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Issue # 48 Spring 2023

Prose

Edited by Dorian Gossy

 

Brian Mark Barbeito
Breath

I go through from inside to the outside deck via the automatic doors of an impossibly large ship. Just beyond handsome wooden slats beige that meet white painted wrought iron dividers topped with a teak rail, are nothing but waves, the waves of the salt sea. I sit down and watch the horizon line. Some birds appear birds that are tropical and that follow the ship. I wonder then where and when they rest, and it puzzles me. I sit in a chair with faded orange cushions. A woman comes out and her dress is long and is a print decorative and unapologetic.

 

 The wind makes it to dance.

 

I wish I had a camera, she says, because I would get you take a picture of me. My dress is part of the wind and I look like a bird. Can I sit next to you? I don’t want to bother you.

 

Sure.

 

The woman says she is from the Carolinas now, but lived most of her life in New York City. I am no Southern Belle. Her intonation denotes that she is not below such, but rather more expansive, even cosmopolitan.

 

She remains on my left. A man approaches from the right but I don’t see him. She does. She says to him, You are one fine man. I have had my eye on you. And what a head of hair. Every time I lay my eyes on you I can’t take them off. Other men just don’t compare.

 

I look over, turning my head right to a forty five degree angle. He is a bit shy. He has flyers in his hand and is smoking a cigarette. I handed out these flyers advertising a party and I put the wrong information and now I have to go around and hand out the new ones. A pain. But I’ll get it done.

 

He takes a long drag of smoke into his lungs and exhales. The woman and I look at him and then glance out to the sea. By the way, he says to me, pointing to a table messy with wine glasses and beer bottles, an industrial strength ashtray with half its metal lid missing, I don’t know you but wanted to mention that you handled yourself really well in the midst of that fiasco last night. My husband and I were watching the whole thing. Bravo. Admirable.

 

I have no idea what he is talking about because he has mistaken me for someone else, which is a pattern, which is something that happens often.

 

Thanks but it wasn’t me. I wasn’t even near here.

 

He is surprised. I breathe in smoke. The woman breathes in smoke. He breathes in smoke again.

We are all thinking.

 

Say, I say, What was it all about anyway? Sounds intense.

 

Abortion.

 

Abortion?

 

Ya. There is a group of women here that think the new anti-abortion laws are great. I could hardly believe it from anyone, but from women makes it worse in my mind. I was so angry.

 

He is political. The non-Southern Belle with the beautiful dress nevertheless says something but I can’t make it out for a gust of wind, wind somehow like a breath exhaled by the sea skies. I am generally apolitical, though I have a few ideas here and there that lean left. I let them talk.

 

He listens to her and is upset about something and then voices his disagreement... They continue on though and are friendly but there is still some problem. Yet, they seem to find common ground on other things, more than not. Their voices fade out. I am thinking. I wonder what will happen if someone mistakes me for a person other than one that had a gift of oratory in debate, or attended an information technology training weekend, or someone who worked construction in the north of towns for a company that I, in reality, had never even heard name of. I wonder some more, about other things similar that have also happened, like the man who identified me as the person who Did not deserve one bit what Lisa and them did to you…no way, not you, who is a good guy and they are wicked evil and I am sorry you had to go through that..

 

I don’t know any Lisa or group like that.

 

But so far the reviews of the persons that are not me but look like me are good reviews.

 

I wonder what would happen if some authorities approach and say simply, Can you come with us please, and though it is a question on paper, is not a question in real life but a statement, and I have been mistaken for someone who did something, well, bad, untoward.

 

Two men come out and sit beside me on the right. One is of German descent. He told me this before. He chews on his cigar. I am a fisherman, from California, he says, as if simply continuing a days old conversation.

 

There are many rules where I come from, about fishing, I offer. If you get caught out of season they can impound your car, your boat, basically anything.

 

That’s right. Where I go also it is the same. Your Canada country population can fit into my California by the way. And, he puts his hand in front of him to help his point, and makes a gesture of some sort, There are rules for a reason, and they should be obeyed. It’s to protect the poor fishies.

 

I laugh inwardly at hearing this big and otherwise tough guy, chewing on the thickest cigar I have ever seen, say, ‘fishies,’ instead of ‘fish’.

 

Beside him I see the another man. His face and affect, clothing and something about his general aura remind me of an old friend that committed suicide. Joseph Campbell said that once you reach over thirty everyone you meet will remind you of someone else you already met. True enough. And then what about fifty? What happens then? Maybe unless you are an extrovert, you don’t want to meet anyone else.  This man looks like the suicide had he lived another decade or two. The man wears a collar shirt, a golf shirt or something close to one. Non-non descript haircut, average height and weight if there are such things. I sense he is not an asshole though, but rather an okay guy. The suicide was also kind, especially as the world goes. Golf shirt is thoughtful but thinks about worldly things. He is talking to someone yet next to his right about points, aero plan, miles, and he keeps glancing at his phone. This mediocrity consumes many people, perhaps the majority.

 

I breathe deeply, drawing the tropical air as if right to my stomach. Then I take a drag of nicotine and chemicals in smoke and bring them just as deeply in.  I don’t really want to talk to any of these people, one way or the other, but there is nowhere else to go to smoke. It’s hard maintaining, to coin a phrase, ‘lonership,’ upon a ship. Someone apparently caused a fire on a balcony and there is no smoking any longer on such personal outdoor spaces. Everyone pays for the sins of one. Plus it’s gotten late, and alcohol is a strange thing, - it loosens the mind otherwise inhibited and lubricates the lips. People say things they otherwise would not. I don’t know that I want to see or hear or know what waits dormant in most peoples’ minds and behind their lips.

 

The ship continues at eighteen to twenty knots, but it feels much faster than that in my guts and blood and bones. Maybe I am too sensitive, empathic towards the immediate and not so immediate environment. Luckily, a song sounds, and it’s Fleetwood Mac. It’s somehow soothing, a calm against the cacophony. Almost everywhere I go, they play Fleetwood Mac, because there is something universal about it all. I listen. I listen then to Stevie Nicks as she sings Dreams,

 

Oh, thunder only happens when it’s raining

Players only love you when they’re playing

Say, women, they will come and they will go

When the rain washes you clean, you’ll know

Now here I go again, I see the crystal vision,

I keep my visions to myself

 

The wind picks up. A storm is beginning but they don’t close the area. The man with the lauded hair excuses himself and goes inside. I am back with the bird-dress lady, who is kind and articulate, animated and eccentric and quite beautiful, statuesque. She speaks of many things seemingly at once. America. The Black experience. Diasporas. Education. Employment. Travel. Relationships. Even diet and nutrition. And hens, ‘Hens,’ which I sought clarification on, and was her designation for women that, as she put it,… talk gossip, talk cheap talk, talk nothing but shit and lies about others, people that spread darkness and not light, not realizing that their darkness is going to come back and visit them double-fold in time…

 

It begins raining hard.

 

That warm tropical rain.

 

The wind pushes it into the deck area.

 

We stand up together. She is tall by any metric. But I am taller.  She asks me if she can hold my arm to go inside, and it is windy, for the breath of nature has become something much more pronounced.

 

I guide her inside at her request.

 

Where is the woman’s washroom, she asks.

 

I don’t know. I know the men’s is here. But I have never gone to the woman’s washroom. She walks with me to the stairs and I ask her if she will be okay to find one.

 

Yes.

 

I ascend the steps and she disappears down a hallway. I would normally offer to help her a bit more, to get there, but I have then begun worrying about many things, half formed fears, mistaken identities and the faulty perception of people, even of good people. I was thinking of storms, of politics and division, of life and no life, of health problems and health care, of alcohol, tobacco, and vessels that travel in the night through tropical storms strong.

 

At the top of the steps I was not out of breath, yet I paused and took a deep breath anyhow.

 

Then I began to make my way to my room, walking alone under one green electrical sign after another that illumined the way. I could feel the ship rocking back and forth more than usual, a ship perhaps five or seven stories high and housing more than three thousand people.

 

The night storm had gathered so much strength by then that I could hear the winds whistling even from the inner corridors of the boat.

 

They sounded like spirits calling out diatribes, rhetoric, pleas, strange joys plus metaphysical pains and warnings, all songs and long wild unabridged strange poems in the middle of a living dream. It all mixed together in my brain and spirit, and I thought of the sea and its vast expanse, of the Atlantic, the Caribbean, of how it rains, the sometimes pregnant sky birthing endlessly through time and cycle its own waters, and how the wind often takes these and places them everywhere, blows them with a breath, and they land sometimes in drips and drops like tears across and down windows, mostly never seen or noted, but having existed nevertheless.

 

There are spirits simply everywhere, and I think to myself then that many of the dead so-called are more alive than the living.

 

 

 

  Brian J. Buchanan
We’ll Spend Some Time Fishing

 

I’m happy now, pretty happy, though I wouldn’t have been if I’d gotten away with what I tried to do. At least I don’t think so.

Anyway. It started from nothing. I was just standing outside my parole office, a modern building defeated by northern Michigan weather, and she pulled alongside me at the curb and stopped. She was driving an old yellow pickup full of junk.

Get in.

How she knew I needed a ride, I didn’t know. I got in. Immediately she pulled a U-turn.

I was going the way you were going when you pulled over.

I just have to pick up some stuff. You’ll help.

I looked back into the truck bed, full of chicken wire, a dozen old shovels, stacks of brand-new blue buckets with thin metal handles, several boxes of paint cans.

You work construction?

She looked at me quickly and smiled. She was fairly young, whereas I’ve been around; pretty, pale with little dark freckles, a strange gaze that involved frowning dark eyebrows and an amused mouth. Her whole face was a pretty contradiction. Rough brown hair, swept back roughly. Her eyes seemed uneven somehow, which I reckoned also accounted for the gaze. Later I would see that one was dark brown, the other dull gray.

Maud, she said.

I didn’t give my name at first. Maud? I said. Isn’t that kind of old-fashioned?

Old family name. Ooh, she said, pulling over behind a food truck. She handed me a twenty and said, Polish sausage, easy on the mustard, RC and napkins. I gotta make a call. Get yourself something.

RC?

‘You’re not from around here, are you, son,’ she quoted at me from something, putting on a husky drawl. Royal Crown Cola. It’s big up here. Where you from, and do you have a name?

Points south, where RC isn’t big.

Get the food.

Somehow I liked that she was putting me to work, though I figured there’d be questions. I didn’t really want anything from the food truck, and didn’t want to spend her trusting money on me, but just to get something I bought a bag of Wise potato chips.

Her call finished, we munched in the cab. She wore a faded blue down vest. It’s Marty, I said.

Hi, Marty. What were you in for?

Who says I was in?

Parole office. I live here, unlike you.

Grand theft auto.

You stole a video game?

An actual auto, I said. 2002 Cadillac Deville. Got good money for it, then got caught and had to give back what was left. Did three years, time off for good behavior.

Maud ate quietly, napkins at the ready.

I was very well-behaved.

She smiled, wiping away mustard. They always put too much on, no matter what you tell them.

I forgot to tell them.

It was all so matter of fact. We dropped off some of the stuff, got paid, went someplace else and picked up other stuff. I did a lot of lifting, none of it too heavy. It made me chuckle, the contents of the yellow pickup changing throughout the day like that.

What, she said. What’s funny.

What kind of racket is this, anyway? This stuff stolen?

As if that would worry you.

It would worry me.

It’s not stolen. I run a junk business, that’s all, buying up excess stuff people don’t want, selling it to people who do. Simple. Legit, she emphasized, looking at me with pretend seriousness, and I felt comfortable enough to give her the finger.

As if as a matter of course we zoomed up at nightfall in front of a one-story, weather-beaten house armored with multicolored asphalt siding and went in. She turned off a crockpot and ladled out chicken stew for us, sliced a loaf of bread, placed a dish of butter on the table. The kitchen was colored like a kindergarten, cabinets painted in chipped pale green, drawers black, counter red tile, floor brown linoleum.

You could set the table, Maud said. It’s all in that drawer.

The silverware was mismatched but clean. The stew was pretty good.

Well, thanks much, I said. I guess I should be going now.

You’re staying here, dummy. Don’t you want to?

I guess, I said uncertainly.

In the living room we sat on a short, stained orange couch and watched some old movie from the ‘40s for a while. The room was furnished higgledy-piggledy. Before the movie ended she said it was time to turn in. I looked into some of the other rooms but saw no bed but hers.

Uh … I said.

She put on a long pajama top open one too many buttons, I undressed, and we were in bed, just like that. I guess you could say my head was spinning. She swung on top of me as if we’d done it five hundred times.

Why me, I said afterward.

You’re approximately good-looking. I like your company. You have good table manners.

A little old for you?

Nah, not really. You can lift things.

I gave up my apartment, no loss there, quit my low-pay job as the building super, best I could do with no vehicle, and we moved my few belongings in the yellow pickup, all of it jammed in next to boxes of cookware. We went along like this for some months, I didn’t count them. It was all right. Then winter came in, and all the snow made me a little nervous, on edge, as it tends to do with me, I don’t know why. Snow was also a problem with junk pickup and transport, though most of it was short distances. Sometimes she got impatient as if I should have known something I couldn’t possibly have. I’d bark straight back and she’d smile that frowning smile.

As I say, we just fell into it. Or I fell into what she wanted from the get-go. Briefest glimpse of me loitering outside the parole office, indifferent as to my next move, so she pulls over? I can’t grasp that impulse. To be attracted and ask a girl out, yeah, sure, but to incorporate her immediately into my life like that, no woman would stand for it. Why did I stand for it? Love? Not then — interest, sure, Maud was pretty, intriguing. Mainly there was just so much action — constant picking up and hauling, all over the place, where we going now, what’s this about, now what, and lots of action in bed, and then some talking here and there as I watched for clues. Clues to her and to why I stayed with her.

Maud didn’t give a lot of clues. As to what her deal was with me or anything else. She had shelves full of beat-up paperbacks, some looking like college texts. She read them in bed at night before and after lovemaking, different ones all the time. Restless — that I understood. She seemed simple yet intelligent. I couldn’t quite get the contrast. I reckoned I’d stick around long enough to figure her out, then head out for parts unknown and missions unknown, because I’d be restless as always.

It didn’t quite work out that way. She had a baked-on surface I couldn’t get beneath, or not far, only so far down. She was cheery about my questions, just grinned, mischievous, like, keeping herself just out of reach, like tag-you’re-it, only I could never tag her. She enjoyed my not knowing. That seemed to magnetize her for me, as if she’d taken control of my mind.

You look thoughtful tonight, Maud said. Don’t go all philosophical on me. I took a philosophy course once. Gave me headaches.

I said, I don’t think I’d know how to be philosophical. But I am curious about you.

Nothing to be curious about. What you see is all there is.

You said you’re from here, but I see no evidence of family or friends.

I didn’t say I was from here. I said I lived here.

I took the risk — You’re running from something, I said.

Aren’t you? Isn’t everyone? So what.

So why me?

I’m trying to run a goddam business, and I like having you be part of it. It doesn’t have to be more complicated than that.

I shrugged, and on we went like that, more or less. Now and then in good weather she’d shove me awake at 5 a.m.

Come on.

What.

Sunrise over the lake.

We’d drive to a park on Lake Huron, about a five-minute drive, and watch it come up.

Always a grand drama, she said at one of those sunrises. A grand, massive, magnificent, overwhelming fucking drama. Life itself. It keeps me going.

None taken, I said.

Maud’s hair rushed straight back in the wind, her skin pale with dawn, freckles darker. Sound of wave wash, as she called it, spectacle of pink and yellow above us, like it was coming for us. I kissed her that time. Her two-color eyes stayed on the sunrise, and she frowned and smiled.

I’m going to need ice cream, Maud said one night. I will need a lot of ice cream.

The months passed quickly. At the hospital a nurse stood in front of me with a gown, holding it so I’d put it on. I said I didn’t know about this but went into the delivery room. Maud had been quiet but suddenly started yelling.

Out! Get out of here! Get him out! Go! Goddam it!

Timothy, we named him. Still all very matter of fact when we brought him home. The tight truck cab was a bit of a problem with a car seat in the middle, but we managed. Baby clothes and toys became a bigger part of the junk business. Soon the house, never all that organized to begin with, was overrun with baby stuff. Cradle, changing station, bassinet, two cribs because Maud couldn’t decide which one was better. One day when she was out working and I was home with Timothy I made some headway setting things to rights, not that I’m all that neat myself. I did the dishes and put all sorts of things in some kind of order. When Maud came home she looked around and nodded and kept nodding.

I think we should talk before you do things like this.

What, the dishes?

All this rearranging.

I didn’t really rearrange anything, I just put stuff away so we can move around.

I could move around just fine.

Well, I’m sorry. Should I scatter it all back on the floor and the furniture?

Don’t get churlish.

I had to look that one up in her dog-eared dictionary next to the baby monitor with its constant low hum. We got over that scrap fine. Suddenly Timothy was three years old, however that happens. I loved him. He had this expression when he looked at me that seemed like a mix of wonder and suspicion, as if he knew what I might do. He had Maud’s features, but she never looked at me that way. Always matter of fact with her.

I’d been taking courses at the local community college in boat maintenance and repair, including engines, figuring it could prove useful up here, Lake Huron with all these boats, boats everywhere. Money kept getting tight, more than a couple of times. I resisted reentering the world of freelance crime. Once I saw a 2015 Lexus RX 350 that I could have boosted in a snap, but the aftermath. I’d had enough aftermath, especially at points south, including a one-month marriage I’d skipped out on. What was keeping me in Michigan was Maud and Timothy, especially trying to get inside Maud’s head. The only thing she admitted was that she’d been heavily into drugs at one time but had stopped, stopped cold. She wouldn’t say why, just said, It was getting bad. I knew she had possibilities in her, but I’ll be damned if I knew what. She continued to resist close questioning, though somehow I’d found myself telling her all about me. None of it fazed her, apparently. Maud the riddle. When I said I’d abandoned a wife, she nodded and resumed her detective novel, didn’t even ask why. The baby monitor erupted into a squawk, which became a high laugh, and we laughed too.

Finally one day I just couldn’t get past the snow nerves. Drinking has never helped me much with that, and with Timothy’s adventurous doings we didn’t drink much anyway. Maud and Timothy were out somewhere. The snow lay in piles up past the windows. I’d cleaned up the kitchen, done a lot of shoveling. Snowflakes rocked past the window like cradles. I was shivering and jittery. I surprised myself by suddenly starting to write out a note.

This just won’t work. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m sorry. I’ll send money as soon as I can. —Marty

I packed a few things and ended up walking down to the docks because I didn’t want to spend money on a taxi. I had about $190. I talked to a guy with a clipboard standing next to a tanker fixing to sail east to someplace in Canada. He happened to be a ship’s officer of some sort and agreed to take me aboard, even offered a cabin for a small fee. I took a look at it and it was fine. I had about an hour and a half, so I hustled around the shops for more provisions, then walked regretfully up the gangplank, picturing Maud reading my note and maybe even, I don’t know, crying a little, though it was harder to picture that, and when I opened the door to the cabin, she was lying on the bunk reading a Western novel and Timothy was having a high time with a box of red-and-white fishing bobs from somewhere. About a dozen fishing rods stood in the corner.

What’s this? I hollered, trying to fight down my feelings of relief, I might even say joy. I felt found out, known, and at the same time I felt I knew her. In that weird instant maybe I even felt loved. Maybe I could get to that too.

We’re on a voyage, Maud said. To Owen Sound, Ontario. The captain was very informative.

Oh, really.

Timothy, pick up some of those bobs, they’re all over the floor. We’ll step on them.

And just what are we going to do there?

Fishing, Maud said. We’ll spend some time fishing.

 

 

 

Conor Hogan
La mort de l'auteur 

July 12th, 2025

 

Well. Our first entry in nearly three years. To be honest, we thought our journaling days were behind us. But an event has occurred that, although we would never say this out loud, might surpass Clarissa’s birth in terms of importance. If we’re looking at things objectively. And, between you and me, perhaps subjectively, as well.

GlobalSYNTX has won the Cascadia Short Story Prize. Something like this felt inevitable, but still, even we were surprised at how fast it all happened. We were out in the garden, trying to coax the sugar peppers back to life and avoiding the Part III rewrites Brody suggested (this last block has been one of the one worst yet. I don’t know how many times we have to pledge to stop reading the Gravity Wave forums…although that might be a moot point now) when our phone started to explode with group messages from the Delicates. Unbelievable and so…where are the 4 horsemen? and anybody else thinking about plathing themselves?

What’s particularly ass-chapping, of course, is that we’d considered something like this. Since the CSSP was announced, we’ve been reading through the old journals, and yes, past-Mallory really did possess an admirable farsightedness, if we do say so ourself. For example, in a journal from 2008, amidst the clunky pieces of Le Guin fan fiction and vivid odes to Anik the Lifeguard’s chest, are long, thoughtful considerations about where to attend college. These entries include a rank-ordered list of all 50 states by severity of projected climate disasters, the resilience of their respective tax bases, and the combined volume of their aquifers. Once we settled on Washington, the research suggesting the small but statistically significant chance of a tidal wave obliterating the west coast nudged us towards SWU, instead of Seattle University or Western. It was oddly flattering, reading about the lengths past-Mallory went to, trying to imagine how her decisions might affect future-Mallory.

These considerations continue throughout college. Among the vignettes that eventually formed the inspiration for Gravity Wave (including an interpistle we’d forgotten, from the High Priestess of Arudo to Wendell Garcia, that, although rough, suggests a solution to the quantum-branching paradox we’ve been banging our head about. Which is another moot point, I suppose) and entries about youthful landmarks (taking mushrooms with Carly or the first time Kent gave us head, for example) are pro-and-con lists about potential areas of study.

The possibility of technological displacement factors heavily into these entries. We theorize about an encyclopedic index of case law, outfitted with a self-guided search engine, into which two parties could enter all relevant facts and figures, highlight their dispute, and receive the appropriate verdict, thus eliminating any need for civil litigation lawyers. Or a deep-structure microscopy imager that could scan human bodies, cross-reference the results with a global database, and deliver diagnoses, sending many physicians the way of the dodo. It was easy to imagine algorithms becoming better than humans at managing hedge funds, organizing shipping routes, and piloting planes. Even as we were unsure of which major to choose, we pitied our peers, blindly pursuing hyper-specialization in fields that would almost certainly become colonized by computers in our lifetime.

Then, after the Kent Incident, the author idea starts to blossom. It’s all there, in a lavender journal marked Winter, 2011: the initial freewrite, where we wrestle with our anger and confusion, and ponder any role we might have played in encouraging him. There’s disgust at our own naïveté and the heartbreak of young eyes shedding scales. Rereading it, after everything that’s happened since, I must say, it’s rather prescient. We ponder some grand unsilencing, and the political toxification that would inevitably result. A few days later, there’s an entry about our conversation with Carly, and how much trouble we had trying to explain this density of feeling. How we eventually just let her read what we’d written.

We struggle to explain the sensation, of having our words read and so thoroughly praised. Occasionally, we’ve wondered if we were being pollyannaish, recalling our motivations before that day. However, nowhere in the journals is there any consideration of showing someone else our writing; all the stories really were just a young, somewhat lonely girl playing make-believe with herself.

But yes. We felt pride, buoyant and addictive, after Carly’s effusive compliments. We follow her suggestion to polish the entry and submit it somewhere, convinced (partly) by her that it’s a selfless act. That other women “need to read it.” And…well. You know. After the prize money, after all the texts and emails and Facebook likes, we begin to consider writing as a potential source of income. We submit Evermorning and win more money. And it’s off to the races.

But throughout the rest of the journals, there’s a strain of self-regard for our…what? Sobriety? Practicality? The entries dry up for the most part in 2017, after an elated scribble about Gravity Wave: Dioid getting long-listed for the Hugo, but there are freewrites here and there about encounters with the Delicates: at the Hawthorne Group’s anniversary party, at the Women in SciFi conference, at that ridiculous 30 Under 30 symposium. There’s the time Martha Feinstein and Julie Shào nearly came to blows over an argument about Honoré de Balzac. Or when cristina jax got so choked up discussing the trauma of workshops that she couldn’t finish her speech at Aspen. We go back and forth about the superiority we feel toward other writers, with their penchant for abstraction that dissolved into nothing.

Our authorial self-perception concretized in opposition to these weepy, mercurial people, who wrote so beautifully and yet were incapable of navigating the mildest affront. Who had no business acumen. Who outsourced everything besides the actual act of typing to agents and managers. They were the ones who militantly ignored their children for the first five hours every day, because contact with the outside world might break the “spell.” They were the ones who discussed, with no embarrassment, the methods by which they invoked their various muses.

We, on the other hand, grew up in Grangeville, and were raised with blue-collar good sense. We negotiated the Gravity Wave merchandising deals ourself. We got our 2,000 words in during lulls at the shop, in any spare hour we could find. We killed our darlings mercilessly, and wrote, not to “transcend our mortal limitations,” but to put food on our family’s table.

However, it turns out we were just as precious. When trying to predict the future, we assumed art would be the last realm to fall before technology’s predacious advance. We pitied the actuaries and security analysts, certain they would be unemployed by 2030. Art, it seemed to us, would be the only bull market left, once computers had their way.

But GlobalSYNTX has won a major, blind-judged literary prize, in the same year TrazomProductions was Grammy-nominated for that bizarre song Darren keeps telling us is “the future of house,” and to which Clarissa flops around with spastic arm flails that delight our dear doofus of a husband. To us, Composition No. 1131 sounds like a laser beam having a seizure, but it sparked quite the uproar back in February, breaking streaming records and causing half the nominated artists to #BoycottTheGrammys in protest. And that’s not all: last month, a painting, which turned out to be the work of an AI and a new type of spray-gun, was auctioned for over eight million dollars.

Since the winner of the Cascadia Prize was announced (judged by none other than Albert Ziang, who, despite his inability to carry a conversation, is perhaps the most discerning literary mind we know), three separate versions of Gravity Wave: Tetroid have appeared online. We read one of them, and…well. It is excellent. Yes. We will say it. It is better, far better, than our current draft. It ties together the neutrino arc in both shocking and sublime fashion, and solves the intertemporal tunnel problem in a way that still has us reeling.

And we are not the only one. Programmers have trained bots on Mariel Magalhães novels, Farad Abedi poems, and Jeannette Heller plays. On countless forms and tropes. The work populating online, faster than seems possible, is indistinguishable, or, increasingly, superior, to the human creations. Our timelines are full of tearful videos from Booker and Costa winners, begging their readers to avoid these artificial, soulless artifacts, and screeds from various intellectuals pronouncing large language models the harbingers of death for human creativity. Trolls have directed bots to write even more passionate and eloquent and insightful dissertations, dissecting the ways that their own software signifies imagination’s downfall.

But we are not so sure. All the doomsayers are focused entirely on the working creatives’ plight. No one seems excited for the consumer. However, we cannot wait to read the books artificially produced in the upcoming years. Especially given how hostile the world has become to the prolonged attention required to create fiction. Honestly, we’ve long feared that nothing worth reading would be produced by anyone born after 2002, anyways.

Plus, this whole eruption has given us occasion to revisit our journals, and remember that we once wrote without the consideration of a potential audience freighting every word. To recall what writing for writing’s sake felt like. Since Subalpine first published "An Encounter After Dark," and much more so after Evermorning received all that attention, our writing descended into the world. It grew reasons. It became work.

But now, if things continue along the direction they appear headed, a radical purification seems possible. Because the bots will remain derivative for only so long. Soon, they will propagate genres and styles all their own, at hyper-speed, and, through sheer volume, blot out the market for organic creation. For every work of human-art, there will be a thousand million pumped out by computers. And so, if a boy plucks at a guitar, or a girl sketches a whale, they will be doing so without any hope for fame or fortune. They will be doing so for the sheer joy it brings them. If it brings them no joy, they will not expend the energy. The impulse, to try and pimp out any artistic talent one might possess, will vanish, and perhaps, after its death, something new will be born.

Because even in the entry preceding this one, about the triumph and terror of having given birth, about the sci-fi insanity of it all, there are notes on how to transform the entry into an essay for The Southern Review or Guernica under the title "Motherhood, Reimagined," or something equally dumb. I remember thinking it would be a lost opportunity, if we didn’t manage to convey the sensation of holding our daughter for the first time to some faceless reader. This, however, is the first thing we have written in a long, long time that we know no one else will ever see.

And, I must tell you, it feels liberating.

Pointless? 

Lonely

 

 

 

Eleanor Lerman
Normal People

Lissa is on the train, riding New Jersey Transit to the station near her ex-mother-in-law’s house on Concannon Drive in Fords, NJ. She hasn’t made this trip in many years but she’s on her way this morning because this is the one day that the realtor who is selling Katherine McInerney’s house has set aside for designated friends and relatives to claim any keepsakes they may want. Katherine died a few weeks ago, and this is what she specified in her will. After the house is sold, the proceeds will be split among her children, who used to number eight: five boys, three girls. Only five are still alive: two of the girls—grown women now, of course—and three of the boys, the younger ones, all men in their forties.

Lissa was surprised when she had received the letter from a law firm telling her that she was on the “designated relatives” list. Her ex-husband, Chris, the second oldest of the eight siblings, had died several years ago, but they had been divorced for over a decade before that, so she would not have expected Katherine to include her among the relatives. Still, she had been fond of her mother-in-law and felt genuinely saddened when she heard about her death.

In truth, Lissa hadn’t really planned on making this trip because she couldn’t imagine that there would be anything she’d actually want to take from the house, though she changed her mind when she woke up this morning and realized how beautiful a day it was going to be: warm and sunny, with the fragrance of June scenting the air. Something about all that brought back a random memory of the day that Frank McInerny, Lissa’s father-in-law at the time, had installed an awning above the back porch of the house. Frank, who passed away a few years before Katherine, had been a dockworker, Katherine a housewife, and money was always tight, so for them to have spent several hundred dollars on an awning to keep the porch cool on summer days when their adult children with families of their own came to visit was a major investment, one they were both very proud of. So: summer days, a striped green and white awning over the back porch, pitchers of iced tea, hot dogs and French fries. Those were nice memories, and though God knows, there were many more of a very different nature associated with that time in Lissa’s life, they had spurred her to think, Oh, why not go? Maybe she’d find some small memento that she’d like to have around to remind her that sometimes, there were happy days that she could remember spending in the house on Concannon drive.

Lissa arrives at the station just before noon. As she waits for the train door to open, she sees her reflection and can’t help comparing it to the young woman who used to stand here, with her handsome, dissolute husband, who was—as she well knew—already plotting how to get through lunch with his parents so he could hurry back to the city to start drinking and then score enough dope to keep him entertained for another lost night. What Lissa remembers of herself is that she was pretty—maybe not head-turningly so, but pretty enough. Now, what she sees is a much older version of that woman, with shorter, shoulder-length hair—still dark, thanks to regular coloring—and features sharpened by time and events that have also chipped away at her talent for convincing herself that things happening right in front of her are not as bad as they seem. These days, she is a better judge of situations like that, though it is, as she readily admits to herself, a little late in the game to have come to that realization.

She also sees one of those women who carry a little dog around like an accessory tucked into a purse. Her little dog, Bodhi, is some kind of mixed-breed terrier that she saw in the window of a strip mall pet store a few years ago. He was sitting alone in the back of the window display, surrounded by puppies playfully bouncing around in a pile of shredded newspaper. His head was down, staring at his feet, and he looked malnourished, so something struck her heart; something made her feel that she couldn’t simply walk away. When she went into the store to ask about the dog, the owner insisted that the he was four months old but Lissa guessed that wasn’t true. A few days later, the vet she took him to—after paying ninety-five dollars for the dog, an amount that tested her carefully managed retiree’s budget for the month—told her that the little brown terrier was at least two years old. Who knew where he had come from or what his life had been before, but whatever had happened to him had left him with a bad case of anxiety. Her neighbor—who said he did not mean to sound like he was complaining because he was a dog owner himself—told her that the dog cried all the time when she left the house, so she started taking him with her whenever she could. She bought a shoulder bag that had a front compartment designed to hold the dog snugly while letting his head stick out from under her arm, which was not quite as embarrassing as an actual purse, or having him wear a rhinestone collar and a fake Burberry jacket, which is the kind of thing she saw on other little dogs that women carried with them on the subway or in the supermarket. Lissa would never have expected to be this kind of woman, but a lot of things have happened to her that she never expected, so there you go.

Now, she takes a cab from the station to Concannon Drive and when it lets her out, she stands at the edge of the front lawn, looking up at the house that she used to visit every other Sunday or so during the twelve years that her marriage had lasted. This is a quiet, middle-class neighborhood of two-story homes with bay windows and vinyl siding in shades of white and gray, sitting on quarter-acre plots where families raise children who play in the back yard and housewives plant flowers along the side of the driveway. Some of the houses are shaded by maple trees, some have birdbaths surrounded by a row of shrubs in full leaf. The house that Lissa will be entering any minute has a statue of the Virgin Mary near the front door.

First, she has to take a deep breath as she is momentarily overwhelmed by the feeling that she is looking at a double landscape, meaning that while she has a whole collection of memories about this place spinning around in her mind, she is also experiencing a peculiar sense of never having been here before. It’s as if the memories are from another life—maybe somebody else’s, somebody different who was playacting the part of dutiful daughter-in-law, contented wife. What she thinks now is that she must have been very good at it because for a long time she fooled everyone, including herself.

Still, she can’t just stand out front all day, so she goes up the walk and rings the bell. The door is opened by a young woman in professional young woman’s business attire who introduces herself as a representative of the real estate company handling the sale of the house. The young woman finds Lissa’s name on the list of people welcome to go through Katherine’s belonging and she is invited in.

The house looks the same as when Lissa was last here. The same patterned sofa and matching easy chair, the same well-used dining room table with decorative plates arranged on a wooden rail above the door leading to the kitchen, the same framed picture of Jesus with eyes that follow you around the room.

“When we had dinner at here, I always made sure I saw with my back to that picture. It still gives me the creeps.”

Lissa, who has been staring at the picture, turns around and sees her former sister-in-law, Elaine Matsumoto, standing in the living room. Lissa walks over to her and gives her a hug. “It’s so nice to see you,” Lissa says, and means it. She hasn’t seen Elaine for many years, but out of all her former sisters- and brothers-in-law, Elaine was the one she felt a real kinship with. They were both about the same age, both had been raised in New York, not New Jersey, and both—for many reasons—did not easily blend in with a family of Irish-Italian Catholics. “Is there anyone else here?” Lissa asks.

“Not right now, thank God,” Elaine says. Then, noticing the little dog, she laughs. “And who have we here?” she asks.

“This is Bodhi,” Lissa replies. “Actually, it’s Bodhisattva. It means ‘Someone who is able to reach nirvana but delays doing so out of compassion in order to save suffering beings’.”

“Well holy shit,” Elaine says. “That’s a lot for that little piece of fluff to carry around, don’t you think?”

Now it’s Lissa’s turn to laugh. “It was just the first thing that popped up in my mind when I was trying to think of what to name him.”

“Your hippie past come back to haunt you?”

“Maybe something like that,” Lissa says, laughing again.

Elaine knows a lot about Lissa’ past because they talked about it; Lissa knows about Elaine’s, too. And each also knows a great deal about the other’s ex-husband, because both men were the subject of many conversations Lissa and Elaine had, sitting on the steps of the back porch, furtively smoking cigarettes that their mother-in-law disapproved of. What Lissa told Elaine was that Chris was the best-looking guy she had ever met, that she knew he drank a lot and seemed to have no real direction in life, but she was kind of a wanderer, too. She didn’t drink but she did like weed, and after she left home at eighteen, had lived the life of a go-along-to-get-along hippie, renting a tiny place in an East Village tenement building so old that it still had a tub in the kitchen and scratching out a living by waitressing in a succession of downtown coffee shops and restaurants. But living hand-to-mouth didn’t matter because everyone she knew lived that way: it was the era of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll, of be-ins and protest marches and maharishis. Chris had been mostly working part-time in music studios where bands rented rooms to rehearse. He was the handyman who fixed broken pipes and blown fuses but could also fill in on guitar or drums when someone didn’t show up for rehearsal. By the time Lissa and Chris met and got married, they were both thirty-six years old and they made a pact to try to become what they both thought of as normal people because they knew that the time of happy hippies had passed and so had the years of lazy jobs that you only showed up to when you were in the mood. They thought that what they needed to do was stand up and fly right, which required transforming themselves into people with regular nine-to-five employment, who didn’t blow all their money on just hanging out and getting high, who bought real furniture in a store instead of finding stuff on the streets. People who had savings accounts and health insurance and plans for the future. Lissa kept her side of the bargain—she took a computer course, learned Word and Excel, and got a job with a social services agency where she actually felt like she was doing something useful. Chris, on the other hand, not only kept his love affair with Jack Daniels tuned up, but added first heroin and then crack into the mix. He had signed on with the maintenance crew of the city’s housing authority but that didn’t last long. He went through all the money he earned each week, then everything Lissa made, and screamed at her when she tried to withhold at least enough to pay the rent on the apartment they had moved to in Queens. That way of life dragged on and on until Lissa finally left. When she did, she had the impression that Chris really didn’t care.

Elaine had quite a different experience. She had moved to New Jersey when she was in her early twenties and joined the state police, where she met and married a fellow officer, Dennis McInerny, the oldest brother in the family. Elaine turned out to be a first-class sharpshooter who won marksmanship honors in national police competitions. She was not only the first and only woman in the nation to achieve that kind of success, she was also the first Asian American. It wasn’t any kind of professional jealousy or the idea (offered around by his cop buddies at their post in Trenton) that tough-guy Dennis felt emasculated by his tiny, barely-made-the-height-requirements-of-the-state-police wife that broke up the Elaine-Dennis marriage, it was his chronic infidelity. They had two children, and for the kids’ sake, managed to remain on good terms even past the time that they both retired. Dennis died soon after. Along with Mary, the middle sister in the McInerny family, those are the dead: Chris, Dennis and Mary

Now though, that’s all behind the two women who have met, by happy happenstance, in their former mother-in-law’s house. Lissa lets the dog out of the carry bag and he runs around, sniffing all the new corners he can find. Together, she and Elaine wander through the house, looking through the bedrooms, the den, the sewing room, the kitchen. Mostly, this makes both women feel melancholy. The relentless passage of time has left its cold and loveless mark in the stillness of the air, on the cloudy mirrors, the shadows on the walls. Reluctant to even touch anything but feeling the obligation to choose at least one item to carry home as a keepsake, Elaine takes a piece of costume jewelry—a gold pin in the shape of a peacock with outstretched feathers—and Lissa choses a little Capodimonte basket with pink flowers around the rim, which she decides she can use in her kitchen to hold the packets of artificial sweetener that she uses. She remembers seeing the porcelain basket every time she came here with Chris and always thought it was ugly but now…well, it just seems like something that deserves to be saved from the junkpile.

“Okay,” Elaine says to Lissa. “I think we’ve done our duty, so I’m going to head home.” But then, looking toward the door in the kitchen that leads out to the back porch, she pulls a pack of cigarettes from her purse and says, “How about one for the road?”

“Sure,” Lissa agrees. She calls to Bodhi and the two women head outside, followed by the dog. There’s still a table and chairs along with a barbeque grill set up on the porch. “Oh boy,” Lissa says as she settles into one of the chairs. “This brings back memories.”

Elaine nods. “It does. We did have some nice days here.” 

They sit on the porch, smoking Marlboro Lights and watching Bodhi happily run around in the grass, which is dotted with bright yellow dandelions. An early summer breeze rustles through the trees; sparrows alight on the wooden fence that separates this house from its neighbors.

“Why was she always so nice to us?” Lissa says. It’s a thought, a question, that came to her as she walked through the dead quiet rooms of the house. “I mean, you and me. She was always so kind to both of us, but I’m sure you heard the stories, too—about how horrible she and Frank were to their kids. The constant beatings—even the girls got smacked around and beaten with a belt.”

“Dennis said his mother used a wooden spoon like a weapon. And even when they were adults,” Elaine says, “she took every opportunity she could to belittle her children, Nothing they accomplished was ever good enough. Maureen is a pediatrician, for God’s sake and she told me that Katherine still managed to make her feel like she was stupid. That’s why she moved to California, so she had an excuse to never come home and visit her parents. And when Frank was alive, when he got mad at his sons for something, he got that look in his eye….”

“Oh yes, I remember,” Lissa says. “‘Push me one more inch and you’ll see that I can still break your arm if I feel like it.’”

“And he did, too. Remember when Michael was a teenager—I think you and Chris had just gotten married, right? I don’t recall what Michael had done but Frank’s way of punishing him was to break his arm in two places and Katherine had to lie about what happened when she took him to the hospital. Frank didn’t even go.”

“So why was she so sweet to us? She treated us better than her own daughters. I remember the first Christmas that we were married, Katherine actually hung a Star of David on the Christmas tree. It was a little weird, but I knew that she wanted me to feel included. Like I was part of the family.”

“I know. When Dennis first brought me here to meet her, I was sure she was going to faint but nope, she was nothing but lovely to me. And when we were getting divorced, she told me that Dennis was never going to find anyone that was in the same class as me. Can you imagine?”

“Maybe it’s because she wasn’t responsible for us.” Lissa says. “I mean, when we met her, we were already adults. We were who we were. She had nothing to do with our values, our behavior, or anything else so she could, like, relax. No one could ever hold her accountable for how we turned out. Besides, think about how she was raised—it was a different world, everything was different. When she grew up on the lower east side of Manhattan, it was barely the turn of the twentieth century. There were still stockyards where the UN is now. Everyone was an immigrant, all the adults barely spoke English. Where they had come from—Ireland, Italy, Eastern Europe—children worked in the fields or in factories and if they didn’t do what their parents wanted, they got beaten within an inch of their lives. She probably thought that since our parents—yours and mine—were born in the U.S., they had raised softies, so it wasn’t our fault if we came across as smart alecks with crazy opinions about things.”

You “know what?” Elaine says. “You’re one smart chick.”

Lissa sighs. “I think I stopped being any kind of chick a long time ago.”

A few moments later, the young woman from the real estate agency steps out on the porch and says she’s going to go out and grab something for lunch. Lissa and Elaine stay where they are, sitting on the back porch, enjoying the pleasant weather, chatting and smoking Elaine’s cigarettes. When they hear the front door slam open, they’re surprised by the loud sound but assume that the young woman has returned.

“We’re still back here, on the porch,” Elaine calls out.

They hear heavy footsteps pounding through the living room and the kitchen. Then the door to the porch flies open.

“Wow. Look who it is. The Jap and the Jew.”

Lissa and Elaine narrow their eyes, exchange a quick look. “Well, hello to you, too, Kevin,” Elaine says to her ex-brother-in-law. Like Elaine and her ex-husband, Kevin is also a cop, but city, not state. He spent four years in the Navy and now he’s on the job in Newark.“Yeah, hi, Kevin,” Lissa says. Kevin is her ex-brother-in-law too, the second youngest in the family. He’s thin, with pale blue eyes and light brown hair, like all the brothers, like their father. The sisters look pretty much the same except, by the vagaries of fate or just scrambled DNA, they were all born with chestnut-brown hair, like their mother.“What are you two doing here?” Kevin says. “Slumming in the boonies?”

“We were invited,” Elaine says, blowing out thin tendrils of cigarette smoke. “I came out of respect for your mother. So did Lissa, I’m sure. She obviously wanted us to have some remembrance of her.”“Right. Like you actually care. Like you gave a shit about her when she was alive but it’s fine and dandy to come her now and pick through her bones.”

“Okay,” Elaine says, stubbing out her cigarette in a seashell sitting on the table. Getting to her feet, she says, “If it’s going to be like that, I think I’ll just get going, Kev. So, sorry about your mother and I wish you the best, etcetera, etcetera. Lissa, want to walk me out?”

“Sure,” Lissa says. She calls to the dog, who runs up on the porch. Instinctively, Lissa lifts him up into her arms.

“What’s the matter?” Kevin says. “We could have a nice little family meeting here, just the three of us. Share some memories, have a few laughs.”

He’s swaying on his feet as he stays positioned in front of the door, seeming to be intentionally blocking it. Elaine stands completely still and Lissa, sensing that she should just follow her sister-in-law’s lead, remains exactly where she is.

“Kevin,” Elaine says, finally, “you’re drunk. I know you are—I can smell it.”

“So what?” he says. “I’m off duty and you’re retired, so you don’t get to say anything to me about what I do. You’re not a big fucking deal anymore, Miss State Trooper. Miss big-shit marksman—or is it markswoman? Fuck me if I’m being politically incorrect.”

The relationship between Kevin and Elaine has always been an uneasy one, partly because there’s always tension between state troopers and city cops, partly because these two people simply never liked each other. Years ago, when one of the other brothers or sisters was around, they would run interference but there’s no one here to do that now. Certainly, Lissa doesn’t feel equipped to calm these waters: Kevin was never particularly fond of her, either.

“Bye, Kev,” Elaine says. With Kevin still blocking the back door, Elaine motions to Lissa, then turns and walks toward the porch stairs, meaning to go around the side of the house and out to the street. “I’m done with this.”

“What’s your problem?” Kevin says, his voice rising. “Too chickenshit to face off with me? Don’t tell me you left that baby Glock at home.”

“I never leave my gun at home,” Lissa says in a quiet voice. Too quiet.

“Then why don’t you pull it out and see if I can’t get it away from you faster than you can yank it out of that stupid ankle holster you’re so famous for? It’s just a pussy ass way of showing off. Everyone knows the draw’s too slow to do any good.”

“You don’t really want to find out if that’s true.” Elaine says.

“Maybe I do,” Kevin tells her. Then, in one swift motion, he moves away from the door, steps towards Lissa, and grabs the dog from her arms. Lissa is too startled to utter even a single word of protest. “Are you going to play hero if I twist the head off this stupid piece of shit?” he spits out at Elaine. Then, turning to Lissa, he says, “I hate little dogs. Another girl thing that just makes the world a lousier place than it already is.”

Lissa is so startled that she’s finding it hard to form coherent thoughts, but there is one that suddenly lights up in her mind like a big neon sign and it’s that Kevin sounds just like Chris when he was at his worst, drunk and stoned and gripped by the same poisonous rage that went so deep, reached so far back into the past that there was no remedy—at least, none that Lissa could ever come up with. Eight siblings: six with perfectly normal, productive lives—more or less—and two, Chris and Kevin, as broken and bleeding as the walking dead. The wounds were invisible at first but boy, as time went on, whatever kept them functioning began to peel away like burnt skin.

“Why are you even carrying this thing around?” Kevin says to Lissa. As Bodhi begins to whimper, Kevin tosses him up in the air and catches him, holding the dog under his front legs so that his back legs are dangling in the air. “I thought you were better than that.”What does that mean? Lissa can’t think of anything to say to Kevin that isn’t likely to make the situation worse, so she decides to simply tell him the truth. She knows what it is, even though when she bought the dog she told herself it was because she was doing a good deed, because she thought it was unlikely that anyone else would want him and then eventually, he’d be put down. “I got him because I’m lonely. I need some living thing to keep me company, I’m getting old and I’m all alone and I don’t know what else to do about any of that. ”

There’s a pause, a brief but undeniable silence that hangs in the air because something’s been said that no one in this family ever says. But then it’s gone “Oh, boo-hoo,” Kevin finally replies, twisting his mouth into an ugly sneer. “Poor fucking you.”

“Listen to me,” Elaine says, drawing Kevin’s attention back to her, “I am going to reach into my back pocket and get my phone. Then I’m going to call your captain. I know him—Jack Beason, right? I am going to call him and tell him that you are threatening me and my sister-in-law and I need a patrol car to respond to this address with all possible urgency. That will be the end of your career and your pension. Do you want that? Because here’s my phone.”

Kevin looks towards Elaine, who now has her cell phone in her hand. In that moment, without even thinking about it, Lissa lunges forward and pulls her dog out of Kevin’s arms. He steps towards her but as she cradles the dog in one arm, she raises the other and lifts up her hand. Her fingers open like a fan. “Don’t come near me,” she says. “Don’t you fucking touch me.”

Kevin hesitates for a moment, but then steps back. “You’re both such crybabies. You can’t even take a joke.” 

“Fuck you, Kevin,” Elaine says, glowering. She pushes past him and Lissa follows, holding tight to her dog. When they’re back outside, Elaine opens the passenger-side door to her car and tells Lissa to get in. “I still hear things,” Elaine says as she slides in behind the wheel and starts the car, “and what I hear is that Kevin has already been suspended twice. They shouldn’t let him back on the streets at all because he’s way out of control.” Once they’ve turned the corner on Concannon Drive and the house is out of sight, Elaine has something else she wants to say to Lissa. “Look, Kevin’s one thing but Chris—well, Chris. I never realized how bad things had gotten with him. I really didn’t. I know that this comes a little late, but I am so sorry about what you must have gone through with him.”

“He was very good at hiding it from everyone,” Lissa replies. “It’s nobody’s fault.”

The dog is still whimpering and looking around as if he’s waiting for someone to strike him. “It’s okay, little boy,” Elaine says, reaching over with one hand to stroke the dog’s ear. “Everybody’s safe now.”

There was something there, something in that small gesture of comfort that it seemed necessary for Lissa to repay. All she had was a confession. “I kept thinking things would get better—that I could make them better, but by the time I admitted to myself that wasn’t possible, I felt stuck. Trapped. I had no friends left and I had to hide money from Chris just so I could pay the rent every month. It took a long time for me to decide that I had to finally take a chance on saving myself. I had health insurance through my job so I talked him into going to rehab and then I moved out of our apartment. When he dropped out of the rehab program, which I guess I knew was going to happen, he wanted to come live with me in my new place but I wouldn’t let him. After that, he used to call me every once in a while. He told me he’d moved back to Jersey, got a job as a custodian in some apartment complex and had stopped getting high, but I knew it wasn’t true—the not getting high part, anyway. It was about a year later that he overdosed. I still miss him, sometimes. There was a time when I really did love him, but by the end, that guy wasn’t there anymore.”

Elaine turns away for a moment as a private look—pain, introspection, something like that—passes across her face. “Yeah, it was sort of the same with me. I mean, about Dennis. No matter how much it hurts inside, it just seems easier to keep going along. The alarm clock rings, you get up for work, you come home exhausted, the days are crazy and full of so much crap that dealing with the other stuff in your life—like your marriage—requires more effort than it seems possible to find anymore. And then—poof!—you just wake up one morning and realize you’re already gone and you’re going to have to start your life all over again.”

That seems all there is to say. They continue on in silence for the rest of the short ride to the station, where they exchange a brief hug and then Elaine drives off into the summer afternoon.

The train back to the city is delayed by debris on the tracks, so it takes much longer than it should have for Elaine to get home. When she finally reaches Penn Station, she has to change for the subway out to Queens, so by the time she reaches her stop she finds herself walking home in the early evening. The sky is lavender; the horizon is darkening, deepening into blue.

Lissa lives in a small studio with a terrace, high up in an apartment tower with a view of the Manhattan skyline. After she left Chris, she was able to save some money, so with her small pension and Social Security, she is now able to pay her rent without worrying about it each month. She thinks about that now, as she opens the door and steps inside—it’s a plus in her life, one less thing to worry about, although the list of troubles that may come always remains on her mind. That do come, no matter what. Still, at least she’s home now, and for the moment, all is well. She puts the dog down on the floor and he runs to his food bowl, waiting for dinner.

“Are you okay now?” she says to him, and imagines that he would say yes. Who knows what he remembers about the things that frighten him, how much he will remember—if anything—about what happened to him today?

After she feeds the dog and eats her own dinner, some left-overs from last night’s take-out (which she does not feel bad about, not one bit: she never liked to cook and is fine with ordering in even though so many of the tv shows she watches portray that as some sort of decline in the quality of life for older women), she goes out to sit on the terrace where she watches the lights coming on in the towers of the city. She takes her knitting with her, as she does most nights when it’s warm enough to sit outside. Lissa’s mother died when she was twelve and her father, who had zero ideas about how to take care of a child by himself, sent her to spend that summer with his sister, Lissa’s aunt, who was also at a loss when it came to knowing how to comfort a grieving child. All she could think of doing was to find a way to occupy Lissa’s time so she taught her to knit, which was the one thing she loved to do, herself. All summer, they sat in rocking chairs on the porch of the aunt’s house in a suburb of New Jersey that seemed to have been designed to inspire nothing but a sense that life was an endless round of meaningless days. Lissa did learn to knit but she hated it and she grew angrier and angrier with each loop she was instructed to wind around her needles. That was the summer she changed, the summer she became another person, uncontrollable and beyond the reach of anyone who tried to make her behave like the nice, well-mannered girl she would have become—maybe—if her mother hadn’t died and her life hadn’t taken an unexpected turn.

After that, when she was sent back home because school was starting, most nights she just walked out of her father’s apartment the Bronx and took the subway down to West Fourth Street in the Village, where she roamed around, got into the hippie scene, listened to music in coffee shops and cafés. She was a lonely, angry teenager, but the music soothed her, the people she met shared their ideas—all new to her—about how life could be. That’s how things went, mostly, until she met Chris, until they made their ridiculous pact to be normal people. The problem with that, of course, as Lissa now knows all too well—is that neither of them were normal to begin with. Whatever that means, it wasn’t them.

But a few years ago, Lissa happened to pass a craft store and saw a skein of glittery black yarn in the window that she thought would make a beautiful sweater. Which I bet I remember how to make, she thought, so she bought the yarn and yes, it all came back to her. There was some trial and error involved and it took a lot of time, but in the end, she was able to knit a long-sleeved sweater with a vee neck that almost looked like the work of someone who had been doing this for a long time. After that, when it became apparent to her that she had some natural skill, she watched YouTube videos that taught her a variety of advanced knitting techniques. Soon, she was able to produce beautiful, elaborate pieces, and even though she sometimes feels that what she’s doing—all this knitting—is an old-lady pastime that she should be embarrassed about, she’s managed to turn her new avocation into a little business for herself. These days, she knits sweaters and scarves and sparkly evening shawls that she sells on Etsy or places in consignment shops where they sell quite well. She even made up a name for her creations, Night Owl Designs, which is what one of those cafés in the Village that she used to hang around in was called. She spent hours and hours there, in the Night Owl Café, drinking Coke and eating potato chips, all she could afford. When she decided on the name, she ordered labels to sew into her knitted pieces from a woman who has her own small business, hand-making labels for hand-made clothing. The labels Lissa has the woman make for her show a little owl with oversized eyes sitting on a branch. The owl is winking.

Now, as Lissa works at her knitting, Bodhi follows her onto the terrace and stretches out beside her. A few minutes later though, he’s on his feet, looking up at the sky with rapt attention as a pair of small brown bats go swooping by.

Whoosh. Whoosh. The bats fly by in silence, but in Lissa’s mind she hears the way the wings of the bats might sound as they glide through the deepening twilight. The first time Lissa saw bats flying past her terrace she thought she was imagining things but then she searched online and found that yes, brown bats are common around here. They live under bridges, in trees, in parklands all through the boroughs. She enjoys seeing them because it’s like knowing a secret about the city. The city is full of secrets, of course, but this is hers.

As she works, as her mind wanders, Lissa finds herself imagining that she’s a character in a scene that has a kind of Southern gothic feel to it. And this is what she imagines: that she is a woman in a pensive mood, sitting all alone with her knitting, perhaps with the memories of her mysterious past. With a pet dog at her feet and bats flying through the gloaming of a century that’s long gone and far away. It’s an image that makes her smile, maybe just because it’s so different than the truth. In fact, the year is 2023 and she’s in New York City, living a life like any other, more or less. Walking down the street, Lissa thinks that you’d never pick her out in a crowd, never dream there was anything special about her, anything important. But looking back, Lissa does think that she has some stories she could tell if anyone wanted to listen. Stories about good things that happened to her as well as bad. Stories from when she was as wild and free as she would ever be. And if no one wants to listen, she can tell them to herself. Maybe that will help, as the days turn into nights and the nights, sometimes, seem to go on forever—especially if, as you get older, you find it hard to fall asleep. But then it's always morning again, and the story goes on.

 

 

 

Connie Draving Malko
Secret Passage

 

 In the guest bedroom, Beth lined up the unfolded chairs, stuck paper under one leg so it wouldn’t wobble. Her husband Gregory helped her ease a wicker nightstand to the far end. Together, they draped sheets tautly over the framework. She tossed pillows and blankets inside the tent but did not crawl in to arrange them, knowing she could tire easily. That’s why she scheduled dialysis early on weekday mornings, preparing for Tommy to come for his usual Saturday overnight.

Beth looked with satisfaction at sheltered place she had created for her grandson — this quickly troubled kid who was afraid of airplanes in the sky, worried that the school bus didn’t have safety belts, and felt uneasy when wet sand seeped oozy between his toes.

“You may have to stop having these sleep-overs as time goes on,” Gregory said. He had reluctantly agreed when Beth had urged that they keep news of her condition from their daughter.

“But we don’t want to raise her suspicions,” Beth reminded him. Their daughter would have bombarded them with questions they didn’t yet know the answers to. Everything might turn out okay. Even though the nondisclosure meant that her husband had to look out for Beth without support, Beth knew he was a strong enough man to do it.

“We’re lucky that he still likes to come here,” said Beth, rolling down her sleeve and fastening her cuff button to cover her inner arm.  “Not all seven-year-olds want to hang out with their grandparents. It won’t last forever.”

“Well, of course he loves to come here,” Gregory said. “You let him do anything he wants.”

“I set boundaries,” Beth said, trying to sound indignant at the suggestion that she indulges the boy.

In their bedroom, Beth pulled a diary and key from the bureau’s top drawer. Locked inside was a rare tax stamp receipt, probably a collectors’ item by now. Stamps like this one were produced in the 1950s to force compliance with a state sales-tax law. It looked “official,” which would have particular appeal for Tommy because he liked working with markers to make his own “documents” in her art studio. His hieroglyphics of squares and curlicues later became letters and numbers. He made labels printing “log numbers” that he stuck on objects and delivered around the house — on the remote control, on a can of chicken soup, to seal her desk drawer shut.

 

*

 

“I’m glad you’re early,” Beth said.

“Mommy said I could come as soon as I finished my ziti.” He headed straight for the art room. “The noodles look like worms,” he complained.

Beth used her thumb to press away a speck of dried sauce over his upper lip.

“What are we going to do today?” he asked. He eyed the leather-bound, latched book on the table.

“This diary is where I keep the surprise I want to show you,” she said.

When he smiled his wide-mouthed smile, Beth noticed an empty space where the front tooth had wriggled the week before. Tommy picked up the key beside the diary. “Let me.” They heard a click as he turned it inside the acorn-sized padlock. Tommy folded back the leather strap.

The gold-embossed pages opened to a tiny certificate wrapped in tissue. Beth said, “This is the surprise — a very old stamp.” She unwrapped the green, two-inch square.

Tommy looked disappointed. “It’s too big. You can’t mail anything with that.”

“It’s a sales tax stamp. Each time customers bought something, storekeepers handed them these receipts to show that the state collected tax money for each purchase.”

“Can we get money?”

“No more. The state stopped issuing them years ago. But when I was your age, I helped my grandfather sort them to turn them in for money.”

Tommy climbed onto her lap, because sometimes he still did this. “I’m closer now. Don’t roll,” he said, talking about her caster-wheeled desk chair.

“This would be your great, great grandfather - August,” said Beth. She took a worn photo out of the diary, a man in a dark suit and bowler derby hat.

“But you told me he was in a wheelchair.”

“This was earlier.” August stood in front of a barn looking proud with his index fingers tucked inside his vest pockets. “He was a locksmith — at one time he had bored holes and fit locks in every front door in town.”

Beth turned on the light box and placed the stamp facedown. “See these lines on the back—the official watermark. Those outlines are in the shape of the state of Ohio.”

Tommy frowned. “It’s like the head of a fox.”

“I was thinking that you and I could make stamps that look like this vintage one.”

“I don’t know. I don’t like foxes,” Tommy said.

“Our copies will be of the front only.” Beth was skilled at intricate work, had a business of making customized stationery, coats of arms and monograms. With her fine-tipped engraver, she cut out the stamp’s picture on a lino block.

“How much money did he get?”

“Not much. Mostly schools redeemed them. My school’s gym had a poster with a locker-tall drawing of a thermometer. The red got higher every time the total went up by $5. My grandmother scolded me for telling him about it; she asked if I was ashamed that he took money for the stamps.”

“But I know you weren’t,” said Tommy. “Maybe she was the one ashamed.”

Beth blinked slowly and sighed, thinking, here I am an adult-turned-child, vindicated by my grandson. “My grandfather knew I didn’t mean that too.”“What’d he do when she said it?”

“He said one of those words that are in a prayer, but he wasn’t praying.”

Tommy giggled.

“And he hollered her name, Claaaaw-ra!” Beth raised her voice to re-enact.

“That loud? ” Tommy tightened the corners of his mouth.

“Yea. When he yelled, his apple cheeks puffed and he snorted.” Beth puckered, close-lipped, and let a blast of air come out her nose. “The stamps scattered everywhere. One even fell to the floor.

“Pretend that I am in the house with you, and he saw me. August,” Tommy said. “Would he snort at me?”

“No. He would say your name…”

“But softly?”

Beth nodded. “He’d knock on the table with his knuckles to show you to sit down. Then he’d pour fistfuls of tax stamps from a brown grocery bag onto the table.

“Would I be afraid of him?”

“Why would you be afraid of your grandfather?” Beth held up the lino block, satisfied with her rendering of the leafed banner, the sun rays on a field of haystacks.

Tommy put his hand on top of hers as she lay the lino block face-down on an ink pad. 

“After she left, that’s when he gave me this stamp. Valuable. She nodded to the $15 numeral printed in the corners, representing a 3 percent tax on something as expensive as a TV. “He could have gotten 45 cents for it, enough for 45 pieces of penny candy.”

Tommy rippled his fingers as though they were moving beads on an abacus. “A stash like Halloween.”

“I thought of all the Bit ‘O Honeys I could sneak to him. But he waved a stout finger at me. He said, ‘This is for your school. You’ll make that thermometer jump right through the ceiling.’”

“Wait.” Tommy interrupted. “Why do you have it now if he told you to take it to school?”

“I knew it was too important to give away. And now I have it for you.” Beth took Tommy’s empty hand and laid the keepsake on his palm the same way her grandfather had laid it on hers. At the edge of Tommy’s palm, the deep crevice of a long lifeline swirled out from beneath the stamp’s edge.

Tommy placed the stamp back onto the diary and touched the key at its side. “And this book that you lock it up in — is that for me too?”

Beth smiled. If she had not realized it before, it was clear now that Tommy was most interested in the book. “We’d better get busy if we’re going to make these stamps.” She motioned for Tommy to pull the lino block off the ink pad and make the first print.

Tommy pressed it hard against a blank piece of paper. It made a sticky sound when he pulled it up. He turned the stamp over to the reverse side and, looking at it, he was dissatisfied. “What about the wavy lines and the heads shaped like foxes?”

“Those are watermarks — embedded into the fiber of the paper. We can’t do that.” 

Beth saw a sober-beyond-his-age look on his face.

“Then our stamps aren’t real — not real like the one your grandfather gave you.”

Beth closed her eyes and lowered her head. After all this, after she had put all the effort she could muster into making this a good project for him, she was at a dead end. “I don’t know what to do about it, Tommy. We can’t make our own paper.”

“I bet we could,” he said, looking at her expectantly.

“Not today,” she said. Beth cut blank paper off around the sides of the stamp.

As Tommy went back to printing more, he occasionally looked over at her. He squinted, his gaze flitting out from the corners of his eyes. She’d seen him give that look to his parents, even before they separated. The expression — not so secretive as he might have thought — showed Beth that he suspected that adults were not always completely open with him, were not telling him everything they should. The thought made her feel tired, even more tired than she expected.

Beth remembered having that suspicion with her own parents, them not allowing her to see her grandfather on the final day. They never said why they insisted on leaving her outside his house. It did not occur to her then that they did this to protect her. All she knew, as she threw her ball against the side of the house, is that they had rushed inside and did not take her with them. Beth knew that her daughter would do the same thing if she found out something was wrong with her. She would keep Tommy away.

Beth was relieved when Gregory looked in on them. She knew that he sensed that her stamina was dwindling. “Leave all this for tomorrow,” he said, scooting the loose paper into a pile at the center.

With slow steadiness, Beth returned the vintage stamp to the diary, let Tommy close it up and put it back to the middle of the table.

Beth looked with pleasure at the squares and slivers of paper on the table, numbered and trimmed and peeping out over one another. The montage of colors reminded Beth of her grandfather’s table, an afternoon’s supply of sales tax stamps spread out on the white tablecloth.

Beth took a deep breath and forced herself to put a spring in her step following Tommy as he skipped up the stairs. She of course would not admit her growing limitations — not to Tommy and even more so not to Gregory.

 

*

 

Beth has laid beside Tommy in their tent enough times to know that the idea of sleep was only theoretical. There would be plenty of stalling. If he’d been a wind-up watch, Beth could have heard the sound of him ticking.

“Can we look at your stamp again?”

Beth knew he might ask this. “No, it’s put away.”

“I could go to sleep better if it was here beside me, the keep-safe.”

Beth did not clarify that the correct word was “keepsake.” Despite feeling like some of the stuffing had been pulled out of her, she was enjoying him. “It is safe where I put it.”

“But what good is something if you never can have it?”

“You don’t have to always hold something to know it exists. Like your mother — you don’t see her now right now, but you know she’s nearby as always.”

“The same with your grandfather? August?” Tommy asked. He pushed his stuffed dog Casper up under his chin. “Why was he in a wheelchair?”

In her tired state, Beth could not think of a child-appropriate answer. She simply told him,“He lost his legs.”

“Lost them? Like teeth?” He wriggled his tongue to explore the place where a baby tooth had fallen out.

“No, more complicated than that. He had to lose his legs so that more serious things wouldn’t happen to him,” she said, avoiding the word amputation.

But Tommy pressed toward her and asked, “Do you think that in heaven he has a wheelchair? Or did he get his legs back on?”

A voice came from outside the tent. “You guys okay in there?” Beth saw her husband’s bare toes at the edge of the hanging sheet.

“We’re almost asleep,” Tommy said.

Gregory pulled up a flap of the sheet. “You don’t look almost asleep.” He stooped, examining Beth. Gregory clicked his tongue. “I wish you’d come to bed,” he said.

Their bedroom down the hall seemed far away. “Not yet,” Beth told him. She watched his shadow through the canopy of the muslin-covered chairs and end tables, circling around before walking slowly away.

Beth reached over and patted the curve of Tommy’s chicken wing arm, bare on top of the sleeping bag. I’d rather not leave here myself, Beth was thinking, but she didn’t speak. She wanted him to go to sleep.

Tommy whispered, “Will you tell me another story?”

Beth sighed, knew that no ultimatum or reproach would work with a child who was wide awake. He crawled out of his bag. His nudge against her body caused her sleeve to ride up. She pulled it back down too late. He’d already seen the thickened vein where needles are placed during dialysis.

“What’s wrong with your arm?” Tommy asked.

Beth did not know how to explain a fistula, a vascular access point. “It’s like a passage; it lets things go through that otherwise could not.” Beth sat up to face Tommy, but kept her head low so she did not dislodge the sheets hanging above them.

They sat with their knees touching. “I had a secret passage like that - at my grandfather’s house,” she told Tommy.

“Is this another story?”

“Not a story exactly, but something in his house that no one else knows.”

“Good. I always wanted to go there.” Tommy grinned his one-tooth-missing grin. Beth knew that they were on the brink of something important here, even though it was a reversal of what she had hoped for. She, like all grandparents, had dreamed of going ahead in life with Tommy, to join him through the years, to see his future self, the man he would someday become. But that long look ahead was less of a sure thing now. Instead they would travel together the other way around — Tommy going back with her in time, to when she was a child.

Beth felt lighter, almost as if she was being lifted into air. “Do you see us — here in the house where it’s dark and cool?”

“You know I’m right behind you. And I’m not scared,” said Tommy.

Beth pointed to the baluster-based table covered with a white tablecloth like the one her grandfather had smoothed out when they had sorted the tax stamps together. “Pretend his bedroom is right behind that table. But the door is locked so we’ll have to go in through the passage.”

Tommy’s breath, in a whisper, touched her cheek. “The girl in the story, I think she’s you.”

Beth narrowed her eyes at him, acknowledging that they were in cahoots. “How else could I show you the secret way?” She felt herself caught in her own story.

Beth wriggled her nose, sniffed at the air.

“What is that?” Tommy asked. “I want to smell it too.”

“His cigar,” she said as they passed the windowsill where he’d placed his snuffed-out cigar, its soggy, chewed end still tainting the air.

The floor rang hollow beneath their footsteps. Beth reached for Tommy’s hand, wanting something more real than the shadow she saw of them walking through the small house.

“What if we get caught?” Tommy asked as they entered her grandmother’s bedroom.

From faraway came the muted sound of scraping, digging in the dirt. “My grandmother - she’s in her garden.”

“But what if Mommy finds out?” Tommy asked. He looked nervous as if the drawn shades were in his mother’s house.

“This is between you and me,” Beth said. She felt for the hard metal of the round knob on the closet door.

“Is it stuck?” asked Tommy. He was as good as she was at making up tales.

Stacks of gardening magazines and Sears Roebuck catalogs leaned against one wall. Behind limply-hanging clothes, Beth felt the coarse patch pocket of her grandmother’s coat. Then there it was — the door to the passageway.

“Ready?” She released a hook on a hinged square board which was the door.

“Will I see your grandfather? Will he have his legs on or won’t he?”

Beth did not have an answer because she did not know what they would find. The top of the passage was so low that Beth had to keep her knees bent in a crouch, had to rally a flexibility that didn’t come easily anymore. Tommy stooped, walked close on her heels. Were their feet slipping on the rayon sleeping bag beneath them?

But now this other place had all her attention. Beth’s fingers touched the bumpy sides of the unfinished passage between her grandparents’ bedrooms. Plaster had hardened in clots where it had seeped through the skeleton framework of wooden slats.

“Watch out,” she said. “The nail tips sticking out could poke you.” He groaned an impatient sigh, braying like when his mother frets and overreacts, if he falls or gets a scrape. Beth knew that if her daughter knew about her own condition, her daughter would exhibit the same overly-obsessional behavior toward Beth.

They crawled on. “Are we near the end?” asked Tommy.

“How do you know — how did you see it first?”

“The light coming around the cracks,” he answered.

“This door is hooked shut,” Beth explained when they reached it. She closed her hand into a fist and hit the board until the slack hook on the other side flipped loose. 

The door opened and swung out of the way. Had they come to the room or were they simply at the end of the tent, sheets held up by the wicker bed stand?

“Is this real?” Tommy asked.

“My memory is real,” Beth said. But she hesitated, suddenly as filled with apprehension as on that day they had forbidden her from coming inside her grandfather’s room.

“I’ll go first,” said Tommy. He squeezed by her, crawled over her curved legs.

Beth could not stop him. She followed, a reflexive leap more than a thought-out act. But her body was off balance, could not quite keep up.

Tommy turned around to her, and he spoke in a voice that echoed off the walls of the empty room. “I’m glad I’m here with you,” he said.

In the bright sunlight flooding the middle of the room, Beth imagined her father and his siblings standing around a cast iron-framed bed, whispering.

Beth’s mother had stood outside the circle, and, when she had noticed Beth at the passageway, she had hurried to scoop her up. Beth had called out — “no-no” as she was carried away. She had felt her mother’s hand cupping the crown of her head, pressing with finality like when pressing a flower inside a book to protect it.

Tommy rushed across the room to the bureau that held her grandfather’s possessions. Spectacles and scissors with paint flaking off one handle — objects that Beth thought she would never see again. Beth picked up a straight-edged razor, the one her grandfather sharpened on a leather strap.

Tommy’s hand passed over an insulin bottle to a glass syringe.

“No, don’t touch that,” Beth said,

“But you’re touching things,” Tommy said. He lifted the syringe, careful to keep his fingers clear of the hypodermic needle fitted at the end.

Beth took it from Tommy. She remembered the sharp point going into her grandfather’s skin, disappearing as if retracting into itself.

“Why’d he have to have shots?”

“They were something he needed to keep well.” She set the needle down. “We all need shots sometimes.”

“Is that why your arm looks funny?” Tommy stared at where her arm was covered by her sleeve. They both knew what he had seen there, what had been exposed when the loose sleeve had accidentally ridden up on her arm — the thickened vein at the curve of her arm. Had he noticed the two prick marks, one for where the blood is pumped out, a second for where the filtered blood is returned.

Tommy had not waited for her to explain. He was already walking toward the wheelchair that sat beside the window.

The wheelchair was empty — like the only other time Beth had seen it without her grandfather sitting in it. She saw it like that day when she was swept out of the room by her mother. Beth had felt her face held so firmly to her mother’s shoulder that it took Beth’s breathe away. Beth now had trouble getting her breathe, looking again at the empty wheelchair. She remembered how the seat would creak under her grandfather’s weight as she crawled into his lap.

“Will you give me a ride in it?” Tommy asked.

“Oh no, Tommy. I couldn’t do that.”

He considered the chair again and said, “I think I can push myself.” Grasping the wooden handles, Tommy climbed up onto the wicker seat. He flipped around and extended his arms over the sides far enough to reach the push-rims on the moving wheels. “Careful,” Beth said. She released the brakes attached near the seat.

“I’m ready to roll,” he said. “Beep-beep,” she heard him shout. He leaned forward in her direction.

In a mock cry of fear, Beth shouted “Help.” She made a face and raised her hands to move away, like a matador sidestepping a bull. She felt relieved, seeing Tommy play in the chair, filling it up again.

Beth was not sure if her grandfather would approve. She often wondered what he thought that last day about the sound of her playing outside, at hearing the blomp-blomp-blomp of her ball against the side of the house. No one had come out to scold her and tell her to stop. She had been left out, as though she wasn’t important, like she wasn’t someone close in his life. What had he thought about dying? Had he been afraid? Was that the worst of it? Or did he fear something else even more? Did he fear what she did — did he fear being forgotten?

From across the room, Beth heard Tommy shout, “I’m stuck.” One of the balancing caster wheels at the front had gotten lodged against the corner baseboard. As Tommy rocked the chair to get loose, its front rigging banged against the wall repeatedly, like a phonograph needle caught in a crack. Like a ball rebounding off the house.

Beth hurried to Tommy and turned the chair around. As he squirmed to get down, his arm brushed a loose piece of wicker at the side of the seat. The strand, sticking up as stiff as a pin, lanced his skin.

Extending both arms — forgetting the nephrologist’s warning not to lift anything heavier than a jug of milk — Beth pulled him from the chair. The action depleted her. She lowered Tommy to the floor and sat down facing him, folding her legs to the side. Rumpling the sleeping bag beneath them as they got settled, they sat face-to-face in the tent.

Across the underside of Tommy’s wrist, a faint line ran in an angle where the wicker had scratched him. Tommy held his face in a look of suspension, waiting to see Beth’s reaction as he often did with his mother to gauge how seriously he had been injured. The line was bright red. A tiny crimson bead congealed at one end.

Tears welled up in Tommy’s eyes. He spoke between breaths. “Call. My. Mommy.”

“Yes, Tommy. Your mother would want to know,” Beth said. “But Tommy, it’s not deep.” Beth took his wrist in her hands and pressed her lips against the red drop to blot it away.

“You know we’re pretending. Us being here.” Beth said, as she pressed a cloth as soft as the stuffed animal’s fleece against the scratch. Beth felt the sides of the room closing in. She drew in air to blow on Tommy’s arm before another drop formed. She made short, quick puffs across the mark. “This is a game we’re playing. Remember?”

“Are we still playing?”

“We’re going to stop.”

“Are you too tired to play?”

“Yes, I am very tired now. I think we have to go back to sleep. We’ve seen so much.” Beth knew that they had to leave her grandfather’s room even though she wished she could stay.

Despite her fatigue, Beth kept puffing on the scratch, blowing as hard as she could to clear away all the pretend. The walls around them dissolved into tiny pieces and flew off like seed tufts of a dandelion.

 

*

 

When Beth awakens, the sheets of the tent have fallen in on them. She draws the fabric back to her waist, freeing her upper body. She pulls the sheet from Tommy’s head and torso. His arm rests atop his chest, fingers curled toward his face. She looks for the mark on his wrist, careful not to tickle the sensitive juncture between forearm and palm. There is no scratch on his nacre skin. The only line she can see is a thin vein, blue under the skin and raised like the relief curves of her lino prints. Lifeblood pulsing. She likes lying beside the sleeping boy even though the floor underneath feels as hard as frozen earth. She stays like this until her husband comes to rouse them.

 

*

 

After breakfast, Tommy decides that he wants to place their hand-made tax stamps around the house. “Like everything’s paid for.” He puts the 5-cent stamps on books and planters, the $2-ones on tables and chairs, and the $15 stamp on the piano keyboard.

“Can we see the real tax stamp again?” He reaches for the key to unlock the journal. She watches his fine little hands, nails tipped with white slivers, argent crescents waning before the moon goes dark. He examines the back of the vintage stamp again, eyes lingering on the fox-shaped watermarks. “I think I had a bad dream. Where you there? Did my ears stand up straight like a fox? Was I a fox?”

“Oh, yes, Tommy, you are very foxy.” Beth watches as he tucks the stamp back inside, turns the key around in the lock again, listening for the click. “I think that you are more interested in playing with the lock than in my prize stamp,” Beth says.

Tommy raised his shoulders to the base of his ears, turtle-like, the way he does when being told something he does not want to hear.

“It’s okay,” Beth says. “You can be honest about that.” She takes his hands in hers. “It’s okay for us to tell each other things, Tommy.”

With a sigh, he stares at the place on her arm now covered by her blouse sleeve. She knows he’s thinking about what he saw, hidden underneath. “Even if we’re afraid?” he asks.

“You can be afraid without having to hide it.” She moved the diary to the center of the table. “I’ll tell you something no one else knows. I keep this diary under the bright scarves in the highest drawer of my bureau. With the key right beside it.”

Tommy nods and closes his eyes. Beth has observed that Tommy never tells his mother what they do here, as though keeping it a secret makes it of greater value. But she knows he’ll think back about making the stamps and locking the diary, from time to time, for at least the rest of the day. Time goes by — a week or a season even — before his mind is absorbed in other ventures and his hands are busy with other tasks. But something remains, an indelible imprint still present in a year, ten or twenty years, even fifty when Tommy is the elder looking after a child. The heart remembers things that the mind forgets, like the feeling left from a dream.

For this day, the time comes too soon when Tommy must go home.

“Did he sleep okay? Did he eat a good breakfast? Did you give him his allergy pill?” his mother asks.

Yes, yes, yes, Beth says as she slides Tommy’s backpack on the seat beside him and fastens the seat belt securely around the boy and his stuffed dog. “One day this week, Tuesday or Thursday, while Tommy is in school, let’s have lunch,” Beth says.

Beth’s daughter slides the shift from “neutral” to “park, “ sensing something important. “Will Dad come too?”

“No, just us for now. Let’s do Tuesday, We’ll get caught up,” Beth said.

Her daughter nods in agreement.

“But I’ll be back next Saturday, won’t I?” asks Tommy. “Same as always?”

“Of course you will,” says Beth.

Beth’s daughter puts the gear in reverse and the wheels of the sedan back briskly down the driveway. The concrete is littered with speckled blossoms fallen from the apple tree. Beth watches the swell of parchment petals, swept into the air by the passing car and scattered like paper scraps strewn across a white tablecloth. Beth opens her hand and catches a flittering petal on the tip of her finger.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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