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Issue # 46 Spring 2022

Prose

Edited by Dorian Gossy

 

 

 

Tom Barlow
The Reckless Coward

 

My ex-girlfriend Alexis would have been shocked to see me hand my credit card to the guide from Eye on the Tornado, Tyler Burton. When she dumped me a couple of months before, she declared I was too spineless to hold her affection. My unwillingness to join her one drunken night free-climbing a 300-foot crane on the Magnificent Mile in downtown Chicago was the final straw, but there were dozens of other good examples of her reckless nature that any sane person would recognize as such.

"Justin? Be ready at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow to spend the rest of the day in the van," Tyler said as he handed me a bound handbook. "Here's some reading, so you'll understand what to expect this week."

I took the handbook with some trepidation. I would, I suspected, be better off not knowing what awaited. Ever since I told my mom I was planning to chase tornados on my vacation, she kept reminding me of times my courage had failed, like on the burro ride into the Grand Canyon, or the Goliath roller coaster at Six Flags, or when my uncle Bruce took me whitewater rafting. I tried to convince her that I'd grown less timid as I matured, but lacking evidence of such a change, my words rang hollow.

My best friend Zack Sinclair texted me shortly after I returned to my motel room. U set up?

Start 2mrw Never bn in a position 2 hope for bad weather be4

Better U than me

U talk 2 Denise? I'd invited Zack to join me, but he and his girlfriend were tight as a square knot and she was loathe to have him more than a five-minute drive away. She and Alexis were buddies too, surprising to me as Alexis was a habitual rule-breaker and Denise wouldn't jaywalk to avoid a runaway truck.

She & Alexis did a high-ropes course b/w buildings dwntwn as a fundraiser 4 some cause

I was familiar with the Chicago event. My refusal to sign up for such a chancy enterprise, thirty stories in the air, had been another strike in our decaying relationship. She was still in my mind though, hard as I tried to purge her. The sex had been on occasion incredible, other times perverse, sometimes both, but it was improving in my memory the farther removed I was from it. And I have to admit, dating a decision-maker made my life easy, at least at first.

Zack wrote, She wore a GoPro, put a vid up on YouTube if ur interested

I'll Pass

                                                             *

I lay awake until shortly before dawn worrying over the week to come, so I almost overslept the tour meetup. I showed up at the Eye on the Tornado van in the hotel parking lot bleary-eyed and hastily dressed. I couldn't help but note that the van's roof was heavily pitted.

All seven of my fellow tourists were already gathered and we made hasty introductions, including a thumbnail bio for each which I remembered better than their names. There was a dentist and his wife from Ocala, both second-generation from Mumbai, a black woman librarian from Memphis in her sixties, two teenage nerd boys from Houston Tech on their first vacation on their own, and a single middle-aged man from York, England, who had made the poor decision to buy a cowboy hat the size of a NASCAR track.

The last participant was a woman, in her twenties like me, with an athletic build. She had a face that would photograph well, with sharp contours, a lower lip that protruded seductively and deep eyes the color of glacial melt. Her hair, in subtle gradients of caramel, was worn to the shoulder and held in place with a batik headband. She introduced herself as a trauma nurse and a big fan of violent weather.

Alexis.

I stepped to her side and whispered, "What the hell are you doing here?" A little too loudly, apparently, as the others looked at me with disapproval.

"This has nothing to do with you," she said. "When I heard about the tour from Denise I thought it sounded like a blast, and nobody else had scheduled this week for vacation."

"Just stay away from me, OK?" I said and turned my back to her.

At that point, Tyler gave a brief description of how the day would run, the same pattern for all six days of the tour: on the road at 10:00 a.m. fed, bathroomed, and ready to spend the next ten hours on the road, traveling as much as 500 miles in pursuit of gravid cloud formations. Supper on the fly. Unfortunately, the whole breadth of Tornado Alley was disappointingly free of storm fronts for the day, so he was going to take us to Crockett, Kansas, which had just sustained an EF4 tornado strike the day before.

The van held eight passengers, as well as Tyler, who would navigate as he drove. It was equipped with captain's seats throughout, rather than bench seats, in five rows, two to a row. Tyler had a whole cockpit of computer and communications equipment up front.

When he invited us to board, I grabbed the frontmost passenger seat next to the Brit, who had a bag of snack foods and a cooler full of drinks at his feet. Before I could even say hi, he tilted his cowboy hat forward and nestled back into the seat, his feet propped on his cooler.

*

We were on the road for the next four hours, cruising past endless wheat and cotton and corn fields, all parched. Tyler tried to distract us with stories of his most exciting days chasing storms, but all it did for me was make me wish for a tornado of good behavior, not the monsters featured in his narrative. However, I’d dropped $1,500 on the six-day tour, money for which I’d written a million lines of code, and I was intent on proving my courage to myself. A week of clear weather would do me no good.

We reached the town of Crockett just before 2:00 p.m. As Tyler promised, we found a town divided in half by a swath of destruction. The houses, blown down to their foundations, the cars overturned, the power poles snapped in half, the smell of the smoke from a grade school electrical fire, all spoke to the awesome power of a tornado.

Tyler took us slowly up one street and down another so we could gawk. The dentist had a video camera and was recording as each victim took the time to glance our way and curl their lips in disdain. One old man, a mangy dog at his heels, gave us an emphatic middle finger. Our car soon fell silent. Tyler waited until we were out of town before he said, “You can’t let that get you down. We donate ten percent of all our proceeds to tornado relief, so they should be grateful.”

That didn’t do much for the guilt I felt.

*

Tyler called it an early night after telling us that the National Weather Service Rapid Refresh forecast warned of a possible weather event the next day somewhere in the Texas plains. We spent the night at a Motel 6 in Topeka. The dentist’s wife suggested we all dine together at the Waffle House next door, but I didn’t want to rub elbows with Alexis, so I waited until they’d all returned to the motel before I slipped over for a BLT and hash browns.

*

As he loaded the van the next morning, Tyler told us we were indeed headed to Texas. The winds at elevation that day, from the southwest, were bringing cooler dry air from the mountains. Those along with warmer ground winds from the southeast that were laden with water from the Gulf of Mexico could very likely spawn a supercell.

Alexis had changed seats with the librarian from Memphis, so she was behind me, where she could speak to the back of my head, but I would have to turn 180 degrees to respond.

"Remember Bloomingdale's?" she muttered, just loud enough for me to hear. The York Cowboy was asleep again, his cheek plastered against the window. I refused to respond, although the memory of having been caught having sex with her in a fitting room one dreary Monday afternoon was enough to remind me why we were no longer together.

Tyler was keeping his eye on the Doppler radar feed as well as reading the sky. He drove the van west and south of Amarillo until we could see smudges on the horizon.

Ten minutes later he said, "If you take a look ahead, you'll see what is known as an anvil cloud. This is often the right side of a supercell, and the radar shows the beginning of a hook echo to the northwest, just beyond what we can see. We don't need to chase this storm. We're going to find a place to pull over and let it come to us."

He found a wide spot in the road where tractors accessed the adjacent cotton field and turned around to position us for a rapid retreat, just in case. We all scrambled out and gathered in a line in the front of the van. The land was flat and there were no trees to block our view of the wide sky.

Alexis stood next to Tyler as he narrated the storm's development. I was soon overwhelmed with his explanation of updrafts and downdrafts and the inflow notch and the Enhanced Fujita Scale, so I tuned him out and watched the sky. The clouds were roiling ominously, while below the anvil cloud the sky was slate gray and opaque.

Five minutes later, a sharp slap of wind reached us, a refreshing ten degrees cooler with the scent of rain. Just as I began to wish I'd brought a raincoat, Tyler, who was looking at the NWS radar feed on his phone, pointed to the north and west, where a spiral of clouds a good five miles away was plunging down and retreating, like God dipping toast in his tea. After half a dozen retreats, it finally reached the ground. Unfortunately, just at that moment rain intervened, obscuring our sight, so that only a shadow of the tornado was visible.

I asked Tyler if we might be wise to retreat, only to get a scowl from Alexis. "For Christ's sake," she said, "man up. This is why we're here. I think we ought to chase that bastard."

Tyler rubbed his chin for a moment. "I don't think it would do us any good to chase. This one won't live longer than a few minutes. It's weak, and the radar shows the front breaking up. It happens more often than not."

Alexis pleaded with Tyler to at least let us stay still while the front passed over us, so we could enjoy the power of such a storm. He checked the radar to confirm it was safe from further tornados before he agreed, and, as we could see a gray rain cloud closing fast, he suggested we enjoy it from the comfort of the van. One by one, we returned to our seats, until only Alexis stood outside. Just as Tyler rolled down a window to plead with her to get in, the storm struck.

The rain came down so heavily I wondered how Alexis could even breathe, big brutal drops that struck the top of the van like a drum roll. She was grinning broadly though, standing out in the deluge, wind gusts rocking the van, and I watched in embarrassment as she peeled off her t-shirt, bra, shorts and underwear, then turned into the wind, raised her arms, and threw her head back, challenging, reveling in the full brunt of the storm.

I couldn't help but notice the swelling in her abdomen, which she usually kept flat with a hundred planks a day.

"Shit," Tyler said as he stepped out into the storm, tried to grab Alexis by the arm. She shook off his hand and danced around in the downpour, which only lasted another minute before dropping to a thin drizzle. She smiled as she wrung out her sodden clothing and dressed. By the time she returned to the van the rain had stopped. The ditches on either side of the road were overflowing.

Tyler shook his head. "Now what the hell was that?"

"You ever experience a storm like that?" she said, poking him in the chest. "I mean, really feel it, not safe in your van? Down in your bones. The power is unbelievable."

"Well, don't let our insurance people find out what you did. And keep your clothes on."

There was tittering from the back of the van, led, to my surprise, by the librarian. The teens' eyes were still wide as hubcaps.

*

Unfortunately, the only seat left for Alexis for the ride to our next hotel was next to me, and not only did water run off her and cross the floor to my shoes, but the excitement had loosened her tongue.

“That was incredible,” she said. “You should try it.”

“I’m not ready to expose myself to a group of strangers. I lowered my voice. “By the way, are you pregnant?”

 She crossed her arms. “Do I look fat around the middle?”

“Maybe only to me. I remember what you looked like a couple of months ago.”

“Maybe I’ve just gained a few pounds. You know how I love my lattes.”

I could tell she was toying with me, which only infuriated me further. “Is it mine?”

 She shook her head. “It’s mine. Don’t worry yourself; she won’t need a father.”

“It’s a girl?”

“You think I could even conceive a boy?”

I closed my eyes. I had no desire to father a child. My dad hung himself when I was five, and I had inherited the same depressive genes. I was keeping the demons at bay thanks to my meds, and I was resolute that I would not give in to the urge to injure myself. I had seen how deeply Dad’s suicide wounded those people close to him, especially my mother. For years this included not taking unwarranted risks, but I now saw how, taken to extremes, this was no longer serving me well.

I had no doubt, however, Alexis would have some expectations of me as she came to her senses: money, at least, if not shared responsibility. If the child was half mine, she’d have that to hold over my head for the next eighteen years.

The other passengers were looking at us like we were the entertainment for the night, so we shut up. It was only later as I sat alone in my hotel room that I allowed myself to consider that the child might take after my mother, with fortitude and a sunny disposition that I would be proud to father.

Did I have the courage to take a child into my life? That would shock the hell out of my mother. And me.

*

The next morning Tyler intuited from NWS data that a supercell might form along a frontal boundary in southern Kansas, around Wichita, so once again we went screaming up I-35 through Oklahoma City.

Now that I had deliberated on her pregnancy, I was eager to sit next to Alexis to explore the topic further. However, she seemed determined to avoid me, grabbing the seat in the front  next to the York Cowboy while the one next to me was still open.

Tyler kept driving straight toward the bluest part of the sky for the next four hours, so when we took a pee break in Dodge City, Alexis challenged him to explain why. He was just shy of condescending as he said that he hoped, given the NWS data, we might see a storm develop into a tornado from its very inception.

By 4:00 p.m. we had taken up a position in a Dollar General parking lot in Bazine, Kansas, and watched as the first clouds bloomed in the clear blue sky. The storm quickly grew, both out and up, taking on the color of week-old snow. When the clouds were well north and east of us, we boarded the van and took chase.

I was a bit unnerved as we reached the side of the developing storm. Again, the clouds were writhing in a most portentous way, and the air soon took on the sharp smell of ozone.

"Move closer," Alexis said, reaching forward to tap Tyler on the shoulder. "We can't see shit from back here."

"I can't go straight into the storm," he said. "That would be dangerous. I'll try to keep us on the south side so we can see its advancing edge."

"Isn't there a possibility the storm will swerve in our direction?" I said.

"The only danger is if this one spreads out or another cell forms behind us. Don't worry, though. I'll keep you out of harm's way."

"But we want to be in harm's way," Alexis said. "Otherwise, what's the point?"

He did manage to bring us closer alongside the storm just outside of Holyrood. A wicked-looking row of thunderheads reached high into the heavens. We followed, stair-stepping county roads as the storm moved northeast, until Tyler pointed out a hook echo on the radar. Just as he did, a funnel dropped from the clouds a few miles away, as though he'd summoned it, a classic tight whirl.

"Closer!" Alexis said, pounding on Tyler's headrest.

"No, we're close enough," he said. "You all getting good pictures?"

The tornado, now firming up, began to drift away, so Tyler cautiously followed. We chased for a good ten minutes as the spiral grew wider and less distinct, which he explained was due to the corn and bean plants it was sucking up. He estimated it at an EF1, relatively weak, a danger mostly to poorly anchored mobile homes and cheap pole barns. He stopped the van again and allowed us to disembark so we could get better pictures of the tornado. However, a wing of the storm had spread overhead and a downpour began as soon as the last person exited the van. Tyler hustled us all back in, but the two teen nerds refused to follow. Instead, they peeled off their t-shirts and cargo shorts, leaving them in their underwear as they turned as Alexis had done into the storm. I glared at her, but she was only amused. Until the hail started.

The first hailstone struck the roof right above my head like a kettle drum. Before the boys could return to the van, the air was full of hailstones the size of golf balls. One cracked the windshield as the taller of the two boys took a direct hit on his glasses, which broke in half. Blood began streaming from his nose. The shorter one grabbed him by the arm and they circled the van to get inside, but one hailstone the size of a baseball struck the short one on the temple. He went down hard. Tyler exited the van, picked him up and carried him inside, followed by the other boy.

The short boy was only unconscious for a minute, but he was groggy when he sat up. Alexis was helping the boy with the bleeding nose pack it with tissue. Tyler gave her a dirty look, leaving no doubt about who he felt should shoulder the blame.

We headed to the ER in nearby Salina and spent the next two hours waiting as doctors checked the boy for a concussion. He was finally released with the caution to rest, so we ended the day there at the Super 8 Motel.

*

Once again, I waited until the group was done eating at the nearby IHOP before crossing the parking lot for dinner. There sitting alone in a booth was Alexis, with the remnants of a pancake platter before her. Ready to hash this out, I joined her.

“I was waiting for you,” she said, “I figured, given a day to think about it, you’d want to talk about the girl.” She was drinking coffee, which I never did late in the day for fear it would keep me up all night.

“Are you excited?” I said. “I mean, about the baby. It’s a big step.”

She sipped her coffee. “Not so big. I’ve lined up a couple for adoption. They’re way cool people I met hang gliding.”

To my surprise, I felt more disappointment than relief. “But it’s half mine, right? Don’t I have some legal rights here?”

She set her coffee down and leaned toward me. “That’s why I’m here. The couple is going to pay me $25,000 under the table, but I need you to tell the court you’re OK with giving up the baby. I know you, I know a baby is the last thing you want, and I’ll cut you in for $5,000. Do we have a deal?”

I was dumbstruck by her proposal, which was based, I could see, on her conviction that I would not have the courage to face parenthood. Her description of the potential parents scared me. She’d never consider any couple cool who didn’t relish danger, and my daughter deserved a safe upbringing. All I could think of to say was, “Let me sleep on it, OK? I mean, this is huge.”

She drummed her fingers on the table. “Come on. We both know you have enough challenges just getting dressed and going to work every day. More complications will just make you miserable.”

“I said, let me sleep on it.” The sharp tone in my voice seemed to take her by surprise, and she didn’t reply as I headed back to the motel.

*

I tossed and turned again through the night as I tried to work out how I really felt, how I should feel. I found I still harbored a great deal of affection for Alexis, despite the way she'd treated me at the end. She was exciting, decisive, and had pushed me into experiences I'd never have tried by myself. In retrospect, I was more grateful than angry for what she had added to my life. But this?

*

By the time I reached the van the next morning, everyone was already inside. The boys had been retrieved by their parents, so there were now just six of us.

Tyler told us that conditions were right down in Texas for a mesoscale convective system, which often resulted in a wide front of straight-line winds that were as destructive as weaker tornados, and sometimes a tornado would form within the front. He planned to intercept the MCS somewhere in the vicinity of Childress, requiring us to hustle.

By the time we arrived we could again see steep clouds advancing. We joined Tyler outside in the parking lot of a Kroger for his description of what the sky was showing us.

“We’re going to get closer, right?” Alexis interrupted him to say.

Tyler shook his head. “We get out in front of that storm, as fast as it’s traveling, and it’ll gobble us up. Plus, there could be a tornado buried somewhere in the front that we’d never see until it was on top of us. We’re better off staying to the side.”

“You pussy,” Alexis said. She leaned over and whispered in my ear, “You got the balls for a little adventure?”

I had the sense that if I declined I’d have a hard time convincing her I had the bravery to be a proper father to a child, so I said, “Try me.”

She laughed and I followed as she snuck back to the van, finding the key still in the ignition. She entered on the driver’s side and patted the passenger’s seat, which I took. Only when Alexis drove past Tyler did he catch on to what was happening, and he ran after us for a moment, impotently waving his arms.

“What’s the plan?” I said, swallowing my gorge as best I could.

“Find the tornado,” she said. “With Tyler, we’d never get within a country mile of one.”

“If he’s not willing to chase this storm, he must have a reason.”

“Yeah, the reason is, few people really want to live. Most are happy to just exist. Come on, you’ll love this.” She took us due north on a course that would put us slightly ahead of the front, a position that would be hard to keep given the storm was tracking at sixty miles per hour with stronger gusts.

“You’re insane. You know that?” I pointed out, studying the GPS for a highway that would allow us to travel northeast as fast as the storm.

“The world needs more crazy people.” With that she turned onto a road running west, meaning we would intersect the storm in five minutes.

And that’s when we spotted the tornado a couple of miles ahead. It was much wider than the one we’d seen the day before, and dark as coal smoke. It was bent toward the northeast, in the center of the storm front. With a big grin, Alexis headed directly toward it.

I begged her to turn around, but she ignored me. Just as we reached a point perhaps a mile from the twister, the straight-line winds and torrential rains smacked us squarely on the side, with a ferocity I couldn’t have imagined. The winds clawed at the side of the van and Alexis fought for control until we crested a small hill and caught its full force. I admit I screamed as the wind flipped the van over on my side, then its top, then onto Alexis’s side before sending us sliding down a steep bank into a deep drainage ditch that was already half full of water. The engine raced for a moment, out of control, then shut down with a shudder.

The storm clouds were so dense overhead the day was no brighter than a full moon. I was suspended above Alexis by my seatbelt, surrounded by deflated air bags, and water was pouring through the shattered windshield. I could see that her head, partly submerged, was bleeding from a wicked cut at her hairline, and she appeared unconscious. There was no way I could open the passenger door above me, but with a careful kick I was able to dislodge the remaining windshield to my right. The water kept rising, and I had very little time to rescue myself.

But Alexis had only moments before she would drown. She was pinned by the steering wheel.  I ignored the howling of the wind as I found footholds on the side of the driver’s seat and the steering wheel post and released my seatbelt. Once freed, I reached into the water, found her seatbelt release, and pressed it. As soon as I could pull it aside, I was able to grab hold of her sweatshirt and, tugging as hard as I could, drag her free. Her head cleared the water, but she still looked lifeless.

The water from the downpour continued to fill the van, so I had no time to waste. I draped her across the steering wheel, then crawled out through the windshield and scrambled up onto the fender. From there, I could kneel and lift Alexis out of the van. We were pressed against the side of the ditch, and I was able to muscle her up the bank and into the adjoining bean field, under the press of rain like a waterfall. I turned her on her side and frantically pounded on her back. To my immense relief, she began to vomit water, then take in gasping breaths.

In a few more minutes the rain stopped. Debris from the receding tornado fell around us like snowflakes, and I sat with Alexis’s head in my lap for what seemed like hours before a passing motorist spotted us and called the local squad.

*

The tour company didn't want the negative publicity, so they put in an insurance claim for the accident, vowing that Alexis was driving with their permission. For the same reason, they declined to call the sheriff on us. We were, of course, dismissed from the tour. I had planned to fly home, but since Alexis had her Lexus in Stillwater and she had been cautioned not to drive with a concussion, I agreed to escort her home.

I had a long time to deliberate as we made our way north. She refused to discuss the incident until we stopped for lunch at a Taco Bell in Tulsa.

"Maybe you're not the coward I thought you were," she finally said, between bites of her burrito. "I owe you, but that doesn't mean you have the right to bring up the tornado every time you think I'm taking a risk."

"Maybe I'm not the coward I thought I was," I said. "But yeah, you owe me. Here's how you pay me back. Sell me the baby. I'll raise her. You don't have a maternal bone in your body, so that will free you up to keep taking risks on anything that captures your attention."

She all but spat out her Coke. "Wow. Where did this come from?"

"You claim average people are cowards, but we aren't. We just choose different dangers. Getting married. Raising a kid. Starting a business. It's not the kind of risk that gets you or your hang-gliding friends off, though. It's more my kind of scene."

"To me it sounds like a prison," she said, "but that wouldn't bother you, would it, hero? Let me think on it."

I spent the rest of the trip trying to fit myself to my reckless words, hoping that if called upon I would find myself worthy of my claim to courage.

I still had my doubts.

 

 

 

 

 

Joshua Beggs
Spit It Out

 

Ever heard of an evil sorcerer named Tristan? Yeah, well, just you wait. Someday, the whole world will know my name, when the rivers turn to acid, when volcanoes spurt open like stress acne, when blood-colored thunderheads rain down lightning on you and the rest of the apes. Except for my mom. She’s okay. Well, apart from when she stuffed me into a cardigan and bowtie for the yearbook picture, and that time in second grade when—

Whap. The girl next to me smacks the back of my head hard enough to give me whiplash—and totally screw up the spell diagram I was doodling, damn it. I twist around in my desk, see Sneha with that nasty what’re-you-going-to-do-about-it smile smeared across her face. My teeth clench so hard that I can feel my braces bending. Good god, she’s hot. I hate that about her.

Hefting her backpack from the floor, Sneha says, “Class is over, Wheeze. Or did you want to stay late and schmooze with Ms. Cassidy?”

I narrow my eyes into two laserbeams of pure loathing. Ms. Cassidy lets out a cataclysmic snore from the recliner she uses as her desk chair, sending a few French worksheets fluttering to the floor.

Sneha gives me a wicked little wink and says, “Hubba-hubba,” then leads her troop of anti-intellectuals snickering and snorting out the door. One of them says something about ‘Ms. Cassidy’ and ‘Wheeze’ and ‘walrus mashing parts with a hippo,’ and I don’t know if I’m supposed to be the walrus or the hippo, only that I’m sick of getting jerked around by a bunch of fourteen-year-olds in push-up bras and gallons of body spray, and before I know what I’m doing I’m spitting out the words to a spell, feeling the Magic crackle from my heart to my fingertips, and—

—and then Ms. Cassidy snuffle-snorts herself awake, lurches upright in her chair, and looks straight…at…me. Every sphincter in my body cinches shut at once—I stutter and wheeze—the half-finished spell falls apart, Magic fizzling out of my blood, leaving me feeling like flat soda.

Ms. Cassidy glances around the classroom, sees it empty, unknits her unibrow. “Go on,” she tells me with a lazy flick-flick of her wrist, settling back in her recliner. “I’m not writing you a tardy pass if you’re late for your next class.”

The next class is lunch. Idiot. But I yank my messenger bag off the floor and leave anyway, grumbling low in the back of my throat at Ms. Cassidy for waking up and ruining my spell like that. Goddamn hippo. Walrus. Whatever.

Because the thing is. I can’t use Magic in public.

Or, well, I can do it in public, just not when anyone is watching. Or listening. Because casting spells takes a hell of a lot of words strung together, and whenever I talk in front of other people, I’m always too busy thinking don’tfuckitupdon’tfuckitup and holy hell I sound like an idiot to remember to breathe, so then I get halfway through a paragraph or a sentence or word or syllable and my lungs finally suddenly collapse and I have to—ggeeeeee-uuuuuuuhhhh!—gasp to keep from passing out.

And then everyone laughs. Because eighth graders are professional asshats. And they nickname me Wheeze, too. Because there’s zero overlap in the Venn Diagram of bullies and people with a shred of smarts—and they don’t know that I can turn them inside out with a few tweaks of my wrist and a mouthful of Magic.

Or, well, I could. But, you know. The stutter.

Anyway, I get to the cafeteria late, and a couple of nerds from the science bowl team have already taken my spot, so I plod over and loom at them. Nerd One mumbles ‘hovering’ and Nerd Two mumbles ‘being awkward’, each time preceded by the word ‘quit,’ but I’ve gotten pretty damn good at looming over the years, and they eventually shimmy-scoot away. And I take my spot cross-legged in the corner, facing the corner, with my homemade spellbook open in front of me and four ziplocked jelly sandwiches in my lap. Yes, just jelly. Sometimes I ask my mom to put a slice of cheese in. But not peanut butter. Because that’s basically just squirrel shit. Sneha still gives me hell about it, but I can eat what I fucking want, I’m a growing boy, damn it. And I don’t have to explain myself to anyone.

Not that I tell her that. Don’t want to sound like my mom.

After lunch, I have speech. Not speech therapy—that would make too much sense. I mean speech class, as in, debating and public speaking, or despaking and public beating, whatever you want to call it, same thing either way. The assistant principal says it’ll help fix my stutter, but that’s like throwing Wheelchair Will into the pool with the swim team and telling him it’ll fix his muscular dystrophy. When I told my mom about it, she f-reak-ed out—talked to the school administrators herself, and she doesn’t need spells to unleash an apocalypse.

But I ended up stuck in the class anyway. Something about deadlines and funding and probably more stuff but I turned my brain off at that point. And, spoiler alert: I’ve still got a stutter. Even more in speech class, honestly, because it’s right after lunch, which means my breath smells like pug farts, which means one more thing to worry-and-forget-to-breathe about. So I usually just keep my head down and only speak when spoken to, and sometimes not even then, because I’ll just get verbally body-slammed if I do.

Which is what I would’ve done today, too, but then Mr. Compote is yakking on, right, and I’m totally zoned out, thinking about how Mr. Compote actually kind of looks like a yak with that gross curly-swirly goatee, or wait no that’s goats not yaks, and hey remember the field trip to the petting zoo in first grade when the goat-gaucho guy said goats pee on their beards when they’re ready to mate, and then that thought combines with the thought about Mr. Compote and his goat-goatee and good god I do not need that image in my head, so I stop looking at Mr. Compote and start staring down at my desk and that is when I see it.

A note.

Somebody has passed me a note.

Like, who would pass me a note? I glance around, but Mr. Compote is still pontificating, and everybody else is either slumped back ignoring him or leaning forward to French-kiss his keister. I read the note as casually as possible, which means bending forward until my forehead practically hits the desk, because the note is crammed onto a paper gum wrapper in teensy-weensy handwriting. i can fix u, it says, and when I follow the tiny arrow pointing off the edge to the back, lbry tmrw @ 7.

So instead of trying to chameleon into the wall and daydreaming about taking over the world, this is how I actually spend speech class. Freaking. The fuck. Out.

I don’t give half a toad’s turd about telling people I know Magic. I don’t even care if people know where I figured what I had to do to get the Magic’s powers (just on Wikipedia, but don’t bother looking, I already edited all the important bits off the page). What’s got me twitching in my seat in speech class and blowing my tuba off-beat in band and getting tripped like a sucker by Sneha in kickball during P.E. is the thought that someone might actually fix my goddamn stutter.

After my mom drives me home from school, while she’s in her home office tippity-tap-typing for work or night school or whatever, I hang out in the living room and try to cast a spell to show me the future, namely my future, tomorrow, but I’m too jittery-jangled to flex my fingers at the right time, and Magic doesn’t really like helping people anyway, so it just gets all chilly and shrivels up inside me like a you-can-guess-what. It’s my turn to make dinner, so I throw some ramen noodles and chicken nuggets in the microwave, then cover them with cold ketchup and slices of American cheese and call it chicken parmesan, a la Tristan. My mom beams when I slide a paper plate of the stuff in front of her. She loves to see me get creative. And this is way fancier than the usual jelly sandwiches.

I say I need her to take me to school an hour early the next day, and she nods and smiles and says okay, no explanation needed. Same as when I first told her I could do Magic. Same as it always is between us. Supportive nod, no questions, just a big-fat-cheesy smile. Not like we have any other options. I’m her only child, she’s my only Mom.

Then she asks how school went today, though, in that tiptoe voice she only uses when she knows something is up—which is fine, usually, I have plenty of practice dodging questions, but when I open my mouth some part of my conversations-with-mom cortex just, krrztch, glitches, and instead of saying it was fine, nothing special, now let’s talk about literally anything else, I’m suddenly telling her all about Sneha tripping me in kickball and Sneha giving me shit about schmoozing with Ms. Cassidy and Sneha getting everyone to call me Wheeze and making me feel like nobody remembers or even cares about my actual name anymore.

My mom does that mom thing where she stares at-through-into me for a long time, seeming a little sad and a little worried but honestly probably just disappointed. She says she thought that I liked Sneha, you know, like, maybe as more than friends. And hearing her say it like that sounds so completely pathetic and is so abso-fucking-lutely true that it makes me crying-level angry, so I shove some noodles in my mouth and bite down as hard as I can and say, “Liking somebody is a one-way street, Mom.”

My mom looks down at her plate. Squishes her fork into her chicken—leaves it there. Then starts talking really fast, all at once, about how I deserve better than Sneha (which is way overoptimistic but whatever), how I’m talented and handsome and full-of-potential (which is such bullshit that I’d laugh if I wasn’t still about to rage-cry), how she wishes that she could make everyone else see me the way that she does, and she hates that people at school make me feel like I’m somehow not enough, like I’m broken, and…rrngh!

That’s the sound she makes, rrngh. Like I’ve ripped something inside her. Just by being my fucking loser self.

And, yep, that does it. That starts the crying. I kick my chair back and stand up, take our dishes to the sink—scrape all the leftovers into an old plastic lunch meat container, set them in the fridge to fossilize—take my time so the rage-tears can boil out of me, so the quiet-disappointed-tears can leak out of my mom—try to forget about the ripping sound my mom made, try to focus on the library tomorrow morning, try to not think about what will happen if they can’t fix me. Not that I actually know how to do any of those things.

My mom, though, she knows how to mom. Even though she’s still puffy around the eyes when I come back with our dessert of raw Pop-Tarts, she takes the foil package from me and puts on this little evil-genius smile that always only ever means good things, and she says, you know what would go great with this, some ice cream. And I say, “Aw, hell yeah,” and she gets up to scoop us some ice cream and tells me not to curse, and that’s when I know that everything is going to be okay, at least for tonight.

Still, when I wake up the next morning, the first thought I have is library, and that’s on top of the usual concrete-mixer churn about Sneha and speech class and another day trapped in educational hell. My mom catches the mood and doesn’t bug me on the ride to school, just hums along with the radio while I scribble through yesterday’s homework in the back seat and gulp down the Fruit Loops she packed in my travel cereal bowl. She drops me off outside the library with a reminder to have a good day and be myself and make friends—three mutually exclusive statements, but I don’t bother correcting her anymore.

When I shove through the library doors, Mr. McGowan looks up from shelving books, and for a second I’m feeling all off-balance and thinking, Waitwaitwait, this is the guy who left me the note? The librarian? With the small-town accent, and the grayed-out bowl cut, and the lightsaber hanging over the door in his office? But then Mr. McGowan snorts a chuckle up into his sinuses and drones, “Well, I’ll be! Another kid coming in early?”

“Another?” I ask.

Mr. McGowan’s hands are full of books, so he does that dorky thing where he points with his toes instead. It’s so casually lame that it makes my skin crawl. But then I look where he’s foot-pointing, the table in the back corner, and then I’m really feeling all off-balance, because the guy waiting for me isn’t a guy, it’s Sneha.

My brain starts rattling off shit-fuck-shit-fuck-shit, and then Sneha looks up and I short-circuit and miss a beat so that I’m going fuck-shit-fuck-shit-fuck instead. I noodle-leg my way over, and she smirks and kicks the chair across from her out from under the table and says, “Come on, don’t tell me widdle Wheeze-y is afwaid to sit down with a girl.” So I drop into the chair, fantasizing about taking that ponytail of hers and wrapping it around her freaking ne—

—xcept, then, Sneha leans forward and looks me dead in the eye, and holy hell how can she be that pretty at seven-o-freakin’-clock in the morning, and oh god if she looks under the table anytime soon I’ll be done, just done, death by mortification, what a way to go, and—

—then I remind myself that this is Sneha. The one who shoots spitballs at me all through speech class. The one who got me banned from every lunch table at the cafeteria. The one who nicknamed me Wheeze before anyone else. And the handful of neurons that aren’t fritzing out finally give me a comeback. “You’re not a girl, you’re—” (Pause for a wheeze.) “—Sneha.”

She scowls at me, looks both ways to check for Mr. McGowan, then lifts a fist and gives me the weakest flip-off ever. It makes me feel pretty good about myself. And a little bad. “Cul absolu,” she says, because Sneha loooves flexing her French, especially because I suck at French. “Get over yourself, Wheeze. Without a little help from moi, you’ll always be a hopeless benne à ordures. So don’t be so fucking rude, you absolute dickwad.”

Ka-thump. Mr. McGowan shelves a book especially noisily to tell us to quiet down. “Passive-aggressive prick,” Sneha whispers not quietly at all, then leans even further forward and hisses, “Look, you want me to fix you or not?”

Sneha is very close to me, I notice. And her hair smells like…pears, I think.

But then I tell myself, godammit, Wheeze, focus—you fucking hate pears. “You can cure a stutter?” I snort. Quietly, though. Because Mr. McGowan really can be a passive-aggressive prick, sometimes.

The corner of Sneha’s mouth quirks up in that I-know-something-you-don’t-knoowww sort of face. She leans towards the bookshelf next to her, takes a book, flips through a few pages. Puts the book back. Stretches. Then crosses her arms behind her head and says, “Yes.”

Now I’m the one leaning forward across the table. “How?” I…wheeze. Damn it.

“How’re you going to pay me?” Sneha presses her hands together at her chest, drums her fingertips against each other.

“How much do you want?” I half-laugh. “I can get you money, trips to Pa—” (Pause for a wheeze. Don’t even care.) “—ris, jewelry and makeup and Lululemon leggings, or whatever other stupid crap girls like. If this works, I can rule the whole freaking world.”

Sneha folds her arms and snickers. “You? Rule the world? What, you think the stutter is the only thing wrong with you?”

She’s smirking again. It makes me want to punch her stupid face. Also kiss it. But mostly punch it. I slam my fist on the table, or I try to, but I wimp out a half-inch before impact and it just ends up making this lazy little tunk. “Look, fix me first, and we’ll figure out payment afterwards. Deal?”

I shoot my arm across the table to shake on it. Sneha wrinkles her nose like my hand is a week-old slice of anchovy pizza. “I’ll take your word for it.”

I drop my arm to the table with a thump. Glowering. And blushing. But I glower more to make up for it. “Fine. How are you going to cure me?”

Sneha suddenly starts looking a little sick. I almost ask her what’s wrong, but, you know, sometimes it’s just nice to watch sucky people suffer. She glances around for Mr. McGowan, hunches forward, and says in a rush, “My cousin told me that people get stutters because they’re insecure—”

“That’s total bullsh—” I start to say, but Sneha steamrolls right over me.

“—and we both know you’re insecure because, well, you’re a lame-ass nerd—”

“I’m not insecure!” Damn. I suck at lying.

“—but I know that you know I’m hot—”

I flap my mouth open. Nothing comes out.

“—and everybody knows the best cure for lame-ass-ness is….” Sneha gulps. “A kiss from a hot girl.”

My stomach goes all roily-boily. I’m suddenly regretting those Fruit Loops.

“Well?” Sneha says. “What do you think?”

But my thoughts are pretty much white noise, at this point, plus some high-pitched screaming in the distance. So I just flop my head a few times in a loose interpretation of a nod.

Sneha literally facepalms. “God, this had better be worth it.”

Then she’s standing up out of her seat and pressing her hands on the tabletop for balance, leaning towards me and squeezing her eyes shut and puckering her lips and whoa-whoa-WHOA, this is seriously happening, and I know that kissing is just lips smushing together and all, but I can smell her vanilla chapstick and her skin is so effing smooth—

—but then I think about her saying she could fix me, and telling me to get over myself, and turning me from Tristan into Wheeze, and then my mom’s voice pops into my head, telling me that I deserve better and I’m full-of-potential and enough and not broken—

—and just before Sneha’s lips touch mine, I grab onto her shoulders, and I shove.

And there goes my self-consciousness.

And my insecurity.

And my…oh…no.

My Magic.

It slithers back through the veins of my heart and peels itself off the inside of my lungs, even though I’m gasp-gagging to try and suck it back in, because Magic and I had a bargain, my heart for its powers, but I’m suddenly thinking or at least acting like maybe I might kind of love myself, too, just a tiny bit, and that’s it, contract breached, bye-bye Magic.

I flump down into my seat. Dry-heave a little. And wet-heave, but I swallow that back down. Sneha starts growling like a busted-open beehive. “You…freaking…jerk!” She picks herself up off the carpet, kicks her chair out of the way, even though it’s already knocked out on the floor—I scootle my seat away from the table, and when it tips over backwards, I just spill out and scrabble to my feet, still backing away, slowly, slooowly. “You asshole! Enculé! You ab-so­-lute piece of sh-, of sh-, sh-, sh-….”

But she’s too angry to get the word out. She takes a deep breath—starts speaking again—and I think, oh. Shit.

I didn’t lose my Magic. Sneha took it.

It comes out of her mouth sounding like a cockroach speaking a mix of German and Morse Code, played backwards on a crackly tape recorder from the bottom of a well during a hailstorm, and suddenly Sneha is three-quarters of the way to cracking the goddamned world in half, giving herself over to the Magic, heart and soul, and then—and then—she stutters.

She tries again—stutters—tries—stutt—tri—st—nothing.

Holyeffingcrabcakes. Sneha got the Magic, but she got the stutter, too. So does that mean…?

My throat is still going all boa-constrictor, but I manage to squeeze out, “I don’t need your stupid kiss, Sneha. If I’m broken, I’d rather do the fixing myself.” Not a single wheeze. Mr. McGowan tut-tut-tuts at me approvingly from somewhere in the shelves.

Sneha splutter-sputter-stutters, “You’re such a fucking prick, Wh- Wh-, Wh—”

I cut her off with a look. Holy hell! I’ve always wanted to do that! “Actually,” I say, “my name is Tristan.” And I leave her there, alone in the library, too ruffl-flustered to say a word.

And all through school that day, while Sneha glares at me in French and I share my lunch spot with the science bowl nerds and everyone watches Mr. Compote’s goat-goatee dingly-dangle during speech class, I think about what I’ll tell my mom when she picks me up that afternoon and asks how my day was—how I’ll shrug and tell her, “Well, I got my name back,” and how she’ll look over at me from the driver’s seat, a little surprised and maybe a little worried but hopefully a little proud, too—how I’ll add, “I can’t do Magic anymore, though,” and how she’ll say, well, that’s too bad, but I’ll find something else, I’ve got all sorts of talents—and how, the way she says it, I might actually believe her.

 

 

 

 

 

Lewis J. Beilman III
Couldn’t I Just Tell You

 

Todd set his favorite guitar, a cherry-colored Gibson SG, on the wooden floor of his Brooklyn apartment’s living room.  He walked to the table next to a window overlooking a cemetery, sat down, and wrote a note to his landlord.  Next to the note, he placed a cashier’s check for payment for the remaining six months of his lease.  He stood, glanced once more around his living room, and went to the door.  Before he left his apartment and his life behind, he grabbed the duffel bag he had packed the night before.

     “Todd out,” he said to himself.

     On the building’s stoop, he squinted beneath the summer sun and donned his sunglasses.  They were a cheap pair of aviators he had bought at a gas station, and, through them, he gazed for the last time on the street he had called home for a decade.  He watched the cars—windows open to a summer breeze—rush by as he stepped onto the sidewalk.

One of his neighbors, a woman in her mid-thirties with a bob haircut and black-rimmed glasses, nearly ran into him as she headed to the building.  “Sorry,” she said, turning toward him.  “Oh, by the way, I loved your last album.”

Always appreciative of his fans, he nodded.  “See you around,” he said, although he knew that wouldn’t be true.  He was tired of this life of low-level fame, tired of his daily encounters with Brooklyn hipsters (of which he reluctantly was one), and tired of touring to promote his latest Indie masterpiece—which had received a 9.3 rating in Pitchfork earlier that year.

No.  He had plans for a new life.  And that life started now.

What would Don do? had become his mantra in recent months—after he had discovered the music of Don Van Vliet, a.k.a. Captain Beefheart.  Despite never trying to replicate the often cacophonous sounds of the Captain, he felt an affinity with the iconoclasm of the late, great musician—and he believed he understood what made that man walk away from music at the age of forty-one to live a reclusive existence as a painter and sculptor.

“Maybe I, too, got too good,” he told himself.  He no longer had any desire to make another album, tour another city, or give another interview.  He had achieved everything he had set out to achieve when he first picked up a guitar at age thirteen.  Now, at age thirty-two, he was ready for something new.

He walked across the street to his car.  His Prius, cell phone, and a duffle bag full of clothes, toiletries, and important papers were the only possessions he was taking to Florida.  He had bought a small home, sight unseen, in a small town near Tallahassee.  He had no connection to the place, other than having passed through the area on tours—but something about the friendliness of the people, the gently rolling hills, and the roads shaded by oaks had made him think, even then, that this would be a place where he could begin his life anew.

As he started his car and eased into traffic, he imagined the Florida sun shining year-round and a quiet life around people who wouldn’t know who he was and wouldn’t care to find out.  The money from his royalties would continue to support him, at least for a while, but he pictured himself getting a job in a restaurant or grocery store to keep busy and bring in some spending money.

He merged onto the expressway that would take him to Interstate-95.  After turning on the radio, he fiddled with the buttons until he found his favorite soft-rock station.  Just then, Gordon Lightfoot’s Carefree Highway began to play.  Although Todd’s story was different than the tale told by the song’s narrator, the longing in the Canadian maestro’s voice stirred deep emotions in him.  He regarded the song as an omen.  Adjusting his sunglasses, he wiped the tears from his eyes and felt his past slip away—seemingly for good.

*

After nearly two days on the road, Todd arrived at his new home on a humid Florida evening.  The single-story house was small, but it contained all of the space he would need.  He planned on living alone, and the less space he had, the fewer rooms he would have to furnish.  He set his bag on the wooden floor in the living room, stretched his arms and legs, and sighed.

     Is this real? he thought, wondering whether he would wake and find himself back in Brooklyn.

     As he walked through the empty rooms, he imagined what each would look like once he had settled in.  He decided he would keep things simple—a sofa in the living room, a small table with a couple of chairs for the kitchen, a full-size bed and white dresser for his bedroom, and a futon and desk for the spare room.  He would place a few throw rugs throughout the house to protect the floors.  He wouldn’t get a television, but he knew he would want a stereo.  He would still want to listen to music, despite no longer having it as his profession.

     That first night there, he lay on the floor, using his bag as a pillow.  The long trip and the excitement of seeing his new place in person had exhausted him.  He slept soundly and dreamed he had a dog and a pickup truck and was driving to a hiking trail he had passed on his way into town.  Once he and his imaginary dog had arrived at the trail, they walked on a dirt path into a pine forest.  No one else was there, and everything was peaceful.

All of a sudden, though, he woke to a knocking on his door.  He sat upright, shaking his head to slough off his sleep.  “Hello?” he called.

He heard no answer.  He glanced at his watch and saw he had slept until ten—much later than he usually slept.

He made his way to the door and looked through the peephole.  He saw a bearded man, probably around his age, wearing a red baseball cap, white t-shirt, and blue jeans.  The man knocked again.

Todd opened the door a crack.  “Hello?” he said.

“Howdy, neighbor,” the man said with a North Florida twang.  “I was walking by and saw your car.  This place has been empty for a few months, so I thought I’d introduce myself.  My name’s Levon, and my wife, Jenna, and I live in the next house over.”

Levon motioned to his left.

Todd opened the door wider and extended his hand.  “My name’s Harry,” he said.

They shook hands.

Not long ago, Todd had decided to use an alias.  He wanted to reduce the likelihood that people might recognize his real name and start asking questions about his past.  To keep things simple, he reversed the order of his first and middle names and decided to go by the name Harry Todd.

“Pleased to meet you, Harry,” Levon said.  “I see you have New York plates.  You from the City?”

     “Yeah,” Harry said.  “From Brooklyn.  I moved here to get away from the hustle and bustle.”

     “If quiet’s what you want, you’ll find it here,” Levon said, stroking his beard.  “This place is quiet enough that you’ll be able to hear my TV at night—if the crickets don’t drown it out.”

     “I think chirping crickets will be a welcome substitute for honking horns and screaming people,” Todd said.

“Yeah, maybe so,” Levon said.  “Still, Jenna and I love the City.  We try to get up there at least once a year to see a show or concert.”

Todd nodded, as if to acknowledge that New York remained a great place in many ways.  Then, despite having slept for nearly twelve hours, he yawned.

     “Well, we hope you like it here—and we’re glad to have a new neighbor,” Levon said, tipping his hat.  “I’ll let you get settled in.  I just wanted to say hi.”

     “Thanks,” Todd said.  “I’ll see you around.”  As Levon walked away, Todd remembered something and called to him.  “Hey—one question.  Is there a place nearby where I can grab a cup of coffee?”

     Levon shuffled his feet, walking backwards as he spoke.  “If you want a good cup of coffee, there’s a place called Tupelo’s not far from here.”  He pointed down the road past his house.  “Head this way for about a quarter mile then turn right at the main road.  It’ll be across the street from the old service station.”

     “Thanks again,” Todd said.

     “Much obliged.”  Levon said as he waved before crossing the dirt driveway that separated their properties.

*

     Todd showered before leaving for the coffee shop.  While he was washing, he mentally prepared for his day.  He would stop at Tupelo’s first.  Then, he would find a barber since he wanted to embrace his new life with a more conventional haircut—something akin to Ralf Hütter’s on the cover of Trans-Europe Express.  After that, he would visit local thrift stores for furniture and knickknacks to outfit his new home.  His last detour would be to a grocery store.  His refrigerator was empty, and he needed to stock up on fruits, vegetables, and vegan sundries.

     He turned off the water and said to himself, “Busy day today—I better get started.”

As he stepped onto the tile floor, he realized he needed to make an additional purchase.  He had no towels.  From his crumpled pile of clothes in the corner, he grabbed the t-shirt he had worn the day before and used it to dry himself.

He decided to walk to Tupelo’s.  After two days of driving, he wanted to stretch his legs and explore his new environs.  He figured he would buy a cup of coffee at the café—and maybe something to eat—and then have his hair cut downtown before returning home to fetch his car to complete his errands.

     He soon realized that Levon was right about the town being sleepy.  It was after eleven, and no cars were on the road.  He crossed the street to reach the sidewalk.  As he headed downtown, what appeared to be a dilapidated school was on his left.  On his right, he passed several single-family homes.  Besides the stillness in the summer air, what struck him was how green the neighborhood was.  Most of his neighbors had neatly manicured lawns, and, in their yards, shrubs and small leafy trees abounded.  Occasionally, he passed a saw palmetto by the roadside, and, not too far in the distance, he glimpsed towering oaks draped in Spanish moss.

     The nature of the town’s quietness intrigued him.  It wasn’t quite silence.  A constant thrum pervaded the air.  Were they cicadas? he wondered.  At times, the screech of a hawk punctuated the lulling hum that surrounded him.  Only when he neared the main street on which he needed to head right did he hear the sounds of traffic.

     This definitely isn’t Brooklyn, he thought.  He ran his hand through his hair, raised his face to the sun, and inhaled.  He felt the hot, humid air enter his lungs.

     As he approached the intersection, brick buildings flanked either side of the road.  Passing beneath the shadow of a tree canopy, he noticed that the air seemed ten degrees cooler in the shade.  I’m going to have to get used to this heat, he thought, looking at the sweat rings that were forming underneath his arms.

     Still, he wasn’t going to let the summer heat bother him.  This was what he wanted.  He turned toward Tupelo’s and caught sight of the town center.  About three blocks away, a white courthouse glimmered beneath the noon sun.  There, palm trees framed a portico lined with four Corinthian columns.

It seemed to him as if he had stumbled upon a new world.

     He waited for a truck to pass before he crossed the street.  As he neared his destination, he encountered a barbershop on his left.  He peered through the window and saw a woman trimming a young boy’s hair.  The boy’s mother flipped through a magazine while she waited.  He decided to stop there after Tupelo’s.  Everything in its right place, he thought as he meandered to the next facade.

     Outside of Tupelo’s, he noticed an empty table with three chairs.  Opening the door to the café, he smelled the aroma of warm cinnamon rolls, buttery pecan pies, and freshly brewed coffee.  He squinted as his eyes adjusted from the brightness outside.  A woman with dark skin and natural hair greeted him from a distance as he entered.  She wore a green apron over a t-shirt and jeans.

No one else was there.

     “Can I help you?” the woman said.

     “A cup of coffee would be nice,” he replied, looking over the woman’s shoulder at the chalkboard menu.  “And do you have anything vegan here?”

     “We have salads,” the woman said.  “Most of those have meat or cheese on them, but I could leave those things out—and we have a sandwich, aptly titled ‘The Vegan.’”

     He craned his neck to see where the sandwich was listed on the menu.  “Oops,” he said, laughing at his oversight.  “I’ll take the sandwich then—with the coffee.”

     The woman smiled.  “It’s pretty good—the sandwich, that is.  I’m a vegetarian, not a vegan, but I like it.”  She turned away from him, stepped to a counter, and began making the sandwich.  “Is this your first time here?” she said over her shoulder.

     “I just moved to town,” he said.  “Not far from here.  Across from some place that looks like an abandoned school.”

     “Oh, you’re on Water Street, then” she said, continuing to make the sandwich.  “I have a friend, Levon, who lives over there.”

     “Small world,” he said.  “I met Levon this morning.  He’s my neighbor.”

     “So you’re the man of mystery!” she said.  “Levon’s been wondering for weeks who bought that house.”

     “I guess I’m guilty as charged,” he said.  “A vegan man of mystery.”

     As the woman carried the sandwich and coffee to Todd on a tray, he noticed the words, “Broken Social Scene”, on her shirt above the neck of her apron.  “You like Broken Social Scene?” he said.  “They’re one of my favorite bands.  I saw them play a few times.”

He omitted that he had opened for them on one of their recent tours.

     “I guess you really are a man of mystery,” she said.  “You’re the first person I’ve met who’s heard of this band.  If you like this type of music, you should come by Levon’s one Wednesday night.  We have a band—and we rehearse there every week.”

     “That sounds like fun,” he said.  “What instrument do you play?”

     “I play bass,” the woman said.  “Do you play anything?”

     He pursed his lips.  “Not really.  I used to dabble with the guitar a little, but I don’t really play anymore.”

     Another customer entered the café and approached the counter.  Todd paid the amount he owed and placed a tip in a mug beside the register.

     “Well, I hope you come by Levon’s some time,” the woman said, extending her hand.  “My name’s Tracy, by the way.”

     He shook her hand.  “I’m Todd,” he said, before catching himself.  “Harry Todd.”

     “It was nice to meet you, Harry,” Tracy said before greeting the next customer.

     “Same here,” he said.  He lifted the tray with his sandwich and coffee and brought it to the table outside.

*

The next few weeks passed as Todd had planned.  He furnished his home by frequenting thrift stores and ordering items online.  He settled into his new life—mowing his lawn, hiking on a nearby trail, and documenting the wildflowers that grew on and around his property.  He occasionally talked with Levon as they worked in their respective yards.  Most days he walked into town to have coffee at Tupelo’s and chat with Tracy.

     He enjoyed her company and got to know her better than he knew anyone else in town.  He learned that she shared an apartment with a friend who played drums in her and Levon’s band, that she had grown up on the outskirts of Tallahassee, and that she had never been to New York City despite loving many of the bands that once called it home.

“I was probably the only Black girl in my high school who liked groups like The Velvet Underground, New York Dolls, or Ramones more than I liked hip-hop,” she told him one afternoon.

     He admitted to his love of the City’s music scene, telling her that it was one of the reasons he had moved there from Philadelphia—although he left out that he had moved there to go to The Julliard School.  Based on the bands she liked, he asked her if she had ever heard of Arthur Russell.

     “No, I haven’t,” she said.

     “You should check his stuff out,” he said.  “I think you’d really like it.”

Then, for the first time, she pried deeper.

“Harry, you’re in here almost every day,” she said as she put away the silverware she had finished washing and drying.  “Not to be nosey, but what do you do for work?”

     He bit his bottom lip.  “I’m in between jobs now,” he said, taking care not to lie.  “I was lucky.  I made enough money in the City to get by for a while after moving down here.”

     “OK,” she said, exhaling.  “I wasn’t trying to pry.  I just wanted to make sure you weren’t a drug dealer or something.”

     He shook his head.  “Definitely not that,” he said.  “With the exception of coffee, I’m pretty straight edge.”

     “So am I,” she said.  “Being around people who are drunk or stoned bums me out.”

     “Still, I’m not a complete hobo,” he said.  “In my spare time, I have been working on a little something.  You’re going to think it’s silly, but I’m attempting to perfect a vegan grilled-cheese sandwich.  I’m experimenting with a few vegan cheeses—and I think I’ve settled on this brand, Chao, because it seems to melt the best.  But I’ve also tried Daiya, Violife, and a few others.  Once I get it exactly right, I’ll share the process with you—maybe then you could see if they would add it to the menu here.”

     Todd actually had been making grilled-cheese sandwiches three or four times a week.  He used a faux butter spread on each slice of bread, put vegan mayonnaise and mustard on the other sides of the bread, and placed pickles and three pieces of vegan cheese in the middle before frying the sandwich golden brown.  Since he was no longer working on music, he thought he should focus on something new—and, as was his wont, he strove for perfection.

     “I don’t think that’s silly,” she said.  “I’ve actually been thinking of going vegan myself, but I think I would miss cheese too much.  If I could find a good alternative, I might join you in your vegan-ness.”

     With a silly grin on his face, he rocked his head back and forth, took a butter knife from his tray, and began striking it on the counter.  He chanted.  “We accept her.  We accept her.  One of us.  One of us.  Gooble gobble.  Gooble gobble.”

     She pushed his arm from the counter, giggling.  “You’re crazy,” she said.  “But I have a deal for you.  Since you still haven’t come by Levon’s house to see our band, I’ll come by your house on Wednesday to try your famous grilled-cheese sandwich—but only if you’ll come with me to our band-practice afterwards.”

     “It’s a deal,” he said, extending his hand toward her.  “A night with a vegan man of mystery.”

     “Damn straight,” she said, shaking his hand.

     He thought he felt a jolt of electricity as their hands pressed together.  And, as he looked closely at her, he believed he saw a flash of light glimmer in her eyes.

*

Todd spent that Wednesday afternoon preparing for Tracy’s arrival.  He mowed his lawn, swept and mopped the floors, cleaned the bathroom, and walked to Piggly Wiggly to purchase fresh produce for a salad.  He hadn’t had any company inside his house and wanted to make sure that everything was perfect for her visit.

     He thought about how easily he had adjusted to this new life.  Not long ago, he had spent his days strolling past the ponds at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, sipping coffee on a park bench outside Café Grumpy, and composing songs on his guitar as he sat on his couch in his old apartment.  Now, he had no city crowds to avoid, no hipsters who recognized him in Trader Joe’s, and no obligations to perform at clubs or festivals.  Even his manager had stopped calling him after he had made it clear he had checked out.

     For the first time in years, he felt normal—at least as normal as someone who didn’t need to work could feel.  Sitting on a used rocking chair, he looked at his watch and realized that Tracy would arrive soon.  He went to the bathroom, where he brushed his teeth, washed his face, and checked his hair to make sure it wasn’t a mess.  After that, he paced in the living room, rubbing his hands together as he waited for a knock on his front door.

     A few minutes later, he heard a gentle rapping.  Straightening his t-shirt with his hands, he walked to the door and, breathing deep, opened it.  He saw Tracy for the first time without an apron and noticed that, this evening, outside of Tupelo’s, she looked every bit a rocker.  She wore torn jeans, a Tortoise t-shirt, and unlaced Chuck Taylor’s.  His heart fluttered, but he kept his excitement in check.  Waving his arm toward the interior, he invited her in.

     After she entered, she presented him with a small green bag.  “A little housewarming gift,” she said.

     He removed the paper tissue at the top and uncovered a bag of coffee beans. 
“Thanks,” he said.  “You didn’t have to do that.”

     “It’s the dark roast we serve at Tupelo’s,” she said.  “You told me you liked it.  And I got the bag with whole beans since you said you grind your own for your French press.”

     “Thanks again—this is perfect,” he said.  “Follow me to the kitchen—and then I’ll give you the grand tour.”

     Once they were in the kitchen, he reached high to place the coffee beans in his coffee and spice cabinet.  All of the items were in well-ordered rows.  “There it goes,” he said.

As he turned around, he caught a smirk on Tracy’s face.  She rolled her eyes.

“That can’t be a coincidence,” she said.  “You alphabetize your spices?”

     He pursed his lips.  “Don’t you?” he asked, quizzically.

     “No,” she said, shaking her head.  “Definitely not.  But I think it’s cute.”

     He blushed.  “A cute vegan man of mystery,” he said.  “I’ll take that appellation.  Now let’s start this tour before my head gets too big.”

     He led her through the house.  With only a kitchen, two bedrooms (one which served as an office), a living room, and a bathroom, the tour lasted less than ten minutes.  He worried that his home—with its perfectly made bed, spotless floors, and polished furniture—looked sterile, and he mentioned to her that he intended to liven the place up with a pet dog at some point.

     “There’s nothing wrong with being neat,” she said.  “Plus, with all of the second-hand furniture, the place feels cozy.  And I’m definitely in agreement on the dog front.  I’m not sure if you’re aware of this, but there’s a no-kill shelter downtown, not far from Tupelo’s.”

     “I did not know that,” he said, glancing at his watch.  “I’ll check it out soon—but, if we’re going to get you to your band-practice on time, I should start dinner.”

     While he prepared the sandwiches and salad, she sat at a small table in the kitchen.  He watched her as she seemed to gaze out the window at a patch of morning glories near a fence post at his yard’s edge.  He hummed along to a song that was streaming through a Bose Wave system.  The song was Arthur Russell’s, That’s Us/Wild Combination, a song that made him feel both sad and hopeful at the same time.

     She turned to him.  “That’s pretty,” she said.  “The song—and your humming. You can carry a tune.”

     “I guess I can,” he said, while continuing to chop a red pepper for the salad.  He put the pepper in a bowl filled with arugula and chickpeas, sprinkled tahini dressing on top, and placed salad servings on two plates.  He then removed two vegan grilled cheese sandwiches from a griddle, cut them from corner to corner on a wooden cutting board, and placed the sandwiches on the plates.

     “Wow,” she said, licking her lips.  “That looks delicious.”

     “Well, sometimes looks can be deceiving,” he said as he carried the plates to the table.  “But I’m hopeful!”  He set a plate before her and sat to her left with his own plate.

     She took a bite of her sandwich.  She used one of her fingers to push some stray melted cheese from her lips into her mouth.  “This is so good!” she said.  “I’m not joking.  I think you converted me.”

     He smiled.  “That was my plan all along—to move from New York to Florida and form a vegan entourage that would save all of the world’s animals.”

     At that moment, they looked into each other’s eyes.  The song that was streaming ended, and, for a few seconds, there was silence.  They stared at each other briefly, before—as a new song began—they turned away shyly.

     Todd felt goosebumps on his arms and neck.

     Tracy, now looking at her plate, broke the stillness.  “You have a dry sense of humor,” she said.  “I like it.”

     “I’m glad you do,” he said, rubbing his hands to relieve his anxiety.  “Sometimes I feel that people don’t get me—and, more often than not, I don’t get myself.  But tonight I guess I’m lucky.  You’ve been here for an hour and haven’t made an excuse to leave yet.”

     “About that,” she said, taking her phone from her back pocket and checking the screen.  “It’s almost time for my band practice.  We probably should head to Levon’s.”

     “Yeah,” he said.  “Let’s get moving.”  He gathered both of their plates from the table and brought them to the sink.  “If you’d like, we could get together again sometime.  We could even go out somewhere to eat.”

     “I would love that,” she said.  She stood and stretched her arms.  “Maybe Saturday night?”

     He smiled as he washed his hands and dried them with a hand towel near the sink.  “For sure,” he said.  “It’s a date.”

*

Todd carried Tracy’s amplifier into Levon’s house while she carried her bass.  He watched as she, Levon, and Sheila—Tracy’s roommate—set up in a living room that was now a makeshift practice space.  There, multi-prong extension cords snaked around a sofa, a coffee table was pressed against a sliding-glass door, and a drum kit was wedged into the far corner beside an entertainment center.  An acoustic guitar rested in the corner nearest the drum set.

While Tracy and Levon were plugging in their amplifier cords, tuning their instruments, and checking their microphones, Levon’s wife, Jenna, entered and introduced herself to Todd.  She offered him something to drink, and he requested water.  While she was in the kitchen getting his drink, Tracy and Levon adjusted the volume on their amplifiers.  Tracy looked up, smiled at Todd, and gave Levon a thumbs up.

Jenna returned with Todd’s water.  She brushed her hair from her face, nudged him, and leaned in to whisper.  “She’s sweet,” she said, looking at Tracy.  “From what Levon tells me, she likes you.”

Todd blushed.  He was happy.  He opened his mouth to respond to Jenna, but, before he could speak, Levon played a familiar opening riff, Tracy followed Levon’s lead, and Sheila struck a steady beat.  The band began playing Big Star’s In the Street, one of Todd’s favorite songs.

     For the next hour, the band performed nearly straight through, mixing original songs with covers.  They stopped only to sip water, banter about which song they should play next, and re-tune their instruments.  The camaraderie between the band members appeared intuitive, as if the individual members were—for a brief period—part of a single, greater whole.

     Todd enjoyed watching this transformation.  He felt like he was on the outside looking in on his past.  He recalled his stage life.  The bright lights, the cheering fans, the constant travel—all of those things were part of his memory now.  And this living-room setting—replete with poor acoustics, cramped space, and a small, but fervent, audience—reminded him of his high school years, when he and his first band would play punk and power-pop music to a few friends in his parents’ garage.

     But most of all, as he watched the performance, he focused on Tracy’s talent.  He saw, in her eyes, a passion for performing that had left him years ago.  She improvised effortlessly on her bass, provided pitch-perfect harmonies to Levon’s lead vocals, and seemed to lose herself completely to whatever song the band was playing.

As he continued observing her, his thoughts shifted to their upcoming date.  He experienced a sense of euphoria when he thought of spending time alone with her again—but he was also worried.  If they grew closer—as he hoped they would—he would eventually have to tell her who he was.  Would she feel betrayed by his initial lack of honesty? he wondered.  And would the knowledge of his true identity change her perception of him?

     As he pondered a future with her, the band stopped playing.  Jenna, anticipating that they had played their final song, began to clap, leading Todd to follow suit.  Levon nodded at the two-person audience, Tracy curtsied, and Sheila struck a final drum roll and cymbal crash.

     Tracy set her bass gently on the floor and asked, “So, Harry, what do you think?  How’d we sound?”

     Todd didn’t hesitate to respond.  “I’m impressed,” he said.  “I’ve seen a lot of bands, and you three are pretty tight.”

     Levon—his guitar still strapped to his chest—slipped his pick between the guitar strings.  “Thanks, neighbor,” he said, as a grin flashed across his face.  “Now, maybe we can have one more performance.  Tracy said you used to play.  Would you like to give us a song?”

     Todd was caught off guard.  His eyes flitted from person to person.  “No,” he said, fumbling with his hands.  “You really wouldn’t want to hear me play.  I haven’t even touched a guitar in months.”

     “Play, play, play,” Tracy said, approaching Todd and beginning to clap.  “One of us, one of us, one of us.”

     The rest of the people there followed suit.  “Play, play, play,” they chanted.

     Todd held out his hands and shook his head.  He knew it would be difficult to keep saying no, and he didn’t want to disappoint Tracy—or his new friends.  “OK, OK, OK” he said, “but don’t get your hopes up.  Like I said, I haven’t played in months.”  He turned to Levon.  “Is it all right to use the acoustic in the corner?”

     “Of course,” Levon said.

     Todd approached the guitar, swung the strap over his shoulder, and strummed.  He fiddled with the tuning pegs, keeping his head down.  Once the guitar was ready, he played a few chords before starting to finger-pick an arrangement he had developed months ago for the Neil Young song, Thrasher.  The song’s lyrics resonated with him, and, while he was playing, he thought about what he had lost and gained with his disavowal of fame and his subsequent move to Florida.

     As he sang, in a voice steadier and fuller than Neil Young’s, he looked up from the guitar.  Everyone in the room was staring, mouths agape, seemingly shocked by his playing ability.  A wave of excitement washed across his eyes, and he continued through the song’s eight verses.  His fingerpicked coda transposed the harmonica solo over the chord changes, and, when he finished his impromptu performance, he inhaled and held his breath before letting out a long sigh.

     Tracy—her eyes open wide—started the applause, and the rest of the audience followed.

“A wizard,” Levon uttered.

“A true star!” Jenna added.

     Todd met Tracy’s gaze.  Was she happy, excited, or confused?  Was she all three at once?  He couldn’t tell, but he knew there was no going back now.

     Tracy shook her head and screwed up her eyes.  “Wow!” she said.  “You’re really good—I mean really, really, really good.”

     Todd lifted the guitar strap from his left shoulder and set the guitar at his feet.  He felt the energy drain from his body.  “Yeah,” he said, struggling to hold his eyes to hers.  “Maybe too good.”

 

 

 

 

 

Joseph Devon
Second Choice

 

 Matthew left the ballroom of the hotel and stepped into the hallway. As the door shut behind him, the music from the dancefloor in full swing became a muffled, rhythmic thump. He looked around at the décor, the patterned wallpaper, the waist high molding, the chandeliers every ten feet, the glass covered wooden tables with overly ornate vases stuffed with flowers. Everything in sight screamed out that this was a place designed to look nice with no thought given to whether or not someone would want to live there.

Matthew began walking past all of this, purpose in his stride, wondering why hotels always had to look like this: comforting but impersonal.

Matthew was a short man but not so short that people noticed that about him. His thinning hair made him look in his thirties while the glint in his blue eyes put him closer to twenty. A pair of thin rimmed glasses sat on his face like a delicate ornament and his tuxedo was cut well but worn in places.

He passed an intersection of hallways, glancing to his right and seeing the elevator bank he continued on. He passed by an ice machine and another intersection before he found the men’s room door.

Entering the bathroom he slowed down, the door easing shut on its spring behind him, as Matthew stood there listening. The dance floor noises were gone now and Matthew could hear his mark, softly, somewhere past the row of sinks. As Matthew trod through the bathroom, which itself was an orgy of overly ornate decorating, he glanced in the corner at the gold mesh wastebasket. There was something there that shouldn’t be, or at least he saw something there that shouldn’t be, and for the first time since he had walked out of the grand ballroom Matthew’s stride broke, his casual cool bounce faltering as he closed his eyes hard and shook his head. When he opened them again the wastebasket was empty.

He turned to face forward and picked up his stride again, turning the corner to where there was a row of stalls with beautifully stained wooden doors. Matthew walked down the row, glaring at the doors one after another. He finally crept around one with its door open and looked in to see a man sitting on the toilet with the lid down, his face in his hands as he sobbed.

“Excuse me?” Matthew said gingerly. The man looked up. “I was just looking for the cigar bar when I got lost and wandered in here and then I heard you from over by the sinks and I…well…I mean what’s wrong, pal?”

The man looked up, all elbows and knees from how he was folded onto the toilet seat. Matthew caught his eyes and smiled. “Come on,” Matthew said, “let’s go over by the sink, you can splash a little water on your face, talk it out, maybe I can help. At the very least,” Matthew looked around and smiled a good-natured smile that oh-so-delicately pointed out the absurdity of a grown man sitting alone in a toilet stall crying, “I can definitely listen.”

Matthew coaxed the man out, a verbal massage, and led him to one of the sinks. He turned the tap on and patiently listened as the man told his story, which Matthew already knew. Matthew nodded, one ear open in case there were any surprises he should know about. While he listened he reached into the breast pocket of his jacket and withdrew a cigar. He spent time enjoying its aroma while he waited for the man to finish his tale of heartbreak and fear and unrequited love.

Matthew hopped up onto the counter using only his legs, his hands never getting involved. He landed between sinks in what he somehow made look like a comfortable position. Through the whole leap the only thing he seemed intent on protecting was his cigar, which he held between thumb and forefinger of one hand. As he sat listening to the man’s speech wind down, he rolled the cigar gently between his fingers, feeling the moist tobacco leaves giving slightly under the pressure of his fingers.

Matthew glanced over and saw that the man had finished and was looking at him with a face that was still damp from a few splashes of cold water. Matthew knew he was ready.

“Look,” Matthew started, leaning back into a new position on the counter between the sinks that should have been ten times more awkward but that he managed to make look comfortable somehow. “I’m no expert on these things. I’m here for this wedding as a distant uncle. Just wanted to find the cigar bar is all. But I see a fellow man sobbing himself to pieces in a toilet stall over a girl, and there isn’t any question in my mind as to what I should think. You, my friend,” and Matthew stared hard at the man, “need to go after this girl.”

“But she’s married,” the man said.

Matthew continued to stare. The other man’s eyes were drawn to his like something deeper was passing between them. “Doesn’t matter,” Matthew said. “A love that can make a man sob in a toilet…that’s a love that you’ve got to at least give a chance to, isn’t it? You said yourself; you knew she was having doubts about her marriage.” Matthew stared.

Finally the man broke eye contact and turned to face himself in the mirror. “Yeah,” he said, “she has doubts.”

“Okay then,” Matthew said with complete confidence in his advice. “Then go get her.”

The man looked at himself in the mirror for a few more seconds, doing something to his face that Matthew could only assume was some form of courage gathering. Then he said, “Thanks,” and turned and walked out of the bathroom.

Matthew continued sitting on the counter, his legs dangling, kicking happily back and forth. There was a beep and he reached into his pocket and withdrew a cell phone. Flipping it open he glanced over a text message, surprise registering on his face. All thoughts of the man and the conversation were gone as he pondered the text message, gone until he looked down at the counter and saw a neat stack of twenty-dollar bills sitting there. “Hm,” he said, “quick work.”

Hopping off the counter he grabbed the bills, gave them a quick tap on the counter to settle them together, and placed them in his pocket. Then he popped his cigar into his mouth. He looked at himself in the mirror, hands in his pockets, the cigar clenched between his teeth off to the side of his mouth, and took a pull, only sucking air through the unlit end.

He looked disappointed and concentrated harder. His cheeks formed small hollows in his face as he took a more determined draw, the unlit cigar bobbing between his teeth, once, twice, three times until, during the fourth pull, the end suddenly burst into bright red flames, catching the cigar alit before residing and leaving only a perfectly glowing red ember. Matthew smiled at himself, taking his hands out of his pocket to smooth down his jacket as he took a few puffs, then he turned and walked out of the bathroom.

*

Matthew walked down 72nd street underneath the modern-gothic windows of the looming apartment building on the corner. He stopped at the edge of the sidewalk, taking a pull at his cigar, now mostly gone, enjoying the warm summer midnight. It had rained earlier, and the streets were damp. He waited on the light, then crossed over Central Park West and followed the wide 72nd street entrance into the park. He turned off the street about twenty yards in and followed a path up a gentle rise, a canopy of trees closing in around him.

Matthew walked further and further into the park, following path after path, cursing more than a few times as branches he hadn’t noticed in the dark swatted at his face. Then, through the darkness, he saw a thin band of yellow hovering in the air. As he drew closer his eyes recognized it as a strip of tape, like the kind used to mark off crime scenes, only different, strung across the path. Matthew paused and looked around, looked at the darkness that was behind him, then looked at how the light on the other side of the tape was different somehow. He smiled, a little laugh coming out of his mouth, then with a touch of nervousness he ducked his torso and stepped onto the other side of the tape.

The first difference was as immediate as it was obvious. All noise ceased. As Matthew straightened himself up there was no more wind in the trees, no more muffled sounds of traffic from Central Park West, there was only silence. He continued walking down the path, the second change slowly sinking in as he realized he was no longer walking through a post-midnight darkness. The air was now mellower, lighter, like it was only a little past dusk. Then he stopped short and walked a slow circle around a single point of light, smiling as he recognized a firefly, its bottom flashing electric green, frozen in time, hovering in the air. He reached a finger up and slowly pointed it towards the glowing beetle. He was about to tap it to see what would happen when a voice spoke up behind him.

“Please don’t.”

Matthew jumped and turned, then smiled and shook his head. “Jesus, Epp, you scared the hell out of me.”

Epp walked over, his face lit by the firefly’s light. His skin was sable black, the color of an exotic hardwood, and he was a good head taller than Matthew, although due to a complete lack of anything but muscle on his body, he probably weighed the same.

“What happens if I touch it?” Matthew asked, looking back to the firefly.

“Just more work for me,” Epp answered, the calm undertone of his voice making Matthew’s attempt at easy confidence seem like a bad case of nerves. Epp looked Matthew up and down. “Nice tuxedo,” he said.

There was honest appreciation for good tailoring in Epp’s voice, but Matthew found himself unable to accept it as a straight compliment considering that Epp was wearing a suit that seemed more like a symphony composed of charcoal threads than mere clothing.

“I was working some adultery at a wedding,” Matthew said to explain his clothes.

“Adultery?” Epp asked turning and walking away. Matthew started walking with him, the idea of not following never crossing his mind. “At a wedding?” Epp continued. “With your skill? Seems a little beneath you, Matthew. You might as well tailgate at the political conventions with the rest of the newbies.”

“Well,” Matthew said, not letting himself get rankled, “the woman in question was the bride.”

A slow exhalation of breath through Epp’s nose was all Matthew got, but he knew enough to recognize that this was as close to laughter as he was likely to get. “I suppose that does contain a certain amount of flair worthy of you, Matthew.”

“You know, it’s been twenty-two years,” Matthew said, “you think it might be time for you to give me a little credit?”

The smile disappeared from Epp’s face and he turned to look at Matthew, studying him with a somber scrutiny that made Matthew feel like an insect pinned to a lightboard. “You’ll get credit when you deserve it,” Epp said.

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Matthew replied uncomfortably, “so why’d you text me?”

“Come,” Epp said, and Matthew followed him off the path into a patch of lawn, more trees popping up between them and the views of the city. Not much farther in, at a secluded area, they came upon a frozen couple. The woman was in the process of falling over, her face contorted in pain and confusion, one hand weakly held to her chest. The man was stuck with a panicked look on his face, his body lurching forward as if he was trying to break into a run.

Epp was holding a clipboard in his hands and as they stood in silence he flipped a page, studying something, then flipped another page.

“So what’s up,” Matthew said, looking over the man and woman again.

“This woman is dying,” Epp answered.

Matthew’s face became more animated. “No kidding?”

“This argument has caused her to have a stroke,” Epp said, flipping another page on his clipboard. “Or possibly it’s simply her time and there’s a blood clot that was thrown loose that has been waiting there for her whole life. The details are a little unclear, but we do know that her time is at an end. This man will run to fetch an ambulance, but he won’t be in time.”

“Really? And you’ve frozen time for that? You can do that?”

“It was a little extra work. But these are special circumstances.”

“No kidding,” Matthew said. His tone was still animated, like this was a fascinating play being acted out in front of him. “I’ve never been involved in a death before. This is kind of nuts.”

Epp didn’t reply.

“I guess you’ve probably had a hand in a dozen of these types of cases. I’ve never wondered but how much are cases like this worth? What’s it like to probe around in a human’s death?”

Epp shrugged, cool eyes never leaving Matthew. “They keep me in Zegna.” Epp extended a hand with the clipboard in it.

Matthew took it and glanced down. “Plus you get to use all the neat toys.” He began flipping through the sheets. “These are probability photographs, aren’t they?”

Matthew turned page after page, each one showing a possible outcome, most of them involving the woman being loaded into an ambulance with the man looking on. Each photo had a graph in the lower right-hand corner containing simple probability waves of varying heights. Matthew stopped at a photo of the couple sitting happily at home; he glanced at the graph in the corner and saw that the curve was barely more than a straight line. Matthew chuckled. Then he handed the clipboard back.

“I still don’t get it. Why bother with the,” he circled his finger in the air, looking around, “you know, the time tape stuff?”

“Special circumstances,” Epp said, reaching a hand out to take the clipboard back.

“And what might these special circumstances be, Epp? And what am I doing here?”

Epp paused. Matthew was struck by the fact that Epp seemed unsure of how to continue. Epp took a deep breath, his lips pursing in thought. Then he pointed. Matthew turned and looked at the form on the ground. “Matthew,” Epp paused again, the rarity of Epp being unsure was making Matthew’s nerves start to sit on edge. “Matthew, she’s yours.”

“My what?” Matthew asked, curious. He was creeping around now, moving very low to the ground, the back of the woman’s head the only thing visible. “I don’t remember messing with her,” he said puzzled, “but it’s been a long time. I guess she could be one of mine.”

“She wasn’t a case of yours, Matthew.” Epp looked around, as if hoping for some help in saying what he had to say. When no help came he continued speaking. “She was your choice.”

Matthew’s body reacted before he did, his legs gave out as he leaned over the body so that he fell kneeling into the grass. “No,” he said in a whisper. He looked up at Epp, eyes stunned, his face showing nothing but denial. “No,” he said, his voice rising in a shout. Shaky hands reached out and rolled the body over with a thump, the woman’s hair falling off of her faced.

Matthew sucked in a stuttering breath and looked down at the pain on her face. He ran hands over her body, smoothing out her shirt, trying to somehow tidy up the inevitable; he looked up at Epp again. “Fix her.”

“Matthew, that’s not how this works. She—”

“Fix her!” Matthew yelled. He stumbled up and began walking towards Epp, who held up his hands, trying to calm Matthew down. “You fix her!” Matthew said, his finger jabbing out behind him at where she lay. “You fix her right now!” Epp lowered his hands as Matthew approached.

“She doesn’t die!” Matthew yelled in Epp’s face. One hand rose up and shoved Epp’s shoulder hard, “that was the deal,” he screamed, his eyes stinging now. “The bullet changed paths and went into me and she gets to live and I die. I die!” Matthew shouted, slapping his own chest. “Me! Not her!” And he pointed another finger back at the body.

“You chose life for her, and she’s had a decent one, as per the deal,” Epp said, calm enveloping him, “but immortality for her was never part of it. Her time has come.”

“Fix her,” Matthew said. Epp remained impassive. “Fuck you!” Matthew screamed, and he stormed off past Epp.

“Matthew,” Epp yelled out after him.

Before Matthew disappeared into the dark Epp saw him walk past the firefly and with one angry hand reach up and swat it out of the air.

*

Matthew fumed down the street. His hands were in his pockets, his bowtie unstrung and dangling from his collar. He wasn’t sure where he was going; he barely recognized his surroundings. He was breathing heavily through his nose, the hot summer air pumping in and out of him like fuel. He spotted a couple walking towards him and he lowered his shoulder and walked into the girl, with a hush like a steam vent he wafted through her, eyebrows angry. “He’s cheating on you,” he thought, and then he was through her, past her, and two steps later he heard her turn and start cursing off the young man with her. A handful of coins appeared in his pocket and he ran his fingers through them.

Another pedestrian came into sight, a lone woman, and he never broke stride, just ducked his head and plowed through, baring his teeth as he went, and he heard the woman burst into sobs behind him and more change appeared in his pocket.

His cheeks were moist and with the flat of his hand he tried to wipe the tears away but they kept coming and he was walking through a group of street dwellers and drug dealers and behind him he heard a fist fight break out and the change in his pocket bulged then flattened into a couple of bills and he thumbed at the corners.

His eyes stung and his nose was running and now he tried the back of his hands but he couldn’t keep his cheeks dry and he heard someone calling his name.

“Matthew!” someone was shouting in his ear and he turned and saw Benjamin with his jowly face and rough beard. He knew Benjamin from around the neighborhood and the familiar face looking into his began to cool him off. “Matthew, leave some for the rest of us, here,” Benjamin was laughing.

“What do you care about them for?” Matthew was staring at the family of tourists.

“I don’t care about them, I care about you.”

“Lemme do ‘em,” Matthew said, his body practically going limp under Benjamin’s restraining arm, as if he wasn’t even able to hold himself up anymore. “I got a good one for them.”

“Okay, but then we go get a drink, right? Maybe get your head back together?”

Matthew nodded and Benjamin let down his arm and gave him a shove. Matthew teetered on one foot, hopping along, passing through the family of tourists who began pointing at a map and arguing. Matthew looked at Benjamin from over the father’s shoulders.

“Arguing over a map?” Benjamin said. “That was your big idea?”

“I don’t…” Matthew stopped talking, looked around confused. “This isn’t helping.”

“Come on,” Benjamin said, and they walked towards the street. “You have a fiver?”

“Yeah.”

“Okay then.”

Benjamin held up his hand with a five dollar bill in it and Matthew stood next to him doing the same. There was a whir and Matthew felt the wind in his hair as the five dollar bill vanished and then he was standing next to a statue of Ralph Kramden and looking up at steel girders painted aqua-green. Benjamin was over by a row of double glass doors holding one open. Matthew walked through the open door into the Port Authority Bus Terminal.

They walked through the long hallway, mostly empty at this time of night, ugly brown brick walls rising up to the ceiling three stories above them, their feet stepping on tiling that looked like it had been decorated with a can of glue and the contents of a well-used three-hole punch. They continued towards the back of the building until they reached the Port Authority bowling alley. On the right was the arcade, down the hall straight ahead were the lanes. Matthew and Benjamin turned left and walked into the bar.

“What do you think?” Benjamin asked, looking around at the bar half-full of college students, bus drivers getting off their shift, bowlers, and anyone else sucked into drinking at the Port Authority. The bar was an island in the center of three walls of booths, most of which were full.

“I don’t know,” Matthew said, running the back of his hand over his forehead like he was testing to see if he had a fever. “You mind clearing a few seats? I think I’m through bumping skin tonight and I certainly don’t feel like going visible.”

“Sure thing, buddy,” Benjamin said and he walked to the farthest corner of the bar where a man was sitting between two empty stools. Benjamin leaned towards him and whispered something in his ear and the guy stood up and stormed out, a half-drunk pint glass still sitting on the bar.

“Cheating wife?” Matthew asked, watching the guy leave.

“Thieving brother,” Benjamin said.

“Interesting,” Matthew said, sitting down.

Benjamin was fishing in his pocket as he pulled back the barstool next to Matthew. He put a stack of twenties on the bar as he sat down and with a wave of his hand a couple of cheap rocks glasses appeared filled with flat ice cubes and pale scotch. They sat in silence, sipping their drinks, listening to the bar around them. One drink finished, Matthew threw a twenty on the bar and another round appeared.

“It was 1985,” Matthew said, apropos of nothing. “We had married the year before when everyone said we weren’t ready. We knew we were ready. We thought we were ready, anyway. Who the hell is ever ready for marriage?”

Benjamin nodded, sipping his drink, staring straight ahead, listening but not intruding. “Anyway,” Matthew went on, “we were living in Brooklyn in some god-awful apartment complex where the noise of the train was a welcome distraction from the mice in the walls. But, you know, we loved it. And we weren’t going to stay there forever of course. We had big plans.” He took a gulp of scotch, holding it on his tongue before clenching his teeth and swallowing it down.

“We went to a Mets game one night. Neither of us were fans or anything, that was the funny part. It was sort of a, ‘We’ve never done anything like this so why don’t we give it a try,’ kind of thing.” He shook his head. “I mean we didn’t know what the fuck we were doing and we left in the middle of the game and wandered down the wrong street and…well it was New York in the eighties.” His glass came up and a couple of ice cubes went into his mouth, he chewed them awhile.

“Anyway, there he was…I can’t even remember really what he looked like, but the gun I remember. And there were some words, it all gets a little jumbled and then the gun went off,” Matthew mimicked a gun with his thumb and forefinger, his thumb dropping, his mouth making a little “pow” sound. “And all I really remember is this rush of thought chased with pure adrenaline and all that was going through my head, over and over was, ‘Please be me not her, me not her, me not her, me not her…’” He sucked another ice cube into his mouth, got a good hold of it between his back teeth and crunched down on it.

“And then things get hazy,” Benjamin said, recognizing the underling story with a laugh.

“And then things get hazy,” Matthew said with slightly drunken camaraderie and the two raised their glasses and clinked them together.

“Next thing I know,” Matthew went on, “I’m standing at my own funeral and this preposterously well-dressed black man is talking to me about things I in no way understood. And he says his name is Epp. And he takes me under his wing.” Matthew breathed out a sad sigh and it came rushing back. He put his glass down on the bar with too much force and liquor splashed over his fingers. “And twenty-two years later she dies anyway.”

“It’s not Epp’s fault you know.”

“I know, I know,” Matthew held his alcohol soaked fingers up and looked around, then settled on wiping them off on his pants. “But you can’t really blame me for my reaction. I never gave this a whole lot of thought, I guess. It’s all sort of jumbled in my head.”

“Of course,” Benjamin said as if Matthew was blaming himself for things that he shouldn’t. “If you don’t think things through, things stay jumbled. That should be our motto.” Benjamin caught sight of a friend on the other side of the bar and he gave a smile and a nod of his head. “Anyway, the deal was never for our choice’s immortality, just that you’d go instead of them, and they’d have a shot at a decent life.”

“Is yours gone yet?”

“Mine? No, forty years later and she’s still puttering on, god bless her.”

“Yeah. Well, I still feel like Epp could have filled me in a little better.”

“Ah. You can’t blame him. That’s just how he is, all impassive and what have you. You know why he’s like that don’t you?” Benjamin looked around like he was worried he was being watched. “It’s because he was a slave.”

“No shit? He’s been doing this for more than a hundred years?”

“That’s why he’s got the rank.”

“And we get cheap whisky.”

“Amen,” Benjamin raised his glass and held it towards Matthew who obligingly gave it another clink with his. “Anyway,” Benjamin took a sip and placed his glass down and looked past Matthew.

Matthew turned to look at what had caught Benjamin’s eye and saw Epp coming through the bar towards them. They watched Epp walk the bar, those who could see him giving curt nods like they were afraid to display any emotion around him. He was courteous in turn, waving and greeting those who he passed, but there was an air about him that kept him detached.

“Hello, sir,” Benjamin said with a little nod of his large head as Epp came over to them.

“I don’t outrank you, Benjamin,” Epp said as he slid into the barstool on the other side of Matthew. “I keep telling you that.”

“Yes, sir,” Benjamin said. “Let me buy you a drink.” He threw another twenty on the bar and watched as it broke into a ten and some singles and another rocks glass appeared in front of Epp.

Epp picked up the glass slowly, turning it in the light. He swirled it gently under his nose and breathed in. Then he took a sip, letting it slide on his tongue, and then swallowed. He put the glass back down. “I don’t outrank you, Benjamin, but tonight I’m going to insist that you drink what I drink.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a crisp stack of bills held together by a paper band. Two of these dropped on the bar and Benjamin stared at them from the corner of his eye, frozen in mid-drink. Matthew looked at Epp, then down at the two stacks of money.

The bands across the packets had “Five Thousand” written on them in orange letters and as Matthew watched they began to shake and shrink, depleting in size as three new crystal rocks glasses appeared on the bar in front of them. The glasses filled up with a new type of scotch. When Matthew looked back at the stacks of bills, there were only a few left.

“Sir, I can’t let you…” Benjamin started, but Epp waved him silent.

“Even for the immortal, Benjamin, life is too short to drink bad scotch.”

Matthew picked up his glass, amazed at how heavy it was and how cool the crystal felt. He smelled the liquor inside and just closed his eyes, enjoying it. Benjamin only stared down at his drink, afraid to go near it. Epp took a sip and smiled, then looked over and saw all of this. “Don’t worry. Next round’s on me as well.” He threw another two stacks of bills onto the bar.

Matthew dared a sip and Benjamin dared to pick his glass up. Much the same as before, the three sat drinking in silence, letting the whisky do the talking. More rounds came, and the conversation started up again, nothing important being said, just words being exchanged over a shared drink or two. After a few more Benjamin pushed his chair out and stood up a little wobbly. “I think I’m done for the night,” he said. “Want to come down to the East Village, Mattie? We’ll fuck with the hipsters and scrounge for change. It’ll be fun.”

Matthew laughed. “No, thanks, I think I’m just going to sit tight for a while.”

“Suit yourself,” Benjamin said, easing his weight off his barstool. He caught Epp’s eye. “That’s some good scotch,” he said, stifling a burp, “I thank you for that, sir.”

He gave a couple of slaps on the shoulder as he walked past them, then exited out of the bar. Epp watched him go. “That guy will not listen to me when I tell him I don’t outrank him.”

“Don’t you?”

Epp turned to look at Matthew and Matthew instantly regretted what he had said Epp’s look was so disappointed. “Don’t tell me you think like him.”

“Well you do get to do a lot of pretty neat things that we don’t get to do.”

“It isn’t rank, Matthew. I can do those things because I have learned how to do them, not because some sanctioning body allows me to do them. I don’t get to use the tape because someone says I get to; I can use the tape because I’ve come to learn a few things about space-time. The elders meet together not to decide the rules for everyone else but because we like meeting together, we like exchanging ideas and lessons. But the pool of knowledge is open for anyone to drink from. We have no control over that. You should know that by now.”

“I feel like there’s a lot I should know by now.”

“It takes time,” Epp said, his voice soft and understanding after his small tirade. “You’ll get there. But the first thing you should do is stop listening to people like Benjamin. I know, he’s fun to share a drink with and I’ll stand him a round anytime, but he’s got a lot of things backwards. Like most newbies he seems to think that we’re in control here. They make their first choice and they get a taste of this new world and they think the meat bags are somehow below them,” Epp looked around at the regular people drinking in the bar all around.

“We do seem to hold a lot of the cards,” Matthew said, and to illustrate his point he waved a hand through the head of a guy walking past his stool. The guy decided then and there to cheat on his taxes.

“But it’s a lot more give and take than most newbies ever care to realize. They have their fun and then their choice straight-lines and then they’re gone. But we share this world, and we use what the mortals come up with. I mean, take the tape again. Do you realize that when I first learned that trick, tape didn’t even exist yet? I mean I had to pound wooden stakes into the ground, and then spool this spindly twine around them to mark off an area. But then tape comes along and I get to use tape. You know? Or take the money,” Epp dropped another two blocks of cash down on the table. “We use money because a symbol for our currency is damned handy, but it’s only a symbol. Most newbies never bother to question that.”

Epp looked over at Matthew, who was watching the cash shaking on the table, slowly depleting itself as his glass filled again with scotch. “Look at you,” Epp said. “I forget sometimes how far along you aren’t. You’re picturing some lady at a desk somewhere tallying up what’s been spent and what’s been earned. You think the elders run the money, don’t you?”

“Well,” Matthew said, clearly thinking something along those lines but also not sure he was so crazy for thinking it.

“It’s just the easiest way for us to visualize what is happening, but there is no bank of accountants somewhere that cuts your paycheck when you do a meat bag, Matthew. It’s just how we come to express the notion of how much you’ve pushed and how much they’ve pushed back. I mean, do you think there’s an exchange rate?”

Matthew’s face was a wrinkle of puzzlement that was part him staring at the money and part scotch. “It doesn’t matter what it looks like, Matthew.” Epp reached a hand out, he flexed his fingers a few times, then made a fist and pounded down on the bar. At first Matthew didn’t notice what was happening, the sound that came out of the bar was so booming, so unnatural, that the sound was all he could focus on. But before Epp’s fist came down again he caught a glimpse of the pile of money and saw that it was now some form of large silver coin he had never seen before. Epp banged the bar again and the coins jumped and Matthew was pretty sure he was looking at Spanish Doubloons. Epp pounded, the coins jumped, and Matthew caught sight of something that must have been Chinese, then a coin that looked vaguely familiar but he couldn’t place, then something he’d never seen before, then back to a stack of crisp $100 bills.

“Neat trick,” Matthew said.

“It’s not a trick, and you will learn in time. If you want to that is. You might not. That’s what tonight is all about. Tonight it’s time for your second choice.” Epp quieted down and went back to sipping his scotch.

“I don’t get it,” Matthew said, shaking his head, not even sure what it was he wasn’t getting.

“It comes in time. And give yourself some credit, you’re learning already. That trick with the cigar you’re so fond of, that takes a fair amount of chemistry and thermodynamics. And you’re doing rather well grasping probability waves.” Epp’s hand reached out and plucked at the bar a few times and three or four small waves sprang up, much like the kind Matthew had seen on the photographs in the park earlier.

Matthew groaned and laid his head on the bar behind his glass of scotch, but he could see the waves dancing through the crystal. “Please…no math.”

Epp smiled, and one by one he pushed down the waves until one began to rise higher and higher until it was the only one left and it reached up to the ceiling. “Oh you’ll have plenty of math to learn. Well, depending on your choice tonight.”

“That’s the second time you’ve said that. I have no idea what it means.”

Epp didn’t answer, only turned back to his drink, took a delicate swallow, rolled it around in his mouth, then let it pass down his throat. He looked around after a few seconds, his eyes glancing to the speaker in the corner then over at the jukebox as he listened to the song that was playing. Matthew realized he wasn’t going to get an answer, so he went back to his drink and the two remained silent for a few more minutes.

“I still don’t think I get the part about them pushing back,” Matthew said finally, something in the rushed form of the question giving away how rare he considered it to have Epp’s mind to pick.

Epp shrugged. “That’s one of the simplest concepts to grasp.” He held his hands out in front of him so his palms were down and his fingertips were touching. “Some you test and they come out okay, they get a little stronger for it, but some you test and they push back,” and Epp pushed in with both his hands, allowing his fingers to rise up like a mountain growing. “Some push back a little,” and his fingertips rose up a little, “and some…well some push back a lot,” and the mountain grew higher. “But, in the end, someone has to give,” and Epp let one of his hands collapse under the other.

“Yeah, but I’m not sure I’ve ever felt that.”

“Of course not, you’re not a tester yet. You haven’t made your second choice. You’re still a newbie. And, frankly, the only thing a newbie really amounts to is a bad idea on legs.”

At the mention of a second choice Matthew looked at Epp, but Epp’s face gave nothing away and he decided not to push it. Matthew returned to his drink, and slowly the events of the night flooded back to him, and he saw her hair tousled and her body lying in the park. “I can’t believe she’s gone,” he said, confused.

Epp didn’t say anything but there was a warmth in his silence.

“Why? Why did you put the tape up to start with?”

“To help you.”

“How does that help me, to know she’s out there dying and I can’t do anything?”

Epp curled his fingers around his glass and smiled down at the bar.

“This have something to do with my second choice again?”

Epp didn’t answer and Matthew returned to staring at the rainbows forming in his crystal glass. Then he turned to Epp with a new question. “Do you remember when your choice died?”

“Of course, you never forget. It was a house fire. I woke up and could hear her screaming in the next room. That was when I made my choice. Twenty years after that I watched as my wife was buried.” He took a drink. “That never fades, Matthew. Never.”

“And you’ve been doing this for two hundred years?”

“Two hundred? You really are bad at math.”

“Sorry, Benjamin said that you were a slave, so I figured—”

“This would be a wonderful time for you to take stock of everything that exists in your head, and to separate out the assumptions from the facts.”

“So you weren’t a slave?”

“Oh, I was a slave.”

“So…”

“My slave name, which I kept, is Epictetus, not Chicken George. Epictetus. That is Greek, Matthew.”

“Greek, but…” and then Matthew saw. “That first set of coins you turned the money into…”

Obligingly Epp pounded the bar again and the cash jumped up and landed as a set of crude silver discs. “Ancient Greek,” Epp said. And he thumped the bar one last time, turning the silver back into a pile of hundreds.

“Jesus Christ,” Matthew said under his breath, still staring at the bar.

“Never had the pleasure of meeting him, no. But he was my mentor’s last great push. After him she retired. Not that I can blame her; the work does take something out of you.” Epp looked down at his glass hollowly.

“She…she retired?”

Epp nodded. “She decided to cross over.”

“So where is she now?”

“How the hell should I know? One world at a time, thank you very much.”

“So,” Matthew was having a hard time with this, “you’ve been doing this for…and she…how long did she test for?”

“Her first great push was to strike Homer blind, and she finished things out by chatting with Yehoshua in the desert. Not a bad pile of work by anyone’s standards.” Epp turned to his drink.

“Fuck me,” Matthew said, and for lack of anything better to do he finished his drink.

“That’s nothing,” Epp said, as the cash on the table shook and Matthew’s drink filled up. “What will really baffle you is the notion that she herself had a mentor. I mean, when you start thinking about what sorts of things came about because of that man’s pushing…” Epp waved his fingers over the bar and the image of a small stone wheel rolled across it, then the image of a fire being lit. “It gets pretty interesting.” Epp looked around the bar. He stood up. “But anyway, we old timers will go on if you let us. I’m going to leave you for now, Matthew. You have a choice to make.”

“I made my choice,” Matthew said glumly. “My life and not hers, and now hers is about to end out in the park when you take that tape down. That was my choice. It’s made already.”

“Oh no. That was your first choice. You still have—”

“My second choice. So you keep telling me, although I have no idea what you mean.”

“Who was it you were protecting, Matthew?”

“My wife.”

“And what was it you saw in the wastebasket of the bathroom?”

Matthew turned on his stool, his face unsteady, his eyes trying to carve away Epp’s calm. “How…how did you know about that?”

“You’ve been seeing it again, haven’t you? That’s a good thing.” Epp nodded as if this confirmed a hunch of his.

“How did you know about that?”

“Our biggest lies are the ones we tell ourselves,” Epp said, and then he was drifted into silence.

Matthew sat drinking, thinking about the wastebasket at the hotel earlier that evening. Only that didn’t seem right, and there hadn’t been anything in there, he had only thought he had seen something. But what had he thought was there? And why did it rattle him so much?

Matthew sat and drank his way through Epp’s cash. Then he started working through his own. It was hours before he left the bar.

*

Matthew walked through the park again. Ducking under the tape he made his way to where his wife lay dying and as he looked down the tears started again. It was strange, he felt so distant from her, but looking at her face the memories were able to reform. The way she had looked up at him after he kissed her, the way she always swung her arm when he took her hand as they walked, how she couldn’t keep the bathroom in any sort of order to save her life. And now that the memories were forming again Matthew turned away from the body, grotesque in its frozen state. He started walking, remembering how they had been stupid and in love. He was out of the park and thinking about how they had made plans. And then he was thinking about what he had seen in the bathroom wastebasket. And suddenly he was on his knees for the second time that night, collapsing to the sidewalk with what he had seen, his sobs split by screams as his world cleaved neatly in two. When his scream stopped he only knelt and quietly breathed, hands shaking at his sides. He saw a familiar pair of dress shoes walk in front of him and stop, the pants hovering above them forming a perfect break just above the cuff. Dawn began to spill over the sidewalk.

“Epp, what is going on?” he said, quietly pleading.

“What was in the wastebasket, Matthew?” Epp said, standing above him.

Matthew started to stand up but thought better of it and wound up sitting down on the concrete. He wiped a stray tear away from the side of his nose with the tip of his finger. “A home pregnancy test. I saw a home pregnancy test in the wastebasket of my bathroom the morning before the Mets game. And it was positive.”

“Very good, Matthew. Are you starting to understand now?”

Matthew looked up at him, bewildered. He shook his head. “I have a child?”

“You have a daughter,” Epp said. “And it is time to make your second choice.”

“What do you mean?”

“All those years ago, when you called out for that bullet to strike you…who was it you were protecting?”

“But I didn’t know about my daughter, did I?”

“You knew enough,” Epp said, and he plucked two curves up out of the sidewalk. He pointed at the larger one, “Your wife,” and he pointed at the smaller one, smaller but still pronounced, “and your daughter.”

“But it was my wife, I was protecting my wife.”

“Were you? Then why did you spend so much time away from her? How come you didn’t even know she was approaching her death? How come you can’t even remember her name?”

“I know her name,” Matthew said, angry, “it’s…” and he stopped, frowning.

“I’ve mentioned before that you were tethered to your choice. Didn’t you ever wonder why you never traveled the world? You have this rather strong new power and yet you never once saw any other lands, never walked through The Vatican at midnight or took a swan dive off of Angel Falls. You’ve been tied here. But what you didn’t realize, some would argue couldn’t realize, was that you’ve been splitting time between two lives. You’ve been following your own daughter.”

“Oh god, whose wedding was I at?”

“Relax. This isn’t a Greek tragedy. I believe she was in attendance as a guest of the bride.”

“So what happens now?”

“I would think that would be obvious. You choose.”

“I get the feeling that there’s more at stake here than I think.”

“How true. Stand up.”

Matthew obliged, and Epp reached out to straighten his jacket, brushing a stray leaf from the park off of his shoulder. Then Epp spoke. “There exists for you now a small window of opportunity. Pick your daughter and you remain tethered, still on this world but permanently a newbie until your daughter’s time comes and you both pass out of this world together. Choose your wife, however, and everything changes. Once she passes, you will be set free. Or cast loose, depending on how you look at it.”

“Won’t I cross over with her?”

Epp shook his head. “Your tether to your daughter will keep you in this world as your wife leaves, but once she is gone, the tether will snap and you will be,” Epp waved a hand through the air absently, trying to think of the correct word, “free.”

“You mean…”

“You’ll be a newbie no longer.”

“So I’ll…I’ll be an actual tester,” Matthew said, starting to understand.

“Indeed. But I really have to warn you, once the tether snaps…once your tie to the ones you loved enough to die for breaks…everything changes.” Epp stopped talking until Matthew finally looked up at him. Epp’s eyes were specters and Matthew wished he could look away, but he only stared and listened as Epp spoke. “You will know for certain that you are entirely alone on this earth, and that you are loved by no one. You will be cast adrift with no compass and no oar. Your brain will expand in ways you never thought possible, but your heart will remain frozen in the same place forever containing nothing but the memories of your two choices. And those memories will haunt you, they will come upon you when you least expect them, when you least look for them, they will reappear to rip into you millennia after they should have vanished quietly into the night. You will not be able to stop the hurt, and your heart will well up, and your eyes will bleed hot tears. You won’t own the memories. You won’t be able to cherish them or enjoy them or call them up for company. The memories will own you. The pain stays with you always, and all you will have to look forward to is the work.”

“And the work makes it worthwhile?” Matthew said, seeing hope.

“The work is horrible,” Epp said bluntly, and he began to pace in front of Matthew as his speaking picked up pace and energy. “You will be known as the scourge of mankind. People will curse you, spit when they refer to you, hate you. You will be viewed as the biggest problem their existence has. Nobody will understand, nobody will see what it is you do, none of them ever grasp that they become who they are in this world because of the obstacles in their lives, not in spite of them. The few you do get through to, the few who come to appreciate the strength you draw out of them, they will instantly be mocked by everyone else the minute they speak these thoughts. The ones who break too easily when you push will be nothing but disappointments, and the ones who make you proud will push back so hard that you will shatter and it will take centuries to put your head back together. The work is nothing but a heartache you chase to wash away the pain of your choice.”

“Then, Epp,” Matthew shook his head, clearly shaken, “I’ve got to ask. What is the upside?”

And Epp stopped short, seemingly frozen, head staring down at his foot. Then he snapped up and his words began rattling off in crisp, strong syllables and his eyes were so strong that Matthew felt a chill run down his spine. “The upside is that you can be greatness itself. You could be Shakespeare’s broken heart, Beethoven’s deaf ears, Van Gogh’s madness. You could be Keller’s scarlet fever, Roebling’s crushed left foot, the color of Dr. King’s skin. You could be the entry for light to pass into the soul. You could be the reason that anything worth doing on this rock ever gets done,” and he stared at Matthew and repeated himself. “You could be greatness itself.”

Matthew stared down at the curb, his eyes out of focus as he thought, one hand reached to rub the back of his neck.

“Do you understand what you need to do?”

He gave the back of his neck a squeeze, then looked up and his eyes met Epp’s. He nodded and said a silent, “Yeah.”

“Do you understand what I’m going to go do?”

Matthew thought for a few seconds. “Yes,” he nodded, “you’re going to go take the tape down.”

“Are you ready?”

“How will I know what to do?”

“I can’t answer that for you.”

“You went through this too?”

Epp nodded with his eyes closed. “When I woke up in that house fire I heard her screaming. I heard both of them screaming. I made my first choice and twenty years after that I attended my wife’s funeral. My wife was the strongest thing in my life. But it was twelve years after her death that the woman I truly loved was buried. We tell our biggest lies to ourselves.”

“Shit.”

“Well put.” Epp raised his eyebrows. “Are you ready?”

Matthew realized his body was trembling. “I think so.”

“Then, Matthew Huntington of Brooklyn, New York, I wish you luck.”

“Thanks,” Matthew said. He looked around, clearly unsure of what exactly to do next, but then his face cleared and he nodded one last time before stepping towards the curb. He held his hand up with a five dollar bill in it and with a blur he was gone.

Epp looked around at the 72nd street square as dawn reflected rosy pink off of the puddles in the street. Then he turned and walked towards the park.

*

Matthew looked at the door, glancing about the frame as if it was going to offer up any number of clues as to what lay beyond. He ran a finger over the doorknob, and then stepped through.

In the park, Epp was standing at the tape, the sunlight growing brighter around him as he stared across the yellow line to the large square of darkness it contained. He reached a hand up and grabbed the strip of yellow, then gave a yank. It grew warmer in his hands as it stretched thinner and thinner, until finally it snapped, the end not in his hand recoiling and springing back whip-like and light towards the tree where it was tied. Inside the square the light began to change.

The hallway Matthew entered was dark, but he had the feel of high ceilings and dusty white walls. He walked, his feet noticing the occasional warped slat of wood under his feet. He walked past a semicircle arch that led to a cramped kitchen, past a closed door, then around a corner to a bedroom. There was a fluffy comforter, rumpled and bright like starched snow, an end table with a clock radio and a lamp, a small desk cluttered with books and a laptop. He stared around; everything looked generic enough on its own, but combined there was a personality here.

Epp stood at a tree, his hands passing around and around it as he unwrapped loop after loop of tape until he finally reached the end. He walked around the tree, gathering handful after handful of tape as he went, the light on his left shifting from dusk into darkness now, and a figure ran towards him until they reached the barrier where the tape had been, and then they disappeared to catch up with their present selves.

Matthew heard a door slam and he spun around to see a woman standing in the hallway, sleepy eyed, wearing a large t-shirt, reaching a hand through the doorway he had passed to flip off the bathroom light. He breathed in, and in, and in, seemingly unable to exhale as his blood beat warm in his ears. “Christ, you look like your mother,” he said as his daughter walked past him. And her face, on top of the resemblance to his wife, was somehow so familiar, and he remembered in rapid succession, a child’s laugh at the corner of a room he was working, a little girl in pigtails who had watched as he caused a fight on a street corner, the glimpse he caught in the shop window of a teenager walking past as he looked over the clientele, her face at a thousand different moments in his past appearing again and again as he floated through his work and it was like an optical illusion that he had only seen one way until just this moment when it became so clear how close he had been to her this whole time, how much of her life he had witnessed.

Epp wound his way around the third corner of the square he had marked out, tugging the tape off a tree branch. Inside the square the light rain that had passed through earlier that night began to fall, the raindrops tapping soothingly against the treetops.

Matthew watched her climb into bed, roll around a few times trying to get the comforter right on her body. She settled down onto her back, her face up at the ceiling. He watched and could tell that she was debating whether she should go back to sleep or not. She reached a hand up, scratched her forehead, half rolled over and looked at the clock radio, then rolled back. She clasped her hands behind her head, wriggled back onto the pillow, and smiled as she looked up at the ceiling. One thought went through Matthew’s head as he watched her and it shocked him with its certainty, but as a lifetime of watching his daughter grow up flooded through his memory he knew it was true.

“She’ll be okay,” he thought.

He lingered for a moment longer, each new breath he took seeming to drink in something from the form lying under the comforter in front of him. Then he turned and walked to the bathroom. Not knowing if there was some sort of rule against this and not particularly caring if there was, he focused on the mirror. With a little effort he managed to steam it up. Then with the tip of his finger, he began to write.

Epp reached the last tree, the mess of tape wrapped around his hand quite large now. He reached up and tugged at a loose end, the knot holding the last bit of tape coming undone. Behind him the uneven square of light was lurching its way towards the present. The knot came undone, the last bit of tape collected in his hands, and behind him everything looked normal. He balled the tape up again and again, compressing it more and more each time until with a final brushing of his hands nothing was left.

He turned and saw Matthew standing in front of him. Epp’s eyes picked him over carefully, starting at his feet and working his way to the top of Matthew’s head. The smallest vibration of a smile wavered on Epp’s lips. “Did you leave her a note?”

“Yeah.”

“Hard to resist. Believe me I know.”

Matthew smiled and then faltered, a puzzled look coming over his face, he stared aslant at the ground looking very much like someone who had walked into a room only to realize they forgot why they had gone into that room to begin with. “Wait, did I leave a note? Why can’t I remember? That happened barely twenty seconds ago, didn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Epp said gravely, “the bond is broken. The memories own you now, not the other way around.”

Matthew swallowed. “Why do I have a terrible feeling?” he looked up and winced as he pressed his palm to his chest. “This is awful. Does this go away?”

“You grow accustomed to it.”

“That’s not the same thing.”

“No. It is not.”

Matthew raised his hand and pointed beyond Epp. “Did my wife pass?” Epp nodded. “I’m going to go say goodbye. Maybe look at her one last time.”

“This section of the park is now in the present,” Epp said. “She was picked up by an ambulance hours ago.”

Matthew looked sick. “Do you know where the ambulance took her? Maybe I can see her one last time?”

Epp stood in silence for a moment. “I think maybe we should occupy you with some simple drills…take your mind off of it instead.”

Matthew breathed out shakily. “Yeah, okay. So you’re my teacher now? Is that how this works?”

“You are free, Matthew. Anything and anyone you care to learn from you may call teacher. I’m more of a welcoming committee.”

“Okay,” Matthew said, not sure he was going to be okay with this, but wanting to start just to do something. “So where do we begin?”

“Some light travel. The choice you just made was difficult, you’ve earned a bit of currency from it. And you’ve never traveled freely before in your existence. I think we should go somewhere far away that you’ve never been.” Epp turned and looked up at the sky, his eyes keen, his face observant, almost as if he were smelling something in the wind. Then he turned back. “Night is falling over the Himalayas. I think we should go view the sunset there. See what long shadows look like upon Mount Everest.”

“Really?”

“It’s as good a place to start as any. A better place to start than most.”

“How the hell do I go about getting there? All I’ve done so far is—”

“Forget what you’ve done so far. And forget what’s in your head right now. Just take a deep breath and give it a try.”

Matthew clearly felt he deserved the right to object some more, but he couldn’t bring himself to open his mouth with the way Epp’s eyes were boring into him, so he gave a cockeyed smile and looked around. Then he closed his eyes. For a few moments nothing happened, but then his form began to waver and then ripple and then vanish. Epp was staring at nothing.

Epp tilted his head and his face took on a vacant look as if he were staring at something far in the distance. He had a look of high expectations growing steadily each second until finally he winced as if watching someone take a bad fall. “So close,” Epp said. And with a quick glance around he began walking, his form rippling as he went, until he was gone and there was nothing but the damp grass of the park and the morning sun.

In an apartment downtown a rumpled white comforter was piled at the foot of a bed, its owner having just recently decided that it was time to get up. She was currently standing next to the shower, trying to adjust the water, leaning over the tub, gingerly running her hand under the spray that was far too hot. As she fiddled with the knobs and steam filled the little bathroom her eyes caught sight of her mirror. She walked over, slowly, head tilted to the side as she read what was written. She gave a glance behind her, as if someone was watching, then turned back. One of her friends must have written the note there last night, she knew, while they were getting ready for the wedding. Only there was something conveyed in the note that was so simple and so warming that she couldn’t imagine which of her friends had written with such emotion. And it was the strangest damned thing. Suddenly all she wanted to do was cry but when she opened her mouth a soft laugh cascaded out, and, after reading the note one more time, she turned and hopped happily back over to the shower.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Salvatore Difalco
Omertà   

 

“Things are scarce,” Luca said in his humblest tones. “Don’t know what we’re going to do.” He even tried to make his eyes tear up by staring at a speck on the wall, except the speck turned out to be a fly and when it flew off, he blinked.  

“You should've stayed in Canada,” Toto said, wiping cream and icing sugar from his lips and slapping a fly from his cheek.     

“I hated it there.”

“You hated it?” Toto chuckled. “What’s going on here that convinced you to return? Nothing’s going on here, brother. Niente.”

“Well, I’m here now,” Luca said, his mouth like chalk.

Toto cleared his throat and spat into a soiled handkerchief. He selected a third pastry, a plump square of millefoglie, and sank his teeth into it, eyes rolling back bestially.    

Crumbs and cream splotching his shirt, Toto offered no pastries to his brother, who had to pour himself a glass of water from the sweating tank—the shed lacked plumbing—to slake his thirst. Luca never directly asked about the lotto—circling around it, dropping hints, intimating this and that—hoping that his brother would mention it himself. But he never did. And judging from his threadbare furnishings, he hadn’t exactly splurged with his winnings.   

No matter, the bug was planted. Even though Mafalda eventually recanted, claiming she'd misheard her source, and no news source reported Toto’s winnings, Luca couldn’t shake that bug. All he could think and talk about was the lotto and his miserly brother. At her limits with her husband’s antics, Luca's wife threatened to leave him if he continued obsessing about the lotto. When he threatened to kill her if she left him, she yielded.        

And so, every morning at ten, Luca boarded the Pullman—the pastries a one-time deal—to Milena and his brother's fly-infested shed. This went on every day, for years. Toto never offered him so much as an espresso during that time, and the two rarely spoke, maintaining a bizarre omertà that took on a life of its own. Except for the drone of flies, they typically spent the visits in silence, staring at the peeling walls or the beaded water tank. Luca never once mentioned the lotto. He expected that Toto would, eventually. But Toto never did and he continued living like a pauper.       

Luca thought it all a ruse—faking poverty in order to keep his money in the mattress. He should enjoy it now, while he can, he thought. Luca even toyed with the idea of killing Toto. The only thing stopping him from cutting his throat was the fear that he'd stashed the money so well he'd never find it.

So after some 30 years of these daily visits, neither brother came clean. Despite their poverty, Luca’s children blossomed into decent adults, married, and had children. The towns of Bompensiere and Milena experienced their share of marriages, births, baptisms and deaths. Storms came and went, heat waves, outbreaks of flu and measles. And yet, neither brother ever mentioned the lotto. Nor did they grow any closer, as might have happened. Nor did, paradoxically, Toto ever tell Luca not to visit—as if he knew his brother’s game and tortured him for it. 

One morning, Luca found Toto on his filthy floor, covered in flies and cold to the touch. But until he had a chance to search the shed, he maintained his cool. Only after turning the place upside down and finding nothing of value did he emote. Townsfolk said Luca’s screams could be heard in Palermo.

During the funeral mass in Milena, Luca sobbed uncontrollably and prostrated himself at the foot of the altar—an unexpected and appalling effusion of grief.          

Continuing his histrionics at the gravesite, Luca threw himself on his brother’s modest coffin as it descended into its grave, crying, “How could you do this to me? How could you do this to me?”

Puzzled and disgusted, the townsfolk departed. And far from feeling guilty for spurring all this nonsense, Mafalda, the gossip, striding off with the others, could barely contain her glee.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ian Goodale
The Queen of the Birds

 

She was bored with humanity—utterly, irretrievably bored. She had endured their petty squabbles and indignities against themselves and her own regal being for hundreds of thousands of years, had watched with agony as they navigated through the slow and painful birth of their stumbling evolution, and was on the cusp of deciding, finally, to leave the humans to their own devices and devote all of her attention to her favorite of her creations, the birds.

She liked the warblers the best: the blackpoll, the blue-winged, and the gold-winged especially; the crested caracara was next, a superb example of her creative prowess; and then the cardinals, then the blue jays, and, in a close fifth, all the rest, lumped peacefully together into a unitive, living mass, their colors all blending together but remaining distinct, individual despite their collective life, their colors like paint splashed across an immeasurably large canvas, breathing, alive, a symphony of color, with their voices joining together into a choral collage of birdsong, likewise united in its individual voices' distinctness. Sounds and colors blended, interwove, danced, so that the boundary between sight and sound was blurred, and everything harmonized as one, resplendent with an infinite peace. This part of her creation pleased her—here there was nothing to be bored with, nothing to grate upon or dull one's sense of wonderment and ease. She reclined in her stellar throne (which was really more akin to a bejeweled rocking chair), content with what she had accomplished so many eons ago.

But the human race, she thought (beginning to mumble herself as she stumbled through half-articulated thoughts), was not much to her liking—a disappointment, although her work in creating the species was nothing to shake a stick at, in cosmic terms, at least. It had taken her a while to think up: a bipedal mass of flesh that would eventually build itself into a large network of interconnected societies, nation-states and governments linked into an enormous quilt of conscious life. Or had it been her coworker, a faceless thing with twenty-odd arms, who had first suggested the idea, and only she who executed it? Her memory was going fuzzy as she aged. Soon she would have to be retired, swapped out for another entity waiting in the wings of the firmament.

She had seen the faceless one milling about near where she lived recently, evidently readying himself for when he would take over her throne, when he would seize the dominion over her creation. And what had he, or she, or it, done? No act, even if the thing had proven valorous beyond comprehension, could warrant the inheriting of her beauteous work, the simple regality of the birds. She would drag them with her to Hell, if need be, to preserve their supreme beauty.

She thought that was where she was going, at some point in the unforeseeable future, but could not be entirely sure: a strange place where your face was wiped clean, like the thing lurking on the outskirts of her life, and you could no longer possess what was rightfully yours. Your identity gone, your spirit crushed to mush, your longing for freedom hampered by your own vainglorious strivings to continue possession of what was not rightfully yours—or so they said. The threat of an indeterminate punishment loomed over her constantly. But why should she surrender what she had made? No, she would not be defeated so easily.

Her memory was going, as she well knew, but she could remember when she first took the throne from her predecessor, the thing with the girlish body and the head with large, staglike antlers and many eyes. It had let out the most horrible screams as it was dragged away and tossed into the pit, let fly into that sinkhole of suffering by her own, indifferent hands. It had deserved it, she thought, had earned everything it got. It was her turn at the throne, her time to rule and build up and control whatever she pleased. Any obstacle to that mission would be consigned to oblivion, and order would prevail. She did not know what lay at the bottom of the abyss into which she had cast her predecessor.

The lost memory that troubled her most was that of the birds’ actual creation. She could remember reveling in their being, glorifying in their magnificent flight and dives and swirls in the air, basking in their beauteous songs—but their actual birth eluded her. The faceless thing had been whispering doubts in her ear again, through the fogged windows that encircled her throne: Were the birds created before her? Was her role in their birth, her very motherhood, an illusion? Could she remember creating any other thing that she took credit for? And indeed she could not remember creating anything, but only the feeling that she had. But her memory was fading, which explained that troubling idea away, if only untidily. No, no, no—she must be their creator.

But what if you aren't?

 “I am. Leave me alone.”

And with that the faceless thing retired, letting out short, raspy sounds that she assumed were its ugly attempts at laughter. Some things have no beauty, she thought. Some things deserve only to die.

 

*

 

Time flowed on like a death-dealing river. She indulged her love for the birds to an absurd degree. All other aspects of her creation, animate and otherwise, were ignored outright—especially her detested humans. The unprecedented step was taken of inviting birds up into her throne room, where they were permitted to fly about freely and gorge themselves on the buffet of grapes, nuts, and seed she had placed out for their enjoyment. She would recline peacefully, watching their flights and feasting with a carefree, wide smile upon her face, a smile that seemed to split her skull in half at the ears. Sometimes she would nap, dreamlessly, lulled to sleep by the wondrous sounds of her feathered companions.

Thus she passed an undetermined amount of time, which to her felt an eternity.

 

*

 

The morning came when her time was finally up. She was looking out at all the birds of the world, admiring the intricate songs of some swallows, in particular, although she could see the totality of her ornithological kingdom, when she was grabbed from behind by the thing without a face and tossed off her throne, down into the pit. She sank like a sack of stones, screaming with the same horrible shriek she had heard on the day of her own ascension. A blind rage filled her when she saw the faceless one assumes the throne, taking what was rightfully hers. She could have stood the mere loss, however crushing it may be, of her own labors, but to have someone else wrest control of the birds from her, to have an impostor in the place of the true monarch? This she could not bear. She beat at the air with her hands, thrashing wildly, struggling in vain to attack anything near her. But her cries were eventually muted by the dense, heavy sound of the air rushing by around her, the desolate soundtrack of a fall that seemed as if it would never stop, and there was nothing around her for the blows to land upon. She was alone, separate from all, a eunuch in fertile world. She shrieked still louder, hoping to make herself pass out from exhaustion, but she never tired. The pain seemed never ending.

The faceless one assumed the throne, pleased that it was finally its turn to rule. A shame that the woman obsessed with birds was so resistant to the necessary change—pitiable, really. She hadn't made anything in the kingdom, only inherited it. And even then, nobody on the throne could really claim ownership over what they surveyed—they could try to exert their influence, of course, but there was no record that they had made any of it. Still, they felt compelled to stick to their beliefs. What had they but their willpower, when the throne was so commonly stripped from others’ grasp?

It was a cool day, with a slight breeze—perfect weather to inherit the responsibilities that came with the power-gilded seat. Somewhere, immeasurably far away, a holy sun awaited its final dawning.

 

 

 

 

 

S Stephanie
When she left

my big sister walked away right down Main Street.  She walked quick, the way a dog walks when it’s got a ghost following it. Turning her head to look over her shoulder every block or so, veering a little sideways when she did.

There were lots of things we walked away from back then.  Drunk mothers, drunk stepfathers, drunk boyfriends, and bad first dates.

And because we were young, there were lots of things we walked toward.  Drunk mothers, drunk stepfathers, drunk boyfriends, and bad first dates.

But this was the night she really walked away.  You could see her wet cheeks as she passed under streetlights.  You could see them reflect and flash when she looked back over her shoulder.  And you could hear something in her voice you’d never heard before as she yelled back at you, Go away!  Quit following me! I mean it!

Years later, she would tell you a story about that night. One she swore you to secrecy about. One you have honored and never repeated to anyone.  It was a story about a night she became no longer young.  A story about a night that required fast walking. A night when the only option was to walk away, permanently. 

 

 

 

 

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