Russian Outlaw

Nate Ferguson

Patsy’s house was surrounded by tumbleweeds. They’d soon start decomposing, leaving behind a heavy chemical smell and shiny streaks of black material everyone in town called sludge. Patsy’s mother questioned why she lived in such a godawful place. Nothing good happened there.

Patsy was sitting on the front porch swing, overlooking a flamboyance of faded flamingos. Her three children were attempting to catch lizards as she sipped lemonade. Patsy’s straw hat did its best to keep the sun from further freckling her nose.

“Don’t pull off the tails,” she hollered. “They don’t grow back overnight.”

Vinyl panels at the corners of the ranch house were flapping while several rows of shingles had long since departed. She didn’t have these problems when Benny was around. Her ex-husband could put anything back together.

Patsy saw a dust plume and hoped it was the postman with her disability check. That always perked her up. Instead, it was a white van with a satellite dish on top. The van chugged its way south.

“Bomb run,” one of the neighbor’s kids shouted. Soon, a pack of children, including Patsy’s lot, were on their bikes and heading toward the aircraft boneyard, just off Mesquite Road, where thousands of retired military airplanes and helicopters were ingesting sand.

Juniper poked her head out of the garage next door and raised her welding visor with a gloved hand.

“Why don’t they dump the shit in our front yards?” Juniper asked, for the umpteenth
time. “It’d save them some trouble.”

Juniper was lucky, Patsy knew. She still had a husband, a third-generation gas station attendant/jeweler. Juniper had coaxed him into dragging a B-29 bomber nose section across the desert with the pickup truck so that she could have the makings of a greenhouse. Patsy admired all the windows, wishing she’d thought of it, although she’d much rather have a husband than a greenhouse.

“This one didn’t look military,” Patsy said.

Juniper rummaged around the garage and reappeared with her army surplus binoculars. “It’s the damn media,” she said, adjusting the fine focus. “What are they cooking up this time?”

Patsy’s first inclination was to call her kids back, but they were too far gone. She shrugged. “Oh, the media. They never say nice about us.”

This was the last thing Patsy needed. She had hopes that Benny might return someday and she didn’t need another ugly news story about the town floating around in the ether. Hope was her middle name, after all. She tried to distract herself from these dark thoughts with images
of Benny hauling lumber up and down the California coast, big grin on his stubbled face, sea breeze lapping at his sideburns.

“Need anything from town?” Patsy was running low on round yellow pills and it was only a matter of time before the family turned on itself.

“Oh, the usual,” Juniper said, before lowering her welding visor. “A couple rolls of duct tape, some baling wire and a dozen eggs.”

***

The children returned with socks caked in red dust. Patsy gathered everyone, fired up the Chevy Suburban and headed into Caper, population 525. Neon signs gave the town at least some sense of motion in the southern Utah desert. Besides the boneyard, there were piles of junk, big as Mayan pyramids, on the outskirts. What blew in didn’t blow out, including tumbleweeds, which occasionally buried the town during annual migrations. Townspeople turned the weeds into Christmas trees, scarecrows and snowmen, while municipal employees pushed the rest around with bulldozers. Canyons kept the town’s odor contained most of the year. On those really hot days, rising brown clouds offered regional newspapers the timeless headline, “The Caper Vapor Strikes Again.”

Behind the supermarket, Patsy found Bixbee, the town’s closest thing to a pharmacist, holding court in her canvas teepee. As Bixbee was preparing the pills, Patsy stared at a new two headed snake tattoo slithering down the woman’s wrist. Bixbee had her hair swaddled in a bulging scarf.

“I like those red eyes,” Pasty said. She always found something to admire about Bixbee.

“Thanks. It’s a good snake, but not as watchful as I’d hoped.”

“That’s too bad.” Patsy had no idea what Bixbee was talking about. She didn’t know the first thing about witchcraft or whatever Bixbee was into. For years, Patsy’s church had been trying to summon Bixbee to Sunday service, but she wouldn’t budge and instead retreated to her RV north of town.

“Any headaches?” Bixbee asked.

“Not lately.” Patsy knew better than to reveal too much to the medical community. Weren’t their computers all connected? Bixbee had a nursing diploma on her bookshelf. Patsy wasn’t going to tell her about the sensations of worms crawling under her skin or pterodactyls flying over her bed at night. No one needed to know that, except maybe Juniper.

The teepee had painted a pointy shadow over the proceedings. Patsy’s eyes darted side to side. She spoke in a low voice.

“Some TV people are sniffing around.”

“Really?” Bixbee asked.

“Juniper and I saw one of those satellite vans. No telling what they’re up to.”

“It always pays to be vigilant, but I wouldn’t worry too much.”

“These are great,” Patsy said, pills in hand. “We’ve never been calmer.”

Bixbee nodded.

Patsy’s cell phone vibrated in her jeans. “Wrong number,” she said. “It’s the story of my life.”

***

Townspeople picnicked in the cleanest part of town, where the landfill was supposed to be. It was a deep, half-finished pit with crumbling sides and a serpentine road that led to nowhere. Without a place to dispose of the garbage, trucks would ship it to a facility in neighboring Salvation, a town ten times its size.

Under Mayor Leach, who doubled as a defrocked Mormon bishop, people didn’t question things in Caper. Two decades ago, the entire town got excommunicated by church headquarters in Salt Lake City for reasons Patsy didn’t know. Despite setbacks, Mayor Leach kept most people employed via his business schemes. Up until the crops started dying, Patsy was in charge of the fruit stand along the highway. She’d wear an apron and pack the giant peaches carefully like infants’ heads, so as not to bruise them. She missed interacting with the public in all its glory.
“Fresh faces from faraway places,” she used to say as they pulled up. There were old people and families and newlyweds, mostly heading to various national parks. Wherever they were going, she wished them well and invited them back. She’d hunker down in her Suburban when afternoon thunderstorms spooled up.

She later went to work at the factory braiding parachute cord into survival wristbands and whatnot. There was pride in that, of course. She was saving lives. But Patsy’s finger joints eventually gave out. She’d been on disability ever since.

Mayor Leach told the town repeatedly that if they lived their lives appropriately, they could become gods of their own worlds. “As if we aren’t already,” Juniper liked to hiss at Patsy.

The parents planted themselves on the landfill’s rim, surrounded by smooth scarlet sandstone and parched Utah sky, and looked down upon the scrub oak where the trash would normally sit, contained by earthen layers and synthetic membranes. Patsy pulled out a tub of fried chicken from the cooler and her children grabbed at it like Komodo dragons. After lunch, the little ones ran into the pit to play king on the mountain.

The city attorney’s second adopted Guatemalan child was finally big enough to play with the rest. Patsy thought she looked adorable, all done up in pink and yellow hair thingies.

“I remember when I had my second,” Patsy said over the screams. “Couldn’t wait for him to see the light of day. They were wrong when they told me each one gets easier.” Patsy, though, had maintained her youthful figure.

The city attorney’s wife sat quietly and Patsy started to panic under a burning coat of sheepishness. Did she say something wrong? Was she being unkind to the less fertile?

“It’s all worth it, you know, being a parent,” Patsy went on.

The woman nodded before getting up to leave. “Your hair has a lovely green tint to it.”

“Yes, well, it’s a new thing,” Patsy said. “Glad you like it.”

Juniper took a seat at the table and looked dehydrated as usual. She tended to drive everywhere with the windows down. One arm was darker than the other.

“You’re not listening to those damn psychologists again, are you?” Juniper asked, referring to the child-rearing book Patsy was resting her fingers on.

“Who says I listen?”

Juniper’s face cinched up. “Yeah, well, they’ll turn your mind into mush.”

Patsy’s kids were now beating each other over the head with sticks.

“Our esteemed mayor was talking to the city attorney in the parking lot,” Juniper said, as she reached for a drumstick. “They were all hush-hush when I walked by. Fucking baboons.”

Juniper’s swearing always caused Patsy to cringe, as if she were dodging spotted bats that sliced up the evening sky.

“Something don’t exactly smell right,” Juniper continued. “I feel bad things brewing.”

Patsy brushed it off and opened her book. She needed to focus.

A scream left the landfill and headed for the stratosphere. A blond kid had punched a dark-haired kid. Arms and legs locked and unlocked. Patsy pulled the most injured child from the wreckage of her family and carried him piggyback off the battlefield.

***

Back at Patsy’s house, an assortment of children busted through the front door as she was bandaging a child in the kitchen. She should’ve asked Bixbee for more salve. You can never have enough salve.

Patsy heard a clank on her sliding glass door and knew, without turning around, that it was Juniper. The woman’s shriveled arms and aviator sunglasses, perched low on her nose, stole the menace from the machete she was holding.

Juniper started yelling before Patsy could open the door. “Those people. Those people in the van. They’re asking about tumbleweeds,” she said. “Imagine that. They come all this way to look at weeds. I pointed them toward the boneyard, but they just stuck up their noses at me. The nerve. How could they resist our biggest attraction? That’s high-grade American junk out there.”

“What does this mean?” Patsy asked.

“Hell if I know.”

Patsy thought about upping her children’s share of the medication. That would keep them out of trouble. After Juniper had left, she said to her oldest, “Maybe you should hang around. Your snake is shedding.”

***

Patsy’s mother called that Sunday. She lived by a nine-hole golf course in Salvation, some fifteen miles away. She wouldn’t visit Caper anymore, not even to see the grandchildren; they had to come to her. And now her mother was starting to sound a lot like Juniper—in both tone and subject matter—reporting that a hazmat vehicle from Salt Lake City and three black government SUVs had parked at the corner motel. Salvation had the only available rooms within a two-hour drive.

“Maybe somebody found uranium,” Patsy said.

“Don’t sound so chipper. You know what mining did to your father. I want no part of that racket.”

Over the next few days, Patsy’s mother started calling and calling. More outsiders were arriving. The RV park was full and so were the campgrounds and the parking lot at the old drive-in movie theater.

“They’ve never shown this much interest in us,” Patsy said.

“It’s time for you to skedaddle. You’re in a cesspool of cesspools.”

Patsy laughed. “I can’t pick up a family and roll out of town. I have a life here.”

“What life? You can’t wait for Benny forever.”

“Maybe I can.”

Her mother hesitated and took a drink of something, most likely Bud Light. She had a pantry full of it. “He ain’t coming back. That’s the bottom line. You gotta come to terms over that. Don’t you see, he knows something you don’t. There’s a whole world out there beyond Ca-
per.”

“I was a good wife.”

“I’m sure you were. But everything runs its course.”

***

Over the next few days, Patsy and Juniper watched trucks spitting pebbles at their mailboxes. Most were military and, like the media, avoided the boneyard and drove straight into town. The outsiders took over the picnic benches that surrounded the landfill, drank bottled water and ate packaged food. All that was left of the community, it seemed, was church.

One afternoon, Patsy went running for Juniper’s garage in a panic. “Bixbee’s teepee is gone. And so is Bixbee. What am I going to do without my pills?”

“She’s a jackrabbit. She’ll turn up when this thing ends,” Juniper said. “In the meantime, I’m going to sharpen my machete. You best arm yourself as well.”

Patsy didn’t know what to say.

***

As Patsy sat at the only stoplight in Caper, she watched a tumbleweed bounce off her hood, then roll toward the bowling alley. It vacillated against the front door as if it wanted in.

Halfway down the street, she saw the mayor’s silver Mercedes parked outside city hall. The seat of city government was located in the attic of a hardware store. She’d only been to “the office” once, back when she was put on leave from the fruit stand and reassigned to the factory. She remembered the mayor’s fat hands resting on a mahogany desk, sensing the power he held.

She drove on to the supermarket where a quarter of the town had congregated in the parking lot. She was craving Fruit Loops and avoided conversation. She was afraid the outsiders had cleaned out the store. Wearing a flowery sundress and cowboy boots, she made her way for the front door only to get stopped by a familiar man in a military surplus trench coat.

Raymond had drifted into town, a tumbleweed himself, with not much more than a California ID card. The guys at the gas station let him sleep in the back office and later discovered that he had a talent for welding steel and shaping aluminum, which proved indispensable in the shop. He was also the town’s sculptor and his abstract creations sourced from the boneyard were all over town, always signed with a spray-painted “R,” encircled like a registered trademark symbol. His orange survival wristband was rotating around his outstretched hand.

When she said hello, Raymond’s eyes widened. She could tell that he was more agitated than usual. His head sprung forward. Patsy couldn’t get her hands over her ears fast enough.

“It’s all going down, man. It’s all going down. They’re killing us. Those sludge fucks. Sludge fucks!”

Raymond kept yelling and Patsy kept walking. Bless him, bless him. He’s a genius.

***

When Patsy arrived at home with a gallon of milk and three boxes of cereal, there was a note taped to her back door in Juniper’s blocky handwriting: “Turn On the Damn Boob Tube!”

Patsy couldn’t handle TV news. Instead, she walked next door. She found Juniper in her garage, hunched over and sweaty as she pumped up a dune buggy tire.

“They’re coming for us. Legions of them,” Juniper said. “We...”

They both instinctively crouched under the wale of an overflying helicopter.

“The Russians are behind it,” Juniper said. “I know it.”

“You’re always blaming the Russians.”

But this time it was too much for Patsy to take. She backed away and retraced her steps through smatterings of sludge.

Where was Bixbee?

***

Patsy found a flyer taped to her front door, asking her to submit to a voluntary medical exam. The next thing she knew, she was at the school gym behind a curtain. Face masks and clipboards brought a degree of formality and seriousness she hadn’t experienced since her divorce hearing. She told them about her family’s cancer history and her occasional skin rashes. But, no, she certainly didn’t have memory problems.

“You’re not going to be sticking us with needles, are you?” Patsy asked the doctor with a crew cut. “If there’s one thing we have in common, it’s sensitive skin.”

Everything she said led to more inquiries. Oddly, they wanted to know if she’d ever incinerated tumbleweeds in her yard. Silly question. Who hadn’t?

***

Patsy’s cat disappeared for a full day and when she came back, clumps of fur were missing from her abdomen. It was like that now. The researchers didn’t ask anymore. They took what they wanted. They did leave, though, cases of bottled water along with a stack of military MRE’s on her front porch. Juniper traded her Mexican-style chicken stew for Patsy’s pad Thai.

At an evening community meeting, Patsy felt the ground shifting underneath her metal seat; fluorescent light seeped into her skull. The tension was too much. She wanted to run.

“Our mayor looks weathered and beaten. Remember when he got lost in the slot canyons?” Juniper asked. “He has no sense of direction.” She said the last part almost loud enough for the mayor to hear.

That seemed to set off the crowd. Patsy heard the words “conspiracy” and “chemical weapons” and “human guinea pigs.” She was getting seriously worried now. The mayor rose amidst the tension and gripped the podium with those fat hands.

“There’s something I must tell you. It’s best that you hear it from me.” He took a drink from a root beer can. “The governor wants us out. The town, they said, is no longer safe. We did everything we could do, but we need to clear out and abandon our homes. I know this is a lot to
take in. Any questions?”

Juniper stood up. “They can’t take our property without giving us something for it. This is the U.S.A., last time I checked.”

“They’re not taking our properties,” the mayor said. “It’s an evacuation order.”

Patsy couldn’t think of anything to ask. She was never good at that.

Grumbles took over. Hands went up. Then came shouting. The crowd quieted when Milton, the hardware/clothing store owner, started waving his arms.

“And you’re telling us now? How long did you know about this? I’ve got inventory. I can’t just pack up everything overnight.”

“I’m sorry,” said the mayor.

“What about our jobs?” asked Felix, the factory foreman. “I thought business was good.”

“It was good, until this happened.”

That’s when Patsy saw Raymond slink through the side door in his trench coat. The door slammed shut behind him. Heads turned. Eyes grew. Patsy’s seat hardened.

“I warned you all about these mother fuckers,” he said. “Are you listening now? Christ, what does it take? Sludge fucks!”

On that note, the meeting was over, fast like an old Western gunfight, Patsy thought.

Her legs had gone to sleep and she couldn’t move.

With all this attention, why hadn’t Benny called to check on the kids?

***

The town was packing up—some in the middle of the night. A short-order cook was heading back to Vegas while an elderly couple was off to St. George to be with family. Everyone, except Patsy, had something else to fall back on, something to pursue, something to rekindle.

Bulldozers started tearing up the park and there was police tape around the playground equipment. Patsy felt violated and left for dead. She had only Juniper to talk to, besides her children, of course. It was becoming harder to keep them calm. Bixbee was long gone and Patsy was running out of pills. She thought about dying her hair black; black as sludge.

***

Patsy awoke early to find two soldiers in her front yard attempting to untie the tire swing. There was something about their relaxed swagger, and total disregard for private property, that created a burning sensation within her. She felt every bit as betrayed as the day her husband told her, with an unflinching mustache, “My destiny ain’t here.” Then he headed southwest and follow the Extraterrestrial Highway right out of her life.

“Children, you stay inside.” She glanced at her half-empty pill bottle, then charged out the front door in her pajamas.

“Hey there, hey there,” Patsy said. “That’s ours.”

The soldiers turned and Patsy was horrified that one of them appeared to be female. How could a woman disrupt another woman’s family life? The soldier’s wraparound sunglasses rose on her nose, but she remained silent.

“We need to remove this,” the man said. “It’s contaminated. You’ve got sludge sitting in the bottom of it.”

“So that’s what this is about?”

“It’s toxic, ma’am,” he added.

Patsy could tell he was a sergeant from the three angled stripes, but his authority and swollen biceps didn’t deter her. This whole thing was going too far. She threw a gaze at them, powerful enough to set plastic flamingos on fire. Patsy grabbed the rope and with vigor not felt nor expressed since she was a teenager, pulled her quivering legs up and threaded the empty hole.

“Ma’am, you can’t do this. It’s for your own safety,” the woman said in her husky army voice.

Patsy laughed.

“You’ve got about three seconds and I’m calling the police,” the sergeant said.

“Call them. Call everybody. Bring in the navy. I don’t care.”

The woman soldier put her hands on Patsy’s shoulders and Patsy felt her back spasm. Patsy gave the ground a swift push. The soldiers jumped back to escape her flying appendages, lost balance and fell on top of each other.

“Jesus Christ,” the sergeant yelled. “Jesus Christ.”

Patsy was trying to twist up the rope, as her uncle used to do, and unleash her fury. As the Earth swung around, Patsy felt a sense of calm. Her shoulders relaxed. Blue sky smeared with cottonwood branches. As the euphoria was setting in, her flamingos raced by and mixed with flashes of sunlight. Such beauty. Her fingertips burned and she caught a glimpse of her husband’s face. It was his idea to buy the house, a solid investment and a good place to raise children, the way he put it. And yet she was still here. His blue eyes and those elf-like ears dissolved in her mind.

What had she gotten herself into?

Something sparkled like a fishing lure. Then came a sawing sound. Patsy felt the ground rise up and smack her on the ass. Her head snapped back. Juniper was standing above her with the machete.

“What? Why’d you cut me down?” Patsy sputtered.

“Sorry, kitten. I didn’t want them escalating things on you.” Juniper waved her blade at the unarmed soldiers. “You’ll bring this tire back, won’t you?”

The sergeant nodded.

Even Patsy knew that was a lie.

***

Patsy awoke the next morning to pops and clanks as Juniper and her husband were loading up the open trailer hitched to their RV. In all her years in Caper, she’d never seen their vehicle move.

“Everything that ain’t tainted, that’s what’s going,” Juniper said.

“Going where?”

“Phoenix. We’ll give civilization a shot. What the hell. You better come with us.”

Patsy rubbed her eyes. Finally, she had a question. “Are the schools any good?” Responsible parents always asked that.

“How should I know? You’re lucky you didn’t end up in jail.”

Patsy had to admit she was right. “It’s too quiet around here.”

“That means it’s time to git. We’re supposed to be out of here within thirty-six hours.”

“That’s not much time.”

“We’ve got some space on the trailer. Load up your bigger things and follow us down,” Juniper said. “By the way, I heard Bixbee turned up. She’s lying low in ole Mexico.”

Patsy pictured her teepee on a beach with palm trees. She always wished the best for people.

***

Patsy kicked her boot on the side of the Suburban after the kids, the cat and other cargo had been loaded, trying to get rid of the last remaining remnants of Caper soil. Today was frightening.

Everything she knew had been uprooted, churned about and lay drying in the sun. That silly sludge. Who would’ve thought?

She left the flamingos behind. It was peaceful as they drove down No End Road, watching the sun sink below the mountains to the west. She went by the mayor’s adobe mansion. His mailbox had been smeared with sludge while hand-molded black spires sat on top like those
hoodoos she’d seen as a child in Bryce Canyon. On the side of the mailbox, Raymond had left his signature symbol.

In one of the few times Patsy listened to radio news in her life, she heard yet another story about Caper.

“It’s an overnight ghost town,” the reporter started out. “The national guard has secured a perimeter and trapped tens of thousands of tumbleweeds. As we reported last week, the tumbleweeds were part of an experiment to suck up toxic waste near town. But Tox-Tek Solutions, the company that was in charge of the project, failed to keep the weeds under control. The chemicals caused the root systems to weaken, which launched the weeds prematurely. And the city didn’t notify residents. Once the toxic plants rolled into town, they got trapped and contaminated the soil. It left townspeople sick. That was the beginning of the end for Caper. Several Tox-Tek executives were arrested on charges of criminal negligence. And two city officials along with an obscure rancher were arrested on charges of embezzlement, conspiracy and racketeering.”

The reporter then segued to an interview with a Nobel Prize-winning scientist. “Based on what I’ve seen, the degradation to mental faculties is so great, in some cases, that I’m surprised they can tie their shoes.”

Patsy shrugged off the last bit. Lies! Lies!

Then the reporter came back with a lighthearted tone. “While many see the tumbleweed as an iconic symbol of the West, it’s actually an invader. The Russian thistle, which wreaked havoc on this town, may have arrived in the 1800s after hijacking shipments of flaxseed. This wind-propelled Siberian pest has been multiplying ever since. Down here, it’s become a Russian outlaw.”

Jesus, Patsy thought. So the Russians were behind it after all. Juniper was right.

The radio anchor came on next. “Thanks for the report, Chip. That was quite a caper, no pun intended. Remind us how this town came to be, out there in the Utah desert.”

“It has its own sordid history. A rancher back in the 1960s started experimenting with different kinds of non-native crops, most notably caper bushes, in greenhouses. He had some scientific training and freely used chemicals that are illegal in most places. That operation continued up until recently and employed a third of the town. Tox-Tek was brought in to assist as part of a cleanup effort, but you know how that turned out. The feds will more than likely designate the town a Superfund site. It could be unlivable for years.”

“Why didn’t people just leave?” the anchor asked.

“That’s a little complicated as well. The rancher built homes for the residents in exchange for high-interest-rate mortgages. City fathers looked the other way. Townspeople also had their hands tied from a religious perspective. The local church, with its own brand of theology, had a lot of influence.”

“Fascinating,” the anchor said. “We look forward to your next report.”

As Patsy and crew reached the apex of No End Road, she saw a tumbleweed flip onto the state highway and stop in her lane as if it were taunting her. She floored the Suburban and the weed twitched as her grill tore through it. Part of it exploded on the windshield. Laughter filled the cavernous vehicle.

“Will we ever go back?” the little one asked.

“I don’t think so, Honey,” Patsy said. “You’ll like it in Phoenix.”

Juniper had scrawled the address of an RV park on a piece of cardboard. She put it next to the class action lawyer’s business card in the glovebox for safekeeping.

Patsy pulled up to a gas station/rock shop before the sun escaped. Sandstone glowed crimson as the temperature tumbled.

“Anybody need to use the bathroom?” Patsy asked.

When Patsy opened her car door, an empty pill bottle fell out. A woman with long, shiny black hair—the kind that belonged in shampoo commercials—and wearing a turquoise bracelet was behind the counter. Patsy had seen her many times before and knew from eavesdropping that she’d grown up on the Navajo Nation. A gaunt white man wearing cowboy boots was putting boxes on the shelves.

“You probably saw me on TV,” Patsy said, flicking her thin hair. She finally had some-thing to share.

“Yeah, maybe.” The woman shrugged. “I saw a lot of people.”

“That Caper Vapor was no joke,” the man said. “About time they shut it down.”

Patsy felt, once again, under attack. Her town had been excommunicated and condemned, wasn’t that enough? Did he have to rub it in? With trembling hands, she set a case of bottled water on the counter.

“I’ll take three headdresses for my kids, if they ever get out of the restroom,” Patsy said. “Did they come from your reservation?”

“No, I don’t know where the store owner gets that stuff. Those feathers aren’t real.”

“Oh, well, OK. Never mind.”

Patsy shivered her way back to the car. As she waited for her family, she second-guessed the idea of going to Phoenix. Where else could they go? Moving in with her mother in Salvation would be like going to prison. No other ideas surfaced, other than Phoenix. Besides, her furniture was on Juniper’s trailer.

Her lungs rasped as she took a deep breath. A coughing fit took over. Once she stopped convulsing, she downed a bottle of water. She felt lightheaded. Different.

She stared off at a darkening horizon. Her mother was right. Benny was gone for good. He had no intention of returning to Caper and seeing his beautiful children again. All she could do was wish him well and hope, hope, hope that he’d keep his eyes on those twisty coastal roads, so unlike the desert. He never belonged here.

The car doors flew open. She glanced at her runny makeup in the rearview mirror and did a headcount. They were soon venturing south toward their own salvation.

THE END


Author’s Statement: I’ve always been fascinated with small, isolated towns in the American West. I majored in anthropology in college and love to decode the history and modern culture of these communities. The environment also figures heavily in my writing. And when I discovered that a well-recognized symbol of the West isn’t quite what it seems, I had the makings of a short story. 


Nathan Ferguson was a newspaper reporter and editor in Utah, Wyoming and California. As a longtime airplane and glider pilot, he also was an editor for AOPA Pilot, an aviation magazine based in Maryland. He presently lives in Denver, Colorado, and works in digital and content marketing. His short stories have appeared in Pooled Ink, a literary anthology published by Northern Colorado Writers, and Anomaly Literary Journal. His creative nonfiction essays have also appeared in I Learned About Flying From That, an anthology published by Flying Magazine, and Eclectica Magazine. He’s presently working on two novels and a collection of connected short stories. He can be found at https://www.nateferguson.com



2 Corinthians 3:3

Tamas Dobozy

Our instructors were Maltese nuns. This was the 1970s, when corporal punishment was
still considered an instructional aid. A yank on the ear, a ruler to the hand, a slap across
the face—all part of the pedagogical toolbox. Not that anyone used the word pedagogy
back then. We were lucky if the nun in question had graduated from high school.
If you were really bad, your ass was paddled by the hockey stick the principal,
Sister Petronilla, kept behind her desk in the main office. She had a powerful slap shot.
Afterwards, while we cried, she assured us this type of teaching not only enhanced our
schooling, but also our chances of getting into heaven, because when we were afraid we
were good and only the good came into the presence of the Lord. (It was the same
reasoning, I would learn, behind the stake and the fire: being burnt alive inspires
repentance.)
We were allowed to use pencils and pencils only, not being schooled enough for
the permanence of ink. So we wrote and erased endlessly, like the passing days, trying to
copy the Zaner-Bloser letters on the green tablets set in a protective circle around the
classroom—not to keep the dangers out, but to keep them in—until the day came when
we'd been made safe enough to let loose on humanity.
Sister Tahima held there was a sacredness to proper cursive. It dwelt less in the
words—even if the words happened to be "saint" or "blessed" or "epiphany"—than in
their shapes, the way they unspooled across the page, in the loops and spurs and squiggles
that tried to ascend to the perfection of the Zaner-Bloser overhead.
Needless to say, cursive was a skill, like catching or kicking or striking a ball, I
was not good at. My handwriting didn't even have the elegance of illegibility, the abstract
expressionism of a doctor's signature, say, decipherable only to pharmacists, or the
efficient jerk of a movie star's autograph, finding the quickest route across a publicity
still. None of my letters went down in the same style. It was as if someone had reached
into a box full of rejected bits of font, and that's what I was given to write with.
For weeks, Sister Tahima examined my handwriting as if she sensed in it a
budding vocation for poison pen letters, done by hand rather than collage, a future career
in bombs and kidnappings and hostages, followed by written demands.
She warned me to make it right. Warned me weekly. Then daily. Then hourly.
Until one afternoon, fed up, she brought the full weight of her pedagogy to bear. Write an
upper-case H, she commanded. Slap. Write a lower-case R. Slap. Write an F, any F. Slap.
Each slap slammed another tear into my eyes. It took all my skill to keep them balanced
there. But we were practised in that, keeping it in, the small secret victory, in a place
where nuns bit your ears, or smacked you for reasons that went unexplained, or made you
watch as they washed a boy's mouth out with soap—that unforgettable animal panic in
his eyes—as they held the back of his neck and ground the bar in, macerating it against
his teeth, the child spraying foam as he sobbed.
Sister Tahima slapped me again, hoping this time it would work, since repetition
is, as we know, the key to learning. My letters drifted in the acid of tears, dissolved into
wisps, corroded to traces, despite my effort to nail them to the page with the point of the
pencil. Slap after slap until finally the tears spilled over and with nothing else for it I
began slashing the pencil back and forth across the page, tearing the point through the
sheets until I felt it crack against the desk.
The shock of my outburst made sister Tahima stand back, her hand to her cheek,
appalled at my violence. She'd never seen anything quite like it—the destruction, the
fury, the undoing of her teaching philosophy. It was as if she was finally seeing what I
saw: the way the Zaner-Bloser sealed off the glory of variations that made it irrelevant.
But Sister Tahima didn't stare at me for long. She jerked her head away, though I
wasn't sure what was harder for her to look at: the devil in her version of rigor, or the God
in my endless varieties of error. The God always in excess of our instruction.


Author’s Note: I’ve long been reflecting on the ills and evils of the institutions of Catholicism that defined so much of my childhood and early life, and the nuns and lay teachers smacking us around and washing mouths out with soap was definitely part of that. It’s amazing to me to think that there was anything of goodness, much less Christ as they liked to talk about him, in the methods they used, which then got me thinking about what another sort of God—one who’s actually worth worshipping—might have been, as a presence, in the midst of all that “education.” That’s basically the genesis of the story, though this kind of makes it all seem so consciously willed, when really I just started writing an anecdote and then realized where it had come from and where it was going on the cusp of the ending. I should also add that it’s very retrospective. Religion, much less worship, has played no role in my life for decades now, except as a queasy traumatic nostalgia, or as it’s allied itself to a toxic politics.


Tamas Dobozy is a professor in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario, Canada. He has published four books of short fiction, When X Equals Marylou, Last Notes and Other Stories, Siege 13: Stories (which won the 2012 Rogers Writers Trust of Canada Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for both the Governor General's Award: Fiction, and the 2013 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Award), and most recently, Ghost Geographies: Fictions. He has published over seventy short stories in journals such as One Story, Fiction, Agni, and Granta, and won an O Henry Prize in 2011, and the Gold Medal for Fiction at the National Magazine Awards in 2014.

Where Are You? Here I Am, Here

Rebecca Meacham

My German Shepherd waits in my front yard. This is unexpected. We killed our German
Shepherd a month ago.

Scarlet? I call. She’s doing that German Shepherd smiling thing you see in dog food ads.

Our German Shepherd wags. Her coat is black and tan and shining—it’s all grown back
—and she runs the way she did when she was alive: a creature too big for the human world, a
horse let loose in pasture.

Now my German Shepherd bounds to the backyard, to the woods full of the turkeys and
deer. When our dog was alive, turkeys were fun: my husband and I would stand at the patio door,
watching them mince their globed, slow way across the grass, and she’d stand beside us, tensed.

Ready? we’d ask. We’d open the door.

And our German Shepherd would bolt.

Turkeys can fly, even the young ones. They rise in an indignant, gobbling flurry, like
airless balloons, until they wobble to a branch. There, they cluck a quiet rollcall: Where-are-
you?-here-I-am-here.

In the month since we had our dog killed, the turkeys stroll the yard like, well, cocks of
the walk. The deer spindle towards our hostas, but we know it isn’t right.

Now my German Shepherd wants to play. She’s found her orange ball, the one we can’t
yet throw away. She trots past the memorial stone our kids made, working through their stunned
grief, embracing our lies (She got really sick while you were at school, we couldn’t make her
better
), gluing on each glass letter: SCARLET.

When she was alive, we had to coax the ball from her jaws. She never dropped on
command, even at the end. Her obedience was selective—you could call it considered. She
chased the ball and kept it, awaiting your negotiation.

Scarlet, I call. She lies in the grass with the orange ball. Just like always, she waits for us
to go to her.

Such a dick move, my husband would say, going to her.

We would always go to her.

With our daughters, the exchange was play: they’d tug the ball together and she’d drag
along with it, a larky, choo-choo, tug-of-war. My husband, whom we called Pack Leader,
simply yanked. I did whatever worked. Usually, I placed my fingers inside her calf-soft lip and
pressed the ball away from her fangs: a modest, almost tender, extraction.

Not long before this, as a giant puppy, her teeth bruised the entire length of my arms in a
battle for dominance. She weighed as much as I did. We were equally committed. I raged,
consulted trainers, nearly returned her to the breeder—until I figured out a way to love her, and
she agreed to love me back.

It helped that we could tame her willfulness just by scratching her back.

Soon my hands knew her skin better than my children’s. It became exhausting, checking
for sores, shaving fur, rubbing salves on her raw-meat paws. Nothing quelled. I knelt and washed
her feet like a penitent. I am sorry for for your hungers for your wounds your sores your
miserable skin your endless, maddening itch
, I whispered into her ears—ears the size of other
animals’ heads—before dosing them, shoving pills down her throat, stabbing her with syringes,
leashing her for another another another another vet trip, across town, across the state, until she
stopped following simple commands, this once-brilliant, still-giant German Shepherd of ours.
Forgive us.

We do not feel forgivable. Because last month, my husband, a man so loyal he keeps
receipts from 1999, said, It’s time. It was a school day. We’d tell the kids after. In the waiting
room, un-coned for the first time in months, she was gorgeous—a movie-star dog, drawing fans.
She’s beautiful! a woman said, because of course a four-year-old German Shepherd is vibrant,
alive. How could it be otherwise? The woman was the kind of person who rehabilitated blighted
orphaned dogs. We waited to murder our young allergic pet. We wept behind our sunglasses.

It wasn’t like when we took our 19-year-old cat, already half-gone. It wasn’t like taking
our pound-dog legend, named for a Grateful Dead song, grown stiff with tumors. Those pets
were put to rest, and you could say “put to rest” because they were doomed. No, a young, strong
dog will fight her death. We held her close and I couldn’t help but root for her. Hell yes, you
should live!
I thought, killing her. Afterward, we couldn’t stop trying to make her comfortable. I
called through the door, Could someone keep her company, just keep her company, please? Two
vet techs carried a man-sized stretcher like medics from a war movie. We consigned her ashes to
a community garden.

A month later, my husband wonders if he’s a monster. Our friends say we’re “brave.”
Our kids are ready for a new dog, maybe a border collie, a breed you can dress up—it’s hard to
find Christmas sweaters in dog-size XXXL, although we did and she wore them all. Our kids are
ready for any dog that’s not allergic to grass, or leaves, or mice, or wool, or human skin, or every
kind of food.

But I don’t feel brave, and I don’t feel like a monster. I like dreaming of a dog we can
take on trips and give an easy life, of pleasure.

I’m dreaming now, in fact.

In this dream, I can finally walk out the patio door, into the yard, alone—even though it’s
the kind of yard a giant dog is supposed to bound through, giving chase.

All the snowballs of our winters hang in mid-air, waiting to be caught.

Now, my German Shepherd, my beautiful girl, lifts her head.

I open the door and ask...myself, I guess, Ready?

Neither of us moves.

My German Shepherd doesn’t come to me. I don’t go to her.

We stay like this, listening to turkeys in the trees.

Where are you?

Here I am.

Here.


Author’s Note: The thing about a family dog is they're everywhere: underfoot, on the landing, stretched across your beds, sneaking onto your couches, blocking the doorways from your cats, chasing deer and turkeys through your yard, hoovering poptart crumbs under your tables, barking at snowmen, rolling like a horse on new-mown grass, watching crows as you play guitar or ride bikes or read in the driveway. So it's not just your heart; it's your world that breaks when your family dog is gone. After we put our dog to sleep, I couldn't imagine these spaces without her— especially our backyard. I’d open the door and freeze. One night, I dreamt Scarlet was outside waiting for me, so I wrote this story. Eventually, in real life, I made it through that door as well. 


Rebecca Meacham is the author of two award-winning fiction collections. Her hybrid chapbook, Feather Rousing, is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press, and recent work has appeared in Best Microfiction 2021, Hobart, and Wigleaf. Her prose has been set to music, translated into Polish, and carved into woodblocks and letter-pressed by steamroller. She is a professor of English at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay, where she is the founder of The Teaching Press and Director of the BFA in Writing and Applied Arts. Read more at http://rebeccameachamwriter.com

Alligator Pickles

Xenia Sylvia Dylag

The tiny alligator wasn’t so tiny anymore. Its leathery face was smushed up against the sixteen-
ounce pickle jar.
The alligator first appeared in Agata’s homemade pickle brine a few months ago. She
transferred it into tap water, and it puffed up until its eyeballs burst out of its sockets. Frightened
by the sight (and the unfortunate lack of for the alligator), Agata placed it back into the jar of
brine before it grew any bigger. It shrunk a bit, but the poor alligator had no eyes.
Agata kept the tiny alligator in a jar with her homemade pickle brine, and after the
alligator adjusted to blindly navigating around the jar, it swam around and around and around.
Each time she put the alligator in a new batch of brine though, it grew a little. Bigger. And
bigger.
Now Agata tapped the glass jar with her dirty fingernail to see if it would move. But it
was stuck in the smushed, spherical position against the glass.
Was it still alive? Agata wondered.
She dumped her homemade pickles and brine into the bathtub in the basement and placed
the limp alligator in the liquid. The alligator instantly grew twice its size. It slapped its stout
paws in the brine and stuck its fat, grainy tongue out. It tossed a pickle up in the air and caught it
in its mouth. The blind alligator sat in the tub eating pickle after pickle. It grew bigger and bigger
right before Agata’s eyes.
I have alligator in tub and afraid it grow bigger and bigger and too big, big, big, Agata
finally whispered to her neighbor Rodrigo when she went out to get her mail later that afternoon.
Rodrigo told her that he wrestled an alligator once, and if he needed to, he would do it again. For
her, he would. Agata blushed and told him she’d let him know.
After sorting her mail, Agata went back down into the basement, but the alligator wasn’t
in the tub. She followed the puddles of brine into her pickle closet. The alligator stood on its hind
legs with shattered glass all around it and half eaten cucumbers on the ground. When the
alligator smelled Agata, it jumped up and down and squawked like a baby bird excited for its
mother.
Agata ran upstairs and bolted the basement door shut.
She called Rodrigo right away.
Rodrigo came with extra jars of pickles. They chopped them up and squeezed them in
through the bottom sliver of the basement door. They listened to the alligator slurp each sliver
into its mouth. After emptying six jars of pickles, the alligator finally flopped down the steps.
They heard it splash and thud into the tub. Rodrigo and Agata waited a few hours staring at the
basement door before they decided it had been long enough and should be safe to go down. They
tip-toed down the staircase and into the bathroom, and the alligator was lounging on its belly in
the tub. Rodrigo gently stroked its head, and the alligator didn’t move. Rodrigo lifted its paw up
and down. And up and down again. Rodrigo even sat on its back.
Go get my fishing pole next door, Rodrigo told Agata.
And so, in the middle of the night with the full moon hovering up above them, Rodrigo
and Agata sat on the alligator’s back, and Rodrigo held a fishing pole with a pickle dangling
about two feet from the eyeless reptile’s face. They crawled up to the edge of the lagoon in the
park down the street.
Agata poured several jars of pickles into the lagoon. Rodrigo led the alligator into the
water with the last pickle. They watched the alligator eat the pickle and then swim off until it
disappeared into the depths of the lagoon.
They never saw the alligator again, but every full moon night, Rodrigo and Agata walked
down to the park at midnight and poured a jar of her pickles into the lagoon.


Author’s Note: This story was inspired by my love for pickles and an actual alligator lurking in the lagoon in Humboldt Park in Chicago. The alligator was named "Chance the Snapper" and was eventually captured by a reptile expert flown in from Florida. "Alligator Pickles" is part of a longer story in my collection of linked short stories about Polish-Americans in Chicago that I am currently polishing up and hoping to publish. 


Xenia Sylvia Dylag is a Polish-American writer and educator from Chicago. She received her MA from Jagiellonian University and MFA from the Mississippi University for Women. Her flash fiction has appeared in Mortar Magazine, The Molotov Cocktail, Coffin Bell, Ligeia Magazine, and Dead Skunk Mag. She currently lives in Texas and teaches English. 

Bug Confidential

Lisa Mae DeMasi

It was a dismal August afternoon in coastal Alabama during a solo month-long rural writer’s
retreat. The deafening chirp of the cicadas sounded from a moss-covered oak and the humidity
could be cut with a knife. The clouds turned black, and thunder rumbled overhead, a daily event
in Bay Shores this time of year.

I sat at the kitchen table, barefoot. Between the stove and sink, stood Archy, his elaborate
antennae flicking in my direction.

I’d named the cockroach Archy after Don Marquis’s character from The Lives and Times
of Archy and Mehitabel.
Both Archy and the story had made big impressions on me when I’d
pulled the book from a library shelf back home and read it in one sitting six months before.

Now, I was here in Bay Shores to write my first short story, and I conjured that Archy
could get me started in the same way he allegedly contributed his wit and wisdom to Marquis, by
leaping onto his typewriter during the night, striking one key with each jump. That I’d sit down
at the desk after a restless night of sleep with coffee in hand and wondrously discover a
provocative line he’d tapped in the dark, all lowercase letters and symbols that did not require
the “Shift” key.

Archy, engineered for extreme adaptability and speed, a tenacity for survival, spoke to
me. His antennae probing, I heard echoes of Franz Kafka, the opening lines of Metamorphosis:

as gregor samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed
in his bed into a gigantic insect.

I was three weeks deep into the 30-day sabbatical—stripped from chaos, far away from
my husband, dog, and the comforts of home in the Boston suburbs. It was the sort of isolation a
writer longs for, getting down to bare bone so-to-speak, without distraction, to create and craft
with no time limits or familial responsibilities.

But, alas, I had yet to be transformed like Archy, inside of whom resided the soul of a
free-verse poet, claimed Marquis. Archy hadn’t worked his poetic magic on my computer screen
yet and I waited for his words with wonder and anticipation.

The evening before, the cottage was crammed with local book-loving junkies, forty or so,
organized by the writing residency chairman Ned Abernathy. They’d come to hear me read a few
pages from my memoir in progress. I was skittery with nerves and began:

I’m standing on a flatbed and tossing flakes of hay into a paddock not far from
Yellowstone on a hot and sticky July afternoon. It’s 1995 and the longhorns are
meandering over. They’re magnificent beasts, donning horns that extend to seven
feet from tip to tip and hides that are ruddy and white and dirty-speckled. Their
surroundings are too much to take in all at once. The big sky and foothills and
mountains and clouds and sage and brush. I reach for a steer’s horn and playfully
give it a tug. He doesn’t like it and tries to jab me in the ribs. These steers, and
the horses too, teach me to live in the moment, take only what I need to nourish
myself, keep me sane, hold me here far from home or where I was heading.

I know in my heart I’ll never want to leave...

Everyone clapped when I finished. I folded my notes in two and watched the crowd
disperse towards a table of food, their chatter indecipherable except for a word here and there.

Charles, a tall, stocky, white-haired man, stood at the threshold of the dining room. I had
had dinner with him and his wife, Cat, at Ned and his wife Victoria’s house my second night in
Bay Shores. Charles and Cat lived across the street and had appeared at Ned and Victoria’s door,
holding highballs of bourbon. Victoria, a former ballerina, had cooked a dinner of fried catfish
and okra for us that second night of my stay. She had picked at her food and delicately sipped on
white wine while telling me about a horse riding accident that had left her debilitated for years.

Charles had gazed at me longingly, despite Cat sitting next to him. I wondered what he’d
think about my looking to the cockroach in residence for creative inspiration. “I grew up on a
cattle ranch in Louisiana,” he said then, and I responded by telling him that I had worked a
summer on a guest ranch in Wyoming, watering and feeding horses and longhorns. He had
gawked at me in pleasant surprise and Cat turned away, muttering “good grief” under her breath.

Now, people milling about, catching crumbs from green tomato fritters and shrimp and
grits piled into mini-pastry shells, he grabbed me suddenly, taking me in his arms, then holding
me back at a slight distance. My chest pressed against his through my sleeveless top. “You’re so
purdy.” His lips parted into a smile, and he looked as if in a trance.

I stood there mute, trapped. Small. Please let me go, I thought.

People laughed and sipped wine, my body frozen, my heart pounding. If you snap out of
your reverie and really look into my eyes, you’ll see this isn’t cool with me at all.


Victoria broke away from a conversation with three middle-aged women in the hallway
and took hold of Charles’s arms and drew them back to his sides. “You are such a liar,” she
drawled. Her movement was graceful and subtle. She swept back a strand of hair from her right
cheek.

I excused myself to the restroom. A liar?

After the last of the book-loving junkies had filed out of the cottage, I drew the blinds and
fled in my high heel sandals to a lively French bistro in the nearby quaint town center. Vibrant
blooms and galleries and shops lined the street. At the bar, I drowned the last traces of nerves in
a martini and then another, eavesdropped on a few conversations, the dialect full of long vowels,
an intoxicating tempo though behind the alcohol I knew I longed for home. I washed down a
Salade Niçoise with a couple glasses of white wine. Then I stumbled my way back to the
cottage.

I had managed to survive the scrutiny, presenting to all those people, their eyes upon me
as I read, the encounter with Charles, Cat’s jealousy. Archy, meanwhile, sat in the kitchen sink,
in the drain. And in an instant, the vertiginous feeling of toiling in a mad iterative circle washed
away. In my mind, I think I thanked him.

The following morning, I couldn’t find Archy anywhere at all. Sitting at the dining room
table in front of my computer in a T-shirt and shorts, I heard the bang of a car door and peered
through the window. Charles was there in the driveway, carrying a paperback. He rapped hard on
the door, full of intention. I squeezed my eyes closed. He wants to see how far he can get with
me. Doesn’t he realize I’m here to work?


I opened the door, his body filling the porch. His expression was that of a young boy,
hopeful, open. Much less intimidating than the night before.

“Working hard?” he asked, his thumb of one hand resting on the loop of his pants and the
paperback at his side in the other.

Without any poetic input from Archy, I had been crafting an essay about the
empowerment of sweating out alcohol during a hot yoga class. I wasn’t going to mention this to
him.

Braless, I folded my arms across my chest. I answered him quietly, wanting to be
courteous but to the point. “Hey there, Charles. I am working hard ‒ to meet a deadline.”

“I had a dream about you last night,” he continued anyway, ignoring me. “I dreamt you
were on my daddy’s ranch, and we needed help moving the herd of cows. You were sleeping in
the house, and I came to wake you. My daddy would have liked you.”

He had fallen asleep thinking about me.

He said it all sweetly, genuinely. I knew the bit about the dream was the truth. I smiled
and folded my arms tighter across my chest. Hope faded from his face.

“Here’s a book I thought you’d enjoy.” I took the book from his outstretched hand,
thumbed the table of contents, and recognized it immediately. The Alumni Grill II: Anthology of
Southern Writers.
My former writing coach had an essay in it and her signature was in the
cottage’s guest book. “Thanks,” I said, and I lifted my hand in a wave goodbye.

Charles lingered there a moment in defeat, then he turned away and climbed down the
steps. “Well, guess I’ll be seeing ya...”

I watched him go and almost felt sorry for him. He had told me over dinner at Ned’s that
he’d been a marine engineer responsible for mechanical systems of oil rigs. He’d made a
comfortable life for himself, he said. My presence clearly had cast ripples into his still water of
retirement. An intrusion in the foursome’s bubble—Ned, Victoria, Cat, him. I could tell by the
couples’ interaction they’d known one another long and intimately, a comfortable easy
companionship that sometimes rested on boredom, sipping bourbon during the hot humid
evenings on Ned’s front porch, talking and not talking. I closed the door, saying nothing, sat
down on the couch and sunk my chin between my hands. I didn’t want biscuits, crawfish and
gravy or a ride on a boat in Mobile Bay. I wanted out of the cottage and its creaks and bumps in
the night and glimpses of Daphne the homeless woman who sometimes roamed the property.
Even Archy had disappeared. But changing my flight would cost two hundred and fifty dollars,
plus a two hundred dollar alteration fee. Whether I liked it or not, I had to stick out the final nine
days of thirty booked and, more importantly, get that first short story written.

Charles didn’t resurface. Archy did, the next day. I had cooked tender scallops and
savory shrimp caught straight from the bay and sold at the local market. Drank a crisp and fruity
white. Archy fed on the scraps I left for him on the kitchen floor. Hi Archy, I said, help yourself.
He reached out his antennae.

I laughed out loud, understanding that I had ‘befriended’ Archy, his company a sign of
resilience and life during my residency. But I kept the Archy-sightings to myself, cautious of my
every flip-flopped footstep in fear of crushing him. He and I were after the same thing: survival.

Two days before I was to leave for home, there came an abrupt knock on the cottage’s
door. Through the window, I glimpsed a man standing at the threshold wearing a dull gray
uniform and carrying a canister and sprayer.

“Exterminator,” he said, without making eye contact. “We have a contract to spray every
three months.”

I reluctantly let him in. He sprayed the living room as I stood there watching, my arms
folded. The pungent pesticide tinged the inside of my nose.

“Archy.” I blurted his name without thinking, an accusation intended for the
exterminator, but also a lament for Archy.

“Archy?”

“He’s a cockroach,” I answered matter-of-factly.

“Archy will be dead tomorrow for sure,” he said without any question as to the reason for
his naming.

As the hours passed, the thought of the poison working on Archy’s nervous system,
slowly killing him, haunted me. An insect can feel pain, too, surely.

I found him near the bathtub at dinnertime, belly up, his antennae swaying raggedly. Oh,
Archy
. I let him be; the poor thing was suffering. I didn’t have it in me to extinguish him, and the
promise I’d found in him. The little guy had been a source of inspiration and self-reflection, and
now came his demise.

Before bed, I took one of the many thank you cards I had written for the good people of
Bay Shores who made my residency possible, and using the flat end of my toothpaste, scooped
his body onto the card to bring him outside. But I let him slip, and he flipped over and
disappeared beneath the vanity, out of reach. Thank you for your company, Archy, I said out
loud.

The night before I was due to leave the cottage, I saw him again, underneath the TV
stand, dead. I left his body there and pictured Ned discovering him – a memory of poetry, a call
for transformation.

In the end, Archy had inadvertently helped me to overcome distractions and fear of
failure of meeting my deadline, reminding me of the free-verse poet living inside my own soul
when my love of writing had taken me far away from home.

On the morning of my departure at 6:30 a.m. I guided my fifty-pound suitcase across the
threshold, but it was my first short story that I remember carrying that day.


Author’s Note: There’s a funny thing about craving alone time to write: you wait and wait and savor the notion of a 30-day sabbatical of distraction-free bliss. Finally, in place and ready to strike that first key, you’re simply overwhelmed at the starkness of it all – the blank page, the sea of opportunity, the isolation. This is what happened to me. I suddenly had so much and then nothing at all. Until Archy appeared, from under the kitchen cabinet, close to where I sat hunched over the computer, waiting for the creativity to pour forth and fill the blank page. This little cockroach, as if a manifestation of Don Marquis’s muse from The Lives and Times of Archy and Mehitabel, became my inspiration, releasing the free-verse poet locked inside my soul by the fear of failure to write my first short story. 


Lisa Mae DeMasi is a passionate tech storyteller and content writer who thrives in engaging with SMEs to craft compelling blogs, interviews, and content marketing pieces that promote world-class digital solutions. She is also writing a memoir called The Baggage Claim, a story about love, loss, and self-discovery. Her personal essays have been featured in Brevity Magazine, Creative Nonfiction, Memoir Magazine, Horse Network, Writer Advice, and WOW! Women on Writing! She resides near Boston, where she bikes, hikes, and rides horses.