Fiction

Paternity Within the Limits of Reason

by Diana George

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

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

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

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

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

A Love Transaction

Maile Chapman

It takes us hours to get everything cleaned up. I do the lighter jobs. He does the heavier jobs. He does anything with lifting, anything with twisting, anything that I can’t do because I am prone to having cramps around the baby-thing. The entire area is sore, and lifting is bad, it provokes the pains down there. I have never told him about my health condition but I assume he must have guessed that I am not completely normal. I know he makes it easier for me, and in exchange I let him hurry me through. He has a standing plan for after work. It is probably a girl, I don’t know, I almost don’t want to know, I never ask and he never volunteers.

If he wants to know about it indirectly, he can find out from the office manager. She’s the only one I’ve told, and I only tell her about my situation when it affects my job. Even then I don’t tell her everything, not too many details. So far I have only told the minimum, that it pinches inside when I have to lift the metal gates and drag the hose out. I told her about the pressure from the baby-thing and the problems caused by the partial bones, because although they are small, and soft, it’s uncomfortable when I have to bend down to do the gutters in the indoor runs.

We can have him do it for a while, she says. She seems sympathetic, but people don’t really want to know the private story. I am sure it makes her want to go home and get away, get comfortable. She’s got a husband. That’s what she says, she likes to go home on time so that she can see her husband. But sometimes she stays a few extra minutes to check in with us. With me, since he’s usually already started on something. He doesn’t talk at all during the first part of the shift. He sweeps, then turns on the waxer and guides it away from her, pretends he can’t hear when she says it’s time to have a word. So I listen. She tells me whether there are any overniters in the back, how many, what the special needs are. Someone puts a towel over their doors before we arrive so that we don’t upset them with the equipment. We never even see them.

She slips on her belted raincoat while she goes over the details. She takes her purse out of the bottom drawer of the file cabinet, takes her keys off the hook. She wants to leave in her high-heeled shoes before the floors get wet. I have tried to get him to talk about her, I thought that maybe there was an attraction there, I thought maybe that’s why she made the point to stay around a little, to see him, to try to talk to him over the hum of the waxer. When I brought it up he looked at me like I was crazy. Which was an answer that made me happy.

We have a pattern of activity together. While he does the indoor runs and the floor I go out back and dump the small boxes of waste. I take the outdoor broom to the fenced area and flip any stools into the bushes. After a while he comes out to smoke and I stand there a minute because he might say something, now that the worst part of the cleaning is over. Then I go inside to bleach the exam rooms and do a general wipe-down. When I’m almost done he gets on the phone. He has a conversation with someone, with whoever it is that waits for him every night. When he hangs up he says, are you almost finished? By then I am checking on the overniters. He won’t have anything to do with that. He won’t go near the berths, doesn’t want to get that close. I put an ear to each, making sure I hear the breathing. We get ready to walk out the door together. He waits while I set the alarm, and then we’re done.

Depending on his mood he will let me give him a ride somewhere. He likes to get out at a certain intersection midway between the clinic and where I live. He points and I pull over. At the intersection are a gas station, a tavern, and a dark apartment complex. He waits until I pull away before he starts walking. I’m sure he goes into the apartment complex. It is a poor-looking place. I think there’s a girl in there, waiting. I know that he thinks I’m spoiled because I have the car. He doesn’t understand the necessity. I can’t do the walking that he does. I try to tell him this while we drive but I want to keep it vague. I always hope that when we talk he won’t ask openly about my health. Saying too much about it would give the wrong impression, especially under the circumstances, he and I alone together in the darkness of the car.

I have appointments I need to get to, I say. I have to drive. I can’t do the walking, for my medical reasons. I really can’t.

He looks away out the window. He says, that’s probably not any of my business.

I hope he won’t make me say more. The best I can do is to think about my situation as hard as I can, and hope he picks up on it. I picture the proteins, the spotty tissues all sealed together. The baby-thing with hair and teeth comprising twenty percent of it. I think about how much I don’t want to describe it to him just then. How much I want to be natural and not suggestive with my details. And he has mercy. I think he sees how it is with me. I think he knows that it isn’t my fault, that it was a sterile happening, and that despite everything, I’m still a very nice girl. By this I mean that I have a good heart, and could be helpful. He could ask me for anything, and I’d give it to him.

The office manager waits and talks to me in private. First she asks about my health, and I tell her that none of the doctors is telling me anything new, that it’s going to be surgery eventually. Even though I don’t want to take the time off. She says that I can cross that bridge when I come to it. Then she asks how it’s working out to have both he and I doing our shifts at the same time. I say that it works well. She asks whether it isn’t too distracting and whether it isn’t taking us too long to finish. Distracting? Did he say that? I am careful to be neutral. I ask her whether he has made any comments about me. Her kindness wavers and I see envy in her face. Not in so many words, she says. He’s concerned with getting out on time.

We always get out on time, I say.

We’ll talk again later, she says, getting ready to leave.

But I know that something is going on. He’s been thinking it through on some level or he wouldn’t have said anything about me, one way or another.

I stay out of his way, to make him wonder, to make him notice my absence when he goes out back to smoke. In the exam rooms I listen for him. I know that he is right there. I know that he is being careful not to think about me. My heart expands. The baby-thing shifts with excitement so that I have to stop and steady myself against the stainless steel table. I am almost sick with all of the possibility, all of the potential for happiness.

Nothing changes for several days, except that I avoid him. I find myself taking more time with the overniters. Adjusting the draping over the recovery area, repositioning the green mesh over the heatlamps.

Then I arrive and he is smoking outside in the parking lot. When I walk in he follows and goes into the back. The office manager is waiting. She says, he won’t listen to me. Can you make sure that he knows there’s a leak in the big room? He simply won’t listen to me.

Runoff water is coming from somewhere. I can hear it hitting the floor.

She says, for god’s sake get it mopped up.

The concrete walls are painted white. Water runs down them like glaze. I hear him turn on the waxer in the back.

He’s going to be electrocuted, she says. I tell her that I will take care of the water. I promise. She wants to leave, and I want her to leave, to go home to her husband, to leave us alone.

When she is gone I bring towels from the utility room, dirty towels from the bin, I’m touching them with my bare hands but I don’t care. The water slowly accumulates in the corners. I need more towels. Just leave it, he says. I’ll do it.

There is a chill from the seeping water. I listen to the overniters and check the controls on all of their heating pads. I turn them each up by one setting. Not too much, otherwise the overniters who can’t move will become dangerously overheated or even burned. Sometimes they are too weak to shift themselves off the pad. I hear him in the next room, moving towards the phone, making his usual call. I don’t look under the toweling but I can hear stirrings behind the bars when I pause outside each berth.

He is on the phone. He says, did you find out?

There is nothing but the sound of water, and then he says, I don’t believe it.

There are jerky movements in the last recovery berth, the sound of nails against stainless steel. I move the toweling a little. I make larger movements than necessary, to catch his eye and remind him that I am here but he doesn’t notice. He stares straight down at the phone. He says, are you sure? His voice gets lower; are you sure? Okay, he says finally. Okay, but stop. If you’re sure then crying won’t help now. He hangs up. I repeatedly adjust the toweling. It is light pink, frayed around the edges. I tuck it more securely around the frame of the door.

I keep my back to him. I am giving him the chance to make up his mind about something. My fingers are between the bars for a long moment during which I hear nothing from him in the room behind me. I try to maintain my calm. I hear the nails again faintly and I am afraid that the overniter is about to touch my fingers. Maybe bite my fingers. But I know they are all delirious, not even aware of me.

He pulls the waxer away from the wall. Pauses.

Can you give me a ride somewhere? he says. It is the first time he has had to ask.

Of course, I say. Inside I feel a mounting pressure. I slide my fingers further into the cage. Labored breathing. Delirium.

He puts the equipment away, the floors undone. He lines the corners and baseboards with rags to catch the seepage. He is on his knees.

I do the exam rooms, fast. He is waiting. He is nervous. He can’t stand still and goes outside. I step out of the building, lock the door. Set the alarm. Push the buttons. He throws his cigarette into the gravel and we get into the car.

I drive him to a cash machine where he withdraws the maximum allowed. Then he asks me to take him to another cash machine nearby, where he attempts to make another withdrawal. He has reached his daily limit. He reads the screen, appears not to understand. He tries again but can’t take out any money. He gets back into the car, waits, and then asks me to drive him to another cash machine.

By now it is dark out. I tell him it’s no use, that no machine will let him take more. He says he has to keep trying. He won’t look at me. I know he is thinking that I don’t understand, that I can’t understand the frustration.

How much? I say.

His hand twitches on his leg.

I don’t know, he says. Anything.

I step out of the car with my purse, take out my debit card. It slides neatly into the machine. My fingers feel swollen when I press the numbers. I know what kind of gesture this is. I would take it all out, if it weren’t for the limit, and so I go that far, and will give it to him in crisp new bills. I get back into the car and sit beside him. Breathless. My hand touches his when he takes the money. His eyes look shiny and red. I feel a pulsing everywhere, a throbbing even in my throat, because now I know that eventually I will have him. Now I know that the girl in the apartment complex will be easy enough to forget, it will only take money to fix that situation. And I never even had to bring up the baby-thing. All of that has been left undescribed – there is still all of the telling to look forward to. I’m thinking about the patience he will have to have, and the secret things he will do for me when we are alone together in a safe place. I have to sit and hold it in for a second before I can drive, before I can even turn the key, because of the movement, the excitement, the hidden cartilage twisting in anticipation of him.

MY FIRST REAL HOME

by Diane Williams

In there, there was this man who developed a habit of sharpening knives. You know he had a house and a yard, so he had a lawnmower and several axes and he had a hedge shears and, of course, he had kitchen knives and scissors, and he and his wife lived in comfort.

Within a relatively short time he had spent half of his fortune on sharpening equipment and they were gracing his basement on every available table and bench and he added special stands for the equipment.

He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself. It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.

Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.

So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.

“I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it – and see that white box over there?” he’d said. That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rubber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.

He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.

I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.

As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shining like a plug bayonet.

All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.

“I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.

Oh, and then he also had a nice touch — for every packet he had completed there was a band aid included. Just a man after my own heart. He died.

I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.

Drought

by Jensen Beach

Her great uncle Gerald had died. Amy just finished reading an email that contained a scanned photograph of his obituary clipped by her Aunt Mary Margaret from the Miami Herald. The obituary did not indicate cause of death, but Amy knew that he’d had some heart trouble recently. The news of his death did not surprise her. It also did not make her particularly sad. Still, she printed the clipping, watched the paper skulk from the printer on her desk. Then she held the obituary in her hand, the paper still soft from the ink, and looked at the small grainy black and white picture of Gerald in his service uniform in a way that she thought might indicate her grief if any of her employees happened to walk by her open office door.

The obituary was mainly concerned with Gerald’s love of baseball. He’d also been a Sergeant in the Army, and he operated a bar in Miami Beach for forty years, and he’d left money to the Boys and Girls Club in Westview, which the obituary writer, who was probably Aunt Mary Margaret, seemed somehow equally proud of and disappointed by. Secondary to these topics was Gerald’s dislike for his home state of Wisconsin. He had lived in Miami for more than sixty years, and apart from infrequent visits and his life-long support of the Green Bay Packers, Gerald, the obituary made clear, wanted nothing whatsoever to do with his home.

Amy was curious, frequently, about the notion of home. In her own case, she had tried but failed to move away and was increasingly convinced she’d end her life where it started. There were worse fates. She had been born in the small central valley town where her grandfather had arrived as a migrant in the 1930s from Wisconsin to work first on a dairy farm and then later start a well drilling operation that made him very rich. Her father took over this business when his father died. Amy had grown up, accordingly, in comfort. She went to the state university located fewer than twenty miles to the south in Fresno. Her junior year she had taken an art history course with a required travel component, and she spent two wonderful weeks in Florence and Milan where she visited countless museums and cathedrals. On her flight home she’d vowed to her seatmate, a sickly girl with vision so poor she needed a magnifying glass to read her textbooks, to spend at least the early part of her adult life traveling the world, seeing all that she could.

Not long after making this promise she graduated, summa cum laude, with a degree in accounting. Her mother threw a party for her to celebrate this milestone, and all Amy’s friends came and lingered about the pool and sipped cocktails mixed poorly by the nervous Mardirosian boy, the neighbor from three houses down, whom her mother had hired to play the role of waiter. He even wore a white suit coat. As the party wound down, guests trickling out of the gate on the side of the house as dusk began to settle, her father approached. He gave her a hug and presented her with a business card that read in ornate script: Amy Susanne Murphy, Chief Financial Officer.

“I had this mocked up for you,” he said. He grabbed her forearm at the wrist, a gesture of his she knew well. “Robert will be retiring soon enough. If you put in the effort and the hours, the job is yours when the time comes.” He smiled and leaned in to give her a kiss on her cheek.

Over the years she made it to Mexico a number of times, was proud of the fact that she’d visited the Pacific and Gulf coasts, each frequently. For a short period, she even owned a one-sixteenth share in a condo in a small village outside Cabo, where she visited a few times before selling her share in order to finance a new car. But she never lived anywhere away from home. The house she bought was less than a mile from her parents’ place, and she saw them every day. She never married, but every two years or so managed to entangle herself into a complicated and usually painful affair with a man, often from work, once from church, and increasingly from the internet.

In addition to obituaries, Aunt Mary Margaret frequently sent holiday themed napkins and paper plates in the mail. All of these Amy kept on a shelf in her pantry, never opening a single package. Since Aunt Mary Margaret’s later than normal conversion to email, she had sent the decorative paper goods much less frequently, but the shelf in Amy’s pantry was still overflowing with floral Easter cake plates and glittery New Year’s cocktail napkins.

Apart from a minor car accident in Fresno in which Amy had broken the pinky finger on her left hand, nothing all that tragic had ever happened to her. There were breakups, minor heartbreaks, of course, but nothing out of the ordinary. She did not have a pet that would grow old and die, no children to risk childhood cancers, no husband to betray her singular trust. She worked out three times a week, rarely drank more than a glass or two of wine at a time, did not smoke, and enjoyed skiing and hiking equally. She was in good shape for her thirty-seven years, and had been given a diagnosis of perfect health at her most recent physical. Compare this to her employee Esmeralda, who was obese and could often be heard wheezing on warm days. Amy pitied her. In the last year alone, Esmeralda’s husband had left her for another woman, her son Orlando had been injured in the line of duty in Afghanistan and lost both of his legs, and her youngest daughter had spilled a pot of boiling water on her chest and thighs causing severe burns. Miraculously, Esmeralda had not missed a single day of work to attend to these tragedies. Though of course Amy would have allowed this if Esmeralda had only asked.

She read the obituary again, scanning for information on where to send flowers and curious to see whether she might uncover the architecture of some unspoken family drama regarding where Gerald should be interred. She supposed it would be Miami, where the funeral was to be held and where the address for the funeral home was located. Gerald had lived there so long. He attended Mass at St. Joseph’s, where the services were to take place in three weeks’ time, according to the notice at the bottom of the obituary. But Aunt Mary Margaret was stubborn, and Amy knew her father would do whatever his cousin wanted if this meant avoiding a conflict. Apart from Gerald, all of the Murphy family lived either in California or in Wisconsin. Aunt Mary Margaret might very well insist that Gerald be laid to rest in Wisconsin at the Murphy family plot. In this case, at least, a visit in his honor would not require travel to a place that meant nothing to any of them now that Uncle Gerald was gone.

She’d tried to see Gerald only a year before. There had been a conference in Ft. Lauderdale for small business owners in the construction industry. Amy had arranged to go, hoping to meet other young professionals, perhaps discover some vision of her own for the company and its future under her leadership, new partners perhaps, or more exciting, new markets. The drought had brought some difficult years. Her guilt over the nature of the company had likewise become difficult. A day might be going along just fine when she would be on Facebook and run across one of those time-lapse videos of a lake up north that showed the dramatic effects of the drought on the water levels in the state. On those days, she’d need an extra glass of wine or two at night to find sleep. Her father had been gradually retiring from his position as CEO and Amy was stepping into this new role. He owned the building and most of the equipment and Amy would pay the lease on these items, at once funding her father’s retirement and also purchasing the business and its various holdings from him. They agreed that whatever balance was left by the end of a six-year period would be her inheritance, whether her father had died yet or not.

The day she arrived in Ft. Lauderdale, it was hot and she was sweating through her shirt before she’d even reached the curbside pick-up for the shuttle bus to the rental car facility. The conference was spread across two separate banquet rooms in a hotel near the airport. It rained the first day, a storm that arrived almost simultaneous to her checking in to the hotel. The second day was sunny, but wickedly hot, and Amy did not leave the hotel for longer than the few minutes it took to walk from one building to the other. She spent her evenings in the bar, making awkward small talk and failing to connect with anyone in a meaningful way. By ten-thirty on the second night, whatever vision she may have hoped to discover had been obscured behind the ill-fitting pants and crew cuts and obvious indentations on ring fingers where wedding bands normally sat. She emptied her half-full glass of wine into a potted palmetto by the elevator and went up to her room.

On the third day, the heat broke and she decided to skip the conference events and drive to Miami to see Gerald. She didn’t bother to call him ahead of time. He lived in an assisted living facility in Miami Beach. Aunt Mary Margaret always made sure to send pictures whenever she visited, and Amy felt in some small way that she knew the place, though she herself had not ever been. There was a view of the water from Gerald’s bedroom window.

On I-95 south, she hit traffic and was glad she’d paid the small fee to the rental car company for the toll pass when she saw the sign indicating that she could merge onto the express if she wanted. She did. In no time she was exiting the freeway and driving, by means of several bridges, to the east toward a hazy line of tall buildings on the horizon.

Aunt Mary Margaret frequently wrote emails to Amy about her visits with Uncle Gerald. A major subject of these emails was the traffic problem in Miami Beach. Traffic was “a real nightmare, as you know, and it’s getting worse.” Her emails often affected that casual tone people use to indicate that they have more experience with a thing than might be assumed. But as Amy made her way across the island and experienced the wait at each stop light, the honking horns, the loud music from convertibles stranded in intersections, the motor scooters and throngs of people dragging coolers and beach chairs toward the water, she began to suspect that perhaps Aunt Mary Margaret had not been exaggerating. This made Amy nervous, and so she parked her rental car several blocks away from Uncle Gerald’s place, in the parking lot of a Walgreen’s housed in a building painted so white it hurt her eyes.

In the end traffic was no less complicated for her on foot, though she was more flexible in her options regarding one-way streets and a funny little section where the road had been torn up and large boulders of concrete and asphalt crowded onto the sidewalk directly in front of an erotic art museum. “Come delight!” the sign above the black-windowed front door read.

By midday it was oppressively hot, though thick clouds had begun to crowd the sky and there was a musty smell in the air as if rain was imminent.

Gerald’s apartment building was on the north side of South Beach, two blocks in from the water. It was a wide, six-storied building, decorated on the broad stucco wall above the entry way with a sunrise motif carved into the façade. As she entered the building, Amy tried to remember that she wanted to google art deco architecture when she got back to her hotel.

Inside, the air conditioning was so powerful that she instinctively hugged herself, briskly rubbing her hands up and down her arms. There was an expansive lobby area with a shiny, reflective white tile floor and beyond that an open entrance to what appeared to be a hallway that led back into the building. This was obscured by a long, flowing linen curtain that shrugged in the air that the ceiling fan pushed about the space. Amy approached the reception desk, behind which a young woman was speaking loudly into a phone. When she saw Amy, the woman placed the phone on the desk and said, warmly, “Hello. Can I help you?”

“I’m here to see my uncle,” Amy said.

The woman pushed a guest registry book across the desk to Amy. “You have to sign in,” she said. “Is he expecting you?”

“I’m only in Florida for a couple of days. I thought I’d surprise him.”

“That’s sweet of you. Some of our residents don’t get any visitors.”

Amy began to fill out the information the registry required. As she finished writing her cell phone number and home address, the woman said, “It’s a lot, I know. We’ve had some trouble with visitors. Mostly distant relatives looking for money or else drugs in the medicine cabinet.”

“Of course,” Amy said.

“You wouldn’t believe what people will do to their loved ones,” the woman said.

When Amy had finished with the registry, she replaced the pen and closed the book.

“Do you know your uncle’s apartment number?” the woman asked.

“I’ve never visited before,” Amy said.

The woman opened the registry, scanned with a finger until she reached Amy’s entry and mouthed to herself as she typed into her computer, “Gerald Murphy. Gerald Murphy.”

Amy smiled as she waited, kept her eyes on a large mole on the woman’s chest, below her collar bone.

“He’s in 507,” the woman said. “I’ll let you surprise him. Gerry’s such a sweetie. I’m sure he’ll be happy to see his niece.”

Apartment 507 was the door located closest to the stairwell. She remembered this detail from one of Aunt Mary Margaret’s emails, actually. Aunt Mary Margaret was always delighting in inconsequential details. Amy knocked. She waited for a few seconds and then knocked again. There was a single window in the hallway, a small frosted glass circle framed by a sunset motif, this one made out of metal, perhaps aluminum or chrome. The sunset reflected what little light there was in the hallway brightly. There was still no answer at the door. She had the number right. 507. Perhaps Uncle Gerald was sleeping, or perhaps he’d gone out. It occurred to Amy that she had almost no idea about his day-to-day life.

Downstairs, the woman behind the desk seemed unconcerned that Gerald had not been home. “He’s probably at the beach,” she said when Amy returned. “Most of the residents spend a lot of time at the beach if they’re healthy enough to go out.”

“Right,” Amy said.

“And can you blame them?” the woman said. “It’s so beautiful down here.”

“It’s gorgeous,” Amy said. “Really pretty.”

“I’m from Georgia, but this is home for me. I’m in it for the long haul. I love Miami,” the woman said. She reached for her phone and held it up as if she were about to make a call. “Maybe they’ll even let me have a place here when it’s time to put me out to pasture.” The woman laughed at this.

“That would really be something,” Amy said, surprising herself.

“I’m sure he’ll be home soon, if you want to come back. Take a walk. There’s plenty to do down here.”

“I will,” Amy said. “Thanks.”

She felt the first rain drops before she’d even made it a block from Uncle Gerald’s place. They were big, thick drops that in no time darkened the sidewalks. And then the wind picked up, and the rain came down heavily and loud, immediately filling the gutters with water and soaking Amy through. She took cover in the first shop she passed, a tourist place with an enormous display of jewelry made with shark teeth—necklaces, earrings, a ridiculous looking headband with the teeth arranged along the top in a way she assumed was meant to suggest a shark’s open mouth.

That was a year ago. In her office, she put Uncle Gerald’s obituary down on her desk. She wondered, briefly, if Aunt Mary Margaret was punishing her for not seeing Uncle Gerald in Florida before he died. It was odd that she hadn’t gotten an email at the least before the obituary was published, or that her father hadn’t called with the news. She didn’t think that anyone had known about her trip to Miami. It was reasonable to travel for business and be unable to make time to visit with distant family. No one would begrudge her that. And no one, as far as she knew, was even aware that she’d tried to see Uncle Gerald but then found herself exhausted from the storm and the little tourist shop and had decided to drive to her hotel and not wait for Uncle Gerald to come back from the beach or wherever he was. But she could not shake the feeling that the timing of the news of his passing had been planned by Aunt Mary Margaret to communicate something to her. The receptionist must have told Uncle Gerald that Amy had visited. And when she didn’t return, Uncle Gerald, offended, must have called Aunt Mary Margaret to tell her.

Amy was a nervous person, a fingernail biter, a fidgeter. She sat at her desk and ran her fingers along the edges of the obituary, pushed the paper back and forth, folded one of the corners, unfolded it. Outside her open office door, her employees passed on their way from one task to another, all of them there for her, and yet not a single one turned to look, no one said hello. She pulled the obituary nearer to her, determined to find some clue as to Aunt Mary Margaret’s motivations. Much loved father, she read, brother, and uncle, Gerald James Murphy passed from this life to his eternal home beside his beloved savior Jesus Christ.

Jensen Beach is the author of two collections of short fiction, most recently Swallowed by the Cold, winner of the 2017 Vermont Book Award. His stories have appeared in A Public Space, The Paris Review, and the New Yorker. He teaches at Northern Vermont University, where he is fiction editor at Green Mountains Review. He lives in Vermont with his children.

Boombox and Neon Flowers

by Abby Savitch-Lew

She walk on Rockaway. She swing purple hips. She buy a bag of green genips like sweetness from the Guyanan people at the corner. The juice gloss her lips, the rubbery rind curl in her palm, the jell ball roll with her tongue. She in 99¢ Century on New York Ave., a plastic crate swing at her arm. She be filling it with pink flip-flops, baby-breath scent candles, cockerspaniel-cookie tins, Nigerian statues, Brazilian masks, and them kind of old time jack-in-the-boxes. With Aunt Cassie anything under five buck belong shelved in her Dumont Brownstone. Thing she seen a million time she want cause they remind her of the old days, and thing she never seen she want cause they be souvenirs of a new life, by Jesus a new, fresh, starched and laced life. She be a widow now and her lover is Brownsville, her fetish is them venders and thrift stores. Money slide out, and the plastic jewelry of oppression slide in. Her family live in Brooklyn long time—she only twenty-five when they came. Long while she work to do, till she could go back then and now to Guyana, her better love. Better and lamented, like that husband that come before Brownsville. This why plastic jewelry taste like oppression when she suck on them beads round her neck. Is not cause she got no freedom or food. She drink sweet sorrel and on her stove be cooking plantains and macaroni.

Five men lounge round a table in the parking lot out of the Key Food. Two got canes and stiff knees. One be saying how he yesterday heave up that god-damn air-conditioning from the basement into his apartment, all by his self. His face still red with pride and gleam with sweat. Another one live behind a curtain a smoke and got bad lungs. Puff, puff, puff, they mock him and call him the black engine and tell him he gonna get a stroke and die. It noon and they’s shoving down pre-made tuna sandwiches thick with mayo, and kiwi fruit salad. Is evening and they talk bout the way kids used to pick up pennies, bout cars without seat-belts, bout Lindy’s cheesecake, bout back in the 80’s when them firecrackers on Fourth of July so loud is sounded like a war going on. Bout the way kids always work too hard now days, and don’t got time for hanging round or mastering real skill—skills like playing dominos or crashing they bikes into peoples’ garbage bins. Then while they’s thinking on wasted summers they think of playing basketball with Runny Joe, and at Runny Joe’s name they eyes get overwhelmed and they’s deciding to split a beer.

Two boys walk on the street step on the cracks on purpose, wondering if they be cursed to hell and die for stepping so. Two boys walk past the community garden where them little toddlers in the day-camp grow corn. Hey they be ducks in here yo, say one boy. And they look through the pentagons of the iron fence like a prison gate trying to see they ducks but they don’t see nothing but a mossy pond and a scarecrow and a mailbox. Hell how the mailman get his mail in the mailbox, say the same one. Teachers say he got a good mind, this one, he always get on so curious-like. The other boy don’t like to talk, only like to chew gum.

Some girl named Amira, she wearing a pink Sunday dress, sit on her porch and read some big fat book by some long-named Russian guy. Her glasses got no lens. Them boys, they’s come by her house to say she a big phony and to tell her she ain’t no friends. They saw some boys do like this on a TV show. In the show one boy get close and hit the girl down, but none these boys going to go so far, though they telling each other to go hit Amira. The other girls left Amira long time ago, they don’t come by no more. They’s done trying to be friends with her cause they all knowing Amira don’t want to be friends with them. Amira, she notice that when she spends time with other girls, her habits and speech and manners all changing. It scare her cause she don’t want to be corrupted. She know she already pure and perfect and pearly like she is, she already been told so many times by many grown people. Everyone always telling you to remember who you are, and that is no less what she trying to do. She don’t want to be the type of person who say “shit” and “fuck”, or the type of girl going behind the school building to be touchy-like with the sixth grade boys. She want to be pure like an angel through and through.

Angels is everywhere. Angels is spread on the sides of brick churches and temples, they holy stone faces like lepers’ faces, with all them holes from the rain. Sometimes when it snow, angels is appearing on the streets and sidewalks. They’s always angels in the kitchens: mommas in bandanas cooking up heaven. You coming home to chili and angel food cake.

One of them mommas got a man named Tommis, and he young and still a beauty. He desperate like a little girl, lone in the world with no papa or bro to walk him safe. He grow up in New Jersey, right by that Wal-Mart which open in Secaucus. Wal-Mart make his Daddy’s business go out like flame. Long time his folks got no money to wager with people in the hood, or buy from people they know. They has to shop at Wal-Mart cause prices come cheapest there. But is all one bitter circle, and by going for the cheap they’s putting out other businesses like they own. So Tommis grow up hating Wal-Mart, and he always tell people that Wal-Mart “de-humanized” him. He say he going to sue Wal-Mart when he older and he ain’t even lying: before he got married he got a job at Wal-Mart pulling up the shopping wagons and he tried to get lock in the store over night so he could sue. Now, he drive a Wonderbread truck in East Brooklyn and his wife never let him go to New Jersey.

On Fourth of July, Aunt Cassie decide she have dinner with her lover, her old and fine-faced Brownsville. So people come out from them tenements on Strauss Street and Sutter Avenue. Then they’s appearing on Empire Boulevard and Linden Boulevard. They all crossing them soft streets, streets wrinkled like old dish towels. They all journeying to Dumont, and they know they reach Cassie’s not by the street signs, but by the yard with them willows sweeping up the night dust. Soon every wall of Aunt Cassie’s house is cake up with Brownsville: that old lover line the hallway, chop in the kitchen, giggle in the bedroom. Soon Brownsville drink sorrel on the porch and in the backyard, and them kids crouch in the alley by the garbage bins and draw with chalk on the cement. Aunt Cassie give a kiss right and left and every which way till she dizzy. Then she serve cold cucumber salad and hamburgers out of tin-foil trays. Everyone stand round and eat from paper plates, and when the kids hear a fire cracker, they climb up the roof trying to see sparks. Aunt Cassie now like the working axle of the whole party, and she tell jokes and sassy stories in her high clacky voice. Meanwhile Aunt Cassie always wonder in her head, if she just to love life and enjoy it without worry bout making something of herself, who in the world would mind? Might Jesus mind it? Might Mama and Daddy mind it? Seems everyone who care bout what you do already long time dead! If life be so sacred, how you supposed to go living by what the dead say, when who know what they really think? She keep thinking it, even while whistling gossip. She feel like she in that nightmare where you ride the subway to nowhere, and when you try getting up you realize you got no power over your body. You can’t say nothing, can’t scream. Got no control of yourself, no more than you has over the rest of the world. She wonder if she even got power in the real world—and if she do, where it gone.

Sam, her Daddy’s friend when he still round, and them men that hang round the Keyfood, they all is here this Fourth of July, rocking in them porch chairs that ain’t meant for rocking. Cassie take the punch and go over to them. She like to see what kind of things is old people like talking bout. She know she getting to be a worn dog, she realize that. She scared she ain’t ready. She ain’t know how to talk, how to walk, how to think like she old. But she find they all just talking bout the holiday. The Nigerian man, he say, All this fun and jazz on Fourth of July, why?

Cause it when the revolution happen and the US come it own nation, say Cortez. He has come long with Sam. When Cortez meet Cassie at the door for the first time, he say he glad to meet her and how he take up his air-conditioning all by his self yesterday. Cassie wonder if he trying to charm her.

But who in hell like the US anymore? Sam say sudden. We has that war in Iraq. I never figure it out. You go one place and you is hearing Bush is there on an oil-hunt. You go another and you is hearing we in a Muslim crusade. I think no one knows what they’s talking bout.

Cassie hear him talking and she walk over to hand him a glass of punch. Old Papa, you don’t waste your time thinking bout these things no more. They isn’t yours to solve, no use getting bugged out. Nothing you do bout all these crazy people killing each other gonna change anything. The old man take the punch and drink her down but he don’t smile, and Cassie feel weird like she gone say something stupid.

The two boys, the one that like talking and the one that don’t talk, they here. They sit on the edge of the roof, looking round when they hear thunder in the cloudless sky. When they’s looking out over the yard, they see many other tight straight yards, and black rusty chimneys, and pink bed sheets flapping on clothing wires. They seeing smoke in every direction. Aunt Cassie’s ain’t the only party on the block. They get up and walk to the street-side of the roof to see if they be kids on the sidewalk bout to set off a cracker. There on the road below they seeing the bum who always squat at the chess tables in Betsy Head Park. He stand outside the house now with his wagon, and his face is all red sinews like beef jerky. The boys watch him but the man keep on without saying a word, without any movement.

Yo, wat you stand there for bum? say one of the boys.

My name is Ben Cooke, son.

Wat you wait there for, Ben?

I is mad hungry. I is smelling the barbecue. It a free for all?

Is Cassie’s house, no it ain’t a free for all. You has got to be invited by some person. They has to have some rules, else any bum off the street be walking in.

I think I get a bite anyway. Is Fourth of July, son. Everything got a right to be free.

If you got two buck you just go to McDonalds. They’s so cheap there.

McDonalds ain’t serving me. I don’t do them. McDonalds, they’s eating up the rainforest. Don’t you know every time you is eating a hamburger at McDonalds, is have another thing of trees being cut down in the Amazon? 50 million acres a year, son! They’s getting rid of the tropics cause they want king-size bedrooms for they cows!

You crazy.

You don’t know that, boy? How come you in school and you don’t know that?

So them boys make Cassie get some meat on a plate for old Ben Cooke, and they is sitting on the stoop with him while he talk bout the Amazon. And Cassie, she watch them from her kitchen window and feel good bout it too. Is nice to see a good patty feed up a hungry man, and she don’t miss a chance to prove her charity before all of them folks.

They got a boombox in the backyard, and someone start playing Keshia Cole loud enough to shake down the Brooklyn Bridge and scare them Manhattan people out of they pants. Cassie go down the porch to where all them folks are dancing in a crowd. Amira, the girl with fake glasses, stand by the fence and look on. Cassie know Amira’s auntie from the Woman’s Club, but every time Cassie try to talk to the pretty girl, Amira get all prissy and turn up her nose. Cassie always wonder what problem she got, and invite Amira over this night to see if she can easy her up. She hoping when all them peoples start dancing like they’s on fire, Amira is gonna get up and act like any other girl, swaying her buns and shifting them feet. But Amira do nothing but watch the crowd like they’s nasty, and when Cassie see this she going over to do something bout it. She loom over Amira, she put her hands on them hips, saying, Why is you standing here by you self, girl?

I ain’t getting dirty, say this child.

How is you going to get dirty by dancing? Cassie reach out and grab them glasses off Amira’s eyes. These ain’t no lens, miss. How is they any help to you?

Amira look down and don’t say no word. All the crowd be laughing and bumping into Cassie while she stand there. They’s all high on grill smoke and perfume. Come, Cassie order, and she take Amira by the hand and pull her under the crowd. Cassie twist and twirl and shake her body like a maraca. Them other women be taking Amira’s hand and trying to move her round too. Amira break free and squeeze her way out. That naughty girl, where she gone? they holler, and they’s all disappointed. But Cassie, she wonder now why she got to make Amira dance like a bad girl. Why is it they all wanting to see her get dirty? Never a soul say they like Amira as she is; they’s always trying to change her into someone else. Why is that? Cassie feel like she been trying to make a tame dog bite.

Ho! Ho! Ho! You all look here! someone say and they be turning off the boombox. Everyone quiet down but them dancers’ ears still ringing. In some throats the laughter goes on bubbling, like those last shoots of water spurting out after you has shut down a fountain. Is the New Jersey boy who spoke, whining pretty Tommis Keat. He long while sit in the den with the wisecracks and cynics, talking in that jaded lisp of old times. Then he come down the porch when he see something catch his eye in the garden patch. You look wat I has found, he tell them. I never in my life believed these guys exist, but see what I see! A jackpot of four leaf clovers! A whole patch of em! Is wat I seeing: hundreds and hundreds of them four leaf clovers! By Jesus I always said not one of them exist in this world!

Honey, we is going to be rich tomorrow, say Tommis’s wife.

Hell, we is going to be the poorest we ever been tomorrow. They’s hired some other driver for the south parts.

You is going to fall into a pot of gold on your way home, say the Nigerian.

You is going to win the Lottery. You be out of town tomorrow.

You all fools talking nonsense, he cry. When I a kid I always collect those pennies with they faces up. Didn’t make no difference. Didn’t keep my Daddy’s store open when that damn Wal-Mart come to Secaucus. Don’t tell me is magic. I don’t go for no Disney Land magic!

Then Cassie step up smiling. How you is saying my four-leaf clovers ain’t no luck if you is never seen a four-leaf clover in your life?

Cassie, you is a fool, say Tommis.

But I has known they’s there all along. Is my little secret.

You lying, whine Tommis.

I ain’t lying and you is only heard the beginning. You can laugh at me all you want but I is going to ask you a question. Ain’t I a lucky woman? I is got friends like a chicken got chicks. I is got nice clothes and pretty things and a big bed and a TV. I is going back every year to see my family in Guyana. Ain’t I the luckiest woman you is ever did see?

You has got those things. That don’t say nothing.

Wat you think I has before I seen them four-leaf-clovers? Them four-leaf-clovers got me through hard times, Tommis! How you think you know everything? You is just fat headed, son! You’s a fool! You don’t know wat they has done for me!

You is crazy. You is a crazy lady.

But you ain’t got proof that four-leaf clovers all luckless. I has got proof all around me!

Then Cassie go squat down on the dirt. She be pulling up a handful of four-leaf clovers in her fist and all them folks can hear the earth rip. Hmmm Hmmm Hmmm, she mutter and she look happy as a cow. She stand up and start passing them clovers out while the crowd all smiling and laughing. Now Amira, she been watching silent all this time, and when she see what Cassie done, she dive for the clovers too. She pick a bunch and her fingernails black up, and her white dress get soggy from the mud. Cassie see her and say, You given up staying clean. Now you is the dirtiest child I ever seen. But Amira don’t pay mind. She smile cause she has four-leaf-clovers, green and shiny, in her palm, and she feel like a princess fairy from a book.

All the people is there till five in the morning, laughing and dancing and eating rhubarb pie. Brownsville is a loud racy thing on a night like this one, loud with rap and reggae, cars and crackers. All the way till dawn time the air is warm and when the smell of meat come wafting down the street, not even angels can plug up—they too is drunk on the night’s electricity. In Brownsville’s backyards, the thread of the talk roll out like yarn from a dropped spool and people’s minds go drifting from thing to thing: 99¢ Century perfume, cigarettes, angel food cake, AIDS in Africa. Cassie notice how they thoughts drifting from place to place easily like feathers on streams, and no one even think twice bout it. As the night goes on, so easy do they voices mesh with them neon flowers of insanity, and words got no sense and stories they jumble. Even so, rising up from this insanity and drunkenness is a kind of understanding, an understanding Cassie see as the best kind of understanding, with more truth to it than the words of them sober.

They talk bout what they know or what they wish they could know, and bout how they’s always hoping certain things to happen which never do. Like finding a pot of gold. Or catching true love. Or changing the world, saving all them orphans in all those mother countries that got no sneakers, no running water, no 99¢ Century. They know these things got to be done but it always look destined to failure no matter how they start bout it. Is mad easier to live for green genips like sweetness and Keshia Cole. They’s just a million fights to fight if you’s gonna be any bigger. Sometime a person just want to hang it all and eat another slice of pie and raise the volume on the radio. But sometime a person can pretend no longer, and they’s angry at all the cynicism they see. They’s so angry they’s even ready to make fools of themselves. Is then that they feel the power rush to they limbs. And they’s standing up. And they’s screaming. And they’s getting off the subway to nowhere, and turning off the boombox,and crushing the neon flowers. And they’s walking right out of humanity’s dream, the one where you is trapped between basket and burial, between today and tomorrow.

Eminence

by Gary Lutz

There was a time I would not hear of women, and a time I looked to them as my betters, and months when my heart went out to anyone done up as a person, but it was usually men I suited: men who liked to keep their words a little stepped back from their meanings and mostly wanted to know whether I was still in school or was hard on shoes. I would awaken to the poundings of one or another of them taking his elbowing ease in the shower stall. The bedside table would of course hold quarters, and a lone dime, out of date and valued-looking, and no doubt a patched-up, gadabout ten-dollar bill—I guess the test was simply how much I would be just the sort of person to take. So I would let pocket change of my own drop to the floor in what I counted on adding up to an answering reproof, then top it with a spruce twenty. I would usually think better, though, and pick everything up, his and mine both, and disappear into my clothes and be gone before he was dry. Still, I suspect that I went unrepresented in much of what I ever did, if I get my drift even now.

There was a father, for instance, who wanted me to help save his daughter from him, or else he wanted to be saved from her—at some point I gave up keeping track of the ones I had been a party to keeping spared. There was a drumble of TV noise from the apartment below; that much is still with me. And he ticked off the points of nervy resemblance: upraised veinage, standout nose, teeth looking stabbed into the gums, arms unfavorable for even the joke sports. A broth of sweat came off him, and I hate it when they talk right into your mouth, but he kept it up until convinced there was nothing set out between my legs other than whichever mishmash he figured on being all hers. (At the time of which I write, circa my youth, there still were glories to be brought out in people behind their backs.) Weeks later I was introduced to the girl at some function I showed for. She was clean-lined, nothing new or unearthly—a desponding thing in a shirtdress, looking care-given and sided with beyond her years. The father was at the steam table, turning over the local foods. He had a tousled smile. “It’s like you never left,” he said.

I had been staying with four or five others thriving compliably on the top floor of a three-story sublet. Freaks of drapery to keep us from the morning sun, double-strength cosmetics and pills of the moment in handbags nailed shoulder-high to the wall—it hardly helped that this was in one of the little cities that had been thrown down at the approaches to a much bigger one once enough people were pinched for time or too moody for the commute. The town had already run afoul of its original intent, and there was a misgiven majesty to the newer, upstrewn architecture that left people flimsier in their citizenship, less likely to put their foot down. So we walked ourselves into recognizability in and around the plazas, the pocket parks, the foremost shrubberied square. You could run your feelings over one unrested person and get them to come out on somebody else a little distance off. There was no need to even come face to face to be stuck in failing familiarity forever.

People eventually answered any purpose or were no skin off my nose.

There was Joeie: clean-tasting but a trace too saline. Colored easily, needed his full eight hours, believed in taking each of his meals in public. His loves were drugstore luxuries and the fitting instant you knew for sure that something was finally finding its way down the wrong pipe. But sometimes the rope I woke up with around my ankles and wrists was only laundry line and the knots weren’t even serious.

And Tarn: He was either off doing somebody a wonder or having something further burned away from his complexion—you looked for the underlying advisory in his motions and let the whole of it lounge in your understanding for a while. Nights I found the key to his car, there was a minor toll bridge I could have just as soon avoided, but I liked surrendering the warmed quarter to the collection attendant in the booth, his arm a sudden, perfected thing of the open air.

It was the night Tarn was first threatening to move out that another came across with a car trunk’s worth of guitars. These were junk guitars, folk-singer styles, with the strings raised penalizingly high above the fretboard. He wasn’t satisfied until one was strapped onto me and he had his hand spread over mine to depress my fingers and get a few dud chords going steadily. When he started to sing, the better part of the lyrics reminded you that with a stepmother and a stepsister, the prefixes alone, if you bothered to do even any of the thinking, made it all but expected of you to walk all over these women and, if you were still up to it, climb them stairwise to a height from which their originals might at least look easier to buy for, easier to mistake for two good eggs. It’s not that I mind it when a pack of lies with real effort behind it gets pitched way over my head to somebody reliably cruel at a remove. But the song was going on and on, with too much yellow smile between verses. He later offered to make it up to us by driving everybody to a party in the city. There was a kid there with an isolating refreshment, something he alone had been given to eat. His fingers kept bringing it up from a plastic sandwich bag opaque with condensation. I was among the least encouraged to get an arm landed lankly on his. One or another of us stayed in touch with him months afterward in notes that amounted to mostly “More soon.”

Some nights, though, we just dosed it out among ourselves. Kept it going round and around our thinned and souring circle. It was illucid and weighed on our speech. There was so much to decide against as one with mouths that stickied! The others would have to doze off before I could begin poring over an iridescence at the inner bend of an elbow, I hoped, or some delicate hingework behind a knee. It was usually Tyner who never fell asleep. I would guide his fingers onto my arm, try to interest them anew in moles so blurry they looked loose, then re-intimate that they were his to slide about to advantage. I was with him the day he won with the instant ticket. I let him use the rim of my bracelet to scratch out the gray antic ellipses, my arm dragging subordinately along. We took the bus to an odd-lots furniture concern for the glass-top coffee table he figured could do the trick. We walked the thing home stretcherwise: there was delight to find in catcalls from the thick civic traffic. The table went to his room, and a tenderness took over in his voice to get the favor finally asked of me. So I got undressed on top of it and tried to be sleepy and unmindful of my petite bowels and bladder while he worked himself up for drawn-out disappointment below.

I do not want to make it seem as if this is all we ever did. There was a neighbor lady’s dog we agreed to feed when employments she could no longer postpone called her far from where she otherwise would have had no reason to keep speaking to us so brightly half the time. It was one of those full-natured, kerchiefed dogs that liked being bossed around. Days it fell to me to fill the dish, I did not so much call his name as thin it out to the scanty inner vowels, but the thing would still put in a complete, gladdened appearance. I would watch him eat, take advantage of his company, draw myself out about things, any part of life I no longer was any part of, just to get listened to without bias or retention. There were also some weak-willed plants to be doused if I thought of it and dresses that were all too tight on me and seemed to smell of more than just one person, though I wasn’t an authority on who all she thought she might be. But I must have liked it over there—I know I liked mooning over the little that came in her mail, even the same circulars that came to our place but which, withdrawn from her box, seemed to enjoy much more shimmer on the type.

As for women overall, though, I went along with what Lorn said about how they were set deeper within themselves and moved about reproductively in a world spaciously different from ours but sharing the same sorry places to meet up for a bite. And it’s not as if I had never at least got myself arranged around one of them, though all I was probably doing was trying to show her out of her body and then not act surprised when my hands slipped right off wherever I tried to unload the things. (Even the older ones are truly as smack-smooth as they are made out to look.) But there was nothing to be held against any of them, either singly or in the dissastisfied aggregate, even if you now and then had somebody’s sister coming forward with rundown makeup and a mugginess to her arms to tell you the only reason you were a waiter instead of a grill man was so you could stand over and above people in couples and make a living looking down your nose. (There were only so many things you could say in return that would come across as both the truth and a dig. I had worked up enough of them to put into conservant, fallback rotation, but lately I just pointed to my groin and explained that if we give them names it’s because they spring from us, we bring them up, we’re forever wiping their snotty little mouths.)

So what’s left? The only other question still worth entertaining should not have to keep being only “Who else?”

Which I take to mean that the answer can’t be parents, or even brothers and sisters, because we all were done with practically the exact same ones. Mother would signal the end of a conversation by saying she could feel inside her skull the precise contours of the space a headache would require, though she did not yet have the actual headache. Father had grown a beard that was more like a black cloud loitering in front of his face. (The beard was purposely mostly air.) The sister or brother was younger and had to have it drilled into the head again and again that it was one house if you came into it from the back and a different one altogether if you came in from the front: the people were the same, they were nice to you to your face, but nobody was being fooled: no one was living here everlastingly.

They were all of them buried neck and neck, so help me, in anything left for us to root against when we set ourselves afresh upon the days.

So that leaves who else to never let you forget the spirit and slants of whichever humidifying proximity must have been solely his? Kittrick? Reese? Malin?

Kittrick: There was a fine-drawn signature of dark hair on the backs of his hands that I had been after him to let me chase away with a razor, on the ground that there should be such a thing as seeing too much spelled out on people. He was a cherisher, true, but there was always something probationary in his regard for whatever he cherished, and he never let you in on how soon he might be through. It was up to me to hold the pocket lighter when he did the bust-ups of his acne with the pin of the name badge he had to wear for work.

And Reese: He went about in low-hanging sweaters and was quick to disappear from whatever he understood of one person and then get going in what might be likelier of the next. I saw some valiance in how he raked us all over the coals. He pointed out the ruthless valedictory business I apparently did with my hands at the close of a meal, something he claimed I brought off under clever cover of separating myself from the napkin and getting up from the table. (I have yet to figure out what he might have meant. I have always believed in rectitude and inexertion as long as any food is still set out.)

But Malin I knew first from only the phone. He had been calling most nights from a wide agricultural county to the north, a modest rural torment in his voice, the voice of a downtaken, suitorly man married full well. My only duty was making sure he dropped off before I finished any cradlesong synopsis I could come up with of a tricky, frugal workshift without deodorant, maybe, or a self-chaperoned tour of the dashier glory holes. But one night he was all revolt and filthied principle. It was suddenly a bone to pick with me that he had married fresh from a haircut, slashes of gloomful hair still on the forehead, down the front of the neck, and that no sooner was the wedding over with than he was less sure than ever of just exactly how he was cut out to be pitted against her, so the two of them had to live first as brother and sister, then as mother and banged-up son, then as women both, with a cuticular bloodiness to whichever hand set the table when neither’s motives were of the best. He must have been making out an invitation in the way I held my tongue, because the next morning he arrived with vague teeth and a tremolant ascension at the end of every sentence: I trailed him to his car when he went for the change of clothes. But before the day was even out, there was a let-up in how he had gone weak around the gauzy waves of my sleeves. I was already expected to shampoo his eyebrows with a tar extract, then see that the minced and runny things he barely ate would crest just so on his plate.

So is that the one time the question stopped being “Who else?” and became only “What other bones do you have in your body?” or “Where are you going to go with all those clothes?”

Because the answer could then be nothing more personal than that at the rebounding municipal college I was a figure of considerable scholastic mystique because I looked over my notes before the quiz and tried not to get cross when the chairs had to be pushed back into a circle. The late-afternoon section of the summer course in speech was mostly boys, because it was mostly boys—repeaters, sweet-naturedly tardy, brush-burned in their undershirts—who had trouble sticking to their points and making it even as far as the middle minute of the three-minute impromptus. But when my turn came, I was slower-hearted in walking them all through how I saw it:

that I was not the good listener everyone kept insisting I was, but I liked hearing people out the way I expected balloons to be quick about losing their air—I wanted the breathy, informative smell on their mouths right afterward;
that the busy signal doesn’t really have to sound like bleedbleedbleedbleedbleed, but even if it does, you can always fall back on the variety of brightwork and wrong-endedness in a day already taking after the night before;
and that I could kick myself every time it did not come out to even so much as a syllogism no matter how often I got it stacked up onto the three needful tiers:

You go with what’s most available on people.
On men it is an eminence that luckily never lasts.
The mess it leaves is nothing that ever bespoke too much or took up any room in what you knew of people a pale day later.

Except there was a farmers’ market open only a couple of nights a week, and I could pick out the one to follow from a produce stand and into the men’s room. There was just the one stall, and the latch was broken: it was up to me to lean against the door to keep up the privacy. Then the unzipping, and we were standing a polite foot apart, my arms retired now behind my back the way his had been first, his eyes already more wishless than mine. We let the things shy off from ourselves, bumble out the way they always did, twinge and dodge and dither a little, until they were kissing unassisted. It was out of our hands, or none of our doing, and then afterward I was at my very best all over again, witnessing the differences from me amassing in him almost instantly.