Prose

Kimberly Gibson-Tran

Survival Instinct

The smell of the bamboo jungle is from the light, clean rain that licks into the fibers of the stalks. And in the air is a sweet fibrous smell, one you catch and let go to catch again. It’s from the hard green tube of sugar cane I broke open, broke open by blasting it against a peacock tail tree, the tree’s soft so soft leaf petals fall in rounds of little velvet fans. When my family had rabbits we used to feed them these, plucking off the stems. How the red-eyed white rabbit, when sprinkled with her food, looked baptized by little tongues of blood. We didn’t have rabbits long; the dogs would get them. This is a dreamscape I recreate. Location: Chiang Klang, Nan province, Thailand. Long ago Siam. Longer ago the northern Lanna Kingdom. I lived in this place from the age of eight to the age of fourteen with my father, a medical doctor, my mother, a nurse, and my younger sister, a brat.   

Katie had to shit in the woods. We were on a star trek, an away mission, mucking our way through the slimy grasses into the tunnel canopies of fat bamboo. Four of us had beamed down, two pairs of sisters: Haley and Sarah, twins, and me and Katie. We were gathering immense amounts of data on our cardboard tricorders. No sign of the Borg, or snakes. But our ten-year-old science officer was in a predicament, as usual. Katie was always ruining games, as I saw it. Impulsive, impatient, prone to random injury. I have watched my father operate on her foot to retrieve a branch of a splinter; she’s woken from bed with a five-inch scorpion on her chest. Her round face reddens with fever when she battles an ear infection. In this memory she is sporting a headgear contraption to correct an overbite. Its adjustable plastic bands squeeze into the pudge of her cheeks and, because of the way she put it on this morning, bunch her choppy blonde hair in fountainous directions. Her hair is choppy because she likes to cut it herself.

Now, deep in the misty, alien woods, Katie needs to go—number two, she clarifies. As captain I cannot compromise the mission. The transporters perennially offline, the commbadge communicators affected by a dampening field, there is no way to contact the ship. “You can hide behind the bamboo and bushes over there,” points Sarah, first officer, helpfully. “Yeah, you just dig a hole and, like, go in it,” adds Haley, chief engineer. Haley wipes a bead of sweat from her pointy, freckled nose. I slap a mosquito buzzing close to my elbow. “Better hurry,” I ordered. And, with difficulty I prefer not to go into, Katie eventually managed and the mission went on.

Why this scene comes back to me, I don’t know. I want to talk about the twins, I think. Or I want to talk about the woods. So much growth. Everything here is giant. You could stick a seed in the ground and it would do the rest. The bamboo, hard bars, thicken into walls, curve into spiral tunnels we could not help but explore. We thought we were going where no one had gone before.

In season 6 episode 2 of Star Trek Voyager, “Survival Instinct,” which aired September 29th, 1999, a Borg sphere crash lands on a moon, and the drones aboard are severed from the collective hive mind. The four surviving Borg drones, the armor-plated, cybernetic bad guys of the galaxy, who plunder the biological and technological advances of other species, find themselves helpless, growing more and more human on the wild moon jungle, their thoughts their own. They start to remember their names. Around a campfire, eating the corpse of a dead comrade, they recount their assimilation, begin to feel that “survival is insufficient.” One of the four drones, my sister’s favorite character of the series, is Seven of Nine. Seven of Nine does not remember her human name.

Childhood is dramatic, the memories sear. The hates root deep and the loves bruise. All of these jumble into the expansive vat of the past. I don’t know the cause and effect. On that away mission, the one where Katie had to squat behind the brushes of bamboo, I don’t know what it meant when she found bones back there. “Look,” she told us. Haley and Sarah were giddy, we were all giddy with the dark secret unearthed. “Did somebody die?” said Katie. “I think it’s a dog. I saw a dog skull once when we lived in Georgia” said Haley or Sarah, “when we used to go rabbit hunting, when we caught that magic one, remember? It was white and had a red eye and we still have the foot. We’ll show you. You can wish on it and things come true.” “A dog?” I asked, trying to rerail the investigation. “Is this where they buried Esther?” asks Katie. But it wasn’t. Katie’s dead puppy Esther was closer to the house. On this mission we had crossed barbed wire fences, we were off the property of the missionary clinic compound. We were in the deep woods, where things stay or decay. A macabre decision maybe, but we took the skulls and half skulls home, dirtying our arms.

I remember the day my mother broke the news to me, how she came in that slow, deliberate way parents come to tell you your pet has died. But no one was dead, not in a way I could name. The twins were only moving away, to a different town in the north of Thailand, a different mission team. “I know already,” I said, grieving tonelessly on a mound of grassy dirt a hundred yards from the house, playing hooky on my homeschool lessons. My mother, on break from the clinic, had had to make a trip to the hill in the boiling sun to interrupt my madness. Katie probably tattled to our cook Pa Jan that I was sun-bathing, and Pa Jan probably called the clinic phone. “I’m just tanning, Mom,” I stretched her title into two long syllables. “I know this is hard,” she said, sounding strange, “but Danny and your dad just couldn’t work things out. Are you wearing sunscreen? In all this UV, you’re going to burn, and there’s cancer in our family.” Danny was Haley and Sarah’s strict dad. He didn’t get along with anyone on the missionary team, thought he knew best how to evangelize a people whose language he didn’t even know.

In the Star Trek Voyager episode, on the leafy alien moon, surrounded by the mangled wreckage of their Borg space ship, Seven of Nine panics at the insubordination, the mutiny of Two of Nine, Three of Nine, and Four of Nine, who do not want to repair the communication beacon and send a distress call to the collective. Seven of Nine, assimilated at such a young age that she has only the memory of fear and chaos before the Borg, cannot lose her only family. She hunts them through the woods, and one by one, pierces their necks with her assimilation tubules, fills them with nanoprobes, reprograms them.

Looking back, I think my mother felt guilty. Whatever had happened between the team of missionary adults, I couldn’t fully understand. I sense that my mom didn’t want me to blame her or my dad for this, the removal of my best friends, a request they must have made to the mission board. We were so isolated in the rural area. I think now that she must have felt she wronged me. I don’t know who I blamed for the breakup of my crew and our endless collective imagination. After trying to toast myself in the sun, I set out for the bamboo caves, breaking everything I could along the way, spending myself on the thrashing of a sugar cane stalk, breathing the sweet mist of its defeat against the peacock tree. The tree that rained red petals. 

I wonder what I said to Katie. It would have been me who told her about the twins leaving. I was always this thread in the chain of command. Did she cry? I don’t remember this episode, but another I do. I remember telling her when the puppy died. Mom didn’t relay this one. I saw it happen with my own eyes. Esther, our white German shepherd, Katie’s favorite, bit an electrical cord on our back porch, convulsed with blue wires, exactly like in the movies. I remember a collective scream—me, my mom, and Pa Jan—Mom and Pa Jan grabbing me, shouting so loudly in two languages, “Don’t touch her! DON’T TOUCH her!” The dog thrashed until she died, her jaws slacked. Pa Jan called the gardener. He bagged the dog, dug a hole, and put her in the ground behind our house. Katie hadn’t been there. That afternoon I walked the stairs to her room and told her. She cried so hard. I have never seen her cry so hard.  

I had a dream some years ago, quiet and safe in a room in my parents’ house in Texas. I dreamed a dark, miasmic danger. I was in Chiang Klang again and there were leaves, teak leaves falling big and veined as elephant ears around the red-flecked peacock tree. And the tree’s long pods, curved scabbards, were rattling savagely in the wind. Something was burning. There were fires. Something I had done or not done for Katie. Guilt. Then the brightness of headlights splashed into my eyes, woke me, and, for a second, I was barred by the striped shadow of the window blinds. No ash in my hair. Katie was spending the college break with friends in Missouri. She doesn’t come home to visit as often as I do.

The Voyager episode flashes forward to years later, after Seven of Nine and the drones are reassimilated by the Borg collective from the jungle moon. Seven of Nine, in a separate incident, has been severed permanently from the collective and is now a member of the starship Voyager’s crew. At first she resists this new, forced individuality, but eventually she comes to terms with being an “I” and not a “we.” She accepts this as what it means to be human. She renounces the cruelty of the Borg collective she was once a part of. She grows golden hair. She even remembers her first name.

One day, out of the vastness of space, Two, Three, and Four of Nine, having themselves escaped from the Collective, hunt down Seven. It so happened that on that alien moon, when Seven of Nine pumped them full of her programmed nanoprobes, she had followed no protocol. She had, in fact, fused the minds of her siblings into a recursive collective of three, bound forever to torture each other with their thoughts, privacy and individuality impossible. The procedure is irreversible. To separate they have to die.

When people are going through a tough time in their lives, some like to say they’re still in the woods, the dark maze of losing one’s way, the thickness of trouble. This is perhaps a collective metaphor. Think Luke Skywalker on the planet Dagobah, Jedi training with Yoda. Remember the muck of his X-wing spacecraft suspended over the swamp. The temptation, the shadowy vision of Darth Vader in the forest. Or Simba, wayward heir in The Lion King, tunneling after Rafiki through brambles and branches to the still pool and his father’s starry reflection. Years past our childhoods, across the world in America, Sarah, half of her twinned self, sat, dabbing and cooling her father Danny’s forehead after his chemo. She was alone and unalone, the little fetus inside her a Borg drone in its green maturation chamber, jungle of rib and vertebrae. 

Bones, so many of them, piercing the ground, grinding back to dust, molecules shooting through stems, feeding us, growing the bones of our children. On October 13th, 2016, his majesty King Bhumibol Adulyadej, the longest reigning monarch in the world, died. The world for about seventy million people shook out of phase. His body lay at the Thai grand palace for a full year and thirteen days before a five-day cremation ceremony. During that interval, thousands, every day, clad all in black, waited hours upon hours to see the man, the god, no one could remember beyond. He had been the king of everyone’s lifetime, beloved, gentle father of the country, calmer of political coups. There’s a famous picture of him cupping the clasped hands of an old beggar woman. Her hair a shock of white, his bespectacled, boyish face bends to hers. When I visited the grand palace in the summer of 2017, there were still numberless throngs in black, voiding the hot white concrete, a dark cloud pouring out of cabs and trains from the skyscraper jungle of Bangkok.

All of everything, far back enough, was star, it is said. Particles, antimatter, neutrinos, subspace. The poetry of the void, the final frontier. I wonder which way they remember it, my crew. Is it a coincidence that Haley collects skulls, paints designs on bones, duplicates marks of her Cherokee ancestors? That Sarah saves every year for a new tattoo, that some of those permanent marks are in Thai language? Did, by chance, I just happen to like backpacking through forests, taking the same readings over and over again? Did Katie, science officer, all on her own, study the body, become a nurse? 

I saw a program, a few years back, or perhaps it was a piece of journalism shared on Facebook, about the illegal dog meat industry in Thailand, and scenes came back to me. Around the corner from the clinic, down a narrow dirt street I explored on my bike, a meat stand open to the air. This was not, in itself, odd. I was used to seeing pigs’ heads and hooves cleaved, the innards grayly slicking the tile of fresh market stalls. The woman behind such a counter, blood to her elbows, would hand you back change, a green bill with the smooth, bespectacled face of the king stamped red with her thumbprint. But this was a different blood money. Hung from the hooks of the street stall were dog heads, black dogs, tongues dangling stiff, eyes only a mirror. I am only remembering this now, after the online video. At first, when Two, Three, and Four of Nine confronted her, Seven of Nine did not remember what she had done to them on the alien jungle moon. They had to reactivate their neural link for the whole history to come roaring back. What else of the past did my brain elide? 

After the bamboo cave away mission, we four sisters hosed the skulls. They were packed with dirt. We watered them white, toweled them dry. Pa Jan, the woman who cooked for us and cared for us when my parents were away at work, whose name means Sun or Monday, shed light on the situation. In her clipped, northern dialect she told me, and I translated for the twins, that we should throw away the skulls. They were from dogs the neighbors were killing and illegally selling. I don’t know what we did with the bones then. I don’t even remember how we took the news. But I think, going back into the cave we would, knowing even now what we know, touch the bones, caress the skulls, paint them with stars and symbols.

When their father Danny passed, I sent Haley and Sarah a poem I wrote for them, and, curious, looked back at some of our old Facebook messages. We had not talked much, we mainly commented on pictures publicly here and there. There was, however, a long string of messages Sarah and I had back in 2010. She’d wanted to get a tattoo of a scripture verse wrapped around her forearm. She wanted it in a Thai Bible translation. Knowing that I can read the language, she asked if I would help her find and parse the verse, help her learn it before injecting it into her skin. Her verse was the first half of Isaiah 26:9. 

My soul yearns for you in the night; 

in the morning my spirit longs for you.

I looked it up in a Thai translation, first in the traditional, kingly one which seeks to match the language used for God with the language used for Thai royalty. Then, I settled on a beautiful translation in a lower, down to earth register:

jit jai khong kha pra ong yak dai phra ong nai klang kheurn

jit winyan phai nai kha phra ong sawang ha phra ong yang rohn ron

Google handles the translation back to English well:

My soul wants you in the night.

The soul within me is seeking Him earnestly.

I handle the Thai words this way:

My heart wants to have you in the night.

The spirit inside me searches for you hotly still.

So many ways to see the metaphors at work. The heart and the spirit, the heat of the searching. Thai does not conjugate verbs for tense, so time is malleable, inferred. In Thai we don’t have to wait for the morning, we can start the search in the thick of the darkness. This plaintive desire is marked on her now, but we share the scar.

After Danny’s passing, my mom visited Haley and Sarah in Georgia, dropped news about my new, extensively tattooed American-Vietnamese boyfriend. Sarah messaged me right away, inhaled my details and photos. “Hey, you can tell a lot about a person by the quality of their tattoos,” she assured me.

Time expressed itself, warped. Haley and Sarah’s babies are crawling now. My hair, in the place I used to pull it, is going white from either age or trauma, I can’t tell. I’m not going to lose my head over it. Katie, I notice from posted photos, is getting the same lines about the mouth that I am. My boyfriend is working through season 6 of Star Trek Voyager. He likes the Borg, interprets Seven of Nine’s transition to human as a loss. Since he and I met online, hardly a day has gone by in which we haven’t talked or messaged. Only one day, perhaps, when I was in the Georgia woods this June, on the one day I couldn’t find a bar of cell phone signal.

At the end of “Survival Instinct,” Two, Three, and Four of Nine, fall into a coma. They’d accessed the buried memory of what Seven had done to them on the jungle moon, learned the truth. Their neural lock prevents them from being revived. There are two solutions: they have to be severed from each other, only to irreparably damage their brains and die within a few days, or they have to be assimilated again by the Borg in order to live out full lives as drones in the Collective. The ship’s doctor asks Seven of Nine what should be done. “Survival is insufficient,” Seven says, opting to break her siblings’ link, to kill them, to give them the taste of a few free days. Only she, similarly scarred, could ever have known that this is what they would have wanted.

As a child in Thailand, I often thought how capable Haley and Sarah were, how in sync, finishing each other’s sentences in their own invented language. Katie and I didn’t even look like sisters. No strangers at summer camp ever thought we were. Though we could easily tell the twins apart because Haley was a little shorter and thinner in the face, the same light brown hair draped their delicate, feminine features like a seamless waterfall. My hair, which I secretly tried to tear out at the roots when nervous and alone, was always a frizzy mass that blurred me into the humid air. No one I knew had my hair. Then there were the dreams the twins had. They had the longest, most fantastical dreams of anyone. Suspiciously detailed dreams that placed us all as characters in the story. I envied their lies, how easily the fabrications came. Their telling was some kind of elegant control. In the glow of the past light, in the emerald canopies and golden harvest fields of our youth, I often forget our fights, bitter and sometimes violent. Sarah shoving Katie in the back, my defending Katie instinctively as I had never done before and have never done since. How in that moment I knew, though she were the bane of my existence, that I would never trade my sister for anyone’s. 

A few weeks ago, when Katie and her husband visited over Thanksgiving, I showed her a draft of this story about us. She read it on her phone silently, curtains of long, golden hair hiding her eyes. On a walk that afternoon, for the first time in a long time, I saw her cry. The guilt hit me. What had I done by bringing back Esther and imaginary games with the twins? By telling the world about Katie’s headgear, her shitting in the woods? “We were violent, us and Haley and Sarah sometimes, weren’t we?” she said finally. We walked on, holding each other around the waist, almost but not quite the same height.

Separation is good. It’s healthy, we are told. I have my doubts. Why else do I keep time traveling, retranslating. Why is it when I close my eyes I can almost feel the shade, hear the creaky moans of the green and gold pipes of bamboo. A colloquial phrase comes to me in Thai—translates to “I’m off to shoot a rabbit.” It means, “I’m going to use the bathroom.” You might use it especially when you are going to go somewhere outdoors, to signal a need for privacy. When my sister defecated outside, when Haley, Sarah, and I ordered her to do it behind the bamboo, that became our unforgettable day in the woods, a flashpoint, a memory in which I see everything now about the way we were—so practical, so powerful, so full of that violent fuse of imagination. My sisters. My collective. My heart wants to have them, my spirit is still looking, hotly, moving through the woods to that still pool of fathers, the mirror of a dog’s eye, that ink, the angry break of bone and cane into a hollow deep, that space in which we love each other. 

Kimberly Gibson-Tran is an educator and college prep advisor who lives with her husband and cats in Plano, Texas. She has studied linguistics and creative writing at Baylor University and the University of North Texas.

Adam McOmber

A List of New Gods

Goats. Dogs. Mirrors. Animals that look like goats and dogs and mirrors. Dracula. The junk room in my grandparents’ house. Clouds of black smoke that issue from old-fashioned tractors. The “artificiality of desire.” A woman who ventures into a forest at midnight (Victorian dress). Cornfields. Incarnate concepts. Being sick at college. Happier times. Cardboard castles at Halloween. Naiads. Nymphs. The male versions of naiads and nymphs. What are those called? The loosening hold of civilization. Young men on the bike path. Perverse spatiality. Two sailors alone on Christmas Eve in a dim-lit bar. Perpetual disintegration. Dread. Sinister acoustics. Dionysiac architecture. Wandering in a city and coming back to the same spot again and again. The notion of “Late Romance.” Cocks. Semen. The taste of semen. The notion that all of us produce only fragments of a much larger work…we can never produce the artifact in its entirety. The abyssal dimension. Documenting symptoms. Murals in childhood playrooms. Yellow lights in the darkness. England. Drive-in movie theaters. The pathology of love. The obscene. Recurring dreams (handsome boy at a county fair). Cipher Signals. The subject beyond the wall of language. Strange sensations in the spine.

Adam McOmber is the author of three novels, The White Forest (Touchstone), Jesus and John (Lethe) and The Ghost Finders (JournalStone) as well as three collections of short stories, My House Gathers Desires (BOA), This New & Poisonous Air (BOA) and Fantasy Kit (Black Lawrence). His new novel, Hound of the Baskervilles, an erotic and Weird reimagining of the Conan Doyle original was released by Lethe Press in October 2022. He is a core faculty member in the MFA Writing Program at Vermont College of Fine Arts as well as editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Hunger Mountain.

Tomas Baiza

Mexican Teeth

“Are you Indian?” the dental instructor said.

José pried his eyes from the snow falling outside the window and peered upward, into the harsh glare of the exam light. Around him hummed the purposeful drone of a large university school of dentistry—drills, sprayers, buffers, rotating drivers, suction tubes, and the occasional yelp from fellow patients who had subjected themselves to the earnest efforts of young dentists-in-training. 

The practicum clinic occupied the entire third floor of the dental school. José had scanned the broad space on the way to his chair in the far corner, closest to the windows. The floor was laid out in a utilitarian cube-farm grid, each examination chair surrounded by shoulder-high partitions covered in grayish-tan cloth the shade of a sick mouse. José’s nostrils flared at the competing odors of disinfectant, cherry mouthwash, and the burnt essence of teeth undergoing any number of invasive procedures. Beyond the windows, the snow fell and fell—a pummeling reminder of just how far he was from California.

José didn’t think it was possible to feel even worse about himself until he had come to Michigan for graduate school.

The instructor’s face was obscured by a surgical mask and plastic safety goggles. José  thought maybe she was Asian. Behind her, several eager dental students looked on in fascination, their heads floating in his peripheral like anxious, debt-ridden spirits.

“I mean, not South-Asian-Indian,” the instructor said, “but native? Native American?”

José stretched his jaw wider as her fingers explored his mouth. The sour tang of latex spread across his tongue. “Definitely American,” he would have liked to say, but he knew the words would sound as though he were gargling marbles. He settled on a shrug.

The dentist smirked as she slipped a hissing plastic tube into his mouth. “Close, please.”

José pressed his lips around the tube. A gurgling rush of saliva and blood fled from his mouth. 

The dentist nodded at him again.

“So, you’re not sure if you’re Native American?” she said, returning the suction wand to its mount. 

José smacked on the coppery essence of blood and tongued the raw edges of gum where the future-dentists had probed him with examination tools that resembled miniature pirate hooks. One student—a clean-cut young man with a clipped accent that José had come to associate with the upper-Midwest—had been more aggressive than the rest, pulling the curved pick beneath his gums in harsh swipes that made his toes curl in his shoes. José had forced himself to not cry out, instead focusing on the white-hot anger that blossomed in his chest.

“Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele,” his mother had once told him, when he was little. Never let them see how much it hurts. She was talking about José’s alcoholic father and not dentists, but here in the exam chair, he took his mother’s advice to heart, bit down on the pain, and embraced a smoldering resentment for the dental student. His breathing slowed as the anger allowed him to focus. 

“Mexican,” José said to the instructor, knowing it was a lie—or a half-lie. He wasn’t born in Mexico. Neither was his mother. And he knew not to say “Chicano.” That wouldn’t mean shit to anyone here in Ann Arbor, he thought.

Behind her goggles, the dentist’s eyes widened in acknowledgement. “That makes sense.”

José blinked. This was new. No one had ever said that him being Mexican “made sense.” On the contrary, they would inspect his pale, freckled, half-white face—some subtly and with grace, others unabashedly obvious—and come up confused. Occasionally, someone would dance awkwardly around his subtle accent, or how he pronounced his name. Some would ask where he was from. It never helped to tell them, “California.” 

“No, before that,” they would say.

José squinted at the instructor in an exaggerated huh? as the gaggle of dental students waited breathlessly for an explanation from the woman whose power over them approached Old Testament, Yahweh-level dimensions. 

The dentist clicked her stainless steel pick against José’s front tooth. Instinctively, he opened wide. 

“See here,” she said to her students, angling a small mirror into his mouth. 

The clean-cut student leaned in, close enough for José to breathe in his smothering cologne. “Sinodonty,” the young man said with an air of innate authority.

There was something about the student’s blue eyes that José found unnerving. 

He breathed through his mouth and studied the young man’s face, half-covered by his mask. White, wealthy, and unquestionably entitled to all good things were what came to José’s mind. The future-dentist was maybe a couple of years younger than him, but far more confident in his academic surroundings. He reminded José of the preeminent members of his own graduate cohort, the early-stage intellectuals who associated so easily with their History professors, who knew without being told to bring Toblerone chocolates for the group when it was their turn to lead seminar discussions, who could recite all of the latest historiographical theories that they’d absorbed from their elite undergraduate institutions, and who knew which campus cafés made the best espressos. 

They were the ones who never felt like imposters who had managed to trick the masters of the Academy into giving them a seat at the table. 

This guy was bred for this, José thought. He realized his hands were balled into fists. The dental student smiled down on him from behind his mask and José knew, from his vulnerable position on the examination chair, that this was just one more person who belonged at this university more than he did. 

“Correct, Colby.” The dental instructor glanced at the students who pressed in around her. “Note the upper incisors,” she said, pushing José’s tongue back with the mirror. “The deep, shovel-shaped groove behind the teeth is common among East Asian populations, or people of Asian ancestry. My own teeth exhibit the same characteristics.”

One of the students—a diminutive woman with large, watery eyes—raised her hand. “But, Dr. Chen, the patient just said—”

“That he’s Mexican, yes. But what is a Mexican?”

José looked up quizzically at the dentist.

“As Colby clearly remembers from my lecture, ‘Diversity and Dentistry,’ Native Americans are descended from Asiatic people. One of the signature ethno-specific features of Asian teeth is sinodonty,” she said with a nod to Colby, “—as seen by these deeply concave pockets behind the upper incisors.” The dentist flipped her tool and nudged the mirrored end against the roof of José’s mouth, pulling his head upward. “Native Americans share this characteristic. Mexicans and other Latin Americans have native roots, and many of them have maintained this physiological trait.”

José’s body tensed as the masked dental students took turns peering into the mirror angled behind his front teeth. One of the students had almond-shaped, coffee-brown eyes. José hoped he was Latino, but behind the mask he could have just as easily been Persian, Turkish, or Italian. The student leaned in especially close—close enough to inspect the details of his beginner ear gauges. 

José listened to Ear Gauge’s soft breathing behind his mask. Those brown eyes glanced upward from his open mouth and José felt a fizz of adrenaline that made him glad he was wearing a shirt that stretched past his beltline. 

As he fidgeted in the exam chair, José wondered whether Ear Gauge was out, and what his dentistry professors thought of this young man’s personal adornment choices. Did they view him with suspicion? Amusement? Pity? Did they gossip in faculty meetings about how this boldly counterculture dentist would struggle to start a respectable practice and probably find himself providing under-resourced care in a government-subsidized clinic in Detroit or some reservation in South Dakota? 

José wondered—for the hundredth time—what his own professors thought about him. Despite his good grades, he pictured them laughing gently as they read his literature reviews, puzzling over how he got himself admitted to one of the best History programs in the country, if not the world. José imagined the dental students leaning in so close that they entered his mouth and slithered down his throat, inspecting everything about him along the way. He wondered whether they would see from the inside out what his professors almost surely did: That this was all a big fucking joke. A sham. One of those fish-out-of-water stories where, instead of eventually learning how to blend in, the alienation would grow until the uncomfortable truth could no longer be denied: That the kid who attended his local state commuter university and had paid for his undergraduate tuition from his welding and pizza delivery jobs had no business taking up space in a selective graduate program.

Colby fingered José’s tongue to the side and slid the mirror behind his incisors. “This mouth is a mess,” he mumbled, just loud enough for the closest dental students to hear. Watery Eyes let slip a gasp.

“Dude…” Ear Gauge whispered, shaking his head at his classmate.

José fought the urge to grab the cocksure Colby by the throat and growl in his thickest homeboy brogue, “The fuck that supposed to mean, bro?” But strangling a cocky, kiss-ass dental student would definitely not help him escape the dull pain that had kept him up at nights, pacing his underlit apartment, reminded him that the childhood deformities he had hoped were resolved would keep sniffing at his heels if he didn’t suck it up and do something about them.

José concentrated on his breathing. Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele.

“Alright, Colby,” said Dr. Chen. Her tone was flat and even. “Let the others get a look.” Colby and José locked eyes for a moment before the dental student backed away for the rest of the cohort to get their turn.

As the students ducked down to inspect his Mexican teeth, José asked himself whether the fact that his graduate fellowship covered treatment at the university dental school was worth being essentialized by pedantic faculty and poked at by zealous students with woefully underdeveloped people skills. He cursed yet again his decision to leave California, where half-Mexican Chicanos like him were a dime a dozen, but in Ann Arbor were only slightly less exotic and welcome than Asian carp or kudzu. Why didn’t I just take that fellowship from Berkeley? he fumed as one dental student’s gaze alternated with pointed skepticism between his face and his shovel-shaped incisors. I’d have mostly blended in there. But no, I had to go and “find myself” by leaving everyone and everything that had ever told me who and what I was—to a place that half my family couldn’t find on a fucking map, to the Midwest where the human landscape is simpler, where if you’re not white, then you’re Black, and if you’re neither, you’re a curiosity at best and an inconvenience at worst. 

Out of the corner of his eye, José watched the ice flakes slap against the clinic windows.

And where it fucking snows. 

•

José had seen snow exactly once before in his life. The weekend trip to the Sierras happened when he was five, a year before his father left for good. His mother had been skeptical about the outing, but José’s father argued that it would help the boy. “The kid’s just so sensitive,” his father had complained. “A couple days in the mountains washing in rivers will put some hair on his sunken little chest.”

The rare July storm crept in slowly, whispering its arrival with a few stray snowflakes. Little José looked into the gray sky with wonder and tracked the falling snow against the dark green pine trees. He’d never seen anything so beautiful. But by the end of the first day, seven miles from the trailhead, the weather front billowed over the surrounding mountains and shed large, thumb-sized flakes that turned his father’s mood foul. In the late-afternoon darkness of the storm, they unrolled their sleeping bags beneath a broad, hanging rock and stared into the coming night as the drifts accumulated. José sat quietly while his father drank from a flask and glowered into the curtain of sideways-falling snow.

The boy awoke in near-total blackness, panting and covered in sweat despite the cold. Where once had been the opening to their rock shelter was now a wall of white powder. The enclosed space smelled of dry pine needles and alcohol. Next to him lay his father, snoring.

Pain lanced through José’s bladder. “Daddy!” 

His father answered with a grunt.

“Daddy, I have to pee.”

The man rolled over in his sleeping bag and began to snore louder. 

José reached out and nudged him. “I have to go!”

A hand clamped down on José’s wrist like a vice. In the darkness, he felt his father’s sour-sweet breath on his face. 

“Then get the fuck out there and go take a piss,” the man said, his voice slurred.

José opened his mouth in a rush of instinct that he had never felt before. Escape sparked through his brain like a lightning strike. Before his teeth could reach their target, the hand released him. 

“Go on,” his father belched. “Do what you need to do.”

It took José several minutes to dig through the snow that had all but entombed them both. The boy rolled down the drift and had barely unzipped his jeans before the piss burst from him. He watched as the yellow stream bore a hole into the snow in a puff of steam. His face stung and his teeth chattered in the cold, teeth that filled his mouth in strange and exotic formations and made his cheeks bulge as though he’d been struck with a baseball bat. His mother had tried to convince him that his teeth were a sign that he was special, but even at five years old, he knew that what was happening in his mouth was deeply wrong. As his bladder emptied, José shivered and reflected on what he had almost done with those misshapen teeth.

Would he have really bitten his father?

•

Dr. Chen gestured at an x-ray that hung from a portable light board across from the examination chair. “The extraction of your upper wisdom tooth will be textbook,” she said. “It’s mostly erupted and should pop out fairly easily.”

“You mean teeth, right?” José said. “My wisdom teeth.” He ran his tongue over the exposed third molar that had been causing him discomfort the past few months. He repeated the action on the opposite side where, instead of a tooth, a mound of tissue pushed out from the back of his mouth. 

“I can feel the other one on the other side, right here.”

The instructor shook her head. “Everyone look at this,” she said, drawing her students’ attention back to the x-ray image. “Here is the upper-left wisdom tooth—well developed, exposed, and ready for extraction.” Slowly, she slid her gloved finger to the opposite corner. “Here, however, you’ll see something interesting.”

With the solemnity of undertakers, the students leaned toward the ghostly representation of José’s mouth.

Ear Gauge rubbed his chin with the back of his gloved hand. “Where are his premolars?”

“He doesn’t have any. Anyone else notice that he has only twenty-four teeth? Far short of the usual thirty to thirty-two.” The instructor returned to José and pulled his mouth open with her thumb. “This patient has had extensive orthodontia. Were you treated for supernumerary teeth as a child?” she said to José.

“Huh?”

“Extra teeth.”

“Yeah, my family called them ‘alligator teeth.’” José frowned at the dentistry students who looked on in morbid curiosity, as if the exchange between dentist and patient were a murder mystery playing out before them. “My permanent teeth didn’t push out my baby teeth, so they all had to get pulled out. A bunch of my adult teeth, too.” 

“El Cocodrilo” is what his abuelita and tías called him as a child. Alligator—for the double-row of teeth that bristled from his gums, so many that it seemed like they came in sideways. 

José had refused to smile for school photos until middle school, after he had endured several rounds of dental surgery. Before he’d gotten his braces, his classmates teased that you could put a Pee-Chee folder in the gaps between his teeth and still have room for a couple of fried tortilla chips. 

The worst of the abuse came from Kiko Guzmán, a skinny kid whose narrow eyes searched constantly for chinks in José’s quiet-boy armor. He and José shared a desk in the fifth grade, at the new school José was forced to attend after his mother had kicked his father out for good and they had to move into a cheaper apartment in a different school district. José noted the differences immediately. Before, he could eat lunch in relative peace and fights among the students were rare. At his new school, however, unaffiliated boys like José wandered the playground at recess, their heads on a swivel and waiting for something to happen. On any given day, some boy—or even girl—might decide that José would make a good foil for their dreams of grandeur within the cutthroat grade-school ecosystem. Kiko was especially ambitious.

José hated Kiko the moment they met. Although José was by far the taller of the two, the small, dark Kiko sensed with that venomous brilliance of all bullies that his deskmate was shy and could not count on the other Mexican kids to back him up in a fight.

For several weeks the tension between them festered, with Kiko mocking José for any physical shortcoming—his height, his freckles, his light skin. It was inevitable that the little shit would zero in on José’s cartoonish teeth. As their teacher wrote on the board, Kiko would hold up surprisingly good sketches of a narrow face marred by crooked fangs bursting from a gash of a mouth. 

“Check it out,” Kiko said once as he passed around his latest rendition of José. “Fool kid’s like a werewolf that didn’t change all the way!”

The others would snigger at the drawings while José fantasized about sliding beneath his desk and disappearing into nothing. The dam holding back his anger and shame groaned with every new image.

The dam finally burst in the cafeteria lunch line.

“Hey, Wolf Man,” Kiko said, loud enough for everyone else to hear, “alguién me dijo que you gotta use a toilet scrubber to brush those scraggly-ass chompers.”

The other kids laughed as they stood in line with their aluminum lunch trays, enveloped in the odor of elementary school gravy that smelled like burnt car wax. José looked to the lunch ladies for help, but the women, blank-faced and hunched beneath their droopy hair nets, slopped food onto trays with robotic precision before motioning the kids onward.

Kiko grinned, reveling in the laughter. “You gotta get that shit taken care of, ¿tú sabes?” He reached up and squeezed José’s cheeks between his forefinger and thumb. “Show us your horsey teeth,” he said as his fingers edged toward José’s mouth.

One of the lunch ladies paused to stare at the boys, her ladle of rubbery mashed potatoes frozen in mid-air. 

José tried to push away Kiko’s hand, but the boy’s grip was too strong.

“Oye, mocoso,” the lunch lady said. “Déjalo en paz.” Hey, brat. Leave him alone.

“C’mon, fool. Let’s see ‘em.” Kiko’s voice was now barely a whispered growl as his squirming fingers pushed past José’s lips. “¡No mames, puto! How you gonna suck dick with all those gnarly fangs getting in the way?”

Deep inside José, something broke. He relaxed his jaw and opened. Kiko squeaked as his fingers slipped past waiting teeth. José closed his eyes and thought that it couldn’t be much worse than biting into one of the thin, gray cafeteria hamburger patties…

Kiko’s scream had barely reached its crescendo before the lunch lady pulled the fire alarm.

*

Beeping from the next examination cubicle caused José to jump in his chair. A bead of sweat rolled past his temple as Dr. Chen looked on with concern. “Are you alright?”

“Y-yeah.” José blinked into the overhead light and wondered what the dentist and her students would do if he simply stood up and left. “I’m okay,” he said. “I think I’m just having trouble keeping my mouth open.”

Dr. Chen nodded. “Not surprised. A small-mouthed patient, pedagogically useful pathology, and curious dental students all add up to jaw fatigue.”

“I’ll get the gag,” Kiss-Ass announced.

“Prop, Colby.” Dr. Chen’s eyes bored into her student. “In the presence of the patient, we call it a ‘prop’.” 

From his prone position, José watched instructor and student measure one another for several tense seconds before Kiss-Ass stalked to a supply cabinet. While he searched the shelves, Ear Gauge positioned himself next to the exam chair and subtly rested a hand on José’s knee. Long fingers gently squeezed.

“You’re doing great, José.”

“Thank you.”

José liked that Ear Gauge said his name correctly. He wondered if the student’s gesture was standard patient-care procedure now, a new protocol sweeping through the nation’s dental programs. He decided it was unlikely and that a far more reasonable interpretation of this development was that the dental student had boundary issues and was super into him. He asked himself what he should do and decided that Ear Gauge’s horniness just barely edged out Kiss-Ass Colby’s closeted sadism and piercing blue eyes. Inappropriate behavior or not, José had to admit that he much preferred the soft brown of Ear Gauge’s eyes that drank him in from behind his oversized safety goggles.

Controlling for Kiss-Ass’s cologne, José was fairly certain that he would be able to feel the difference between his and Ear Gauge’s fingers exploring his mouth if his eyes were closed. 

The beeping in the next cubicle abruptly ended. With the new silence, the swirling echoes of Kiko’s wailing and the cafeteria fire alarm faded into the humming busyness of the dental clinic. José decided that, creepy or not, Ear Gauge at least gave a shit about him—even if it was just to secretly cop a feel. 

Kiss-Ass, on the other hand, triggered him in an entirely different way. 

José managed a smile and reflected on his principal’s words to his mother following the school district’s investigation of what would later be known as the César Chávez Middle School Lunchroom Incident.

“We have concerns, Ms. Bernal,” the principal said, her stubby fingers bunched together on the desktop. “The other boy’s behavior was clearly unacceptable, but José’s response…it can only be called…disproportionate.”

José’s mother fought back tears. “He needs to be in school, Ms. Okoye.”

“He will,” the principal said, her tone conciliatory. “But Ms. Bernal, you must understand the situation. We can’t have them in the same classroom, what with all the uncertainty.” The principal pinched the bridge of her nose in frustration. “Kiko’s mother says that the reattachment isn’t looking good.”

Seated next to his mother, José stared quietly at the floor. He pushed his tongue against his front teeth, still loose from the trauma of liberating Kiko’s finger from his hand. 

Let’s see you try to draw me with no thumb, fuckface.

José had stood motionless as Kiko writhed on the linoleum cafeteria floor. The boy clutched his mutilated hand to his chest and gazed up at José, terrified. As classmates and lunch ladies looked on in shock, José rolled Kiko’s thumb around his mouth, like a soggy chicharrón. It tasted a little like pencil lead and a lot like blood and felt larger than it really was. José bent his neck and let Kiko’s finger plop onto his lunch tray. 

The fire alarm blared. One of the lunch ladies fainted behind the counter.

A week after his meeting with the principal, José found himself in a small classroom attached to the district offices with other “gifted” children—kids whose learning differences and particular needs demanded a much smaller student-to-teacher ratio. For as much as it embarrassed him to be removed from his new school, José marveled how quickly he had modified his circumstances and, with one bite, succeeded in extracting himself from an unpleasant and untenable situation.

*

“Here’s the gag,” Kiss-Ass said, “—I mean, the prop.” He handed the instructor a small rubber wedge wrapped in plastic.

Dr. Chen dropped the package into the front pocket of her smock. “Not sure it’s time for this,” she said, “but we’ll see where things go. Has everyone had a chance to examine the patient? Please note the opportunistic placement of the remaining teeth. Your orthodontic surgeons really earned their pay, José.”

As the rest of the cohort toured his mouth, José fought the memory of arriving at his grandmother’s house one afternoon with his mother, still distraught over the cost of his coming surgeries.

“Es tu culpa,” his abuelita had said as she stirred a large pot of menudo on the stove. The steam rising from the battered pot curled around her head of thick gray hair like a spell from a fairy tale.

José’s mother sat up straight at the kitchen table. “How the hell is it my fault?”

“Porque, tonta, el pobrecito tiene los dientes mejicanos en una mandíbula gringa.”

Because, fool, the poor thing has Mexican teeth in a whiteboy jaw.

José winced at the memory of his mother collapsing into tears as his grandmother shook her head with a grim heaviness that he had always associated with being Mexican, but had taken years to understand was more to do with being a Mexican woman. José’s mother had sacrificed her financial security not because he was entitled to straight teeth, but because she felt it was her duty to him as his mother.

José prayed the dental students wouldn’t notice when his nose began to sting. 

“I’d like for you all to answer a question for me,” said Dr. Chen. “Why are we only talking about removing one upper wisdom tooth and not two?”

The students huddled around the x-ray image again. 

“He had the other one removed,” Kiss-Ass Colby said.

Dr. Chen smirked. “Is my student correct, José?”

José shook his head.

“No, you did not,” she said and turned to her students. “Look more closely this time.”

Ear Gauge pointed at a blurry spot on the x-ray where José’s upper-right wisdom tooth should have been. “What’s that?”

“Odontoma!” Kiss-Ass blurted out, barely containing the triumph in his voice.

The instructor gave a tired nod. “Correct again, Colby. We are privileged to have a patient with a classic presentation of a complex odontoma. Does anyone remember the difference between a compound and complex odon—”

“Yes. A com—”

“Not you, Colby.”

“But it’s—”

“Someone else?” said Dr. Chen, her eyes passing over the other students.

The tiny young woman with the wet, shining eyes raised her hand. “Um…compound odontoma tend to appear between teeth, whereas complex odontoma—”

“Occur in the posterior jaw in the form of a tumor!” said Kiss-Ass.

Dr. Chen breathed a long sigh behind her mask that fogged her safety goggles. “Thank you both,” she said, opening José’s mouth again. “There is only one wisdom tooth on the upper-left to remove because what we have on the upper-right is not a normal tooth, but this.” 

Yet again, José held his mouth open as the students filed past, staring with wonder into his mouth and poking at the mound of flesh that he had never given much attention. Watery Eyes hovered long enough to catch a glimpse of José’s oral deformity before skittering away, while Ear Gauge lingered just a little longer than the last time, his breathing low and relaxed. 

By the time Kiss-Ass finished his perfunctory and frustrated inspection, José’s jaw had started to cramp. He rubbed his cheek when the students concluded their review.

“José,” the instructor said, “has anyone ever pointed out this anomaly to you?”

“No, I just thought I was lucky that my wisdom tooth never came out on that side.”

“Technically, that’s correct. A tooth never erupted from that space back there, but we’re not talking about just one tooth. Beneath the surface are at least a dozen teeth.” Dr. Chen paused for the significance of her words to descend upon her students. “What was originally a primordial bud that was supposed to develop into a single tooth, instead, split into multiple buds, each one an abandoned possibility, a part of you that would never be able to grow.”

“Apparently, this can happen in horses and canids, too,” Kiss-Ass said from over her shoulder. José was certain the dental student shot him a nasty look from behind his surgical mask.

Dr. Chen took a steadying breath. “This is not veterinary dentistry, Colby.”

“Does it have anything to do with my Mexican teeth?” José said, his head swimming with images of his mother crying in his grandmother’s kitchen.

The dentist laughed. “No, odontoma are not associated with any particular human population or ethnophysiological trait. It can happen to anyone—in any mammal, for that matter,” she added with a quick glance at Kiss-Ass, “—but it is intrinsically interesting. Particularly so in a teaching environment.” 

“Shall I get the surgical tray?” Ear Gauge said, examining José’s x-ray. “It looks like they should just pop out. Easy peasy.”

“Yes and no,” she replied. “The area is easily accessible, the simple incision would expose the entire growth, and the odontoma does not appear to be rooted in bone.”

Kiss-Ass cocked his head and shrugged. “Then what’s the problem?”

“The problem, Colby, is that a more thorough inspection of the x-ray image and the patient’s physiology would show you that the tumor borders his nasal cavity.” 

“A nasal ectopic odontoma!” Watery Eyes said, her voice tinged with awe.

The smile behind Dr. Chen’s mask made the corners of her eyes crinkle. “Not quite—it hasn’t broken through and it appears to be stable. And for that reason, we are going to do nothing.”

Kiss-Ass’s shoulders slumped. “No surgical intervention?”

“Sorry, Colby, not this time,” Dr. Chen said. “Removing the growth might perforate the nasal wall. Then we’d be looking at an immediate transport to the university medical center for reconstructive surgery.”

Ear Gauge quietly placed himself next to the examination chair. José felt the dental student’s hand on his knee again. Any casual observer would have ignored it—an innocent gesture intended to comfort the patient—but José felt the fingers squeeze tight, and then again.

¡No mames, puto! How you gonna suck dick with all those gnarly chompers getting in the way?

“Best to leave well enough alone,” Dr. Chen said. “Those secret little teeth don’t impede normal activities and will never see the light of day.”

Ear Gauge’s fingers slid higher a couple of inches. José placed his hands protectively on his lap. 

Nunca dejes que vean cuánto te duele…

Conflicting waves of relief and disappointment washed over José. Behind closed eyes, he half-listened to the doctor and her students discuss the peculiarities of his case. Their voices faded into the ambient murmur of the dental clinic, the purposeful buzz of a learning space filled with eager students and time-worn teachers, all doing their best to make sense of the problems presented to them. José reminded himself that he could never afford any of this if it weren’t for his graduate fellowship. Second-tier care, he reflected. Like the welfare doctors after his father left, the barber college bowl cuts, the mis-matched crutches from his myriad boyhood injuries. He thought of all that his mother had done to provide him the things he needed, but that always felt a little…off.

Listening to the gentle white noise of the clinic, José cursed his lack of gratitude. 

“Gracias, ‘Amá,” he whispered.

“Beg pardon?” said Dr. Chen.

José opened his eyes. “Is that it? Can I go now?”

Dr. Chen stared in surprise. “Not unless you want to leave in that exposed wisdom tooth that’s been bothering you. Also,” she added, “my students would benefit from performing this procedure. Extractions are fairly routine for them, but not adult wisdom teeth.” Dr. Chen tilted her head at José. “My students and I would really appreciate it if you stayed.”

José glanced to his left where the ice continued to slap against the windows and accumulate against the sills, the line of snow inching higher. 

Where would I go if I just got up and left?

He imagined trudging through muddy snow to his apartment, a mile from campus where the rents were cheaper. He would stand out front of the rundown complex, the ice flakes nipping at his cheeks. He would flip off the building and then start walking. The thought of walking all the way home to California made him smile. No more pretentious seminar discussions. No more literature reviews. No more thin, tasteless tortillas from Meijers Superstore. 

What would his mother say when he appeared on her porch? Would she throw her arms around him, or stand in the doorway, hands on hips, and give him a long I-told-you-so lecture in Spanglish?

It had taken José almost a month to screw up the courage to tell his mother about the acceptance letter.

“M’ijo, ¿por qué querrías irte?” José’s mother pleaded from the kitchen table. “To Michigan of all places? It’s so far.”

“Because it’s a good school, Mom. And they offered me a scholarship—a fellowship, I mean.”

She read the acceptance letter again. José watched as her fingertips worried the raised university seal meant to give the document an aura of significance. “Graduate Minority Fellowship,” she hissed. “M’ijo, I think the only reason they gave you that is because you checked the box.”

The acceptance letter tore halfway through when José snatched it from his mother’s hands. “Maybe they think I’m worth it, Mom. Maybe they looked at my grades and personal statement and recommendations and thought that I’d be an actual asset to the program.”

“A lo mejor,” his mother said. Maybe so. “Sometimes they do things more for themselves than for us, m’ijo. Pero one thing I do know is that you’re better off here. What would I do with you gone?”

José sat across from his mother and raised his hands in exasperation. “What you always do? Act like I’m fine, like everything’s okay and that there’s nothing to discuss.”

“There is nothing to discuss!”

José had flinched at the sound of his mother’s open palm slapping the kitchen table. 

“There’s nothing wrong with you!” she yelled. “You’re just a late bloomer, that’s all.”

José let the torn acceptance letter fall to the kitchen floor and buried his face in his hands. “Oh my God, Mom, why is it always about me needing a girlfriend?”

“M’ijo, moving away won’t make you any less different.”

“So you do think that I’m different?”

“I meant special.” His mother drew a deep breath and held it for a long time. “José,” she said, her voice shaking, “m’ijito, the stuff inside us can change. You got past all the…biting things. You can get past these other things, too. You don’t have to go away to be yourself.”

*

José gazed out the third-floor window at the falling snow and wondered whether freezing to death would feel worse than facing either his mother or seminar professors.

“So what do you say?” said Dr. Chen. “Help us out by letting us treat you?”

José’s eyes passed over the dentist and students who crowded around him. “Alright,” he said. “Why not?”

Dr. Chen smiled behind her surgical mask. “Excellent. Anna, would you kindly ready the topical?” Watery Eyes turned to the exam table and began unwrapping two cotton swabs with long blue stems. “Emilio,” she said to Ear Gauge, “please prepare the infiltration anesthetic, 1-mil four percent articaine, buccal and lingual.”

“Needle size?” Ear Gauge asked. 

“Thirty.”

Kiss-Ass stepped forward. “What about me?”

Dr. Chen closed her eyes and then opened them slowly in a show of practiced moderation. “Patience, Colby.”

Colby’s nostrils flared as he stared at José, who despite his vulnerable position on the exam chair, dared to meet the dental student’s slate-blue eyes. Again, their color stirred a deep uneasiness within him.

Watery Eyes leaned over José and rubbed the area around his wisdom tooth with anesthetic. As she worked, José wondered why Colby was such an asshole. It was easier, he knew, to simply despise this arrogant, egotistical, dismissive prick, but natural curiosity forced him to consider the genesis of the future-dentist’s douchebaggery. Has he always been like this? Did he learn it along the way? Is this a nature-nurture thing? What did Kiss-Ass get out of always being first—or at least striving to be so? 

Gradually, José came to an uncomfortable conclusion: that maybe he and Kiss-Ass Colby shared a need for validation. As Watery Eyes finished swabbing his gums, José looked closely at Colby and wondered whether, beneath the officious facade, there might exist a decent person who could someday find a kinder way to get what he needed. Is that what that little shit Kiko had wanted, too? Did he just want to know that people loved him? Did Kiko ever find a way other than cruelty to feel worthy?

José opened his tingling mouth to say something—what?—to Kiss-Ass when the dental student’s eyes narrowed. 

“Alright, topical’s done,” Kiss-Ass said. “Any time now, Emilio.” 

The contempt in the dental student’s voice made José’s scalp prickle. In his head swirled the echoes of grade-school classmates mocking his own name. Hoe-ZAY, Kiko and the others would call him, laughing at how someone who looked so white could have such a name. José felt a distinct ringing in his ears as the anger returned and the last wisps of empathy toward Kiss-Ass dissipated in the clinic’s stifling, overheated air.

Ear Gauge—Emilio—pulled a rolling stool beside the exam chair. In his hand was a polished steel dental syringe, the kind with the two flared finger rings that José always thought looked unnecessarily steampunk. 

Ear Gauge smiled down on him. “I hope that you’re not nervous about needles,” he said to José. “Some guys can get squicked out just before insertion.” 

Watery Eyes’ brows arched high across her forehead.

“I’m good,” said José.

Ear Gauge patted José’s forearm before angling the gleaming syringe into his gaping mouth. The needle scraped across large incisors before finding a suitable spot. Despite the numbing agent that Watery Eyes had applied, José’s eyes stung as the articaine sizzled through his gum.

“¿Todo bien?” Ear Gauge said in sympathy. José thought his accent sounded vaguely Cuban or Puerto Rican, he couldn’t tell. “Solo un par de inyecciones más.” Just a couple more shots…

With each injection, José imagined his teeth—the ones that had caused him so much pain over the years—waking from their slumber and opening themselves up to the as-yet undetermined possibilities of the moment.

Over Ear Gauge’s shoulder, Kiss-Ass frowned and shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Are you two amigos about done?”

“Relájate, bocón,” Ear Gauge muttered with a wink at José. Chill out, big mouth. José felt an unexpected gratitude that Ear Gauge would gift him with snippets of Spanish as the student rose from the stool and turned to his colleague. “He’s all yours now.”

“Colby,” said Dr. Chen, “it’s your turn to make the incision. Prepare the blade, please. A number ten should do.” Kiss-Ass reached quickly for the tray containing the scalpels. José’s stomach lurched at the thought of the blue-eyed student’s fingers in his mouth again. 

No sooner had Ear Gauge removed the gleaming syringe than Kiss-Ass nudged him aside with his elbow. In one hand was the scalpel, in the other, between his gloved thumb and index finger, a rubber wedge. “Open wide,” he said.

“Not yet.” Dr. Chen placed a hand on Colby’s shoulder. “We don’t employ props until absolutely necessary. Despite his small mouth, the patient has done admirably well providing us with enough space to do our work. Can you hold on just a little longer, José?”

“Mmm-hmm” José said, trying not to gag on the anesthetic that ran down the back of his throat.

Kiss-Ass huffed behind his mask and let the dental prop fall with a clang onto the exam tray, opting instead for a wad of cotton gauze. He spun on his stool, leaned over José, and began to shove gauze into the corners of his mouth. The dental student’s eyes widened. José watched, paralyzed, as dilated black pupils expanded within blue irises in anticipation of what was to come. 

As fingers jammed cotton into the dark recesses of his already crowded mouth, José realized with a start why Kiss-Ass’s gaze was so unsettling: the hateful twat’s eyes were the same color as his father’s.   

M’ijito, the stuff inside us can change. You got past all the…biting things. You can get past the other things, too.

Kiss-Ass raised his scalpel, the light glinting off its stainless steel blade. José squeezed his eyes shut and felt his jaws involuntarily resist the student’s probing fingers. The cotton gauze tasted like stale, dusty bread.

“C’mon, let’s do this,” said Kiss-Ass.

*

José lifted his head from the floor. His cheek throbbed from the backhand his father had delivered moments before.

“Look what the little animal did to me!” his father shouted, his blue eyes round with shock. He stood near the front door, a hand pressed tightly over his forearm. The air was sour with the stench of cheap beer and cigarettes. José watched as blood flowed down his father’s pale arm, along trembling, splayed fingers, and fell in droplets onto the old parquet floor.

José’s mother ran to him and placed a hand on his reddened cheek. She pushed her forehead into his, giving him a close-up of her swollen, black eyes. 

“The fuck you expect him to do?” his mother said. “You should be proud of him for protecting me.” She pulled José off of the floor and hugged him again. “Discúlpame, m’ijito,” she sobbed. Forgive me. 

“How many times do I need to tell you—speak goddamn English!” yelled José’s father, his words thick with rage. He raised his forearm to eye-level. Blood ran freely from two jagged wounds on the meatiest part of the muscle, just below the crook of the arm. Each half-moon gash consisted of multiple tooth marks. One more second and José would have succeeded in removing a large chunk of forearm.  

His father cursed and took a step forward.

José’s mother stood between them. “Touch either one of us again and I swear to God I will cut everything between your legs clean off, from your belly button to your fucking taint. Maybe not tonight, or next week, but the next time you’re passed out drunk it’ll happen, and when it does that bite will be the least of your worries, you pinche dickless coward.” 

The man swayed in front of the door, blue eyes searching for an explanation to his woman’s sudden ferocity. “But look at this,” he said, almost whining, as blood flowed down his arm. “He fucking bit me!”

Silence stretched on for what felt like a lifetime before José’s father gave him a long look with those ghostly eyes and turned away.

José and his mother stood holding one another as the front door slammed shut. He pressed his face against her hip and breathed heavily as his cheek expanded and throbbed from the blow. After several minutes, she patted him on the back and shuffled into the kitchen to fill a plastic bucket with warm water and bleach. She kneeled onto the parquet floor and dragged an old dish towel across the smear of darkening blood.

“¿Te ayudo, Mommy?” Can I help?

His mother looked up to the ceiling, her eyes sparkling with tears. “No, m’ijito,” she gasped. “Está bien. Go to bed. I’ll take the day off tomorrow and we can just hang out. How’s that sound?”

José lay awake in bed, listening to his mother cry while she scrubbed the floor. The swelling in his cheek pressed against the riot of teeth that had so worried her lately—teeth that came in sideways, in front, and behind his baby teeth. Teeth that made his gums angry and red and bled when he ate.

Teeth that had made his father leave.

*

José concentrated on the red glow of the exam light through his eyelids as Colby’s fingertips pushed at his lips.

From far away, he heard Dr. Chen’s smooth, even voice. “Is everything alright, José?”

Kiss-Ass pushed again, harder this time—and José felt his mouth open, as if acting under its own will. Latexed fingers filled his mouth. A knuckle brushed deeply concave incisors causing José’s jaw muscles to quiver. The dizzying odor of overcooked cafeteria food filled his brain as the snow fell outside. Through slitted eyes, José glanced at the window. At least three inches of snow had accumulated on the lower sill since the examination had begun.  

“Wider, please,” Kiss-Ass said. 

José thought he heard a faint hint of annoyance. Fingers snaked through his mouth and shoved across his palate. 

“C’mon now, let’s get in there—”

Trembling jaw muscles failed, and José heard more than felt his Mexican teeth splintering as they met bone. 

Tomás Baiza is originally from San José, California, and now lives in Boise, Idaho, where writes and has served as a staff editor for The Idaho Review. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best American Short Stories anthologies, and has appeared in various print and online anthologies and journals.

Tomas's first novel, Delivery: A Pocho's Accidental Guide to College, Love, and Pizza Delivery, and his short-fiction collection, A Purpose to Our Savagery, are forthcoming in 2023 on Running Wild/RIZE Press.

Joan Halperin

Night Moves

He comes into my life and lights up a tunnel. His name is Eugene. I repeat it. I whisper it. I say it normally. If no one is home, I shout it. He brings a male smell with him. He brings charm.  He asks me how I feel, what I hate, what I love.  No one has ever asked me these kinds of questions. I copy his tastes, his habits. I begin to eat Camembert on crackers.  He puts the Trout Quintet on our phonograph. I play it over and over.  He wears sunglasses no matter what the time of day or the season. I wear sunglasses as well, tortoise shell frames and dark shades.  I wear them in the apartment and to school, parties. 

He had no place else to live and he’s a cousin just discharged from the army. During World War II, he was an obstetrician and gynecologist.  Now he needs an apartment.  My mother, a young widow, insists it’s up to me. Obviously he’ll have to occupy my room since he’s a doctor.  I agree and move to the dining room that holds a sleep sofa.

My friend Elaine asks why I wear them, the sunglasses.  It’s my secret. What’s the danger in having a secret love? 

Now that he has occupied my bedroom, I move into the living room.  I remember the front door opening and his entering my new quarters.  I feel superior to my mother. I must be more beautiful even though I don’t think of myself that way.

“Hello,” he says using that special soft laugh.

And so begin nights of longing, secretiveness and guilt when my cousin Eugene comes home from wherever he has been.  I am fourteen years old.  I dream we’ll marry.  I’ll wear a white dress and throw a corsage to Elaine. 

He pulls my blankets down toward the end of the bed. The dining room window faces a courtyard. A cat howls in the alley. Every sound stirs me into longing. Suddenly afraid, I push him away but he slaps my hand. I see a light go on in a window across the way. Then it goes out.  Someone coughs.  He runs his fingers over my breasts and traces a line past my naval and down to my vagina. He takes my hand and guides it toward himself. After a while he rises, kisses my forehead, and tip toes out. 

Darkness and a sudden emptiness.   I think of jumping out the window. I push my head into my pillow.  I smell my hand. It smells of him, a metallic scent mixed with powder. Then I spread my fingers out and place them over my eyes, my nose, and my mouth.   I howl inside of myself:  howls that grow louder and louder until they emerge as whimpers.

He will cling to me my whole life, long after he dies in a car accident. He will haunt me after I marry and have children, after I am widowed and begin to age. 

The way it happened? He and his fiancé crashed on an icy road, his body flung into a ditch, his sunglasses half buried in fresh fallen snow.

Joan Halperin lives at Orchard Cove a continuing care residence in Canton , Massachusetts. Here she writes, teaches, and participates in short story and book discussion groups, swims, exercises, writes and keeps in touch with three grandchildren. She's been published in Rosebud, New York Quarterly, Persimmon Tree, Leap Years, Light Years and others . She has sent out a newsletter , The Daily Touch, since the pandemic that features poems, contests, phantom trips. She can be reached at Jhalp1929@gmail.com

Brad Buchanan

Without the Power to Die: Following Emily Dickinson

I don’t remember exactly what caused me to faint before my bronchoscopy, but I do know that this episode convinced me that I had to write a poem in the style of Emily Dickinson. I hadn’t memorized any of her poems at the time, but I had taught some of them, and knew bits and pieces. The morning of the procedure, her poem about a train was on my mind:

            I like to see it lap the miles,
            And lick the valleys up

They were going to stick a metal tube down my throat and into my left lung to try and find out what was going on. Thinking about the sinuous movements of this metal probe inside my body reminded me of the snaking movements of Dickinson’s locomotive:

            And stop to feed itself at tanks
            And then, prodigious, step
            Around a pile of mountains

I had been diagnosed with “Cutaneous Panniculitis-like T-Cell Lymphoma (Not Otherwise Specified)” and nobody was sure what exactly to do about that, but the latest x-ray had shown something going on in my lung. Pneumonia seemed the likeliest cause, and the coughing I had been doing lent credence to this theory, but they wanted more information.

            And, supercilious, peer
           In shanties by the sides of roads…

I had sought a second opinion at Stanford’s Cutaneous Lymphoma clinic, and they had assured me that my lymphoma seemed like an “indolent” variety; in other words, nothing to get too worked up about. 

In fact, one doctor had told me, in a languid voice, that if I wanted to go hiking in the Himalayas for two months, he would have no problem with that. There was just the small question of what was happening in my lung to be explored. 

I kept insisting on more tests and biopsies to try and “stage” my illness; i.e. to find out how advanced it really was, but the rarity of my condition made it hard to evaluate. Dickinson’s train sounds a plaintive note I to which I could relate;

            Complaining all the while
            In horrid, hooting stanza,
            Then chase itself downhill

Pending the results of the bronchoscopy, the Stanford team had agreed with my UC Davis oncologist that neither chemo nor radiation was called for, and had also concurred that the only drug that would make any sense to use was Romidepsin, an agent not approved by the FDA as a first-time lymphoma treatment. My insurance, however, would not pay for such an unproven treatment. I had been frustrated to hear this, but not surprised. 

For the previous six months, I had been trying to convince the medical professionals I encountered to take my symptoms seriously; now that I had finally made some headway and gotten a diagnosis, it seemed inevitable that more bureaucratic obstacles would present themselves. I told my oncologist that I was hoping my bronchoscopy would clarify matters, somehow, and give my doctors ammunition to fight for my right to the best available treatment. I wanted to quote Dickinson at him, but I kept her to myself:

            My Life had stood—a Loaded Gun—
            In Corners— till a day
            The Owner passed—identified—
            And carried Me away—

The bronchoscopy entailed a general anesthetic, which meant signing a long release form acknowledging the risks and possible adverse consequences of the procedure. I made the mistake of letting the anesthesiologist tell me all these consequences, and although I tried to distract myself as he listed them in his deliberately perfunctory way, I began to feel dizzy.

I signed the form, as well as another advance directive, since my original one had not shown up in their computer files. It was a good thing that I was already lying down, though, because as soon as he had walked away with my paperwork, I passed out cold. It was my nurse who woke me up again, her hand on my shoulder, but it was Dickinson’s voice in my head that I remember:

            I heard a Fly buzz—when I died—
            The Stillness in the Room
            Was like the Stillness in the Air—
            Between the Heaves of Storm—

I hadn’t actually died, of course, but fainting away like that, swooning so suddenly, seemed like a kind of near-death experience. It felt like what I imagined death would feel like: a loss of control, first, and then of consciousness. 

Dickinson was the only poet I knew who seemed to have experienced what I felt at that moment: 

             I willed my Keepsakes—Signed away
             What portion of me be
             Assignable—and then it was
             There interposed a Fly—

She had even anticipated the redundant worst-case scenario forms I had signed before I winked out. I don’t recall a fly in the room, but that’s all that was missing. 

         With Blue—uncertain—stumbling Buzz—
         Between the light—and me—
         And then the Windows failed—and then
         I could not see to see—

My blackout was temporary, and soundless, but I couldn’t help but think of her poem after the bronchoscopy was completed (its findings were inconclusive), and I was wondering how I could write about what had just happened to me. 

I ended up writing “Vagal,” a poem that adopted Dickinson’s stanzaic form and even, to some degree, her staccato style, to try and capture the unnerving episode I had gone through. I had, in medical slang terms, “vagalled,” a verb which I hadn’t heard before, so I began the poem with an explanation: 

         Refuse the suggested autocorrect
         To “fatal,” first of all—
         Then think of the word as an active verb:
         To “vagal” means to fall 

         Asleep from stress at the sight of blood,
         Or an IV in your arm;
         It really freaks the nurses out—
         But does no lasting harm—

         As long as you don’t bang your head
         Too hard against the ground,
         They’ll treat you with renewed respect—
         And maybe atropine—

         Unless somehow your pulse speeds up
         To normal on its own,
         In which case there’s a sweet relief,
         An afterlife, a dream.

         The vagus nerve is the one you keep
         Whenever you stay calm—
         Until you find that losing it
         Will bring no special shame—

It was actually something of a relief to know the actual physiological reason behind my habit of konking out during or just before unpleasant procedures: I had once found myself under the dining room table as a lugubrious nurse took a blood sample from my arm for insurance purposes. In any event, to write about the bronchoscopy from this quasi-parodic point of view felt like a moral victory at the time, and enabled me to steel myself for the many more gruesome experiences that were yet to come. 

More than a year later, I heard a BBC podcast about Emily Dickinson, in particular her tendency to write poems from a point of view that seemed caught between life and death, a nearly posthumous perspective that I felt I could relate to. I used Dickinsonian stanzas as well as half-rhymes once more to sum up my situation a full year after my discharge from the hospital after my transplant:

 
         The Outpatient’s First Anniversary
         (after E. D.)

 
         I was reborn a year ago—
         the painful journey home
         reminded me how much had died
         in that eternal room—

 
         I found that I had lost the wife
         who once had called me friend—
         and in her place, a nurse, for life
         that stopped but would not end—

 
         My children, too, were new to me—
         unfathered for so long
         they cried at yellow eyes that blindly
         flickered, like my gown—

 
         The restless ghost who needed breakfast
         brought to him became
         a halting weight that strained the stairs—
         one half-step at a time—

 
         I walk unaided now, but there
         in corners lurks my cane—
         in case posterity should bear
         my likeness once again—

The details here were accurate: Nora had indeed wept hysterically when she first saw me after my transplant, with my eyes a jarring, iridescent yellow thanks to the eyedrops used by one of the many opthalmologists who came to visit me and peer at my scratched-up corneas. The feeling of having “lost” Kate as a wife and friend was real enough too: our relationship had suffered badly with all the stresses placed on both of us by two cancer diagnoses, endless treatments and visits to the Cancer Center, and a prolonged sense of uncertainty about the future. 

My life really did seem like it had “stopped” (another Dickinsonian word: “Because I could not stop for Death, / He kindly stopped for me”). Even though it was not actually over, very little of my former existence remained intact, and I worried that my relationship with Kate had been irreversibly transformed, and not for the better. 

My final and perhaps most Dickinsonian poem is the most mysterious to me, and the most unnerving. As I pondered the vexed question of how (and why) I managed to survive my ordeal, I found myself channeling her voice once more, as if I could only bear to articulate the terrible truths I was trying to tell in her cadences. The stanza of hers that seemed most relevant to my case, was the utterly baffling conclusion of “My Life Had stood—a Loaded Gun”:

            Though I than He—may longer live
            He longer must—than I—
            For I have but the power to kill
            Without—the power to die—

Damned if I knew what she was talking about, but the uncompromising paradox she was juggling with wouldn’t leave me alone. All I could think of was a kind of self-division, a version of the Freudian opposition between the death-drive and the pleasure principle. (The sexual overtones of Dickinson’s poems are fascinating.) But even that wasn’t quite right.

I found no answers, either for what lay behind Dickinson’s poem or my own improbable survival, but I did restate the paradox in a way that made sense to me. The resulting poem has no title, since I decided to adopt my model’s habit of plunging straight in at the deep end:

            I have a greedy destiny
            that will not find its way;
            it charts a course I cannot trace
            no matter how I spy.

The idea that I must have “a greedy destiny” that uses me for its own inscrutable purpose struck me as very Dickinsonian. (hink of the “loaded gun” who guards her “Master’s head.”) In fact, I am quite sure that I would never have come up with this phrase were it not for her influence; I still can’t quite believe that she didn’t write it herself, and that I’m not actually plagiarizing her.

            I followed it till, threat by threat,
            it cornered me one day.
            It disappeared—but everywhere
            it stared at me. An eye

 
            depicted on an antique canvas
            winked, and I could see
            some subtle fool behind the arras
            imitating me.

I even followed Dickinson in her adoration of Shakespeare, but instead of Polonius hiding behind the arras, I imagined a B-movie villain looking through a peep-hole on a painting. I did however, channel Hamlet’s misguided violence:

            I stabbed, and pulled the veined veil sideways.
            Everybody knew
            the thing I’d killed was merely mercy—
            God was mortal too–

Part of me wanted to end it all, I believe, in that moment of madness in my hospital room, but thankfully I failed.

I do not believe that “everything happens for a reason” (as the cliché goes), still less that God is interested in my individual life or death. In fact, I think that if God were a merciful, omnipotent being, he might have given me the coup de grace I was seeking when I was in such miserable shape.

            My soul made many graceful farewell
            curtsies, but denied
            the leave I humbly craved of her—
            she would not say goodbye.

I imagined that my soul, like Hamlet’s, was female, which made it all the more appropriate to be writing through a female writer’s form and perspective. I also wanted my “fate” to have the coyness of a “feminine” presence, offering polite and agreeable gestures when what I wanted from her was violent quietus.

Maybe it was Emily Dickinson herself moving in my brain, leading me to greater and greater heights of frustration and deferral, in order to save me from myself. Your guess is as good as mine.

            No one would guess what brought me through
            that doubly damnèd day:
            so helpless was my selfish fate
            I couldn’t even die.

My death-wish was disappointed; I had come so close to dying in the hospital without quite managing to cut my sufferings short. Like Dickinson’s Loaded Gun, I didn’t have the power to die, and so I have to try to believe that my “selfish fate” needs me for some other purpose.

The book you are reading is my attempt to articulate that purpose, in the hope that by understanding and sharing it, I will, at last, fulfil it. Yet even as I formulate this aspiration, I suspect that I will find Emily Dickinson waiting for me in that undefined world of possibilities. I may fool myself that I am breaking new ground, but I have a feeling that she has probably beaten the path yet again for me. That’s what the greatest poets do, and sometimes you can only try to follow them as far as you are able.

Brad Buchanan’s writings have appeared in more than 200 journals, and he has published three book-length collections of poetry: The Miracle Shirker (Poet’s Corner Press, 2005), Swimming the Mirror: Poems for My Daughter (Roan Press, 2008), and The Scars, Aligned: A Cancer Narrative (Finishing Line Press, 2019). A fourth book of poems, Chimera, is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press, and his medical memoir, Living with Graft-Versus-Host Disease: How I Stopped Fighting Cancer and Started Healing, was published by Armin Lear in 2021. He was diagnosed with a rare form of T-cell lymphoma in February 2015, and after chemotherapy and radiation, he underwent a stem cell transplant in early 2016. The transplant, though successful, brought on temporary vision loss and disability, a compromised immune system, and an ongoing illness: first acute then chronic Graft-versus-Host Disease. Late in 2016, he underwent an experimental treatment through a clinical trial for malignant B-cell lymphoma (caused by the Epstein-Barr virus); he is currently in remission.

Sophie Casarico

When Josie Comes Home

My Uncle Abraham tells me, before I visit him in prison, to bring him a pastrami on rye from Katz’s. I know his blood pressure can’t handle it, but he’s coming up on eighty and serving a seven year sentence, so I buy the man his damned sandwich.

He’s not my real uncle, not anymore. My mom’s aunt’s ex-husband, to be precise: they’ve been divorced since the seventies, but as he doesn’t have any family of his own, he still attends our gatherings, showing up at bar mitzvahs and shivas to eat noodle kugel and argue vehemently with the rabbi, fork tines pointed directly at the holy man’s heart, on the merits of the Yankees versus the Mets (he’s pro Mets, the rabbi goes for the Yankees–just another example of Jewish separatism). Or at least he did, before the law finally caught up with him.

Abe’s sitting at a concrete picnic table in a sunny patch of the prison yard when I arrive, pastrami in tow. Although he has not had a mustache in decades, I’m surprised to find him sans caterpillar-lip. “Hey kiddo,” he says, skinny as ever in an orange jumpsuit. Despite the shiny crown of naked pink scalp on his head, he continues to wear his silver hair at flower child length. 

“You should’ve stolen more money from those widows. This set me back twenty dollars.” I hand him the paper-wrapped halves of his sandwich. I don’t mention the cost of gas for the two hour drive from the Lower East Side to Otisville. “You talk to Aunt Sylvia lately?” 

“Whatever she told you, it’s schmegegge.” He shoves the overstuffed sandwich into his maw; in two bites, the disappearing act is complete. “Lord but I missed that.”

“Abe, you’ve been in here a week.”

“And what a terrible week it’s been!”

My Uncle Abe has always been a man of extreme appetites. I’m not surprised that he ended up in jail, only that it’s taken this long. When I was still in pigtails, he would take me to the Aqueduct track on weekends and gamble his paycheck until he hit on a winner, more than once dipping into my allowance when his funds ran out. He’d buy dry martinis for all the pretty women watching the races, especially the ones with wedding rings. “That’s a fine way to end up a chalk outline,” I overheard one disgruntled husband tell him. Abe merely shrugged and shot him his best ain’t I a stinker grin. 

“Dana, you look awful,” he says now. The whites of his eyes are spiderwebbed with red veins. “Not losing any sleep over me, are you?”

I wonder if he thinks, in his cell at night, about all the people he’s swindled: Mrs. Moskowitz and Mrs. Fleishman and the Berman sisters and God knows who else. If he even cared about the money. If he wanted to be caught. 

A guard opens the door leading back inside the prison. Visiting hours are over. 

I slap down a napkin. “There’s mustard on your face.” 

*

When I was a girl, my uncle was fond of telling me that there are but two types of people in this world: those who prepare the feast, and those who dine. I never saw him once bring a dish to a potluck. 

Abe could never be accused of being excessively employed, but such was his charm. People everywhere genuflected before him to burden him with gifts; somehow, every time his card declined at the bodega, it only elevated his esteem. It was as though blessings fell upon him from the sky: the bowling shirts he favored were always on sale, lights stayed a perpetual green when he drove his beloved Corvette, and his shiny wingtip shoes never so much as suffered a scuff.

My parents frequently solicited Abe’s services as a babysitter. They both worked as college professors, but with unglamorous effort, scrabbling for tenure as they shuffled from one adjunct position to the next. With their time consumed by grading papers and scraping together scant minutes to devote to their PhD coursework, the large volumes of literature on our bookshelves would have remained unread, had I not, as an only child, gravitated to their leather-bound mysteries. I am not unconvinced that my father did not take up humanities primarily on the strength of his appearance in a tweed jacket, and that my mother did not follow suit in academia because she thought likewise. He was spectacularly dashing, a tall and dark-haired Jew of an incongruously athletic build, and she so blonde it seemed vaguely anti-Semitic. I imagined them, in those days, as Indiana Jones, and the adoring student of his who writes “love you” in black liner across her eyes.  

Abe had little formal education, but he made up for this with zealous street smarts. He knew everybody in the neighborhood, and made it his business to familiarize himself with theirs. You could point out any brownstone on the block and he’d tell you everything about its denizens: who they were screwing, who was late on rent, who had a drinking problem that was getting out of hand. He didn’t need to request that I keep these lessons from my parents; I sensed, even then, that we were indulging in an illicit sort of pleasure, made sweeter for me by its secrecy.

This authority, and his availability to watch me during the daytime, when my parents still had classes to teach, made him an optimal guardian. Nominally, in those days, Abe worked night shifts as a security guard, though he was often on the outs with his employers. 

“It’s because I won’t join the union,” he’d insist to anybody who listened–usually me–chain-smoking an endless series of filterless cigarettes. His ex-wife Sylvia, conversely, said it was because he’d been caught stealing surveillance tapes one too many times. 

Whatever the reason, Abe was often broke, and happy for the few bucks my parents could spare as payment for childcare. Most of it went towards bankrolling his latest get-rich-quick venture. He was perpetually convinced that, in the near future, he’d be able to offload his wholesale-purchased garbage onto some worse sucker than he. Diet pills, pet turtles, handbags with flaking leather handles: if you could find it in suspiciously large quantities in Chinatown, he would hawk it. 

But he always reserved some of his babysitting funds for me. On afternoons when the weather was nice, he would pick me up from school and buy us ice cream cones from a metal street cart: chocolate for him and vanilla for me, because any accidental stains would be easier to hide from my parents. They abhorred sugar, which was how I knew that the ice cream was his own generosity.

Cones in hand, Abe and I would wander Central Park together, regaling each other with tales of bravado. My scholastic successes, I saved for my parents; with Abe, I’d boast about winning the hundred meter dash by elbowing the girl who’d been nipping at my heels, or of the blocks of pastel chalk I’d smuggled out of recess. 

“Liberated,” he corrected, “like the Allies did when they got us out of the camps.” Abe was a fervent fan of accusing everyone he disliked of Nazism. 

Although my mother was a Kantian scholar, and my father had flirted in his youth with joining a yeshiva, it was Abe who taught me most about ethics. Ownership, he said, was basically a construct. Stealing–an ugly word, to be reserved for unpardonable criminals–was only wrong if you were taking things that someone needed more than you. The guys on Wall Street or in the White House? Lowlifes. They were greedy, padding their silk-lined pockets with more than anyone could hope to spend in a lifetime. Petty thieves pickpocketing wallets or looting Rite Aids? Robin Hoods. Honest folk, down on their luck. 

The only crime Abe found truly beyond reproach–and a large part of why he and I got on so famously, though I was just a scabby-kneed preteen girl with a voice of pure helium–was mistreating women.  He condemned anybody who’d put their hands on a lady. Moreover, he found it downright egregious not to spoil them.

He always had a few girlfriends on rotation, and we’d cycle through his harem throughout the week, dropping by their apartments before my parents came home from work. One lived in a wobbly tenement with three other secretaries, who pinched the freckles on my cheeks and always kept a pot of matzah ball soup on the stove warmed. Another, somehow never quite finished with a cosmetology certification, who let me swatch lipsticks on my arms and spray lethal quantities of Aquanet at the cockroaches who liked to scurry behind her radiator. A third, who volunteered for the mayor’s office, and kept Abe supplied with political gossip, most of which I found disappointingly mundane. 

Abe returned their hospitality with frequent gifts: rhinestone jewelry that turned brassy upon skin impact, negligees of scratchy satin, perfumes whose fragrances evoked the wilting bouquets of a funeral parlor. Bellies bursting with ice cream, on the trek to his girlfriends’ apartments, we’d scrounge for treasures amongst the wares of sidewalk vendors, drawn to anything that sparkled. Refunds, obviously, were not accepted: each item lost its luster within moments of its acquisition. The worthlessness of these trinkets was apparent even to me, but each new item was met with ecstatic reception. And through their eyes, I could believe, if only briefly, in Abe’s magic.

My afternoons with Abe were cut short when an old poker buddy of his tipped him off to the then-ongoing lobster season in the Florida Keys. The regulations dictated that, to prevent overfishing, each fisherman could only grab two, so the incentive was to fill a boat with as many bodies as possible. Abe didn’t eat shellfish–not for kosher reasons, just because he was put off by their insectine bodies–but he seized any opportunity for drinking and profit.

“I’ll come back for you, kid,” he said. “Same time next week.”

It would be years before I accepted that he had never intended to fulfill that promise.

*

If you found a nice man, Dana, we’d be retired by now goes my parents’ incessant refrain. Or sometimes, when compromising: If you had a good job, Dana, we’d be retired by now. Which really stings coming from two people who teach Proust to undergrads.

These days, I straddle the worlds of both Abe and my parents and disappoint in equal measure: I write freelance copy. Occasionally, I bartend. 

Speaking cynically, this is similar work. In one, I peddle poison, and in the other, I mix drinks. That’s the kind of joke Abe used to tell, and I imagine in prison, he still does. He'd even share it with his bosses, and they’d laugh. Me, I save it for my journal and my cat. 

My suitors, few and far between, are not the gift-giving type, though out of principle, I distrust presents and do not ask for them. Flowers only make me sad, and remind me of the time that I keep wasting. Still, I would not say no to a bracelet that turned the inside of my wrist green.

At thirty, I do not own a car, so for this outing, I have borrowed my parents’ Subaru. My mom requested, in exchange, I fill up the tank; my dad has a better sense of my finances and overrides this. 

It’s only 3:30 when I make it back to the lot, but the skies are darkening with a summer storm. Under a veil of gathering purple clouds, the SUV’s orange paint has taken on a sinister cast. My parents chose the color for its visibility, but the bumper stickers alone–peeling at the edges, declaring attendance at Shakespeare festivals and an intent to brake for wildlife, two frankly redundant signals on a vehicle such as this–draw the eye. 

The air itself is oppressive; which is, perhaps, an absurd thought to have while the tall concrete walls of a correctional facility are still in view. I feel, reverberating through my bones, some animal urge to get to higher ground. Retrieving the key fob from my NPR pledge tote, I remind myself of a family history of osteoporosis.

Not every Jew is a hypochondriac; some of us are just always sick. My mother keeps, in the glove compartment of the Subaru, a first aid kit so thoroughly stocked she could perform triage on an entire militia. No kidding: she brought the bulging black nylon pouch along when she went car shopping, and picked their SUV not based on any inclination for hiking but for its roomy storage capacity. Band-aids, clear and flesh-toned (for sartorial options, I assume); every brand of extra-strength acetaminophen, color-coded; burn relief gels and epi-pens; generic versions of anti-anxiety medication I suspect I am not supposed to help myself to, stuffed as they are deep into the crevasses of the pouch; and antacids and anti-diarrhea tablets and of course, the almighty, the alpha and omega, Lactaid.  

I pop a diazepam, not for pleasure, but to muffle the experimental noise piece of neuroses that is my birthright. Do I even need to say I don’t have insurance? As I turn the key in the ignition, and the satellite radio kicks in with the Grateful Dead channel, I think, as I have for the past three months, since he was arrested, of Abe’s Corvette. 

*

He won it in a poker game. No, his pal down at the dealership gave him a great deal. Wait: a good Samaritan, watching Abe rescue a litter of kittens from a burning building, was so moved by this mitzvah that he insisted Abe take his keys. 

“It fell off the back of a truck,” Aunt Sylvia quipped at Shabbat dinner. She punctuated this by pushing up her bulky tortoiseshell frames and scraping her silverware on a red Fiesta brand plate.

At ten, knowing nothing of the mafia, shielded from mob films by my parents’ refusal to have a television in the house, I took this literally. It seemed no less plausible than any other excuse Abe could offer. 

The car was sky blue and chrome and gleamed silver in the sun. Its metal body, which Abe buffed free of dings and dents with a craftsman’s precision each Sunday, crested and sloped like the platonic ideal of a wave. Its interior had only two white leather seats, and on the dashboard, above the cassette player, a hula dancer with undulating hips. Partly as a tribute–and partly because he knew she would be incensed by the comparison–Abe dubbed this grass-skirted woman, whose vinyl face had yellowed from cigarette smoke, Sylvia. 

Abe believed that, like a beautiful woman, a car of equally evident sensuality should be displayed ostentatiously and often. In the summer, he liked to drive the Corvette–which he had named Josie, after the Steely Dan song of the same name–all along the coast. With its canvas top down, they mirrored each other, two bald birds soaring down the freeway. The sun baked through his scalp, and salt-wind whipped his silver tendrils in a frenzy, as he belted along to “Glamour Profession.” 

He fit in equally as well down at Ashbury Park, amongst the rockers at the Stone Pony–he claimed, my father told me, to have once done lines in the bathroom with a young Springsteen–as he did flirting with bankers’ wives at country clubs of the Hamptons. The magnetism, he claimed, was all in the car, and I could not deny the allure of it, the scattered sprinkles of shine it threw, its color indistinguishable from the sea. Even when he sped–which was always, if the car was moving–cops never pulled him over, hypnotized, perhaps, by its promise of pure estival thrill, debaucherous and glinting. 

“Hey kid,” he’d say to me over the landline, my parents’ one concession to telecommunications. “Feel like spending the day with me and Joz?”

Weekends in my house, ostensibly, were for contemplation and edification. My parents intended this to mean time spent reading Chaucer together, or practicing the piano, or trips to the Guggenheim, and we did sometimes accomplish these tasks when their course load was light and I could be sufficiently supervised to enrich myself. But often, in between designing their lesson plans and making overdue trips to the hardware store to fix our sputtering air conditioning window unit, I spent a lot of hours alone, graffitiing the underside of our baby grand. 

In the earlier days of our adventures, I was hesitant to make this request. “Tell them I’ll teach you how to change the oil,” he hissed, nicotine-thickened voice crackling in my ear. “You could stand to learn something useful.” 

He did more than that. Behind Josie’s wide wheel, with his sepia-tinted aviators slung over my eyes, Abe fixed my hands at ten and two and taught me how to drive. “Hollywood, I know your middle name,” I would sing, inching around a deserted liquor store parking lot, somewhere on Long Island. I would not find out until college what exactly Hoops McCann’s special delivery comprised, but then, it did not matter. It smelled, no matter where we went, like coconut sunscreen and possibility. 

*

I spend a lot of time, lately, at my parents’ place. I tell them it’s because I can’t stand the construction, and all of its penetrating percussiveness, a new “luxury” realty corp is doing next door to my apartment. Or I say that my roommate, who is newly affianced to her stockbroker beau, has created a miasma of wedding planning anxiety so severe that I could not possibly preserve brand integrity in said conditions. But neither one of those reasons, really, explain why I’ve suddenly developed such an affinity for my mom’s rooster-themed kitchen or clamor so much to try the lemon squares my dad makes all the time. They’re selling the apartment, like they’ve threatened to for so many years, and moving upstate to the country.

When I get home, there’s Miles Davis playing on the turntable and my dad is building a birdhouse. I hang up the key, step out of the hideous Dansko clogs I’ve borrowed from my mom and would not even at gunpoint admit are the most comfortable shoes I have ever worn, and come to the kitchen table to investigate. 

The moving clutter is not dissimilar to the usual macedoine of their space. There are still-flattened cardboard boxes propped against the far wall, dividing the living room and the kitchen, and a huge spool of teal bubble wrap looms atop the baby grand, but the mess of newspapers spread over the couch, coffee table, and window reading nook is typical of my father’s reading habits. It’s organized chaos: each section of the Times must be perused, and cast off, in its assigned corner. Beside him, flanking the birdhouse, under a pile of balsa shavings and an uncapped tube of wood glue, is the Saturday crossword, three-fourths completed. As is our silent ritual, I uncap a Bic and set to work finishing the remainder. 

My father sets down the sloppy wood frame of the birdhouse and clears his throat. “How’s the old man?”

“The same. A lot of good-natured kvetching, I think he’s actually getting a kick out of the whole thing.” I frown over the grid. All it calls to mind now is a wall of prison cells. 

“Of course he is.” His big hand pats mine. I try not to linger over how ropey the veins in them have gotten, the age spots metastasizing over their surface. “He’s Teflon.” 

“I’d say he’s got a Rita Hayworth poster back there, but I can’t imagine him doing all that digging.”

“That’s what his roommate’s for,” my mom says, emerging from their shared office. Her typhoon of slate-gray curls threatens to subsume the reading glasses she has perched on her forehead. “Have you eaten yet? There’s some whitefish spread in the fridge and I’ve got bagels in the freezer. We went to Russ and Daughters earlier.”

“Aren’t you going to miss being able to do that? You’ll be lucky to find lox anywhere in the country.” 

“With your father’s appetite, I’m lucky to find it in this house.” She sets down a roll of packing tape, and the metallic teeth hit the scratched surface of the table with a thwang. “I’m not asking anymore. The Hefty bags are already in your bedroom. Please go through your crap and get rid of some of it. We’re not hauling your old spelling tests all the way to Woodstock.”

I abandon the crossword and rise from my chair, which originally belonged to my great-grandmother’s dining room set, broken up now into piecemeal parts between my father and his sisters in Arizona. “As if that town hasn’t seen worse.” 

My bedroom, despite the decade since graduation, remains a shrine to my high school self. Above the ditsy floral sheets, the princess canopy I begged for at fourteen still hangs, though its white anti-malarial netting seems to sag more with every visit. Atop the quilt is a pile of worn stuffed animals, gifts from high school boyfriends whose preciousness–the gifts and the boyfriends–embarrasses me now. I pick up one, a chocolate labrador purchased by the treasurer of my high school’s chess club, and stroke its muzzle, half-surprised that the years have not whitened it. The boy is an accountant now, with a haircut that doesn’t quite cover his receding hairline and a paunch that mirrors his new wife’s baby bump. I still like all of his photos, but I cannot recall the last time I exchanged even one word with him. 

I haven’t slept on this bed since two Purims ago, when I ill-advisedly combined too much Manischewitz and my cousin Jacob’s extra-strength rice krispie edible and passed out in my harlequin costume. But I climb onto it now, starfishing my limbs, surveying the rest of the room. Postage-sized replications of Monet’s water lilies, tacked to a corkboard. The taxidermied butterflies framed above my vanity, their wings, in periphery, almost simulating flight. A map of the world where my younger self circled all the places I someday hoped to travel. There’s a big red star beside Key West. 

*

Like many Jews of a certain age, Abe puttered around Florida in his later years, when the joy of complaining about its humidity superseded that of complaining about the coldness of New York winters. He really was a natural fit for a parrot-patterned shirt, and in the postcards he sporadically sent back home, he radiated contentedness. He took a job as a bouncer for a nightclub on Duval Street; in hindsight, I can’t believe I hadn’t realized sooner that it was a strip joint. His skin had caramelized under the southern sun, and posed before the yellow French Colonial facade of the Hemingway House, thumbs jauntily hooked through his belt loops, his outlaw swagger had not dimmed. 

But the pictures, as with most things Abe shared, only told a half-truth. His goodwill was running out, and the debtors he’d fled from in New York eventually found him, sheltered by a throng of Sabal palms, tanning himself at the southernmost point. Whatever intention he might have had to turn honest, dubiously expressed to my parents, quickly went belly up. He started moving coke, lots of it, though to call him a dealer would be generous; surrounded by topless women and tourists seeking an authentic, all-encompassing Florida high, it sold itself. 

At sixteen, I visited him by myself, flying alone on an airplane for the first time. Four years had passed since Abe had first taken off for lobster season. That week, my spring break, my parents had gone to Ithaca for an academic conference, and they thought I might benefit from a tropical getaway, as they didn’t want me or my percolating teenage surliness around to squash the aphrodisiac zest they got from presenting on the political implications of Joyce’s refusal to use quotation marks. Perverted commas, indeed.   

Abe picked me up from the Key West International airport, an hour late. Josie looked a little worse for wear; the salt air had gnawed at her paint job, and a layer of corrosive rust clung to her tail pipe. On her bumper, some punk–or perhaps Abe himself–had dredged his finger through her cloud of dirt and written wash me. 

He, conversely, appeared as I’d expected from the photos: ruddy color in his cheeks, green eyes bright, and he had even gained some much-needed weight. In his left ear, he sported a fresh piercing, a fat diamond stud. He was perfumed with cedar and orange blossoms.

“Let’s get you a Cuban,” he said, without preamble. 

“While we’re at it, can I get a tattoo?” My stomach was rumbling, but I was hungrier still to piss off my parents. 

“All in good time, bubbeleh.”

As we drove through the heavy April air, I could feel my hair getting denser, and my skin prickled from its humidity. It was as if a giant cat’s tongue had descended from the sky and coated me in saliva. The pressure of it made me anxious, and Abe likewise was tense, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel, skipping through tracks on the cassette player. His copy of Gaucho, it seemed, had finally gasped its last. 

“How do you handle this place in the summer?” I fanned myself with my boarding pass. From the pavement, dust kicked up. “This whole state is like the inside of a gym sock.”

He was driving too fast, not his usual 15 over the speed limit but a frenzied 30, accelerating to 40. I looked down at his flip-flopped foot, leaden on the gas, and noticed that the floor around the pedals seemed torn up, as though a small rodent had chewed it from the inside out.

A key deer leapt through the highway, and Abe swerved to miss it. I shot my hand up to reach for the handle to steady myself, forgetting that the top was down. Behind us, the driver of a truck laden with watermelons honked. Through the speakers, “Hey Nineteen,” garbled and whining, popped like firecrackers.

“Abe,” I said, “maybe you should–”

“Fakakta!” He hit the stereo, and the car zagged again. I jumped. “Sorry Dana, didn’t mean to scare you.” He had never once called me my name before.

In the rearview mirror, a set of blue and red lights flared to life. As the siren whined, Abe put his head in his hands. He took a deep breath and pulled over into the shade of a latherleaf shrub. 

A beige-uniformed Florida highway patrol officer appeared at the window, his face obscured by a pair of mirrored lenses. In them, Abe’s face was reflected back, warped and startlingly old. I thought, dumbly, of how even though he wasn’t a blood relative, how much he looked like my mother. How much he looked like me.

“License and registration?”

Abe stared blankly back. 

“License and registration?” The register had dropped now.

His hands shook.

Fear seized my throat; I was an honor student and had never heard a cop use that tone in my presence before. Abe’s effortless charisma had vanished. There was no hope for me talking my way out of this.

I popped the glove compartment and dug through a pile of empty cigarette cartons and loose change and scuba brochures to fish out the paperwork. Abe’s wallet was in the cupholder, ID jammed so deep into a fold that I broke a nail prying it from the hot leather’s grip. His wry smile in its photo made it impossible to reconcile the Abe of the ID with the quivering ghost beside me. I presented the items to the cop, all moisture wicked from my mouth, my hands fragrant with pennies. 

The officer eyed us for a long moment, though with his mouth flattened and his expression impenetrable beneath the sunglasses I could not tell with what emotion. Disgust, possibly; maybe he thought I was a child bride on the lam with my senior citizen lover, though this was unlikely, as I’d inherited my father’s height and my mother’s zaftig build and had for several years read, despite the acne splotched across my chin, as solidly adult. 

He strode back to his cruiser to run his check, each black-booted footfall deliberate and heavy. I glanced over at Abe, motionless in the driver’s seat. His face was pickled with tears. Still, he said nothing. 

After a few minutes of interminable silence, with only the whoosh of passing cars to break it, the officer returned, his cheeks crammed with tobacco. “I’d take a trip to the DMV, if I was you. Might wanna update those New York plates.”

“Yes.” I swabbed at the nervous sweat falling into my eyes. Then, because we were in the south, I added, “Sir.” 

He spit black sludge onto the gravel below. “That’s all. Y’all have a nice day. Drive safe.”

We waited until he had walked back to his cruiser and driven off. I was too aware, suddenly, of the wildness of this place. Across the road, vultures pecked at an unidentifiable piece of carrion. Mosquitos tore at my skin. A bloated iguana limped by. 

Abe looked rattled; nothing was supposed to rattle him. 

“What the fuck was that?” I was new to swearing, and the word came out with a jangling wrongness.

“Iguana.” There was a dreamy expression on his face. “Invasive lizard, there’s so many they let you shoot them here–”

“I know what an iguana is, Abe, I’m talking about what just happened with the cop.”

“Kid…”

“No, no more ‘kid.’ I’m too old for that.”

He placed his hand on Josie’s now-tarnished silver handle and opened the car door, then crossed over to my side. Wordlessly, he dropped his keys in my lap. I brushed my thumb over the matted rabbit’s foot charm dangling from the chain. 

“You have your license yet?” he asked. 

“No, I’m not old enough.”

“Learner’s permit?”

“Uh-huh.”

He gestured for me to get into the driver’s seat, so I unclipped my seat belt and slid over. My legs were cramped, and I adjusted the length of the seat. I hadn’t realized, as he’d stayed in the car until just then, that I’d grown taller than him. 

Abe got in on the passenger’s side. He didn’t buckle his seat belt; not wanting to chastise him again, I let it slide. With one white-furred knuckle, he tapped Sylvia on the dash. The crown of hibiscus flowers around her head had nearly completely rubbed off. Only small splotches of red remained. 

I turned the key in the ignition. “Abe,” I said. 

“Yes, k-Dana?”

“I don’t know where I’m going.”

He laughed at that, a low growl revving through his chest, until his whole body shook. I started to laugh too, so hard that tears stung my ears, and my stomach ached. “It’s not funny,” I wheezed.

“No,” he agreed, gasping for air.

*

Abe returned to New York a few years later, trailing the flotsam and jetsam of Josie in his wake. By that point, I was in college, out in southern California amongst the birds of paradise and about as far away as I could have been from him and the old neighborhood. I changed my major about six times and dropped out more than once to chase some guy or idea to Alaska, Colombia, Croatia. Nothing stuck; by the time I’d pursued Buddhism to Thailand, at twenty-five, I was starting to feel past all the topless enlightenment. I shook off the nineteen-year-old folk singer who’d followed me there and flew back to LA, banging at the gates for USC to let me back in, but made a pit stop first at Cantor’s to abandon my vegetarianism. All told, it took me about eight years to scrape together enough credits for a bachelor’s degree in sociology.

I had only been back in New York a year when Abe got nabbed for fraud. We’d seen each other for the high holidays and at our Passover Seder, and gamely we had attempted to replicate our old badinage, but it wasn’t the same and we both knew it. I no longer believed in the Hebrew prayers I spoke and likewise had lost all faith in him.

But when he asked me over the phone yesterday if I could pick up that sandwich for him, his voice crackling the way it used to on those summer afternoons twenty years ago, it was as though I was that same chubby kid desperate to get out of the apartment, to be his accomplice, and I knew I couldn’t deny him his request.

My mom finds me in my bedroom, knees drawn up to my chest, still fixated on my map. “You haven’t thrown anything away.” 

“What happened to Josie?”

“Who?”

“Abe’s Corvette.”

“Oh. I’d ask Sylvia about it. She’s his emergency contact.”

The next day, I visit her. Sylvia’s small apartment is a perfect shrine, still, to the 70s: yellow and brown floral wallpaper clings stubbornly to its walls, and her refrigerator is a viscerally repugnant shade of avocado green. Unraveling crochet potholders litter the space, giving one the impression of being slowly subsumed by fungal spread of multicolored yarn. On fridge magnets, trapped behind near-opaque plastic, the decade’s sex symbols emit a fading luster: Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck, in open-shirted, mustachioed glory, pose with a long-lost hirsute sensuality. Sylvia quit smoking a decade ago, but despite the thickly-sprayed, almost perceptible clouds of lemon Pledge fumigating its surface area, the air retains decades-worth of stale tobacco funk. 

She pours me some lemonade, hand-squeezed, into a porcelain Farberware china teacup patterned with blue daisies. A holdover from my childhood, when we would play tea party, and I turned my nose up at its bitterness. Seeds float up to the rim, but I raise my lips to the cup and discreetly drink around them. It is gritty from all of the sugar she has mixed in, the way I used to like it. 

I stifle a grimace. “Thank you.”

“What do you want?” Her voice has the droning quality of a dial tone. 

“Why can’t I just pop in to see my favorite aunt?”

On the counter, propped up by old mail, a small yet bulky television is tuned to the TVLand channel. Through the fuzz in the black and white picture, I see the opening credits of Bonanza.

“You tell me. You never call.”

“I just saw you, like, a week ago.” I push the cup aside, unable to swallow its grainy sweetness. “Fine. I was curious about Abe’s car.”

“That old rust bucket. Did he mention it?”

“No, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it since I saw him yesterday, in prison. I bet he misses it. Maybe he wants me to have it.”

“Don’t count on it. There’s no salvaging that thing. It’s rotted from the inside out, at least from what I saw of it. Cut your losses.”

“So you know where it is?”

“What’s left of it.” She drains her cup and pushes herself up from the kitchen table, every joint in her body snapping like a gun salute. In her bedraggled house shoes, she shuffles over to the sink and twists on the shrieking tap, rinsing the dregs from her cup. She has never bothered with installing a dishwasher; if something needs cleaning, she’ll do it sooner and better. “I’ll get you the keys, if you’re so intent on seeing this. But good luck rehabilitating that thing.”

She sets the cup on a drying rack and heads into her bedroom. I get up to wash mine, but I’m distracted by the irrepressible genetic urge to snoop. 

 Tucked under a fridge magnet, a Polaroid flutters in the stiff breeze of a fan. Sylvia, a dead ringer for my mother, and Abe, not yet bald; it must be over forty years old. Sylvia wears a broad-brimmed white straw hat and a toile de Jouy patterned dress that looks to be made from an upcycled bedsheet. Abe is clad in a powder blue leisure suit with cartoonishly large lapels and no tie. They are both, with slack faces and red eyes, conspicuously stoned. Written in black Sharpie on the border, in Abe’s sloppy scrawl, is “Gone to the chapel.”

“I’ve never seen this picture before,” I call back to Sylvia.  

“Found it hiding in the drawer of the armoire the other day. I keep thinking I've gotten rid of all of Abe’s drek, but it has a way of turning up.” She joins me at the fridge, fingers worrying over the old key chain. “We eloped, you know. Very fashionable in those days. My mother didn’t speak to me for months. Didn’t know what the hell I was doing getting hitched to some dead mechanic’s son from Queens. Eventually I realized that I didn’t, either. Your grandmother was still so young when I got married; it took her even longer to forgive me for it. She was sad we hadn’t let her be a bridesmaid. What really hurt most is that the last thing she said to me for over a year was that I looked fat in my wedding dress.”

I laugh, but cover my mouth when I realize how distant Sylvia’s face looks, gazing at the picture. “Why’d you guys get divorced?”

“Why’d we get married?” She takes my hand and places the keys in my palm, folding my fingers over the metal that’s been warmed by her touch. “I was pregnant, and then I wasn’t. We kept trying, but never got very far along. It never seemed to bother him as much as it did me. Eventually it just hurt too much to be the only one hurting.”

“I’m sorry it went down the way it did.” I squeeze her hand, about as much physical affection as we both can handle.

“Sometimes, I thought about getting back together with him. In those early years, right after the divorce, I thought all the time of his better qualities. That was before he started collecting all of those girlfriends. He was kinda shy back then, and mostly sweet. And he said he never gave up on me.” Her eyes cloud over. “But you can’t go back. You have to stick to your convictions; your word is your burden.” 

“Do you wish you hadn’t married him? If you could go back?”

She smiles cryptically, half wistful and half amused. Her expression seems to say Just you wait. “You’re young, Dana.” It sounds like the scrap of an old song. 

Josie is parked in an uncovered lot two blocks north; last night’s shaking thunderstorm has confettied her hood with damp rhododendron petals and muddied green streaks of pollen. With her steel frame sagging, almost hugging the asphalt, she seems to be in the midst of a capitulating sigh. She fits in well with the other cars clustered nearby, tires balding, armored with huge sienna plates of rust. Through volcanic cracks in the pavement, reluctant dandelions poke their leonine heads. 

The keys, it turns out, are unnecessary, as Sylvia has forgotten to lock it. Or perhaps she has intentionally left it as such, hoping that someone will take it off her hands. Inside, it smells like rotting pine needles and yeast. 

The old drivers’ seat straining beneath my weight, I slide into the car and shut the door behind me. Little Sylvia is gone now: in her place, a scabby ring of sticky residue. Though the stench is becoming overbearing, I breathe in deeply, flaring my nostrils as I search for the tannins that characterized Abe’s old aroma, his vellum sweetness. If I close my eyes, I can pretend that the car is jostling below, and feel the ridged hardness of a waffle cone in my hand, dripping wet ice cream down my veins. 

I press a dial on the dashboard. The stereo, somehow, still works, and I turn through staticky channels, past the Mets game and public radio. I pop the glove compartment, and out tumbles a new cassette, its plastic cover unscratched. The image is grimier than I remembered it, but the figures on the cover–the woman in blue, the man in black–hold each other with the same intensity they always have. What once seemed a romantic clinch now strikes me as one more of desperation, the way people cling to cliffsides to avoid falling into the abyss.

I remove the cassette from its case and hold its plastic body before the slot, my fingers trembling. All I need to do is insert it, a task that strikes me suddenly as impossible. 

I want to crush the tape between my fingers, to smash the shattered edges against the console. I want to plunge my hands inside the passenger seat’s tattered upholstery and disembowel every shred of crumbling yellow polyurethane foam. I want to rip up every bit of wiring in this faulty old junker and prevent anyone from ever making this thing move again, though it only went, really, in circles, running on fumes. I want to tear the gear stick from its woodgrain-paneled hole and bludgeon Abe with it. 

I hit my free hand against the steering wheel, watching as the skin becomes inflamed with blood. “Fuck!” I yelp, half as a delayed reaction to the pain and half as a primal cry. It still sounds puerile and lacking in menace. Who, I wonder, am I even kidding. 

With a resigned breath, I push the tape in, side B. “This one,” Abe used to tell me, no matter how many times I assured him I’d heard the story, his voice barely audible over the wind roaring through the car barreling seventy miles an hour down the highway, “Keith Jarrett said, was ripping off one of his songs. They owed him some money for it in the end. But no doubt about it: they make it all their own.”

And I wait for the sax to stumble in. 

Sophie Casarico hails from St. Augustine, Florida, and is a writer and graduate student in the MFA Creative Writing program at Emerson College in Boston. Her work has also been published by The Kudzu Review and The Australian Writers' Centre. Sophie enjoys distance running, golden age Hollywood cinema, and impressionist paintings. She can be found @sophiecasarico on Twitter and Instagram.

Katie Machen

Cheese Prophecy

Standing behind the cheese counter, I imagine I know what it’s like to be a musician. Maybe I play the piano, or my hands move up and down the neck of a guitar, knowing instinctively where to go. Now when someone asks for a quarter-pound of Manchego, or a half-pound of Fulvi Romano, I know what those words mean, know the weight in my hand. When we get in a new cheese, maybe something sent by mistake, an aged Gruyère, a small-batch porter-washed tomme from a family farm in Georgia, we halve it and shave off a taste, letting the cheese sit on our tongues, contemplating what it is. As the flavors come together in my mouth, my mind, I feel like I’m inventing language, words only doing so much to say what it is, Adam put on Earth to name the animals. Alpine nuttiness, bright pineapple, velvety, fudgy, chalky; chocolate, a cold dark beer on a cooling fall day, the first scarf of the season.

The shop is small, a bowling lane of a store, cases on one side, shelves on the other. There’s no getting lost, no hiding, though there are plenty of ways to look busy: kneel down and organize the cheeses in their cases, reuniting pieces that have ended up in the wrong place, finding their nametags and pinning them on; straighten boxes of crackers and tinned fish, unbox deliveries and make space for jams and cookies and mustards because there’s always space; pack out olives, ricotta, cream cheese. Windows fill the space with light, looking out to the neighborhood as it passes by. When the owners, a young couple, first opened the shop, they said it felt like Sesame Street: so many friendly faces popping in, introducing themselves, some looking for the Russian products of the previous owners and walking away, disappointed. When I go in to work, once or twice a week, I make a list in my head of who I might see: the retired firefighter who asks for “that cheese I like,” which I know to be an aged Gouda, and his prosciutto sliced extra thin, but only if the leg has been cut into just exactly halfway; the smiling woman with the pink hair who asks for her sandwiches in half so she can split them with her friend, who she meets in the park; the woman who only comes on Friday for a single loaf of bread ordered expressly for her. Each person, young or old, has their place in the order of things. When I walk in the door and don my apron, I do, too.

*

In the summer before I moved to New York, a friend and I spent a few days visiting different neighborhoods in Queens, the borough where I’d start graduate school, trying to decide where I might look for an apartment. We made an adventure of it: Astoria, Flushing, Jackson Heights, riding the train to see what we might find. In Jackson Heights we sat for coffee and people-watched; we walked up 37th Avenue and found, to our surprise, a cheese shop. I asked my friend if we should stop in and she said that of course we should, and that is part of why we are friends. They had samples and, I noticed, the sort of cheese I couldn’t find at the grocery store or in my parents’ deli drawer, really good cheese, things I’d never seen before. The owner was kind when we didn’t buy anything, and I starred the address in the map on my phone. As we continued our wandering, it was more than just the shop that grabbed me, it was how June brought everyone outside, how I heard more languages than I could count, and I thought, this must be the place. When I moved in September, I took my parents to the shop I remembered and my father treated me, buying three cheeses that reminded me of my life in France a few years earlier: Comté, St. Agur, Tomme de Chèvre Grand-mère. “You’ve got yourself a new customer here,” he said to the owner. “I think she’d love to be a cheesemonger.” I blushed and thanked the man and we swung our arms to a yellow-doored restaurant where we drank beers at the bar. When my parents left, I was alone: new apartment, new roommates, new life waiting to unfold.

*

Cow, goat, sheep. Note the yellow of the Ameribella: good grass, happy cows. When sorting through odds and ends, straightening up the cases, I take a piece to the owner, who has a name, but who I’ve started referring to as my Cheese Boss. I ask him what this one cheese might be and he smiles and says, “You know,” and I do, it’s the same damn cheese whose name I always forget, the one I wish would just disappear already, please, someone, buy it and put me out of my misery. I quickly choose my staff pick, Aarewaser, nutty, creamy, Swiss pasty. I find I want to describe every cheese I love as “melt in your mouth,” but it’s true, it all melts in your mouth if you savor it, which sometimes I do well and other times, at my kitchen table, I do poorly, gorging myself on what is good, which is why I taste best at the shop, tiny bites, each one a reach to some likeness: What does this remind you of? Where does it take you?

*

After a couple of weeks in New York, my stress elevated; I’d applied to jobs all summer long and hadn’t heard from anyone. In office hours, I vented to my professor, who was also my neighbor, and she asked if I’d ever thought about selling cheese. 

“What?” I asked. 

“Well, I don’t know, you keep telling me about this cheese shop, and it seems like something you’re drawn to, and I feel like it could help you meet people in the community,” she said. 

It was true, I’d added myself to the shop’s mailing list and forwarded it her way. It seemed like such a big deal to ask someone for something, to pose a question there was no precedent for, no HIRING sign in the window, no familiar banter established, just desperation paired with a true interest. By that point, I’d started baking my own bread and had worked a harvest at a New Zealand winery, gaining basic proficiencies in the fields that fascinated me because I loved to taste. I’d always loved cheese, and it seemed like the next logical step just as it made no sense at all, looked nothing like the nonprofits where I’d sent resume after resume. 

The next day, I walked in, asked the owner a few questions about how such and such cheese was made, ordered a piece, and finally asked if he might be looking for help. Actually, yes, he said, they’d only been open since June, and he needed somebody on weekends, and before I know it I’d sent a resume, and before I knew it I was working the register, and tasting cheeses, and wrapping them up, and cutting them myself. When I’ve told my cheese origin story, at parties, on first dates, I say it’s a love story, that it was meant to be. My mother tells me I was fulfilling a prophecy. 

“Say more,” I say, on the phone.

“Remember what Dad said that day?” she asks. Later I learned from Cheese Boss that he’d had a job posting written up, that he shelved it after I walked in the door.

*

I don’t have to be sure about the workings of the universe, my own faith or lack thereof, don’t have to believe that everything happens for a reason to feel when things are right. Some friendships just fit, some places have a sense of home to them even if I’ve only been there an hour. Wavelength, radio station, perfect chord, quiet comfort. 

At the beginning, I took notes. 

Zimbro: tangy and gooey, bursting like a plump blueberry from its bandaged exterior, its rind that I’m not sure if I’m supposed to eat or not. I picture sheep grazing somewhere in the Portuguese countryside — so much must happen for anything to happen. Zimbro would make a great dog name.

Schallenberg: like Gruyère, I think, but better. Which is to say: stronger, smooth and creamy and nutty. It has its following, I learn, including a man who regularly buys three-quarter-pound pieces, big chunks, to pair with jamón serrano. When he walks in the door, I’ve already pulled it from the case.

Caña de Cabra: like the bûche de chèvre I’d buy in France, but from Spain, a log, a tree trunk, a white branch, and when cut into, a ring, the interior crumbly, perfect in a quiche with leeks. It’s the goat cheese I could never find when I returned from living abroad, not fresh and wet and young, but smooth and held together with a firm exterior. I was so frustrated to return from France and realize that in the U.S., in restaurants, with my friends, goat cheese was often just thought of as goat cheese, that there weren’t usually any distinguishing factors to separate that one thing sprinkled on salads and pizzas from the rest. Goat, or cheddar, or blue, all thought of as if they might be one thing, but in the shop’s case, I saw a never-ending spectrum, so many shades spilling one into the other, coming together to represent only a tiny percentage of global possibility. Cheese, like anything, can mean so much more than what’s eaten on a cracker at a party, than what’s spread onto bread at the table.

*

Inevitably, someone asks for Parm, grated. I take the big knife and cut from a large chunk, maybe five pounds, and proceed to cube it. I lift the heavy metal grater from the shelf below, bending and setting the weight in my legs and not my back; I press the handle, moving the Reggiano through a fast-spinning wheel. I inhale deeply, with intention, filling myself up with the best aroma I’ve come to know: bright fruit, like walking to the farmers’ market on a Sunday and smelling the strawberries before you see them, walking home with a green pint as if there were no other option. Or pineapple, not the kind they serve in college dining halls, pale and crunchy, but deep yellow, the juice dripping from your hands as you cut lengthwise. The combination, red and yellow, brings me to junior year just when my friends started learning to drive, going after school for a too-big smoothie, sitting in the sun, our uniform shirts untucked, flip flops instead of those brown shoes they made us wear. It’s not just fruit, though, it’s butter melting in a pan, waiting for the mushrooms to melt in. Or spice cake in the works: vanilla, nutmeg, clove. As the cheese grates, collecting in a metal bowl, I breathe in, willing the moment to last forever. I spoon the cheese, now soft, fluffy, weighing almost nothing, and compress it in plastic containers. I sneak a small bite, chewy, granular, and it’s more rich chocolate ganache than waxy Halloween candy, a little goes a long way, the taste a revolution, I think, almost holy. I wonder if there’s a perfume that encapsulates the smell, but to bottle it would lose something, the anticipation, not the grated, but the grating.

Deliveries arrive: men show up throughout the day, double parking their trucks and backing into the shop with carts piled high with cardboard boxes, which we stack on the floor. 

“Oh man, this is awesome,” says my coworker one day. “You think the Parm smells good, wait till you smell this.” 

He’s worked in cheese much longer than me and knows his shit, but it’s clear our tastes differ on most everything from music to Easter candy. Still, we agree that some things are objectively good: rye crullers, fresh oranges, clothbound cheddar. 

As he halves the new 20-pound wheel from Cabot in Vermont with a wire, he says, “Now THAT smells good.” 

At first, I can’t smell anything. I lean in closer, pull down my mask for a second, and breathe, but still, it’s not what I’d call spectacular, not in the way I’m stunned by Parmigiano. Slowly, though, I start to get it: subtler, not a slap to the nose, no fruit, but… “Dirt,” I say.

 “Yeah,” he says, “it’s definitely dirty.” 

And grassy, the woods in spring. The trail by the house I grew up in, mossy, the smell of trees and a river not far away. There’s also honeysuckle, but not quite here — it’s just out of season. I think of spring onions, of mud pies, of carving my name into the swing set. 

A friend’s dad creates sense memories for himself. On a trip, he’ll make a point of stopping to smell the flowers, telling himself, lilacs are the essence of May with my family. Brides sometimes choose specific scents for their wedding days so that whenever they encounter the perfume in the future, it brings them back. In my first year of college, I befriended a senior who had been my preorientation leader, who moved me into my dorm, who made fun of me and mentored me and whose commitment to human rights inspired me, showed me what college could be, who I could become. I sought out her presence, often climbing to the top floor of the science library where no noise was permitted, where I knew she went to study. I usually smelled her before I saw her, her perfume thick, musky, dark berries, warm spices. I’d sit nearby, popping over to wave and give her a hug, and returning to my work, hoping that her diligence and natural brilliance might rub off on me. In years to come, I’d walk down the street and pass a woman wearing the same perfume. I still don’t know what it is, though it must be sort of common, but whenever I smell it again, a pang of longing hits me, missing my friend, missing the potential of being 18 and looking up to someone who is 22, even as the potential mixed with angst, fear, like notes below the surface of the initial bang, the sweat beneath the sweet. 

*

One day in late December, I opened the shop on my own when Cheese Boss’s wife, who had become my friend, a middle school teacher who loves to read creative nonfiction, was due to give birth. The timing couldn’t have been more stressful: pandemic plus Christmas rush, extra hired hands, a hundred orders piled up and printed out. In 2020 there were no office parties, but it seemed everyone was making up for it with fancy dinners at home, truffle cheeses and caviar, panettone for families, couples, sitting in their twinkle-light glow. It had been nine months since we let anyone inside the shop; now orders happened online or over the phone or at the door, and people waited in line to receive their cheese at a peeling blue table outside. I’d left the city for several months when the pandemic first hit and had been told there would be space for me at the shop whenever I was ready to come back. When I did, I quickly became accustomed to the new flow of things, to the way we’d jot down orders by hand, cut cheese and slice meat and gather shelf products and place them all in baskets along the shelf, and call up our customers, who would arrive outside and hand over their debit cards for us to run. Inside the shop was an organized chaos that only we, the initiated, knew how to handle. Standing side by side in our masks for days at a time, we saw more of each other than we did of most anyone else in our lives.

Cheese Boss had entrusted me with the keys, shown me how to open and close the grate, told me the morning’s sequence: turn on the lights, set up the slicer, make the sandwiches. The day was cold and filled with anticipation: the holidays, the end of my semester, the baby. When I turned the key, the metal grate screeching upwards, I saw the paper bags of bread resting by the door, dropped off in the early morning by delivery men. I smiled and took a picture, thinking to myself, look, it’s my shop, my bread, and the day that will be. When my coworker arrived, he asked me what the plan was, and I felt satisfaction in knowing the answer. 

*

One freezing Sunday a year after I’d started selling cheese, I ran into a woman I knew from the shop, a customer who worked for a cheese distributor. She’d stop by for conversations with Cheese Boss about people they knew in common and goings-on in the cheese world, and we were friendly but not quite friends. At the market we chatted about our lives. She asked how things were going, and I told her I was actually also a grad student, that it was my first semester adjuncting, that I also babysat for a friend two days a week. The shop fit into the ecosystem of the rest of the life I managed, serving as the plug to insta-community, neighbors I wouldn’t otherwise have had any ideas of. And of course, I loved the cheese. I was stunned by all that I’d learned, not from reading up, but by doing it, by looking and smelling and tasting and discussing products with people who loved them. I stunned myself when I’d speak intelligently, or at least confidently, about the differences between young and aged Manchego, of how if you want something similar but different you might try Garrotxa, or Ossau-Iraty, or Roncal. I was stunned by how well I could cut pieces to order without having to ask Cheese Boss if he thought it looked like a proper half-pound. And I was grateful, in retrospect, for his patience, for how he mentored me for months, looking over from his side of the counter no matter what he was doing to say, yes, that looks about right, Pedro, just listen to your heart, that’s what I do. 

I mentioned to this woman, my neighbor, that I’d love to learn more about cheesemaking and she said how she had a whole library of books at her apartment, all of it moved home when everyone stopped going into the office. Later, at the shop, I said how I wondered if she’d like to be my Cheese Mentor. I was talking about our customers the way we sometimes do: Who would you like to have over for dinner? Who would you pick for your zombie apocalypse survival team? Who are your favorite shop kids — the eight-year-old who comes alone with a grocery list, asks why ash-ripened goats look the way they do, whispers his dad’s PIN number as we help him run the card; the small British girl with the sheepish smile who one time said “strawberry” in a way so adorable, so British, that we quote her often; the cheeky two-year-old who escapes from her stroller barefoot and tries to hide her Starbucks muffin in the bread basket; the boy who, when his dad isn’t looking, eats ice from the ravioli freezer; the little girl who brought me a flower she’d just picked, who stands in the doorway and plays peek-a-boo, who tells me about the ghosts in her apartment building. 

I kept repeating how I’d love this woman to be my Cheese Mentor as a joke, mostly, when my coworker said, “You should ask her to add you to the Women in Cheese listserv.” 

“What?” I said, laughing. “But I’m not a woman in cheese.” 

Both men stopped what they were doing and looked at me, “What are you talking about?” 

“I mean,” I said, “I just work here, you know? I don’t even work here full-time. I’m not a real Woman in Cheese.” 

“You literally are,” said my coworker. “You know more than most people about cheese. You’re currently really excited about putting price stickers on boxes of crackers. I think that defines you as a Woman in Cheese.” 

“Oh,” I said, quietly. Oh. 

Hours later, as we were about to flip the open sign to closed, Cheese Boss said, “I can’t believe you didn’t think you were a Woman in Cheese.” For reasons I couldn’t fully say, I wanted to cry, and when I went to the small bathroom before we closed, I pulled down my mask and wiped my face, looked up, stopped the tears from falling so I wouldn’t make myself further incomprehensible to these men, though so often I’d shown them my cards. We knew the facts of each other’s lives, about our families and friends and tattoos and summer plans, stories from elementary school, our worst teachers, our worst nemeses, what we were watching, our opinions on mayoral candidates. But there was also so much we couldn’t know, whatever secret hidden things sat just below the top layers, and when I went home body-tired to an evening without plans, I still wanted to cry, wanted to hug myself like I would a friend, wanted to be my own mentor, my own grown-up telling me that I was doing things just right, that I was already on the way to where I was going. 

Not a week later, I got a text from the neighbor who was also a cheese distributor asking if I’d like to take part in a Women in Cheese 5k over the summer. I hated running, and I wouldn’t even be in town, but when I got the text, I swelled. I wrote back and asked if she’d maybe add me to the listserv, and she did, and that was all it took. 

*

In December, a few months after I moved to Queens and started working at the cheese shop, my mother visited New York for her 60th birthday along with my godmother. I took them to the shop, where my mother had been before it was mine, so she could choose a few cheeses. When I reintroduced her to Cheese Boss, she said, “Thank you for fulfilling the prophecy.” We ate at my small dining table covered in a tablecloth I bought in South Africa, my mother’s favorite colors, blue and white. There was wine, there was cheese, there was bread I made myself.

On the phone two years later, I want to know what she meant. “I’m sure it was just a silly thing I said,” she recalls, but I don’t believe that’s the full answer. Because silly or not, there’s a reason I remember it so clearly, a truth that made sense to me, lightbulb, bell ringing. “I guess I meant that the prophecy was there but hadn’t completely been written,” she says. 

*

The shop is small, scrappy, opened six months before a pandemic disrupted all manner of regular business, has a small staff, two or three others aside from Cheese Boss. Things are often disorganized, the cases filling with indeterminate pieces of cheese, a piece of chèvre with the Manchego, the Gouda mixed in with the triple crèmes, a hunk of Stilton tucked between the Swiss and Havarti. If the price is not marked on a product, only Cheese Boss knows the true answer: $10.99, $13.50, $29.99/lb. On days when Cheese Boss isn’t there, we will text him questions, and if we don’t hear back from him in time, we give it our best guess. 

Once, more than a year after I started, I was in the shop with another part-time coworker I hadn’t worked with much before, Cheese Boss at his baby’s one-month check-up. (The baby been born at nearly twelve pounds, not “Babybel,” as I’d been referring to him in utero, but “more like a Comté wheel,” his mother had texted.) A cold day in late January, it was a quiet and dark afternoon. When I realized we had somehow run out of Parmigiano, our biggest seller, I lifted half a wheel, a forty-pound piece from the back fridge, and set it on the butcher block to score and chisel open as I’d done several times under Cheese Boss’s supervision. I took a selfie with the cheese, holding its weight against my apron, and got to scoring. But the wheel was cold and the knife slid like an ice skater across its oily surface, sliding right across my left thumb, which held the cheese in place. In the bathroom I removed my gloves, pain searing, the gash something I was afraid to look at head-on, and my coworker wrapped my hand like a mummy. I held on for the last two hours of our shift, raising my hand above my head and directing my coworker, “That one’s Chebris, not Vache Basque,” feeling guilty I couldn’t help wash knives or Windex or vacuum. Later, I got six stitches and, looking at my Frankenthumb, thought how now I’d have proof of my mongering for the rest of my life.

*

I open the shop a morning in spring. It’s quiet still, ten, not so early, but early enough that the street doesn’t fill with horns honking, Spanish music playing, the man who drinks on the bench on the corner not yet arrived to fill the air with his harmless shouting, “I know everything!” I open the grate, bring in the bread, and lock the door behind me, keeping the lights off so innocent passersby won’t stop to ask me for something I’m not ready to give them. I play music and revel in the stillness yet to break, before the mess we won’t fully clean until evening. I will make sandwiches: I need mozzarella, marinated tomatoes, pesto, butter, oil and vinaigrette and cheese and ham and prosciutto and salami. As soon as I start with the ham, there’s a knock at the window.

I go to the door in my apron, and, instead of my coworker, see a man holding a single shoe as if on display. It is broken. I pause and we stare at each other a minute before realizing, oh. “The cobbler is next door,” I say, pointing. For a beat he is confused, and then he notices my apron, notices our sign in the window boasting, CHEESE, and we laugh, and he waves, and leaves. 

For a long time, I’ve searched for a place to call mine. In every city I’ve lived, I’ve reached for something, walking the perimeter, memorizing how the street feels on my feet, noticing beautiful houses, or restaurants I’d like to try, or flowers in bloom. I struggle with this need to belong and feel belonged to, knowing that really, nothing is ours, even the home that might for some feel so soundly so. Land is borrowed or stolen or both. The urge to claim, to possess, feels wrong — why should I feel the need to take ownership of what can never really be mine? And yet. Perhaps belonging is less about ownership than it is about a quiet knowledge of a place, of paying attention. There’s something to knowing that the cobbler is next door, that the strange pounding I hear when the shop is quiet is a banging on shoes, fixing. There’s something to knowing the order of the day, of the neighborhood. There’s something to seeing that a favorite customer has placed an order, the excitement that I’ll see them today, or to the surprise of a new cheese arriving, maybe from a goat farm run by one woman, all on her own. 

Katie Machen is a writer and cheesemonger based in Queens by way of Maryland, Pennsylvania, France, and New Zealand. She loves summer produce, most any body of water, and walking really fast without always knowing exactly where she’s going. Her work has appeared in Entropy, Windmill, and Off Assignment, and she holds an MFA in creative nonfiction from Queens College, CUNY. Find her on Twitter @katie_machen and Instagram @katie.machen.

Kailah Figueroa

good things grow here

I am standing on the back pegs of Jim’s bike and we’re riding down the center of an empty street. The sun is setting, and I hold on tight to his shoulders, digging my fingers into the tweed fabric of his suit. We’re seconds from dusk and minutes away from what Jim calls the coolest place in the world. It’s a garden and Jim says that it has healing properties. But, only for those who truly need it.

“Just don’t take any of the plants,” he says. “You’ll get 24 years of bad luck.”

Though I cannot see a version of myself twenty-four years in the future, an image of a mirror comes to mind but there is nothing reflected back to me. So, I close my eyes and make a wish on the back of Jim’s bike. In twenty-four years I will be unrecognizable and everything will still be good. I tell Jim that bad luck is relative and makes a good start for an amazing story. He says I’m selfish and conceited because I think the world revolves around me. It’s the truth though. I know that nothing good would exist if it wasn’t for me.

When we get to the garden, I extend my hand to Jim. We leap through into the high grass, duck under the tangled vines, and pass the trees that lead to the gated fence. Jim is talking about the etymology of the word departure and how he hates having to leave his home. I sit beside him on the stone bench as he plays “I Wish You Were Here” by Al Green on his phone. Al Green’s voice becomes the lead singer of a garden chorus filled with crickets, birds, and howls that fade into the background. The grass stains from last week are still present on Jim’s pants. Maybe now he will have a piece of home to bring with him wherever he goes. I pull out the sandwiches and drinks from my bag and Jim pours water over my bare hands. It drips onto the grass, my jeans, and on my dirty sneakers. Then, it’s my turn to do the cleansing. Only I will make less of a mess.

Jim sighs, “I think I’m in love with the French girl.”

I want to tell him that she is not French, that she only exaggerates the euhhs and eurrs in the front row of French class so our teacher will feel better about his teaching methods. But, I do not say that. Instead, I tell him that love can be held in the palm of your hand, that love is one syllable so everyone should be able to have it. So, if he wants to love her, then it’s plausible. Love is four letters long and shaped like a bed that would trigger nightmares for me, but the sweetest of dreams for Jim. I want to tell him that I will always lie in love with him and I hope he does too. Jim was my kindergarten boyfriend, the first person in my life that I put here by choice, and the only boy who can hold my hand. Now, Jim is less boy and more friend with a pinch of best in between. The girls at school think we’re together. We are. But not in the way they want. We are one lifeline pulsing up and down on a vital sign monitor in an ICU. Only we are both the body, the monitor, and the hospital room. We’re together because we have to be. If we weren’t it wouldn't make any sense. We eat our sandwiches in silence and I wonder how the garden looked before we stepped into it.

“You’re so dramatic,” he says.

“I can speak French too, you know,” I say.

“Yeah, but you’re not very good at it.”

“I am.”

“Prove it,” he says.

“I don’t have to prove anything.”

“And you wonder why people think we’re dumb,” Jim says.

I kick the dirt beneath us causing a wave of fireflies to rise from the grass, brightening and diffusing their bulbs like a light switch. I feel terrible for ruining their night.

“You think everyone is wrong. Even if you believe them, you just want to be the first to say it,” he says.

I leave Jim and walk to the edge of the garden. He follows. We are side by side with flashlights in our hands, inches in front of a rose bush. Jim says his mother told him that he was born in a shipping container near the harbor, and that’s why his skin and features are darker than hers. Jim brings this up as we shine our flashlights on the darker parts of the garden. In elementary school when the lights would turn off in the classroom, the white kids would say, Where’d Jim go? as if he had some supernatural ability that allowed him to be invisible. Jim tells me since he is older now, he realizes that it was not about harvesting a superpower. He looks down at his hands.

“If I were the last man on Earth, do you think people would be mad at me?” Jim says.

 “Everyone would be dead, so I don’t think they can be mad.” I shrug. “Plus, it’s a bit unrealistic.”

“You’re right. I think I’d be the first to go. I’m not very strong,” he says.

I know I’m right. I place my hand on his shoulder and smile. “I would be right behind you.”

Jim usually cries at this part, and I pretend to be too busy staring at the chain fence and the rosebuds to notice his tears. But tonight is different. Tonight, Jim wants to time travel and wonder how his life would be if he wasn’t the one living it. He is still crying and says he doesn’t want his dad to see him like this. Jim looks down at the grass stains on his brown tweed suit, it’s the only thing he wears out of the house regardless of the destination or weather. It’s all he has.

I tell Jim that he hasn’t seen the man in nine years. He should take Jim as he is, just like I do. But Jim isn’t convinced.

“You’re just saying that to make me feel better,” he says.

“Is that so bad?” I say. He looks away from me.

Soon, Jim will be making the 14-hour journey from our country to his father’s all by himself. Jim thinks that he is not a good enough man to be in his father’s home and that his father deserves a son who loves himself. I want to hold his face in my hands and tell him that the stranger dressed like his father does not deserve him. I want to tell him that departure isn’t all bad and that I will be right here, waiting for when he comes back. I wish I were a better friend. Maybe then he wouldn’t try to find the error in my words.

Jim sighs and wipes his eyes. I reach into the rose bush and break off a red rose. I blow the bugs off the petals and hold the stem tight between my thumb and pointer finger so that the thorns won’t hurt me. I extend my hand to Jim.

“You just got yourself 24 years of bad luck,” he says.

“It’s a present. Just for you.”

He shakes his head and pushes my hand away from him, “I can’t believe you did that. What if something happens to you while I’m away? I’m gonna be gone the whole summer.”

“I’ll be fine,” I say. “Nothing bad will happen.”

The song ends and we look around the garden. There are hydrangeas, peonies, lilies, and a dozen other flowers that Jim can name from memory. I never cared to remember them. But now, I wish I did. My hand is warm, and I look down and see that my palm is covered in blood. While Jim is gone, I won’t come to the garden. I don’t remember the way from this side of town to our neighborhood, and I wouldn’t dare to come all this way alone at night. 

When we leave the garden, I trip over the tree roots and Jim holds on tight to me. He isn’t crying anymore, so we sing another song as we ride down the street.

I won’t be an important player in Jim’s summer, he will come back home and there will be stories and moments he’ll forget to tell me about. And that scares me the most. I shake the worry away and try to keep my balance with one hand on his shoulder and the other suspended in the air. The rose is still in my hand and my blood dries on its own. The sky is darker now and we ride under the copper-colored streetlights as we make our way home.

Kailah Figueroa is a rhetorical engineer and memory archivist. Her writing has appeared in Homology Lit, Perhappened, Prose Online, Passengers Journal, and others. She is the founding editor-in-chief of Mid-heaven Magazine, an online magazine for art and writing pushed to the sidelines of pop culture. She also writes The Saddest Girl in _______ a monthly newsletter for commonplace meditations. You can find her at kailahfigueroa.com

Fatima Abby Tall

A Moment into Night

ONE 

SACRE COEUR, Senegal. Night. Street parallel to the Liquor store. MOON is bright and full in the sky. The buildings hug the road close – shoulders touching. They whisper to themselves quietly. A few strain their necks to tell MOON what’s happening in their streets. The whole city hums for her. The city bows down to her. She being their source. Their mother. The ones who were not born to her, forget her presence.  Unhear her word. A man and a woman sit in a car. Music plays softly in a foreign language. The song is comforting and sweet. If you heard it, you’d think you had heard it before, somewhere at home in a room you never knew was there. They both look straight ahead as the wind comes through open windows. It’s hard to speak when you don’t have the right words. Everything is covered in Red. An animal wades through a pile of trash outside the store. 

MOON: Despite her cyclic nature, she is always in full. You will never see only half of her. If you do, do not assume you’ve seen her. Do not assume you understand her function – her ways. If you’ve seen her in waning, then you’ve seen the devil and no one else. He and God are the only two incapable of being purely vulnerable. If you think you’ve seen her - you haven't. He has found you instead.

She will come to you when you’ve given up the external world. When you’ve dragged it out of the river and forced it to stand to move forward to take accountability. She forces you to use your hands again. To let her speak through you like this voice had been anchored there for years.  Like somehow, she moves in one body that you just realized you lived in too. She’s in every moment sitting in the corner of your mouth when you curl your lip – trying to pry the truth from you. She is never lost, especially in the night. 

Sometimes I think he’s taken everything from me. 
Even the night. 
Yet, I know what darkness looks like without me. 
She used to pray to me. 
Used let me lead her. 
I’ve forgotten how lonely it’s been here. 
Who misguides the devote follower? 
When will they come into holy transcendence?

ALRAABA: Young. Too young to be in a car with a man who’s too old to be sitting in cars with young woman. She hates wine. Doesn’t like the way it makes her mouth dry. Feels too much like a weapon. Too rough to say pretty things. To let a forgotten native language fall effortlessly from her mouth. Also, the taste. She hates the taste. She sings along to the radio, finding the patterns that allow her to hold it without doubt. She has a lot of doubt. She is doubting most days. She does know that men do not let her enter the way she wants to; wishes she could leave but wouldn’t know what else she could do. The music is cut off, so she makes her own. The melody is not enough; she quietly adds a few words – silence can never be empty. He’ll ask her if 

I am eight years old 
And a dog latches its teeth onto 
my left cheek 
I am eight years old 
and a dog latches its teeth 
onto my left cheek  
Pain – temporary 
Those who hurt me only see me 
No tears for my pain 
I carry too much 
This body so foreign to me 
Please I want to be

MOUSSA: Almost done being young.  Likes wine. Loves wine. Likes that loving wine can make him feel so good. He isn’t sure who the moon is. Doesn’t want to meet her. Doesn’t want to meet her if she looks like his mother or grandmother, especially grandmother. Has long legs that keep him from going home or going to a funeral in June when his mother begs him to. Likes music more than his own voice. Doesn’t like being alone. Likes touching more than talking. Loves touching. 

 Here doggy sssssss. Doggy. Come here. 
Sssssssss. Let me touch you. Do you know how to be touched?
Let me hold you. Sssssss. 
No not there, here. Here doggy. Are you listening doggy? 
Girl hear me. 
Ssssssss. Listen. Let me touch you. Let me hold you. 
Do you know how to be a good girl?
Do you? Sssss. 

MOON: Hates Moussa. 

I show you how to use your hands. 
Can you listen? Look at me, make eye contact. 
Respect me. 
I show you how to use your hands. 
Who taught you? Hear me, do not touch me. 
Honor me. 
I show you how to use your hands. 
       What are you looking for? Understand me, do not hold me. 
            Release me. 
I show you how to use your hands. 

XAJ (animal): Often prays wishing it was more red. More full. More alive. Likes to listen into conversations that do not belong to them. It likes collecting sounds. Like a dying bird between teeth, the sound of dead meat on a hot pan in June, or the scream of a young woman in a passenger seat. Especially the sound of screaming young woman in car passenger seats. Likes to lie. Often caught praying it had more red. Wish it could hold all the red. Isn’t sure what red truly looks like. Hates the moon. She doesn’t know he exists. She thinks she does but she doesn’t. Is good at being things it's not. Good at being the things you don’t like. People willingly give the things they don’t like. XAJ is everything we do not like. When the screaming starts, they’ll take this melody and put it to song. When the screaming starts, he’ll remember it like he whistles it every morning. He’ll replay it and replay it and replay it until the rhythm has gone off beat and it’s slipped into all the rest of the noise. 

I don’t remember being born
Yet, watch me come to your door
You didn’t ask for me 
You didn’t ask 
But I give you everything 
Red things are so pretty in her light 
Red things feel so heavy 
I want to hold everything 
Let me bore into you 

TWO 

MOUSSA

You want wine? 

ALRAABA

 Sure. 

MOUSSA

What kind?

ALRAABA

Any. I don’t really care; I don’t need wine. 

MOUSSA

You said you liked wine. 

ALRAABA

Yeah but I don’t need it. 

MOUSSA

Okay. Do you know what you like?

ALRAABA

Yeah.

//Alraaba sings along to the radio//

MOUSSA

Do you know this song? 

//Places hand on her upper thigh. It wonders, looking for the opening of her skirt. //

ALRAABA

No.

//Moves Moussa’s hand//

MOUSSA

Oh, you just seemed to know it. 

//moves hand to cheek//

SACRE COEUR 

His hand.  

XAJ

Mmm. His hand. 

MOON

He has found you instead. 

ALRAABA 

I just like it. 

MOUSSA

Yeah but you were singing the words and --- you know it's bad if a Senegalese woman can’t speak her own language. 

ALRAABA 

What?

MOUSSA

You’ll never get a husband that way. 

MOON

He has found you instead. 

ALRAABA 

Deggmum. (Tries to say “I don’t understand”)

MOUSSA 

Deggumaaaa. You forgot the a at the end. 

See, I told you... Listen to me, you want some wine? 

// Moussa leans out the window waiting for an answer he will never get. //

Xaj ssssssss sssssss. Come here. Let me touch you. 

XAJ

//Lifts head from the mouse it paws on wet cement. Looks to Moussa not for his yelling but for her arm hanging out the car window nails tapping the side door to the rhythm of the street. It sees that she finds silence in nothing. It likes that. // 

So pure. 
So soft. 
So young. 
So full. 

MOON

//She descends – red palming the bottoms of her feet. She hums in a vibration that feels so earthly. The street stretches in her presence. Bends backward backs to sky to show her their true face. Hide nothing from her for she knows all secrets, nothing is quiet in the night. // 

Not pure. 
Not soft. 
Not young. 
Not full tonight. 

MOUSSA

Why waste my night, Alraaba? I deserve to feel it too. Let me feel it. Let me. 

ALRAABA

//Stiffens - forgot what movement sounds like. How do you sing a getaway? How do you broadcast it across the radio? How do you get people to hear it? She hums.//

XAJ

//Lunges for Moon//                                                                            

MOUSSA

//Lunges for Alraaba//

MOON

No tears for my pain.                                                              

ALRAABA

No tears for my pain. 

// Both MOON and ALRAABA make eye contact through the windshield. They hum together and ALRAABA swears she’s heard this somewhere before. As the sound grows louder and SACRE COEUR starts to hum at the car  and begins to disappear. She’s in the ocean floating with the moon. She lets water fill her ears and sit in the silence of the source. She likes this silence. It feels familiar, warm. We see a small speck in the distance frantic on the shore. A small animal knowing it will only drown if it moves past the shore. She does not see it. She doesn't know it’s even there. She only hears this//

I am eight years old 
and the water cradles me 
one body that can move everything 
Washes over me like I never stopped being clean 
Hold me 
Hold me 
Hold me 
Let this silence take me in.

fatima abby tall is a creative currently residing in Portland, OR. They were raised in rural Idaho but feel most at home in Dakar, Senegal. They graduated from the University of Iowa with BA’s in English and Creative Writing and Gender, Women's & Sexuality Studies. fatima does not work within one specific discipline. You can find their work at LoosenArt, Bottlecap Press, and in AbolitionISH Zine Endnotes. Additional work can be viewed at Fatimaabbytall.com. Find them on Instagram: @fatima_tall and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/fatima.tall.10

Jayson Carcione

Crossings

Imagine — a woman undertaking such a voyage on her own.  A woman on the endless ocean. A woman held by the waves on a scrapheap steamer… 

I always appear on deck at dawn — a habit born of poverty. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t rise with the sun, the beasts in the fields. Even here, far from the cursed land of my youth, I escape the fetid, dark hole of steerage to bathe in the glow of first light. The light breaks softly upon the grey-tipped waves. The wind a baby’s breath upon the surface of the water. I was but a girl when papa took me to the sea. We came from the interior and I only knew the brown-scorched hills and green valleys, the suffocating sky, the dead mountain villages.  Sicily is an island he said, we are surrounded by water.  Do not fear it, he said. It is our road to America. We returned to our dusty village and papa burned with the fever of America. It took his mind, for he spoke of nothing else until he was crushed under the wheels of a donkey cart. I promised mamma I would never leave her, but Paolo is waiting on the other side.  I should be thinking of Paolo, but I think only of water.

*

The boy does not fear the water. It is trying to kill him but he does not fear it as he did the desert. That endless sea of sand. He is still wiping sand from his ears, his toes. He hears the night-time desert wind above the groaning sea. He dry heaves over the rubber gunwale. There is nothing to expel from his hollowed-out body. He captures a handful of churning sea and brings it to his mouth.  The salt burns his bleeding gums. His throat is raw but he is careful not to swallow a drop. He swishes the sea around his mouth before releasing it over the side. The boat is dead in the water — it cannot break free of the swell, the ring of bloated corpses. Hours before, they ditched the motor of the boat. The boy can still smell fire and burning fuel and it sickens him more than the vomit and blood washing over his feet. His sister is sprawled across his knees, he doesn’t know if she is alive or dead. His mother is lost among the broken bodies around him. 

*

Of course, mamma shed an ocean of tears when Paolo’s letter came.  Even before I tore the wax seal from the envelope with trembling hands, mamma knew Paolo wanted me to join him in America. I wasn’t Paolo’s first choice but after my sister died from typhoid, I was his only choice. Mamma couldn’t read and I repeated Paolo’s words to her again and again. She roused me in the middle of the night,  she hounded me at dawn. When I could take no more, I hurled Paolo’s letter into the fire. Mamma sobbed as his words went up the chimney in a serpent’s tail of black smoke, her cheeks stained with tears of ash.    

*

His first kiss under an ashen sky.  The rains had not come for months. Villages burned. The herds died and rotted in the hinterlands. Children picked meat from the bones. Men with guns roamed the bush. They killed his uncle and threatened worse to his sister. His father bundled them into the back of a pickup truck with five other families. She kissed him goodbye, warm sweet rosewater on lips. His sister teased him when she saw him kiss the girl and they fled to a city of brick and mud at the edge of the desert.

This is what he remembers as his sister dies across his knees.  She breathes her last, sharp and sudden. Seawater bleeds from her mouth onto his knees.  He has no strength to stop them throwing her over the side of the boat. He has no strength for tears. He brushes his lips, cracked by the sea and sun. He tastes that rosewater kiss.  

*

The captain wants to kiss me. He’s too polite to say so but I can see it in his eyes, the jerk of his chin,  the constant drumming of fingers on the guardrail that separates us from the heaving waves.  A woman knows such things — not that I have much experience in matters of the heart. Paolo is the only man I have ever kissed. His lips the taste of tobacco, wine, regret. He kissed me but he longed for my sister. A woman knows such things. The captain, a proud Dutchman,  is ever so polite. He often joins me on my morning walk. We go from bow to stern and back again. He speaks of tides and trade winds, his harbour home in Rotterdam.  He tells me wondrous things about my own land, places I have never seen. The temples of Agrigento, the amphitheatre in Taormina. His Italian is flawless, far better than my own. He is sorry he cannot speak Sicilian, but he makes up for it by teaching me some words in English.  Ocean. Waves. Hello. Clouds. Sun. Thank You. Stars. Beautiful. You. Are. The words trip off my tongue. My cheeks blaze when I say them. His hand brushes mine on the guardrail, My hand is still, I allow his touch to linger. His fingers burn and his eyes fasten on the darkening horizon. 

*

The horizon burns with the setting sun. Shadows spread over the surface of the sea like obscene slicks of oil. The boy welcomes the coming night. It will bring respite from the relentless sun. His eyes are so heavy, the world dims, but he keeps his gaze upon the water. He longs to touch the floating body of a young girl. It is not his sister, but he wants to make the connection anyway. 

The surface of the water reflects the night. He finds the strength to cast his gaze upwards and he counts the stars. An impossible task. He doesn’t know if there are more stars in the sky or grains of sands in the desert. His father never made it out of the desert. The fever took him and he prayed until the end. The boy does not pray to the heavens. He knows there are only stars in the night sky, planets, comets, vast blankets of interstellar dust.  Still, he does not curse the non-existent god — just in case. He stops counting the stars, wonders how many of them are long dead. Their ancient light filling his eyes on a rubber boat in the middle of a godless sea. 

*

Do not think me a godless woman. I have broken no vows. I have not betrayed Paolo. The captain is merely my walking companion. I have shunned his invitations to dine in his cabin, but I have caused quite the scandal in steerage. The women look at me and turn away. Some cast the evil eye upon me. Men violate me with their gaze. I do not deserve their scorn so it means nothing to me.  I am a woman crossing the ocean alone. I will have a new life in America — that is what I deserve.

I am alone now. The captain has returned to the wheelhouse. I watch the darkening horizon that so preoccupied him. Grey curtains of rain billow from sky to sea. The mirror surface of the water shatters into furious, little white caps.  The ship heaves to the side. The sudden squall is upon us. Great black clouds of smoke escape from the twin stacks of the ship like a frightened flock of crows. The ship cuts through the rising swell. Passengers scurry from the decks back to their cabins or the hell of steerage.  I seek refuge in one of the tarp-covered lifeboats attached to the upper deck.  I hold back the sea sickness. I do not pray to god, I pray to the captain to find a path through the storm.  I lay flat on the floor of the lifeboat. The tarp is heavy with seawater, the lifeboat strains against the ropes and pulleys holding it in place. I shut my eyes and clasp my hands over my ears to drown out the ocean’s roar. I listen for my father’s voice in the crashing waves. Do not fear it, he said. But it is my mother’s voice that whispers through the screaming wind.

*

His mother is gone. The waves took her at dawn. He is an orphan of the sea. Rain falls. He raises his head and opens his mouth to take in the rain. It is not enough to fill his husk of a body. Water dribbles from his swollen lips. He cannot hear the others in the boat. The moaning has stopped, save for the endless moan of the sea. He lies on his back and opens his limbs like the broken petals of a flower. He does not touch other withered limbs. His delirium takes him back to when the rains came. The pastures green and lush. He kissed his mother, touched her swollen belly to feel his sister safely inside her.  The boy was so proud he thought he would explode. He was going to market with his father. They fetched a good price for the goats. His father was elated and took the boy to a cafe. They had powerful cups of coffee. His father had a beer and let the boy take a sip. He had never seen his father so animated. He spoke to the boy like a brother and told him tales of his great-grandfather who took up arms against the Italians.

Then on that glorious day, his father decided to take him to the sea. They left town and travelled beyond the pastures and scrubland to where the earth meets the sea. Palm trees dipped in a soft wind. Fisherman cast nets from skiffs on the horizon. The boy took off his sandals, dragged his feet through sand and water. His father did the same and they watched egrets strut along the shore, raptors ruling the clean, cloudless sky.  Water kissed the boy’s feet and the sea spread out before him. It seemed to go on forever. It was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen.

This is the sea he remembers as waves crash upon the rubber boat. He stretches his limbs further until he can move no more. A white cap rolls over him. Salt and spray whip his face. He squirms onto his knees and expels water from his sodden lungs. He falls back to a sitting position. He is alone. The others are gone, taken by the waves. He leans over the rubber gunwale. Bodies churn in the vortex. Wave after wave roll in from the storm-black horizon. A wall of water rises, he can feel its shadow looming over him.

*

The shadow of my mother huddles with me in the lifeboat. Her voice cracks in the storm-raging wind. She chides me. I know she will not forgive me. A pulley snaps in the wind and the lifeboat falls, its bow dips towards the lower decks, the waiting sea. I crawl to the back of the lifeboat. It evens out to give me enough time to peel back the tarp and escape to the  howling deck of the ship.  I fall to my knees. Fire rips through one of the great stacks and it explodes in a fury of black smoke. The ship lists. We are dead in the water. I do not hear the screams of my fellow passengers. I hear my mother’s lament. A wall of water breaks over me. I topple down stairs of blood and vomit to the lower deck.   Mamma is calling me. I deserve her fury. I lied to her. I lied and left her in a dead mountain village. She saw it in my eyes when I read the letter, when I paused and stumbled as I read as if I was making up the words. Which of course, I was. Paolo did not write the letter. Paolo is dead. The letter was written by a priest who detailed Paolo’s demise. Crushed by a train as he laid railway track. He whispered my name from bloodied lips, but I know he was thinking of my sister at the end. I could not reveal this to my mother — doing so would have condemned me to a life of misery. Mamma’s life —a life I could not bear.

The second stack explodes. Fire burns through the belly of the ship. We are caught between great mountains of water. The bow thrusts upward, the stern falls to the waves. The ship lists on its side, a wounded animal. I crawl to the bow of the stricken ship. Mamma is waiting for me. She is a shadow, a thin squid-shaped shadow, that crawls over the bow of the ship into the black water. A jagged wave rises over me and I follow her into the depths.

*

The ship appears to the boy through jagged pieces of fog. The sea is green, as smooth as pressed silk. The fog burns away to reveal a green-tinted sky. The sun is beautiful, he basks in its caress.  The ship cuts through the dead calm without making a sound. The ship is bathed in green light. Seaweed clings to the scarred hull. The boy thinks it is a ship he once glimpsed in the torn pages of an old school book. A ship with two great stacks like the fin of a great beast. The boy floats in the water as if he is standing upright on solid ground. Rope ladders drop from the side of the ship. The boy places a foot on the ladder and begins to climb. He sees the others scrambling up the ladders. They come from the depths, they break the green silk surface. They are beautiful. His mother and sister are waiting on board, but it is another woman who eases him onto the deck.

*

I walk the upper deck. The boy at my side. He often joins me on my excursions. We speak of the sea, the currents and tides, the wind and the waves. It is all we truly know. We speak of the others. They are always welcome here.  He points to something on the horizon even though he knows we will never reach it. We search the waves, peer into the deepest depths. The boy looks into my eyes. He asks the question they always ask. 

I turn away and lose myself in the ever-changing sea. Forever, I tell him. We go on forever.

Born in New Jersey and raised in New York, Jayson Carcione now lives in Cork, Ireland, where he works for the Irish Examiner newspaper. His short fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Forge, Across the Margin, Lunate, and Pigeon Review. His work was also highly commended in the 2020 Sean O'Faoláin International Short Story Competition. He was awarded a Munster Literature Centre Mentoring Fellowship (Fiction) in 2022. Find him on Twitter: @carcionejay

Karen Regen-Tuero

One By One

Kazuhito had not been feeling well.  It started one night toward the end of spring.  He was working late, as usual, and his boss shuffled over in his slippers to his desk.  He cleared his throat, which always set Kazu’s nerves on edge.

“You have been of invaluable service for these last 15 years,” Chairman Watanabe said.  He bowed, more deeply than Kazu was used to seeing him do.  “I wanted to tell you now to give you time. I’ll be closing the company in October.”  

“Is that so?”  Kazu met his boss’s eyes for just a moment before returning to the pile of tax documents on his desk and the Excel sheet opened on his computer.  

He should not have been surprised.  Matsumoto, Sasaki, Yoshida…one by one, over the years, a staff of eleven that had filled the office with the sound of slurped noodles and wise cracks about troublesome clients, had been let go.  For the past year, it had been only Kazu.  Each morning, arriving to an empty office before his boss did, turning on the coffee machine and plugging in the microwave, taking in the sight of vacant desks piled with direct mail and take out flyers, Kazu had felt like the last man standing.  Now, with the global downturn, less and less Japanese companies in New York needed an accountant.

When he was done with the day’s work, at eight, he called Noriko, as usual, to say he was heading home.  It was a warm night; he kept his overcoat unbuttoned as he walked to Grand Central, passing few people on the street.  During the ride on the subway and then the bus, too, there were less passengers than usual, and he had the eerie sense of a city emptying itself out. 

When he got home Keiko and Aki were side by side on the couch watching TV.  

“I’m home!” he called.

“Welcome back,” they said without turning from the screen.  

He went into the kitchen where he knew one of Noriko’s home cooked dinners would be waiting.  He flaked off a piece of the salmon, had a bite, then returned the chopsticks to their rest. The smell of soy sauce and ginger did nothing for his appetite.  

“Did you snack at work?  How come you’re not eating?” Noriko said.  “The fish is fresh.  I was at Nara this morning.”

“I’m not too hungry.”

“Well at least eat the asparagus.  It just came in season.” 

He took a bite, but chewed in a labored way, with no relish. She gave him a studied look.  She had known him for almost twenty years, since meeting him here at Club Kira as a hostess, where he was her only customer who didn’t laugh at her dream of performing with one of the modern dance companies in New York.   Tonight, he didn’t look himself.  The broad smile he was known for, that had etched lines into the sides of his eyes, was gone.  She sat down next to him.  “Go on.  Talk.”   

He took a moment to gather his breath.  “He’s throwing in the towel.  That’s it.”

“What do you mean?”

“In October.  He’s closing shop.”

Noriko stayed seated, hands under the table so he wouldn’t see them shaking.  She forced herself to quickly recover so he would not notice how she was taking the news.  “Well, sometimes these things are for the better.  You’ve been there so long.  Maybe you’ll find work you like even more.”

“At my age?”

She did not bother to tell him that 58 was not so old; it would be of no use.  

“Why don’t you stop at the Kitano?  Go listen to some jazz.  Get your mind off of things,” Noriko said the next day before he left the house.

“Maybe.”  But that night she got his usual call from work at eight telling her he was leaving for home. 

She tried to get her mind on other things.  Next month, plums would be in season in Japan.  She was thinking of having her friend send some so she could make umeshu.  “Would you like that?” she asked Kazu.  “It won’t be ready until next year but we’ll be able to look forward to sitting out back and enjoying it together.”

He gave a grunt of assent.  

She emailed her friend and asked her to send them.  It was something to anticipate anyway, something in addition to the activities of the children that filled her day. 

It was at her son’s end-of-the-year dance recital that Noriko first noticed how off Kazu was.  In Alvin Ailey’s gorgeous theater, it was impossible not to feel hopeful.  Aki was advancing nicely through the ranks.  He had been studying at the school for four years now, and would have opportunities and successes far beyond what she had had.  Today, watching him perform on stage with the other boys in his group, she let a parent’s pride fill her heart.  But when she glanced at Kazu next to her to share the moment, he was staring vacantly, lost in his own thoughts.

“You should see Dr. Ueno,” she said the next night when she was serving him dinner and again, he had no appetite.  “You can’t go on like this.”

And so, two days later, Kazu did.  During his lunch hour, he went to the small clinic in midtown with the receptionist who, to everyone’s annoyance, spoke broken Japanese.  The doctor was better.  A native of Osaka, like Kazu, he spoke in a familiar consoling accent. His hands felt good, pressing gently against Kazu’s lymph nodes on both sides.  As he continued with the examination, Kazu looked at the doctor’s round face and puffy eyes.  When the doctor was done, he spoke to Kazu at length.

“Well?” Noriko said that night when he came home.  “What’d he say?”

“It’s stress.”

“And?”

“That’s it.”

“Did he give you medicine?”

“No.”

Noriko took a sharp breath.  She put some rice porridge seasoned with green tea on the table.  “Please.  You’ve got to eat something.”

He took a couple of spoonfuls and pushed the bowl aside.

How could it be that the doctor had nothing to offer?   The next morning while Kazu was at work, Noriko looked up “psychiatrist” in the benricho, calling several until she had one who seemed to have been practicing for some time in New York with good results.    She made an appointment and took her husband during his lunch hour.  

He left with a prescription for an antidepressant and an appointment for the following Friday.  No lunch hour appointments were available – he’d be attending a conference – so they made it for 8:30pm, after work.  The psychiatrist took her aside before they left.  “Don’t leave him alone,” he said.

The pills did not seem to have much of an effect.  Each morning, he trudged to work and back.  Considering how little he had been eating, it was astounding that he could do as much.  But he was a devoted worker, and for this she could only respect him.  He knew that without him, his many Japanese clients would be left in the lurch.  

Noriko kept herself occupied. The plums had arrived, the dirty white package on her doorstep belying the beauty inside the bag.  Feeling the fullness of the fruit and seeing the burst of green, cheered her.  Now, the fruit was waiting to be set on its way to becoming wine for next year.  But she kept thinking of Kazu at work at his desk and the bad shape that he was in.  She called Chairman Watanabe at the office.

“Yes, I have noticed he’s been under the weather,” the Chairman said, keeping his voice down, presumably so Kazu would not hear.  

“I hate to trouble you, but would you mind keeping an eye on him?” she said.

“Of course,” he said and she thanked him and apologized again for inconveniencing him.  

On Wednesday morning, Noriko was surprised to see her husband finish all his rice.  

“Now that’s better!” she said, delighted to see that he was also intently drinking his miso soup.  For almost a month he had had no appetite and a vacant look in his eyes, but today she saw a glimmer in his eye that had not been there before.   

“Be careful,” she said, nevertheless, cautious of growing too excited.  She watched him walk through the door, one shoulder weighted down with his brown satchel.

That night, after washing and drying the plums, and using a toothpick to take off the stem end bits, she set the plums in a wide mouthed glass jar, submerging them in shochu and rock sugar.  Preparing the umeshu took her mind from waiting for Kazu.  She felt excited, a fluttering at her chest.  That look in his eye this morning had to be proof that he had turned the corner; she had been mistaken about those antidepressants – like anything, they just took time.  She said a silent prayer of gratitude for the ordinariness of the moment: she, screwing the lid on the big canning jar and shaking it; Keiko, upstairs, doing last minute studying for a math Regent; Aki, blissfully still spared from these pressures, in the other room immersed in Avatar.  In fact, the spirit of the swamp had erupted moments earlier, sending him jumping with such fear and amusement she’d gone in to see what the fuss was about.  

As eight o’clock approached, she began waiting for Kazu’s call.  Fifteen minutes later, by the kitchen clock, when there was still no call, she considered that he could have an especially heavy workload, but checked the house phone anyway to ensure that it was working properly.  Finding that it was, she went downstairs to find a cool dark place to store the jar, but once she returned upstairs, there was no way to get her thoughts off his call.

At eight forty-five, her call to his cell went into immediate voice mail, a sign that the phone was off.  This did not perturb her; he always kept it off at the office, lest it interfere with his concentration.  She called the office.  The answering machine came on.  

She waited until nine-thirty.  “You’re being silly. He probably finally took you up on your suggestion to stop by the Kitano,” she told herself, steadying her hands enough to call the hotel and have them connect her with the lounge.  

“A man by the name of Kazuhito Otsubo.  In his late fifties,” she inquired.  “Thank you.  I’ll wait.”

From the roots, she stretched her hair back against her scalp, something to do to get through the waiting.  

“It’s a light turnout tonight.  No one by that name,” she was told.

“Oh.  I see.  That’s okay.  I thought he might have stopped by,” she said, hanging up.

She phoned the Chairman at home, in his apartment uptown on Lexington, not far from the office.   His wife picked up.  “I’m so sorry to bother you,” Noriko said.  “Is your husband at home?”

The Chairman came on.  “Yes?” he said, in a voice that was less gruff than usual.

“It’s about my husband.”  She took a quick breath.  

“Your husband?”

“He has not come home.  Normally, I wouldn’t worry, but as you know--”

“I see.  Actually, I wasn’t in during the afternoon.  I had meetings with clients and then, since it was so late, came straight home.”

Her shoulders curled in and she had to sit down. “You went straight home?” she said, the words escaping before she could think.  She had asked him to watch him.  “Of course.  I understand. You have duties to perform.”

“He probably wanted to squeeze in some extra work,” the Chairman casually said.  “I’ll go check on him.  Put your mind at ease.”

After hanging up, Watanabe stayed there looking at the phone, hand on the receiver.  

Coming back into the room, his wife saw him standing motionless.  “What is it?” she said.  

“Otsubo.  He hasn’t come home.  I said I’d go check things out.”  He put effort into taking his hand from the phone and gathering his things.  He hesitated at the door.

“I’ll go with you.”  She got her jacket and an umbrella big enough for two.

They walked together along Lexington Avenue.  Cars and taxis whisked by; there was little traffic at this hour.  Very few pedestrians.  They passed three beggars in the course of as many blocks.  One, Watanabe saw now, was actually not alone.  It was a mother and, in the shadows, protecting themselves from the downpour, small children.

“It wasn’t this way before.  When we first came,” Watanabe said.  “Damn it, this is like a third world country.”

“Well, Japan’s no different these days.”

“Mmm.”

It was fortunate that the security guard was still on duty, since he went off at twelve o’clock.  

“You’re out and about late,” Ramir said.

“Oh just something I need to check on.”

At the elevator, as he waited, Watanabe had a thought.  He went back to Ramir.  “By the way, did you happen to see Mr. Otsubo come down?”

“No I don’t think so, but I had Daryl cover for me for a few minutes when UPS was here.  I’d ask him but he’s gone home.”

“It’s okay.”

The elevator came and Watanabe boarded it with his wife.  They watched the numbers rise. 

At ten o’clock, Noriko sent Aki upstairs to bed.  Ordinarily, she let him stay up to eleven to give him time with his father.  It was never the case that Kazu would play games, or even watch TV, with him.  But even if they were in separate rooms she knew that they appreciated each other’s presence.  She stood at the edge of the bathroom as he prepared for bed, noticing how similar his profile was to that of his father’s.  “Papa’s working late,” she said and rubbed his head.  When she was returning downstairs, the phone rang. 

“We found him,” Mrs. Watanabe said.  “At his desk.”  

Noriko waited for Mrs. Watanabe to continue.  When she didn’t, Noriko said, “And?”

“It doesn’t look good.”

“Doesn’t look good?  What do you mean?”

“We tried to wake him.  He was not breathing.  911 is on the way.”  She hesitated.  “But I’m afraid it’s too late.”

Noriko thanked her and apologized for inconveniencing them at this time of night.  

She stayed up repeating the news to herself so it would seem real.  But it seemed no more real than the poorly drawn manga swamp spirit that had filled the television screen moments earlier.  When a detective called at three in the morning to give her the final word, and tell her that the body had been identified and she need not make the trip in, she was still up, and able to get the phone on the first ring.  She thanked him, relieved.  It would be impossible to leave the kids alone and go into the city at this time of the night.

In the morning, on no sleep, she made lunch for the kids, the sandwich they looked forward to every Thursday.  She covered the Wonder bread with the crunchy peanut butter they so liked, coating the other slice with the flavorful grape jelly from Smuckers.  Every step along the way, she commanded herself to act as she would on a typical day.  She decided, in fact, that there was no need to think beyond the moment she was in, to do things in the normal way. “Futsu ni,” she told herself.  

When the kids came down, calling out “Morning!” she returned the greeting in her usual spirited way.  Kazu always left for work before they were up so they did not ask for him. She served their usual Eggo waffles with powdered sugar and a full glass of orange juice.  She kept the radio on for the weather as always, low enough not to interfere with the ebb and flow of their conversation.  

Keiko went off to school in the city, the bus then the subway, a big girl at 16.  Aki walked to school down the hill and around the corner with the other boys from their circle of condos.  

She felt she needed more time to be able to tell them.  That afternoon, Keiko was absorbed in studying for her last Regents and was locked inside her room.  Noriko served Aki a snack of Sandies at the table and asked about school.  Every object she touched in the kitchen seemed to have some connection to her husband.  Opening the refrigerator recalled the two of them at PC Richards eight years ago when they bought the condo and needed to refurbish the kitchen.  Recently the door’s handle had come undone and he had found a trustworthy Japanese repairman who came to the house to fix it.  Before Aki went to bed she braced herself in case he should ask for his father, but he did not.  

Early on Friday she went into the city to her husband’s office.  She took his route – the bus outside their condo to the #7 train in Flushing into Grand Central Station.  From there it was a brief walk to an office building that looked like so many others.  It was her first time seeing where he’d spent so much of his life.  The office itself was but one large room with about a dozen desks and a 2009 Japan Airlines calendar showing a picture of puffing Sakurajima Volcano pinned to the wall.  Perhaps the office had originally been some kind of storage area, because there was no window.  Against one wall was a coffee maker and a microwave with a stack of containers of instant ramen.  

The Chairman was at his desk on the phone but, seeing her, got off.  He gave her her husband’s brown satchel and, thinking of how it had hung from his shoulder, she felt a wave of nausea pass through her.  She braced herself as the Chairman handed her his wallet, and then papers he had kept with him at the office.   

“This is where he is,” he said and handed her a scrap of paper with the address.  

She looked at the paper, small in her hands.  She could not move.  At last, the Chairman walked her to the door, escorting her into the elevator and out the building, hailing her a taxi.  He put his hands on her shoulders and with a quick squeeze, told her to stay strong. 

She gave the driver the address and a few minutes later was let off in front of a brick hospital.  

It had been raining and raining lately.  There had not been one good day in all of June – it reminded her of the rainy season back in Tokyo -- and today was no different.  She held her red umbrella and, listening to the pounding drops, stood at the entrance of the hospital.  She stood for so long a woman passing by gave her an odd look.  A man did the same.  She could not get herself to go inside.

At home, Aki was first to arrive, as usual.  “How was school?” 

She expected him to say, “Same as always,” but then remembered it was his last day.

“I’m done!” he said, throwing up his arms.

Then Keiko came back.  “Nothing but rain.  This is crazy.  It’s never like this.  It feels like fall.  But who cares – school’s out!”  She took her brother by the arms and danced around the kitchen with him.

Noriko gave them a snack.  Dinner, later on.  They always ate before Kazu got home so it was completely normal for it to be just the three of them.  

“Phone!  For Papa.  Some doctor’s office,” Keiko said, as Noriko was coming out of the bathroom.

Noriko took the phone upstairs.  “Yes?  This is Mr. Otsubo’s wife.  May I help you?”

“Your husband had an 8:30 appointment.  I waited but I’m leaving now,” the psychiatrist said, sounding put off.  When Noriko did not respond, the psychiatrist said, “So how is he feeling? Is the medication helping?”

“It’s too late,” Noriko said.  

It was the first time she had told anyone and doing so, made her feel unhinged.

She heard silence on the other end.  “I see,” the psychiatrist said.

When she got off she listened to her children’s footsteps downstairs.  From the sound of it, Keiko was chasing Aki, at her age, still such a kid.  In a few hours, Friday would become Saturday.  Kazu wasn’t the sort to be away on a weekend.  And then there would be all sorts of arrangements that she would have to make that the kids were bound to overhear now that school was out.  If nothing else, she appreciated the thoughtfulness of Kazu’s timing.  

Karen Regen-Tuero's short fiction has appeared in Glimmer Train Stories, North American Review, The Literary Review, and other national literary journals. A graduate of Sarah Lawrence College's MFA Writing Program, she lives in Long Island and works in long-form television. To read her recent work published in online journals - including her 2020 Pushcart-nominated short story - go to: New World Writing Quarterly, Lunch Ticket, Maryland Literary Review, HeartWood Literary Magazine, and Adirondack Review. Find her on IG at @regenkaren and TW at @RegenKaren or reach her at karen.regen1@gmail.com.

Eva Fitzsimons

Dana

It was Sunday morning and Dana had been in the bathroom for two days. Upstairs, her parents lay in bed, sheet and the blankets pulled up in a straight line to their chins. Outside, it rained. It was a terrible, soggy May that was rotting the blossoms right in their buds. 

“I thought she’d give up by now,” said Greg. “I thought maybe she just needed some time.” 

Valerie got up and walked to the dresser. The second story was one room, shaped to the pitch of the roof. It was dim with dozens of low corners. A half-painted canvas rested on an easel, newspaper spread underneath. Tubes of paint and a tin can of linseed oil were laid out; a fistful of brushes was shoved in a jar.  

“I’ll put an out-of-order sign on the bathroom door,” said Greg. “You can draw a nice one.”

Pulling a sweater over her grey pajamas, Valerie went to the easel, looked at her painting in progress. She worked at an art supply store. She still painted but hadn’t had a show in ages, not even at a bar or coffee shop. Back in college, she’d been a realist. Portraits, mainly, and still lifes. Recently, though, her work was becoming more and more abstract. She didn’t know what to do with what she began anymore.

“You know, I wish you hadn’t brought up moving again,” said Greg. “That really upsets her.”

Valerie lit a stick of incense and stuck it in an empty water glass. Something smelled, and seemed to be getting stronger. “Will you check under the house today? Since you didn’t yesterday, like I asked you to?”

 Breakfast was scrambled eggs and toast, one plate slid under the bathroom door for Dana. Nolan wolfed his down. Nolan was ten, a generic, adaptable boy. Dana was thirteen, fat, and unlovely. Recently, the middle school called. Dana had again been caught sneaking into the science lab to eat lunch, alone. When Valerie brought it up, Dana started crying. “But where am I supposed to go?” she said.

After they ate, Greg put on his grubbiest jeans and Valerie half shoved, half rolled him up into the crawlspace at the top of the basement wall. For twenty minutes he shimmied around in the dirt underneath the porch but couldn’t find anything rotten. All he found were shells, whatever it was that had been in them long gone. Neither he nor Valerie had ever seen snails in the house or around the yard, yet there they were, a whole handful that he spilled onto the cement floor of the basement.  

“Can we take down the bathroom door?” asked Valerie. 

“The hinges are on the inside. We’d have to use an axe. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore,” Greg said, meaning it would be difficult, meaning also that it was a nice door and expensive, if not impossible, to replace. Nolan hovered at the top of the stairs, still afraid of the basement. You and me both, kid, thought Valerie and called him down to help clean up anyway. He crunched the shells like hard candy beneath his grubby sneakers. 

“Get the broom and dustpan,” she said, but a minute after he ran back up the basement stairs, the front door slammed. And the heavy step at the top of the porch that meant he’d launched himself onto the sidewalk and was off, probably to Zack’s house.  

“Hey,” said Greg. He turned and held his arms out so his wife could slap the dirt and cobwebs from his paint-stained sweatshirt. “At least we don’t have to worry about her dating.”

Valerie was standing at the far wall, where the smell was strongest. She unlatched the small window that opened at ground level and looked out at Mr. Holler’s camellias.

“Mr. Holler’s recycling bins have been at the curb since last week,” said Valerie. “But his car’s in the driveway.”

“I haven’t seen him,” said Greg. He pulled one last cobweb from his sleeve and flicked it onto the basement floor. He walked to the window. “Do you think—?”

*

Valerie and Greg had purchased the house in their mid-twenties, under somewhat mysterious circumstances. Greg had just started at the lab, and Valerie was working at a gallery. Greg wanted to buy in the neighborhood he had grown up in. Valerie didn’t want to. It was too sweet, too orderly. 

“Unless we can live in that house,” she said.

“That one?” said Greg, pulling the Volvo to the curb. 

All the other houses were tidy bungalows, with gabled roofs and pillared porches, the kind built from Sears and Roebuck kits in the early nineteen-hundreds. They were cheerful colors and had moderately priced cars in the driveway and neat lawns, green even in the August heat.  

“We called that the witch’s house when we were kids,” said Greg. A poorly done second story addition gave it an odd hump, and long strips of yellow-gray paint fluttered in the wind. Withered petals clung to thorns and swollen rose hips bulged on overgrown bushes. The rest of the yard was a mass of blooming lavender, teeming with frenzied bees.    

A woman who had been stooping in the lavender stood, but slowly. Greg hit the gas. The car sped away but Valerie could see the woman watching them go. 

“What was that?” Valerie asked. “She probably thinks we’re creeps.”

“I don’t know,” said Greg, and laughed nervously. “Why that house?”

Valerie slouched into the passenger seat, wondering how much a plane ticket to Spain would cost, wondering what it would be like to be Greg’s first wife, the crazy one who ran off four months into their marriage. She fought the urge to bolt for the first five years. They hadn’t dated long, had almost dared each other into wedlock. At the time, it seemed like the wildest thing she could do. 

“I just want to make you happy,” said Greg, putting his hand on Valerie’s. She felt guilty and soothed. “If you want that house, I’ll call and see if the owner will sell. It can’t be that Mrs. Bimeholt still lives there. She must have died years ago.” 

Crouched outside of the downstairs bathroom door, Valerie remembered that guilt. Greg was a good man. She stood. Dana’s canaries needed to be fed. She sprinkled seed onto the cookie sheet. Dana also gave the birds raw hamburger.

“Do I have to?” said Valerie, rubbing her fingertips, already dreading the red beads of meat sticking to her skin.   

“It’s for my experiment,” said Dana. “Please, Mom?   

The birds. That was how she knew Dana was going to be in there for a while. Valerie disliked the canaries. They sang, but were also capable of a deep, rising cry that erupted in a burbling, head-splitting warble. Dana hadn’t named them; she’d given them numbers.    

“I need to monitor the birds,” Dana had said on the second night. “Put them under the door or I’ll break this safety razor and cut my femoral artery. I know where it is.”

The birds were a lot lighter than they looked. Valerie tried not to squeeze them too tightly. She felt as if she would lose everything if just one died in her hands. Their hearts beat fast and wild, like they were going to burst, throbbing in her palm like a wind-up toy. She slid the first one under the door. It hopped on the linoleum a step or two, cheeped, and then launched into the air. 

*

Mr. Holler had been dead for two weeks. Heart attack, the policeman said. That explained the smell. “It may linger,” they warned, as they left the premises. “Sometimes it goes away, but you just keep smelling it. Psychological.” They sent a special cleaning crew with suits and face masks. Nolan and his friends were fascinated. Valerie came home from work to find them sitting on the porch.

“That’s morbid,” she said, shooing them away. “Go play.”

The following Thursday, Valerie walked inside just as the rain-soaked paper grocery bag gave way. She grabbed the bottom, a lime slipping between her fingers. It rolled all the way across the living room. The floors in the house were uneven.  

“Mom?” Nolan said, peeking around the corner. He had a black eye. A tall boy with big ears and a big nose and knobby limbs was behind him holding a skateboard in one raw-knuckled hand. It was Zack, Nolan’s best friend.

Valerie stumbled over Nolan’s backpack. “What happened to your eye?”

He had a shiner, purple and yellow. He said nothing. Valerie rummaged around until she found a bag of frozen peas. From the hallway came Zack’s voice.  “Nolan says you sleep on towels in the bathtub. Where do you do your homework?” 

“I put it on top of the toilet tank and sit on it backwards with the seat down.”

“Whoaaaaa,” said Zack. “That’s so clever.” 

Valerie wrapped a dishtowel around the peas and shoved a cookie in Nolan’s mouth.

“I exercise too,” said Dana. “I do push-ups and jumping jacks. I jog in place. I’ve lost two pounds. And I’ve got all my birds in here.”

Valerie sent Nolan to the car to get the other bag of groceries, then herded Zack into the kitchen and grilled him about the black eye. He wouldn’t look at her. There was a rumor at the middle school, he said, that Dana had been expelled for being pregnant. Someone repeated it to Nolan. He’d gotten angry.  

“Dana’s not pregnant,” said Valerie. “She’s in boarding school, ok? She’s not here. You don’t tell anyone about this.”

Zack nodded. It probably wasn’t the worst thing to have someone else near Dana’s age around, thought Valerie. She asked him to dinner. The boys went to the schoolyard to skate. Valerie put away the groceries. Ten minutes later, she remembered the lime. When she went into the living room to pick it up, she couldn’t find it anywhere.  

*

In the kitchen, Valerie scooped ice cream into four bowls and a pie plate. Somehow, Zack had gotten Greg into the subject of the neighborhood. The neighborhood. When Valerie and Greg used to go out to the Black Cat Tavern, she watched middle-aged men squeezed into their high school letterman jackets, playing shuffleboard and drinking light beer and hitting on young women. Greg moved among them, catching up, while Valerie sipped her vodka tonic at the bar. 

“Nolan said you folks were thinking about moving,” said Zack. He sat very upright and used odd words for a boy in middle school. Folks, for instance. Shindig. One time, he told Valerie that he appreciated her candor. They had been talking about glue sticks.   

Greg had moved the coffee table so they could have some semblance of family dinners. It was stuck endwise through the door opposite the bathroom, so two people sat in the hallway and two in the dining room.  

“Must have been someone else,” said Greg. “I’m a lifer. We’re lucky to live in this area.” 

Valerie looked at a painting she’d done in art school. Three Bananas & Broken Coconut wasn’t her best, but it was big enough to mostly hide a ragged vertical crack on the wall, and every time she looked at it she remembered the French boyfriend she’d had back then. He always said she’d give up on art. Valerie was glad he couldn’t see her now, passing a pie plate of ice cream under a locked bathroom door to a spoiled teenage daughter.   

Moving was how the whole thing had started, anyway. Not another city. Just somewhere closer to their jobs; a fresh start for Dana when she began high school in the fall; a less creepy house. Valerie had stopped by a real-estate agent on her way home from work and picked up some listing sheets, had put them on the table and Dana burst into tears and fled to the bathroom. I will never leave. That was it. 

“Ice cream,” said Zack. “How refreshing.”

On her way back into the kitchen to get spoons, she adjusted the coconut painting, realizing as she did so that it wasn’t crooked— the walls were. I knew that already, she thought. 

“I like it here,” said Dana from behind the door. One strand of Valerie’s long hair was taped across the doorway, to see if Dana was coming out when they weren’t around. So far, it hadn’t been disturbed.

“In the bathroom?” said Nolan. 

“We’re going to the beach next week, Dana,” said Valerie, stacking the dinner dishes. “Remember, we rented the house? You don’t want to miss that.”

The weather had changed so rapidly. They hadn’t even turned off the heat until the end of May. Sunny days warmed the wood floors and paneling, drawing out the odors of wax and varnish and pine. When Valerie closed her eyes, she swore she could smell lavender. The plants still grew out front, huge and silvery. They would not die. Greg ran them over with a lawnmower in the springtime, called it pruning.

“For five days,” said Valerie. “We can’t leave you that long. You love the beach, and you are going with us. It’s not fair on Nolan. Or your father. Or me. Our lives have revolved around this bathroom for too long now. You need to come out,” said Valerie. There was no reply from the bathroom. Then Dana said that if they broke down the door, she’d be dead before they got in.

The family sat in silence.  

“I can feed her,” said Zack, after a moment, like she was a cat, or a houseplant.  

“That’s not a bad idea,” said Greg, taking Valerie’s hand. 

“Please Mom?” asked Dana. “Please.”

*

Nolan was asleep in the back seat of the car when they pulled up in front of home. Valerie and Greg loaded up their arms with as many sandy towels and canvas bags of dirty clothes as they could, but one of the neighbors caught Greg and started talking at him. The front door of the house was wide open, letting in the soft June sun and the cloying smell of moss roses. 

The beach trip had turned out fine. Valerie painted. Nolan got sunburned. They boiled corn in sea water and waited for the sand to dry on their wet legs before rubbing it off. Normal things made strange: Dana was not there. At a gift shop, Valerie bought a small painting. On closer examination, it was hideous. Zack called and gave them updates. Once, when Valerie picked up the phone, she heard Dana laughing in the background.  

From the front porch, through the screen, Valerie could see Zack lying in the hallway. A Scrabble board was shoved under the door, half in, half out, but pushed back against the narrow end of the gap, ignored. Zack lay there on his side in his raggedy t-shirt, big long arms and legs sticking out. He looked like a collapsed pup tent. 

Valerie watched, unnoticed. From time spent in that same position talking to Dana, she knew the cool hardness of the floor, the hallway ceiling seeming very high up, like the inside of a cathedral, and the sound of the house, the odd clicks and pings of expanding wood, rats scuffling in the basement walls. 

As Valerie watched, Zack’s fingers crept out as though they could not help it and took a strand of Dana’s hair. He slowly rubbed the end against his face, across the hollows of his cheeks, against his upper lip and his nose. His eyes were closed. 

When Greg’s heavy footsteps started up the porch stairs, Zack dropped Dana’s hair and replaced the Scrabble board. Valerie held the door for her husband. Greg threw a pile of books on the couch.

“Well,” he said, smiling at Zack. “Did she behave herself?”

*

Zack had started coming over for dinner with regularity. Afterwards, he hung out in the hallway. He brought over his amp, and electric 

guitar. He could slide the guitar under the wide end of the gap and tell Dana how to play, his eyes closed, feeling the chords out as if he was holding an invisible guitar. Valerie thought this pretentious: the noise, obnoxious.

“You have to come out for school,” said Valerie. They were eating salmon, creamed spinach, boiled new potatoes with pepper. 

“Dad says I can stay in here,” said Dana. Greg cleared his throat. 

“We talked it over,” he said, putting down his fork. Zack put down his fork, too. They both looked at Valerie, steadily. Nolan kept eating, shoveling food into his mouth. He’d gone up two shoe sizes since June. A woman down the street came by one evening. Nolan had beaten up her son, knocked out two of his grownup teeth. 

Valerie pictured year after year of passing things under the doorway: textbooks, papers, food, Christmas gifts. Dana could survive forever in that room, in this house. This house, repossessed from Mrs. Bimeholt, daughter of the original owner. She hadn’t paid property taxes. She had disappeared, no record of her death. Walked into the river, perhaps, or been found unconscious and anonymous and put in a home. For months after they moved in, Valerie had found all sorts of hidden built-ins, laundry chutes and dumbwaiters and every time imagined Mrs. Bimeholt leaping out at her. 

Valerie did something she’d never considered: reached forward and twisted the glass knob. The door swung inwards, the hair snapping, the seal breaking. There came the mighty muted crash of dozens of wings. Canaries rose, disturbed, and swarmed over the coffee table, free at last. There was the mirror, cracked, the shelf below it holding nests of cloth and paper and long black hair.

Shielding her head from the rush of birds, Valerie stepped forward into the small room. It was unoccupied, empty but for the bathtub. In it lay the pink shards of two broken safety razors and a flaky red-brown channel leading to the drain, and the skeleton of a thirteen-year-old girl. The bones gleamed white, long picked clean. 

The last few canaries hovered, beating their wings against the frosted glass of the bathroom window. Empty. Valerie watched them, her heart constricting, watching her world contract yet again, like a hand closing softly around a small brown bird.

Eva Fitzsimons is a writer and editor from Oregon. Her work has previously appeared in the Dirty Goat and the Brooklyn Review, as well as Kitchen Table magazine, where she is a contributing editor. Follow her on Instagram @msfitzedits

J Brooke

Denny and Me

Ti-X. That’s what Denny proposed calling me. “Sounds like T-Rex” I overheard my brother chime into the phone conversation from the same room Denny was in. There were 2,915 miles between where Denny had grown up and was about to leave from for college, and where I had just moved to. “Ti like from Tia or Tio in Spanish, and then X,” explained Denny. “I like it” I said.

I had struggled for months with how to refer to Denny. When looking up “nonbinary names for nieces and nephews” I found “nephling” and “niephling” which sounded like referencing an infant, and the more popular “nibling” which seemed to liken Denny to a snack.

While filling out DMV forms for my new state’s new driver’s license, my pen freezes above three gender choices: Male, Female…and X! 40 years after my initial driver’s license, I’m offered X. Overenthusiastically over-inking, I obscure the box with a Rorschach-like blotch.

“Hey! CT has nonbinary driver’s licenses, does CA?” I text Denny.

“no clue—hope so” bookended by thumbs-up emojis they text back.

When Denny was born, I sent a football and a ballerina tutu along with a note welcoming them to the world and wishing them choices and options in their life ahead.

Denny was two when they attended Beatrice’s and my wedding in Montreal. When Beatrice’s sister saw me dressed for the wedding, in grey trousers and a floral print button-down, she shifted her lower lip to the side and said, “You’re wearing street clothes to get married in?” Denny was still being dressed in dresses back then, but their Paddington Bear-ish overcoat saved them, as they sat tall on my brother’s shoulders.

When Denny was 5, I taught them how to throw a baseball. When Denny was 8, I gave them a mitt and we spent the entirety of my visit playing catch. Denny wore a baseball cap everywhere.

As a kid, I wore a baseball cap too, tucking up into it the long hair my mother wouldn’t allow me to get barbered the way my brother got his done monthly. At summer camp I was known as “the kid with the baseball cap” which was meant as a slight, but I took as compliment. During the school year I’d go and watch my brother’s haircuts. He’d sit statue-still reading a Superman comic while the barber snipped at his feathery sideburns. My favorite part was the two columns of hair that congregated on the back of my brother’s neck getting buzzed clean. Zzzh zzzh. I’d touch the back of my neck trying to locate what such fresh stubble might feel like on me.

While researching a documentary my wife and I produced in 2009 about LGBT people who came out as senior citizens, an interviewee in Kansas said, “If you’re queer, you don’t come from a queer family… so you must create that family.” It reminded me of being teased when my brother had the role of Oberon in his high school production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. “Your brother’s the king of the fairies, your brother’s the king of the fairies” two older girls sing-songed the whole bus ride home. Dance belt and tights were part of my brother’s costume for the role, and he wore them around our apartment for the weeks leading up to the performance, continuing to wear them under his jeans after the play ended.

My parents worried my brother was gay, thinly based on his disdain of sports and his self-created origin story that he “floated down on a pink cloud.” A frequent reader of my brother’s diary when we were growing up, I knew he wasn’t gay. He was five years older, so I often needed the dictionary to look up terms he used describing what he was doing with his girlfriend. Still, he walked like a ballet dancer – “Stop prancing!” our mother would yell.

While I understood my brother wasn’t gay, I couldn’t make sense of how feminine he seemed. Certain I’d been born male, I figured stuff had somehow gotten switched around, and it seemed something similar had occurred with my brother. I wondered if who we each were had broken at birth, like a china platter shattering before getting glued imperfectly back together. I longed for all my brother was offered and summarily turned down: Cub Scouts, football, Swiss Army knives, sling shots, cap guns. When our grandfather returned from a trip to Australia, he brought my brother a handsome hand-carved Aboriginal boomerang and me a doll whose eyes closed when turned horizontal. I went into the guest bathroom, shoved as much of a hand towel as I could fit into my mouth, and screamed.

My brother and I watched “The Six Million Dollar Man” together. The premise, Col. Steve Austin, an astronaut returning to earth, endures a deadly crash the military takes as an opportunity to make Austin bionic. The opening digital readout defined “Bionic” in neon blue: “A HUMAN BEING WHOSE ORIGINAL HUMAN PARTS HAVE HAD TO BE REPLACED TO ONE EXTENT OR ANOTHER BY MACHINES THAT PERFORM THE SAME FUNCTIONS” My brother and I never discussed which of our human parts we’d like replaced, but we agreed that were we bionic, we’d become (like Austin) “Better than before – Better, stronger, faster.”

I was a fast runner, expert at rope climbing, winning an All-Around-Athlete trophy in third grade. After switching schools in 5th grade, I never took gym again. Every year my mother made Dr. Levbarg write a note saying I couldn’t participate in gym because I had “bad knees.” My knees were fine, I’d explain early on, when called to the infirmary and questioned by the school nurse. The rumor the popular girls floated around during lunchtime was I didn’t take gym because I didn’t want the other girls seeing me naked. While the notion of changing into the one-piece pink romper the girls had to wear for gym seemed the apex of humiliation, I would willingly have endured it to play sports. One thing I could be sure of, whatever my mother told Dr. Levbarg to get him to write the damn note each year, and whatever she then confided to the school nurse about me, it wasn’t, “I don’t want our daughter taking gym because she asks for sex change surgery and knows she’s really a boy.” No way was it that, because I knew my mother didn’t believe me.

Desperate for the competition, speed and pummel of aggressive play, I’d run around outside during lunch with the boys who liked contact games. 5th grade was “Buck-Buck” or “Johnny on the Pony.”  In 6th grade we played “Kill the Carrier.” In 7th grade the same game was re-named “Schmeer the Queer” and I played it through a frequently bloodied lip, and a twice dislocated finger. In 8th grade the boys abandoned these pick-up games and paraded around with lacrosse sticks, their pageantry seemingly choreographed as they cradled rock-hard rubber balls like unhatched ostrich eggs within netting attached to long metal sticks. Mesmerized watching them wring their wrists rhythmically back and forth, I’d wonder whether they were rocking the unborn ostrich or scrambling it within its shell. Asking my school’s athletic office to borrow a lacrosse stick, I was offered a girl’s one, so said “thanks anyway.”

My brother lobbied our parents to no avail to jettison his gym class. In 6th grade my science classroom window had a direct view of his 11th grade athletic requirement. He never changed out of his chinos and leather shoes which landed my brother most often on the bench observing the other man-boys not on Varsity or JV teams suffer the hour-long humiliation of forced sports. One time I witnessed my brother participate in a softball scrimmage. Covering second base, not wearing a mitt, he halted an infield grounder with the instep of his oxford, then kicked it towards the pitcher.

When Denny was 14, they accompanied my brother and sister-in-law to the east coast to spend a week with my family. Picking the three of them up at the airport I couldn’t believe how much Denny had grown. Tall and lanky, slumped broad shoulders, plaid flannel button down over knee length shorts and a dark t-shirt. I didn’t point out we were wearing identical outfits, (my cap backwards, Denny’s forward), but I noticed my brother and sister-in-law noticing. We four stopped for dinner before the long drive home. Denny, often quiet in front of their parents, spoke at articulate length about their pain being born in a girl’s body, being subject to traditional gender expectations, being out-of-sync in even the progressive world around them. They complained about most boys they used to be friends with and now were not, and most girls who judge them and they don’t want to be friends with. The word “unfair” was used no fewer than 50 times before our appetizers arrived. That night I told Denny what I believed about societal fumbling of sexuality and gender, explaining how the two are often conflated or confused in assessing people. I told them that many queer people, like us, initially fumble around with this too, in figuring ourselves out. I told them about how many trans individuals had lived entire lives as gay cisgender people unable to claim their authentic self in generations prior to this. And then I told them that I thought the person I interviewed in Kansas was mistaken…that if you’re queer, it’s entirely possible you come from a queer family. And that that’s a good thing.

That was the summer before Denny’s first girlfriend, three summers before Denny’s second girlfriend, four summers before Denny moved, just last month, into their gender-neutral dormitory to begin their freshman year at college.

“Denny, I don’t like ‘nibling’, it sounds weird” I told them on the phone last week. Not missing a beat, “Call me Nix” they said. The prefix of niece with X just like Ti-X, they mean. I like it, but I couldn’t have thought of it myself. Like Steve Austin, Denny is simply better, stronger, faster at this than I am.

J Brooke (They/e) won Columbia Journal’s 2020 Nonfiction Award for their autobiographical essay, “HYBRID”, in the Womxn’s History Month Special Issue. Their work has appeared in The Massachusetts Review, The Normal School, Electric Lit, Harvard Review, Maine Review, Bangalore Review, The Sun Magazine, Beyond Queer Words, and The Fiddlehead (forthcoming). Brooke was Nonfiction Editor of the Stonecoast Review while receiving an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Southern Maine. Brooke currently resides with their spouse Beatrice on land stolen from the Hammonasset People.