, Author at Post Road Magazine

Poker

by Trevor Creighton

Three aces.

He should hold them but Carl hesitated. I always get three aces, he thought. This machine can’t be real. It must be rigged somehow.

But he kept on playing.

Queen, king.

He’d thrown away a jack and a ten to follow the aces.

Of course, he thought, as he lost the hand.

Carl put more quarters in the poker machine and listened as they made their way into its machinery. They were gone now. Irretrievable. The radio announced a cool evening, two suicides, a boy hospitalized by bee stings, and half price printer ink. Carl’s ink had turned to dust long ago and his printer sat unplugged under magazines kept for their unread sweet dessert recipes.

When Paula and Jen had first moved to Hendercove, they had opened a pool hall with cash. They never said where they made their money and they never mentioned no family but they arrived and redid an old building on Main Street and opened their hall. Over the years, the pool gave way to video games and now the main room was a sort of tabletop gaming community bar. The girls had died over ten years ago but they’d left everything to Henrietta, a part-time employee at the time, who had stood up and kept the place running when Jen got sick, four months after Paula had left them. Whatever the rumors, and they were plenty, Henrietta now owned the joint, and if there had been any questions still lingering about the money it was washed in Jen’s death.

Carl was in the back room where the last arcade machines lingered. He played the poker machine. For hours. It passed the time. Passed his life. Passed, allowing him to pass also. No one noticed him. No one came in. Not regularly anyways. Not for long. No one played fifteen-year-old arcade machines anymore but the lights still flashed and Henrietta hadn’t decided what to do with that room yet. The tabletop gamers were pleasant enough, sipping their craft beers and rolling their dice, shuffling all kinds of creatures over imagined worlds to their deaths and glory. Now and then a few would wander back to the room Carl was in, bartering quarters for poker hands and sometimes needing to cash in before going home. They never stayed long but seemed to really enjoy what they called old school for the few minutes they spent back there. It reminded Carl of when folks would play for hours at a time. They’d practiced of course. Spent their lives in the arcade. But boy could they play.

His poker machine was one of the almost extinct versions that allowed a player to win money. He went up and down and played for long times out of the tray where the payouts fell but mostly he paid the entertainment fees and went home, happy some time had passed. Happy he too was passing. Life is a membership and all memberships expire but if Carl had been on a subscription plan it’s unlikely he would have renewed.

The building, The Fun House, had been part of a nunnery a long time ago that had been closed for medical malpractice. In the eighteen-hundreds they had experimented with limb transplants but their subjects had been alive and left in their care by families unable to support children with severe mental challenges. Limbs had been taken and explored and this had been developed into attempting to figure out how to reattach them and have them heal with the goal of eventually switching the children’s heads. The writings and log books explained the thought behind Sister Julienne’s vision. If the mind could filter its thoughts and blood supply through a different body, perhaps the mind would operate differently, and in the case of the insane, perhaps become sane. There had been nothing but carnage in the end. No medical breakthroughs and no protection from the church when their experiments were uncovered. We were doing God’s work they had said before becoming the charges of facilities similar to what they had been trusted with providing. More secure, more regulated, and more isolated facilities.

The machine Carl frequented was painted green over yellow. You could see the yellow leaking through where the metal was scratched showing the age of the game. The moves it had made. The history it contained. Carl had found one online once. He’d considered picking it up. Having it at home but somehow he needed to be out. He couldn’t exist all day, all at home, all alone. This place was solitary but he saw people. Walked past the stores. Got some air. And there was Hen.

He’d stopped by the dog shelter on the way there three days ago and had a look around. Back in the far corner, a mutt shivered in the corner of a cage.

“What’s that one?” he asked.

“Dunno,” the attendant replied. “You want him… or her?”

Carl lowered himself outside the fencing and beckoned the dog but it wouldn’t come. It pushed backwards against the opposite corner, risking pain and Carl didn’t want to terrify it.

“Is it alright?”

The attendant didn’t know. Carl wasn’t impressed. The attendant set down the paper he had been reading.

“Bob will be back later,” the attendant explained. “He knows the dogs. I just muck ’em out. Feed ‘em. Pet ‘em sometimes but this one don’t go near anyone. It’s been hurt maybe. Beat perhaps. They say a dog remembers that kind of thing.”

The other dogs yelped and yipped and climbed and jumped, trying anything to get Carl’s attention. Looking for the attendant’s hand. Anything at all to be touched. To be seen. To be loved. But Carl only had eyes for this shaggy, shivering thing that backed itself into a corner.

“When does Bob get here?” he asked.

“Later. All’s I know. After lunch, likely. He usually brings some leftovers. You hear about that boy getting hospitalized? They say he was stung more than a hundred times. A hundred. How does one survive that?”

Carl didn’t know. He sat by the cage ten minutes after the attendant had busied himself with other tasks and once, during his time there, the dog ventured a single paw toward him. Just a step but Carl’s facial movement must’ve scared it back. In time perhaps, it would come and sniff. Come and say hi. Come and discover all was safe but not today and he couldn’t drag it out of there. He’d talk to Bob. Bob would know what to do.

Henrietta had nightmares since Jen’s death. She’d wake in the night, around three, and go for a glass of water, sweating from the fear. As she filled the glass a spider raced up her arm and she felt every footstep it made. All eight of them, furiously moving toward her armpit. She dropped the glass and heard it smash as she brushed at her arm with her right hand. She was dancing backward, away from the faucet when she stabbed her soles on the freshly broken glass. She jumped involuntarily and slipped on the water, falling as the spider burrowed into her armpit. The blood spread quickly through the water and her legs found more of the glass. When she next woke, the spider was gone and she had a strange tickle in her throat. She didn’t remember all of her nightmares. Just that she’d had them and she seldom felt rested in the mornings as a result.

Two tens, two sixes and a seven. Carl considered the flush but held the tens. An eight, a five, and a four. All diamonds. Damn it, he thought and drew again. He’d been wondering about the rising sea levels. He’d been wondering why with all the technology in the world we couldn’t have some sort of device that could make water evaporate. It, or they… he imagined an army of them, all smart enough to not get too close to each other so fish and the like could still surface. They would need engines to reposition and GPS to know where they were but they would all take in a little water through holes and as it passed through it would turn turbines, charging the machine. It would close the doors once charged and heat the water till it became vapor, pressured enough to rise to the skies, forming clouds above. Carl figured this might, with enough of them, keep the sea levels under control and also create cloud cover to stop a lot of the sun’s rays making it through to the lower levels. He wasn’t a scientist of course, nor an environmentalist, not even an engineer, but this was what he was wondering about as his stack of quarters grew smaller.

I’m due a win, he told himself. I’m due a win, but he knew the machines always made money in the end and he was the only one that played it in any real sense. He trusted Henrietta not to be fixing things too much in favor of the house but he knew it was designed to only pay out a percentage of what it took in. Still, I’m due a win, he told himself and held two twos in hopes of four of a kind.

Carl lost forty dollars that day and considered it an alright day. He was sober. He hadn’t done any harm. No harm had come to him. He had food at home but how he dreaded that empty, quiet hole. He couldn’t understand why the dog hadn’t come to him. He was drawn to it for the dog was him only without the education. With different limbs. More fur. Just shivering in his corner and hoping no one would notice. Hoping no one would hurt him yet every now and then stretching out his paw. Thinking, maybe, he had found something different. Something more. It never lasted of course but why wouldn’t the dog come to him? They could take care of each other. He wouldn’t ever hurt it or let hurt come to it. The game room had plenty of room for them both and they could be happy moving between his one room at home and his other one room, taking care of each other. He might even venture into a park now and then. He paused by the gate to the shelter and tried to be there for the dog. His dog. If only it’d come to him. Bob would know what to do. A half hour he stood there, displaying his dedication the only way he knew how. His commitment. He felt crazy, then dumb, then determined, then proud. He was hungry. Then he left.

His one room was a fifteen-minute walk from the gaming rooms. The streets were lit but not bright and there was enough foot traffic to feel safe. It had been a snobbish, under the cap kind of neighborhood many years ago before becoming more affordable as people sprawled on but now it had passed through disrepair and danger to become hip again, reviving, hopeful, with young folk and more money than it’d seen in a long while.

One of Carl’s friends, John, lived a block off his route between the two rooms. The route had a single turn to make and sometimes he missed it, which was ridiculous of course but he hadn’t missed it in months. He got so wound up in his thoughts sometimes, walking past these homes in the evening, the golden warmth of their hidden insides leaking through the curtains, staining the twilight, and threatening to scar the dusk. He took a side street to the next block, three roads down from John’s and made his way to his house. He wanted to ask about the dog. How to coach it. He wanted to share a meal. He wanted to say hi but when his fingers could sense the cool of the buttons he paused long enough to feel awkward and then casually leaned by the entrance instead. He pulled out his phone and flipped it open. Phone. J. John. Call. He paused again. What would he say? How would he begin? So many times he had hovered over the call function. The one button he regularly stared at that didn’t cost him much money. I’ll text tonight, he thought. He’s probably busy. Besides, Bob’ll know what to do about the dog. I should get home.

Henrietta thought about Carl sometimes. Times like tonight when the gamers were busy. They were so involved in their worlds and rules and routines. Beers and drawings and paint and strategies. She had always liked table top games but had never been able to afford the different components. Then, when she could, she’d never really had the time. When she’d been part-time for the sisters, she’d had a full-time overnight gig, just to make rent. She could paint the basic troops and enjoyed making scenery and the like but who had the time with a business to run? Suppliers and repairs and customers and Carl. She’d often thought about how many Carls might have been devastated when the pool hall was converted to a gaming place. She’d kept a few tables of course but they weren’t in a hall anymore. More a room. A bright room, with a bar, and overpriced snacks she’d never known growing up, all neatly displayed on racks made from repurposed barn doors, old farmstead fencing, and abandoned beehive boards. The greasy spoon next door sold individual pizzas now, for three times the cost of a family sized pie, baked potatoes stuffed with avocado butter on sticks, and celery frames filled with fruit. She remembered the streets Carl had known with her. Before the business did better. Before the poker machine had been moved to the storage room. Before he’d asked about it. Before she’d opened the room. Let him in. Turned it back on and let him treat the space as his own. It was only a bunch of relics now. Two of them still with life.

Henrietta had seen a horse the day before she dreamed of one. It was out in a meadow, steam coming from its nostrils as its muscular body tensed against the morning chill. The sun was coming up and its glow became centered around a single flickering flame. A candle that dripped wax onto rat dung covered stonework. Forgotten, it had burned in the same window for three days now as the corpse that had lit it decayed below the window it sat in, covered with coal sacks from the abandoned warehouse adjacent. The horse was just outside now, in the street, laying on its side. Blood kept the children warm as they sliced palm-sized chunks of flesh to gnaw on, wrapped snugly in the hairy skin they had just removed and taken as clothing. The neck had a hundred stab wounds from them bringing it down and the steam rose from the blood keeping everything cozy.

She was thinking of this horse when Carl had asked her for change. She was trying to remember what color it had been in the meadow. What color it had been before the city. Before the dream. She supposed it didn’t matter much but she so desperately wanted to see it as it had been. As it was. Before. Before becoming what she knew and saw now.

“Just twenty, Carl?”

“Yeah, Hen. Feeling lucky today. I’ll have winnings to play with.”

“Want a Diet Coke? They’re expired. The rep said to toss them or take them home.”

“Yeah, that’d be great. Thanks, Hen.”

“Plenty more. Just ask.”

“Hen?” Carl accepted the bottle and stared at it for a moment.

“What’s up, Carl?”

“I was just wondering…” He turned the bottle over in his hands before looking at her eye to eye. He paused, then “Would you ever consider…it’s silly really.”

“Go on.” She didn’t care about anything else in that moment and he could tell. She wanted him to ask her. She cared about him and knew he was weighing his words carefully.

“Could I, I mean would you…it’s just…there’s a dog. I’d like to maybe bring a dog here with me. In the future. Not right away. But soon.”

“A dog.” Henrietta broke the eye contact and shuffled some flyers on the countertop. “Of course, Carl. So long as it’s trained. Got enough to clean up.”

“I’ll be sure. Thanks, Hen. You’re the best.”

She smiled at him and he nodded slightly before heading to the back room. She really did like him. He was somewhat from before. She couldn’t quite sense it right but every now and then she’d feel a connection. Like everything was fine so long as Carl was there. Bearable maybe. Fine. Another smile came. She’d wanted to bring him a Christmas plate the previous year. And she had. Made plates for all the customers but sent all the leftovers home with Carl. I’ve no room, she said. I do this for everyone, she said. I had a little extra time, she said. She’d wanted to invite him to a meal. She hadn’t wanted to push the issue. Hadn’t wanted to make it awkward. Draw attention to him sitting alone. Her rooms closed. Her alone too. She just wanted the holiday to end so they could get back to their routines again. And he seemed happy enough. Maybe he had plans. They never really talked about holiday plans. She could invite him for a meal some other time. It seemed silly for them both to eat alone.

Carl had never been a part of the evening crowd back when Paula and Jen had run the pool hall. He would stop by for a snack every now and then but he was always headed off to work. Sometimes he worked noon to midnight, sometimes eight to four in the morning, and every now and then, midnight till eight. Always at night though and so morning had become his evening. He prefered the eight till four as it gave him plenty of time to take care of some stuff and enjoy the morning as it arrived. He liked to watch as its sweet amber shards tore through what remained of the night’s decaying flesh. He could roam the stores or take care of business without long lines and stopped often, by the pool hall for a drink and a few shots or played some video games for a while. He’d started playing poker the last two years of his working, the sixth year Henrietta had been there. The machine was by the counter so they got to know each other over time. Slowly, with a counter between them, safely, till they were familiar and looked for each other when they were there.

Bob was busy mucking out a cage. Rooms they called them but it was just some fencing and straw with a small wooden shelter in a corner. Bob knew the mutt Carl was asking after.

“Doesn’t go to no one. I won’t be able to keep it much longer. Taking a place of one that might have a home. I can’t help those that won’t be helped.”

“I’ll take it.” Carl didn’t ask what would happen if Bob couldn’t keep it. He didn’t ask how much money might be involved. He didn’t ask how many separate cans of food that one shivering lump might be found in the following month.

“Why not take one that wants the company, Carl? Every dog in here would love to get taken home but that one. Every one of them. They’d do you well. Pleased to see you. Happy and playful. Some dogs just aren’t right. They don’t work. It’s no one’s fault, Carl.”

“I’ll take it Bob, but can it stay a while? I don’t want to force it. I’ll stop by and get it familiar. I think it’ll warm up. I can bring things. Maybe feed it.”

“You’ll have to pay lodging. We can’t keep a non lodged dog if it’s not up for taking.”

“I understand. How much is lodging?”

“Just twenty a night. It’s hows we feed them, mostly. Just about keep the lights on but that’s the game, I suppose.” He didn’t mention the other income. The cents per pound for those that wouldn’t get taken. That was how the bedding got bought. So much wrong to build such good. The angels that help often dirty their gowns and singe their wings, one of his buyers had said. Those that do great good could pass through hell looking native, she had went on, but Bob didn’t hold with that. He figured by then the works were good but they were side products of devilry. Devils can do as much good as angels can do harm. Good people were always bringing evil to the world so he figured if he was bad for what he did, it didn’t mean he wasn’t a force for good.

Bob swiped at a bee. “Damn things have been everywhere recently. I’ve never known there to be so many bees.”

“Just leave them be,” Carl said. “If you don’t annoy them, they won’t annoy you. When does he eat? Is it a he?”

“She. Already fixed and all her shots. Why not take another? One that wants?”

“I think they all want. Just some don’t show it as much.”

“You might be right. I started here as a volunteer, you know. Just walking and playing with them. Especially with ones like her. I’d lay in their rooms with them till they got to being playful but we had time back then. No one volunteers no more and it’s all I can do to keep them fed and to their appointments and clean enough for visitors.”

“You do great Bob. Maybe after, I can still stop by. Sit awhile with the shyer ones.”

“That’d be good Carl and if you took her in the end and needed to be off someplace we could keep her for free, if you’re helping out and all.”

“All right. Here’s a hundred.” Carl held out some notes.

“Just pay when you take her. Or weekly. Starting Monday let’s say.”

Carl nodded and noticed a bee crawling by the dog. “You see, Bob. See the bee. Just leave them be and you’ll be fine.”

Trixie, what Carl thought the dog might be called, just shivered in her shelter. Carl knelt in her room and put food by her door. She would sniff at him if he didn’t move for a while but she wasn’t going to be won over in a single feeding.

“Trauma,” Bob said as Carl left the room.

“Deserving,” Carl replied. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Henrietta dreamt of Carl taking Trixie home. He stopped by the register and got some change. He had a dog in his arms with a bright red leash. The dog licked him and struggled to greet her when she spoke to her. Then Carl was in the poker room. She could see the cards on the screen but knew she was still outside by the register. She was inside Carl and he was winning. She remembered three threes and then Trixie ran out of the room and there was a loud explosion. The lights went out and buzzing filled the air. Bees swarmed in, coming and coming and Carl backed against the wall. They were crushing against him. Thousands. Millions perhaps. He couldn’t move. He was waiting to be stung. Then she was herself again and Trixie had come to her. The dog set down a cookie and nudged it toward her before the bees came back from the storage room and forced her against the wall too. She couldn’t breath and they were entering her through her nostrils. Down the throat, flying around her stomach. They were up her skirt and filling every hole. Then they were gone and she sat against the wall in the dark. A hand reached out, luminous but she dared not take it. Dared not touch. It just hovered there. Waiting.

Henrietta wondered about the light in the dream. How she’d been able to see the dog if the lights had gone out. She hadn’t been concerned about Carl in the dream but when she woke, she wondered if he’d died or if he’d survived like she had. She’d heard that if you die in your dreams you don’t wake in this world again so maybe that was the hand. An offer of help. A way to stay there. Or this world inviting her back. She’d never know now. She watched the gamers rolling their dice, moving figurines across a board. Controlling their movements with carefully calculated chance. Some were painting in a corner. Creating colorful armies for future battles.

“Hey, Hen.”

“Carl, sorry, I was miles away.”

“No worries.”

“How’s that dog Carl?”

“Think I’ll bring her home soon. She’s been coming up and letting me stroke her. Climbing on me. Lets me walk her around the cage. Her room, I mean.”

“Great. You’ll have to bring her by.”

“Everyday if she likes it.”

“All right. Good luck today.”

He took a soda and left the dollar. He didn’t pay three dollars like the new ones did. There was something to be said for being where you belong.

Two queens and a king. Throw the three and four. Hope for something more. Two threes and another loss to the dealer. He’d played those machines that pay on your hand but this one played against an AI. Fancy term for the dealer. You had to beat the dealer was all cause there was only ever two hands in the game and Carl never dealt. Never chose the cards he would get and always played them as best he could but the dealer always won, eventually. The game, this game, his game, was rigged that way. Carl had been dealt great cards and felt confident, and he’d held poor cards and made the best of them but no matter what he tried the dealer was always there, waiting, lingering, daring him to settle. Just settle and walk away. Give it up. Stop playing. There’s no way to win in the end and eventually even the screen would go dark. Carl knew this but on he went, never seeing the dealer, always believing it was there, though his rational mind spoke of algorithms and percentages, chance, and logic. He knew the dealer was there. He was playing with a dealer and that’s the only way the game would ever make sense. The only way to continue with any sense of hope.

A poster had been hung between the bathrooms where a gritty cork slab was cut into the shape of a tree for public notices to be hung. Nothing obscene but generally anything went. The gents was to the left and the ladies to the right but above the corkboard a new sign encouraged folks to make use of whichever room they most identified with that day. The new patrons felt this was proper. The older ones didn’t understand. Carl used the room on the left but when it was busier he found himself wanting to use a cubicle. To not be seen. He felt like a Dodo bird when it was busy and he was using the left room. In line for extinction, following in the ways those before him had gone. Getting closer to the cliff. They observed him as a cashier observes a person buying condoms for the first time and he knew he was only a momentary distraction from their strategies and chatter of other worlds and the mythologies they existed within.

The poster board had a sign from the corner church, inviting all to a dinner, for friendship and connection. You could bring something if you wished but nothing was needed. Hen asked if he’d seen it.

“Yeah. Do you know anyone that goes there?”

“No, but the guy that hung the poster seemed nice enough. Probably a local. I never see anyone going in or out of that place.”

“It used to be full every week. I went to a few services, years ago.”

“So what do you think?”

“About the dinner?”

“Yeah.” She waited as his face muscled through different responses.

“Could be good. Aren’t you open?”

“It’s never busy, Friday nights. I’ll get the shift covered. Plenty of people looking for shifts.”

“Dinner then. Pick up here?”

She answered immediately as her body relaxed. “I’ll be here.”

Carl was hoping the dog, Mav he thought he might call her now, might enjoy a soft toy to snuggle with when he wasn’t there. It wouldn’t be long now till he brought her home. He arrived around four forty-five, a good forty-five minutes before Bob locked up for the evening. There was a police car by the entrance and Bob was talking with an officer and priest when he entered the office that separated the street from the lot. Another officer stopped Carl.

“I’m sorry. There’s been an accident. You won’t be able to come in right now.”

“What’s happened?” Carl asked, looking at Bob.

“Carl,” Bob replied. “I don’t know what happened. I don’t know what it is.”

Carl moved toward him but the officer stopped him again. “Sorry sir, we really can’t let you in just yet.”

“No he’s good. He’s the… It’s his dog.”

“My dog?” Carl asked. “Mav?” The teddy bear dangled from his right hand.

The officer nodded. “You’d best come with me then. We’re not entirely sure what’s happened. There’s a response team on their way. You can’t go into the cage but you’d best come and see. We’ll want to know everything the dog, Mav was it, has been fed and a record of your activities. Bob told us you’ve been with her everyday. Just him and you. No one else.”

Mav was lying near the gate, her body split in half from her neck to the anus, like a hotdog bun laid flat. One of her legs had been removed and sat, like a baseball bat, leaning against the fencing. Her insides were honeycomb and bees crawled all over her, going about their business, unaware their rebuilding work would not be left alone for long. Her head sat alone, detached, beside the body, liquid oozing over honey dipped tendrils.

“What is it?” Carl asked.

“We don’t know. There’s a team on it’s way.”

“But that’s a bee hive. And her leg. It can’t have just got there. Someone must have done this. She was walking. She was eating. There’s no lungs. No stomach. No blood.” He moved closer to the gate.

“Try not to touch it. The whole cage needs to be kept as it is.”

Carl looked at the soft toy. Its fur covering everything imagined inside. Mav’s head stared to the left. A bee came out of her nostril.

“It’s a room,” he said. “They’re rooms not cages.”

“We should go back to the office now.”

“Yes, ok.” but he just stood there, staring at the honey. The sweetness inside of his dog finally on display for all to see. Available for all to taste. Four numbers and a face card. Nothing to hold but fluff.

Trevor Creighton is a recent graduate of Sarah Lawrence College’s M.F.A. program in Speculative Fiction. He received a B.A. in Creative Writing from Columbia University and an Ed.M. from Harvard University. He is working on a collection of short stories and is super excited the first to leave his nest will be dwelling at Post Road Magazine. Trevor currently teaches at Mercy College and you can find him in the twinkle of campfires, painting in the woods, or savoring bizarre conversations.

French Antarctica

JoAnna Novak

I do not need much, so I have brought very little. I am on the open water yet snug in the cell of my vessel. Two openings. One for me, one for my valise. My antiscurbatics, my earthly affects.

Thus:

Sack of apricots, navel oranges.
One loose kumquat, size of eyeball of dissection corpse.
Two flesh-toned-nylon-hued empty sleeves of Ritz Crackers. (Let these stand in for my sons.)
Sheaf of wartime letters. Husband’s Palmerian script buttressing each consonant. Each vowel a suspension.

Upon the faces of the waves are expressions of fear and dispassion. The sun, round and runted, behind the clouds: gray nut. And nature’s accomplice––time is assaultive and present-tense.

I do not need much on this narrow boat––the Soviet handle is baidarka. I am poor, especially poor with denominations. As such, I have long fetishized them, believing proper terms might prevent me from descending into madness. Utter madness is the accepted phrase––I prefer commonplace commands. Sit down. Stay put. Put up. Speak up.

Utter madness.

Madness, I say to the stiff sealskin covering the canoe.

The first thing my husband noticed was my tendency to make a morning of blueberry biscuits. Creamed butter. Paddled butter. Melted butter. Buttermilk. Grossness of butter.

This was obvious and knuckled, a pastry blender sharding frozen butter when the boys should be getting off to school. And we were living in a house with proper walls, posts behind bricks, and glass blocks even in our shower, melting the outdoors inside. It was 1956, not 1842––we had no need to collect fats and butcher paper our windows.

One tallows a boat, one talks to a mirror, one recognizes oneself in a photograph of a mother with unsteady eyes, the same eyes one sees in her compact. Almost violent, these affinities. And the year, the home, the predictability of it all. Doorways. Area rugs. In our yard there grew a rose-apple tree.

I did enjoy that. A grandmother had taught me to talk to plants. Pitch your voice like you’d swaddle a newborn, sure and tight.

Of course, you needn’t speak sunshine. Try Czech.

My grandmother would splutter shit-something-shit.

Utter madness.

A pervasive chaos written into the bones. It runs for you. It runs deep. It does not matter if can give it a name, assign it a number. Call it Patient. If it has been rightly tied to a bed, sentenced three weeks in solitary, loud, soloing its chorus of mania in a downstate Illinois reformatory. Emaciating on cereal grains the color of colostrum.

(The milk of the sealion is fat-dense, I learned when last I took the boys to Brookfield Zoo.)

The sea chops the boat’s forked bow. Underneath the tough, stretched pelts are bones and pieces of driftwood. This is a frame light enough for one boy to carry with the help of his brother.

The second thing my husband noticed was how I napped in the garage, near bags of sandbox sand.

Third: I went to the butcher and brought home Polynesian shish kabobs. Ate them over the sink, pineapple and green peppers and pork belly, raw.

Fourth: Riotous laughter in church.

Fifth: A preliminary experiment with vanishing: We had a sitter on a Saturday, and we had gone out for humdrum errandry: A shirt to the tailor, Breen’s. Gravel from DeWitt’s on 31^st Street. Afterwards, we got lunch.

The chop suey shop sat across from a cemetery. We were marooned in a booth, with a teapot adjudicating our silence. We were the only patrons.

When the egg rolls arrived, I excused myself. I pushed through a curtain of grenade beads depicting an emerald dragon surrounded by tiger lilies. In the restroom, there were things on the wall: a cigarette machine, a wet, waffle-weave towel that fed through a metal box with sharp, sharp corners. I pulled the towel, yanked it, heard the chuck of whatever gear inside needed oiling. I remember I was wearing a favorite dress of mine: wool, long-sleeved, navy blue with a jewel neckline. A pair of gold, low-heeled pumps that matched my clutch. I looked vaguely like Deanna Durbin, but more villainous: Deanna Durbin pulling her wrist across the corner of the towel dispenser until it bled. Deanna Durbin lighting a cigarette and watching it burn sour down to her fingertips.

A short woman in a charmeuse pantsuit, the owner, came and found me.

Do you want your supper? she asked.

Do you want your suffer? I repeated.

The moo shu had arrived and the pancakes were no good cold.

It is quite cold on the water, but I stay warm. Crossing my legs and thinking up little orgasms. Fisting my hand inside the camel sleeves of my one nice coat.

I stop rowing, let the oar gag on the water. I am paddling toward Saint Joseph or French Antarctica. I have come to test my possessions. Do they float?

Of course, I am lazy and immoderate, and have eaten the frills off the Ritz crackers first. This taught me that often I had misused the word nibble.

Another oily word: Nicene. Another: nyctalopia. But what, was I to bring the lamb’s quarters?

I lean forward, squashing my waist. I grab an orange. Warm in my hand, the fruit is alive.

There. Like that. I let it go, in the water.

Still, I had flirted with hope on at least one other occasion.

It was an August Thursday. Thunderstorms aborted whatever daylight. I was looking out the window, paused as I often found myself, entranced with being the only adult in our house.

My husband? Call him John, call him Stephen, call him Timothy. He was at his desk in his office in a building behind the sanitary plant in Stickney. At lunch he would alley over to Mrs. Dolezal’s tavern, eat in the basement cafeteria, roast turkey on dry toast.

That place, he’d told me, was overrun by cats.

(There: I draw lines. I do not learn breeds.)

I had opened a sleeve of Ritz crackers when I heard the crack. A CRACK. The sound was enormous and biological, like someone breaking invisible bone breaking clean in two. I looked out the window, observing the clever silence. From where I was standing, inside, at the kitchen sink, I could see that a long precarious limb of our front elm had snapped off. It had plunged like a cock, striking the hood of my husband’s car.

This was my own adventure, the isolation interrupted, framed by curtains the color of mango fluff. I felt aware of my lungs, compressing. Numbness in my forearms. And like that, I realized I should not fear happiness.

The thought hounded me, a fly I couldn’t shoo. I had to distract myself somehow: I put five Ritz crackers on a plate. The butter was waiting on the kitchen table. It slumped under its milk glass cover like a cow in the distance. Rounded, humped. I attacked it horizontally, skimming the edge. Not a straight up and down slice.

I remember the pleasure of biting through that thick layer of butter, which was no biting at all, the way that clenching a feather pillow in one’s mouth is both taking it and being taken. The luxury, the glamour, a quarter-inch of butter on those small crackers shaped like the dials on our Zenith.

Tune in.

The boys were crying in their nursery. I let them. It is an art, knowing when a whimper is a nightmare or a prelude to a second sleep. I grew—had grown—comfortable—confident—in making this distinction.

I ate, looking at the tree limb, heavy on my husband’s car. He was in the habit of riding in with Richard down the block. And I was in the habit of admiring the buckskin frock of the Land O’ Lakes princess while the salt-sweet milk icing got me salivating all whorish, the opulence of excess. This is happiness, I realized, mundane, manageable, here it is.

Why did I feel so horrid?

Ornamental?

Appoggiaturic.

So leaned on.

So rested.

Fatly munched––

and watching the static aftermath of the storm, the mild destruction suffered by our stupid Buick. Car the color of a prairie dog.

What is so bad about this? I thought. I moved to the couch. I stretched my long calves, preening and admiring my taffeta house shoes. I winked my ankles, la-di-da. The sun would emerge. The boys would wake up. We’d walk. I could open my change purse, dime them, and like that they would have cake cones with squares scoops of mint chocolate chip and raspberry royale and New York cherry from Cock Robbin.

I held a Ritz cracker like a compass and went outside.

The sky was sfumato and the air on my bare legs was cool and delicious. A patter of raindrops pearled the car. The sky veined with waning electricity, gently illuminating the wrens feathering in the puddles on the street.

The branch was five feet long, thick as a can of Coca-Cola. At either end, it was jagged and snarly, toothed with thick splinters, like the clawish nails of the wood. The rain had come to a stop. The morning had come to a lull. I looked at the car, and I could feel a weird, distant expression screwing up my face, stiffening my mouth.

Across the street, the one-eyed standard poodle, Catie, began to bark. I petted her often, and the boys liked to scratch her ears, which her owner said were extra sensitive, but she was ruffing, worked up, like the king rooster of Sanborn Avenue. New day, she barked, new day, new day.

Yes. Panic drenched me.

I put the cracker in my mouth whole and struggled a little, chewing. The butter sat too much on the roof of my mouth.

The dog knew me, but she did not recognize me, I realized. I must have looked off, unusual, foreign, estranged from myself, split. I did not recognize the branch, entirely, amputated from the elm, and it was no surprise the dog did not recognize me. I had been staring, and it was very long, so long that I kept staring even as my body-self went into the backyard and stood at the base of the rose-apple tree.

It is not in my nature to know what I want, but at that moment I felt certain I had to unmake my world. I envied my grandmother––what must it feel like to have your capillaries buck with voltage? I must have looked as though I were recognizing this exact image from a dream.

I touched the trunk. It was damp, spongy.

In the family tree, I was fungible. One unsteady lady’s fingers become another.

Shit something something, shit, I whispered. I tasted cracker crumbs in my lipstick.

Because yes. I was the sort of woman who wore lipstick alone. Yes, I wanted to look nice for the milkman. The paper boy. The plumber. I combed my ravenette hair one hundred times a day so it would gleam when I yanked the boys through the turnstile at the zoo. I wanted the lions to slather me with their rough tongues and the lion trainers to cage me up. Madness. Utter madness.

This was when I knew I could leave. I couldn’t hear if the boys were crying.

It needn’t be such a mystery. A woman packs her valise with fruit and crackers. A woman sends her sons off to school. A woman picks out a tie and kisses her husband goodbye, telephones a taxi, stands on the curb, smiling and smiling her itchy smile. Her shoulders back and proud.

Now I read the waves like a worm reads the soil. Slashed with whitish foam. Choppy. Shoreless.

Another orange. I toss it, underhanded, into the water. Another. Another. I think of the sea parting totally for the fruit, fruit down a chute, a tube, a gene through the ages.

The canoe stinks awful, the sealskin reeking like old pork, rank and blood-muted. Ritz wrappers, goodbye. Then, I rid myself of the kumquat. Now all that’s left are the letters.

Reburying my diary was one matter: erasing a diagnosis like writing a check in invisible ink and tucking it inside a grandfather clock. Dear sons––. Rereading my husband’s letters is another matter. He wrote from Burma. He wrote of the Hump. He wrote of knowing in his bicipital soul that he had the stamina for solo flights.

He is a good man.

Confronting these letters, I am sure that I should feel a deep love. I am sure that I should feel like a woman of value, steadfasted to an earnest man. Two boys that smell like chocolate and raisins, easy, sleeping side by side. When I let the past go, I suppose I should feel rebuked by god, or whatever force turned branches into oars. But I don’t.

JoAnna Novak’s debut memoir Contradiction Days will be published by Catapult in 2022. Her short story collection, Meaningful Work, won the 2020 Ronald Sukenick Innovative Fiction Contest and will be published by FC2 in 2021. Her third book of poetry, New Life, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press. She is the author of the novel I Must Have You and two previous books of poetry: Noirmania and Abeyance, North America. Her writing has appeared in The Paris Review, The New York Times, the Washington Post, The Atlantic, and other publications. She is a co-founder of the literary journal and chapbook publisher, Tammy.

Two Poems

Lauren Hilger

State fair

I believe in the game
and win the Tamagotchi.
In my hand, it has a pulse or a beat, sort of alive.
I feed it lollipops, jelly hearts. It moves
like a diaphanous creature, like
a complicated multicellular organism,
an extension of me. Against the wall
of the Gravitron, I keep one leg down,
one leg held in a standing split. Mass up,
Velocity down, relative rates
at which the constant pressure
holds me in place. It’s childish
and deserves a blue ribbon.
I am scared of the ones that spin,
the rides that sling you inside yourself,
the pirate ship held aloft by a cable
that sifts in two directions so
you’re falling both ways. The
hammer, its required strength,
that asks are you external? Do
you really only exist here?
Saved nowhere else.
Sun sets. Look twice nothing’s
there. I stand in line as if I were tall.
Lick the side of a lemonade for
water, to say I swallow nothing.
But there it is, that hot metal horse under me,
that ride I pay for, that circle I
make heavy. In gymnastics, all
kinetic potential, I run a full length
of the floor and then stop right before,
my body keeps going,
my skin burns the mats from face
to ankle, broken vessels. I ate dirt,
we said. All that rugburn. I had stopped myself
from being thrown across the room.
It came out anyway.

“Diadems—drop—”

The place has carved out my sleep. I walk it every night.

When I moved here, there were old sounds,
a sputtering meter at the end of a cab ride,

back of the ferry, its engine like the
low-end keys of a baby grand,

like a whale, centuries away.

Then too I believed the beauty of things I didn’t have,

an evening shrug, light blue, dark red stained-glass windows, staged
and elaborate.

the noun <<cicatrice>>,
that sounds more like it,

the citron glow of a scar, still there, the sour of the word,

the softness of the word ruins, the softness of inward ruins,

my signature.

We still measure how long we will live.

A sweetened charge of color
if you unfocus.

But I could lengthen always into this.

Lauren Hilger is the author of Lady Be Good (CCM, 2016.) Named a Nadya Aisenberg Fellow in poetry from MacDowell, she has also received fellowships from the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Her work has appeared in BOMB, Harvard Review online, Kenyon Review online, Pleiades, The Threepenny Review, West Branch, and elsewhere. She serves as a poetry editor for No Tokens.

Two Poems

Elizabeth Senja Spackman

Unheimlich (Not at home)

Under your golden hair
beneath the white
you sleep
stone eyed and twitching
Live once and more
Hold me if you must
There’s nothing
here not
for the taking.

After the Sex, Simile or Something Like It

I. The beginning

Exactly like when you peel

back a price sticker and you

take some of the surface

of the book or the poster paper

with the adhesive

leaving that fuzzy rough spot

where you can trail your finger

from the gloss to the underneath

Had never loved

with such ferocity

unkempt and belly-deep

wanting nothing but

to be as tawny as

those flesh colored leotards

from modern dance

circa the sixties

smoothing the genitals, breasts

into sexless dolls

II. The fruit

Its translucent color

so alluring and taste and aroma

so gentle and mellow

after admiring feelings

of a graceful lady. Enjoy soft

and juicy Kasugai Muscat Gummy!

The cardboard sound

of pomegranate skin

as you scrape the ruby kernels

from their papery fascia,

eat them by the palmful

A man bites into his first papaw

catches her eye and

cannot continue

III. The revelations

She says to her

recently come-out daughter

that until Monica, she had no idea

that cunnilingus was something done

outside of pornographic videos.

A quiet moment that does not explain

the finer distinctions between

fellatio, general oral sex, cigars,

what she has been doing in her own apartment

to the sound of the refrigerator hum

these past four years.

She tells him

she told him

because she did not want him

to taste another’s latex

on her labia.

What to say?

IV. The response

When asked at the museum Q&A

for the scariest thing he’d ever done

Bill T looked the young co-ed

straight on

and said it would have to be

opening myself

the first time I let him

pull apart my cheeks

and fuck me in the ass.

you see the ballerina,

and all you can think

is How small her boobs!

V. The beginning

Bare-assed and crying

the first blow job between them,

whether beautiful or pathetic

Ten reasons it’s better:

—Don’t have to listen to you slurp your noodles with the same sibilance as your lattes

—There’s no reason to be nice to your father

—I no longer need stare at the ceiling, thinking of polite yet seductive ways to slow that

licking down

—The way you hold your fingers to your thumb and sniff

—

Once when it was different

there was water spreading like a quilt

sand in shoes, on gums and scalps,

a silver shore of wet and light.

In the rock he holds and will not skip

the childish smear of a trace fossil

(not the remains of animals themselves,

but burrows, trails, evidence of feeding).

Planolites, maybe.

Rolls over,

belly up,

as a puppy might say ‘smell me’

Two Poems

Ravi Shankar

Cape Sagres to Lisbon and Back Again

And the promontory, sacrum, cliffs lashed by the waves,
land’s end Europe, howling wind, arrhythmic nets
pulled in by fishermen sharing half a bottle of wine
between them, raindrops the size of olive pits plinking
the clay rooftops, mi amor, minarets of the monastery
an architectural oxymoron not based on any gentility
principle that can be parsed in storm, dolmens jutting
from clay, granite eggs crosshatched with scored letters
in an ancient language—druidic?—the dialogical quality
of history in conversation, the rhythm of faint lines due
in large part to the size of the cahiers, bowls of fish soup
and fado guitar overflowing the cobblestone, lurching
streetcars in parallel fifths, far from the Anglican belts
of hymnal, an irreducible secret, unspun wool, Moorish
palimpsest beneath erasures of Spaniards, Catholic dub
the anti-theatricality of the domestic arcane, presiding
over the gnarled cityscape the one and only begotten son,
whosoever believeth in him shall not perish, a middling
fish peeled from hook by handkerchief and from the boat’s
bottom a checkerboard pattern palpitating like a heart,
the fishermen rowing back to shore, dragging with them
a wet heat in their wine-stained clothes, heavy with salt.

Surface Tension

Scarified now but how? When we once heard parades
from windows, swayed in artificially

luminescent reeds under the Brooklyn Bridge,
filled soaked corn husks with masa dough,

glimpsed mouse-deer scamper on wish-thin
legs, called each other mon petit coeur de sucre,

split each other like oranges at the navel,
turning pith to string between wet fingers.

Our realm was the back of doors, ill-lit alleys,
lying splayed out on a lake dock baked in sun

until the impulse to jump. We were gods
caught in a rising soap bubble, arms bare,

upswept scent of sand dune barren as moon
except for us twinned, intertwined, tied

to nothing but in the moment each other.
Where did you go? Suds, not love, evaporates.

Dummies

Greg Ames

The word ventriloquism comes from the Latin terms venter and loqui, literally meaning “belly speak.” Dummies, therefore, are often referred to as “tummy talkers,” because they “speak from the stomach” and give voice to previously unexpressed thoughts and feelings. The doll speaks in a more frank and open manner than her human counterpart can, given the handler’s need to save face and follow established social conventions of propriety. The dummy, therefore, is the truthteller, the oracle, in this contentious relationship, and the “master” is soon revealed to be the subservient one. The audience sits in silent anticipation, eager to see the handler outwitted by a dummy who gives voice to the hidden and hitherto unacknowledged needs of heart, stomach, and genitals.
— Elaine Blabler, Hearing the Unspoken Voice: The Ancient Art of Ventriloquism

When she was eleven years old, my older sister Cassie carried a ventriloquist’s dummy with her wherever she went. The dummy’s name was Marilyn, and at first nobody had the heart to tell Cassie that Marilyn was not really a dummy, but a charred log from our fireplace. Every night Cassie slept in her narrow bed with this splintered wedge of burnt wood. She cuddled with it on the sofa while watching soap operas and sitcoms, and she left ashy smudges on everything she touched, from the refrigerator door to her once-white gerbils. Cassie’s homeroom teacher was concerned. The school psychologist, Nancy Palermo, asked my father if we had recently lost any family members to a house blaze or fiery car crash, anything like that. My father said, “Not exactly.” Ms. Palermo wanted to see Cassie three times a week after school for private consultations.

We lived in a squat, crumbling yellow brick house surrounded by tiger lilies. All the houses on Hood Lane were the same size. Our street appealed to young couples just starting out, elderly folks in pajamas, recovering addicts taking life one day at a time, and struggling small business owners. There were no block parties or street fairs, but every now and then some drunk kid would crash his father’s car into a tree, and we’d all gather around swimming in the headlights.

My mother’s absence from our lives—she said she was just getting her head straight in Tampa, Florida—forced my father to become the sole nurturer in our household, a terrible burden added to his already overwhelming duties as paragon and provider. He hadn’t touched a vodka tonic in over fourteen months. But when my mother took off for Florida, a move that took us all by surprise, Dad stopped going to his Don’t Drink meetings and stayed home with us.

“You listen to me,” he said from the helm of his armchair, unable to ignore my sister’s strange new hobby any longer. “That’s not a proper dummy.” He rose to his feet and stood above us. “Just look at it, for God’s sake. It doesn’t even have a mouth or or even a face.”

When my sister didn’t respond, Dad changed tactics. In a softer voice, he said, “The other kids will make fun of you. You don’t want that—do you, honey?”

He unwrapped a lollipop and paced in front of Cassie, who was seated on the family room sofa clutching Marilyn to her breast like some horribly burned infant. I sat crosslegged on the floor at Dad’s feet, paying close attention because I knew that someday I’d need to write all this down, just in case somebody asked me why I behave the way I do. “Ventriloquists are . . .” He thought for a moment. “Annoying,” he said. “And nobody really likes them.”

Cassie brooded, arms folded, on the sofa. “That’s not true,” she said. “A lot of people like them.”

“Sure, the dimwits in the audience eat it up with a spoon,” he said, “but only because they’re embarrassed for the ridiculous sap who totes a stupid dummy around. Really. It’s old hat. Fifties Vegas crap. That type of humor doesn’t appeal to us anymore. We’re much more sophisticated in our interests nowadays, Cassandra.” He hooked his thumbs into the belt loops of his jeans. “And I’m only talking about the traditional stuff. What you’re attempting here . . . Well, believe me, honey. Nobody will have any patience for some confused little kid with a burnt log for a freakin’ dummy. That’s for damn sure.”

“I like them!” Cassie said, her braces glittering. “I know you don’t care what I like, Dad, but ventriloquists make me happy.” She squeezed Marilyn tighter. “I’m gonna be a world famous ventriloquist someday, whether you like it or not.”

“Honey,” he said, “it’s burnt wood.” He chopped the blade of his hand through the air. “Am I the only one in this house who sees that? Just look at that thing. It doesn’t even have a mouth or—or even a face!” He turned to me. “Wayne, could you back me up here?”

“Dummies,” I said, smiling. “Dummies, dummies, dummies.”

My father stared at me for a few seconds without speaking.

“Mom would let me do it,” Cassie said. “Mom would encourage me.”

My father twirled the lollipop stick in his mouth. “I just don’t get the attraction of ventriloquism. Really. I’m at a loss here. I mean, it wasn’t even cool in my day. And now? Let’s face it, it’s not even in the conversation.”

He looked to me again. Whatever expression he saw on my nine-year-old face didn’t invite an easy alliance.

“You two need to learn about ‘cool.’ You know what the coolest kids in any school do?” Dad shoved both hands in the back pockets of his jeans. “They sing and dance. Look back in time, look forward: doesn’t matter. What will the cool kids be doing a hundred years from now?”

“Singing and maybe dancing?” I said, trying to catch Cassie’s eye, hoping she’d laugh with me.

“That’s right, son. That’s right,” he said, smiling back at me. “They will be singing and dancing in the streets. You can’t hold them back. Don’t even try.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“Smart. Because it wouldn’t do you any good.”

My sister hugged Marilyn to her breast. “You guys are both such jerks,” she said in a small voice.

“What did I do?” I said.

“Okay, okay, fine, if you insist on pursuing this,” he said, making a grand concession, the lollipop bobbing up and down in his mouth, “just ditch the log, and I’ll buy you a real dummy at the clown shop or whatever, and you can—”

“Stop it!” Cassie pushed past him. Swinging her pointed elbows, she ran out of the family room and stomped up the stairs, trailing a whiff of scorch behind her. We heard her bedroom door slam shut.

“Well, she’s got a flair for the dramatic, I’ll give her that,” he said. “But I’m worried about that girl. What is she trying to prove here?”

Stroking his goatee, that gingery eruption of hair on his face, Dad looked out the family room window at the snowplowed street. Cassie’s strange behavior had called into question so much that he had taken for granted, including his own coolness. He was forty-four years old, a marketing director for Studio Arena Theatre, a job that allowed him to dress and act like an artist—ponytail, earrings, jeans—yet still collect a businessman’s steady paycheck. He liked avant-garde theater, but he was not hip enough to deal with the grotesque in his own home. He bit into the lollipop. Flakes of green candy clung to the inverted triangle of hair beneath his lower lip. He would have welcomed my mother’s input in a situation like this. Her absence galled him. He looked down at me and frowned. “And what do you find so amusing, mister?”

I had become a watchdog for adult hypocrisy. I spent up to twelve hours a day studying the erratic behavior of grownups with a smirk on my face.

My father hitched up his sagging jeans and squatted before me like an aging baseball catcher. He put his hands on my shoulders. “Let’s have us a little chat,” he said, “man to man. Now, I know you two are a team, but we’re all on the same team, right?” I smelled the sour apple of his lollipop. “Is your sister still popular at that school? What do the other kids say about her?”

“She has lots of friends,” I said, and then corrected myself. “She used to.”

He nodded. “Minor setback. She’ll win them back. So, who are the most popular kids nowadays? The singers, the dancers? Or the jocks?”

I shrugged.

“The nerds?” He smiled. “Have the nerds finally risen to the top?”

“Every cool kid is different, Dad.”

“Right, right. It’s the age of specialization. She’s taking a big risk with this log thing, but who knows? It might pay off. You think it could?”

I was the wrong person to ask. My inability to keep up with the latest trends always unnerved my father. The public schools, in his opinion, were a hotbed of ingenuity, a testing ground where a tribe of potential superstars sparred over the future of our culture’s rites and rituals. But I was too busy to worry about any of that. My mother had moved to Florida, without warning, and I’d become the unofficial archivist of her debris. I inventoried the baubles on her bedside table. I straightened the photo I’d pinned on the fridge beneath a pineapple magnet. Nights, in my bedroom, I read her left-behind books, especially the photocopied working scripts from the roles she’d played at the theater. I fixated on her tiny pencil-scrawled notes in the margins: “Build.” “Energy, energy, energy.” “Brokenhearted.”

“So what’s your gambit to achieve popularity in school?” my father asked.

“My what?”

“Your sister has Marilyn. What sets you apart from the pack?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“That’s loser talk. Think about where there’s a demand, a need, and then give the people what they want. Are there any singers and dancers in your grade?”

“I don’t know.” A tired sigh escaped me. “I guess.”

Roosevelt Middle School, a four-story moron factory on the west side of town, warehoused close to four thousand kids, and featured a substantial population of head bangers, gasoline sniffers, bullies and other future felons. Mr. Brummer, the head security guard, roamed the corridors eyeballing every backpack and lunchbox with the institutional distrust of an El Paso border guard. A cleft-chinned chain smoker with a diamond stud in his left earlobe, Brummer the Bummer would sometimes stop me in the hall, invade my personal space and ask an inane question just so he could see if my pupils were dilated. I didn’t know if he recognized the future stoner in me and was trying to prevent this terrible fate, or if all his chatter about illicit substances and “what they could do to a boy” actually drove me to the bong in high school.

“You kids have so much to offer,” Dad said, “but in my opinion you’re selling yourselves short.”

He tucked the sticky lollipop stick behind his ear, one of the oddest moves I’d ever seen him make. Though twenty years have passed since that day, I still sometimes think about that hapless white stick balanced over my father’s ear like an unsmoked cigarette, giving him the look of a street tough in an old Hollywood movie, a ne’er-do-well loitering outside the pool hall.

Dad patted my shoulder, stood up, and walked out of the room. In the kitchen, a cupboard door banged shut. “God, grant me the serenity . . .” he said. A moment later he returned, his cheek bulging with a fresh lollipop.

“I’m gonna check on Cassie,” I said, rising from the floor.

“Okay! Now you’re talking.” He nodded in approval. “Good man,” he called after me. “That’s the spirit! Report back to me afterwards and we’ll compare notes.”

I climbed the stairs and knocked on my sister’s closed bedroom door. “Get lost, Wayne,” she said, sniffling. “I just wanna be alone.”

I opened the door and stepped in. The bonfire aroma blended with all the other exotic smells of her bedroom: damp towels and washcloths; nail polish remover; sticky bottles of cheap perfume spot welded to the dresser; cherry and grape lip gloss. She’d moved these items from Mom’s dressing table to her own, along with some costume jewelry and a handheld mirror. Chest down on her bed, her ankles crossed in the air behind her, Cassie flicked through the pages of a Seventeen magazine. Marilyn was on the once-white pillowcase, just under Cassie’s swaying feet. In the virginal setting of her bedroom, this black log was as conspicuous and disconcerting as a man standing naked in traffic.

I sat down on the smudged pink comforter and placed my hand on her back, the way Dad sometimes did with me when I had a nightmare.

“I have gum in my room,” I said, trying not to brag. “Hubba Bubba and Bubble Yum. I’ll give you a piece. What’s your favorite flavor?”

She ignored me.

“I might have Juicy Fruit, but I’d have to check first.”

“I don’t want any gum. God.”

We sat in silence for half a minute, my sister smothering her tears while I searched for the right words.

“Want me to try to paint your toenails again?” I asked at last. “I can do it better this time.”

“Just leave me alone, Wayne. God, can’t I have any privacy in this house?”

“I wish! Tell me about it,” I said, employing two of her favorite expressions back-to-back to ingratiate myself with her. And for about three seconds, I gawked at the oily burnt stains on her pillowcases, knowing, even then, that they would never be clean again. “Hey, Cassie,” I said. “You’re right. Ventriloquists are cool.”

She swung her face toward me. “Really? You think so?”

“Definitely.” I nodded. “Yep.”

“I’ve been practicing every night. I’m getting better, too. I think I’m actually pretty good.”

“Well, that’s what it takes. To get good, I mean.”

“Do you want to see me do a routine?”

I told her I did, and honestly, I did. Even though my sister’s armpit sweat smelled foreign to me now and zits had colonized her chin, I still considered her my best friend. We hadn’t spent much time together since Mom had left for Florida. Cassie’s bedroom had become off limits. No boys allowed. So I felt honored by her invitation to watch a private performance.

She propped the burnt log on her lap. Her oily forehead featured a few ashy fingerprint swirls. Her smudged yellow T-shirt called to mind a demented crossbreed of Charlie Brown and Pigpen. “Okay,” she said. “Here goes.” She took a deep breath and shouted, “It’s a nice day today, isn’t it, Marilyn?” She bounced her left knee once, hard, and ashes fell to the rug.

“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.

Cassie looked down at Marilyn as though she were a newborn baby.

“Do you like going to school, Marilyn?”

“Mmm-hmm!” Marilyn said.

“That’s good.” Cassie laughed. “School is important. But it’s also really tough for a lot of people. Will you be ready for seventh grade, you think?”

Marilyn thought about it for a moment, considered the possibilities before answering definitively: “Mmm-hmm!”

My sister stared at me with raised eyebrows. “So? What do you think?” A loose strand of blond hair fell over her eyes. She pushed her lower lip out and blew the curl back.

“Wow,” I said.

“Right? I’m getting good at it. Mrs. Palermo says I have a ‘unique talent.’

Remember when I told you about Mister Charleston and Woody coming for assembly? They were really great and everybody loved it when Mr. Charleston drank that orange juice and Woody sang ‘Feelings.’ Whoa oh oh feelings.” She searched my eyes for an answer and motioned to her oppressor downstairs. “And if I love it,” she said, “shouldn’t that be what matters? I want to get really good before Mom comes back, so she can see what I can do.”

On an intuitive level I understood my sister’s sorrow. On the other hand, I found ventriloquism weird and scary. And though I agreed, in principle, with my father’s assessment of the craft, I tried to remain neutral to protect everyone’s feelings. Even at nine, I recognized the necessity of self-preservation.

“Why won’t he ever support me?” she asked. “Why does he do that?”

I shrugged. “Because all grownups are dicks and I hate them?”

Cassie smiled at me. I smiled back. Then we both broke out snorting and cracking up. At that moment, we were as close as we had been since Mom left for Florida.

It didn’t last.

“Well, if Mom’s not back soon,” Cassie said, “I’m going to Florida to live with her. She’ll let me do what I want.”

My sister had once been popular and funny, a straight-A student who had always been a favorite of her teachers. Her high standing had given me, her little brother, an extra boost. Left to my own devices, I was a brooding, bookish daydreamer trying to read Waiting For Godot and The Bald Soprano in my room while other boys shot pellet guns by the railroad tracks. Sometimes I tried to read my mom’s existential philosophy books, too, and as a consequence of this unsupervised research, I began to suspect that God, like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, was just another big fat lie, a threat perpetuated by adults who wanted to keep children docile. I waited for the day when Dad would sit me down and explain that heaven and the devil and happiness and sex also didn’t exist. It occurred to me that grownups had no idea what they were doing, especially when it came to raising children, and I studied their alien behavior with cold objectivity, hoping that by understanding the nature of hypocrisy, I might not go through life terrified of absolutely everything.

As far as I could tell my sister was a lost cause. A training bra dangled over the back of her desk chair. She couldn’t pass a mirror without poking her hair, checking her teeth, inspecting her profile. Her once-smooth face was now shiny with grime and pustules. Something secret and horrible was going on in her bedroom at night, something that didn’t include me.

I wanted Cassandra to go back to normal, to give up ventriloquism and become my best friend again, but she was as stubborn as everybody else in the family. Nobody could tell her what to do. She needed to believe she’d made the choice on her own. My job, as I saw it, was simply to plant the seed and skedaddle.

“You know,” I said, rising to my feet, “it’s okay that you’re embarrassing our family with all this crazy stuff. Because Mom isn’t ever coming back. She couldn’t wait to ditch us.” I motioned with my chin to the burnt log in my sister’s arms. “Probably for reasons like this. We’re freaks.”

I left her bedroom with hardly a backward glance. I trotted down the carpeted stairs, kicked open the back door, and hopped down the slushy cement steps. Snow crunched underneath my sneakers in the driveway.

My father followed me outside. “What did you find out, champ?” he called out. “Let’s compare notes.”

I sprinted down the driveway and dove behind a snow bank, knowing that I had broken away from her, too, my last link to the idea of a family.

“Wayne!” My father stood on the steps and hugged himself for warmth. “Come here, son. I want to ask you some questions.”

Ignoring his call, I lay flat on the sidewalk behind the snowbank, holding my breath, swallowing my words, until my father cursed at the sky and returned inside.

From that night until just now, I have been on my own.