Corey Mesler has published in numerous journals and anthologies. He is the author of four novels, three books of short stories, two full-length collections of poetry, and numerous chapbooks of poetry and prose. He and his wife own Burke’s Book Store in Memphis, Tennessee.

All of a single sudden not a soul remains

When we are gone the light is alone

                Paul Eluard

Predawn.

In the city, a factory burned.

Luisa paused, her brush frozen in the air, touching her lashes.

The transportation workers are out on strike; the freeways blockaded.

The capital will be cut off.

From up high, the city was unnaturally still.

She continued applying make up, noticing, perhaps for the second or third time, that the circle of lights around the mirror made tiny rings in her pupils.

Drinking coffee on the balcony, she watched the smoke rise in the distance against the ashen sky. She loved being in the apartment early in the morning when her husband was gone. It gave her sense of calm and readiness for the day. In their room, the bed was already made and her suit lay across the sheets.

Her husband had withdrawn a bundle of dollars, in case the peso devalued, and had put them in the freezer, inside a plastic bag. They never kept much money around the house and since he had left, three days prior, she found herself, again and again, in front of the open freezer, looking at those frozen bills.

She walked back to the balcony and lit a cigarette, another luxury of her husband’s absence. In the distance, a brownish haze hung where the smoke had been. She stubbed her cigarette out in the abalone shell she used for an ashtray, tipping the ashes out afterward and watching them flutter towards the street below.

Today is the last time, she thought to herself. Although later couldn’t recall if she had said it aloud or only mouthed the words. She went back to the kitchen, opened the fridge and looked at the money again. She closed the door, turned the radio off and left.

*

She had been married for seven years. They met in university and were engaged not long after they both graduated. She loved him then, of that she is sure. Maybe she still loved him. He had studied law and she sociology, they met in a class that bridged both disciplines. His family was more conservative than hers but he seemed uninterested in politics and she found this appealing. He liked fun: fun things, nice restaurants, movies and talking. He kidded her but never too much. After university he became a lawyer and then started working for an American company. She took a job in a PR firm and their marriage settled into itself. They moved into a high-rise apartment and talked about starting a family. In the beginning they had sex often  but slowly the frequency tapered off. After the wedding they stopped using condoms but she never got pregnant. This didn’t bother her so much but, although he never brought it up, she could tell it bothered him. He talked about his colleagues’ children in a certain way.

Driving through the back streets of downtown, she was again struck by the unnatural quiet. She waited at an intersection while a man and a young boy pushed a cardboard-filled cart across the street. At a pile of trash they stopped and began sorting out bits of refuse. More and more people were living off recycled cardboard. Luisa watched them for a while and tried to remember the moment that she lost her desires. There must have been a time before, a time when she wanted things, when she dreamed, desired; but only the present hung all around her, an endless, empty present in which she asked for nothing and received nothing in return.

Finally a car came up behind and honked.

She drove on, unhurried.

*

The affair had started a year before the collapse. She met him at a friend’s party, on a rooftop. It was small and they had all just sat around in white plastic chairs drinking wine or coca-cola and talking. Her friend had strung Christmas lights across the patio and they moved in the breeze coming in off the river.

He came late and took an empty chair next to her. He was younger by a few years and charming, in a quiet way. He worked for the center-left party but seemed ambivalent about it. Just a job, he had said, like any other that needs to be done. They talked most of the night. Towards the end of the conversation, when the sky was turning warm grey, he told her about a book he liked, a book by Fabián Casas, and she said she would be interested in reading it. He offered to bring it by her office and, for a moment, his eyes rested on her wedding band. He looked at the ring without expression, then back at her face and the flirtatious smile returned, tugging at the corners of his mouth.  She thought about it and then gave him her office address.

She was surprised when he brought the book a week later, she hadn’t expected him to come. It was dog-eared and coffee stained and she could feel the many creases as she turned it over in her hands. They went out to lunch and pretended as if they were friends or business associates. It was uncomfortable at first, tense even, but after a while the playful flirting returned. He even made a few jokes that made her blush, the blood pounding against her skin. After lunch, he asked to see her again and added afterward, at the very least to get the book back. She said they could meet in a few days and took the book off of the table from where she had set it down. I’m a fast reader, she said, smiling.

Walking back to her office, she bought a pack of cigarettes.

That Friday they met in a bar, in the old part of the city, crowded with tourists. She arrived first, ordered a vodka tonic and waited at a small table towards the back, near the door to the kitchen. He rushed in, looking flustered but relaxed into a comfortable swagger when he walked over to her. His bristles scratched her skin as he kissed her on the cheek. He smelled clean, not of soap but as if he lacked fragrance. This brief moment of intimacy was electrifying. They managed to get through two drinks but the tension between them was palpable. It became a hostility: hostility at the bar for being full of people, at the table for keeping their bodies apart, at the weak pretenses that hung between them.

In his apartment they didn’t make it to his bed but had sex on the floor, in the light spilling from the kitchen. Afterwards, the coolness of the tiles spread against her back as if she were touching them for the first time. They talked for a while and shared a beer from his fridge. They arranged a time to meet again.

The affair continued for a year, in a very pragmatic way. They met every Thursday afternoon, only on Thursdays unless her husband was out of town. They met at his apartment or, occasionally, a cafe nearby. They had sex, often several times. Sometimes he made a late lunch or ran out to get pastries to have with coffee. They talked but never about much. At some point she realized that he was the same as her husband; that he had the same closed indifference. He never asked her to leave her marriage and she never said that she loved him. They met every Thursday and, though he was rough, he was careful not to leave marks on her body. Sometimes, while he was sleeping, she walked through his empty apartment and cried in the kitchen, quietly, so as not to wake him.

*

The city was waking up and she thought about how he dragged his hand across her face while they were having sex, as if trying to rub off her skin. Throngs of people were walking though the streets, some carrying signs. There must be a demonstration today, she thought. Men stood on the street corners watching the people, arms folded or smoking cigars, a few cars, mostly taxis, raced through the intersections.

She arrived at the bank, where she had an appointment, fifteen minutes early and parked in front. The bank building was unnaturally dark, light coming from only a few upstairs offices. A chain and padlock hung around the inside handles of the large glass doors. She knocked anyway, rapping her rings against the glass. A guard came out of the darkness and walked towards the door. He was holding a thin shotgun casually in one hand. Through the tiny crack between the doors she told him she had an appointment. He looked at her as if she was crazy and finally said that no one was there, that she should go home. When she tried to argue he simply receded into the darkness of the building.

She sat in the car for a long time. She must end it. It was all she could think, over and over. She turned on the radio but could not concentrate on the words. It was too fragmentary: more factories closed, banks smashed, streets barricaded. She turned it off; the world felt as discordant as she did. The windows of the car were tinted and the sun caught the dust sweeping through the streets, the air was full of particles.

Everything had fallen to pieces so quickly: the economy, the peso, the country. She couldn’t remember a time when people didn’t talk about the crisis but those days must have existed before: a time when people were happy to spend and spend, lapping up the inexorable wealth, sure that it would last forever.

She tried calling him but the line was busy. She felt that, from the darkness of the bank building, the guard with the shotgun was watching her. She tried calling his office but no one picked up. She started driving, just to move.

Passing through the streets she realized she was heading towards his apartment. It was the logical place to go. She called again and this time he answered. He was distracted; she could hear the television in the background. He spoke in apocalyptic terms and didn’t say why he wasn’t at work. He hung up without a goodbye.

She had always hated his apartment building. It was rustic, South American and yet as artificial and sterile as the modern high-rise she lived in. She hated its inauthenticity, its deceit. She always took the stairs because she couldn’t stand to wait for the elevator.

The door was open and he stood in the living room, remote in hand, watching the big screen TV. On it were images more chaotic than before: people looting a store in the provinces, police firing teargas, images from a helicopter: jerky and pixilated. She closed the door behind her. This is bad, he said, without looking up.

She stared at him, at the side of his face. She felt the familiar feelings: hate and shame and lust. Her lips went dry. They stood like that for what felt like a long time. Finally she said that she couldn’t see him anymore but he didn’t hear or pretended not to. She leaned her back against the wall and said it louder and he turned around. He was framed by the television, a shadow against lines of color. He walked over to her and asked why she would say that. She turned her head to the side and gave the reasons, the ones she had practiced in her mind and the ones she had said before. She didn’t sound convincing and again her cheeks flushed with shame. He grasped her shoulder and looked into her eyes.

Now, of all times, we have to stay together, he said. She shook her head emphatically but also placed her hand on his. He took hold of her other shoulder and kissed her neck. The resistance fell out of her. He bit her neck and she moaned, she struggled and he pushed her against the wall and then she was kissing him, her tongue lapping at the edge of his mouth. His hands up her skirt, pulling her panties off, shredding them against her thighs. And then he was inside her and she was only shoulders and a wall and pounding blood. She bit her lip to stop from crying out and choked. On the screen a tear gas canister arced against the sky. When she came, tears flooded her eyes.

They had been through this ritual before.

This time they sat and drank black coffee on the couch. He touched her legs, he touched her hair; they didn’t say anything. Later he tried to convince her to stay but she wanted to go home. He offered to drive but she refused. They kissed at the door.

*

The streets were still empty. She raced through them, hoping for catastrophe. No car appeared though, not even the police. She thought about leaving both of them; she could get on a plane, if they were still flying, and go to the United States or Spain and then be free of both their deadening silences.

At home Luisa took the ziplock bag out of the freezer and set it on the table. She put her passport next to it and sat and watched the moisture condense on the inside of the bag. She lit a cigarette and turned on the radio.

Two protestors had been shot and the Minister of Finance had resigned. The unemployed were pouring into the capital; people were attacking banks.

Luisa stubbed out the cigarette and walked to the balcony.

Tomorrow there will be a general strike.

From high up, the city looked the same.

Luisa walked inside and thought about putting the money back in the freezer.

Before falling asleep, she remembered she still had her make up on.

She could feel it on her skin.

Michael McCanne is an editor at Lightful Press (lightfulpress.com). He lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Then turning to the spirit once again,
I said: “Francesca, what you suffer here
melts me to tears of pity and pain.

But tell me: in the time of your sweetest sighs
by what appearances found love the way
to lure you to his perilous paradise?”

-The Inferno, Dante, Canto V, Circle Two

I. Francesca

Paolo threw himself from the window last night, but it might have been the night before or the night before that. It might have been a hundred years ago, and it’s quite likely he’ll do it again tomorrow. Time means so little when the same monotonous moonbeams have streamed through these broken panes for years on end and all I see is night.

He returned inexplicably, and that’s what matters. I woke (who can say how long I slept?) and there he was, sitting across from me. We never share a word, but lacking that mad look, the snarling smile and arch of his brow, this room would lose meaning, the shadows wouldn’t take form, and our story would dissolve.

When I close my eyes, I can see his face—not Paolo’s, but a replica—a round, olive orb, curtained by twisting black locks, his brazen scowl as he crept the corridors before our death, his eyes like flames in the bedroom’s hearth. He clutches a long knife below the blade’s silver glint—his lips a demonic curl—and he springs through heavy wooden doors to catch us off guard.

But how can I tell this story outside of time without confusing myself? I prefer to think of that first night with Paolo, but it’s hard to conjure. If he feels this way, does he suffer as I do?

Paolo, please speak.

If only we could.

*

I remember a luminous day. The sun in my father’s study brings warmth to an otherwise dreary room, its illicit rays casting curious patterns on the walls. I’ve been beckoned here to find my father standing behind a desk opposite Paolo, whose face is framed in shade. Paolo’s the proxy, an intermediary for my marriage, but I think he’s Giovanni, my fiancé, and as he takes a short step forward, I want to marry this handsome man whose muscular arms bulge through that shirt’s soft, fine silk. In that instant, we’re at once beginning to love and finished, and an image strikes me as prophecy: my naked form staggers across the floor toward Paolo’s; a gash separates his neck and shoulders; and I have only enough strength for a few indistinct thoughts before joining him here.

*

I stare at the moon until its phosphorescence drives me mad. I hate the moon, but when it disappears behind heavy clouds, I hurry to the window with a fear that exceeds my hatred. To lose that light would mean losing both Paolo and the memory of our life, and I couldn’t endure that no matter how much I crave an end to this.

*

Paolo and I make love that night beneath the glow of a solitary candle. He steals past the guard he placed outside my tent, and his smooth body moves across mine in long, gentle undulations. His lips nestle on my neck, his fingers gliding against my back. “Francesca,” he whispers—his first words in passion. “Francesca.” We were married that afternoon—he in his brother’s stead—but I want to believe he’s Giovanni, and when I say this name, he doesn’t correct me. In the midst of orgasm, the deception doesn’t matter. As long as Paolo’s nearby, I don’t care that we’re committing a sin.

I still believe we’ll be forgiven, since we couldn’t have known, exhausted beneath that brown canvas canopy we’d set in motion a chain of events that would end only in Giovanni’s far-off castle. While Paolo and I lay entwined, I was betrothed, wed, and killed; I was born to play a part in the peace between my homeland Ravenna and their kingdom of Rimini, a pattern of life and death swirling around me.

*

Outside the window, blue mist surrounds our sharp steep mountain; a lifeless tree with cracked limbs juts from the rocks; and when Paolo jumps, I watch until his body’s black outline disappears. The height reminds me of our castle at Rimini, cold nights in winter, locked as I was by Giovanni in the east wing chamber. I see jealousy in his eyes, lack of trust, and I experience emptiness, separate from Paolo.

*

I have trouble recalling things now. I strain, but it doesn’t do much good. Am I sure we lived? I have vestiges of memory, but this isn’t proof of existence, and I’m left to obsess over the arbitrary importance of events. I can’t even be sure we died, since we’re still here, but perhaps I can find sense in the process of listing facts: Paolo was my lover; Giovanni was my husband; Paolo and Giovanni were brothers… My father, he ruled in Ravenna…

*

Paolo is often away, leading mercenary troops in Romagna. Earlier, I hear Giovanni’s booming voice, admonishing him for a loss in the fields. It quakes the stone walls, and I envision him in front of Paolo, limping back and forth, so close that Paolo can smell his putrid breath, see the rotting teeth and pink lining of throat, the heartless cavity of Giovanni’s chest. When Paolo comes to my chamber later, he weeps in my arms like a child. I hold him and brush the hair from his eyes, but he locks my arms above my head, pulls the dress past my waist, tears my undergarments away, and thrusts me upward. I lean my head into his shoulder and bite his neck, but above our measured breath and stifled cries, I hear a cloth-bound limb scraping the cold floor. I glance past Paolo, and in the darkness, think I see Giovanni’s eyes, but they vanish so quickly I might be mistaken.

It’s possible we understood our deaths weren’t far off. It’s possible that when we saw the first flash of that knife, we surrendered completely.

Giovanni knocks me off the bed, pulls me from the floor, and hits me so hard that I tumble across the room toward the fire. My hair is set ablaze; a gaping crimson wound spreads from my chest; and my left breast hangs in a loose fold as I claw my way toward them, not to stop Giovanni, but to touch Paolo one last time. I stretch my arms, clutching the cracked ground, a slick bloody trail behind me. My fingernails break, and my head lights the room like a torch leading back to my beloved, but Paolo never moves.

Giovanni straddles him, runs a hand across his brother’s face, and in a sharp concise sweep, drags the blade across Paolo’s neck. He goes limp, and as I watch him die, I find myself fading away. I try to think of something I’ve forgotten, something important, but it eludes me. I want to call for help, but I can’t.

*

Was this my life then?

My memory often fails me. A love affair. Marriage and death. A birth somewhere—mine, or possibly, my children’s. I suppose that without time, memory means little, but I try to summon what I was thinking when I died. Maybe it had to do with the moon. I retrace my steps, but all I recover are fragments of ecstasy marred by violence. I wonder what Paolo knows, sitting there, staring out the window. I’d like to ask what we’ve done to deserve this, but we’ve lost more than the will to speak.

II. Paolo

…Nothing else is important.

Below us, there are other levels than this, and near the ground, Giovanni waits for me, covered in ash. He laughs at my weaknesses now, like he laughed at me when we were children, but I’ll put an end to this in the same way I stopped it back then.

Can you hear me, Giovanni?

I’ll put an end to this.

*

We used to hunt in the woods with our father. You and I set traps for foxes, rabbits, and smaller animals, prying open that sharp-toothed jaw where they tripped the mechanism and got caught and killed, but you never suspected that I’d planted one beneath the lush begonias in our garden. When it clamped down on your leg, you cried out, and I ran to our mother with a look of concern so cunning that neither she nor father suspected me. “Giovanni’s hurt,” I cried, and they attributed the accident to one of our enemies. But I’m sure you remember how you lay in bed suffering for months. There was even talk of severing the limb, but in the end, the infection didn’t spread, and it was saved. At first, I didn’t understand why you chose not to expose me, but you were biding your time. You were certain you’d have revenge, and you did. But keep this in mind: Even though you ruled over Rimini, I ruled over you. Your younger brother was always more clever than you were. I took your leg, and later, as adults, I took your wife.

*

Below the mountain, below the mists, there’s a sea that I fall into whenever I plunge through the window. The boiling water envelops me, and my flesh erupts in blisters, but I’ve seen you. You’re in a room, but yours is full of charred embers and dark figures that lash you with red tongues and tear your flesh. The last time I fell, you were peering through a window, laughing despite your punishment, and you whispered one word, a name I somehow heard above the wind rushing past my ears and fierce surge of waves below:

“Francesca…”

I always return from the sea, but never know how. I don’t climb the mountain, and if I tried, I’d likely fall, so there has to be another explanation, but this isn’t important either.

Francesca continues to mock me. She sleeps most nights, but when she’s awake, she stares with such brutal eyes. She blames me for this. It’s my fault we’re here, but that’s of no importance. What matters is you. I’d like to punish you. I’d like to destroy you. I picture myself with a firm grip on your throat. “Breathe,” I’ll hiss. “Breathe if you can.”

I should jump again.

*

My slightest movement provokes Francesca to watch me, and I wonder how she feels when I’m gone. I try to sit as still as possible so I don’t disturb her, but she follows my eyelids as they open and close. Does she think I’m trying to kill myself? I can’t tell her I’m not, can’t say there’s another reason for jumping. When I leap, I try to yell, “Don’t worry, I’ll be back,” but there’s no wind in my lungs. The glass breaks; the shards splinter; and water surrounds me. Then everything runs together: images, sounds, sensations, emotions. Unclear and impossible to understand. The water’s dark at first, and then I close my eyes to keep out the searing heat.

Can I feel my way toward you?

Can I reach dry land if I swim hard enough?

I count my strokes, but the distance is indeterminate. Through my closed eyes, I can sense the light of burning torches, and then I’m lost again in the pitch black eternity of sea. My strokes shorten, grow weak. The water pressure increases as I sink. With my eyes closed, I ask “Is this real? Or am I with Francesca in the room, dreaming?” and I have to keep them closed for fear I might realize I haven’t moved at all. Still I swim, and my muscles strain to carry me further. “Giovanni,” I think, “Giovanni.” I reach out and touch a smooth obsidian surface. I reach out and pull against the water. My muscles strain tight and release. I feel myself rising to the surface, and I pull against the current. If only I could fight against the current. If only I could open my eyes, but I have keep them closed and rest. I have to reach you, Giovanni. I don’t know why, but I do. Nothing else is important…

Weekdays between nine and five, Jason M. Jones edits academic journals in the Philadelphia area. He spends the rest of his time writing stories, some of which have appeared in Potomac Review 47, LIT 19, The MacGuffin, The Pinch, and Gulf Stream. For more, please visit: www.jasonmjones.net

In the meantime, enjoy a sneak preview from the issue, the poem “Against Elegy” by Adam Tavel. We’ve posted it here.

I heard a rumbling. I thought the other guy heard it too, the old man with the shopping bag, wearing a sweater vest and a hat that used to have some kind of special name when he was younger, before my time— fisherman’s cap. No, sandcatcher. Something like that.

It was a special rumbling. It’s always a special sound, when I think I’m going to die. I wanted to ask the old man, can’t you tell that there’s something different about that, that it’s coming from the bowels of the elevator shaft? He’s older than I am and has probably been riding elevators since they were made differently. Maybe rumbling louder than this was what an elevator ride used to sound like; maybe you were taking your life in your hands every time you set foot inside one of these, and they had a cute name for them, death boxes or the devil’s dumbwaiter. I’m just guessing. I would have asked him. It would have been the last thing I ever learned.

ii. Camping

I argued with myself for what seems like an hour in the still darkness of the tent. If I speak, I thought, I will be destroying the silence and everything about it. That will be on me. “Just because it’s a cliché to get mauled by a bear on a camping trip doesn’t mean it can’t happen,” I said.

“Ssssssh,” everyone said.

iii. In My Desk Chair Late At Night

I found a dot I’d never found before. A spot. Irregularly shaped. On my thigh. I’d never seen it before. Maybe I had, but it looked different this time. Difference— the silent killer. I asked the Internet, over and over again, and it grew later and later and the spot looked more and more irregular. I touched it, trying to make sense of an unknown illness with my fingers. Nothing made sense.

When I closed my laptop and shrunk my room into darkness and crawled into my bed, it was because I remembered I was already on the lookout for cockroaches and bedbugs, and I’d promised myself to keep it to one thing at a time for a while.

iv. On the Subway

I was feeling good. But isn’t that always when it happens?

v. At a Play

I would have the good fortune to sit directly in front of the guy with photos of John Wilkes Booth plastered all over his bedroom walls, newspaper clippings from that day saved in a scrapbook with his baby pictures. He’s been waiting his whole life for this moment, and here I am.

vi. In Bed, Late at Night

It must be an instinct, staying up until sunrise, because my parents didn’t teach me, and I didn’t learn it in school. Somewhere I can’t remember, I was trained to interpret shadow shapes on the wall and to pluck out the noises other people can’t hear. At some point I absorbed the knowledge that a human being, armed and with an intent to kill, can make themselves as silent as an empty house. Two voices have been arguing with each other since I was born: One says, Remember this morning? You woke up in this bed. The other one says, This time, I won’t.

vii. On the Airplane

“Just because it’s a cliché to be afraid of flying,” I whisper to the person sitting next to me, “doesn’t mean people don’t die in airplane crashes every day.”

viii. Having Sex

I hope people will allow themselves to think it’s funny, after an appropriate amount of time has passed. I hope someone will point out the fact that my last living act was to make someone a necrophiliac for a few seconds. I hope that someone else will act offended and tell him that the remark was in bad taste, and that later a third person will find him and whisper that she thought it was funny.

ix. At Work

Who would discover me at my desk? Not Cheryl, please, God, not Cheryl. My mother brought me into this world— my mother, lovely, soft-spoken, self-deprecating, patient, generous, my mother whose hands smelled like lemons, who got a thousand paper cuts a year, who’d only wear her pretty paisley blouse for special occasions, who hummed songs from Bye Bye Birdie while she washed dishes and didn’t think anyone could hear, who bought me a box of colored pencils for my eleventh birthday and I didn’t know until I opened it that it was exactly what I wanted, who shushed us in the car while she was trying to listen to NPR, who let me lie on her stomach while she watched TV— and now Cheryl who stares at the blank wall in the copy room while she waits for a fax to go through was going to be there as I left it. Not bloody likely.

xi. Directly After My Broken Heart

It would not be a coincidence. Or would it? He’d never know. He’d wonder and wonder. It would torture him for the rest of his days. He’d excuse himself from the funeral reception to walk outside and sit on a rock and stare at the road. He’d visit my grave and speak to it, to me, and maybe once he’d even sleep there.

That would be nice.

xii. My First Time Doing Mushrooms

“Just because it’s unusual to get a fatally bad batch,” I whispered to my roommate’s asshole friend who got these for us, “doesn’t mean it never happens.”

He sneered at me like I was ruining everything that’s ever existed.

xiii. In the Jardins de Luxembourg

I’ve watched the same boy try and fail to grab the gold ring at the edge of the carousel four or five times now, and I can’t read the expression on his face, which is killing me. I need to know if he’s frustrated or crying or doesn’t care because he’s a child; maybe he’s smiling and laughing, because that’s what the carousel’s for. The not seeing is making me sad; nothing seems right today at the Jardins de Luxembourg. My little green chair isn’t in quite a scenic enough spot, and there was a lone duck on the lawn outside the palatial building whose function I still haven’t bothered to learn, where all the pigeons hang out, and it must have been lost and no one could do anything about it, and every one of these children looks ready to fall at high speed because the ring is just that far out of reach. I’d almost rather meet my end here than sit in the middle of this neat stack of imperfections, knowing it will follow me out into the street and who knows where after that.

xiv. Mid-Failure

“She left the world with nothing,” I imagine the eulogist intoning, “And no one was surprised.”

xv. On Vacation With My Family

I was maybe seven, and we were staying at this cabin practically in Lake George. There were a bunch of other families there and our cabins were all nose-to-nose with each other and we just swam all day, and into the evening. My sister and I made hour-long friendships with all of the kids there, easy as you please— what’s your name, how old are you, and we’d be set. We only brought one bathing suit apiece— mine was red, a little big in parts and a little tight in others, and every morning I’d pull it on even though it was still wet. My father became the most popular guy there, because he’d toss all the kids around in the water and he’d take requests for their style choice— one was called the cannonball, and one was the javelin, where we’d stretch our little bodies out across his arms and put our hands in prayer position above our heads, and he’d launch us out and we’d go, it seemed, for miles.

The sun would set spectacularly, the kind of sunset you’d pay to see, and we were right there at horizon-level, so close we could touch it, like it was just for us. That week felt like undeserved special treatment; there was nothing to it, there was no reason.

At night, the four of us would lie together in one room and I’d know that everyone was smiling in their sleep and it was dark and close and safe, and I’d stay awake, thinking, This can’t be. This can’t last.

xvi. After A Joke

It was finals and we were in the dining hall, me and my freshman year friends I could practically see smiling noncommittally at me when the new semester began and finding better people to spend time with. I was hanging on for dear life.

Stephanie complained that it had been raining all week. “You should write a strongly worded letter,” I said, and everyone laughed.

Like a movie, things slowed down for a moment and I looked at their faces one by one. I felt so good, and then it was there again, the death voice, and this time it said, At least you’ll go out on a good line.

xvii. Watching a War Documentary

It’s all so absurd and so true, that some people will never fully wake from a lifelong sleep and then slip on something and it will end like well-crafted punctuation, and some have seen bodies piled in the streets. It’s so far removed from me that I can bear the sight of limbs piled in mountains, twisted arms ending in hands reaching up towards nothing. It doesn’t move my guts at all, I don’t have to choke anything back when I see it.

I won’t make it all the way through without experiencing something like this, I think. One of those things filling in space on someone’s screen will be me. I’ll learn it that way.

xx. When I Almost Died

The other car came out of nowhere, it seemed. My sister sucked in her breath with this fluidy choke that didn’t sound human and I thought, This is something I never thought I’d hear, and it’s the last thing I’m ever going to hear. My hand went for the handle above the window, but her car doesn’t have one, so I just groped the air, which almost made me feel better. When I closed my eyes I saw white, so I was sure there was a flash of some kind, and I heard a screech of tires and it all made sense, this was what I’d seen before, on TV, in movies, what I’d been waiting for, that panic moment when nothing can stop what’s happening, and I knew I was right all along, that death comes on wings of inertia, for better or worse.

And when I opened my eyes the car wasn’t even stopped, it was still going. The stop light receded behind us and there was the Stewart’s, the post office, places I knew and had never thought about. My sister was speaking. “Hey,” she was saying, “hey, we’re okay.”

And I nodded and choked something. The air conditioning woke up the wet skin on my cheeks; that’s the last thing I would have expected, to cry at a moment like this. I would have thought that all liquid in my body would freeze, like time.

“You’re so skittish,” she said, and even laughed a little. Laughed. The sound was like a door opening at the back of a funeral. “You always were.”

The other car wasn’t around anymore. We were just driving to the mall. It was the most normal moment I’ve ever been in, as normal as waking up in the morning.

Raphaela Weissman is a writer and teacher based in Seattle, Washington. Her fiction has received the 2004 Herbert J. Rubin Award for Excellence in Prose from Gallatin Review and won L Magazine‘s 2007 Pocket Fiction competition. Last year she completed her first novel, Monsters, and is currently at work on a second. She teaches remedial reading at an inner-city high school in Seattle.

She watches them on her corner as they pass by fearlessly plucking peaches from a sidewalk bin. Black. White. Brown. Slim hips in baggy jeans, white sneakers bulging like anti-gravity boots. The Port Authority Bus terminal in the background sits like the ribs and flesh of a twisted whale. They drift by, noisily chomping, smooth faces sticky with peach ripeness, shiny in the neon glow from the Chinese Restaurant’s sign, simmering in the soupy summer night.

“Gonna fuck you up bitch.”

“And your little dog, too.”

They laugh, and then they are gone. She pulls the leash in tighter. The dog, a Bassett hound mix, who always looks anxious, starts to grow. The sky is a wash of purples, swirling grey clouds, the gargoyles reading books on the roof of the building across the way look up and snarl. The Wicked Witch of the West, she thinks. She glances quickly over her shoulder, sees nothing, but doesn’t trust her eyes. The moment goes on and on. Joshua will never come out of that store, she thinks and wonders how she will muster up the nerve to walk the half a block to their apartment.

“What the hell took you so long?” she demands as Joshua emerges from the corner store carrying a big brown paper bag filled with small bottles of soda. “I want to get home.”

He pulls a pack of cigarettes out from his shirt pocket and lights one.

“So go home,” he says breathing smoke. He’s dawdling she thinks feeling panicky. Maybe he will really not come home with her. Maybe he will leave her right on this corner. Maybe her legs won’t move. The dog, seeming to channel her alarm, looks up at the sky and howls.

“I don’t have the keys,” she spits at him.

“Don’t take that tone with me.”

“You’re upsetting the dog.”

He wrenches the dog’s leash out of her hand.

“Fuck you.”

They walk the half a block to their building stoop. He walks a few steps behind her. She sways as she walk, partly because she’s pissed and partly because she wants to get at him, flaunt it, show him what he may be missing.

Maybe it works, because when the get to the stoop he offers her a cigarette. He lights it. They smoke together. The proverbial peace pipe. She wishes the whole dog and pony show could be done already and they could be making it, making up, making it go away, making it right for another small section of time.

“I’m sorry. These little shits, they said something to me.”

He stops, looks around. His chest puffs up.

“Where?” he asks defensively. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Back on the corner. They’re gone now.”

She grabs his arm. “Let’s get inside.”

“You should have told me,” he says as he fumbles with the keys and unlocks the door. “Shit, I can’t believe you didn’t say anything.”

“I did,” she says taking back the dog and leading her inside, “I just did.”

“I don’t like when people say things like that to you.”

“Yeah, well its not picnic for either of us.”

“You just don’t get it. It’s not just about you. It’s about me. Now I have to fuck them up next time I see them.”

“You don’t even know who they are.”

“Oh I’ll know.”

“You’re kidding right?”

Joshua pushes the button for the elevator. He smoothes back her bangs and kisses her.

“Baby, let’s not fight,” he says.

He unlocks the front door of their apartment. Inside, the lights are on. They walk in and her jewelry boxes are strewn out on the floor of their bedroom. Dresser drawers are pulled out and turned upside down. “God, I left it a mess,” she thinks, “worse than usual.”

He passes by her to put his little bottles of soda in the refrigerator in the kitchen. The back door, which leads out, onto the fire escape is open.

“Did we do that?” she asks.

“Holy shit,” he says, “the place’s been hit.”

She grabs the dog’s leash, an old fashioned metal chain which drags an angry growl along the unfinished hard wood floors, and retreats to the bedroom

“What the?” she starts, “they may still be here.”

“Shit,” he repeats and grabs an old umbrella wielding it like a club. He looks sleek and fine as he slips through the apartment jumping into each room like cops on a cops show, checking closets and corners and such for bad men.

It makes her want him, which is messed up. She realizes that.

“Should I call 911?” she whispers loudly. The phones in her hand and Joshua’s doesn’t answer. He’s sifting through papers, piles of clothes, looking for something it seems.

“Well, I’m doing it.” She says to no one in particular. The dog, who has slumped into a pile by her feet, appears to be unconcerned. If there were someone in the apartment, or even near the front door, by he would get off his lazy ass and bark at least.

But Joshua needs to be sure. She dials 911 from the bedroom, while Joshua dances over piles of clothes and piles of other personal belongings scattered all over. The closet has been emptied, her underwear drawer overturned.

“Our apartment’s just been robbed,” she says when 911 answers.

“It’s your apartment?” the 911 lady asks, “Then you haven’t been robbed, you’ve been burgled.”

The 911 ladies got a low, thick voice. She sounds like Joshua’s mother.

“Okay, then we’ve been burgled. What do we do?”

She’s grateful that she can blame some of the mess in their lives on someone else, “it happened a few minutes ago, while we were out at the store.”

Joshua walks back into the room carrying his typewriter. It’s an ugly old blue thing, an Underwood Five. It has a ribbon that leaves ink stains on his hands that last weeks.

“Hang up. We’re cool.”

She puts her hand over the phone.

“What do you mean? We still have to report it?’

“No. They didn’t take anything. We’re cool.”

She wonders about the pearls her mother gave her on her 16th birthday. She wonders about the new pair of 200-dollar cowboy boots. She wonders about her computer, their music, their TV . . .

“What’s your address? Officers will be over in a moment,” the 911 lady says.

“I said, it’s all there,” Joshua says. “Hang up Melissa.”

He says it like he means it. So she does.

He smiles. He kicks off his shoes, they skid across the room and end in a pile.

“They didn’t take the computer did they?”

“No.”

He sits on the bed next to her and slips his hand under her shirt. She isn’t wearing a bra.

“What about the disks. Maybe they stole some of my bad stories.”

He pushes her down on the bed. She can feel, knapsacks and shoes under the piles of clothes that used to be in her closet.

“Your stories are beautiful. Just like you baby.”

“What the hell were they looking for?”

“Shh,” he says, “Joshua’s gonna make it all right. Joshua’s gonna take care of you.”

Then he kisses her. And he kisses her again.

“I keep thinking about that dead millionaire in Jersey.” she says.

“It’s a hot steamy night baby. Purple sky. Everything feels ominous. There’s always gonna’ be something to get crazy about. There’s got to be dead men in the bushes.”

She frowns trying to not to get sucked in and trying to go with it too.

“Why?”

“Cause that’s the way it is. A dead man in the bushes. A dead millionaire. Fuck that dead white man. Forget him.”

Then Joshua unzips her shorts.

She thinks, everything we own has been thrown around, rummaged through, touched, violated. She wants to get up, bag it all, give it to the Salvation Army. Get the fuck out of here

“You know who did this Joshua?”

She’s trying to sound angry. She’s trying to sound mean. She’s trying not to sound terrified.

“Don’t worry about the mess baby, Joshua’s gonna take care of it all. It’s our moment baby. Go with it.”

Joshua has said that before, and she still is not sure what it means. The phone is still by the bedside. She could reach out and hit redial and then the mess would be cleaned up in a different way.

But Joshua takes her hand and puts it to a different use. And she falls back into an old rhythm, an old pattern, an old song. His way and her way. Her way to make things feel right.

Maybe next time she’ll do it differently, she thinks. But in her heart, she doubts it. She seriously doubts it.

Lisa Burdige writes fiction, poetry, and short plays. Some of her other publications can be found online at EverydayWeirdness, InterBirth Books and Exquisite Corpse. She lives in New York City with her family. She is currently working on a novel.

My apartment seemed empty now, without the squeaking that usually greeted me upon opening the front door. The absence of furniture made every step louder. No carpet softened the blow of my boots against the warp of the wooden boards; no welcome mat caught the leaf stuck to my heel. I could see dusty outlines on the floor of where the bed, coffee table, armchair had been, and dust motes colliding in the sunlight pouring in from the bare windows. Home, yet not home. Empty.

I was supposed to pick up Will in Savannah on Saturday night before heading out west to the funeral. My bags and the cardboard boxes I hadn’t shipped were piled by the door, waiting to be packed into my car in the morning. I had left only a mug and a hot water kettle plugged in on the counter, for the mugs of tea I would need to fall asleep tonight. It was still only five, but I pulled out a packet of black leaves from a drawer and made myself a cup, steeped too long like my mother used to brew it. I curled up in the window seat, wrapping my fingers around the hot ceramic and pulling my knees to my chest. Women in bright sundresses strolled arm in arm with their beaus on the sidewalk below, the wind and the whistles from passing cars blowing up their skirts. I could almost see the heat waves snaking from the sidewalk up the walls of my apartment building, but I was still cold. I rested my head against the hot glass, cheeks flushing with artificial warmth.

I fell asleep like that, luck being the only thing that stopped my empty cup from falling to the floor.

***

Looking back at my apartment in the rear view mirror the next morning, I realized that I had left a pot of geraniums on the window sill above the kitchen. I watched it growing smaller as I drove away, barely visibly through the blinding reflection of the sun on the glass. I wished that I had taken it with me, just so I could have another living thing in the front seat next to me. It was a lonely nine hours driving down I-95.

The towering cement sound barriers eventually disappeared as the road unwound from the beige metropolis, the trees turning greener as I drove further south. The stretches of woods broken up by occasional glimpses of farmland turned into acres of farmland interspersed with patches of trees. I dreamt that I could feel the humidity pressing against the front of my car, giving me an excuse to push down on the gas pedal. I wanted to turn off the road and drive into the fields of cotton, leaving a trail of petroleum fumes to mark my path. I didn’t care that I wouldn’t find my way back.

Halfway through South Carolina, green disappeared from the color spectrum for a few minutes, swallowed by the blue of Lake Moultrie. I hadn’t even known that there were lakes this big in South Carolina. I looked for it on my map at the next rest stop as something to do. It was big enough to fill an entire square. For the next two hours, I thought of myself moving millimeter by millimeter across that quadrant.

Before I knew it, I had arrived in Savannah, surprised despite the numerous signs. Porches and roofs erupted with hardly any warning, but I welcomed the change, envying the uncramped legs of the people crowding the sidewalk. I wanted to get out of the car as fast as possible. I called Will on my cell phone to let him know that I had arrived and would be knocking on his door at any moment, but his answering machine picked up. I left a quick message – you can be my Paradise if you’d only pick up the phone – and dug around in my backpack at a stop light for his scrawled address. I remembered him saying his apartment was a few blocks away from Forsyth Park, in the historic district. I pulled over next to a bed and breakfast by the park and left my car there. I started walking in the direction of Habersham Street, and Will.

Savannah was one of the few Southern cities I’d been to, on a vacation with my parents. I’d been around eight or nine. I remembered thinking that voodoo would start pouring out of the cracks on the sidewalk (at the time, I hadn’t known that New Orleans wasn’t the entire lower half of the country) and that alligator tail must have been really hard to chew. Walking along the streets now brought to mind my mother in our hotel room, poring over a tourist map of Savannah for old homes and cemeteries. My dad had teased me about ghosts, but she had promised to hold my hand if I got scared. I dialed Will’s number again.

The address he had given me turned out to be an eggshell blue townhouse with a three levels, all of which had porches. He answered as I began walking up the steps. “I’m here,” I began, before he cut me off with a shouted “Coming!” I heard half of his reply through the phone and the other through the walls, and then quickening footsteps across the wooden floor. He swept the door open and immediately pressed me to his chest.

“Hello to you, too,” I said, patting him mildly on the back. He grabbed me by the shoulders and held me at arm’s length.

“We haven’t seen each other in months,” he said, sandy hair all askew. “Show me some emotion.”

I smiled and leaned into him, burying my face against his collar. “That’s what I’m trying not to do,” I mumbled into his neck.

“What was that?” he said, pulling away. He changed his mind and pulled me closer, ushering me through the door. “Doesn’t matter. You need something solid to eat after your trip. You’re probably crazed with hunger.” He led me into the kitchen, sitting me down at the table and then rummaging around in the refrigerator. “What was it, seven hours?” he said through the door.

“Nine, actually.”

“Damn.” Will emerged with a plate piled with cornbread. “Sorry it’s not warm,” he said, “but it’s from the best restaurant in town, and this stuff cold is a hell of a lot better than what you probably ate on the way down.”

“Thanks.” I didn’t mention that I hadn’t actually eaten anything since leaving home. I picked up a fork.

He sat down across from me, steepling his elbows on the table. “So, when do you want to leave tomorrow? I’m all packed.” He smiled. “I even stowed a typewriter in my bag so that we can write a fifty-foot scroll about our adventures.”

I paused before answering, holding up a finger to indicate that I was still chewing. When I had originally called Will a few weeks ago to ask if he would drive to Portland with me, I hadn’t mentioned anything about a funeral. He’d sounded surprised to hear from me at all, and a little cold, which I didn’t understand. I hadn’t wanted to make it seem like I was only calling him after all these months because I was grieving. Which might have been true; I don’t know. But I ended up only telling him that I was moving out there for work and needed a friend to help me move into my new place. Never mind that the place wasn’t new. Never mind that it was the house in which I grew up. The favor was true, even if the reason for it wasn’t.

“How about nine?”

“You’ve got it,” he said, reaching across the table to brush my cheek.

***

Since On the Road was Will’s favorite book, I thought borrowing from Kerouac would be a good way to convince him to keep me company. I would have done anything for company. If our route happened to correspond to the one taken in the book, only going a little farther north, I figured he would be sold on the trip, even if he wasn’t sold on it being with me. At that moment, he was driving with a cigarette in his hand, muttering, “Burn, burn, burn!” out the window as we sped out of the city into the lazy Southern countryside. I was looking at a map, planning our next few stops.

“So, I meant to ask you when you first called,” Will said nonchalantly. He blew a ring of smoke out the window. “Why did you ask me?”

I put down the map. “What do you mean?”

“You could have taken anyone with you on this trip. Any one of your friends would have gladly helped you move in. Why me?”

I wasn’t sure how to answer that question. Will turned to look at me after a few seconds of silence, scrutinizing my face. His eyebrows were furrowed.

“God, you look so serious,” I said, laughing a little nervously. “That’s why I asked you, because I thought you needed a break from all the jambalaya. That much chili isn’t good for you.”

Will laughed. “You really have no idea how misinformed you are about the South, do you? We’re not even in Louisiana, and that dish isn’t even remotely related to chili.” He shook his head regretfully. “I’m ashamed to be seen with you.”

“Oh, whatever,” I said, waving my hand. “Seriously,” I continued. “I asked you because you’re my friend. Did you think anything changed when I moved to DC?”

“I just thought that after – well, I just thought I’d make sure,” he said, shrugging.

“Of course you’re still my friend.” I shoved him lightly. “Don’t be ridiculous. Even though you can’t exactly help it when you’re blowing smoke rings.”

“So this is how you treat your friends, huh?” he sniffed, but his eyes were smiling, wrinkled at the corners.

“Yeah,” I said, “this is how,” and turned back to the map.

We stopped outside of Tallahassee for lunch, and then switched off driving every few hours after that. By the time we pulled New Orleans for the night, it was well past ten o’clock, and we were too exhausted to bother with going to a restaurant for dinner.

“How do you feel about getting really, really, drunk?” I proposed.

“Great,” he said. “Where’s the nearest liquor store?”

We checked into a hotel in Algiers and dumped our bags in the room. With a little help from some questionable characters on the sidewalk, we managed to find a liquor store nine blocks away from the hotel. After a brief debate inside– “Bourbon or straight whiskey?” “We’re closer to Tennessee: whiskey.” “But Basil Hayden could take Jack Daniel in a knife fight any day.” “They’re both eighty proof, so does it really matter?” – Will left with a bottle of bourbon tucked under his arm, and I with one of whiskey. They stayed unopened for a block.

We stumbled into our room thirty minutes later like we’d already been drinking for hours. “I should have done this weeks ago,” I declared, sitting down on the bed and pulling off my boots. “Fuck tea.”

Will took a long swig from his bottle and sat down on the couch he’d set up earlier as a bed. He kicked off his shoes with undue care. “Only crazy people,” he said, “choose leaves over liquor.” He straightened abruptly and added slowly, “Unless you’re trying to get your shit together, in which case I didn’t mean to offend you.” He raised his hands in appeasement. “Completely respectable goal.”

I laughed at his chivalry and drank some more whiskey. “Not at all. I’m definitely still a fuck up,” I said, and accidentally spilled some liquor on the coverlet to prove it.

Will put down his bottle of Basil’s and crawled over to me on his knees. He took my hands in his and looked up at me, suddenly serious. “You are anything but a fuck up,” he said. “If anything, I’m the fuck up.”

“Oh, so we’re in a fuck up competition now, are we?” I said archly, trying to wrest my hands from his grasp.

He held on stubbornly. “Yes.”

“Well, you’re going to lose this one!”

“Already did,” he said, and gazed forlornly at a point above my shoulder.

I rolled my eyes. “What are you talking abou – ”

“I scared you off. I lost you,” he said, cutting me off. He looked me straight in the eye. “I’m the fuck up. I win.”

I laughed and put my hand against his face. “Oh, silly Will,” I prattled. “I have no idea what you’re talking about, and I’m very drunk right now, but how can you lose something that’s right in front of you?” I tilted my head to make sense of him. But he wasn’t making any sense.

“So,” he said, face slowly brightening, “you meant what you said earlier?”

“Of course,” I said immediately, even though I couldn’t remember what I’d said earlier.

“And you don’t never want to see me again?”

I didn’t know what that meant either, so I guessed. “No.”

That answer seemed to make him very happy, because he suddenly pulled me down on top of him and kissed me. He slid his tongue into my mouth and his hands all over my back, pulling me closer. I was limp in his arms, but I no longer felt drunk.

I couldn’t bring myself to stop him as he rolled me over and began unbuttoning my blouse. As Will moved his mouth against my neck, I neither felt nor thought anything about him, or my mother, or the past few weeks, or what awaited me after another six days of driving.

“Did you ask me to come with you because you love me?” Will asked, mouthing the side of my jaw. I lay there on the ground, and all I felt was the carpet rough against my back.

“Yes,” I said, the lie waiting on my lips for him to kiss. He shuddered and pressed desperately against me. I didn’t want him to stop, because if he did, my heart would start.

Stephanie Bastek is a first year at Reed College, currently pursuing a degree in English and creative writing. She has won the F. Scott Fitzgerald Student Short Story Contest and served as editor-in-chief of Fine Lines literary magazine, winner of a Columbia Scholastic Press Association Gold Crown. Her fiction has appeared in Bethesda magazine.

The laundry, off a side street, has a small sign over the front door that says Capeti & Brothers. It’s a large, two-story building with no windows. From inside comes the roar of machines.

Schroeder finds the front door locked, so he knocks, then notices a button and pushes it. A bell rings. A buzz unlocks the door. He goes into a lobby with linoleum floor, plastic chairs, a table, and a Plexiglas window sealing off an empty office. A woman appears in the office, comes to the window, and hands him an employment application and pen through a round hole in the Plexiglas. He sits at the table, fills out the application, then turns it in. The woman takes the application and says, “Wait.” Schroeder sits in a chair, opens his knapsack, takes out an apple, decides not to eat it, and puts it back in the knapsack.

Ten minutes later a man in slacks and white shirt comes into the lobby from a side door Charles hasn’t noticed. The man looks familiar. Schroeder is trying to place him.

“Are you Herman Muiz Schroeder?” the man asks, looking at the application.

Schroeder nods. “Yes.”

“When can you start?”

Schroeder is wondering what the pay is. He doesn’t ask. “Anytime,” he says.

“Today?”

“Sure,” Schroeder says.

“Now?”

Schroeder nods.

***

Two months later Schroeder, now with an income, has his car working again and is driving downtown. He comes to a stop at a traffic light and looks over at a building across the street. The windows of the building, which has no identifying sign, are filled with cement blocks. The wall of the building comes flush to the sidewalk. Written on the wall in chalk is “WHERE’S MY FUCKING BAILOUT?”

The hours at the laundry are from 5 PM to 3 or 4 or 5 AM. It’s an industrial laundry, cleaning uniforms for factories and auto shops. There’s a break after three hours and another at “dinner,” which is at midnight, and no other break. The day supervisor goes home at 6 PM, leaving no other supervisor, but likes to show up unannounced.

Near Schroeder’s workstation is a desk and chair used to fill out forms. On the wall by the chair is a steam pipe covered with brown foam insulation. Schroeder notices an indentation in the foam exactly the size of a person’s head. If you sit in the chair a certain way, he notices, and lean back, your head fits neatly into the indentation, forming a pillow. It’s comfortable—perfect for sleeping—but when Schroeder tries it he can’t sleep. The thought that the supervisor showing up makes him nervous.

One night he’s sitting at the desk filling out forms, and the supervisor, wearing a suit and tie like he’s going to church, walks in. It’s 3:45 am. The supervisor looks at Schroeder sitting at the desk and gives a friendly wave. “Just dropped by,” he says. “To see if you needed any help.”

***

In the fall work slows. Instead of working to 4 or 5 AM, Schroeder works to 2 AM, then all overtime stops. Three weeks later he’s laid off. When he comes into work one Monday he’s called into the supervisor’s office. The supervisor’s name in McEmamy. He’s young, handsome, with a bright smile and he’s always been friendly to Schroeder. “I have some bad news for you,” he says.

Schroeder has a girlfriend, Marie, he hasn’t known for long. The two of them are in a diner. She’s eating Jell-O with whipped cream; he’s eating apple pie.

“These men call me up,” she’s saying to him. “I don’t want anything to do with them. Why are they always calling me up?”

“Who are these men?” he asks. “How do they get your number?”

Marie ignores the questions. “Men!” she says.

***

Schroeder’s friend Ricky, who drives a truck, is having a good year. “It’s been the best year ever,” he tells Schroeder. “Made more money than I’ve ever made.”

Schroeder says he’s been laid off.

“Sure,” Ricky says. “Everybody’s getting laid off. I go into New York, the streets are quiet. At bus stops where there were twenty people waiting now there’s two.”

Ricky has a new car, a Volkswagen Passat. “It’s a beautiful car,” he says. “German engineering. Not just some rickety cheap shit car. This car is well-made. I’m not going to drive around in any old rickety cheap-shit car.”

***

Diane, Schroeder’s ex-girlfriend, is talking about going on a cruise and suggests Schroeder go with her. Schroeder wonders about this. They’ve broken up months before and aren’t getting along well, not even as friends. The first question he asks himself is, what would the sleeping arrangements be? Question two, who would pay for the trip? If Schroeder paid his life savings would be wiped out. If Diane pays—he wouldn’t let her pay. He couldn’t face it.

He thinks it’s just talk. She has no intention of going on a cruise with him. She doesn’t like him and has told him so. “You’re too serious,” she tells him. “You never want to go out. You don’t like movies. Every time I mention a movie you have some objection. You say you don’t want to see “Slumdog Millionaire.” How could anyone not want to see ‘Slumdog Millionaire?’”

“It has too much violence,” Schroeder says.

“It doesn’t have too much violence. Where did you get that? It has violence but not what you call violence. I know a dozen people who’ve seen it and nobody objects to the violence. And you complain about the violence and you haven’t even seen it.”

“I don’t want to see it,” Schroeder says.

“That’s what I mean,” she says.

***

Now that he’s laid off Schroeder thinks he should be cooking more, instead of buying unhealthy fast food. He has the time. Instead he cooks the same as before, no more creatively, no more time spent. He eats the same unimaginative meals as before.

He looks for work. There is a job listed online he knows he can do. Instead of emailing his resume (which seems to accomplish nothing) he goes to the street address of the job to hand in his résumé in person. He finds the location in a large modern building with mostly empty offices. He goes into the office of the company, a job service, and finds a secretary eating a roll and taking a cup of coffee at her desk. She looks bored. No one else is in the office. She appears surprised to see him.

Schroeder says he’s come to turn in his résumé for a job.

“We don’t have jobs here,” the secretary says. Schroeder says he saw the job listed online. “Oh, we just put those out there to keep our name out,” she says. “We don’t have jobs. You can sign the list.”

She hands Schroeder a clip board with hundreds of names and phone numbers on it. There is no indication of the type of job being signed up for. The list goes on for pages. Schroeder puts his name and phone number at the bottom of the list.

***

Schroeder is spending too much time on the computer reading stories about Alex Rodriguez and Barack Obama and the economic collapse. Being on the computer so much, he decides, is a disease. He finds himself emailing news stories to friends who email him back with stories that are equally distracting. One morning Schroeder finds an story entitled “Russian scholar says the United States will collapse—next year.”

“There’s a high probability that the collapse of the United States will occur by 2010,” the scholar says in a lecture at the Diplomat Academy in Moscow. The story says foreign media were invited to attend the lecture in which Igor Panarin, the scholar, argued that Americans are in moral decline, saying their great psychological stress is evident from school shootings, the size of the prison population, and the number of gay men.

Schroeder prints out the story and shows it to Marie, his new girlfriend, who doesn’t know him well and asks him such questions as, how old are you, really? Why have you had so many jobs? How many times did you say you were married?

Surprisingly, Marie takes the story seriously. Schroeder intended it as a joke. Schroeder never knows quite what to expect from Marie, who has a good job and drives a new car and tells him how many foreign countries she’s visited. Schroeder has been to foreign countries but not nearly so many and his dilapidated car (he thinks Marie thinks) is evidence of a lack of financial resources, which it is.

Marie reads the whole story, including a part in which the professor predicts the United States will break up into six autonomous regions and that Alaska will revert to Russian control. She reads the story over and over. Schroeder wishes she’d forget about it, but she wants to discuss it.

“You know,” she says after she’s read the story for the fourth or fifth time. “This doesn’t make sense.”

“Why not?” Schroeder says.

“It says Alaska will revert to Russian control. I lived in Alaska five years. You know what’s in Russia across the Bering Straits from Alaska? Siberia. There’s nothing there but ice and gray wolves.”

Schroeder agrees, hoping Marie will change the subject and after a while she does.

***

The next day Schroeder visits a place he’s applied for work at two or three times before. He waits in the lobby for forty-five minutes, then the plant manager, who Schroeder has talked to several times, appears. They shake hands.

“Perhaps you remember me,” Schroeder says. “Just thought I’d check.”

The plant manager remembers him. He is very polite, perhaps a little apologetic. “At the moment,” he says. “We don’t have an opening, but…in a month or two…”

Schroeder asks if it’s all right if he checks back in a month or two.

“Sure,” the plant manager says. “Check back in a month or two. Things should get going again by then…in a month or two.” His smile is vague, uncertain.

Lee Oleson grew up in California and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley, majoring in Dramatic Art.  For several years he was a newspaper reporter in Massachusetts, Tennessee, and Washington, DC.  Since then he has worked various industrial jobs, and now lives in Newark, NJ.

Downstairs, the Scotch bottle makes a scraping noise as it is pulled from the pantry. I picture Matt pouring himself three fingers at least. It must have been Matt fishing ice from the freezer that had sounded so much like Caro’s keys. Hope is such a sucker, I think, at work even while I sleep. The rest—the door closing, the retching—ghosts. Lately, Matt has been patrolling the house at night, checking door locks, peering out windows, sometimes keeping vigil in the front steps, in a drunken parody of my nighttime patrols when Caro was still alive. “Jesus, Christ,” he would say, coming downstairs when I disturbed him. “Lay off her. She stays out just to annoy you.”

Now, Matt gazes up at me blearily, his Scotch glass a good five-fingers deep at precarious rest on the arm of the brocade chair in the den. The blanket I’ve wrapped about my shoulders drags on the ground and I have a brief memory of Matt having once forgotten Caro’s favorite blanket at home on our way to a beach vacation. “What does it matter,” he’d protested as we pulled into a Fred Meyer to purchase a substitute. “It’s just a fucking blanket.”

On the television, Conan O’Brien is making the studio audience laugh.

“I thought you were Caro,” I say.

Matt stares at me. “Holy hell, Susan, do you really think saying stuff like that helps?”

He is more drunk than usual. Today is the day that Caro would have returned from her freshman year. Right about now, we would be arriving home from the airport, girding ourselves for a summer of adjustment after her year away; I picture us chirping in syrupy tones, trying to find some middle ground between her difficult past and the unknowable present. Being a parent is an exhausting act of balance between hope and reality, but all that was behind us now.

“I can’t sleep. If I fall asleep, I dream that she’s still alive.”

“Get it through your skull. She’s not coming back,” Matt says, his voice husky from the liquor. On the kitchen counter, Matt has left out the freezer ice bucket on a red dishtowel, and a small, pink pool is forming around its base. Matt shakes his head. “Not coming back,” he repeats, drawing out the words as if this is helpful to me, as if I don’t know what he knows, as if I have been duped. At the funeral, he clasped and unclasped his hands, and all through the service, especially afterwards at the cemetery, I was afraid he might hit someone.

“You know, if you’d just have laid off her, she wouldn’t have been there,” he says. “You always wanted more for her than she wanted for herself. If you’d have let her be—”

“You wanted her to go away to school just as much as I did.”

“It was you she was running from, you know. You she couldn’t stand anymore.”

“Because you couldn’t deal with her. You left me to do it all.”

“Kids drink, they go to parties. It’s harmless, but you were on her case all the time, you were the one saying that it was unacceptable, as if she were some toddler throwing a tantrum. God, Susan. Jesus.”

I feel knocked off my feet, as if Matt has physically reached over and slapped me. I would pack my bags and leave him except that I don’t have the energy and I don’t know where I would go. Caro’s murder has tethered me to the home in which we raised her—in which I raised her. But part of me forgives Matt. Regret is a whirlpool, anger a life raft, and I am not so far gone that I can’t recognize a lunge for survival when I see it.

If I had been this patient with Caro—well, it’s over now. It’s all over.

***

The harbinger was a phone call. Phillip from next door, saying, Turn on the television. An architect, he worked at home in a basement office, where he kept the news channels on as a distraction.

The campus had never seemed beautiful to me; it was too sprawling to feel intimate, too new to feel reassuringly historic. When we had dropped Caro off in September, its wide quads between the brick and stone buildings had given me a sense of foreboding. Now it looked even worse through the lens of the television cameras, too institutional, too impersonal a place to have left a difficult, but beloved daughter. Encouraging Caro to go to college had not seemed a reckless act to me; it had seemed instead the end of worry. I struggled now to make sense of the grainy cell phone video CNN was showing; it reminded me of trying to find Caro in the static of the sonogram when I had been carrying her. What kind of mother was I, I had worried, if I couldn’t recognize her? And all her life, she had remained just as inscrutable, just as mysterious to me as the tiny pixilated mass they had sworn was my child. These television images, too, were gray and fleeting, the staccato gunshots nothing like the reassuring, windy swish of her fetal heart beat.

Phillip pounded on my front door. “Call her cell phone,” he ordered.

Of course. Yes. That was the thing to do. What was the matter with me? But my fingers couldn’t dial. I handed Phillip the phone, but Caro did not answer.

“It means nothing,” Phillip said. “We’ll call the college.”

But the lines were busy, giving off that odd, siren-like pattern that happens when the circuits overload. The campus was 2,000 miles away, far from our Washington home. There was no question of getting in the car. Frantically, I flipped back and forth between the news channels, my breath echoing the disjointed unevenness of the gunfire playing over and over.
Matt came home wearing his surgical scrubs, his mask still dangling from his neck. Had Phillip called him? Had I? As soon as Matt came through the door, Phillip began to break down. Matt and I turned to one another. Even I had not yet cried—worry capitulating to denial—but tears were running down Phillip’s face. I was resorting to logic. On a campus of 20,000 students, our daughter could not have been in the wrong place at the wrong time. It simply defeated statistics. It is like the mantra you say in the plane as it rushes down the runway: Just because I am on this plane, does not mean it is going to crash. She could be in the shower. She could be asleep. Perhaps there was a boyfriend she did not want us to know about. I pictured a frat house, a messy room, unwashed sheets, the protective comfort of his arms. I suddenly adored him.

Phillip got through on the telephone to the administration offices. It was second semester, and I had trouble remembering what classes Caro was taking. She had changed them twice in the first weeks of the semester as she tried to come to some foregone conclusion about who she was. I thought this desperation to define herself overwrought and premature, even as I was glad that she was still in school. Take classes, any classes, I said. Nobody expects you to know who you are right now. Just being in college is enough for the first year. But she had seen an advisor, she had written down her plans, in an effort, I feared, to please me. (There had been a glimmer of reversal on Christmas vacation; she’d gone out to a movie with me and Matt instead of meeting her friends for a party, a small choice on her part that I had treasured.) Art? I remembered. Biology? A language? Phillip was being so efficient. Soon, we would soon be sighing in relief. We would get on a plane, just to reassure ourselves that she was fine. We would attend the memorial services with her. Take her to dinner. Measure our luck against the sorrow of others and guiltily believe that we had deserved the reprieve.

Phillip hung up the phone. Biology, he said. She is in that building on the second floor. His voice had the timbre of a ringing bell. For whom it tolls, but mixed with a kind of awe, though he was not pleased to be here with us. He hated the words falling from his mouth, hated being the one to tell us.

“Is she out?” I asked. A quick memory surfaced of a field trip I had helped chaperone: second grade, at the zoo, Caro’s teacher lining all the children up outside the lion’s den, recounting three times, so solemn, so dedicated to bringing back every child entrusted to her care.

“They don’t know who’s out.”

Perhaps Caro had turned off her cell phone for class. Perhaps she hadn’t thought to turn it on afterwards, and she was huddling in a group of escapees somewhere; perhaps she was being reassured, not remembering to call to reassure us. There were a hundred reasons why she was not answering her cell.

On our phone, Matt was shouting at the United Airlines clerk. We would go either way; either way, we would be there.

When the call came from the college president four hours later, we had memorized the panorama of violence: police battering doors, ambulances screaming, wounded carried out splayed and bleeding. We had craved something more informative, something less terrifying, but television had not suddenly discovered integrity because we were now involved. My husband and I had retreated to the bedroom to pour something into our suitcases, anything, no rhyme or reason: golf shorts, pink underwear, five bras. At the first ring, Matt pounced for the phone. He shut his eyes, screwed his face into a pursed flower of concentration. Time pulsed in slow beats, fingers to Caro’s wrist.

Matt’s cry was the crackle of gunfire ripping through the room.

I tore the phone from his hands.

“I’m sorry, I am so terribly sorry,” the voice was saying. No second grade teacher counting noses, but a college president who had lost the sum of an entire second grade class. “But your daughter wasn’t in the class. She was in her bed. We found her in her bed. He shot her in her bed. He knew her. We found emails, pictures. But she was asleep when it happened. At least we think so.”

All day, I’d been suppressing a picture of Caro, arms upraised, defenseless, her mouth slowly opening, her brown eyes growing big and round, her uncanny ability to argue her way out of any situation useless as she ducked or rolled or screamed or fled. Now I saw Caro curled up in her bed, two, three, four-years old, her soft ringlets a messy halo about her face, her mouth the shape of a kiss. All the rebellion ahead unanticipated, while I had leaned against the doorjamb, a cup of coffee in my hands, marveling at the generosity of the universe.

Phillip came running up the stairs and took the phone from me as I crumpled to the bed, where so many mornings Matt and I had made silent love, coming with soundless cries in order not to disturb Caroline with our carnality. Orgasm of agony, silent parody of love. My Caro, asleep in her bed.

Grief separates the afflicted from the unafflicted; people generally leave the dying to die, the grieving to grieve, a primal guarantee of survival, but Phillip abandoned protocol, reaching through the invisible scrim to weep with us, and then to care for us, filling our suitcases, making us each drink a shot of whiskey, turning off the house lights, locking the door, and then driving us through tears to the airport, where he shepherded us through the ticket line and on to the metal detectors, explaining to the guards, making clear with his hushed rendition that the ordinary had evanesced and that the extraordinary had now descended.

The plane ride, the car sent to retrieve us, the school’s ambassador who accompanied us to the morgue, none of this remains in my accessible memory. Of that three-day trip, all that survives is the moment when they pulled open the stainless steel drawer, and there was my Caro, looking nothing and everything like herself: hair dyed an unfamiliar, hennaed red, a new piercing in her lip, those beautiful eyes that had flashed in rebellious fury whenever I had crossed her, the thick eyelashes that made strangers audibly exhale at her beauty. Caroline. Caro. Little girl, stumbling into adulthood, her skin an opalescent canvas of relative innocence. Her torso was covered, to conceal the damage. Matt and I stood on either side of her tray, which was too high, so that it was awkward to try to hold one another and her, too, but we stayed for an immeasurable length of time so that when we finally emerged, after having flown through the night, we were shocked that it was past noon, and that the day was unrelentingly beautiful.

Widow. Widower. Orphan. But what was the word for parents who have lost a child?

***

I leave Matt to his Scotch and Conan O’Brien, and go into Caro’s room, where I had often slept in Caro’s spare bed her last year of high school, keeping drowsy vigil until she flopped across hers at two, three, four in the morning. After she died, I could not bring myself to clean out her room. Among the artifacts that Caro left behind—bright photographs of her high school friends scotch-taped to the walls, drill team posters, dried bottles of nail polish, American Girl dolls, and an array of forgotten boas, scarves, camp neckerchiefs, ribbons, trophies, shells, yearbooks and other preserved cast-offs we had intended to clean out this summer, when she returned—I slip under the sheets of one of her beds. Matt and I bought the twin beds when Caro was four-years old. Maple, whitewashed, solidly-built, they were meant to be with us always, a bridge of permanence between Caro’s childhood and her future. The picture wasn’t quite clear—either we would keep them or we would give them to her—but somehow, the image of tousle-haired twin granddaughters went into the decision-making. Now in the dark I clutch the little jaguar she had loved into disrepair when she was five. Downstairs, Matt drinks his highballs, the ice, like keys, clinking against one another, mimicking promise. I don’t know whose mornings are more painful, mine or Matt’s. Daily, we each have to decide in our respective hangovers—his alcoholic, mine solely wretchedness—whether or not to go on without her. But we never speak of this subterranean possibility. We hardly speak of anything, because coming together poses the dangerous possibility of revealing, in the end, that neither of us possesses the strength we secretly wish the other to have.

If I sleep, I will see things I should not see. But awake, it is worse. In these beds I read her “Good Night, Moon,” and “If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.” And when a third-grader spilled the beans to her about sex on the playground, I explained that yes, what she’d heard was essentially true. I remember the gravity of her gaze as she filed the information, possibly tossing out the Santa Claus myth in the process. But what surfaces most now are my million, tiny infinitesimal mistakes—a curt phrase here, a sharp word there—and the squandered gaggle of seconds, minutes, hours and days in which I had foolishly disregarded the essential fact of human mortality. I spent hours despairing over her capricious disregard for responsibility and its effect on her prospects. She was smart, but rebellious. She refused to study, eschewed note taking, disdained reading. No college for me! I’m going to cut hair! I want to join the circus! I think I’ll be a tattoo artist! She flung these declarations at me like mini-grenades, exploding my sense of wellbeing. But Caro’s brilliance defied her wayward intentions. She aced the SATs in impressive fashion, and in return, received benefit-of-the-doubt-we’ll-ignore-the-abysmal-GPA acceptance letters from three colleges. In a fit of my own adolescent pique, I refused to pay tuition to her most recent infatuation, beauty school, and pushed and prodded until she agreed to attend the college she found the least offensive. The day before she left, her room a tornado-swept catastrophe, she stood over her open suitcases, holding the little jaguar in her hands. When she saw me watching from the doorjamb, she tossed the stuffed animal aside.

“You’re going to love it, Caro. College is the best.”

“At least I’ll be away from you.”

The hair on the back of my neck began to rise, and I marked this warning sign, striving for equanimity. The next day, we’d be on the airplane and then we’d drop her off, and in the year to come, she’d come to appreciate how easy her life had been and how much we loved her.

“Don’t you want to take your little jaguar? A bit of home with you?” I asked, giving her the permission she could not give herself.

But Caro rolled her eyes in an exaggerated tantrum. “I’m going to college, Mom. Not nursery school.”

“Honestly, I had the most fun in college. You just don’t know.”

She was throwing things in her suitcases—hair dryer, pillow, makeup—everything but the jaguar.

“It’s stupid to spend all your money on me this way when I don’t want to be there. Why can’t I just get a job?”

I held back, because we’d had this conversation a hundred different times. “Working a minimum wage job for nothing? Making bracelets and selling them at county fairs? Bagging groceries? No, Caro. No. You do that, you go live somewhere else.”

The fact of her economic dependence weighed more heavily on her than she cared to voice. It was a wedge I used because it was the only weapon I had. “Listen. It’s going to be great. Trust me.”

Her moue was a great rolling wave of disdain, more pronounced than any she had flung at me before.

“Listen, Missie, this little act, this little thing you have going about how terrible your life is and how awful it is to be my daughter is really old. So just be grateful and pack your bags.”

Essentially, I was saying, Get out. You either move away to college or you move out.
“Hey,” I said.

She turned. “One fucking year. And that’s it.”

***

It is now a month after the funeral, and Matt goes back to work, and our days begin to go like this: he leaves early, waking me with his showering, but I feign sleep; he does not call me during the day; he never did before, but now, when I need him to, he still doesn’t. He makes the excuse of his surgeries. I picture him in his scrubs, hovering over his anesthetized patients, removing the offending tumor or gall bladder or bullet, while I take walks, go to the grocery store, and in the late afternoons, read a book in the circle of walkway just outside our front door. After Caro left for school, I had been in the midst of discovering what to do with myself. What she left behind when she went to college was space, but now there is even more space. Sometimes Phillip joins me, emerging from his house with bemused, quiet solicitude. He asks me how I am, holding my gaze while I say things like, God, I just want to kill myself. For some reason, this makes him weep, and we end up weeping together on the terrace until I go inside at five-thirty to cook dinner. I keep a schedule of strict punctuality; any deviation, and I think I might fall apart. Pills? Slit wrists? Narcotics that I would steal from Matt’s hospital? I contemplate these options while I cook, and then Matt returns at seven o’clock, glancing at the mail I have placed on the kitchen counter before he ever looks at me. Then he pours himself a Scotch and we sit down to the pork chops or lamb or pasta that I have prepared. He answers my questions—How was your day? How are you?—in monosyllables, and then sits in the armchair opposite the television and drinks himself to sleep.

On Saturday mornings, Phillip and Matt chat before they enact the rituals of suburbia: lawn mowing, trimming, weeding, though of what they speak, I do not know. The walls of normal life came ripping down that evening in our bedroom, and I expect the two are rebuilding them, mundane word by mundane word, about fertilizer and weed killer and perhaps, how I am doing.

Two months after the funeral, Phillip and I begin to meet in a bar on a little used road that runs out of town toward North Bend. The bar is the kind of place where people who have given up on ordinary life seek release in the pine-knotted comfort of bad lighting and gin. No one knows us here. Phillip waits for me in a booth that has become ours, under a row of drafty windows, a television hanging from a contraption bolted to the ceiling, the red Naugahyde seats leaking stuffing. The trim man whose bar this is brings Phillip a martini and me a lethal combination of something in coffee. I knew once what was in the drink, now but I no longer care. It does the job, both of insulation and anesthesia, and I welcome the warmth of the ceramic cup in my hands and the odd slant in the bench that causes me to sink backwards into its chrome edging.

The owner leaves us alone. His name is Benjamin. He is about forty-years old, and his round, wire-framed glasses make him look as if he should be an accountant. He talks mostly to the solitary patrons hunched over glasses at the smooth maple bar. Occasionally, someone asks Benjamin about his wife, and he sighs and says, “Alabama, last I heard.”

Usually, Phillip and I stay and drink all afternoon, but after a while the intimacy becomes unbearable and so one day we bolt our drinks and rent one of the rooms in the drafty hotel across the road with its broken neon sign and bad beds. I am not even aware how the decision to engage in sex got made; it’s just that I know I am not being taken advantage of. The window faces north and the mattress is cold. Kneeling on the quilted bedspread, I begin to unbutton my blouse. I wonder, is this cause and effect? A boy kills my difficult daughter, and so I begin to drink with my next-door neighbor, which leads me to fling myself across these sheets much as I had hoped that Caro was doing that awful morning in the arms of some imagined, nameless boy? I begin to cry, fumbling as I wrest the buttons from their holes. Phillip is lying on the bed, his gaze flickering from my hands to my face, his blue eyes watchful, alert. I unbutton the last one when he puts his hand to my wrist and says, “Stop.”

Twenty-five years of marriage, and I have not once strayed. About Matt, I don’t know. At hospital receptions, there is one nurse in particular who leans in for pictures with an ease that I think betrays them. After the Christmas party one year I asked, “Who is she?”

“Who?” he’d said, his distraction sufficient answer for me, or maybe I just avoided the confrontation. Courage is required for a new life, and I wasn’t certain I had any.

“Do you want to do this?” Phillip says.

“She’s not coming back, is she?”

Phillip rebuttons my blouse and pulls me down beside him. “When I was twelve, my mother shot herself. I came home from school and called for her, but she didn’t answer.” He weeps now when he tells me that he did not go in search of her, that instead, gleeful, he watched afternoon cartoons and sneaked Cheetos, after first arranging his schoolbooks on the dining room table as a ruse of studiousness for when she returned. But the afternoon wore on and he began to worry. It was deep winter, dark by four-thirty. He turned on the lights and crept up the stairs, wiping Cheeto dust from his lips. Perhaps she was sick? Perhaps she had fallen and hurt herself? He was a terrible son. The upstairs landing was dark. In the bedroom, his mother wore a brown tweed skirt and white blouse, pearls, stockings, pumps, and perfume. To this day, Phillip pictures his mother in front of the mirror applying her makeup, affixing the gold hoop earrings later fished from the aftermath, combing her hair, and then pausing for a minute for a last look before she taped blue plastic tarps over the bedspread and walls along the bullet’s planned trajectory. (So much fastidiousness among murderers. Caro’s had chained the doors of the science building, to keep everyone out.)

“Is she coming back?” Phillip remembered asking his father, who was to have come home that day at noon, but who had been prevented by an unexpected meeting at work.

“That boy. The gunman. Do you suppose he loved Caro?” I ask now.

Phillip winces when I utter the word gunman but I would take a gun to my own head if I didn’t say the word once a day. Gunman. I could be my own gunman, like Phillip’s mother. To murder yourself. The ultimate in being hard on yourself. But what had Phillip’s mother done that was so terrible? Her little boy was alive, whereas I had failed to keep my daughter safe.

***

Now sometimes Phillip cannot get away. He sees clients who want him to build homes for their families, an optimistic foolhardiness on his part that I cannot abide, so he does not tell me this any longer. On the phone, he says, Not today, and I answer, Pity. On those days, I huddle in our booth alone and nurse my coffee and alcohol so that I am not too drunk when I get behind the wheel of the car. I am scrupulous, like Phillip’s mother. But the owner, Benjamin, is concerned. I do not fit the type. He doesn’t know my story, because he chooses to be adamantly ignorant of the goings-on of the world. He likes his corner of Washington, next to a stream, above a bar where he makes enough money to take a holiday the second week of every July. The world is sorrowful enough, I heard him say once. CNN, newspapers. People have got enough troubles of their own. Human beings weren’t made to carry the whole world. We’re too fragile.

“Fragility. Agility.” Maybe I am drunk, which makes me furious because being drunk is Matt’s thing, not mine.

“More, please,” I ask, but Ben is studying me.

“Husband busy?” he asks, though he is no fool; he knows Phillip is not my husband.

“I don’t think he’s coming back,” I say.

It is four o’clock in the afternoon, about the time Ben’s business usually picks up, but he flips the sign on the door that says, Closed and turns to me. “I want to show you something.”

It is mid-August, and out back a garden slopes to the stream that runs behind the bar. The garden is an imitation of heaven, imperfectly wrought, like the place I imagine God has stashed my Caro. (This is the last vestige of any hope: Caro at rest in a perfect garden.) We walk under an arbor that forms the entrance. A little dog that looks like Caro’s jaguar is leashed to a pot made of staves, and he rises and wags his tail at me. His hair is brown, with a combed glossy shine and eyes the shape of black buttons. Benjamin lifts the pot and takes the little dog by the leash. We make a little parade along the gravel paths that wind between overflowing beds. A breeze rustles the blue petals of dahlias in the sunshine. The dog sniffs at my ankles, but is careful not to trip me up. Not even Phillip has been as solicitous as this little puff of a dog, who leaps into my lap as soon as I sit on a bench next to Ben.

Ben says, “My wife hated it here. But she loved this garden. Every spring, she’d wait for the snow to thaw and then she’d start with the raking and the digging and the planting. Ten years she did that. Then she left.”

“Fuck the garden,” I say. And then I let the little dog go and I kneel in the gravel path, but I do not feel the stones cutting into my knees. All those years, I should have said, The circus? Yes! Crafts? Brilliant!

I tell Ben about the shooting. All my friends make sounds of sympathy and kindness, but Ben says nothing. I tell him about all the years in which Caro was defiant and argumentative. “It was a relief when she went to college. Whole days went by and I never had to raise my voice. It was a relief, you know?” I am telling him what I have not been able to admit to myself, that I was happy she had gone so far away to school, happy that I no longer had to steel myself every day for the battle that was Caro, happy that I thought that I was finally able to stop worrying.
I lie down in the dirt, sun-warmed so that it feels like a safe bed. I think I wouldn’t mind dying here, like Caro.

I see Ben walk away toward a shed, hear keys jingling and the sound of rummaging. He returns with a hedge trimmer, its wooden handles worn smooth. The blades are sharp enough that he is able to sever with some precision the slender stalks of the diaphanous hollyhocks that line the walkway. Whack. Whack. Pop. Pop. The schwooping sound of the trimmer echoes my waking nightmares of the noise of my daughter’s death. He works faster and faster, imitating the precision, the deliberation of the gunman. You there, you lovely delphinium. And you, cowering beneath the overspreading branches of that rock rose. Whack. The violence makes the hair on the back of my neck stand on end. Was that what it was like for Caro in her bed? Safely warm, did she hear the gunman coming, time stretching to encompass the devastation, or was it mere seconds, a breath, only, from when she feared to when she knew? You worry too much, Mom, she used to say when she left for her high school weekend nights. I’ll be fine. Nothing is going to happen to me.

Ben comes toward me along the path between the slain stalks, his shoes découpaged with crushed poppy petals. He kneels beside me and pulls a gun from his waistband. The barrel is long, made of a dark metal that I cannot identify.

“Every fucking day,” he says, “I look at this damn thing, and at night I put it back in the case.”

We make love in a disconnected, desperate fumble: clothes ripping, shoes flinging. There is nothing safe about this; it is dangerous a hundred different ways. If Matt finds out, if I, in a fit of despair, pick up that gun and kill Ben out of my need to obliterate myself, we will not really have accomplished the narcosis I am after.

I stumble to my feet.

She’s not coming back,” he says.

Whether he is speaking of his wife or Caro makes no difference.

***

At home, I find Matt in Caro’s room, clutching her little jaguar, asleep on one of the twin beds that once had seemed the beginning of everything. His sleeping form echoes the shape of Caro’s when I would wake and find her passed out on her purple comforter, her yellow sheets peeking out untidily from underneath. A scotch glass perspires on the bedside table, the ice melted, forming a clear layer above the amber liquor. The windows are open to the garden; the summer evening is quiet except for the hysterical trill of a thrush in the dogwood. I hear Phillip’s car pull into his driveway, the sharp crack of his door slamming shut. I imagine him rushing into his empty house, calling, Mom, Mom.

Asleep, devoid of animation or defense, Matt looks like the child Caro once was. She was just beginning, I think, just getting to that stage when the caverns of risk that exist in all adolescent minds—the emptiness that terrifies them and causes them to leap into voids believing they can survive anything—fill in and heal over. I nudge Matt’s shoulder and he wakes slowly. Small, red veins spider out from his dark pupils.

“Tell me. Were we good to her? Was she happy?” I ask.

Matt says, “Of course we were good to her. Caro was difficult. I was difficult. We are all difficult.”

I search his eyes, which are undisturbed by doubt. I want him to read my mind, follow both the spoken and the unspoken, as my daughter had once raged that I couldn’t. I’d been yelling at her once about why couldn’t she just clean her room, did it need to be a pigsty, and she had sunk to the floor and said, But it’s never about the room!

Matt rises to his elbow and says, “Do you remember that time when Caro was three, and she ran into the street in front of a car? God, she ran like a flash, and that car coming? I thought she was going to die.”

A vague memory of my back being turned and Matt crying out comes over me.

“I spanked her. God, how she cried. And the way she looked at me? All I wanted was for her to be safe.”

“Have you been having an affair?” I ask.

Matt’s hips are touching mine. It is as close as we have been since we hovered over Caro in the morgue. “I ended it the day that Caro died.”

“That nurse?”

He nods.

We needed Caro’s future, Matt and I. We needed that Thanksgiving dinner when she returned home with her husband and children, her life an improved semblance of ours. Matt and I would eye one another over the turkey and think with relief that we hadn’t screwed up. She was okay. All those nights we’d worried, and Look now. We would tuck Caro’s twins into these beds, and watch them sleep because we understood just how difficult it is to be a parent.

Matt makes room for me on the bed and I hold him the way I used to snuggle Caro next to me, all her rebellion before her, her ringlets tickling my chin as we whispered, Good night, moon. Good night, cow jumping over the moon, her jaguar tucked in her arms. If I could just go backwards, I could avoid the pitfalls. I could say, I love you to every bitter word she flung my way.

Matt begins to weep.

“Once upon a time,” I begin, “There was a little girl with beautiful curls who didn’t get to grow up.”

It is our bedtime story, the one I will repeat until we know every word by heart. I will never conjure a false ending, the one in which everything turns out fine. Caro is never coming back, and I will worry about her forever, though it will do none of us any good.

***

A month later, I drive to North Bend. I have not been back since that afternoon, and the bar is shuttered. A hand-lettered note on the door says that Ben has gone to Alabama to look for his wife. In the garden, in preparation for her possible return, the clippings have been swept away. What grows now is stark, but beautiful, a bud here, a blossom there, baby soft leaves, winding tendrils, everything new.

Robin Oliveira holds an MFA in Writing from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She is the fiction editor of upstreet, a literary magazine, and the winner of the 2007 James Jones First Novel Fellowship for her novel, My Name is Mary Sutter, which is forthcoming from Viking in June, 2010. An excerpt from that novel, previously entitled The Last Beautiful Day, was published in the 2008 Provincetown Arts.

When the detective with the crooked jaw and prom king blue eyes says this to me, I want to punch him in the throat.  Apparently, he lacks an appreciation for metaphor because what I said was “it was like a symphony of orange and white, dancing, mocking us as we watched our life disappear into little black specks of nothingness.”  I know, it was a bit elaborate, but I couldn’t help myself.  What it was; was a fire.  One that I started, but he doesn’t know that.  He doesn’t ask his arrogant questions because he suspects anything.  I am flawless and practiced.  He asks his questions because he is simple.  But I still want to punch him in the throat.  Instead I look at him, calm and confused.

One important thing to remember, after you incinerate your home for insurance money, or murder your adulterous wife or maim your abusive husband: don’t act upset.  Act confused.  The detective that is questioning you, the one that looks like a depressed version of Johnny-football-hero from your high school or a clean cut version of Jimmy-always-high from college, learns everything he knows from watching television and movies.  So if you act like a guilty actor, laying it on thick with snot and mascara running down your face, phlegm crackling in your throat, coughing out a screaming accusation toward the God that is sending you straight to hell, he will know you are guilty.  And if you feel the icy fist of guilt squeezing your throat and punching your bowels, then confess, because you have done something wrong and you probably deserve to pay for it.  But, in my case, I’ve done nothing wrong.  I’ve only incinerated my house.

This is because I am an arsonist.

It’s not a metaphor.  It’s not a philosophy or a way of life or a path to some sort of Nietzschean ‘destroy everything’ enlightenment.  It’s just me and I just am.  Analyze me if you feel the need, but your backyard psychology would be put to better use in your own life.  So, if you are looking for an easy story, go away and read ‘Tuesdays With Morey.’  I hear it’s delightful.  If you are looking for enlightenment, go meditate under a tree or eat some LSD.  This isn’t the trip you are seeking.  If you are killing time between phone calls and two-dollar coffees, you should start to seriously consider suicide.  If you are looking for reality, lets continue through this together.  I will be your guide.

I’ve successfully set sixty-four structure fires.  Today was my last.  And yes, you guessed right, I’m going to tell you about the first.  You know the drill, so let’s jump back about thirty years.

Once upon a time there was a stupid little boy with stupid fat little fingers and a stupid fat drooling mouth.  During the bright cancer-causing sunny days of summer, he chased beautifully colored infection carrying butterflies and fluffy feral cats, pulling off their wings and yanking on their tails. And of course, this stupid little boy was stupid little me.

I stumbled around, barely able to talk without drool oozing out of the left side of my mouth.  A stupid little chubby legged kid, I picked up shiny dirty things and popped them in my mouth until my mother smacked me.  She only smacked me when the object was small enough to swallow or obviously lethal.  She only looked at me when she smacked me.  So I spent most of my time sifting through garbage and knick-knacks finding items big enough to choke on or strange enough to kill me.  I became quite skilled at it despite my mental handicaps.  A marble will pass right through you, whereas the cracked lens from a pair of big fashion sunglasses can roadblock your esophagus and scar your throat in a matter of seconds.  And nail polish remover, well, you’ll have to experience that for yourself.

And my father, he never looked at me, and I never looked at him.  I never had the opportunity, so I can only assume my mother was some sort of whore.  This is why I exist.  I take no offense.  Everything comes from somewhere.  The best coffee is dug from the fecal matter of a strange tree marmot (it’s called an Asian Palm Civet; look it up if you don’t believe me).

So it’s not surprising when this stupid little version of me with his stupid little lazy eye wandering around a cluttered garage, picking up dried up cockroaches and silverfish remnants and putting them in his slobbery disgusting mouth, stumbled upon a red box of matches.  It was a cardboard box about as long as one of my ugly little stubby fingers.  The box was painted with unknown words (stupid little me couldn’t read a word with my lazy stupid eye) and a golden bicycle.

I put it in my mouth and sucked on it, cleaning off the chips of lead paint and dried moth wings with my tongue, but my mother didn’t smack me.  That’s because she was inside with my grandmother crying about something.  Probably crying about being a whore.  So I spit out the now soggy box and my retarded little brain managed click on and realize there was something inside the little red box.   My fat fingers slid the box open to reveal blue-tipped matches.  I ate one, which I advise against.   Unless you’ve mastered the nail polish remover—if so, enjoy the ride.  With no smack my little idiot brain shockingly began to churn out ideas and thoughts.  After much trial and error, and swallowing only three more matches, one was not in my mouth, but rather in my hand; aflame.  And like the first man to reach his hand into the dung of a tree cat and bravely ingest his findings, this is how it began.

Mouth wide open, gawking at the flame like a little moron who has never seen fire before, I dropped the match.  Mouth still open and drool oozing toward the ground, I watched the match as the once lively flame slowly diminished into a tiny blackened tip and a beautifully curved arc of off-white smoke.  My stubby little sausage fingers pulled out another match and struck it.  I dropped it again and watched.  Again, mouth open, drool running, as if I had the memory of a goldfish and had never seen a lit match before.    After wiping the snot from my nose I lit another.  Then another, and another.  Tossing them all on the floor, watching them burn.  Finally, it was more than the dry clutter could handle.  I remember a rush of air pushing on my back and sweeping through my hair.  Then, born from old magazines and dead bugs and an unhealthy layer of dust, an enormous jagged wall of flame climbed the side of the garage like some medieval beast.

Because I was a stupid little moron, I stepped toward the flames, bathing in the heat and smoke that was quickly turning from a brown gray to a fuzzy black.  I inhaled deeply, coughing.  Soon my eyes were tearing from the heat and my face was tanning from the collected soot as I was surrounded by the blaze.  A halo of fire, the flames danced around me swaying in unison.  I stood admiring, mesmerized.  There was no exit, just continuous drooling and crying and coughing up bits of cockroach shell.

I never heard my crying whore mother enter the garage.  I never heard her scream in surprise or fear.  I never heard her yell my name or call for help.  All I heard was the sizzle and pop as the flames ate her hair while she punched through the wall of fire.  Grabbing me roughly, flames hopped from her head to her shirt, finally licking her leg until she was covered in hot yellow.

Dragging me far from the blaze, she rolled me on the ground, putting out my non-existent fires before she rolled herself on the ground, extinguishing what must have been an excruciating burn.  We both lay in the dirty insect-infested grass.  Ants crawled up my leg as she patted my head softly.

She was never the same after that, scarred on her arms and face.  Her hair never fully returned and she never cried again.  I never put anything in my mouth and she never smacked me.  She looked at me every day.  She looked in my eyes and stroked my hair until I fell asleep.  She took me for walks and played catch with me and fed me Popsicles when I stubbed my toe.  She was too ugly to be a whore anymore.

That was my first burn.  It was many years before my next.  It was many years before I realized what really happened.  The burns became more controlled and more purposeful.

That was my first, and this one was my last.

Sixty-four successful structures fires.  Approximately eleven humans born from their useless self-indulgent, self-pitied, privileged existence.  Don’t snicker, you are one of them.  You haven’t been born yet.  You have yet to be pulled you from the waste of a common animal.

Because I’m smarter than you, I know that there are six locations inside every standing structure; that if ignited, can create an unstoppable blaze.  This is not meant to be an insult, just the truth.  I don’t know you, but by the law of averages, if you are reading this, my academic résumé has more than likely far surpassed what you will ever accomplish.  I won’t tell you where the six locations are because you would only hurt yourself.

So along with that statistic, here is another item you can share the next time you are pretending to care what your colleagues are discussing at work:  one out of six people still have enough human left in them to face death in order to pull someone from a deadly unstoppable blaze.  Enough human because that is what you are supposed to do.  You are a human when you are born and everyday it slowly slips away from you.  Until you become a number, or a tax dollar or a debt ratio or a rapist.

The reality is we exist to continue existence; to keep things alive.  That’s all, nothing else.  Sorry to disappoint you, but there is no grandiose plan, no epic journey, nothing special.  Don’t feel bad if you didn’t know that.  Not many do, and only one in six figure it out when given the opportunity.  You probably wouldn’t, so go complain about your paycheck at the nearest chemo center.

So when the blaze peaks and the thick black smoke floats toward heaven and John Q. Paycheck bursts into the towering inferno without rationally analyzing his options, he comes back out a human.  Caked in dust and soot and barely breathing through the hot fog, carrying a child or an old woman or a useless accountant, he is born again.  Rising from the flames and ashes of all of our daily mistakes.  He is clean.

The first thing they usually do is phone their wife or girlfriend, hysterically professing their love and commitment in fits of oozing tears and snot choked laughter.  Next they call their mother, to apologize for not calling enough and not caring enough.  This is the first time those mothers hear ‘I love you’ from their son in over twenty-five years.  Then they cheer for their kids at soccer games, visit their grandmothers on random Saturdays, teach their sons how to build a fort out of sticks and newspaper, drink fake tea and hold one-sided conversations with their daughter’s stuffed zebra.  And sometimes they quit their jobs and do what makes them happy.  But not often.

So where do you want to go from here?  I could go through all the previous sixty-three fires in detail, but they are all the same.  Sometimes people died.  Sometimes they didn’t.  Those who didn’t are cut from a different stone now, if you don’t mind the bad cliché.  They are not heroes among men; they are humans among junk and numbers.  They are the clean full flavored coffee beans, far removed from the dung.

So when my baby boy was born and opened his tragic green eyes for the first time, I knew I had to do it.  I wanted to wait until he was four, but when my wife cried because she got a diaper genie instead of Gucci purse for Christmas, I had no choice.

Approximately three hours ago I looked at the skin pulled tight around her face and watched her sunken eyes twitch under her veiny purple lids as she slept roughly under the influence of colorful factory stamped pills.  She was skull and stretch marks and fabric.  Hollow.

I looked into the crib.  I didn’t know him yet, at least not in any describable way.  He was just a sack of skin that I didn’t quite understand.  At that moment, I knew he would be a martyr or a genius, but not a number or a ratio.  So just to be sure, tonight I ignited three out of the six places.  There was no room for error.

So when the detective with the football player jaw widens his eyes sarcastically and asks me to repeat myself because he doesn’t understand my metaphor, I want to punch him in the throat.  He doesn’t get it.  He sips his two-dollar coffee.  Two minutes before he started questioning me, he was bragging to a fat greasy fireman about his new bass boat.  He will never be human.  He thinks he is a hero.  He thinks if he catches the man with the snaggle tooth and jagged scar he is living out his epic grandiose plan.  He thinks this gives him the right to find a shiny new wife and a shiny new boat.  He thinks it makes it okay to forget his son’s soccer game because he is shopping for that new boat, shaking hands with the owner of the boat shop describing his super heroic hero-ness.

So after acting confused and innocent and not punching detective hero in the throat, I take the time to gaze across the charred remains of my lawn at my wife.  Wrapped in a gray blanket, she holds my son tightly.  His fat little dumb fingers pull at his mother’s hair.  She kisses him lightly on the cheek.  He gurgles disgustingly and drool runs down his chubby little chin.

A nervous EMT with a menopause haircut tries to tend to the ugly white puss filled burn wound on my wife’s once beautifully tan neck.  She pushes the frustrated EMT away, too concerned about my son’s dopey little soot covered face to care about her new atrocious disfigurement.  She rocks him back and forth as his dumb little eyes close calmly while he sighs.

Relieved, I lie down in the soot and look up toward the night sky, admiring the dancing pinpoints of light winking at me.  I smile because life continues, even through the mess.

This is where I brought you, and there is no easy moral here.  The story doesn’t end in a box with a bow.  It is just reality.  And what it is; is fire.  And what it is like is the blinding white-hot face of god.

James Henschen is the author of the award winning short film “Looking in the Fishbowl” as well as a film adaptation of the short story “The Monkey’s Paw” which screened in film festivals throughout the country.  His work has appeared in literary journals such as Whiskey Island Review, Glassfire Magazine and Eleven-Eleven magazine.  James currently resides in Orlando, FL.