Waiting to Be Thin

By Seenat Thongdee

In my closet, there are three stacks of jeans. One stack for the “fit now” jeans. One for the “will fit if I lose ten pounds” jeans. And the last category—which, when I lay eyes upon it, sets my head into many fantastical journeys—is the “may someday fit after being stranded on an island for six months with only half a carrot and water each day” jeans.

I have struggled with my weight all my life. My mother breast fed me until I was four. Even as I drank my mother’s milk, I still liked to eat the powdered milk by the spoonful. By five years old, my relatives were already calling me “Baby Pig.” But at that age, it was endearing. They would squeeze my chubby cheeks and exclaim, “How precious!”, and afterward put little treats in my greedy palms. Childhood was the happiest period of my life. I was surrounded by the warmth of my family and relatives, and the goodness of sweets.

Then when I turned seven, my mother gave birth to my sister. Nothing really changed. I still had all the sweets I wanted, maybe even more than before. I ate while my parents tended to my sister. For many months, I thought she was the ugliest little thing—all red and wrinkly. But then she got better looking as she got bigger. I liked playing with her. I would tie her soft hair in little rubber bands of different colors and wrap her up in my mother’s colorful scarves. One day I gave her a piece of candy and she began choking. My parents said I shouldn’t give her sweets and told me to stay away from her from that day on. I was not to be alone in a room with her.

I am thirty-three now, and I never did lose that baby fat that my mother said I would lose. Instead, I’ve gained adult fat on top of my baby fat. And my sister’s wedding is in three months. There is still enough time left. I have my goals all written out week by week. Total weight loss desired is 30 pounds, which isn’t so bad. I’ve read somewhere that the first 5 to 10 pounds are water weight anyway. That leaves only 20 actual pounds that I need to lose. And then there’s SPANX, which gives the appearance of being 5 to 10 pounds slimmer. So the absolute number of pounds required to shed is 10.

It’s not that my sister and I are close. She only asked me to be her bridesmaid out of obligation. “It’s the aesthetic quality of things, you know. They say it’s an important part of weddings,” she told me. “If you could try to lose just a little. Not a lot. Just a little. All the other girls are the same size. It just wouldn’t look right. You’re not upset, are you?” What? Of course not. “I knew you’d understand.” All I understood was that I wanted to sucker-punch her. She had gone ahead and purchased a dress for me several sizes smaller. “This is my gift to you, since we’re sisters. The other girls bought their own dresses. This can serve as your motivator. Take it with you so you can try it on each day.” Thanks.

It’s nobody’s fault, really. Our parents had us seven years apart. We were never close. I was too old to hang out with her and her friends. It wasn’t a problem. I had friends of my own. Well, that was the case until I moved a couple of years ago for work. I have few regrets about moving. My new place is only about two hours away, but these days, if you’re not within a ten minute drive, it’s hard to make time to see anyone. Besides, all of my friends have married and started families of their own.

My job is great, for the most part. Well, it’s okay, anyway. But I’ve already made a really good friend at work. Matt, who is my gay work husband. Though I’m not one hundred percent sure that he’s gay. He has never said so. But I’ve had my share of coming out parties for guys I’ve dated, so I’m pretty sure Matt is.

“Thirty pounds. That’s my goal,” I told Matt.

“Are you crazy? And how long do you have to lose this?”

“Three months.”

“That’s not a lot of time. You’d have to not eat anything.”

“Well, what am I supposed to do? She bought the goddamn dress already.”

“Make your dog wear it down the aisle.”

“JoJo? Please. It’s not his color. Besides, you’ve seen him. I would have an easier time getting into the dress than he would. He’s as big as a house and can barely walk. His stomach hangs to the floor.”

“Do you have a plan?”

“I’m going to join the gym here at work. That way, I can go right after work. No excuses.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” I was determined.

Day 1: Good Intentions, Results Postponed

I had every intention of going down to sign up for the gym membership, but was caught up with work. Things have been so busy lately. It’s been difficult trying to find time for anything else. But I had a light lunch today. I walked by the pizza, merely inhaled, then walked straight to the salad bar. The pizza smelled delicious. Special today was the meat lover: pepperoni, ham, sausage, and bacon. One of my favorites. My stomach was growling.

After lunch, I had a difficult time focusing in meetings. Valerie, my boss, said something and everyone laughed. I didn’t hear. It felt like a marathon runner was circling in my belly. I thought about what I would have for dinner. Maybe just carrots.

At dinner, I had some carrots dipped in ranch dressing, which weren’t all that delicious. But they are known as a negative-calorie food, meaning that it takes more calories to digest than the food contains. I chewed extra hard. Any movement utilizes energy. I ate about half a bag of baby carrots and figured that the negative calories would be more than enough to have a spoonful of Moose Track flavored ice cream. I ate one spoonful, but that scoop didn’t have any peanut butter cups in it, so I took some more, careful to get some peanut butter cups. The saltiness of peanut butter and the sweetness of the chocolate and ice cream were so good together. It was barely a spoonful.

Day 2: The Pang of a Mere Spoonful

I thought I would die last night. My stomach was in pain from the hunger, which woke me up several times during the night. I resisted the urge to raid the fridge. For breakfast, I made myself two eggs, over easy, with light sprinkles of sea salt and pepper. Finished with a glass of orange juice. Vitamin C is supposed to help break down the proteins.

I decided on a slice of pepperoni pizza for lunch. The slices are usually very large, so I could have half for lunch and half for dinner. But when I went to pay, I couldn’t resist also getting the cookie with M&Ms placed next to the cash register.

Work was so busy that I didn’t even realize I had eaten the entire slice of pizza and the cookie as well. But I am definitely going to sign up for the gym right after work. Matt walked by and saw the pizza plate and cookie wrapper and said, “You know, they say that nothing tastes as good as thin feels.” Shut up! The bastard. Knew he was kidding though. But it’s true.

I am now a member at the gym. I asked how soon I could start working out, and Jenna, the staff and trainer, said “immediately.” Immediately? “Immediately. The membership includes all the group classes as well. And if you’d like, you can also sign up for a personal trainer, for an additional charge.” Oh, that’s great. Thanks. I wished I’d had my gym clothes. I’d thought it was going to take a few days to process the membership.

Dinner was not so bad. I decided to skip it and have just a handful of salt and pepper potato chips. They say that part of a successful diet is that you don’t feel deprived. So small quantities of the things you love will help you endure the diet.

Day 3: Slightly Off Course (Reason: Alcohol)

Starving like mad again last night. JoJo was no help. He kept staring at me. I’ve put him on a diet with me. I’m giving him only half portions of what he’s used to.

I had my gym bag with me today. But I couldn’t bring it in with me in the morning. I had my laptop bag, my tote bag, and a third bag would have been too much. I left it in the car with the intention of getting it during lunch, but was caught up with some urgent issues at work. I thought about getting it after work then heading straight to the gym, but it’d been so cold out. The clothes were probably freezing. I didn’t really want to get into cold clothes.

I left my laptop locked up at work so I would have no trouble with the gym bag tomorrow.

A group of people were going out for drinks and food after work. I thought about going too, but didn’t want to drink all those empty calories and eat all that greasy bar food. So I didn’t go. “You should come out,” said Matt. I can’t. All those empty calories. “But you’ll have fun.” I’ll pass on the fun for now. “You can always get bigger pants.” Not cute!

I came home and had a nice glass of red wine, which is supposed to be good for your heart. And it goes so well with filet mignon. Only a petite size, with some asparagus, which makes your pee smell really bad.

Hmmm…I didn’t realize I had drunk half a bottle. Gave JoJo a full portion, since I had veered from my diet a little too.

Day 4: The Scale of Reckoning

I’m feeling good and very proud. A small salad for lunch and went to the gym and was 20 minutes on the elliptical machine. It felt like my lungs were going to burst. I hadn’t sweated like that in years, or ever.

I came home and decided to get on a scale. It’s been over a year since I’ve been on one. I’d tucked it way back in the closet after Jack dumped me for bad sex. I couldn’t help it. When my legs were pressed toward my head, I couldn’t focus on anything else aside from the rolls pushing against my breasts. I tried doggy style, but gravity was even more cruel from that angle. So after he left, I put away the scale and tried to focus on loving my body without the number attached. They say as long as you’re healthy, the weight doesn’t matter.

Getting on the scale…

Oh FUCK!

Just carrots and ranch dressing for dinner today. Actually, just carrots.

Day 5: On the Right Footing

Worked out like a mad woman today. Was 30 minutes on the elliptical. At one point, my foot came off the step and I thought it was going to be disastrous. But I thankfully recovered. No need to hide my face from the gym. I also did 3 sets of 10 bicep curls with 8 lb dumbbells. My arms were wobbly for a while after.

Oatmeal and honey for breakfast. Small lunch and dinner. Today was a great success.

Day 6: No Pizza, No Cookies, No Problem

Told Matt about progress yesterday. “Wow. That’s good,” he said. “Stay away from the pizza and cookies. You don’t want to erase all that hard work.” I know. I brought my own lunch today to avoid any temptation. “So you’re really sticking to this?” Trying to. “You should just get SPANX and call it a day.”

Another excellent day at the gym.

Day 7 and Day 8: Untitled

Fuck! Fuck! FUCK! Who knew working out would increase your appetite so much.

Week 2: Hold, Please

Will be recording progress on a weekly basis from now on. They say that your body fluctuates from day to day, so it’s better to record on a weekly basis.

Made excellent progress this week. Down 2 pounds.

Mom called for me to come down for the weekend. She was going to cook some healthy diet food for me to take home. And asked me to bring the dress. She wanted to make sure I was on the right track to be ready by wedding day. I told her I was swamped at work and needed to spend the weekend to catch up. I don’t want her to see me until I’ve lost a bit more weight.

In college, my dorm mates went clubbing nearly every weekend. I never joined them. I had a pair of jeans that I absolutely loved. I bought them though they didn’t fit, wanting to shrink into them. I told myself that once I fit into the jeans, I would start going clubbing and wearing cute little tops like them. But weeks turned into months and eventually, they stopped asking me to join.

Week 3: Who Needs Cover-ups?

Another excellent week. Down 3.5 pounds. I feel wonderful. All week, while on the elliptical, I envisioned myself in my bridesmaid dress gliding down the aisle and everyone staring in disbelief. And I also imagined myself in a sexy bikini this summer, walking along the beach with no beach towel wrapped around my waist. They say it’s important to picture what you want to look like, and not focus on what you look like now.

Week 4: Will Smile for Food

I went to the gym every day (every working day). Didn’t go out or see anyone outside of work. It was a bit of a drag. I was hungry all the time. And people on my project team were pissing me off. Yelled a lot during group discussions.

Week 5: Untitled 2

I really don’t want to talk about it.

Week 6: Name Calling, It Worked in Grade School

I really need to get back into it. I went to the gym only twice this week and have been eating more than usual. I tried taking JoJo for walks, but he kept stopping to scratch himself and would just lie there on the sidewalk.

I really don’t think I can do this, I told Matt. “You’re pushing too hard.” I have to; I don’t have much time left. “Do you really want to do this? Is it worth it?” Yes. I really do. “How can I help?” Just insult me each day. Call me fatty or something. That should motivate me. “I’m not going to do that. If HR gets wind of it I’ll be pounding the pavement.” Just do it.

Week 8: Sticks and Stones

I just realized that each year, I wish I was the size I was the year before. Since I was twelve, I’ve looked back each year thinking to myself, I wish I looked like I did before.

Pulled myself together by midweek. If all those celebrities could spring back into shape after popping out twins, triplets, and even sextuplets, I could lose 30 pounds. I could do this.

Matt walked by my cube and said, “Should I call real estate management and have them remove a wall so you can get out?” What? You asshole! “You told me to insult you!” Oh…you’re still an ass.

Week 9: One to Not Share

Down 10 pounds! It’s amazing. I feel great. Even went out with people from work for happy hours. Limited myself to two Bud Light Limes. Best beer ever! And a couple of chicken wings and mozzarella sticks. So delicious. I haven’t had anything deep fried in weeks. Oh, so delicious. Maybe a small cheesecake. “We only have one size, ma’am,” said the waitress. That’s fine. Just bring it. I’ll share. Can you bring two spoons? The waitress forgot to bring the second spoon. Poor service. I didn’t want to bother asking again.

Week 10: Sister So Good

Down another 3 pounds! My pants are actually a little loose around the waist and thighs. I called Mom and said I was coming over to visit.

Neither Mom nor Dad noticed that I’d lost weight. Mom said, “Why didn’t you bring the dress? Have you tried it on? Have you been exercising and dieting? You don’t have much time left.” I have been going to the gym at work. I’ve lost some weight. “I should never have let you develop such bad eating habits. You’ve been this way since you were little, you know. Your sister was never like that.”

Week 11: Give Me Death and Give Me Thin

Oh, who gives a fuck anymore. I’m so sick and tired of eating carrots. My skin is actually turning orange. I don’t know why I bothered in the first place. We are all going to die. Then what? Does it matter once you’re dead whether or not your corpse is thin? Worms will eat me thin. I can be skinny in death. Why not enjoy life?

Got really drunk a couple of nights this week and ate the entire tub of Moose Track.

No regrets.

Week 11½ : A Moose of a Defeat

So many regrets. That tub of ice cream was not worth this. Every inch of my body aches. I went to the gym every single day and worked out twice as hard.

Was talking to Matt and started crying. “You shouldn’t do this to yourself. Go to the wedding. Don’t zip the dress. Just make sure you wear hot panties.” Started laughing. Matt could always do that—make me laugh.

Two days before the wedding: HHH (Help Harry Houdini)

My sister called. “You did lose the weight, didn’t you? Mom said she didn’t see any result last time you came. But you did, didn’t you? That was weeks ago.”

Got off the phone and went to try on the dress. Put on the SPANX and tried to zip the back. It went up about a third of the way, then the zipper teeth unclenched and I wasn’t able to unzip.

Tried for over an hour. My arms were so tired. I was tired.

One day before the wedding: Throwing in the Towel

Shit! What am I going to do? The dress is in two pieces. I had to cut myself out. There was no way around it. My sister is going to kill me. Fuck it. Her and her wedding.

I called my boss and left her a message that I needed to take some personal time off, then removed the battery from my cell phone. I used the money that I was going to give my sister as a wedding present and booked a trip for myself to Aruba. I packed my two-piece bikinis and no beach towel.

My sister can see me when I’m thin.

* * *

Seenat Thongdee was born in Cambodia; she and her family migrated to Thailand as refugees when she was three years old. She lived in refugee camps for seven years before admittance to the U.S. 1986. She currently lives in Massachusetts.

She holds an MBA from Bryant University, but intends to pursue a graduate degree in English and fulfill her dream of becoming an English teacher. Writes Seenat: “I began creating stories in my head as a child, because what I imagined was safer and more pleasant than my surroundings. I write as an adult to rediscover that child, and because writing always feels like that big mango tree next to our concrete home in the refugee camp—warm and pleasant.”

Will knew she was getting tired of him, as they usually did—tired of the repetitive, unimaginative movement of his jeans against hers, barely keeping in time with the rap beat bouncing off of the basement’s brick walls; tired of the way his hands hung limply on the front of her hips. She had accepted his invitation to dance with a shrug, and as far as he could tell, her interest hadn’t increased. He wasn’t surprised when, as the beat faded away to a second of interstitial crowd noise, she released herself from his grasp, turned, and said that she was going to go use the bathroom.

“Okay,” Will said.

The relative silence was broken by a new beat, distorted bass and snare over barely audible synths. She squeezed her way through the crowd of dancing couples, heading in the direction of the stairs, away from him. Will watched her go for a second, looked around at nothing in particular, and started making his way over to the bar, apologizing as he pushed dancers up against their partners in an attempt to clear a path.

Will waited behind a cluster of people until the bartender, a muscled guy in a frat T-shirt, handed him a half-empty red cup and turned away to the next customers. Some of Will’s beer sloshed onto his sleeves as he made his way to the wall, where he had a little space to stand.

Will sipped his beer and looked around. A few colored lights flashed intermittently over the makeshift dance floor, turning the dancers’ skin and clothes red, blue, yellow. A few strobe lights were blinking, indistinguishable from the occasional flash of a digital camera. At the far side of the room, it looked like some stragglers were still being let in, two or three at a time. Were Will’s floormates around? He scanned the crowd and spotted Ed from the quad, who was standing on the calmer side of the room talking with a short
girl in a red blouse. Will decided not to bother him.

Will sighed, leaned back against the rough brick, and decided he might as well wait around for—had she told him her name? Whoever. Bathroom girl. There was a chance she might actually return. Will glanced over at the dance floor to see if she had found a new partner yet.

That was when Will saw him: The guy was moderately tall, dressed in crisp off-white khakis and a neon orange polo, the collar popped to his jaw, aviator glasses gleaming beneath his brow. He was grinding authoritatively with a pretty girl who had a tight pink T-shirt, a denim skirt, and long, dark hair. Her eyes remained shut as she danced, her face set serenely into an expression of entranced satisfaction. The guy held a red cup in one hand and bore the hint of an apathetic half-smile.

But he was Will.

His hair was a little longer than Will’s was. He had some beard stubble, more evenly spaced than Will had ever been able to manage. He had some muscle. But he was still, definitely, Will. He had Will’s round face, Will’s lumpy nose—even a mole identical to the one on Will’s left cheek, corresponding to the exact same facial coordinates.

Will stood by the wall, waiting for a change in the light or shift in perspective to break the illusion. But no matter how the dancers turned or how the strobes flashed, the face that looked out from over the dark-haired girl’s shoulder remained basically the same as Will’s own.

Will hesitated a moment, unable to look away, then stepped quickly over to Ed, who was still engaged in conversation.

“Ed.” Will tugged on Ed’s shoulder.

Ed turned away from the short girl to look at Will, controlled annoyance barely visible in the dim light. “Will? What?”

Will pointed at the dance floor. “Doesn’t that guy look like me?”

Ed stared at Will for a second, then flicked his gaze to the dancers.

“What guy?”

“The one dancing with that girl.”

“That’s helpful, Will, thanks.”

“The one in the polo shirt. He’s got, uh…” Will turned and tried to locate the guy.

“The Indian kid? I guess he looks kind of like you.”

“No, not the Indian kid. The guy…” Will’s eyes swept back and forth across the room,
searching unsuccessfully. “I don’t know. He’s gone.”

Ed turned back to Will. “Uh, okay…”

“Sorry.” Will looked around the room once more, then headed off towards the space where the guy had been standing. Behind him he heard Ed say to the girl, “Uh, sorry about that. Anyway—”

Will pushed his way back into the mass of dancers, skipping apologies. Eventually he found himself standing right where the guy had been, right between a man with a shaved head, who was dancing with a girl with curly hair, and a short frat brother entangled with a blonde sorority girl. Will shouted over the music: “Do you know the guy who was dancing here?”

The man with the shaved head looked at Will. “What?”

“I said, do you know the guy who was just dancing right here?”

He shook his head. “I can’t hear you.”

Will turned to the brother: “You know the guy who was dancing here?”

The brother gave Will a glazed smile and turned away.

Will frowned and headed toward the exit. On his way he passed by the girl he had been dancing with before. She saw him, then flicked her eyes away; he brushed past her and climbed the few steps leading up to the basement door.

An ice-water November breeze hit Will as he opened the door and stepped outside. Streetlights reflected off the pavement and cast the run-down suburban neighborhood in an orange murk. Will turned to his right and saw a heavy-set frat bouncer looking at him skeptically, arms crossed.

“Hey,” Will said.

“You want to shut the door, man? You’re letting all the heat out.”

“Oh yeah, sorry.” Will stepped all the way out into the driveway and let the door swing shut behind him, muffling the sound of the stereo. He turned back to the bouncer. “There’s a guy at this party in an orange polo shirt. Kind of looks like me. I think he’s with, uh, a girl in a pink shirt. Do you know him?”

“They just left.”

“Really? Who is the guy, what’s his name?”

The bouncer shrugged. “Search me.”

“Well, where’d they go?”

The bouncer glared. “Why you want to know?”

“He, uh, I…” Will looked down at the wet cement for a second, then made eye contact again. “He left his wallet.” Will grabbed his own wallet out of his pocket and held it up, smiling.

“They took a right on the sidewalk,” the bouncer said, briefly uncrossing his arms to point the direction.

“Thank you!” Will turned and jogged across the driveway.

Once he hit the sidewalk, the neighboring houses no longer cut off his view, and he could see down the street for a few blocks. The night was mostly deserted, but a few houses down, Will spotted the outline of a couple walking hand in hand. The guy was tall, dressed in a dark jacket and khakis; the girl had long, dark hair, and wore a coat and
skirt.

Will set off jogging after the couple, his sneakers kicking up drops of old rainwater as he ran. A few partygoers on a porch across the street shouted something at him and laughed, but Will couldn’t hear what was said. As he got within earshot of the couple, the guy stopped and turned around.

It was the same guy, the one with Will’s face.

At first, the guy looked back with the same satisfied disinterest he had shown earlier. As Will drew nearer, though, the guy’s eyes widened, and his lips unsealed themselves and hung slackly open. The girl stood waiting, glancing back and forth from the guy to Will.

Will started slowing to a walk. “Hey, excuse me—”

The guy bolted, taking off down the sidewalk.

“Hey!” Will shouted, breaking back into a dash, then stopping abruptly where the girl was standing.

“Who was that guy?” Will asked, gasping for breath.

The girl turned to look at Will and suddenly stepped back, taking a quick breath.

“What was his name?” Will insisted, glancing up the street.

“He said his name was Will,” she said softly.

Will stared at her for a second—had he met this girl before?—then turned and started running.

Up ahead, the guy took a sharp right and disappeared behind the house on the corner. He had been moving faster than Will, who could already feel a cramp growing in his gut. He ignored it and pumped his legs as hard as he could, until his bangs were swept back off of his forehead and each breath burned his lungs.

Will nearly slipped as he turned the corner, then kept moving forward as he stared ahead, searching. The street stayed suburban for about a block, then opened up as it intersected with a larger road, one lined with restaurants, businesses, apartments. Subway tracks ran up the center of the larger road, and there was a small crowd of people gathered around a stop that lay ahead to Will’s left. The guy was running toward that crowd, his arms jerking up and down in unison with his legs.

Will swerved into the street without looking and heard the sound of tires skidding behind him, followed by the blast of a horn. He tried yelling, “Hey! Come on, stop!”

The guy didn’t stop running, but he did look over his shoulder for a second. For a short moment, he and Will made eye contact. To Will, it felt less like looking into a mirror than like watching himself in a film. The face he saw onscreen, his own face, was stretched into an expression of wide-eyed, gasping fear.

Then the guy faced forward again and kept running. Will grimaced and tried to push his legs to move faster.

The rumble of an engine was getting louder, and a bright, hard light was spreading over the group gathered at the subway stop. Some people standing there turned and stared as the guy dashed along the right side of the crowd, over the platform. The ground around the tracks must have been slippery, though, because the guy’s feet suddenly flew out from under him, and he fell.

The wailing horn and screeching brakes began in unison. The guy tried to get to his feet.

In the next instant the guy was gone, replaced by a blur of metal and glass. Will thought he heard sounds, but couldn’t be sure.

Will came to a stop at the edge of the crowd. People were yelling, holding each other, pulling out cell phones. The train was still screeching along the tracks.

“He looked just like me,” Will whispered, breathing heavily, his eyes vaguely focused on the tracks.

Will blinked a few times, then looked to the left and spoke to a gray-haired, middle-aged man standing on the platform. “Didn’t he look like me?”

The man stared at Will.

The train finally pulled past the edge of the platform. The body lay splayed out on the tracks, blood spreading over the orange polo and khakis.

The guy’s face was beyond recognition.

Matt Hoffman is a recent graduate of Boston University, where he studied Film and International Relations. He grew up in Connecticut and attended the Educational Center for the Arts in New Haven. His fiction has been published in The Battered Suitcase, his film commentary appears frequently on the genre entertainment website Mania.com, and he performs standup at various New York City comedy clubs. He currently lives in Brooklyn.

Finding a Book Under the Bureau You Keep Your Keys On
by Michael J. Rosenbaum

As you move toward another day, on your way to work, your hand absently, mechanically, swings over the top of the bureau that sits next to the front door of your apartment, meaning to grab the keys that are kept there. But in its haste to move on toward the door knob, your hand doesn’t completely close around the keys and they’re knocked to the floor. A shock goes through you as the keys make the kind of small, crashing sound that keys make as they hit the hardwood floor, and you stare at them for a moment, unsure—the routine broken (strangely, the hand has continued on and turned the knob and opened the door). Recovering quickly though, you bend over for them. But as you do, you notice a stack of papers under the bureau.  Another incongruity. You drop to your knees and press your face close to the cool wood for a better look and you find that it’s not a stack of papers, not in the way you thought it was, but is a book instead. So you reach under, curious, mind whirling through the memory bank, trying prematurely to solve the mystery, even though the answer is only a moment away.

As you pull the book—thick layer of dust across the cover—out from its dungeon, your mind scores a minor victory by remembering the title before your eyes are able to read it, the series of journalistic pictures across the cover being the final clues needed: Evidence of My Existence. And immediately, though you’re still on your knees, by your open front door, you are in New York City. You are in a small restaurant in Greenwich Village that serves gluten-free, vegan-friendly food. You’re not there because you’re allergic to gluten or because you’re vegan, but because there are no restaurants like this where you live. Having already eaten and paid, you’re walking out the door with your partner, chatting about how amazing the duck—that of course was not really duck—was, when your eye catches this book on a shelf amongst twenty or so other books. Evidence of My Existence. The book says its title to you in a tragic and yet hopeful way, like a parent that has caught a child cheating at a game but seeks to guide rather than to punish. You pick it up and look at the cover. There’s a photo of men with darkly-masked faces carrying automatic rifles. There’s a picture of a naked man lying in the red powder of a foreign desert, his body caked in sand. Two small Buddhist children wearing the traditional robes of monks smile at you, a vast temple in the background. This book is a documentary of the life of a photographer. It is evidence of his existence and you know that you need to read this book because it will tell you something about yourself by telling you something about the world. You know this because you’re a traveler in this moment, because going to New York and eating duck that was not duck has brought you closer to something beneath your surface, the world’s surface. It’s not by any means the same as the dead body being carried by soldiers in one of the other pictures on the cover, but it has made that reality something conceivable. It means that just because there are not gluten-free restaurants where you are from does not mean that they do not exist, and if you can taste from them then you prove that you are real by acknowledging that they are real. It is a step. Seeing the pictures on this cover, not as news, seeing the people, not as statistics, seeing as evidenced by the author, is a step. Reading this book is the next step.

And so sitting now, on your knees, by the open door that leads to work, you wonder how this book got there. It’s been months, maybe a year, since that New York trip. The book had been left on the bureau as a reminder. How could it have fallen down there, unnoticed? Evidence of My Existence, sitting there as you went to work, as you went to the gym, as you went out to eat and to drink with friends. It, sitting there, hidden, as you grocery shopped and got oil changes and wrote checks to the credit card companies and sat in movie theaters and called the landlord eight times about the broken washing machine in the basement. Work—eight hours out of the day. An extra hour for commuting. An hour for grooming and maintenance:  showering, brushing, scrubbing, shitting, wiping. Two hours a day for preparing food and eating—more if you go out and you have to go out. You have to go out with people to not come apart, to take a break. You have to go out and let someone else make the food and pour the drinks. This is life. Your fingernails grow, your driver’s license expires, your parents want to see you and sometimes you need to see them. You get weary. You get languid. You get shiftless. You get hungry. You get fucking hungry.

Your heart rate goes up as you think of what you want and what you have and what you do and what you do not do. And it is then that you remember that you had to be coaxed into taking the book. The restaurant owner, a woman of middle age with long salt and pepper hair and a forearm full of bracelets and a full-length, white, cotton dress who sat drinking wine with a friend in a then-otherwise-unoccupied restaurant in Greenwich Village, had seen you stopped in the doorway and had said the words, “Take it.” She had had to say the words “take it” because you were deliberating.  You were thinking of all the other books you had that you hadn’t read yet and that were sitting in a pile on a shelf at home collecting dust and you were telling yourself that it might be unwise to add another to that stack, to add Evidence of My Existence. And here she was, middle-aged and saying ‘take it’. It was a ‘take a book-leave a book’ shelf, and so you told her that you didn’t have a book to leave but she said that was fine, she said that she understood.

This thought makes your heart beat all the faster now and you feel anger at her for a moment but the anger, the resentment, passes because so much time has passed that you can’t even call up a face in your mind to feel anger and resentment at.

You can feel your heart in your head, in between your ears, pounding like it wants out, like something trapped in a closet. You can feel time crashing. Someone is passing by your open door, on their way out of the building. You look up and he, a young boy, maybe ten or eleven, looks down at you, you sitting there on your knees holding Evidence of My Existence in your hands, which have fallen idly, listlessly, to your lap—the book moments away from dropping to the bare, hardwood floor. You see him as he slows his pace to better look at you. He is wearing a Yankees baseball cap and in his hand there’s a stick, like that of a broom handle broken in half, and you wonder where he’s going with that stick, what he needs it for. And just before he passes completely, past the frame of your door, you smile at him. He starts to smile, too, to smile back. But then he stops, his facial muscles going limp. And then he’s gone

* * *

Michael J. Rosenbaum is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at the University of Texas at El Paso and is currently enrolled in the MFA Fiction Program at Texas State University. This piece previously appeared in The Rio Grande Review.

Gibraltar
By Mark Sutz

Like most identical twins, my brother Oscar and I were indistinguishable from one another to most people. We weren’t the kinds of twins who harbored any unique moles or tics or cowlicks that would, to the discerning eye, separate us one from the other. On every square inch of our bodies, we were exactly alike, two people walking the earth who seemed in every hop, slurp, action or speech, to be the same. Even when we got into trouble, the harsh punishments were meted out in doubled, equal chunks. Our bar mitzvahs were even held in unison, our passage from boys to men held side-by-side, firmly cementing in our minds that we were going to travel through our lives closer to one another than most could imagine or desire.

The only thing different about us was the titanium rod that had been inserted into Oscar’s ankle when we were twelve. He’d sustained a nearly identical injury to me during a particularly vicious skiing accident, an impromptu downhill race we’d engaged in during a ski trip in Zermatt.

Even the scar left visible on his ankle we shared, but when the doctors had gone into my ankle they’d determined I wouldn’t need the permanent assistance of a metal rod to help strengthen my joint. The scar on the insides of our left ankles was shaped like a fingernail moon. Try as we might, we couldn’t ditch our identicalness.

That is, until we were eighteen and Oscar met Luisa.

We’d been apprenticing on a research vessel, the Fathom, to learn the business of what most people call treasure hunting but was known in the trade as deep sea salvage. My father knew the captain, John Angeletti, and convinced him to take Oscar and me along with him one summer. The captain’s daughter, Luisa, had practically grown up on the ship and become a beautiful diversion for us both. We spent as much energy pursuing Luisa as we did learning salvage.

It took Luisa five or six weeks to be able to even tell which one of us had snuck into her cabin and crawled under her sheets. When she was finally able to distinguish Oscar and me — Oliver is my name — from the other, she sat us both down and told us it was Oscar she wanted.

We had both been as smitten as lovesick children, but for the first time in our lives, Oscar and I had one thing different about us. Over the next five years, Oscar and I worked on the vessel, but Oscar was made the heir apparent to its ownership.

Luisa and Oscar were married at sea on our fifth summer on the boat and I became a valued, if not heired, member of the crew.

Captain Angelotti treated us both with equal respect and responsibility—after all, even our boat skills were perfectly comparable—but Luisa’s choice of Oscar as her lover and companion meant his place was far more secure.

Before launching for our sixth summer, Captain Angelotti brought the whole crew together to hear his encouragement. More than once, our salvage operations were conducted in tricky weather and conditions that only people addicted to uncovering history would bother suffering. Captain Angelotti’s boundless energy and enthusiasm was enough to palliate any amount of trepidation we had.

He gave us his usual spiel, but there was always at least one person in the crew who was new and hadn’t heard the captain discuss the vastness of treasures in the waters of the world. According to the UN, there are more than 3 million shipwrecks on the ocean floors of the world. Whenever the Captain repeated this number, it amazed even the most jaded person. At least we knew we’d never be out of work and could always dream we’d find something magical.

“This year,” he said, “is going to be a special year. I was privy to information about what could be the most valuable shipwreck the world has ever had and one which has remained secret.”

I nudged Luisa who was sitting next to me and asked her if she knew what he was talking about.

“He’s kept it secret even from me,” she said.

“Last year,” the captain continued, “some historians discovered papers that have brought to light a very interesting twist in the sinking of the HMS Sussex.”

The Sussex was a known shipwreck, but no more interesting for salvagers than any other of the hundreds which we’d studied. It was simply a Royal Navy ship that had sunk in along the Spanish coast on its way to the Mediterranean in 1694 and one which interested historians more than it did salvagers. The captain’s body had washed up clad only in a nightshirt on the shores of Gibraltar.

“Apparently,” he said, “the Sussex was on a secret mission. Captain Wheeler was carrying 1 million pounds sterling to deliver to the Duke of Savoy, to keep him from falling to French bribes. Today, that booty, all those silver and gold coins are worth more than a billion dollars.”

We could hear the collective gasp and then childlike tittering from the crew. The captain told us all we’d sail in two days.

Oscar, Luisa and I went to the local pub at the marina where we were docked and spent the night reveling in the possibilities of our next adventure.

“You and Luisa are going to be rich beyond your dreams. Beyond mine. Beyond anyone’s,” I said.

Oscar said, “Oliver, whatever’s mine is yours. You know that.”

Luisa, as she usually did, bristled when I brought up the fact that her choice of Oscar had inexorably changed the course of my life. After all, because they were married, Luisa and Oscar became the beneficiaries of anything that Captain Angelotti and the Fathom found at sea.

Oscar squeezed my shoulder, knowing full well how our lives had taken different roads. But I believed in his reassurances and put it to rest.

We drank enough that night to carry us into a reverie about our impending trip that we’d ever had before. The three of us stumbled back to the ship and passed out in our cabins, dreaming of the Sussex’s treasure off the Spanish coast.

The next day, last minute preparations were made with more vigor than I could recall. Broad smiles were on everyone’s faces. Captain Angelotti even treated the entire crew to a gluttonous dinner where pats on the back and hugs were in full sight. We all could taste the possibilities, though we knew full well how difficult this salvage would be.

The sail across the Atlantic was calm, uneventful, and filled with energy. For three weeks, we studied maps of the wreck, made specific plans for the salvage and read more about the history of the Sussex. Our dinner conversations often veered to Admiral Wheeler and his unfortunate voyage three hundred years before. Even Don, the first mate, was excited for old sea voyages as he never was before.

On the 22nd day after we left the eastern coast of the United States, we anchored above what was the site of the HMS Sussex. Captain Angelotti gave us his final pre-salvage pep talk.

“I know this will likely be the most exciting excavation of your lives. It certainly is mine. But we’re going to be working out here for the better part of six months, so whenever anyone needs to take a break and visit Gibraltar via the transit vessel, just let me know. Or First Mate Don, here.” The captain put his arm around Don and said, “To a successful rebirth of the HMS Sussex.”

After the anchoring and initial lowering of our navigation sub, the electronic eyes for the crew, a few of us gathered around the video feed to await the first images of the Sussex. Through the murky water, we spied the ship that had lain under a thousand meters of water for four centuries. We all applauded and then set in to guide the sub around the wreck to see how we’d begin the excavation.

That first day was a day of meticulous planning on how we’d raise the ship, piece by piece, into airtight compartments under the water so the wood wouldn’t disintegrate upon hitting the air. Then, to the surface, and into the transfer ship that would head to our warehouse on land to go through the treasures of the wreck. At the end of the day it felt like we’d already been working for months because of what we knew lay ahead of us, the sweat and hard work we’d endure. We ended the day on the deck, Oscar, Luisa, Captain Angelotti and I sharing two bottles of Spanish wine.

When we were nearly finished with the second bottle, we noticed the sky was darkening and a storm would soon be upon us. Mostly clear weather had been on the horizon all day, so the quick turn to drizzle surprised us all.

Don came up and consulted with Captain Angelotti. After the first mate returned below deck, the captain told us we’d be in for a surprise levanter, the strong easterly wind that in this part of the world could appear in an instant and cause havoc to even the most sturdy of ships. It was a levanter, in fact, that had originally downed the Sussex long ago.

Within minutes the Fathom was in the middle of severe winds and a rainstorm of frightening night. As the four of us were making our way carefully along the rails to find our way below deck, the Fathom lurched heavily and I slid headfirst across the slick deck.

I awoke in my cabin, my vision blurred and my head a knot of pain. Two people were at my bedside – Don and the ship’s medic.

“You’re awake, son,” Don said.

I struggled for words.

“The storm. What happened?” I asked.

The medic had his hand around my wrist to check my pulse. “You were knocked unconscious. You’ve been out for five days.”

“My brother? Luisa? The captain?”

Don motioned for the medic to leave, and waited for the door to close behind him.

“Oscar, this is difficult, but you’ve got to know,” Don said. “The three of them were washed overboard that night. It took us two days to find their bodies.”

My memory was absent. The last thing I recalled was sliding uncontrollably across the wet deck. And why was Don calling me Oscar? In my haze, I was unsure of my own identity.

Don continued, “The Fathom was severely damaged. The storm got so bad they couldn’t even send any boats to assist us.”

“Where is my brother’s body?” I asked.

“Oscar, we lost all power to the refrigeration systems. There was nothing else we could do but cremate them.”

I remembered Captain Angelotti once telling us that in the absolute worst case and in order to spare the rest of the crew the possibility of disease, a person who died at sea might have to be put into the ‘crematorium’ built into the Fathom. Though referred to as the crematorium, it was actually a large oven used to help bake off debris from wrecks we pulled up. The morbid truth was that it was easily big enough for a body.

I began to weep thinking I’d lost the person with whom I’d entered life. The confusion was overwhelming. And then I thought about what would happen to the Fathom.

Don said, “The captain and Luisa, their ashes are where they would want them to be. In the ocean. Your brother’s ashes are in a makeshift urn, secured on the main deck.”

I lifted myself up so I was sitting on the bed.

“Will you please bring the urn to me, Don?”

He left me alone there. It was the loneliest I’ve ever felt since the day Oscar and I were separated for a mere three hours when we were five years old. I had no idea how life would even be possible without him, without that possibility of working with him and Luisa on the Fathom once the captain had retired and passed it onto them. Now I had no claim to it at all.

As I was weeping into my hands, Don brought the urn. My parents would never understand the cremation. Our faith forbade it.

“We saved the titanium pin. We had no idea your brother had one, but the melting point of titanium is higher than the oven. I assumed you’d want to keep it with his ashes. A tug is coming. When we finally are able to dock in Gibraltar, your parents will be there. They’ve been notified and are coming to pick up you and his ashes. I’ll leave you alone now. I’m so terribly sorry, Oscar.”

After a while, I took the urn under my arm and made my way to the deck. The day was so still the water looked like a sheet of blue glass. I said a prayer for the three of them and unscrewed the lid to the urn. I poured my brother’s ashes over the side of the boat and watched, as if in slow motion, the titanium rod implanted in his ankle when we were twelve—the only difference between us—plummet into the ocean with a visible but inaudible splash. It sank, I hoped, to the very bottom of the ocean near the Sussex. I wished as hard as I’ve ever wished for anything in my life that by taking my brother’s place in this life, I was doing the honorable thing.

I buried both of us that day and often think of Oscar’s ashes in the ocean. And me, Oliver, lost to my parents that day too, though they’d never be fully aware of what had really happened. The lie was written in water, and somewhere in the limbo of two lives taken much too early, I wonder some days who I really am.

* * *

Mark Sutz is a writer living in Arizona. He contributes regularly to the online culture magazine, The Nervous Breakdown. A list of his publications can be found at www.marksutz.com. You can contact him at his gmail.com address, “masutz”.

The Spider in the Sink

by Jean Ryan

 Ants are easy. Their very numbers make them expendable. They goad you into it, the way they march across the kitchen and besiege your sugar bowl in broad daylight. Who wouldn’t pick up a sponge and decimate them? 

But what to do about the spider in the sink?  No bigger than an aspirin, it shrinks in terror when your hand approaches. Somewhere the little fellow made a wrong turn; it does not want to be in your sink and now it can’t get out. With a splash of water you could send it down the dark hell of your plumbing; you wouldn’t even have to look. There is a chance the wee bug would never cross your mind again. 

You don’t take that chance. You tear off a piece of toilet paper and nudge it beneath the creature, and in your nightgown you walk through the house and out the back door and you shake the tissue over a bush. One day perhaps this spider will eat the aphids off your rosebuds. But that is not why you save it. 

#

 Your husband did not wave before he pulled out of the driveway and your thoughts keep snagging on this. Every morning you wait for that gesture, his hand arcing out the window, and today he simply drove off. Now as you push his clothes into the washer, you try to recall what color shirt he was wearing, which pair of boots, and your mind draws a blank. Not much was said over toast and coffee. Your heart did not melt at the sight of his thinning blonde hair and you can’t say if his gaze lingered on you. It would be on a day like this, without clues, without touchstones, that he would leave and never come back. 

Already the heat is pressing on the house. You part the living room curtains and look at the sky, pale yellow, but dark on the horizon. Out there, just above the wheat fields, clouds are building. Just as you imagined. 

By now he is at the McKeever’s. Grace has brought him a cup of coffee and he is talking with her as he nails up paneling. Every few minutes, though she tries not to, she regards his tidy rump. Grace has a crush on Tad―most women do. It’s the blonde hair, which curls ever so slightly around his collar, and his blue eyes with their sand-colored lashes, and the clean cut of his jaw, and the shy smile he offers to not just everyone. 

You hear about the pitfalls of marrying a gorgeous woman but less is said about gorgeous husbands. It didn’t matter a few years ago, when your thighs were tight and your skin was creamy smooth, but now that the crow’s feet and spider veins are appearing, you wonder what he’s up to. You see him putting down his hammer, reaching for something else. It doesn’t help that his work takes him into other people houses, usually when the mister is gone. You haven’t heard any rumors, and he still gathers you in his arms when he gets home and pulls you on top of him more often than not, and yet you wonder. 

You go into the bedroom, take off your nightgown and stand before the full-length mirror. Because of the heat, your long auburn hair is pinned up. To hide the strands of gray, you are using a rinse that has just a bit more red than your real color. Your brown eyes still shimmer, though the wrinkles around them are getting deeper. Your breasts are high and your waist hasn’t thickened. The trouble begins with your bottom, which has always been too big; now you see some dimpling there. Worse yet are the twin bulges of flesh on your hips, the saddlebags your mother, and her mother, wore; and lately, on your thighs, the small red whorls of broken veins. In front of you are the facts, thirty-nine years of them, and while there are plenty of mornings you resent this body, today, somehow, you feel sorry for it. Slowly, respectfully, you pull on your clothes. 

Washing the breakfast dishes, you keep edging looks at the sky. The clouds are coming closer, mushrooming upwards. Under the dense mantle of air, each stalk of wheat is poised. You peer at the top of the hackberry tree and notice the birds are gone. 

The radio waits on the kitchen table. You dry each dish, you sweep the floor; at last you bite your lip and reach for the dial. Over at the McKeever’s, your husband is listening to his scanner. Grace doesn’t mind the noisy static, or the fact that he might bolt from her living room at any moment. Everyone knows about Tad. 

You open the refrigerator and let the cool air chill the sweat on your neck and shoulders. Already it is ninety-two. Again you visit those tall pine trees, that blue mountain lake in your mind. If it weren’t for Tad you would have moved out of Enid a long time ago. 

You were born and raised and married in the path of tornadoes; all your life you have been a target. Not that you haven’t been lucky. You haven’t lost anything that couldn’t be replaced (and falling in love with a carpenter was certainly fortuitous), and it’s a fact that most of these storms don’t amount to much. Still, you’d like to live one spring without knocking on wood. 

The rain starts while you are dusting the coffee table. You pause at the window and watch. Punk…punk…punk punk, the slow fat drops strike the road, sending up puffs of dirt. Tad hears it too. He puts down his handsaw, walks over to the screen door. He sniffs the air, eyes the clouds; his stomach tightens. 

The rain falls harder, bending the wheat, filling the road with puddles. To the north the sky is almost black. You can see the flashes of lightning. 

When they issue the warning you are not surprised. You knew it was out there somewhere. They say it’s big―a half-mile wide and headed for Jefferson. 

Your husband is already in his truck. He shifts into reverse, bumps and splashes down the drive. The wipers are going full tilt. He gets on the CB, tells Duane where to meet him. 

As long as you have known him, Tad has been chasing tornadoes. He is not, you admit, as fanatic as some. He does not spend the entire month of May driving around Tornado Alley, analyzing radar images and estimating wind sheer. And rarely does he actually see what he’s after―most of his chases end in a bust. But if a storm is close enough, if there’s a chance he can get there in time, nothing on earth can stop him. You have told him it’s foolish, that he will get himself killed. You have cited the damage done to the truck, the cost of all those repairs. You have begged and scolded; you have even threatened, but by now it’s clear you’re not leaving this place, not, that is, until you’re a widow. 

You sit down at the red Formica-topped table and fix your gaze on the radio. They’re rating the tornado an F4. It has blown through Jefferson and is now moving west toward Nash. People saw two huge funnels which merged and picked up a barn. Homes are gone; cows are dead; a girl and her father are missing. 

Tad picks up Duane at Everett’s Dairy and they head north on 64. Rain beats against the windshield, gushes down the sides. “We can’t see anything through this shit,” Duane says, squinting at the thick clouds ahead of them. Tad turns up the CB and the cab ricochets with voices and static. 

“It’s in Nash―we gotta take Cochran Road.”    

Tad knows they should stay off the dirt roads. But this one’s a maxi. And they’re so close. 

You don’t have to worry about the others: your boys had the sense to move out west and your mother is safe in Muskogee. As for this house, well it’s not exactly a dream come true. Indeed there are times when, studying the worn yellow box from across the road, its two front windows like small sad eyes, you wish for a strong wind. 

Tornadoes can change direction on a whim and this one might decide to plow its way toward Enid. You’re aware of this and yet you don’t move from your chair. There is no need to take cover, no reason to collect your valuables and stow them in the basement. You have used up your luck. It is not the house you will lose today. 

Tad accelerates and the tires fling mud on the doors and windows. They are close. Wind pummels the hickory trees. Leaves and twigs and paper whirl through the blue-black sky. A ragdoll flies past. Now they drive into hail. The icy chunks bombard the puddles, bounce off the hood. 

They can hear the wind, can feel it pulling on the truck. Tad reaches for the video camera. 

At his funeral he will be a hero. His father will muster the strength to offer a short eulogy through which his mother will sob. Men will be stone-faced; women will shake their heads and recall his smile and the way he listened when they spoke. Two of these women will weep and from this you will draw irrefutable conclusions. 

You will move to a state with mountains and water. It will not help. You will sit on your porch at dusk and gaze at the pine trees and listen to the loons. You will think of silos and wheat fields and wind. 

Suddenly it is there, so massive, so near, that all they can see is one brown whirling side. Tad lets go of the camera and reaches for the gear shift. 

“We’re too close,” he says, yanking the wheel to the right, turning the track partway around. He shoves into reverse and the truck’s back tires lurch into a gully of mud. 

“Do it, man―get us out of here!” Duane shouts. 

Tad shifts gears, guns the engine; the truck shudders but stays where it is. He reverses, tries again―the tires just keep spinning. 

Duane pushes open the door and jumps out. 

“No!” Tad yells. “Stay in the truck!” 

But Duane won’t stop. Hands frozen on the wheel, Tad watches him run through the wheat, his white shirt getting smaller and smaller, until it’s gone, and there is only the roaring curtain of wind. 

The tornado expired just south of Pond Creek. It battered four towns and left a woman wedged in a tree. She is the only confirmed death, but several people have not been accounted for. 

The storm has cleansed the earth and the air does not feel like warm cotton anymore. You walk out to porch and sit on the glider. Gently you push your feet against the floor and the seat begins to swing. Beyond the puddle-pocked road the wheat is bent and glistening; above it swallows dive. The neighbor’s bloodhound barks. A fat grasshopper lands on the screen. 

Just after one o’clock they show up. You see the truck coming down the road, and Duane’s orange baseball cap, and then Tad’s arm, waving. For the hundredth time, you get to your feet and wave back. 

#

 You are lying alongside Tad, your front pressed lightly against his back, your hand resting on his waist. All you can hear are his slow deep breaths and the constant chirping of crickets. 

Sure enough you think about that spider. You didn’t see it fall from the tissue and you hope it landed safely, that it found, on the glossy contours of a leaf, something to eat, perhaps a mite or two. You hope, when the rain came, that it chanced upon a cozy niche, a place to curl up its legs and rest. Soon enough it will find another precipice, will wander across the length of the leaf, and cling, bewildered, to the edge of its world.

* * *

Jean Ryan lives in Napa, California, and her writing has appeared in a variety of journals to include The Massachusetts Review, The Summerset Review, and The Foundling Review.  Her novel, LOST SISTER, was published in 2005 and is available on Amazon.com. “The Spider in the Sink” was originally published in Artisan in December, 1999.

Georgetown Kisses

by Sarah Harris Wallman

Trimble had a bad habit of prolonged eye contact; the so-called windows of his soul seemed perpetually open for business. His wife used to call it his “basset hound look.” He remembered that every time he saw the basset-shaped bank by the cash register at the corner convenience store. You were supposed to deposit change for crippled children, or maybe it was pediatric cancer. Trimble was not a consistent contributor, though if he had pennies he’d just as soon give them away. He wasn’t without sympathy, he just didn’t have as much as his eyes suggested.

That day he put in a whole quarter. He was nervous about the way the clerk was staring at him. He’d paid with a twenty and they were waiting for her manager to bring her more ones.

“That’s real nice,” she said. “They help kids.”

He shrugged, but made eye contact. It was accidental. Her nametag said “Lena.”

There were three people in line behind him, waiting to buy formula or pints of ice cream. The store was one of the few in Georgetown that offered such low-key goods, so there was always a line. Trimble made sympathetic eye contact with all of them, too.

“Do you like to read this?” said Lena, poking at the copy of The New Yorker he was buying.

“Not really,” he laughed. It was true. He was looking for conversation-fodder on the off-chance he and his wife had a conversation. “I just live with someone who does.” This was not quite true.

“I live with someone,” said Lena. “She don’t read magazines, though.”

“Most people prefer television.” He didn’t mean it as an insult. He wouldn’t have minded an evening of television as long as it was with Sylvie, making her usual acid commentary about all the improbable things that happened on the screen.

“Oh, she likes magazines and all,” said Lena. “She just can’t read. She didn’t get much school. Plus, she don’t hold her head up too good.”

He looked up, really seeing Lena for the first time: the way her eyes were not quite focused, maybe even a little crossed. She had a broad pimply forehead and wore no makeup beyond a thick swipe of blue on each eyelid. He couldn’t believe she’d lured him into an implied condemnation of some stricken illiterate.

“The agency sends someone over once a week to read her the TV Guide. She likes that a lot. She’s like, ‘buh buh buh.’” Lena cocked her head and crossed her eyes a bit more to demonstrate her roommate’s expression of joy.

“My goodness.”

“I’m more independent than that,” said Lena, confidentially, “Got a job and everything.”

Afterward, Trimble walked up the hill with his magazine and toilet paper. He lived behind one of the neighborhood’s many multi-million dollar houses, down a narrow brick driveway in the carriage house. Every time he walked down the street he was struck by the friendly grandiosity of the houses. They seemed likely to house charming aristocrats who supported the arts and never mentioned money. It was a very appealing neighborhood, so on some level it was understandable why they didn’t want a Metro station bringing an endless tide of undesirables. Lena probably got here by bus, arriving from some dark corner of Maryland in the predawn. Either that or she too lived in a rented carriage house, one with a bigger-hearted landlady than Mrs. Herbert Q. Schmidt, call me Nancy.

Before Ben Trimble was a possible bachelor in Georgetown, he was a doctor in a charmless house of magenta brick in Vienna, the last stop on the Orange Line. Before that he’d coached his daughter’s soccer team and taken them out for pizza and “hustle” awards. Before that he was a frazzled obstetrics resident with an equally frazzled wife and baby and before that he was a whimsical undergraduate at Georgetown University, dating Sylvie Strickland. A few years ago, while still happily inhabiting the Vienna house, watching Holly pole vault through high school, there came a night when he and Sylvie sat down over a pile of paperwork and calculated that with the rising cost of malpractice insurance, he really could not afford to keep his private practice afloat. One of his justifications for accepting the position at the Georgetown student clinic was that it would improve Holly’s chances of getting in (she did). But really he’d loved the idea of never working in an office park again, the idea of walking to lunch at the kind of place that served new-age burritos to students and fashionable young professionals. So he was back at Georgetown professionally before the current mess with Sylvie. Every day he wanted to call her and tell about some spot where they once got drunk or laughed hysterically or kissed. He wanted to tell her how said spot now sold designer eyeglasses or how it was still the same cheap pizza.

When they were freshmen together, Trimble had been perpetually impressed with the way Sylvie could locate food and drink in the maze of shops and cafes. He had come from darkest Virginia and didn’t know which fork was which. In fact, that fork thing had become kind of a figure of speech with him, a kind of nostalgia for his former ineptness. “I’m just a farm boy who doesn’t know which fork is which,” he said to smooth over any shortcoming of etiquette or sophistication. Two months ago he had used this statement to justify his failure to purchase the right kind of puff pastry for Sylvie’s “famous” wrapped brie. She’d punched a bag of packaged salad, causing it to pop. “What fucking forks, Ben? What fucking forks?”

#

He climbed the stairs of the carriage house, anticipating the use of the toilet paper, maybe even the magazine. But Holly was there, sprawled in the middle of the floor with various books and papers. Holly liked the apartment, its beamed ceiling and squat 1950’s refrigerator. She was tired of all her usual study haunts and, he suspected, she assumed that her parents would soon resolve whatever was between them and the spoils of the unbreakable lease would fall to her when he moved back to Vienna. She’d been strangely cheerful about the whole situation, but maybe that was reasonable. He’d been waiting patiently for the tears, the anger, the recriminations, and, hopefully, the sense that they were bravely facing something together.

“Hey, kiddo.”

“Hey, dad-o.”

“Looks like a hurricane hit.”

Hurricane Holly, she was supposed to say. It was an old joke between them.

“I need to talk to you about something,” she said.

So it was time. Thank goodness for the basset eyes. “What is it Holly?”

“Can I cook here on Friday? And maybe have some people over? Just Moe and the girls.”

“I’m not sure that’s…”

“Oh, come on. You’ve got plans, right?”

“Since when do I make plans?”

“Dad, it’s Friday.”

“Right. Movie night.” A tradition with Sylvie.

“You should go see this German thing at the student center. Blow your mind.”

“Movie night may be a thing of the past, Holly.”

“I’m serious. It questions the very nature of perception. It’s a little gnarly in the middle, I mean, there’s an evisceration, but the whole point is like, if you react to the evisceration, you’re just…just complicit in the…”

“So you want me to leave the apartment Friday evening.”

“Just for a few hours.”

“That’s it? No suggestion of who I might take to a German film at the student center?”

She shrugged. “If you don’t see it you’re missing out.”

He pressed on, “Because your mother and I aren’t doing that kind of thing any more, in case you haven’t noticed.”

“Actually, I took mom to see it Monday. She came down for lunch and we were going to shop but it was raining. She kept covering her eyes. You know how she is.”

“How is she?”

“Good. She ordered wrong, though. You’re not going to get decent maki at a noodle bar. I tried to tell her.”

Was it really possible that he had raised a human being this impervious to the suffering of others? Or were German films and Japanese noodles supposed to stand for something, to tell him that she was feeling…what, exactly?

“Don’t look that way,” Holly said. “Mediocre sushi is not the end of the world.”

“Your mother—”

“We had a good day.”

“Did she say something about this Friday? Is there something planned?”

“She gave me her linguine recipe. And I’m going to do that thing with the brie.”

Maybe the chatter was a kind of deflection. But she’d never been awkward with him before. When she was eleven, she’d asked him detailed, matter-of-fact questions about the mechanics of sex. They’d been driving home from a lost softball game, buckled in. She’d already asked her mother, but she wanted his take.

“Well,” said Trimble, “I guess I’ll wander the streets. I’m making lots of friends out there.” He told her about Lena, to lighten things up a little.

“Making fun of the disabled. Nice, Dad.”

“I was very nice to her.”

She rolled her eyes and reopened her psychology book, “I know your whole nice thing, dad. Some of my friends even think it’s cute.”

So that was it. Holly had no idea why her parents were separated. She’d assumed it was some amplified version of the usual: squabbles over what to do on Saturday, whether
breakfast food could be served as dinner, the notion that the big-lipped skinniness of some actress voided her ability to portray characters other than herself. Sylvie had always
enjoyed little flare-ups of righteous indignation and Trimble sometimes mistakenly played devil’s advocate when what all that was wanted was devil’s audience.

What Holly did not know was that Dr. Ben Trimble had kissed a student in his clinic and refused to turn himself in. He’d confessed the kiss to Sylvie. That wasn’t debatable. He had betrayed her, if only for a few seconds. He expected tears, a period of exile, but ultimately the betrayal had no depth, and he thought he could convey that to Sylvie.

He had not expected her to insist that he turn himself in, like some kind of sexual predator, even if it meant losing his job, even if that meant losing their house.

“You would really lose the house on principle?” he said.

“Of course.”

“Of course nothing. This ethics bullshit is just to punish me.”

“Do you really think so little of ethics?”

“Stop talking that way.”

“You’re better than this, Ben.”

“I know I’m better. It was a momentary slip. I didn’t even instigate it.”

“Now you sound like a rapist,” she said. “Worse: a rapist’s lawyer.”

It had gone on like that. At one point she refused to live in “a house built on lies” and he had said, fine, he’d take his lies and go. Then the magenta rancher would be a zone of total honesty. In the end, she didn’t even have to kick him out.

The first two nights he slept on the floor of his office. But they turned off the air at night and the window was adjacent to the exhaust vent of an all-night Chinese take-out. He’d spent the third night on Holly’s floor, much to the amusement of all the girls on the hall. It was scarcely possible to go to the bathroom there, so he’d answered an ad posted in the coffee shop for the carriage house. Mrs. Herbert Q. Schmidt, call me Nancy. He’d told her he worked at the university and let her assume he was a professor. She was instantly taken with the idea of a professorial boarder. It befitted the memory of the late Herbert Q. Schmidt (actually, the Q was Trimble’s addition when he described his landlady to others). He had been living there nearly six weeks.

Of course, it was probably the look that had softened Nancy Schmidt more than anything else. The look of nearly painful sympathy had probably got him all the dates he’d ever had, including young Sylvie, who’d caught him watching a drunk girl dancing on a bar, flinging her long hair around. Sylvie thought he was enlightened enough to pity the drunk girl, though he’d actually been hoping she would take the crowd up on their suggestion that she remove her shirt.

The look had certainly got him the job at the student clinic. After fifteen years as a suburban obstetrician, it was strange to work in an environment where babies were most emphatically not the goal. Parents-to-be in Vienna had a self-satisfied air. His new patients were scared. They came to him when they’d been trembling in a fevered sweat in a dorm room for three days, hundreds of miles from their mothers, or because they feared they’d sacrificed their bodies for one (or more) nights of beer and loud music and goings home with a beautiful stranger who didn’t have sheets on his bed, much less condoms. They were almost all girls in the clinic. Boys never sought medical attention unless they were passed out or punctured. They went to the E.R.

Ashley Jennings had honey blond hair and the usual perfect figure. She wore miniscule running shorts. Her come-on hadn’t been very original; she probably never needed to polish it. She was just trying to be the kind of girl who does outrageous things and gets away with them. The kiss lasted several seconds and tasted of chewed gum, more like spit than fruit. Not unpleasant.

As she left, she glanced back over her shoulder and gave him what she would probably call a wicked smile when describing the scene to her roommates. The thought did not fill him with horror. He imagined they would sit in a circle and pass around a plastic bag of bulk snacks, banana chips and gummi worms, maybe, and Ashley would tell them how she’d kissed a doctor. Holly could even be there, because it wouldn’t have anything to do with him. It would just be about bold kisses and possibilities. So much life and so many kisses ahead of them. It would be perfectly all right for Holly to be there. He hadn’t mentally dressed them in silk nighties. That’s not how college girls in repose dressed these days. They wore flannel pajama bottoms and sweatshirts. If you did look at their
breasts, all you saw was the usual rectangular proclamation: “Georgetown.”

#

At seven o’clock, Holly was still there, scowling at the psych book and underlining fiercely. Trimble was trying to read an article in one of the less serious journals, something about a computer implant that would allow the blind to see with their tongues. It was pretty theoretical; no chance that he would see blind people skipping along tongue-first in his lifetime.

What he really wanted to do was walk along M street and find a crowded bar of the student variety. He didn’t want to see anyone he knew (except, of course, Sylvie, but she was probably standing at their kitchen counter, eating something odd: an avocado and crackers, or a scrambled egg.). He didn’t want to take Holly with him, but he didn’t want to ask her to leave. He certainly didn’t want to have a few beers and find that she was still there when he wanted sprawl on the couch and devise new ways to approach Sylvie: maybe she would be interested in email. Maybe they should sell the so-called house of lies move somewhere with a different energy. Maybe she had finally tired of being dramatic and would simply accept a hug.

Finally, he said Holly’s name. She reluctantly looked up.

“You told your mother you were going to have a dinner party at my apartment?”

“It’s not really a dinner party.”

“But you told her all the details?’

“You make it sound like we’re going to eat off china and swap wives. It’s just linguine. Maybe some wine. I’ll clean up.”

“Listen: you told your mother you’re inviting college girls to my apartment.”

“Women,” said Holly.

“Women,” Trimble conceded. “To my apartment.”

“And Moe. But he doesn’t count.”

“That’s not my point.”

“What, you think someone’s going to have sex with Moe? Because I can guarantee—”

“Holly.”

“Are you really saying no to this?”

“Do you have any clue why I’m living here?”

She started to cry. Which meant she might not talk for a minute or two and he could explain himself.

“I wronged your mother very deeply, maybe for good. It’s not what I want, but we might never be a family again. What I want is for her to forgive me, but I’m not saying I deserve that.”

“I’m not going to pass messages.” Holly stood and began to gather her papers. “I already told Mom. If you two have something to say to each other then pick up the phone. I’m trying to have a life here.”

“She said something? When you had lunch?”

“Forget it,” said Holly. “I’ll find somewhere else to study. I’ll find somewhere else to have my friends.”

She slammed the door and was off, back to her alleged life. Trimble missed her instantly. The afternoons they had spent in the carriage house seemed suddenly special in their weirdness, as if they had both occupied the waiting room of some crazy hospital where the doctors performed invasive full-body neuron rewiring, so that when you left you could smell colors or taste music, a change that would either reinvigorate you or disable you so completely you went insane. He and Holly were going through different doors and might experience different outcomes, but at least they’d had this sweet, bland time in the waiting room. Most people never got that.

Down at Extra Innings, he ordered the beer special and paid with a couple of ones. They had a barback who reminded him of Lena from the corner store; she was slow or touched, or whatever Lena was. She gathered empty glasses and washed them and periodically wiped down the counter with an ammonia-soaked rag, lifting people’s beers out of the way when necessary. When anyone tried to get her attention she stared steadfastly at a spot two inches below the bar and said “I’m not ’llowed to serve drinks.”

“You’re doing a great job,” Trimble said, when she lifted his beer to clean the spot beneath.

“Thank you,” she whispered. Her eyes flickered up to his for a moment. On her next pass, she spoke.

“You know we got pretzels for free?” she said. “You like pretzels?”

“Sure,” he said. “Pretzels are my favorite.”

“Not me,” she said. “My favorite is grilled cheese sandwich.”

“How interesting.” Was this it? Was this how sympathetic people spoke? People who actually cared?

“We also got free matches,” said the girl, “But I’m not ’llowed no matches.”

“Hey!” The bartender had noticed them. He pointed a beefy finger at Trimble. “You some kind of pervert?”

Ben managed a “who me?” gesture. The eyes were failing him. “I was just talking to…to your…”

“As far as you’re concerned, she’s my freakin’ wife. My daughter. She’s my goddamned mother, guy. So don’t bother her.”

“I’m not.”

“Don’t give me the goo-goo eyes, asshole. I got your number.”

Could you give it to me, Trimble wanted to quip. But that didn’t seem wise. He wondered

if it was still Lena’s shift at the corner store. He could go in and buy some beers just to hear her too loud, too stilted, “DID YOU FIND EVERYTHING YOU NEED?” She might not remember his name, but at least she would recognize him as a good person.

He ordered another beer and called Holly’s cell phone. He left a message, saying that she could have the apartment Friday, that he might have plans after all, he might take her advice on the whole marriage thing. He wanted desperately for her to like him. He considered a second message, so that he could go ahead and say “I love you.” He wanted to tell her that everything he’d ever done had been out of love for her and her mother. But it wasn’t true. He’d done any number of things for no reason at all. He didn’t really like pretzels (or nuts, or snack mix) but he was always eating by the handful at bars, at parties. Last Christmas he filled up on this nasty Asian mustard mix to the extent that he wanted to throw up so he could start over with the real food. But reversing the digestive
process in Sylvie’s parents’ guest bathroom seemed a little over the top. He couldn’t work up the nerve.

The slow girl barback was wrestling a loaded garbage bag out of the can, straining so hard her tongue stuck out to the side. But she didn’t seem discouraged. She seemed perfectly sure the garbage would yield to her will.

“That’s it. I warned you.” Somehow the bartender was behind him, knocking the stool from beneath him and man-handling him toward the exit. Trimble hit M street with both knees and then with both hands, skidding an inch or so. A flock of legs in platform sandals paused. There were a few giggles and a soft inquiry as to whether he was okay.

“Yes, yes. I’m okay.” He looked at his scuffed palms and never saw their faces. Actually, he kept looking at the ground even when they said “hey” to him because he could not bear to meet their eyes. He had the impression that they were underage and over-made-up. They were armed with false identification and headed for some terrible danger from which he was only a brief distraction. He didn’t want to see.

He limped into a nearby ATM vestibule and dialed the number of his own house, miles away in Virginia. He got the machine, but that was okay. He could still tell her what he needed to tell her. He told her that everything he does from now on, he does for love. Part of him believed that this was possible.

* * *

Sarah Harris Wallman’s work has previously appeared in Brooklyn’s L Magazine and been produced off-off Broadway. She holds an MFA from the University of Pittsburgh and currently co-directs a new MFA program at a small but scrappy college in New Haven, CT.

A version of “Georgetown Kisses” was honorably mentioned in Glimmer Train’s Fiction Open.

Dog Farts and Dancer Girls

by Brady Allen

Emotions. They are misleading. Of this, he was sure.

They puttered along in the downtown traffic. Snowflakes were clinging desperately to the windshield in the borderline freezing weather, seeming to know that a sudden burst of sunshine could end their already short existence.

Anger: not as it appeared—beneath it was always sadness.

And sadness was impossible without first having happiness.

No wonder so many people are just generally fucked up. Emotions aren’t clear cut or reliable.

Next to him, she put on her makeup, looking into the mirror in the passenger-side visor. In her late thirties and she still had the face of a child, a face alive with curiosity, but with a certain sadness, too, if you looked deep into her eyes. This said that she must have been happy once, and the childlike quality said she wanted to be happy again. She had the look of a kid who has suddenly realized that she must grow up one day and that it won’t be everything she expects it to be.

He had a can of Coors between his legs. Ice cold from the cooler in the back seat. And he had one in his hand, sweating, almost empty.

She worked the mascara on her lashes. “So?” she asked.

Neither of them had spoken for five minutes or more, but he knew exactly what she was asking.

“Still thinking,” he said, taking a swig and emptying the can, crushing it and throwing it into the back seat, hitting his dog on the rump. Broad daylight and he paid no attention to whether or not there were cops around, or even goody-goody busybodies.

She flipped up the visor and leaned back against the headrest. “We’ve got to move beyond thinking. It’s important. Jesus.”

“It’s not easy,” he said, opening the Coors between his legs, “to talk about it without thinking first.”

“You sure didn’t think first before it happened.”

In the back seat of their old Buick, the dog sneezed and blew snot on the window. This only minutes after farting and causing a synchronized front window roll-down.

“Fucking dog,” she said.

“Shut up,” he said. “Waycross likes you.”

“Humping my leg isn’t like. It’s pornographic. It’s exploitation. Waycross is a porn dog.”

“I don’t think a dog can exploit a woman.” He looked at her sideways. “Besides, you used to be dirty.” He turned his head toward his window and muttered, “You used to be fun.”

She had nothing to say to this, and he smiled secretly behind his lips. She always shut up when she knew she’d said something stupid. Porn dog.

“So?” she said again some time later.

“I told you. I’m thinking.”

“Fuck it. Drop me at the house,” she said, and the dog farted again.

#

Joy wasn’t a heightened form of happiness; it was really relief. It was Thank god something happened that doesn’t suck up the ass.

They sat in a corner booth in the bar, and he couldn’t help but think of his dog. Waycross somehow defined their relationship. Even beyond humping her leg and farting.

She was checking her makeup again, peering this time into a compact the size of a golf ball and looking at herself in golf ball-sized chunks.

He hated golf.

But wasn’t hate just a form of jealousy that came about because of loneliness?

He smiled briefly, then realized it had nothing to do with golf. He didn’t hate golf because he was lonely, did he?

“So?” She was semi-smiling, too, as though his own smile had spread like a grinning rictus plague across the table.

“Thinking,” he said. And he was: of his dog, and of shooting golfers from behind one of those pretentious stone walls surrounding their private courses and country clubs.

And then his thoughts shifted to the dancer, the young dancer with the tight, round ass and innocent face. He’d met her nearly a year ago on campus. She had always walked out of class quickly to make it across campus to a dance class, her buttocks taut and quivering as she walked ahead of him—she had given him the strongest erections he’d ever had. He had thought of her frequently while he and his wife had lain in bed, not talking, not sleeping, not fucking or making love, and the erections were just as firm then on those lonely nights as they’d been upon first seeing her and following her along.

He felt guilty. But wasn’t guilt just a form of sadness that came from loneliness, which was brought about as a repercussion of anger or jealousy?

Christ.

“We have to discuss it soon,” she said.

“Yeah, I know. Just give me a chance to think about it.”

“Oh, fuck,” she said. She got up and walked out.

#

He sat in his office at his desk, surrounded by books—Sartre and Freud and his John D. MacDonald collection, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Kafka, his books on Dali and Van Gogh, his own book: Relationships with the Nude—and he thought of the dancer girl, thought of what her ass had looked like under the leotards and tiny shorts, thought—

The phone rang. He picked it up and said his name.

“So,” she said, “are we going to talk about it tonight?”

“Yeah, sure. I’ll think about it,” he said. And continued to think of the dancer girl as he nestled the phone in its cradle.

#

“May I take your picture?” he had asked the dancer girl.

And she had said, “What do you mean?”

“I’m something of a painter, and I think you’d make an interesting subject.”

She had touched him on the arm, lightly, and said, “Calling a girl a subject will get you nowhere.” She chewed her bottom lip and looked away thoughtfully. “Unless it pays,” she smiled, touching him lightly on the hip.

“I’ll give you twenty dollars,” he said, and she giggled as she wrote down the time and place.

“We’ll see,” she smiled.

“Would you—can you pose nu—is it okay if—?”

“We’ll see.” She turned and walked away.

The image of her butt stayed in his mind until it came time for the pictures. Lust, he thought. That might be a feeling I can trust.

#

He took a bite of his clam chowder and looked around the kitchen. Their house seemed foreign to him.

“So?” his wife asked while she looked into her compact.

“I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still thinking.” His dog rested at his feet, under the table.

“Tomorrow,” she said. “Tomorrow we talk about it, or we don’t talk about it at all.”

He nodded and started humming an old Willie Nelson song to himself.

She sighed. Waycross licked her leg under the table. “I told you to leave that fucking dog outside,” she said.

He took another bite of his clam chowder, thought absently of those crazy Russian writers he loved so, and tried to will his dog to fart.

#

The dancer girl had been a few minutes early. She had taken her clothes off without his asking.

She had asked him to get naked, too. Her pubis had been hairy and soft looking, and he liked that. She seemed to know he’d like it, and she confirmed it when she put her mouth on his cock and took it all down her throat. That’s what he’d thought then: Jesus, she took my cock down her throat. And then he had felt bad for thinking it, felt crude, until she’d said, later, as they rested naked, side by side on the hardwood floor, semen trickling from between her legs, “Were you surprised I swallowed your whole cock?”

He’d never heard a woman talk like this. Never. Not even his wife back when she’d been . . . different. And he still thought that not many did.

“Were you?”

Surprise can only follow expectations, can only follow judgment. I misjudged her, that’s all. Even though I don’t even know how I judged her to be.

“Yes,” he said, “I was.” He considered this statement. “I mean, not because it’s so big or anything, but . . .”

She looked at him funny then, and he knew what she thought. He started, “I didn’t mean—”

“Save it,” she said. “I’m not a slut. Lots of girls do it.”

This statement, this thought, lots of girls—a room full of dancer girls in leotards and tights—aroused him again, and she rolled over without hesitation, straddling him, not bothering with her mouth.

#

“We’re going to talk about it today.” His wife plucked at her eyebrows with a pair of tweezers.

“Okay.”

“No more thinking about it.”

“Okay.”

“So what do you have to say about it?”

Waycross humped a pillow in the corner of the room.

“Nothing yet.”

“Fuck. Just get out. And take the damn dog. I’m going to have to trash that pillow.”

#

He had painted her body the next time she’d come by, and she refused his twenty dollars.

She was a delicate canvas, and at the same time, a wall for foul-mouthed graffiti. She was sensuous, but she also talked dirty, acted dirty. All, apparently, for free.

“Do you still love your—do you still love her?” she asked, her fingers grazing his thigh as she stretched out between his legs, her breath hot on the underside of his balls.

He didn’t say anything.

“Do you?”

“You shouldn’t ask.”

She wiggled and wormed up his body, hovered over him, kissed him lightly on the lips.

“You shouldn’t ask,” he said again. “Because—”

She filled his mouth with her tongue.

Once again, they did. And she was art in motion.

#

“I don’t love her,” he’d told his wife when he found out the dancer girl was pregnant, and that there was no way she was having an abortion.

“Fuck you,” she said and kicked his dog on the way out of the room.

He stayed with the dancer girl, and lived, mostly, out of his office on campus. Every call home to his wife during the nine months had resulted in a hang up, mostly his before he’d even said a word.

#

“I may have loved her a little, just a little,” he said to his wife on the telephone after the dancer girl died—complications after childbirth. Something rare but not unheard of.

He cried briefly but wasn’t sure why.

#

In the car again, remotely neutral territory but for the dog, who licked himself in the backseat.

“Well?” she said.

Waycross farted just as he answered her. “I think maybe I’d probably like to raise the baby,” he said, “and I understand if you can’t . . . won’t . . . help.” The dog’s trumpeting was affirmation.

“Fucking dog.” She paused. “I’d like you to drop me back at the house,” she said.

“I thought you wanted to talk about it.”

“We just did.” She pressed herself against the passenger-side door. “Fuck,” she said.

He stared straight ahead, unsure but decided. He spent almost all of his free time in the infant ward holding his daughter. She’d be released in a day. His sister had flown in from California to help for a bit.

“I guess I don’t have to raise the baby,” he said, looking in the rearview mirror, watching Waycross lick his crotch again, “but I will and—I mean, I want to.”

He thought of the dancer girl, walking away from him, her shapely ass growing smaller and smaller, until it was but a pinprick in the membrane of memory, and then he re-imagined her and she was as clear as ever again. All this while wondering, also, about the futility of guilt.

* * *

Brady Allen lives and writes in Dayton, OH. He has published stories in the genres of horror, crime, literary, and magical realism in magazines, anthologies, and journals in the US, England, and Ireland. Twice he has received honorable mention in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror and he has received an Individual Fellowship in Fiction from the Ohio Arts Council. You can learn more at www.bradyallen.com

The Minx
by Cassandra Dunn

Like me, the minx was a ten o’clock regular at Lily’s Cafe. She wasn’t friendly, although she wasn’t rude, she just never returned my smiles or made any effort to exchange greetings. She always hid behind her oversized sunglasses, feigning absorption in the man beside her, a magenta smile on her face, a girlish giggle squeaking out of her throat.

She was Asian, slim and petite, probably early forties to judge by her hands, as my years of living in LA had taught me to do. Faces lied about age all the time, bodies, too, but hands kept you honest. She always dressed like a young girl, in short skirts, low-slung tops, with chunky jewelry and ridiculous heels she tottered on. She never came alone, was always on the arm of some older man.

Today’s guy was fairly casual, in his jeans and button-down shirt, and fairly young, with his hip shaved head, his recent tan, his confidently squared shoulders while he waited for their order.

I took my coffee, tried and failed to exchange a smile with her, had to settle for one from her latest guy, which made me like him and made the game of people-watching less fun. Now I was invested. Now I was worried about him, this complete stranger, resting his hand casually around the waist of the minx.

Her guys were usually in ill-fitting business suits, were frequently the awkward geeky type: balding, doughy, stoop-shouldered, broadcasting insecurity like a car alarm. Some wore wedding rings, some didn’t. All hung on her every giggly word, each flirty gesture, blushing dumbly at her attention.

She had long sleek black hair, the kind I’d once had, but in brown, before I’d had kids and it had thinned and grown brittle. Why having children had to cost me my beautiful hair I didn’t understand. But there it was. The minx liked to twist her hair around her finger, watching him watch her, then toss it behind her shoulder, gestures borrowed from a sixteen-year-old girl, to lure him in. She’d rest her hand on his arm as they sipped coffee together, moving her palm to his thigh under the table after a while.

The man changed every couple of months, but the look in his eyes as he took her in, the Asian beauty showering him with attention, was the same each time.

Until today. This guy liked her, you could tell by the softness in his brown eyes when he looked at her, but he wasn’t fawning over her, wasn’t blushing at her lacquered nail, tracing a streak down his muscled forearm. Maybe this one was her real boyfriend. Maybe she’d finally met her match.

I certainly hoped so. I wasn’t sure what her deal was, with the regular coffee dates for six or eight weeks, when a new man would rotate in. It was too innocuous for a prostitute, too consistently tame for a tryst. Was she after their money? They never looked wealthy, her soft businessmen in cheap suits, driving their aging Corollas and Civics. Was she simply lonely, possibly damaged, courting the affection of these harmless un-macho types she’d never have to fear? But then why toss them aside every other month for a new model, who looked exactly like the one before him? There was a game here, I was certain, I just wasn’t sure what it was.

Was it some woman like this that Clark had fallen for? The one he’d said had tricked him, into trusting her, betraying me, forsaking our family, enraging me until I simply had no choice but to leave? A lithe minx, with her thick shining hair intact, promising him, what, exactly? Not that it mattered anymore. My divorce was nearly final. In a matter of weeks my name would be mine again.

Once I’d seen the minx in the cafe with a young man she introduced as her brother. The businessman on her arm that day–balding, with dated glasses that pinched his nose, belly resting on the belt of his slacks, one she’d had for nearly a month, who’d grown quite comfortable with laying his arm around her shoulders in public–seemed uncomfortable in this young man’s presence. She kept it up, the hair tosses, the hand on his inner thigh, but he wasn’t gazing at her with adoration, he was staring at his coffee cup, his hands wrapped around it, on the small round table before him. It sounded like they were discussing money, some trouble the brother was having, how grateful they were for the man’s help. The wrinkled-suit suitor, who didn’t touch his little minx the whole time, had the look of a man being taken, who knows he’s being taken, but is powerless to stop the events unfolding before him. That was the last time I saw that man, and I hadn’t seen the brother since.

I took my usual seat, near the door, with the crossword puzzle before me to pretend I was doing something other than eavesdropping on the more interesting puzzle of her dating life. She always sat by the window, in the sun, maybe to justify her ever-present large sunglasses. What did they hide? I would not find out today. Today the tan, toned, head-shaved man took his coffee, handed hers to her, and led the way outside. They drove off, in his new Acura, taking their story with them.

I returned to my coffee, my crossword puzzle, my brief break from the hectic office down the street and my life happening all around me without my permission to do so. I touched my hair, now layered and colored and the shortest I’d ever worn it, a look the stylist promised would take years off my hair, but only made me feel like my mother.

I gave in and read the first crossword clue: Sneetches have stars upon thars. It was a Dr. Seuss-themed puzzle today, on Theodor Geisel’s birthday. I smiled, grateful for the reminder. The minx could have them, these lost men with their understroked egos. She could have the abundant hair, the mini dresses with legs to match.

Right now my children were in school, and my coffee break was just about over, but at three o’clock I’d blow out of work, race over to Dawson Elementary to meet them, their smiling faces hurrying toward me, proudly holding out a picture they’d drawn, or an A on a paper, arms open for a hug. The minx, and Clark, had nothing like that waiting for them, I was fairly certain.

* * *

Cassandra Dunn received her MFA in creative writing from Mills College. She was a finalist in Glimmer Train’s Short Story Award for New Writers, and has appeared in or will be published in All Things Girl, Midwest Literary Magazine’s Bearing North, Read Short Fiction, Literary House Review, The Battered Suitcase, and The Scruffy Dog Review.

Man Murders Wife
by Judy Viertel

I’m running. I stop to retie my shoe, and find myself looking at a young woman’s breasts. She’s walking towards me—I don’t mean to stare, I’m not a lesbian, although my short hair and lack of makeup often confuse people. It’s the way her tight shirt pushes her breasts up that makes them difficult to ignore. They’re oddly rounded, like two cereal bowls propped against her chest. As I finish with my shoelace, she wobbles past on spiked heels. Ankle breakers, my grandmother would have called those boots, and her leather skirt is so tight she can only manage tiny, nibbling steps. The two men she’s walking with have to support her as she steps down into the crosswalk. They look ten years older than her. They outweigh her, each of them, by at least a hundred pounds. It’s none of my business. Even so, I start thinking about something I recently read.

A man murdered his wife. She was a fashion model. Did he use a gun, or was it a knife? I can’t remember. He killed her and dumped the body. But first, he cut off all her fingers. He pulled her teeth. Why? No fingerprints, no dental records. There was no way for the police to identify the body. But those detectives, they were smart. They traced the serial numbers in her breast implants. That’s how they caught the husband.

I wonder: those fingers—how did he get rid of them? They were fingers he’d kissed many times, fingers that had, no doubt, curled themselves tenderly around his penis. Did he drop them into a garbage disposal unit? Did he smile as he flipped the switch?

The woman and her companions sway down the street, laughing. They’ve been drinking, I figure. I decide to follow them. There are many upscale clubs on this street, places with polished wood and carefully composed cocktails. Places where, on a warm evening like this, a young woman might easily drink too much and find herself in trouble.

Those men, I think: they look dangerous. And even if the police are able to identify her body by the numbers bar-coded into her beautiful, artificial bosom, it won’t be any consolation to her. Not when she’s dead. The woman looks a few years younger than me: I’d guess she’s about twenty-two. Given the chance, I’d speak to her like a sister. Be careful, I’d say.

When I was a child, my parents often left me in the care of my older brother. He used to make me watch horror films. I’d cry, and he’d say: don’t be so sensitive. They caused terrible dreams, those movies. Sometimes I still have nightmares: a woman is tied to a chair. She sees a man coming into the room with pliers. She screams. A boy, shackled nearby, blindfolded, hears the screams and wonders, is he next? Horror movies are just stories, but they teach us about human nature. It’s possible for people to hurt each other—not for survival, not for the sake of some ideal, but just because they enjoy inflicting pain.

I watch the three of them enter a restaurant. I lean my face against the window, but I can’t see through the tinted glass. The door swings open and a woman comes out. She’s another young beauty, but of a different type: snake tattoos twist along her muscular arms. She looks at me, checks her clipboard, and asks: are you waiting for someone? May I help you?

I notice her assessing my sweatpants and messy hair. No, I say, but thanks for asking.

Okay, she says. Smiling, she retreats into the restaurant.

I move along, embarrassed to be caught looking in the window, and suddenly feeling silly for thinking I might be of help to a young stranger. Before the door closes, I catch a snippet of music. It’s just a few minimal, tinkling notes, but I find it compelling. I think: I might like it in there. Not wearing skimpy clothing, of course, and not surgically enhanced, but still: enjoying a drink. Chatting with a man, perhaps someone I’d just met.

I’m running again, my powerful legs pushing me through the fading light. I wish I could free myself from my brother’s hand, but I still feel it, pinning my wrist to the couch. All those movies we watched, those broken bodies—how do I make them go away?

* * *

Judy Viertel leads the Drunken Goats, a San Francisco-based group for wine-swilling writers. She wrote Miss Judy Goes to the Yucatan, a journal of her adventures among the Mayan people of Mexico’s Yucatan Peninsula. She’s previously been published in Mad Swirl, and two of her stories have recently been selected for publication in Gargoyle Magazine.

The Heartbreak Next Door

by S.G. Rogers

With her mom’s help, Helena spent the weekend baking and decorating cookies for Valentine’s Day.  She’d set aside one special cookie for her next-door neighbor, Erik. It had taken her a half-hour to decorate that particular one. She’d piped white icing around the edges of the large, heart-shaped cookie and then filled the inside with a checkerboard of colored icing. Helena had finished it off by piping XOXO in the center. It was the prettiest cookie Helena had ever made.  She could hardly wait to give it to Erik when he got home from school on Valentine’s Day.

Erik happened to be the most gorgeous boy in the seventh grade. He was unusually tall and well muscled for a kid his age, with grey eyes and blonde wavy hair, but that wasn’t important to Helena.  She had known Erik since they were both toddlers. They used to run naked through the sprinklers back then, oblivious to the differences between boys and girls. When they got a little older, she and Erik would pitch a tent and camp out in the backyard.  It was so much fun to lie there at night, just the two of them. They would tell ghost stories and talk about what they wanted to be when they grew up. When they started school, Helena couldn’t help but notice girls would act goofy whenever Erik was around. They all wanted to marry him for some reason. The boys couldn’t decide whether or not to hang out with Erik or pound him into the ground. Erik’s involvement in sports had the dual benefit of keeping girls at bay and winning him acceptance by his peers.

Although Helena was often pushed aside by girls who wanted to be with Erik, she wasn’t jealous. Helena knew that silly girls would come and go, but best friends were forever. Besides, Erik was frequently embarrassed by all the attention, which made Helena all the more sympathetic and loyal. Eventually, though, the girls learned to cope with Erik’s glamour, and the incidents calmed down.

Until this year.

It wasn’t as if Helena was immune from the effects of the hormones that were unleashing themselves on her body, but there seemed to be a collective insanity running through the seventh grade. A maelstrom of gossip swirled amongst the students…who was interested in whom, which kids were already a couple, who’d split up or who’d gotten back together. Very few kids were actually allowed to date, but facts didn’t seem to get in the way of the rumors. In this atmosphere, Valentine’s Day was shaping up to be the Holy Grail of holidays. Preparations had been underway for weeks as the girls decided what kinds of Valentines they were going to pass out, and to whom. The boys were largely and deliberately oblivious.

On the appointed morning, Helena stood on the sidewalk outside Erik’s house and waited for him to emerge. Walking to school together had become routine. Helena had her backpack slung over one shoulder, and in her hand she held a plastic container of the cookies she’d carefully prepared. To commemorate the occasion, she’d tied a red ribbon on the end of her braid, and worn red socks with her white tennis shoes. Helena had also thrown a red hoodie over her jeans.

Erik bounded out of his house, backpack flying. There was not a shred of anything red on his person, nor was he carrying anything that remotely resembled a Valentine. “Sorry I’m late.” He looked Helena up and down. “What’s with all the red?”

“Duh, it’s Valentine’s Day, don’t you remember?” Helena retorted.

It was as if she’d reminded Erik of an overdue library book. “Oh,” he replied.

They set off down the street. As they turned the corner, Erik noticed the plastic box.  “Is that your lunch?” he asked.

“Cookies for homeroom,” she said.

“Too bad I’m not in your homeroom,” he laughed.

“Don’t worry, I saved one for you,” she said. “You can have it later.”

When they arrived at school, it was clear that Valentine’s Day hysteria had infected the female half the student body. Most of them had donned red, white and/or pink attire, decorated with hearts whenever possible. Boys were trudging through the halls in a stoic fashion as they tried to ignore the obvious. Some of the girls had decorated their lockers with lacey doilies, cardboard cherubs, and crepe paper flowers, all in an attempt to win a contest sponsored by the pep squad.

Erik laughed as he passed his friend Gary’s locker. Gary had put a silhouette of a beheaded cupid on the front, complete with spurting blood.

“I’d vote for that one,” he said to Helena.

Erik’s smile faded as he approached his own locker. He was dismayed to see it had been decorated to within an inch of its life. Someone had taken a photo of him and printed it out with a cartoon ‘kiss’ mark on his cheek. The photo was surrounded by a series of heart-shaped construction paper pockets into which foil-embossed Valentines and candy had been stuffed. The word ‘LOVE’ was a repeating theme, particularly in the helium balloon bouquet that floated on top of the locker itself.

Erik stopped dead as he stared at the horror in front of him. His blush extended from his collar to his hairline. Helena winced in sympathy; the decorations really were obnoxious. “Ick,” she said.

“I am going to die,” Erik moaned.

“Do you want me to help you clean it off?” she offered.

The warning bell rang.

“Thanks, but there’s no time,” he replied. “We’ll have to do it after school.”

Helena’s cookies were a big hit in her homeroom and she almost forgot about Erik’s predicament until lunch, when he won the pep squad locker decorating contest. Helena realized the fix was in when each member of the pep squad insisted on giving Erik a kiss on the cheek as a prize.

Helena stopped by Erik’s locker after the final bell rang to help him remove the decorations. When she arrived, though, the locker had already been stripped clean and Erik was nowhere to be found. She knew he didn’t have any sports that day, so she reluctantly concluded he’d left without her.

Helena hurried home. After she’d stowed her backpack in her room, she went to the kitchen to pack Erik’s cookie. She lined a small pink bakery box with a paper doily and cradled the cookie inside. Helena took a moment to admire the presentation before she closed the box up and walked next door. Erik’s mom answered her knock. “Oh, Helena, I’m glad you’re here,” she said. “Erik’s in his room. He had a rough time at school today.”

Erik’s door was open, but the lights were off inside. Helena tapped on the door before she walked inside. “Hey, can I come in?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he replied.

Helen was surprised to find Erik curled up on his beanbag chair, with a bag of ice pressed to his face. “Are you okay?” she asked, taken aback.

Erik raised his head to reveal a black eye, a purple cheekbone and a split lip.

Helena gasped. “What happened to you?”

“I got jumped in the locker room at P.E.,” he mumbled.

Helena laid the cookie box on Erik’s bed and sat on the carpet beside her friend.  “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I guess that pep squad thing must have made a lot of the guys jealous.”

“I guess so,” he replied. “I hate Valentine’s Day.”

A lock of Erik’s wavy blonde hair had fallen down over his eyes. Even though he was battered and bruised, he was still breathtaking. Helena had to stifle the impulse to move the lock of hair back.

“Let’s make a promise, Helena,” Erik said. “I don’t ever want there to be any gooey love stuff between us, okay? That just ruins everything. I promise I won’t ever fall in love with you and you won’t ever fall in love with me and we’ll always be friends. Deal?”

“Yeah, sure,” Helena said. Her response was automatic, instantaneous…and hollow.

“Cool,” Erik replied, clearly relieved. His attention turned to the bakery box. “What’d you bring me?”

“Oh, uh, it’s a cookie,” Helena said. She got to her feet. “Look, I’ve got homework.  I’ll see you later.”

Helena left.

Erik knew he shouldn’t eat anything before dinner, but suddenly he was starving. He pulled open the box and looked inside. There was a beautiful heart-shaped cookie inside, in two pieces. Erik picked up one half and bit into it. The cookie was delicious, but he debated whether or not he should tell Helena it had been broken somehow.

What Erik didn’t realize was that Helena already knew.

* * *

S.G. Rogers is the author of the YA fantasy novel Jon Hansen and the Dragon Clan of Yden. Her website is www.childofyden.com and she lives in Savannah, Georgia.

(Photo illustration font credit: Jellyka Nerevan, www.cuttyfrutty.com)