, Author at Post Road Magazine

CHILI 4-WAY

by Michael Martone

Michigan Pike

When you were in college, at Butler, you would drive out Michigan Pike to eat at the Steak ‘n Shake there. It looked like a Steak ‘n Shake but it wasn’t quite right. It looked the same as other Steak ‘n Shakes—black and white with the chromium fixtures and the enameled tiled walls and ceramic tile floor. The staff wore the paper hats and the checkered pants, the white aprons and the red bow ties. But often you were the only customer. You sat at a table, not the counter, and scanned the menu while as many as a dozen waiters and waitresses waited for you to order. This was a training restaurant for the restaurant chain, self-conscious of its self-consciousness, a hamburger university. There were waiters and waitresses-in-training watching how your waiter would take your order and there were waiter and waitress trainers who were being followed by other waiters and waitresses-in-training watching the waiter and the waiters and waitresses watching the waiter taking your order after he brought you several glasses of welcoming water. They crowded around the table in their spotless uniforms like hospital interns around your bed waiting, taking notes on their checkered clipboards. There were television cameras everywhere and television monitors everywhere displaying what the television cameras were recording. There, the grill and the dozen or so trainee grill cooks pressed with the fork and spatula the meat puck into a perfect steak burger. There, one after the other flipped each patty once, crossed the instruments at right angles and pressed down again forming the perfect circles of meat, the evidence of this broadcast on snowy monitors next to those displaying the scoops of ice cream falling perfectly and endlessly into a parade of mixers. There was even a monitor that showed the bank of monitors and one that showed the monitor showing that monitor and, in it the endless regression of televisions within televisions, the black and white clad waiters and waitresses and the grill cooks and prep chefs moving like a chorus line, constructing your two doubles that you had ordered some time ago. And the caterpillar of service snaked with your plates of perfectly plated food held by the waiter at the head-end trailed by a conga line of identical servers back to your perfect table where the television cameras panned to focus on you eating your two doubles and showing you eating your two doubles in the monitor that showed the monitor of the double you eating. And everyone in the place made sure you had everything you needed and said they’d be back to check and then came back to check and asked you if you wouldn’t mind filling out the survey about the service and food and a survey about the survey and the survey about the survey’s survey. The sandwiches were perfect. And the milkshake. The French-fries were all exactly the same length and arranged in a pleasing random jumble. The real stainless steel cutlery gleamed and the real dishes and the glass glasses gleamed. As you left, at every empty table an employee wiped and polished the Formica tabletop, watched over by two or three others, nodding unconsciously in what you took to be approval.

96th Street

She would meet him when he was in town, when he was going through town, at the Steak ‘n Shake right off I-69 on 96th Street. They both remembered when this part of the city had not been part of the city, had been nothing but farm land, nothing but woods. She grew up in the city. He grew up in another part of the state. They met later after both their lives were settled. Now 96th Street was all strip malls and box stores and freestanding drive-ins. Sometimes, after they would meet at the Steak ‘n Shake, they would decide to drive separately to one of the motels nearby and spend a few hours there before she would go back to work, her family, her home, and he would get back on the road to drive back to his home, his family. Or he would stay the night, call his wife to say he was too tired to keep driving, would get an early start the next day. On the nights he stayed over, he drove back to the Steak ‘n Shake and had dinner, trying to get the table they had shared hours before. In the parking lots outside, as the parking lots’ lights came on, teenagers gathered in crowds of cars. Everyone out there milled about, switching rides, changing places, slamming the doors, flashing the car lights. Some of the kids would come inside to order shakes and fries, take the order back out between the pools of light to pass around the drinks and the bag of fries to their friends in the shadows. He watched through the plate glass with its camouflage of advertisement the purposeful loitering in the lots outside. Earlier that day at the same table, they had talked about how things had changed and how they wanted them to stay the same. She always ordered a Coke, but Steak ‘n Shake had its own brand of pop. King Cola. It tasted the same, she always said, but it was different. He always ordered chili, and as they talked he crushed each oyster cracker separately in the plastic bag, one at a time, turning the crackers into finer and finer crumbs, a dust of crumbs, before he would tear open the bag and pour the cracker crumbs into the bowl of chili. That day when she ordered the King Cola she was told that Steak ‘n Shake now served regular Coca-Cola. The waitress waited while she considered. There was a Diet Coke now, too, and that’s what she ordered after she thought about it. When the waitress came back with the drink, she dropped off the bags of crackers, and without thinking, he began to pinch and pop the crackers inside the bag. He asked her how the new cola tasted. She used a straw. The same, she said, and different.

Keystone

Bob called. I had been out of town. I just walked in. I was hungry after the trip. The phone rang. It was Bob.

“If any body asks where you were Saturday night, you were with me,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “Where were we?”

Bob thought for a second. “We were at the old Steak ‘n Shake on Keystone.”

“What did I eat,” I said.

“What? What did you have to eat?”

“At the Steak ‘n Shake. If someone asks.” Bob thought again.

“You had Chili 4-Way.”

“Okay.”

He hung up, and I went back out to find something to eat in earnest. The car was still warm. I drove over to the Steak ‘n Shake on Emerson Avenue. I looked at the menu. There was Chili, there was Chili Mac, there was Chili 3-Way, and there was Chili 5-way. I had remembered incorrectly.

Normal

We visited Normal to eat at the original Steak ‘n Shake. The chain was founded in Normal in 1934, and the first restaurant was still standing after all these years. We liked to eat at the Steak ‘n Shakes in Indianapolis, where we are from, that are all modern and new but retain, by design, what we believed was the look and feel of the original. We especially liked the trademarked logo of the disk with wings and the slogan that graced the actual restaurant china: In Sight It Must Be Right. The company history online has pictures of the original Steak ‘n Shake in Normal that looks even more retro than the retro restaurants they are building now. We could see how they were trying to retain, in the present, a suggestion of the past. Then, there were car hops, too, and marquee lighting with signs that swooped and curved into streamlined decorations on the roof. It was all very modern for its time, and now, in the pictures it looked like the past’s idea of the future. And here we were in that future looking back to a past that, for us, never was. Turns out that “In Sight It Must Be Right” meant something specific back then. We could see, if we were customers then, the cooks grind the steaks into ground meat right before our eyes. The fine cuts of meat being turned into the ropey cables of meat as the cooks in immaculate white aprons turned the old-fashioned cranks of the machines. We guess, back then, people didn’t trust what went into things like that, and that eating out, then, was more of an adventure. So we wanted to see for ourselves, the past, go back in time, we thought, to see the real past in Normal instead of what was left of the past today in Indianapolis. Turns out we were too late. By the time we got there—driving through the farmlands of Indiana, Illinois, the fields dotted with cattle gazing on the green grass of the gently rolling pastures passing by—the original Steak ‘n Shake had been demolished, or was in the process of being demolished, the yellow bulldozers still moving the ruins around into neat piles of rubble. We parked the car and watched them tidy up. We mixed into the crowd of onlookers watching. The setting sun, shining through the arch of water being sprayed on the debris to keep the dust in check, created a miniature diminished rainbow over what we had come looking for.

The Artist and His Sister Gerti

Christine Schutt

The buckskin color of her silky throat signaled her sexual self as did a bird’s breast in its fluttering coloration; and the underside of her, under her chin, was soft, and a small excess of folded-over skin gave her, young as she was, an appearance of age and seriousness and wisdom. The stilling experience of stroking her throat and her belly as she lay in my lap amazed me when I had expected her to be excitable, restless, loudly after play and vigorous attention; I had expected she would exhaust me; instead, she shut her eyes. Her eyes, like her mouth, were darkly outlined, liquidy and sad; even her tears looked black. She seemed too full of feeling all too easily spilled. I didn’t dare to move or move her though her head was heavy against my leg, and I had begun to worry. Was she sick? The rest of her—bare belly, fleshy, stretched along the couch—was warm. No sign of fever; but then it happened, she walked to another part of the room and was sick.

“What’s the matter, darling?”

But by then—already!—she was too unwell to answer and was puzzled herself and weakened to a sigh.

I cleaned up what there was, and there wasn’t much because she had had no appetite in the days before. None, now that I thought of it, or little to speak of. I said, “I’m going to call the doctor, darling. You’re not well,” and I left her where she was, although she shortly after looked for me. I heard her light step in the hall, and she came to where I was sitting and sat next to me, then she slumped a little and again lay her head in my lap.

Those eyes! she was suffering, and I wished she would speak. What was it she felt? And why hadn’t I noticed before?

I thought of all the times I had left her alone, quite confident that she would manage; moreover, that it was good training for her to be alone: she would learn how to amuse herself. At the very least, she could sleep. No one expected her to work. She was new to the neighborhood and far too young. In time she might look after those who didn’t need much looking after, but anything more than this was beyond her reach. She was, as I have said, young, too young, I think now, to have been left at all; and yet I did leave her. Stay in your room. I’ll be back. Don’t whimper. Now she was too sick to speak.

“Bring her in,” was what they said; and so I dressed her for the cold and the wind. By then she was trembling; she was afraid; and I took her in my arms and petted her and said, “Darling, darling, you’ll be all right.” But something was happening in the city outside—a parade or a visiting dignitary—and carriages were scarce. The police were no help, although

kindly; they didn’t know how we might cross the park, and I knew we couldn’t walk, not in this cold. I felt the curses welling in me, and my throat hurt in restraint of them. “We’re in trouble here,” was what I said. “My sister is sick.”

The policeman only shrugged and said, “Sorry. There may be carriages further south of here.”

The streets changed but still no carriages. I looked at my girl and those liquidy eyes, and I wished she would curse me for making her suffer. I should have had a solution; I should have made her feel better. Darling, darling, darling. Her reproachful quiet, or that was how I thought of her quiet, as reproachful—for my incompetence, my unknowing, the thickness of my fingers—and I thought if I could only take her place because I could better withstand whatever it was that made her shiver and turn inward, snailing back to babysize as best she could. Darling. Others, passing, saw her and seemed instantly compassionate in a way, I imagined, they weren’t for anyone else, even for their dogs. Well, I might have been exaggerating, but always before she had drawn light towards her so that others drew near, admiring, and remarked on how she shone. Although no one seeing us—me wailing for a carriage—said she looked well now or bright. Now she was dulled when the two of us stood with those other sufferers at the nurse’s station. “Is she? Will she?” The clock was too far away to read—thank goodness!

Later, when she was dead, I thought how in the last few days her once-soft hair had strawed slightly, gone lackluster, turned to cat’s fur and visibly dusted, changed color; the dark oily swirl of her was nearly no more; and her eyes, too, while teared, were lightless, murky, vacant. Such decline had been inconceivable; her youth and trilling spirits, the way it seemed she wagged at the slap of mail against the door, had made a strong impression of health; so that although I asked and asked again, nagged the doctor, whose neutral prognosis went mostly unchanged, I myself did not believe she would die. Her absence was only temporary.

Temporary, yet everywhere; and my back teeth throbbed from missing her. I lost my appetite. Besides, I didn’t have the heart to cook, and my militant interest in dust declined, and I started smoking again, then lying awake at night thinking about how small she had looked, how alone in the sick room. The way she had to lie on her side with a tube in her neck. I thought of her in this position, one-eyed, and that eye sad and surprised, dim, pained, exhausted, afraid.

The doctor didn’t think I should see her. The doctor said, “You’ll upset her if you’re upset yourself.” And I was upset, so I didn’t often dare to see her; yet at home she was all I saw, the darling, on her side, alone, in a windowless space with no prospect onto anything living.

Make her well. Please!But the doctor said they couldn’t feed her by mouth; they couldn’t address her slim resources except with sugars needled in.

She had no fat! She was too thin!

I had tried to feed her, to get her to feed herself, but she had wanted only to put her head in my lap and let me muss the soft curls at her ears.

How my fingers, when I looked at them, looked fat.

I took her to the hospital on a Sunday, and by Tuesday night, she was dead. The books say the virus is deadly, a killer. It destroys the intestinal walls, which explains it—sick, blood, stink, all. All swept over her with a swiftness I have not known matched except in novels.

My life is a baggy, sentimental novel with me, the weak character, whining in the middle of it.

Our mother writes to say: No one wants to see such trespass undressed. Because of you, Ernst, she is dead.

Even before she was visibly sick, I wondered how long would she live? How long!

The blinked thought was scalding despite quickly past. It came from her soft scratching through and around the room, down the hall, circuiting the kitchen, retracing her sharp steps: this, over and over again, was what made me wonder how long? The cracked sound, as of something ground underfoot, was the ached sound she made when she chewed on food. How long then before her teeth were gone? How long before the bones disappeared and she was so much skin huffing to the floor?

My fleshiness appalls me.

I should remember whatever was good between us. How at night we lay on the long couch—hours together—her head in the wedge of my crotch. The heat of her was a comfort in the cold months, but summer forced us foot to foot so we might stay cool yet together under the blanket. Easily and almost always I was in her company and felt the quiet in my room or the living room or wherever it was we were, the quiet was the quiet of a temple, orderly and incensed, orange-red, warm. I was not thirsty or tempted to smoke but felt content in the purely present tense.

My hand, her throat.

The buckskin color of her throat, the stilling experience of stroking her throat. My best model, she hardly spoke.

From I Spy: Prose Poems

by Elizabeth Powell

12. District Courthouse, Divorce Court, White Plains, New York

His wedding ring shimmered like an inviting lake. His height was like a diving board, something she wanted to accomplish. She would perfect the three step approach before the bounce and lift off, before she’d let go into her swan dive. For now, her divorce papers in hand like an edict, proclamation of having a broken meter reader. Of course, she knew this man, handsome in his friendliness, following the elevator to the top—small claims—could never deliver what he’d promise as they made their way skyward, amazed at their similarities.

Her friends would eventually have their thesis statements and favorite words ugly as burnt casserole—weasel, just run, you’re fucked. Indeed, he was a nuisance, but she didn’t know that yet. But that was what made him so appealing.

She could only see the way the elevator light lifted them heavenward, not to doom; himself the sky father, herself the earth mother. She was letting a silly school girl hope boa feather seduce her again.

Yes, he was a sociable sort, raised on cocktail parties and good manners. Yes, he was just like his father, her father, her husband, that tired repetition of plot and narrative. To the invisible undercurrent of evidence he would plead to her— nolo contendere. Cheating would be his secret religion, his iron clad non-disclosure agreement, and she? She would be called simply, the bitch, all her vulnerabilities on paper once again, a writ of habeas corpus, a kind of toxic tort that read good in bed, to just this kind of man.

The Wife Notebooks – 1. Apocalyptic Wife

But why compare?
I’m wife! Stop there!
– Emily Dickinson

I married the apocalypse, I adored

The way he rode his white horse through the door, the way

My mother abhorred him, his hot sun

Eclipsing me there with its permanent stare.

We had meant to live modestly until our time drew near,

But I became unsanitized, compromised from clipping coupons,

Swatting winged houseflies. I prayed twice a day

For a kind a comfort I knew did not exist, except in England at tea,

But knew that was no place for me. He had a director’s voice

Deep and unqualified, madmen with arms listened,

And so did I. Nothing to do now. Except watch

The black flies bow their heads to winter, toward his dull light

Of what’s to come, how sometimes I think the end will smell of him,

The moist stench of rafters, wood and old tin.

Behold The Coach, In Sorrow, Unemployed

by Will Eno

Dramatis Persona

The Coach

Setting

A press conference. A podium with microphones mounted on it. Periodic flashbulbs

THE COACH

(He enters. Cameras flash.) All right, everybody, let’s just get going. You people know what I’ve come here to probably say. This should all come as all as no surprise. The phrase, of course, you are familiar with. It was a “building year,” this last year was. We suffered some losses, sure, we suffered some, last season, and we’ve had to start out all over, in a fashion; we’ve had to come at this thing as if it were some kind of a– and you folks in the press will have to tell me if this is a pleonasm– a new beginning. We made some changes here and there and here and we made these, mainly, mostly, with the fans in mind, because we wanted the fans to be happy, in our minds we wanted the fans to love us. And I think they should be happy, I think they should love us. Listen, last year was not the easiest year. The plan was it would be for building, for rebuilding, for replacing what was lost, replenishing what was gone. Our strategy was, in theory, to betray that which had become merely habit, to betray our very very fear, that thing which has in theory kept us alive, that thing which says to us: Don’t cross the street without looking everywhere in the world first; Don’t speak your mind and certainly never your heart. That fear which keeps you from calling, from calling out into the game night, from dropping to your weakened knees and screaming from the bottom to the top of your burning smoking lungs: “Jesus please! Could somebody just–. Christ! I am going to die, to drop dead, some slow-news Saturday, an off-season Monday, so much not yet done, good-bye, forever, as I die an unremarked and ‘He-did-not-look-so-calm’ death. I don’t know what color pants go with what color shirt. I don’t know what I go with. I don’t know the meaning of my own bleeping heart. My personality is killing me. Would somebody please just please help me and everybody live!” (He pauses.) That is what this year was. We had to look hard at a few things and, surprise surprise, we found that they looked hard back. But I think we have to be happy. We broke a few attendance records. We sold a few hot dogs. We played some ball, and got some sun. It was the life, it really was, and, granted, this was not the greatest year, no, I guess it was really kind of a shambles.

I had no idea how hard hard was until this year came around. My God, Jesus, so hard. Nights, whole nights, weeks of nights, in a row. I bet I walked a thousand miles on my street alone. I came home and went out, walking. My eyes running, me thinking of the Dark Lady of my own incompetent sonnets, me saying hardly just above my breath, “I remember you. I almost completely remember you. In the year since you, there hasn’t been anything but ashes and paperwork. A year of cigarettes and minor car crashes. And I will never love any thing or body again. And I am not young and handsome. And I could not coach a gallon of water out of a paper bag.” (He pauses.)

So you see, I’ve had my doubts. I’ve had what you people call Personal Problems. But I tried. To run things different. With a little elegance, a new uniform, with some sense of calm amidst the– I don’t know, you tell me, you lived through it, too. What was this year, what happened? Who, or–. Christ Jesus Christ Christ Christ. (He directs the question halfway toward a person in the audience.) What was it? What did you feel this year? Of what would you be speaking, if were you standing here, this year, speaking of the last? And did any one of us have what he would call a winning season? And what would that look like? And could someone tell me, while we’re at it, when is High School over, when comes High School to its high schoolish end? Because I really don’t understand when the seriousness is supposed to start. And I am so filled with wanting, I so crave to know, to know a little, to be sure, just a little anything, a fact, a meaning, a song or jingle. A lullaby, to be put to bed by, to sleep, to sleep off my life. A gentle anthem– a bluenosed tribute to the old man at the helm. (He pauses.) It was a real hell of a hell of a time, this year. What’s that saying? About the penguin? And the fifty-yard dash? Well, that’s exactly what it was. A trying time. A building year. An endless gorgeous endless loss. Which now is now over. And we have how many more left left to us to lose? (A pause.)

Now, I know you guys in the press are going to have a field day with some of the things I’ve said up here today. And I know you’re probably thinking: “Something seems to have kind of crushed the fire this guy had when we hired him.” Or: “Could someone in this red-eyed poet-souled state ever win the division and go on to seize the brass ring, what with the distraction of his heart-broken relation to a fragile lass of a woman of a girl, who can not even say with any authority what her own last name is?” Well, I’ll tell you, because I came here to tell you a few things. I came here to feel the burn from your flash bulbs, and to speak a few things– my losing heart included. And the answer is, I don’t know. I don’t know if I can lead anyone to victory, or even lead anyone anywhere. I don’t know if my plan is a good one, or even if I have one.

You have to let me turn my season-worn face toward our record-breaking American heaven, to the stadium blue air overhead of the world, and let me say, you’ve got to please let me declaim, and I quote: (He pauses.) I don’t know. In general. And, in particular, in particular. But I do know that someone has to be everywhere. And I am the one who is standing here now, before all of you who are sitting there, there. I am the one in the position I am in. I see a man bowed like Atlas under the weight of his whistle. I see him smoking himself blind, poring over blank pieces of paper. I am that man. I lived as that man through this last year, past. And I think I should be happy. I think we should all be very terribly proud and happy, and happy and afraid, and afraid and thrilled, really, to death at the upcoming year and all of the life it will naturally contain.

This is my feeling.

We have time for one question.

Cameras flash. Blackout.

End

Mr. Theatre Comes Home Different

by Will Eno

Dramatis Personae
Mr. Theatre

Setting
The stage set of a living room. A table with a telephone and a vase of flowers on it.

(He enters with an open umbrella. He shakes the rain off of it and places it in a stand. He checks his watch, takes his coat off, looks around as if expecting someone. He ponders over the set and then, he sees the audience. He sits. He stares. He stands. He starts to leave and then turns around and comes back toward the audience. He flips the table out of his way, kicks the chairs over.)

MR. THEATRE

Strike the set! Strike the world! My former life, gone! Everything stricken, struck, gotten rid of. Now, set the stage again for something nothing less than me: some man, a wound; an animal, with English. Here I am. I am come! Born from the wings, or somewhere in the back of the theatre. Alone. (He sees the telephone.) But whom have we here? Someone? (He picks up the telephone.) Hello? No one? Prop! (He throws the telephone aside. He notices a flower on the floor.) Speaking of nature— which I was, and still am, and always will— here is some that someone planted here. (He picks it up.) Good evening, flower. Did you grow today? Get some sun? Look at you, you lovely fresh-cut dying thing. Have you come to upstage me? (He eats the flower.) That tasted the way you would think a flower should. (He chews.) This last, I find a terribly suggestive remark. But I meant for it to suggest or augur nothing; beyond that of my darker purpose, which is, in fact, dark. Is, in deed, darker. But, between you, me, and the lighting, I should tell you, in an aside: whisper, whisper, whisper.

Gentle’s all, my name is blank. And I have come and kicked things over. I have breathed badly. I will act quickly, entertain myself, and then leave. This is my character, as I would have you have it; and this, my interior life, as I would, for you, outwardly live it. (He kicks a chair offstage. Laughing.) But I— I would like you to know— I yearn.

Witness me yearn.

(On bended knee.) My love! my love! if you are out there: why don’t you love me, and why aren’t you out there? I should look up your old address. So as for us to enact the love scene that is coming. That is here. Now! Kiss my moving mouth. I am all afire, burning. (He purses his lips as if to kiss, closes his eyes, and rises to stand on the tips of his toes. He stands, so, and then opens his eyes and unpurses his lips.) By the way, the fire exits are located here and here, and in the event of a fire, or should you hear a fire alarm, or, should you see someone run screaming past you in flames, or, simply, should you panic, anxious, and seek to suffer alone, like an injured thing does, please use the doors, either there or there, and peaceably remove yourself. But not now, stay seated for now, for the climax— if I can make it come— is coming. Something climactic is nigh.

Here cometh the storm scene! Shaken by a teenage stagehand from a box up in the flies! Rise! Rain your fake rain and drown the fake world! Make the floorboards buckle! Come sideways, hail, sleet, serious weather! Ruin every wedding and parade! Mess up my hair, make my bones ache! Wrack, weather! Wrack!

But first, stop.

Not so fast.

Here comes the calm. The calm during the storm. Do you hear birds singing? I don’t. And it’s for me that they are not singing. No explanation is needed. But as for exposition: you should see certain parts of my anatomy. You should see the mess of bed I rise from in the afternoon, looking in a mirror to see the damage done in the night, checking myself for some rare infection and or new sore having come. Making sure— ensuring— that my hair and gums and face are all receding, leaving me left with only eyes leftover to stare from. And I stare. Hands in lap, I think of one Easter, one spring; me in a suit, clean; the world sparkling; hunting scenes on the dishes; the feet beneath the table. But enough talk of mirrors and of reflections of what once was but now isn’t.

Where were we? I believe, over here. And in love, wasn’t it? It was sweet, wasn’t it? But now it’s over, is it not? When I’m gone, I’ll be gone. I wish the little life I lived tonight were different. Were more lived. But I am glad I ate that flower. Would that the world entire were a flower for me to eat. And would that my faked feelings could make yours truly genuine. But the death scene! I almost forgot. Not surprising. But, here, now: the end, at last.

Pretend I am dying. (He begins to die. He drops to a knee.) Pretend my life was wasted. (He dies more.) That I spent my time in this body on this earth dumbly. (He stops.) Pretend you loved me. (He stands.) I smell bad, and I am in a hospital. I am your mother. (He carries the table off- stage. Throughout the remainder of this paragraph he is striking the set.) Pretend I am your mother. That you loved me when little. That then you then stopped for some time, but have started up again, in time for me to die. Pretend it’s hard to look. My eyes and breasts, nothing on my body looks the way it’s supposed to look. You mother me. You stand there, pretend, and you mother your mother, who is dying. Or I am your child who cannot get his breath, as you stand above me, breathing. Or, I am— imagine it— you. Whoever— I am dying. Pretend this, that this is not pretend. Pretend you are sitting there. And that this was good. Pretend I am crying. That you are crying. And that this is the end. I start to go. I don’t look at you. It seems familiar. It seems resolved. (He retrieves his umbrella and opens it. It is held over his head and behind him, gracefully.) Pretend that this is over. That it will not go on, interminably. The end. People coming and going. Entering and exiting. Forever. (He drops the umbrella and comes downstage.)

Give yourselves a big hand.

You were lovely.

I die.

Snow starts to fall. We are in rapture. A bloodhound crouches near, there, by a freezing river, in a darkening wood. And your hands are cold. And our happy world is ended. Pretend.

(He begins walking toward the audience. Lights fade.)

End

Recommendation for Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker

by Emily Carr

Lately, I’ve been asking writers I respect if they’ve read anything in the last year that they think everyone should read. A book that, given our limited amount of time on this planet, simply Must Be Read—regardless of whether everyone’s going to like it, learn from it, etc. I’ve been asking this question partly because I have an answer: Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker: a Novel, which broke my heart open in all the right ways.

Why? To explain why I love this novel so much would be reductive: like saying I love my partner because he’s smart, has a good sense of humor, and is willing to clean up after me. These things are true, but as we all know, you can’t quantify love. For the purposes of this recommendation, however, I will attempt to get specific, and list four reasons you should read Heartbreaker. (But before I do: please, please, just read the novel and see for yourself. I promise it will be better that way.)

#1: A recent LitHub article titled “11 Books for Adults Featuring Talking Animals” inspired me to curate a reading list composed of literary fiction that incorporates an animal perspective in a way that’s nuanced, complex, and three-dimensional—novels that let the animals speak for the animal, that get at what Joy Williams really means when she lists “an animal within to give its blessing” as the fourth essential attribute of the story. Claudia Dey’s Heartbreaker was #7 on Lithub’s list; Emily Temple writes: “This novel has three narrators: Pony, a girl; Supernatural, a boy; and Gena Rowlands, Pony’s dog. The three live in the Territory, a place no one leaves—until someone does. It is, as is also true in everyday life, the dog who knows the most about what’s really going on.”

The novel is, indeed, broken into three sections, and told from three perspectives: Billie Jean’s pre-teen daughter, Billie Jean’s dog, and Billie Jean’s teenage lover, who turns out to be her husband’s illegitimate son. The perspectives layer, like a palimpsest or film that’s been exposed twice. We figure out what’s happened—why Billie Jean first fled to and then fled from the Territory—as one perspective builds on another. As Temple explains, the dog’s point of view is crucial, and an important reminder that, while we assume we are alone when spending time with our pets, they are in fact paying attention and we are never, in fact, truly alone.

#2: You might be wondering “what is the Territory?” The Territory refers to the legendary far-northern reaches of Canada, those places you can only reach by driving a hundred miles or so over a frozen lake. The Territory is populated by a cult that settled there in the 1980s. The story takes place as the first generation is exiting middle age; the leader has died (mysteriously, of course); and the cult members have had to improvise to keep the community afloat fiscally (via selling their children’s blood to the outside world). No one comes out. No one comes in. As a consequence, there are plenty of love triangles, love affairs, incest, and illegitimate children. Despite this premise, the people, the place, the compromises, the affairs, and the children have depth and breadth and Dey treats the situation without judgment; she draws us into the community so we can experience it from the inside out.

In a recent Instagram post, Dey writes: “I read many FLDS [Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints] cult survivor accounts when I was writing Heartbreaker. This photograph is from Rachel Jeffs’ ‘Breaking Free.’ The pastel line up of girls, soon to be made wives, under a neutral sun. It is one of the most sinister images I have ever seen. What is left when you are forced to give up your moral and physical agency in the name of God? Lorrie Moore writes: ‘Terrible world. Great sky.’”

#3: My recent reading spree has also, purely incidentally, involved contemporary fiction that focuses on mothers and their estranged daughters, or mothers who estrange their daughters, or mothers who have, with all of the best intentions, done motherhood “wrong,” or mothers who have, without quite meaning to, failed their daughters. I’ve been suffering from work-related stress and indulging in genre fiction, so most of these plots have all of the melodramatic gracelessness of reality television. Most of these mothers were abused, and in turn, become abusers, often of the passive-aggressive sort. Mostly, I (though my own relationship with my mother is, for reasons both personal and systemic, fraught) empathize with these mothers. Mostly, I get angry because I think that reductive narratives of blame and abuse don’t help us daughters, as we try to be both ourselves and mothers in our own rights. Mostly, what I want is story that turns this narrative INSIDE OUT.

The plot of Heartbreaker, for example, hinges on a thirty-three-year old mother who ran away from mostly absent, wealthy parents as a teenager, re-named herself Billie Jean, had a brief but intense love affair with the eighteen-year-old boy Supernatural whose true origins are unbeknownst to her, gets pregnant, has the baby, gives up the baby, deals with some more baby- and lover-related tragedy, and, in utter despair, flees, abandoning her fourteen-year-old daughter, Pony Darlene. (The names! Oh, the beautiful, heartbreaking names!) Later, Billie Jean recounts the story of nearly hitting a bison in the night. “You know the truth when you look into the eyes of something wild,” she concludes.

Despite this technically accurate yet completely misleading and melodramatic summary, Heartbreaker is, in fact, a nuanced exploration of mother-daughter relationships: all of the ways we get it right and get it wrong and have to be willing to start over, again and again.

#4: Advance praise on the dust-jacket of the hardcover includes Leslie Feist, who writes, “I want Van Halen to write the soundtrack and the Coen brothers to make the movie.” Lauren Groff is a “giant fan” of “Claudia Dey’s wild brain” and Sheila Heti says that Heartbreaker gave her “chills all of the way through. “Also,” Rivka Galchen writes, “it has one of the most awesome dogs in literature…”

All of this is true, and all of it is, necessarily, reductive. If I were invited to write an endorsement, I would say, “this novel is for the heartbreakers and the heartbroken, for the new hearts and the old hearts, the hearts we sometimes have to hold together, and the hearts that hold us together. By which I mean: this novel is for EVERYONE. Please read it immediately.”

Emily Carr writes murder mysteries that turn into love poems that are sometimes (by her McSweeney’s editors, for example) called divorce poems. These days, she’s Visiting Assistant Professor of Creative Writing at the New College. Her newest book, whosoever has let a minotaur enter them, or a sonnet—, is available from McSweeney’s. It inspired a beer of the same name, now available at the Ale Apothecary. Emily’s Tarot romance, Name Your Bird Without a Gun, is forthcoming from Spork. Visit Emily online at www.ifshedrawsadoor.com or on Instagram as ifshedrawsadoor.

Forgetting Everything I Know

by Marston Hefner

Everyone agreed in the neighborhood that she was the best. She was the beauty. How could she let everyone know she was nothing but a pile of shit? Oh, well. Nothing, really. She did everything perfectly. Not a thing wrong with her. No conflicts. Oh, all the men loved her. Her boss especially. She was such a hard worker. How was it possible to still be beautiful at forty years old? How was it possible when you had two children?

Everything coming easy to you entitled you to a few things. The first was praise. The second was recognition of your beauty. The third was a small but imprecise aching indicating that one was hungry for something one did not know of and that one wanted to reach this place by the end of one’s life. It was what caused people to fall in love. It was what caused people to go into the present moment. It was that insatiable itch that made her that much more interesting. That much more human. She cried at night. Did you know that? She cried when no one was looking because she was perfect and it was sad to be perfect in your imperfections. The itch could not be scratched.

She only knew there was something completely wrong. Eventually she cried in front of her husband in the marital bed who handled the situation terribly. Then she cried at the dinner table in front of her children. There were long bouts of silence in the household. She found it difficult to go and be productive. To go to work became a chore. It was just depression. Did that make her more perfect? More human? More down to earth? She was getting older. Her age was taking a toll. She started smoking cigarettes. She wanted to be closer to death, desired for things to be finished. Here. This is your life. Did it make you proud to be beautiful?

What was it that pained her? Why was she crying now in the bathroom? The only light on in the house. Her husband asleep. Her children breathing light steps in their dreams. The more she asked the less clear it was. She wanted sleep. No. She wanted death. No. She wanted fame. No. She wanted rest. No. She wanted everything. Yes. Everything in the world handed to her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Limitless growth wasn’t the answer. She needed a stopping point. Someone to tell her this is enough. Point to her children. This is enough. Point to her husband. This is enough. Point to her house. This is enough. All of it is enough.

The twins in the bed did not stir. Perhaps they could go to her eyelids while she slept, place their fingers gently on them and announce that everything was OK. There was no need to cry anymore. Everything that would happen would happen. Everything that did not happen was meant to be. All that we wanted was part of being human. The hunger never goes away. The children knew hunger. They wanted As. They wanted to be the best at the sports they played. They knew it. Knew it in their skin. In their genes. They were never happy either. They would touch her eyelids and tell her to rest. Rest for a week. Childhood is not like dreaming, they’d say. Go into a coma. Bang your head against the porcelain sink accidentally and forget all you know. Forget everyone. And rest. Just rest.

There was a man going down river in a canoe. It was his yearly summer outing. Even though the canoe had gone far, even though its owner had worked his arms to reach what was almost the end, a natural anomaly occurred and stopped him from ever completing the course. A wind pushed his canoe back through all the river he had waded. Back over the rocks and waterfalls. It was the opposite of a miracle. He reached the end which was the beginning, went on the sandy shore, bent down at the foot of the river and screamed.

In his free time, Marston Hefner plays backgammon, video games, and practices yoga. He is 6’4” with a strong jaw line. He has short hair. He has a toned upper body but working the thighs is difficult because of his height.