Opening Note ~ In 1893 Henry C. Wood published one of the first self-help books, IDEAL SUGGESTIONS THROUGH MENTAL PHOTOGRAPHY. Mr. Wood’s theory, coinciding with the advent of photography in popular culture, maintained that one’s brain could photograph positive affirmations or “Ideal Suggestions.” The “solar light” of the camera corrected the “lunar imbalance” of the lunatic or otherwise morally flawed individual. In many asylums it was popular to dress the commited in fancy attire and take their portrait. After, the photographed individual would view their evolved “moral version” as part of their correctional therapy.
Over the last five years, I have watched films while simultaneously photographing them, shooting approximately 450 images per film, as part of a larger installation project concerned with generating a divinatory poetics. While photographing, I attempted (and failed) to memorize the dialogue and storyline, and then narrate each film still. I then put this existing language through an exercise outlined in Henry C. Wood’s book, at times invoking and disrupting his language. After, I “took pictures” of the text/image pieces with my brain, and attempted to be redeemed from various moral flaws, which in turn prompted additional revisions of the text.
In this excerpt, I attempt to recover from love through brain-photographing images from Jeff Kanew’s 1984, Revenge of the Nerds.
Lovers separate. Thought confers realism upon ideal
entities. Or: just plain old piss poor conditions. What we
dwell upon we become, or at least God, if it be God, moves
across the waters. It is easy for God to be morally correct
and also a tattoo of some shitty initials on some girl’s neck.
The vision must be clarified. Do this: through the medium
of the outer eye engrave it on the tablet.
True, forms are built by subtle devices, but are also
shadows. Dust is seized through its living potency and
later it is fashioned. Our materialism upon the seen is so
dull and this whole potluck is lame. Every dish is some
shitty hippie casserole. To build with enduring material we
must build with bones. Here as much as in the hereafter. I
hereby link myself to exuberance. My trust is in what I
cannot see. Through it, I am drained.
Lover is the given name. It represents the type manifested
through a dead body. Both of our bodies are already
within, but remain undiscovered. We were children and
we made children. And are crucified in the lower-self
made through suffering. We rise, resurrection. So just
relax and let me finish the sex act.
The Lover perception is self-evident. We were taught that
only unfolding beings need corrective disciplines, the old
timey growing pains of good. We must have an experience
in matter. Hell is a bunch of fuckin’ junk. In constructing
our water park, we should leave it out. Those words of the
Lover, so often repeated, FEAR NOT, are significant. They
are religious and also scientific.
The fact that I am the Lover’s child dissipates the mist. In a
vastly deeper and more vital sense I am the child of the
Lovers who I also was. We have called ourselves Loretta
and Conway. There is no surer way of becoming so and so
then to think so. The Lover’s image must break in line, fuck
all the others, we are getting to the front.
Selah Saterstrom is the author of SLAB (forthcoming), The Meat and Spirit Plan, and The Pink Institution (all published by Coffee House Press). Her work can be found in Bombay Gin, Tarpaulin Sky, Fourteen Hills, and other places. She teaches and lectures widely and is on faculty in the University of Denver’s graduate creative writing program.
Two Stories
Paul Lisicky
Liberty
The father wanted to go to the top. The boy wanted to back up, but it was too late to back up. They were forty steps into her gown. The herd behind them pushed them upward, forward. It was a cave of smells now (dust, sweat, foot powder, makeup), cooked by the heat of the spotlights. Shoes clonked on the planks. The steps wound round and round. Was the father thinking about the mother left behind? The father had other things on his mind. Maybe that was why the boy needed to sit down and rest. If the father had done his share of the work, the boy wouldn’t have had to worry for two.
The mother trembled inside the gift shop on the ground. The boy felt her down there, even if he couldn’t see her face. He didn’t need eyes for that. Her heartbeat—he heard it. Her posture—he felt it in his back. She smelled a little like starch—or bread, but bread taken out of the oven too soon.
Then the father and he were in the crown. The room was so tight that he looked up at the father, who didn’t look down. Legs knocked him this way and that. He couldn’t get to the window. They were at the top of the world now. Only the torch was higher. People were shoving him toward the back. They wanted the windows. There was something to see down there and they were going to get to it, no matter what it took. But when the stranger carried him forward, lifting him up under the armpits— where had the father gone?—he didn’t see the mother he’d hoped to see. All he saw was some girl, some fleck in the grass. She raised her fist, held the invisible book to her chest, as if laughing at the statue that cast a shadow on her.
They got down, the father and the boy. Somehow they made it without falling through the gown. But where was the mother? There was no mother. And when the boy looked up at his father to see how he felt about this, the father smiled, eyes drifting to the take out stand. Would you like a hot dog? he said.
The boy shook his head yes, though he didn’t want a hot dog.
Then order it yourself, the father said, as if such a thing were obvious.
The boy took the dollar and put it on the counter. In minutes a hot dog was passed over to him. It lay in its bun, in a crinkled paper boat, with a red checkerboard pattern. A pump of yellow paint sat on the counter, and the boy wondered why anyone would want to paint a hot dog bright yellow.
Still, that didn’t stop him from pumping the handle with abandon, splashing himself.
Where is my husband? the voice said. I lost my husband. What did they do with my husband?
It was the mother. crying so hard, she didn’t feel the boy tugging at her jacket. She didn’t see the yellow paint all over his face, which felt like another end. It tasted of mustard, and he kept on eating it off his fingers, waiting for her to look at him again.
Beach Town
The birds can go elsewhere. The maritime forest? Let it burn to the ground. The palms along the causeway can go up with it. The spiders, the fleas, the rats, the snakes: any living creature that lives in the leaves. They can burn up, too. Ruby thinks these thoughts while she volunteers at the beach town bird sanctuary, dispensing wisdom to the schoolchildren bused in from the mainland. They all think she’s a nice lady in her aqua sundress and her benign smiling face. The wrens who eat nuts and seeds out of her hand think she’s a nice lady too. Is she a nice lady? She wonders whether she doesn’t think enough about that question. She thinks a lot about her house in the woods, the house with the anchor patterns on the shutters, the house she’s lived in since childhood. She thinks a lot about selling it to a rich young couple who will surely destroy it. She’ll watch the bulldozer ramming the sun room where her mother once poured cereal. She’ll look at the accomplishment and indifference on the young couples’ faces, then she’ll drive back to the new condo she’s bought on the mainland, with its granite and stainless steel and cobblestone drive— every amenity she despises. Isn’t that what they call them these days? Amenities?
There is an awful chorus of horns one morning. The black snake with the pink spots is once again sunning itself in the road. It is the same snake that has scared the neighborhood senseless for the past week. Ruby feels friendly to the snake. She is a great appreciator of the way it has frightened the children, making them cower inside their houses, in front of their laptops and Gameboys at night. Ruby leaves it a dish of milk by the front door before she goes to sleep, and when it is morning, it is almost empty, with only a few drops left. It makes her happy that the snake is drinking her milk. Maybe she will go on-line some night to find out what a good snake eats.
Now the new couple next door is out waving their arms over their heads. They are blurred with fury. They are shouting at the driver of the Land Rover, with his righteous, twisted face behind glass. He wants to go forward. The snake is as still as a question mark. It will not move, and the car is full of passengers who are hungry. They will not be stopped for one more minute. The young couple cannot stand that there are people like the passengers of the Land Rover in the world. The way they plead and cajole, you might think the neighborhood has always been just for them, built in anticipation of their arrival. The horn hurts Ruby’s ears. It cuts right through the center of her. And for just this reason alone, Ruby rushes out the front door in her nightie and grabs the snake. The snake is cool and luscious in her hands. The palms go silent. The horn goes silent. The snake hunches left, right, it turns its face directly toward Ruby’s face. It is asking her a question. It wants something of her. Yes, I know what you are, Ruby answers, though she holds those words in her head instead of speaking them. And just as the snake seems to close its eyes and sigh and shrink into itself in delirious pleasure, it lunges forward and jabs Ruby in the breast. Ruby moistens her bottom lip. The young couple is too shocked to scream. And just as Ruby begins to take in the clean sharp cut of the bite, the glistening needles of it, the snake goes back in a second time, and the purification she didn’t know she’d been seeking begins to have its way with her.
Paul Lisicky is the author of Lawnboy, Famous Builder, The Burning House, and Unbuilt Projects. His work has appeared in Fence, Ploughshares, The Rumpus, Tin House, Unstuck, and other magazines and anthologies. He is the New Voices Professor at Rutgers University and he teaches in the low residency MFA Program at Sierra Nevada College. A memoir, The Narrow Door, is forthcoming from Graywolf in 2014.
Red Owl
by Brandon Hobson
I live in a small town called Red Owl, where the mayor likes to get avocado facials. From Fulton Road, which runs north into town, some mornings you can see him sitting on his front porch, thumbing through the newspaper, his face caked in green. Most evenings he sits wearing his monogrammed slippers, sipping Polish vodka and listening to the smooth jazz FM station. Before bed he steps outside and waves a flashlight to check for trespassers. Ever since a group of teenagers from Crawford destroyed his mailbox with a baseball bat he’s been paranoid. He’s a man who’s afraid of everything, including cities. “Life is too fast paced,” he tells me. “I like quiet places. Red Owl is a quiet place.”
This is what it’s like to live in Red Owl: with fall’s dying leaves a redtailed hawk returns to its same nesting tree, in blowing wind, and red-winged blackbirds gather at the windowsill. There are opossums and skunks in the assemblage of trees across Fulton Road. At night they creep around outside and look for mice. My house sits in the country, down the road from an amber pond with moss on the bank. The pond is a decent place to fish, full of catfish and largemouth bass. I’ve seen bullfrogs and yellow-striped ribbon snakes there. I’ve seen a muskrat swimming toward the bank. In the mornings, as I walk down to the mailbox, several cedar waxwings with apple-blossom petals in their beaks sit on a branch, watching me. Early mornings in spring a fog hangs over the road. I’ve just moved here to Oklahoma, where I grew up many years ago. I have no family here, no real connection anymore, other than I lived here briefly as a child when my father taught at a small college near Tulsa. I’m now a widower. I’m now far away from Boston, only six months into my retirement. After my wife Margaret died, I wanted to move somewhere far away, somewhere quiet. I felt I needed to return to a place from my childhood.
At one time, many years ago, Margaret and I lived and worked in Boston. It’s a life I miss, but that life is gone. I’m far away from the tunnel traffic from I-93 to Albany Street and the yellow lights of the city; far from the morning jogs from the waterfront near UMASS, past the JFK Library and Museum to Castle Island to Broadway; far from the Back Bay brownstones, Copley Square, the architecture of Trinity and Old South Church; far from the North End, with its Italian restaurants and men who yell at each other as they unload trucks; far from the pubs, the good chowder and pale ale, the buildings, Commercial Street’s harbor with its dark water; far from the walks along the Charles River Parkway, the summer concerts in the park, Cambridge, Cape Cod, the view of the Prudential Tower from a sailboat at sunset; far from Fenway; far from the Red Sox and the Bruins and the Patriots and the Celtics.
The nearest city is sixty miles from my house. On my back porch you can sit outside for hours and study how branches interlace, which is riveting when you mix scotch and Xanax. After I moved in, I spent a week storing boxes in the musty attic with its scent of cedar and mothballs. The attic is now full of boxes of useless items: batteries, steel-wool buffer pads, my son’s old motorcycle magazines, paperback books and comic books. There are kerosene lamps and cloth-covered picture albums of our children and grandchildren. There are flashlights and paintbrushes and spiral notebooks and old greeting cards. There are boxes of toys I’ve never gotten rid of: wind-up plastic boats, racecars, a wooden Mickey Mouse doll, a stuffed white rabbit, a miniature bird cage, a tiny plastic house with a red roof, and so on. There are so many things I’ve kept over the years I no longer know what’s trash and what isn’t. Once a year I will go into that attic to bring down the Christmas decorations, boxes full of ornaments sprinkled with glitter, holly berries, strands of silver tinsel and tangled strings of blinking lights. I might run my hand along the curved back of a wicker chair Margaret liked to sit in, or blow the dust from an old cigar box that my father gave me when I was twelve. But mostly I will see the attic for what it is: a place to store the past, a room rarely visited, separated from the ordinary and lonely world below it.
Sometimes I sit at the back of the chapel near my house. I imagine sitting there with Margaret and listening to a choir while people around us sit with their heads bowed. At her funeral there were six pallbearers. It was freezing outside. They carried her coffin on their shoulders in a cold mist, and watching them I had a flash of her face before the tumor in her head started eating her memories. Before she died, for a while we met with a pastor who gave us hope. He kept referring to Mark 8 and the miraculous healing of a blind man in Bethsaida. Healing, miracles, hope. And now: how do you go from spending forty years with someone to being alone? Out here, at least, I have a telescope on the back deck and a lawn chair I can sleep in. I have my nights to sip scotch and look at the stars: constellations, Polaris and Lyra. I have neighbors down the road who own a dog, a terrier mutt named Batshit who sometimes tries to swim across the pond but never makes it to the other side. The dog, panting heavily, always turns around and paddles back to the bank. I’ve stood on the railed wooden bridge over the pond and watched this several times. The dog’s owner, a fourteen-year-old boy named Jamie, once told me that he screwed his girlfriend like a caveman until his legs went weak. Jamie plays bass guitar at a small country church on the south side of town.
“I’m thinking of changing my name,” he told me one morning by the mailbox. “Jamie’s a girl’s name. I like the name Elvis. My middle name’s Clyde.”
Jamie’s not the strangest person in Red Owl. Four miles north, past the only street light in town, Willie Ray Jones walks around with a knapsack full of dirty magazines that he tries to give away to people. About once a week the sheriff or on-duty police officer has to drive Willie Ray home. Willie Ray has a strabismus eye disorder (townies refer to him as “cockeyed”) and wears a tattered old fedora hat and overalls and work boots, though he doesn’t work due to mental issues from being struck by lightning when he was a teenager. At forty-one, Willie Ray lives with his mother and aunt in a small house behind C.J.’s Seed and Feed. Willie Ray’s mother and aunt drag him along with them to play bingo at the community center every Saturday night. He apparently has to be supervised at all times. His mother said if they leave him alone he’ll take off all his clothes and walk around town naked. A couple of weeks ago I saw him walking south on Main in only his boxer shorts and boots. The sheriff arrived as usual, helped him into his car, and drove him home.
My first night living here, I kept thinking I was hearing something out back, but it was too dark to see anything. Opossums, I told myself. Skunks, critters. I drank Jim Beam and fell asleep in the recliner in front of the television. Sleep is a precious thing. My afternoon naps are disturbed by a squirrel determined to torment me. Last week he came in through the kitchen window and stole a piece of banana nut bread from the saucer in the breakfast nook. The next day, while I was napping, the same squirrel hopped onto the arm of the couch and tapped on my head with an acorn. I managed to sit up and watch him run out.
“You’ll learn to deal with those things,” Jamie told me outside, where he threw an old tennis ball for Batshit to chase. “You’re in the country now, sir. Learn to drive a stake in the ground. Use a chain saw. Kick cow shit.”
Red Owl is like no other town I’ve ever encountered. Its strangeness is defined by the community in the same way the fictional town of Hooterville was defined by the farming communities in Green Acres and Petticoat Junction. Red Owl originated just after the 1889 land run. The Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railroad reached Pawnee Lake around this same time on its trek from Kansas down to Texas. In the 1950s and 60s, the railroad constructed the coach building center and division repair shops north of town. The railroad went bankrupt in 1980.
The assumption, I think, is that the town is as ordinary as any other small town. I enjoy these people who live on their own time: the people who act slowly, discussing the intricacies of weather, landscape, the shapes of natural creation. My neighbor, Wilbur Brunk, challenges me to look into my soul on nights he sits on his front porch and plays a fivestring banjo with all four of his grandchildren. This is a family of uniquely talented musicians: the two boys finger-pick their acoustic guitars, Chet Atkins style; the eldest granddaughter plays the fiddle and wears boots; the little one plays a tambourine. The music is wild and fast and foot-stomping. Wilbur calls it hillbilly music, and I can see by the fierce intensity in his eyes that he possesses a deep passion for it. He sometimes breaks out into fits of laughter as they play. Often I’ve found myself wanting to clap along. One of his grandsons occasionally tries to teach me a D or a C chord on the guitar, but my fingers are too stiff, all bone.
“These songs are easy,” the boy told me. “They’re your standard three chord progression, G-C-D, like most country music. Or blues. Or early rock-n-roll.”
“I wasn’t aware there was a standard three chord progression.”
“Maybe there’s an A7 thrown in at times,” he said, “but it’s pretty standard. You’re an old timer like Grandpa. You should know this.”
“Give me Sinatra any day,” I told him.
“That boy’s been thumb-picking since he was six,” Wilbur said. “He’s a hard worker. Mows lawns and works in the field all summer without complaining. I’m proud of him.”
Wilbur is a man who learned the value of hard work. He grew up in this town and quit school at fourteen to help his father and grandfather in the fields. At one time he cut hay by swinging a scythe all day. More recently, he was the maintenance supervisor at the golf course east of town before it closed down. “All the golfers are gone,” he told me. “The owner sold it to someone who let it go to shit. Moved his family down to Houston.”
In the eighties, when the oil business was booming, the town held calcuttas, golf tournaments in which people bid on 4-person teams through an auction and put all the money in the pool. At one time, Wilbur was a scratch golfer who putted cross-handed and held the course record. His team won one of the big calcuttas once and he used the money to help pay for the restoration of a 1960 MG Model A sports car. “MG stands for Morris Garage Company,” he said, running his hand over the hood. “They were early racers. This goddamn car is hell on wheels.” There’s a certain measure of ecstasy that flows through me whenever I look at that car. It is clean and fast and sprightly blue. On several occasions I’ve asked Wilbur to take me for a ride, but he never drives it due to the road dust and gravel. At sixty-four, he is worried about throat or testicular cancer, which runs in his family. Before he dies, he told me, he wants to visit Cairene and Mayan Pyramids, or maybe the island of Samos in Greece. He wants to climb rocks in Ontario. Hike in the Chiricahuas. Fall unapologetically in love with the natural world.
Wilbur’s wife Dorine works part-time in a downtown café where they serve fried onion burgers and apple cider. I can’t eat there. Two years ago, while mowing the lawn, I felt a squeezing in my chest and a sharp pain in my shoulder. Half an hour later I was in the emergency room with a minor myocardial infarction. I sold insurance for many years, and my doctor recommended early retirement, which I ignored. Six months after that, I was back at the heart hospital thinking I’d had another heart attack. False alarm. “You’re taking a huge risk,” my neighbor told me. “Unless you change your lifestyle, your clock is ticking.” So here I am in the country. Far away from that life, far away. I keep a vial of nitroglycerine pills in my shirt pocket and maintain a low cholesterol diet that consists of nothing fried, lots of vegetables. In the evenings I take walks and carry a big stick to keep the dogs and other animals away. I’m learning to like life in the country. My part is supposed to be easy: I can build a garden, work in a shed, keep to myself. “There’s not much else left for us to do,” Wilbur Brunk told me. “Eat, shit, and die. Go enjoy the outdoors. Go bowhunting with me. Kick cow shit.”
Lately I’ve been reading in the paper about bobcats in the area, which is one of the reasons I’m afraid to go into the woods, though I go anyway with Wilbur. He likes to go bowhunting, luring elk with calls. He’s not very good. A few months ago he taught me how to shoot a bow in the field behind his house. We shot arrows at a bull’s-eye stapled to bales of hay. He took me bowhunting and showed me his best hiding places. I’ve heard you have to be really good to bring elk in close. We never saw one. I moved slowly through the woods, trying to be as quiet as I could. Every noise startled me. I kept thinking something was behind me. I imagined Wilbur following a blood trail, approaching a dead elk and leaning down to admire it. Afterwards, I asked him why he enjoyed hunting so much.
“Good question,” he said.
Some nights we sit on Wilbur’s front porch, and he tells me stories about everything that’s happened in Red Owl over the past few years. I can sense his pain and worry. There is a clear history of things that have gone wrong. A year ago, a girl was found dead out on the bank of Pawnee Lake. Her death had an enormous effect on the town. Women tried to look like her. Girls wanted to be her. Adults had sex parties where the women dressed as her. But to single out this event would distort the record because other incidents followed. The first was a suicide. J.D. Hock, who liked motorcycles and guns, decided to build a tepee out of bamboo and discarded plastic. He lived in it for two weeks before he put a .38 Smith & Wesson pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. For a few weeks after the funeral, his mother began sleeping in the tepee herself, perhaps to cope with her loss. She kept to herself. Later in the summer the tepee burned down, but luckily Mrs. Hock wasn’t there when it happened. Fire Capt. Arthur Gann said he was feeding his horses when he saw the tepee burst into flames. He said a woodstove was likely the reason.
Then followed the death of Paul Franks, who worked sixty miles out of town. Paul was a foundry worker his whole life and came home every night in blackface. Wilbur’s wife said he came into the café every morning and drank coffee. He told her the story about the time a furnace exploded at work when he and some other workers were melting scrap pipe. Hot metal sprayed all over the place and nobody came away harmed. A miracle, everyone said. When Paul got lung cancer, his wife blamed it on the work conditions, breathing asbestos, being around all that talc and silica. He’d started smoking cigarettes when he was twelve, and in the latter part of his life he spent a lot of time around exhaust in his garage, working on engines. “Every single day we dragged giant buckets of hot white metal across a track overhead and poured them into molds,” he told her. “I wore an asbestos outfit, goggles, and gloves ripped at the fingertips.” He showed her the burn marks on the fingers of his left hand. But it was the cancer that got to him. When his wife found him, he was hanging from a dog leash he’d attached to a wooden beam on the basement ceiling.
On his birthday, former Red Owl calf roper Matt Cochran died when he fell thirty feet from the roof of a condominium construction project out in Tahlequah while he was removing roofing materials. He was twenty-three. There was a huge lawsuit over the whole thing. The contractor Matt worked for was fined a large amount of money for violating some sort of construction safety code that requires employees use safety belts and lifelines whenever they’re working at least fifteen feet high.
It might have been left at that, but other tragedies followed. Marty Lancaster, quarterback for the Red Owl High School Red Owls, flipped his truck off Sternbridge Road after leaving a party by the lake, and died. His girlfriend became so hysterical at the funeral that her parents had to walk her out of the church. She has since made two suicide attempts. Her father, who refinishes wood floors, keeps sandpaper and saws and containers of polyurethane in his garage. He says he’s dying a slow death from all the sawdust in his lungs.
Otto Prairiewolf, who likes to drink whiskey with us, comes over to Wilbur’s sometimes and tells us stories about healing people with bearberry leaves and juniper. He once healed a young boy of spinal problems through his Native American healing methods and prayer. I met him one Saturday afternoon when I’d drank just enough scotch to follow Jamie down Fulton Road to see a dead porcupine. “You ever see a porcupine?” Jamie asked me. “You ever seen a dead one?”
“I’ve seen porcupines,” I said.
“Otto can resurrect it.”
“What are you saying?”
“He can bring it back to life,” Jamie said. “Do you know Otto? Big
Indian guy? He lives in that cabin around the corner.”
Ten minutes later we were standing on Otto’s porch while Jamie beat on the door with his fist. When Otto opened the door I saw a large man, standing at least six-foot seven, with long dark hair that partly covered his face. He looked vicious. I had no idea he would be so large. He was shirtless and dark-skinned and wearing blue jeans. I wondered if he’d been asleep. I guessed he was in his early forties. Otto looked me over. “This your dad?” he asked Jamie.
“No, I just moved here,” I told him. “I live down the road.”
“We’re Cheyenne-Arapaho,” he said. He studied me for a minute then invited us in. His house was small and dark and warm. A ceiling fan hummed in the living room. We followed Otto into the small kitchen, where Jamie told him about the dead porcupine. Otto pulled on a t-shirt and said he had porcupine meat in his freezer. “Also deer and bobcat meat,” he said.
“We can show you where that porcupine is,” Jamie said. “Can you resurrect it?”
“Porcupine liver is good,” he said. “I can clean it if you bring it to me.” Jamie looked at me, as if for confirmation. I looked at my watch. I was drunk. “I’m making a roast for dinner,” I said. “I’d better get home.” “Venison roast is good,” Otto said. “Muskrat and bobcat is good.”
I question Otto’s sanity at times. He told me his sense of smell is so strong that, at the age of six, he detected the presence of colorectal cancer in his grandmother’s feces. A fecal occult blood test evidently confirmed he was correct. He told me others things, too: that the East African jumping spider is more likely to attack girls with Gonorrhea than boys; that taking peyote and screaming during sex can increase the spiritual enlightenment during Indian sweat ceremonies; that porcupine quills contain a sticky substance used to make beads but can cause extreme paranoia and panic if swallowed.
“Why would anyone swallow it?” I asked.
“To seek healing,” he said. “People who are dying are desperate, my friend. Dying gives us an opportunity to be interesting.”
“This man speaks the goddamn truth,” Wilbur said.
Some nights when the whiskey really kicks in, Otto tells us how much he’s in love with Mildred Thorn. Otto hasn’t told anyone but us. Mildred Thorn is a reclusive woman who lives farther down on Fulton Road with her two young sons. She is forty-seven and has never been married. She lived with her elderly father until his death three years ago. She is the mother of twin boys who were born conjoined at the forehead. They survived the surgeries, and though their heads are slightly oblong and their foreheads are large, they are now able to live and function in Red Owl. Mildred homeschools them and occasionally takes them for walks. Sometimes you can see her walking with them along Fulton Road, wiping drool from their mouths or helping them collect rocks and berries. Nobody knows who the father is. Wilbur says there were rumors that Mildred’s father repeatedly raped her, so it’s likely he’s the twins’ father. A few years ago the newspaper ran a story about the boys with their “before” and “after” surgery photos, but since then Mildred has mostly kept quiet. She rarely goes into town except when it’s necessary. The grocery store makes special deliveries just for her on Thursdays. Otto doesn’t mind any of those things.
“One day soon I shall throw myself at her feet,” he told us. “I shall stand before her and confess my feelings. And if she don’t like me, I shall sit on my roof for three nights straight and howl like a gutshot dog.”
We tell him not to waste time. We tell him the world is not made for perfect moments regardless of how much we want to believe that. Otto sips his whiskey and nods, deep in thought. He is a man who speaks little but listens well. The more I get to know him the more I see his sincerity. One afternoon not long ago, he asked me to drive him and Jamie into town. It was Jamie’s birthday. We parked in front of an old red brick building that’s been converted into a local gym and walked around to the alley behind the building. “Women’s locker room,” Otto said, pointing up to the window. He patted Jamie hard on the shoulder. “For the boy’s birthday.” I looked up and saw a small window about eight feet high. Otto knelt down, hoisted Jamie up on his shoulders and stood up so that Jamie could peek in the window.
“Someone’s definitely in there,” Jamie said, gripping the ledge with both hands.
“Look for a tit,” Otto said.
“She’s old. It’s an old woman. Oh God.” “But do you see tits,” Otto said.
“I can’t look at this.”
“Forget about age. Age means nothing. Describe the tits.”
“I can’t look at this anymore,” Jamie said, wincing. “Let me down.” Like Otto and Jamie, I have my own moments of guilty pleasures.
Walking around the pond some nights, I feel, with a sense of urgency, the need to see the young woman who sits on the bank with her young son and looks out over the dark water. She lives on the other side of the pond. I don’t know her name and don’t care to know. I haven’t asked anyone about her, not even Wilbur. I’ve seen her working in her garden in pants with dirt-stained knees. I’ve seen her roll up her pants and ease her feet into the water. There is something wonderful about watching her sit with her young son in the evenings. She looks at him for a long moment and stands. They walk around and throw bits of bread and crackers at the ducks. They see me walking at a steady pace and know I am an old man with a bad heart. Maybe they think my time is limited. Maybe I remind them of someone who’s passed on. The question I’m most bothered with during these walks is: how much longer will I be here?
“You should just get yourself a dog,” Wilbur keeps telling me. “Take the dog for walks. Go to the park, play fetch. Kick cow shit.”
“A dog’s life is too short,” I tell him. “They get old and sick. They get weak. I can’t stand to watch suffering.”
But I don’t mind being alone most nights. Despite the invitations to barn dances in town, or pig roasts, or coffee at the mayor’s house, I prefer my life remain, for the most part, solitary. This is how the rest of my life will be spent. Still, I miss my wife. During lumbering night hours, I might wander into the kitchen in a sort of half sleepwalk, expecting to find Margaret sitting there eating honey on toast, like she used to do on nights she couldn’t sleep. Wilbur once told me he liked to watch his wife wash the vegetables and potatoes in the sink. Dorine liked to take charge and do things. She shaved carrots, chopped onions, used a boning knife on the catfish he’d brought in with his grandsons. I miss those sorts of things. In truth, I’m a man who’s afraid of looking lonely.
Not long ago I saw a fox at the edge of my driveway. I tried to get a closer look, but it fled into the woods as I approached it. As I checked my mail, I heard Jamie calling me from down the road. He was running toward me, and when he reached me he was out of breath. “Batshit’s run off,” he said.
“Settle down,” I said.
“He’s run off. Have you seen him?” “No, but I can help you look.”
He seemed pleased. “I’ve already covered the area down by Otto’s,” he said. So we decided to head down to the pond. We crossed the fence and walked past Howard Carter’s old abandoned Chevrolet, where mice had built nests around the engine and nibbled the electrical wiring. Otto told Wilbur and me once that he used to screw a second cousin of his in the backseat on nights when he had family in town from Slaughterville and Thomas for the summer Pow-wow.
“A second cousin,” I told him, “is still considered a cousin, isn’t it?” “Pussy is pussy,” he said sternly.
Jamie and I walked through the field, calling Batshit’s name and whistling. We headed down toward the pond, where we saw a crowd of people. Somehow the whole place looked more colorful, or maybe it was just that I hadn’t been sleeping well and was tired. We walked by a group of boys sitting on the grass, looking at laminated images of the Virgin Mary printed on prayer cards. I saw the mayor sitting in a lawn chair, his legs crossed, his face caked in green. He waved as we approached.
“There’s a chili cook-off tonight at the high school gym,” he called out to us. “See you there?” I gave a slight wave.
“He’s there,” Jamie said, pointing. I looked at the pond, where I saw Wilbur and his grandchildren, all four of them, cheering for Batshit who was paddling across the pond. As we approached them, Jamie put two pinkie fingers in his mouth and whistled. Batshit, on command, turned and paddled back, crawled out of the water and shook himself dry. Then he stretched lazily before trotting over to us. I walked over to Wilbur and his grandkids and saw Otto with Mildred Thorn on the other side of the pond.
“Everyone came to see Otto and Mildred Thorn,” he said. “We’re all pretending to stand around, but we’re watching to see what happens.”
“Word spreads quickly,” I said. I saw Mildred Thorn across the pond, sitting on a stump with her two boys beside her. Otto stood in front of them like a giant, looking ridiculous, moving his arms in a wide circular motion as if describing something extremely round.
“I can only imagine what he’s saying,” I said.
Wilbur nodded. “That woman is distant and gloomy. She’s perfect for Otto.”
“One time Margaret and I visited Sakonnet,” I told him. “It’s a beautiful place. She had relatives in Westport who drove us there. We were young, in our twenties. We were newly engaged.”
Wilbur didn’t respond, but I knew he was listening. Then we saw Otto lift his arms and shout: “I declare that the town of Red Owl is healed!” A few people laughed. “I declare,” Otto shouted, “that there will be no more suicides! No more tragedies!” People clapped. Then Mildred Thorn stood up, and she and Otto walked away with her children.
After that, everyone left. There was nothing left to see.
We haven’t seen much of Otto, though, lately. We imagine him sitting in Mildred Thorn’s house with her and her children, telling stories of Indian warriors and eagles and healing. We look forward to seeing him. As for my own nights, sometimes I walk into empty bedrooms in my house and try to get a memory of Margaret. In the evenings I walk down Fulton Road in the streaming clouds and blowing wind. I walk down Fulton Road alone, past Nick’s Garage and then past Ellis Park, where a group of boys are always playing football, downhill toward J.B.’s Bait and Tackle where the air is heavy and filled with the smell of dead things. I tell myself there is a destiny to the journey of all objects: stones and rivers, stars and dogs and the good people of Red Owl. People drive by and wave, and I pretend I have a plan, that I’m a serious man in a hurry to reach a destination, my own destination, wherever that may be.
Brandon Hobson‘s fiction has appeared in NOON, Puerto del Sol, Web Conjunctions, Forty Stories: New Writing from Harper Perennial, New York Tyrant, Narrative Magazine, and elsewhere. His book reviews have appeared in The Believer, The Collagist, and The Faster Times. He lives with his wife and son in Oklahoma.
CHILI 4-WAY
by Michael Martone
Michigan Pike
When you were in college, at Butler, you would drive out Michigan Pike to eat at the Steak ‘n Shake there. It looked like a Steak ‘n Shake but it wasn’t quite right. It looked the same as other Steak ‘n Shakes—black and white with the chromium fixtures and the enameled tiled walls and ceramic tile floor. The staff wore the paper hats and the checkered pants, the white aprons and the red bow ties. But often you were the only customer. You sat at a table, not the counter, and scanned the menu while as many as a dozen waiters and waitresses waited for you to order. This was a training restaurant for the restaurant chain, self-conscious of its self-consciousness, a hamburger university. There were waiters and waitresses-in-training watching how your waiter would take your order and there were waiter and waitress trainers who were being followed by other waiters and waitresses-in-training watching the waiter and the waiters and waitresses watching the waiter taking your order after he brought you several glasses of welcoming water. They crowded around the table in their spotless uniforms like hospital interns around your bed waiting, taking notes on their checkered clipboards. There were television cameras everywhere and television monitors everywhere displaying what the television cameras were recording. There, the grill and the dozen or so trainee grill cooks pressed with the fork and spatula the meat puck into a perfect steak burger. There, one after the other flipped each patty once, crossed the instruments at right angles and pressed down again forming the perfect circles of meat, the evidence of this broadcast on snowy monitors next to those displaying the scoops of ice cream falling perfectly and endlessly into a parade of mixers. There was even a monitor that showed the bank of monitors and one that showed the monitor showing that monitor and, in it the endless regression of televisions within televisions, the black and white clad waiters and waitresses and the grill cooks and prep chefs moving like a chorus line, constructing your two doubles that you had ordered some time ago. And the caterpillar of service snaked with your plates of perfectly plated food held by the waiter at the head-end trailed by a conga line of identical servers back to your perfect table where the television cameras panned to focus on you eating your two doubles and showing you eating your two doubles in the monitor that showed the monitor of the double you eating. And everyone in the place made sure you had everything you needed and said they’d be back to check and then came back to check and asked you if you wouldn’t mind filling out the survey about the service and food and a survey about the survey and the survey about the survey’s survey. The sandwiches were perfect. And the milkshake. The French-fries were all exactly the same length and arranged in a pleasing random jumble. The real stainless steel cutlery gleamed and the real dishes and the glass glasses gleamed. As you left, at every empty table an employee wiped and polished the Formica tabletop, watched over by two or three others, nodding unconsciously in what you took to be approval.
96th Street
She would meet him when he was in town, when he was going through town, at the Steak ‘n Shake right off I-69 on 96th Street. They both remembered when this part of the city had not been part of the city, had been nothing but farm land, nothing but woods. She grew up in the city. He grew up in another part of the state. They met later after both their lives were settled. Now 96th Street was all strip malls and box stores and freestanding drive-ins. Sometimes, after they would meet at the Steak ‘n Shake, they would decide to drive separately to one of the motels nearby and spend a few hours there before she would go back to work, her family, her home, and he would get back on the road to drive back to his home, his family. Or he would stay the night, call his wife to say he was too tired to keep driving, would get an early start the next day. On the nights he stayed over, he drove back to the Steak ‘n Shake and had dinner, trying to get the table they had shared hours before. In the parking lots outside, as the parking lots’ lights came on, teenagers gathered in crowds of cars. Everyone out there milled about, switching rides, changing places, slamming the doors, flashing the car lights. Some of the kids would come inside to order shakes and fries, take the order back out between the pools of light to pass around the drinks and the bag of fries to their friends in the shadows. He watched through the plate glass with its camouflage of advertisement the purposeful loitering in the lots outside. Earlier that day at the same table, they had talked about how things had changed and how they wanted them to stay the same. She always ordered a Coke, but Steak ‘n Shake had its own brand of pop. King Cola. It tasted the same, she always said, but it was different. He always ordered chili, and as they talked he crushed each oyster cracker separately in the plastic bag, one at a time, turning the crackers into finer and finer crumbs, a dust of crumbs, before he would tear open the bag and pour the cracker crumbs into the bowl of chili. That day when she ordered the King Cola she was told that Steak ‘n Shake now served regular Coca-Cola. The waitress waited while she considered. There was a Diet Coke now, too, and that’s what she ordered after she thought about it. When the waitress came back with the drink, she dropped off the bags of crackers, and without thinking, he began to pinch and pop the crackers inside the bag. He asked her how the new cola tasted. She used a straw. The same, she said, and different.
Keystone
Bob called. I had been out of town. I just walked in. I was hungry after the trip. The phone rang. It was Bob.
“If any body asks where you were Saturday night, you were with me,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “Where were we?”
Bob thought for a second. “We were at the old Steak ‘n Shake on Keystone.”
“What did I eat,” I said.
“What? What did you have to eat?”
“At the Steak ‘n Shake. If someone asks.” Bob thought again.
“You had Chili 4-Way.”
“Okay.”
He hung up, and I went back out to find something to eat in earnest. The car was still warm. I drove over to the Steak ‘n Shake on Emerson Avenue. I looked at the menu. There was Chili, there was Chili Mac, there was Chili 3-Way, and there was Chili 5-way. I had remembered incorrectly.
Normal
We visited Normal to eat at the original Steak ‘n Shake. The chain was founded in Normal in 1934, and the first restaurant was still standing after all these years. We liked to eat at the Steak ‘n Shakes in Indianapolis, where we are from, that are all modern and new but retain, by design, what we believed was the look and feel of the original. We especially liked the trademarked logo of the disk with wings and the slogan that graced the actual restaurant china: In Sight It Must Be Right. The company history online has pictures of the original Steak ‘n Shake in Normal that looks even more retro than the retro restaurants they are building now. We could see how they were trying to retain, in the present, a suggestion of the past. Then, there were car hops, too, and marquee lighting with signs that swooped and curved into streamlined decorations on the roof. It was all very modern for its time, and now, in the pictures it looked like the past’s idea of the future. And here we were in that future looking back to a past that, for us, never was. Turns out that “In Sight It Must Be Right” meant something specific back then. We could see, if we were customers then, the cooks grind the steaks into ground meat right before our eyes. The fine cuts of meat being turned into the ropey cables of meat as the cooks in immaculate white aprons turned the old-fashioned cranks of the machines. We guess, back then, people didn’t trust what went into things like that, and that eating out, then, was more of an adventure. So we wanted to see for ourselves, the past, go back in time, we thought, to see the real past in Normal instead of what was left of the past today in Indianapolis. Turns out we were too late. By the time we got there—driving through the farmlands of Indiana, Illinois, the fields dotted with cattle gazing on the green grass of the gently rolling pastures passing by—the original Steak ‘n Shake had been demolished, or was in the process of being demolished, the yellow bulldozers still moving the ruins around into neat piles of rubble. We parked the car and watched them tidy up. We mixed into the crowd of onlookers watching. The setting sun, shining through the arch of water being sprayed on the debris to keep the dust in check, created a miniature diminished rainbow over what we had come looking for.
The Artist and His Sister Gerti
Christine Schutt
The buckskin color of her silky throat signaled her sexual self as did a bird’s breast in its fluttering coloration; and the underside of her, under her chin, was soft, and a small excess of folded-over skin gave her, young as she was, an appearance of age and seriousness and wisdom. The stilling experience of stroking her throat and her belly as she lay in my lap amazed me when I had expected her to be excitable, restless, loudly after play and vigorous attention; I had expected she would exhaust me; instead, she shut her eyes. Her eyes, like her mouth, were darkly outlined, liquidy and sad; even her tears looked black. She seemed too full of feeling all too easily spilled. I didn’t dare to move or move her though her head was heavy against my leg, and I had begun to worry. Was she sick? The rest of her—bare belly, fleshy, stretched along the couch—was warm. No sign of fever; but then it happened, she walked to another part of the room and was sick.
“What’s the matter, darling?”
But by then—already!—she was too unwell to answer and was puzzled herself and weakened to a sigh.
I cleaned up what there was, and there wasn’t much because she had had no appetite in the days before. None, now that I thought of it, or little to speak of. I said, “I’m going to call the doctor, darling. You’re not well,” and I left her where she was, although she shortly after looked for me. I heard her light step in the hall, and she came to where I was sitting and sat next to me, then she slumped a little and again lay her head in my lap.
Those eyes! she was suffering, and I wished she would speak. What was it she felt? And why hadn’t I noticed before?
I thought of all the times I had left her alone, quite confident that she would manage; moreover, that it was good training for her to be alone: she would learn how to amuse herself. At the very least, she could sleep. No one expected her to work. She was new to the neighborhood and far too young. In time she might look after those who didn’t need much looking after, but anything more than this was beyond her reach. She was, as I have said, young, too young, I think now, to have been left at all; and yet I did leave her. Stay in your room. I’ll be back. Don’t whimper. Now she was too sick to speak.
“Bring her in,” was what they said; and so I dressed her for the cold and the wind. By then she was trembling; she was afraid; and I took her in my arms and petted her and said, “Darling, darling, you’ll be all right.” But something was happening in the city outside—a parade or a visiting dignitary—and carriages were scarce. The police were no help, although
kindly; they didn’t know how we might cross the park, and I knew we couldn’t walk, not in this cold. I felt the curses welling in me, and my throat hurt in restraint of them. “We’re in trouble here,” was what I said. “My sister is sick.”
The policeman only shrugged and said, “Sorry. There may be carriages further south of here.”
The streets changed but still no carriages. I looked at my girl and those liquidy eyes, and I wished she would curse me for making her suffer. I should have had a solution; I should have made her feel better. Darling, darling, darling. Her reproachful quiet, or that was how I thought of her quiet, as reproachful—for my incompetence, my unknowing, the thickness of my fingers—and I thought if I could only take her place because I could better withstand whatever it was that made her shiver and turn inward, snailing back to babysize as best she could. Darling. Others, passing, saw her and seemed instantly compassionate in a way, I imagined, they weren’t for anyone else, even for their dogs. Well, I might have been exaggerating, but always before she had drawn light towards her so that others drew near, admiring, and remarked on how she shone. Although no one seeing us—me wailing for a carriage—said she looked well now or bright. Now she was dulled when the two of us stood with those other sufferers at the nurse’s station. “Is she? Will she?” The clock was too far away to read—thank goodness!
Later, when she was dead, I thought how in the last few days her once-soft hair had strawed slightly, gone lackluster, turned to cat’s fur and visibly dusted, changed color; the dark oily swirl of her was nearly no more; and her eyes, too, while teared, were lightless, murky, vacant. Such decline had been inconceivable; her youth and trilling spirits, the way it seemed she wagged at the slap of mail against the door, had made a strong impression of health; so that although I asked and asked again, nagged the doctor, whose neutral prognosis went mostly unchanged, I myself did not believe she would die. Her absence was only temporary.
Temporary, yet everywhere; and my back teeth throbbed from missing her. I lost my appetite. Besides, I didn’t have the heart to cook, and my militant interest in dust declined, and I started smoking again, then lying awake at night thinking about how small she had looked, how alone in the sick room. The way she had to lie on her side with a tube in her neck. I thought of her in this position, one-eyed, and that eye sad and surprised, dim, pained, exhausted, afraid.
The doctor didn’t think I should see her. The doctor said, “You’ll upset her if you’re upset yourself.” And I was upset, so I didn’t often dare to see her; yet at home she was all I saw, the darling, on her side, alone, in a windowless space with no prospect onto anything living.
Make her well. Please!But the doctor said they couldn’t feed her by mouth; they couldn’t address her slim resources except with sugars needled in.
She had no fat! She was too thin!
I had tried to feed her, to get her to feed herself, but she had wanted only to put her head in my lap and let me muss the soft curls at her ears.
How my fingers, when I looked at them, looked fat.
I took her to the hospital on a Sunday, and by Tuesday night, she was dead. The books say the virus is deadly, a killer. It destroys the intestinal walls, which explains it—sick, blood, stink, all. All swept over her with a swiftness I have not known matched except in novels.
My life is a baggy, sentimental novel with me, the weak character, whining in the middle of it.
Our mother writes to say: No one wants to see such trespass undressed. Because of you, Ernst, she is dead.
Even before she was visibly sick, I wondered how long would she live? How long!
The blinked thought was scalding despite quickly past. It came from her soft scratching through and around the room, down the hall, circuiting the kitchen, retracing her sharp steps: this, over and over again, was what made me wonder how long? The cracked sound, as of something ground underfoot, was the ached sound she made when she chewed on food. How long then before her teeth were gone? How long before the bones disappeared and she was so much skin huffing to the floor?
My fleshiness appalls me.
I should remember whatever was good between us. How at night we lay on the long couch—hours together—her head in the wedge of my crotch. The heat of her was a comfort in the cold months, but summer forced us foot to foot so we might stay cool yet together under the blanket. Easily and almost always I was in her company and felt the quiet in my room or the living room or wherever it was we were, the quiet was the quiet of a temple, orderly and incensed, orange-red, warm. I was not thirsty or tempted to smoke but felt content in the purely present tense.
My hand, her throat.
The buckskin color of her throat, the stilling experience of stroking her throat. My best model, she hardly spoke.
Forgetting Everything I Know
by Marston Hefner
Everyone agreed in the neighborhood that she was the best. She was the beauty. How could she let everyone know she was nothing but a pile of shit? Oh, well. Nothing, really. She did everything perfectly. Not a thing wrong with her. No conflicts. Oh, all the men loved her. Her boss especially. She was such a hard worker. How was it possible to still be beautiful at forty years old? How was it possible when you had two children?
Everything coming easy to you entitled you to a few things. The first was praise. The second was recognition of your beauty. The third was a small but imprecise aching indicating that one was hungry for something one did not know of and that one wanted to reach this place by the end of one’s life. It was what caused people to fall in love. It was what caused people to go into the present moment. It was that insatiable itch that made her that much more interesting. That much more human. She cried at night. Did you know that? She cried when no one was looking because she was perfect and it was sad to be perfect in your imperfections. The itch could not be scratched.
She only knew there was something completely wrong. Eventually she cried in front of her husband in the marital bed who handled the situation terribly. Then she cried at the dinner table in front of her children. There were long bouts of silence in the household. She found it difficult to go and be productive. To go to work became a chore. It was just depression. Did that make her more perfect? More human? More down to earth? She was getting older. Her age was taking a toll. She started smoking cigarettes. She wanted to be closer to death, desired for things to be finished. Here. This is your life. Did it make you proud to be beautiful?
What was it that pained her? Why was she crying now in the bathroom? The only light on in the house. Her husband asleep. Her children breathing light steps in their dreams. The more she asked the less clear it was. She wanted sleep. No. She wanted death. No. She wanted fame. No. She wanted rest. No. She wanted everything. Yes. Everything in the world handed to her. It wasn’t supposed to be like this. Limitless growth wasn’t the answer. She needed a stopping point. Someone to tell her this is enough. Point to her children. This is enough. Point to her husband. This is enough. Point to her house. This is enough. All of it is enough.
The twins in the bed did not stir. Perhaps they could go to her eyelids while she slept, place their fingers gently on them and announce that everything was OK. There was no need to cry anymore. Everything that would happen would happen. Everything that did not happen was meant to be. All that we wanted was part of being human. The hunger never goes away. The children knew hunger. They wanted As. They wanted to be the best at the sports they played. They knew it. Knew it in their skin. In their genes. They were never happy either. They would touch her eyelids and tell her to rest. Rest for a week. Childhood is not like dreaming, they’d say. Go into a coma. Bang your head against the porcelain sink accidentally and forget all you know. Forget everyone. And rest. Just rest.
There was a man going down river in a canoe. It was his yearly summer outing. Even though the canoe had gone far, even though its owner had worked his arms to reach what was almost the end, a natural anomaly occurred and stopped him from ever completing the course. A wind pushed his canoe back through all the river he had waded. Back over the rocks and waterfalls. It was the opposite of a miracle. He reached the end which was the beginning, went on the sandy shore, bent down at the foot of the river and screamed.
In his free time, Marston Hefner plays backgammon, video games, and practices yoga. He is 6’4” with a strong jaw line. He has short hair. He has a toned upper body but working the thighs is difficult because of his height.
