Email your images to euphonyjournal@gmail.com by April 30th. We welcome multiple submissions.

• As you may have noticed, we’ve changed our web page design again. Hopefully, it’ll provide a better reading experience. (Of course, let us know if it doesn’t. We like hearing your opinons!)
• It’s almost here! On February 28th, check our homepage for our brand new winter issue! For those of you around UChicago, print issues will be forthcoming. (In the mean time, pick up a copy of last year’s issue to tide you over and revisit your old favorites!)
• Our winner of our cover contest is Alice Jo! Congratulations! We’re really excited about our cover. (Come see for yourself on February 28th!)

Until Thursday!
- The Editors

Send your images to euphonyjournal@gmail.com by Friday, February 1. You are welcome to submit multiple entries, and the selected submission will appear as the cover of our next issue. As always, we look forward to reviewing your work!

Cheers,
The Editors

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*

Understand this is no random anxiety yanked from my quivering panic glands. Last week, huffing home from Thriftway, pedaling strong with both panniers grocery-stuffed, I’m on a mean, rain-slick climb when two haggard losers, cirrhosis-eyed and leering from a jacked-up Camino, swerve in beside me. Flicking cigarettes at my helmet, they howl, “This is a road, queerboy hippy! Buy a fuckin’ car!” and throttle over the crest of the rise.

Entirely mud-coated, the jalopy was, so a plate number was out. Though this didn’t deter me from spending the next hour fuming, biking all over Olympia’s East Side, hunting the chodes and picturing what I’d do, what I’d say. My seat-post popped out, flipped over for stabbing, for bruising their white-trash kidneys. Or maybe ratchet-off my bike chain? Start swinging it mace-style? Then, once I’ve got Beavis and Buttfuck flat-grounded, I’ll stand between them, a cleat pinching both filthy Adam’s apples, and say. “How about we clarify your critical thinking skills, boys? Why queerboy hippy? Why purchase a car? Do you fellows have a car? Or is the El Camino a truck? Golly, I just can’t seem untangle the complexities of your energy-drink enthymemes.”

*

Fantasy rhetoric, theoretical bravery, sure, but it kept me clenched, riding street-after-foggy-and-puddled-street. And thank heaven I came up empty-handed. Luckily my legs gave out, my fingers cramped. I was forced me to abandon my crusade with I still seven rolling miles between me and home. Out of the suburbs, through the blueberry bogs, into the country. When I finally rattle into our gravel drive, I’m cashed. Top it off, I dismount to find one of my bike bags is oozing sour pink. Seems the bottom’s blood-flooded, my ground turkey completely thawed. Am I pissed? Sure, but still I tell myself—senses collected, adrenaline lost to my sweat-soaked gear—I’m fortunate. Fortunate because had I actually found those morons there’s no doubt they would’ve steel-toe-booted me into the quickest coma.

*

Anyway, we ate the thawed gobbler goop and passed out to wind-spit rain on the windows.

Yes, a full two weeks ago, all that tweaker nonsense was. Really though it seems an entire season. Because, I’m telling you today’s a whole new world. Disney-fresh and crisp as all-get-out. It’s our inaugural scorcher weekend of the year: in a snap, winter’s been blown out in a puff of Pacific blue. Late May. The days are protracting, and the wife and I are just buttery abuzz about it. We’re climbing into shorts, dusting off the shades. Next thing I know, I’m digging out two, lengthy coils of speaker-wire and jerking my vintage, SB-A33 Technics—those bad boys towers of my college days, 260 watts apiece—through the living room windows, into the front yard.

Of course we’ve got Pandora on the iPhones, but in the spirit of greater things, Kyoko unearths a case of scratched CDs and gets Mr. Hearts & Bones himself bellowing off the clicking player: If you took all the girls I knew when I was single, and brought them all together for one night…

*

And my dream of a wife doesn’t stop with just that. Gets our kitchen chairs by the nape, drags the suckers out into these vivid frays of sun. Soon we’re sitting gangster, sprawled, because there’s not a hint of wind, zilch arctic chill. Just luscious, I’m saying. So much goodness here and hell do we deserve it. Sixty-eight days of rain in the last blustering go, a sky so sunk-wet that you’re trudging the eternal, you’re sleeping in clouds, their weight in your lungs, choking all optimism.

But then, overnight, ten thousand dandelions scream forth from the dark-loamed lawn. A field of gold medallions, and they’ve called out the sun, got that bastard to ante up. When he finally did the apple trees around our sagging farmhouse detonated a pink-white against the crispest green. It’s a fete of pastel fireworks, lust painted stiff in the afternoon air and colors even brighter than this epic day.

So here I am, and I’m thinking, Christ, steel-toed-coma’s right. Where would we be if my macho fantasy fulfilled itself? Not sipping chardonnay straight off the green glass teet…

*

I didn’t finish with the true metaphor of my redneck vignette: see, it’s not about meth-heads and their Caminos, but about how dark-lining creeps into its own stuffing. It’s about how a powerful imagination such as my own consumes its own necessary reality. Ironically, my primary anxiety is how my anxiety is worsening with age. And worse than that, how I can’t stop it. No, not without anxiousness itself being the impetus to stop it. Hell of a pickle. Guess it’s the Croat in me, my mother’s Balkan bloodline—the sky’s always falling, a southern Slav jumpiness over yet another Ottoman, Venetian, or Nazi force marching in to backflip your entire paradigm. And then there’s my Evangelical childhood of an indeterminate Jesus thieving my nights. The hippy-lamb gone all Rapturous Lion of Judah.

*

Good thing Kyoko’s patient and kind, always texting me immediately when she gets to Eggs & Oysters, letting me know when she loading up to leave. Still, after the incident, even though it was me it happened to, I offered to buy the wife a gun. She wasn’t down with this, demanding who I thought I was, what had I done with her husband. Jesus, who I thought she was.

I went back to the drawing board, pitched her a tazer. Told her how, online, I’d found a miniature stun gun called “The Eel”—size of a flashlight, but 950,000 watts of hick-twitching vigor.

“Genius,” she said, “so I shock myself cold, piss my chamois, make it easier for those hillbilly Bundys to haul me off? Huh? That your rationale?”

*

Front yard. Canted opposite, blissed, gulping that cheap white. The delicate movement of her flushed throat, her glistening lips. Now my precious paragon hands it round for yours truly. Soon we’ve got delicious rhythm, taking turns slurping and lurching to our feet so we can half-ass chuck sticks for the dogs.

I’m shirtless, and my wife’s in that red bikini top. She’ in those too-short cut-offs. Oh sweet imagination. Here’s Kyoko, but not Kyoko. Like, Hallelujah, who is this divinity? Who is this half-stranger behind silvered sunglasses? Just ten minutes of sun and before my very eyes she’s gone shimmery. A sweat-sheen that’s driving me some kind of pagan horny. Such a promulgation of flesh and I want nothing more than to swallow the slightest shiver of her movements. Yes, we’re both glacially pallid, but my queen will be turning fast brown with that spicy Okinawa blood. I can hear the melanin percolating her surfaces and in my mind it’s already there. I’m already steam-wrapped in her smoky sesame scent, lapping it up, everything forgotten, the past seven months of fog, doubt, all those fucking Lazarus concerns.

*

The dogs tire in the heat, collapse-panting into our waxy laurel hedge. Follow suit, I do. Sprawl the lush sod staring up at fast, sterile clouds scrawling my too-blue vision. And what have we here? Kyoko’s looming over me. It’s some Kate-Beckinsale-Underworld stance. The vim of her biking thighs and that rich shadow along the lips of her shorts. Suddenly, I’m swearing we’ll never have babies. Right now, misogyny be damned, I’m swearing I’ll never ruin the curves of her hips with gluttonous offspring, and amidst this very thought she lowers. Knees in my pits. Ass on my rapidly un-evening lap. Hands loving zookeepers nursing me back to mother summer, patiently feeding me cold slugs of wine, dribbles over my cheeks, sticky in my whiskers so she can lean over, lap it up.

And on and on.

*

Until we’re seated in the chairs again, whole CD on repeat. Somehow a platter of brie and meaty Kalamatas has corporealized between us. Somehow we’re making the most beautiful sentences for each other. Words so easy, so unhibernated. And her smile! A relic of last summer. Like she hasn’t had since she arrived Stateside on the cusp of last fall. I can’t keep my eyes off that mouth. This isn’t the burning animal in me, but the believing dream. In her easy grin I see Kyoko back in Tottori prefecture, biking Yonago’s thin side-streets or huffing up Mount Diasen’s sea-sprung spine, her pack lumpy with Lawson onigiri. Because it will happen. A straight-up fact. In two weeks we return to Japan, grab the remainder of her belongings out of storage, bringing them here, home.

*

Though Japan isn’t some straight business mission. Jesus no. We’re going to soak in her past, remind her who she still is. The plane tickets I bought as a surprise, three weeks ago. Left them on the kitchen table then hopped in the shower all ears for her to find them. Of course when she did she starts crying. So me, I just stroll out in my towel, totally straight-faced, going, “Hey, what’s the goddamn conniption?”

I better stop with that part of the story. Better, before physical logistics of the kinky kind disrupt my linear abilities. Suffice to say, maneuvers got dangerous, swollen, damp. In the kitchen, in the hallway, now rug-burning figure eights in the bedroom floor. Dangerous, as in I couldn’t lift my eyelids. Just sprawled there absorbing the cadence of rain on pane, Kyoko nuzzling my neck so holy. That’s how it felt. As if I’d crossed over into supreme godhood, all human frailty drained in warm pulse draws.

*

Except the rain had continued and continued. Pillaged our heat, forced us onto the bed, under the sheets, the heavy blankets. This point my heroic cloud slipped into sheepishness. Because truth-be-told I’d bought the trip out of dread, never generosity. Out of the idea I was losing the woman and that if I didn’t get her back to Japan, even for a mere ten days, there’d be fuck-all left for me.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m floored to jet back across the Pacific, to Honshu-it gangbusters—binging fried octopus balls, downing pints of Ebisu Dark at Jun’s Chicken, hitting the karaoke booths until six am. And let’s not forget our good faith charge of ensuring a nostalgia-fling in the Doma Doma bathroom—tennis skirt folded back, panties yanked aside, breathing sighs of hot sake while outside the frail door a line of teenage drinkers giggle and giggle—

*

“What?” Kyoko says. “Why’re you smiling? Why’re you crying?”

Her toes. Her toes under the table. Her toes petting mine and grass applauding all around. I’m back in my spring skin once again, back from daydream land. UV’s to the cheekbones, wine to the veins. She takes off her shades, stands, steps over, folds into my lap. My chair groans. Her arms around my neck, she whispers that we’re fine, whispers into the bake of my ever-silvering hair—

But irony be damned our Shangri-La’s shattered. The approaching whine of a sportbike, another Red Bull cockhole on his crotch-rocket screaming our road at an easy hundred-plus. He blows past our house, drowns everything out. This mayhem’s been happening nearly every day for the past week and a half, increasing in direct proportion to the slow-tapering rain. Because we live six miles outside of town. We’re on a chunk of rural peninsula, our rental along a two-mile stretch of country road running straight out to the end of Levaster Point. Asphalt’s virgin here, doesn’t so much as hiccup right or left from Hank’s memorial cross to the bend right before Levaster Park. What this means is that by the time these gas-phallic fuckers gun it at the cross, a hundred yards later they’re at top speed in front of our property.

*

No, no, no, no. Hear me out, I beg you. No way am I that curmudgeony. Not yet. Not at all. So I’d be worse than a liar to assert that part of me can’t grasp why they do it—because they don’t do it. It’s something older fanging up into the ever-leaking and drying meat of youth. Something primal teased from man’s muddled core, called forth to race the sun. Not its heat, understand, but its ticking countdown in that furry lobe of your brain where space and time collapse into coveting and before you know it you’re clenching every muscle in a swan-dive for the ineffable.

Still, I loathe the chodes. Hate how my sounds, Kyoko’s sounds, all the good sounds—dogs panting, blackbirds trilling, silent waves of blue sky crashing against towering firs, hell, even the yelps from those paunchy brats across the street, sugar-blitzed on their trampoline—I hate how these things are instantaneously overwhelmed, flattened under the shriek and echo of RPM’s.

Anyway, that’s one thing, the noise. But another, or the most viable grievance, is safety. We’ve got dogs out here. All of us. Dogs and cats and horses and llamas, and a handful of endangered teens, the sort who still, by God’s untechnologized grace, toss Frisbees or baseballs, still wander around in an emo-haze with scratched notebooks and fiery pens, teens not yet addicted to Final Fantasy or Grand Theft Automaton-maker.

*

Kyoko’s whole body jerks, stiffens. She pops off my laps, face falling, now tightening. Hurrying around our detached garage, she tries to catch a glimpse of the douche, but he’s dematerialized. Just the sick whine of his engine hanging in the air like a steel fart. So back she marches, shaking her head. She grabs the second bottle, drains a good two inches. “Goddamn it all,” she growls, and narrows her eyes at me. I try to shrug, wanting to keep things bright, floating above. I focus on how the sun’s already releasing the Irish in her Crackerjap freckles, grin at her luscious tits, jog my eyebrows to let her know what’s in store when the third bottle’s tapped—but none of these insinuations work.

What to do but stand, reach for her shoulders, intend to pull her into a hug except she spins away. Staring at the road, she hisses, “Nan-dayo omae-wa? Do it. I dare you. Come on back, you selfish shitfuck.”

“Look,” I say, and I’m crossing my arms, “look, don’t tell me, I’m just as pissed. God, I’ve got this daydream were one of those fuckers wipes out and comes tumbling into our yard, his bike on fire, the bastard writhing around in our grass with compound fractures poking our everywhere, and he’s face-down, and there’s me mowing the yard, just ignoring him, mowing around him blowing mulch in his bleeding mouth.”

Kyoko says nothing. I say, “Guess I’d have to pull off his helmet first though….” But she’s not listening. She flips over the wine bottle, gets it by the neck in her white fist, strides past the garage.

*

Good noises—kids, dogs, yes, but then there’s our final gripe: real bikes. Bicycles. Early evening, torrential wind or rain, nothing stops Kyoko from her pedaling. She got me into road-biking, too, last fall when she moved here. Or actually, it was in January, for my birthday. That was it. See, I’d sworn all I ever needed was my mountain bike, but she found a refurbished Bianchi that fits me perfectly and now I’m in the best shape of my life. That’s precisely why these warp-speed Ducatis fully gut my goat—it’s the larger tenor. Sure, a postulant Vin Diesel in his 426 Hemi does as well, but somehow wheelie-squids are the basest of the base. It’s the notion of biking with filched power and unearned speed, like the world’s just a keyboard or game controller, all synapsis and hands, and damn the rest of the body.

Post-humanism, forced ignorance. Now Kyoko, should she hear a motorcycle yearning for terminal-v, well the first thing out of her mouth is, “Just once! Just once, Impo, I’d like to see you climb on a real bike and I’ll burn your Gold’s Gym ass up Courthouse Hill.”

*

Ah, my bitter paradox, right there—how it turns me forever on when she growls such challenges. I’m practically mass-mailing thank you cards to Ducati, Yamaha, Kawasaki. My wife, she’s so small, five-feet even, but the woman can climb like nobody’s business. It’s not fast; it’s steadfast. Me, I fry out on big hills, standing on my pedals, but not Kyoko. I’ll reach the top first, undoubtedly, but then I’m squandered. Dismounting, eyes dizzy, I’m gripping my ribs as here comes the tortoise to my hare, smiling, gliding right by me chirping, “Oyasuminasai!”

It’s not so much my own premature exhaustuation, but that some streamlined Zen occurs when my wife clips-in. She becomes more herself, more realized. All timidity, self-consciousness, and ex-ex-pat confusion vanish into smooth pace. Not that Kyoko’s timid or self-conscious, but the transition back to the States was more than bumpy. Six years she’d lived in Japan, running an English school, making amazing yen, feeling respected, whipping up a difference in her community, etc., etc., but then she moves back here, to Washington, to be with me, and all she can land is a thirty-hour serving gig at a moldy, port diner.

OK, we live outside a hip-enough burg, but it’s surrounded by dank hollows. Yahoos spill out of the fecund underbrush to refill their cholesterol batteries and tip worth shit. Or the trust-funded, neo-yippies waltzing into Eggs & Oysters to leave piles of salt-grain art and poems taped to pennies. Then come the worst of the military ball-sackers. Don’t get me started. These aren’t the real soldiers with an appreciation for the blurred binaries of the world; these are new guys, barely blue-heads. Never seen the enemy, seen combat, passed basic training but still think they’re a goddamn commercial, an Army of One. Off-base they come streaming, down from Tacoma, always happening through our little city to quip and grope, desperate for some kind of proof that there’s no need to ask about what they haven’t told.

*

Question: do I fear that Eggs & Oysters will send Kyoko’d reneging our matrimony, hightailing it back to the shores of Lake Nakaumi? No, not that, though what I have been seeing in her eyes, hearing in her pensive sentences, is much worse; the truth that the sacrifice is gradually poisoning her. A moss clogging our libidos. Because we’ve barely frogged in the past two months, really just the plane-ticket surprise, but what’re our options? Move to Japan? Two grand it costs—or more—to fly each dog across the Pacific. On top of that, my bootlicking position at the paper finally has me half-way molded into a salaried editorship. No way I can sever these things, not yet, not now…

*

At our country road’s weedy shoulder, my wife cocks her head, listens, waits. I follow her, stop right beside. As evenly as I can, I say, “They always turn around and zip back. We’ll hear him. We can try to get his plate number, a description.”

“That’s not what I want.”

There’s another minute listening. Nothing. With a snort, Kyoko stomps back to the house and then our music’s gone, off.

*

…not to mention it was doubly hard for both of us coming off the high of her first month here. How we went all Bruce-Springsteen-style. Racing to the courthouse on our bikes, stumbling in with Black Butte Porter grins and no one else knowing about the pact but a couple of witnesses I wrangled from the part-time staff at my office.

Anyway, in the rush to relocate, she left most of her stuff over in Yonago, still in her old closet at her old school. That’s our Dumbo feather, at least for now—clutching in our trunks a plumy hope everything will be different once she’s gathered the remains of her context, once she’s reminded again of who she is, how Japan was but a chapter and not her whole book.

See, Kyoko grew up in Seattle, in these perfect northwest summers, just like today. No humidity, brilliant blue, verdant green trees and clear skies from the 4 a.m. dawn to the 10 p.m. dusk, and this is what we’re both thinking, both absorbing, my wife tucked on my lap, nose in my hair, our cocoon of chardonnay and light and then shattered when this son of a bitch rips along.

*

Kyoko’s back, both of us side-by-side at the edge of the road, listening. My tongue’s gone sour. A needle headache’s weaseling into my right temple. Heat creeps off the asphalt, oppressive and nauseating. I look back at the house, see the dogs have moved to the shade of the porch, pressed against the door, panting, red-eyed.

Then we hear it. The tool u-turning to zoom back.

Cued, Kyoko, in those short-shorts and high-heeled flip-flops, re-adjusts her grip on the wine bottle. Before I can protest, she strides into the middle of the road, sets her legs firmly apart, the long, green glass weapon dangling casually against her left thigh. “Let’s do this,” she mutters.

I panic, spot a soft-ball-sized stone in the grassy gutter, scoop it up. Barefoot, road boiling my soles, I step out, too. My knees tremble. The bike’s whine is bearing down. A white glint in the distance and the dude’s a good football-field off when he must see us. Because for a second I hear him lay off the throttle. He’s analyzing, maybe.

But then he guns it again, full-hum, keeps coming. Sun-flares shoot off his small faring, his silver helmet, and his whole form wavers in layers of pavement heat. Forty yards off now. But he only slows down to twenty or so. And he’s swerving, he’s looking for gaps, looking because Kyoko and I have spread out, eight feet apart. She yells, “Get off your bike! I wanna talk!”

*

The stone feels too heavy in my hand. A life of its own, peaceful, complete, wanting no part of this. But I yell too, yell for the guy to stop, to dismount. I tell him to converse with us like a real man. That’s what I say; it sounds at once absurd and incredibly solemn. But it seems like he gets it, seems like he will. His boots come down off the pegs and he slows even more, inching forward and Kyoko says, “Good, good—we just want to talk.”

Ten feet away, idling, rolling, eight feet, seven. She makes a motion for him to take his helmet off, but then the hands twitch and this faceless man cranks his throttle. He leaps forward, not between us, but weaving to the left of Kyoko, a hair from toppling her. Severely off-balance, his back tire drops off the shoulder, spins out. It throws grass, dirt, rocks, but then finds purchase, heaves forward, carrying him away from us with a sucking whine and the hint of exhaust and new rubber.

*

Though fourteen days later and all’s forgotten. Seattle to Kansai. Our trip to Japan runs better than smoothly—unfiltered sake smothering my brain, I’ve got Kyoko in a tennis skirt, on the counter in Doma Doma’s bathroom, and then we’re working off our hangovers the next day at Jun’s chicken. After that, a hike up to the Ogamiyama Shrine, then three more nights of karaoke booths with her old buddies…

Well, better than smooth except for our very first night: nineteen hours of travel, then getting off that miserable Yonago train, that cacophonous beast jostling and shuttering, light blinking in and out, leaving us nauseous and wobbly as we checked into our hotel. We drag ourselves thirteen stories up, strip off our rank clothes, shower, and yank back the covers, and what do we find but three feral pubes glinting black on the white sheets. Two more hours it took to get our money back. And another to get set up in a different hotel. Both of us too angry to speak. But we slept in, saw her friends, and I … I … Ah hell—

*

This isn’t working. Look, there’s one more facet to this story. One more thing I better divulge no matter how heavy-handed it feels. Then again, it can’t feel nearly as apocryphal as trying to leave it out: my college roommate, dead.

Ten years ago, this was, and not long after we’d graduated. Happened on the second day both of us had our brand-spanking Ninja ZX600s. These were garish and uncomfortable machines, a bike Tadd had always wanted, so I was certain I wanted too. But I bought mine in black, not red like his, to keep myself convinced it was my choice.

Red or not, it didn’t stop my nerves going bunk. How just mounting the thing made my muscles drain most of their impetus, a gnawing fear the second I clicked into gear. You know those dreams where you’re making no progress? Trying to catch something that’s not moving, and you’re moving but still never closer? Or, better, that scene in Monty Python’s Holy Grail where Lancelot’s charging the castle gate and not getting any nearer, the guards watching, perplexed, unconcerned, because he’s always a hundred yards off and then, in a cut, he’s on top of them, slicing and dicing…

*

Funny because I had no business on that bike and Tadd absolutely did. He’d ridden his whole life and I think that’s why, that day, he kept me ahead of him. Ahead, but I thought he was right on my ass. Anyway, it was one of those long, curling off-ramps, off the freeway, that we were taking, and there this massive U-Haul doddering along in front of us. The truck’s straddling both lanes, so I pass it on the left, rocketing forward because it doesn’t seem the driver sees me. Then once I’m around in front I check my mirror to see the truck’s over, fully behind me, finally in the left lane, but, ignorantly, his left blinker’s still on…

What do I do but move back into the right lane. Do this to spot Tadd’s bright yellow helmet. Or try. Nothing. Slower, slower. I dropped my speed until here comes the U-Haul again, passing me, but its rear’s shooting sparks, making a horrid noise with no brake lights on, no laying off the gas, no clue they’re dragging an entire motorcycle.

*

Our faceless antagonist gone around the sudden bend. Our eyes with nowhere to look but right at Hank’s small memorial cross. Kyoko’s crying. It’s not hard, not sobbing, and not, I’m sure, only about what just happened. I watch her walk off, head for our recycle bin by the garage. Then I look away. A sharp clatter of glass, the closing lid. I rub my eyes. The hat’s still there, on Hank’s cross. And if I squint there’s a blue and yellow cluster of flowers on the ground. But I’m not really seeing it. Hot sweat leaks behind my ears. Dropping the rock from my hand, what I’m picturing is a bare skull in the coffin. They say hair grows after death, right, but for how long? A week, two?

Hank was the neighbor’s college-bound son, two houses down, who died only a month or two before we moved in last year, before we left the dingy duplex and decided this road, this property, was where we wanted to really start our life together.

Hank, and what do we know about Hank? Story goes the kid was in his Jeep backing out of his drive when he got t-boned by a woman in an SUV. Not just any woman, but his own kindergarten teacher. Supposedly, she was thirty over the speed limit, but some neighbors say she wasn’t. They say she was talking on the phone, but others say she was fiddling with her sun-roof. I don’t see how it matters now, the cause, the connection between the two. At some point all coincidence is reduced to cheap narrative, to easy punch lines.

*

Tadd, Hank, Hank, Tadd. This is a road, you queerboy hippy, so buy a fuckin’ car.

Last week, though, maybe on the anniversary, Kyoko pointed out that someone had hung a Mariners hat on the cross. I said, “Yeah, must be Hanks.”

She said, “Must have been.”

*

The stopping, the turning around, I don’t remember. The truck passed me, kept going. The sound faded and then there was no traffic. Me alone. On this empty freeway ramp and next my memories burp. I’ve got Tadd, still alive, for a few seconds, head on my lap. Under his gear his chest and hips are crushed but nothing’s leaking, not yet. And there’s no damage to his face. Looking up me, he’s gulping—but listen, me, I’m not sad, I’m giddy.

Giddy and I don’t know why, how. I’m some kind of ecstatic with the displacement, with this look on my friend’s face. Because this look, it’s complete bullshit. It’s a sort of cross-eyed sneer that we’re always giving each other, our jackass sneer. But here Tadd’s doing it without meaning to, like this is his most natural face, his essentialness, and the whole world’s some big, skewed gag he’s just delivered.

I remember my muscles were perfectly calm. Perfectly. Because of this look on his face. And I remember the only thought in my mind was this: Wow, well, shit, that’s over with.

*

I stop staring at Hank’s memorial. Strolling back to the porch, I’m thinking about Tadd. The dogs aren’t outside so I’m expecting to walk in through a dim kitchen and find our bedroom door shut, our day over too soon. In fact, it isn’t until my fist is on the doorknob that I realize the music’s back. Back and just lower volume.

Kyoko’s behind me. She’s in her chair again. I walked right passed her. She’s on the front lawn, sunglasses on, the third bottle of chardonnay clenched in her thighs. She wrestles the cork and I sit. We talk in low voices, and it works, this pacing ourselves back to where we were.

*

Then, somehow, it’s hours later. Coming on sundown. Barn swallows thread the glowing surface of our north field. They’re banking and gliding in underwater motions. Kyoko says, “Then you must have taken it off for him.”

“For him?”

“Of him.”

“I must have, yeah, because he was making that face. But, Jesus, I don’t remember taking his helmet off, not at all, and that’s always bothered me.”

Her sunglasses are up on her head. Eyes wavering between brown and green, she stares at me for a long moment. She says, “Bothered, huh.”  It’s not a question. She says, “The fallen sky can’t fall.”

“Tadd,” I say, “anymore I can’t picture him staring up at me any better than I can picture Hank.” And I’m staring her down as I speak. I want her to tell me that’s not goddamn true. How all my worries are justified by love, by genes, by history and childhood. How I’m getting older, more paced, more emotional, and these are good things, but she only says, “Wine’s gone. Sun’s gone. You’re really burned, Baby. Looks like someone gave you The Eel.”

This is the conclusion of Philip Larkin’s ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. In this poem, a disillusioned reader recounts how literature has let him down. Nowadays he prefers to get drunk. In three short stanzas, he describes a lifetime of searching and changing tastes and, in the process, deftly parodies various kinds of literature: action and adventure stories, pornography, and earnest realism. As Andrew Motion has observed, literature had offered a way “to fool the sexually insecure reader into thinking he was adventurous and successful [...] Now, jaded by failure in the real world, he can see in books only the reflection of his own incompetence”(299). The joke, it seems, is on the hapless reader.

This interpretation is reasonable enough, as far as it goes, but I would like to argue that one should look further and see the parodies in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ as something more than an invitation to chuckle at the “insights” of a bluff vulgarian. Indeed, if one considers this poem in light of other Larkin poems that employ parody, such as ‘Poetry of Departures’ and ‘I Remember, I Remember’, the joke appears to be part of a more sober undertaking: a questioning of the fundamental role of literature. And when one considers a late poem like ‘Aubade’ (his last major published work, whose speaker seems cut off from the consolations of art), the situation becomes all the more stark. Larkin’s rueful clowning gives way to a tone that is simply stricken. A serious loss has occurred. Parody, from this perspective, is not an escapist diversion, a form of “lightweight literature.” On the contrary, it is a vital mode because it interrogates assumptions of literary value, while simultaneously confirming the attractiveness of what is being mocked. Larkin was keenly aware of this paradox, and subtle at exploiting it.

Parody frequently targets individual works or poets—classroom chestnuts like Marlowe’s ‘The Passionate Shepherd to His Love’ and Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ have taught generations of young readers about parody and its purposes. Larkin’s method tends to be less direct. Before considering examples, though, I would like to make explicit some assumptions which accompany my readings, particularly in regard to parody and intertextuality.

Parody is a mode of literary allusion which goes further than intertexuality because it takes into account authorial intention. Robert Alter has explained this distinction as follows:

‘Intertextuality’ is a much more general concept, which occasionally may be warranted for that very reason, and the adjective ‘intertextual’ in certain contexts may be particularly useful. But this more abstract term finesses the crucial question of authorial intention: you can allude to a poem or a play but you can’t ‘intertextual’ it. Whereas allusion implies a writer’s active, purposeful use of antecedent texts, intertextuality is something that can be talked about when two or more texts are set side by side, and in recent critical practice such juxtaposition has often been the wilful or whimsical act of the critic, without regard to authorial intention (112).

Alter is speaking of many kinds of allusion here, not just parody, but the emphasis on authorial intention remains the same. Determining authorial intention, however, is a notoriously risky enterprise, prone to the same pitfalls, the “wilful or whimsical act of the critic,” that Alter disparages. It can lead to reductive readings of what the text is “about” and how it connects with the “real” world. Larkin’s work is no stranger to such debates, which at bottom are discussions not only about the work, but about how to read. For Tom Paulin, “Larkin’s snarl, his populism and his calculated philistinism all speak for Tebbit’s England” (175). For James Booth, such claims and the method behind them are fundamentally misplaced, because “beautiful, static, depersonalised lyrics are perversely returned to the parochial kinetics from which they have been so artfully disengaged—as though the critic’s duty were to uncover what Larkin’s poems would have been like had he not been a great poet” (196-97).

For my part, although I acknowledge that any description of authorial intention is always provisional and never more than informed speculation, I shall venture onto that territory, nonetheless, when reading parody. Since parody is writing about writing, a specifically literary “aboutness” of the text is made explicit. To recognize a text as parody is to concede, from the outset, a particular authorial intention. (What some might call “unconscious parody” is not really parody at all, but recognition that a work is derivative.) Parody is not necessarily the only intention or the most important facet of a poem, but when it exists, it stands as an open invitation for the reader to come over and have a look at how the author reads.

In Larkin’s case, he avoids specific dialogues with poems (à la Ralegh), in favor of a more general parody of literary sensibilities and manners of engaging the world. This approach is not surprising from a man who remarked, “Personally I am always sorry when poets desert their private agonies to rehash others’ literature,”(Further Requirements, 233). He handles his primary sources with tongs. Consider, for instance, the ersatz reminiscences of ‘I Remember, I Remember’:

Our garden, first:  where I did not invent
Blinding theologies of flowers and fruits,
And wasn’t spoken to by [...]
that splendid family
I never ran to when I got depressed,
The boys all biceps and the girls all chest

These observations and others in the poem parody D.H. Lawrence and Dylan Thomas (see Motion, 236) but there is no direct quotation or obvious textual reference, and certainly no explicit mention of either writer. Rather, there is a convincing “feel” here, a finely-tuned ear which focuses less on style than on tics of thought. It is a performance of another order than the poetic spoofs and tributes that find their way into anthologies; and its modes of allusion contrast considerably with the Modernist pyrotechnics of T.S. Eliot. The reader is invited to experience the connection otherwise. (One senses that for Larkin, there are few sins greater than name-dropping, which is true not only of his parodic poems but also of his entire corpus:  perhaps a reverse snobbery is at work.) Larkin’s less explicitly “literary” approach led critics to identify him with “The Movement”, and though this was always an oversimplification, it did try to address a signature difference. What emerges as most important, however, is a poet who is unapologetic and confident about the efficacy of his methods, particularly about the fact that he needn’t assert his seriousness so strenuously in order to accomplish something serious. Parody of his mentors is a natural vehicle to express this assurance.

What’s more, Thomas and Lawrence aren’t even the main targets of this poem. Larkin is writing more generally about how one reconstructs the past, and of the limits of nostalgia. ‘I Remember, I Remember’ extends the conversation beyond allusions to specific writers: it is a means to denaturalize habits of thinking. Although there is obviously no love lost between the poem’s speaker and Coventry (“where my childhood was unspent”), even this reference, in the end, is not decisive. Larkin’s assertive “Englishness” has been the object of much discussion but the factitiousness parodied here (which emerges as the poem’s main preoccupation) could have taken place in Hong Kong or Omaha. The concluding lines emphasize that “‘it’s not the place’s fault [...] // Nothing, like something, happens anywhere.’”

Just as ‘I Remember, I Remember’ parodies received ways of talking about the past, ‘Poetry of Departures’ addresses clichés of yearning and fantasies about the future. Again, the allusions are not to specific writers but to more general modes of speaking about desire—literally speaking, in many instances, since italicized lines like “He chucked up everything / And just cleared off ” or “Take that you bastard” are obviously oral and underline how deeply certain fundamental narratives have burrowed into everyday conversation. Other lines, though, are more self-consciously “writerly”:

But I’d go today,
Yes, swagger the nut-strewn roads,
Crouch in the fo’c'sle
Stubbly with goodness, if
It weren’t so artificial [...]

But in either case, whether oral or writerly, what is striking is the speaker’s ambivalence about what he parodies. For instance, after referring to tales of dramatic departures as “fifth-hand” and setting up an expectation that he is going to mock those who approve of such exploits, he admits, in the second stanza, his own hunger for the same clichés, even while recognizing their connection to his own complacency. Although they are “artificial” and untenable for this speaker, who sternly judges them as “reprehensibl[e]”, they are also, in their manner, “perfect”.  He cannot reject them completely because they answer to desires that he remains unable to address by other means. In ‘I Remember, I Remember’, the ambivalence was more restrained (the “nothing” which concludes the poem implicitly softens the parodies in earlier stanzas); in ‘Poetry of Departures’, the tension is explicit. The speaker longs for what he mocks.

A similar ambivalence is at work in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, and this is why the poem transcends mere jokiness. Here, an impersonal title instantly creates a distance between the implied author and the speaker, and makes broader claims. It announces, in effect, that the poem is not saying “This is how I read and feel” but rather “This is how people read and feel.” Almost 20 years after he first published the poem, Larkin believed that its assumptions had been confirmed:

I was wondering whether in the new Oxford Dictionary of Quotations I was going to be lumbered with ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ [...] If someone asked me what lines I am known for it would be the one about mum and dad or ‘Books are a load of crap’—sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo, as Dr Johnson said. (Required Writing, 48).

Despite this supposed appeal to “every bosom”, other devices in the poem add to the distance between the speaker’s words and the poem’s ostensible meaning. These include doggerel rhyme (‘school/cool; specs/sex; dude/stewed’), a ‘low’ register (‘dirty dogs/yellow/crap’ etc.) and farcical brutality (‘Me and my cloak and fangs [...] / The women I clubbed with sex! / I broke them up like meringues’). If this is how readers feel (or, more precisely, male readers), then the picture is unflattering, to say the least. The reader parodied here manages to be menacing and pathetic at the same time, before retiring into his own impotence.

Although Larkin is unsparing in this depiction—one also thinks of his published recollection ‘Single-handed and Untrained’, about his first library job in Wellington, where he had ample opportunity to observe such reading habits (Required Writing, 31-35)—there is also an implied sympathy for the frustrated speaker. And this amounts to more than commiserating with a lout. (Need it be said one more time that the misogyny expressed here should not be directly attributed to the author?) Although in Larkin’s personal correspondence there is no shortage of ugly or reactionary sentiments (confirmed, yet again, in the 2011 publication of Letters to Monica), for which I would attempt no excuse, one can also recognize, without special pleading, that Larkin the poet is more subtle, that he is adroit with masks and here, as in other poems, he is engaging in a kind of ventriloquism, in order to achieve a calculated effect. Of course the speaker’s observations are suspect, and the poem contains any number of hints on that matter: for instance, his indulgence of his reading habits has ruined his eyes. Yet, at the same time, the desire that reduced him to this condition is not necessarily contemptible: he speaks of “curing” himself of his mediocrity (or of the mediocrity of life itself?). Even if his remedies are poorly chosen and his escapism is naive, that does not invalidate his recognition of his need. In his groping way (at least before he gives up the enterprise and decides he might as well “get stewed”), he takes reading very seriously.

As does Larkin: the title of the poem, which does not come from the poem’s speaker, is itself a locus of parody. A study of reading habits? The impersonal nature of this title, its assertive sterility, is also a joke. For Larkin, reading was first and foremost a means of gratification.  Poetry needed “to be rescued from among our duties and restored to our pleasures” (Required Writing, 82). Though a highly accomplished reviewer and critic himself, he never disguised his belief that his professional output represented a lower form of reading, and remarked dryly, “[it] probably did me no harm” (Required Writing, 12). In his 1982 interview with the Paris Review, he could not contain his exasperation when asked what he learned from his “study” of Auden, Thomas, Yeats and Hardy, replying: “Oh, for Christ’s sake! One doesn’t study poets. You read them and think, That’s marvellous, how is it done, could I do it? and that’s how you learn” (Required Writing, 67).

Is this attitude, which is indifferent to the constraints of “professionalism” and which expresses a desire to emulate what he likes to read—is it really so different from the attitude of the speaker in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’? Granted, he’s not reading the same kind of literature, but there seems to be a similar thrill at the prospect of being able, poetically speaking, to “deal out the old right hook” and maybe even have “ripping times in the dark”. Larkin was only a few years from his death when he made this rejoinder, yet he still clung, without apology, to this highly personal conception of the purpose of reading. It has nothing to do with self-improvement, but everything to do with self-fulfilment.

That is why a late poem like ‘Aubade’, though obviously incongruous with ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, contains nevertheless an odd echo. A solitary speaker looks out into darkness, unable to cure his dread of death. For him, “This is a special way of being afraid / No trick dispels. [...] / Nothing to love or link with.” Religion and rationalizing offer no solace; the only thing he can do is work by day, and drink at night. But instead of getting “stewed” like the speaker in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’, he manages only to get “half-drunk”. Not even this escape is available. Meanwhile, as dawn breaks for the rest of the world, he observes, “Work has to be done. / Postmen like doctors go from house to house.”

This final image recalls the beginning of Trouble At Willow Gables, Larkin’s early parody of lesbian schoolgirl novels written back in his Oxford days, and it effectively serves as a book end for his writing career (Motion, 89).  Only this time, we are a world away from playfulness and high spirits, and — in light of my earlier discussion — there is no allusion to another text or literary sensibility. A parody like Trouble At Willow Gables is eminently unserious but it possesses something which the speaker in ‘Aubade’ avowedly lacks: something to “link with”. ‘Aubade’’s speaker inhabits a world closed in upon itself, an unrelieved material reality. He stands in Prufrock-like isolation but without even Prufrock’s imagined romantic releases. “Telephones crouch, getting ready to ring / in locked-up offices.” Sadly, he knows they do ring for him. “Work has to be done” but it is drudgery, without aesthetic reward. Unlike the speaker of ‘Poetry of Departures’, he cannot get “flushed and stirred” at the prospect of rebellion; nor, in his morose, predawn state of semi-intoxication, can he describe himself as “sober and industrious”. The postmen making their rounds like doctors cannot bring him the sort of “cure” that the speaker in ‘A Study of Reading Habits’ enjoyed, albeit temporarily.

If literature — even bad literature — is one of those fear-dispelling “tricks” like religion or specious rationalization, then it is too late for the speaker in ‘Aubade’. He is post-literary;  parody is no longer a possible remedy.

Larkin’s skepticism is central to his work; he raises “no-nonsense” to an aesthetic. Yet he is also aware of the limits of this approach. As Andrew Swarbrick has observed, “the result is an art suspicious of its own claims, resisting its own rhetorical persuasiveness.” Parody, in this light, is a way for Larkin to resist literature while at the same time enjoying its attractions.  As ‘Poetry of Departures’ suggests, it might be a step backwards to create a life “reprehensibly perfect”. But there is still something desirable about it:  even if reprehensible, it’s still “perfect”. Although a poem like ‘I Remember, I Remember’ is premised on the negation of what it describes, it still affords the pleasure of making that description. For Larkin, parody offers more than a pretext for a literary inside-joke. It creates a space for performance, and even if the performance doesn’t solve the problems it enacts, it adds something else which wasn’t there before: a “supplement” which affirms its creator. This mode of existence will never save the speaker in ‘Aubade’—indeed, with respect to his stark terms, nothing will. And that is the final irony of ‘A Study of Reading Habits’. This speaker, for all his limits, might have a point. Books might be a load of crap.  But sometimes, they’re all we’ve got.

Bibliography
Alter R. (1996): The Pleasures of Reading in an Ideological Age. New York: W.W. Norton.
Booth J. (1997): ‘Philip Larkin:  Lyricism, Englishness and Postcoloniality’. Repr. in: S. Regan (ed.),  New Casebooks:  Philip Larkin. Basingtonstoke:  Macmillan.

———————————(2006): ‘Resistance and Affinity:  Philip Larkin and T.S. Eliot’. Pp. 189-209 in: A. McKeown/C. Holdefer (eds.), in Philip Larkin and the Poetics of Resistance. Paris: l’Harmattan.
Larkin P. (1988, 2003): Collected Poems. A. Thwaite (ed.). East Saint Kilda and London: Marvel Press and Faber and  Faber
——————————(2002): Further Requirements. A. Thwaite (ed.). London: Faber and Faber.
____________________(2011): Letters to Monica. A. Thwaite (ed.). London: Faber and Faber.——————————(1983): Required Writing.  Miscellaneous Pieces 1955-1982. London: Faber and Faber, 1983.
——————————(2002): Trouble at Willow Gables and other fictions. J. Booth (ed.). London: Faber and Faber.
Paulin T. (1997): ‘Into the Heart of Englishness’. Repr. in: S. Regan (ed.l). New Casebooks:  Philip Larkin. Basingtonstoke: Macmillan.
Regan S. (ed.) (1997):  New Casebooks:  Philip Larkin. Basingtonstoke:  Macmillan.
Swarbrick A. (1997): ‘Larkin’s Identities’. Repr. in: S. Regan (ed.), New Casebooks:  Philip Larkin. Basingtonstoke: Macmillan.

Last Wednesday, Ms Delacruz went on a tirade.  When I thought about it later, I figured it was more a desperate expression of her thoughts, but it came out as a torrent of outrage. A petite woman, Ms Delacruz has more swag than swag. She scares the worst behaved kids, the most jaded of the 280-pound teachers. “Men,” she exclaimed, “they can only do ONE job. And most of them have no job! Women, we do three, FOUR jobs. We come to work, when we go home we are the mother, the nurturer, the cook, the cleaner. The men, they can’t do nothing; just good for watching the sports … gambling … womanizing.  Look at the students – show me a boy who can do a bulletin board! Show me a boy who know how to edit a classmate’s work!”

I don’t know if Ms Delacruz ever married. Many of her peers, single mothers, have boyfriends and step-children. It’s just the way it is. In the hood, Mother’s Day is consecrated and Father’s Day, desecrated. The way I see it, and I have been working in the school for three years, the real problem is this: our school is being run like a mafia. The new principal fancies himself as a kind of Godfather with his Hispanic Boys’ Club – consisting of assistant principals, coaches and teachers – doing his bidding. Male administrators, like Mr Tejada, cruise around the block in black Mercedes Benzes with darkened windows. The Godfather surrounds himself with a coterie of young, blonde female teachers in his “cabinet” – the ones who weren’t blonde swiftly rectified the situation. Most of the older Hispanic female staff were terrified of the Godfather – he has been quick to lay off and harass the teachers who are, for whatever reason, out of favor with the cronies.

Ms Delacruz soaks this all in with a healthy dose of cynicism. She, Lupé Maria Francesca Delacruz, who has seen a lot in her lifetime, is standing up to a tsunami of sexism by discarding her floral dresses and adopting the bolo tie. Her life story can be summed up in the following: bad city, mean streets, men with too much power, bad women with misplaced ambitions and good women with strong hearts.

“Suck my dick, Ms G,” Mariel Cerda play-acts before me, extending from her groin the 7-foot long pole used to close the top windows. Mariel can’t help grinning at her own joke. The girls let out fake groans of disgust. Some of the groans sound like delight. The boys, as usual, pretend they didn’t hear what she said.

I look at Mariel’s newfound pose. Her body looks stretched. Even the pimple marks on her brown skin look enlarged. The pole is disproportionately long. One can’t miss the irony in this picture: Mariel is standing before a poster that quotes our newly elected Obama, “We cannot help but believe the old hatreds shall some day pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve.” Mariel resembles some centaur I have seen out of Greek mythology, or a fantastical creature in a Japanese manga. I have to bite my lip so as not to betray a smile. “Put that down,” I say firmly. Mariel is satisfied with my reaction. I have passed her test. She puts the pole down.

Mariel is a twin. The twins were big, strong girls with brawny arms and large backs. Everyone in the neighborhood knows Mariel and Fidelia Cerda. Teachers refer to “the twins” or “the Cerda girls” in low, hushed tones. To the cafeteria lady, they are “the football players”. The Deans have known their reputations from other Deans since they were little girls. To Ms Delacruz, they simply are products of their environment, and she handles them with the same strictness she dishes out to everyone else.  At thirteen years of age and five feet eight inches, the Cerda girls live to be outrageous and outraged. At their best (or worst, depending on how you look at it), they have the effect of a Midwestern tornado, shredding the learning environment to tatters with the sheer force of their will. The Godfather, and the principal before him, had to place the Cerda girls in two different school buildings so that their collective power would be lessened.

Mariel and Fidelia were popular among their girlfriends who enjoyed their exuberant, egregious antics and their untamed weirdness. The boys thought they were ogres, those ugly monsters in Harry Potter movies. To the boys, who have already started to have crushes and ideas of womanhood dictated by the media and their surroundings – Shakira shaking her booty, J-Lo getting on the floor, the blonde sycophants in the school. It is bad enough that there’s one Cerda girl, but there are two of them.

Today Mariel Cerda has reason to placate me. Faced with the prospect of summer school in the city while her twin Fidelia, the better student, is at home on the pearly beaches in the Dominican Republic, she is determined to do my bidding.

“Please don’t fail me, Ms Gomez,” Mariel pleads. “I’ll be good. I won’t act out. I’ll sit here. I’ll even read my chapter book, not the Daily Post. I’ll finish my essay on Emmet Till, and I’ll do a good job. All I want is a 65. Please, I promise to be good. You watch. I’ll read. My mom will kill me. Please, Ms G, please.” When Mariel tries to get into your good book, her vernacular becomes as grammatical as the Queen’s English. During these rare moments, I can imagine her in elementary school – the strong reader who raises her hand to answer the teacher’s questions, the teacher’s best helper. Mariel pleads me with her beady eyes. She sees me as the softie from outside the hood, one of the three chinitas from The Philippines who cringes every time a kid uses a swear word and makes them write five paragraphs and say “a pair of scissors” instead of “a scissor”.

The fact is, no one wants to teach in the American ghettos, and the U.S. government sponsors overseas teachers to come and teach their children. I come from Bukidnon in North Mindanao, half way around the world, and my students’ and my native geographies are married by the latitudinal range of 19 degrees north. Some of our most famous fruits are also theirs – the papayas, rambutans, pinapples, guavas, starfruits and bananas. Our cultures are used to drinking coconut water directly from the fruit. We are also married by our post-colonial pasts and our post-colonial names. Cerda, Gomez, Tejada, Delvalle. We are bound by a history and diaspora that has flung us to a colder, harsher and more prosperous corner of the world, by and against our wills, products of history and economics.

In the mountains I grew up in, the air is cleaner than anywhere else, a stark contrast to New York City’s ghettos where most kids have asthma from air pollution. I come from waterfalls bathed in cool mists. I come from tall canopies and giant tufts of bamboo. In my home, it would not be out of place to see a Manobo tribesman race through the forest, spear in hand, or to see happy children walking for three hours on mountain paths, just to get to school. Here in the city, students live five minutes away from school at most, most the boys roll out of bed minutes before homeroom and sit in class sleepy-eyed, chomping on cheese and toast; some are already high on their first smoke; while the girls have dressed themselves up immaculately, every strand of hair tamed by conditioner or bobby pins.

Mrs Cerda, Mariel’s mother, helps out with the Parents’ Association and After-School Programs. I have spoken to her twice. The first time, on the phone, was brief. The second time I invited her to come in for a chat about her daughter. Mrs Cerda is intelligent, lovely and well-mannered. She says she and Mariel like the Civil Rights unit I am teaching and my writing workshops. We talk about the importance of education, colonization and the inequities of the world. Mrs Cerda instinctively grasps my particular situation and the sacrifices I am making in coming to work in this school. “We come from the same places with pockets of poverty – ex-Spanish colonies, mira, we even have the same Spanish names,” she says.  She grabs my hand and promises she would do her best to cooperate with me. All things considered, this woman is doing her best with her twins in the throes of adolescence. I am relieved. Usually when Mariel does something overboard, my only resort is to take her to Ms Delacruz – the only person in the entire school who can control her. Delacruz would give her tasks to complete – take the paper off the bulletin boards, staple the handouts, organize the blue cards alphabetically. Now I can reason with Mariel and have Mrs Cerda on my side.

Mariel is agitated today. So agitated she can’t sit still in her seat. She runs out of the room in the middle of class, and comes back ten minutes later, her eyes shining with injustice. When the kids tell me the news, I cannot believe them. There was a fight after school yesterday. The victim was Jimmer O’Neal, an African-American student who was friends with Mariel. A group of six Dominican boys jumped him right outside the bodega on his way home to the projects. If I had looked out of the fourth floor classroom window at dismissal, I might have seen the whole incident. But I did not. It’s normally so noisy it’s hard to tell if it was a fight or kids playing.

Jimmer is the class pet. He has a sweet nature and still has the wonder – something very few kids in eighth grade have. His voice hasn’t yet broken, and he has a stammer. The kids love to imitate his stutter and his high-pitched voice, and he mostly takes it in stride. Unlike most kids in the neighborhood, Jimmer is a good reader and thinker. When I first took over the class, he used to play possum at the back. Then I moved him to the front and he started to listen, respond to questions, ask his own, and on two occasions, voluntarily tried to repeat multiple syllables after me. “E-man-ci-pa-tion Pro-cla-ma-tion,” we chanted, over and over. Mariel joined in the chant. In fact, Jimmer and Mariel have a close bond because they’re outcasts in the hierarchical society of the school – Jimmer is not “manly” enough, and Mariel is not “girly” enough, so in a social environment that preys on gender stereotypes, they have become fast friends.  Moreover, Jimmer is African-American in a school with 98% Hispanic population – and the stammer doesn’t help things. Everyone knows that Jimmer was picked on yesterday purely because he didn’t fit the crowd. I make a mental note to call Jimmer at his home when I get a period off.

“Attention 8^th grade, please make your way to the auditorium,” the Godfather’s buffoonish voice thunders into the classrooms from the loudspeaker. I can see the ugly, gargoyle snarl on his face. Noise erupts down the hallway. “Ooooooooo …  Someone’s gonna get in trouble!” Kids bounce out of their seats. Some, like Mariel, are mad that Jimmer has been discriminated against and are waiting to see some justice. Others, quite simply, are conditioned to be grateful for any disruption to lessons. From Mariel’s detective work, we know that the perpetrators of the crime have been sitting smugly in the classrooms all this time, promulgating their heroism, exaggerating the story for any bobinchero or gossiper who cares to listen. This infuriates Mariel. She gets to work fast, “Yo, be quiet, shuddup! Johnlaudy, stop shaking yo ass in my face, yo! … Sergio, Carlito, line up! C’mon, Antonio, you know better than that!” The last line sounds oddly familiar – one of my own. Mariel gets all 35 kids in line and quiet in record time. She takes the lead and stands in the front and waits for me to open the door. I smile at her. “I be kickin’ butt,” she says.

Seated in the auditorium, we’re all waiting for the Godfather to talk about what’s foremost on our minds – namely, a racist crime that’s happened practically on school grounds – but he appears uninterested in justice. He sermonized long and tediously about standardized test scores, as if they were unrelated to the circumstances that surrounded the students – gangs, the lure of the streets, drugs, homelessness and segregation. In the hood test scores, quite simply, are irrelevant in the scheme of things – getting your next meal and enough money to pay the rent takes precedence. But one rule of thumb is unchanging: brotherhood and solidarity, above all. Since his taking over the school, the Godfather has messed with this rule, creating an environment of fear that pits kid against kid, teacher against teacher, kids against teachers and vice versa. The Dominican teachers are mad at the Filipino teachers for “taking their jobs”. (Would that the entire parent body were as understanding as Mrs Cerda.) The Science and Math teachers are being intimidated by getting unsatisfactory ratings. The misguided “bad kids” have been sold out and suspended for months, and since Angel – the perpetrator of the attack – is the Godfather’s primary little snitch, nothing’s going to happen to him. The police came and interviewed the Godfather till 5pm yesterday; I wonder what version of the story he gave to the cops. Rashomon in the hood, what’s new?  A student reported that he left at 5:04 with the new fake blonde, Ms Beiber.

The atmosphere in the hundred-year old auditorium gets stuffier by the second. The air is a smothering blanket; all that the gigantic industrial standing fan is doing is to disperse the air that is directly in its path slightly. I look around and see Mariel shifting in her seat constantly, her eyebrows knitted together. Carlos and Sergio are fast asleep in the back. Mrs Delvalle is munching on a pastelito, and Mr Kreider’s reading the newspaper. I wish I were in the park, strolling along the salubrious path near the Cloisters overlooking the Hudson. Even the Hispanic Boys’ Club – the administrators – cannot hide their boredom. Secretly we all know that the Godfather will be gone in a year, just like the principals before him, if the test scores don’t go up. And typically in 8^th grade there is a big slide in the reading scores because kids have already got into high schools and stopped taking the test seriously. The city has been threatening to close the school for years – we are the last remaining big school in the largest school system in the country, with more than 1500 students. For years, the Board of Education has thrown taxpayers’ money at us with no visible results – except more books about dragons and fairies that kids have no interest in reading. The Godfather knows the score better than anyone else, which makes him bombinate with increasing vigor.

A sharp, high-pitched voice interrupts the drone. Everyone looks up. “Excuse me, what you gonna do about the fight yesterday?” It is Ms Delacruz. She is standing near the front and in the aisle right in the middle of the auditorium. She repeats clearly and loudly, as if talking to a small child, “I say, what you gonna do about the fight yesterday?”

The Godfather looks stunned. “What are you asking me, Ms Delacruz?”

This time, she enunciates the words carefully. “What – you – gonna – do – about the – fight –  yes-ter-day?” With each extended syllable, Ms Delacruz enthralls the audience. 367 pairs of eyes rest on the Godfather. Everyone knows who the perpetrators of the crime are – Angel and his posse of hate-mongers.

“What do you mean, Ms Delacruz? That was taken care of yesterday, by the police. So why don’t you take a seat and let me finish my job.” The tone of the last five words are patronizing and pat.

I swear I can feel Ms Delacruz’s wrath – everyone in the auditorium can.  Her frilly, fiery red hair is defying gravity (I see a pregnant cat with her hair standing). Her black bolero jacket, with smart matching slacks, gives her the air of an old matador giving his final performance. Her thin, deeply-etched face and her chiseled cheekbones take on a kind of old-world beauty. Her little nose turned upwards, she glares at the Godfather. In a flash, she turns her back on the Godfather and strides down the aisle towards the exit, her sharp heels clipping, resonating throughout the entire auditorium.

Mariel leaps out of her seat. “Yo, this shit is whack!” she hollers, “what kind of Principal doesn’t address a hate crime – nigga’s on crack, I swear! This be lynchin’ all over again – and mira, I don’t wanna be no Strange Fruit hangin’ off no tree. Answer me this: Who’s the president? Barack Obama! This can’t be happening now. Y’all mad stooopid if you stay here and listen to this idiota jerk off! ¡Vamos! Your mamas will be proud of you! This loser will be gone next year, anyway, like Mr Vargas and Mr Zenon and all the Mr Mistahs before them!”

Mariel trots behind Ms Delacruz like a pony which has just won best-in-show. Soon her twin Fidelia is running after them. “Go, Mariel,” Fidelia punches the air. Then she turns round and shrieks at the Godfather, “You racist, suck my dick!” Laughter erupts in the auditorium. Then Fidelia adds, facing the entire class of eighth graders, “What are they gonna do? What can they do? The most they can do is give us detention. They can’t suspend all of us, coz’ you know we’re right, right like white on rice. C’mon ¡Vamos! ¡Vamos!” Her voice ripples throughout the stolid, century-old auditorium.

Johnlaudy is the first to stand up, followed by Carlito and Sergio – then Ariel and Alejandra and Abiel – Alexa and Alyssa – Brandon and Bisma – Chevelly and Christian – Devon and Diogenes – Fabian and Fausto – Jewels and Justyna – Kelvin and Kerven… Everyone gets up, and soon, the Cerda sisters are taking the entire 8^th grade class with them. They walk tall behind Ms Delacruz. A breeze blows through the auditorium. It is the march from Selma to Montgomery all over again.  The Women’s Suffrage March a hundred years later, this time in the City’s ghetto. The horizon is breaking.

Only, Tejada and his men slam the heavy doors shut – and everyone gets an hour’s detention.

Ling grew up in Singapore and lived in London, where she won an Asham Award for writing. Her work has been published by Serpent’s Tail, Fiction Brigade, Crosstimbers and We’ll Never Have Paris. She lives and teaches in NYC.

summer’s first light skims
top most limbs of hemlock
incites swallows to their aerobic
labors and peeks under the skirts
of my uphill big leaf maple

angular beams mottle through
elder and salmon berries painting
lime     grass     nile     bottle
greens     highlight slug slime
calligraphy on my window glass

agonizingly slow action painters
those banana slugs     viscous
Jackson Pollocks     trailing glutinous
stories of creation     disintegration
and forest floor

sword ferns fronds moving
in the breeze moiré against each other
cast tiger shadows in my bath
stretch spider silk to telegraph
emergency dots and dashes

signal alder leaves to fall
elderberries to redden
insinuate summer’s end

Linda Beeman is an award-winning non-fiction writer and poet living on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound. An independent scholar and former Foreign Service spouse, she writes extensively about South and Southeast Asian antique textiles. Her travel and cultural outreach articles have been published in The Los Angeles Times and the Foreign Service Journal, among others. Her poems have appeared in Pinyon, Windfall and online at Adanna.

Her brown hair was messily escaping from yesterday’s ponytail and dipped into her cereal. Colette allowed herself to be distracted long enough to minister to the errant hair with a bobby pin, grabbed from a basket of trinkets she kept near the telephone. Her daughter’s funny freckled little face, still puckered by baby fat, looked up at this gesture with an expression hovering between wistfulness and resentment.

Colette kept a hand holding Jillian’s head tilted back, so she could look into her light brown eyes. “You really don’t want to go?”

Jillian shook back and forth, no.

There wouldn’t be any good explanation to offer to Robert. But Colette gave in easily enough and said, “Well, Mommy and Daddy are going. I’ll call Grandma to come sit with you for a couple hours.”

“Teddy’s not going either. Can he come over?”  Teddy was Jillian’s best friend, a shy thoughtful creature who seemed to outsiders mostly a silent backdrop for her personality.

“Is that why you don’t want to go, so you can play with Teddy?”

No answer, and Colette let go of Jillian’s hair. Maybe eight was too young for such an ordeal anyway—after all, Teddy’s parents had never expected him to go. It would be especially frightening because the child had been years younger than Jillian herself.

But before Jillian had even finished her breakfast Robert came out of his office, stopped by the kitchen to have another cup of tea. “She doesn’t want to go,” Colette said under her breath the moment he was close enough. Hoping to avoid an argument today, she avoided looking at him again while pouring her tea.

Robert took the tea and faced Jillian, skipping Colette altogether. “What is this, Jillian?  You don’t want to go to the service?”

“No-o-o…”  Jillian hadn’t quite the defiance she’d assumed when it was just Colette in the room. Not that Robert could be called the disciplinarian of the family—that, like most unpleasant minutiae, fell to Colette—but when Robert ventured out of the deep gloom of his office, the occasion always seemed more important.

“But it’s not about what we want,” he said, “is it?  It’s about what God wants.”

“Mommy doesn’t believe in God,” Jillian said, as if she had the trump card and was playing it now for the first and last time.

In Robert’s thin, dark-browed face the shadows gathered where the muscles had tightened. “I didn’t tell her,” Colette said in still low tones, but she felt as if she had broken a longstanding treaty all the same. He wouldn’t look at her now.

“God,” he said to Jillian, “is taking care of Maddie’s soul right now, in heaven.”

Colette turned to do the dishes, so that her back was to her daughter when Jillian said gravely, “Did Maddie know she was going to die when she had the asthma?”  Stumbling a little on the word asthma: azzuma.

“No, she didn’t,” said Robert, tender again now that the crisis seemed smaller than it had, “she was too little to understand what was happening.”

Scrubbing, scrubbing, Colette listened for Jillian’s next question, but it didn’t come. She caught her wedding ring on the grimy sponge, so she twisted it off, leaving it by the sink so that she could wash more easily.

Her hands began to feel coarse and raw from the soap and hot water, which dried her skin out more easily in these past few years. She focused on the sensation so that she wouldn’t have to watch Robert leave the room again, back to his office to keep writing his endless dissertation on the Book of Job, which he’d been working on for longer than Jillian had been alive.

They had planned to leave at ten-thirty, and with merciless promptitude Robert appeared in the bedroom at ten o’clock, just as Colette had stepped out of the shower and wrapped herself in his old plaid robe.

He stood by the doorway. “Your mother’s downstairs,” he said, and added after a tense pause during which she knew, knew something else was coming, “Does the woman always have to have a romance novel in hand, even around Jillian?”

Colette leaned against the wall the very furthest from where Robert was standing, still, in the doorway. Her hair was dripping down her back, but she hadn’t had time to wrap it in a towel before she was interrupted (it did feel like an interruption, in such a small room, with so little space for decency, even from Robert). “I read romance novels,” she said, an implied question.

“I don’t want her picking one up and getting more than she bargained for.”

“Well, it’s my mother or we pay a sitter, and she raised me just fine.”

“I’m not saying,” he started, then gave up.

Colette stood up straight and said, “We should get dressed.”

Hesitating a moment and shaking off that shyness in her turn, she dropped her robe and opened her underwear drawer.

They had only one bureau, a second-hand piece not quite as high as her waist. Colette’s things took up her side and half of his; Robert had one nice suit and very few other clothes. Out of the drawer she pulled something black and lacy, tugged it up over her hips on her way back to the closet.

When she passed Robert she found him studying with a helpless look on his face the body that had given her so much grief of late. Pregnancy had stretched out the skin by her hips, and beach trips and tanning salons had taken their toll in wrinkles and dark anomalies of freckles on her arms and legs. It had been two weeks since her last dye and she knew the graying dark roots showed a little bit in the buttery blonde.

None of it could be striking him as beautiful, she thought. But he seemed fairly incapacitated by lust sometimes; not that he was so lascivious a man, but that the slightest bodily weakness shamed him so completely.

She reached inside the closet to pluck out the black dress that had been hanging on a hook inside the door. The last time it had been worn, or dry-cleaned, was five years ago for the death of Robert’s mother. With some dismay she said, “It’s wrinkled.”

“It’s not so bad.” The huskiness in his voice surprised her.

“Well,” she said. “Let’s see how it looks on—”  And she held it open and stepped in, feet first.

It slid snugly over her hips, but the back zipper was troublesome at the waist. She moved to stand in front of the mirror on the near wall, and stared with perturbation at her own face as she struggled, arms bent awkwardly behind her. There was a flush on her face. “It must be all the eating I’ve been doing since I quit smoking,” she apologized.

“You look magnificent,” Robert said, coming closer. “Let me.”

She tensed but let go of the zipper. It took some effort, with the skin and slight fat of her upper back getting between the zippers, and his fingers were clumsy for this, but he was clearly trying not to let the task seem difficult.

Colette was close to tears now. “I hate this.”

He didn’t ask what this she hated. Simply leaned his head forward and pressed a paternal kiss to her damp hair, his hands gripping her shoulders.

“I didn’t tell her.”

He let go of her shoulders in a movement close to a push. Stupid, she knew she had ruined that tendril of good faith, and they might be alienated again for hours. “I don’t know how she would have figured it out otherwise.”

After giving a last rough shake of her hands through her blonde hair, she turned to face him, away from the mirror. “I don’t exactly vomit up Biblical references in every sentence. She’s not blind.”

“I should spend more time with her,” he said to himself.

“Yeah,” she said, turning back around and snapping her jewelry case open with emphasis. “You probably should.”

He had been with Jillian when they heard about baby Maddie Costa. It was a rare thing, especially during the week, but school had been let out for teacher conferences and Colette worked till three every day at the salon. So he took Jillian to his morning class with him (he was teaching two classes this semester, one on the Psalms and one on translation) and then home.

Bridget Mayer, who lived next door to the Costas, had called the house. At first Robert hadn’t even recognized her name. The way he told it, she wasn’t terribly miffed. He did remember her, eventually, as a big, soft-spoken older woman who had brought them brownies their first week in the house.

“I’m calling about the little girl, Maddie Costa,” she said. “You know, Mark and Gina’s daughter, they live at number 12.”

He knew who Maddie was, but he told Colette later that he didn’t have a chance to be snippy about it, because Bridget launched right into telling him about the asthma attack. She was calling everyone. She had no time for a near-stranger.

By the time Colette, summoned by the receptionist with an inquisitive, slinky “Your husband,” got to the phone at the salon, leaving a regular customer with wet hair that was half cut, Robert was just saying “Jesus” over and over.

He had picked the word up from her, she knew. She tried to calm him down. “Robert,” she said. “Robert?”

The second time she said his name, he stopped saying anything.

“Robert?” she tried again. “Are you there?”

“Will you come home?” he said, so she did.

Outside, when Colette arrived in the driveway, Jillian and Teddy had been playing prince-and-dragon, their delighted roars echoing in a too-quiet neighborhood already blanketed with melancholy. She sent Teddy home to his house next door, waited to see that he was safely home and to wave back to his mother when she came to the door, and went inside her own house.

Robert was sitting in the kitchen. His mangy plaid shirt and khakis, hanging awkwardly off long limbs and legs, were too big for the homely room, too dark for the shabby gleaming linoleum, newly scrubbed.

“I didn’t tell them yet,” he said.

“I can see that.”  She looked out the small window above the sink. Jillian, who had been playing dragon to Teddy’s prince, had appropriated the stick he’d used for his enchanted sword after he left. She was dashing it back and forth, swiping invisible enemies. “I suppose I could do it.”  Or rather, that he wanted her to do it.

He knitted his long fingers together. Words came slowly, as they so often did. “Will you just, will you tell her that Maddie is with God?”

“Robert!”  She threw up her hands. “So you want me to tell her, but you want me to tell her in your words?”

“I never said I wanted you to tell her.”

“Then let’s go. Let’s do it together.”

He hesitated—so slow to action, as he’d always been, that she shoved ahead of him and went to Jillian. How little she was, her upright stocky body was so very alive and alight with energy, and she wondered what it would be like. She was so distracted that she didn’t even hear Robert speaking in the same quiet and mellifluous voice he used to speak with parishioners, until she heard the phrase, “and now she’s in heaven like… like…”

“Like Teddy’s grandmother,” Jillian nodded phlegmatically.

Now Colette remembered being surprised when Teddy’s grandmother died at how Jillian approached death, at how little a child could understand—and here she’d been so afraid that Jillian would be devastated. She looked over Jillian’s head at him and saw Robert’s tears, sparkling in the last remnants of daylight, matching her own.

Now he was following her downstairs at the sound of the doorbell. When Elaine showed up, smelling of smoke and Burberry Brit like Colette herself, Robert didn’t say anything at all.

“Hi Mom,” Colette said, air-kissing. “Thank you so much for—”

“Do you have diet Coke in the house, love,” Elaine asked almost indecently fast, and Colette said no, they didn’t keep soda in the house. Both of them shooting a look at Robert:  Wasn’t it his rule, held to with pig-headed firmness against all her protests?

“There’s coffee in the revolving cabinet,” Robert said somewhat stiffly. “And OJ in the fridge. Make yourself at home, please.”

“Thanks dear,” said an amiable Elaine, whose faults, as numerous as Colette’s, didn’t include pettiness. She patted his cheek even, but he recoiled as from an invasion. “It’s all upsetting. Very upsetting.”

But she hadn’t even known the child.

“I’m glad Jillian’s not here,” said Colette when they were sitting in the church in the fifth row from the back. They preferred to be unobtrusive at serious events. Even at Jillian’s first communion they’d hardly known how to stand, how to hold their bodies. Robert seemed uninterested in the social side of it all; meanwhile Colette felt, as usual, all wrong when confronted with such somber and reverent calm. It was because she had this feeling that she thought she recognized the same skittishness in Robert, who hid his shyness with pomposity, and tried to pretend he was above everything.

Yet Jillian had been beautiful then, and Colette had been proud; and now, at the funeral, even too far away to see the child laid out in her open and cruelly tiny casket, she felt as if all the grief in the room was her own to hold inside. She wept.

Beside her she saw Robert clasp his hand in his own lap. He might have thought about reaching out to her—she thought he would do it. But she’d never know. She heard someone cry chokingly in the front—Gina maybe. Definitely a woman.

At the reception she felt less sad—instead she was embarrassingly, ravenously hungry. She was eyeing the mini sandwiches by the time she was halfway through the receiving line. Gina’s eyes were dead and dry—she must not have been the one crying—and it was as if she were a shell of a person, programmed to say over and over Thank you for coming like a demented robot. Colette felt tired looking at her. After all life went on and you were only ground down; your heart, rather than breaking, day by day got worn out. She wanted a sandwich and a drink. God, for something more than wine. The familiar thirst reawakened.

Once they’d had Mark and Gina over for dinner. It hadn’t been that long ago but to Colette it felt distant already, since it had been before she quit drinking. A year, maybe fourteen months ago.

They were Italians from New Jersey, which they joked about a lot, calling themselves Mafia royalty, though they were children of privilege raised in Hoboken to be doctors or lawyers. Not so far off, they were both in marketing now and commuted into Boston for work. Gina had been plump and fresh-faced, her breasts hanging enormous in a tight blouse unbuttoned one too far down. Colette got the sense that was the farthest she ever buttoned up.

Mark was small, dark and nervous. He laughed heartily at things that weren’t funny and asked too many questions. Colette didn’t find it easy to like him, but she tried to anyway, because where she’d grown up, men who stuck around for a pregnancy had been so few and far between. “It’s very kind of you to reach out to us when you seem to be weary to the bone,” he’d said at the end of the night. “You have a beautiful family. I admire the way you take care of them.”  He had touched the small of Colette’s back, kissing her good-bye.

Afterwards Colette kept saying, “I liked them so much, but Mark did seem a little, you know, weird?  Right?”

And Robert just kept saying, “I don’t know. Sure.”  Wrapped up in his damned dissertation, he hadn’t noticed them at all.

Now, at the reception, the two of them were clinging onto each other—Mark standing behind Gina, hugging her waist as if she might fall over.

Colette passed with a simple kiss for each of them. It was as if they didn’t recognize her. After her, Robert said, “I am so sorry. My prayers are with you and Maddie every moment.”

If Colette could have put words together at all, she still would not have been able to say something so simple. Still, neither of the Costas said anything.

Later, when Colette was picking mini cannolis from a tray of desserts, Mark appeared at the other side of the table.

“Hi,” Colette said.

He half-smiled at her. “I love these.”

“Cannolis?”

“The Neapolitans, actually.”  He picked one up and pressed it so hard between his fingers that the three colors warped against each other a bit. It looked like he might, rather than eating it, dash the thing to pieces against the table. “Delicious.”

“Yeah.”  She gave him her best attempt at a kind smile. It felt like the seams that held her face together had frayed and warped. She was just grimacing now; so she stopped.

“She’s in bad shape,” he remarked, in such a conversational tone that Colette wasn’t even sure what he meant. Then, “She’s in the ladies’ room.”

“Gina?”

Mark looked up from the Neapolitan and his eyes shone at her. “I know I’m not supposed to go in there. That’s why she’s there. Can you?”

“Maybe she wants to be alone.”

“OK. If you’re scared, then don’t go. I’m just worried. I can’t go in there. I’m not supposed to go in there.”

“I’m not scared, I just—well I’ll go. I’ll go now.”

“Please bring her up here. I need to talk to her. Tell her I need to talk to her.”

Colette shook her head. “I’m just not sure what I could do.”

“Me either.”  He rasped out a cough meant to mask his crying. Then a tap on his shoulder, and he whirled around for a handshake with a bear of a man who called him “MC”; the Neapolitan skittered onto the table, tossed away.

She went downstairs to a narrow hallway, branching off into small Sunday School classrooms and a few mysterious dark vestibules. The ladies’ room was the second door from the end of the hall, with a garish turquoise-toned poster of the Virgin Mary stuck on it. What was on the men’s room door, Colette wondered.

She said “Gina?  Gina?” into the ladies’ room stalls, one by one, but no one answered. There were no feet under the doors.

Sitting, then, in a stall by herself and listening to her own suddenly urgent stream of urine echoing off the toilet wall, she felt some relief. Maybe she’d have a smoke. Rules didn’t count during funerals. It meant another few minutes of peace. Someone else would probably be sneaking one on the front porch; and it would be someone easier to talk to than Gina.

Her feet ached. She slipped off her heels for a second, wiggled her toes, and examined the growing bunion on the left foot. Hideous. Maybe she’d get it removed, and then she wouldn’t have to look and feel so old; wouldn’t have to turn her back to Robert at night. Doing that left him worse off, she knew: guiltier and guiltier that he was so bound to his physical body, when she could, at least in bed, transcend her own.

She gave her eye makeup a hasty fix in front of the mirror and left.

There was an exit at this end of the hallway that led to the cemetery. It would be easier to walk around the building to the porch, and sneak a smoke without speaking to anyone—to Mark—on the way.

But she heard a voice coming from the last classroom, which was lit. It was Gina’s.

“He was in bed,” she was saying dully. “She didn’t make any noise. It’s hard to hear even when we’re awake. I do know that.”

Colette stepped forward, trying to be quiet, to see if Mark had found Gina all on his own. It must have been just a motion in the corner of Gina’s eye, but it made her look up—and Colette stood still, feeling so embarrassed it took her a full second or two to break eye contact and realize that the man sitting next to Gina was Robert.

“Mark is, um.”  She met Robert’s eyes, held them. He gave a tiny shake of his head, but she ignored it. “Looking for you.”

Gina had had her hands clasped in her lap, and she raised them to press her fingers hard to her temples. “Tell him I’ll be right up.”

Colette scurried back towards the stairs that led to the lobby.

Mark was still standing next to the desserts, talking to the big man who had called him MC. His arms were crossed and he looked nervous and shifty, as if he were trying to escape. But Colette saw him swallow half a dozen times in a row, by the bobbing of the pointy Adam’s apple in his strangely toneless neck.

She peeled off the path she’d been weaving towards him and headed towards the front exit, and the porch. Her eyes were prickling and she was afraid to run her mascara again. Besides if Gina would be up soon, there was no need to tell him anything.

Outside in the muggy heat there was an old man with a beard smoking off to the left. She stayed away, lighting her own, her purse dangling off the railing from her wrist.

Oh she could admit now that she had envied Gina a little—sometimes, when they passed each other in the grocery store and Gina, pushing her stroller, gave her that proud bashful smile, a lot—but with a generous, big-sisterly envy. Having passed successfully the test of her own unhappy pregnancy and hasty, unwilling wedding to Robert—having emerged into her pure wild love for her baby girl—she tried to begrudge other women nothing.

Besides, Gina had showed up at their door in tears one night, not long after that first awkward dinner. Colette shepherded her away past Robert and Jillian, who were making a fire in the den. “I’m sorry,” Gina kept saying. “I don’t have any friends here. I thought you might understand.”  She poured her whole story out—there had been some other woman, recriminations, promises from Mark to keep the faith. Colette hugged her and said it would be okay. When that didn’t work she said that love was hard.

That night in bed, Robert, who had not seemed to notice anything, had said, “Is she okay?  Gina I mean.”

“Oh. Yes, she’s fine, Robert, it’s, it’s nothing. Really.”

“Nothing…dangerous?” She wasn’t sure quite what he meant. Abuse. Death. Disease.

“God, no. Look, I think she’d rather I kept this private, but it’s just Mark. They’re having problems. I don’t know if they’ll get a divorce, or if it was just a fight. It wasn’t clear.”

“’Private’?” he repeated. “I’m your husband.”

Colette sat up a little, propping her head on her hand to look down towards him in the dark. At first he’d sounded angry, but in the silence that passed, she realized she might have wounded him. “I know that. But don’t start moralizing about what the holy bonds of matrimony might mean until you don’t have any secrets from me, all right?”

Later she’d always been ashamed of that conversation. It was as if the separation of their daily lives and thoughts, all that she’d implied with the word “private,” the fact that she thought of him as a being so distinct from her own sphere of knowledge and experience, were itself a sacred object.

Time passed, and Mark and Gina had appeared often on Birch Street, pushing their stroller together in the spring afternoons, the summer evenings; their laughter echoing up and down the streets, his a tenor chuckle, hers a high and staccato, too-loud laugh. They seemed happy. It had just been a fight after all. Colette did not become close friends with Gina, and it was all right. She had her own things to worry about: Jillian’s inability to sleep at night, her inability to stay still in school, her penchant for climbing trees, her habit of falling off them.

—Robert said in her ear, Walk, Colette.

She walked. They found their car in the center of the church lot, baking on black tar.

Colette felt deflated, like a popped water balloon, as if she were positively leaking sweat. They’d hardly left before she’d remarked, having been itching to say it all day, “I can’t believe they used West Side Story music in the fucking service. What kind of tacky shit is that?”

She’d immediately felt stupid but there were some things that had to be said, and Robert looked at her as if he barely saw her.

Colette began to suspect that she was the tacky one, but really she was only honest. If he could make her feel two inches high and stupid, he always, always did. Some angle of the eye—so subtle she could not even picture it in her head, but they had known each other so well and long, his gestures were as crystalline in her perception as words.

Robert left nagging lifelong doubt inside her that perhaps she was as callow and blunt as she had always been presumed by others, though once she had thought he saw beyond that. Maybe after all she was, like her mother, only a nervy earthy creature of cigarette smoke and blonde dye.

They drove home, the three miles from the church, in sunlight and silence.

It was the height of afternoon. Robert got out first after he’d pulled into the driveway and came around to open the door for her, an old habit of his. Colette looked towards the Costas’ house for the briefest instant. It felt illegitimate. Their house was towards the nicest end of the street, the west side that was more open and sunny, where the houses nested prettily atop the slopes of generous green lawns—most of them dotted with bright plastic children’s toys during the summer.

It was that that unsettled her the most, that they had thought, or someone had thought, to spirit away the life-sized Barbie car that little Maddie had liked to keep “parked” alongside her mommy and daddy’s Lexus.

She tore her eyes away from the now-desolate house and followed Robert across the driveway.

His right shoe was scuffed on the toes, but Colette hadn’t had enough notice to get them polished before the service—and Robert never bothered with it. The left one was pristine. He shuffled a little on the right when he walked, he always had. She had had to admit to herself sometime early in their relationship that it attracted her more than anything. Still did. His one sad scuff-marked shoe stirred her.

They paused at the door. Colette began to rummage in the small unfamiliar black clutch she’d carried to the funeral, amongst lipstick, cell phone, mascara. The keys to the house jangled, but unreachably, hidden somewhere.

“It’s nearly dinner time for Jillian,” she said as she searched, for lack of anything better.

“Do you think your mother will have cooked?”

“Probably not.”

“All right. Let’s order something then. This is no day for either of us to be working hard in the kitchen.”

“I wouldn’t mind cooking.”

“Don’t worry about it.”  He reached out to touch her shoulder, and she jumped in surprise. At that, he gave up on whatever impulse it had been.

“I just think we should have a nice night all together,” she said, to cover up her embarrassment. “I don’t want Jilly to be afraid, or something. I don’t know. It must be upsetting.”

“Do you think she really grasps it?”

“I think she knows it’s something bad, or bad to us. I’m not sure she has any idea that it’s forever.”

“That’s probably right. I wish though—”

Colette yanked the keys out of her bag, skidding a hole into the silk lining. She paused with one hand extended towards the doorknob and, when he stopped in the middle of his sentence, said, “What do you wish?”

“It was … part of the bargain … that we raise her in the church,” he said. “That’s all. I wish you’d remembered that.”

“The bargain?” she said. “The ”bargain’?”

He looked a little worried, but mystified.

“And what did I get in the bargain?” she said. “I don’t think I really know anymore why Jillian needs to owe you her own free will and thought.”

“She’s nine,” he hissed but the door flew open before he could say anything else.

“How are you kids?” Elaine said. “You okay?  Colette my lovely, you look so drained.”

Colette blinked. Her mother drew her into a tight, businesslike hug. “Awful,” she said, because it was expected of her. “It was a nightmare.”

“It was sad,” agreed Robert, stepping past them both to get inside. She followed him into their cramped foyer, shutting the front door behind her on the bright afternoon.

Jillian yelled, “Mommy!” in the shrill drawn-out call of an overexcited child, pelting out from the den to throw herself into Colette’s arms. Her hair was all in a tangle, and she was wearing a pair of Colette’s plaid Bermuda shorts, a pink tank-top that had rhinestones on it in the shape of a unicorn, and a feather boa. “I made a tower out of Popsicle sticks and it’s higher than Grandma’s. Want to see?”

“Sure!  Show me and Daddy what you made,” Colette said, allowing herself to be led by the grasp of Jill’s plump damp hand and motioning with her head for Robert to follow them.

“I figured out that if you tilt them against each other you can make them stay up till the glue dries,” Jillian was explaining in absorption as she showed them her three-foot-high structure, glistening with globules of glue. “It’s just like when we made that cushion fort and hung sheets over it with Poppy. And he said you had to have stuff lean together or it would fall down.”

“Smart girl!” cooed Colette.

“I am the house building captain of the world!” she crowed, running in circles around both of them with her boa held against her shoulders and flying behind like a cape. “I have suuuper powerrrs,” she hollered on her way past Robert, with her fist in the air.

Colette and Robert smiled at each other, encircled in the noisy ring of boasting and connected by it, apart from and deaf to everything in the world but their daughter. Then something interrupted the wild revolution—Jillian tripped, thudding ignominiously to the ground—lifted her head and licked a little droplet of blood from her top lip.

Colette got to her the fastest, knelt by her and laid a hand on the flushed face, breath heaving. “Hey babe,” she said.

“Ow,” Jillian said, calmly. “Stupid Harry, I tripped on him.”  Harry was her security blanket. He never left the house, but she liked to have him around wherever she went within it. Grayed with age and ratty at the corner Jillian used to suck as a baby, it was only washed when Colette picked it up on her way to the laundry, ruefully, with delicate fingertips.

Then, straightening herself up to a sitting position, Jillian saw that the popsicle sticks, the glue not quite dry, had slid gently into a bristling pile and burst into tears. She burrowed into Colette’s lap.

Shifting a little to accommodate the weight, Colette came face to face with the television, on which, with a sinking subtle dread, she recognized her mother’s favorite program, one of the lowest of the talk shows, where people confronted their ex-lovers in paroxysms of self-righteousness.

“Oh Mom,” she said to Elaine, who had come to the doorway after hearing the crash. “do you let her watch this?  It’s terrible.”  She believed what she was saying, but felt herself performing it for Robert, giving her disapproval some extra flair.

“Calm down Colette. You put too much goddamn importance on your crazy notions of children’s purity. You think this is anything so new for her?  It’s just not a big deal.”

“It’s trashy, Mom. They talk about all sorts of things on there.”  She sighed and cupped the back of Jill’s head, pulling it more towards her welcoming shoulder, as Robert reached for the remote on the coffee table and flicked off the set.

She remembered a “case” she’d seen once where a girl had gotten genital warts after her boyfriend cheated on her. Degrading, sad. She’d hardly been able not to watch it but it was no good for a child, and then tonight there would be the inevitable clash with Robert where he’d all but call Elaine “trashy” herself.

Colette turned her head towards him and said in a low voice, “Please order Chinese food. I’m going to take Jillian outside to play for a bit.”

“What about your mother?”

Colette began to shift her weight to stand and answered quite mildly, “Ask her to stay, of course.”  She left with the child in her arms, caring very little about Robert’s look of chagrin.

Ouside she convinced Jillian to crouch by a rock and dig around the long flexible stalks of the onion grass to find the pearly appealing bulbs underneath. She’d had such a hard time convincing Jillian not to eat them, dirt and all, as a younger child when they played at “farmer”!  She sat on a nearby thick pine log, fallen months ago over the winter in a flash flood that had ruined their basement.

The sun was beginning to set, filtered gently by the clusters of birch trees at the west end of the street, where the nice houses were, where Mark and Gina would be home by now, alone. Beyond them she could see more trees and, faintly, the hill that led to the elementary school, bathed in shadow. It was still hot but growing cooler: soon Jillian would enter fourth grade, and then fifth and sixth. At the thought of watching her grow up, Colette shivered: in gladness?

“Ladies, what’s happening?”  Marnie Gilligan, drawling from the sidewalk, wearing bright white sneakers and a skintight fuschia jogging suit, holding the five-pound weights she always power-walked with at seven p.m. Throughout the reception Colette had been ducking her. Now she was an unavoidable plague in Juicy and New Balance.

Colette shrank inside herself. “Jillian and I are just out for a little playtime before bed.”

“Poor darling little thing, today’s been rough all around.”

“Her mind isn’t on that right now,” Colette said in warning, giving up her attempt at avoiding conversation and moving closer. She didn’t want Jillian to hear what this woman would have to say about a death.

She stepped over the knee-high log she’d been sitting on with its rotting prickly bark like wet fishscales, and stood at the edge of their lawn. Its blades poked up to her toes over her flipflops; meanwhile, on the gravel, Marnie shifted her weight up and down as if to continue burning calories while she talked. Folds of flesh from her armpits spilled out from her jogging suit in rhythm with her bouncing. “Did you like the funeral?” she said in her nasal, almost-hidden Boston accent.

“Um…”

“I thought it was super classy. They got it right, in everything. God, the flowers. Gorgeous.”

Colette nodded limply.

“And she. She looked real sad. Oh that face. I could have kissed her like I was her own mother if it would’ve done any good but there are things in this world we just can’t help.”

“I guess there are.”

“He looked different than her. He cried awfully. You know?  Oh and you know what, I walked by there two nights ago after they got back from the hospital, and they were fighting?”

Colette lifted her eyebrows. Did not want to encourage the telling of this story, which could only be sordid. But it might do Gina good if Colette knew, and besides—she wanted to know.

“You could hear them halfway down the street.”  Marnie knit her hands together with a look of importance and consternation. “God it was awful. You could hear the pain—”

“All right,” Colette interrupted.

“Well. He left.”

“What?  He was here this morning.”

“I know, I don’t mean that, jeez. I mean he got in the car and drove away. Slammed the door so hard I swear to God it would have woken that little child in her coffin. Just that hard. It was a little vicious. I always thought he had something off about him. But god what a beautiful baby she was.”

“I know. Please let’s—”

“What, hon?”

“Let’s not talk about it anymore.”

“Of course.”  She had a look of understanding on her broad still-lipsticked face now. A look as if she’d understood, oh, everything; everything that had happened and every pale lurking terrifying thing that might happen in their pretty, stricken world. “I’ll see you around, Colette.”

“See you. Around,” she choked. Then turned back towards the house, and Jillian, all smeared with muck already, her chubby knees ground into the dirt.

“What are you doing?” she asked, voice soft.

“Playing.”

“With what?”  She stepped closer, saw something strange going on beneath Jillian’s hands, a glint of steel-gray, a glimmer of viscera. “Oh, Jilly, what—”

“I’m playing funeral,” Jillian said. And she was, she was cutting them in half, the little wriggling puce-colored worms she’d uncovered by turning over a long flat rock. The moist ground bore the marks of scrabbling fingertips. Having cut the worms in half with another, smaller, sharper rock she picked them up in steady cold hands and lay them in their makeshift mean tomb.

“You’re burying the worms, baby?” Colette said, kneeling down.

“Yes, like you buried Maddie.”

“I didn’t. I didn’t!”

“It’s a game, Mommy.”

“Oh God, oh God,” Colette heard herself murmuring, but she didn’t know if she would stop the game. She looked towards the house again and saw Robert at the narrow window of his office, watching them, one arm hugged to his chest, another lifted to shade his eyes against the sunset. She lifted a hand, and he waved back, and then she scooped Jillian into her arms; and even in the blur of dusk she swore to herself she could see Robert smile, all the long way back to the house.

Kristen Hamelin Tracey lives in New York City and is currently a student in the MFA program at the City College of New York. Her fiction has recently appeared in publications such as Bound Off, The Raleigh Review, and The Foundling Review.

You see the headlights of a car pulling into the driveway and you look out the window, but it is not who you are hoping for.  It is your dad.  He wears a St. Louis Cardinals visor and an Albert Pujols jersey.  Every year since you were a baby, he has taken your family on the same vacation, a week in St. Louis.  It’s the kind of vacation people go on so they can say they went on vacation.  You spend half of the trip inside Busch stadium, eating eight dollar ice cream that melts before you finish it, clapping when everyone else does.  You spend the other half staring at the boys you see, determining which ones are afraid of you and which ones aren’t.  You’re starting to understand that you’re beautiful, that people aren’t just saying that because it’s what you want to hear.  You’ve noticed that your mom doesn’t say it anymore.

Your dad knocks on your door before he opens it.  He smells like cedar, and he wears a cell phone in a holster on his hip.  You normally make fun of him for everything he does, but you’ve stopped for now, while he’s living at the motel down the street.  As soon as he gets an apartment, he will be fair game again.  He looks at you and shakes his head.  “Sixteen?” he says, but it’s not really a question.  He’s not that kind of father.  He leans halfway over for an awkward hug, the kind he might give to a coworker or a church friend.  Then he pulls out his wallet and hands you two hundred dollar bills.  It is more than he’s ever given you, the most anyone has ever handed you, but you don’t say anything about that.  You thank him and give him a real hug, the kind he’s forgotten how to give.  He talks about insurance for a while and then he leaves.  When he’s gone you put one of the bills in your wallet and you lay the other flat inside the pages of the Bible on your wicker bedside table.

Another pair of headlights flashes into the driveway.  You’re certain about who it is this time.  You stand up on your bed to look at yourself in the mirror, combing your hands through your long brown hair.  You’re convinced that your body fluctuates daily, that some days your boobs are big and your legs small, that some days it’s the other way around.  But today is not one of those days.  Today is your birthday.  Your legs seem tiny, barely big enough to hold you up, and your boobs feel swollen.  On days like today, your boobs make you feel bulletproof, like the knots of flesh on your chest could protect you from anything, like your heart is safe behind them.

The doorbell rings.  You run to answer it because you don’t want your mom to.  She’s in the living room, watching America’s Funniest Home Videos.  She laughs at all of the clips, especially the ones with pets in them.  She is obsessed with reality television.  Since your father moved out, she’s started calling herself “The Bachelorette.”

When you open the door, he’s holding a single red rose.  His hair is shaggy, his bangs in his eyes, and he’s wearing a shirt without sleeves.  He hasn’t cut them off; he bought the shirt that way.  He smells like a dressing room at the mall, like cologne and cigarettes.  He kisses you in the doorway, a soggy, scouring kiss.  It is still light outside.  You wonder if your neighbors can see you.  The thought of that embarrasses and excites you at the same time.  While he’s kissing you, you rub your fingers along the muscled lump of his left bicep.  Your sexuality is hyper but malleable, still shaped more by rumor and expectation than by anything you actually feel.  The girls you sit with during lunch have decided arms are important, arms are sexy, and so now you pay particular attention to his arms.  It’s an easy thing to do since his shirts almost never have sleeves.

You grab his hand and lead him inside.  You take him to the kitchen, hoping your mom will stay in the living room.  There’s a cake on the kitchen counter.  Your mom picked it up from the Wal-Mart deli.  It says, HAPPY SWEET SIXTEEN NIKOLE!!!  You can’t believe they spelled your name right.  The spelling of your name makes you proud.  There are fourteen Nicoles in your class.  You are the only Nikole.  Someday you’ll understand what it means that your name is spelled funny.  Someday, when you’re selling pharmaceuticals in a place that would now seem inconceivably big, inconceivably urbane, some place like Nashville or Atlanta or even Birmingham, you’ll blush at the provincial spelling of your name.  But not now.  Now you’re sixteen and you live in rural Arkansas and it’s your birthday.

The cake is yellow with white icing.  You tried a piece of it earlier, but you didn’t like it.  It tasted like the smell of a magic marker, the kind you use to write tightly scripted notes to your boyfriend.  In the notes, you try to tell him how you feel about him, but it never seems like enough.  The words, no matter how hard you press the marker against the page, fail to convey the intensity of your emotions.  The rigid purple letters on your wide-ruled paper seem only like the estranged, sickly cousins of the searing flares in your chest cavity, the swells of feeling that make it seem as though your body is transparent, a gauzy screen through which the whole of the universe is passing.

So you don’t like the cake.  But he does.  He’s on his third piece already, eating it with his hands and talking with his mouth full.  Your mom walks into the kitchen.  She rolls her eyes when she sees him.  Your mom is not a person.  She is your mom, a servant who’s no longer useful, who’s starting to get in the way.  You remember when you cared about her opinion.  You remember when she was pretty, but time has pinched her face.  Time has thinned her stringy black hair to transparency.  Time has made her stupid.

She’s bending over, leaning into the refrigerator, when she asks what y’all are up to.  He shrugs and lowers his eyes.  You completely ignore her.  She pulls a can of Miller Lite out of the refrigerator.  She says it’s Miller time.  She has a seemingly endless catalogue of drinking clichés.  But you’ve never noticed.  You don’t pay attention to anything she says, and for the most part, you’re not missing much.   She pops the beer open and stares, looking back and forth between the two of you.

“How many calories does that have?” you ask.

“Not very many.  I’m drinking my dinner.  You and your calories, it’s unhealthy to obsess over them.”

“Drinking isn’t healthy.  It kills brain cells.  Mrs. Milton said it causes memory loss.”

“Charlotte Milton really shouldn’t be teaching health class.”  She shakes her head and takes a long drink.  “She wears a wig.”

“What’s that have to do with health class?” You ask.  Your boyfriend never says anything in front of your mom.  You wish he would speak.  You wish he would do something to make her less suspicious.  He could smile, at least, but he doesn’t. He just scratches his neck and stares at the floor, looking at the peeling brown linoleum like it’s a piece of abstract art.  In more ways than you’ll ever know, it is.  In more ways than you’ll ever know, that peeling brown linoleum tells the whole story.

“I’m just saying, it doesn’t make any sense to have a sick woman teaching health class.”

#

You feel like you should be the one driving, but you’re not.  After all, it’s your birthday.  And not just any birthday, your sixteenth birthday.  You’re in his truck.  You like that it’s an extended cab, but you wish it had automatic locks and windows.  The radio is on a country station.  He likes a brand of rock that’s all screeches and reverb and oily bangs, and you like top 40 music.  Neither of you likes country music.  You have that in common with him, and listening to it reminds you of that fact.

You know where you’re going.  You’ve been arranging it for a long time.  You’ve been arranging it since he asked for a piece of gum in Mrs. Milton’s class.  You’ve been arranging it in breathy, latenight whispers over the telephone, ringlets of phone cord wrapped around your dainty wrist.  Every word, everything, you have exchanged with him has been a negotiation of this night, of this event.

There’s a weightlessness in his truck, a stillness.  It’s as though the nighttime–the burning rice fields and liquid air and brimming moon–is passing around and through the two of you, as though it’s not the other way around.  A single word might disrupt it, might bring all of it– the truck, the music, the night–to a screeching halt.  And so you don’t speak.  The two of you get this part of the story right:  neither of you utters a single fucking word.  And before you know it, just as you had settled into the anti-gravity silence, you’re there.

It’s a single-wide trailer in the middle of a flat, empty field.  It’s not at all as you had imagined it.  He had called it his hunting club.  You had pictured a cabin in the middle of the woods, someplace rustic and beautiful, smelling of the oak from which it had been carved.  For most of your life, you’ve been a fit-thrower, tyrannically intolerant of the disparities between your expectations and reality.  But not tonight.  Tonight is the night you swallow the world’s proffer of disappointment, consume it eagerly, even.  And it’s a good thing, too, because there’s plenty of it in store for you.  That new car you’ve been begging for?  You’ll inherit your grandmother’s ’91 Lumina your senior year, after she hacks up the bloody last of her lungs.  A good college?  Try the local community college.  Medical school someday, if you really, really bust your ass?  C- in organic chemistry.  Your parents’ marriage?  Please, please don’t make me get started on your fucking parents.

But none of that is tonight.  None of that is now.  Now he’s telling you to wait as he opens his door, and for a second you worry that he’s going to leave you here in the dark, sitting alone in his truck, until he’s opening your door and helping you down.  He’s a gentleman, earnest in all his sleeveless chivalry.  You grab his hand, and he pulls you up the stairs of the porch propped in front of the trailer, the porch that had, many years ago, been someone’s drunken weekend foray into carpentry.  You don’t notice the swollen electric globe of the moon.  You don’t notice the sky yawning up above you.

Inside, he flips a light switch and musty yellow leaks down from an unfixtured bulb.  You are surprised, but not bothered, by the number of dead animals hanging around the room.  Antlered deer heads leer at you, their grotesque shadows cast black against the grainy white walls.  Bird bodies perch on crooked sticks, poised, it seems, for flight.  In the kitchen, a turkey roosts on top of the refrigerator.

He opens the fridge door to reveal a baffling variety of cheap light beers, the cans stacked and prismatic, gleaming like bricks of polished silver.  He pulls one out, pinches it open, and offers it to you.  You take a drink, your face shriveling with the bitterness, and hand it back to him.  The two of you stand there and pass the beer back and forth, taking constricted sips, until there’s nothing left in the can, not even a drop, and it’s like you’re drinking the aluminum air.

#

It may be your birthday but it’s a weeknight.  You don’t have all night.  You’ve got a curfew.  Your mom will be waiting for you in the living room, comatose from the excesses of distilled reality and Miller Light.  You decide it’s time to act.  You take his hand and pull him down a narrow hallway, toward a dark room at its end.

It takes your eyes a moment to adjust to the darkness.  Bunk beds are stacked around the room like cages at the animal shelter, their wooden frames skeletal, almost, in the frail light that lags through the doorway.  You grab his arms just below the shoulder and pull him toward you.  You kiss him.  It’s not like the kiss earlier, the one on your doorstep.  There’s a distance to this kiss, a withholding of something that you don’t recognize.

He pulls your shirt off, over your head, and you tug at his, but it won’t come off.  You’ve never undressed anyone before.  It’s like wrestling with a mannequin in the dark.  You finally give up.  You back away and start pulling your clothes off yourself.  You watch him as he does the same.  This works much better; just pretend you’re getting ready to get in the bathtub.

He is on top of you now.  Your head rests on a pillow that smells like syrupy pancakes.  Your back clings to the cool nylon of a flimsy mattress.  Your hands grip its tattered edges.    He pushes his body closer to yours, his scrawny legs warming against your thighs.  You’ve heard a lot of discussion about this.  Your slutty friends have told you a million different horror stories.  None of them are true.  Not now, at least.

As part of him presses, cuts, into you, you feel like the frog you dissected two weeks ago in biology class, its squishy carcass splayed on a stainless steel tray, lifeless beneath the blade of your scalpel.  You know that what’s happening is much bigger, much more important, than it seems.  But you’re not sure why.  That’s okay.  That’s normal.  Welcome to a world where gravity is made of doubt.

#

You get dressed without saying anything, but you talk in his truck.  Both of you sing along to a Garth Brooks song.  The ride home feels like you are returning from a long trip, feels like you’re returning from vacation.  You’re surprised by how little things have changed while you were gone.  And when you walk in the door of your house, when you find your mom waiting where you knew she would be, you are glad to see her there.  You are glad to see her watching a show with a hot tub full of screaming, shirtless people.

She asks if you’ve had a good birthday and you nod your head.  She asks how much money your father gave you, and you lie.  You tell her he gave you a hundred dollars, the same as her.  She shakes her head.  You tell her you’re going to bed, and then you do.

You close the door behind you.  Your television is still on from earlier, flashing the bright shadows of the Disney Channel on your walls.  You check the pages of your Bible to make sure the hundred dollar bill is in there.  You put on your pajamas, sprawl out on top of the covers, and turn the volume up.  It’s Hannah Montana, your favorite show.  You watch for a few minutes but you’ve seen this episode before and it starts to bore you, so you turn the television off.  You lie there in the darkness, listening to the nighttime hum of your house, until you roll over onto your stomach, the way you normally sleep.  You look up at your headboard.  The white paint is starting to chip off of the wicker, naked brown strands checkering across its surface.  You rub your hand over it.  It feels grainy and brittle.  It feels weak.  The wicker all around you seems so fragile, but it keeps holding you up.

Woody Skinner grew up in Batesville, Arkansas, before attending four different universities in three different states.  He’s currently an MFA candidate at Wichita State University, where he was awarded the 2011-2012 Fiction Fellowship.  His work has appeared in The Carolina Quarterly and Necessary Fiction.