, Author at Post Road Magazine

A Brief History of Ice

The iceberg cuts its facets from within.
Like jewelry from a grave
Elizabeth Bishop

Outside the Tate Modern on Christmas Eve,
everyone is touching the blocks of ice two artists
have shipped from the Arctic so we can feel
their melting: a petting zoo of ancient beasts

we slaughtered by accident, now guiltily
glide our hands along the smooth high ridges
of their incisors in the gloveless sun in this
two thousandth eighteenth year of the lord

(how many of us are believers? and in what?
a future writ in water? enough right people
reading this braille before it melts?)—these
blocks calved off icebergs calved off an ice

sheet, a boy now lifts the smallest chunk of
to smash on concrete—leaping joyous at its
shatter as his mother scolds, although the sign
says listen to it, smell it, look *at it, put your hands on; *

studies show we humans are poor abstractors—
will do more to help 20 starving people than 2,000;
need our own hands to tell us we don’t live
in snow globes with tiny houses redolent with pine
and woodsmoke sheltered by glass poles—
a Platonic Christmas Eve of families trailing
the Millennium Bridge, fur coats and velvet
despite the heat (how many generations

have believed in Santa at the North Pole?
Angerona, Greek goddess of winter days?)
(millennium before, her name warned of anguish
from the too-little-time, before the light falls, to do

what’s noble); fathers taking photos of their kids
with the ice, of light through ice, of the guitarist
playing “Pachelbel’s Canon” beyond the ice, as
my husband slides his hand above a vein of water,

blue-green glowing, trapped, otherworldly
(which is not how I should think of it) and says,
It’s perfect he’s playing the most predictable song ever written
as Rome burns. To which say, yes, but I’ve always kind of

loved it;repetitive, but aren’t our lives variations
on tired themes we are not tired of: hope, child,
house,Christmas morning, love—it feels new:
the old threat of coal in our stockings, candy if

we’re good (in older stories, the Whipping Father
boiled children so Santa had to resurrect them)
(we tried to warn ourselves, didn’t we?) (or have
we confused ourselves with resurrections?):

this ice dripping drains to the Thames until
a miracle freezes another future: positive and clear
as the crystals I wore as a pagan teen channeling
good as I walked the aisle to “Pachelbel” to marry

a boy I believed I’d love forever (so many notes
could be predicted, have been predicted), my hand
tracing one fading fin of ice until its slip to concavity,
a landscape that doesn’t belong to me and does;

a roughened slickness I want to compare to manta rays
I felt once in a shallow pool at Sea World, though
doesn’t this have to be about more than describing
loss as another kind of wonder we don’t deserve?

Periphery

by Bradley Clompus

As though stuck at thirteen,
as though mother were
fixed in mid-forties. Beside,
an uncomposed demolition
of sounds, iron ball slowly
arcing into the top level ruins,
muddled whump of impact, girders
shearing, tumbling, concrete fists,
shoulders, joints staggering
down to cutters and torchers,
massed pushers, haulers. Building
guts spilling from pre-crash fruition
of 1920s: lawyers, insurance agents,
accountants pale from overwork, hopeless
hoarding of others’ assets, plaster
a sickly mint green granulating
from every exposed, torn off
room, secrets mixed with
unaccustomed white, newly
opened to wind, to light.

From one of those half
de-created spaces, floor jigsawed,
dust billowing, paint chips mothing
down, a thin object falls, twists
while falling, hits ground
noiselessly, lost behind a drift
of debris. I say Something just
fell from a building. Mother
doesn’t answer, keeps walking.
Next day the news allots
a name, a past, a truncated
present. He was working
the 11th floor, wore a yellow
hard hat. If we stayed, we might
have seen a crowd assemble,
a few lance-like arms pointing.
There could have been a subsonic
hum of frightened bees, a plea
for reckoning. Try to remember
this, I remind myself. Mother says,
not to me, not to the watchers,
That poor guy, that poor, poor
guy. Rubble is piling on the ground,
a minor mountain, its peak unstable,
sloughing off the hard and soft
stuff we’ve made, the brownish
scarlet rusts, dirty beige, broken
Wedgewood blues. The man waits
for his pickup, his arrangements.
Verging toward mourning,
the crowd might have huddled
a bit, leaned in tentatively,
sheltering an absent core.
And two of us who’d partly
seen, partly known, left it
all behind, kept walking.

Blood Loss

by Philip Probasco

You promised to give blood on this date every year, and when you keep your promises, things generally go all right for you. You drive around for an hour before you find the blood donation bus in a parking lot. It looks about like you’d expect on the inside: a cramped doctor’s office with a nurse who gives you a rubber-foam Earth ball to squeeze. She pinches your arm with the needle. As the blood leaves you, you think about the routine evacuation of vital things. Of fire drills and how you’ve never been able to trust the calm faces on the men beckoning to you while an alarm insists something is wrong.

You give quite a bit of blood, perhaps too much.

“We need as much as we can get,” the nurse says as she sticks a band-aid on your arm.

You nod without speaking. The band-aid has a picture of fruits dancing on it. A cluster of grapes smiles at you. You should say something. “Thank you for taking so much of it off my hands,” you say.

You feel faint. Your work takes a lot out of you. You move money into and out of funds. As blood nourishes the body, money nourishes the world. This is how you think about your work. At your office, you prefer to ride the elevator alone.

You do not need any groceries, so you drive home. You hit traffic past the mall. The sun sets, and you move along for a while until traffic lets up. You get off the highway and begin driving through the kind of neighborhood you always hoped to live in with a family one day. You still feel faint, but then again, you gave a lot of blood.

The realization that you dozed off will come back to you later, but for now, you hear only the blare of a horn. Your car hops onto the curb, and the woman doesn’t get out of the way, so you hit her. The hood of your car crumples into a telephone pole. Your steering wheel releases an airbag it kept hidden in there for years, and everything is still. Fresh smoke rises outside the windshield.

You get out of your car. You don’t remember this part well, you will later say to a tired man with papers in front of him. Right now, you need to sit down, so you do. A policewoman crouches in front of you. She has a kind face. She looks you in the eyes with searching concern. She stands and walks away, and an ambulance arrives. A siren fills the air, shrieking It’s not your fault over and over.

A woman sits across from you. She is pregnant, maybe, and her forehead is smeared with something dark.

You ride to the hospital with the policewoman whose name you will later forget. She tells you about the wreck your carelessness caused. The woman had a flat tire. She was parked off on the side of the road, and you hit her. You ask her a question, and she tells you that whatever it is, it’s better than being dead.

You have some tests done and they give you papers to sign and release you. You sit waiting to hear about the woman you hit, though you don’t know how long it will be or if you are in the right room. A nurse comes to tell you the woman wants you to leave if you are here. She has lost a lot of blood.

“There’s a national blood shortage,” the nurse says. “People don’t give enough blood these days.” You tell her you just gave. The nurse shakes her head sadly at you and tells you to get some rest. You take a cab to the park closest to your building. It is a pretty park, the prettiest park in the whole city. You find a tree and sit under this prettiest tree, which doesn’t start talking to you, not for a while.

You open your eyes. An ambulance sits on the street with its lights on. A man advances toward you.

“You left your vehicle running.”

The driver of the ambulance doesn’t speak. The path lights are a blue thrill on his face. He drops something into the grass, then gets up close to you. “This belongs to you.” His eyes glisten with tears.

You don’t understand, but you get the feeling you should say something. “I’m sorry.”

“Yeah, yeah.” He walks off up the path.

“It wasn’t my fault!” you shout. This is the side you will always be on, this side of the conversation. You open the towel. A baby reaches a tiny hand out. It wriggles off the towel and crawls toward you.

It doesn’t seem like anything you should be a part of. You shut your eyes so tight that the blackness begins to bloom. A soft hand presses against your eye and pries it apart. A naked boy stands in front of you.

“Peek-a-boo,” he says. You don’t respond. You can’t think of a response to that. He is untroubled by your silence. With quivery precision, he opens your other eye. You get the feeling you should say something, but you can’t think of anything. He motions like he is going to run away, then stops and kisses your nose.

A faint rumble sounds in the distance. You turn around to look. When you turn back, the child has disappeared. You try to stand, but a soft weight falls onto you. “Daddy! Got you!” Your head bumps against the ground. The boy sits on top of you. His blond hair almost reaches his shoulders.

“What did you call me?”

“I climbed the tree. I got to the third branch this time.”

“Don’t call me that.” You push him off.

He falls away and stands. “Okay. What should I call you?”

The obedience throws you. You aren’t used to it. You almost fall to your knees.

And then you remember. This boy has been cast aside by his mother. You recall the details. A car struck her when she was pregnant with him. She must have given up hope. The driver, too.

“I love you,” you say. The words rush out of you.

He bites his lip, suddenly serious. He kicks you with his foot. “I love you too,” he says. You hug him. The rumble grows louder. A horn fills the air. You cover his ears, because you know what’s coming. He struggles, but you hold tight. An enormous, drunken rattle passes the park. Only when the noise and light have passed do you let him go.

Beneath the tree, you try to give him a life. Most of what you need is here. There’s a sandwich shop that delivers across the street, and an ice cream cart that comes by twice a day. You keep up with the news by asking a kind old man for his paper once he’s through with it. He pulls out the comics section and gives that to your boy. You befriend him, and he leaves his paper with you every day, when he’s done with it.

You teach your boy how money circulates through the world using red leaves as stocks and yellows as bonds. Greens are cash. The boy asks questions about your job, which you manage by phone. He can’t believe how you keep it all straight, but it’s never felt like a big deal to you. You begin to see yourself as important. Your boss calls one day and fires you.

You withhold certain deep regrets. You make him memorize the state capitals, which your father made you learn. He learns them fast. You teach him the rule of threes. A human can survive three weeks without food, three days without water, and three seconds without blood. He is skeptical about the last one. It turns out he is smarter than you.

You take out an ad in the paper and sell your condo, and use the money to hire a tutor to stop by the tree. You want to offer your boy enough answers for all the questions he has, but that is difficult. You order a tent online. You’ve worked out a deal with the sandwich shop across the street. They will receive your online orders and bring them to you if, in exchange, you buy two sandwiches every day for lunch. Your job has taught you how to make a deal or two, so it was not a complete loss.

You spend a whole day setting up the tent, getting it just right. Years later, you have to buy a second tent, so your boy can have his privacy. He makes friends in the park, and one day he meets a girl he really likes. She wants him to come out with her, but he isn’t allowed to go past the train tracks. You fight about this. You don’t want him to leave this park. Everything is nice here. He has everything. The world is full of careless people. It should be enough for anyone, shouldn’t it? One day he finds a dirty band-aid in the leaves with fruits on it. You name the fruits silly names. Once he would have found this funny, but he is too old now to laugh. You tell him you might build a treehouse one day, so you can live in a proper house. This is not practical, but young boys need to dream.

“Dad, can I ask you something?” he says one day.

“Go ahead.”

“Am I different than everyone else?”

“Of course you are. You’re my boy.”

“No. I mean, are there other people who live in parks?”

“I’ve lived in this city my whole life,” you say. “There’s no place as pretty as this park.”

“But there are people who pass through here. They go places. We just stay.”

“Nothing bad has ever happened here, to my knowledge,” you say. “Other places, there are accidents. There are careless people everywhere.”

“I know,” he says.

One day he meets a group of young people his age who are playing ball in the park. They ask questions of your boy and can’t believe it when he tells them that he doesn’t leave the park. You are proud of how bold he is with them. They are wearing t-shirts with the name of a college on them, and your boy asks about college. They tell him it’s great. From this day on, he doesn’t talk of anything else. He collects brochures and magazines from the garbage and learns about college. He spends a lot of time in his tent writing. He won’t let you read it, but a week later, he pays the old man with his allowance to mail it off for him. You know what this means. You know he will get in.

Sure enough, a large envelope arrives at the sandwich shop a few months later. The owner brings it over with two sandwiches and a large grin on his face.

Your boy is going to leave. There is nothing you can do about it.

“What did they say?” you say, unwrapping your sandwich.

“I got in!” he says. They’ve sent him his own t-shirt. He puts it on.

He leaves at the end of the summer, and you make sure it is the best summer ever. But you are getting older. Your voice is getting weaker. He is becoming too much for you. “How about today we find some timber for that treehouse?” you say, but then you remember that he’s already left to make his train. You can’t wait to call him, but you want to give him his space.

The old man and the sandwich shop owner come by and get you talking about your boy. You tell them that you hope he will major in philosophy because he loves questions more than answers. You add that if he doesn’t, that will be fine, too. You want him to be happy. He is whom you hoped for but never deserved. You imagine his first visit back from college. You will leave the park with him. You will walk down the railroad tracks. You see it: the mist hanging low, his face pale in the moonlight, pure as an unpicked flower. You will finally share your regrets, the importance of keeping one’s promises. How your first girlfriend fell asleep on the tracks and was killed by a train. There was no blood, she went peacefully. You won’t tell about her arm in the undercarriage, or the beers in the ditch, or how you rolled off in the night. The world is full of careless people. You try to give back where you can. You can’t wait to call him, but you need to give him space. You hear a faint rumble in the distance, and turn to look, but you see only darkness. The pretty tree in the prettiest park finally speaks to you. It says, there was no blood loss. Give him space, you think, but you can’t wait to call him.

Golden State

by Emma Cline

If there was a landscape that was more blessed, none of us knew it. We grew up with the sun generous and round in a blue sky, with fields and fields of dry grass. We knew from childhood the lines of the coast angled against the vast and shifting Pacific, the arc and swell, the rocky cliffs. We learned how the cows moved in the evenings, the way the creeks ran like veins across the hills, how the vast and startling sunsets appeared, biblical in their breadth and scope. We felt subtle changes of weather, the disruptions of patterns and habits, and studied the quail that made their daily migration to the oak trees behind our houses where they settled in low for the night, squawking and chittering to each other in the growing darkness.

There were the long days of waiting. We met each other in the dim sparking hours between sunset and dawn, the long night. We drove the back roads early in the morning, lights on at the convenience stores, past the shadowed oaks and houses of our sleeping families. Our parents knew how much time we spent together, at first anyways, were pleased to see us pile into packed cars, knew about the late-night drives and the parties at the wooden house outside town. They didn’t know that no one lived in the wooden house, that no one owned it at all, that it was full of a strange detritus, aluminum plates and brocade armchairs, colored light bulbs and the drugs of someone long gone. We babbled incoherently, talking thickly to the speed freaks that pedaled there furiously on their lavender girls’ bicycles, felt the motions of a thousand flies buzzing overhead, the floodwaters sloshing in our hearts.

It used to be that we only went there on Friday nights, left the rest of the weekend for the daytime, for the hikes with our fathers and naps on our broad leather couches. Soon we started sleeping our strange hours, waking startled and blinking in the evening light. We were groggy and distant at the dinner parties our parents gave for the conductors and art critics from the city—the circling trays of food, the drunken wives shivering alone on our balconies, gardenias drifting in the blue light of the pool. Soon enough we left that behind too, sneaking out every night to gather around the fire in back of the old house. The older boys showed us how to handle metallic powders with our bare hands while others of us diligently crushed black seeds in the corner for a foul-smelling brew.

And when deep night comes, we found beds, clustered into a close wood room, using towels for blankets. The air was heavy and still. Someone vomited silently into their cupped hands. The boys made the wet low sounds of the very drunk, the cough and hack, the moist screw in the throat. Some grabbed the hands of sleeping girls and moved them over their crotches. One muttered in his sleep, And the dead, the dead, while the rest of us were dreaming too; our favorite English teacher getting ripped apart by dogs in a snowstorm, stinking red tides loosed over our town, gangs of thieves roaming bleached African deserts with nowhere for us to hide.

In the small rooms the menace gathered and hung. We knew it would come, just not which night, and so, when one of the younger boys, with blood running down his face and his swollen tongue lolling, jumped head first out the attic window, it felt as though things had reached the point we had been building towards all this time, all the drugs, all the darkness, all the sly feels and ways of giving away parts of ourselves. We scattered, one of us calling the cops, the rest of us back in the cool, unfamiliar sheets of our bedrooms, twitching wildly with nervous energy. For days we saw black snakes sudden and stark in our path, lizards scattering, a coyote waiting under the stairs. There was danger everywhere. Always the shadowed figure of the stranger cutting across an empty, moonlit field.

The city razed the wooden house, while our parents asked us if we had known the boy. We said, of course, that we hadn’t, and it was true. They would ask us this many times again, because this guy was just the first in a long line. We got to an age where people we know started to die. It happened around high school graduation; the first mention in the newspaper of a boy crashing his truck at three in the morning, along the string of 101. The freshman who killed himself with his father’s shotgun in his basement the week before homecoming, the girl from high school who drowned in the Russian River. Your first kiss, your choir teacher’s daughter, the vice-president of the junior class. The deaths stacked up. And they were written about in the dulcet, innocuous tones of our smalltown newspapers, the sports, the hobbies, the dental-hygienist dreams. The radio played Teen Angel on a loop that summer, while the local DJ jokingly kept a death watch, promising a case of Coca Cola to the family of the teen with the prettiest yearbook photo;

Just sweet sixteen, and now you’re gone
They’ve taken you away.
Are you somewhere up above
And I am still your own true love
I’ll never kiss your lips again
They buried you today

We all knew about the time the dead girl took off her shirt and bared her breasts to a crowd, danced languidly in a darkened room, but we kept it quiet, drank a beer to her memory.

Everyone was scared then, felt the fear of our parents in waves. We rolled away from each other like marbles, some of us to the junior college, some of us staying home. None of us encountered anything but aimlessness, dreamy days that turned lazily around and around. Our parents had expectations but let us easily shrug them off, pleased when we shaved, went walking, groomed our horses or idly baked zucchini bread from the harvest of our mothers’ gardens. What they couldn’t know was how far away we were by then, how much things seemed to have shifted. We couldn’t stop our minds from catching again and again on the fact of the bodies, the splintered bones and leaking hearts. We dreamt endlessly of a meeting between the dead in an empty ballroom, watched the town erect a huge white cross strung with lights on the hillside above the football field. Though we made our movements away from each other, lived alone in apartments, and held jobs, bought groceries and pickup trucks, we never forgot those sparks at the back of our throats, the dark pale sky of early morning.

The first night we were together again, we drank sweet wine in the high hills of someone’s parent’s vineyard, in a row of vines. The summer wind rose, a dry heavy heat, and we lay back and took off our clothes, all of us, our white limbs clustered together in the moonlight. Later we rode our bicycles down the rows of vines, following the dark roads of the ranch to the meadow to feel the horses’ brambly breathing against our bare chests. We rubbed the foamy sweat that secretes itself in their curves across our arms, touched it to our necks to feel the moist heat of it. Some of us walked silently into the pond, floating on our backs where the daylight warmth collects, diving down to the muddy depths, letting the black water rise up and catch our hair. We gasped for breath, while the harvest moon kept the rest of us dazed and circling the banks.

It was like the old times, but better. We spent the hours gathering what we needed: the wet stones from the lake’s edge, the turkey feathers with their calcified hollows. The chimney swifts swooped low over us, heading south. We made piles of leaves arranged by shape, by minute changes of color, found soft-skinned Chanterelles burning under a stutter of leaves, carried them like babies in our arms. We crushed silt-red rocks for a dry pigment we mixed with water and marked our bodies with, concentric circles around our stomach, rings up our legs, streaks drying stiff and tight under our eyes. We flaked off the crust to feel it sting.

Our wealthy parents—the San Francisco high-society philanthropists, old sitcom actresses holed up in sprawling estates in Healdsburg— didn’t mind us living on the rocky part of Sonoma Mountain where grapes were hard to grow. We mapped the land, roving with our picnics and the old simple guitars. The girls made rosemary pan–bread and black beans in coffee cans while the boys roasted peppers and corn tortillas, and it all tasted like fire. At first we camped in our parents’ nylon sleeping bags, high on the grassy ridge over the lake, but soon enough, structures started to rise, rigged in trees, dug into the hillside, made of mud, sheets of cotton and car doors, corrugated tin and hay bales. They were beautiful, and the girls would make velvet curtains from their first communion dresses, and the boys kept the dirt down in the roads and offered up shirtfuls of dark berries for the girls’ white bowls. We dragged together beds and hung paper lanterns in the trees, lit them as darkness came on, played volleyball under their diffuse glow. We danced in two circles, like we’d been taught as children, the give and take, hand over wrist, the dizzy, reeling turns. They trucked in an old church organ from town, and we spent the nights wine-drunk and smeared, someone playing murder ballads and the sweet religious songs from our childhoods while our voices met under the fixed and radiant stars and our hearts opened like hothouse flowers.

Reporters liked to make the things we did sound dirty, make it sound like the guys forced the girls into it. That wasn’t true, not at all. There was an incense we burned sometimes that made us all drowsy, made us feverish and yielding. Girls read aloud from sacred texts and back issues of Playboy, one hand on the page and the other hand unbuttoning their blouse, five shameless mouths on you at once, it didn’t matter whose, Some girls tucked their long hair into caps and wrestled in the grass like men. They tricked the boys into posing for obscene and luminous polaroids they secreted away and traded like baseball cards. We felt so generous with one another, someone’s finger in your mouth making you tremble like a bass string, warm breasts in your hands like full-bellied birds.

We used an embroidery needle and India ink, tattooing blue ships in full sail on each other’s backs, interlocking hearts on the white expanse of our thighs. These were the symbols we recognized each other by, the striated feathers that came to us in dreams, the silhouettes of Western mountain ranges, religious medals we had won in some other life.

And when October came, and the girls among us grew swollen and tight in the belly, it was better. It was life, at least, fecundity, none of the death or darkness that riddled that old wooden house, that left us dead too. We imagined growing corn in the high heat of summer and canning peaches for the winter, drying sheets of lemon verbena under the noonday sun, jam bubbling hot and dark in cast-iron pots. We would all be their parents, since no one would know whose child was whose, and the children would know about moss, about snake skins and maps, and they would pick apart owl pellets to birth the bones of mice beneath their hands.

And so it came to be, the main house, the babies born, all of us growing together into women and men. Our hen-house was papered with pages from Rolling Stone and our children charted the voyage of the planets in the dirt with their fingers, rode together to the pond on the back of their Indian pony. We trusted the magnetics, our ripe-red hearts, the hills that take human shape and remind us who we are.

Emma Cline‘s work has appeared in Tin House. In 2009, she was the recipient of a Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference scholarship.

Father’s Day

by Joseph Scapellato

The old man went with his son to a restaurant. The restaurant was in a bowling alley where the old man used to take his son to bowl when his son was a boy. When they sat down, in a booth by the door, the old man said, “This is a terrible place to die.”

The son said, “I can’t believe we used to bowl here. Remember? Boy, was I lousy.”

The old man didn’t say anything.

“My wife is pregnant,” said the son.

Their food came. It was as expected. The son paid.

Outside it was bright and clear and cool. The son, who had driven, opened the car door for the old man. The old man shuffled in and sat down. He said, “A terrible, terrible place.”

The son drove the old man for a long time, for longer than it took to get to the old man’s house, the house where the son had grown up. The old man grunted. He tapped the window. The son turned on news radio. They passed a chain of strip malls, a forest preserve, and three ugly rivers. The man on the radio laughed.

When they arrived at the old folks home the son opened the car door for the old man, then the door to the lobby, then the door to the receiving office, and left. A nurse, who was fat, led the old man to his room. It smelled like an airplane smells between flights. Some of the old man’s things were already there: sweaters, slippers, pictures of his wife, his son, his son’s pregnant wife, and the ticket from the boat that had carried the old man across the ocean from the Old Country when he’d been an infant.

The old man did not sit down. He said, “This is a terrible place to die.”

The fat nurse handed him a cup of water. “All places are terrible places to die.”

The old man coughed. That was how he laughed. He drank his water slowly and pointed at the bed. “All places are terrible places.”

She shook her head, but in agreement. “All places are places of dying.”

“But dying, dying itself is not terrible.”

“Believe me,” said the nurse, preparing him for his bath, “dying is terrible. Not death. Death can’t be terrible.”

“Nope, you’ve got it backwards.”

The summer ended. “Tell me,” said a different nurse, male, “don’t you have a son?”

“You bet I have a son.”

The nurse reloaded the old man’s IV. “Well, won’t you live on through him?”

“I want to read a book.”

The nurse helped the old man into a wheelchair and pushed him to the tiny library near the cafeteria. The single bookshelf sagged with thrillers, mysteries, and romances, all donated. The room was empty.

The old man chewed his tongue.

The nurse gave him a cookie and said, “We don’t disagree.”

“We do disagree,” said the old man five years later, seated in the cafeteria. He raised his swollen fists. “Dying isn’t terrible because dying is knowable, it begins and ends, but death, death is unknowable. Therefore terrible.”

This nurse, in her first week of work, laughed. She was young and skinny and she planted her hands on her hips. “Death doesn’t end?”

“Right,” said the old man, “only dying ends, it ends and that’s that. Now how about dessert.”

The next day the son returned to the old folks home with the old man’s grandson, a quiet little boy. The son offered cookies his wife had baked, but the old man pretended not to smell the cookies and not to know his son and grandson, he stared through their heads and chests like they were broken televisions. The son, who was sweating, told a story about this one time when they bowled together, when he was lousy. He pretended to be telling the story to the quiet little grandson but was really telling the story to the old man. He told it three times. The old man wetly cleared his throat.

When they left, the young nurse dressed the old man for bed. “Good of them to come,” she said.

“Wasn’t terrible. Wasn’t good. But could have been either.”

“It was terrible,” said the nurse, crying.

“Terrible?” he said, and, not wearing any pants or underwear, touched his thigh as she watched. His thigh was soft and gray and stank like dumpsters in the sun. Then he touched hers, which was white and firm and smelled like an imaginary fruit.

“I know, I know,” she said, and kissed his scalp. She kissed again.

He tried to push her. “Dying! Is! Not! Terrible!”

Ten years later the old man, bedridden, exhaled fiercely and declared: “Dying is terrible.”

The young nurse wasn’t young anymore. She was pregnant. “What about death.”

“Death is a place.”

“What kind of place?”

The old man waved. “I am a place.”

The summer came. The old man was very old.

The grandson returned by himself, a teenager. He looked strange, with strange hair and strange clothes.

The old man met his eyes and said, “You are strange with strange hair and strange clothes but beneath that you are a man, and beneath that you are a place, like me.”

The grandson said, “Nice.”

The old man grunted. Some of the tubes that were plugged into him rubbed together. “Death is a place.”

The grandson gently touched the old man’s arm. “We have to move you to a hospice.”

“Tell me something that I do not know.”

The grandson took his other hand out of his pocket and counted off on fingers: “You don’t scare me; I respect you; you may know you are a place but the place itself remains unknown; the known is more terrible than the unknown; my dad won’t tell us he has cancer and always wants to take us bowling but when we go he can’t even throw the ball, he just starts crying and runs outside and waits in the car and when we knock on the window he gets out and pretends like he just showed up; my mom is awesome, super-awesome, she’s teaching me how to bake; my girlfriend’s pregnant; I’m not so sure I’m straight; today is Father’s Day; happy Father’s Day.”

The old man coughed a real cough—it took a while, but he cleared it. “That’s good,” he said. “Don’t go.”

Joseph Scapellato was born in the suburbs of Chicago and earned his MFA in Fiction at New Mexico State University. Currently he teaches as an adjunct professor in the English/Creative Writing departments at Susquehanna University and Bucknell University. His work appears/is forthcoming in The Collagist, SmokeLong Quarterly, UNSAID, Gulf Coast, and others. He occasionally blogs at http://www.josephscapellato.blogspot.com/

The Girl I Hate

by Mona Awad

So I’m eating scones with the girl I hate. The scones are her idea. She says eating one of them is like getting fucked. Not vanilla-style either, the kind with whips. She’s eating the scones and I’m watching, sipping black tea with milk but no sugar. Actually, she hasn’t quite started yet. She’s still spreading clotted cream on each half of the split scone, then homemade jam on top of that. As she does this, she warns me she might make groaning noises. Just so, you know, I know. That’s fine, I shrug, feeling little bits of me catch fire. I’ve got the teacup in my hand, my finger crooked in the little handle that’s too small for it so the circulation’s getting cut off. I watch her bite into the scone with her little bunny teeth. I watch gobs of clotted cream catch in either corner of her lip. She tilts her head back, closes her eyes, starts to make what must be the groaning noises. I pour myself more tea and cup it in both hands like it’s warming them, even though it’s gone cold. Then I pretend to look out the window at the dismal view of the Grassmarket. I say, “Busy in the office this morning,” and try not to think Cunt.

She is after all, a friend and colleague.

“What?” She says, her mouth full of scone. She hasn’t heard me because of her groans.

I repeat that it was busy in the office this morning, loudly, over-enunciating, then I do think Cunt.

“Mm,” she says. But she’s too high on scone to really carry on a conversation. She’s so high, she’s swinging her little stick legs back and forth underneath her seat like a child and doing this side-to-side dance with her head like the one she did when she ate the fried porkchop in front of me at Typhoon a few weeks ago.

There’s her groaning and there’s her stick legs and there’s her aggressively jutting out clavicle. There’s the Cookie Monster impression she does after she describes food she loves (Om-Nom-Nom!). There’s how the largeness of the scone seems only to emphasize her impossible smallness. Mainly, there’s the fact that she exists at all.

There’s also her outfits, which she buys from vintage shops, and which are usually a cross between quirky and whorish. Today, she’s wearing this spandex playsuit like something out of a Goldfrapp video, which she’s paired with sheer tights that have a backseam of little black hearts. Over that she’s wearing a red bell coat like the ones little girls wear when they ice skate in picture books. I had a coat like this when I was five but in pink. There’s a picture of me in the coat, holding my father’s hand in a frozen over parking lot somewhere in Michigan. In the picture, my dad’s got an Afro and he’s looking down at this small thing holding his hand as if he can’t believe how small this thing—me—is. In the picture, I’m about the same size as the girl I hate is now, except that I’m a child and she’s a full grown woman, and I guess I’m looking at her now with my father’s same unbelief, except without love.

She catches me looking at her and she says, “What?” and I say, “Nothing.”

She looks at my cup of cold tea and at my lack of scone. “How come you didn’t get one? Aren’t you hungry?”

“I’m going to have a salad later,” I tell her. “On the afternoon fifteen.”

I’m already picturing it: me in the blissfully empty break room, my M&S lettuce, the dated copy of Hello! I’ll pretend to read if anyone comes in. I won’t turn on the lights.

She shrugs, eats more scone. Then she sort of squints at me like a pirate attempting to gauge the whole of someone’s soul with one eye.

“You’re very salad-y,” she says.

“Am I?”

After she’s done, she sinks back in her chair, pats her non-existent stomach through her playsuit, and says she’s feeling sleepy. She sighs, faux pouts.

“Wish we didn’t have to go back to work.”

“Yeah,” I say, signaling for the check and grabbing my purse from the back of the chair. She reaches over and pats the fuzzy leopard print like it’s a pet of hers.

“Pretty,” she says.

On the walk back to the office, we discuss our worst temp jobs. Hers was the one before this one. The boss kept trying to fuck her. Also they had this photocopier she’s pretty sure was possessed by Satan. Also it wasn’t near any good lunch places.

“What about you?”

“The one before this one.” Actually, it’s this one.

“Satanic photocopier?” she offers.

“Fax,” I say, looking at how the long white line of her neck is offset by a cheap black choker.

“Ooh,” she says. “Worse.”

When we reach the office, before we head to our respective cubicles, she turns to me, her lips and her cheeks still flushed from scone, and says, “text me later okay?”

“Okay,” I say. Then she trots off a little ahead of me, and I see how her little heart back seams are perfectly aligned down both calves.

All afternoon, I have the waking dream where she gets so fat on scone, she explodes.

At home, I eat the other half of my M&S salad with the other half of the honey Dijon dressing it came with. I make sure to draw the curtains first. I didn’t used to, but then I caught the owner of the Turkish restaurant next door staring at me from his upstairs window, smoking, just as I had finished my post-salad ritual of dragging all my finger pads over and over again across the empty plate and sucking them one by one. It used to be he would say hello when I walked past him in the street. Now he looks at me like he’s familiar with the details of my most unfortunate pair of underwear. Has fingered the fraying, scalloped edge. Waggled the limp pink bow. Held the Made in Cambodia tag between his teeth.

Post-salad, I try on the French Connection bodycon, followed by the Bettie Page pencil skirt and the Stop Staring! halter. In all cases, I’m no closer but I’m also no further, which is not news at all. Then I just sort of stand in front of the mirror in my bra and my French cuts and attempt to come to grips with certain irrevocable truths. Then I eat several handfuls of flax cereal and 15 raw, unsalted almonds.

Later, while I lie awake in bed, I think of the perfect come back to the salad-y remark. I put us both back in the teashop and I make her say that I’m salad-y with clotted cream in each corner of her lip. But instead of replying, Am I?, I lean in and in a low voice I say Listen, you little skank! Not all of us can eat scones and have it turn into more taut littleness! Some of us are forced to eat spring mix in the half-dark of our bachelors and still expand inexplicably. Some of us expand at the mere contemplation of what you shovel so carelessly so dancingly into your smug little mouth. And the way I say it, leaning in like that, with all this edge and darkness in my voice garnered from years of precipice-induced restraint, makes her bow her head in genuine remorse.

On my way to work the next day, I make a promise to myself. I promise that when the girl I hate asks me out to lunch I’ll say No, I’ll say No, I’ll say No. Then, at around 11, when she sends me a text that says, Weird Swedish Pizza!! Omnomnom!, I text back ☺. We go to the Scandinavian café she loves. She orders a sausage-lavender-thyme pizza square the size of her head plus a Kardemummabullar for later, for what she calls Secret Eating. I get the fennel-pomegranate-dill salad, which comes undressed in a diamond-shaped bowl. While she’s eating the pizza, she watches me forage through limp dill fronds for fennel quarter moons. I try to distract her by making a comment about the weather, how I thought it was supposed to rain today, something to make her look skywards, but her eyes are on me, my fork, the bowl.

“That salad’s small,” she says.

“Not really,” I say, bringing the bowl closer to me. “It only looks small.”

But she won’t let it be. She lifts her heart-shaped sunglasses, leans forward and peers down into the bowl and sort of wrinkles her nose like she’s just smelled something awful.

“It looks small because it is small,” she says, sitting back. She cocks her head to one side, like I’m curious. “How come you got that?”

I say something about how I just like pomegranate seeds, how they’re pretty like rubies.

She stares at me until I feel heat creep up the back of my neck. Then she shrugs. She’s wearing this strappy tank that exposes how her shoulders are all bone. She opens her mouth wide and takes a pointedly large bite of pizza then leans back, chewing, and tilts her tiny face towards the sun.

“I love shun,” she says.

That night, while I’m having dinner with Mel at the bistro with the fun salads, I bitch to her about Itsy Bitsy, which is what I call the girl I hate when I’m being funny about how I hate her. I don’t even wait until we’ve gotten our drinks, I just start in while we still have the oversized menus in front of us. I tell Mel about the scones and the Swedish pizza. I tell her about the salad-y remark. I tell her what I wished I could have told Itsy Bitsy, about scones turning into more taut littleness for some, while others are forced to grow fat on salad. I figure Mel, who’s fat, fatter even than I am, will appreciate how hate-worthy she is. It’s what I love most about Mel.

Mel says, “Itsy Bitsy. Is this the girl who kept eating the lemon slices off your vodka sevens?”

“That was Soy Foam. The anorexic from my old work. This is another one, from my new work. And I don’t hate her so much anymore.”

“Itsy Bitsy?”

“Soy Foam.”

Soy Foam was annoying, really annoying, but at least I got her. I didn’t at first. At first all I saw was this terribly small woman from accounts who, whenever we’d go to lunch, would order an Americano with steamed soy milk on the side, then eat the foam with a spoon, like soup. Then one night, during Happy Hour, after devouring all my cocktail garnish, she drunkenly confessed she hadn’t had her period in two years and that, as a result of premature menopause, she’d had to start shaving her face. After that, I hated her less. But it’s different with Itsy Bitsy.

“Sorry. So who’s Itsy Bitsy then?”

“The super thin one? With the bunny teeth? Who makes the Cookie Monster noises?”

“Oh,” she said. “Right. Why do you go to lunch with her if you hate her so much?”

“We’re friends. She’s actually nice aside from this.”

She is nice, sort of. My first week, she sort of took me under her wing. Showed me how to use the photocopier. Got me out of a printing jam by banging her little fist repeatedly on the lid until it belched out the other half of my report. Once, when I had a tension headache, she pinched my palm between her thumb and forefinger super hard for five minutes because she’d read online that sometimes that helped. Also, she was the only one at the office who bothered to talk to me. We even have a girl we hate together: Probiotic Yoga Evangelist, this whore from HR. After we caught each other making gag-me faces at her Bikram-Changed-My-Life speech, which she made between spoonfuls of Oikos, we sort of bonded.

“Yeah,” Mel agrees. “I guess that makes it awkward.”

The waitress comes and I order my heart salad with the poppy seed dressing on the side.

“Heart salad?” Mel asks.

“This salad that has heart everything,” I say. “Artichoke hearts. Romaine hearts. Hearts of palm. I love it.”

Mel orders the roast beef and havarti scroll with the sweet potato fries. She suggests sharing the baked camembert appetizer but when I refuse, she doesn’t push like she used to. Maybe she’s starting to understand how I can’t afford to lose what is at best a tenuous, hard won momentum. I tell her she should get it though. For herself. It sounds good.

“I can’t get it for just me. I’m not that much of a pig. I hope.”

“I’ll have a bite,” I offer.

Mel says she shouldn’t get it anyway. She should, you know, be good. “Like you,” she gives me a half smile.

I tell her I’m honestly not that good. Really, I’m—

“You are,” she says. “I wish I had your discipline.”

“You did for a while.” I say looking away.

For a while Mel was pretty committed. Using her mother’s old exercycle, living on Diet Coke and Michelina’s Light. In fact, for a while there, Mel began to look very much the unstoppable force of nature she was when she was seventeen, the girl who wore black bras you could see through her white Catholic school blouse and who blew all the boys I ever professed to love in her bedroom, while I played solitaire in the downstairs den with her mother.

When Mel started losing weight, I tried to be supportive. I kept telling her things like, “You look great, but you don’t want to go too far.” You know, things a friend would say to a friend. But Mel would just sip her Diet Coke sort of smug like she had a secret, leaving half her salad for the waitress to clear away. She lost steam after a few months, though. Couldn’t keep it up. Gained it back plus plus. It was really really sad.

“I guess I kind of went too far,” Mel says now.

“I did tell you not to go too far,” I remind her. Then I realize that’s kind of harsh. Surely she’s suffered enough?

“You still look beautiful though,” I add. I search for something about her to compliment. It isn’t easy. She’s still beautiful but since she gained all that weight back, she’s really let herself go grooming-wise. Usually she’ll wear at least lipstick for me because she knows it depresses me to see her without it, but today her lips are all bare and crackly.

“I love your top,” I say at last. It’s hideous. One of those tent-like horrors from the plus size store. There are some iridescent baubles along the neckline, some frothy bits of lace trailing from the cap-sleeves to lessen its resemblance to a shroud.

“I love the sleeve-detail.”

Mel looks down at the froth, frowning. “It’s okay, I guess.”

“I think it’s nice. They clearly have way nicer things at that store than they did back when I had to shop there.”

“It’s still the same crap,” she spits. “They just have more selection is all.”

We stab at our ice.

“I love your top, though,” she says, eyeing my bustier. “Siren?”

“Hell’s Belles.”

“I thought that place closed.”

“Nope. Still open. New owner though.”

“I used to love shopping there.”

“I remember.”

Waiting outside the change room while she tried on PVC corsets and velvet, empire- waisted dresses. The former owner, a corpse-like woman named Gruvella, regarding me with eyes the color of skim milk as though I were about to steal something, not that anything she had would’ve fit me then, not even the fingerless gloves. Mel finally coming out from behind the white and black striped curtain, twirling for me while I sat in the chair with the clawed armrests, saying “Great, that looks great.”

“I still remember that black bell-sleeved dress you got there. The one you wore to the prom with the spider tights.”

“The Bella. I forgot about that dress. God, good memory.”

The waitress brings our food. She’s forgotten to put my poppy seed dressing on the side which often happens with this waitress and sometimes, honestly, I think maybe she does it on purpose just to fuck with me. I tell her about it and she says oh, well, she could change it for me, and I say, could you? And I tell Mel, you go ahead and start without me.

“She sounds pretty annoying,” Mel says. “Sadistic even.”

“Itsy Bitsy? She is.” In fact, I tell Mel that I’m starting to think she befriended me to make herself feel good. To feel extra bitsy. That I think she actually gets off on it, eating copiously in front of me while I eat nothing, and pointing out how I’m eating nothing while she’s eating copiously.

“I guess that’s possible,” Mel says. She picks up her fork and knife, then lowers them. “I feel bad about starting without you. You sure you don’t want at least some fries while you wait?”

I tell her I better not. I’ve been on such a slippery slope lately.

Mel bites into her scroll. “You look the shame to me,” she says. “Shkinnier even.”

“Are you kidding? I’m huge.”

Mel gives me a look like if I’m huge, then what the hell is she?

It’s awkward for a bit.

“So, anyone you hate these days?” I ask.

Mel cuts a large piece of scroll. Then she says there are people who annoy her. Who seriously, seriously annoy her. But no, no one worthy of hate. Hating requires a lot of energy; she’s so tired these days.

“I know what you mean,” I say. “I’m tired, too.”

But I get her going. I can always get her going.

We talk about the girls we hate on television and in the movies. We talk about the one who started out almost fat but then got thin after she swore she’d never lose the weight, she’d stay sort of fat forever and fuck them, them being The Industry. We talk about how we hate her so much for that, for caving to Industry Standards. But we hated her when she was fat too, for her skin. For her defiance of norms which we guess we’re still slaves to. Also, because boys seemed to love her either way, which is rare for boys. We talk about how it is that the boys we love always seem to love the girl we hate most. It makes us want to know every detail about her. What her sign is, if she is a vegetarian, whether she ever did porn or at least posed topless. And if she did, we’ll hunt for it on the net. We’ll download it by whatever means necessary, and as we watch it our hatred will glow, intensify, become something like an emergency and we’ll have to call each other up just so it doesn’t sit there, this lump in our throats. We half-laugh about how we’re masochists.

Then Mel remembers she has an early day tomorrow.

I ask her if she’d like me to drive her home, but she says it’s fine. Really.

I tell her I’m happy to at least drive her to the bus station closer to her house, that I’d really hate for her to have to take two buses at night, both such long rides, and besides, I never see her anymore.

“Okay,” she says, and I try not to hear that it’s sort of half-hearted.

On the ride over, to make her laugh, I tell her all about Aggressively Naked, this woman who works out at my gym who does all of her post-workout grooming naked. She brushes her hair naked. She uses her straightening iron naked. Eyelash curler and mascara naked. Rings necklace and even bracelets naked. Trouser socks and even shoes naked. Only after she’s got herself totally primped will she put on her clothes.

“Isn’t that annoying?”

“It is,” Mel agrees.

“I can’t believe I forgot to tell you earlier. Also, she’s got this body you wouldn’t believe. Like I knew just by her body she didn’t speak English. I knew that when she opened her mouth, something like Danish would come out.”

“Oh my god, stop,” she says, mock-covering her ears. “Just stop.”

Once we get to the bus station, I insist on holding Mel in the car until the bus comes. She takes her bus pass out of her little change purse to be at the ready. I tell her I love her change purse, even though there is really nothing distinctive about it, it’s just a change purse. Black leather with a little zip.

I ask her if she’s sure she doesn’t want me to take her home, it’s a long ride. She says actually she doesn’t mind it, that ever since she started living with her mother, she uses the bus time for Me Time. Me Time for Mel has always been a dark fantasy novel and some Norwegian darkwave on her ipod. It comforts me so much that this has never changed.

I ask her what she’s been reading and listening to lately, but she’s spotted the bus in the distance, so I say okay, good-bye, and tell her I’ll text her later, but she’s already out of the car, running toward the stop.

I go home and do my assessment in front of the mirror. Tonight, it seems there are more truths to come to grips with. Sometimes this happens. How many there are often depends on lighting. Not on how much, but on how it’s hitting me, on how it’s hitting certain parts. I eat a 100 gram bar of 70% dark chocolate square by square. As I lie in bed, I picture Mel in her house, spiky with all of her mother’s strange breeds of plant. I picture her walking up the creaking steps toward her bedroom, surrounded by walls of obscure fantasy and even more obscure CDs. I think of her lying on her back in the too-small bed of her childhood, the twin mattress sagging beneath her, a moon through the window silhouetting her, the gentle rise and fall of her vast stomach, her slight snore, until my eyes close.

At work the next day, Itsy Bitsy is secret eating a Kardemummabullar at her desk. She’s pretending to secret eat for my sake, to make me laugh, like, at look what a pig she is, she can’t even wait until lunch. She over-crackles the paper bag, does shifty eyes before each super-bite. She’s wearing this sixties mini dress with matching white go-go boots like something stitched out of my nightmares. Seeing me watch her, she waves, her cheeks plump with Kardemummabullar. I wave back, and the hate I feel is bottomless. The hate could drown us both. She swallows and mouths Lunch at me like it’s a question and I nod in spite of myself.

Then she texts me:

Banana orgy at Kilimanjaro! Om-nom-nom-nom!!!! }8D

I’ve eaten there with her before. It’s this sandwich and cake shop that has nothing to do with Africa, despite its name and décor. Under a black and white still of Serengeti cranes, I’ll watch her eat a vast ham and gruyere Panini with apricot chutney, slurp down a peanut butter and banana smoothie, then scarf a slice of banana cake. By the time the waitress sets that slice in front of her, I’ll have done eating half of my veggie delite wrap, even though I will eat as slowly as possible. By the time she cuts into her cake, my hands will be empty. And with her mouth full of cake, she’ll say something about how I’ve only eaten half the wrap. She might even point. She might even reach across the table and point at it, my sad, uneaten other half. And I’ll have to say something awkward about wanting to save this other half for later, which we’ll both know is a lie. I might even ask the waitress for a to-go bag, but she won’t be fooled. She’ll look at me like, Huh, and take another bite of banana cake. And I’ll know that once again my bearing miserable witness will have increased the flavor of her food somehow, like salt. I text back ;D, and as I do this, the hate shifts, spreads its wings in me, becomes almost electric, like love.

Mona Awad‘s fiction has appeared in McSweeney’s, The Walrus, Joyland, St. Petersburg Review, and Two Serious Ladies. She holds an MScR in English literature from the University of Edinburgh and is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Brown University.