Mimosas

Holden Wright

Josh told me his sister had just learned he was dating another boy half his age, and she was pissed. He tried to laugh it off, but all I could think was, “Another?” and for the first time wondered how many predecessors I had.

Josh was self-conscious about his girth, but I loved to feel the weight of him on top of me, pressing me into the bed. I was in Boise for the first time, visiting him for a long weekend. He’d been to see me once in Corpus Christi, where I took him to a concert and threw up on his shoes after too many margaritas. Before that we dated online nearly six months. 

Idaho was almost another country to me: a tidal wave of mountains came at you from the horizon, making the sky seem far away and brittle. I came completely unprepared, wearing a light jacket that was no defense against the October chill. “We’ll get you a real coat,” Josh told me. “And a scarf and gloves.”

Too, I was unprepared for Josh who knew exactly how to unravel me with nothing more than a well-placed look. He was effusive, disarming; we spoke entire conversations over tikka masala with our eyes and hands. Nights, I would lie awake next to him while the wind rammed against the window, waves of sound, making his house somehow cozier. I wondered what it would be to live here with Josh full-time. He was, I think, the first man I ever loved.

The sister, who lived two hours away, showed up one day without announcement. Josh was not an early riser, and we spent our mornings in bed, watching the square of window light crawl lazily down the walls. I answered the door wearing only Josh’s bathrobe, which looked comically large on me, and the first thing I registered was not the woman on Josh’s doorstep, but the world beyond her, white and delicate with an early snow. 

Natalie (that was her name) wore her dark hair in a fierce A-line, and her plum-colored lips flattened into a grimace when she saw me. “God,” she said. She pushed her way past the front door and through the house to Josh’s bedroom.

They talked about me the way adults talk to each other about their children, as if I could not hear them. I stood in the kitchen and watched the snow Natalie had tacked in melt on the pale linoleum.

“I don’t think you understand how impressionable a twenty-year-old is. He probably thinks you’re in love with him,” she said. I had to hug the bathrobe tight against my body to keep it from slipping off.

“He’s older than that,” Josh said. “And anyway, we’re just having fun. Nobody’s planning on settling down or anything. Just let us have our fun.”

Josh offered to take us all for brunch. “Let’s get mimosas and talk civilly, I mean really,” he said. He swore he knew a place on Delancey street, but we trekked down Delancey and Parker and Mulligan, and could not find it, the wind rushing us, and the ground slick with snow and ice. We walked in silence, Natalie’s heels smacking loudly against the sidewalk, until Josh stopped, put his hands on his knees and said, “Shit. I need to sit down.”

“Can we go inside?” I asked. I still didn’t have my scarf and gloves.

Natalie threw open the door nearest to us, and we filed in. It was a beauty salon, warm, honey colored. Josh fell into a salon chair with a sigh. We waited for him to catch his breath.

A saleswoman surprised us. “You want to try our new product? Perfect for you!” She said.

“What?” said Josh.

The saleswoman wore a cream-colored pantsuit and long ombre hair. “I’m Francesca,” she said. “We’ve got a new skin cream here. No more wrinkles around your eyes. You want to try? Free sample!” Josh looked up at me, and I saw how tired his eyes were. Tired eyes, a face soft and warm, puffy now from walking, red from the cold.

“Sure,” Josh said. Francesca got to work, rubbing thick lotion under and around his eyes. Her hands looked warm and smooth.

“You here with your wife and kid?” she asked. Natalie snorted.

“My sister, actually,” he said. “And my boyfriend.”

“Ooh!” Francesca said, “Lucky you. He’s a cutie.”

She winked at me. “Hey kid, after this you’re not even gonna recognize your man. Those lines? Poof! Gone! By the time we’re done here, everything’s gonna be different. Watch his face, you’ll see.” 

Francesca stepped back to let the magic cream settle in, and I stared into Josh’s eyes, looking not at the creases of pinched skin surrounding them, or at the bags, soft and bulging underneath. I looked past the irises flecked with brown and green, and into the darkness of his pupils. Something crouched there, something I was only beginning to make out.

“Well,” Josh asked, “What do you see?” 

---

Author’s Note: The inspiration for "Mimosas" came from an experience my boyfriend and I had in La Jolla, being accosted by a salesman. The encounter unsettled me: his warmth and familiarity, his persistence, the unequal power dynamic at play. I knew he was only looking for a commission, and yet a part of me was drawn in by his friendliness. I began to wonder how these tactics might look in other circumstances, like a romantic relationship.

---

Holden Wright is a queer writer with an MFA at Bowling Green State University. He has prose published or forthcoming in Barren Magazine, X-R-A-Y, and elsewhere. He has worked as an associate editor for Mid-American Review and JuxtaProse.

My Mother's Body

Carmel Mc Mahon

My mother and I rarely speak; I live in New York, and she lives in Ireland, but we are never really far from each other. Whenever one of us is sick or troubled, the other will call to say, I knew it, you were on my mind. If one has a cold, or a flu, or is going through a dark spell, we will say it is passing, passed—so as not to worry the other. Still, we can read between the lines, smell the air.

•

All women alive today can trace their DNA back to a single woman living in Africa two hundred thousand years ago. We have named her, Mitochondrial Eve. She is our closest common ancestor and our oldest mother. She could not have foreseen the tiny contingency in her body that changed the course of history—she could not have known that a mutation in her genetic code would be passed on to her daughters, nor could she have envisioned me, her great x 10,000 granddaughter, sitting here thinking about our matrilineal lineage. Wondering, how far it might stretch in either direction, before it strains and snaps?

•

Grotto: from the Italian grotta, grotto, from Latin crypta, “cavern, crypt.”

On a visit home, my mother gives me a photograph. We are sitting on her bed going through the old albums. She is wearing a pale blue sweater and a pair of white jeans. Her hair has been freshly colored and her nails painted the pale peach of the moment. She always keeps herself “presentable” at home, but she has taken a little extra care for my arrival. I, on the other hand, am going through a uniform phase: black t-shirt and black jeans. I don’t want to have to think about dressing at the moment. My nails are cut to the quick, and if I remember, I will cover the grey hairs with a box from the pharmacy. Despite our opposing attitudes to appearance, we make the same shape on the world. People mistake us for each other in photographs, and sometimes, we even do ourselves. Is that me or you?

Sometimes, I see what my mother sees when she looks at me: a childless woman in her forties, never married, always busy; a strange bird who spends her days pecking about in archives, scratching out stories. She does not ask about my life or work, because she does not believe in disturbing ghosts. Can she see what I see when I look at her? A mother of nine children, swept up into a life she never intended? I want to see myself in her, but I never wanted her life. We seem to be locked in a perpetual groove of reacting to our limited view of each other. We skirt and side-step, because we do not want to hurt each other’s feelings, and so the distance grows between us: an umbilical cord, an ocean, a college education.

I examine the faces of our unsmiling ancestors for traces of us.

“Can I have this one?” I ask. 

“You can have all of them,” Mam says. “You are the only one with any interest in these old things.”

“Who are they?” I point to the photograph. 

Mam squints at the group of men huddled together in front of the house where she grew up on Mount Drummond Avenue. Their names sound like music to my long-term emigrant ears: Albie Murphy, Neddy Bolger, Gerard Bolger, Bill Hennessy (my grandfather), Jack Mahony, Pa Neelan and standing apart, my great grand-father, Christy Bolger, the neighborhood money-man and a book-keeper for the IRA. 

The men are gathered to celebrate the opening of a Marian grotto. A small garden dedicated to the Blessed Virgin, where people could come to pray. A collection was taken from the people of the parish to commission a statue. The photograph was taken 1954. Pope Pius XII declared it a Marian Year to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the decision to make the conception of Mary an immaculate one. Almost two thousand years after the fact, the men in Rome agreed that Jesus could not have come from the body of an ordinary woman. 

The centennial was celebrated all over the world, but it had particular resonance in Ireland: A country constitutionally connected to the Catholic Church which had rushed in to fill the power vacuum left by the British. Ideas about the danger of women’s bodies proliferated. They needed to be controlled in the Church/state union of marriage and put to good use producing more Catholics/citizens, whose bodies would in turn replenish a population halved by famine and colonization. All around the country, churches were dedicated to the Immaculate Conception, Marian grottos dotted the land, and baby girls were named Marian, Miriam, Maria and Mary. 

Where are the women? I ask. My mother shrugs and a familiar feeling blooms between us, a kind of chaotic silence that signals the end of the conversation. I want to know if their invisibility meant they were excluded from all social affairs, or if they were just not bothered with the pomp of the day? Maybe they were busy making the tea and sandwiches behind those net curtains? But, the past is off limits, even though it is here with us, in this room, all these years later, in a 4” x 4” image, the freeze-frame of an eternal present. Mam cannot go back to Mount Drummond Avenue, and I cannot make myself reach across the silence to ask her why. 

•

Crypt: from the Latin, crypta from Greek krypté, from the feminine of kryptós, “hidden, secret.”

This photograph was taken in 1986. It is my brother Martin’s Confirmation Day. He wears a red tie and a red rosette. Our younger brothers, John and Peter stand at either side of him. The three boys are posed in front of the commissioned statue of the Virgin Mary. They smile awkwardly for the camera, because they are not used to being photographed. Film costs money, and shots are not to be wasted.

On Sunday afternoons we visited our grandparents’ house. All the people who lived on Mount Drummond Avenue were old. The street smelled of boiled onions and marrowfat peas. Paisley pajamas and piss-stained long johns flapped along the clotheslines that crisscrossed the gardens at the back of the terraced houses. In the kitchen, my brothers and sisters sat on the floor in front of the telly and ate jelly and ice-cream. Dad and Granddad sat in the old armchairs by the fire and discussed the football and the week’s news. Sometimes granddad talked about the time he worked in England. Coming home on the ferry, he would lose all his earnings on the horses or the dogs. 

I sat at the table with Mam and Nanny. We drank tea and ate apple tart like ladies. Mam and Nanny faced each other and whispered stories about women who suffered from their nerves. The smoke from Mam’s cigarette curled back into my face, and I inhaled it and pretended I was smoking too. The gold mantle clock, the nail art ship on the wall, the Spanish dancer souvenir in her red and white dress on the windowsill, and the net curtains behind her, stiff with an old lineage of dust-mites busy about their day, eating, shitting and mating in their polyester-blend universe, completely contained and unconcerned with our affairs. 

•

Twice a year, Dad took us on a short drive to Mount Jerome Cemetery to visit the grave of our sister: in August for her birthday, and in December for her death day. Mam never came with us. Inside the graveyard gates, there were tall trees dark with rookeries that blew about in the loud wind. Caw! Caw! Caw! We called back to the crows, as we ran along the curbs and breathed in the special graveyard smells: rot and moss and old flower water. We jumped and twirled with the little tornados of dead leaves. We kept an eye out for solitary magpies, one for sorrow, and if we saw one, we had to wait for it to fly: one in flight is worth two in sight. Two for joy!

Dad told us to keep our bloody voices down. To have some respect. We made our way through the maze of graves careful not to step on any, so as not to disturb the dead. We could see Michelle’s grave from a distance. It stood out because it was so new and clean. 

Our Beloved Daughter
Aged 5 Years

I counted three months on my fingers between Michelle’s death day and my birthday. I figured out that I had been living inside Mam’s body for six months when the car hit Michelle outside the old school. Nobody had to tell me. I already knew. It was a kind of memory from before I learned how to speak or to make a certain kind of sense of things. We blessed ourselves, said a prayer, and left. 

Wait. I am here again. The memory accessed over and over. I add to it. I take away. The magpies and the crows. My father’s exact wording. Impossible to remember the details with such certainty. The weather? How can one be sure? It doesn’t matter. Not really. I don’t think. I don’t know.

We picked Mam up on the way home. She sat in the passenger seat beside Dad. The rain beat the bonnet and blurred the edges of the city’s lights. The smoke from their cigarettes clogging our throats, so we could only watch as a silhouette of tears streamed down our mother’s cheek. The horror of it: Michelle was real/is real. A chasm opened, and our mother was lost to us. 

I have asked my siblings: do they remember it like I do? Yes, they say, they remember. Then they say, “Oh God,” and shake their heads. “Jesus Christ” they say, and shake their heads.

•

Trauma can be passed from generation to generation. We know that now. Vehicles of transportation include, according to the scholar of memory studies Marianne Hirsch, “narratives, actions and symptoms.” This is how the trauma was carried into our lives: Our mother held it tightly to herself. She refused to burden her children with it. Still, despite her best efforts, it seeped out in slips of story and song. Whenever we heard the name Michelle, like when the radio played that Beatles track, a panic rose among us. We developed an unspoken code: we must distract Mam from it. We fought with each other, we fought with her, we fought to keep her face from falling. Sometimes, most times, anger just is grief that has forgotten its name. 

•

Carl Jung observed that children react less to what grown-ups say than they do to the “imponderables in the surrounding atmosphere.” They unconsciously adapt themselves to the weather, which produces a correlative compensatory nature. My compensatory schemes involved touching and tapping things. One time, tap. Three times: tap, tap, tap. Walls, railings, tree trunks. And blessing myself: once for Churches, hearses, and graveyards. Three times for holy statues, holy pictures and grottos. I bowed my head. I avoided the lines in the pavement and the cracks in the road lest they opened up and swallowed me whole.

I found a dashboard Saint Christopher at the end of our road, and I could not believe anyone would discard such a sacred object. I found a Padre Pio keychain in the sweet shop at Woolworths. It contained a tiny relic of Padres clothing. This was the beginning of my collection of Holy Things. I started taking them to bed with me, and before long, I could not sleep without them. In the morning, they were placed, for safe-keeping, in the carved wooden box that my best friend brought me back from her holidays in Lanzarote.

Childhood was for other children. Death was my deepest and most primary concern. The death of the body was not nearly as terrifying as the life of the soul. We understood that heaven was hardly likely for ourselves. With any luck, we might make it to purgatory, and we could work our way up from there, otherwise we would be going to hell—for all eternity. Time without end. Our whole lives were geared toward avoiding this outcome: Sunday mass, monthly confession, sacraments and observations. We did the First Fridays which ensured the presence of a priest before we drew our last breath. The school gave us a set of scapulars, which, if worn at the moment of death, would ensure entry into heaven. Best take all precautions. I blessed myself (three times) and genuflected in front of the picture of the Sacred Heart at the top of the stairs. Sometimes on visits home, I still take this reflex action, even though I am long-lapsed and the picture of Jesus, his wounded heart exposed, has been replaced with a mirror. 

The Our Father
Three Hail Marys
The Glory Be
The Apostles Creed
The Confiteor
Saint Patrick’s Breastplate
The Hail Holy Queen
The Prayer to the Guardian Angel
The Prayer for the Souls of the Dead

Nightly prayers were said with focus and intention. If I drifted off, I had to start over. From the top. Occasionally, I pissed the bed. To comfort me through the confusion and embarrassment, Dad would say, little girls don’t go to hell. Mam would say, there is no such thing. I didn’t believe either of them, so I waded through the safety of days, dazed, dark-eyed and exhausted.

•

My grandfather went to mass every single day. He wore a three-piece suit and a trilby hat. He took up the collection, and gathered the missals after the service. My grandmother did not go at all because she did not like priests or nuns. She shuffled about the kitchen in her slippers and pinny, saying, “Don’t mind that ould-fella, he says more than his prayers.”

When my grandparents were born, Ireland was still colonially tied to England. Nanny came from Kevin Street in the Liberties when it was the biggest slum in Europe. My mind did not connect her to the history lessons in school: the Lockout of 1913, the Easter Rising of 1916, the Irish War of Independence, or the Irish Civil War. I did not consider how she had survived malnutrition, rickets, tuberculosis, or between my uncle and my mother, five miscarriages. 

In the 1930s, Dublin Corporation built housing around the city. It was the new Irish government’s initiative to clear the slums of the city center. For years, my mother’s extended family, six adults and seven children, lived together in the two-bedroom-semi at the end of Mount Drummond Avenue. They were grateful for all the extra space, but they missed their old friends from the tenements and the way of life they had known there. People looked out for one another, Nanny said. Not like now, they’d step over you in the street like they do in England.

On Sundays, when RTÉ sounded the six o’ clock Angelus bell, it was our cue to go outside and give the adults some peace. We joined the old neighbors in the grotto. Mr. Fox and Mrs. White said we were very good children. With them, we stood in front of the statue and said the rosary. It was an agony of boredom, but we gazed up at the twinkling star-lights animating the Blessed Mother’s face. The lights were a gift from my family, restitution, we heard whispered, for some secret and ill-gotten gains. Something to do with the horses or the dogs or the IRA. 

•

Grotto is an angry word. I said it over and over inside my head, growling. I looked up and asked Mother Mary why she didn’t help that girl who was in the news. Ann Lovett died in a grotto, just like this one. She gave birth to a baby in the rain and the cold, and no one came to help her. The people said they didn’t know. She was fifteen years old. I counted on my fingers, four years older than me.

“Did she go straight to hell when she died?” I asked. “For committing a sin?” My parents said no, but they took me into our front room and closed the door. If I ever got into trouble, they said, I must not be afraid to tell them. 

Everyone stopped talking about Ann Lovett, but I could not separate her grotto from our grotto. Every week, I imagined her face blank, the rain falling, the blood and the dead baby in the cold grass. Every week I looked up, but the mother of the world was made of stone. Still, we petitioned her, muttering our prayers, rattling our beads: Hail Holy Queen!        

• 

Secret: Middle English, from the Anglo-French secré, secret, from Latin secretus, from past participle of secernere, “to separate.”

• 

In 2018 when Netflix started streaming the Irish comedy-drama series, Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope in the US, I settled in for a binge. If you don’t blink during the first episode, you will see my grandparents’ house with the statue standing out front.

Can’t Cope, Won’t Cope follows two friends, Danielle and Aisling, coming of age in Dublin. Aisling gets the morning-after pill for her younger sister, Rachel. Against Aisling’s wishes, Rachel does not take the medication. One of the most powerful scenes comes in the final episode when Rachel roars, “I can do what I want. It’s my fucking body!” (13:48). When the series was made two years earlier, abortion was not yet legal in Ireland, and the morning-after pill had just become available without a prescription. 

•

Clare, my younger sister, tells me about the time she was consumed by an inexplicable and urgent need to drive over to Mount Drummond Avenue. It was the late 1990s, and she had just found out she was pregnant. She was not married, but everyone wished her well, so she had no idea why, when she parked her car outside our grandparents’ house, she broke over the steering wheel and sobbed as she had not done before, or since. Was she moved by memories older than herself? Thirty-odd years earlier, our Mother was there with Michelle in her body, she was not married either, but no one would have wished her well. 

•

When my grandparents died in the early 1990s, my family sold the old house. On a visit home in 2019, I had a yen to see it again, so I took the bus over to Mount Drummond Avenue. Daydreaming all the way, like I used to, yielding to the muscle-memories of being in Ireland in April when the ground is soft and the rain is soft. Now, I like to feel my way down to the deep and tangled roots of things. Of humans, trees, words, stories. The ancestors and their calendars of stars: the spring equinox, the full moon, Easter. 

There were Christians in Ireland long before Saint Patrick arrived in the fifth century, but his is the story around which the narrative threads of Ireland’s history have been woven. On the evening of the spring equinox in the year 433 BCE, the High King lit the great fire at Ireland’s seat of political power, the Hill of Tara. This fire celebrated the sacred relationship between the darkness and the light. Agrarian people understood the spectrums and the interconnectedness of the days and seasons, of earth and sky. On the spring equinox, day and night are of equal length, after which, in the northern Hemisphere, the days continue to grow, and with them, everything else, too. 

The seventh century monk Múirchu wrote in his Life of Patrick that the law of the land stated that no other fire could be lit until the first flames of the sacred fire had been seen. But, on this particular night, before he lit the great fire, King Laoghaire saw another fire burning on the neighboring hill of Slane. 

Patrick, the son of a Roman soldier, had been kidnapped from his home in Wales and sold as a slave in Ireland. After six grueling years, a dream showed him the way to escape. He vowed to return to the pagan land to spread the Good News. Years later, he lit the Paschal fire on the Hill of Slane and was preaching to the natives about the Risen Lord, when he was summoned to Tara to be brought before the High King.

For protection on the way, he chanted this incantation:

Christ with me
Christ before me
Christ in me
Christ beneath me
Christ above me
Christ on my right
Christ on my left
Christ when I lie down
Christ when I arise
Christ in heart of everyone who thinks of me
Christ in the mouth of everyone who speaks of me
Christ in the eye that sees me
Christ in the ear that hears.  

At Tara, the pagan and the Christian faced off. King Laoghaire’s druids worked their magic and Patrick performed his miracles. Finally, the druids sent a mist to envelope Patrick and his followers, but Patrick dispelled the mist, impressing King Laoghaire. He allowed Patrick to preach his new religion. Symbolically, Patrick brought the light that banished the darkness of pagan superstition and ignorance, but in effect, he took darkness off the spectrum and put it on a binary. The wrong side, the bad side, the side that needed to be denied and dismissed, ignored and punished, and so, the ancient relationship between the people and nature was changed thereafter. There began one of the many social, economic and cultural shifts in Ireland. The staggered and frayed end of an old order, and the uneven and unfinished beginnings of a new.                                   

•                      

On Mount Drummond Avenue, the former council houses were painted and bright and the old cottages were renovated and rented out. Who can save for a home today with most of the paycheck going to a landlord? Everywhere in the city, there are signs that another kind of power has swept in to fill the power vacuum left by the Catholic Church. From a distance, I saw her outlined on her lone pedestal. There were no flowers to adorn her, even as we approached the Marion month of May. She was exposed; her stone was stained and her features weatherworn. Without the halo of star-lights, her head was round as a baby’s, and she was so much smaller than I thought her to be.

•

When I returned to Ashbourne, my sister and niece were sitting at the kitchen table. Mam had put the kettle on. 

“What did you do today?” She asked. A reasonable question, but I hesitated for a second.

“I went to Mount Drummond Avenue,” I said, and waited for the oxygen to evaporate. 

My sister shot a panic’d glance at me, at Mam. I was perilously close to breaking our code. 

Mam took four mugs from the kitchen cupboard and placed them on the table.

“What’s it like?” my niece asked, and a new air entered the room. A disturbance, a contingency. An opportunity for a mutation in our emotional DNA.

Mam took a jug of milk and an apple tart from the fridge.

“I saw Mr. Fox’s house,” I told her, “and Mrs. White’s. They were these old people from the road who were very kind to us.”

“Will you bring me there?” my niece asked her mother.

“We should all go together,” my sister replied, cutting the tart open. 

“The street looks lovely,” I said, while watching Mam from the corner of my eye.

She turned around. “You couldn’t afford to buy a house there now,” she said, putting the teapot on the table.

“If you’d waited a couple of years to sell in the boom, we’d be rich,” my niece said. An oft-repeated fallacy in our home. “Sure, how were we to know?” Mam asked, pouring our tea and taking a seat with us.

I told them that the statue was still there, and they knew what I meant when I said, that the old house was the same, but all our ghosts were gone.                                                                   

---

Author’s Note: This piece is a response to Luce Irigary’s claim that inauthentic bonds develop between mothers and daughters in patriarchal societies.

---

Carmel Mc Mahon holds an MA in Liberal Arts from the CUNY Graduate Center. Her essays have been published in the Humanities Review, the Irish Times, the Hennessy Book of Irish Fiction, 2005-2015 and Longreads. Her hybrid memoir, In Ordinary Time will be published by Duckworth in spring, 2023. She lives in County Mayo with her partner and dogs.

Flight Risk

Keith Blouin

She remembered scales. A tune taking flight as her hands curled around ivory. There were major scales, minor scales, whole tone, chromatic, their names now just names, their meanings running off into the far spaces of a room. Back then she had practiced and practiced. She graduated to the Solfeggio in C Minor, the Traumerei, the Bagatelle No. 25 in A minor. How she loved playing Schumann. Life an escape on the little black wings of eighth notes. Then came chords, a time for singalongs, the music weighted with her age. And even as she no longer made sense of sheet music her muscles kept the faith, her hands reached for keys, her fingers splayed, it hardly mattered where. When someone passing her in the corridor noticed, she heard a mindless, “Oh look. How cute. She’s playing the piano.”

And so they wheeled her to the far side of the common room, as if sitting before a tinny spinet in need of repair would connect her to the past, the present. She stared at them, at the instrument, and plunked a key that made a muffled sound.

“Fix it,” she demanded.

“Oh Mrs. Withers,” they replied as if she didn’t mean it. She was small, childlike in their view, glassy blue eyes searching theirs for a response. They left her by the piano, in a room with other slow-moving octogenarians poring over puzzles and having disjunctive conversations.

No one fixed anything. She sat before the keyboard and as she waited she cased the room. Doorways to the north and south into wide halls, men and women in armchairs and wheelchairs strewn about like boulders. Daylight casting shadows of window muntins like bars. She could feel an ache inside the cast on her ankle.

“Lady, lady, lady,” she heard from a man seated behind her. She turned to face him. He grinned at her, knowingly, porcine eyes squinting amid thick white hair. He remained in his chair but as he spoke he jerked his pink head repeatedly up and to the side, as if to say, How about you and me over there in the dark corner just like in high school.

She scowled at him. “The male species of eighty-five ought not to be allowed,” she trilled.

If he understood her, he didn’t let on but continued leering at her and jerking his head. She turned again toward the keyboard and slammed her hands into discordant notes. A man ought to be like—she glanced around the room again and her eyes settled on a lithe, muscled figure in uniform—like that, she said just under her breath. Electrician, perhaps? He was young and he moved with grace as he disappeared into the building’s lobby. Something about his shoulders plucked a string in her mind but she couldn’t place it.

She eased her chair around and propelled herself slowly toward the lobby. Her broken ankle sent occasional spikes of pain through her but she ignored them, pushed herself on. No one seemed to mind or even notice until she had come within a few feet of the front doors. She could see the electrician through the glass, loading up his van.

“There you are, Mrs. Withers,” she heard as an aide took hold of the back of her chair and began to spin her in the other direction. A voice like a bird. Amber, her badge read. “We need you in the office,” she chirped.

In the office and across a desk the size of a football field sat a middle aged man, smug, his face fat and creased, thinning black hair sprinkling his forehead, a phone up against an ear. He waved them in and jabbered on.

“I had a man,” she said to him, but only the aide heard her.

“Yes, Mrs. Withers,” Amber replied, “wasn’t that Pete, your husband? He ran the greenhouse. My mom used to buy her tomato plants there.”

“I don’t know Pete,” she said.

The man put down the phone and shuffled through files on his desk. “Mrs. Withers,” he said. “Welcome to our community. I apologize for not seeking you out when you first got here. I like to know all our guests. How are you settling in?”

Silence ensued. Three weeks since her fall, her surgery, her cast like a ball and chain. Amber patted the older woman’s shoulders and tittered, “Mrs. Withers has been giving us a concert this morning, haven’t you? But we think the piano needs tuning.”

Mrs. Withers bared her teeth.

The man picked up the phone again and dialed a number he found in the file. “Mrs. Withers,” he said, “Lucy. I’m calling your nephew Brian. He appears to be your closest relative. I need to give him an update. You remember Brian, don’t you?”

“I don’t know Pete,” she replied. “I don’t know Brian.”

“Now, now,” said the aide as she patted Lucy’s arm. “Of course you do.”

Lucy had seen that man before. It was on an airplane, wasn’t it? He was the pilot on a short trip to Durham, that was it. The time her father wanted her to get to Homecoming, to be with the boy he favored, the one who brought him cartons of Old Gold cigarettes. She recalled how badly his pilot’s uniform fit over his paunch, and she wondered as she boarded if he’d been drinking. But they landed safely, she got to the game, the boy gave her a corsage to wear on the lapel of her suit jacket.

“You drove that plane,” she told the man.

“Yes, some deterioration,” she heard the man saying into the phone. “I take it she was living alone before the accident. That can accelerate this sort of confusion.”

She could still smell the carnations the boy had pinned on her, baby pinks against the navy blue wool.

“What we’re concerned about today,” the man continued, “is her safety.”

The trip across the North Carolina piedmont had been her first in a plane. She had a window seat and could watch the fields glide by below, shadows of tree-covered hills creating patterns in the greens and browns. She hadn’t been afraid, even when the aircraft hit a bit of turbulence. No, it was more like a ride at the county carnival, thrilling. She’d been disappointed that Sunday when she had to drive back home with the boy in his car.

The man went on, “It’s just that she appears to have an agenda of some sort. That’s right. Agenda. Can’t say exactly what, but our people often find her waiting by the front door. Yes, I realize she’s in a wheel chair, I realize that, sir. No, she can’t walk yet. The doctors have assured us of that. We’re surprised she’s able to move herself in her chair. She’s stronger than she looks.”

Robert was the boy’s name. They rolled down all the car windows for the two-hour drive home, and she tossed her head back and laughed and let the wind tear through her carefully styled hair.

“What I’m trying to tell you, sir, is that we consider her a flight risk.”

*

Everything was right with Robert, and at the same time nothing was right.

Lucy could almost picture him now as she spied cardinals through the rain-dirtied windows of her room in the nursing home. How his square jaw and quick eyes impressed her father, who saw in Robert a sure future for his only daughter. Chemistry major at Duke, then on to medical school, maybe by way of the Naval Reserves. Then a nice practice and a big clapboard house on a street where Lucy could raise his grandchildren without the fears that had plagued him during the Depression. Not that her father had lost his job; he had thrived at the thread company, but he knew what a bad economy could do to folks. He wanted something else for Lucy, who aced advanced math, who dazzled with her Clair de Lune. Yes, she would finish college, he said, but that was to make her Robert’s equal, as if a man and a woman ever could be equals.

“Yoo hoo! Mrs. Withers!” she heard from behind her door. A knock, and Amber peered inside the room.

“You have company,” Amber announced. “Brian is downstairs!”

Lucy tried to say something but nothing came out as the aide approached and took charge of her wheelchair.

“Do you want me to freshen you up?” said Amber, pausing by the mirror at the dressing table. “I’ll just get these little stray ends,” she continued as deft fingers picked at Lucy’s white head. “Your hair is very fine. Oh that’s it. You look very nice today, Mrs. Withers.”

Lucy remembered suddenly how Robert used to run fingers through the blonde curls that covered her shoulders. He called her Goldilocks. He teased her about things having to be just right, even though she knew he was describing himself.

“I had my hair cut,” she told Amber as they headed toward the elevators. “I wanted to look like a boy.”

“It’s easier to keep that way,” Amber replied.

And then she thought of Pete and how he used to braid her hair after a swim when she sat between his thighs on the sun-warmed limestone by the stream. He had the most marvelous hands, calloused and bony. They were used to work, they could find every part of her that she wanted found. They could plait her hair in jig time and then it would dry in funny, sideways curls, the top of her head flattened at the part. Pete would crack up at the sight. When she cut it all off, pixie-style, he just winked and said, “I can still get my fingers in there.”

Robert would have pouted. Robert thought her hair belonged to him.

“It’s my hair,” she insisted to Amber.

Robert wanted everything in its place, but Lucy didn’t like the way he sorted by gender—boys do this, girls do that. And girls don’t look like boys, though she was petite and wiry and flat-chested and short hair became her. Robert didn’t want her to compete in the county math contest, he didn’t want her to study math in college. What would she do with it—count babies? he used to joke.

Brian stood when he spotted her. “Aunt Lucy!” he said with a wide grin. He was trim and smartly dressed, with closely cropped graying hair, a kind face. He handed Amber the vase of daisies he was carrying as he took Lucy’s hands in his and kissed her cheeks. “How are you doing? How’s the ankle?”

“Are you Pete?”

Amber leaned in close to her ear and whispered, “No, Mrs. Withers, this is Brian, your nephew, remember? Aren’t these flowers lovely!”

Lucy glanced from the daisies to the cast on her ankle. She burst into tears.

“Does it hurt?” Brian said. He squatted beside her chair and continued to hold her hands. “Do you need to see the doctor?”

Lucy said nothing, wiped her face.

“I think she’s glad to see you,” Amber suggested. “She’s been keeping to herself lately.”

Brian said, “It’s been more than a year, other than when she was in surgery and that hardly counts. My fault completely.”

Lucy wondered if they would continue to talk over her, when all she wanted was to go home. And that woman with the reddish hair and freckles wasn’t Amber—she was Mary Louise, the junior from down the hall who made it her business to tell all the freshmen in the dorm what to do. Mary Louise wanted Lucy to marry the doctor, even though Robert wasn’t a doctor yet.

“But he will be,” Mary Louise insisted. “And he’s handsome, and he’ll be rich. Doctors are rich, you know.”

“Aunt Lucy,” Brian began. “They tell me you want to get out of here.” He tilted his head slightly up to her. “Your ankle is going to take a little more time to heal. You have to stay here until then because they can get you your meals and help you walk again. I wish I could do that, but with my job and all I can’t right now. Plus, I couldn’t even get your wheelchair inside my house.”

Lucy studied his hazel eyes under their thin brows. “Robert wants to put me in a box,” she said.

Brian stood, crinkled his face. “Who?” he asked. Box, box, box, was she thinking of a coffin? He gave Amber a confused glance and stared at Lucy. “No one wants to put you in a box,” he replied.

Lucy was thinking of the times Robert took her to those parties where everyone had to dress up. Girdles and brassieres that scratched and squeezed and stockings and high heels and pencil skirts that made you feel like a Geisha tottering around on bound feet. The boys gave you liquor to drink and you had to hold it or else you’d get sloppy and say something you didn’t mean to say, or you’d let the boy touch you where he wasn’t supposed to touch you. Robert always complimented her on how she held herself together at frat parties. And Robert knew his limits when it came to necking. She never had to stop him, even if she’d wanted to. Such a gentleman, they said.

But one time she did get tipsy. Susie Lehann, in love with Robert, sidled up to Robert and told Lucy how often she’d admired the dress Lucy was wearing. Lucy rolled her eyes at Susie and wandered off. She didn’t care what either of them thought about her wardrobe. These gatherings bored her. The men and women talked nonstop about who was who, and how they were connected to those uninteresting persons who, by the way, belonged to the so-and-so sorority or the fraternity or the club, where they dined and gossiped about yet other uninteresting so-and-sos. She gulped down the highball and felt lighter, merrier, as Robert came after her and she and Robert flew from party to parked car. How amorous she felt and then how appalled he was at her willingness to shed her clothes for him.

“No, no,” he insisted as he moved away from her in the front seat, leaving her all hot and bothered, and slightly drunk. “Not like this.”

“I wanted to drive home but he wouldn’t let me,” Lucy said, interrupting the conversation between Brian and Amber. “He said I’d wreck the car.”

Brian paused. “No, you can’t drive with that ankle. We’ll just have to wait and see about driving.” He patted her hand.

“I see what you mean,” he told Amber.

What Lucy saw was Robert trying to hold her back. He was afraid of something inside her. He couldn’t let that thing out, whatever it was, it might overwhelm him. And her father hoped she would marry him, she knew, her father who taught her to fish and swim and ride a bike and throw a ball like a man. Her father who helped her with trigonometry. Who bought the piano and paid for the lessons and listened as she struggled through this key and that key and all those flats and sharps. And yet he did, and he welcomed Robert into his house long after Lucy found herself confounded by the two of them and unwittingly trying to escape the life they promised.

*

She ran into Pete at the Withers’ Nursery, just outside of town, where she went with her mother to pick out pansies for the pots on the front porch. It was May, she was home for a weekend before the final push for the end of the semester, papers and exams. “You’re pretty fancy,” he told her. She and her mother had been downtown shopping and she had on a skirt and blouse, a string of pearls. He wore blue jeans and a work shirt and had a tray of petunias in dirt-covered gloved hands. She could see the outline of a pack of cigarettes in the breast pocket. His shoulders were bony and broad, and one lurched up at a funny angle as he shifted his load about.

She recognized him. They’d been in school together, though in different grades.

“I could outrun you by a mile,” she replied.

He grinned. It was true; they used to race and she always won, at least until she was eight.

“I heard you play piano last year at the auditorium,” he said. “Night concert. It was real nice. You played Beethoven.”

She smiled and nodded, surprised he attended and even more so he remembered her piece.

“I’m crazy for Beethoven,” he added.

She next saw him that summer in town as they waited in line at the movies.

“Hey, fancy girl,” he said with a wink. “Hey, Robert.”

Pete and Robert had played football together in high school. Robert called plays and Pete ran a lot and caught passes. Lucy didn’t care much for the game but had enjoyed watching the slender waists and big shoulders of the athletes as they moved up and down the field. She had a thing for men’s shoulders.

“That Pete was a decent halfback,” Robert told her later. He had noticed the familiar way Pete eyed her that night they saw him at the movies. “I’m surprised he wanted to carry on the family business. That’s a dead end. And I don’t know why he’d want to be stuck in this hick town. He should’ve gone to college.”

When Pete called her up on the phone a few days later, he said, “Are you and Robert engaged or something?”

Lucy stammered. “Um, sort of, no, not really. I don’t know.”

Pete laughed. “Either you are or you aren’t. You can tell me. I can keep a secret.”

“We’re not,” she decided. No one ever consulted her about anything.

“Then do you want to go out?” he asked. “I’d like to take you to a spot I know.”

She agreed to meet him one afternoon—seemed harmless enough and something she could explain away to Robert if necessary—and she let herself out of the house when no one was around. He picked her up at the street and began a slow drive around town.

“Do you like college?” Pete asked.

“Sure,” she replied. Except the rich girls and frat parties. “Do you like working at the nursery?”

“It’s all I know,” he said. “I’ve been doing it so long—since I could walk, it seems. They put me in charge of some zinnia seeds as soon as my fingers could thin out the little sprouts, maybe even before that. Before long I graduated to tomatoes.” His laugh invited her in. “I love to watch plants grow, even give them names, Fred, Dot, Jonathan, Matilda. I know, sounds crazy, right? What do you study?”

“Math,” she said. “But some of the names are foreign, like Pythagoras. And I don’t get to give them out.”

Pete whistled. He pulled the car into the drive by the high school. “Surprise,” he said.

“Nostalgia tour.”

They walked to the back of the building and down a few steps where he unlocked a basement door. He turned on some overhead lights, scattering a few bugs. The corridors seemed small, and they smelled of wax and dust and the stale air of enclosure. Their steps resounded as they passed the cafeteria and found the stairwell to the main level. She followed him into the auditorium and then up on the stage where he swung open the green velvet curtains and switched on a spotlight above the grand piano.

“I wanted to hear you play again,” he announced with a smile. “Do you mind?”

She ran her fingers over the dusty black wood and then opened the keyboard. The piano responded warmly to her touch. As she worked her way into “Für Elise” she forgot about breaking into the school, she forgot about sneaking out of the house with Pete when she was half spoken for by Robert. She let the music fly out of her, there was no controlling it. She fumbled some parts and didn’t care, just picked up where she could and pushed on. Pete didn’t seem to mind. She realized Robert never had asked her to play anything. But Pete clapped, and he asked for an encore, and then another, and another. She ran through everything she could remember, bits and pieces of Bach and Scarlatti and Chopin all strung together.

Pete asked if he could kiss her before she got out of the car that afternoon. He leaned over and slowly brushed her lips with his. A few times, for good measure, his eyes daring hers.

“Where’d you learn that?” she said with a giggle.

“Next time we take it up on the track,” he replied. “You and me in a footrace. To the victor go the spoils.”

She slid out of the car and waved. Turned and went into the house. As he drove off she could feel her delight all gummed up inside her confusion. She couldn’t quite admit to herself that she wanted him to call again. But then he didn’t.

*

If it had been all about reasoning she might have had an easier time. But life was baffling. You couldn’t solve emotions, they weren’t linear. They crescendoed, they crashed. You had to play them like an unfamiliar score.

Lucy wasn’t in love with Robert, though everyone wished it, herself included. Two hometown superstars, fates entwined for a fairy tale ending. She wrecked the story line, she hardly knew why. She took the bus home one weekend that fall when she could no longer stand Pete’s silence. She called him from the bus station and told him she wanted to work with him in the nursery that afternoon. He picked her up and gave her gloves and showed her how to set the stems in soil to propagate next year’s geraniums. She spent hours sorting the stems by color and then planting and watering. The sweat, the dirt, the monotony—nothing bothered her.

She asked Pete why he never called.

“I figured you were going to marry Robert,” he said. “I didn’t want to interfere.”

“I don’t know if I will,” she told him, archly. “Anyway I told you we weren’t engaged.”

“Yeah but people talk.”

She studied the green eyes and turned up nose in his thin face, the tiny white scar on one side of the chin. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

He shrugged.

“Heck I might marry you one day.”

And now here she was in this unwanted place, her years winding down, her body held captive by the stiff black Velcroed box enclosing her ankle, her thoughts osmotic. Brian was saying something about her ankle being almost good as new, but his words made no sense. She was old, not new. She recognized him in this moment as her older brother’s son—her older brother, friend of Robert’s, both of them long gone.

“I want to see Pete,” Lucy said.

Brian measured his words. “Uncle Pete got the lung cancer a while back. He’s buried out past the old greenhouse. You ran the nursery after he died, remember?”

Sometimes there was a shaft of clarity that allowed Lucy to recall her life with Pete. The nursery became their family and they named the plants each year for all the children they never could have. Some were difficult, some won prizes. Pete bought Lucy a baby grand and later they recorded her on a reel-to-reel. They ran speakers through the greenhouse to have music for the flowers and the vegetables. Chopin produced the best blooms.

When Robert had found out about her bus trip to the nursery he said, “I can’t believe you’d want to spend a day with your hands in the dirt like that. Like a servant or something. What is it with you? And Pete—he’s going nowhere. I can give you anything you could possibly want. You’ll never have to lift a finger.”

She’d felt like running away, but she tapped her foot to keep time to a rhythm in her head and she let him tell her off.

“It’s your funeral,” Robert said finally when he realized it was over between them.

She’d been nineteen then, mid first semester of her sophomore year. Sixty-eight years gone since, and she knew she was still nineteen inside. She still felt like running away, and so the morning after Brian’s visit she got up before daylight. Instead of waiting for someone to help her with the black boot she slipped on the sneakers she found in her closet. Took the walker, made her way slowly downstairs by way of the elevator, putting as little weight on her right foot as possible.

Walking revived her confidence. Yes, her ankle was good as new! Lucy could smell the coffee and bacon from the dining room as she crept past, hoping not to be noticed. Then on to the lobby where she waited for sunup near a window to one side of the glass doors. Oh for a young man in a uniform to enter, she thought, that electrician would do. The room felt close, and she realized that the air wasn’t working right. Before long she saw the arrival of a fleet of vans for some air conditioning company, a bevy of men staging boxes and tools. Someone propped open the front doors so the workers could bring in their equipment. It was her moment.

She had gained yardage by the time they noticed she was gone. They could see her limping slowly way down the sidewalk and a pair of aides screamed at one another and took off in pursuit. But Lucy was nineteen again and she was running as fast as she could, trying to catch up with Pete. They were racing on the high school field, where runners had beaten out a soft dirt track encircling the ball diamonds and the concrete amphitheater on the side of the hill, and it was no longer August, but a crisp Saturday in late October.

“Pete!” she called out.

The aides saw the car jump the curb. They were just in time to attend to the woman on the ground and call the paramedics. They were just in time to calm the driver. He was young and he’d only glanced down at his phone for a half a second to read a text from his girlfriend, who was breaking up with him.

Lucy had thrilled to the music in Pete’s voice, thrilled to the way he smiled at her, as the blow delivered her from lines, and boxes, and chronology.

---

Author’s Note: The story grew out of a conversation with a neighbor who was caring long-distance for an elderly aunt, confined to a nursing home and troublesome. The staff there worried she would run off, even though she was in a wheelchair. I was interested in the character of an independent woman growing up in that post-Depression era, and I wanted to play with the passage of time, and how as we age we know we are the same person inside as when we were young.

---

I grew up in Lexington, Virginia, and graduated from Hollins College, now University. I have written for business journals and as a freelancer and most recently taught Latin and mythology at a middle school in Tampa, Florida.

The Leaving Kind

Martha Keller

Someone had hurled Purcell’s body off the old Catawba Bridge and left it raw and open to scavengers and the late summer heat. Lucinda Durand’s habit of keeping her head down when she walked meant she couldn’t pass by the swirl of orange and white fur without taking special notice. Particularly when she had come to admire the brightly colored hair on Purcell’s left hind leg — a limb that was now immobilized and half-hidden by a mess of thimbleweeds. She dropped her book bag and hiked up her school jumper. Then she clambered down the craggy edge and dug her patent leather heels and pink fingertips in the warm, fecund mud.

“Purcy?” She whispered. But only the wind rustled a reply.

Lucinda hoped the old tomcat would stretch his paws towards the sunlight and lift his head off the ground once more. Since arriving at her grandmother’s house in Alyssum County a year ago, Lucinda had passed countless lonely hours on the sun porch staring out at overgrown hydrangeas and a decaying trellis. Late one morning in the steamy hours after a spring storm, she had looked up from a tedious reading assignment on the New Deal to see Purcell strutting along the perimeter of her grandmother’s garden. He paused to survey his territory before perching at the edge of the porch to tend to his paws and his underbelly. She studied the whorl of orange on his ears and his long whiskers until he darted behind the trellis and disappeared.

In the weeks that followed, Purcy’s visits became routine. Each day she sat a little closer to him and he stayed a little longer. When she finally told Granny about the tabby with a ratty collar and a nametag that read “Purcell” in old English scrawl, Granny looked unimpressed. Purcell had belonged to the Widow Hargrove before she passed on two years prior. Since then, Purcell had lived paw-to-mouth, stealing from trashcans and gardens. Granny said Old Man Hargrove was not much of a hunter when he was alive — a defect the man had passed down to his sons and three generations of cats.

Purcell’s failings as a hunter did not dissuade Lucinda from opening up to him during his daily baths. Like Purcell, Lucinda understood the deep pangs of sudden loss. She knew how long bouts of loneliness could hollow any creature out from heartache to numbness. Granny said the world had two kinds of people in it: the staying kind and the leaving kind. Lucinda and Purcell were the kind that stayed put until the last stretch and the last bellyache. Most of the people Lucinda had loved in her life had been the other sort. Now a nest of flowering weeds covered her friend’s tender middle. Purcell’s neck was broken in at least two different places. His head twisted unnaturally away from the rest of his body and his eyes bulged as if to catch a final glimpse of his killer.

The ratty collar that once hung around his neck, however, was missing.

Purcell was a proud, handsome creature who deserved a far more dignified end than he had received. Given his status in the community as a thief and a ne’er do well, Lucinda doubted that his death would command a thorough investigation. The case required a detective with a fine mind and a finer heart. Some old-fashioned ornery stubbornness wouldn’t hurt either. Lucinda wiped the tears and mud off her face with her clean sleeve as she pulled the biggest clump of flowers away from Purcell’s body so that she could survey the extent of his mortal wounds.

She steeled herself for a gruesome display of blood and entrails. Other than an occasional patch of mud, Purcell’s lanky body was untouched. She reached out to stroke the mottled orange and white fur one more time and recoiled at the hardened corpse beneath her fingertips. Purcy had been dead long enough for the warm wriggle of life and mischief to vanish from his veins. All that was left was a small broken body in the weeds. Lucinda knelt down and inspected the ground. No blood pools or torn earth. His body had hardly made an impression in the grass beneath him.

In her peripheral, Lucinda caught sight of underbrush twitching against the wind.

“Who’s there?” She shouted. The twitching stilled.

Lucinda spotted a pair of human eyeballs blinking between the shadows and the branches. The forced whispers of a cornered animal counting the last seconds to his execution grew more audible with each passing moment.

“I can see you,” Lucinda said. “I can hear you too.”

The eyeballs stared back at Lucinda for a split second before the branches snapped and Ronald Barnett, a small-boned boy with a stutter and a cowlick, burst forth and ran for heaven.

***

Ronald Barnett counted to two-hundred-and-twenty-seven before stopping to catch his breath. He enjoyed counting because he never stumbled over numbers. He counted footsteps, tiles, stairs, cracks in plaster walls, ladybugs, and the reddish-brown curls on the back of Lucinda Durand’s head. He’d counted forty-two curls on Wednesday and made it as high as sixty-one on Thursday. He had planned to pursue the matter on Friday, but now he wondered if he’d live to see another sunrise.

He had already counted to one-hundred-and-twenty-one — the number of steps he had taken from Rutherford Academy — when he caught sight of the orange tabby crumpled on the side of the road. Ronald knelt down for a closer inspection and recognized the striations along the cat’s front legs. Purcell Hargrove was a known thief and romancer of felines. In the years since the Widow Hargrove died, Purcell had taken refuge in any number of back alleys and garages like a common tramp. Guilty or not, Purcell had come under suspicion for shredded azaleas, overturned trash bins, and unwanted pregnancies. As to the last charge, Ronald had to admit that an unusually high number of kittens in Alyssum had been born with a familiar orange and white pattern on their fur in recent years.

Besides Ronald and his older brother Easton, only two other students from Rutherford crossed the Catawba on their way home: Grady Jones and Lucinda Durand. Since toddlerhood, Grady Jones had spent most of his time home sick with a persistent respiratory infection. Lucinda Durand was the new girl with fine curls who said even less than Ronald and doodled in her notebook. Lately, he’d seen her sketching whiskers, pert ears, and parti-colored tails. As he crouched over the cat’s body, Ronald wondered if Lucinda Durand had fallen under the spell of Purcell’s charms.

If Ronald’s calculations were correct, then Lucinda Durand was less than eighty-seven steps away from certain heartbreak. He cradled Purcell in his arms and hurried down the embankment. With each passing second, Lucinda Durand drew closer. The sight of Ronald holding her dead sweetheart was sure to invite the kind of blood-cursing recrimination he preferred to avoid. Though a weaker man might have hurled the dead cat over old Catawba Bridge, Ronald believed that all creatures deserved a proper burial and a respectful send-off to the hereafter.

Ronald spied a moist mound of earth in the shadow of a rotting oak tree, but there was no time to dig a shallow grave. He tucked Purcell behind a small patch of wild flowers and took cover in the underbrush.

Slow deliberate footsteps pressed against the planks above his head. But the footfalls stopped short when they should have kept going.

In the discomfiting stillness, Ronald snuck a peek at Purcell. A flash of white paw shown bright against the deep green stalks of the flowering weeds. Purcell’s corpus had been discovered.

Lucinda scrambled down the embankment and inspected Purcell while Ronald resumed counting the curls on Lucinda’s head. He got as high as forty-three this time before he lost his balance and exposed his hiding place.

Now Ronald kept running towards the horizon. If he made it home alive, he’d say three prayers at bedtime and sleep with two Bibles under his pillow. Tomorrow was Friday. No doubt Lucinda would approach him about this Purcell business at recess. He dreaded facing her and discussing the deceased partly because the letter “P” was a peculiarly troublesome sound to make.

Alone in his room, Ronald practiced saying the name again and again.

“P-P-Purcell Hargrove. P-P-Purcell Hargrove.” That night he drifted off to sleep with the late tomcat’s name still skittering across his lips.

***

“Two-hundred-and-twenty-six,” Ronald whispered. “Two-hundred-and—”

“Did you kill him?” Lucinda asked.

Ronald shook his head and backed away. She had watched him standing near the jungle gym all by his lonesome since the beginning of recess. While the other children swung from the monkey bars, Ronald stared up at the brick wall of the school as if in a trance.

“I know it was you in those bushes yesterday,” she said. “You’re counting now just like you were back then.”

At this last observation, Ronald inhaled down to his tailbone and puffed out his cheeks for good measure. Lucinda inched closer.

“You know who killed him?” she asked.

Ronald, all puffy-cheeked and red-faced, shook his head. The two had attracted the attention of a small pack of children. Whispered taunts of “Ron-Ron-Ronald” whipped through the crowd, and Ronald’s eyeballs followed each echo. Lucinda leaned up next to Ronald’s ear.

“I’m gonna find out what happened to Purcell,” she whispered. “And if there’s any blood on your hands, you’ll be the sorriest boy in all of Alyssum.”

Mr. Hagan, the gym teacher, rang the bell to end recess. The other children dragged themselves away from the playground drama with curious stares and murmurs.

“P-P-Purcell Hargrove,” Ronald shouted, much louder than he had expected.

The pack of children sniggered at Ronald’s outburst, but Lucinda Durand only studied Ronald’s frantic eyes and small quivering lips.

***

That afternoon Ronald saw her crouched over the tangle of wildflowers at the banks of the Catawba. He stood on the bridge for a moment, mouthing the words he planned to say.

“Somebody took his body,” Lucinda shouted.

Ronald startled at the proclamation. She pulled back the wildflowers and pointed to the empty spot where he’d deposited Purcell’s body a day ago.

“How come you don’t speak?” she asked.

“I sp-sp-speak,” Ronald answered, inwardly cursing the troublesome “P.”

“Fine,” she sounded unconvinced. “He was still here this morning when I came by.” Her eyes returned to surveying the ground. “Could’ve been the State Highway Patrol.”

Ronald marveled at the thought of the State Highway Patrol coming as far west as Catawba Bridge. He dropped his book bag on the ground and shimmied down the hill.

“I have to find his collar,” Lucinda said. “The killer probably held onto it as a souvenir.”

She squatted on all fours to inspect the wet depressions in the mud.

“I saw a whole television program about serial killers and their souvenirs with my granny a while back,” she said. “Purcell’s killer is probably a bed wetter.”

Ronald froze.

“I’m looking for footprints by the way,” she said. “You don’t have to talk. You could just point if you see anything.”

Ronald pointed at a slick patch close to her head.

“Those are mine.”

Ronald pointed double-quick.

“L-L-Look!”

Lucinda followed his finger to a man-sized print of a boot heel.

“Wouldja look at that!” She said, poking her fingers in the damp mud. “You know, I could use an assistant with all this investigation.”

Ronald counted six horizontal ridges in the boot print.

“If you’re interested.”

***

Granny was smoking a Pall Mall in Granddaddy’s recliner, watching her afternoon shows. Lucinda waited for a contestant to make another “damned fool’s choice” that stirred up Granny’s blood and drove her to swear. Then Lucinda snuck Ronald from the kitchen to the sun porch through a violent storm of “chicken-shit-dumbasses.”

“We need to keep this investigation purely confidential,” Lucinda said. “That means it’s just between us.”

Ronald nodded.

“Too much talking could tip off the killer,” she said. “All the best detectives stay quiet until they figure everything out.”

Lucinda made a list of their clues: a collar with Purcell’s name on it, a muddy boot print, and a missing cat corpus. She folded the slip of paper down to a tiny triangle and handed it to Ronald. The two vowed to follow up the next morning during daylight.

“All we have to do is find a cat-hating, boot-wearing, chicken-shit-dumbass, and we’ll find Purcell’s killer.”

“Is your friend staying for supper?” The question came from kitchen. “I’ll put on another plate. Could do with the company and conversation.”

But before Lucinda could answer yes or no, Ronald grabbed his book bag and lit out through the back door.

“Is that little Ronald Barnett?” Granny squinted at the window.

“You scared him off,” Lucinda said. “He’s not the talking type.”

“He’s the leaving kind,” Granny answered. She and Lucinda watched Ronald haul across the neighboring field. “At least he’s making good time.”

Granny and Lucinda sat down at the table to say grace. Lucinda spent most of the meal poking at her cornbread and nibbling the edges of her fried chicken.

“When are you planning to unpack those boxes in your room?” Granny asked.

Lucinda shrugged and jabbed at a stray corn kernel.

“You know your mother’s not like us, sweetheart. She’s not coming back.”

Lucinda shoved a forkful of cornbread in her mouth to keep from talking or crying. From her kitchen chair Lucinda could see the towering trellis rotting at the edges and the untended tomato plants. Less than a week ago, Purcell spent a whole afternoon sleeping in a sunbeam on the porch beside her. Now, in his absence, there were only shadows and silence.

***

When Ronald made it all eight-hundred-and-thirty-three steps home, his brother Easton grabbed him by the collar before Ronald could open the front door.

“Where in the hell have you been?”

Easton smelled like tobacco and aftershave. He’d started using a razor the year before and still went to school most mornings with blood streaking down his neck and dollops of Old Spice behind his ears.

“She sent me looking for you,” Easton said. With each syllable, his hands grew bigger and tighter around Ronald’s neck. “I’m supposed to drive around this county hunting your bony little ass.”

Ronald clawed at Easton’s hands, but they only dug in deeper.

“Ronald?” Their mother called from inside. “Easton? Do I hear voices?”

Easton pushed his face against Ronald’s. “I got better things to do tonight,” he said, “than waste time on some L-L-Loser!”

Easton threw Ronald in the mum bushes and left him in a breathless, teary-eyed heap of shamefulness.

“Where’s your brother?” Their mother was standing in the doorway.

“Went around back,” Easton called out, halfway to his souped up Torino.

Ronald stayed still.

“Make sure you’re here when your father gets home.”

“I’ll be back before then,” Easton answered. “Long before.”

***

The next day was Saturday, and Lucinda would not let Purcell’s murder investigation get cold. She planned to hitch a ride with Granny when she headed to town for her “Saturday errands and conversation.” Lucinda would use the time to pump Granny for information without her noticing.

Granny drove with less urgency than Lucinda would have liked. She nearly pulled the car to a full stop in front of the Nelson house to admire the garden.

“Would you look at those roses!” Granny gasped. “It’s all the rain that makes them bloom.”

“Did the Widow Hargrove have any enemies?” Lucinda asked.

“Virginia?” Granny tapped the gas pedal. “No. Not that I can think of. There were bad feelings after a Christmas pageant some time ago—”

“How long ago?” Lucinda scribbled the words “Virginia” and “Christmas pageant” down on her scratch paper.

“Twenty-five? Thirty years?” Granny said. “Why do you ask?”

“It’s for school.”

“I see.”

Lucinda soon exhausted the limits of Granny’s knowledge about Virginia Hargrove’s relationship with Purcell and the felines of Virginia’s youth and middle age. Other than church gossip and the knowledge that Purcell had earned a reputation as a “tail chaser” Lucinda had not uncovered much of obvious use.

“This is an awfully unusual ‘school project,’” Granny said.

“I need to be thorough,” Lucinda answered. “If I aim to earn an ‘A.’”

Lucinda considered breaking her vow of confidentiality to confide in Granny. Too risky, she thought. Granny might tip off the killer, and she knew Ronald Barnett would keep his word. Other than counting and pointing, Ronald hardly ever spoke to anyone. Granny dropped Lucinda off near the Catawba Bridge and told her to be back by supper.

“I’ll make enough food for three mouths,” Granny told her. “In case that Barnett boy gets hungry.”

***

He waited an hour before Lucinda scooted down the bank in a pair of overalls with her hair tied back.

“Been here long?” Lucinda asked.

Ronald shook his head.

She outlined the plan. There were a handful of houses within easy walking distance from Catawba Bridge. Lucinda would do all the talking. Ronald would steal inside to “use the wash room,” but his real aim was to search the place for boots and cat collars. Lucinda would ask old people questions about the past and young people questions about the future. Whenever Ronald came back from the “wash room,” she’d thank them for their time and they’d move on to the next house.

The two spent the morning talking to three sisters who refused to drive again until the price of gasoline dropped to under a dollar, a girl who knew Ronald’s brother Easton and sang gospel, and a man who was still mad as hell about Nixon and the Russians. They had not, however, located any cat collars or muddy boots.

Ronald counted as high as six-hundred-and-seventy-three under his breath.

“How come you’re always counting?” Lucinda asked.

Ronald shrugged.

“Anybody ever tell you it’s awful strange to be counting all the time?”

Ronald shook his head. His eyes drifted to three curls clinging to the nape of Lucinda’s neck.

“I’m real g-g-good at c-c-counting,” he whispered. “Helps me think.”

The two walked the twisty street in silence for a few awkward moments before Lucinda reminded Ronald that he had stopped counting at six-hundred-and-seventy-three. Ronald knew he should be as high as six-hundred-and-ninety-four, but he would amend the matter in private after he and Lucinda parted ways.

“This is the next place,” Lucinda said. They’d come to a driveway shaded by a weeping willow. The mailbox was in the shape of a black cat.

Lucinda knocked on the front door and a woman with bobbed hair appeared in the window. When she opened the door, Ronald noticed her form-fitting day dress and her long slender hands.

“Afternoon, ma’am. We’re interviewing our neighbors for school,” Lucinda told her. “We’d like to ask you questions about events of historical significance.”

Ronald did his best to stay hidden behind Lucinda, but the woman with the bobbed hair fixed her eyes on the back of his neck.

“You’re Jessup Barnett’s boy, aren’t you?”

Ronald nodded.

“Come on in.”

A hateful black cat pranced around the living room and eyed Lucinda and Ronald with suspicious rage.

“Don’t mind Hellfire,” she told them. “She hates everyone.”

“Who’s this?” Lucinda picked up a framed picture on the mantel and held it up to the woman while Ronald snuck off to the “wash room.”

The hallway branched off to two bedrooms and a pink bathroom. Ronald cracked the first door open and eyeballed the dressers and bookshelves. Every corner was packed with feline knickknacks and photographs. Ronald spotted orange tabby pictures on the night table in the bigger bedroom. He crept closer and peered deep into a smug pair of eyeballs.

Purcell Hargrove.

Purcell had charmed the short-haired woman for love and a meal. No sign of a cat collar or men’s boots. Ronald scanned the other pictures of Purcell, the short-haired woman, and Hellfire. That tomcat had built himself a life with these women, Ronald thought. Poor Lucinda Durand was no more than a side dish.

Then Ronald spotted a photograph of the short-haired woman kissing a much older, smiling man on the cheek. Ronald snatched the photograph and bolted out the front door double-quick.

***

Lucinda chased Ronald all the way to Catawba Bridge before he stopped to breathe.

“What did you find?” Lucinda pressed. “Did she kill Purcell?”

“Three-hundred-seventy-two d-d-days,” Ronald stuttered between tears.

“I need you to stop talking crazy.”

Ronald produced a picture of the short-haired woman kissing Purcell and another picture of her kissing an older man.

“So she loved Purcy,” Lucinda said. “You think it was a crime of passion?”

Ronald turned the second picture over and pointed to the date on the back written a little over a year ago.

“Three-hundred-seventy-two d-d-days,” he repeated. Lucinda studied the man in the picture. She’d seen his face before. His nose and lips were wrinkled but familiar.

Of course.

She was staring at a younger, sniveling version of them now. No wonder the woman had known Ronald was Jessup Barnett’s son.

Ronald grabbed the picture and tore it to pulp in a cyclone of counting and ripping the likes of which Lucinda would never see again.

“Let’s talk to her,” Lucinda said. But Ronald wiped his face, surveyed the damaged photograph, and lit out for the horizon on two small bony legs.

“Ronald!” Lucinda shouted. “Ronald, wait!” But it was no use. Granny was right. Ronald Barnett was a leaving kind of man.

***

Ronald set up camp in the downstairs coat closet and counted hangers, shoes, sleeves, buttons, anything to take his mind away from the real and the inevitable. His daddy hadn’t been working late or visiting his sister in Boonesville. He’d been playing house with some short-haired lady and Hellfire. His daddy was no better than a tomcat. Worse still, Ronald had to break the news to his mama, and he didn’t know if he had the heart or the tongue for that kind of work. His eyes raced over piles of high heels and wing tips before settling on a pair of working boots tucked in the far corner. Ronald crawled over the detritus to count the ridges on the heel of the boot — all six of them — caked in mud.

Was his daddy a philanderer and a cat murderer? The shame of bad blood weighed heavy on his small shoulders and flushed his face to crimson. Then he looked up and saw Purcell Hargrove’s cat collar dangling from the left pocket of his mother’s raincoat.

***

“Did you love Granddaddy?” Lucinda asked Granny over forkfuls of squash and pork tenderloin.

“Of course I loved him,” Granny answered. “You asking ‘for school’?”

Lucinda kept nodding and chewing.

“People have different ways of loving a person. Sometimes leaving is an act of generosity and tenderness.”

“Is that why mama left me?” Lucinda pressed. Granny reached out her hand.

“I think your mama knew how much we needed each other. Your mother takes after her father, but we both have staying kind of hearts.”

“You think a staying heart and a leaving heart could ever be happy together?” Lucinda asked.

“For a while,” Granny admitted, “but not forever. You know there’s a dignity in leaving a person when it’s time, and there’s a dignity in letting a person go.”

Lucinda wasn’t interested in “dignity.” She wanted to find a way to anchor Ronald Barnett’s bony legs to the ground and get him to talk past his tears and his counting.

“Finish your supper,” Granny said. “And your schoolwork.”

***

During recess that week, Ronald Barnett hid in the boys’ bathroom.

He couldn’t face lying, and he couldn’t face the truth. His mama had wrung Purcell Hargrove’s tiny neck because she couldn’t wring his daddy’s. She’d even kept Purcell’s collar like some common killer. Ronald shuddered at the thought of his mama stroking the cat collar with satisfaction, taunting his daddy with lurid descriptions of her cold-blooded killing.

Daddy had come home later and drunker every night that week. His mama spent most nights on the phone with her sister in Clarkson. Easton wanted to finish out his schooling in Alyssum but his mama had fixed on taking Ronald back home to her people.

Ronald knew down in his bones what had poisoned the heart of a good woman. Ronald blamed his mama, but he blamed her loneliness more. He’d rescued Purcell’s collar from the left pocket of his mama’s raincoat and hidden it in his lunchbox for safekeeping. Purcell’s tattered collar was the last tie of that small life to this great earth. The rust-bitten tags with the faded letters belonged in the hands of a creature who’d loved him. As a gentlemen, Ronald was honor bound to deliver them.

Lucinda tapped on the boys’ bathroom door every day. Ronald didn’t answer. He counted the tiles and stayed still and invisible. He traced the edges of Purcell’s collar in case he found the courage to say the words that needed saying. On Friday Ronald stopped running, and Lucinda found him at the Catawba Bridge.

“I heard you were leaving,” Lucinda said.

Ronald nodded.

He unlatched his lunchbox and held out the collar. Lucinda’s eyes grew big.

“My m-m-mama done it,” he said. “My m-m-mama killed P-P-Purcell.”

Lucinda reached for the collar and stroked the name on the tags.

“We’re g-g-going tonight,” Ronald told her. Though he still wondered if the law would permit a hasty departure with cat blood on his mama’s hands.

He took one last look at the reddish-brown curls on Lucinda Durand’s head.

“One-hundred-and-sixty-seven,” he whispered. Then he turned tail and walked away.

***

Lucinda watched him until he was nothing but a small speck in the distance. She’d never bothered to count the number of steps from the Catawba to her Granny’s house before. But she’d count them today.

She’d count them every day — for a long time to come.

---

Martha ("Marty") Keller's work has appeared in Bridge Eight, Brilliant Flash Fiction, Wraparound South, and elsewhere. She is a reader for Flash Fiction Magazine, and she was also a 2019 Pitch Wars Mentee. Over the years, she’s worked in strip malls, skyscrapers, and high school classrooms. She lives at the end of a long narrow road somewhere outside of Chicago.

Swing Me Till Summer

Casey DW Jones

That April afternoon, atop the slide in the backyard at Sandy’s daycare, Brady and I plucked fresh leaves from the maple tree and collected them in a plastic beach bucket. Brady dared me to eat one, and I did. It got stuck halfway down my throat, but I gulped it down. I dared him to eat one, too, and he did, and then he dared me to eat another one. In the end, I ate fourteen leaves, and Brady ate thirteen. While trying to take down number fourteen, he threw up on his denim overalls, so Sandy took him inside to clean him up.

I lay alone, back flat on the grass, watching the leaves tremble and the clouds drift, until Sandy yelled out the back window that my dad was there. He didn’t normally pick me up, but Carl was out of town for work and Mommy was studying. He trudged down the steps as I ran toward him with excitement. He crouched down and I wrapped my arms around his prickly, stubbled neck.

“Daddy! Daddy! I want a piggyback?” I said.

“I don’t think so, Ethan,” he said and pried my fingers from his shoulders. “Daddy’s had a long day.”

As we walked to the red pickup, I told him how many leaves I ate and that my stomach felt achy. He said eating leaves was stupid and if I was going to puke, I should puke before I got in the truck, which might not start anyway.

He popped the hood and pulled out the hammer stashed under the driver’s seat. He banged the solenoid and darted back to thrust his arm through the window and wiggled the yellow-handled screwdriver jammed into the ignition.

Nothing happened.

“Shit, piss, and fuck. Just my fucking luck,” he said.

“Can I try, Daddy?” I asked.

He took his Winston out of his mouth and flicked it to the sidewalk. He arched his chin up toward the sky and smoothed out his ponytail. “Let me give it one more go, buddy.”

Still nothing.

“Goddamn it all to hell,” he said and struck the door panel with the hammer. Daddy wobbled from the curb into the gutter from the impact, and his sunglasses slipped sideways. He pushed them back up onto his head, gritted his teeth, and regripped the hammer. He gave the truck another long stare before he spun around and thrashed at the trunk of an oak tree on the boulevard, punctuating each strike with a different swear word. Shards of bark popped and whizzed into the lawn and street. A couple kids on bikes slowed down, but quickly sped off when Daddy told them to mind their fucking business.

“Well, partner,” he said. “Let’s see what you got.”

He hoisted me up on the front bumper and showed me where to tap. I already knew, though, because this always happened anytime he tried to take us anywhere, but he had a hard time remembering things, like our birthdays, so I figured he just forgot I knew that. He sat behind the wheel and counted to three. I gave it a couple gentle kisses with the hammer, and the starter clicked and the engine whirred and sputtered and settled into a deep hum.

Daddy scratched his head and snorted. “Maybe luck does run in this family after all!”

*

Cooper stood on the steps of the elementary school in his camouflage jacket, tossing a wad of paper in the air to himself. The principal, wearing a beige cardigan and bow tie, pointed at his watch when he saw us pull up in the truck. He disappeared around the side of the school building and Coop ran over to us. I opened the door for him, and he barked at me to scoot over and punched me in the arm until I was straddling the hump.

“Settle down, now, Coop,” Daddy said.

“Bite me,” Coop said, and slammed the door shut. With that the engine cut out.

“You little turd,” Daddy said. “Goddamn it. I don’t know why I even try with you two.”

“Mom says you don’t,” Cooper said.

“Well, I’m officially done trying with this truck today,” Daddy said. “Out.”

We walked to the bait shop and Daddy used the payphone to leave a message at our Mom’s house. Then we went to the park across the street. The squirrels chased each other through the grass and twisted up the maples, and pools of black ants congregated in the patches of dirt where the grass wasn’t sprouting yet. The breeze picked up and the chill blast gave me goosebumps. I had forgotten my jacket at Sandy’s, but Daddy said it was my job to remember those things and I’d have to get it back tomorrow.

I ran for the swing set as soon I clocked it, while Cooper made for the giant slide shaped like a shoe. Daddy sat on the empty merry-go-round and put his hands in his pockets before laying down. Cooper ran down the slide standing up, even though Mom had told him not to a thousand times. He picked up a big stick and pretended it was a machine gun and sprayed us with imaginary bullets.

“Daddy, can I have a push?” I said.

“You’re getting too big for a that, aren’t you,” he said, drifting, and dragging his feet in a slow arc in the dirt. “Five-year-olds shouldn’t need help.”

“Hey! I am not five until August. I want to go really high, and I can’t get that high on my own. Please.”

Daddy sighed and walked over. He grunted and pushed me so high the chains popped, and it felt like my stomach shot out through my feet, so I screamed at him. He corralled me to a stop and said he was sorry. As soon as my heartbeat settled, I asked to do it all over again.

“OK, but this time while you’re up there, grab a piece of those fluffy cotton candy clouds for me,” Daddy said. “They look yummy.”

I clawed at the blobby clouds in the sky and pretended to eat the sweet tufts of clouds, occasionally throwing one behind me for Daddy to eat. We giggled together for a few minutes, until Daddy needed a breather. He took a seat in the swing next to me. Some meadowlarks whistled, and we even heard an owl, even though it was the middle of the day. But we didn’t say anything for a long time. Finally, he crouched down in front of me and said he had something important to tell me.

“I just want you to know that, even though you’re moving away, I’m still going to be your daddy, and I’m gonna miss you. A bushel and a peck.”

“What? We’re not moving!”

“Your mom didn’t tell you?” He stood up and kicked the dirt and twirled around. “Well, goddamn it all to hell, I’m sorry. Yes, you all are moving with your Mom and Carl out west, to where his people are.”

“And you’re not?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I have to stay here and look after the farm.”

“But you hate the farm. You stay it’s a curse, and that always say you’d rather be playing music.”

“That’s just stuff I say when I’m mad. The farm’s been part of our family forever. I can’t just leave it.”

“Aren’t you part of our family?” Daddy lit a cigarette. The wind picked up and swept my curls across my face. I raked my shoes through the dirt under the swing, spit into it, and raked some more. “I take that as a no.”

“The situation is...complicated,” he said. “I asked your mom to let you visit in the summertime. And at spring break and Christmas.”

“Does Coop know?”

“Oh, yeah. He knows all right. Hey, don’t look so sad. You like Carl, right? I mean, even I think he’s a pretty solid dude.”

“I don’t know,” I said. Carl moved into our Mom’s apartment last month. He bought us some Star Wars action figures and ordered pizza for us when Mom was at night class. But he also said weird things when Mom wasn’t around. A few days earlier, I broke one of his whiskey glasses when I threw a fork in the sink and he told me to sleep with one eye open that night.

“You should be excited,” Daddy said. “You’re gonna have a good life out there. Big house. Big yard. Bicycles and toys galore. A minivan. Maybe even a Nintendo. I can’t compete with that. But you will always be my son, you hear me?”

He patted my shoulder and turned my chin toward him. I forced a smile. Three geese wobbled toward us, honking and pecking at the ground. Cooper leapt from the top of the slide and yelled, “Take no prisoners!” before he army-rolled into the flock of geese, who squawked away.

From across the park, a melody warbled toward us, B-I-N-G-O. A rusting white van splotched with peeling stickers of frozen treats pulled up to the curb alongside the park.

Cooper sprinted to the ice cream van, ignoring Daddy, who yelled at him to wait. Coop took a crumpled dollar bill out of his tube sock and bought a Bomb Pop.

“I want a Bomb Pop too. Can I have one? Please.”

Daddy opened his wallet. A gum wrapper and some receipts fluttered to the ground. “Sorry, I don’t have any. I even used my last quarter to call your mom.”

“Coop, will you buy me a Bomb Pop?” I yelled. “I’ll pay you back.”

“Even if I had another dollar, I wouldn’t give you one, dork wad.”

“It’s not fair,” I said, and crossed my arms. Helplessness washed over me, and I fought back tears.

“I have an idea,” Daddy said to me. “Why don’t you grab some more of that cotton candy out of the sky.”

“I don’t want an imaginary treat,” I said. “I want a popsicle.”

“I’m sure Carl will buy you all the popsicles you want later,” Daddy said. “But right now, there’s a sky full of cotton candy up there, all puffy and ripe for the pickings.”

“But that’s not the same,” I said.

“Well,” Daddy said. “Sometimes, you have to make do with what you got.”

“Oh, shut up,” I said.

“Excuse me?”

“You heard me, Webdon. Just shut up.” I’d never called him by his first name before, and I never called him Daddy again after that day.

Webdon looked at me the way he had looked at the truck and the tree on the boulevard earlier that day. But he didn’t strike me, even though a big part of me wanted him to. That would have made the rest of my life a lot easier. Instead, he pulled me backwards in the swing and flung me into the sky.

I closed my eyes, and little flashes of us spiraled out of my body: Webdon gripping a bullhead while I worked a treble hook out of its mouth under the creek-side cottonwood shade; Webdon steering the tractor through the brome with me bumping on his lap; watching the lightning fork over the pasture below, while we listened to a Led Zeppelin cassette in his truck; Webdon starting a fire from dried cow chips, to warm me up after I’d fallen in the pond.

To this day, I still see him, sometimes, when I close my eyes, plucking his guitar on the front porch under the oaks at his farm, which has long been sold. I can smell his wood-burning stove, his Winstons, the fish guts wiped on his jeans. I can see the rips in his gown at the VA. Hear his screaming nonsense echoing through the hospital hallways the last time I saw him.

Webdon planted his hands firmly into my back, before he pushed me away from him, as hard as he could.

---

Author’s note: This piece is somewhat autobiographical in nature. One of my earliest memories that I have is of eating leaves on top of a slide in the backyard of somebody's in-home daycare. My family also had several vehicles that didn't operate under normal circumstances, so tapping the solenoid was something I became familiar with, and even one of our vans had a screwdriver wedged into the ignition. I wanted to try to capture what it's like for a child to, for the first time, understand that one of his parents isn't perhaps who they want them to be, and that they never may be ... I moved away from my biological father at an early age, much like the young protagonist, so a lot of the emotions running through this piece are ones that I sat with and came to know intimately from a very early age. Disappointment. Anger. Grief. And a whole lot of things above the head of a four-year-old but still there in the veins.

---

Casey DW Jones grew up in the high desert plains of Southwestern Kansas. He holds an MFA from Hamline University, where he served on the Water~Stone Review fiction board. His short stories have recently appeared in Stoneboat Literary Journal, New Limestone Review, Peatsmoke Literary Journal, and Sundog Lit. He was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize in fiction. Casey is the founding editor of Casino Literary Magazine. He currently resides in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Home or, The European

J.M. Parker

When the poor exiles, every pleasure past,
Hung round their bowers, and fondly looked their last
- Oliver Goldsmith, “The Deserted Village”

“I don’t get it,” Nathan said, setting two carefully-balanced beers down between them.

“When people in Paris are interested, they look at you. When they aren’t, they don’t. Here, they all stare, but it doesn’t seem to mean anything.”

“Here? Tonight?” Julia asked. Her hair, under the club’s blue neon, Nathan noticed, was somewhat blonder than a few years earlier.

“Here tonight, at the grocery store. In general.”

“Well, you don’t exactly fit in,” Julia mused.

“I’m making an effort.” Nathan’s chin fell, following Julia’s gaze at his t-shirt and polar fleece, following her gaze toward his jeans and hiking boots. A week earlier, as somewhere below the airport sixty pounds of books, clothes and electronics were pulled toward the carousel, he had come off a plane, a pair of kidskin gloves stuffed in a pocket, overjoyed to see her, not having slept or smoked in fourteen hours, and kissed her on each cheek, something he’d never done before, but which Julia had found pleasantly appropriate. Julia looked back up at his face now. There was nothing remarkable about it, he saw her register. It was reasonably handsome. She had known it since high school. “I even untucked my shirttail,” Nathan said.

“It’s not so much the clothes,” Julia said, fitting places for her words between beats, as the club’s music rose. “It’s more. Hair. Maybe. Posture.”

“What should I do to my hair?” asked Nathan. “It’s normal hair.”

“It isn’t abnormal hair. But look around.” Julia nodded toward the barstools behind him. “There’s a lot you’d have to do. Gain forty pounds, get a buzz cut, some glasses. Even dressed like them, you’d look like yourself in bad clothes, but it wouldn’t change that much.”

“And I still wouldn’t get picked up.”

“I said you’d fit in. They probably just don’t know what to make of you.”

“I’m even growing a beard,” Nathan said, fishing for compliments on his third beer, something he imagined best done by systematically deflecting them.

“That’s not really a beard,” said Julia, on a third beer herself, and humoring him. “It’s more like some kind of Italian five o’clock shadow.”

“But tell me what I’m wearing isn’t completely normal American suburban guy, circa 2000.”

“Yeah. Normal American suburban Calvin Klein model guy. Face it. You could go home with any one of them if you wanted to. You just don’t want to.”

Nathan was silent.

“I don’t blame you. Notice I’m not dating anyone at the moment.”

“There must be cute guys in this town.”

“There are a few.” Julia smiled. “But even if I hooked up with them, I’ve been thinking lately, do I really want to? I mean, if I fell in love and they didn’t want to move, then moving would be hard for me. And I have decided to move,” she said, having likewise moved the subject back to herself. He had changed it on returning from the bar, where the lack of people was frustrating, then further frustrating as he realized the only way to make the experience agreeable was to drink more than he would have liked, for which he was going to have to pay money.

Nathan’s heart sank whenever he thought of money. Its uncontrollable ebb was a morose subject. It had always been something―earned or bought with something else―that came, then seemed to pass through him. Even thinking of it now, in a good humor as the music pounded louder from the bar, Nathan rarely thought of making it, but only of trying to keep it. He prided himself on this earnest familial urge to protect it, but never found himself in a position to staunch its flow. At twenty-nine, both his savings and debts left him equally uncomfortable. “I mean,” Julia was saying, “I do miss talking and sex and restaurants.”

They looked up as a boy at the next table rose with swaying hips, as if unable to resist the music any longer, to dance alone against the club’s back wall―a skinny boy, face invisible. “Why is it gay men feel the need to fulfill this kind of stereotype?” Julia asked.

“I can’t imagine anyone else dancing to this crap, can you?”

“It’s a stage,” Nathan said. “He’s figured out he’s gay, and decided that’s good, so anything ‘gay’ must be good.”

“You never went through that stage.”

“I’m a terrible dancer.” They sat quiet for a minute, fingering their newspapers, then remembering it was too dark to read.

“Do you see Justin like that?” Nathan asked.

“Justin hams it up a little.”

“Ooof,” said Nathan, blowing through his lips with an exasperated and decidedly foreign expression. “It’s better when he’s around.”

Julia’s silence gave Nathan the impression the conversation he wanted to pursue wouldn’t be easily broached without more alcohol, so he let Julia move it back to herself: her reimmersion in Southern manners, her eagerness to get back to a city where a woman could speak more bluntly to waiters and hail a taxi. Julia’s mother’s horrified reaction to a brusque riposte she’d offered a waiter the week after her return had marked her and now, making efforts, she found cordiality a creeping habit. Perhaps, she worried, she’d overcompensated by becoming overly polite.

Nathan drove her home. “Should I come up?” he asked outside her building.

“If you want to.”

“That was a no. You’re overcompensating.”

Julia laughed, pushing open the car door. “I should probably get some sleep. You’ve got the key if you need somewhere quiet to study this week.”

Climbing up from the curb, she opened the building’s door. In a charming pocket of modestly-successful urban renewal, Julia’s apartment approximated her college dorm room, though somewhat more neat and with real furniture unearthed from her mother’s garage. It felt either cramped or expansive, depending on the city one had just come from or the relatives’ homes one had been squatting on return. By her own standards it was cavernous. Nights alone, she tended to shelter in a corner of the sofa by her stepfather’s fake Tiffany reading lamp. Pouring a wheatgrass shot from the refrigerator, she pulled out the local gay newspaper she’d stuck in her purse at the bar, turning its pages out of blank curiosity―there were a scanty six. Frowning to swallow her juice, she pored over its classified ads: headless barrel-chested figures flexed in newsprint. Her first thought had been to look for Justin. But there was no one here for Justin. There was no one here for Nathan. Taking the paper to the bedroom, she announced herself to her bed sheets, leaving its pages to drop to the nightstand.

The main thing he’d learned in two weeks of repatriation, Nathan told himself, driving toward his parents’ suburb, was that coming home was dangerous to home itself. In the first week back, things had resonated deeply here among the scenery of his childhood. Buildings, parks, trees appeared, as if on an otherwise regular line of text, someone had run a highlighter pen over them, or circled them in black, looming like objects in Munch paintings, not things or places but characters, alive with personality and presence. That week in the theater.

At the theater he’d wanted them to marvel that the barber shop across the street hadn’t changed. As soon as he’d said it, it all flattened out in the wake of his words, his own feelings understatements once put into language, each one a stage prop. It’s easy to revisit a place―to replace―with the eyes of childhood for a single afternoon.

Harder to keep one’s eyes fixed for a month. Look too close, too often, verbalize your sensations, and your own childhood gets flattened.

He didn’t like flattening things, but Nathan detested feeling sentimental. With sensations like strange volumes in his mouth, he walked carefully. If they became too strong or sentimental, he flattened them, letting them slide on the tip of his tongue. Buildings, rooms, views, bridges, church steeples weren’t the same, flattened. He reassured himself, imagining it might make them more mobile and portable. Like Orthodox icons packable in a suitcase. In this way, everything in America began to feel smaller, more fragile. It was a fair trade: When he thought of Paris now, he had flattened feelings, stripped of any logic they’d had in proximity to places and people attached to them.

Living with his parents was a benign, constant irritation. His brother’s Labrador, senile and spoiled in five years’ absence, left early morning jogs around the pond solitary. The family library had lost its charm. From the kitchen phone he called Paris, and the European asked, “Where are you?”

“At my parents’.”

“I thought you were with your friend Joolee-ah.”

“It’s comfortable here. I have my bed.”

“You like comfort, you bourgeois.”

“I have my brother’s room, too.”

“So a room for studying and another for throwing your clothes in. But when do you come back?” he asked.

Whatever the answer, the truth was that Nathan spent most of his time at Julia’s, or like tonight, driving along the same roads he’d cruised in high school.

Justin’s apartment was down the hall from Julia’s. The week before, standing in Julia’s kitchen, Justin had asked if he could kiss him.

Nathan had pretended not to hear. Surprisingly, Justin, like people here, tended to live by a rote series of blind circumstances. This displeased him. Europeans lived in a world where lucky chances came less often than to Americans.

Still, Nathan found himself slipping into this world of circumstance, convincing himself things were the result of his own schemes. Disliking circumstance, as Justin woke up the next morning, Nathan’s first reaction to Justin’s sleepy surprise (watching his own presence dawn over Justin, eyes still shut, a smile gradually creeping over his face) was to imagine he (or even Julia) had planned this. But no one had.

He was trying to decide what to do. He had a certain (Calvinistic, he chastised himself) belief that everything was always for the best if you made it so. Waking up in Justin’s bed, watching slow dawning surprise fall across Justin’s half-sleeping face, Nathan had hesitated. Up for an hour already, grateful the corner gas station took credit cards for hot chocolate, Nathan had come back to bed to describe the sun in the park, the station clerk and the kids in the parking lot. Justin stretched, taking a sip of the chocolate with the embarrassed, delighted smile of people watched with adoration.

It had been a pleasant evening, as far as Nathan remembered. No reason to make the morning after anything less than pleasant.

“You’re ninety-five percent evil,” Justin said, an eye flickering open.

“How so?” Nathan asked.

“You do everything just the way you would if you wanted to keep me in bed all day.”

“I’ll work on the other five percent.”

“It looks like a nice day,” Justin said, sunlight glint on Justin’s nape, peeking round Nathan at the window.

“It’s awful out there,” Nathan answered, closing the blinds.

Over breakfast, Justin had described his boyfriend (a framed photo, face-down the night before, now graced Justin’s nightstand upright). Nathan listened politely, forgetting how to function without a cultural barrier, a foil without which he wasn’t himself anymore, trying to convince himself Justin’s behavior was less calculated than a misunderstanding of manners. If naïve, that might itself be endearing. Uninterested in Justin’s boyfriend, whoever he was, wherever he lived, Nathan assumed Justin, like himself, was used to having his fingers kissed, ears fondled, yet was still curious to see it happening. Verbal flattery fell flat in English. He tried not to look into Justin’s eyes.

“How long are you staying in America?” Justin asked, and Nathan smoothed Justin’s forehead, asking him not to rumple it before he saw him again.

Not far from the front door, across the park’s shrubbery, hung an auditorium where Nathan had seen plays as a child. Its Greek portico was only a short drive up the hill. From Julia’s and Justin’s lawn, he thought of going up there. The little lawn around its front, its view through the oaks receding down the hill toward the park, Doric columns to lean against, the city’s skyline laid out below. From across the park, the building looked like all his memories of it encapsulated, iconic. But up close the auditorium would seem a dollhouse. He imagined flattening it, going to sit on its steps. Not flattening it was a conscious act of pity. Dishonest, too. To preserve a place so grand in his mind. When a moment on its steps might wash it away. Childhood’s monuments had enjoyed a long respite, not from Nathan’s thoughts (they remained, always, points of navigation, wherever he went), but from being probed at close physical proximity. Never quite retro-fitted to the insights of his early twenties, they sat―he saw they should―as beacons of indescribable but certain meaning, dried for preservation, on which any future rested. Pressed between the pages of a book, frail as new buds.

In the car, Nathan took the street’s upward curve with a burst of speed, the hill a familiar contour in his stomach, rising toward it, veering softly downhill, gravity and the engine’s thrum, equal forces before the brake pulls them to unison at the hill’s base, where his father, for so many mornings, had dropped him off at school. Level road pulled evenly on again, around another bend to the street that led, though a series of stoplights, home. In some French magazine, he’d read that after the age of forty, people have to choose between keeping their face or their figure. The simplicity of the formula was chilling. The idea of becoming faceless charmed, then haunted him by turns.

A roll of wrapping paper drooped across the Vanity Fairs on Julia’s coffee table. The local paper spread across an aging New Yorker. Nathan lay outstretched, legs crossed, listening to Julia’s voice from behind the bathroom door. “He’s confused enough as it is,” she was saying.

“You said he liked lovers who live miles away.”

“There is that.” Julia popped her head around the door with a toothbrush for a moment before returning to the bathroom mirror. “He’s confused over someone three states away. All he needs is you coming waltzing in from Paris and leaving him to pine away.”

“Pining over one, he could just as well pine over two,” Nathan suggested.

“And that would be one more person I’d hear him moaning about for the next six months,” Julia’s voice rang. “Not to mention the fact that I’m going to miss you, too.” She smiled, coming back into the bedroom.

Nathan, outstretched on the bed, had been tossing Julia’s childhood teddy bear back and forth between his arms. As the bear went flying over the footboard, in an outburst of explicatives, Nathan soared to the foot of the bed, swooping the bear up, staring at its face in disbelief. “Jesus, I hope I remember my CPR.” He flung the bear on the bedspread, pumping it rhythmically with his fists.

“Is he going to be all right?”

“Oh, god, Ben, you’ve got to pull through.” Twisting its head sideways, mimicking gasps, Nathan jerked the bear while making progressively violent vomiting noises. “It’s probably just a concussion. I think he’s going to survive.”

“Oh my god.”

“You all right, buddy?”

“Looks like he’s breathing again,” Julia said distractedly, turning to the closet.

“Ben has a big booger hanging out of his nose,” Nathan said, holding the bear up, inspecting it suspiciously.

“That’s not a booger,” said Julia. “It’s part of his lips that’s coming off.”

“What do you call that part of a bear’s lips?”

“I don’t know.”

“He’s hare-lipped.”

“My bear is not hare-lipped. And you’d better not pull his mouth off.” She’d gone back to the bathroom mirror.

“Would he die?” Nathan asked.

“Probably not right away,” Julia called.

“You could sew it back on.”

“That would be a pain. Plus it would hurt him terribly.”

“He wouldn’t feel it. Stuffed bears don’t feel anything.”

“I thought we were already anthropomorphizing this bear to a certain extent.”

“Not to that extent.” Nathan smiled a smile, a recent innovation still needing work, suggesting more sweetness and more guile than he actually possessed, a smile learned while bargaining for things in places where he didn’t speak the language. “If I can get Justin to stop talking about this guy in Ohio, do I have your permission to continue?”

“You won’t.”

“But if I can?”

“He’s already in love with someone on the other side of the country. The last thing he needs is someone on the other side of an ocean.”

“He could consolidate.”

“Emotional consolidation? Is that what this is to you?”

“It would make everything simpler for everyone.”

From the bathroom, Julia’s voice took on a high, slightly false pitch, losing interest in the argument, taking a more moralistic tone than she intended, simply to end it. “You’re not good for him. Justin needs someone who lives in the same city. For once in his life.”

“Come on. I’m making a bet.”

“Is there no emotion in this whole scenario for you?”

“Oh, so I’m some heartless monster who’s out to seduce your harmless neighbor. I could fall in love, too. He started it, after all.”

Julia stepped back into the bedroom, holding a necklace above her chest. “This one?”

“A big gold one.”

“I like this one, but I don’t think it’s going to do.”

“Wear your Christmas necklace.” Nathan leaned back into the pillows.

“I’m saving it for Christmas.”

Taking the bear from Nathan’s arms, she tucked it carefully in beside him. “You try and get some rest, buddy,” Nathan cooed next to him.

“He isn’t going to think much of you if you keep getting him drunk and sleeping with him.”

“That’s not a problem. He gets drunk himself. I probably ought to spend more time on conversation. Unfortunately he’s one of those people who likes getting out of bed in the morning.”

“Fancy that,” said Julia. “I have a bet. I bet you can’t get yourself to fall in love with him.”

“Now there’s a challenge.” Nathan thought for a minute. “Not that there’s anything not to like about him.”

“Your theory about blue sheets does work,” she said, looking down. “Your eyes are very blue.”

It was a stroke of genius, Nathan admitted. “My mother and I searched three department stores to find the perfect shade for my own pied-à-terre. Imagine the looks you get―from sales clerks and from your mother―asking for a mirror in the bedding section of house wares.”

“But your eyes are always blue.”

“With the right bedspread I can make them green. But someone likes blue.”

“Are you coming shopping?”

“I need a nap,” Nathan said. “My great-aunt just got in. You remember my energetic Aunt Polly from Scarsdale.”

“Will you be around tonight?” Julia was in the hall, shuffling with her purse.

“Much as I would love to hang Christmas ornaments with your beloved step-siblings, I must go home and be entertaining for once. And need a nap.”

“My stepfather still makes those eggnogs strong, if you want to stop by later.”

“Duty before pleasure, I fear.” Leaning into a pillow, Nathan tried to bring to mind the lyrics of a song, fretting vaguely at his French, chanting mindless Franco-pop, enjoying the sound of his own voice. He’d smoked cigarettes, and it was low and husky. He heard the door latch behind her.

“You’re not in love,” Julia said that week. “I don’t think you know what love means.”

They were leaving the mall. On the way out Nathan had ordered new glasses. “I’ve never seen anyone pick out a pair of glasses so fast,” she said in the car. “But maybe I’ve just never shopped for glasses with a boy.”

“Did you like them?”

“The color was off. I liked them from a distance, but not up close.”

“Well,” Nathan said, leaning toward her with a mock whisper, “I’ll take them off when I get up close.”

“Ooh baby.” She smiled, starting the car. “You just think everyone ought to fall in love with you, and Justin’s spoiling your theory of how the world runs itself.”

“That’s a reasonable assessment. Want to get some coffee?”

“Yeah.”

The café was big, but they couldn’t find a table that suited them both. The smoking section was at the barista’s counter. The barista himself was in an armchair with two young women on his knees. The entrance was too crowded. The barista was speaking to the two young women. “How old are you, Destiny?” He paused to guess. “Nineteen.”

Destiny stared at him as if just realizing he was raving mad. “I’ll be twenty-one on Saturday.”

“On Christmas,” nodded Destiny’s sister.

Nathan hadn’t gone out all week. His great-aunt had accidentally filled a car with diesel when he hadn’t gone with her to the gas station, and the house had been drained him to a semi-stupor for several days. Julia flipped through a magazine.

“Everyone is so young here,” he said.

“It’s three in the afternoon. The rest of them work. Unlike yourself,” she murmured. Though unsure to what the definition of “sabbatical” might technically extend, she harbored vague notions it didn’t involve Nathan’s teaching English at an upscale Parisian unemployment center.

“It’s freelance,” he said. “Most teachers take off July or August. I’m taking December, January and February.”

Teapots steamed on the table as their read their papers. Julia finished the horoscopes. The rest of the paper was comics, five pages of editorials, and personal ads, from which she read aloud the most humorous.

“I’m obsessed with him,” Nathan said at length. “Is it getting tiresome?”

Julia pulled her paper toward her face. “It is.”

“I know.”

“You just expect,” she said, pulling her tea behind the paper, “People want to have a relationship with you, and if they don’t, you act shocked. People sometimes have perfectly good reasons for not wanting to be in relationships.”

“Like what? I’ve never wanted not to be in one.”

“Well, I’ve told you why I wouldn’t want a relationship now. I’d be a wreck. But then you’ve had more experience than I have . . . changing tracks.”

“Don’t say that.”

Destiny dismounted and the barista rose. Nathan ordered two glasses of wine.

“Do you really want wine at three in the afternoon?”

“It’s after three.” He left his glass alone until she had finished hers. Then said, “What exactly did you tell him about me?”

“With him, he asks about you,” Julia said. “With you, you ask what I told him about you.” He slid the wine toward her with a nervous tap. “I used to actually have real conversations with each of you. Now it’s always all this.”

“I know.”

“Can we leave the subject for a week?”

“But he has this misplaced impression I’m insincere.”

“He doesn’t think that. He doesn’t want to start something with someone who lives on another continent.”

“If I said I was staying, I’d have to stop being sincere. Where do I lose more points?” Southerners, like Europeans, in his experience, were swayed by words, even their own words, especially their own, and once a thing was spoken, their hearts were like the air between a harp’s strings: empty, perhaps, but tremoring. Midwesterners, unused to plucking their own heartstrings, were less likely to have them plucked.

The rest of the conversation revealed Justin’s boyfriend had plans to come down from Ohio after Christmas.

“Why are you so intent on this boy?” she asked Nathan.

“Maybe I’m looking for a reason to stay here,” he said.

“If that’s true, it’s sad. Sad for you, and sad for whoever you’re seeing over there.”

“So,” Nathan said. “I’ll give him up.”

Julia smiled at him from across the newspaper. “That would be wise.” Finishing her wine, she smiled. “He likes you. I didn’t tell him anything too terrible.” On their way out the door she noticed Nathan hadn’t touched his own glass.

Nathan tried to keep places in memory. For him, moving was intrinsic to growing up. Hehadn’t thought of himself as having been an adult until he had left home, gauging changes in his life by moves made from there. Moving induced change, a matter of debate how much of it was real change, and how much simply seeing yourself against a new background. But it felt like change, and acted like change. That fall, he’d gone with a friend to unload some last remnants from the basement of the friend’s own childhood apartment, now up for sale, leaving the apartment empty. “Here,” the friend had said at the window, rubbing the sill, “the shutters on the windows were wood, real wood, lacquered. They were real wood shutters―” They’d found boxes of toy cars in the basement, tiny American matchbox cars. Nathan had picked up and held the matchbox cars.

Taking daily routes through Paris, by foot or bus or train, Nathan had passed the same buildings, streets, passed them over and over, across months of different recurring thoughts, provoked by, corresponding to, or simply in sync with the buildings passing by. Chains of thought linked to places stable as the facades, like fossils, a petrified support for his own traces.

New places should inspire new trains of thought. Familiar places should trigger familiar ones. Now he found himself remodeling a familiar landscape with new thoughts. Like a kind of undermining of himself.

Julia, coming home one evening after New Year, found NPR playing on the radio. A half-dozen cups of half-drunk coffee punctuated piles of books sprawled across her kitchen table. She flipped off the radio. The back door hung open to a mild January’s slow sunset. From the balcony, she saw Justin’s truck in the lot below, freshly washed, the garden hose sprawled along the grass and sudsy puddles pooling across the patio. Nathan and Justin sat on the garden wall below it. “Well hey,” she said, going down to them, crossing the brick walk for a hug.

“He’s famous for standing people up,” Julia said later that week.

“I’m famous for standing people up,” said Nathan.

“You do sort of begin to remind people of each other that way. His boyfriend is going to show up any day now.”

“He says.”

“Rumor has it.”

“Rumor has it.”

Wednesday and Thursday passed. Friday they had dinner with Julia’s office mates. Saturday there was a gallery hop downtown. Nathan had an unfamiliar sensation of nothing seeming to matter. They watched films at Julia’s. During silences, they could hear Justin moving furniture in the room next door. At midnight, Nathan paused in the stairwell, hesitating to knock at Justin’s before going downstairs. A sudden stark silence fell behind the door as he did. He went down the stairs. As the thick thud of the car door sounded behind him and he started the engine, a window opened wide upstairs in the house. Then a hand at the open upper window, waving frenetically, his face, mouth open, static, a voice in the chill air, muted by the car’s frosted glass.

Nathan found Justin cooking chicken soup the next day, the apartment taking on a salty, homey smell Nathan hated. To avoid it, he stood very still, nose to the window panes, where a cushion of cold outside air vibrated close at the glass. Leaves lay piled along the sidewalk. A taxi paused, letting out a boy in a dark coat, pulling a huge brown duffel bag from the car seat after him.

“That’s him,” Justin called from the kitchen, where he, too, had been standing to watch from a window.

As Justin’s phrase took sense, the room’s sounds flattened like leaves crushed in a flower press. A static panic padded the room. Each corner and piece of furniture seemed frozen for a moment. Whether this came from Justin or from himself, Nathan couldn’t have said―it had no visible effect beyond the window panes, where the figure on the sidewalk, hoisting his bag to his shoulder, placidly climbed the steps toward the house between the fallen leaves.

Moving to the door, Nathan pulled it open. Stepping out to the stairwell landing, he pressed his back to the door. Its latch let out a soft, full, reassuring tock from the wood’s inner workings behind him, echoing on the landing, resonating so richly in the stairwell that he felt its vibration not only through his fingertips on the door, but in his own mouth, voluminous as his tongue.

---

J.M. Parker’s fiction has appeared in Chelsea Station, Foglifter, Frank, Gertrude, ISLE, SAND, and Segue, among other journals, been reprinted in Best Gay Stories 2015, and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. His first novel, A Budget Traveler’s Guide to the Museums of Europe, was published in 2017, and his volume of translated poetry, Blossoms in Snow: Austrian Refugee Poets in Manhattan, is just out with the University of New Orleans Press. His second novel Seattle or, In the Meantime was recently published by Beautiful Dreamer Press. He lives in Salzburg, Austria, where he teaches creative writing and American studies.

Splintered

Jennifer Fliss

When laughing over something the neighbor says, Katie slaps an old picnic table. This is the first splinter. It embeds itself quickly, inserting itself so readily, it is as if her skin is dough. She squeals at the intrusion and Josh insists on using a needle to get it out. They fill the small bathroom with their two bodies. Beneath Katie’s feet, the tile is cool, but still she sweats. Josh too, she can see it on the sides of his face and in the darkened patches of his t-shirt. He closes one eye and scrape, scrape, digs. It’s not a needle but a safety pin. He hasn’t sterilized it, but surely it doesn’t matter, he tells Katie. She struggles not to pull her hand back from his as he squeezes her pinky as he works. He is not successful, and Katie sucks her finger the rest of the day between bites of Greek salad and taco dip.

The next day, Katie holds tight to the railing as she ascends the steep steps to the back door. There is a piercing into the flesh between thumb and forefinger, that delicate space. She gasps, usually splinters don’t hurt so much. This is the second splinter. The ladder from the garage. A half-done birdhouse. The deck she’s been meaning to clean up. These are the third, fourth, and fifth splinters. Josh says maybe she has particularly tender flesh. His eyes shimmer as he says it, looking almost like they are filling with water, but she knows better. She doesn’t feel like sex but doesn’t say so. While Josh is in her, steadily moving his body over hers, Katie studies the most recent splinter near her thumb. It seems large and it should be easy to dislodge. She will try later with some tweezers. 

The house is cold. Katie is always cold, no matter the season, so once dusk sets in and the house takes on colors only visible during those few minutes a day, she arranges the wood in the fireplace to set a fire. She cries out. Six. 

“You okay?” Josh shouts from the kitchen. He is making dinner. She hates salmon, but he insists it’s healthy for her. 

“Fine,” she says. 

“You want me to do that? I can set the fire.” 

“So can I.” 

“I usually set the fires,” he says. It sounds like he is eating something, mouth filled with masticated things. 

“I know,” Katie says and flips the vent switch. 

It is not as if she decides to leave the foreign objects there, embedded in her skin. But no amount of coaxing seems to work. She scrapes along her surface, skin flaking, her own self dropping like snow. She tries tweezers and needles, sucking and fingernails. She remembers something her father had told her when she was young: if you don’t take splinters out, they stay there forever. They become a part of you. Her father had wanted to abrade her skin away. You might have to get amputated, he had said. Cut it off completely or it will become infected. He had come at her with a sharp object, its tip and his eyes glinting. She had envisioned her skin gradually losing its softness, hardening, turning to bark. Her imagination took her further and further until she was a tree in a field, rooted down, unable to move, birds flitting into her branches, sap running down her middle. Anyway, her father was a beast. He would not allow her to even climb her own trunk. 

It should also be said Katie works with wood. She never thought this is something she would do as an adult. She had been recused from the woodshed in summer camp after ineptitude with a vise. She hadn’t even gotten to saws. But now she makes birdhouses and dollhouses and small tables, sometimes carving out small necklaces like puzzle pieces. She sells these at local craft fairs, one time venturing as far as Portland, three hours south. Katie has attempted an online store, only to find the intricacies of e-commerce daunting. Plus she likes meeting her customers, knowing that what she creates with her hands would be a part of their houses, their lives. 

She is packing up some recently made items into plastic storage containers. Today she has rented a stall at the local flea and farmers’ market. She will put up colorful bunting that reads Katie’s Kwality Wood. She hates the name, Josh had come up with it, and in a fit of productivity had made all her collateral with the name on it. She has a stack of business cards, matte, not glossy. She’s made little slabs of wood which will act as display shelves. Those go into boxes along with mini plastic bags for jewelry, a cash box, a credit card reader, five birdhouses, two dollhouses, and three small stools with paisley designs carved into them. She has a few brochures that say she can build custom items: stools with children’s names in them, wedding décor, cutting boards. She can bend wood, but this isn’t easy and she doesn’t do it often. 

She hugs Josh, she is that excited. He smells like hotel soap.  

“That smell’s making me nauseous,” she says. 

“Nauseated.” 

“You too?” she asks. 

“No, it’s nauseated.” 

“Whatever. The new soap or new cologne or whatever is making me sick.” 

“Bitch,” he says and waits ten seconds before he smiles and punches her shoulder like it’s a joke. 

“Okay, I’m going,” Katie says. 

“Where to?” 

“The market. Remember I told you,” she says filling the trunk with her wares. 

“We have the party at Andy and Marie’s today,” Josh says. 

“Well, I can’t go. This has been on the calendar for –” 

“Fuck the calendar,” he says. She looks up at his eyes. They are dark and he goes to stand in front of the car, blocking her way out. 

“Josh,” 

“It’s Andy’s fortieth.” 

“Tell them I’m sorry.” 

“You tell them.” 

“Josh, I’m going to be late. I have to set up.” He puts his hands on his hips and she imagines that this is what he looked like as a belligerent five year old. She had hoped to have a child of her own one day. But she is thirty nine, not too late, but getting there. When they were dating, Josh had said he wanted kids too, a whole brood of them, but he had said little about it in the recent years. 

Katie gets into her car and starts the ignition. Through the bug smattered windshield Josh looks like he wants to be a superhero, as if he is waiting for someone to save. Arms still on his hips, head cocked slightly upwards. One of her splinters begins to pulse. Mostly they do not cause her pain after they lodge into her body, but they had stayed put, none of them giving up, not a one allowing her to pry it free.  

She revs the engine and Josh smirks. She rolls down her window. “Josh, move!” 

He doesn’t say anything. Doesn’t budge. She can see Philip from across the street, eighty-nine (he tells everyone) and nosy, kind and widowed. He is standing in his driveway no longer occupied by a vehicle and watching the scene at Katie and Josh’s house.  

Katie revs again. “Maybe I’ll come later,” she shouts. “I’ll meet you there, okay?” She won’t. She has the stall until the end of the market which is until six. She will come home, take a bath, and calculate her revenue for the day, determine if it is a loss or not given the time she put into it. But at least she will have alone time. That is valuable.  

She allows the car to jerk forward a foot or two. It works and Josh jumps out of the way into the long grasses and pretty purple flowers that are in fact weeds.  

Her stomach lurches as she drives past her husband and turns out of the driveway. She waves at Philip, smiles big like she is happy. 

She had been. When she and Josh were dating, everyone said it was a match made in heaven. Her father, long widowed, his abusive ways fading away like his grief, now took Josh into his confidences. Threw a fat arm over his shoulder, told him he was getting the deal of a lifetime in his daughter. No one mentioned how dangerous matches can be in the wrong hands. It wasn’t until years after they got married that the matches ignited. A little at first, small flames snapping. A child would help, Katie had thought and then said. But she couldn’t get pregnant. At first months, then years, and now here she is at thirty-nine, no kids.  

Josh had made love to her on those days marked on the calendar with a heart. If she said she was feeling a little sick, he brought her cold water in bed. They didn’t have money for fertility treatments or special doctors. They talked about selling land; their house was situated on the front end of a large double lot. It seemed like a hassle. Anyway, he had said, he liked having that space. 

It’s been three years since that last cold water and they rarely use their backyard.  

The market is a success. Katie sells almost everything. She would have to continue this course, way better than an online store. She talks to so many people and they all seem happy to see her. As she putters back into the driveway, she sees that Josh’s car is gone. Right, Andy’s party. Should she go? He was Josh’s friend, really, an old college roommate. Andy came before her. She would unpack and then decide. Slipping her feet out of her shoes in the mudroom, she feels an elation that the house is empty. Once inside though, her foot immediately stings. She feels the splinter in the soft of her foot before she sees the mess. 

The hallway is covered with piles and piles of wood. Fragments, two-by-fours, dowels, slabs, her tools scattered like buckshot on the floor. She breathes heavily, sidesteps the collection, and begins to return the pieces to her workshop. No, she will not be going to Andy’s party.  

After she is done getting her shop in order, she sits. The task has winded her. She checks her email and flips through social media on her phone. Ice cream cones in front of colored walls, carefully placed bikini bodies, latte art, yoga positions in far away places, smiling children at dance recitals and on beaches. Then she sees a photo of Josh on Andy’s feed. He is assisting a young blond with a frothy white drink. One hand is at the back of her neck as if holding her up. Katie doesn’t know who she is. She stands up, and falls back down again, dizzy. She allows it to pass and slowly makes her way through the hall, now only shards of wood threaten each step, almost unseen. She tiptoes through the minefield, slips her shoes back on, and gets back in her car.  

When she gets to Andy’s she can hear music even though her windows are rolled up. She goes around the side of the house and Marie is immediately at her side with a beer. 

“So glad you could make it!” she exclaims. Katie shakes her head at the drink.  

“Really?” says Marie. 

“I think I’ll just have a pop,” Katie says. 

“Pop. Ha. So cute. Your little Midwestern ways,” Marie says and bounds onto the deck and returns with a sweating can of artisanal cola. Katie would’ve preferred a simple Coke. She scans the crowd. A lot of young blond women. A piñata shaped like a poop emoji. TLC’s Waterfalls is playing. It had been a favorite when Katie was in school. She knows all the words and can’t help but mouth them as she walks over the perfect grass, sidestepping lawn chairs, beer cans, and discarded tiny cocktail umbrellas. A crew of men are playing beer pong with red cups. Who knew forty was so…Katie doesn’t even know how to finish the thought. She sees Josh alone in the shade of a tremendous maple tree picking grass. She must have misunderstood the photograph. She approaches smiling.  

“Made it.” She sits beside him. It takes him a moment.  

“Hey!” he says and stares into the distance.  

“I made, like, seven hundred bucks.” 

“That’s great,” he says distracted. She follows his gaze. The blonde from the photograph is headed straight for them, two drinks in hand. In her peripheral vision, Katie sees Josh shake his head at the woman, but she looks puzzled and keeps walking.  

Crocheted bikini top, denim cut-offs, barefooted. Twenty-five, Katie would guess. Presumably one of the models that Andy works with. Her name would be Madison or Hayley. Maybe Taylor. 

“Hi, I’m Hayley,” she says and offers Katie the drink. Hayley isn’t as dumb as she appears.  

“Friend of yours Josh?” Katie says and takes the drink from the girl, pulls out the cocktail umbrella, and puts the drink down in the grass behind her. She sucks the froth off of the umbrella, piña colada. Katie twirls it in her hand, feels the sharp tip. 

“Um, yeah, we just met. She’s a nanny,” Josh says. 

“Is she?” 

“I just love kids,” Hayley says. 

Then Katie is overwhelmed with nausea. Her every pore is suddenly filled with sweat. Bile collects in her throat – it is like so much she wants to say – and she is unable to hold it in. She vomits. Hayley startles and jumps back. Says she’ll go get some napkins.  

She doesn’t return.  

Katie and Josh go home that night in one car. We’ll get mine tomorrow, he says. Katie sticks the cocktail umbrella in the radiator vent. 

Perhaps she is pregnant.  

At the doctors, she pees in a cup and they wave a wand.   

“There’s a small house in there,” Dr. McManus says with the air of someone saying you need rotate your tires or your oil must be changed.  

“A house,” Josh asks, a puzzle on his face. He has come to the appointment and Katie thinks maybe they had been right. Maybe this will help. 

“What are you talking about?” Katie says. “Am I having a baby or what?”

“Yes, it is strange. I suppose you could call it a baby. But you know in this field, we see all kinds of things,” Dr. McManus says and leaves the room in a whoosh of sterile paper.  

They sign a lot of paperwork. There are needles inserted into her, which, given the spate of recent splinters, is no big deal for Katie. Calendars are looked at, appointments made. She is a geriatric pregnancy, they tell her. She bristles and wants to punch them, but they say it with a smile, purple mouthed, saccharine – not real sweetness, but it still tastes similar enough. 

Katie pulls the little cocktail umbrella from the car vent. What a useless piece of shit. In bed she tears off the canopy of the umbrella, snaps the little ribs that hold it up, purple bits of paper scatter around her on the bed like confetti. She unwinds a tiny piece of paper that looks like a very small Chinese newspaper. What she is left with is a toothpick. A sharp thin piece of wood. She jabs herself, it draws a pinprick of blood to the surface. She puts it in her bedside drawer.  

Later in bed, Josh says, “Remember that time in Florida?” For their honeymoon, they’d stayed at a $700 a night beach resort. Breakfast in bed, the sun baking them as they ate overpriced hummus plates by the pool. Cucumber never tasted so good. Two days in, she had stepped on a Portuguese man-o-war and howled like she was a wolf. Josh carried her, always carrying her, across the dense sand, up the wooden stairs, past the pool and bar where they’d spent hours drinking frozen daiquiris, and into the cool marble floored lobby. Someone help us! he had shouted. The concierge wore a suit, but he bent to her wet sandy body, made the right phone calls quickly, and it wasn’t long before Katie and Josh were back at the poolside bar drinking daiquiris, but hers now virgin because of the medicine she’d been prescribed. They laughed about it later, often, but Katie still remembered how much that sting hurt. Never before had she experienced such pain. Labor is worse, a friend had told her. Much worse. 

I will protect you, was what Josh had said then and repeats in bed as he cleans up the purple umbrella confetti from the sheets. From what, is a question Katie only now thinks to ask.  

He does not apologize for the woodshop incident and she doesn’t bring it up, but she still sees splinters around the floorboard edges just waiting to stab someone. At night she pulls out the former cocktail umbrella and lightly pushes it against Josh’s sleeping skin. He snorts and rolls over. She pushes again at the flesh on his upper arm, the skin starts to give, that tiny cleaving. He waves his arm in his sleep, mumbles, Not today. I’m not ready. Katie puts the fine piece of wood back in her drawer. 

At another barbeque, this time celebrating Andy’s job promotion, Marie approaches Katie. “Wow, you’re a house,” she says maneuvering her hands around Katie’s girth. 

“What?” 

“You’re as big as a house,” she repeats. 

 There is no question it would have to be a C-section. 

They put it on the calendar on an otherwise unadorned Monday. It would be a full moon the calendar told them. They look at pregnancy books but when it says their baby should be the size of a lentil, a peach, a papaya, she thinks this is not my baby. My baby does not look like a piece of fruit.  

The full mooned Monday arrives. Needles are installed in her body, drugs pushed in. In a surgery that lasts triple the time it normally would, the surgeons pull a small wooden house out – a shack, it could be called.  

At home, Katie caresses it and places it on the mantle.  

“Are you sure that’s the right place for it?” Josh asks.  

“Don’t you think I know how to take care of it? I carried it for nine months,” she says. 

“Ten,” he says and she staggers from the room, the staples in her abdomen itchy with fire. 

The shack grows into a cabin which expands into a cottage and is showing all signs of healthy growth. Katie outfits it with small furniture, procured from online, thrift shops, and estate sales. She makes tables and shelves herself. She creates its own accounts on social media, @LittleHouseOnTheCherry. They live on Cherry Lane and she finds her nostalgic wordplay hopeful. Her little abode has over nine thousand followers already. She sews tiny bedding and rugs. It is a lovely little place. Someone could fall in love with it, in it.  

Josh grumbles about how much time she spends with the small house.  

“This is what it needs,” she says. “It needs its mother.” He occasionally reassembles rooms and pokes at things that could become problems.  

“I know houses,” he says. She thinks, he does not. 

Katie worries about its future. Would it ultimately become a McMansion? The same as everyone else on the block? Dance recitals, cute utterances, videos posted to social media? She approaches Josh with research.  

“We could use the lot out back,” she says. “It’s getting bigger and we don’t use the space anyway and isn’t that what we said we wanted when we bought the place?” 

“I don’t remember that,” he says. 

“We said that one day, we would have children running around out back, naked in the sunshine,” Katie says. 

“But we don’t.” 

“We do. Kind of,” she says. 

“I want my land,” Josh says and Katie clams up and stews quietly about what to do about her progeny. 

It’s growing colder; fall is approaching and Katie sets a fire in the fireplace. Above, on the mantle, the little house is lit by tiny fairy lights. It is outgrowing the mantle, so she moves it to a nearby table. It looks homey and she thinks that so far, she is doing a good job of being a mother.  

It is eight-thirty and still Josh isn’t home from work. Katie eats pickles from the jar and pushes to find any soft spots in the wood of her little house. She finds that it is pretty sturdy, no splinters jutting out from its baseboards or walls. She is proud of herself.  

Then Josh gets home. She hears it first; he has hit the mailbox. He comes in staggering drunk and babbles and spits about his unhappiness, leaning into Katie. If he got close enough to the fire he would ignite. A conflagration of their marriage, all up at once. He points at the cottage. 

He says, “This is just trash. It should be thrown out.” He lunges for it, Katie is too slow. He shakes it and shakes it and pieces of furniture fall from its open windows. The door hangs by one screw and he rips it off.  

“Josh! Stop!” 

“It’s not real, Katie.” He throws the door into the fire. 

“Stop! You’re killing it!”  

“This is not your baby.” 

“It is.” 

“It is not our baby,” he says. She cries out, tears fill every crevice on her face. There are more now that she is forty. Each split in her skin to hold more, a crevasse where you can no longer see the bottom. The aging body is a kind of topography. 

Josh is shaking the house, profanities issuing from his mouth. He smells astringent, like a bathtub of gin. He pries off a piece of the roof, throws that in the fire too.  

“Stop it! Stop it! Stop it!” 

“This is shoddy,” Josh says. “You should know that. Shoddy design, made like shit.” 

Katie had abandoned Katie’s Kwality Wood. She only cares for the little wooden cottage now. But she believes she is putting her best work into it. She spends late nights sketching designs, talking to it, though it does not talk back. Josh complains from their bedroom, stomping out to work in the morning without looking back.  

The doorbell rings. Framed in the open doorway is Philip, the old neighbor. Katie and Josh stop, Josh holding the tiny house above his head. 

“The door was open,” Philip says, surveying the room. “The car door is still open too.” The crackling of the fire and the tick tick tick of the grandfather clock are the only sounds. Katie’s heart is booming. Outside a car whooshes by. Katie can see out the window, that the car door is in fact open, the interior dome light still on.  

Josh lowers the house an inch and she snatches it. He storms out past Philip to the car. Slams the door, but stays outside. 

“Thanks Philip,” Katie whispers. 

“You’re welcome dear,” he says and limps out not even turning to look at Josh. 

The next day, while Josh is at work, Katie pours a small foundation out back. Places the cottage just so and Josh says not a word. A week later, she has people in to hook it up to water, gas, and electricity.  

The house is still fairly small. She returns to her shop to create wooden people. She sets them up in the house in tableaus of domesticity. Four of them at dinner together. One sleeping while the rest cook a surprise cake in the kitchen. The mother caring for a small wooden baby in a tub while the father gets the other wooden child ready for bed. 

Every day a new scene. Josh comes and goes, occasionally commenting on how she is wasting her time.  

Eventually someone knocks on their door. Katie rises to answer and is met with the fat pink face of a city official.  

“I hear you have an illegal ADU,” he says. 

“What’s an ADU?” 

“Accessory dwelling unit.” 

She closes the door on him. But not two minutes later sees him in her backyard. 

“You can’t be here,” she says. “This is private property.” 

“Ma’am, I have to issue you a citation.” 

“Fuck you,” she says. “Get out of here.” She slams the door, closes the blinds but watches through a crack as he measures her small house and takes notes. 

“What do we got here,” Josh says that night, as he comes in with a handful of papers. “This was at the front door.” 

“It’s nothing,” she says. 

“Doesn’t look like nothing,” he says. 

“Fuck it. Ignore it.” 

“I’m not going to ignore it. I don’t want to be doing anything illegal Katherine.” There is grease in his mouth and his eyes have gone predatory. She recognizes it immediately and knows she is the prey. 

“You called,” she says. “It was you.” 

“You yourself once said we could use that land to make money.” 

“You’re an asshole.” She gets up and pummels his chest. He doesn’t strike back. Holds his hands up as if he is saying, I didn’t touch her. I didn’t do a thing. “FuckyouFuckyouFuckyou,” she says. One jab knocks his glasses from his face. Another brings blood to his nostrils. 

Three days later he files for divorce. She tells Josh she won’t sign anything. He doesn’t come home from work the next day. Again she sees Josh on Andy’s social media feed. He is prone on a deck lounge chair. Hayley is beside him. They aren’t touching, but the smile on Hayley’s face mirrors Josh’s. 

She calls Marie who does not call her back.  

That night she hears voices from out back. Her little house has grown into a three bedroom, two bath, with a deck out back and an eat-in kitchen. As Katie steps into her garden shoes, she sees lights burning in the den, which she has outfitted much like her own, fireplace, L-shaped couch, coffee table with magazines fanned out. She looks back at her and Josh’s house. All the lights are extinguished except for in the kitchen. She had been preparing a microwaved bowl of mac and cheese, a childhood favorite now rendered into congealed cheese sauce and undercooked noodles. The house out back looks so warm and inviting. A light shines over the front door. Katie doesn’t knock and turns the doorknob. The door gives and she follows the voices into the den. There is a man on the sofa with a book in his hand, thumb in the spot where he had paused his reading. He is assisting a woman, who is nursing a baby. The baby falls off the nipple and issues a bleat, which turns into a full-blown cry. The woman pats the baby’s back, shushes softly into her ear. The man rubs her shoulder with his thumb. Katie sits on the rug in front of the fire, and then curls into a nautilus. She closes her eyes as the fire heats her skin. 

The cries of the baby, her baby; she’d know that sound anywhere.  

---

Jennifer Fliss (she/her) is a Seattle-based writer whose writing has appeared in F(r)iction, The Rumpus, The Washington Post, and elsewhere, including the 2019 Best Short Fiction anthology. She can be found on Twitter at @writesforlife or via her website, www.jenniferflisscreative.com.