Category: Web Features

Four Poems

Dorianne Laux

Garage Band

for my brother, Jack

My brother had one, my boyfriend.
Every man I have loved loved music.
Each song a pearl threaded onto a necklace
I have worn all my life.  I see them,
sitting on crates, guitars strapped
over their chests, tools hung
from rusty nails behind their heads,
oil stains at their feet.  A drum beat
so loud every mirror in the house
shook, every window a glass prism
of fragile light.  Was I sixteen
when I first heard them? Saw them
trapped in the boxed garage surrounded
by oily engine parts, coiled hoses,
shovels leaning against battered trash bins,
the air smelling of gas and dust
and stale cigarettes? My brother’s fingers
shuttled across the organ keys,
all of them singing a cover of Jimi’s
“Are You Experienced?”, a guitar string
strangled toward heaven, a compass
crushed under the bass drum’s pedal,
a cousin refusing to go to war, a lapse
in the fabric of time.  My life
has been blessed by these visits
through the gauze of the past.
And weren’t they what we deserved?
Their music booming down
the suburban streets, reminding us
who we were and who we could be,
their beauty and truth, their youth
and exuberance, crashing into
the chronic silence of our lives.

Famous Housedress

My mother’s should be preserved
in a museum, though not pressed
and hung behind glass, a glossy
placard spelling out her name, place
of birth, the years she wore it,
a tiny hyphen floating between them,
but amid a crumpled pile on top
of the washing machine, crushed
flower, her scent rising from
the neckline when a patron lowers
her face to look more closely, to see
the smear of egg yolk along the bodice
like a gold badge pinned above her breast,
or the burn mark on the edge
of the cotton belt she tightened, grime
along the hem where she got down
on hands and knees to scrub between
the tiles with a toothbrush, the skirt a mottled
map of the bathtubs she scoured, the roses
she clipped, stretch marks from the pillows
of her pear-shaped hips, the mushroom-shaped
buttons she lassoed into their holes
encrusted with grease.  The patron
would have to imagine her standing
before a mirror, staring straight ahead
with the eyes of a sphinx, certain
of nothing, her boredom a desert
beyond her shoulders, her lion’s body
buried in eons of sand, her sigh
almost audible in the high-ceilinged room.
This image would haunt each one that saw her,
smelled her, finally understood her mystery
and power, and would henceforth be heard
in the bleachy, airy, musty or oniony
rooms of their days, the only thing
holding them to the earth. 

Jalopy

Under the blown out stars
sounds the lone horn
of the Cucaracha car

the slow rolling music box
of the ice cream truck
rising from the muck

Trumpet vine
ball of twine
yours/mine…

Dig yourself out
from your house
in the ground

flick the dimes
off your eyes
and come dance with me

through the streets, your feet
between sidewalk cracks
twist my back low

twirl and dip and
flip them off
the ones who don’t know

how to bop with a ghost
my holy host
stop with me beneath

the stop sign
it’s red hexagon
a heart chopped down

like a stolen car
parked along the curb
loading and unloading

the gun in your pocket
Lets jump off the dock
unlock the flame inside us

float over to the waters
of Mexico, heave ho
heave into me, weave

me into the singing
of the ringing phone
alone on the pier

swim into the going-gone
sun, our bodies turning rose
as night comes on

smother my wet face
with underwater kisses
I miss you so much

I could drown

The Weight of Days 

Sometimes the months can be weighed
like pounds, twelve in a year.  What weighs
twelve pounds?  One chair. One dog.
Seven crates of tomatoes. One month old
baby.  A double neck guitar someone
shreds ruthlessly, the band behind
trying to keep up.  Sometimes the months
drag, drug like a chair across the dry dirt
of days.  Some years come at a price.
Some marked down, on sale, tagged
“as is”.  Some days line up like siblings
against a wall, each waiting their turn
to be smacked with a ruler.  Or time
can be a beam of light which travels
faster than sound, fastest through air,
slower through water or glass.  A dog
lies on the grass, wagging its tail
until someone comes along
and frees the chain, a key
pressed into the metallic dark.
A year can be a truck on the interstate
loaded with seven crates of tomatoes,
the driver’s wife at home
holding a month-old baby.  Some days
there’s no room for another minute. 
Some years there’s not enough room
for the days.

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Pulitzer Prize finalist Dorianne Laux’s Only As the Day is Long: New and Selected Poems is available from W.W. Norton as are her award winning books, Facts about the Moon and The Book of Men. A text book, Finger Exercises for Poets, is forthcoming from W.W. Norton as well as in January, a new book of poems, Life on Earth. She is founding faculty at Pacific University’s Low Residency MFA and a chancellor of The Academy of American Poets. https://www.doriannelaux.net/

Medication

by Eric Buechel

Jesse was staring down at her when I walked into the room. His face looked puffy like he’d been crying. He leaned down, kissed his mother on the cheek, and whispered something I couldn’t hear.

            A picture of the two of them hung on a thin nail in the bedroom. His mom was wearing a white dress with tiny yellow tulips in the embroidery, holding Jesse’s hand. He was probably five or six in the picture, but I never asked about it since I didn’t want to upset him. It looked like they were at an Easter egg hunt at a church.

             The machines hummed. It reminded me of listening to the waves at the beach when I was younger. Monitors beeped and pulsed around the body, lighting up the bedroom. They diagnosed Jesse’s mom before I had met him in the seventh grade. When she stopped speaking or walking, they put her in a homecare bed to wait until she died. The room smelled sweet, like the bandages needed cleaning. It was a kind of smell you only know about when you’re around rotten skin.

            Jesse and I had been close for a while. My dad had died when I was eight, so it felt like we had something in common. My mom had a boyfriend right after Dad died. He was some type of artist. He built sculptures out of trash in the backyard, and I helped him pick out the right pieces from the neighbor’s garbage can. He let me sip his beer while I handed him cans and broken furniture bits that he balanced and fixed together with twine.

            “I can’t believe people toss this gold,” he’d say, marveling at the variety of artistic supplies he could scrounge. Sometimes, he snuck me R-rated movies to watch on the weekends that I wasn’t allowed to see. I still carried the pocket knife with me that he gave me for my 12th birthday. A few weeks later, he asked for it back while he was drunk, but I told him I lost it at the park. I liked him. He had another girlfriend in Seattle the whole time, and after my mom got pregnant with my sister, he moved away to live with her.

            Jesse put his hands underneath his mother’s torso and lifted her, rolling her over onto her side so the bedsores could breathe. She had that absent look in her eyes like she was looking at a car crash that had just happened and didn’t quite know how to react to it yet.

            Jesse put his face in his hand for a second and looked like he might be crying. I wanted to reach over and put my arm around him. I looked at his long hands and thought about holding one of them in mine for a while. It doesn’t have to mean anything about me, really, I thought. It could just be something friends do.

            I pushed that feeling out of my mind, terrified at what it might signify, and clenched my jaw slightly. Jesse was just rubbing his eyes. He sighed a little, then looked over at me and gestured with his head at the medicine shelf.

            The insurance sent the money to her boyfriend, Marty, who lived in the master bedroom. He spent a lot of time with his new girlfriend, drinking in the kitchen. Whatever homecare he did for Jesse’s mom, I never saw it happen. He seemed too angry to be a nurse, but most adults seemed angry to me then.

            The shelf had stacks of prescription pill bottles neatly arranged on it. We looked through them to see if there was any left to steal. We each picked up the different containers and shook them, hoping for a rattle, but they were all empty except for a stool softener and a blood pressure medication.

            “She’s supposed to get a new prescription delivered sometime soon, I guess,” Jesse said. I don’t think Jesse felt good about it, but his mom hadn’t spoken in so long that he probably just wanted to get high to forget about her. He told me once he talks to her all the time since she’s his only real family. Marty probably wished Jesse wasn’t around at all. I only ever saw them yelling at each other.

            “Let’s go,” I said. Jesse turned around and shut the light off. The glow from the machines made the dark of the room seem possessed.

            As we shut the door, we heard Marty’s new Charger pull into the driveway. He’d put on an aftermarket muffler when he got it. It made a loud gurgle that echoed off the garage door while he was in the driveway. Jesse told me that the neighbors had complained about the noise, and then Marty had threatened to break their car’s windows with a golf club. He got pretty wild after his shift at the hospital; so, usually I timed my visits so he wouldn’t be there. We snuck quietly into the kitchen.

            “I don’t want you to be bringing people in that room,” Marty said, catching us just as we made it to the sliding glass door to the backyard. He slurred a bit. His red hair was unkempt and pointed in different directions, making him look like a broken clown.

            “It’s just Gabe,” Jesse said.

            “I don’t care who it is,” Marty said. “Did you check the mail today?”

            “No. I mean, I did, but it didn’t come yet,” Jesse said while he inched us closer to the door.

            “Shit.” He looked tired with his nurse scrubs dirty and covered in wrinkles. The hospital shift must’ve been busy. He opened the freezer and brought out some vodka with ice caked around the bottom of the bottle. “I know you’ve been stealing those pills.” He poured the liquor into a small, blue-colored plastic tumbler. She needs them, not you, you little bastard.” Jesse didn’t respond. Marty got a big jug of cranberry juice out of the refrigerator for his cocktail. On the fridge door was a picture of girlfriend Alexis that he must’ve recently put up.

            “What the hell’s that up for?” Jesse said.

            Marty stirred the drink with his finger then licked it clean. He stared back at us. His eyes were glassy, and I knew we had to leave. 

            Jesse got as mad as Marty sometimes, almost like they were related, and I could tell then he wanted to scream. I took his arm and led him outside before Marty could hit him. We walked out and grabbed the bikes in the grass of the backyard. I tried to catch Jesse’s eyes to tell what he was thinking, but he wouldn’t look at me.

            Some of the trees were already beginning to shed. Our bikes left a divot in the thin pile of leaves as we rode past the boundary that separates the east side of town from the west. Susan’s ice cream stand was open until dark, which still gave us some time. I looked up along the hillside and the bridge where cables of light came through the smatter of dark clouds, brightening up the golden edges of maple leaves as they turned yellow. I could feel the first real edge of cold in the air. It burned on the low end of my breath when I took a deeper one.

            Jesse rode ahead of me like he usually did, leaning back on the bike’s seat and coasting casually down the hill. When he was far enough in front, he took his feet off the pedals and spread them out in a V shape. I pumped in a low gear, trying to catch up, but he was older than me and encouraged with the ropy muscles adolescence had thrust on him overnight. As I finally inched closer, I could see he was smiling in the breeze of the ride. When he smiled, his cheeks bunched up around the speckles of acne scars. They were healing purple craters all down from his temple to chin. I couldn’t help but smile too. I know everyone thinks you should be ashamed of scars like that, but I always thought they looked nice on Jesse. He had a happy face, even if his life at home wasn’t any good.

            Mine wasn’t good either, but I guess that’s the age we were. Looking at the other kids in our class, by comparison, made me clench my teeth, but I don’t know if their life was any happier than Jesse’s or mine. It just looked that way.

            Once the hill curved back up, we pushed back into our pedals and towards the bridge where the tents were. Ever since I could remember, the parking lot near the bridge’s underbelly had been a campsite for the homeless people in town. Faded blue and red second-hand tents formed a makeshift village. Scattered trash and panhandling signs had spilled into the street near the camp. We weaved around the plastic cups, plastic bags, and broken needles, then up towards Susan’s.

            Jesse got a blackberry milkshake, which I decided against since my mom always told me that the fruit flavors were all artificial, and I got a butterscotch one with a scoop of peanut butter mixed in for fifty cents extra. We walked our bikes and shakes to the curb and sat where we could oversee the parking lot. The shakes were too thick to pull through a straw, so we waited for them to melt. Jesse took the top off and poked at the ice cream with his finger to get it to thaw quicker.

            A man was picking up cigarettes on the other end of the parking lot. He pinched them and poured the tobacco out in tiny flakes into a plastic shopping bag. He was shaking a bit; he looked sick with something.

            “Hell,” Jesse said,” taking a labored sip from his shake,” I feel kinda bad for him. I should just give him one, huh?”

            “Where’d you get smokes?” I said, my ears tingled a little.

            “Marty had them, only have three.”

            When Marty was drinking, Jesse would sometimes pocket a few of his cigarettes. Marty usually just figured he’d smoked them himself unless Jesse got greedy and took the whole pack.

            “Here,” Jesse handed me one and walked over to the man. 

            I lit mine immediately and took a drag before taking a sip of my shake. The salt and the sweet, all mixed in with the taste of smoke, gave me a quick headrush that felt nice. I kicked a couple of brown and golden leaves next to my feet that were piling up and rotting in the parking lot. It was too cold for ice cream, but I was still warm from the ride, my sweat cooling the fabric on the back of my shirt. Jesse handed the guy a cigarette. The man tore off the filter and lit it right away with a book of matches. I could see them talking about something, but I was too light-headed and enjoying myself to care. For a moment, I felt content. They walked back over. Jesse was grinning with his cheeks all wrinkled up with scars.

            “Gabe, this Isaac,” he pointed at the man, “Isaac said he’ll buy us beer. What kind of cash you got?” I had exactly six dollars. Jesse, for some reason, had ten.

            “Perfect,” Jesse said as I handed him the money. The bills were damp from my sweat since I didn’t have a wallet, and I felt embarrassed about it. Jesse didn’t seem to notice. He smoothed the bills flat in his hand, stacked them up, licked his finger as if imitating a serious checker at the bank, and counted them out. He handed the stack to Isaac, who put it in his pocket without counting them.

            “Gotta go get my ID,” he said. He was looking past us when he said it like he was staring at something further off.

            “Why do you need that?” I said, “no one’s gonna ID you.” He looked like he was fifty years old. I looked at Jesse, who shrugged it off. Isaac turned and walked towards the bridge. We followed, walking our bikes. I figured the money was gone.

            We walked past the sifting swoop sounds of rush hour traffic and down the hill. After about a half-mile, before the bridge, Isaac turned left and pushed through a thick patch of blackberry bramble and pine branches, then disappeared. I tried to catch Jesse’s eyes.

            “He said he could get pills too, Jesse hissed, following Isaac through the branches. I waited for a second, then decided I might as well follow. I didn’t have to be home for a few more hours. I took one last sip of my shake and left the still half-full cup on the concrete, hoisted my bike up over my shoulder, and wobbled in. Bramble vines stuck in the spokes, and the ground was too soft and wet to balance on. I fell forward and onto a pathway that was so well maintained and smooth it looked like it should be in a park near a mansion.

            The ends of branches were tied up at their tips, forming a lattice above us that made me feel like I was walking through a portal to a lush garden. Bits of trash, woven together in little stick figures and dream catchers, hung from all over. Chunks from a tin can, cut up with a serrated knife to look like tinsel, reflected bits of the light it could catch in tiny flashes of pure white.

            Isaac plodded along in front of us, muttering to himself words I couldn’t understand besides the curses. The path winded downwards and finally opened up to the sky near the water, where we could see the bridge’s backside. It was an angle I had never seen, and I realized the camp spread out much further from what I had imagined it did from everyone else’s view on the side of the road. The whole of it seemed to stretch for miles.

            Old cardboard boxes lined the path, so pushing my bike was smoother even though it was still wet from the rain.

            “Mindy’s got my ID,” Isaac said, breaking up his incomprehensible mutter. “We gotta go see Mindy.”

            He curved into the camp, which I now saw was more than just used tents and tarps. Pallets were stacked to build castle-like barriers from one dwelling to the next. Repurposed appliances lined the pathways like futuristic cobblestones. Camp stoves and tiny firepits glowed in dwelling areas where people cooked. Shopping carts were all over. I had never seen so many. They carried people’s belongings, acting as a dresser or a car for some people. Each one had its unique pile of junk in it. One of them had piles and piles of bike parts. Another was full of what looked like old groceries left too long in the sun. A man turned a hunk of meat on a spit over the crackle of flame in an old coffee can. I watched him throw the plastic wrapper in the heat and heard it crinkle.

            This Mindy was mending a rip in her pants with a spool of cinnamon dental floss. You could see the criss-cross pattern of red where she’d already gone over. It looked sturdy enough. She sat next to an old pitbull with markings on it like a brown and white spotted cow. It wagged its tail a little when we got close. Otherwise, it looked nailed down to the cardboard, too exhausted to attempt a sniff at our pant legs.

            “Need my ID,” Isaac said to Mindy. She looked up at him for a second without talking, like they were communicating through thoughts. Then she got up and walked off further into the camp. The dog leaped up like it touched an electric fence and trotted off behind her with a grin on its face, its pink gums full of drool dripping onto the cardboard on the ground.

            “Wait a few minutes,” Isaac said, not addressing Jesse or me directly. “Doc’s coming soon.” He lay down on some paper and curled his knees under his arms. I could hear him swearing. He started to shiver so hard I thought he might be having a seizure. I touched his shoulder and tried to get him to turn over, but he rolled away from me and moaned.

            “What guy?” asked Jesse. Isaac didn’t answer. He pushed his forehead into the dirt and made a high-pitched sound. 

            It was twilight by then. The autumn light was darkening quickly, and I was starting just to wish I wasn’t there.

            Mindy came back with Isaac’s tattered ID card. Her dog chased a Shepard pup away, nipping at its tail. They circled each other, growled then sped off into the camp like they were friends. Mindy laughed at it and didn’t seem to think Isaac on the ground was anything much to be concerned over. She saw I was scared and put her hand on my shoulder.

            “S’alright hon, he’s just getting sick without his meds. The doc will be here soon. He’ll be okay.”

            “What’s wrong with him?” Jesse asked.

            “Just dope sick,” Mindy said. “He needs a bunch of other stuff too, but he doesn’t have ways to get it. Pills will help him calm down.”

            We stood and looked at the man, shuddering and clenching his jaw. I felt like I shouldn’t be watching. I looked over at Jesse, and he was facing the other direction, looking at someone coming towards us.

            A stringy-looking man with black pools for eyes walked up.

            “Are you boys in some kind of bike gang?” he said. He laughed at his joke, and we clung to our bikes a little tighter. He had burn scars up and down his arms that were raised and irritated from scratching.

            “Let me see that,” he said as he started to reach for my bike. I stood dumb and unmoving. I thought about the knife in my pocket but knew it wouldn’t help much. He grabbed the handles as I held onto the seat post. I fingered the knife in my pocket, but I was too scared to pull it out.

            “Stay back!” Jesse yelled out at him. He was loud but still sounded small. The man wrenched the bike from me and hopped on.

            “Ooh wee, this is a nice one,” he said, pedaling around in a circle and smiling. “Real, real nice.”

            Jesse dropped his bike and ran towards him, colliding with his whole body weight into the man’s side, knocking him down. He landed with a hollow thud, his arm twisted back behind him, with his teeth in the dirt. Stunned, his big black eyes wide open, he began to howl. Jesse picked up my bike and brought it back over to me. People were looking at us then. A few of them started walking towards the hurt man on the ground. “Shit,” Jesse said. A half-circle of the camp residents began to crowd us.

            “Who are you?” somebody yelled out at us. Someone else threw a bottle. It hit the side of my neck and bounced off my bike to the ground. I felt it, but it didn’t hurt then. I looked back at Isaac and realized he was gone. Looking past the crowd, I could see him headed towards a man parked in a car that looked sort of familiar.

            “Isaac!” I called out after him, but he was too far off to hear us. A couple of the people turned around and saw who it was.

            “Doc’s here,” I heard a few of them say. They began to peel off, one or two at a time, and head towards them.

            We ran, wheeling our bikes fast over the lumpy ground. We took a route up the side of the bridge that was steep but passable. Looking back, I could see the group crowded around the car that had driven to the side of the camp. I felt a tingling feeling that went from the base of my spine to somewhere in my forehead, where it settled. Marty’s red hair was visible from this distance. He passed small bags of something to the men and women that swarmed around his vehicle, exchanging them for wads of dirty bills.

            “What’s he doing here,” Jesse said, “let’s go before he sees us, c’mon.” he pulled at the back of my shoulder.

            “He’s selling something,” I said. Then a sinking feeling came over us both, knowing that we’d lost our money.

            “We could wait for a bit, then go try and get the cash,” Jesse said.

            “It’s gone, man,” I said.

Back at Jesse’s, Marty’s girlfriend was watching television on the couch and smoking a cigarette. We walked past her without saying anything. In the kitchen, Jesse grabbed the garbage lid off and started digging out the insides. He pulled out some empty microwave dinner packets and fast food bags, then he found it. A white prescription bag, with his mom’s name on it and today’s date, crumpled up and empty.

            Jesse looked down at the bag and wrinkled up his face, then threw it on the floor with the rest of the trash and walked towards his mom’s room.

            He turned his mom back up and over, finishing his chore for the day. She groaned. It sounded like it came from somewhere far off, like the third echo down a canyon in an old cartoon.

            “Mom?” he said down into her face, “Mom, can you talk?”

            But she couldn’t.

            I wanted to stay, but I had to be home. Jesse’s face was puffy, and he looked older, like in his twenties already. Marty’s girlfriend laughed at something on the television in the other room. I said goodbye to Jesse, but he didn’t say it back.

            “I’ll see you at school tomorrow,” I said. I looked at Jesse’s shoulders, skinny in his thin shirt, and wished I could wrap my arms around them. “Love you, man.” He didn’t turn around.

            I left. I didn’t know what else there was to do. If I didn’t get home by ten, my mom would drunkenly call the cops. It’d happened before. I went outside alone and picked up my bike. I felt a bad feeling all over like something was going to happen that I didn’t want to, but I couldn’t help. It moved around my chest like something had burrowed there that shouldn’t have. The streetlights were on, I could hear the buzz in the cold, and for a moment, I watched a couple of moths bump into each other near the glow. The Charger pulled in just as I walked off the driveway. I ducked behind the neighbor’s rotten fence and held my breath while Marty walked inside. The car’s engine clicked and tittered as it cooled. I sat for a moment, thinking, then got up and took out my knife.  It felt heavier than it should in my hand as I pushed the blade’s tip into the tire’s center bulge. At first, nothing happened, but I worked it in until it punctured. Rubber-thick air gushed into the night until the rim touched the driveway.

            I pushed down hard on my bike pedals towards home. The wind stung the skin under my eyes, and I wished I was drunk or asleep. Maybe someplace far off and away from anybody. The street lights flickered dimly, just barely light enough for me to see the road.

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Eric Buechel is a writer from the Pacific Northwest. He has a BA in Psychology from The Evergreen State College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he was the fiction editor for Lumina and taught in the Right to Write program through Westchester County Corrections. He works as an editor and English tutor.

Three days from The Weird Years

by Ryan Ridge and Mel Bosworth

The Day the Missionaries Came to the Door

I spied them through the peephole and thought, okay, let’s have some fun. “One second,” I said, and then I went out the back door and circled to the front. I took my phone from my back pocket and began an imaginary conversation, a loud one. “Yeah, so what?” I said. “What does that mean to me? I don’t care about any moose. Well, this isn’t a normal situation.” I didn’t know what I was planning to do and that’s when I lost sight of where I was going. I tripped on an exposed tree root and landed chest first onto the pointed hat of a lawn gnome. It pierced my heart. The missionaries saw the whole thing go down and came running over, dark robes flowing in the breeze. They sat me up against a tree trunk and told me to press hard on the hole in my chest. One missionary sat with me while the other phoned for help. The one who phoned for help said they’d meet the ambulance at the end of my driveway, and then they took off running. I looked at the missionary who stayed behind who was now holding my right hand since my left hand was pressed to my chest. I said, “I know you.” “I don’t think so,” they said. “Sure I do,” I said. “You’re Tommy Pinata.” “No,” the missionary winced. “That’s not me.” But I was certain it was. I remembered the red hair and freckles. The Wiffle ball bat. Our cruelties as children. I said, “It’s you, Tommy. I remember. We were real bastards to you when we were kids. And I dated your sister for a little while when we got older. Come to think of it, I wasn’t very good to her either.” I held my heart, and he held my hand. The blood came through my fingers in great whooshes. I said, “I’m sorry, Tommy. I’m sorry for all the mess I made.” He reached beneath his robe and took out a candy bar. He peeled the wrapper back with his teeth, then he put the end in my mouth. I didn’t have the strength to bite and chew, but I tongued it for a while. It tasted delicious. He took the bar out of my mouth. “My favorite,” I said. “Your sister used to give those to me.” Then I asked, “How is your sister?” Then I asked, “Will anyone remember me?” Then I asked, “What’s on TV tonight?” Then I died in the missionary’s tears, though to me they felt like raindrops.  

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The Day the Corner BAR Was Closed

Dean lost his shit. He pointed and said, “My office!” I stepped into his office and closed the door. He said, “I’ve lost my shit. I can’t find it anywhere. Where is it?” I had no idea. I laughed and said, “What?” He said, “Don’t laugh. It’s serious.” He smacked his open palm on his desk. “This is the last straw, Crenshaw. Your colleagues all despise you and now this. It can’t continue. It won’t. You won’t.” I said, “I don’t know anything about any of this, and I’m not Crenshaw. I’m Schrodinger. Crenshaw doesn’t work here anymore. Hasn’t for a while.” “Well,” Dean said, “that makes two of you. Pack your stuff and go.” Tobin from Sales, a renowned eavesdropper, tripped through the doorway, laughing. Dean said, “Something funny? You’re laughing at this man’s misery? I fire him, and you think it’s hilarious? You’re a terrible salesman and a worse regular man.” He smacked Tobin across the face, and Tobin laughed. He said, “Oh, you think that’s funny?” “Yes,” said Tobin, kicking Dean in the balls, and now Dean laughed, too. “Why are you guys laughing?” I said. “None of this is funny.” “To keep from crying,” Dean said. “Same,” said Tobin. Then they laughed and laughed and laughed until they were crying laughing. Then they were just crying, and I mean sobbing. I said, “Hey, it’s all right. It’s okay.” Dean shook his head and said, “Every day is a nightmare. I need a drink.” “Me, too,” Tobin said. “I’ll join you,” I said. We went to the corner bar, but the corner bar was closed. A sign on the door said: “Closed for business due to my health. Thanks for the memories and the money, but mostly the money. –Karl” The note prompted Tobin to sob. Dean followed suit. I even teared up, too. It’d been an emotional day. “Group hug,” I said. We stood there on sidewalk hugging and crying until an old guy in a wheelchair rolled and up and said, “Looks like you folks could use some booze.” “The bar’s closed,” I said. “Says who?” the guy in the wheelchair said. “Says Karl,” I said, pointing at the note. He shook his keys like a tambourine. “I am Karl,” he said. “Come on. You can cry into your beers in here.” At that moment, Dean tripped and fell into the street and got hit by a bus. It was a school bus. He was dead. The bus driver got out and attempted CPR in vain. “School’s out forever for him,” Karl said to the driver. “I never liked that guy,” Tobin said to me. “Me neither,” I said to him. “First round is on the house,” said Karl to us. “Right on,” a nearby homeless person said. He parked his shopping cart next to the door and followed us inside. For a solid hour, I managed to approximate happiness. 

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The Day You Crowdfunded a City

You said, “There’s a ghost town for sale on the internet. It’s only a million dollars.” “That’s out of our range,” I said. “Not if we crowdfund it,” you said. I shrugged.  You got to work, and by noon the fundraising page had been shared nearly three thousand times. In just a few short hours you’d amassed nearly two hundred thousand in cold cash. Donors ranged from likable cousins to total strangers with deep pockets. This was getting serious. I went to the corner cowboy store to pick out a cowboy getup. A few leathery sharpshooters with small, hawk-like eyes haunted the place. I told them I needed it all from hat to boots to pistols. As the proprietor took my measurements, I noticed a quiet soul crouched in the corner, his lower lip bulging with what I assumed to be tobacco. My suspicion was confirmed when his narrow chin jutted forward and he arched a dark brown rope into a brass spittoon. The clumpy juice tailed cleanly through the center of the rim. “Nice shot,” I said. He pinched the brim of his hat. “Much obliged,” he said. I stepped behind a red curtain and stepped out of my old getup and into my new ensemble. It felt good. When I stepped out from behind the curtain, the men in the store had faded, and they began to flicker like broken computer screens, the insides of their outlines popping with brilliant, cinematic footage from vintage westerns: rickety wagons churning up dust, buxom women in ruffled dresses sipping from tiny teacups, jagged mountains of red rock roasting beneath wide open skies, polished six-shooters sliding into well-oiled holsters, and straw-haired children daydreaming on wooden fences near pastures of steers lazily grazing. The proprietor came back into focus as he wheeled a full-length mirror in front of me. I blinked hard, and then I blinked again. I gasped. I looked so awesome I took my breath away. I felt the room lift with ethereal enthusiasm. “We’ve been looking for you, son,” said the tobacco slinger, rising from his crouch. “The world has been looking for you.” I was getting emotional, and I felt like I needed to cry, and then my phone vibrated with a text from you that read: “We got the ghost town!” I stuffed the phone into my back pocket and slipped my six-shooters from their holsters. My chest swelled with a mighty wind, and I let loose a long and glorious howl. The store joined in and then the store filled with smoke and pistol reports as we sent celebratory bullets tearing through the ceiling. We’d all be ghosts soon. I couldn’t wait.

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Mel Bosworth is the author of the novel Freight, and co-author with Ryan Ridge of the short fiction collection Second Acts in American Lives. His work has appeared in Hayden’s Ferry Review, Tin House, New World Writing, Santa Monica Review, Melville House, American Book Review, and elsewhere. He lives in Western Massachusetts.

Ryan Ridge is the author of four chapbooks as well as five books, most recently, New Bad News(Sarabande Books 2020). He has received the Italo Calvino Prize in Fabulist Fiction, the Linda Bruckheimer Prize in Kentucky Literature, and the Kentucky Writers Fellowship for Innovative Writing from the Baltic Writing Residency. His work has been featured in American Book Review, DIAGRAM, Denver Quarterly, Passages North, Salt Hill, Santa Monica Review, and Southwest Review, among others. He is an assistant professor at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah, where he co-directs the Creative Writing Program. In addition to his work as a writer and teacher, he edits the literary magazine Juked. He lives in Salt Lake City.