Fiction

Two Stories — Andrew Morgan

Doctor Tukes, Off the Clock

But that’s all blather. I can’t even remember how old I was. Can’t remember my teacher at the time, my closest friend, or whether that summer I played T-ball, “minor league” (where the coach pitches), “major league” (where I pitched, “hard” and under the pretense of “wild”) or even later still when there was but rocks and glass and a gameless kind of running. I can’t remember whether we’d yet crossed from printing to cursive, which I do remember took place in third grade which was the same year that Susan Crandle, prancing across the gymnasium as she was lunch-hour-prone to do, tripped—“it must’ve been her laces”—and broke her nose right there on the free-throw line and wailed a gurgled wail and dripped a splatter which even years later when me and Teddy Lagere snuck in after hours for some one-on-one, even then, and that must’ve been at least ninth grade ’cause Teddy didn’t transfer back till I’d started shaving and that was on a rainy night at some point in the summer before high-school (having started not so much ’cause I needed to but ’cause I wanted to and why not I had just enough money for a razor and other needs for a razor and so what with birds and stones and whatnot there I tremored, determined, eye to mirrored eye beneath the single swinging light of the basement bathroom which hissed as its arc’s apex occasionally synched with the random rain’s drip making it down past what sealant there was between the trapdoored porch and the alcoved chunk of mirror Timor, my sitter’s younger brother, and I snatched from his Auntie’s when she was away at her praying; there, without cream which I hadn’t the money for and without method which I hadn’t the traditional intactness of family to provide, bringing a blade to bare not for the first time [but near the first time] with purpose) but even then, Teddy and I at least a year deep in friendship and not for the first time (or near the first time) sweating in the gymnasium’s half-dark, tested our athleticism a little too vigorously, and limbs tangling, ended up both face down on the floor at that same line where even then, after who-knows-how-much sweeping and waxing, a shadowed hint of crimson haze still remained somehow clear-as-day apparent and I said “Look: it’s Crandle’s randle” and that took us funny and we laughed and clutched one another unsurely in what I remember thinking would’ve resembled, in collective contour and especially so from above, a more cursive styling than that of standard print. I can’t remember if I’d yet to lose a tooth or already had those I grind while not remembering this or if this was somewhere in between the two when Allie Alters called me “notch face” and I swung at her all clumsy like ’cause she was pretty but she swung back, not one bit clumsy, and doubled the gap which had inspired the namecalling. I can’t remember if my sister had yet begun her womanly or when that actually was as she at least twice prematurely claimed her adulthood ’cause her friends at least twice beat her to it. I can’t remember my nose-ornament status or that of my nipple(s), my hairstyle or its color, my lunchbox, parent of custody, or even my handedness for sometime ’round then I switched dominance left to right as I was still but the beginning of a golfer and it was still, then, a righty and only the wealthiest of lefty’s (and I was certainly not, not by far, the former of the later) sport. I can’t remember if The Falcon’s training wheels were on or yet off or even if this was before or after The Falcon was traded for a Mickey Mantle rookie card Bubba’s daddy found in the wall when the plumbing blew out in the winter and he had to half-ash fix it himself because Little Lil was only two and was small and cold and sick and Bubba’s ma was havin’ none of that or so Bubba said when he handed me the sticky envelope with Mantle inside and I, clutching its stick and suddenly remorse-fearingly uncertain about my choice’s wiseness, knee-jerk spun and kicked The Falcon over straight at Bubba’s feet and stood silent as its handlebar gouged his shins and Bubba dropped and cried and said “mah mah mah” over and over like he said Lil did when she kicked off her covers and frostbited her toes ’cause of the blow out and it being winter and all. I can’t remember if I loved Dora or Nina or Carl or Otto. Can’t remember if it was before the glasses or after the glasses with the contacts or during the glasses just before the contacts when Rudy kept thieving my lenses for convexing the sun onto flies. I can’t remember the decision, its ease; how it was void of malice, of cruelty, how there was even a taste of the generous. Can’t remember the red gloss on the pavement, the reflection of the streetlight like a bubble-gum bubble somehow rippling as if notifying us all of an earthquake we had yet to register. Can’t remember Willie—compelled against the nature of safety, compelled by the nature of fearing not fitting-in—sticking the tip of his left thumb first-knuckle-deep into the center of that bubble and then rigidly freezing, eyes focusless, as if he had instead inserted that thumb’s filed-point-of-a-nail straight on into an electric outlet. I can’t remember pushing Willie back, can’t remember jumping into the midst of that gloss, can’t remember sweeping my feet left and right like miniature snowplows gale-caught and hauled straight on across a thicker-than-water lake, can’t remember the splatter along Willie’s arm and along his shoulder and across his neck, thickening as it climbed until curling off with a clearly-cursive-not-print flourish to form a toothless clown smile just beneath the bobbing nose of his Adams apple which was itself bobbing beneath the I’ll-never-smile-again clenched-in-horrorness of his lips. I can’t remember Willie’s eyes the instant his pupils exploded away any hint of the pulse-blue his mumma called her “cloudless frontier”; can’t remember the drip of snot from his left nostril or how it revolted me that he wouldn’t wipe it away, couldn’t wipe it away; can’t remember the woodpeckering tap that kept increasing in volume until there was a thunderclapping crack and a wail from Willie as he unfroze and thrusting both hands into his mouth removed what seemed to be fistfuls of shattered teeth. I can’t remember my mother weeks later driving white-knuckled with her left hand at ten and the right ticking down to three and then to her lap and the sound of a bottle and up again to her mouth, toss toss gulp gulp, polly want a num num and then ticking back down to three and her for some reason not responding as I ask again and again why Willie don’t want to come over and play. And I wish I could remember the day nearly a month after that when Willie showed up unexpected at the front door and still all just gums and bandages rang the bell with his red gauzed left stub of a thumb and I peeked from behind the curtain of the window beside the door and seeing it was Willie got very still and kinda lost focus with my vision and then with my body entire and felt all of a sudden like I was sitting in a bath and tasted the steam deep in my throat and heard the sound of fingers on doorknobs and the bobbing rubber of miniature animals afloat and the creak of hinges and the rippling water and its warmth on my thighs but why only my thighs? and with that hiccup of confusion coming back to myself at the door, so close to and yet separate from Willie and it feeling proper and like something expected and I began to (gently and then with a little more force) allow an inkling of hope to buzz deep behind my eye only to see it swiftly peter away startled bird-like as I realized the dampness as wholely real and bodily and wrong just wrong and I wailed and Willie ran and my mother turned up the volume on the radio either so she didn’t hear me or so I didn’t hear her practiced twitching and the gulp gulp of the pellets down her gullet and polly-want-a-numb-numb numbness for a long, long time. But that’s what I’m saying. All blather from far and long ago and not very interesting at all to poor oublietted Dr. Walter Reinhold Pence, my colleague (and so much brighter than the others), whose interest, at the moment (but not for the first time), is bloodshot-and-non-blinking-eye lasered in on beggary and how its potential to elicit the ultimate of mercy might be somehow realized through force-forgetting the camouflage of why I’m making him repeat the polly numb numb thing and focusing instead on the singed fingers of the melting mannequin and why I painted its eyes in the endless tones of a cloudless frontier.

Marie to Eleanor, Resenting Her Elasticness

…or like a flower on a footstool with a soft summer breeze coming in from the porch where your grandmother’s casket is sitting half-opened in the sun and you’re whistling to yourself some stage tune your sister had a record of because her post high schools dream-year boyfriend thought he was a singer and not a rock star singer but an on-the-stage-some-day-singing-and-dancing-in-a-rustic-costume-while-people-in-suits-that-cost-half-as-much-as-the-set-stare-down-the-dresses-of-their-dates/wives-and-wonder-why-art-has-to-be-so-boring-and-why-it-isn’t-easier-to-stare-down-the-dresses-of-their-dates/wives singer and you wonder if your whistling would sound more inappropriate to your sister or to your grandmother but you know the answer to that because there was nothing that was ever fully appropriate in your grandmother’s book and your sister could give a shit because that boyfriend did become a singer and when he did he gave your sister a son he found in the alley outside the off-broadway theatre that burned down after the third night’s performance of his second play which, unlike the first, had some real moving parts and the role fit his voice if not like a sock does a foot than like a necklace does a neck and for once he felt positive about his choices and there was this son in the alley and he thought of your sister and how she played records and encouraged him and said to himself “I think she would be a good mom” and he took the child and gave it to her and the real parents, who apparently were just ripping a joint around the corner, were not happy to not find their child when returning and said some things to some people that were not quite true because they didn’t want to give all the details about the joint and such because that would have been bad news for the dad who wasn’t supposed to do that ‘cause of his heart and the fact that he was just up for new life insurance and he needed that because he was planning to off himself in a way that was not able to be recognized as self-offing so that the mother and the child could live a life a little less cold and empty, that and the fact that they didn’t want to be the parents who went around the corner to burn a joint and lost their child because no one really does and certainly not Claude and Marie who already had enough judgment upon them as both their parents had expected so much more of each and had told them so often and still did and would until one night Claude’s mother looks at Marie’s dad and says “I bet they lost that baby ’cause they went around the corner to smoke a joint” and Marie’s dad doesn’t respond right away but begins to think then and there that he’ll take Claude’s mother to a play sometime, just him and her, and during the play he will look down her dress and think about art and the grandchild it took from them and he’ll whisper something about Monet or Mozart which he’ll have researched beforehand and she’ll stare at him and half-smile and he’d half-smile back and a little later their hands would brush gently against one another and they’d both wonder what-if and then they’d correct themselves, readjust their posture and soon after leave early because of something they both would agree to find pressing and on the cab ride home Marie’s dad would tell a joke about when Marie was four and Claude’s mom would find it crass and there would be an extended silence no one would be able to do anything about and it would be forever between them and in the end too much so for Claude and Marie and Claude’s dad and Marie’s mom to ever think it was not something a little more than it was and everyone would eventually pull back and think about how much this isn’t what it should be and count the ways in which they were clearly the least at fault and so when he finally responds with “I bet you fuck non-Claude’s dad men all the time, what’s a fucking joint and a lost baby to you” it’s not because of what she said but because of what she would have done to him had he done to her what he wanted to do to her and the irony would be that she would think that his saying of this was actually an attempt to open up an opportunity for him to accomplish the same thing he had wanted to do and she wasn’t put out but tired by the whole thing and she half-smiled that response and Marie’s dad half-smiled his own smile and they would be no more lonely and not alone than they were before this exchange and they would both in their mind’s thank the other for that a little too often and a little too much until that thanks inevitably bent toward a resentment that would be forever between them and in the end too much so for Claude and Marie and Claude’s dad and Marie’s mom to ever think it was not something a little more than it was and everyone would eventually pull back and think about how much this isn’t what it should be and count the ways in which they were clearly the least at fault and having assumed custodial duties of their son your sister was far too busy to hear whistling and if she did her inappropriate radar was so-to-a-different-frequency tuned that she jumped not like the moon in the fog, but more like the feeling of the moon in the fog, like a whisper you’re chasing down a hallway in a nightmare you know to be nightmare, but not yet consciously enough to facilitate caution to an extent which eventually asks for everyone to just pull back a bit and think about how much this isn’t what it should be…

ADJUST, by Glen Pourciau

No one could say I was idle. I walked miles every day. I didn’t sit in my apartment moping. I had mixed feelings about being among people on a bustling sidewalk, exposed to their looks and judgments, but it was better than being alone in my apartment. When I walked I often had the feeling that someone was watching, either across the street or behind me, though I knew that no one had been assigned by some unknown force to keep eyes on me. I explained my sense of being observed as a projection of the unspoken voice yakking in my head. But it could be more accurate to say that the voice itself was the thing tracking me, portending a day of reckoning that I’d been spared for much longer than I deserved.

One day while walking down King Street I thought I saw a familiar face, a man who looked like a classmate of mine during the year I attended the local college. I didn’t know if he’d recognize me and I wasn’t sure he wasn’t someone else, but his forward-tilted head and the way he squinted through his glasses did seem distinctly like him. He was just a step ahead so I slowed my pace, dreading the thought of presenting an acceptable account of myself. He might ask me what I did with myself or what I’d become and I couldn’t imagine how I’d answer those questions without sounding as limited as I felt. I tried to believe it wasn’t him, but I couldn’t do it and I turned a corner to put more distance between us, thinking that perhaps he was in town for a visit and I’d never see him again.

At happy hour I went into a quiet bar I liked to visit occasionally. I sat to one side rather than in the long stretch of barstools, making it slightly harder for others to sit near me. I ordered a draught beer, two dollars off during happy hour, and only one other person was drinking at the bar, a man with three or four smartphones spread in front of him, his mind and hands fully engaged. I was at a safe distance from him, and he never looked up at me and seemed to have forgotten there was anything or anyone around him. In a way, I envied him.

I’d drunk about half my beer and was contemplating ordering another when a bulky man of around forty walked in and sat just around the corner from me. He wore white sunglasses and had short white hair that stood on end, aided by a hair-care product. He gestured to the bartender, pointed at my beer, and I looked straight ahead as the bartender brought him a glass of what I was having. I got tired of shrinking from the looks and sounds of others, but was I prepared to deal with all the ranking and judgments that would almost inevitably ensue if he started talking? The white-haired man sipped silently and then looked toward the smartphone user.

“Insatiability, I’d guess, is the opposite of fulfillment, but I can’t claim to know that for a fact. I won’t impose on you by telling you my name. Introductions can create an illusion that we’ve identified a stranger. The same is true with asking people what they do for a living. Their answers tell you how they spend their time but often little about what’s inside them. Why should we conjure up assumptions and hierarchies based on people’s occupations? Some people love to talk about themselves, but the question that occurs to me as I listen is why they want to impress me with their idealized versions of their identity. Others remain silent about what they do, which is much more interesting. Do they feel an aversion to the undercurrents of their own voices or do they prefer to listen? Are they too aware of ambiguities in their nature to present themselves as one thing?”

He paused. I said nothing.

“My brother Tony suffers from a fear of being devoured,” he continued. “I think it’s an expression of anxiety about how he’ll ultimately be judged. He shudders in the presence of large barking dogs, and one day he felt a painful need to defecate when he locked eyes with a bobcat in his front yard. Tony has never overcome his feeling of guilt at being descended from a family with a criminal past, something I have also struggled to come to terms with. Every urge for revenge or fantasy transgression confirms his worst suspicions about his inherent identity. He experiences our family’s history as an indelible stain that runs all the way through him, a case of the destructive potential of internal storytelling. Tony has never accepted himself, and he’s now living somewhere off the grid. My direction also seems dubious to a few people I’ve encountered. I refer to myself as a PA; what those initials stand for is open to interpretation. I consider myself a personal adjuster or a personal account specialist, though to prevent any misunderstanding I must clarify that I never discuss money. Personal assistant is not completely wrong, but I don’t do shopping for hire or serve as an important-person surrogate on phone calls. Some people would call me a life coach, but that phrase makes my flesh prickle because it could imply that I know considerably more than I do. The painful truth is that at this moment I can’t recall a single thing I know, which doesn’t bother me in the least.”

He paused again and drank from his beer. I wondered if there was a real brother named Tony or if the so-called PA had invented him to provoke a response from me. Did he expect me to see myself in his fictional brother? Was he playing mind-reading games with me? How could he presume to know me, and why would he?

“I can guess how Tony would feel if he were in your shoes. He would rather not speak or react. He might harbor a subterranean fear that I’d come to see him about his personal account. He’d suppress questions and hide inside himself. I hope I haven’t bored you. I wish you peaceful footsteps, yours and those around you.”

He put a couple of bills on the bar and walked out, his bulk stirring a draft when he passed. Had his eyes been following me? Did that make any sense? I’d never seen him during my walks and how could I have missed him? I signaled the bartender, paid and went out the door, looking around for the PA, wanting and not wanting to see him.

In the following days as I walked I was dogged by the idea that he’d appear, and if he did I planned to avoid him. Yet the memory of his voice kept returning and I told myself that I deserved to hear any thoughts he had about me. I imagined trying to speak with his possibly fictitious brother Tony, but we merely nodded at each other, something deeper than words in the silence.

About a week after his monologue in the bar I thought I saw him in an ice-cream store, but that turned out to be a younger man whose hair was not as white as his. Later that same day I felt an impulse to look behind me, and I saw him maybe twenty feet back, same white sunglasses, gait rapid, his finger pointing at me. I abandoned any idea of eluding him and waited.

“I wanted to tell you that Tony’s in town. He’s staying with me for now, who knows for how long, but he’s feeling a little better. I told him about you, and he said that if you’re willing he’d be open to meeting you. We could go to my humble impersonation of an office and talk. It’s not really an office, no staff to overhear us, just a converted porch at my apartment. It’s only a block and a half down the street.”

I walked with him toward what I accepted on faith was his office, wondering what he could have told Tony about me and what I’d be letting myself in for, but I pressed on, resigned to hearing more from him and curious about Tony.

We climbed a wooden stairway that took us above a storefront, and at the top he unlocked a door that opened onto a walled-in porch furnished with an old kitchen chair and a lopsided desk propped up by a brick. “I’ll tell him you’re here,” he said and unlocked a second door, the original front door, and closed it behind him.

I feared intruding questions and that any answers I gave would lead to an assessment, and the thought of them coming toward me with their minds choked me. Yet I stood there, and a minute or so later the PA returned alone, his sunglasses folded in his hand. “Tony’s not around. I should have called, but he doesn’t usually like to go out. Anyway, we can start.”

I sat in the kitchen chair, and he went behind the desk and dropped into a desk chair that creaked under his weight.

“You look distressed. Let me assure you I’m not selling anything, not a book or a pill or a set of keys for living. As I’ve said, I know nothing. I’d hoped that Tony could benefit from meeting you and that you could benefit from meeting Tony. I don’t intend to ask you uncomfortable questions and stare into your eyes until you crack and give answers you’d later find embarrassing or humiliating. Let’s say we can sit here and rest together, and if an urge arises for you to discuss how you see yourself, for example, we can take that raw material and perhaps begin to adjust your perspective. In my opinion, everything rests with how we see things. If we see things from a perspective that damages us, suffering accumulates until we feel almost buried beneath it.”

I acted on my pent-up desire to bolt, the course of his words virtually yanking me up, and not looking back I went out the door and rattled down the stairs, my breath already coming more easily. But turning left at the sidewalk I nearly smashed into my ex-classmate and stifled a gasp at the sight of him. His arm rose between us like a shield and he glared at me but continued on his way without any sign he’d ever seen me before. And though I wanted to avoid being identified, it troubled me as we walked away from each other that I was nothing more to him than an obstacle to step around, an insignificant speck beyond recognition.

The next day the closed-in porch came repeatedly to mind as I paced up and down King Street. The PA had mentioned telling him how I saw myself. Where would my reply have taken us, and would Tony have returned? Would the three of us know one another by now, at ease as we talked and drank our beers? I went back to the bar where I’d first seen the PA and drank a beer alone at happy hour, preoccupied by questions. Did I want to lead my life into a void? Shouldn’t I expect more from myself? What did I fear in any questions he could ask me? I feared my answers, but my answers were nothing I could reasonably blame him for.

In the morning I rose earlier than usual. I sat on my front step and watched people pass by, waving at any of them who looked at me, working myself up to a decision.

When I reached the PA’s apartment, I found a for rent sign posted on the door. No one answered my knock, so I dug in my pocket for the cheap phone I carried in case someone tried to assault me. I called the posted number, and a man picked up on the first ring. I told him where I was and that I wanted to get in touch with the former tenant. The apartment had been vacant for two months, he said, and the man who’d lived there was now deceased. I said that I’d struck up a conversation with a guy on King Street, white hair, around forty, and I’d seen him go up the stairs to the property.

“That sounds like our assistant Tony,” he said. “He helps with most of our properties, but he’s not here. He’s eager for any task that gets him on the road, which figures since he recently moved here from out of state. He likes to drive away from himself, he says. I have no clue what that means, but that’s Tony. Want me to tell him you called?”

I said no, I’d catch up with him.

“I don’t know if this will help; he sometimes parks his car on King and watches people. Small car, dark-tinted windows. He doesn’t like too much sun. His eyes and skin are sensitive to sunlight.”

I thanked him for the information. I spent the next hour walking, disturbed that Tony could have been watching me for weeks, assessing me, thinking I had nowhere to go, no one to see, and that I was on the lookout for something I feared I would find. He could have planned to sit near me in the bar at happy hour and pictured my face as he rehearsed his monologue. But I saw no ill will in him, and I couldn’t say that I was in the habit of presenting my true face to people. So why had he created a persona to talk to me? How did he see himself? Had he recognized me in some way? Was being devoured his version of a day of reckoning?

Days passed, no Tony. Then one afternoon, a cloudy day, I saw a white compact car parked on King, tinted windows you could barely see through. I knocked on the passenger-side window and he rolled it down.

“Tony,” I said, leaning in. He looked surprised as he shook my extended hand. “It’s good to finally meet you.”

Why, by Toby Leah Bochan

Because when I was little, my mother paraded around the house naked. I could too until I reached a certain age, until it didn’t seem right for my father to see me naked. I never in my life saw my father fully naked. That was my childhood. Mother dressing and undressing, father in a suit. So this place seems like the natural order of things.

Because I wanted to get over my modesty. Because I’m an exhibitionist. Because I’m an actress. Because I love to dance. Because I’m not talented. I was bad at ballet, tap, modern, jazz. There weren’t many options left.

Because my boyfriend wanted me to. This boy was prettier than me — slight and pale with thick straight black hair and very blue eyes. The eyes were really what did it. Grey blue surrounded by thick black long eyelashes, sharp at the corners and wide in the middle, like some kind of boat. Dazzling.

He whispered, “Do you think you could ever do that?” while we were watching Striptease. In the dark of the movie theater, I couldn’t tell if he thought I could or not.

I said, “I’ve never even been to a strip club.”

So he took me to one. I wanted to see what it was really like. Because it seemed like fun.

Because I needed a part-time job. Because I needed a summer job. Because it was summer and I’d be shaving my legs everyday anyway.

Some guy once asked me if I shaved everything. I said I kept a little bit. He said, “A Landing Strip.” I liked that — that’s how I always think of it now. Right here, right this way, boys! Fasten your seat belts and prepare for take off! There’s even a club called that, but until then I thought it was because the place was close to the airport, and the whole joke was the word ‘strip.’ It’s not as if I was raised to be a porn star or something. Just because I’m a dancer now doesn’t mean I was born with some kind of innate ability to understand that a man giving you a ‘pearl necklace’ isn’t necessarily going to give you a piece of jewelry. But then again, now sometimes he does.

Because of the money.

Because I lost twenty pounds and I wanted to show off. I’m a show-off. I need a lot of attention. I was an only, lonely child.

Because I was raised without religion and I’ve modeled my whole life on the question: What Would Madonna Do? I mean Madonna the singer, of course. I’m going to get bracelets made.

Because the boy dared me to do it. The boy was the first one to take me to a strip club — that was a dare too — we went to this all-nude strip club. I wasn’t twenty-one, but the place didn’t serve alcohol so you only had to be eighteen to go there. And male. They only let female customers in with a male escort. This is true almost everywhere. The excuse they give you is that they don’t want prostitutes soliciting in the club. But the reason is it’s a boy’s club. The boys want the girls to stay out, so they can have their dirty, mudpie fun.

Because I don’t like to be kept out of places. Because I was a thousand miles away from my family and they would never find out. Because out-of-state tuition was so high.

My first time out I was high as a kite. The boy wasn’t, so he drove. I was going to be in an amateur night. Before the amateurs they were having some kind of competition called the “pole-lympics.” The boy laughed when a girl would do something particularly impressive, sliding upside down the entire length of the pole or swinging around by her knees. He had a loud, high laugh. I told him to go give a dollar to his favorite girl. I gave him the dollar.

He chose this curly-haired, Shirley Temple type, Angel. Angel came by our table and gave the boy and me both a kiss on the cheek. She giggled.

“You dance?” Angel asked.

The boy told her I was there for amateur night. She wished me luck and squeezed my shoulder. I felt the tips of her acrylic nails on my skin.

“I’ve only been dancing three weeks and if I can do it, you can.”

Angel got second place, three hundred bucks.

Did I mention the money? Because the money’s important. I thought it would be entirely under the table, but it’s not — of course, no one ever declares all their tips in any service job.

I had to fill out forms, even at amateur night. The manager checked my driver’s license as the boy went to find us a table. He photocopied my license and handed me a piece of paper to sign, swearing I’d never been arrested for prostitution or drugs and another form, for tax purposes.

“We gotta report if you make money, honey,” the manager told me.

There would be a record of this, I realized. I never planned on working in politics anyway. I signed my name. I was going to dance by Jezebel but it was taken. I put down Rose — the perfume I was wearing that night.

Because I was failing biology and wanted to be good at something that had to do with the body. Because I had a great body. I wanted to see what I was worth.

This is how it went: After they had crowned their pole queen, the manager told me I could go and get ready. But I was already ready. I hadn’t known if I’d get a chance to change or anything. How would I know? Striptease wasn’t exactly realistic. I came in all tarted up — I just had to take off my sweater and put on heels. But I went backstage. It seemed like the thing to do.

I talked to the only other girl who was really an amateur, Cocoa. She had rich dark skin and long thin braids which swayed as she talked. Cocoa was the perfect name for her. I started thinking Rose was a stupid choice for me.

“Don’t worry,” she said to me. “The guys like the real amateurs, that’s why they come.”

Even Cocoa had done amateur night two or three times before. One of the regular dancers there was shaving in front of the mirror with a cordless electric razor. She was very thin and beautiful, like a lingerie model in a fancy catalogue. Most of the girls at that club were. But it was the only strip club I’d ever been to, so I didn’t know there were other kinds of places.

Because I wanted to know. Because there were things I already knew. I was a good flirt. I had a good smile. Because I liked to get done up — to put on my face. I liked the idea of having something to get fancy for every night. If it couldn’t be Christmas everyday, it could be Halloween.

I sat in front of the mirror and put on more lipstick, to look busy. I adjusted my body in the black bustier. The bustier was tight and my breasts quivered, white and pale, from the top. I felt fat. My high heels were too short — only a few inches in a club filled with heels as long and sharp as steak knives. I was afraid of falling anyway, in my short heels. I wasn’t going to swing on the poles. In between songs, the DJ sang the praises of one girl after another, what Joy could do, Leah’s long legs, Desire’s dark beauty. Naked and totally exposed. I was really nervous.

The boy was sitting out there in the audience, watching the other girls and waiting for me. And so were other men, strangers. But they didn’t worry me as much, somehow, even then. They were strangers I would never see again, that didn’t know me from Eve, that never would.

Because I loved the boy. Because I wanted to be the best he ever had. I wanted to be incomparable. I wanted to do things with him that no one would ever do again.

The regular dancers barged in and out of the dressing room, seeming very loud and sure and crazy to me. The girl shaving with the electric razor kept saying things like, “I had to come back and trim my bush,” to the other girls. I tried not to stare, as she lifted her leg to shave her labia, it seemed rude to stare, even though the whole reason she was shaving was because she expected people — men — to stare all night. I had no idea what I would say to this girl if I wanted to start a conversation. She seemed about as different as anyone could possibly be. At the same time, I knew she wasn’t that different at all. There was something about her I admired.

Because there’s something about being the focus of attention. Because I watched myself dance and I was good at it, at this type of dancing. Because I wanted to be a girl who was full of surprises. Because I wanted to be a girl who could do anything. Would do anything.

When it was my turn to go on stage, I was shaking. My first song was “Erotica,” by Madonna. I couldn’t look at anyone. I tried to remember how it had been in my room, watching myself in the closet door mirror. The whole stage was surrounded by mirrors but I didn’t want to look at myself in them. The manager had told me to take off my clothes on stage during the first song, except for my thong which I saved, he said, for song two. I stretched my hand up and threw my bustier aside. I unzipped the skirt and kicked it off.

That was a mistake — I slipped. My legs were unsteady. I started to fall down, but half-managed to make it look like I was trying to do some kind of back bend. The guys were all quiet, watching me. I almost lost it. The beautiful boy let out a long whistle. I knew it was his, the way I knew his laugh or his gait from a mile away.

Because I loved the boy. Because the boy loved me.

The second song began, “When Doves Cry.” I had been practicing to that song since the first time the boy had brought me to the strip club. Because the truth of the matter is, I wanted to do it. I was glad the boy had dared me. From the audience, it looked like a sexy, beautiful world. It sounds silly now, but it did.

Because I wanted to be that woman: that flesh in the sunlight that made a man’s heart rush down. Didn’t every woman want that? I thought so then. Object of desire. Eternal, lusty desire. I wanted to drive in a car with a man’s hand between my legs. I wanted to pull over down a side road. Ten feet away at a party, I wanted the way my dress shifted to call his cock to attention. There was a time when that seemed like a good goal to have, something to achieve.

Touch if you will my stomach, Prince sang. I opened my eyes. I took off my black thong. In the mirrors, I saw myself from unfamiliar angles, dancing, bending. There was my nape, my hair brushing the floor. In the reflection, I looked for the boy. He was staring at me with his blue, blue eyes, smiling. I reached for a pole and leaned back, watching myself. I thought, le arch de triumph.

Because later, we sat in Denny’s and the boy said, “You should have won,” even though we both knew it wasn’t true. “You were amazing. Did you practice?”

“Well–” I said, looking into my coffee, “a little.”

“You’re a natural,” the boy told me. And I saw that it didn’t matter if it was true or not. He believed it. “You’re every guy’s fantasy come true,” he said, and I saw that he believed that too.

“But I only care about yours,” I said, and that was true too, but less so than it had been before, hours before.

Because you came in looking one way and you changed into something else, and as simple as that sounds, it’s also true.

Last, Last, Last,
by Nicholas Montemarano

Would you do something for me? I hate to ask this of you, of all people, especially since I’ve spent most of these last years of my life asking you to do things for me. I wish there was another person I could ask to do me this last favor, and if you can think of such a person please let me know—that would be as much a favor to me as anything else, since nothing would please me more than to see someone other than you just for once doing me a favor. I’m not sure if I’ve said so before now—and please don’t take my saying this as my saying this because I want to try to sweeten you up before I ask you to do for me this last favor—but I’m very grateful for everything you’ve done for me. I mean that. You’ve paid my bills and driven me to the grocery and to see the doctor, and because I have terrible hearing you’ve explained to me what the doctor said to me about what I should and should not do, and because my eyes have seen better days—do you like that one?—that one was just for you—because my eyes have seen better days you’ve read to me what it says on the labels of all the pill bottles I need to take pills from, and one time when you saw that I was choking you slapped me hard on the back until what I was choking on came shooting out of my mouth, and a few times, when I was feeling seriously depressed and took too many pills, you threw cold water on my face and rubbed ice on my chest and forced coffee into my mouth, and for all these things I can’t say enough thank you’s to thank you enough. But I would like to just ask you to do just one more thing for me. That is, if you don’t object. That is, if you can’t come up with someone other than you to do this last for me. As you can see, I’m in no condition to go anywhere or to see anyone. I’m grateful that you were able to come see me today, which I thought would be the last favor I would ever have to ask you to do for me. But it turns out I have this last last favor I’m about to ask you to do for me now, and it might be the most important favor I have ever asked of anyone. What I would like you to do is to bring some messages from me to all those people I don’t have the strength left to go see them one last time. This is very serious and for this you need a good memory. I know you have always had a very good memory. Do you remember how I helped you with your memory? You used to sit on the floor with a pile of colored marbles in front of you, and I would sneak up and snatch up one of these marbles, and I would hold this marble in my closed hand and tell you that you could have the marble back only if you guessed what color it was, and you would cry a little bit and sit there for a while with that pouty face you used to have and ask me please to give you your marble back, and I would say no, you need to earn your marble back by guessing what color, and you lost quite a few marbles this way, didn’t you. The truth is that sometimes you got lucky and guessed the right color and I said wrong anyway and put the marble in my pocket. But you see—this is why you began working on your memory. Am I right? Tell me if I’m not right. Because I’ve always told you you should tell me if I’m not right. Sure I’m right. At some point you must have said to yourself, Enough of this!, because all of a sudden one day I came up behind you and snatched up one of your marbles and held out my hand and told you if you wanted the marble back you would have to guess what color, and you sat there and stared hard at the marbles still on the floor—there may have been I don’t know how many, maybe fifty sixty marbles—and after a while you looked up at me and said blue, and there it was in my hand. So for this reason I think maybe you are the person with just the right kind of memory to do me this last last—I promise—favor. So unless you object to any of this—and I hope you would tell me if you do—I might as well get started telling you what I want you to say to whom. First there is my mother, God rest her soul. What I need you to do is to go to her grave and lay one flower on her headstone and tell her her son is very sorry for what he put her through when he was a boy. If you can weep, weep. But asking you to weep might be asking too much. I mean, beyond what I’m already asking. So just tell my mother I’m sorry for what I put her through. The truth is, I was murder on my mother. I was nothing but trouble from my first day walking. From even before that—the way I used to scream all hours. My mother always used to tell me that I was responsible for every gray hair on her head, and I would like for you to tell her for me that now I know she was right and that I’m very sorry how I used to wander off when she always told me to never wander off, like in the grocery or in the park. She used to turn around and—where did I go? Where did that rascal go? she would say. I would hide somewhere where I could see her, and the way she would get flustered would make me laugh, and you can tell her for me that for this and for every gray hair I put on her head I am sorry and can only hope the Lord does not give me the penance I deserve. Next I need you to take the subway from Queens into Brooklyn—you know the way, the G line or the R line or one of those lines that get you from Queens to Brooklyn—and go find my father’s grave. This is where it gets tricky. You may not know this about your grandparents: the reason my father isn’t buried next to my mother is on account of all the hatred they had between them, and the fact that he died without a penny and blamed my mother for that and for everything. My father always used to say to my mother, I don’t want to be buried next to you. Why would I want to be buried next to you? If it’s the only thing you ever do for me, make sure I’m buried somewhere far away from where you’re buried. My mother in turn blamed me for the fact that there was so much hatred between her and my father and for the fact that my father died without a penny and said such terrible things to her and had to be buried next to the bodies of strangers in a not so nice cemetery with not even a headstone with his name engraved into the stone and the date he was born and the date he died. That’s the other thing. When you get to the cemetery you’ll have to ask the people who work there—maybe they have records of these things?—where exactly my father is buried, and when you find the right place you can tell my father for me that I’m very sorry that I came into the world the way I did—I was born with a crooked hip—and caused him so many headaches—for years I had to have all sorts of doctors trying to fix my hip—and left him penniless with not even a stone to mark where he was buried. You can also tell my father that I’m very sorry for tripping over some of the lines I was asked to read at his funeral and for leaving out the last part of the prayer I was supposed to read for the repose of his soul because I didn’t think to turn the page and see that the rest of the prayer—probably the most important part—was sitting there right on the next page. And now that I’m thinking about it, when you’re in the cemetery in Queens saying sorry for me to my mother, you can add that to the list of things you’re telling her I’m sorry for—my messing up my father’s funeral and embarrassing her by not knowing enough to turn the page to find the rest of a prayer, and in the process maybe putting my father’s soul at great risk. For that last part maybe I don’t need to be so sorry to my mother. But you better mention it to my father while you’re there in the cemetery in Brooklyn—how if I put his eternal soul in any danger by skipping the last part of that prayer, I’m very sorry, and I can only hope my own soul can be forgiven for such a terrible mistake. Also, you can tell my father that I’m sorry that when I was a boy I stole some of his favorite hair gel and brought it to school with me and squeezed some of it on Mrs. Gilfeather’s seat and laughed with all the other kids when Mrs. Gilfeather sat in the gel and stood up and didn’t even know she had gel on the seat of her dress. Which reminds me. If you can somehow find Mrs. Gilfeather’s grave—I don’t know how you would go about finding it, but you were always a very smart boy and I know you’re the best person to figure something like this out—if you could find her grave and lay a flower on the stone and tell her I’m sorry for what I did that day with the hair gel, that would be just as important to me as telling my mother and father I’m sorry for what I did to them. Because if I was murder on my mother and my father, I was just as much if not more murder on Mrs. Gilfeather. I remember one time—and you should tell Mrs. Gilfeather I’m sorry for this too—she came to school with a small metal box hooked around the top of her skirt and coming out of the box were these wires which she told us were attached to her chest and had something to do with her doctor wanting to know if her heart was skipping beats. So every time Mrs. Gilfeather turned to write something on the chalkboard I made fart sounds with my mouth and when she turned back around I sat there in my seat as if nothing was wrong, and pretty soon her face turned red and the box hooked around the top of her skirt started to make all sorts of beeping sounds and she ran out of the room crying and didn’t come back to school for a week. Please, if you can remember, tell Mrs. Gilfeather I’m sorry for that and for anything else I may have done to her ever. Then there is my sister, your Aunt Helen, who last I heard was in a rest home up on Bay Seventeenth Street down in Brooklyn. This is on account of her leaky valves. She can walk from here to there, maybe, but beyond there she’s no good. So if you could go down there and tell her for me—she’s also hard of hearing, so don’t be afraid to say what you have to say extra loud for her—tell her for me that I’m sorry for not keeping up with her these last years or ever going to see her for a visit and helping her walk from here to there or even calling on her birthday to say how’s shakes and ask her how her leaky valves are doing. Also, when Helen and I were children—God, I was murder on everyone, and for that reason alone should be flogged—when we were little kids, I used to take Helen’s favorite doll—the one with eyes that opened and closed—and make like I was making out with this doll and sometimes lick up and down this doll’s face until Helen cried and my mother or my father came in and cuffed me good and told me what a good-for-nothing I was. My sister Helen used to get up early in the morning, before even my mother or my father, just to pretend to feed this particular doll its breakfast and to comb its hair and talk with it and so on, and I was just the kind of monster back then to want to ruin her love for this doll. Some might say I’m still a monster, though a different kind, for never once going to see my sister at the rest home down in Brooklyn, and for never once giving her a ring to say how’s shakes, sorry for what I did with the doll way back when and for what I used to say to you about all the blotches you used to have on your face. That was the other thing I did to my sister Helen. I used to catch her looking at herself in the mirror and tell her it was no use because looking at yourself in the mirror will never make all the blotches on your face go away, and she would cry and cry, and then my mother or my father would come in and cuff the side of my head and call me a no-good monster. Or . . . wait a second . . . was that—was that you I used to say that to about the blotches? I don’t remember now. It’s hard to remember sometimes. You can grant me that much, can’t you—that it’s sometimes very hard to remember when you’re at as late a stage of the game as I’m at? Who knows? Maybe it was you I used to say that to. Because I remember you went around for a while when you were a kid with all sorts of blotches on your face, and it’s quite possible, sure it is, that it could have been you that I caught looking in the mirror and said what I said about looking in the mirror never being able to take away blotches. Well, I said that to someone, and now I don’t know who it was. So when you see my sister Helen down in the rest home, just to be safe, tell her I’m sorry for saying what I said about her blotches, and what the hell—when you’re talking to my mother for me in the cemetery in Queens, you might as well tell her I’m sorry for saying what I said about her blotches, because now that I’m thinking about it it could have been her I said it to, and when you’re saying sorry for me to my father in the cemetery in Brooklyn, why not throw in an extra sorry about my saying something about his blotches, because now I’m remembering that my father didn’t have the greatest skin in the world—I mean, my father was never someone who people used to say about him that he had great skin—and Jesus, when you’re over there with Mrs. Gilfeather, wherever she happens to be buried, go ahead and tell her I’m sorry too for saying in front of the whole class what an ugly blotchy face she had, because it’s very likely that’s something I may have done, since I was such a monster and since Mrs. Gilfeather’s skin was some of the worst skin I have ever seen. But this is all just in case, because, like I said, it may have been you I was saying all this terrible stuff to about what blotchy skin you had, and if that’s the case then my mother and my father and Mrs. Gilfeather and my sister Helen will have gotten one more sorry than they should have gotten. But when you think about it, I was such murder on all of them that even if I give each of them one hundred extra sorrys I will probably not have given each of them even close to the number of sorrys a monster like me should give every single person he ever came into contact with. Then there is your mother and all the lies I told her. I want you to go see your mother down in Jersey and tell her I’m sorry for all the lies I told her. But the thing is she doesn’t know about all the lies I told her. So when you’re there telling her how sorry I am for all the lies I told her, you might as well tell her what the lies were and what the truths I should have told her were. Not so long after your mother and I started dating I was kissing her goodnight one night and shortly after the kiss began I pulled away from her just a little bit, and she asked me, she said, Honey—that was what she called me back then before we were married and had you and grew to hate the site of each other—she said to me, Honey, what’s wrong?, and I said to her, Nothing is wrong, why, what’s the matter, what makes you think something might be wrong?, and she said to me, The way when we were kissing you pulled away from me like that, and I said, Like what, and she said to me, Like you just did, the way you pulled your lips back away from my lips as if something was wrong, and I told her she was imagining things, why would I want to go and do a thing like that with my best sweetheart, and she said, What do you mean your best sweetheart, does that mean you have other sweethearts?, and I said to your mother, Come on baby, come on, now you don’t think—, and she looked at me in that way you may have seen her look at me as if she doesn’t believe a word and needs more reassurance, so I said to her, Come on, you can’t possibly think—, and she smiled and I kissed her forehead and told her I had to get back home so I could dream about her—some lovey nonsense like that—and we said goodnight and that was it. But the truth of the matter—and this is one of the things I want you to tell your mother for me—is that I really did have other sweethearts, and what was worse was that one of these sweethearts was my best sweetheart, and I wanted to get home so I could lie in bed and think about this other young lady, who I would see on the nights I was not seeing your mother or any of the other lesser sweethearts, and while you’re at it you could tell your mother that the real reason I pulled my lips away from her lips was on account of the bad breath she had—it was nothing to do with the food she ate, it had something to do with something in her stomach, I mean something deep in the juices of her stomach, for which you would need to see a special doctor and get special medications or something. I know this because there were many nights I would offer your mother peppermint suckers—Take a few, I would say—and she would ask me, Is it my breath, my God, tell me the truth, is it my breath?, and I would say, Come on baby, you’re my number one sweetheart, and she would suck on these suckers I would give her, but when it came time to kiss her goodnight there was always this—I don’t know what to call it—this stale aftertaste to her mouth, and I would find myself pulling my lips away from hers and saying some lovey nothing into her ear. So that’s how come I know your mother’s bad breath had nothing to do with her mouth and had everything to do with her stomach. Why I married her with such bad breath was because she had lovely skin. Your mother had—and probably still has—some of the loveliest skin I have ever seen. I suppose you could also tell your mother for me that the time I grew a mustache was because I knew a woman I worked with was attracted to men with mustaches. Your mother said to me, What made you decide to grow a mustache?, and I said, Because I thought you would like it, and she said to me, I don’t very much like it, it prickles my face when you go to kiss me goodnight, and I said to her, Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t know that, and whenever I went to kiss your mother goodnight she would say, Ouch, or, Watch out with that mustache, and I would say, Sorry, I keep forgetting, I’ll shave it off tomorrow, and as you can see I never shaved it off and I never had to kiss your mother goodnight any longer than it would take her to say, Ouch. And do you remember the time when you were maybe seven years old and I told you I was going to take you to the park to teach you how to throw a frisbee? You said that you didn’t want to go to the park or learn to throw a frisbee, and I told you that all the kids were going around throwing frisbees, so you were better off coming with me to learn how to throw one before you were put in a situation with some kids your age where you might be embarrassed if you didn’t know how to throw one, and your mother said to me something like, Leave the boy alone, if he doesn’t want to go he doesn’t want to go, and I asked her if she knew just how many kids were out there every day throwing around a frisbee, and she said, No, and I said, Well then. So we went. Do you remember that day? How I took you to the park and set you up with a frisbee and told you to keep throwing it as far as you could and to keep running after it and picking it up and throwing it again? Well, what I want you to tell your mother for me is that I pushed so hard to bring you to the park that day and all the other days—even after you knew how to throw a frisbee probably better than any other kid—because I had already made plans to meet my number one sweetheart—who I didn’t want to marry because I wanted her to stay my number one sweetheart—and needed an excuse to get to the park where I told her I would meet her. So while you were chasing around the frisbee, I was off with this lady, and I want you to tell your mother for me how terribly sorry I am for being that kind of a monster and for setting up her son with a frisbee and leaving him out of my sight while I was kissing this woman who had lovely skin and a fresh taste in her mouth. Tell your mother I should be murdered for doing something like that. And it would be an extra special favor to me if you could also try to find this lady I went to the park to see—her name is Rose Fischetti, and if she’s still alive she probably lives in the Bronx—and tell her I’m sorry for telling her for so many years I was going to leave my wife for her and then when your mother and I split up running off with some other sweetheart I had found. I’m pretty sure she’s the last person I can think of right now who I need to say I’m sorry to, though I’m sure there are others out there. In fact, after I’m gone, if you ever run into anyone who tells you they knew me, right away tell them for me that before I died I said I was sorry for whatever I did to them. Jesus, if I could go back in time knowing what I know now about how it feels to be dying with so many sorrys to say to so many people. Wait a minute—I just remembered. You can also tell her—Rose Fischetti, I mean—that I’m sorry about the one time I refused to go into a restaurant with her on account she had so many runs in her stockings. She had lovely skin and a sweet taste in her mouth, but she was always running around with runs in her stockings. But the most important thing is that you tell your mother for me about those lies I told her, and that I know I have always been a monster and will die a monster and certainly deserve more than anyone else the wrath of my Maker. Take now, for instance. I asked you to come here to see me as the last favor I would ever ask of you, and only when you got here did I tell you that I had this last last favor to ask you to do for me. But the truth of the matter is that I knew before I even called you that I was going to ask you to do this last last favor for me, and Jesus Christ, I didn’t even offer you a glass of juice. What kind of monster am I that I’ve had you here for how long and I didn’t even think once to offer you a small glass of juice? If only I could have known five or ten minutes ago what I know now. But the last thing I want you to do now is to get up from where you’re sitting and get yourself a glass of juice! Because the only reason—God help me—I started to feel sorry for not having asked you if you wanted a glass of juice was because I started to feel thirsty and thought to myself that I would like a glass of juice, and I thought the best way to get you to get me a glass of juice would be to offer you one, and this way while you were in the kitchen getting your glass it would be no problem for you to bring me mine. But this is just business as usual for a lifetime monster, and it kills me to think that I couldn’t just for once think of someone else and want you with no strings attached to have a simple glass of juice—Jesus, oh Jesus, what have I done, oh God, oh Jesus God, what have I done with my life, oh Christ, oh Christ Almighty, I can’t breathe thinking about everything I’ve done, my throat is closing up on me, Jesus Mary and Joseph, I can’t breathe, I can’t swallow, oh Jesus, oh Son, oh my son, would you do for me a favor, please, I’m begging you, your father is begging you, I can’t breathe, my throat, oh Son, I promise this is the last last last favor I’ll ever ask of you, I promise, the last last last, would you go into the kitchen for your father, please, hurry, and get for him what might very well be, God help us, his last glass of juice?

Gentility, by June Unjoo Yang

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

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

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

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

A Huge, Old Radio, by Ander Monsen

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

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

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

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

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

“Jump, you fuck!”

Chuckles echo from someone else up ahead.

“Who’s that up there?”

“Listen—”

Paul is telling the Goat Boy story again.

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

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

He feels stupid.

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

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

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

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

“Ya fucking shitball.”

Tiny hairs poke out, erect, from his legs,

“God it—”

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

“Get your ass…” The flashlight vanishes.

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

“Shouldn’t…cold…”

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

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