal poetry of a tycoon put down by a bullet old enough to have been quarried from the very ore as his maiden axle.

            The luxury of other people’s histories is that you owe them nothing. Which is why when the day comes for my son to learn about the summer I met Clark—a summer two decades after Archibald Piper’s suicide and subsequent revelation that The Piper Company was bankrupt and its employees’ pensions looted—I’ll begin with what I can’t know and end with what I can’t change, and hope my son recognizes that truth owes no debt to fact.

            And the truth remains that at the start of that summer I was what every boy is when in spitting-distance of his driver’s license: a man. All I needed was a car and I’d have the world. I had begun searching for a summer job in April, balking at each dungeon of retail that presented itself in all its minimum-wage, chintzy nametag glory. Then tragedy struck and I glimpsed hope. Amos Pune, a retiree who’d been supplementing his Social Security income by walking the neighborhood’s dogs, suffered a coronary while skinny-dipping in the creek. (“At least no dogs were hurt,” became a frequent refrain in the days following Pune’s waterlogged corpse trawled and buried.) I drew up flyers, adding RIP Amos at the bottom, and plastered them throughout town. By the time school let out, I was raking in more money than in my two previous summer jobs combined. (All cash, because why pay into Social Security when you’ll just die buck-naked mid-breaststroke and leave Uncle Sam to pocket the rest.)

            Almost as satisfying as the money was the bliss of lazy mornings in bed with a Discman and car magazines, empathizing with the tortured ballads of Sonic Youth while mooning over my dream hotrod. The morning I met Clark Rodney that fantasy consisted of a crow black Lamborghini Diablo VT souped-up with a V12 nitrous oxide engine, F150 bucket seats, tinted windows, and Alpine stereo system with atomic subwoofers. A genie’s bottle on wheels I could have fantasized about all morning. I would have too, if not for the three dogs waiting for me.

            I picked up Flash, Mr. Lomann’s arthritic and yappy rescue Greyhound, whose barking commenced the moment I leashed him. We ambled around the block to collect the Davis’ bulldogs, Rock and Hudson. The four of us set out through the neighborhood. Drifted, really, past trees streamered with crinkled red, white, and blue crepe paper and houses wainscoted with bunting. Fourth of July had found me ricocheting between street parties, sampling from miscellaneous chuck wagon buffets and jockeying for a spot in football games captained by kids who, over the years, had written me off as a runt, dipstick, loser, puny spaz dickhead. I watched from the sideline, game after game after game, praying someone would be summoned by their parents or cripplingly injured, any opportunity to prove I wouldn’t splatter when tackled. My hopes set with the sun, at which point the games disbanded and my classmates, firecracker stashes secured, faded into the night and left me to stare at the sky.

            However that was poised to change. By September, I’d have money for a down payment. Not for a Lamborghini Diablo VT, but something with flair and horsepower. Certain to get me from here to there and garner plenty of attention along the way. That’s what I was reminding myself when the double-wide moving van sputtered past me, its filthy exhaust stinging my eyes and sending Flash into a coughing fit. I wouldn’t have given it a second thought had the van not banked onto the private turnoff leading to Piper Mansion.

            Sure, I was blown away at learning the mansion had new owners. But it wasn’t curiosity or awe that compelled me to reroute the dogs and hustle after the van’s exhaust cloud. It was money, plain and simple. The adolescent choplogic and barefaced gumption that assured me anyone who could afford that house had several dogs and would gladly shell out triple my normal rate. That I could buy an even more imposing car and never again be relegated to the sideline.

            Flash lagged as we neared the turnoff, spittle foaming around his jowls like a milk moustache, though his barking somehow amplified. I steered him and the bulldogs into a shaded grove, knotting their leashes to a tusk of deadwood and then trudging up the gradient. The porch inched into view, its tawny balustrades like nicotine-stained teeth.

            An elephantine mover shouldered an armoire up the porch steps, abruptly halting at the door. He craned his head, and I noticed a bald man sitting with his knees crunched to his chest. He gestured with his neck like someone draining water from his eardrum. The mover, peeved, about-faced and galumphed around the side of the mansion.

            It was then the bald man started flicking his wrist, and brassy clacks muted my footfalls. The unmistakable snap of a flint-wheel Zippo lid. Unmistakable to me, at least, as it was the very sound that had heralded my father’s nightly Lucky Strike the way the National Anthem did Major League Baseball games. The tempo put me at ease as I stepped onto the porch. The bald man reared his head and I realized he wasn’t a man at all. Head shorn, donning a basketball jersey, he looked like a juvenile delinquent Mr. Clean. The clacking ceased. “Yeah?”

            I introduced myself, knitting my dog-walking services and padded rate into welcome tidings.

            A puzzled grin wrenched his lips. “You see any dogs?” The boy hopped up and unfolded. Six feet easy, with the chest of a professional logroller. “Got one world-class bitch though. Now you could take her off my hands, I’ll give you all my money in this life and an IOU for all my money in the next one.” He laughed. I stood there dumbfounded, which threw his laughter into a gut-hugging cackle.

            “Clark!” A svelte blond emerged from the side of the porch. The mover lugging the armoire trailed her. “For the last time, leave the workers be.” She told the mover where to place the armoire. “Absolutely, Mrs. Rodney,” the man said, scowling at Clark as he angled through the door.

            Clark didn’t notice. “Mom, this kid wants to take you for a walk.”

            Mrs. Rodney keyed her vexed stare on me. Her face was thin and grooved, like a vinyl record. “You want to take me where now, young man?”

            I panicked, registering Clark’s wisecrack in the same breath I was conscripted into it. “Thought you were hiring, ma’am,” I said, groping for a reply. “My mistake.”

            The Zippo lid flung open, shut. “That shed. And that shit in the yard you want cleared.” A spiny unrest prickled the air. Never before had I heard a kid curse in front of an adult, no less at an adult, no less at an adult who was his mother.

            “You promised your father you’d help.” Mrs. Rodney tugged at the hem of her shirt.

            “Just helped you find someone to do it.”

            I chuckled. A nervous tic of laughter. Both Clark and his mother trained their focus on me. It wouldn’t be accurate to say it was then I gleaned a resemblance. In truth, they looked no more alike than me and my parents. But in that instant, Clark’s arrogance melding with Mrs. Rodney’s chagrin, they looked akin in the way of the Janus masks in the high school auditorium.

            “Three dollars an hour,” she said, her tone abraded. My acceptance bordered on genuflection, even after I realized her offer amounted to a buck less than minimum wage. “Eight AM tomorrow. Dress to get dirty.” I tried to push back, retain my languid mornings. Really, I tried to try but a riptide of thank yous surged from my lips.

            “Not that way,” I heard Clark pester another mover as I threaded away from the mansion. “Use the patio door.”

            Over dinner I told my parents about the new job. My mother bombarded me with questions I mostly shrugged off. She was less curious than nettled to learn of the mansion’s sale from me instead of her best friend Lucinda, whose husband worked at the county clerk where the deed transfer would’ve been filed. “She’s probably been sittin’ on this for months, angry I didn’t offer her gas money last time we went shopping in Dearborn.”

            “Could be she knew enough not to give a damn.” My father sawed into his meatloaf. He was still wearing his overalls, the recycling plant’s earthen funk seasoning our meal, and bayonet lights protruded from his center pocket. “It was gonna happen sooner or later. Couple extra bucks never hurt anyone, that’s the important thing.”

            “Must hurt you,” my mother said. “Throwing away money hand over fist on circus lights for a damn casket.” She was referring to the pinball machine crowding his workbench in the garage. My father had salvaged it from the plant’s conveyor belt in January and devoted every free hour to restoring it.

            “I earn it, I’ll spend it as I please.” My father dropped his utensils, the knife clanging against his plate. “Wait till I sell it. You’ll be begging me for shopping money. That machine, some moron didn’t know what he had.”

            “Ain’t that the truth,” my mother said.

            My father’s utensils clanged against the plate and he stalked into the garage. I cleared the table while my mother dialed and upbraided Lucinda, and then slinked into the garage to listen to the Tigers’ game with my father. He was poised at his workbench, screwing in the bayonet lights and tinkering with a labyrinth of gears. I turned on the radio. “Listen to the game in your room,” he said, cautiously rotating a Philips head. “I’m gonna be making a lot noise down here.”

            “We’re playing Oakland. It’ll be some ace pitching.”

            He put down a Philips head and clamped my bicep, pumping it twice. “Start doing push-ups, you could throw like that, too.” He fished his cigarettes and lighter from his overalls and turned back to the pinball machine.

            Upstairs, I salved my ego through a methodical accounting of my earnings, parceling the bills by denomination and ranking them according to crispness. Fourteen bucks closer to the driver’s seat. A prospect that fortified me as the honeyed tang of Lucky Strike tobacco interlaced with the chiseled baritone of the Detroit Tiger’s radio announcer. Power tools cycled in and out, the shrill ruckus overtaking and yielding to the game. My father beached amid the pitcher’s mound and pinball drain.

            “Swing and a miss,” the announcer bellowed. “No stoppin’ that fastball.”

            The next morning, I drowsily shuffled to Piper Mansion. The journey felt longer, the incline steeper. I reached the porch to find the door open. I knocked anyway. When no one answered, I warily stepped inside. Cardboard boxes girded the cavernous foyer. The surrounding walls looked like something out of my history textbook, with a moldering frieze and cornice as antiquated as they were ornate.

            “Hello?” Mrs. Rodney appeared in neon-yellow Lycra and a matching headband. Her face was ruddy and the vein in her neck quaked. I thought she was annoyed I’d let myself in, and I sought to pacify her by offering to transport the boxes. “Think those’ll be a bit much for you. Come now,” she said, letting me walk off my embarrassment in circuitous hallways that funneled into a rotunda. A TV took up the middle of the room. There was a workout video on, with a peppy, mop-headed juggernaut tugging exercise cables with both hands. Identical cables lay on the floor, beside a water bottle. We continued out the patio door, onto a deck that overlooked a grassy expanse more like a pasture than a backyard. Five acres minimum, cluttered with deadwood and shrubs. “Clearing this mess will be a big help.” Mrs. Rodney checked her watch. “It’s 8:05.” She bowed her wrist toward me. “Eight. Oh. Five.”

            The sun was low and the air already muggy. Within seconds of hauling that first cumbersome branch into the coppices hemming the property, I was basting in sweat and sick of the job. I resolved to work until noon, before the heat became predatory, and then tell Mrs. Rodney I had a dog to walk (which I did, much later in the afternoon). Whether she believed me made no difference, as I wasn’t coming back. I bucked a tree-worth of limbs, my lungs rebelling. Doubled over and winded, I thought was going to pass out.

            Snap snap snap.

            I saw the Zippo first, and then Clark slouched over the balcony rail. He stared directly at me, eyes steely and unblinking. He held out his hand. I waved back, reeling in my arm as the Zippo moved under it and the blue-orange flame ignited, sweeping his static palm. Horrified and rapt, I stood as motionless. Ten seconds. Ten minutes. Ten hours. I have no idea how long it lasted; for its duration it felt like forever. Just like Clark’s liquid cool visage, unwavering after flame expired. The Zippo’s closing snap rattled through my bones, and he was gone.

            At some point, I forced myself back to work. Though no matter how ungainly the branch or how mired the path to the woods, my attention didn’t stray from the balcony for too long. I was scared Clark would return and scared he wouldn’t. Yardwork became an afterthought, so much so that I didn’t notice Mrs. Rodney sneak up on me.

            She held out ice water. “I didn’t think you’d make it half the day.” I asked her the time. “Four-thirty,” she said, “but I’ll round it up to 4:35 and we’ll call it eight hours. Come back tomorrow.”

            I returned the water but kept my hand out. “Eight hours. That’s twenty-four dollars.”

            “Something to look forward to come Friday. More fun to get paid for the full week.”

            Leaving the yard, I glanced skyward. At the balcony and windows. I was still searching for Clark as I rounded the mansion, when a sense of unease nailed me to the ground. I was thirty minutes late to pick up the Mitchells’ Golden Retriever. Sprinting away, I prayed they wouldn’t fire me, though the fire consuming my mind was the flame licking Clark’s hand. To this day, I’m not sure he watched me hightailing down the hill. I like to believe he did. That even then he saw something in me.

The Mitchells didn’t fire me. However, the Andersons and Nicholsons did, both patriarchs falling victim to the recycling plant’s latest round of furloughs. My father had delivered the news to them at work and then to me that night, with assurance that his role as executioner had no bearing on their decision. It would be easy to blame this setback on my groggy trek to Piper Mansion the next morning. But that’d be bullshit. It owed no more to the Andersons and Nicholsons than it did my mother’s ravenous appetite for gossip with which to tantalize Lucinda (who swore up and down her husband had been clueless about the mansion’s sale—that, in fact, the county clerk himself executed the paperwork). It was Clark. The certainty my parents would forbid me from setting foot near him had they known about his gutter mouth and pyro tendencies.

            My father was operating on the pinball machine’s circuit board when I left for Piper Mansion, his greeting muffled by a network of corrosion. It must’ve been around 7:45 AM, because “Eight oh three” were the first words to penetrate my conscious, Mrs. Rodney’s percussive tone walloping me from my stupor. Easing into the tedium of gruntwork, I snapped branches off the most colossal limbs to ensure a smooth tow across the yard. I was shucking away at the third limb when I felt unnerved. I peered at the balcony.

            Kettlebells dangled from Clark’s hands like Christmas tree ornaments. His biceps tremored through alternating repetitions. Ogling him made the branches in my arms heavier, and I hurried to jettison them at the property line. When I looked back, he was gone. My pulse had barely leveled off when the unnerving returned, Clark having swapped kettlebells for a jump rope. The dual thud of his bare feet and whoosh of rope drowned out nature, steadily intensifying to a gale-force pitch before swiftly dying off. The balcony again vacant. Hours later, as I was sticky and drenched, he was back. Zippo in hand.

            This routine persisted throughout the week. Clark cropping up on the watchtower of the balcony, hushed and eagle-eyed. Sometimes he’d linger for an hour or longer; other times he’d vanish before my second glance. Sometimes he’d lift weights; other times he remained stock-still. The only consistency was the Zippo in the late afternoon, Clark assailing his palm with that butane saber like it was the workday swansong.

            Briefly, I considered if Mrs. Rodney assigned him to surveil me as a compromise for the chores he shirked. But even then, on some level, it was clear that between them existed no middle ground. Clark was watching me of his own accord. This, more than cash, was how I justified yo-yoing to Piper Mansion every morning: while I didn’t think he liked me, I was strangely confident he didn’t dislike me, which may sound like semantics but in my world passed for hope—specially the hope I would recruit an ally whose freakish dimensions rendered him—and me—bully-proof.

            Cultivating Clark’s interest quickly became my primary job. I did it the way other kids had ginned up my curiosity: I ignored him. For three days I refused to raise my head, even if I heard the groan of free-weight repetitions or the Zippo’s flint-wheel grind. Most of the time I had no idea when I was and wasn’t in the crosshairs of his doughty glare, the Big Brother of looming suspicion impelling me to hustle faster, brook heavier loads. That’s why when the sun mercifully relented on Friday afternoon, timberland shadows hooding the near-branchless yard, I wasn’t entirely shocked to see Clark. Not gawking from the balcony but hovering on the deck.

            “Still looks like crap.” He hopped down, stomping pouches of crabgrass and bull thistle on his leisurely approach. “More bush than an orgy at Woodstock.”

            “Way more,” I said. My grin went unrequited. Clark surveyed the grounds, his black t-shirt tautening against his gyrating torso. The letters URMPA spanned across the sleeves. “URMPA. That’s a band, right?”

            Clark eyeballed his sleeve.

            “Goth metal? Pretty sure I have their CD.”

            He regarded me with daunting suspicion. “Union River Military Preparatory Academy.”

            I right-right-of-coursed him, laughing off my mistake like it was an age-old mix up. While I’d never heard of URMPA, I would’ve had to be catatonic not to know Union River. It was a military base ten miles north. Local news stations featured it each spring when recruiters descended on the state’s high schools in pursuit of “the best and the brightest.” Clark let me brew in silence. I felt his interest waning. For the first time I wondered if he remembered my name.

            “I’m a cadet,” he said.

            “You’re in the military?”

            “Will be that day I turn seventeen.” Clark’s brow dipped, his bald pate like a boulder poised to roll off the crag of his neck. “Three years one month to enlistment.”

            Prior to that, enlistment—much like cocaine and serial murder and braised pork shoulder—was a phrase I had encountered frequently on TV and in movies to little effect. But from Clark’s mouth, it struck me as incomprehensible. Actually, it was the opposite: crystallized and explicit. Discharged from the quarantine of G-rated wholesomeness. Enlistment. It was dangerous and admirable, with a face staring right at me. I felt heady, awestruck. “When do go you back?”

            Clark straightened his posture. His lips thinned like drawstrings. “Soon. Just waiting out the shitstorm.” He read the confusion in my face, adding, “We had a pussy in the squad. As Squad Leader, it was on me to discipline him. Problem disciplining pussies is they break easy.”

            “You beat him up?”

            His expression curdled. “What, are you a fucking pussy, too? More worried about him than the squad?”

            “No, absolutely not,” I said, adamant.

            Clark’s sigh reminded me to breathe. “Only reason I got suspended is cause my dad’s Headmaster. So the rules are even stricter for me. But he knows what it’s like. Three tours in ’Nam.”

            “I can’t wait to meet him.”

            “He’s living at the Academy. Just til this rattrap comes together.” Clark leered at the mansion. “Anyway, my mom told me to give you this.” His hand floated toward me, my knees buckling at the sight of it close up.

            That hand. Rucked and grisly, like garage-sale Naugahyde. Like a taxidermied snake. Like beef jerky cured for eternity on desert stone. Except it was like none of those things. It was like nothing I had encountered before then or have encountered since. A horror no metaphor would adequately capture for my son. Endow him with the very tunnel vision and paralytic terror coursing through me in that instant, preventing me from recoiling before Clark’s opposite hand clenched my wrist.

            “Pussies make weak soldiers. Weak soldiers get good ones killed. You’re either telling the truth or you’re a pussy and full of shit.” The Zippo lid clacked. The flint-wheel grinded. “That’s why god created The Pussy Test.” Clark’s voice, its measure and craft, was as natural as the flame’s whisper. “Don’t fight it,” he said, injecting the fire into my knuckle. “Forget it.”

            The pain went from excruciating to immobilizing to imperceptible. My body numb.

            “Well, fuck me.” He chewed his lip, nodding. “I’d’ve bet money you’d be crying harder than a room full of fat girls on Valentine’s Day.”

            The numbness lapsed and I squeezed my knuckle as if its nerve endings were a branch to sever. Clark held out a check. I snatched and folded it into my pocket. “My mom said you can start cleaning out the shed Monday.” I relaxed my gritted teeth to thank him. “A little advice,” Clark said. “You get paid by the hour; take as many as you can get away with.” His smile threw me off.

            I reciprocated it all the same, preserving the expression until I made it down the gradient and could safely jam my fist into my mouth to suckle away the burn. At dinner, as a squishy sac ballooned over the knuckle, my mother needled me for gossip about the Rodneys and my father augured additional “shake ups” at the plant in the undertones of a stock trader divulging insider tips. Later that night—as my mother wove the innocuous details I’d provided into a tapestry for Lucinda and my father settled in to refurbish vintage pinball bumpers ordered by mail—I unfolded the check. It was post-dated two weeks and short seven bucks.

            Of course, I didn’t mention it. Not to my parents or to Mrs. Rodney on Monday morning as she conducted me through the tree line, into a corroded depot stockpiled with old axle parts, and instructed me to chuck it all into the dumpster I’d passed on my slog uphill. And certainly not to Clark when he materialized around eleven AM, jumping out from behind the front porch and spooking an axle shaft clean from my grasp.

            “Your face.” Clark almost keeled over laughing, his brawny arms enfolding his bare and sweat-soaked midsection. “I was gonna ambush you last trip, but I held out till you were carrying something big.”

            I laughed, too. “Were you hiding long?”

            Clark winced. “I wasn’t hiding at all.” He turned around. His back was scratched to hell. Blood dribbled from minute punctures. “I was lying on the brambles. Part of my training program.” He faced me. I spotted a thorn in his shoulder.

            “Like lifting weights?”

            He scoffed. “Shit, even pussies can bench press their own pussy weight. I’m talking about real training. Like the other day.” He gestured at my hand, smirking. “Less you can’t take anymore.”

            It didn’t sound like a challenge so much as a choice between being special or being me. Only after peeling off my shirt and reclining onto the brambles like it was a pool float did I quaver with doubt, Clark’s bleak gaze poring over my wretchedly gaunt physique. Then the agony set in, like waking up on a bed of nails, and I started to writhe. His snaky hand plummeted onto my chest and I went still. “You don’t feel anything,” he said, pressing harder. “You’re not even here. Say that. Say, ‘I’m not even here.’”

            I repeated it until I had no voice, which was exactly what Clark was waiting for. He hoisted me off the brambles. “Forty-eight seconds.” He smacked my shoulder. “I’ve seen better. But I’ve seen a helluva a lot worse.”

            My back ached, the pain sporadically interrupted by the chilly slither of blood, and I wanted more than anything to do better. To prove I was better. Clark must’ve had the same thought, as he dug into his pocket and produced the Zippo. He gave it to me. I persevered slightly longer than I had initially. Though nowhere near as long as Clark. As if to remind of that, he perched his hand atop the flame for so long the air smelled like pan-fried beef. Clark never flinched.

            “I don’t feel anything,” he said, the flame nesting in his palm, his calm like sculpture. “Remember, I’m not even here.”

And yet I didn’t want to be anywhere else. That’s not to say I’d forgotten about the dogs, though business was on the decline. (My father had slashed Mr. Davis’ shifts, taking Rock and Hudson off my roster, and two other families had moved.) Maintaining my dwindling clientele required less and less commitment, which was convenient because I had less and less to offer. Each morning I set out humping flanges and shafts and ball joints, keenly anticipating Clark’s intervention. Some days he appeared before ten AM. Other days he kept me on tenterhooks well into the cooling afternoon. But whenever he showed up, I was ready, affecting courage and grit. Labored pauses before answering questions. Nodding instead of speaking. Never being the first to smile. Acting like Clark in order to be like Clark.

            “Navy Seals can hold their breath underwater for two minutes,” he told me the day after the brambles, my tender back shuddering as I leaned forward to watch him dunk his face in a cistern brimming with hose water. Air bubbles capped the surface, painstakingly slow at first and then frantically, like water boiling on a stovetop. Clark jerked back, gasping. “Forty-six seconds,” he said. “Fuck.”

            You would think I’d vividly recall submerging my face in that foggy water, the magnifying distress as my oxygen was milked dry. Sure, I can still picture it. Hues faded, textures muddied. Nothing like the dazzling clarity with which I remember Clark’s goading, the radial heat of his splayed fingers pressuring my nape. The ruthless encouragement that billowed my lungs and marshaled an impossible breath.

            “Twenty-three seconds.” Clark palmed my scalp. “Beats most cadets.”

            I tried again. And again. And again. At least another three dozen times, until I cracked twenty-four seconds and nearly suffocated. Just as I insisted on bettering my handstand time when Clark demonstrated how Air Force pilots train to overcome g-force blackouts, and crawling over fifty yards of jagged rocks in under thirty seconds in the manner of Green Berets.

            Training. Over those weeks the word itself was enough to juice me up. Its aura and tenure. The holy provenance of boxers and Olympians and, of course, elite soldiers. The harder the exercise—the deeper the gash, darker the bruise, fatter the swelling, denser the scab it left—the fewer people I believed could endure it. “Comes down to willpower,” Clark explained after, blindfolded and arms bound, negotiating a path through the woodlands to recover a ball joint I had hidden. “The way to tolerate something is to not think about it.”

            Or maybe he said that after scattering salt on our hands and topping them with ice cubes, as the burn embedded and the skin puckered. Or after combat training, when he drilled me in bare-knuckling trees he had named Brett and Jason and Todd—the kids at school I most reviled. At some point, lodging toothpicks into my nailbeds became as commonplace as kneeling on uncooked rice. I felt stirred and determined and able. Through it all, however, I never felt special. I stopped wanting to. Everything I considered “special”—the McDonald’s Happy Meal my mother bought me for acing a math test, intact VHS cassettes my father rescued from the conveyor belt’s pulverizing maw—was as tenuous as a firecracker. Training made me feel the opposite of special, which wasn’t ordinary but indestructible.

            It wasn’t just the exercises. It was my father’s abrupt pause from screwing in pinball flippers, his attention diverted to the ripening bruise along my forearm. It was my mother’s precarious inflection when asking how I shredded my back. More than anything, it was coming across a football game between classmates who had shunned me on the Fourth of July, taunting them to let me play and then brutally tackling anyone stupid enough to run toward me. It was the way one kid could barely look at me as he limped home. The way the kids on my team high-fived me. Kids who probably didn’t know my name but would never again call me “runt” or “spaz” or “dickhead.”

            I was still feeding off that rush when I got to Mr. Lomann’s the next day. His brow became as corrugated as his aluminum siding and he pointed at the titanic welt crowning my hand. I told him I tripped while doing yardwork.

            “Let me see.” He yanked my hand, appraising it. “Doesn’t look like a fall.”

            My parents had readily swallowed whatever half-baked excuses I fed them. Having never been second-guessed, I was flustered. “I fell into some bushes. Think there was poison ivy or something.” Mr. Lomann looked me dead-on. I didn’t blink. He released my hand. I’m not sure if he believed me or simply cared more about getting to the airport on time. He was visiting his brother in Wisconsin and had asked me to feed and walk Flash while he was gone.

            “One more thing…” Mr. Lomann whistled for Flash, who trotted to the door wearing a Twizzlers-red leather collar anchored by a beeper-like gizmo. “This is to keep him from yapping his head off while I’m gone,” Mr. Lomann said. “Zaps him when he gets loud. Only needs it inside the house.” He counted out thirty bucks, scrutinizing my welt as he handed it over. “Be more careful.”

            I sometimes wonder what would’ve happened had I told Mr. Lomann the truth. Would he have lectured me? Driven me home and made me tell my parents? Smuggled me into his car and raced to the nearest mental asylum? Of the countless the scenarios I’ve envisioned, none conclude with Mr. Lomann saluting me. It’s not his fault. Few people would understand, I know, which is why I’ve never wasted anyone’s time or sympathy. Why I’ve never disappointed them with my dearth of shame and remorse. Needless, that’s how the Mr. Lomanns of the world would sum up my behavior that summer. How my son might, too. Unless he beheld his father as the sniveling puke of existence that I was. Then he’d accept that my time with Clark was anything but needless—that it couldn’t be needless because it taught me necessity.

            The morning after Mr. Lomann, I arrived at Piper Mansion to find Clark roosting on the porch rail. I was surprised to see him up so early. Even more surprised to see him smiling. “My dad called,” he said. “I’m going back.” My vocal cords bound into a slipknot. I managed to ask when. “Tomorrow,” he said, smacking together his hands.

            I felt lightheaded. “You’re leaving tomorrow?”

“Tomorrow I do my song and dance for the Disciplinary Committee. ‘I’m so sorry and it was a mistake and I’ve grown so much from the experience.’” He made a masturbating gesture, sound effects and all. “Come on. I want to show you something.”

            I followed him inside, through the obstacle course of hallways, trying my damnedest to emulate his enthusiasm. Clark led me into the kitchen, where I spotted his Zippo on the otherwise empty table. For a millisecond, intoxicated on ooey-gooey pubescent soppiness, I was convinced he planned to give it to me. A symbol of my growth and his pride. Of our friendship.

            “It’s on the table,” I said after he passed it.

            Clark looked stumped. “Oh, yeah.” He grabbed the lighter, carving his thumb over the flint-wheel. There was no flame. “Needs lighter fluid.” He pocketed it. “Basement’s this way.”

            Descending the rickety stairs, my disappointment compounded. I wanted to ask if the Academy allowed visitors, but the question itself felt like a concession. I was still mulling over what to say, how to coax out an iota of validation, when I caught sight of the moving boxes. Stacked and unopened exactly as they had been upstairs. Clark rearranged the piles, ripping through a box marked Clark Senior.

            “Check this out.” He whipped around, leveling a murky blade inches from my jugular. “This is my dad’s. From ’Nam.” Clark fastened the knife at its ends. The hilt was scored with tally marks. “See that? Forty-two.”

            “Forty-two what?”

            “Dead Charlies.” He looked solemn but honored.

            I asked if I could hold it. He was thinking it over when concern flickered across his face. A moment later Mrs. Rodney shouted his name. He quickly concealed the knife away and barricaded the box behind the others.

            “Clark?” Mrs. Rodney managed the steps gingerly, hoisting a laundry-wrapped hanger. Inside the plastic was a charcoal suit with epaulettes and gilded buttons as thick as the pegs above my father’s workbench. A pair of ivory-white gloves drooped from the breast pocket. “What are you boys up to?” Her perturbed stare roved between Clark and me.

            “Nothing,” Clark said. “You get the fluid?”

            “I’ll give it to you later.” Mrs. Rodney glanced at me, frazzled.

            “He doesn’t give a shit.” Clark extended his hand, fingers wangling a voodoo motion. “Now!”

            Mrs. Rodney withdrew a black tin from her pocketbook and Clark wrested it free. As he filled the Zippo, her countenance ossified. “You should get back to work,” she said to me, her tone creaking and gaze averted.

            I ferried scrap metal for the rest of the day. Clark never came out. Before heading home, I stopped at the mansion to wish him luck. Mrs. Rodney met me at the door and explained that he was busy preparing for tomorrow. I turned to go and she summoned me back.

            “The lighter, Clark explained why we gave it to him?”

            “He told me about his training.” I modulated my voice to imitate him. “The way to tolerate something is not to think about it.”

            Color imbued her cheeks and her mouth slackened. “That’s right. We all get tested. Remember that. You, me, Clark. Everybody. Sufferance is our protection.” Mrs. Rodney rubbed my shoulder, irritating a bruise. “We’ll be home by one. Come by then. You can work and get your paycheck.”

            Plodding down the hill, I felt mired and restless. I stopped at the Lomanns’ to feed and walk Flash. His barking commenced the moment I unstrapped his collar. For once, I welcomed it. White noise divesting my thoughts from Clark’s departure and my budding anxiety that once he left, I’d relapse into my former self. The farther we walked, the more apparent the solution seemed: the way to prove I could withstand training once Clark left was to train without him while he was still there.

            That night I skulked into the garage in search of my father’s Zippo. The pinball machine caught me off guard. It looked spectacular, unrecognizable from the heap he’d brought home. Something worth begging for quarters over. My father was listlessly buffing it, his concentration monopolized by the Tigers’ game. For a moment, I forgot why I went in there and asked him if I could play.

            “Tomorrow.” He slapped a round socket in front of the machine. “I’m picking up the ball launcher. Consider this thing yours until I sell it.” The offer riled me, its condescension and charity. I zeroed in on the lighter, perched atop his cigarettes. “No-hitter through the fifth,” he said. “Nine strikeouts. Last week this kid was pitching in Double-A.” The game announcer called a line drive up the foul line. “Foul!” my father yelled, and as he gaped at the radio I filched the Zippo off his workbench. The ball hooked into the stands. He sighed with relief and I drifted toward the door. “Where you going? No-hitters by no-namers are once in a lifetime. I got a double-shift tomorrow and I’m staying up.”

            I remained at my father’s side, latching onto his cheer and disquiet. His vainglory and supplication. His palpable anticipation in the bottom of the ninth, two outs and two strikes, the stadium on its feet—summarily obliterated as the ball thundered out of the ballpark on a game-tying home run. The Tigers lost in extra innings. I don’t remember that minor league ace’s name. I doubt anyone does.

            What has stayed with me from that night is the reflection of my naked body in the bathroom mirror: contused knuckles; lacerated torso; gouged legs. Palm flexed and flame kindled. The heat beveling into my skin. Singed flesh adulterating the potpourri’s balm with a gamey funk I can taste to this day. How deeply I examined that throbbing wound., like a palmist transcribing my own future. The promise it foretold. That nothing was beyond me.

I hardly slept. Car magazines and money-counting bridged the hours before sunrise. Perusing the classified section, I focused on ads for Jeeps and Land Rovers, cars designed for off-road terrain. I circled a dozen, pining to show Clark both the cars and my engorged hand. His return to the Academy wouldn’t be a loss if I could drive to Union River. Meet his squadron, who would know about me. The civilian from Axle Junction gutsier than them.

            Lucinda came by at ten to pick up my mother for their monthly day-long window-shopping spree in Dearborn. Alone, my antsiness grew unbearable. I didn’t make it to eleven before dashing to the Lomanns’, unleashing Flash’s collar and piloting him on a walk that was really a gallop. He seemed bewildered, hesitantly sniffing his food and maintaining his distance afterward. I checked the clock. It was almost twelve. Clark would be home soon. Gone soon. My anxiety redoubled. Whatever benefits I had dreamed up regarding his return to the Academy vaporized.

            I gave up on Flash and bolted to Piper Mansion, at first pacified to spot Mrs. Rodney’s car in the driveway, and then dazed by the sonic boom of Clark’s scream. Crying ensued, followed by louder screams. Eavesdropping from the porch felt sinful and absconding felt impossible. I barely rapped the door before it launched open, Clark glowering in that charcoal uniform, his pupils a bloodshot tracery.

            “Fuck this place,” he said. “Fuck these worthless pieces of rat shit.” He stormed downhill. I followed. Mrs. Rodney shouted at us, begging Clark to come back, to be reasonable. He didn’t turn around, but I did. Long enough to absorb her puffy eyes and full-throated despair. To believe the worst had transpired and that I could comprehend it.

            Clark wended across side streets, his reticence as difficult to match as his stride. His temples pulsated. His swiveling neck veins bulged. Cars slowed to rubberneck. A SUV honked twice, the way drivers thanked soldiers for their service.

            “Asshole,” Clark said.

            “He thinks you’re a—”

            “I’m not talking about him, Einstein.” He scowled at me. “My asshole scumbag fuck father. That pussy I beat up, his pussy parents threatened to sue the Academy. They were at my disciplinary hearing. Got me publically expelled for conduct unbecoming of an officer.” Clark interlaced his fingers and squeezed them as if fusing his hands. “Just to keep his job and that crap house.”

            Blood gushed to my head. My vision blurred. It was the wickedest story to ever cross my ears and I couldn’t help but share in his wrath. I cursed, I shouted, I flipped off the next car that double-honked at us. We neared my house. I told him I’d grab money and we could go somewhere.

            Clark’s gait flagged. “Your parents home?”

            “My dad’s at work, mom’s in Dearborn.”

            Clark wandered the ground floor of my house as I dialed the pizzeria. I braced for him to rag on the plastic-covered sofa or gawky family portraits. He was staring at me when I hung up, grinning like he’d just told himself a joke.

            “Your ass,” he said. “God, I hope those aren’t hemorrhoids.”

            My enlarged hand settled on the enlarged bump at the rear of my shorts. Flash’s bark collar. Clark plucked it from my hands, inspecting the black box and tracing his finger over the dual metal prongs. I related what Mr. Lomann had told me about the device.

            “No shit,” Clark said. “I want to see it in action.”

            “Come with me to feed him later. Doesn’t take much to get him barking.”

            Clark squinted. “Not on him. On you.” He strapped the collar around my neck. “Training never stops.” His tone, its familiarity, calmed me. To hell with the Academy. We, the two of us, comprised an elite unit. The collar’s stiff prongs jabbed my Adam’s apple. “Say ‘asshole,” Clark said. I did. Nothing happened. “Louder. Lieutenant Rodney Clark Senior is a fucking asshole.”

            I opened my mouth. “Lieutenant Rod—”

            “Louder!”

            “Lieutenaarch.” The shock muzzled me. I tried again and the pain intensified, like sipping water through a live wire. “Rodchh…” My eyes teared. I went to dry them and Clark batted away my hand. His grainy fingers traveled along my face, wicking away the moisture. I blinked through the haze and then Clark was all I saw. His dogged aspect a breath’s distance from my face and closing in. I tasted his lips.

            I jerked my head. “What are you doing?”

            Clark shut his eyes and came at me again, his tongue a battering ram against my mouth, his hand cupping my groin. I kneed him in the stomach and yelled that he get off me, the collar’s wattage truncating my consternation.

            “I knew it!” he said. “You are a pussy!”

            I unstrapped the collar, wheezing. “What’s wrong with you?”

            “Like this isn’t exactly what you wanted. Only now you don’t know what to do with it.” “I don’t…I wanted us…”

            “Exactly, because that’s what a pussy is.” Clark was fuming. “Cry to your parents about it. Turns out, pussies get free tuition.”

            I won’t pretend Clark’s life unfurled before me right then and there, or that I even deciphered the true cause of his expulsion from the Academy. Even now, I can’t gauge the torrents of lighter fluid expended on that family’s drought of sufferance. The infernos cultivated one flint-wheel spin at a time in hopes to cauterize what couldn’t be bled out. But at that moment, bottled by Clark’s heft and zeal, his unmarred hand as menacing as his scared one as he clasped my head, I feared absolutely nothing. He wrestled his tongue into my mouth, flogging it back and forth, and I counted. He unzipped his pants and I counted. He helmed my face to the kinked nub beetling over his fly and I counted. Counted and counted and counted, reaching an infinity secluded from his engorged penis and gruff moans.

            So far away I never heard the door open. Never heard my father’s clunky paces. His war cry. Only when Clark detached my mouth from his crotch did reality lose its camouflage, and I saw my father plant his foot and cock his hip and swing a coiled-steel rod, Clark nimbly dodging its path and withering to the floor. His deformed hand feebly shielding his terror-ravaged face, that was the last transmission my retina processed before the pinball launcher skewered it.

            “A freak accident,” my father told the EMTs. “The spring mechanism backfired,” he told the ER doctor. “I traded shifts so I could surprise him and we’d finish it together,” he told my mother, which may be why that part of the story never changed, even after he moved us to Ann Arbor days before school started, perfecting the tragedy for neighbors and coworkers who couldn’t possibly have whiffed rumors of a police investigation and Children’s Services visits triggered by my head-to-toe examination at the hospital.

            Odd as it may seem, this isn’t the part I most dread telling my son. It’s the next part, when he’ll inevitably ask what happened to Clark and I’ll have no answer. That it would be almost two years later, while my mother and I battled over my refusal to check off the box marked “disabled” on college applications, when Lucinda called. A new family moved into Piper Mansion, she told my mother. Large and friendly, the children capping their sentences with “sir” or “ma’am.”

            I know what he’ll assume. That had I glimpsed the man Clark became I wouldn’t have been the father I was. A father who berates his wailing eight-year-old for surrendering his new baseball glove to bullies. A father who, profoundly unsettled when his thirteen-year-old boy gets cut from baseball tryouts and bitches that the coach was unfair, belts his son the way you startle someone plagued by hiccups. A father who dislocate his son’s jaw for penning a college scholarship-winning essay about his disabled father.

            And then he slugged me back. Closefisted and rabid. Popping my nose like a champagne cork and swelling shut my good eye. The pride I felt in that moment. The relief. Never again did I lose sleep over his well-being. Because a boy able to hit his father is a man willing to hit anyone. He’ll either appreciate that or he won’t. Then again, maybe it’s not something he can hear from me. That it’s a cruel truth he’ll discover once he begins paying the restitution of fatherhood and accepts that if he doesn’t teach his boy resilience he’s teaching him failure.

            There are still days I believe he might call. If and when he does, I’ll offer no apologies. No self-recriminations. I’ll simply ask him to hear me out. Remind him who he is. Who I made him to be. That I did it with these two hands.

---

Douglas Silver’s fiction has appeared in New England Review, Crazyhorse, Chicago Tribune’s Printers Row, Cincinnati Review, Electric Literature’s The Commuter, and elsewhere. An Elizabeth George Foundation grant recipient and former writer-in-residence at the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation, he lives in New York City where he serves as executive director of Gotham Food Pantry, an organization striving to eliminate food insecurity throughout the five boroughs. Read more at www.DouglasSilver.com.

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 sort 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.

            

---

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 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.

On Inis Mór

Helen Sitler

Under strong winds in late October, the ferry rocks on the sea as I sail toward Inis Mór, off Ireland’s west coast. I look ahead to where gray sky melds into gray horizon and struggle to maintain my balance. Men wearing trousers and sports jackets, unlikely clothing for visiting an island of farmers and fishermen, congregate in small groups. Their low conversations hum under the grinding of the boat’s engine. They purchase coffee and, standing, sway with the waves.

            In Galway Cathedral on the day before Inis Mór, I lit a votive candle to remember my deceased husband Tom. The organist began to practice at that moment. A prayer of notes—deep, resonant, mournful— showered down around me. Overwhelmed, I sat in the pew and sobbed. Today my emotions are as raw as the elements buffeting the ferry.

            At the dock, I pull my coat tight against the wind. Island resident Deidre greets my tour group at the community hall. She speaks of the islanders’ ancient connection to the earth. Cycles of crop growth signal seasonal tasks. Changes in behavior among cattle and sheep and the movements of schools of fish relay critical information to residents whose livelihoods depend on the animals. In explaining the islanders’ deep-rooted understanding of natural endings and beginnings, Deidre also speaks of an ancient, nature-oriented spiritualism. It is the season of Samhain, the celebration of the Celtic New Year at October’s end, when, according to Deirdre, “the veil between worlds is thin.”

            She announces that she must leave soon to sing at a funeral of an islander, solving the mystery of carefully-dressed men from the ferry. Following centuries-long traditions, they will mourn at Catholic Mass, then celebrate a life with toasts and laughter in Inis Mór’s homes and pubs. And some, like Deidre, steeped in the island’s mysticism, will expect the spirit of their friend to cross through the veil for one final goodbye at this Samhain, or at one to come.

            I shiver at the possibility of the veil. Since my husband died, I have desperately wanted to feel him close again. His nearness, as Deirdre describes, should be a comfort. Instead the possibility only highlights what seems an unbridgeable gulf. As Deirdre steps to the back of the hall to share her funeral offering, I gaze out at the sea. Her slow, haunting, a cappella melody echoes from the plaster walls, the stone floor. How can I have heard this song so many times and never noticed the longing in the words? “Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling … It’s you, it’s you must go and I must bide.” My own loss roars back, despite the Celtic acknowledgement of a lost loved one’s closeness through the veil, despite the tide whispering of leave-taking and return. The notes climb inside me while the surf pushes up onto the shore, rolls away, pushes up again.

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Before retiring in 2016, Helen Collins Sitler spent forty-two years as an educator, her closing twenty years in the English Department at Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Her academic articles have appeared in teacher education publications, such as English Journal and Language Arts. Her creative nonfiction has appeared in Hippocampus Magazine and in the local journal The Loyalhanna Review. Her creative nonfiction essay “Grieving Ceremonies” appears as a chapter in Western Pennsylvania Reflections: Stories from the Alleghenies to Lake Erie.