Author: Post Road

Bethlehem in Indiana: The Obstetrician Instructs His Son

Robert Cochran

Your father will want to answer this, Mother says, not interrupting her nursing. I’ll call him. He’ll talk with you tonight.

            This is a surprise. Nine-year-old me figures Mom, busy with three children in addition to the infant at her breast, as the obvious parent for queries about babies’ origins.  Father, I know, is a doctor, but I don’t yet know he’s a specialist in babies, currently honing his skills in a year-long obstetric residency at Honolulu’s Kapiolani Maternity Hospital.

            Mom’s right—I’m summoned after dinner to the backyard lanai where two hefty anatomical models, a loose-leaf folder, and a dictionary-sized medical textbook occupy a table customarily used for trimming and potting plants. Have a seat, Father says, pointing to a chair and moving to the opposite side. Mother, sisters, and baby remain upstairs.

            A very long lecture follows, lasting far past bedtime, but my attention, to Father himself and to his vivid subject, never for an instant wavers. The models, it turns out, are constructed of heavy plastic or ceramic with detachable pieces in contrasting colors, heavier even than Father’s bowling ball and mounted on pedestals like busts not of heads, but of reproductive systems. The female is a frontal, or coronal section, Father explains as he gradually disassembles both, while the male is a cross or midsagittal view.

            Babies are made, Father begins, when a sperm joins an egg. Here’s how it works. Then come the words, a cascade of exotic terminology accompanied by body parts held aloft, fingers pointed, references to folder and textbook. Every word and everything the words describe astounds. On and on he goes—fallopian tubes and vas deferens, uterus and urethra. Only Buckminster Fuller, he of the geodesic domes, famous for marathon lectures, will match Father’s stamina at the podium—and I’ll be twenty-three then, not nine, in graduate school, not fourth grade. Finally, his hundreds of terms distributed, the bodily machinery minutely itemized, Father turns to its operations.  Ovulation, fertilization, implantation, gestation, labor and delivery—all are painstakingly covered. His presentation of the sexual act itself (a wholly unanticipated notion) is direct, though at times oddly formal and impersonal. The penis, he says, an apparently autonomous actor fastened to no person, is “introduced” to the similarly free-floating vagina, there to “deposit” sperm as a sort of biological calling card. Father does note in passing that the act is “uniquely pleasurable to both parties.”

            Dumbfounded by everything, I’m at last sent to bed, assured that models, folder, and textbook will be indefinitely available for study, though Father’s astonishing revelations make sleep even this overdue elusive. And the language!  At nine, most children lack occupational foresight, but a perceptive adult observer might have predicted a wordsmith, a journalist or poet, so persistently is Father’s young pupil distracted from the astonishing facts by their novel verbal descriptors. What strange and vivid words Father commands!  They carry in their very letters arcane aura, a distance from mundane vocabulary. Epididymis sports a profusion of extra syllables, while mons, menses, and glans appear somehow truncated. In the aggregate, presented in such concentration, they offer the intoxicating lure of pure nomenclature, the power of capturing a manifold world in a net of names.

            Father apparently regards his instructional duties as adequately discharged by our marathon seminar, as Babies 101 features no review or follow-up session.  Fast forward now through a three-year, two-stop journey, and set us down in Indiana, where Mother calls a halt to Father’s nomad career. The children need to go to high school in one place, she says. We are a larger family now, a brother added during a second residency in Atlanta, and a fourth sister arriving soon after the Hoosier move. Both family and Father’s medical apprenticeship are now complete—we are two parents plus six children, with Father a board-certified specialist in obstetrics and gynecology. It’s the perfect field of medicine, he claims. Outcomes are almost always joyful. Plus, we’re never out of work—demand for midwives and morticians is both universal and stable.

            Things have been mostly quiet on the where-babies-come-from front, though a brief firestorm erupts shortly after our arrival in Indiana over my gory preview of monthly ordeals soon to be visited upon my sisters by puberty’s onset. This error-filled and blood-drenched narrative—a twelve-year-old’s confused mix of menstrual and parturient elements—sends both siblings in alarm to Mother, who quickly shuts down my backyard academy.

            Much worse soon follows. Four years later, just as I enter high school, Father inaugurates a decade of sex education lectures to sophomore biology classes. For a teenager riven by myriad anxieties, eager most of all for anonymity’s refuge, no more scorched-earth humiliation is imaginable. Your Dad not only makes his living messing around in female private parts, he shows up at your school to talk about it!  Each year he arrives, addressing only females while male classmates, supervised by coaches, sit through scary VD films. These appearances inspire without fail a new round of teasing from classmates. Your Dad told us to avoid boys like you, reports the blonde cheerleader, already “pinned” to a college frat boy, who trifles with my affections over a three-year span. They play, you pay, he told us.

            The tenor of this bromide is typical of Father’s address, behavioral concerns now replacing the anatomical focus of the Hawaiian lecture. (For our biology-class anatomy unit we study and learn to label then-standard Turtox Sexless Manikins, beautifully drawn in many colors. Livers are purple, kidneys are green, ovaries and testes are absent.)  Father’s presentations make introductory bows to reality—I’m not suggesting the cloister, he opens—but these are in essence feints, followed by standard commendations of abstinence.  A minimal level of “necking” is reportedly condoned, by which Father intends a chaste and strictly vertical embracing. Hands on deck, feet on the floor, he urges. “Petting” he presents as a distinctly more dangerous practice, slipperiest of slopes, so risky careless listeners might suppose unwanted pregnancies could result from unrestrained indulgence. The notion of safe sex is not yet in circulation; condoms are unmentioned. It is clear, too, that Father vests his entire stock of hope in his female auditors; their male counterparts he presents as hormonally-deranged junior satyrs saved from a mindless rut only by unremitting feminine vigilance.

            Summaries of Father’s lectures are regularly served up with indulgent smiles by sophisticate female classmates who are by this time masturbating and fellating favored athletes and hoodlums, the most precocious even “going all the way” according to triumphalist accounts circulated by the jocks and delinquents. Such interviews present terribly complex issues for a son reluctant on the one hand to abet patronizing dismissal of a revered parent and on the other to appear hopelessly unhip to classmates talking so casually about sex. Father’s “uniquely pleasurable to both parties” formulation is also placed in doubt during this period, as the locker room and street corner vaunts are conspicuously lacking in attention to reciprocity. Graduation alone puts an end to these embarrassments.

            In the midst of the annual humiliations, however, Father bestows an additional gift, perfect follow-up to his introductory lecture. Informing others and perhaps convincing himself that his eldest is destined for a career in medicine, he begins taking me with him to work. On rounds and in operating rooms I’m introduced to patients and staff alike as a physician in training, a novice apprentice. Beginning at sixteen I am present each year at eight to ten births and other obstetric and gynecological surgeries. By graduation I will welcome maybe thirty babies to the world, including two sets of twins.

            Even the preliminaries impress, the elaborate scrubbing, gowning, masking, and gloving. The scrubbing alone is a protracted affair, starting with a lathering of the forearms up to the elbows with surgical soap, followed by no less sudsy rubbing of cupped fingertips in opposing palms, and massage of each wrist by the encircling opposite hand. I’m reminded of it every time I witness the elaborate power shakes of today’s athletes. I copy Father’s ablutions with great fidelity—and wash my hands today in exactly the same way, in reflexive tribute, though I operate on nothing more sensitive than a computer keyboard.

            From these elaborate protocols I conclude that Father is a greatly venerated figure, served by a squadron of nurses attending his every move—holding up his green gown for the threading through of his freshly washed hands, fitting and fastening his mask and cap, assisting with his gloves. Thus invested, he appears as a secular priest presiding over a ritual occasion of transcendent significance. Father, I think, has more than a job. You’re a star, I tell him. Everybody does what you tell them to do. Father is quick to correct this impression. Don’t be fooled, he says. I’m a stagehand, a midwife with initials after my name. The leading lady enters on wheels, belly up. The star comes on last. It’s the greatest show on earth. You’ll see.

            For even the first of these occasions, Father opens in the dispassionate register of his Hawaiian lecture, but lifts to lyric in directing particular attention to the climactic instant when each newly arrived infant, shocked by the sudden shift from aquatic to terrestrial environs, puckers, grimaces, throws out a leg or arm, finally opens her or his mouth to breathe the big world. Look! Father says, cradling the glistening, just-clear-of-Mom form in his gloved hands. Listen!  Obedient, leaning as close as I dare, I gradually learn to view the moment through Father’s eyes, hear with his ears the tiny engine snort and splutter into life.

            Both sights and sounds are preludes, heralds to the cries that relax the whole delivery team into smiling praises of mothers and children. Routine is now quickly restored. Cords are clamped, eye drops administered, swaddling blankets unfolded, wrapped and quieted babies tucked to mothers’ arms.  But the instant itself, the move from insentience to animation, normalized by language as the crossing from embryo to neonate—for even the most experienced nurses and doctors it’s never wholly routine. For Father it stands as a cosmic pivot, the numinous core of matter’s messy welter. Here, bloody and blue, is his teaching’s capstone, high point of his practice. As a physician in training he’d mastered the science and language, and here, in Indiana’s heartland, he reaches teaching’s end.  There’s learning and more learning, he counsels, leading to knowing and more knowing. But here, at learning’s and knowing’s edge, luminous mystery flares. All the miracle I’ll ever need, Father says.

            I’m soon after this in Chicago for college, where Father’s dream of a son following in his professional footsteps is dashed by sophomore Cs in organic chemistry and embryology, but on visits home I caddy for him on the golf course where he asks about my literature and philosophy classes. Only later, after I’m off to Toronto for graduate school and Father trades in his clubs for a pilot’s license and turns to flying for recreation, do I come to understand both activities as substitutes for changes of address. His itinerant instincts curtailed by Mother’s insistence on their children’s needs, he turns first to golf’s pedestrian circumambulations before lifting to aerial sorties. When his first grandchild is born he flies to Nashville to celebrate, with Mother and housekeeper along, their eagerness to see daughter and baby overcoming for the only time their fear of his small plane. With characteristic sartorial flair, he orders the plane’s likeness on a custom-made tie bar—the single-engine Cessna, its 4902L license plate clearly legible, climbs skyward across his chest.

            Our talks on the fairways and greens revisit earlier topics when my studies occasionally unearth a nugget reminiscent of his lectures. Remember when you called yourself a midwife with a degree? I ask when I encounter obstetrix in a Latin reading. Did you know “obstetrician” comes from the Latin word for midwife?  He does. When I find vagitus in Samuel Beckett’s Murphy, this too is brought to the links. It means the newborn baby’s first cry, I say. Did you know that?  Yes again. Sometimes it happens early in difficult births, he tells me. It’s called vagitus uterinus. But Father is pleased by the story. It reminds him of a sermon.

            Speaking of vagitus, he says, your mother took me to hear a guest preacher,  some young hotshot fluent in Hebrew and Greek. Your mother’s like you, a sucker for the words. Turns out the hotshot put up slides (rare then in heartland Presbyterian sermons) focusing on the Hebrew name of God, teaching Father in the process that Hebrew writing reads from right to left. His central text came from Exodus, where God, addressing Moses, tells him His name simply asserts His existence. God’s name, Father learns, means I AM!  The preacher’s repetitions, the going on about Yahweh and Jehovah, eventually send Father off into his own line of reasoning. After awhile I’m remembering the delivery room, he reports. The babies’ first cries sound like this Hebrew word!  Waah!  Waah! Yahweh!  Yahweh!  I AM! I AM! 

            Father is initially shocked, worried his thought might be blasphemous, but the more he thinks the more he likes it.  I told your mother, he says. She liked it too. I also like it, there on the golf course, and we talk it over through several holes. He’s always understood infants’ initial cries as protest, Father says, as outrage. It makes sense, he adds—kid is without warning and with considerable rough handling hauled from a warm uterine Eden into a chilly OR, handled by strangers, slapped on the butt.

            But what if it’s sheer assertion? Father asks. What if that’s what’s happening?  Just tiny egos, insisting on limitless prerogative?  Yahweh! they shout. Yahweh!  I AM!  I AM!  I AM!

            Such exuberance from Father is uncharacteristic. He’s playing on my ground now, off and running with the visiting preacher’s cue, and triggering my own unbridled register. Dad, the hospital is church for you—it’s Bethlehem in Indiana, every kid the promised messiah. Clock in down at the manger, scrub up and wait on Mary!

            It’s not such a stretch, this little riff, the basic trope lifted from Brueghel’s relocation of his Adorations to Netherlandish landscapes, but Father glances over from his cart, absolutely delighted. That’s nice, he smiles. That’s really very nice. He gets it, understands these flights as my own epiphany portal, the closest thing I own to his midwife’s worship. Father sees he’s passed on his reverence, if not his profession. And this, he’s telling me, is altogether fine, a satisfaction.

            That’s half a century old now, with Father gone the last forty, taken out at fifty-one by kidney cancer. 4902L grounded, Bismarck and Honolulu and Atlanta and Nashville behind him, the restless West Virginian touches down for good. He’s buried in Muncie. The loss of him tears the roof from my world, lets wind and cold and storm crash in.

            His memory throngs back more often now, with me twenty years beyond the oldest age he knew—his office walls plastered with snapshots of everything from babies in cribs to high school graduates in robes and mortarboards, shopping cart encounters with mothers, shyly proud, introducing teenagers whose debut I AM! was uttered from his hands. At their age I mistook him for Mr. Big, recipient of deference and issuer of orders, but learned over time, thanks to his patient teaching, to see him find his deepest fulfillment as a privileged servant. Obstetrix. Stagehand. These days he visits most often as sentences heard in my head, and the surprise is this: shorn of visual presence, pared to pure sound, his voice carries even now the pitch and timbre of an awestruck boy. Look at this, son, he says. Look!  Listen!

---

Robert Cochran lives and works in Arkansas, where he most often writes, co-authors, and edits books for university presses. His essays, poems, and stories have surfaced in Black Warrior Review, Georgia Review, Kenyon Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, New Orleans Review, and The Quarterly, among others. Recent work: “Spinoza’s Landlady,” a runner-up for the Jeffrey E. Smith Editors’ Prize, appears in the Spring 2019 issue of The Missouri Review.

from The Work

Christian Barter

            I had this clearish vision of what to write:
            a portrait of a year, a love affair
            caught pivoting towards serious, and right
            at mid-life’s pivot, that ten-mile stare,
            my own decline and fall co-terminant
            with country’s and, perhaps, us all,
            as though the universe had heard me bawl
            and said, “I’ll give you something to cry about!”
            No small pickins for a poem of complaint.
            And yet it never has come truly clear,
            the vision, muddy as the life which yet
            may grant me one more useful metaphor
            at the expense of that which could confer it:
            if all this goes unread, it will be perfect.

So if you’re somewhere out there, passed out on the floor:
Oh, Joey, I’m not angry any more.

—Concrete Blonde

1

I have no problem any more with this small town.
I’ve stopped worrying if my neighbors wave—
though sometimes they do—and at forty-eight
I figure the friendships that didn’t take
when we had time to waste on them won’t now
and don’t take too long at Hannaford’s getting the low-down
on which vanished mutual companion
is climbing in Utah or dating an old ex.
For we are all old exes here,
our pearls built on the grit of one another.
It’s easy now to pull the brie right under
the nose of some ex-buddy who came by early
every night one winter to throw darts
and drink, and build up nacre for the bars.

2

I’m telling you this, Mariah, because you may
at some point come up here to live with me.
I don’t care any more about misdirection,
or lit-theory breakdowns of the unintentional.
My last long work of fragmented voices
pollutes back shelves of independent bookstores
everywhere, unread as Dickinson.
I’ve made my peace with that small-town shoulder,
or just using others’ words if they work better.
Oh Joey, I’m not angry any more,
as Concrete Blond once belted in high style,
and we, as though we’d scored it, sang right with her.
For we are all old exes here, my love,
and, even in theory, have one life to live.

3

Though lately I can’t seem to see the sky—
the snow, the stream on Norway Drive, the tree
across the road, all thrust and knotty elbow
that once backgrounded all my verse like Fuji;
all I see are phone poles, the backyard trash
of distant interstates cutting the next ridge,
and the actual backyard trash—tipped car, old fridge,
bags piled for the truck like someone’s iPhone
ringing in the adagio, the mass,
the speech where Kennedy says we must go to the moon;
I keep seeing the charts, the line since carbon fuel
jumping up like a Superball that’s hit a stone—
always cut off at now like an intervention,
caesura, skyline, freak assassination. 

4

I’m going to try to write something anyway,
writing and inspiration often acting
as opposite strides, the light too bright
at the moment of seeing to see your way through
the dank passages—like love and passion,
which rarely operate in concert; or exertion
and strength, which every lifter knows go back
and forth, one laying track for the other
to glide on, as though under its own power,
days later.  Nothing is under its own power.
All that’s worth saying comes in a kind of dream:
a name coming after you’ve given up trying,
or you, when I’d become okay with being alone,
leaning forward, saying, “Mariah.”

---

Christian Barter works at Acadia National Park as a stone worker, rigger, arborist and trail crew supervisor. He has won a Hodder Fellowship from Princeton, and The Maine Literary Award. Recent poetry has appeared in Tin House, NewLetters and on poets.org. His latest book is Bye-bye Land from BOA Editions.

Uh-Oh, Love Comes to Town

by RJC Smith

We were on the roof, smoking pot.  Rena had a pair of binoculars.  It was the last summer, or any season for that matter, that I would spend with my father, the last before his unfortunate break.  Rena was only my friend, and possibly my only friend.  There wasn’t much else to do and we had no other means of emotional support save each other.  That and Rena was in love with me, and maybe I got off on it.

“Huh,” said Rena, and I suppressed the urge to roll my eyes at her coyness, which I found grating.  There was a lot about her that I found grating, yet she continued to spend time with me.  This was invaluable because I didn’t have a driver’s license.  

I had already hit the joint twice, but in light of her obliviousness, took one last extended toke, which sent me into a coughing fit.  My eyes reddened as I coughed and I pushed a wave of nausea back into my stomach.

“What,” I said, extending the joint towards her.  She didn’t notice me.  She was transfixed with whatever her binoculars were pointed at.  I looked down at the pool, visible along with a good portion of the wooden deck from where we sat on my house’s roof.  I watched its surface waver and reflect light.

My father had a routine for swimming in this pool.  It was the same every time, every day, every morning.  First, he’d walk, straight into the frigid shallow end, down the textured steps, into the water.  He’d rotate back and forth, the tips of his fingers gliding across the chlorinated blue.  Then he’d raise his arms up into a triangle and dive forward, transitioning into a measured butterfly stroke. 

“Where did you say your dad was,” Rena said, in a confused voice.

“Grocery shopping, I think,” I said. “Do you want any more of this joint or what?”

“Maybe you should take a look at this,” Rena said, motioning for me to come look through her binoculars, “Or maybe you shouldn’t.  I don’t know.”  

I swiped them from Rena’s hands.  I put them up to my eyes and moved back and forth, adding sarcastically, 

“What am I looking for?  What am I looking for?” before Rena guided me to the sweet spot with her right hand.  

“What is it,” I continued, “a blue-jay?  An ostrich?  Some kind of rare sparrow?”

Then I saw it.  It was a scene set inside my next-door neighbor’s, Richard Godsen’s, hot tub.  Inside were Richard and my father.  Richard was positioned over my father, hunched over somewhat, and my father, Pete, was leaning back, his eyes closed and his mouth hanging agape.  He was giving him a fucking handjob.  You could tell from the little splashes of water around my father’s crotch.

“Huh,” I said.

#

I’d rather not go into the scene where my father hit my mother repeatedly with a wooden spoon from 7:23 PM to 7:24 PM (I was looking away through most of it and staring at the stove’s LED clock), because I’m saving that for the therapist my mother will force me to see once they’re legally divorced and she has money.

“Why didn’t you do anything to stop him,” Rena asked, behind the wheel with red puffy eyes, turning a corner into the parking lot of a local playground and baseball diamond.  We were both high and would be getting higher in a minute.

“I guess at the time I wasn’t sure it was really happening,” I said, answering without thinking, a direct line between my mouth and my brain.  I felt a bit queasy because I knew a more honest answer might be something like, ‘I didn’t want to be hit with the spoon either’. 

“Yeah,” Rena said. “I guess I can sort of understand that.”  She enunciated each little word like they all had lives of their own.

We got out of the car and walked up past the playground and towards the baseball diamond, its outfield meshing indiscriminately with the larger grassy area.  We walked out and stopped ten or so yards from an ongoing little league game. I sat down on the grass cross-legged and Rena did the same.  Sometimes I wanted life to be something bigger than smoking pot in a field, but my life was often little more than that.  Five yards away an outfielder stood, his body twisted to eye us with suspicion. 

#

When we drove back, all I could imagine were buildings, warehouses let’s say, filled with little stationary cars where moving roads were projected onto windshield shaped screens.  Rena’s ever-present shoegaze played on the car stereo, somehow sending me farther into myself.

The only thing that separated my house from Richard Godsen’s was a few yards’ strip of dirt and pre-autumnal leaves.  I wanted it to be the last summer I spent there, smoking pot atop the pool diving-board or throwing a ball at the half-tennis court wall.

“I think I’m getting headaches,” Rena said, “headaches unlike those felt by other people.”

“Hmm,” I responded, “Interesting,” while continuing to stare alternatingly out the side window and windshield.

The headlights on passing cars shone through the windshield and I winced.  Rena glanced over at me and I continued looking forward.  This was the little thing we did, the talking without saying, avoiding the tension of her want.  No emotion resonated out from me.

“Maybe it’s a satellite,” she went on.

“Or maybe your rising planet,” I said.

“Rising sign,” she said.  “I think you mean rising sign.”

“Or ruling planet, maybe,” I said, as we curved onto my house’s road.  Rena snorted through her nose.

We pulled into my driveway and sat there in the parked car, outside of my garage.  A jetliner passed above, close enough for us to hear the sound, or me at least, as Rena’s ethereal music was blasting from the speakers, bouncing around the inside of the SUV.  Rena opened up the glove box to pull out her little acrylic pipe and proceeded to fill it with marijuana from a small glass box.  The windows of her car were open and I wondered if my father could hear us from inside over cable news squall.  Then we smoked more, back and forth, the rotating act of it almost better than the high.

“Can we put on something with, like, a beat,” I asked.  “I feel like I’m about to drift off into nothingness.”

“Like what,” she said, “what would you have me put on?”

“Something more pop/rock, I guess.”

“You take it, just put something on,” she said, throwing her iPod into my lap.

I scrolled through it.  She wasn’t the type of person that listened to music for a hook. I persevered and found something because I was high and didn’t want to agitate her further. 

We sat there quiet with just the music for a while.  It was fine.  I had become adept at thinking it was fine.

“You don’t have any cigarettes do you?” I said, finally.

She pulled a pack out from her cup holder and held it in the dark in front of her torso.  Rena looked up at me with a blank face and was silent, then smiled.

“Just the one,” she said,  “wanna split it?”

We passed it back and forth for a few minutes.

“Do you want the last drag?” Rena asked, displaying a cigarette that was little more than a cotton filter.

“Sure,” I said.

Rena pulled on it and grabbed my head with her free hand.  She moved closer and pulled me in, we met midway.  Though she was attempting to kiss me while blowing smoke into my mouth, the sensation I most remember is our teeth hitting.

“No,” I said, “no.”  I hadn’t wanted it.  Perhaps I pushed back a bit too hard.  She was looking at me with a face.  I was trying not to look at her.

#

I walked in the front door and closed it quiet enough so you couldn’t hear it click.  My father was passed out on the recliner with a can of coke held limply, resting on his stomach, the blue light from the TV coating him.  I wondered if he had slipped some whiskey into the can, but decided it wasn’t worth the risk of checking.

Then the TV started emitting a horrible beeping noise, and a gray box appeared over a pundit’s face.  ‘FLASH FLOOD WARNING: 1AM-9AM’ it said in bold lettering.  My father jolted awake and spilt some of his drink on himself.  He looked up at me, failing to recognize my presence for a good half-a-minute.  Behind us the television set continued to blare warning noises.

“I’m going to bed now,” I said to him.  I said it, loud, as if shouting over some swell.

“Did you remember to close the door and take your medication?” he asked.  It was nonsense.  I couldn’t fault him as he was only half awake.

#

I was lying down in my room, listening to the sound of the intermittent but heavy rainfall.  If you stare at a white plaster ceiling for long enough all of its little imperfections will become known to you.  Through my laptop speakers black metal was playing, which meant I was not quite ready for sleep.  It was close to two in the morning.  I’d always had trouble sleeping.

I got up from bed to turn the lights off, then I lay back down, switched my gaze from the ceiling to the standing, oscillating fan in the corner.  The rain picked up again, pattering against the window.  Outside, I could hear a car door open and close.  Its engine started.  I heard the sound of tires moving over gravel and onto dirt.  

I had thoughts of Richard until my thoughts were submerged.

#

Rena and I began to kiss.  She wrapped her hand around the back of my head and I pulled her pelvis into mine. Then she let go and pushed my hands away, falling back onto the bed.  She pulled off her sweatshirt and when that was off, her t-shirt.

I should have felt something different, I know.  Instead I felt coldness welling inside of me, enough that it scared me.  I slunk back like I was being rewound.  I crouched fetally on the floor for a minute.  From outside came the sounds of drunkenness and car doors.  Rena sat upright, took her head in her hands and began moaning like a deer whose back has been broken through car collision.  Her head began warping, though I couldn’t tell if it was just my vision failing me, if I was too high or something.  Little slits opened up in a ring around the top, columns formed along her forehead and across her temples.

I got up and walked out of my room, down the stairs and to the ground floor, where the garage and laundry room were.  I slid the glass door open and stepped out onto the gravel.  Richard and my father were leaning against the family sedan.  Richard was gripping a bottle of whiskey with a hand connected to an arm wrapped around my father’s neck.

“Pete?” My father whimpered.  “Is that you?”

It was raining and very dark out.  There were rumblings of thunder in the sky.  When I’m lit up and remembering being there, this is what I think it was: simply lightning.  But then there was the moaning and thumping I heard coming from up and behind me.  Looking back I saw Rena at my bedroom window.  Light was pouring from the northern hemisphere of her head as she banged it against the glass.  Her moaning was loud enough to make out from the gravel lot.  The light was bluish-white and almost blinding.  It was illuminating the three of us, the parked car, and the edges of the nearby woods.

---

RJC Smith lives in New York.  He has work published in X-Ray Lit Mag.

Fever on Good Friday

Sean Williamson

Theodor’s fever broke on Good Friday. We had fallen asleep on the couch. Theodor was sweating under a blanket. I was twisted up in a hot afternoon dream: standing on the empty patio at Jess and Oscar’s house in Milwaukee, on an overcast day. We are laughing belly-straining laughter. What else about the dream I can’t recall.

            On that same patio, a few years ago in real life, I stood up as a witness in their tiny wedding and read a quote from Bob Marley. They didn’t have a baby boy then, but he’s big now, Jess sent me a video of him running down the hall in his diaper, dragging a handful of balloon strings, balloons bouncing against each other in the air.

            When I woke, Theodor was soaked with sweat next to me, eyeballs flitting under closed lids. Just a couple days before this, I read an essay about a man who lost his tiny daughter because a brick fell off a building in Manhattan. There is so much dread in parenthood. It is easy to amplify. Just go ahead and tell us what happened, a thing we all know could happen. And we’ll weep at the devastation of a house fire. Forever keep our eyes up, for falling bricks, for grills and satellite dishes, for air conditioning units, raining from the sky. Watch our baby’s fever’s rise and fall.

            We are the hot engines that run our lives. Sometimes we are maintained and fueled. Sometimes punished for nothing. My family is in Wisconsin, living their good lives. They must be in pain, too, but so far away. Is anything worth not being there? Theodor’s eyebrows shine with sweat. Damp ringlets of hair stick to his forehead. He was just a baby once.

            When should I call the doctor? Is this serious enough?

            Washing the dishes and preparing dinner keeps the nervous barf from my mouth.

            One time, at the Walgreens on Metropolitan, Theodor ran away from me across a busy parking lot. I chased him down and twisted his shirt in my fist. Sawyer, the smaller one, was confused and tucked under my other arm. Theodor struggled to free himself, from me, from my fist pushing him against the car.

            “You can’t do that!” I screamed looming over him.

            “Why?” he cried.

            “Because I need you. That’s why!”

            Fruit flies tumble in the air above the sink. My neck and head sting and are sore.

            Sawyer, who was napping in his bedroom stumbles out and cries for want of everything, but will settle for frozen berries. I sit him at the table and before long he looks like a wild baby, just done gorging on road kill. Then he goes naked into the bath.

            Heather will be home soon, and traffic brushes down the street below the apartment. It’s loud like it’s always loud. My mother and father are putting new carpet in our childhood home, they told me. The old carpet still holding hairs from a family dog, dead ten years now.

            If a bubble were to pop in my brain, what would happen to my boys? To the chicken cooking on the stove? To Sawyer in the filling bath? Could they make it another forty minutes until Heather unlocked the door? Don’t we know all the horrible things? Haven’t we listed them in our minds? Christ, how can I make this life go? How can I keep this engine running?

            “Dad?” Theodor says, groggy. “What are you making?”

            “Hi, baby. I made chicken and broccoli and applesauce.”

            “I’m hungry,” he says, then slides off the edge of the couch, then waddles to the kitchen.

            I touch his head. It’s still wet but much cooler. I bend down and put a thermometer in his armpit and it reads 99 degrees, which we can all live with. “Sawyer, are you OK?” I ask.

            Sawyer squeals from the bathtub. There’s better music now.

            Theodor bobs his head back and forth and sits sleepy in the dining room nook, hair drying in a hilarious shape. I fill his construction-themed plate with chicken and broccoli and applesauce, some in each section. He is so hungry and eats everything. His plate fills again. I lean in the doorway between the bathroom and kitchen and assign each one of them an eye. They are happy. More applesauce and all his broccoli without asking. My eyes are hot with tears because he is hungry and smiling and eating, because it’s not for me. Because he doesn’t remember how much I need him, does he?

Heather and I kiss at the top of the stairs and I rush out to my night restaurant job. A crowd walks slowly down the middle of Woodward. Voices chuck a song into the air, cop cars lead the way, bleeping and blipping. Drummers bang out a march. From the back, they chant some Catholic song in Italian. At least I guess it’s Italian. Thousand-year-old women walk with black shawls around their heads. Men push a glass case down the middle of the street. Inside, Jesus lies in a bed of flowers. Following, men in tan suits push the statue of a woman, a pale specter, head bent to the side, in a black hooded robe. They chant and the pale woman looks down at me, my headphones around my neck, dirty high top sneakers, wearing shorts for the first time of the year. I turn my back and outpace them down Woodward. But they follow, Jesus and the specter, the police and the Italian vampires, chanting, “What do you think you’re getting away with?”

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Sean Williamson’s feature film debut, Heavy Hands, was an official selection for the 2013 Raindance Film Festival (London). In 2018 he released the audio storytelling series, BLIGHT: Stories in the Key of Decay and Repair. Sean is a Wisconsin native living in Queens with his partner and two sons. His work has appeared at The Millions, Juked, and Maudlin House.