, Author at Post Road Magazine

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.

Two Poems by Miranda Field

Birth Mark

In my ninth month I ached for the savor of black-currants — a fruit out of season, a fruit of elsewhere — and since his birth he’s carried a map of that place on his instep. A place more private than the sex of a boy, which he can never quite hide. I thought my craving signified the daughter whose dresses I store. Which, when I have a second son, I’ll bury. A summer frock writhes on the line in the wind, a white and blue grid with one small as aphid inside each square — as in a glass specimen box, a room you can look into from all sides. My ‘Book of God-fear’ warns of good women who love to account for every defect in their children by the doctrine of longing…. but my boy’s sex is no defect. And the mark on his foot is only my burden if my fault, only my fault if you can blame me. There was a mother whose huge desire for oysters she couldn’t satisfy. And when her child came with rough scurf on his hands and feet that mimicked the shells of those so-wanted morsels, something foreign fled from her, slipped into the night and locked the door behind it. Should she go after it? Well my daughter knows to run from me, to leave her clothing empty. I’d gorge on any rare commodity to bring her forth. I’ll travel to the shore and trawl until the sea-muck makes a mountain on the sand and gives to this bad hunger a body.

Cock Robin

Not eat the thing you took. Not pluck its feathers, peel its skin.
Not kiss your own face on the mouth after imagining
the tasting. Nor bury the thing you bring down from the sky.

Not interpret the meaning of its cry. Not clothe the cooling thing
in woollens. Not reel it in. Not wind it while it writhes.
Not breathe hard while you work, not speak of it, not burrow in.

But barely look upon the garden where the weight fell, sudden.
Where the falling broke it open. The plummet stopped.
Where the rain falls down in dying angles and damage blooms.

Not touch the entry wound. Not stitch it up. Nor enter .
Not with a finger. Not the viking eye. Not wonder.
But leave be what you took. But let what spills congeal.

And wager everything you own the grass grows over it in time.
It will not rise again. The sky assists this with its rain.
And the garden, and the mind.

Divinatory Experiment

by Selah Saterstrom

Opening Note ~
In 1893 Henry C. Wood published one of the first self-help books, IDEAL SUGGESTIONS THROUGH MENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY. Mr. Wood’s theory, coinciding with the advent of photography in popular culture, maintained that one’s brain could photograph positive affirmations or “Ideal Suggestions.” The “solar light” of the camera corrected the “lunar imbalance” of the lunatic or otherwise morally flawed individual. In many asylums it was popular to dress the commited in fancy attire and take their portrait. After, the photographed individual would view their evolved “moral version” as part of their correctional therapy.

Over the last five years, I have watched films while simultaneously photographing them, shooting approximately 450 images per film, as part of a larger installation project concerned with generating a divinatory poetics. While photographing, I attempted (and failed) to memorize the dialogue and storyline, and then narrate each film still. I then put this existing language through an exercise outlined in Henry C. Wood’s book, at times invoking and disrupting his language. After, I “took pictures” of the text/image pieces with my brain, and attempted to be redeemed from various moral flaws, which in turn prompted additional revisions of the text.

In this excerpt, I attempt to recover from love through brain-photographing images from Jeff Kanew’s 1984, Revenge of the Nerds.

Lovers separate. Thought confers realism upon ideal

entities. Or: just plain old piss poor conditions. What we

dwell upon we become, or at least God, if it be God, moves

across the waters. It is easy for God to be morally correct

and also a tattoo of some shitty initials on some girl’s neck.

The vision must be clarified. Do this: through the medium

of the outer eye engrave it on the tablet.

True, forms are built by subtle devices, but are also

shadows. Dust is seized through its living potency and

later it is fashioned. Our materialism upon the seen is so

dull and this whole potluck is lame. Every dish is some

shitty hippie casserole. To build with enduring material we

must build with bones. Here as much as in the hereafter. I

hereby link myself to exuberance. My trust is in what I

cannot see. Through it, I am drained.

Lover is the given name. It represents the type manifested

through a dead body. Both of our bodies are already

within, but remain undiscovered. We were children and

we made children. And are crucified in the lower-self

made through suffering. We rise, resurrection. So just

relax and let me finish the sex act.

The Lover perception is self-evident. We were taught that

only unfolding beings need corrective disciplines, the old

timey growing pains of good. We must have an experience

in matter. Hell is a bunch of fuckin’ junk. In constructing

our water park, we should leave it out. Those words of the

Lover, so often repeated, FEAR NOT, are significant. They

are religious and also scientific.

The fact that I am the Lover’s child dissipates the mist. In a

vastly deeper and more vital sense I am the child of the

Lovers who I also was. We have called ourselves Loretta

and Conway. There is no surer way of becoming so and so

then to think so. The Lover’s image must break in line, fuck

all the others, we are getting to the front.

Selah Saterstrom is the author of SLAB (forthcoming), The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution (all published by Coffee House Press). Her work can be found in Bombay Gin, Tarpaulin Sky, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She teaches and lectures widely and is on faculty in the University of Denver’s graduate creative writing program.

Two Stories

Paul Lisicky

Liberty

The father wanted to go to the top. The boy wanted to back up, but it was too late to back up. They were forty steps into her gown. The herd behind them pushed them upward, forward. It was a cave of smells now (dust, sweat, foot powder, makeup), cooked by the heat of the spotlights. Shoes clonked on the planks. The steps wound round and round. Was the father thinking about the mother left behind? The father had other things on his mind. Maybe that was why the boy needed to sit down and rest. If the father had done his share of the work, the boy wouldn’t have had to worry for two.

The mother trembled inside the gift shop on the ground. The boy felt her down there, even if he couldn’t see her face. He didn’t need eyes for that. Her heartbeat—he heard it. Her posture—he felt it in his back. She smelled a little like starch—or bread, but bread taken out of the oven too soon.

Then the father and he were in the crown. The room was so tight that he looked up at the father, who didn’t look down. Legs knocked him this way and that. He couldn’t get to the window. They were at the top of the world now. Only the torch was higher. People were shoving him toward the back. They wanted the windows. There was something to see down there and they were going to get to it, no matter what it took. But when the stranger carried him forward, lifting him up under the armpits— where had the father gone?—he didn’t see the mother he’d hoped to see. All he saw was some girl, some fleck in the grass. She raised her fist, held the invisible book to her chest, as if laughing at the statue that cast a shadow on her.

They got down, the father and the boy. Somehow they made it without falling through the gown. But where was the mother? There was no mother. And when the boy looked up at his father to see how he felt about this, the father smiled, eyes drifting to the take out stand. Would you like a hot dog? he said.

The boy shook his head yes, though he didn’t want a hot dog.

Then order it yourself, the father said, as if such a thing were obvious.

The boy took the dollar and put it on the counter. In minutes a hot dog was passed over to him. It lay in its bun, in a crinkled paper boat, with a red checkerboard pattern. A pump of yellow paint sat on the counter, and the boy wondered why anyone would want to paint a hot dog bright yellow.

Still, that didn’t stop him from pumping the handle with abandon, splashing himself.

Where is my husband? the voice said. I lost my husband. What did they do with my husband?

It was the mother. crying so hard, she didn’t feel the boy tugging at her jacket. She didn’t see the yellow paint all over his face, which felt like another end. It tasted of mustard, and he kept on eating it off his fingers, waiting for her to look at him again.

Beach Town

The birds can go elsewhere. The maritime forest? Let it burn to the ground. The palms along the causeway can go up with it. The spiders, the fleas, the rats, the snakes: any living creature that lives in the leaves. They can burn up, too. Ruby thinks these thoughts while she volunteers at the beach town bird sanctuary, dispensing wisdom to the schoolchildren bused in from the mainland. They all think she’s a nice lady in her aqua sundress and her benign smiling face. The wrens who eat nuts and seeds out of her hand think she’s a nice lady too. Is she a nice lady? She wonders whether she doesn’t think enough about that question. She thinks a lot about her house in the woods, the house with the anchor patterns on the shutters, the house she’s lived in since childhood. She thinks a lot about selling it to a rich young couple who will surely destroy it. She’ll watch the bulldozer ramming the sun room where her mother once poured cereal. She’ll look at the accomplishment and indifference on the young couples’ faces, then she’ll drive back to the new condo she’s bought on the mainland, with its granite and stainless steel and cobblestone drive— every amenity she despises. Isn’t that what they call them these days? Amenities?

There is an awful chorus of horns one morning. The black snake with the pink spots is once again sunning itself in the road. It is the same snake that has scared the neighborhood senseless for the past week. Ruby feels friendly to the snake. She is a great appreciator of the way it has frightened the children, making them cower inside their houses, in front of their laptops and Gameboys at night. Ruby leaves it a dish of milk by the front door before she goes to sleep, and when it is morning, it is almost empty, with only a few drops left. It makes her happy that the snake is drinking her milk. Maybe she will go on-line some night to find out what a good snake eats.

Now the new couple next door is out waving their arms over their heads. They are blurred with fury. They are shouting at the driver of the Land Rover, with his righteous, twisted face behind glass. He wants to go forward. The snake is as still as a question mark. It will not move, and the car is full of passengers who are hungry. They will not be stopped for one more minute. The young couple cannot stand that there are people like the passengers of the Land Rover in the world. The way they plead and cajole, you might think the neighborhood has always been just for them, built in anticipation of their arrival. The horn hurts Ruby’s ears. It cuts right through the center of her. And for just this reason alone, Ruby rushes out the front door in her nightie and grabs the snake. The snake is cool and luscious in her hands. The palms go silent. The horn goes silent. The snake hunches left, right, it turns its face directly toward Ruby’s face. It is asking her a question. It wants something of her. Yes, I know what you are, Ruby answers, though she holds those words in her head instead of speaking them. And just as the snake seems to close its eyes and sigh and shrink into itself in delirious pleasure, it lunges forward and jabs Ruby in the breast. Ruby moistens her bottom lip. The young couple is too shocked to scream. And just as Ruby begins to take in the clean sharp cut of the bite, the glistening needles of it, the snake goes back in a second time, and the purification she didn’t know she’d been seeking begins to have its way with her.

Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and Unbuilt Projects. His work has appeared in Fence, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Tin House, Unstuck, and other magazines and anthologies. He is the New Voices Professor at Rutgers University and he teaches in the low residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College. A memoir, The Narrow Door, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2014.

Red Owl

by Brandon Hobson

I live in a small town called Red Owl, where the mayor likes to get avocado facials. From Fulton Road, which runs north into town, some mornings you can see him sitting on his front porch, thumbing through the newspaper, his face caked in green. Most evenings he sits wearing his monogrammed slippers, sipping Polish vodka and listening to the smooth jazz FM station. Before bed he steps outside and waves a flashlight to check for trespassers. Ever since a group of teenagers from Crawford destroyed his mailbox with a baseball bat he’s been paranoid. He’s a man who’s afraid of everything, including cities. “Life is too fast paced,” he tells me. “I like quiet places. Red Owl is a quiet place.”

This is what it’s like to live in Red Owl: with fall’s dying leaves a redtailed hawk returns to its same nesting tree, in blowing wind, and red-winged blackbirds gather at the windowsill. There are opossums and skunks in the assemblage of trees across Fulton Road. At night they creep around outside and look for mice. My house sits in the country, down the road from an amber pond with moss on the bank. The pond is a decent place to fish, full of catfish and largemouth bass. I’ve seen bullfrogs and yellow-striped ribbon snakes there. I’ve seen a muskrat swimming toward the bank. In the mornings, as I walk down to the mailbox, several cedar waxwings with apple-blossom petals in their beaks sit on a branch, watching me. Early mornings in spring a fog hangs over the road. I’ve just moved here to Oklahoma, where I grew up many years ago. I have no family here, no real connection anymore, other than I lived here briefly as a child when my father taught at a small college near Tulsa. I’m now a widower. I’m now far away from Boston, only six months into my retirement. After my wife Margaret died, I wanted to move somewhere far away, somewhere quiet. I felt I needed to return to a place from my childhood.

At one time, many years ago, Margaret and I lived and worked in Boston. It’s a life I miss, but that life is gone. I’m far away from the tunnel traffic from I-93 to Albany Street and the yellow lights of the city; far from the morning jogs from the waterfront near UMASS, past the JFK Library and Museum to Castle Island to Broadway; far from the Back Bay brownstones, Copley Square, the architecture of Trinity and Old South Church; far from the North End, with its Italian restaurants and men who yell at each other as they unload trucks; far from the pubs, the good chowder and pale ale, the buildings, Commercial Street’s harbor with its dark water; far from the walks along the Charles River Parkway, the summer concerts in the park, Cambridge, Cape Cod, the view of the Prudential Tower from a sailboat at sunset; far from Fenway; far from the Red Sox and the Bruins and the Patriots and the Celtics.

The nearest city is sixty miles from my house. On my back porch you can sit outside for hours and study how branches interlace, which is riveting when you mix scotch and Xanax. After I moved in, I spent a week storing boxes in the musty attic with its scent of cedar and mothballs. The attic is now full of boxes of useless items: batteries, steel-wool buffer pads, my son’s old motorcycle magazines, paperback books and comic books. There are kerosene lamps and cloth-covered picture albums of our children and grandchildren. There are flashlights and paintbrushes and spiral notebooks and old greeting cards. There are boxes of toys I’ve never gotten rid of: wind-up plastic boats, racecars, a wooden Mickey Mouse doll, a stuffed white rabbit, a miniature bird cage, a tiny plastic house with a red roof, and so on. There are so many things I’ve kept over the years I no longer know what’s trash and what isn’t. Once a year I will go into that attic to bring down the Christmas decorations, boxes full of ornaments sprinkled with glitter, holly berries, strands of silver tinsel and tangled strings of blinking lights. I might run my hand along the curved back of a wicker chair Margaret liked to sit in, or blow the dust from an old cigar box that my father gave me when I was twelve. But mostly I will see the attic for what it is: a place to store the past, a room rarely visited, separated from the ordinary and lonely world below it.

Sometimes I sit at the back of the chapel near my house. I imagine sitting there with Margaret and listening to a choir while people around us sit with their heads bowed. At her funeral there were six pallbearers. It was freezing outside. They carried her coffin on their shoulders in a cold mist, and watching them I had a flash of her face before the tumor in her head started eating her memories. Before she died, for a while we met with a pastor who gave us hope. He kept referring to Mark 8 and the miraculous healing of a blind man in Bethsaida. Healing, miracles, hope. And now: how do you go from spending forty years with someone to being alone? Out here, at least, I have a telescope on the back deck and a lawn chair I can sleep in. I have my nights to sip scotch and look at the stars: constellations, Polaris and Lyra. I have neighbors down the road who own a dog, a terrier mutt named Batshit who sometimes tries to swim across the pond but never makes it to the other side. The dog, panting heavily, always turns around and paddles back to the bank. I’ve stood on the railed wooden bridge over the pond and watched this several times. The dog’s owner, a fourteen-year-old boy named Jamie, once told me that he screwed his girlfriend like a caveman until his legs went weak. Jamie plays bass guitar at a small country church on the south side of town.

“I’m thinking of changing my name,” he told me one morning by the mailbox. “Jamie’s a girl’s name. I like the name Elvis. My middle name’s Clyde.”

Jamie’s not the strangest person in Red Owl. Four miles north, past the only street light in town, Willie Ray Jones walks around with a knapsack full of dirty magazines that he tries to give away to people. About once a week the sheriff or on-duty police officer has to drive Willie Ray home. Willie Ray has a strabismus eye disorder (townies refer to him as “cockeyed”) and wears a tattered old fedora hat and overalls and work boots, though he doesn’t work due to mental issues from being struck by lightning when he was a teenager. At forty-one, Willie Ray lives with his mother and aunt in a small house behind C.J.’s Seed and Feed. Willie Ray’s mother and aunt drag him along with them to play bingo at the community center every Saturday night. He apparently has to be supervised at all times. His mother said if they leave him alone he’ll take off all his clothes and walk around town naked. A couple of weeks ago I saw him walking south on Main in only his boxer shorts and boots. The sheriff arrived as usual, helped him into his car, and drove him home.

My first night living here, I kept thinking I was hearing something out back, but it was too dark to see anything. Opossums, I told myself. Skunks, critters. I drank Jim Beam and fell asleep in the recliner in front of the television. Sleep is a precious thing. My afternoon naps are disturbed by a squirrel determined to torment me. Last week he came in through the kitchen window and stole a piece of banana nut bread from the saucer in the breakfast nook. The next day, while I was napping, the same squirrel hopped onto the arm of the couch and tapped on my head with an acorn. I managed to sit up and watch him run out.

“You’ll learn to deal with those things,” Jamie told me outside, where he threw an old tennis ball for Batshit to chase. “You’re in the country now, sir. Learn to drive a stake in the ground. Use a chain saw. Kick cow shit.”

Red Owl is like no other town I’ve ever encountered. Its strangeness is defined by the community in the same way the fictional town of Hooterville was defined by the farming communities in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Red Owl originated just after the 1889 land run. The Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad reached Pawnee Lake around this same time on its trek from Kansas down to Texas. In the 1950s and 60s, the railroad constructed the coach building center and division repair shops north of town. The railroad went bankrupt in 1980.

The assumption, I think, is that the town is as ordinary as any other small town. I enjoy these people who live on their own time: the people who act slowly, discussing the intricacies of weather, landscape, the shapes of natural creation. My neighbor, Wilbur Brunk, challenges me to look into my soul on nights he sits on his front porch and plays a fivestring banjo with all four of his grandchildren. This is a family of uniquely talented musicians: the two boys finger-pick their acoustic guitars, Chet Atkins style; the eldest granddaughter plays the fiddle and wears boots; the little one plays a tambourine. The music is wild and fast and foot-stomping. Wilbur calls it hillbilly music, and I can see by the fierce intensity in his eyes that he possesses a deep passion for it. He sometimes breaks out into fits of laughter as they play. Often I’ve found myself wanting to clap along. One of his grandsons occasionally tries to teach me a D or a C chord on the guitar, but my fingers are too stiff, all bone.

“These songs are easy,” the boy told me. “They’re your standard three chord progression, G-C-D, like most country music. Or blues. Or early rock-n-roll.”

“I wasn’t aware there was a standard three chord progression.”

“Maybe there’s an A7 thrown in at times,” he said, “but it’s pretty standard. You’re an old timer like Grandpa. You should know this.”

“Give me Sinatra any day,” I told him.

“That boy’s been thumb-picking since he was six,” Wilbur said. “He’s a hard worker. Mows lawns and works in the field all summer without complaining. I’m proud of him.”

Wilbur is a man who learned the value of hard work. He grew up in this town and quit school at fourteen to help his father and grandfather in the fields. At one time he cut hay by swinging a scythe all day. More recently, he was the maintenance supervisor at the golf course east of town before it closed down. “All the golfers are gone,” he told me. “The owner sold it to someone who let it go to shit. Moved his family down to Houston.”

In the eighties, when the oil business was booming, the town held calcuttas, golf tournaments in which people bid on 4-person teams through an auction and put all the money in the pool. At one time, Wilbur was a scratch golfer who putted cross-handed and held the course record. His team won one of the big calcuttas once and he used the money to help pay for the restoration of a 1960 MG Model A sports car. “MG stands for Morris Garage Company,” he said, running his hand over the hood. “They were early racers. This goddamn car is hell on wheels.” There’s a certain measure of ecstasy that flows through me whenever I look at that car. It is clean and fast and sprightly blue. On several occasions I’ve asked Wilbur to take me for a ride, but he never drives it due to the road dust and gravel. At sixty-four, he is worried about throat or testicular cancer, which runs in his family. Before he dies, he told me, he wants to visit Cairene and Mayan Pyramids, or maybe the island of Samos in Greece. He wants to climb rocks in Ontario. Hike in the Chiricahuas. Fall unapologetically in love with the natural world.

Wilbur’s wife Dorine works part-time in a downtown café where they serve fried onion burgers and apple cider. I can’t eat there. Two years ago, while mowing the lawn, I felt a squeezing in my chest and a sharp pain in my shoulder. Half an hour later I was in the emergency room with a minor myocardial infarction. I sold insurance for many years, and my doctor recommended early retirement, which I ignored. Six months after that, I was back at the heart hospital thinking I’d had another heart attack. False alarm. “You’re taking a huge risk,” my neighbor told me. “Unless you change your lifestyle, your clock is ticking.” So here I am in the country. Far away from that life, far away. I keep a vial of nitroglycerine pills in my shirt pocket and maintain a low cholesterol diet that consists of nothing fried, lots of vegetables. In the evenings I take walks and carry a big stick to keep the dogs and other animals away. I’m learning to like life in the country. My part is supposed to be easy: I can build a garden, work in a shed, keep to myself. “There’s not much else left for us to do,” Wilbur Brunk told me. “Eat, shit, and die. Go enjoy the outdoors. Go bowhunting with me. Kick cow shit.”

Lately I’ve been reading in the paper about bobcats in the area, which is one of the reasons I’m afraid to go into the woods, though I go anyway with Wilbur. He likes to go bowhunting, luring elk with calls. He’s not very good. A few months ago he taught me how to shoot a bow in the field behind his house. We shot arrows at a bull’s-eye stapled to bales of hay. He took me bowhunting and showed me his best hiding places. I’ve heard you have to be really good to bring elk in close. We never saw one. I moved slowly through the woods, trying to be as quiet as I could. Every noise startled me. I kept thinking something was behind me. I imagined Wilbur following a blood trail, approaching a dead elk and leaning down to admire it. Afterwards, I asked him why he enjoyed hunting so much.

“Good question,” he said.

Some nights we sit on Wilbur’s front porch, and he tells me stories about everything that’s happened in Red Owl over the past few years. I can sense his pain and worry. There is a clear history of things that have gone wrong. A year ago, a girl was found dead out on the bank of Pawnee Lake. Her death had an enormous effect on the town. Women tried to look like her. Girls wanted to be her. Adults had sex parties where the women dressed as her. But to single out this event would distort the record because other incidents followed. The first was a suicide. J.D. Hock, who liked motorcycles and guns, decided to build a tepee out of bamboo and discarded plastic. He lived in it for two weeks before he put a .38 Smith & Wesson pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. For a few weeks after the funeral, his mother began sleeping in the tepee herself, perhaps to cope with her loss. She kept to herself. Later in the summer the tepee burned down, but luckily Mrs. Hock wasn’t there when it happened. Fire Capt. Arthur Gann said he was feeding his horses when he saw the tepee burst into flames. He said a woodstove was likely the reason.

Then followed the death of Paul Franks, who worked sixty miles out of town. Paul was a foundry worker his whole life and came home every night in blackface. Wilbur’s wife said he came into the café every morning and drank coffee. He told her the story about the time a furnace exploded at work when he and some other workers were melting scrap pipe. Hot metal sprayed all over the place and nobody came away harmed. A miracle, everyone said. When Paul got lung cancer, his wife blamed it on the work conditions, breathing asbestos, being around all that talc and silica. He’d started smoking cigarettes when he was twelve, and in the latter part of his life he spent a lot of time around exhaust in his garage, working on engines. “Every single day we dragged giant buckets of hot white metal across a track overhead and poured them into molds,” he told her. “I wore an asbestos outfit, goggles, and gloves ripped at the fingertips.” He showed her the burn marks on the fingers of his left hand. But it was the cancer that got to him. When his wife found him, he was hanging from a dog leash he’d attached to a wooden beam on the basement ceiling.

On his birthday, former Red Owl calf roper Matt Cochran died when he fell thirty feet from the roof of a condominium construction project out in Tahlequah while he was removing roofing materials. He was twenty-three. There was a huge lawsuit over the whole thing. The contractor Matt worked for was fined a large amount of money for violating some sort of construction safety code that requires employees use safety belts and lifelines whenever they’re working at least fifteen feet high.

It might have been left at that, but other tragedies followed. Marty Lancaster, quarterback for the Red Owl High School Red Owls, flipped his truck off Sternbridge Road after leaving a party by the lake, and died. His girlfriend became so hysterical at the funeral that her parents had to walk her out of the church. She has since made two suicide attempts. Her father, who refinishes wood floors, keeps sandpaper and saws and containers of polyurethane in his garage. He says he’s dying a slow death from all the sawdust in his lungs.

Otto Prairiewolf, who likes to drink whiskey with us, comes over to Wilbur’s sometimes and tells us stories about healing people with bearberry leaves and juniper. He once healed a young boy of spinal problems through his Native American healing methods and prayer. I met him one Saturday afternoon when I’d drank just enough scotch to follow Jamie down Fulton Road to see a dead porcupine. “You ever see a porcupine?” Jamie asked me. “You ever seen a dead one?”

“I’ve seen porcupines,” I said.

“Otto can resurrect it.”

“What are you saying?”

“He can bring it back to life,” Jamie said. “Do you know Otto? Big

Indian guy? He lives in that cabin around the corner.”

Ten minutes later we were standing on Otto’s porch while Jamie beat on the door with his fist. When Otto opened the door I saw a large man, standing at least six-foot seven, with long dark hair that partly covered his face. He looked vicious. I had no idea he would be so large. He was shirtless and dark-skinned and wearing blue jeans. I wondered if he’d been asleep. I guessed he was in his early forties. Otto looked me over. “This your dad?” he asked Jamie.

“No, I just moved here,” I told him. “I live down the road.”

“We’re Cheyenne-Arapaho,” he said. He studied me for a minute then invited us in. His house was small and dark and warm. A ceiling fan hummed in the living room. We followed Otto into the small kitchen, where Jamie told him about the dead porcupine. Otto pulled on a t-shirt and said he had porcupine meat in his freezer. “Also deer and bobcat meat,” he said.

“We can show you where that porcupine is,” Jamie said. “Can you resurrect it?”

“Porcupine liver is good,” he said. “I can clean it if you bring it to me.” Jamie looked at me, as if for confirmation. I looked at my watch. I was drunk. “I’m making a roast for dinner,” I said. “I’d better get home.” “Venison roast is good,” Otto said. “Muskrat and bobcat is good.”

I question Otto’s sanity at times. He told me his sense of smell is so strong that, at the age of six, he detected the presence of colorectal cancer in his grandmother’s feces. A fecal occult blood test evidently confirmed he was correct. He told me others things, too: that the East African jumping spider is more likely to attack girls with Gonorrhea than boys; that taking peyote and screaming during sex can increase the spiritual enlightenment during Indian sweat ceremonies; that porcupine quills contain a sticky substance used to make beads but can cause extreme paranoia and panic if swallowed.

“Why would anyone swallow it?” I asked.

“To seek healing,” he said. “People who are dying are desperate, my friend. Dying gives us an opportunity to be interesting.”

“This man speaks the goddamn truth,” Wilbur said.

Some nights when the whiskey really kicks in, Otto tells us how much he’s in love with Mildred Thorn. Otto hasn’t told anyone but us. Mildred Thorn is a reclusive woman who lives farther down on Fulton Road with her two young sons. She is forty-seven and has never been married. She lived with her elderly father until his death three years ago. She is the mother of twin boys who were born conjoined at the forehead. They survived the surgeries, and though their heads are slightly oblong and their foreheads are large, they are now able to live and function in Red Owl. Mildred homeschools them and occasionally takes them for walks. Sometimes you can see her walking with them along Fulton Road, wiping drool from their mouths or helping them collect rocks and berries. Nobody knows who the father is. Wilbur says there were rumors that Mildred’s father repeatedly raped her, so it’s likely he’s the twins’ father. A few years ago the newspaper ran a story about the boys with their “before” and “after” surgery photos, but since then Mildred has mostly kept quiet. She rarely goes into town except when it’s necessary. The grocery store makes special deliveries just for her on Thursdays. Otto doesn’t mind any of those things.

“One day soon I shall throw myself at her feet,” he told us. “I shall stand before her and confess my feelings. And if she don’t like me, I shall sit on my roof for three nights straight and howl like a gutshot dog.”

We tell him not to waste time. We tell him the world is not made for perfect moments regardless of how much we want to believe that. Otto sips his whiskey and nods, deep in thought. He is a man who speaks little but listens well. The more I get to know him the more I see his sincerity. One afternoon not long ago, he asked me to drive him and Jamie into town. It was Jamie’s birthday. We parked in front of an old red brick building that’s been converted into a local gym and walked around to the alley behind the building. “Women’s locker room,” Otto said, pointing up to the window. He patted Jamie hard on the shoulder. “For the boy’s birthday.” I looked up and saw a small window about eight feet high. Otto knelt down, hoisted Jamie up on his shoulders and stood up so that Jamie could peek in the window.

“Someone’s definitely in there,” Jamie said, gripping the ledge with both hands.

“Look for a tit,” Otto said.

“She’s old. It’s an old woman. Oh God.” “But do you see tits,” Otto said.

“I can’t look at this.”

“Forget about age. Age means nothing. Describe the tits.”

“I can’t look at this anymore,” Jamie said, wincing. “Let me down.” Like Otto and Jamie, I have my own moments of guilty pleasures.

Walking around the pond some nights, I feel, with a sense of urgency, the need to see the young woman who sits on the bank with her young son and looks out over the dark water. She lives on the other side of the pond. I don’t know her name and don’t care to know. I haven’t asked anyone about her, not even Wilbur. I’ve seen her working in her garden in pants with dirt-stained knees. I’ve seen her roll up her pants and ease her feet into the water. There is something wonderful about watching her sit with her young son in the evenings. She looks at him for a long moment and stands. They walk around and throw bits of bread and crackers at the ducks. They see me walking at a steady pace and know I am an old man with a bad heart. Maybe they think my time is limited. Maybe I remind them of someone who’s passed on. The question I’m most bothered with during these walks is: how much longer will I be here?

“You should just get yourself a dog,” Wilbur keeps telling me. “Take the dog for walks. Go to the park, play fetch. Kick cow shit.”

“A dog’s life is too short,” I tell him. “They get old and sick. They get weak. I can’t stand to watch suffering.”

But I don’t mind being alone most nights. Despite the invitations to barn dances in town, or pig roasts, or coffee at the mayor’s house, I prefer my life remain, for the most part, solitary. This is how the rest of my life will be spent. Still, I miss my wife. During lumbering night hours, I might wander into the kitchen in a sort of half sleepwalk, expecting to find Margaret sitting there eating honey on toast, like she used to do on nights she couldn’t sleep. Wilbur once told me he liked to watch his wife wash the vegetables and potatoes in the sink. Dorine liked to take charge and do things. She shaved carrots, chopped onions, used a boning knife on the catfish he’d brought in with his grandsons. I miss those sorts of things. In truth, I’m a man who’s afraid of looking lonely.

Not long ago I saw a fox at the edge of my driveway. I tried to get a closer look, but it fled into the woods as I approached it. As I checked my mail, I heard Jamie calling me from down the road. He was running toward me, and when he reached me he was out of breath. “Batshit’s run off,” he said.

“Settle down,” I said.

“He’s run off. Have you seen him?” “No, but I can help you look.”

He seemed pleased. “I’ve already covered the area down by Otto’s,” he said. So we decided to head down to the pond. We crossed the fence and walked past Howard Carter’s old abandoned Chevrolet, where mice had built nests around the engine and nibbled the electrical wiring. Otto told Wilbur and me once that he used to screw a second cousin of his in the backseat on nights when he had family in town from Slaughterville and Thomas for the summer Pow-wow.

“A second cousin,” I told him, “is still considered a cousin, isn’t it?” “Pussy is pussy,” he said sternly.

Jamie and I walked through the field, calling Batshit’s name and whistling. We headed down toward the pond, where we saw a crowd of people. Somehow the whole place looked more colorful, or maybe it was just that I hadn’t been sleeping well and was tired. We walked by a group of boys sitting on the grass, looking at laminated images of the Virgin Mary printed on prayer cards. I saw the mayor sitting in a lawn chair, his legs crossed, his face caked in green. He waved as we approached.

“There’s a chili cook-off tonight at the high school gym,” he called out to us. “See you there?” I gave a slight wave.

“He’s there,” Jamie said, pointing. I looked at the pond, where I saw Wilbur and his grandchildren, all four of them, cheering for Batshit who was paddling across the pond. As we approached them, Jamie put two pinkie fingers in his mouth and whistled. Batshit, on command, turned and paddled back, crawled out of the water and shook himself dry. Then he stretched lazily before trotting over to us. I walked over to Wilbur and his grandkids and saw Otto with Mildred Thorn on the other side of the pond.

“Everyone came to see Otto and Mildred Thorn,” he said. “We’re all pretending to stand around, but we’re watching to see what happens.”

“Word spreads quickly,” I said. I saw Mildred Thorn across the pond, sitting on a stump with her two boys beside her. Otto stood in front of them like a giant, looking ridiculous, moving his arms in a wide circular motion as if describing something extremely round.

“I can only imagine what he’s saying,” I said.

Wilbur nodded. “That woman is distant and gloomy. She’s perfect for Otto.”

“One time Margaret and I visited Sakonnet,” I told him. “It’s a beautiful place. She had relatives in Westport who drove us there. We were young, in our twenties. We were newly engaged.”

Wilbur didn’t respond, but I knew he was listening. Then we saw Otto lift his arms and shout: “I declare that the town of Red Owl is healed!” A few people laughed. “I declare,” Otto shouted, “that there will be no more suicides! No more tragedies!” People clapped. Then Mildred Thorn stood up, and she and Otto walked away with her children.

After that, everyone left. There was nothing left to see.

We haven’t seen much of Otto, though, lately. We imagine him sitting in Mildred Thorn’s house with her and her children, telling stories of Indian warriors and eagles and healing. We look forward to seeing him. As for my own nights, sometimes I walk into empty bedrooms in my house and try to get a memory of Margaret. In the evenings I walk down Fulton Road in the streaming clouds and blowing wind. I walk down Fulton Road alone, past Nick’s Garage and then past Ellis Park, where a group of boys are always playing football, downhill toward J.B.’s Bait and Tackle where the air is heavy and filled with the smell of dead things. I tell myself there is a destiny to the journey of all objects: stones and rivers, stars and dogs and the good people of Red Owl. People drive by and wave, and I pretend I have a plan, that I’m a serious man in a hurry to reach a destination, my own destination, wherever that may be.

Brandon Hobson‘s fiction has appeared in NOON, Puerto del Sol, Web Conjunctions, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, New York Tyrant, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. His book reviews have appeared in The Believer, The Collagist, and The Faster Times. He lives with his wife and son in Oklahoma.