Category: Issue 40

The River Roux

Tom Cowen

The jasmine rice sits like a baseball split down the middle, a tangle of cork and string hidden by what’s on the outside. The mound has been perfectly rounded not by hand but by a utensil or small bowl. I slide the plate from the bartender and my nostrils are consumed like I’ve dipped my nose in a warehouse-sized peanut butter jar. I know it emanates from the flour and fat that must turn the color of peanut butter before the chef stops stirring. The fragrance precedes the sight somewhere before the flour burns. I’ve heard it referred to as a two-beer roux. It’s a Rembrandt you inhale, I want to admire it, but my nose outvotes my eyes, and I reach for the white mound. I flip my fork over and rake at the pile as if they are leaves. The grains fall not in a clump, connected, but as individuals unencumbered by the others. I count them, there are eight.

            It is March, I’m in Orlando for a conference, it is 55 today back home in Connecticut heading towards the upper sixties on Friday. I’ve already looked at my calendar and seen when my last phone call of the day is, after that I will go fly fishing. My thoughts are wishful, after all, I am 56 and have never caught a fish. Not with a spinner and a worm, let alone a fly rod and dry fly. It will be my second time out, I don’t have the right fly, the right cast, don’t know what sections of the river to fish. But that is all fine, my Orvis equipment is still new enough to return.

            The first etouffee I cooked was five years earlier. The roux started with little hope, starting with a clump that could stick to a wall, saved by melted butter gathered from the edges to moisten the middle. The color remained for minutes, a sun-faded tan shoe, with little change. I paused and re-read the recipe before I noticed the quick burn of flour in the wake of the last stir. I stirred again, fast, quick, until the burn disappeared. Then, I placed onions, green peppers, and celery on my Boos cooking board. I looked forward to cutting vegetables, stirring the roux and relaxing in something slow, mindless, repetitive. I picked up my Santoku knife and made my way through the celery, feeding the stalk into the blade. Thin, even slices, almost transparent, then too thick. The peppers fell in quick order before I switched to the onions. Saved for last, I knew they would make me cry. Not the cry I needed but a cry, nonetheless. I slit lines horizontally, then across the top, before toppling the onion into small pieces, like a Jenga. The roux’s nutty fragrance beckoned, and I gave it a few stirs before returning to the onion for a finer chop. Left and right, through the mound, before I pulled far right and rolled the knife over my thumb. The skin tore and then the knife ground against bone. I looked down for the gusher. My thumb turned pale white, stayed like that, one one-thousand, two one-thousand, before it started surging. “Owww,” I yelled.

             “What did you do now?” my wife, Ronee asked.

             “I sliced my thumb wide open.”

             “There’s plenty of gauze in Justin’s bathroom.”

             “What an idiot,” I heard, my older son, Brandon chortle.

             I stood at Justin’s vanity, running cold water and applying pressure. I released it every minute to see if the bleeding was slowing. It wasn’t. What if it didn’t stop? Determined not to take the family to the hospital on a day off from Justin’s radiation treatment, I pressed harder. The bleeding slowed.

             “Dad?” Justin called from the bottom of the stairs, “Are you OK?”

            I looked at the mirror, shook my head and wondered how a child with a bone tumor in his neck could be the one asking if I was OK.

             “Yes, Justin, I’ll be OK. The bleeding has almost stopped. I don’t have to go to the hospital.”

             “I’m glad you’re OK, Dad.”

            I looked in the mirror and let out a long breath, overwhelmed by the person my son had become. I wrapped my finger with gauze, pulled it tight until the finger turned purple, then I loosened.

             The previous night’s crawfish etouffee was the best I’ve ever eaten and so I return to the restaurant the next evening. Landry’s is not a shack off a bayou, but a chain, owned by Tyler Fertito, who owns casinos and is a Shark Tank guest shark. I work an initial rake of rice onto the slurry of onions, peppers, celery, and crawfish. The rice sticks to my fork, falls in a clump. I fold the etouffee onto the grains, coating them in the liquid. Running my fork through the etouffee it is decidedly thinner, the taste off, I sense that the roux burned. Still, as the crawfish slide down my throat, I determine it is a top five etouffee.

             It takes 32 hours to fly home from Orlando, and so I don’t hit the Norwalk River until Saturday. The fog oozes from the rippling water, like pus from a scab. My legs and torso remain dry in the waders while a steady drizzle wets my upper third. Knots are more challenging to tie on the river than the couch and my hook finds my thumb. The hook slides like a knife and inflicts constant pain until I pull it out the same path it entered. My line ends up tangled, a drunken spider’s web, again and again. I catch five trees, my boot, but no fish. Still, in several casts, I sense that someday, the line will release from the water, slow, and deliberate in motion and thought, profound like a graduation tassel moved from left to right. And if those things happen, the rod will rise to midnight and pause as the line, leader, tippet and fly race for the trees. I will draw them back, following a heartbeat of delay.

             I begin following the weather, not in anticipation of a flight delay, but for the opportunity to fish. My return to the river is the following Saturday. My casts improve over the several hours I am in the water. I move to a section where the river widens, and the branches seem out of reach. I move towards the center of the river and let my casts air out. All disappears into the whistle of the line and the rush of the stream as I find a rhythm. I gain confidence, strip more line and cast further.

             My next fly never hits the waters as it snags on a tree. Pulling as I have done dozens of times before, left then right and still the fly does not release. My hands tighten, strangling the cork as I bear down. It’s an awful snap, the same crack a bird’s leg must make as it breaks. The bottom of the rod gives way, the butt handle jerks into my waders. I can tell it is a break without even looking. The rod is fractured between the first and second sections, jagged as a break appears on an x-ray. I cup my wounded rod in my hands, like a fireman holds a baby, walking to the riverbank, glancing through the trees, hoping no one sees my new waders, boots or busted rod.

             Bob at Orvis purses his lips as I hand him my rod. I sense he takes pity on me because we talked about Justin’s cancer as he taught me how to cast in the parking lot. He goes into the stockroom and returns with a loaner. “Orvis’ rod makers should have your rod as good as new within weeks,” he says. I nod, but doubt that the body broken, the roux burned can ever be truly fixed.

            I return to the Norwalk on Monday evening with Gerald from Trout Unlimited. We talk as Gerald attaches my line to leader, leader to tippet. He clinch knots caddis and stonefly to form a double nymph rig, explaining all. They are words, techniques, knots I didn’t know a month earlier. Gerald seems to be in his thirties, but as we talk I find out he has just graduated college, like my older son, Brandon. Gerald ties his own flies and knows knots and how the water flows and when and how a fish might rise. He has grown up on the Norwalk which widens, bends and ripples through his small town. He describes Trout Unlimited’s mission as we walk to one of his prime spots, explaining how will remove a dam, just upriver several months later. We fish a popular pool first and three fish bite. I am slow to set the hook. We proceed to a fast ripple of water formed where a stream meets the Norwalk.

            Gerald crosses the river the way I cross a street. I step with caution. My ankle pulls as I roll over a rock and my hip jams into its socket as another step is deeper than I expect. The ripple is no more than fifteen feet wide, two feet deep, but it churns like the rinse cycle in a washing machine. I am surrounded by trees overhead and on both sides, leafless, pre-spring, naked wood calling for my hook. A tree hangs lower on the opposite bank, it’s branches reaching for the water. There will be no cross-river shadow casts, not even a roll cast. Gerald shows me, it will be a simple palm down to palm up, as I move the rod across my bodyas if I am opening a gate. I get a bite on my second cast, but I am slow. My third and fourth casts are limp before I feel the rhythm on the following half dozen casts.

            The indicator goes down hard, the line pulls and this time, my hand shoots up as fast as a fifth-grade math student. I have the fish. The line runs through my fingers, I pinch the line, lead him upstream, then down. I reel in, the trout breaks the dark water line, the unmistakable pink streak of a rainbow. Gerald helps me shepherd the fish to the net. I take a picture as he releases the hook. This is the first fish I have caught in my life. A twelve-inch rainbow, caught in waters black as night, as the sun touches the horizon.

            A calmness invades my body, my ribs, arms, shoulders lowering into my waders. A reading of A River Runs Through It and resultant obsession in it’s every word has brought me to this point. A bloodied thumb, maybe to Landry’s two nights in a row. As I drive home from the river, I know this is just the first step. There will be a first time when I locate a fish without Gerald tying my line. Where he will not be there with his net, and I will be using my own rod. There will be a first time when the gills are clean and strong and the fish wild. When a fly I tied during the winter will present and a trout will rise as the sun hits the horizon.

            In life, there are few moments of perfection. Fleeting seconds when you stir your best roux or when the first rice grains fall into a master’s etouffee. Moments when the first forkful contains six grains of rice, the holy trinity, and a crawfish soft as a marshmallow. Bumps in time that can only be described by Norman Maclean’s words spoken in Robert Redford’s voice, Then in the Arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the Big Blackfoot River and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise. Perhaps, I’ve only seen perfection once as my twelve-year-old son, four months away from his death, asked if I was OK. Times when all the hooked thumbs and burnt roux result in moments earned. Maybe, I’ve learned that somewhere there must be a perfect etouffee. Now envision how a trout might one day rise into the still of a crimson spring sky. For now, those pursuits take me one step closer to a place I’ve only known once.

Born and raised in New York City, Tom Cowen currently lives in the beautiful New England town of Ridgefield, CT. He is an above-average software sales engineer, retired amateur boxer, and barely serviceable hockey player. His work has been published in the Forge Literary Magazine, Montana Mouthful, and 2021 Connecticut Literary Anthology, amongst others. He is a graduate of New York University and the Newport MFA at Salve Regina University. He writes about courage and his incredibly brave son, Justin.

R. damascene

Irene Cox

There were botanists who claimed that Rosa damascena was among the most important species of rose. Other experts did not concur.

            On the pro side, R. damascena, or the damask rose, was firstly an ornamental plant. You could say it was objectively beautiful, with short, intertwined petals — a complex frontispiece, intemperate, that rested atop dense stems with their stiff bristles, their curved prickles. Its petals were generally a moderate pink, less pronounced than fuchsia, but they could also be white. And the petals were edible, most often used to flavor desserts such as marzipan or turrón.

            Secondly, R. damascena had a perfuming effect, provided the scent hadn’t been bred out of the line. The late Wilfred Sommerfeldt used to say that their perfume “was nothing to sniff at,” then laugh imposingly at his own wit.

            But R. damascena had a number of pharmacologic properties as well. A hypnotic! An antibacterial, antioxidant, antitussive, antidiabetic, and anti-HIV. It had a relaxant effect on tracheal chains (perhaps reminding artists everywhere that scientific processes, such as an “inflammatory cascade” or “ischemic myopathy,” were often described with luxurious words. No matter how pernicious the activity, the descriptive words were beautiful).

            It should be noted that the damask rose was a hybrid, derived from Rosa gallica (the gallic rose) and Rosa moschata (or musk rose). The Sommerfeldts’ next-door-neighbor Felicity Pearce liked to think that R. gallica was the mother and R. moschata the father, with the musk rose smelling like her late father Frederick. She wondered whether the grand rose bush that straddled the Pearce and Sommerfeldt properties had been bred right there on the spot from the two progenitors. But that’s not what her mother Loyce had to say.

            The story from Loyce Pearce went that the day great-grandmother Pearce traveled to pick out English damask to paper the walls and to be sewn into curtains, this grand lady determined she would plant a very British damask rose out front ‘to match.’ But that wasn’t the Sommerfeldts’ story. According to Sommerfeldt lore, great-grandmother Sommerfeldt carried an infant damask rose plant, together with her pale baby son, in her mother’s potato basket on a ship from Norway to the United States. It was planted the day they moved in, or so they said.

            This was the essence of the feud between the English Pearces at 33 Ferncliff Road and the Norwegian Sommerfeldts at 35 Ferncliff Road. Who owned the rose bush was a skirmish that had flared for two generations. On the Pearce side were four: the mother, Loyce, together with her sons Giffard and Hames, and her daughter Felicity, who were in their twenties. Opposing the Pearces in the Sommerfeldt camp were three: the mother Lyssa, along with her daughters Tillie and Blythe, also in their twenties.

            As for the literal roots of the rose bush, they were clearly on both properties, yet the Sommerfeldts contended that the bush belonged to them. The Pearces insisted that the bush had its inception in their own yard, but they conceded that it had spread and was now shared between the two properties.

            Felicity Pearce sat on her living room’s antique damask chair and her eyes ran up and down the damask curtains. Despite the strength derived from a hybrid of silk, wool, and linen woven on a Jacquard loom, the curtains were a good fifty years old, and faded. As a child, Felicity adored that both sides of the curtains had the same pattern. Loyce had explained that damask is woven with one warp yarn and one weft yarn, usually with the pattern in warp-faced satin weave and the ground in weft-faced sateen weave.

            Later in childhood, Felicity had come to love her bedspread’s brocade, another patterned fabric that she understood to be woven on a Jacquard loom as well. Both damask and brocades were shiny, derived from either the damask’s satin weave or the brocade’s metallic threads. But brocades were not reversible because the pattern was embossed and raised. Ultimately Felicity preferred the reversibility of the opaque damask. It could be flipped without penalty, providing a cultivated solace against her skin.

            But it was Blythe Sommerfeldt next door in need of some type of solace. Circumstances found her pregnant, and Lyssa and Tillie Sommerfeldt were livid. They demanded the name of the father, but Blythe was not going to give that up. Blythe was showing, and it was obvious that the neighbors’ glances were resting on her midsection. To calm herself, Blythe used to go for drives in her old, lopsided Volvo, and it worked. She would return home feeling more peaceful.

            On the afternoon Loyce Pearce went outside to cut some flowers only to find an unfathomable scene — well, let’s just say that the Pearces would never forget July 10. Every rose on the Pearces’ side of the rose bush had been clipped. On the Sommerfeldts’ front-patio table were place settings for three. Damask placemats and napkins circled a vase resplendent with Pearce roses. And so the Sommerfeldts had desiccated the Pearces’ blossoms, after which they created a petty scene on their patio with damask accessories to mock their next-door-neighbors. Unreal.

            Loyce Pearce dashed inside and called her children to the picture window. “Don’t go outside and give them that satisfaction,” she cried. But Giffard and Hames stomped out, got in their “classic” (old) Land Rover, and peeled off. Neither was spending much time at home these days, and this incident was to propel their distance farther.

            The three Sommerfeldts came outside carrying food and sat at their table, eating from a gorgeous summer smorgasbord and laughing with their heads dramatically thrown back, eyes closed. As she ate, Blythe felt something give way. She ran to her bedroom, lay down on her bed, and lost her baby. Unimaginable loss. That night Blythe asked her mother to bring the vase of roses to her room. She held the roses to her nose, trancelike. In clinging to the sharp stems, the sting of these weapons against her skin delivered a release: pain attenuating pain.

            A month later, found under Blythe’s windshield wiper was a handwritten envelope. Loyce Pearce had written a note on behalf of her family: “Dear Blythe, We are so sorry to hear of your loss. Please know that we are thinking of you. Sincerely, Loyce, Giffard, Hames, and Felicity Pearce.” In fact, Loyce hadn’t heard of her loss, but had witnessed the change in Blythe’s shape. And for Loyce, it resurrected the devastating change in her own shape at about the same age.

            On October 12, the morning before Blythe Sommerfeldt left for good, Felicity Pearce went outside, only to witness her own patio table set for four, a symmetrical reversal of last summer’s table. A damask runner and napkins appeared to be carefully placed on the Pearce table. A vase held damask roses, this time cut from the Sommerfeldt side of the bush. In the center of the table was a handwritten envelope. Inside, the note read: “Dear Pearces, Please accept these gifts as a token of our regret. Sincerely, Blythe Sommerfeldt.” Felicity was bewildered by the power of these simple words.

            By March, there was word in the neighborhood that Blythe Sommerfeldt was living thirty-five miles away and was pregnant again. Apparently, she had not named the father.

            On July 10 (the anniversary of the summer patio fiasco), the Volvo pulled into the Sommerfeldt driveway, followed immediately by the Land Rover into the Pearce driveway. Blythe emerged from her car while Hames got out of his. Each rang the other’s doorbell, holding a single rose —hers yellow, his red.

            As the families came out their doors and onto the front lawns, Blythe pulled a carrier out of the backseat and Hames placed his arm around Blythe’s back. Blythe said, “We’d like you to accept us and our little girl, Rose.” The two families responded by bringing out their damask table linens, which they spread across the two tables along with an increasingly lavish meal. They also took turns gently running their fingers along the baby’s translucent skin, amazed.

            It seemed written words, along with loss and deliverance, had brought them to these tables. Or had it been the insurgence of roses? As they lifted the tables and placed them together, the meal’s aroma intermingled with the scent of R. damascena — fragrant, indeterminate, kind.

Irene Cox studied English literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. A former book editor and anthologist, she now works as a copywriter in advertising in New York City. She lives with her daughter in New York’s Hudson Valley.

Brock Clarke

Charlotte

Charlotte asked her mother for money. To buy chips. Or gum. Maybe a hat. Most definitely birth control. What did it matter? But Charlotte’s mother said that it mattered to her, and besides, she didn’t have any money.

            “You can’t get blood from a stone,” Charlotte’s mother told her.

             “No kidding,” Charlotte said. “That’s why I’m asking you for money. ”

             It was easily the least rude out of all the many rude things Charlotte had said to her mother. For instance: “You look really old this morning.” She’d said that just ten hours earlier, and her mother had merely yawned in response. But the heart is always surprised by what finally breaks it.

             Later that night, Charlotte found a piece of paper on the kitchen table. It read, “Charlotte, I’m sorry and I love you, but you’ll never see me again. Mom.”

             Charlotte had no one except for her mother, basically. She’d never had a father. Her father was a sperm donor. She didn’t have classmates. She used to have classmates. This was back when she was eight years old. But her classmates had been disappointing. So had her teachers. School had been just a joke. And Charlotte had always known that her mother’s dream was to spend as much time with Charlotte as possible. This was why her mother had wanted Charlotte so badly in the first place.

             “Would you homeschool me?” Charlotte had asked, already knowing by her mother’s gross happy face what the answer would be.

             Charlotte was fourteen years old now. Oh, the awful things Charlotte had said to her most over those six years!

             Do you suck at everything? I hope I’m not fat like you when I grow up. Don’t you think some people deserve to end up alone?

            Those sentences now bounced around the house, the house that had seemed so claustrophobically small because they were always in it together but which felt huge now that Charlotte was in it alone. “Come back!” Charlotte said out loud, to the house. “Come back, I’m sorry, I’ll be better!” It was feeble, talking to an empty house. Feeble was the thing her mother had always been. No one tells you how quickly you turn into your parents. And no one tells you, once you’ve driven a parent away, that you’ll want them to come back, so you can say something to them that will make you forget the awful things you said that drove them away in the first place.

            Charlotte did have one friend, Therese, who was also being homeschooled. Charlotte and Therese would convene regularly to gripe about their homes and homeschools, their mothers and teachers. Charlotte called Therese and explained the situation.

             “Well, God,” Therese said, “do you even care that she’s gone?” After all, this was exactly the situation they’d been dreaming about since forever.

             “I care,” Charlotte said. “I care, I care, I care.”

             “She’ll probably come back.” .”

             “I don’t think so,” Charlotte said. There was the matter of the note. The note was serious business. Her mother had left her many notes before—where she was going, what time she’d be home—and she had always done exactly what the note had promised.

             “’You’ll never see me again,’” Therese repeated. “What does that mean?”

             Charlotte, who was afraid to think too hard about what it meant, said, “It means that she’s run away.”

             “So go find her then.”

             “I don’t know how. I’ve never tried to find anyone before.”

             Therese considered this. Charlotte could hear her breathing over the phone. God, why do you have to breathe so loud? That was another rude thing she’d said to her mother.

             “You should start small and then work your way up to finding your mother,” Therese finally said.

             “Small how?”

             “Slick just went missing,” Therese said. Slick was Therese’s cat, a surly Maine coon, liked by no one. “You could start by finding him. I’ll help you.”

             And that’s right, now you know who Charlotte is: Charlotte Vandeweghe, the internationally famous private investigator who started off by finding missing pets in her neighborhood, and who then went on to hunt down a stolen original copy of the Magna Carta, the war criminal with a new face on a new continent, the Fabergé egg snatched from the Hermitage, so many people with amnesia, so many missing nuclear warheads, the sole survivor of the plane crash deep in the Amazon, the man who went out for a soda and just kept going, the woman who went out for milk and just kept going, the 2011 Calder Cup trophy, Prime Minister Iyer and his entire cabinet, and so on and so on, hundreds of cases and all of them successfully solved, including the Alami twins, abducted by their deranged taekwondo instructor, and returned to their grateful parents, here in Chefchaouen, Morocco.

             “How did you find the twins?” one reporter wants to know, at the hastily thrown together press conference. This is the first time Charlotte has agreed to speak to the media. Until now, she’s seemed content to be known only for her results, and her genius.

             “Using the method,” Charlotte says, “by which I find everything.”

             “What is that method?”

             “I take things too far.”

             “Too far? What does that mean?” .”

             In front of Charlotte, three dozen reporters, crammed into a courtyard, and between her and the reporters, a microphone; behind her, a stone wall painted brilliant blue. Charlotte is wearing clothes identical to those she was wearing when her mother disappeared: a blue and gray horizontally striped long-sleeve shirt, and blue jeans that stop just above her ankle, and low-cut blue sneakers. She wears no socks because socks are an abomination. She is an even five feet tall, and thin and wiry, like a straightened-out paperclip. Her hair is blonde, short, untamed, curly to the point of combativeness.

             “Don’t forget to brush your hair,” Linus’s mother always told her, back when she was around to tell her things.

             “Then I would look like you,” Charlotte always said back. “And why would anyone want to look like you?”

             “It means,” Charlotte says, “that I don’t know when to stop.”

             “Well, it apparently works,” another reporter says. “Another case solved. Do you ever get bored? What keeps you going? What drives you?”

             “I think of the cases as practice. Each case is more difficult than the last. With each one, I get better. And when I’m good enough I’ll finally find my mother.”

             “Your mother?” the reporter says. Her eyes are huge, her voice hungry. Usually, one has to manufacture a backstory. “What happened to your mother?”

             “She left me twenty years ago. She’s been missing for twenty years.”

             “Why did she leave you?”

             “I don’t like to say,” Charlotte says.

             “But we’d like to know,” the reporter points out.

             “Think of the reasons your parents might leave you, or why they did leave you,” Charlotte says, and the reporters do, and then they don’t ask any more questions about that, because now they know.

             “How do you know you’re not good enough to find her?”

             “Because I haven’t found her yet.”

             “And why are you telling us this now?”

             “Because I haven’t found her yet. Maybe she’ll read your articles, listen to your podcasts. Maybe if she knows I’m looking for her, she’ll let me find her.”

             “And what will you tell her if you do find her?”

             “That I’m sorry. And that I love her. And that things will be different. And to please come home.

             The reporters nod, they nod. Yes, they think, that sounds about right. That’s what they would tell their parents. That is what their parents would want to hear.

             “But what if your mother is dead?” another reporter asks. He is standing in the back, and everyone turns to look at him, and to hate him. There is always someone who takes things too far. Charlotte should know. It’s how she’s become the world’s most famous private investigator, and also why she’s needed to become the world’s most famous private investigator. And even that hasn’t been enough. What if it’s never going to be enough? Charlotte wonders, and then wants to take the microphone and ram it through her eyeball and socket and into her brain, and then scape or rub out everything that makes her who she is.

             “She isn’t dead,” Charlotte says, instead.

             “How do you know?”

             “Because if she were dead,” Charlotte says, “then I would know it, and I would know it because I would want to die.”

             Charlotte pauses to let the reporters think about that, and while they do, let’s go back twenty years. Charlotte’s mother has written her note, and left her house, and has walked out to Buttermilk Falls. She is wearing many-pocketed pants and a many-pocketed jacket and all of her pockets are full of rocks. Over her head she has tied a plastic shopping bag. This is a woman who does not want to take any chances.”

             Charlotte’s mother looks up. Through the plastic the moon looks blurry and cheap. I’ve tried so hard and wanted this so much and failed so completely and I’m so tired and I just want to go away forever, Charlotte’s mother thinks, for the millionth and now the last time, and then she jumps, and sinks, and dies, and is stuck, still and possibly forever, possibly never to be found, wedged under that big rock at the base of the falls as the water roars on and on all around her.

             “But I don’t want to die,” Charlotte tells the reporters. “I want to live, so I can find my mother.”

             Someone to Charlotte’s left clears their throat. It is Therese, Charlotte’s oldest and only friend, and now her faithful assistant. Therese has a bud in her ear, through which she receives news of who or what has just been reported missing. Therese taps her wristwatch, twirls her index finger. There is always someone who needs you. There is always someone or something that needs finding. There is always someone who needs Charlotte.

             So please, if you ever meet her, please don’t tell Charlotte the truth about her mother.

Brock Clarke is the author of nine books–most recently the novel Who Are You, Calvin Bledsoe? and the essay collection I, Grape; or the Case for Fiction. Clarke’s individual stories and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Boston Globe, Ploughshares, Virginia Quarterly Review, One Story, Southern Review, The Believer, Ninth Letter, and the New England Review, and have appeared in the annual Pushcart Prize and New Stories from the South anthologies and on NPR’s Selected Shorts. He lives in Portland, Maine, and is the A. LeRoy Greason Chair of English and Creative Writing at Bowdoin College.

Love, (Un)translated

A. Molotkov

An incident becomes a narrative becomes a drama, and grows a happy ending. Which is the real story, after all its parts have played out, changing us?

            It’s summer 1984. I’m sixteen. My friend Artem and I are at a discotheque in Repino, a suburban town on the Gulf of Finland and a summer dacha destination for many Leningrad families. Quiet streets, one- or two-story buildings. Darkness is settling. The discotheque is held at a dom otdyha (a Soviet blend of sanatorium and health resort).

            Several middle-aged people mill about, their faces void of passion or curiosity. The hall is nondescript, a beige room with sound—a mélange of 1980s Italian pop, state-sanctioned Soviet music, and the occasional something in English, all pulsing with tasteless energy. Too embarrassed to relax and really dance, Artem and I occupy ourselves with minor dancelike moves.

            Then everything changes. A skinny, attractive girl our age enters. Her mischievous face shines with a confident and humorous light, her blond hair flows down her shoulders. Her close-fitting jeans look rare and imported over a cool pair of sneakers; her tunic is down to just above her knees.

            The stranger briefly examines the scene. I’m shocked to see her head over to the spot where Artem and I perform our awkward swaying. That smile—surely it’s not addressed to us; she must know someone else here. I turn around—no one in that direction. She approaches.

            The music is extraordinarily loud. The three of us nod to one another and keep dancing. The newcomer is the only graceful person in the room, her sense of rhythm evident in every move. A happy grin illumines her face as she dances.

            In a pause between songs, we exchange names.

            “Luba.”

            Short form of Lubov, the Russian word for love—a common name a generation or two ago, now falling out of use.

            Is Luba flirting with us? She makes more eye contact with me. I’m just a teenager—possibly slightly cute, in transition from a child to an adult, not nearly as good-looking as when I was a child. My clothes are baggy and uninteresting. What might others see in me?

            What should I do? I focus on the music, trying not to overthink this. As the dancing continues and we become part of it, smiles on our faces find each other. I hope my hands and my voice don’t shake when the music is over and we have a conversation. I hope we do have one. She might just walk away.

            It’s an hour-long event: Soviet citizens are not supposed to have too much fun. The disco lights dim. We are an awkward trio as we stroll down a chilly Repino street. There are no cars.

            “What are you two doing here?” Luba’s brows rise, comically. “I didn’t think I’d meet anyone below my parents’ age.”

            I believe her. I’m aware of the kind of people that tend to go to resorts: communists with some claim to being important on the Soviet scale. Random walk-ins like us must have been her own hope.

            “I could be your father,” I say, and we crack up. I’m too sincere to withhold the actual answer. “We live in Leningrad—here for the summer. And you?”

            “I’m on vacation here, for another week. I’m staying at the resort.” Luba points back at the building.

            “Where’re you from?”

            “Moscow. My aunt lives in Leningrad. I love the city—all the literature. Dostoevsky, Pushkin. You two are lucky to live there.”

            “How’s the resort?” No one in my family has ever gone to resorts—my parents reference them as a luxury available only through special connections. How Luba got here is a question for another time.

            “There’s no one to talk to.” Luba shrugs. “I tried, but everyone stares at me like I’m from another world, or just speaks in banalities. No one has read any books.”

            “What do you do all day?” Artem asks.

            “I brought Anna Karenina.” Luba grins. “I read in my room. I read in the garden. I go to the beach and read some more. I sleep. I write. I have my meals at the cafeteria. To be honest, I can’t wait till this vacation is over.”

            “I’m not sure about Tolstoy.” I try to sound mild about it, even if the famous author’s self-indulgent homegrown philosophies annoy me as much as his exuberant page counts. “We can argue about it later. What do you write?”

            “Notes. Poems. I’m starting my first year in college.”

            “What will you study?”

            “Journalism.”

            She must be about a year older—this makes our encounter even more intriguing.

            “I write poetry and fiction.” With books in the picture, my embarrassment has lifted. “I’m just starting.”

            Luba is smart, interesting, full of shared references; one theme easily leads to another. A beautiful girl is a beautiful girl, but quality conversation is a must. The dark street with its yellow lights is helpful and optimistic. The occasional pedestrians are in no rush.

            “I have to go back in.” Luba stops. “Otherwise they’ll gossip about me.”

            It’s past nine. In this Soviet reality, I believe her.

            “Let’s do this again tomorrow,” she adds.

            I hesitate. What kind of joy, happiness, or distress will this new acquaintance bring into my life? Living in different cities is not a great foundation to build on, at this age. Long-distance relationships are not exactly in fashion in the USSR. Artem seems equally uncertain.

            But I’ve met few girls as fascinating as Luba seems to be.

            “Come on, come on—what do you have to lose?” she eggs us on. “Don’t let me die from boredom.”

            “Sure, why not,” I say.

            Will I regret it?


The next day it’s just Luba and I. I won’t remember the clever and somewhat questionable maneuver that yields this result. Maybe there is no maneuver. Maybe Artem simply cancels of his own accord.

            When I spot Luba’s mischievous smile, I feel a surge of energy and good cheer. The dance party is not for another hour. We walk about Repino.

            “I’ve been thinking about you,” I say.

            “Of course. Not much else to think about, here.”

            We laugh, but I read some interest in her humor, in the very fact that she came out to meet me.

            We dance, smiling at each other like co-conspirators, pounding fast rhythms into the floor. I feel more at ease with the rhythm. Then, a slow dance intoxicates me as I hold this stranger in my arms, her breasts against my chest as we sway to the predictable, yet momentarily sweet, pop music. Her hair smells sweet, a mix of sweat and an unfamiliar shampoo, an option rare in this country where most of us use soap to wash our hair. Her arms around my neck are strong, elegant like a gift, like a noose. In this dancing embrace, I’m about to melt.


Luba’s vacation is coming to an end. My heart is cracked open the way it’s never been before. We’ve spent a good part of this week together, sad that our access to each other is constrained by distance. As we head down a wooded path leading to the Gulf, tension and magic are palpable. My hand on the small of her back—she turns to me; we kiss. How quickly can I fall in love?

            Most moderately-educated Russians like us have read many thick volumes of romantic prose and poetry and feel sentimental about accidental meetings and vast distances. Chekhov and his little dog are breathing down our necks.

            “Will we see each other again?”

            “Sure.” Luba’s lips are soft as they touch mine. “I’ll be back in Leningrad in September. I can stay at my aunt’s. I’ll miss you so much.”

            “I’ll miss you too.”

            How likely is this, to meet someone from elsewhere, instead of a girl from my own city of millions? It’s clear we’ve made a dent in each other. We begin writing. Fortunately, mail is the one thing in the USSR that works; for some reason I don’t quite understand, it’s delivered twice a day, except for Sunday.


September arrives. I’m in my last year of high school. The girls in my class are nowhere near as interesting as Luba. With all the schoolwork and writing and socializing among my small group of friends, I don’t meet many new people.

            Luba visits every month or two, as promised. We see each other for a few hours at a time. We wander Leningrad streets, beautiful baroque buildings all around us. We talk, we kiss. Although the Soviet Union is not puritanical about sex, it’s not common here to be sexually active at sixteen. Besides, we don’t have a good place to develop a deeper intimacy, nor does it seem as though the time allotted us allows this development. Our brief meetings are filled with longing, every emotion enhanced by brevity. The gigantic train station looms over us, the two of us running, her train always leaving in two minutes.

            It’s a little too convenient for me that Luba must always be the one to make the effort. I feel bad about it, yet unprepared to reciprocate. I’m not sure where we’re going with this. We spend enough time together to keep me hooked, but not enough to feel properly in love. The intervals between our meetings subdue the intensity and make room for minor crushes on other girls in my vicinity. I miss Luba, but not desperately. I think about her, but not all the time.

            Over the next year or two, I notice that some details in Luba’s account of her place of residence don’t connect. She never lets me take her to the train itself; we always say goodbye inside the station. Eventually, it comes out that Luba is not from Moscow—she lives in Vologda, a small medieval city. It’s new to me that someone could change the details of her life, substitute fiction for facts. Why? To avoid appearing provincial to snobbish Leningraders? But I don’t care where someone is from.

            I’m on shaky territory, in a world with unclear rules—but the deviations are minor, and I’m drawn to this bright person who’s done so much to keep me in her life. I assume she wouldn’t lie about significant things.


As I write this down in 2018, I don’t remember the conversation about Moscow vs. Vologda. Was there a confrontation? Things one expects to remember are forgotten. Does it mean they weren’t important?

            I remember Luba’s striped shirts and sweaters of those years, white and blue. I remember her small feet.


In June 1986, I’m eighteen. Promptly, I’m drafted into the Soviet Military. For two desperate years, Luba is one of my correspondents as I go through stages of personality removal, trying to make sure there is enough left to rebuild.

            I visit her in the summer of 1988. The train stops at Vologda’s ornate station, a baroque two-story building quite unlike Leningrad’s. Two platforms in Vologda are quite a contrast to the vast spread of tracks in Leningrad. A few people disembark; many will travel farther, into lands I will never visit. Luba is doing an internship at the Spaso-Prilutsky Monastery outside Vologda; she is working on a double major, in journalism and history. I take a bus and meet her there. She is even more full of spark than I remember, something in her appearance refined or solidified. A tan adds to the effect.

            We exchange an awkward hug, a too-brief kiss. I’m not sure if we meet as a potential romantic couple or as friends. The monastery is not operational—the Soviet regime has exterminated not only free thought, but most competing dogmas. The place is open to visitors as a museum. Built from white stone, it looks bland as I enter.

            We kiss more as we explore the second-floor gallery in the monastery wall, the structure’s most interesting feature. I notice how well Luba’s body fits with mine—something I remember from two and a half years ago. Her head rests easily on my chest. I can almost wrap my hands around her waist.

            The monastery wall is massive; the first floor below us utilized for workshops and storage. The concave ceiling narrows the gallery. Elongated arches form unpaned windows on either side. Curved shadows on the floor and the walls, stark against the all-white background, obey the incoming light’s irregular configurations.

            To one side of the monastery grounds, the Vologda river drags along the reflections of isolated clouds. A well-proportioned white cathedral rises in the middle, a touch of gray contributed by time. Everything is in some degree of disrepair, except for Luba, a well-proportioned individual full of plans, books, opinions—engaged in life, which deserves a full engagement. So few people I know have that spark, that commitment to emotional and intellectual intensity.

            “This place was founded in 1371. Imagine that.” Her blue eyes are bright with excitement. “In the 1930s, it was a Gulag transport prison for political prisoners. Not something you can read about, but if you ask around, people tell you. Later, it was used for storage. And now . . .” She looks around, as if uncertain how to evaluate the current state of affairs in an ancient monastery, now a poorly attended museum.

             “I’m going to marry you,” I declare. Saying this feels right just now, even if I’m not nearly as confident as this statement might suggest.

            “No way!” Luba cracks up. “I’m seeing someone, as you know.”

            She did mention this in a letter. I can’t be too upset after thirty months apart, but the fact does contribute to the moment’s ambiguity. Why is she making out with me?

            I’m not going to protest.

            As shadows migrate toward the closing hour, we head to the exit. I pull on the massive wooden door, a long diagonal crack in it sealed with glue in a darker brown.

            The door is locked.

            “Shit.” I check my watch. “It’s not five yet.”

​

            “I bet the monk who locked up knew we were here,” Luba laughs. “He was checking us out. He must have heard us laughing upstairs.”

            “Doesn’t he know you from before?”

            “We’ve said hello once or twice. He’s stern. I don’t think he approves of me.”

            I’m surprised there is still a monk in this monastery which no longer functions as one. Perhaps he was kept around for groundskeeping.

            “Is he really a monk?” I ask.

            “I think so.” Luba grins.

            “Great opportunity to check my karate skills.” I point at the door.

            We laugh, unafraid. I’m intoxicated by the ease of our connection. I slam my foot into the door, but my foot is the only item affected. I wince, try again. The heavy door was built in centuries when solid work was appreciated and well repaired. In any case, my karate skills barely approach one on a one to ten scale.

            “Coming, coming,” a voice yells. The monk grudgingly unlocks the door. A long black robe validates his claim to this role.

            The rest of my visit passes with no big decisions, no broken doors. It’s too late for us, or too early. Our shared hours in life are insufficient to commit to anything. We’ve known each other for four years but can’t claim more than four days’ worth of shared time. Not enough emotional content exists between us—as if we are destined to drift near each other, but not together.


Next summer, Luba visits me in Leningrad. I’m twenty-one; she’s twenty-two. I pick her up at the station, as the tradition goes. The reliable rails, ready to carry us across time.

            “I’m pregnant.”

            We haven’t had sex, haven’t tried a full-size relationship. This announcement drops with the weight of all the lead in the world. What am I doing in Luba’s life? Why is she in mine? Why is she here? Perhaps we value each other more than the circumstances of our lives have allowed us to show, to take advantage of? We’ve never said I love you to each other.

            I’ve never thought any of this through all the way.

            “Who’s the father?”

            “An old friend. I should’ve left it at that. We met in preschool, age two. He wants to marry me, always has.” Hesitation in her voice.

            My chest tightens. I’m sad because now I’ll lose Luba for sure, happy because this logistically and emotionally difficult long-distance relationship will be behind me. Is she here to ask for my blessing?

            How can I give one?


I’m in Vologda again in late summer, the day before Luba’s wedding. I’ve grown fond of this small city on the river, with its elegant old churches and its empty streets compared to the bustling Leningrad. We meet at Luba’s small apartment. She is crying, defeat on her face.

            “I don’t want to marry him. I don’t want to do it.”

            What’s my role in this? Do I convince her not to marry? Is it my right? I’m a college student. Unlike Luba, I don’t have a place of my own—I share one with my family. I have little to offer. I’m studying to be a scientist but am compelled to be a writer. We live in a country where neither pursuit amounts to a good plan. And even if I had a solid plan, a reliable future, I’m not confident I’d be safe with this sometimes-unpredictable person.

            “Why are you marrying him if you don’t want to?”

            “We’re having a baby. I told him I didn’t want to go through with this. He got so angry. I was scared.” Luba pauses. “I begged him not to do anything crazy.”

            I’m worried about her. Why did she get involved with this potentially dangerous man? Is he really the way she describes him? The day passes, sadness hovering over us. No answers arrive in time for my return train. I’m preparing to move past this relationship. I’m tired of all the drama; I feel a dull edge of nothing.


In July 1990, my friend Sergey and I receive our US visas. No matter what happens next, I can’t stay in the USSR. This decision emerged all at once back in May. Now is my chance to change my life, or at least to try. If I stay, I may never be able to leave.

            Luba must have given birth five or six months ago; I’m in a brief relationship of my own. Still, as I begin to organize my life for departure, I have no doubt: she is one of the people to whom I owe the news. I write.

            A few days later, I get a phone call.

            “Tolechka, I can’t believe it. When are you leaving?”

            “My US visa expires next January. I’m trying to get my hands on a plane ticket.”

            “I must see you before you go. I’ll come.”

            “You’ll come? To Leningrad?”

            “Yes, of course.”

            I’m reminded: she picked me first. She’s the one who’s traveled so many more times to see me.


When Luba arrives in early August 1990, we’re stuck to each other like crazy magnets. At twenty-two, I haven’t developed the morals to be concerned that Luba is a newly married woman with a small baby, currently watched over by her husband. Besides, I have a prior claim on her. We’ve been through a lot, even if so much of it has happened at a distance.

            We head to my apartment. At this age, I’m no longer concerned about my parents and Babushka’s witnessing our intimacy. I make introductions; we have tea. Soon, we are in my room, our clothes rendered obsolete. We stay there for hours, finding each other’s bodies for the first time. The day and the night pass through us as concentrated time, wringing us up.

             You dropped me off at the airport, Luba writes in a few days. I remember wishing the plane would crash. I love you. I don’t know what to do.

            Do I love Luba? I think so. I don’t have a reference point, but I think about her enough to assume so. Want to come to America with me? I write back. A crazy idea—but emigration is no trifle in any case. Wouldn’t a companion be marvelous?

            My invitation is lightweight. So much in Luba’s life makes this impossible. Clearly, she will say no.

            Yes, she writes in her reply. Of course, I’ll come with you.

            I can’t believe this. I find myself grinning as I reread.

            We begin to plan. Luba needs to get a divorce, convince her husband to surrender his parental rights, and prepare to travel to the United States with a baby not quite a year old. No problem—people do this every day. At this point in my life, everything is possible.


When I visit Vologda in September 1990, the husband is on a business trip, and it’s the three of us in the small Soviet-style one-bedroom apartment on the second floor: Luba, the charming Sonya in her seven-month-old glory, and I. Our clothes fly off.

            As the evening settles outside, we are starving. Luba cooks some fried hot dogs and potatoes; I volunteer to do the dishes. Luba mixes a new bottle of formula. Sonya, who was beginning to fuss, is quickly satisfied. Luba changes a cloth diaper, carefully disposing of the contents in the bathroom and stowing the soiled cloth in a smelly plastic bag.

            The baby taken care of, we enjoy each other’s company again. It’s liberating, to finally be together after hovering around each other for all these years.

            Then it’s the next afternoon. I get ready to pack and head to the train station. We are adrift in this parting moment.

​

            Outside, a car door slams shut.

            “Fuck.” Luba freezes.

            “What?”

            “He’s back. He wasn’t due back until tonight.”

            “What do we do?”

            Luba thinks. “Stay here.”

            It’s not the time to argue. I remain in the apartment, nervously checking my backpack and my ticket and examining the place for anything embarrassing—as if the situation didn’t speak for itself. I prepare for a physical confrontation if one should occur.

            Five or ten minutes later, Luba returns, pale and out of breath.

            “He’s gone. He and I will talk tonight.”

            “I’m sorry.”

            “That’s okay. I had to tell him anyway. Now there’s no going back.”

            I’m glad. I’m not a fan of secrets.


After my parents’ separation a few months ago, it’s Mom and Babushka who share the Leningrad apartment with me. Each of us has the luxury of a separate room, fairly uncommon in the USSR.

            “Luba is coming to America with me,” I open as we sit down to dinner.

            “Really?” My mom doesn’t look too happy about it. She must be still worried about Luba after the Moscow/Vologda debacle.

            “Yes. It’s going to be less lonely.”

            “I guess so,” she concurs. “But what about the baby?”

            “She’ll have to come with us, of course.”

            “Really?” I can tell she doesn’t know where to begin her follow-up questions.

            “We’ve decided she and Sonya should move here for now.”

            “Here?” Mom lets go of her tablespoon; with a loud click, it rests in her soup bowl. Babushka watches, her face neutral.

            “Sure. Just temporarily, of course.”

            “But she doesn’t have the visa, anything. Besides, what are we going to do with the baby? I don’t have time for her.”

            “That’s okay. Luba and I will take care of her. You don’t have to do anything.”

            By my mother’s grim face, I can tell she’s not particularly happy about this. But it’s the Soviet Union, a place where an alternative solution, like renting a small apartment, is quite simply unavailable. I know I’m leaving Mom with no choice.

            “I can watch Sonya sometimes.” Babushka is always kind; perhaps she has the time and the mental space to offer her help.

            “Thank you.”

            “Wait!” Mom’s voice is still tense, higher than usual, as it tends to be when something difficult and potentially unpleasant needs to be settled. “And after you leave for the United States?”

            “They might have to stay here. We’ll have to see, but it might be safer for Luba here, away from her husband.”

            I’ve already shared the background of this complicated story.

            “That’s a crazy idea, Tolka.” My mother smiles a little now, which tells me that we won’t have a bigger argument with yelling involved. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting yourself into?”

            “Not exactly, but sometimes we have to take risks.”

            “If you say so.”

            I’m consumed by a what the hell attitude. So much is changing in my life. Why be afraid of additional changes?


Luba quits her journalist job in Vologda, a rare and much sought-after position she’s held since her graduation a year ago. She won’t have enough time to get a new job in Leningrad.

            Caring for a baby is new to me. It’s harder than my newly abandoned major, mathematical physics. My life as I know it is being dismantled; in its place, I’ll create whatever I want—or at least whatever I manage to pull off.

            The last three months of 1990 are tense and emotional because of our overcrowded life and the upcoming changes. We take walks with Sonya in the stroller, talk, read poetry to each other. My friends love Luba’s vibe; her integration into my small circle is quick and natural. On many evenings, four or five of us gather in our small kitchen, deep in conversation.


Do you realize that this—all this—being here, in Leningrad, with you, won’t remain in our lives much longer?” Luba whispers, her head on the pillow next to mine.

            “I know. We’ll remember this.” I close my eyes, the couch bed I’ve slept on for over a decade firm and reliable under me. The two of us get to share it briefly this fall. What other beds will we find ourselves in?


Have you discussed divorce with your husband yet?”

            “Not yet. He’ll be in Leningrad next week. I should talk to him in person.”

            I’m happy but insecure. Not only am I committing to a more substantial relationship than ever in my life, and a baby to boot—but I fear Luba might change her mind. I wasn’t extremely invested in her coming along when the notion first struck me, but after these few months of an intense relationship, we’ve become much closer. As young Russian romantics, we refer to each other as husband and wife—even if this is not technically accurate.


Luba can be casual about time.

            “I’ll be back at seven.” She entrusts me with Sonya’s care.

            It’s 7:00, 7:30, 8:00. I’m interchangeably irritated and worried, imagining any number of misfortunes that may have befallen her in this gigantic city, after dark, which, in winter, descends in the early afternoon. Luba arrives around 8:30.

            “I lost track of time.” She is happy and casual as I stare, dumbfounded.

            “How is that possible? You have a watch on your wrist.”

            “I was just wandering around the city center. I’m sorry.”

            “I was worried. I had to cancel my plans.”

            We’re both rather spoiled in our early twenties. Most of our problems have been solved by our parents—and, in Luba’s case of late, by her husband.


In November, I finally procure an airplane ticket for New York. I’m set to depart on December 20th, 1990.

            So, this is it, then? Am I really doing this? Do I have the guts? When I get there, will I commit to staying? Will leaving my language and my culture ever pay off?

            Our free time is running out. Luba might not be able to get a US visa, a divorce, a plane ticket. We live with uncertainty, the possibility of ruined plans and hopes. No matter how much I try to arrange my life’s components, Luba is a separate person. I trust her plan to join me in the States. Optimism and improvisation become key components in our lives.

            December 20th at the airport, Luba’s eyes are red, our last kiss desperate.

            The plane takes off.


My first months in the United States are as difficult and as fun as life can be to a naïve kid who’s never been outside his own perverse country. Sergey and I have chosen Albany, New York. We have a pal here, Igor, another Russian émigré. Even if I would prefer to live in New York City, we have concluded that a relatively inexpensive smaller town would be an easier challenge for new immigrants. I’m optimistic, but I miss Luba terribly. Letters take so much longer to get here. At $2 per minute, international calls are for emergencies only.

            While I run about ferretlike trying to ensure a minimal income, Luba is brilliant as ever. She obtains a US visa for herself and Sonya and finalizes her divorce. I can’t quite believe it when I learn she’s arriving on April 27th, 1991. I’m thrilled.

            Igor volunteers to drive me to JFK. It’s a three-hour ride and the longest I’ve spent inside a car, in the US or back in the USSR, where cars are a rarity. If not for the adrenaline and the anticipation, I could admire the rock formations along the freeway, the happy trees perched on their crumbling faces.

            Luba takes an hour to emerge from customs; all other passengers who look or speak Russian have already passed through. Sonya sleeps, bundled up in Luba’s arms. Our hug is awkward. I don’t know what to say first.

            “How was your trip?”

            “Terrible.” She grins—I remember this grin so well. “Can you imagine flying eighteen hours with a baby?”

            On the way back, I keep Igor company in the front. He bought a baby seat at Goodwill—I’m humbled by this small kindness. We’re an odd group at an odd moment when so much must be said, but so much is unclear. I need to share how bad my financial circumstances are—but I also dread this sharing. I’ve done my best over the four months since my arrival, but my best has amounted to little. I’m embarrassed. I encouraged Luba to leave her wealthy husband, to emigrate with me—and all I have to offer her and her child is poverty and uncertainty.

            At some point, the conversation turns to the fact that May’s rent is due in a week, and I don’t have the money.

            “We’re going to have to dip into the dollars you got for your rubles.”

            Officially, one can exchange no more than 500 rubles when traveling to the United States, yielding some $340 based on the fake conversion rate the communist authorities have made up, even if a dollar actually costs six rubles on the black market. I brought $343 with me, and I assume Luba has a comparative sum. I’m ashamed to ask for it.

            “I gave that money to your mom. Didn’t she tell you?”

            I turn in my seat to face her. “No. Why didn’t you check with me?”

            “How? I couldn’t exactly make international calls from your mom’s apartment. I thought she’d settled this with you.” Luba pauses. “It’s my money anyway.”

            I’m frozen with worry. We’d made plans to build a life here, but so far, I’m destitute. Still, it is Luba’s money—this much is indisputable.

            We arrive in Albany. We thank Igor, and now it’s the three of us, beginning to relax. Our place features a relatively large living room, a kitchenette, a small bathroom, and a miniature bedroom that fits little more than the bed. Fortunately, Luba approves of my choice of wallpaper. We know we won’t spend the rest of our lives in a tiny place like this. I’m happy, worried, relieved.


I’m so excited to have access to disposable diapers. Finally.” Luba stands in the middle of our small living room, holding one up like a flag, a happy expression on her face.

            “Yes. Much handier than dealing with the fabric option. Yuck. I won’t miss those.”

            Across Madison Avenue, Washington Park waves to us with its tree branches. Sonya watches our conversation while being changed. It’s Luba’s turn.

            “The wipes are an excellent idea too,” she adds.

            We knew we would admire the West’s obvious advantages: access to books, food options, choices in clothes. What we hadn’t known is that many spheres of life had moved on to new tools, unavailable in the USSR. Diapers. Dental floss. Microwaves.

            It’s time for Sonya’s nap. Her crib is in the living room—it wouldn’t fit anywhere else. She’s been cranky all afternoon—she must be tired. She’ll fall asleep soon—then we can do any number of things: watch a movie banned in the USSR, make love, have tea, read poetry to each other. Later in the afternoon, I must work.

            “I love that everyone smiles at me here.” Luba’s brow tightens in contemplation. “Not just the men—I mean, everyone is so friendly. I missed this back in Russia, even if I didn’t know it.”

            “I missed it too.”


May through August 1991, we are loving and passionate and excited about our new life—but we face many practical difficulties and logistical disagreements. Most fights are about money, the lack thereof. Neither of us is right or wrong: all priorities are valid. A tight net of demands pulls at our limited resources.

            “Do you have to take your ESL classes right now?” I ask.

            “I need to work on my English. You’re lucky, yours is so much better.”

            “Yours is good too. It’s just that babysitting Sonya while you go to class makes it impossible for me to get a second job.”

            I’m working a periodic gig as an electrician’s assistant, performing all the physical effort of installing electrical circuits at a new factory. It’s hard labor, but not quite enough hours to cover our expenses.

            “If I don’t improve my English, I can’t get a job.” Luba sounds firm.

            “You could probably get one right now if you wanted to.”

            I know she resents the difficulties, and I resent what I perceive as her lack of enthusiasm for trying to help. She yells, and I shut down. We don’t talk, we begin to talk, we work or study, we take care of Sonya. We do well for a while, then we fight again.


On one of our most penniless evenings, Luba and I pack Sonya in her stroller and set out hunting for bottles and cans to recycle. We hope to approach minimum wage—all it takes is a can or two a minute. We wear rubber gloves. It’s a depressing experience but an adventure—after all, we may never fall so low again. It’s a chilly night.

            “Will this one claim any money?” Luba holds a strangely shaped wine bottle, elegant and thin, with a glass handle that must have been also filled with wine.

            I examine it and find no reference to a bottle deposit.

            “I don’t think so.”

            “It’s beautiful. I’m tempted to pick it up anyway.”

            “I feel as if none of this is real. We couldn’t imagine this a year ago, could we?”

            “It’s completely unreal.” Luba nods.

            Sonya is sound asleep in her stroller.

            As we prowl Albany’s streets with the homeless and the hopeless for our five-cent prizes, the dark downtown buildings stare down in disgust. We are not put off: we’d rather be collecting cans in the United States than engaging in our intellectual pursuits in the Soviet Union. We are both convinced that there’s no future there, in a country with no freedom, no access to books, no basic necessities.


Tensions don’t quiet from one interaction to the next. I’m still worried about money, offended at something Luba said yesterday, wishing she approached our shared problems differently.

            “Why did you move my books?” I sound irritated; I realize this too late. It’s not about the books.

            “I was cleaning. I moved them over to the windowsill. They were just stacked here on the floor in the middle of the room.” Luba is friendly, but I’m still upset; I can’t push the gloom away.

            “You could’ve put them back.”

            “So you want me to clean and take care of the baby and make sure I put the books back in the middle of the room?” Sarcasm grows in Luba’s voice. “What else do you want me to do?”

            “I was working. I take care of Sonya at other times.”

            “I’m looking for work.”

            I’m being ridiculous. These are the kinds of scenes I’ll end up most embarrassed about.


July, Luba finds a part-time job at a hot dog stand in Downtown Albany. It’s reasonable work; Luba assures me that wearing tank tops increases the tips. We both trade hours with Sonya and working. Between the two of us, it’s easier to pay the rent.

            Luba is social. She’s been going out with friends, leaving me with Sonya. She is late now and then, as she used to be during our months in Leningrad.

            “Why do you have to be out so long?” I ask.

            “I like it. You wouldn’t enjoy it. You don’t even like spending time with people.”

            “Not true. I had a very social life back in Leningrad. In any case, it’s not fair that I should stay home with Sonya so much. A couple of times I was late for work because you were late.”

            “It’s not my fault we can’t afford a babysitter. If I hadn’t divorced my husband, I wouldn’t have to worry about any of this.”

            “I didn’t force you to divorce him.”

            “Yes, you did.”


In October 1991, a few inconsistencies in Luba’s accounts lead to a confrontation.

            “It’s true, I’m seeing someone.” Her face is firm, sad, familiar, different.

            Heat all over me, from inside. So she did lie about more than her city of origin.

            “I love you,” she continues, “but we fight so much. We fight all the time. I can’t do this anymore. It’s destroying me.”

            I don’t understand—I must be more resilient to our type of fighting. Even if I hate our fights with every fiber, I wouldn’t abandon the relationship.

            “When did it start, this affair?”

            “About a month ago. It’s a guy I met at the hot dog stand.”

            So, this happens in my own life. Someone makes other plans, moves behind my back. A wind of sadness sweeps through me—in an instant, I’ve grown older.

            Luba picked me first, she leaves me first.


Where does the truth end? Where do lies start? Luba’s never been fond of her parents, claiming that they are full of shit: insincere, sold out. I’ve never met them; she knows much more about mine. We are too young to ask too many questions about family, to wonder about the origins of our personalities, our choices. I don’t have enough information to make conclusions.

            Our breakup is more a concept than reality. We’re still drawn to each other, body and soul. We meet at her new place or back at mine, each date filled with passion and tension. Neither of us is ready to surrender the claim on the other. I can’t be sure what’s going on in Luba’s mind, but I still haven’t met anyone more interesting—and haven’t tried very hard, stuck between my commitment to writing, my burning interest for books and films unavailable in the USSR, and my insecurity about the possibility of a relationship with any of my American acquaintances.

            In 1993, Luba breaks the stalemate.

            “I’m moving to the West Coast.” Her voice is firm over the phone.

            Something in me knows or wants to think it knows: this is for the best.

            I throw up from anxiety when we hang up. We’ve been fighting and reconciling for several years; I must be addicted to this awful dynamic. We meet twice on her last day in town for tense words and desperate sex.


Thirteen years pass. It’s October 2006. I’m thirty-eight. Luba and I haven’t been in touch. For ten of these years, I was married to another woman—now my marriage is over. I’m lonely half the time—the other half, my son Xander is with me. I’ve lived in Portland, Oregon since 2003.

            The internet has flourished since Luba and I last saw each other. I google her and am shocked to find her picture, a San Francisco phone number next to it. Fascinating. During my own years in the Bay Area, 1996-2003, I didn’t look for her, fearing she might still hold power over me. Our lives there must have overlapped.

            In the picture, Luba looks herself, the usual spark in her cheerful face. This virtual encounter sends a flood of excitement and anguish through me. Should I call?

            Can I?

            I pace about for a minute or two to calm down.

            Her voice on the answering machine—in English, with a small accent.

            “You know who this is,” I say in Russian. “Give me a call.”

            I don’t know how Luba feels about the prospect of talking again, but a few hours later, the phone rings. Luba’s voice. She’s excited to hear from me, invites me to visit.


Luba hasn’t changed much—she is full of energy and humor, interesting thoughts and ambitious plans. She has a full, successful life, with her own business and many friends. The only thing that’s changed: she no longer speaks Russian without mixing in handfuls of English words. We switch back and forth between the two languages. This feels a little strange considering our entire relationship has transpired in Russian—but not strange enough to embarrass these two language travelers.

            We kiss and reminisce and lightly consider what might happen—but we are both hesitant. Luba is in a tentative relationship; I’m still uncertain about the dissolution of my marriage. Neither of us wants to unpack the heavy baggage in the basement of our shared life.

            Luba invites me to dinner, and I get to see Sonya again. At sixteen, she is smart and opinionated. I’m glad she’s grown to be an insightful, sparkling human being, even if my presence in her life was short, too short to feel sentimental about her. A total of seven months of taking care of her alongside Luba was not enough for a deep attachment or a parental feeling, especially for a twenty-two-year-old—but I wish her well. Luba fills her in about the key details of our past.

            “I’m so excited about that,” Sonya says. “You guys were brave. But I don’t remember anything.”


I return to Portland undecided. We talk on the phone, and I realize that a renewed relationship may not live up to the original one. Our personalities, our paths have diverged.

            Luba must have her own reservations. We settle into occasional interactions on Facebook and a phone call or two a year.


By December 2018, many details of my past are vague in memory as if they belonged in a novel I read in my youth. I share the first draft of this essay with Luba and call to discuss it.

            “You forgot so much.”

            “I did?”

            “You were mad at me.” Luba sounds agitated. “That time on the way back from the airport, when you picked me up.”

            “I was?”

            “Yes. You said I was a bad wife to you. That hurt me so much.”

            “I said that? Seriously or as a joke?”

            “You were serious. Igor was there.”

            The context eludes me; I can’t place this statement within the way I remember that day. But I must have said this or something like this, a sarcastic half-joke. It hurt Luba enough to be remembered twenty-five years later.

            “The other thing I remember is the air at JFK,” Luba adds. “I noticed it as soon as I arrived. It was the sweetest air I’d ever breathed.”

            I remember my own first impression: a beautiful sea of multiethnic faces.

            “We’ve made it to the better times,” I say. “I wish I had more patience and compassion back then. I’m sorry.”

            “We both did shitty things. I’m sorry for my part as well.” Luba thinks a moment. “Please have compassion for yourself. We were insanely young.” In the small pause, I stare into the darkness outside my window. “By the way, I was going to ask you to change my name, but now I see that you can’t, especially considering your title.”

            “No, I can’t.”

            Lubov, the Russian word for love.

            “I’m fond of my name,” Luba adds, as if reading my thoughts. “With a name comes responsibility. Mine is to take the pain away. People just start talking to me, telling me things they’ve never shared with anyone.”

            She’s been a therapist for many years.


Our breakup seemed tragic at the time—but it doesn’t feel tragic when I fast-forward twenty-five years into myself. I’m in the best relationship of my life—a more fitting one for the person I’ve become. I wouldn’t want to have missed out on it.

            I’ve learned a few things. For me, truth is a requirement. I need to trust my partner’s substantial statements. Also, I’ve learned to worry less about preferences that lie outside ethics, to be more flexible in logistical negotiations. I’ve learned that the other person’s experience of the same interaction can be vastly different from my own.

            Luba insists that moving to the States is the one decision she’s never had any doubts about. From what I can tell, she, too, is content with her life. She’s never gone back to Russia; she’s delighted that Sonya has had the opportunity to grow up here.

            Is former tragedy what they call wisdom? Is this a happy ending, or simply a different one? We helped each other peel off our more selfish selves, gave each other permission to hope for a better future. And then, separately, we made better futures for ourselves. I regret nothing. It’s a relief to be on good terms, this side of harm.

A. Molotkov is a supporter of Ukraine. His poetry collections are The Catalog of Broken Things, Application of Shadows, Synonyms for Silence, and Future Symptoms. His memoir A Broken Russia Inside Me about growing up in the USSR and making a new life in America is forthcoming from Propertius; he co-edits The Inflectionist Review. His collection of ten short stories, Interventions in Blood, is part of Hawai’i Review Issue 91; his prose is represented by Laura Strachan at Strachan Lit. Please visit him at AMolotkov.com.

Fountain

Greg Mulcahy

Driscoe told the long story, which Driscoe claimed originated with Cooboo, of two neighbors who plotted each other’s downfall, each seeking possession of the other’s land.

            As narrator, Driscoe assured, he had nothing to do with, and no aligned interest for, either.

            Since this was a story, this narrator’s posture was, presumably, nothing more than a narrative element.

            So Driscoe, according to Driscoe, had nothing to do with either.

            And if both came from Cooboo anyway, that made a kind of sense.

            Those two neighbors knew no bounds.

            Each, in fact, planned the other’s murder until, finally, one carried it out.

            Predator and victim.

            Common enough.

            Did I mention, Driscoe said, these neighbors were brothers?

            Did I mention, Driscoe said, this was the Oldest Story in the World?

            With ending pat, the story lacked power.

            Oldest in the world—where could anyone go for or with that?

            And if there was, as he supposed there was supposed to be, a moral, Driscoe failed to reveal it, and Driscoe failed to mention it.

            These half-familiar stories never added up to anything.

            Pastime at best.

            As the assassination attempt.

            The assassination attempt was an assassination attempt or else it was a hoax or else it was, maybe, a hoax assassination attempt.

            Driscoe claimed the unknown assassins had attempted to assassinate Driscoe near a fountain.

            Or a round-about.

            Or a round-about gone round a fountain.

            He believed the fountain had stone horses in it as part of the display, but Driscoe had never described it thus, and it was entirely possible he was confusing the story with some other fountain.

            Or story set near a fountain.

            Driscoe had ducked and crouched and run in the dark as the car sped away after the shots were fired according to Driscoe.

            When he asked Driscoe who had wanted to assassinate Driscoe, Driscoe said, enemies.

            What they wanted, Driscoe said, was to silence me.

            That was the total.

            No resolution.

            The alleged would-be assassins vanished into the story and existed only there.

            A story told with other stories in a shed that was really a garage in a cul de sac.

            By Driscoe, a man in the oddly-sad leisure shoes of the aged.

            And he there to listen by some accident of dirty association.

            From somewhere the final—the only real question—came: where had the money come from?

            There were attempts at answers.

            Lottery.

            Inheritance.

            Dope.

            Multiple created dependents in an elaborate scam to defraud the government aligned to related medical, data, and real estate scams.

            Details hidden behind details.

            Driscoe’s collapse sudden and quick death left in the quiet, paved-over, region forlorn of FOR SALE signs.

            Seemed like a dream of ancient times—Cooboo, that misunderstood, fantasy-based figure not yet fully-evolved to cartoon, and Gratz, for Christ’s sake, like what—the grackle he might be named for, and Driscoe’s kingdom, beneath all of which, the development rested on better not to ask what chemicals.

            As though demolished it would have no presence.

            No weight.

            Garage as idea.

            Gone as though a plague swept through.

            And he left alienated in this place that made him.

            In foolish revolt still—against what?

Greg Mulcahy is the author of Out of Work, Constellation, Carbine, and O’Hearn.

Horse Latitudes

Jamie Black

0-302 ft.

Daddy named me Honus, but everyone’s always only called me what he called me: Onus. Lose the “H.” He told me someday I’d get the joke. I don’t. But there’s lots I don’t get. Like acts of God. Like how to do life, nowadays. But I don’t need to understand things to outsmart them, and that’s what I’m gonna do. I tested the harness this morning and it works. The Bambi, a third the size of the Airstream, moves with me when I walk. It’s just a length of heavy chain wrapped around the tow hook, a couple of seatbelts with towels duct-taped around them attached to that, but it works. I’ve outsmarted the next hurricane. I’m not gonna lose everything, not gonna drown when the next levee breaks.

            Lunchtime, I’ve only gone fifty feet, but I’m already sweating like a fat fry cook. Sun’s up high. Air feels like a fart. Strip down to just a beater, undershorts, and workboots. Undershorts have little pills of cotton on them and they’ve sprouted gills on either side—I’ve got too big for my britches, I guess. Chicken skin of my thighs shows through.

            I look back and I can see the cornbread-colored rectangle of grass where the trailer sat for years. When I look ahead, I get dizzy. It’s three-thousand feet up Aucun Hill, but it’s a trip I’ve gotta make. On the news, I saw this child inside its own house, crying up on top of a six-foot-tall bookshelf. Couldn’t tell if it was a boy or girl, just looked like a wet cat. Dirty water that looked like old antifreeze still rising. I saw grandmas floating face up and face down. Houses crushed and rubbed smooth like sandcastles at high tide. Siding marked with scum lines, like a nuked Cup Noodle. This last hurricane canceled New Orleans, and missed Keener by less than a pit bull’s tooth on the map. I ain’t a gambling man.

            After beans over Sterno, I yoke myself back up. If I had a car, I’d leave town entirely. But Momma’s debt wiped out my bank account. I don’t understand economics neither. Anyways, this is where I live. So, I’m dragging all three-thousand pounds of my home, my entire life, up the side of the mountain, like some goddamn giant metal turtle.


303-627 ft.

            Wind picked up last night. Gusts that sounded like werewolves in heat. Went on for hours and hours, too. Took healthy leaves along with ones that already changed color. Lying all over the place, overlapping upside-down and rightside-up, the ground looks camouflaged. Like the backs of a thousand dead soldiers. I best keep on. Nature’s making war.

            Had to ditch some weight to get up faster. Just a couple of boxes. Kid junk. One-eyed stuffed tigers, Lego bricks, scratched up die-cast cars, that sort of thing. Deflated yellow balloons still tied with grimy strings—the ones they gave me years back, when me and Momma went for breakfast to Shoney’s. Stash it all behind some brambles off the trail. Nothing important. Nothing I need. But I’ll miss it, I think.


628-1000 ft.

            Cormac Delacroix, the Bastard Priest, is the son of a French Quarter whore and an unnamed abortionist who died in a clinic bombing soon after his kid was born. Cormac became a priest, I guess, on account of the guilt. Or because he needed God’s help to hate his folks so much. He hates most everyone and he likes to yell, so I’m not happy to see him rolling down Aucun in his wheelchair, flock clomping, heavy-footed, behind.

             “Look here, children,” he says, rolling to a stop. “It’s the boy what ain’t got faith to come worship since his momma died.” .

             Amen, his people say. Hol-ley-lou-yuh. They nod so fast and hard they look like epileptics. Bastard Priest asks me what in Hell I think I’m doing. I tell him my plan. Ask him, please, to get out of the way. I’m not taking any detours with all three-thousand pounds of my life tied to me.

             “Goin up the mountain?” Delacroix clucks his tongue and his goons shake their heads with shame. “Ain’t you got no faith at all, boy?” He raises a hand from the muddy spokes of his wheelchair and twists his fingers in the thin end of a Catfish Hunter moustache the color of raw French fries.

             “Ain’t got a life jacket, neither.” .

             “Goin up there gonna lead you to ruin, boy. The Devil works in private places. Ain’t you heard? No man’s an island.” A lady with a lopsided perm wipes the greasy, thick lenses of glasses on her gold blouse. “No man’s an island. Laws, no,” she echoes.

            Bastard Priest says something about trusting God. I tell him God done most everything awful in the first place. He says something about God watching over. I think about those flood videos. Wonder who filmed them. Camera sometimes seemed snuck into places only God could get. Bastard Priest tells me even without legs he don’t want for nothing because he’s got God. I tell him, “No, it’s on account of the collection plate and your flock.” .

             “Mysterious ways,” he explains. .

             “Look I just don’t want to drown. And if God did this hurricane, got Momma, maybe I want to be somewhere He can’t find me. So pretty please, get out of my way.” I’m sweating marbles and all my muscles are trembling. Only thing harder than trudging up the mountain with all the weight of my life is trying to stand still. But Delacroix doesn’t move and he jabbers on about how God didn’t take Momma for her boy to turn his back on Him. So I don’t feel bad when I do it.

             “Cormac, you bastard, you need to learn when to keep your mouth shut,” I scream. From the look of his mouth, ain’t no one called him “bastard” to his face in a long while. I only give him a little kick, enough to set him off balance, and rolling into a stump. He flips over, out of his chair. Purple plaid lap blanket hanging over his head, he looks like an ugly ghost. His minions slap me, spit on me, as they rush by to help him. Like I said, ain’t God watching over him, it’s his congregation. Ain’t any lightning. God didn’t do nothing.

             Past some cattails, in a clearing thirty yards away, a girl with hair like sunset on the bayou claps for me. “Don’t you mind those nimrods!” she screams. She bends down and picks up the black handles of what look like two shovels and drags them uphill, behind trees, where I can’t see her anymore.

             I think about her that night, think about Delacroix, while I drag more deadweight into the woods. Momma’s Bibles and hymnals. Pewter-framed pictures of church socials, my baptism, first communion. A hand-painted Virgin Mary that weighs half as much as me. Lord knows I ain’t welcome at our church no more. ’Sides, it’s gonna be easier going without all this to keep me down.


1001-1257 ft.

            Didn’t get as far as I wanted today. Got to wondering about the point of it all. Maybe I don’t drown next time a levee breaks, but I die eventually. Five, twenty, forty years. Dropped cement blocks and rolled the Bambi in front of them, a block behind all four wheels. The sky was still eye blue, and I called it an early day. Even with the padding, the harness marked me. An X of tar black bruises across my chest. Gotta lose more weight.

            I stack my books behind the trash can-sized trunks of giant poplars ten yards off the trail. Textbooks I bought when I had dreams of being a college boy, back before Momma got sick, died, and damn near bankrupted me. When I thought someday I’d leave Keener. Twenty lipstick red leatherbound volumes of the encyclopedia: uncracked spines, gold pages still stuck together. I leave books behind four trees.

            So maybe I never get a good job. Maybe I just settle down and, worst case, my dreams come to slinging drinks at the Blue Law. I come down the mountain once, twice a week to make what I need. Old Harv promised I’d have a job there if I ever needed money. Mixing up mint juleps and boilermakers for all the other hopeless idiots who couldn’t drag their lives any farther than the town they grew up in.


1258-1499 ft.

            Less than a minute after the branch carves a fingernail moon into my cheek, she comes strolling out of a thicket of pricker bushes and pushes her tongue into the wound. Kisses the blood right off my face. Takes my filthy hand, all hairy-knuckled, in hers and says, “I’m Melody.” Her shoulders are almost solid orange with freckles. Her beater is grey and torn up about the hem. She takes a step back behind the bushes and drags two red wagons around the far side. I try to reach out and touch her again, but I can’t. Damn trailer holds me back.

            I try to tell her my name, Onus, but she shushes me, says that ain’t a name. “I seen your license at the Blue Law one time when you left your wallet by the pool cues. Your name’s Honus. Like the ballplayer.” .

            I give it to her. “If you say so.” .

             “I saw you, day before last,” she says. “Yelling at the Bastard Priest. I like the way you carry yourself. Plus, you got eyes like butter-rum Life Savers.” She brushes long bangs that float like spider webs away from her face. She’s got the smallest hands I’ve ever seen. Dirt under short nails and a silver ring on each finger. Her eyes look like broken Rolling Rock bottles pressed into wet clay. “I’m going up Aucun,” she explains. “In case another flood comes this way.” Her lips purse and pucker into a left-of-the-middle smirk while she waits for me to say something. I don’t want to be anyplace else ever again.

             I nod. Introduce myself. Tell her I’m doing the same. She asks if I’m from the trailer park and I tell her the long story so my answer can be No. Momma and I came from Ohio when daddy went in for sixty days on account of beating her up. Momma got sick and died. I got stuck here. “Was supposed to be for just a while,” I say.

             “Well, no one ever lives the life they expect,” she says, then busies herself wiping those hands on her thighs. Those thighs, all light blue denim and little continents of caked mud, they look like a map of the world. Melody pulls her hair out of a ponytail and stretches the yellow tie between her finger and thumb. “Think I might walk alongside you a while,” she says, firing the band at me with a cartoon sound effect. I catch it mid-air. “If you want me, that is.” .

             “I do,” I say. “I do.” I wrap her hair-tie two times around my finger. It’s still wound with strands of her hair, smells like strawberries and soap. We walk on. Can’t ever stand still.


1500-1724 ft.

             Melody’s lashed herself to me with some rope she had in her wagons. She walks in front of me and I hold her hands. We pull all three-thousand pounds of my life up Aucun together. The load seems so much lighter. I can’t get my head around how strong she must be.

            Nighttime is downright chilly. Feels like standing sweaty in front of an open freezer door. Melody wears a drape of a grey sweater and looks like a little girl playing dress-up. She wears it every night, she says, and when she rests her head on my belly I catch the citrus and cinder smell of a thousand smoked cigarettes, sewn right into the wool. Halfway to the top, and I know that this is the very best night I’ve ever lived.

            Melody traces the shape of my bruises with the tip of her pinky and I can feel every swirl in her fingerprint, I swear it. I ain’t even cold no more. She’s all the blanket I need.


1725-1990 ft.

            She takes these double sighs, Melody, like the first one’s a stutter. Like she’s settling in to get really settled in. When she smiles at me, I can see a single white freckle below her lip, mixed in with all the others. Chicken pox scar, maybe. I watch her shoulders all day long, staring at pale spots and waiting for new freckles to form. Her sweat smells like Momma’s chicken noodle soup. When she puts her hand to her chin and turns her neck to crack it, sometimes our eyes meet, and she winks at me.

            She chatters on like a grackle. Asks me all sorts of questions about being a kid. “Don’t really recall being young,” I tell her. Tells me about when she was a kid. Stories are short, but I get the hint and, if her daddy wasn’t all the way back in Keener, I’d kick him in the jimmy. Asks after my hopes and dreams and such, and I got no answers for her. “Future?” I repeat the word as a question of my own.

            Once, she stopped dead and spun to kiss me. One kiss, the first since she cleaned the blood off my cheek before she even knew my name. I feel like a kitten in the window during a lightning storm. Hair on end, can’t think, can’t move. But the three-thousand pounds of my life gives a tug and reminds us of the weight of it all. She turns back and braces herself to walk forward again. I’ll get rid of something later. I never made up for adding her wagons to the load.


1991-2127 ft.

            Steeper still. Where we wind up, I could skip a stone to where we camped last night. Damn trailer’s still too heavy. Melody tries to talk me out of it when she sees what I’m ready to do, but I tell her the truth. “I’d feel better without her,” I promise. “Sometimes it feels like being haunted, carrying Momma everywhere with me. And it weighs so much. Besides, I got another lady in my life now, don’t I?”

            She sits criss-cross applesauce in front of me, blue bandana around one wrist, red around the other. The knees of her jeans are wearing through and, with the full moon peeking between clouds, the white, white skin underneath looks like deer eyes in the dark.

             “Don’t I?”

             “I guess you do,” she says, then turns back to frying up a skillet of canned hash.

            I bury Momma by myself. Takes an hour to dig a hole deep enough, silver urn’s the size of a fire hydrant. Cremains and all, it weighs about sixty pounds. I make a marker with some glue stick, a Polaroid, and the two-by-four from under the short leg of the stove. Pushing dirt back in, I can feel nightcrawlers squirm between my fingers.

             I haul two boxes of Momma’s clothes and diaries off into the woods and leave them behind a boulder half a man high. When Melody yells at me, I say, “Maybe I can come get them later. It won’t flood again this year. I’ll find time. ’Sides, why do I need diaries when I got your mind to keep me occupied?”

             “They say ‘you can never go home again’ for a reason, Honus. You can’t.”

             “You feel like home,” I say. I ain’t lying. She does. Still, seems like a strange thing to say.”

             She pulls up a pantleg to scratch an itch and I see the sharp short hairs on the bone ridge of a skinny shin. Think about those shins tight around my waist, those hairs rubbing my sides raw, leaving a kind of rugburn that would shine in the daylight like the inside of a snake’s mouth. I crawl around the campfire to her. Kiss her knees. “I love you,” I say. And I ain’t lying. I do. She winks at me. Presses my face between her dirty palms and pushes a wet kiss, hours long, between my eyebrows.


2128-2304 ft.

            Melody jumps out of the harness the second I say we’re done for the day, and I almost fall on my ass, skid all the way down Aucun. Already forgot how heavy the Bambi was without her help. She’s been quiet all day. Early, we talked about music and movies, but it turns out we don’t like any of the same stuff. When she comes back from her piss, I’m grunting, my back to a collapsing cardboard box full of cassettes, comic books, and videos. Pushing it over trampled grass and into the weeds.

             “Now what are you doing?”

             “Just getting rid of some heavy stuff. Old tapes I used to like. Boom-box. Nothing I need. Don’t listen to the radio much anymore and I never go to the theater. Guess I’m old enough to not get what people like these days.”

            Melody sneers at me. Box against my shoulder blades, I crab walk it back into the woods and when I come out, she’s got a fire going and she’s digging up flat rocks to circle around it. She stops, wipes her hands on her thighs and tries to light a cigarette. Her stainless steel Zippo won’t spark, so she leans in over the flames, bangs dangling. The smell of singed hair is skunk spray strong. “I don’t get you, Honus,” she tells me. “You told me this morning you liked those things.”

            My bones creak like an old oak rocking chair as I sit down beside her. “Suppose I just realized how stupid they were after we talked. Most of it’s just stuff that one person or another told me to try. I don’t get what people like now and I don’t even like what I liked anymore. It’s all just so much work, to get into tapes and videos and Hollywood and all that. It’s so much weight, I figured I just might as well ditch it.”

             “So what do you like?”

             At first I can’t figure an answer and the feeling’s like the time just after I had long hair, and cut it all off. Kept trying to find it with my hands, tuck it behind my ears. So, I look at her, sort of guilty feeling, and it hits me. “I like you,” I tell her.

             She pokes at the dirt with her finger. Draws a dozen zeroes. Looks up at me without moving her head. Her nostrils flare, the half of her face near the fire is orange, the other half black. “If it’s about weight, why don’t we just leave the trailer here and move the tent up top. Tomorrow, we can use my wagons and take what you’ve got left up there. It’ll take a couple of trips for both of us, but you won’t lose anything else in a rush to get wherever you want to be.”

             Wipe my brow with a black bandana she gave me. “I’m over halfway there, Mel. It’s too late to change the way I do things. Just wouldn’t make sense.”

             She flicks her filter into the fire. Turns her back to it. Says, “It doesn’t have to be just you doing this. I wish you knew that.” Reaches for my hand and pulls the yellow tie off my finger. She tips her head back, careless, and fastens a ponytail. Both our noses twitch with the stink of burning hair. “I’m afraid to see how much I lost,” she tells me, then stands and walks away, brushing the dead leaves and clinging twigs from the swaying curves of her hips and ass.

             Zipping herself into the tent, leaving me by the fire with some cold, salty beef hash, she whispers, “It’s only too late to change when you believe you’re incapable of changing.”


2305-2491 ft.

             I’m up before dawn when Melody squirms out of my arms. Humid outside. Hot. Inside the tent, it feels like a lung. In the corner farthest from me, she’s pulling on a dirty striped tube sock and boot. I reach over to her, clap her one bare foot between my hands. “Hey,” I say and kiss her toes. “I love you.” The black of her eye swells as she stares at me. Her lids droop, and she exhales hard enough to mess my hair. “I’m going,” she says.

            I don’t speak when she tugs her foot away and jams it into a sock. My eyes feel like peeled bark, chest packed with cotton balls and old charcoal. “What do you mean?”

             “I’ll find my own place somewhere. Or maybe I’ll decide to go back to town. I can’t do this. I’m not a superhero. I can’t carry both our lives.” She shoves her foot into a boot. I can smell the cheesy scent of the leather inside and I love it. The boot reaches mid-calf on her chopstick leg, but she doesn’t thread the eyelets, just loops the laces around. Like she’s in a hurry to get gone.

             She crawls out, stands at a distance from the open flap and looks in at me, still on my belly, for a long minute. I try to memorize her. Mask of freckles, small hands, ashy elbows. Smile of belly peeking out from under a black tank top: white, white, white. “I’m sorry. I can’t love you,” she says. “I’m no universe. Good luck.”

             Stay awake on the polyester floor till noon. Instead of Melody, I memorize the placement of each cicada shell abandoned in the corner. Each bent blade of grass, gold and dead. I get up off my belly near eleven. Touch the top of my head with my fingertips, tender like. Feeling for scalp. I’ve shed some short black hairs on the pillow, the kind I know won’t grow back.


2492-2598 ft.

            Melody took everything except her sweater. Left it neatly folded for me. There are two toothpick-thin tan lines on my finger, like those house-side watermarks from the flood, but in reverse. Don’t know how I’m gonna go on alone. Guess I have to admit I didn’t plan this real well. Didn’t make it very far today. Aucun is twice as steep here as when I started. Took the stove out and left it. Doesn’t seem to make any difference. Even almost empty, it weighs so much. Maybe it’s just the steepness, but it seems the emptiness actually weighs more.


2599-2733 ft.

            Been eating nothing but canned tuna and chewable vitamins two days. My piss smells like both. I’m spraying all over my boots when the couple sees me. The woman has fragile flat yellow hair teased into a tumbleweed. Her man wears an ironed polo shirt tucked into olive shorts with a blinking cell phone clipped to his belt. I scream when they walk out from between stationwagon green pines.

            I stammer. “S-sorry. Don’t. . .don’t see too many people on this side of Aucun. All the pretty stuff’s over yonder.” I wave my hand off toward the horizon.

             “We came up for the view,” she explains, breathing hard with every word, like it’s a huge effort. Talking like a queen. “You can see my cousin’s house from up here. It takes hours to get there, though. From up top, you forget how far you’d have to go to get to anything.” She gasps and flutters a hand like a paper fan in front of her mouth, sudden. “Oh, Tad! He’s a pervert!”

            Tad gnaws the end of an unlit cigar clenched between his teeth. Scratches his cheek through three days growth of a salt and pepper beard. “Disgusting,” he snorts. “Real Louisiana trailer trash. Tiny too. Let’s go down the other way, Tab.” They turn their backs on me and march back up to the top, holding hands. Which is about the time I realize my dick is still drooping from my fly. Bead of piss still clinging to the end. All soft and shrunken, it looks like a toe. Ridiculous.

            I relive the experience all day. When I put down for the night, I drag a dusty cedar chest full of magazines into the trees. Penthouse, Hustler, Victoria’s Secret, all gone. After Melody, those women don’t look like anything but ink. Anyways, I’m too old to be thinking about girls all the day. Must be something more worth my while.


2734-2909 ft.

            He’s three times my size and his belly hangs a good six inches over his belt line. He’s got a leather vest and matching cowboy hat. In high-tech plastic sandals, his toes look like bloated pink worms shot through with yellow shards of glass. Says his name’s Hilliard and he’s son of the man who owns Aucun Hill. Says he got word of my plan from someone at church, and he’s resolved to stand in my way till I change my mind.

            Just over a hundred feet to go and hours of daylight left, I’ve gotta stake down for the night. I can’t go around. I start crying, so he helps me shove the blocks behind the Bambi’s tires. My ears are plugged and he keeps trying to reason with me.

             “You can’t survive all alone. With nothing. Without someone’s help. Without paying my daddy lots and lots to build some lines, you can’t have no electric, no gas up there.” He wrings his fat hands, cracking joints, and I shudder with every noise they make. “What you gonna do all alone up there, anyway?” I don’t answer. Insects hum and chirp. Owls hoot. Campfire snaps. “What’s a life without anything or anyone?”

             “What’s life with everything and everyone? Let’s call ’em both ‘running out the clock.’”

             He doesn’t say anything. His shaved head droops ’til it about touches his floppy man-titties. Maybe he’s fallen asleep. I drag a full-length antique silver mirror out to the woods. Toss it on the ground where it shatters, then crawl into the tent Zip myself inside. Raindrops sound like tapping fingers, like static, like a rolling boil. They creep into my dreams.

             When I wake up, Hilliard’s gone and everything’s drenched. All those boxes tucked everywhere down the slope: there really ain’t no going home again.


2910-summit

             It’s bald of trees like the top of a monk’s head. Made it to the top. Three-thousand pounds of my life, three-thousand feet above sea level. Way above any flood. I open the trailer door and check inside to see what’s left. Not much. Sink with no running water, fridge with no power, musty clothes. Cupboard full of canned tuna, franks and beans. Bottled water. Deck of cards. Not much.

             Picture of Momma. Melody’s sweater.

             I wonder, why’d I bother with the fridge if I ain’t got power. I might’ve kept something to read. No one teaches you about this sort of thing, how to do it. How to drag your whole life around and make it where you’re going, same as you were at the beginning.

             Tad and Tab were right. I can see into town. Kids playing baseball, parents gathered round to watch. A sea of faces. The field’s a swampy mess, sure, but it ain’t flooded. There’s decent living everywhere. I hear the crack of a bat when the lanky boy that hit the ball is halfway to first base, running off a dinger. I start to clap, then I remember. Ain’t no one gonna hear me.

             I sit criss-cross applesauce in the mud, slapping cards onto a moth eaten bathrobe. The sky goes from robin’s egg blue to churchwife salmon to orchid purple to busted TV grey, but some things ain’t much good without someone to share them with. If Melody was here, she’d maybe come up behind me, wrap her arms around, push her tiny hands up under my shirt to keep them warm. Tell me that this is some pretty part of heaven and we’re safe, free to be happy forever.

             When it’s dark, I have to stop playing cards. Was boring anyway. Rain cooled everything down. Pull on Melody’s sweater and breathe in the stale smoke and dry sweat scent of her. Air up here is crisp like toothpaste breath, like dragging on a menthol cigarette back up north, in Ohio winter. Wind blows like Velcro pulled fast across your cheek. I walk to the edge and look down on all the little lights in town. Churches, libraries, an office or two. All those people with something important to do. Husbands and wives having supper. Babies taking baths in metal sinks, listening to mommas or daddies reading Goodnight Moon or Winnie the Pooh. All the regular boys are probably planted on their stools at the Blue Law, betting college football. Melody, maybe in the plastic bubble of the bus stop by the post office. So many busy lives.

             It rains for a minute, then quits, then kicks in again. Nature can’t decide whether to advance its front lines. All those busy lives gonna seem fragile as beetle wings when the next one blows in from the Gulf. Least the floodwater can’t touch me up here. Ain’t nothing, no one, can touch me up here.

Jamie Black studied Magical Realism and Metafiction at the State University of New York at Brockport. After that, as is tradition, they continued to tend bar for a decade. They live in upstate New York with their partner and 2.75 cats who have rich interior lives. Their fiction has been published in The Wisconsin Review, Natural Bridge, Amoskeag, Redivider, and Spindrift, as well as several smaller journals.