I met Pammie one summer evening on the Carson’s grassy lawn. People were standing around holding plastic glasses of wine. The old house rose above the party, its grey heightened to blue in the dusky light. Edward and I had recently moved to the neighborhood. It was a gathering of homes on the bay of a salty inland sea. There was a small marina near a lighthouse that still rang out on foggy pre-dawn mornings. People seemed to know each other well, bringing meals when someone was injured or had a new baby. Our youngest would start kindergarten at the little school behind the marina in just a few weeks.

Pammie was at the party with her husband, Fred. She wore turquoise and he was in off-white muslin. They had the permanent tans of people from a sunnier clime. She apologized for their distressed skin. They had lived in the dry New Mexican air for too many years, she laughed, and needed the moist Northwest climate. She was small, shorter even than me, with frosted hair cut to her shoulders. She waved her hands when she spoke, sweeping away her words as if to show how unimportant they were. It would be years before I realized the strength residing in that small, self-deprecating turquoise woman.

Fred wandered off and I spent close to an hour chatting with Pammie, captivated by the sparkly and fun personality she projected. She was intelligent and engaging, though extremely modest. She talked about her children and New Mexico and their move north. She didn’t mention her work or Fred.

Later in the evening she approached me with an older man. “This is Bob Garrett,” she said. Bob was her father. Small like her, with thin hair and wet eyes, he smiled.

I said, “You are to be congratulated; you have produced a wonderful daughter.”

He said, “In four days it will be the sixtieth anniversary of my marriage to her mother.”

Pam’s mother had died thirty years before. Every year, they still celebrated with a big dinner flowing with champagne and brandy. Pammie remembered having dinner in a famous New York restaurant on her parents’ fiftieth anniversary and not hearing a word anyone said. Someone standing with us at the Carson’s party that night, asked, “But was the food good?”

Pammie laughed, “I don’t know; I couldn’t hear it!”

After the party, while we were undressing for bed, Edward told me he had sat and talked with Bob for quite awhile. They talked about Florida real estate costs and judgeships. Bob was a Federal judge. His chambers looked out on the hole in the ground called Ground Zero, where the planes hit on that September day. He wasn’t there, though. He was in Florida looking at property. I thought about how grateful Pam must be for that chance of fate.

Once school started, I ran into Pammie fairly often. Our children were in the same class and became friends. Whenever I saw her, she smiled with her whole face, eyes crinkling and head nodding. Over the weeks, she told me about her work. She was running an environmental law agency. In New Mexico she had recruited school kids to lobby for legislative protection of toads and lizards in precious, irreplaceable desert lands. Now in the northwestern climate, she was organizing fourth graders to convince the legislature to name a little frog the state amphibian.

Edward and I started seeing her and Fred socially. We invited them over for wine and cheese one night by the fire in our living room. Pammie raved about our home, saying it was just lovely and in such good taste. Fred had a glass of white wine, then said he needed his own coke and rum and left to get it. We sat, waiting for him to drive the blocks to and from their house for his drink. He came in with a plastic grocery bag sagging from the weight of the two liters. Ice clinked in the kitchen and Fred came back into the room, his cheeks flushed from the cold wind outside. The rest of us drank red wine, swirling it in bright glasses like blood.

One night later that year at their home, Fred and I began to talk about the Boy Scouts. I questioned their discrimination against atheists and homosexuals. He was a loyal Eagle Scout and grew enraged. He yelled at me for upwards of forty-five minutes. He demanded I agree they were a great organization. I stayed quiet while he roared. I didn’t know how to respond.

As we said good-bye that evening, Pammie pulled me aside and murmured, “Now you see what I have to put up with.”

That spring we attended a neighborhood party at a local park. Under a wooden shelter, food was spread out on picnic tables. Kids chased each other down a long green field. They played football and frisbee and climbed trees. Our son climbed so high he scared the other adults, but Edward and I were used to it. The men drank beer from bottles and the women held paper cups of wine. Edward and I stood off to one side watching the crowd. Pammie arrived with her children and a cheese platter. She smiled and waved to us and came over to say hello.

“How are you doing, Pam?” asked Edward.

“Oh, I think I broke my back!” she laughed. “It’s so silly, really, but I think it’s cracked or something.”

Edward expressed concern. “Oh, it’s just silly,” she repeated, laughing again. “But, I think I really broke it.”

I didn’t see her or Fred much the rest of that spring and summer except to wave as we drove our kids to and from places. Once I saw them from a distance at the Farmer’s Market. She was eating an ice cream cone, licking the frozen chocolate while he talked to her. She kept eating while he gesticulated broader and broader points. I don’t think he meant to hit her arm, but the ice cream fell in a ball of plop on the hot pavement. She stared down at it. He walked away.

In September I saw Pam’s car parked by the school and went over to say hello. She was bubbly as usual, asking about my children.

“Your kids are so great,” she gushed, “I just love them. Jack is so smart and Karen is just beautiful!”

Then I asked after her. “Oh, I lost my job,” she laughed, “and then I had to fly to West Virginia to rescue my brother.”

“He lives way up on this beautiful mountain. It’s just gorgeous. He lives up there alone with three dogs. That’s part of the problem. It’s too beautiful and he loves those dogs so much he just stays up there and drinks. He only comes down to buy more whiskey! I had to go get him and take him to California for rehab.“

The rehab people told her, “Don’t let him stop drinking before you get here. He might die,” so she traveled with a tote filled with dozens of little airline sized bottles of vodka to keep him pickled.

“Then I wanted to fly back and clean up his house, but he won’t let my dad go near there and he won’t let me go alone. I don’t know why!” she laughed again. “It’s so crazy. My family is just crazy.”

About a month later, I saw Pam’s car again. Her brother was in the car with her. He was unshaven, wearing a paint-spattered sweatshirt. His eyes were red and sad, but he smiled when he said hello.

“Oh, you have to meet my brother,” Pammie called as soon as she saw me. “This is Bobbie.”

Bobbie had spent nine weeks in the rehab center before realizing the counselors were preaching Scientology. Pammie went and brought him to her home. She took him to see the volcano that blew in 1980, Mount Saint Helens. It made his home mountain seem small, a mere bump on the landscape. All the world is small compared to a volcano when you are sober and standing at the edge of its crater.

It was fall and a new school year had started. She and Fred held a little party to celebrate and so, Edward and I went to their home. Pam bustled around serving everyone hors d’oeuvres. Fred held court in the little kitchen. She kept apologizing for having to pass by him to get more crackers and black olives. At one point, Fred turned to me.

“I finally got her where I want her: in the kitchen and cleaning the house,” he laughed.

He was referring to the loss of her job. She grimaced at me as she went by with another tray. Fred got sloppier and sloppier as the evening went on, eventually degrading into sexist jokes and demanding of Edward, “Come on, Ed, laugh! Whose team are you on?”

Pammie glanced at me. Edward didn’t say anything. He told me later he was too angry to talk. “I couldn’t trust myself to speak,” he explained. “I knew I would blow up at him. That guy is such a jerk. He treats Pammie so badly.”

I convinced Edward to invite them over for dinner one night a few months later. I felt the need to normalize relations after that unpleasant evening. “I don’t want to be estranged from a neighbor,” I explained to him.

Pammie called in the afternoon before the dinner, “Fred had to go out of town. Do you want to reschedule?”

“Oh, no. Come over anyway. We’d love to see you.” I was relieved.

“Are you sure? I don’t want to be an inconvenience. We can reschedule, really. It‘s so much trouble to go to for just me. Why don’t we look at our calendars? We could have you guys over here!”

“No, no, really. I want you to come. It’ll be nice and you can get out of the house. I’ve already got dinner started,” I assured her.

Edward built a big fire in the fireplace and we sat near it with glasses of merlot. She began to talk.

“Fred had to go take care of his father. He lives down in Arizona. He had a fall. He was drunk and he fell and cut his head really badly. Fred’s embarrassed to talk about it, but his dad is a real drunk,” she looked down. “I know you guys will understand. I wish he would talk about it.”

“You guys are so great,” she seemed vulnerable. “I just wish he’d talk about it. It would help him so much.”

We sat there for hours that night, talking about our families, sharing stories that were sad and funny. She told a story about seeing her father falling down in the walkway leading up to the house three times before he got to the door while she and her sister watched from behind the curtains and laughed.

“We nearly peed our pants,” she laughed again, remembering. “You can’t understand how funny these things are unless you’ve lived them. We just laughed and laughed.”

It was six months later that I ran into Fred at the grocery store. Spring was turning into summer. I hadn’t seen either of them for a long time. His craggy face seemed cracked with worry. He was hunched forward over a cart filled with frozen burritos and pizza pouches.

“Hey, did you know Pam’s out of town?” he asked. He looked weary. “It’s just me and the kids.”

I stared at him. I didn’t know what to say. I’d never seen him be anything but cocksure.

“Do you need some help? How long has she been away?” I watched his face. Pain moved across the familiar creases the sun had left behind.

“Oh, no, we’re fine.” I watched him move off down the aisle.

A few weeks later, I was surprised to hear her voice on the phone. Usually we communicated by accident, in parking lots or at parties. Except for that one call about the dinner without Fred, I didn’t remember her ever calling me. I asked how she was doing. I mentioned seeing Fred while she was away.

“Yeah. I went to a retreat. I almost left him,” I could her the shrug in her voice. “I needed to get away and think. I went to this place where you meditate all day long and there’s gourmet food at night. There’s no alcohol and everything’s organic. It was so great. I felt so relaxed. You’ve seen how he is. But, he’s so great, too. If you’d seen him when he was younger, so much energy and power. You know, forget it, it’s just the way it is. I’m fine really. Do you want to come to dinner?”

© 2012 Molly Knox

When they called him down there to the morgue to identify the body, he drove behind the wheel of his truck like some steady maniac on a long haul. The Ford 150 cried out for new shocks, but that hardly mattered. Mud plastered side panels and wheel wells didn’t matter. Movie-of-the-Week music thumping dire through his brain and his limbs didn’t matter. What mattered? Only that he identify Cato, busted head and all. Even the inner racket of his melanoma shrunk as he looked straight-on into the mess of his grandson. Robert’s scab from last summer that rioted cells from his foot straight up his leg instead of healing, well if it had itched right then he would have scratched it off just to see blood other than this boy’s.

All night he tried reaching Steve and Mindy in Vegas, where they’d entered one of those gambling tournaments. He kept ringing Steve’s cell and getting bumped into the message system. Damned things. Nobody around anymore to pick up, everybody on hold, all the world’s problems funneled into voicemail. He wouldn’t leave the shocker that was going to slam them soon enough, just said, “Call me at home right away. I mean it.” And “Where the hell are you? This is your dad and I need to talk at you right now.” And, “Don’t you ever check your god-forsaken phone?” He bet they were winning.

No sleep then, his head shiny-ache full with the brand new motorcycle Cato’d killed himself on. Robert didn’t plunk down the money for it, though God knows he had the cash, and had spent plenty of it catering to the whims of that boy—more than half his indulgences turned sour. Steve, who himself rode a Harley, refused to co-sign for Cato, begged Robert to stand tough on this one. When Cato bucked up the gravel drive, come to show it off, yelling, “Look Pawpaw,” over the growl of the machine, Robert told him, “You make one mistake, take one wrong turn with that, and I’m chaining it to this goddamned tree.”

He set his hand on the trunk of the oak. Felt good to lean on something sturdy, since his legs took to buckling without notice.

Kid had busted up so many automobiles, and other shit, it was a miracle he got out of high school alive. That girl Cato’d flipped for, the one who had his baby last Christmas, she co-signed. How she could back up the loan, Robert didn’t know because she was only a nail tech, whatever that meant.

News reporters rang, and Robert said they should go print what they’d already scooped from the police reports and the scanner, or they could all go to hell. When the caller ID listed Steve’s cell, Robert picked up before the first ring finished.

“What’s so important, Dad?”

Tinny and pissed off, his son sounded a million miles away, he could have been on Mars.

“Looks like your boy done killed himself on that motorcycle.” Robert had never been known to mince his words.

Steve screamed, “What?!” and in the background he could hear Mindy railing, the girl with a sixth sense about her boy and hitting Steve with incoherence while Robert hung on the line and waited.

His voice all broke and croaky, Steve said, “We’ll come back.”

Robert heard his daughter-in-law keening.

“You damned well better. And get Mindy something from a doctor. She sounds off the wall.”

“Dad—“

“I know. Get a flight. We’ll talk when you get home.”

Mindy begged to look before they fixed Cato, and Robert warned what she’d see would haunt her all her days, but she wailed, “Don’t you tell me. He’s my one and only boy.”

When the funeral director lifted the sheet, she collapsed as Robert knew she would. He bent and lifted her with a difficulty he hid from his son, and he kept Mindy in his arms, though honestly he wasn’t used to holding a woman. Margaret dead almost seven years, and even before that they’d had a good twenty where they lived together as roommates, nothing but fake kisses since they conceived Steve. Steve, who stood there dazed, no help, the three of them left to cope in that basement.

Mindy, her voice clotted with tears, said, “I should have had more children.”

“No replacing Cato,” Robert said. More words could be dangerous, still he tasted them. “Could have a dozen, but it won’t change this.” And wouldn’t do, either, pinning guilt on her and Steve for going off gaming. Cato had been twenty, with an apartment on his own, and he’d lived a life of flaunting their house rules all the way to the county’s legal code. He was of the tribe of good looking punks who get away with all kinds of shit and make you love them while they’re scamming you.

Some caveman with a prominent brow lay in the casket, the bones of his face huge and sculpted rock. Alive, Cato had been handsome. Everybody remarked on it.

Pastor said, “This death breeds a lump in our throats, but we need to talk of the good boy we knew, to celebrate Cato.”

Beside Robert, a drugged Mindy muttered, “That’s bull.”

The pastor told about the time Cato and his buddies had a BB gun war inside the house, shot up Mindy’s newly papered walls. The guys had to take Cato to the ER for patching up after he tried to dig a BB out of his arm with a razor blade. This drew laughs from the crowd. Another must have given over the details for the pastor to shape his story because he didn’t know Cato. Robert strained, trying to recall whether they’d ever even baptized the boy, but chemo had peppered his once-sharp brain.

Cato had sported the most expensive gym shoes and the baggy pants of a gangster. When the cancer started spreading above his knees, it swole up Robert’s legs so bad he couldn’t wear his usual slacks. The scabs from his ankles to his thighs seeped liquid that ruined clothes. What he found worked was wrapping his legs in cut-up adult diapers, held in place with masking tape. He said then to Cato, “Where can I go buy some of those big pants you wear?”

Cato’s narrow eyes laughed at him. “You’d look stupid.”

Robert said, “Like you don’t?”

He’d ducked away so his grand kid wouldn’t see him flinch, drove the truck to K-Mart for pants in the Big and Tall. Getting up and down out of the cab proved trickiest, as his knees had limited bend. Robert sped on the same county road that would weeks later flip Cato’s bike. Where’d the boy get off spouting cruel to him? Those guys he hung out with, they looked past Cato’s needling—well, sure, he was the source of their good time, as he’d been given every video game and bike and skateboard and drive-able thing. People gravitated Cato’s way, not only because of the dazzle-ly stuff he had; he charmed you with compliments, he roped you in with his smile. Which was probably how he first sweet talked that girl, who’d had his child, out of her clothes.

Come the day Benjy was born, and Robert’s heart still hadn’t opened. The world had rules, he lectured Cato, proper ways of acting, and improper. At the hospital, in view of all those babies in their bassinettes and nurses strolling the hallway, he told him, “Don’t think about giving him your last name without marrying.”

Cato said, “Pawpaw, things are different these days.” But he didn’t cross Robert.

Now they were talking with the lawyer about creating a trust fund for Benjy, about applying Robert’s last name to him in every legal way. Cato’s fiance still no part of the family, but she’d be tied to them forever because Benjy was the girl’s meal ticket, and likely she damned well knew it.

Inside his head, Robert preached his own tribute about the good and bad Cato, boy with a perpetual want that Robert rarely denied since he couldn’t bear his grandson’s face turned away from him for any reason.

The circumstances of how Robert came to possess a U.S. mail truck didn’t matter, but he drug out that little machine, three-legged in its looks, steering on the wrong side like in England, every time toddler Cato begged him to, putt-putted that engine around the block shout-singing, “I am the mailman, I work for Uncle Sam!” holding Cato tight when he cut sharp the curves. Kid laughed so hard he cried; Robert did, too.

That was pre-kindergarten, before Cato started kinging-it up, trading on a charisma he never had chance to figure the why of.

Nothing like the Mailman Song bound them together in that same hilarious way. Thinking back on it, preschool years were the prime time Robert had with Steve when he was boy.

Of course with Steve there’d been Margaret. Mother and son so tight, during Vietnam she vowed to boost him over the border and make her new residence Canada, too, though it never came to that, thank God. Froze out, Robert left them to each other, settled in at the shop where he welded for Diehl Steel, signed for all the overtime they’d dish his direction. What he contributed at home, when Steve would listen, touched on work, women, and doing what was right. Same things Robert failed trying to teach Cato.

Robert felt the distance jump just around the time his son, and then his grandson, grew old enough to challenge him, to suddenly see him smaller than God. Bullshit. He’d never had good communication with them, nor with Margaret either. He’d never told a single person how he felt about what held an ounce of importance for him. And just what did he deem valuable, anyway? He inched back from plumbing that mystery as this was no day to pick over the bones of his own lost cause.

Robert sighed and Mindy put her hand on his. She had Cato’s narrow eyes, or more correct to say he’d had hers. Eyes that didn’t betray much. He could smell the lotion she used on her skin, and the powder, the perfume, the layers she put on for the world all piled at the back of his throat to stop his swallowing. What he’d give for a drink of cold water. Where was that damned fountain he saw when the mortician hustled them through the maze of this place to look and choose a coffin?

Cato, too, had been a hustler. Robert suspected his grandson had been the thief who broke in one night, stole cash from his bureau and the World War I Luger Robert had been given by his own father. Never pressed charges, didn’t turn the boy in to Steve or even grill Cato about it. Wouldn’t have been the first time Cato shit where he slept, with Robert sidling in to mop up, lips zipped tight. He resisted confronting the boy, and this wrenched him deep. It might have made a difference, but who the hell could tell?

He was no whistle-blower. He’d taught Steve, and then Cato, the same: “Don’t be a snitch.”

Halfway through the funeral service, his skin-crawly legs tipped off the nausea he was getting to be old friends with. He had to excuse himself, half-bent to cause the least fuss, avoiding the trip laid out for him by the legs and feet of Mindy, Steve, and the girl with Benjy on her lap.

He wondered if corpses ever rested on the leather-like slab where the attendant directed him. Lying stretched out there in the dim back room, he dreamed Cato rode his goddamned motorbike right up and over a chest that already felt hollow.

“I’d take it from you if I could, Pawpaw.”

More useless yammering. Though with Cato, or even the ghost of Cato doing the taking, Robert supposed he might be able to knock heads with what barreled down the pike on the back of this cancer, especially since he’d numbed himself to the boy’s robbing him of most every other meaningful thing. Disease and Cato putting the squeeze on Robert in the back room of the funeral parlor seemed apt, as both resisted discipline.

Above the din of exiting mourners, he heard Mindy wailing her son’s name clear from the other room. Robert knew he should rise and get out there with the rest of the family taking their last look before they shut Cato for good, but his legs wouldn’t obey. All the cells of his body would rebel if he tried getting up. Robert felt like buck shot scattered through a carcass, and even that buck shot wasn’t going to hold it together.

“When you gonna grow up to be worth something?” he’d dared Cato at the very last, a memory that made him groan.

“You all right?” Steve said.

Robert nodded with his eyes closed. “I will be.”

Steve said, “We’re making our way out of here now.”

As Robert sensed his son shifting to the doorway, he said, “I’m with you,” but had to think about it deeply before his eyelids would peel and reveal the moment.

Cato’s bike had dented his ribs, nailed him flat, slit a trench in him so deep it cut at the leather-covered slab. What fired through his center beat Mindy’s shrieking by a goddamned mile. He was a two-faced granddad, and they’d not reconciled, damn it, he’d been unable to let love outrun despising, at least enough so the boy’d know it.

If Cato had been the dare-devil leaping the gorge, Robert was the lip of the land, awful far off and crumbling underneath the boy hitting ground, Cato whooping it up even as he was slipping, the crowd clapping, too, because they were always on his side, likely squinting, wishing hard he’d make it but afraid to look, everybody failing everybody else.

Robert swung his legs to the side and rose slowly to sit. This stole his equilibrium and he awaited what was never restored. “Who’s going to help get me unstuck from this slab?” he said.

The car doors outside were slamming, voices receding. His hands squeaked against the leather-like cover as he leveraged his feet to the floor, slowly, slowly, and the adult diapers he’d wrapped as a make-shift buffer inside his pants tore from where they’d adhered to his legs, allowing the sores their stagnant, copious weeping.

© 2012 Donna D. Vitucci

I get up everyday at six. I drag myself from bed, shower, make coffee, and then dress for work. I am always on the 8:15 train. I’ve never missed it and I’ve never been late, ever.

[You probably think I’m fucked up. You probably think it would do me good to wake up late one morning—to just for fun call in sick. But that can’t happen. That can never happen.]

By eight forty-five I’m ascending the stairs of the Powell Street Station, making my way to the department store where I work. I love watching the pedestrian traffic downtown, but I don’t let myself linger. I move on, weaving quickly through the crowd. As I said, I’ve never been late, not even once.

[My first boyfriend was a thirty-seven year old Persian. He just moved here from Iran and had a hundred grand in the bank. We’d meet at a café in a strip mall near my high school. I liked to ditch class and hang out there, drinking coffee and reading. Actually, I wasn’t really reading, just carrying around books from my father’s library. I wanted to read them. I wanted to be the kind of person who understood things. But I could never concentrate on the pages. My mind was always wandering. I couldn’t hold it still. I couldn’t keep from staring out the window, daydreaming.]

The employee entrance is at the end of a long, filthy alley. People live back there. I see them every morning, sleeping on old blankets. I dash by them, trying not to look, trying not to notice the tattered belongings they keep stuffed in bags. I don’t like to see the bottles and cigarette butts that surround them. As soon as I reach the back door, security buzzes me in.

[I was sixteen when I met the Persian. At the time I was living in a house way out on a lonely highway in the Central Valley. My dad left my brother and me there with no money and three large dogs to feed. He said he had business to take care of in Los Angeles—he had to sell an antique tribal weaving, or a Pre-Columbian stone carving, or perhaps it was the Turkish runner that used to line our hallway. Two months went by and he still had not returned.

First they turned the electricity off, which wasn’t so bad because there were candles. Then the phone was disconnected, which we could deal with because there was a mini-mart a mile down the road. But there came a point when we actually began to starve. I met the Persian just in time. "You need money, don’t you?" he said, noticing that I always paid for my coffee in change. When he picked me up in his Mercedes, I had my clothes packed in grocery bags. I threw them in the trunk and we drove away. My brother stood on the front porch waving.]

Once safely inside the employee entrance, I pick up my keys from security. I then go straight to my office, turn on the computer, powder my nose, and comb my hair.

[When the Persian’s ex-wife decided to come to the U.S. for a visit, I was asked to leave. I didn’t want to go back to the house on the highway, so he set me up with a studio apartment in the old part of town. He covered the bills for a few months, but soon he started cruising the young actress that lived next door to me. They would go out for coffee together in the morning and sometimes meet for drinks at night. She enjoyed coming over and telling me all about his advances, about the pretty Indian earrings he had given her and the promise he had made to take her to Italy one day. When he stopped paying my rent altogether, I got myself a job selling dresses in a small boutique. I earned just enough to cover my bills and buy cigarettes. But I soon discovered that if I wore make-up and high heels, I could pass for an adult, so I started going out at night. That’s when I met the Armenian.]

Usually by ten I’m ready to collect the orders. First I check with furnishings and shoes. Then I make my way to the suit department. The guys up there like to joke around, asking me things like when am I going to get married or go out with them and what the heck is wrong with me anyway that I’m such a loner and a quiet girl and why don’t I ever have some fun after work, just once?

[The Armenian picked me up one night in a bar when I was out drinking with a friend. To be honest, it was actually me who picked him up. He was my type—tall, wearing an expensive suit and a heavy pair of wingtips. I said something about liking his shoes and we started talking. Within a week I was living with him. The first night at his apartment he asked me to make him dinner. I was petrified. He ate differently than I. He wanted his meat cooked in richly spiced sauces. He wanted his vegetables prepared the way his mother back home made them—lightly par boiled, a squeeze of lemon and some yogurt on the side. What did I know of making such dishes? The best I could do was a pot of rice and some sautéed zucchini. As soon as he discovered I was useless around the house, he wanted me out. But he was too ashamed to admit it. He felt he had assumed an obligation in taking me in and he bore it. Not like a stoic though. He still fucked me when he was drunk and he drank heavily. But the message was clear—I was a burden.]

By eleven I’m back downstairs in my office. Before processing the orders, I check over the employee timecards from the previous day. The manager likes me to report to Human Resources anyone who punches in over five minutes late. My co-workers despise me for this. When I enter the lunchroom, the place immediately gets quiet and one by one people leave. Once everyone’s left, I shut off the TV and read.

[During the day I attempted to fix up the Armenian’s place. I went to the Salvation Army and picked up some furniture. I found a chartreuse vinyl chair and some cool ceramic lamps. I even started experimenting in the kitchen. I bought cookbooks and learned a few recipes. I made baked chicken with rice pilaf. I could do it, I told myself. I could be a good wife. But at the end of the day, he’d just laugh at the things I bought. “Where I come from, we throw that old shit out.” My cooking was never right either. “You poor girl,” he’d say. “Didn’t your mother teach you anything?”]

Once I’ve processed the orders, I pick up the completed ones from the receiving room. The receiving workers are a rough, alcoholic bunch. I handle them carefully. If they say to come back later, I turn and leave. If they say they need coffee before they can help me, I go and get them coffee. I do what I have to get my orders filled. After signing for the packages, I return to my office and match the merchandise with the forms.

[I was finally able to escape from the Armenian and move to San Francisco. Actually, he paid me to leave. One Saturday morning he loaded me up in his car and drove me to the city. He found me a furnished room in an apartment building downtown. It had a nice view overlooking the street and a charming little walk-in closet. He then helped me arrange my things. We hung all my dresses and coats in the closet and folded my sweaters and put them in the drawers. Later we went to the store and he bought me a pound of freshly ground coffee, a loaf of bread, and a bottle of Johnnie Walker black label. Afterwards he handed me an envelope with three thousand dollars in it and left.]

I leave work promptly at five. Once I find a seat on the train, I sit and read. I have a stack of books at home that I’m slowing making headway on. Mostly philosophy. I’m half way through the Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant. I like to imagine myself as embodying the categorical imperative. I don’t even allow myself to think things that can’t be universalized [Obviously I do, but these thoughts have not been consented to, they just come –I do not choose them].

Once home, I slip into my house clothes and pour myself a beer. I only have one, except on weekends, when I have exactly two a night.

[The first night in my room it was so cold I used one of my vintage coats as a blanket. I lay in bed shivering. I could hear men and women passing by my door laughing and the scratchy sound of mice scampering inside the walls.

I did okay for a few months. I got a job in a dress shop on Fillmore. I worked during the day, drank myself out of existence at night, and somehow managed to get by. But I was starting to wear down a little. I’d wake up late, my head throbbing and my clothing strewn about the room. The first thing I’d look for was my wallet—the money was always gone; spent or lost somewhere the night before.]

At eight I make dinner, usually steamed vegetables with brown rice. Sometimes, as a treat, I indulge in an avocado salad. I eat in silence, reading Kant, occasionally glancing out the window into my neighbor’s apartment. I am in bed by nine.

[One day I forgot to show up for work and my boss fired me. I was seriously in debt at the time and on the verge of being evicted from my room.

That night I cried myself to sleep. I cried myself into a state of hysteria. I cried until there was nothing left to cry. I wept so violently the gods couldn’t tolerate it any longer. “Look,” Father Zeus said, placing a hand on my shoulder, “From now on I will take care of you. Only, you must do exactly as I say, and never, not even once, deviate from my orders.”]

*****

One morning when I boarded the train there were two homeless people sleeping on the seats, a teenage boy and a young woman. The boy had an Afro. Not the kind of cool afro kids get to annoy their parents, but the kind of afro people have when they can’t afford to take care of their hair properly. There were no other seats, so I sat next to them. The boy’s arms were tucked inside his t-shirt and he was shivering. I looked over at the girl. A blanket partially covered her face. At her feet were several shopping bags filled with clothes. I quickly turned away and the young boy saw me—he was staring straight at me. I tried to avoid his gaze, but he kept looking. Soon tears formed in his eyes.

I tried to concentrate on my book, but I couldn’t. The letters and paragraphs were swirling together, melting into a gray blur on the page. My mind drifted and soon I was staring out the window. Cherry trees filled with white blossoms lined the street outside and their petals were blowing in the wind like snow. Underneath them, a little blond boy was running and laughing. I waved to him as we passed, but he didn’t see me. He just kept running and laughing, reaching into the air, trying to catch the petals.

© 2012 Mira Martin-Parker

Previously Published San Francisco Bay Guardian 2005

Dear readers,

Truth has a way of reverberating inside the human psyche in ways that few other things do.  It stays with us long after it first reveals itself and forces us to look at society and ourselves in ways we haven’t before.  The piece I have selected to open with does just that.  Liz Tucker’s short story, Apartment 14b, takes us inside the seemingly mundane world of two individuals and reveals a variety of truths that haunts readers long after the story’s conclusion.

Thank you to all the talented contributors that trusted me with reading their work and to the Whistling Fire for giving me the opportunity to sit with the various truths submitted in the form of poetry, fiction and nonfiction.  I hope you enjoy this month’s selections as much as I did.

Best,

Massiel Ladrón De Guevara
Guest Editor

© 2012 Liz Tucker

His farm would be sold today. The realtors and lawyers would pick apart the remnants of his life: the rusting white pickup, the broken  John Deere tractor, the wheelbarrow, tools in the shed, what was left in his house and all he’d left in the sagging, misshapen barn. He was selling it lock, stock and barrel, except for the gruff and unsightly giraffe, which no one would buy.

He memorized the balding hills of his farm, the clefts in the black dirt, the loamy smell of his rotting onion fields, the shambles of his barn and coops. Nearly deserted now, the cows were gone, the chickens rousted from their coops and hauled away in thin wire cages, brown and white feathers flying. The last goat was waiting, tied to a fencepost at the top of the driveway, waiting for Minnie, the Pilewski’s Organic Farm manager to come and take it away.  Who knew what end it would find? Just as well, he thought. Most of the farms were gone now, turned into lavish developments, their owners retired to Florida or wherever the hell it was they went.

Unsure the giraffe was dead, Borkowski stooped over its twitching hind quarters. He lifted his shotgun once more, but stopped, not able to fire again. At length, its legs ceased moving and he said a short wordless prayer. Now what would he do with it? Leave it for the developers, he guessed. They could figure it out for themselves.  Wouldn’t they be surprised to see a flyblown giraffe carcass in their field? Borkowski smiled, imagining the smell of rotting flesh drifting through the upscale neighborhoods surrounding him.

It had been a star once, the only giraffe in a formerly Communist zoo in Poland. As the story went, it had been content to be alone. It was so cantankerous and rude, no one went near it for years. Bankrupt and overwhelmed by capitalism, the zoo eventually closed, and its directors sold the giraffe to a film production company. Supposedly the animal was expected to perform, but soon it became clear it would never cooperate. Eventually Borkowski came by the giraffe through a friend of a friend whose wife was a secretary at its offices in New York. The giraffe was nearly insane, the friend said, and wouldn’t take direction, would Borkowski board the giraffe until a more suitable place could be found? He’d not heard from his friend again after he cashed the sizeable check, so Borkowski boarded the giraffe like a horse in winter, feeding it, covering it with a blanket and affording it most of the barn. Generally they had a decent relationship; he fed it and made sure it was warm, and the animal never bit him.

Borkwoski knew they would build ugly and identical townhouses or estate homes right over the giraffe, its bones buried among foundations, its grave made into a rec room with a widescreen TV. He sensed the grey sky carried rain, the clouds aimless and stalled over his head. He watched as a red tailed hawk drifted over the ridge, its slight wings tipped against the wind. There would be plenty of rodents for her, with all the garbage and grass seed. The nearby sod farms would still do well, at least until all the new lawns were planted; then the sod farmers would take their checks, too.

He watched from a distance as a red luxury sedan rolled toward the house, uncertain where to turn in. It was a Lexus LS, their latest, the one with automatic parallel parking and a six CD changer.  He might buy one of those when the sale was done, Borkowski thought. The sedan rolled to a stop at the house and a woman stepped out. He recognized her as his lawyer from the closing, Meredith something … Instinctively, he tensed. He could just make out the color of her hair from where he stood. She favored dull oversized suits and flat shoes and carried a large tan bag over one shoulder. He wondered where she lived, if she were married.

He watched, amused as the lawyer found the path to the front door and knocked politely, then grew upset. She called someone, while peering into the lower windows.  His wife, Abby, would have just hollered, but a farmer’s wife is different from a lady lawyer, he guessed. Borkowski watched her drop her bag onto the lawn and pull her fingers through her hair. She would spot him soon enough and then he would go inside the empty house, or not, and sign away the last of his life. In a way, he was glad the giraffe wasn’t alive to scrutinize him; the shame was his alone.

For years the giraffe was an attraction in Pine Island, although no one paid to see it. The grumpy animal wandered his 20 acre cow pasture with impunity while local school children, their heads hung out of roaring SUV’s and sleek minivans, pointed to the barnyard oddity as if his farm were a suburban safari. Few stopped to chat or say hello if they saw him; even his neighbors tended to keep away as if keeping a giraffe in upstate New York made him a curiosity, someone frightening. If they had seen him shoot the animal, watch its blood drain into the grass, they would be horrified. He felt like a heathen.

He walked carefully around the giraffe’s body, allowing himself to step in the blood, debating whether or not he would go up to the house. She’d come back again tomorrow or the next day, anxious to give him a million dollars and expecting he’d be happy about it, generous even. He could not go back on the agreement he’d made even if he wanted to. There was nowhere to go. He’d had to sell: there was no money to pay hired hands and he’d sold the farm equipment long ago to pay for heat and hot water. He had hoped to subsist on vegetables and eggs, things he could grow himself, but even he had to have hot showers. There comes a time when an old man bends, so when the realtor asked would he sell, the decision seemed already made.

He patted the giraffe’s cooling flesh. He stroked the coarse hairs and tough bristles along its neck, feeling the summer heat simmering in its pale black spots. With a sharp, empty pang, Borkowski wished the animal would spring to life again on wild reedy legs. The giraffe had been the last of his compatriots. At least the money he got from the land would give him a decent burial; not so for the giraffe.

He turned and searched for the lawyer again. He didn’t want her to come out here. As if on cue, she began waving wildly at him as if flagging down a cab and started toward him. He had no desire to walk the distance between them, no interest in leaving his farm, this inelegant body, but now he was on his own. Borkowski walked slowly back toward the house, his back bothering him again. He noticed how young the lawyer looked and slowly turned to survey his land one more time. The giraffe would be his last regret.

© 2012 Aimee Henkel

Originally published at Sleet.com

Fetal position doesn’t work on the right or the left. On her back like a corpse doesn’t either. Lying on her stomach makes her nervous, as if her thoughts might smother her. Thoughts are wispy, scattered clouds. Laundry, the gas bill, the empty carton of milk, the empty fridge, the fact that she bought more canvas, new brushes, and a bottle of blue acrylic instead of more socks and things for the baby. When she closes her eyes she sees each of these hovering above her like a pregnant rain cloud.

The music mobile above the crib is on its last round. This melody has started showing up in her dreams. It’s a classical tune she can’t remember the name of. Near the end of its round, the mobile grows slower and fainter, drawing notes out as if they’re mentally challenged. It has been years since she’d had a running dream until night before last, when she dreamt that her cat Henry was running through traffic while she stood on the sidewalk, too numb to do anything. In another recent dream, she found herself running in slow motion through the congested city, zigzagging through cars that wouldn’t honk their horns or slam on their breaks, as if she were invisible. Her therapist would probably say these dreams were flirting with the juxtaposition of vulnerability and control. When she was a child, she had a recurring dream of a rabid tiger that had sharp fangs and frothed at the mouth. It was always the same scenario. She’d be running in slow motion as the tiger nipped at her heels. He was always just one step behind her—eyes glowing and drooling—but was never quite able to reach her skin.

It’ll be a couple hours before he wakes up hungry. A checklist runs the length of her whole body, as if anxiety is absorbed in every organ and tissue, as if tension has replaced her blood. Take care of baby should be the only item on the list, but she has to go back to work soon. She once saw a bumper sticker that said: The world doesn’t stop for your pain… so drive! She thinks of how the world doesn’t stop for new mothers or single mothers—or both, like her—how it doesn’t stop for anyone really, except the dead. Maybe not even for them. She imagines dead people racing around in the sky, knocking into ghosts and angels and clouds. How the To-Do list of the dead would include cleaning up hell’s kitchen or painting heaven’s door.

There are bills to pay and calls to place, conversation to finish and paintings that beg to be started. She feels as if her head will burst from responsibility, and then she remembers a particular Emily Dickinson quote: To live is so starling it leaves little time for anything else. When she went through a major depression in her mid- twenties, this quote made her feel a fraction better about her morose perspective—that to simply live in this world is enough.

She rolls onto her side and opens the drawer of the bedside table. A bottle of Ibuprofen rolls around. She bites her tongue so hard she wants to scream. The noise of plastic on wood might wake him. Her hand touches her reading glasses, a few loose slips of paper, her journal and pen. She keeps the journal and pen for sporadic middle of the night thoughts—things that won’t leave her head until she has transferred them onto paper: scribbled lists, random one-liners, and reminders. Oh, the trail of reminders, the dangling fragments of everything she can’t keep track of, those things that are only revealed in the dark of night.

She gropes around in the dark for the Butterfly Bullet.

She would love to get off in her own bed. Maybe then she could actually visualize a man in it. But she can’t bring herself to feel pleasure in the baby’s presence, even though he is asleep. If he were awake, he wouldn’t have an inkling of a clue what she was up to anyway– his three- month- old brain renders him oblivious– but she still can’t bring herself to do it. She tried to masturbate in bed one time after he’d been sleeping a while, but thirty seconds into it, she turned the vibrator off, too nervous that the buzzing would wake him. Then she could feel bad, not only for disrupting his sleep, but for doing it for the sake of her own pleasure. She would not be the mother who woke her child to the sound of her vibrator.

She pushes the comforter away, irritated by its thick touch, and moves to the living room. On the couch, she puts the bullet under her nightgown and between her legs. The cool plastic buzzes and she moves it in circles. For several weeks now, her sexual imagination has been dry. Fantasies consist of faceless people going down on her. No more rapid tearing of clothes in the back of an abandoned building with a wild stranger. No more slow, passionate build- ups with a Johnny Depp look alike. And she never fantasizes about Kenneth, the baby’s father either—she can hardly recall the shape of his body anymore–only of faceless, genderless people going down on her. They have long, soft tongues that lick deliberately and with care, then speed up like motors and make tiny shocking flicks. It’s been seven and a half months since she’s gotten laid. The last two months before Kenneth left they didn’t fuck. She was achy and hormonal, heavy and bloated, and they were both irritable. It was hot then too and the apartment felt cramped and much too small for the two of them.

3:46 a.m the clock on the coffee table reads. Only ghosts and the homeless are roaming around at this hour while she is on the living room couch, masturbating under a maternity nightgown that was a gift from her mother. Wearing a nightgown feels both too old and too young for her– something that only grandmothers or little girls wear. But it’s comfortable, made of soft white cotton, and unbuttons at the top for convenient breastfeeding access.

Suddenly, she hears him above the hum of vibrator. She stays there, the tingling sensation rising, her body preparing to bloom. The baby grows more agitated. Not now, she silently begs. The fussing becomes crying and then turns to a borderline wail. She loses the image of the tongue and the tingly sensation lessens, but she is achy, as if this aching is deep in her bones. She needs to come badly. Everything—her ability to fall asleep, pay her bills on time, and be a good mother—depends on this release.

His tiny lungs are really wailing now. Shut up, she mutters through clenched teeth. He’s always interrupting. She can’t finish a meal or a magazine article, a phone conversation or an email. Can’t even come.

She blocks out the crying and brings the image of the tongue back. She speeds up, moving rapidly now—up, down, up and down. The harder he cries, the harder she presses the vibrating bullet, as if she can stop the crying with willpower and focus. She is willing her body to perform, begging for it to.

When she comes, they both scream. A warm stream of fluid shoots onto the back of her nightgown. Tension has come apart; release is in every cell. His crying is soft and tired now, as if he too, is spent.

She unbuttons the top of her nightgown on her way to the crib and lifts him out. Sitting in the rocking chair, she puts him on her breast. Her nipples are taut and swollen. He sucks like a ravenous bird.

© 2012 Brittany Michelson

Originally Published by Speech Bubble Magazine

Tarleton perches on the exam table in a gown, her thighs pasted to the runner of waxy paper like she is her own favorite mayo and banana pregnancy sandwich. Hugging her stomach she wonders if her baby will like the color red, the taste of cherries, and the feel of velvet; or will it be green her baby loves, the emerald world of frogs and grass. I can’t wiggle my toes, she thinks. My feet are swollen bread loaves with grape toes.

Earlier she’d drunk a sugary liquid and now sits waiting for the man-nurse, Wystan, who comes with the butterfly syringe. She was fine sitting there. Now she’s not fine. Someone coughs in the hall. Wystan enters, a cart following him. Tying the tourniquet above her elbow, he finds the crook of her arm and sees how she shakes and has to be calmed before he can slip the thin needle in. She turns away as the vial fills with rubies.

“You’re not the only patient with blood phobia,” Wystan says. “When I walk into an exam room I might as well be a hurricane. I’ve seen women that afraid.” He likes to talk, to speak of tropical storms and earthquakes. The eleventh tropical storm of the season is out there. It has teeth and an appetite. Hurricane Wystan, he calls himself. He’s a winker. The first vial is capped and another to be drawn. When Tarleton glances she sees red cinnabar moths flying into the vial.

When he leaves he closes the door tight. There aren’t any stories in this room. She listens. The hallway has more. There are secrets kept and revealed here, but the examining table and metal surfaces are too silver and shiny for them to stick. Footsteps approach, then fall back. Her eyes wander the ceiling’s low white sky. The baby is a little seahorse, hers alone. She picked the father for his quickness, for his not-too-short or too tallness. She saw him each day. In her mind she called him the boy because he looked younger than her, although not by much. He smiled more with his dark eyes than his strong white teeth.

Her hands hold her stomach, her fingers touching each deep breath her body takes. Her diaphragm is being squashed by her expanding uterus. She imagines herself as a five-year-old in a burgundy dress with velvet sash and a cancan. Her birthday party. She’d blown up a balloon and when it popped pieces flew to the back of her throat. The instant she couldn’t breathe she felt free. A bird escaping the cat’s daggers. How far away the people around the tall strawberry shortcake seemed. Breathlessness made her float as if she would soon dissolve into bits of silk ribbon. She had no mother who wished to hold her to earth. Struggling to breathe, she gulped in air and panted.

•

The door opens and Tarleton turns, her face expectant. But it’s not soft-spoken Doctor Lynette Roby. Instead it’s a thin, blond man with a long nose overlooking his white lab coat and stethoscope who takes her hand. He is shaking it, pressing his cold palm against hers. His hair, combed back from his forehead, is long enough to tuck behind his ears. He tells her he is replacing Doctor Roby. He tells her his name is Doctor Liszt. The name sounds familiar.

He helps her lie back on the examining table. Maybe he thinks she won’t miss Doctor Roby because his eyes are so very blue—the cobalt-blue of her childhood’s glass pig-bank. The one she used to feed dimes, quarters, and twigs. Half dollars were too big for his mouth. Her grandmother owned Laundromats. Her clothes rained quarters. When Lester the pig-bank broke, she gathered up all the blue glass and planted it next to the chinaberry tree. She waited for a tree of slivery blue leaves. Branches jagged like shards of broken Lester. She watered the ground with her tears.

“Any vaginal bleeding?” he asks, seating himself on the wheeled silver stool. He turns a page in her file. A bulldog clip holds her first and second trimesters.

“No.”

“Any irregular contractions?”

“Some.”

He wants to measure her cervix. A mirror, light and speculum opens her. The hidden world. She thinks of the deposit of semen injected high into the cervix with a needle-less syringe. She decided on the boy herself. He was twenty-one. A cashier at her neighborhood Stop N Go; a boy set on saving money to become an herpetologist; a boy who would eventually return to his native Bangladesh.

“How old are you, Tarleton?”

“Almost twenty-five,” she answers.

“We’ll be taking a repeat gonorrhea test.” He pronounces gonorrhea like an entrée in an expensive restaurant.

“Why?”

“It’s routine.”

Her cheeks burn. “There’s no reason. The baby is from a sperm bank.” He pauses to look at her. Is he surprised that this pretty dark-skinned girl chose a donor? This girl with high cheekbones and pale green eyes is likely partnered with another pretty girl. But he can’t see everything, sitting as he is on the metal stool with four wheels. Maybe he loves to roll like she used to roll, up and down, up and down. Then he sits, draping the sheet between her legs. His fingers examine her ankles.

“I’m retaining water,” she says.

“That’s normal. How are you sleeping?”

She thinks of her body and how it took in noises from the street, and the gospel singing of mosquitoes through the thin walls of the apartment. The baby listens to everything. The baby is listening now. She feels the cold of the speculum. “You have extremely pleasing eyes,” he says, looking at her blue cervix. Her leaf-colored eyes aren’t there.

“I thought Doctor Roby would be with me,” Tarleton trembles. Her skin is clammy, her skin doesn’t like the wax paper sheet, doesn’t like him looking.

“Won’t your partner be with you in the delivery room?” he asks.

“I don’t have a partner. The baby and I will be everything to each other.”

“Maybe you can ask your mother to be with you.”

“Who?” Silence swallows the room. Her grandmother said Tarleton’s mother had an aneurism during her delivery. Should she share that fact with his face or the ceiling’s perforated holes pricked by a million butterfly needles? He unsnaps his rubber glove so forcefully. Like he is angry at her. Angry that she is the cause of him having to put it on. “A berry aneurism?” His eyes turn opaque. Blue plaster. “What was the outcome?” She shrugs as if she doesn’t know. But she does. Her mother died. Her mother became stillness. There was a lawsuit that became a handsome trust fund. She wonders if the baby inside her, a girl-child, could be her mother returning. “Cheer up.” he says, closing her folder and patting her shoulder. “You’re young,” he repeats, already most of the way out of the room. “Stay active. Keep exercising.” Tarleton sighs not loud enough for the light switch to hear or the glove that touched the inside of her body withering in the wastebasket.

She thinks of the boy’s dark eyes so intelligent behind his glasses. How quickly he gave change. He already knew the total before the electronic sensor touched the bar code. He knew things about her. That she didn’t require a plastic bag. That she refused to add to the reefs of plastic in the ocean that choked dolphins. That she preferred paying in cash. Sometimes, handfuls of quarters. It was this knowing that led to him telling her he had a discovered a frog in the Chittagong district of his home country that had not yet been classified. There was an article in a newspaper on-line. She asked many questions of him. What his favorite time of day was? First light. Did he sleep well at night? Always. Did he like the color orange? Yes, when the sun dropped into Bay of Bengal at dusk, orange swallowed the world. Then the day came and she asked him to be a donor. Hers. He would be paid. She bought ice cold water, a coconut ice cream bar.

•

In the waiting room the TV is turned to pregnancy yoga. A big woman in black shorts on her hands and knees curls her toes and raises her hips. Her legs are great marbled cuts of beef. Wystan coming down the hall gives her a thumbs up. Doctor Roby shouldn’t have left without telling Tarleton goodbye. Clutching her cell phone she starts down the uneven sidewalk that passes the nursing college and Herman Hospital. Cathedrals, blue-white in the sun. Cars pass. Traffic is a blur. Buildings are sharp-edged, like scalpels. She hopes the little seahorse doesn’t mind. It’s good for both of them to walk, so said the blond, thin-nosed doctor. Before the lawsuit she lived with her grandmother in a three-story yellow house with wraparound porch and bamboo shades that broke the sun into slanting pieces that the ceiling fan stirred.

The heat in this city is always spoken of. The most air-conditioned city in the world. It was flat out heat like this, the day she and the boy walked together to the clinic. He wore a long-sleeved shirt and his dark hair was freshly washed. Sun glinted from the black centers of his eyes. He said things to her. He would like to know her better. She could teach him. Did she know how to play marbles with sea shells? Had she ever seen a swamp deer? The male antlers have twelve points. He was nervous. Like a swamp deer. He felt the great honor. Thank you, he told her. Thank you, he repeated.

Her dress liquefies and the nylon material sweats flat against her body. She feels as if she is walking naked. Doctor Roby didn’t tell her goodbye, and neither had she told the boy goodbye. Is my conscience clean? Will I be a good mother if my conscience needs washing? Twice a day for months she’d talked with him; he spoke good but not perfect English; yes, frog hunting in brackish ponds near the ancient temples he’d taught himself English; old science journal articles were sometimes written in German and so he learned German, that’s how smart he was. The day he accompanied her to the clinic; she gave him a check for more money than he could believe. For doing such a thing.

She keeps walking through the heat and as soon as she thinks she is almost home another block unrolls itself. There are smells of warm dirt and leaves. Along the sidewalks she notices beige gravel like broken teeth. Yucca plants, fleshy daggers poke into the sun. Her head sweats like her skin, perspiration trickling into her eyes, perspiration running from her chin, from her ears like water diamonds. Walking she rocks, knowing the baby likes the motion of going. We will be everything to each other. Why, the boy asked, don’t you want to make a baby in the ordinary way? Are you afraid?

She turns onto West Dallas Street. The cars go faster and not a hint of a breeze. Someone in a passing truck honks. “Mamasita!” Squat brick apartments with oxidized lilacs. A man in overalls at the corner holds long pruning shears. The giant tongs click at the bush’s pointed yellow tips. She goes on between lawns stamped brown by the scorching sun. She needs no one but the life inside her. Behind the blue cervix is the hidden word.

© 2012 Stephanie Dickinson

C.G. went to the forest. She lied about going on a sleepover―at Eleanor’s, Ma, and found her parents’ trusting, Okay, Cee, maliciously benign. She slammed the front door, shouted an apology and left, to pedal furiously along the road winding like a concrete shoreline by the river. At its end she hid her bike under bushes.

A farmer she recognized from the Saturday market allowed her on the back of his pickup along with his cants, toms, corn and berries. She ate one ear of fresh, raw corn while she was in the back of that truck, threw the husk to the floorbed and let the silk glide in the air to the road.

At Tadpole Creek, where the side road meets the highway, the farmer stopped; she cut him off before he could ask any questions. “A good kid,” he decided and drove on.

Again she hitched. Lowered her thumb when three different drivers who made her anxious slowed. Accepted a lift from a teenage boy whose great ambition was showing off his red four-door. The road ended; he yanked the emergency brake. She fidgeted with her ponytail and thanked him, trying to blend finality with gratitude. She was going solo and needed him to understand.

His face flushed while she listed her scouting badges in outdoor survival.

“I-I-I was an Eagle Scout,“ he said.

Two ravens met overhead, exchanged ancient caws and flapped away.

The boy worried a speck of dust on a fender. “Okay, then.“ C.G. watched as he backed up; held her breath when he stopped; breathed with relief when he shrugged at her insistence she was fine and drove off.

Holy cow. She scampered up another, smaller road, this one gravel, past a deserted campground. It was too early in the year for campers; the park service wasn’t recommending anyone hike until June, and all the better. She loved the month of May, its flower baskets and magic Celtic feel. May a good month for a quest.

She reached the trailhead and pressed onward, gaining 300 feet in ten minutes; putting real distance between her and the bothersome world, drawing herself into the Cascades.

When she spotted blueberry bushes, she crawled under to lie on her back and stare at swaying pines and hemlocks in the misty air. She looked past ripe green leaves of the blueberries to the deep and silver greens above. Drops of water slid from leaves, splashed into her eyes and magnified the flattened structure of each leaf and tension of droplets, the universe enlarged. She remembered a time she was with her sisters and parents driving. There was no outdoors in that memory. There was only the enclosed space of an old, gray car. In the back seat, an older sister on either side, sat C.G. The family was lost. Her father swore. Her mother prayed. Each sister pinched her and she’d cried. Did they care? Nah.

She started walking and realized that wile her mind stayed anchored back home, the trail was too wet for distractions; her judgment failed, her foot was sucked into slick mud. She teetered, yanked her boot out―she was strong―and make her way onward, concentrating on the present.

Clouds abounded but there was no rain; the air rang sweet and dank. C.G. headed for a rocky area that looked safe, veered away, choosing in favor of comfort. Her mattress that night was to be an almost convex surface with a patch of resilient undergrowth. She shook out plastic, unrolled her pad and sleeping bag; stretched her tarp above, fixing it between a tall dense bush and a tree.

Water from a nearby brook was so cold it made her head ache; she filled her jug. Four matches wouldn’t ignite, then bla-zooie, a fifth flamed so she could light her small stove. She sipped hot tea, chewed raisins and cashews.

And studied the wonder of a mountain with aspens and maples emerging from its slopes. You’re my spirit guide, she informed its unmovable form. Witches used cats for familiars. But I have you, my beauty. Mountains were women, she decided.

A quick sparkle above the peak made her heart race. Was this was a sign? Hey! She waited for more, but the sky became hazy wool; she crawled into her sleeping bag, and fell asleep like slumber was an enchanted well and she’d been thrown in. Once she woke and stuck her head out from the tarp. She craned toward the summit where this time she thought she saw a flash, but after groping for her glasses―stashed in a boot―she was disappointed. The sky was dim and dull. And vast and unsettling, she thought with the confidence of the impassioned, to anyone who was not on a mission such as I am.

At sunrise she heated water to boil the two eggs she’d brought as a treat. She manged to drop both and saw the yolk spread on the ground; her breakfast was brown bread.

She needed something―armor or strength against meddlers of the world―to maintain herself―Carla Genevieve Matilda Standish-McMannis (as soon as she saved up the money she was changing her name, that was a given, what kind of parents hyphenated―or let two daughters have a say in naming the third?). She sorted and rolled her gear and slung her arms through her khaki backpack’s straps. Clouds scuttled, exposing her mountain’s classic peak the color of cedar, bare at its crest of everything but snow, a glacier on an oddly sloping side.

The final half-mile to the gap was strewn with rocks and boulders and she had to pick her way with care, step-by-step, sometimes one hand against a boulder to steady herself. This tedious climbing, this sense of being tossed and tumbled, left her grumpy. She wanted to be on level ground and when, after so many deliberated steps she could walk freely, C.G. threw herself on flat greenery. In her bliss she saw short climbs of 300 or 400 feet and across the valleys in all directions, the glorious range of mountains of which her peak―cipher and sibyl―was part.

What’s the secret?she asked; how do you do it? It seemed stoic, unless the occasional rock slide was a mountain’s way of complaining. It outlasted trees; would outlast anyone she was related to.

She rolled on her side. Before her was a tiny floating ghost of a mountain, a doppelganger which vaporized to became the sum of its parts and the essence of that sum: a mystical cloud wafting towards her, hovering, and in an instant, dissipating.

Are you playing tricks on me?

The cloud reappeared and disappeared.

Her family would smirk if they heard about her vision―and maybe they’d be right. It was weird.

We need to stop thinking and get to work. Was that her mother’s voice? In my mind’s stupid ear. The indoctrination would follow her to whatever corner of the globe she fled. She trudged up another 200 or 300 feet where she found a hollow tree to lean against as she ate a piece of bread and a few cashews. Clouds sped by, their spreading shadows dragging along green curves, the peaks and slope of the land beneath, slowly and sensuously.

Like a hand.

That was how lovers touched lovers. She just knew it―no experience necessary. She considered her mission―how to become so important every star in the sky would know her, every human on earth would love her, love C.G., for who she was. She tried to picture her life unfolding into high school and college and jobs and travel and maybe family. What she imagined was the short form of a decent life, the form without worry, disappointment or injustice. In her imagined future, she moved with grace and importance through jobs, award and applause. C.G. was fully in the future. When she looked around she was disoriented, then sensed she was being watched.

Who’s there?

Was that a rustle in that tree? Her neck was plugged into an electric cord―her hair was straight and flying. Maybe another hiker was messing with her. Maybe red-car boy was a psycho and she’d missed the signs. An eagle flew in the distance. Had to mean something.

In an effort to make the eerie humdrum, C.G. whistled and ran her hands through her wild hair, rocked herself eye-level with a hollow in the log. Oh, not a good idea. She saw two eyes, white and round and chestnut and peering―with the sure, cold insight―from inside the dead tree. Damn. C.G. was afraid to move. But that was why she was here. For a test. To get strong.

Leave! she demanded. The afternoon felt quiet. She tried to sing, but notes fell to her lap. Time for me, then, she muttered, standing up, squinting left and right. Time for me to scout the best route out. She assured herself, It’s all gonna be fine and dandy, dandy and fine. The warm sun soothed, the air was soft and pine-scented. She hadn’t figured life out yet, but she was scoring points and she had another night. A whole other night.

She swung her pack off the ground but the freaking bulky thing was alive. She dropped it and jumped away.

C.G. knew she had to get going, and that she couldn’t leave her backpack with all her provisions. She inhaled seriously, like her oldest sister did when practicing yoga, then closed her eyes and put her finger on her third eye. Wow. Energy circled into her index finger, hand, arm and coursed through her body. She lifted her pack; her fingers curled around the strips. Everything inside was inert. She settled it on her back and laughed she’d thought there had to be a battle between bad and good, darkness and light. She wasn’t Guinevere or St. Joan, wasn’t brave as Harriet Tubman or defiant as Antigone.

“You haven’t come into your own, dearie.”

C.G. almost collapsed. A hand encircled her with short fingers which barely curled over half her forearm, but they were strong. It was attached to a creature, No, not a creature, a woman, but a woman like no one I’ve ever seen.

“I’m real,” the creature, female, said.

Something happened―a movement of clouds―a play of light and dark. C.G. could see the female’s gray eyes which saw her as she wasn’t sure she wanted to be seen. That creature had too much wisdom for any one person or any one creature.

“Are you sure you’re real?”

Something scuttled along the ground. They were too high for snakes but C.G. did a quick jig, the kind you do when you don’t want an unknown near your ankles.

“Real enough.” The non-human feline almost smiled. “I’m a…” she paused, and C.G. thought her expression was cynical or sarcastic, the kind teachers and parents hated. “I’m what’s known as a crone.”

The crone―for sure not a word the woman liked using to describe herself―crouched next to her. C.G. saw she was beautiful in the way women could be―with lines and imperfections and supreme confidence in their power.

“See this?” The old woman blew on her palm and the air filled with dust that was more than dust. C.G.’s eyes stung and her throat hurt. “Not earth. Just clutter. Something temporal.” She assumed C.G. understood or knew enough to get the drift. “Don’t let yourself be so pulled into it.”

C.G. shuddered. She realized night was on the way.

The woman not quite real, or too real, pulled at her long matted hair. “You’re not there yet, but it’s there for you, someday. I have no magic for you and no more advice and about that I don’t care.” And disappeared. C.F. heard a howl or cackle.

She knew she’d better move, and would have but she no longer knew what move meant. It had something to do with her feet and legs, right? The last thing she wanted to be was a news item―Missing Mountain Teen, or the focus of an editorial on the burden of inexperienced campers on search-and-rescue teams. She was ashamed for such a trivial thought after such a momentous meeting, but then nothing was good or bad. Her feet tingled like they’d fallen asleep and were waking up. She hauled down a different trail, found a spot midway down and set up. After slunging up her tarp and boiling water, she crawled into her sleeping bag, a hot canteen by her feet.

Now, a tarp thrown over a rope to make an A-frame shelter is no tent. Each end is exposed to the fathomless black of a mountain night. The tarp didn’t afford much protection, but she barreled into an exhausted sleep.

And woke a few hours later to hear a shrill and gripping whine as if all of life’s suffering as knew it at her age had been drawn out in one audible line of pain. The pain of a life without every person alive cheering her on.

It’s over. She was ready to die. The crone showed up to lead me to the next world.

Was she was breathing? Her life would have flashed by, but she hadn’t come to the mountain to review her life. She’d come to prepare for it.

The chanting stopped.

When she woke at break of day, she saw raindrops beading the tarp. She became a spin of smooth and even impulse, packing, slipping on her large, bright poncho, tending to the details.

The mystery of life: some fear, some pain, some cessation. Some joy. Some tranquility. That wasn’t the answer but she was preparing to find an answer, maybe in a few years, maybe on her deathbed. She squinted through mist. Trees like troops flanked the mountain’s stout sides. Her spirit leaned, then sank, into the hillside of evergreens.

She reached the trailhead and made her way to she the gravel road where, in the late afternoon, she was picked up by a friendly threesome of fishermen in a station wagon. She sat in the far back with a collie and a golden retriever while the men talked.

“What we didn’t catch this trip just won’t be caught.”

“Nothing like it.”

“Not nothing.”

“We got some good fish.”

“Yup.”

“Good fish and good fishing.”

They dropped her off on the river road at her bike hideaway. The boy with the red car anxiously waited. He asked if she was okay, poured her coffee from his thermos and told her he’d spent most of the time since he dropped her off driving between the trailhead where he’d let her off and the river Then her sisters pulled up. On a hunch they’d called the friend she claimed she was visiting; noted her missing bike and pack; rummaged through maps on her desk; sweated it out; said nothing to their parents. The boy tied ’s bike to the roof of the family car, and waved.

She was glad to be with her sisters even though they didn’t stop crabbing―she was foolhardy, she was a dope. But together they snuck her through the back door so she could bathe, dress in her flannel bed clothes and greet her mother and father with respect and cordiality. Her parents kissed her with love and the usual confusion.

When she bolted upright at three a.m., hearing the chant, she called out, remembered the wail could end. She remembered the crone, and fell asleep, one hand dangling off the mattress above a small clump of earth she’d shaken from her boots.

© 2011 Sarah Gancher Sarai

The walls were bare now, some riddled with holes from the battle that the opposing armies had waged through the property a few months before. The family had scattered most likely, taken their treasured belongings and fled, planning perhaps to return someday.

Someday.

When the war was over.

Today, the men that gathered here had little purpose beyond an order to appear and the insistence of commanding officers or in one case military escort. A table, cobbled together from remnant boards and shored up with bricks at its feet, sat in the middle of the near barren space. Chairs, some little more than a bucket upended and left on the floor, were spattered about the room.

This was not a place of comfort or hospitality. It would, however, become a war room over the next few hours, nothing grand in stature or decoration, but grand in purpose.

Looking at the orders in his hand Captain Healy felt the press of both his duty and the victory he longed for sitting heavily on his shoulders. The plan was merely a spark of innovation and a spark, as he knew first hand, could start a fire that might consume him as well as light the way.

He was the first to enter the room, take his bearings of the random spill of furniture, and set his will to see the matter through.  A soft rap of sound on one of the inner doors caught his attention, turned him toward the immediate future, the task at hand. “Enter.”

The door swung open, held in place by some nameless private that Healy had never bothered to ask for his name. Three men entered the room, uneasy by the looks of their expressions, and unsure of their purpose they assembled. No one indicated that they take a chair but it seemed ‘expected’ and fulfilling that expectation had been ingrained into their lives. Each picked a chair and left one unclaimed, the head of the table was his.

“Take a seat, gentlemen.”

The request startled one of the men. He had expected an order from the Captain as any subordinate soldier would. He was the last to lower himself into his seat.

He was also the first man that the Captain addressed. “Lieutenant Morris, you made good time from the coast. I am sorry that you had to leave your work.”

Grey nodded, a stiff movement that gave away little of his true feelings. “There are those who can continue my work before I return. We can’t afford to lose time in any event.”

There was a subtle rebuke in his words, but Healy wasn’t looking for a confrontation and so he ignored it. “Lieutenant Morris is part of our submarine corps. He and his men are making vast improvements in our fleet, hoping to punch an irrevocable hole in the Union Navy.”

The other men murmured in agreement, the hopeful sentiment was one they shared.

“And you, Donnelly.” The Captain acknowledged the man to his left, quiet in manner and pale in color. “Your specialty is ordinance.”

“And I didn’t want to have anything to do with the military, but here I am.” Burke’s gruff interjection was not a shock to Healy, but the other two showed their surprise openly.

“You have skills that will be pertinent to this conversation, Mr. Burke.” Healy offered a hospitable smile, or as close as he could approximate one. “Your connection to this group will be revealed in due course.”

“I don’t see how we have much of anything for the lot of us to talk about together.” He leaned back in his chair. “I have other duties to perform.”  With that he began to rise from his chair.

“You have a duty here, Burke.” The captain’s tone cut into atmosphere of the room, stilling Burke’s actions. “I’ll thank you to have a seat so that we may begin.” Looking about the table, Healy saw the expectant and curious looks of the assembled group. It was, he agreed, an odd assemblage, but it was the only configuration that he could imagine that could make this feat possible. “We’re looking to create a warship. The likes of which will stagger the Union in their tracks.”

“Ship?”  Morris’s shock sputtered from his lips. “The war for superiority is on the ground, Captain. What good is another ship when we’ve already bested the Union at sea numerous times? At this juncture, it is merely a matter of out-producing them; putting boats out to sea and bringing down the Union fleet.”

The captain listened to the words and gave them their due, but neither his expression nor his resolve changed. He had expected a good deal of complications and was prepared to overcome them. “The Army has the battle well in hand and the ship that we’ve been tasked to build is one meant to ride the air, not the sea.”

The room was stunned into utter silence; the captain’s worn boots the only sound as he stepped to a side board and retrieved a large sheet of paper and a pencil sharpened just for the occasion. Smoothing the paper out on the table, he felt the scars of the old wood through the sheet and removed any remnants of dust from the surface. Satisfied that the canvas he used was suitable for his purpose he began to draw a round shape, a bit longer in height than a circle but his repeated tracings blurred the image somewhat. “The body of the ship will be light, held aloft with hydrogen gas in the same manner as a balloon.”

That had Burke’s attention and his derision. “Ride the air, hmm?” He looked at the other men at the table in turn. “We’re tethered to a base,” he explained, “we can be towed by train, wagon or barge, but it won’t fly. Not the way I think you’re meaning.”

Healy barely acknowledged the argument, addressing it only with a pointed look. His hand outlined the round body and added gored panels running from top to bottom. “We’d fill it with tankers that we’ve captured from the Union. They will provide a reliable source of gas and travel with the ship; a dock, but one that we could mobilize.”

Donnelly shook his head. “How does that answer Mr. Burke’s challenge? The restriction of a balloon stems from the fact that it needs a connection to the ground, a pull to move it along and give it direction. There is little use for such a craft in active war.”

“Exactly.” The Captain allowed himself a moment to gather his thoughts, softening the deeply etched lines about the corners of his eyes. “That is part of the problem.”

Morris ventured a query. “Then you’ve an idea to sort it out… to make it move from one place to another on its own?”  He sounded more hopeful than his expression alluded. “Forgive me, but that sounds like quite a flight of the imagination, Captain.”

Burke wasn’t about to make it easy. “Have a few trained pigeons up your sleeve, Captain?” He sat back in his chair, one booted foot sliding out a bit and under the table. “Can’t see how you’d make it work otherwise.” He looked about, waiting for someone to agree with him, to understand his meaning. “Up in the air you’ve got the wind buffeting the balloon around, not much you can use up there to steer.”

Captain Healy turned his sanguine gaze on another man at the table. “That’s where you come in, Morris.” Using his pencil he drew a shape beside the balloon. One that was easily recognizable to the sailor.  “Moving through the water is harder than moving through the air,” he drew a hasty sketch at the back,” blades cut through the water, propelling the ship through it. Wouldn’t the same concept work in the sky… rudders and-”

“A submarine in the air?” Burke banged his fist on the table top before him. “It’s not the same thing.” He leaned forward with a measuring gaze on the captain. “The weight alone would drag it down! You’ve brought us here on some fool’s errand, Captain, I’m done.” Folding his arms across his chest he stared at the wall, his ruddy complexion darkening. “Stuff and nonsense.”

Perhaps it was a vague expression on Morris’s face or the silent working of his lips that gave Healy some measure of hope. When Morris finally spoke it was as if he was caught in a daydream. “Wind has a current, like the ocean. The submarine must stay afloat even in the midst of water, but a balloon-” He looked to Burke for assistance and received a grudging response.

“Stays aloft with lift. Lighter than air is the way we keep it up above the trees.” He shifted in his chair uneasy at how quickly he was drawn back in. “I doubt you could make one big enough to support the weight of rudders of any kind.”

“Not size then,” the Captain conceded, “perhaps number? Placement? A single alteration or-”

“Or a number of changes along different disciplines.” Morris shook his head desolately, his slim frame wavering. “How much time would it take? How much time would we have?”

“And what good would it do?” argued Burke. “We’d move faster, venture farther, but fat lot that would do for us now. Keeping an eye on the Union Blue won’t be enough.”

Donnelly lifted his hand and caught the Captain’s attention. “I don’t think we’ve been shown the whole picture. Or at least I believe I am about to enter into it.”

The captain’s quiet acknowledgement continued into the explanation. “The lift of the balloon, the maneuverability of the submarine and lastly,” he turned to Donnelly, “perhaps you will be so kind as to bring in our acquisition.”

Rising from his chair, the man brushed at the ever-present dust discoloring his dark coat. He made his way around the table and opened the door. Two soldiers took the opportunity to enter the breach carrying in a small structure, the top of which was shrouded with an oilcloth. They set the object down beside Donnelly and exited without a word.  Lifting the corner of the cloth he let it fall to the floor at his feet.

“What is that?” Morris half stood from his chair and stared at the complicated mass of metal perched on the wooden stand.

Donnelly touched the cool iron of the barrel, his hand gentle, and the hushed tone of his voice reverent. “I’m sure you’ve heard of the ‘coffee mill’ guns that the boys of Pennsylvania have used on our troops.  This gun was recently brought to our attention by a Dr. Gatling from North Carolina.”

Indicating the barrel of the weapon, Donnelly pointed out that it had six barrels that “rotate and fire a continuous spray of bullets operated by a single gunner.“

Burke turned up his nose at the mention. “Heard he offered it to the Union as well.”

“Yes,” Captain Healy accepted the truth of the statement, “he admitted as much, but that, as he says, is the prerogative of a businessmen.”

“He’s a Carolina boy,” Grey took up the argument, “he should be loyal.”

Holding up his hands in surrender, Donnelly ventured forward with a thought. “However it came to be, we have acquired a dozen of the guns and I believe Captain Healy has asked me here because he’d like to add these to this ‘ship’ of his.”

Healy nodded his assent. “You have me dead to rights on that score, Donnelly.”

Morris leaned over the diagram on the table. “It’s crazy, what you have in mind here.” His fingers traced the pencil lines, smudging a bit here and there. “Even if we could find a way to put something like this up in the air,” he sighed, a long suffering exhale of air from his lips, “adding a gun… is pure madness!”

Burke, who they would learn could always be counted on for a prediction of dire consequences, added in his own assessment. “Madness, truly. This isn’t as simple as forge-welding something together. There’s gas involved and ordinance.” His laughter shook his shoulders and his middle but the darkness of his narrowed gaze was imperious. “A spark could send the whole thing up in flames! Then the Union would make a mockery of our innovation.”

“Not to mention,” Grey continued the thought, “if the Union were to bring it down, capture it for their own use.”

The three began to argue at once, at times with each other and then against as they began to out-shout opposing viewpoints with their questions and declarations. These men, all three intelligent and well educated in regards to their own specialties seemed to find no shortage of opinions about the proposal.

The pencil, given over by the Captain during the ensuing debate, passed from hand to hand to hand as they scratched out possible configurations and then crossed them out in turn.

Healy could only stand back and watch in amazement at the wild conjectures of their imaginations and the demanding press of their viewpoints on the subject at hand. He thought, given the obvious discord surrounding the table, that they would never see eye-to-eye on the project.

He was wrong.

It was Donnelly that finally cut through the ragged cacophony of noise with his pronouncement. “We all agree.” He looked at the Captain, his gaze steady even as his hands shook slightly with nerves. “It’s impossible, but we’d all like to try.”

© 2011 Ray Dean

Dear Readers,
It was a great honor and a great time guest editing for Whistling Fire this month. My theme was steampunk. If you don’t know what that is, don’t worry, our first piece, “After Crystal City” by Andrea Myer, is about as steampunk as it gets. Her story shows a woman living in a steampunk world in all of its glamor and gore. I found it to be both a welcoming and frightening introduction to steampunk and I think you will too. Enjoy.
Cheers,
AE Stueve

© 2011 Andrea Myer