Author: Post Road

Gentility, by June Unjoo Yang

Evenings, he teaches an amateur watercolor class at the local community college. His students are housewives baffled by the proper use of perspective, their foregrounds peppered with  importunate saucer-eyed spaniels, fox cubs huddled in foliage, deer. They’re wounded, says Barb, a new divorcée. Get it?

Yes, he gets it, averting his gaze from her short skirts with slits up the front and slightly off to one side, fashionable five years ago. He leans over her easel and sketches in tree trunks, the papery bark of a white birch, rings in a cut redwood. She presses against him with the tops of her breasts spilling over her pushup bra, purple lace visible through the weave of her blouse. There are freckles in the folds of her skin. Old skin. He could tell her, lay off, she’s barking up the wrong tree, but he adds a pond to her forest scene, a riot of Spanish moss and shy creatures watching from their dark nooks and crannies. He likes Walden, the last book he read in its entirety; could he, like Thoreau, go it alone and never regret the decision? He wonders. Sometimes he thinks he could tenant a cave, a garden hewn in limestone, the slow drip of stalactites to mark time passing.

Like sightless fish, he shrinks from too much sun, sweltering beneath an afghan crocheted by an aunt who had raised him when his parents died, her sitting room crowded with kitsch: heart-shaped candy dishes, ashtrays spoofing urns, and the porcelain drummer boy he detested for its rouge and Clara Bow lips. One day he aimed a baseball at that mail-order cherub and knocked it to kingdom come. A red-letter day; he couldn’t stop smiling at the memory. He’d never apologized to his aunt for it, either, but when she died, she left him the house and everything in it, as if scolding. He has filled it with his paintings of saucer-eyed children. He used to have visitors, young friends he chatted up and asked to model for him, but he never ever touched them. He bought them gingersnaps and watched them stuff the crumbs into their mouths with plump fingers, fists. They gave him pleasure, just watching. Now he buys cookies for himself and eats them every night, alone, with a glass of milk on his bedside table.

Sometimes he brushes his teeth, sometimes not. Before retiring, he likes to swill tepid water against his teeth to revive the old gingery flavors.

A Huge, Old Radio, by Ander Monsen

Josh waits his turn, shirtless, in the dark. He hears his friends’ voices tossing back and forth in the quiet, wet air up ahead, punctuated by spurts of canned music and talk coming from behind, open car windows a hundred feet back on M-26 through Baraga, through L’Anse, by the Reservation. They’re here to jump off the rushing spout of Canyon Falls into the pool below. An early winter rite. A flashlight trolls across the rocky pathway and disappears. A brief ‘Cannonball!’ and a second of silence, then a muffled two-tone splash—ba-whoosh—somewhere up ahead.

It’s October. The first snowfall hit last night and was gone by morning, burned off by a warm late fall sun—probably the last day before real, sticking snow. The snow here comes and goes, piles up and gets burned off, until it settles in for six months, collecting dirt, salt, and urine, blackening on the sides of roads and plowed driveways.

The cars parked in the short two-rut road off the highway are in states of disrepair. Jelly’s Aerostar with the driver’s side mirror bashed off, hanging by a black cord, taken off on a birch tree driving home from the Breakers last summer. Dan’s old key-scratched blue Ford Fairlane running only through the grace of God he says, kept with a King James Bible and a Virgin Mary figurine in the cracked dashboard recess. People feel up the Virgin Mary and tear out the pages in the Bible when they ride with him. Because the car’s metal body is so rusted out from road salt and extended winter, you can see the space in the walls and the floor. There’s a huge hole in the back of the roof in which rain collects, spawning bugs and mosquitoes that bite backs and necks. 

Josh has taken his dad’s climate-controlled company car without permission, a Lincoln Mark VIII with speakers and working sound. This is the only still-whole car in the group, but no one will ride with him—he doesn’t have a full license yet. Only half the group likes him. He’s a week shy of sixteen.

Throwing a quick hopeful glance over his shoulder, he can’t make out the vehicles hidden in the black air. It’s so dark, he can smell boys’ bodies clearly up ahead but can’t see. No one’s speaking. The line is halted. Thin Rupert must be up ahead, teetering on the edge, his breath stuck, his fingers grasping in his pockets for his inhaler. “Hey guys?”

“Jump, you fuck!” 

Chuckles echo from someone else up ahead.

“Who’s that up there?”

“Listen—” 

Paul is telling the Goat Boy story again.

Everyone knows the story; everyone listens. Laughter breaks out from the line when he gets to The Cross! The Cross! part. It’s not as funny, though, this time. Josh can hear wet, asthmatic hacking from below. Like something from a movie or a book. Like emphysema and the breathing machines his grandfather had in the last month of his life. The story doesn’t work as well in this place, this particular dark. It feels like they’re in something’s mouth. 

The words get lost in the wet air, among the birch trees that populate these woods like huge white vertical bars. Paul’s mom died last year. Nobody talks about it. The image of her offering fruit salad in a big red bowl to everyone at Halloween, face wide in a cherry-lipsticked smile, keeps coming back to Josh, breaking down his laugh, making it mechanical, dysfunctional, strange.

He feels stupid. 

Tiny pinpricks of cold all over his neck and back. It must be snowing again. The cold makes his skin feel hot. Move ahead. 

He hears a half-caught breath and reaches out ahead of him to touch Paul’s skin, but finds nothing, feels the air swirling. A splash down below.

“Yeah, that shit.” Rupert’s voice comes up reinforced from below.

A dash of laughter cut off in the middle. A smell like old dirt under a house, moving, filled with pill bugs and sticky worms.

“Ya fucking shitball.”

Tiny hairs poke out, erect, from his legs,

“God it—”

He can feel the edge falling away, disintegrating under his toes. There is a honk from the road. A tire-squeal. The air from below moves against his chest, melting the snow before it hits his body, so he’s crowned with hundreds of tiny drops. From below it might look bright and gleaming, like sweat when the flashlight moves across. He thinks he might look like Jesus. He’s the last one in line.

“Get your ass…” The flashlight vanishes. 

It’s different up here against the edge. Everything below is hidden in the swirling, gently snowing darkness. Josh can hear their broken muttering coming up from below. For an instant, he thinks the world might be a huge, old radio, alive and electric with voice and squeal, the crossover of stations bleeding into one another. Like the kind Paul has in his living room, with a big luminescent dial that clicks when you turn it, and a knotty wood cabinet—the signal coming in clear then breaking up into a static hush, repeating.

“Shouldn’t…cold…”

He’s steaming now. Like pasta in a colander. Or breath coming out in winter. A breast fresh from the bath seen through the old keyhole in a door. Like a kidney pulled right out of the body. The air around the freshly dead. Like microwaving all the water out of a potato until it’s dry, a rind.

The flashlight comes up against him again, illuminating the air around his thin wet chest. Smoking, burning off. He wonders how he looks, who he is right now. Inhales, raises his arms, lets the pits breathe. A shiver. Strobe effect. Sublime. He thinks about his mom, and Paul’s mom, tries to summon a sharp clear image of them both at one time but can’t hold it, starts to breathe out, leans forward, and lets himself go—drops like a spinning cat’s eye marble in a deep, deep well—into the cooling black air. He falls. Dark. Free in this moment. Then light. Down. Melting. The stars disintegrating in the sky. The radio waves through and through him. The air below warming with his passage, moving up. Conversation and convection. Slices of Bon Jovi. Everything steam and motion. Filter. A vector. Depth and car alarm. Snow and snow and snow.

Paternity Within the Limits of Reason

by Diana George

1.   A sheet covers the father where he lies in the hallway. He has wept brown tears that stain and reek. The father has more than two eyes, and not only on his head, or else he has other weeping-holes.

2.   The daughter sows the floor about the sheet with salt, so the liquors that seep produce nothing more than a dark crust. Late at night, when father-fumes are least likely to be noticed, the daughter airs the house out. She sits on the front steps, smoking, partitioned from the father by a screen door. She shaves the ash of her cigarette against the inside of a coffee can. 

3.   A father liquesces, a daughter stanches. A father is vanishing substance, a daughter increasing devotion. He leaks, she salts. This second or daughter-fathered life of the father is poor in incident, but not without activity. Such a father still overwhelms. He looms. He enters every breath. He can weep and ooze. He can stink in the heat of day and grow chill in the night. He cannot not weep, ooze, stink, grow chill. A father is weak. 

4.   The father is that which used to have women. If a woman never came home again, or if a process server came to the door, or if a woman “forced” the father “to stop loving her,” the father soon had another. A father was whatever was never without a woman for long. The one woman a father refuses to have is the daughter. Is the daughter a woman? This is the antinomy of the father and the daughter.

5.   The father has ceased to draw women to him; his weakened powers of attraction work only on beetles. The daughter has seen them scrabbling over the salt ridges on the floor, wriggling their flat brown bodies to get under the sheet, eager to reach him. Unable to sleep, the daughter lies in her bed listening to the intercourse of beetles and father, a sound of husks.