The Absolution by Leila Allison

“Is it fair?”

Those were the last words Eddie said to the man he had thought I was before he drifted back into the only honest sleep of his final days. A smiling sleep caused by my youngest daughter, who did one of the finest things I have ever seen a human being do.

Eddie died yesterday, and his parents have asked me to speak at his Celebration of Life this Sunday. I have plenty of harmless Eddie anecdotes to warm hearts and kill ten minutes with. It may be cynical of me to say it, but even though the most timid human being tends to live an R-rated life, few celebrations of such are anything less than family friendly.

What I Won’t Be Saying Come Sunday

When we were kids, slow was the polite term to describe what had been up with Eddie, while retarded had been the “scientific” word for it. He spent his entire fifty-five year run at the same house in Crestview Drive, two doors down from my childhood home. It’s one of those faux ranch-style houses that had been so popular in the suburbs during the early days of Camelot, NASA and Bonanza. Those homes have always reminded me just how cheerful and prosperous things had been, and how the future, even that for guys like Eddie, glittered with great promise. I catch a permanent sense of Sunday when I look at Eddie’s house nowadays; and his death isn’t the only cause of it.

Eddie was that kid. Everybody gets one of those in life, and everybody is told by their parents to be nice to that kid if you know what’s good for you. For whatever reason, I became the closest thing to a best friend that Eddie ever got (here I must add, except his dad, for they did everything together). And although I eventually went off to college, a career, marriage and family, we still lived close enough to each other as to allow the continuation of our friendship, which had lasted something around fifty years, until the same condition that had held back his mind at last silenced his heart.

All right, before I allow the current to sweep this thing off to the Purple Sea of Sentimentality (where it seems determined to go), it’s dishonest to fit the dead (even the special dead) with a harp and halo, and speak of them as though they were saints. Eddie could be hell, annoying, a petulant little asshole when he didn’t get his own way, and there were times when his handicap made being with, and looking out for him as burdensome as dragging around a wrecked Buick.

And there had been that terrible time when his in no way diminished sexual awakening had almost got him “sent away.” At twelve or so, he’d fallen into the habit of pulling down his pants and underwear around the girls and hoped (I guess), they’d do the same. Although Eddie had never touched anybody, and although his dad had somehow finally set him straight on the subject, there is no doubt in my mind if the trouser dropping had happened now and not in 1970-whatever, he would have been sent away. My opinion here is mixed: I cared for and perhaps loved Eddie, but was this part of himself that he (nor any other child about him─or herself, for that matter) could never possibly understand harmless? For the record I’m the father of three girls whom I never allowed Eddie to do more than shake hands with, even after they had grown up.

Still, Eddie was what he was. The older kids used to call that sort of a statement a “cop out.” Whatever. It really doesn’t matter anymore. Eddie was. He did the best he could with what little he had.

The Stuff I Should Say Come Sunday

Eddie’s parents had been told that their only child might live thirty, maybe thirty-five years, and never on his own. His parents are, I think, what Christians are supposed to be. They have a gentle and loving faith, and humor and kindness. His parents are the only lucky break Eddie ever got; thus he didn’t need a second. And I guess that this part might sound hard, but I’m glad he died first. His folks are “getting on,” as the old saying goes. I have a pretty good idea what happens to guys like Eddie after their parents die.

Eddie had nearly doubled his life-expectancy when his wheezy heart finally found itself no longer up to the routine of its master’s small life. He was abed in his room the last time I saw him. It had been three months or so since our last meeting, and he had lost a huge amount of weight and nearly all his hair.

Our youngest daughter, Trina, had been home from college when I got the call from Eddie’s mom. Although Trina had had the scantest relationship with Eddie─save for what I had told her over the years─she asked if she could come along.

We visited him for awhile in that same room where we had played trucks and drank Kool Aid all those thousands of years ago. We spoke of those times, and Trina listened. There were Seahawks and Mariners and UW Husky posters on the wall, as well as the various trophies and medals Eddie had earned in all the Special Olympics he had participated in. A little kid’s room; sweet and nostalgic.

After his mom (who at nearly eighty was still cheerfully caring for her little boy) came in and gave him a blue pill and said something about five minutes and left the room, we made as to say our goodbyes. Eddie had been shifting between the now and a fuzzy delirium for a bit by then, and he had confused me with the church deacon who had recently come by to visit every day. In Eddie’s mind everybody associated with the church was “father.” And toward the end, Eddie uncharacteristically complained about the fact that he had never gotten married. He called me father, and asked “Is it fair?”

This is when Trina drew close to where he lay and gently kissed him on the lips and said, “No, it isn’t. But it soon will be.”  

The sun came out in his face. He knew he had been kissed; first and last. He settled into a deeper and healthier sleep than what I guessed he had had in days. Maybe that kiss caused secret dreams to go on in there until the end. If so, it’s all right.

Fight for Me by L.T. Ward

Geoffrey sneezes on my face as I bend to give him the kiss he’d pleaded for. My sassy four-year-old, my fourth child, has always been demanding of my affection, but this stage of still being unaware of anyone’s needs but his own is breaking me.

It has only been over the past year that I’ve been reclaiming me and who I want to be. Who I need to be.

I hand Geoffrey a tissue and he taps it to his nose before snorting the dripping vulgar mucus from his upper lip back into his nostrils. I gag but press the tissue to his face. “Blow,” I say.

He does lightly, the tissue fluttering from the air out of his mouth.

“Blow!” I say.

This time, I’m rewarded with a sopping tissue and a son without a clogged nose. “Good job,” I sigh.

Geoffrey wipes his nose on his sleeve then runs from the room. My wild children are always bringing home their school-cultivated viruses. Blech.

I roll my eyes as I toss the tissue into the kitchen garbage then go to the sink to wash my hands. I’m so stressed from being confined to my home over the last month. Pain. Degradation. Misery.

Two more months and I should be healed. That’s what the doctor said from the very beginning. The tummy tuck would be four weeks of hell followed by two months of restrictions.

But my doctor lies. She omits details, waiting to warn me until whatever horror would come is already here. First, about what came right after the surgery, then, at each follow-up appointment.

The worst were the two drains collecting my blood and other fluids from behind the incision for the first two weeks of recovery. Dr. Denali had mentioned them briefly at a pre-op appointment, but it wasn’t until the hour before the surgery that I was told exactly what was to happen. Two tubes stretched beneath my cut and sutured skin. From both of my hips dangled a tube that fed into a bulb─each needing to be strapped to one of my thighs by pinning them to the bottom hem of my full-body compression girdle.

In my oversized pajama pants post-surgery, I was at my least sexy with what looked like droopy testicles hanging between my legs. Hearing the muted sucking from them doing their job, knowing that they were filled with my fluids, I was furious and heartbroken at having to endure more humiliation and pain.

A heads up from Dr. Denali would have been appreciated. But the thing she did get right was the swelling. My skin had been tight and choking my entire body until a few days ago when it simply subsided. Now, I’m like my old self.

My new self.

I walk into the living room and ease myself onto the sofa. My belly is still sore, and after being on my feet for the last few hours─wrangling my children through homework, making dinner, and convincing them to stop killing off each other’s digital sheep in Minecraft─I need a break.

“Geoffrey?” asks Brian.

I nod. “He’s fine now.” Brian grunts, ignoring the television show across the room to flick a finger absentmindedly over his tablet. “Can you put the kids to bed in a half-hour?” I ask.

Brian grunts again. He lets out a deep sigh. “Sure.”

I roll my eyes and pick my phone from my pocket. A text from Seamus: How’s your night?

I smile and text back a censored version, noting how the villain sitting further down on the sofa is ignoring me and leaving out the snot fest that is my youngest.

***

After I drop the kids off at their two schools─because of course we live too close for the bus services─I make my daily phone call to my mother, my daily Russian roulette of either loving support or crushing judgment and unwanted advice. “Kristen, are you sure I can’t take the kids next weekend?” Mom asks.

Today, I am trying to recover from a bullet wound. “I’m sure, Mom,” I say through gritted teeth.

If I keep my cool, I can get her off the phone and get on with my day─my worthless day of trying to get a job somewhere in my small town where I’m nowhere near as connected to the local business owners as I need to be. I wasn’t born here and I’m no one’s cousin.

“But couldn’t you use the break?” Mom asks.

I pick up the socks from the living room floor. My teenager, Megan, had thrown them at me before telling me I was ruining her life because I wouldn’t allow her to leave the house dressed in denim shorts in the middle of February. Three feet of snow outside and ice on the roads, but I was the one being unreasonable.

“I’m sure, Mom,” I say. I could use the break, but a break would mean being alone with Brian, and my plague monsters being underfoot has been the only thing keeping Brian’s libido at bay. It certainly wasn’t the scabbed incision running across my belly. Or the fact that I had rebuffed every flirtation he’d made in the last three months.

“It’s just that you and Brian need to find a way back to each other,” Mom says.

I close my eyes until the darkness bursts to stars. “Mom, I told you that I don’t want to find a way back to Brian. I want out. I’m done.”

“But you’ve been married so long. Twenty-two years is nothing to throw away.”

I inhale and hold my breath for a few seconds before saying, “I’ve tried. For twenty-two years, I’ve tried. I want out. I want someone who wants me to be more than his family’s personal assistant.”

“But it’s hard out there. And you’ve been in so long. Why end it now?”

I feel my heart pound as my honesty pours out to my mother. “Because I no longer hate who I am and I want better.” My eyes sting and my stomach tightens.

Mom has another bullet in the chamber. “Honey, you’ve been through so much over the last year. You lost all that weight, and now you’re starting that new hobby.”

I pinch the bridge of my nose, closing my eyes. “Mom. It’s not a hobby. Singing is my career.”

Mom sighs. “There are so many perfect voices in the world. And you’re so old. I know you think you can become a professional singer, but I don’t want you to be disappointed. Wouldn’t teaching at Megan’s school be better for you?”

I flex my jaw and stare at the ceiling. “The high school isn’t hiring for the Music Department. Besides, I told you that I don’t want to be a teacher. I want to be on stage and sing.”

“Sweetie, you need to be pragmatic.”

“Mom, I love you, but I need to get going,” I say.

“Okay. Love you, too. Have a great day.”

I disconnect the call before she can slip more round into the chamber. I stare at my phone’s screensaver─a picture of my kids at an apple orchard last fall. My tweens, Mason and Abigail, smile happily for the camera, but Megan scowls as her usual pissy self, and Geoffrey is turning away from the camera, trying to ditch the picture to resume climbing the trees. Brian hadn’t bothered coming because he claimed he needed more downtime after a long work week. An outing with the kids wasn’t downtime, he said.

I head to my text messages and tap on Seamus’s name. Seamus, my unexpected and unplanned reward for the new me. His picture appears and I smile. My lower belly clenches with excitement. I bite my lip as I quickly type up a dirty text. He’ll be at work and arousing him gives me a thrill I haven’t had since I was a teenager.

I hit Send, then head to my sofa and laptop to search for any job that will allow me to earn income while I satisfy my soul, singing.

***

“What’s for dinner?” whines Abigail.

“Food,” I say. I’m standing at the stove, stirring spaghetti noodles in a pot. The sauce jar is on the counter, as is a cheese grater and a mountain of shredded mozzarella. My ten-year-old is somehow oblivious to the food before her.

“Fine,” she huffs, leaving me to prepare the rest of our dinner.

A faint rumble of the garage door catches my ear. Brian’s home. At least he’s on time for dinner tonight. The door to the garage thumps, and, seconds later, he’s in the kitchen, dropping his keys and phone into a bowl on the counter.

“How was your day?” I say.

Brian grunts. My apathetic caveman says, “Dinner almost ready?”

“Yep,” I reply.

“Cool,” he says, then leaves me to my domesticity while he heads to our bedroom to change into his lazy man’s attire. No kiss. No hug. For the last few years, Brian’s only attention to me is to work out the logistics of our lives. And, on occasion, to tell me I’m sexy a few moments before he wants me to perform wifely duties.

Before, I lived for those comments. Now, my stomach roils at the idea of being touched by Brian. Even before Seamus, I was done with Brian. Twenty-two years of begging for scraps of affection from my partner and being rebuffed over and over again.

I strain the steaming noodles into the sink and hear my phone ding. I blush. It would be Seamus on the other end. His daily check-in.

As the noodles drain in the strainer, I check the text. Good day?

I smile and text back: Same old. Same old. No luck on the job hunt, but I’m hopeful. How was your day?

Him: Fine.

I wait for another reply, but when one isn’t forthcoming, I brush it off. I assume he’s busy with a life thing, and I go back to prepping dinner.

***

It had been Brian’s idea that I take vocal lessons. Megan had been giving me a hard time for not going after my dreams, and, for once, Brian suggested something that was about me and for me.

As I’d attended the weekly sessions with Marjorie, I found myself liking myself more and more.
Then the pounds started falling off. I was no longer feeling the vacancy in my life’s purpose. The emotional, lonesome snacking was replaced by hours of studying music theory and working my diaphragm for the right pitch in a ballad. My self-image morphed into a fierce warrior who walked into a room carrying a big stick with a wall of fire behind her.

I was feeling amazing until I’d lost around seventy pounds. That’s when things changed. The slack skin was a particular brand of hell. I had developed a stomach apron that I had to lift to wash, and my bottom became a laundry line of skin sheets that folded and pinched when I sat. I watched as my warrior became a shrunken old woman identifying more with Sophia Petrillo than Wonder Woman.

My kids remind me of this with their own aging. Megan is my fifteen-year-old teenager and my mini-me in every way except her mouth. Her smile is Brian’s. Next year, she and I will be searching for colleges because I’m about to become a mother to an adult. I am old and I missed out on my life.

Trying to ignore my wrinkles and self-disgust, I refocused on my singing career. My research on becoming a professional singer required me to create an account on Instagram. Pictures and videos needed to be uploaded for my skills to catch someone’s eye. I needed to be visible and have a following in order for anyone outside of my hometown to give me a chance. For my profile pic, I chose one that Megan had taken of me that actually reflected the momentary goddess I had been, and I opened my account.

Enter Seamus. A songwriter I mutually followed.

I had posted a video of me singing The Streets of Laredo, and he’d sent me a direct message telling me how impressed he was with my rendition. After spending two hours cooking dinner, then convincing Geoffrey that the broccoli wouldn’t make him barf, followed by getting soaked as I washed the massive dish pile, I sat on the sofa to watch television with Brian. But he’d turned on Firefly several episodes past where we’d left off. When I asked him if he’d been watching ahead, Brian told me he figured I wouldn’t mind. The only thing we do together is watch a series, and he’d left me out.

So I got lost in my DMs with Seamus. For the next few weeks, we messaged daily. He lived in Ohio while I was in Vermont. Single, but divorced for six years. One child in college. Mid-forties and passionate about classic rock while enjoying diversity in genre from spirituals to punk to K-pop music.

Our DMs drifted from casual life and professional discussions into flirtations. One day, I became his “Kit.” He texted that I was an amazing woman while I carefully walked the line between flirting and remaining a faithful wife, but the messages that man sent about how gorgeous I was in my pictures and videos made me feel seen in ways that I’d long thought were impossible.

After a few app glitches, we decided to exchange phone numbers and became regular texting buddies. He knew I was married, but I let him in on a secret.

I’m going to divorce Brian. I have plans and they are in motion.

Seamus didn’t ask about Brian after that. Instead, he sent me a sext that I reciprocated. Our deliciously naughty words fell right into place. Sure, we continued texting about music and books we loved and the travels we wanted in life. Ninety percent of our conversations were about mutual interests, but that other ten percent was hot, dirty, and made me feel sexy as hell, despite the collapsing skin shell over my improved body.

Once the sexting began, platonic conversations between our digital dates were satisfying. The sort of discussions between friends where you both share so much of the same ideals, but the differences are easily discussed. He didn’t want a serious relationship or romance, wasn’t even looking. I was still shackled in matrimony. Everything about us clicked.

Our sexting trysts were initially impromptu, but after a few dates, we started scheduling with one another. On his end, it was when he was home. On my end, it was when the kids were all distracted and Brian was out with his buddies doing who-knows-what-and-I-no-longer-cared.

The highlights of my day can be broken down into five moments: morning hello text from Seamus; singing practice; my kids coming home from school, eager to tell me about their day; evening check-in from Seamus; and Brian going to bed before me.

I want out of my marriage. I want to feel alive. Singing started that feeling in me. But being seen again was taking my vitality to a whole other level.

***

“How’re we doing today, Kristen?” Dr. Denali says. I’m sitting naked apart from the full-body girdle and a cotton waffle-weave robe on the patient’s table before her.

“Fine,” I say. “When will I be ready for the next surgery?”

Dr. Denali smiles in that way I do when Mason asks if he can have an ice cream sandwich for breakfast because it is technically a sandwich. “Let’s see how you’re recovering from the tummy tuck before we get to the lower lift. Can you lower the girdle?”

I nod with my heart in my throat. I can’t leave Brian until I get through the second surgery and I land a job. I need this surgery. Vanity be damned. My soul is in pain.

I stand from the table and slip the robe back from my shoulders. My breasts are on display and I unhook the over-the-shoulder straps. I unzip each side of the girdle, then unhook each of the dozen eye hooks. I lower the girdle I’ve worn all day, every day, since my surgery to reveal my perfectly flat stomach. My first win in regaining my life.

“Looks good,” Dr. Denali says as she eyes my abs, oblivious to my nudity. She looks at my reconstructed belly button, the original having been tossed into a medical waste receptacle during the tummy tuck. Most of the scabs have fallen off, but there is still a little bit left within the superficial indentation which is otherwise a beautiful shade of rose.

Then, Dr. Denali lowers her gaze to my incision. She cocks her head to one side, then to the other, taking in the angled line. Still more scabs on my right side, which had the drain in longer, but the left side of the incision has been fading from red to a muted pink. My stretch marks run perpendicular to my scar. The tattoos of motherhood crossing paths with the scar of the New Me.

“You’re free from all restrictions unless your belly hurts. Then stop. And no more girdle except when you do something strenuous. Your muscles will want that support, at least initially. But, I think we can schedule the second surgery for eight weeks from now,” says Dr. Denali. My chest swells as I inhale a deep breath of excitement. “Go ahead and get dressed. Cleo will check you out at the front desk and schedule your next appointment in four weeks as well as your lower lift surgery.”

I squeal, “Thank you.” The good doctor leaves the room and I re-dress. My mind swirls at taking the next step toward freedom. I slip on my winter jacket and weave through the hallway until I reach the front desk.

“Kristen Yonce. I need to schedule two appointments.”

Cleo taps her keyboard, then pauses to look up at me with a smile. “Ah, the Mommy Surgeries,” she says.

My face flushes. I hate her. Her friendly demeanor and that horrific label. A tummy tuck and a lower lift. Common surgeries for any woman who has borne children. A breast lift would be the trifecta.

My abs tense and I feel the tight skin across my navel. Since my tummy tuck, I’ve worn a belt of pained-turned-desensitized skin. This is my championship belt for losing weight. For finding myself.

It’s not about my kids or motherhood. It’s my achievement.

“Yes,” I say through gritted teeth. “I need to schedule my follow-up and then the lower lift.” For the next five minutes, I ignore all impulse to tell off Cleo who is only doing her job.

When I leave the doctor’s office with my faux-fur hood pulled tightly around my face, I hear my inner mantra: Fight for me. Fight for me.

***

Home over the next two weeks is almost unbearable. Brian works late and texts with Seamus have been falling to the wayside. His wayside. I’m still keeping up with reaching out.

He claims he’s busy and that he hopes I’ll understand, but I miss him, and it hurts that the person who once saw me now seems to be dismissing me.

It’s not helping that the winter snow and ice keeps generating travel warnings and making any outings nearly impossible. I want to escape anywhere, even if that means driving forty-five minutes to the nearest Target with no interest in buying anything. Instead, my confinement at home continues.

Then, the kids’ extracurricular activities are canceled. One by one, my children are stuck at home with me and they’re bored. So bored that they fight over who sat on the spinney chair last until one of them is flung off said chair and is crying. Or they come up with disgusting games like who can spit in the sink with the most mucus.

The screaming and crying, followed by the banshee wails for Mom, are piercing into my spine. The dreadful secret I’ve held onto over the last year floods my brain as I break up Mason and Abigail from trying to bind Geoffrey to one of the kitchen chairs. They use Megan’s belts, which means all four Horsemen of the Apocalypse are in my kitchen and screaming.

I wish I’d only had one child. I wouldn’t trade any of my four for a specific one of them. I don’t regret the people who are smaller versions of Brian and me. I resent the responsibility of raising plague monsters into adulthood─never-ending and exhausting. These are the people I chose to create when I wanted more people in my life to love me, but the moments of stress, constant worry, absolute grossness, and prioritizing all of them before myself are breaking me.

As I have discovered who I am, I realize that I was never meant to be the mother of four. Instead of my children fulfilling me, I have no one to build me up. All I want is to be saved. Even if it’s for a moment. Someone to care enough to take the burdens off my back. The most loving act, and I have no one.

With another shriek in the air, I’m fighting tears. This regret is my greatest shame.

***

The next Wednesday, school is canceled due to an ice day. Megan screams at Abigail for stealing her makeup without permission and using it to paint her whole face as a gothic fairy when my phone dings and I have a plausible reason to ignore the chaos around me. I open the email to see that I’ve been accepted to perform with The Vermont Chorale in the upcoming summer season.

Accepted.

Accepted!

My first singing win. And the ensemble practices are due to start five weeks after my next surgery. It pays almost nothing, but it’s a professional credit and I can make the schedule work. Another step forward in my plan to leave Brian.

“Kids,” I say. The mob ignores me. “Kids!” I try louder. They all turn, equally indifferent.

“Mom’s got her first singing job.”

Geoffrey says, “Does this mean you will be on YouTube?”

“What? No,” I say.

“Pfft,” says my baby.

“Congrats, Mom,” Mason and Abigail say flatly in unison.

“Megan, don’t you have anything to say?”

My beautiful eldest rolls her eyes and sasses, “Congrats.”

I shake my head to turn back to my phone while my children resume their fight for dominance over one another. I text Brian: I got the Chorale gig!

Then I text the same to Seamus. I want more rush from my acceptance, so I reread the email. And reread it. And reread it.

My phone dings. Brian: Congrats!

I shrug. Not the respondent I wanted, but at least someone congratulated me.

The day passes, and it’s not until I’m cooking dinner that I hear from Seamus. Nice. You up for a date later tonight?

My chest tightens. My big win and that’s all I get? But Seamus has been busy. Tone and context are hard in text. I exhale and text back: Sure.

Closing my eyes, I focus on my mantra: Fight for me. Fight for me.

***

March has rolled into April. I’m two weeks away from the lower lift. My NOT-Mommy Surgery surgery. Over the last month, I’ve lost myself in prep work for the upcoming performances. I spend my days rehearsing and doing yoga to work my lung capacity. My evenings, I wrangle children while an exhausted Brian ignores the family chaos from the sofa. Always with the television blaring and his focus on his tablet.

After Brian leaves the house without saying good-bye and I’m left to contend with Mason who now requires and doesn’t want pinkeye medication, I desperately need something to cheer me up. Brian had pointed out all the hours I was putting in for my low-paying gig last night. Now, looking at the sheet music infuriates me. Brian has tainted my small win.

Instead of rehearsing, I reread the last texts between Seamus and me. My expectations for a pick-me-up fizzle as I see them with fresh eyes. My texts are full sentences, usually two or three. His responses are less than three words. He has stopped initiating the contact.

And I am no longer “Kit.” I have no name.

My throat clenches. He’s bored with me. I’ve annoyed him. What happened for him to lose interest in me?

I scroll through our texts. My heart races as the words lay out the story before me. I’m there for him with support about his songwriting. He never asks me about my singing. I ask about his day and follow up with questions. He asks about my day without anything more than a one-word comment.

Even our last few dates were all about him. Focused on his desires.

Choking on my breath, I head to my bathroom and lean over the sink. I rip off my shirt to view myself in my bra. I strip until I’m standing in only my socks before my mirror. I can only see my body from my hips up. My battle scar and motherhood tattoos glare at me. My belly is flat and the marks are soft silver.

I twist to check out my backside. The sagging horrifies me.

All of this work. All of this pain, and I’m a middle class mother of four who no one ever sees as anything but a mother of four. Even when I’m seen, I can’t hold anyone’s attention.

I re-dress and fling myself onto my bed to sob. I have three hours until I have to pick up Geoffrey. I cry for the next two, mourning my wasted life. My faltering dreams. My destroyed body. My worthless value.

***

“But if you leave him, how are you going to make ends meet?” Mom’s a pro at Russian roulette.

“Mom, Brian doesn’t care about me. He doesn’t notice me. Don’t I deserve better?” I say quietly from the kitchen. Abigail is in my bedroom, home with strep throat and watching a YouTube Fortnite video.

“How will you afford to live without his money?” Mom’s go-to worry. “You have four kids, Kristen. You chose to have them. It’s irresponsible if you leave.”

Steadying my voice, I say, “I’m leaving for them.”

“But…”

“Mom, my kids can’t keep watching their mother be weak because it’s easier than fighting for herself. Myself.” I’ve said this repeatedly to my mom for the past few months, but my explanations fall on deaf ears.

“Kristen, you think this will be better, but it’s going to be so hard.”

I sigh. “I know, Mom. But how can my kids ever think they’re worth anything if I don’t show them that I’m worth something?”

“It’s all my fault,” Mom says.

Tears choke my throat. “Not at all. This is about me. I’ve made mistakes in my life, and I need to fix them. I’d rather be alone than with a partner who never notices me. That’s it.”

“Mommy,” whines Abigail.

“Mom, I gotta go. Abigail needs me,” I say.

“Alright, sweetie. Give my angel a kiss and tell her Grandma wants her to feel better.”

“I will.” We hang up, and I compose myself before I enter my bedroom. My poor sick darling sits propped up against a pillow throne. “What do you need, baby?”

“Mom, can you snuggle me?” she says. Her pale face pleads with me.

I climb across my bed to wrap my arms around my fevered child. “Of course, baby.”

She nestles herself into the crook of my arm. “You’re my favorite mom ever.”

The words of my own mother in my mind are replaced by my mantra: Fight for me. Fight for me. Fight for them.

***

“Welcome, Kristen,” Cleo says with her bubbly smile. “Doctor’s running on time. It should only be a few minutes. Have a seat and we’ll come get you shortly.”

I curtly nod then sit in the waiting room, avoiding eye contact with the other patients. I open my phone and scroll through my Instagram notifications. Seamus has been liking my recent posts. I smile.

I go into the main feed. He’s been liking a lot of other singers’ posts. All female.

Then, his responses populate. Kissy emojis. “That’s hot,” and “You’re incredible!” are his comments.

My mouth drops as a purple scrubs-clad nurse calls, “Kristen Yonce?”

I rise from my seat and slip my phone into my winter coat pocket. I follow the nurse as he leads me through the hallway, my mind in a haze. He ushers me into a patient’s room. “Go ahead and take your coat off.”

It’s my pre-surgery appointment, so he has me fill out several pages of medical history on a tablet. While I tap away, the nurse runs through the usual vitals check─temperature, blood pressure, and one blood draw for my hemoglobin levels. I barely notice the questions on the screen. When I hand it back to the nurse, I wonder if I marked that I have an infectious disease.

Turning to leave the room, leaving me alone with my thoughts, the nurse says, “Doctor will be in soon.” He flashes me a smile and adds, “You’re just a week away from your second Mommy Surgery.”

And the hits keep coming.

***

That evening, I plate the kids’ meals while I try to ignore my phone. I don’t want to see something that I can’t unsee, and I’m tired of checking for new messages that aren’t there.

As I sit at the table, my phone dings across the room. I shift in my chair, conditioned to get up to check the message, but it’s dinner time. With my kids surrounding me and babbling about their day, I don’t want to think about anything else.

Even Brian’s presence is far less grating. He’s actually jabbering on with Megan about something from her sociology course. Watching their animated faces, my heart winces. He’s a good dad, even if he is a terrible husband.

We finish eating and I clear the table. Setting the dishes on the counter near the dishwasher, I finally check the message I’ve obsessed over for the last twenty-five minutes. It’s a DM on Instagram.

I apprehensively open it. Then I read it, twice. Then a third time.

It’s an offer for a voice-acting gig! And it will pay me $500. With a possibility to add more gigs.

Sure, I’d be a singing rabbit in a commercial, not on stage, but it’s paying work for my voice.

I rush to Brian in the living room, his feet on the sofa and his finger swiping up and down the tablet. I tell him the offer and show him the email.

Brian stands from the sofa and hugs me. Then he places a chaste kiss on my lips and says, “Congratulations. I’ll take care of the dishes. You enjoy your win.”

I shake my head at his version of a supportive response and text the one person who I know will understand what an accomplishment this is. Moments later, my phone dings: Congrats.

That’s it? I text Seamus again. It’s big, don’t you think?!?

Several moments pass before he answers.

It is. Congrats.

My weighted sadness bubbles until it rages into my fingers. I type. I emotionally vomit everything into one massive text that I had previously held back while hoping we’d get back to what we had been. His distance. His indifference. His public flirtations with other women. His apathy.

I hit Send.

I stare at the screen and heartbreak floods my veins. I skim through what I’d written. Autocorrect and my fury had transformed several sentences into gibberish. But the rest, very clear. Very angry.

My eyes still fixed on the screen, Seamus’s response pops up: I’ve been meaning to bring this up for some time. I think we both know this isn’t working and we should just stop. This is too much drama. You took all the fun out of this for me. Congrats on the gig.

I swallow hard. I meant what I’d said, but Seamus viewed my pain as an attack from a madwoman. Except that I’m no madwoman. I’m a madwoman. A hurt woman.

I want to hide, but there’s nowhere to go. I resign myself to the living room. Brian’s not there for once, so I plop myself onto the sofa. Megan sits on one end, posing for selfies, having taken Brian’s usual seat. Geoffrey lies on his back on the floor, his feet in the air and his hands holding a Kindle above his face as he twists it around.

Mason and Abigail run in screaming. “Mom! Blabigail won’t let me play on the PS4!” Mason wails.

“Don’t call me that!” Both of my middle children push each other as they stand in front of me, waiting for my ruling on which child is in the right and dooming the other to shame.

“Hey, kids,” I say softly. “Mom has some happy news.” I hear the sadness in my voice, but I need to tell them. “Mom got a job today. I’m going to be the voice of a cartoon bunny in a commercial.”

“That’s so cool,” Mason shouts simultaneously to Abigail’s, “You’ll be famous!”

Geoffrey climbs off the floor and onto my lap. “You’re turning into a bunny?”

I smile and chuckle with tears ready to fall. “No baby. I’m going to sing for a cartoon bunny.”

“Okay,” he says and presses his back against my chest to resume play on his tablet.

“That’s really cool, Mom,” Megan says.

I turn to look at my daughter, shocked at the lack of sarcasm. I hear the click of her phone. “Had to take a pic. It’s a big moment,” she says. “Gonna post this.” Her attention leaves the room for the digital world.

Mason leans over his brother and hugs me. “Proud of you, Mom.”

Abigail overlaps her brother’s embrace. “I’m prouder.”

Next week, I will resume a state of pain from another surgery. As soon as I recover, I will tell Brian that I don’t want to be his wife. First the physical pain. Then the emotional.

But today, it’s a battle won for me and my plague monsters.

Fight for me. Fight for them.

Assumptions by James Mulhern

(First published with Fiction on the web and previously published in The Writing Disorder Literary Journal)

“You are altogether beautiful, my love; there is no flaw in you.” (Song of Solomon 4:7)

Peggy Fleming, according to my grandfather was the “homeliest damn woman” he’d ever seen. Her face was swollen and pasty, with broken capillaries that sloped down the sides of her nostrils, flooding the arid plain of her skin, like some dreary river and its tributaries eking over a delta of nasolabial folds to terminate in the red seas of two droopy cheeks. Spindly, awkward limbs stuck out of a round body, like you might see in a kindergartner’s rendering of a person. She was, unfortunately, toothless and hairless as well, suffering from a mysterious childhood disease that had left her with chronic alopecia.

Peggy used to tell us kids that she lost her hair because she refused to eat green beans when she was a child. I always thought it a cruel irony that she had the same name as the graceful and beautiful skater who had won the Olympic Gold Medal in 1968.

I remember hearing my grandparents and Auntie Ag, my grandmother’s older and “much smarter” sister (the one who graduated high school), likening Peggy’s features to those of a bulldog as they puffed away on Lucky Strikes and Parliaments, stopping every now and then to slap down a poker chip or a playing card, or take another sip of whiskey. While they played, I circled the kitchen table and listened, picking up snippets about Peggy’s tragic life.

Her story goes something like this:

She was married once to a very handsome man named Jim, who was quite successful in business, something to do with cutting pants—”slacks” my grandmother called them—for a good company. Everyone was surprised that Peg could get such a catch, but like many ugly people, she had a heart of gold, and oh could she sing! The two of them, they met in a nightclub in Boston’s Back Bay, one of those divey joints, nothin’ too swanky, where Peg sang jazz classics for a small crowd on Friday nights. Jim often stopped by the nightclub after work, and you know, eventually they hit it off. One thing led to another, and of course they got married. But by Christ! How in God’s name could Jim stand to look at that puss day in and day out?

And wasn’t it a tragedy, how one evening, after a game at Fenway Park, Jim drove the green Buick that he loved so much into a fruit stand on the side of the road, killing the old Italian guy selling the stuff, and himself, of course. Afterward, Peg was never the same. She wouldn’t go out, still hardly does, and that was years ago. It’s a shame how she’s tried to drown her sorrows by cozying up to that bottle. It’s a good thing she has a neighbor like Helen to check on her, and take her out once in a while.

My grandmother would beam smugly. Aunty Ag would say, “Oh what troubles some people have,” and my grandfather would look down, embarrassed he had said too much.

***

In the knotty pine basement of Peggy’s home was a beautiful Steinway piano. My most vivid memory of Peg’s singing was when. After my grandmother and she had a few highballs, they led me down the cellar stairs so that she could sing for me. My grandmother had bragged that I was a most talented pianist, and Peg wanted to share her own talent with me, encouraging me that I could “make it” like she had.

They were both very drunk. I was relieved that neither of them fell down the stairs and broke their necks. My grandmother goaded Peg to sing “When Your Old Wedding Ring Was New,” Peg’s favorite.

With one thin arm braced against the polished black surface of the Steinway, she sang with no accompaniment. Even now, years later, I hear the swelling sadness in her voice, the indignity and shame that I experienced when my grandmother slyly smirked at me and rolled her eyes. Peg was horrible of course. Years of smoking, drinking, and heartache had ravaged her vocal chords, but her pain was so real. I knew that she was dreaming, longing for her husband Jim. I think it was then that the first throb of death’s glower entered my consciousness.

***

When I was ten, my father sent my dog to the pound because he barked too much. I cried and phoned my grandmother, who had just come from lunch with Peg. The two of them arrived within the hour, scolded my mother, and cursed my father, who was still at work. A few hours later, we retrieved Scruffy from the Animal Rescue League of Boston. During the ride back, my grandmother and Peg convinced me that the best thing was to find a new home for the dog.

“To hell with your father.” Peg passed me a mint she kept in her pocketbook in case her blood sugar dropped. “We saved Scruffy’s life, sweetheart. And what matters most, Jimmy, is knowing that he’s happy.  Sometimes that’s the way it has to be, my love.”

At my grandmother’s house, Peg took charge, calling the local radio stations and asking would they broadcast that “the sweetest dog Scruffy” needed a home. She and my grandmother drank several whiskey sours during their home-for-the-dog campaign, and I’m certain that the disc jockeys did not take Peg seriously, let alone understand her slurred words.

“You’ll see. Everything will be all right,” she kept telling me.

We had Chinese food delivered, and at the end of our meal, Peg opened a fortune cookie and read, “Do you believe? Endurance and persistence will be rewarded.” For Peggy, this was a mystical sign that we should “get off our arses” and knock on doors all over the neighborhood.

“Where there’s a way, there’s a will,” she stammered. “What we need is faith is all, and our coats.” She smiled at me and rubbed my head.

My grandmother said she was too damn tired to go traipsing around the neighborhood, and passed out on the couch.

Peggy said, “To hell with you, too, then!” and laughed.

The three of us, Peg, Scruffy, and myself, canvassed the neighborhood. It was December and cold. The sky was crystal clear. I could see my breath, and just above us, one bright star seemed to be chasing a crescent of moon.

What a sight we must have been. Peg zigzagging beside me, me nudging Peg–trying to keep her from falling off the curb, Scruffy following behind, wagging his tail and sniffing spots along the way.

We walked several blocks that night, ringing bells and knocking on doors, stopping a few times to plan what we should say. Peg said that what we needed was a “hook.” She suggested that she could take off her wig and tell the people “just a little white lie” about her dying of cancer.

I said that I thought that was probably a mortal sin, and my grandmother wouldn’t like it. She reluctantly agreed, and we decided to state the simple facts. “No blarney. Just the bit about your father sending poor Scruffy to the pound.”

Some people didn’t answer their doors. It must have been after 10 p.m., and I imagined tired strangers peeking out at us, annoyed to be disturbed at this time of the night. Of the people who listened to our tale of woe, most were gracious and polite. Some of the neighbors clearly recognized Peg though, and they expressed exasperation and disgust on their faces.

“Take the boy and his dog home,” one young mother said. “It’s too late to be out, especially with you in the state you’re in. You should be ashamed of yourself. It’s freezing out there and the boy’s gonna catch a cold.”

“But the dog needs a home,” Peg pleaded.

“The boy needs a home. Now take him home before I call the police and have you arrested for public drunkenness.” She gave me a pitiful look before shutting the door in our faces.

“Show me the way to go home. I’m tired and I wanna go to bed,” Peg sang. “I had a little drink about an hour ago and it went right to my head—”Have faith,” she told me, “We’ll find a home for him. You know I’d keep him if I could, Jimmy, but I’m all allergies. Makes my face puff up and screws up my breathing.” In addition to alopecia and diabetes, Peg suffered from episodes of acute asthma.

My grandmother was snoring on the couch when we returned. Scruffy jumped onto the wing-tipped chair, and curled himself into a ball.

Peg and I serenaded my grandmother with “You’re Nobody Till Somebody Loves You” until she awoke with a start and asked for her “damn” drink.

The rest of the night is a blur. Perhaps I fell asleep on the rug watching TV. Maybe my grandfather carried me to bed when he returned from his night job. What I remember most about the events of that evening is that Peg kept her promise.

Later that week, she found a home for Scruffy–with a “rich doctor” at the clinic where she got all her medications. A couple times over the following months, she took me to see Scruffy. I was content. He had a large fenced-in yard, and there were other dogs as well. I was happy to know that he was happy. Peg had been my savior.

***

A few years later, my grandmother brought my sister, Beth, with Peg, and me to be “cured” in the waters of Nantasket Beach. Snapping open her compact, she peered into the mirror while she smothered her lips with red, all the while explaining the importance of August 15th to us. We were seated in her kitchen, sunlight flickering on the orange-and-gold checkered pattern of the wallpaper behind her.

“On August 15th,” my grandmother elaborated, “we celebrate the Feast of the Blessed Mother’s Assumption, when Jesus’s mother, was taken to her heavenly home.”

“Who took her?” Beth asked.

“God, dear.”

“In an airplane?”

“No, sweetheart. Finish up your eggs.”

“Then how’d she get there?”

My grandmother rose and began washing dishes at the sink. Beth and I looked past her head through the window to examine the sky.

“It’s a mystery, Bethie. Just one of those things,” she said.

“Oh.” Beth picked up her fork. “A mystery.”

The dogma of the Assumption, I later learned, was firmly established in 1950 when Pope Pius XII made his decree that the Immaculate Mother of God was “assumed into heavenly glory.” I’ve always wondered why it took so long to decide on the fate of poor Mary, who like a participant in a tableau vivant, remained motionless, one foot on the earth and one foot in the air, for centuries.

On that August day, the idea of a “cure” paled in comparison to the roller coaster ride my sister and I, if well behaved, might enjoy at Paragon Amusement Park across from the beach. Since we weren’t sick and didn’t need a cure, “Mary’s blessing” seemed like a gip.

After breakfast, the three of us—Beth and I wearing bathing suits under our T-shirts, and my grandmother arrayed in a white and gold sundress, a wide-brimmed hat with a spray of lilies, and black Farrah sunglasses—crossed the street to get Peggy, who had been “very ill” lately.

I had overhead my grandparents whispering about Peg’s “delirium tremens,” how she was imagining things, and telling crazy stories about monkeys calling her up on the phone. One night a police officer brought her to my grandmother’s house after he found Peg wandering the streets of a nearby square; she was bruised and teary.

Peg said she was looking for her husband Jim, trying to bring him home. I remembered our cold walk in December and wondered if Jim had been on her mind even then.

In the bag I carried were six baby-food jars to collect salt water for our family, some clusters of red grapes, as well as apples, raisins, and a few banana loaves that my grandmother had stolen from Solomon’s Bakery, where she worked part time. My grandmother believed it was a mortal sin to waste the day-old baked goods, even though the management had insisted that they be tossed in the rubbish.

Just outside Peg’s door, my grandmother stopped us. “Now you both behave. And Jimmy, remember to call her Lovely Peggy, ” she whispered quickly.

“Lovely Peggy” was the sobriquet my grandmother had invented one Sunday after a sermon the priest had given on the power of names and the mystery of the Word. If we thought lovely things about Peggy, she explained, Peggy’s life would be happier, and she would feel better. “You kiddos don’t know how much this visit means to a lonely old lady.”

Peg opened the door. I mechanically announced, “Good morning, Lovely Peggy.”

Peggy responded, as she always did, “Isn’t he adorable,” while Beth skirted past her into the kitchen, desperate to get away, and my grandmother, appalled at Peg’s appearance, said, “What’s the matter with you? Did you forget we were going to the beach?” She looked down at Peg’s feet, tsking at what Peg was wearing. “You look foolish in those things.”

Peggy had a confused look on her face, like she was half-asleep. There was pure grief in her expression, as if she felt cheated from a surprise. Her housedress, which had a pattern of tiny roses, shrouded a pair of small black boots. There were red stains at the end of her sleeves from where she had spilled some juice. She had forgotten her wig and the sunlight highlighted a laurel of peach-fuzz hair; a few silver strands, moist from sweat, garlanded the area by her temples and behind her large ears. The blinds were pulled down on the window behind the kitchen table, and the sweet smell of cedar cabinets and wine surrounded us in a cloud.

My grandmother crossed the threshold, flicked on the lamp, and guided Peg to the table. I hadn’t seen Peg in several months. Her usual cheeriness had vanished, and she was distracted and distant. It unnerved me to see how much she had changed. I joined my sister who was seated on the verdant green divan in the living room, strategically positioned in front of the dish of hard candies that we had grown accustomed to raiding on our visits.

We were quiet, enjoying the deliciousness of peppermint candy, swinging our legs together and humming just a little, eavesdropping on the conversation from the kitchen table, which was not far from where we sat.

“Let’s have one for the road, Helen.”

“You’ve had quite enough already, Peg. Aren’t your feet hot in those God-awful boots?”

“Not really.”

“But your feet must stink. You’ve got to take those damn things off. The salt water will be good for your gout and all that puffiness around your ankles. And the water will help the calluses on our soles!”

Peg laughed. “I figured the boots were perfect for the beach.”

“For Christ’s sake, Peg. The point is to get wet. How else are you going to get the cure?”

“Cure for what?”

“Anything. Your aching bones, your mood, your bowels, whatever it is that’s bothering you. God will know what you need. Miracles do happen, ya know.”

I pictured my grandmother making the sign of the cross, Peg watching dreamily. I don’t know that Peg was very religious. I’m not even sure if she was a practicing Catholic, but that wouldn’t have stopped my grandmother in her missionary zeal.

“I believe miracles sometimes do happen, Helen,” Peg said at last. “It will only take me a moment to get ready. I have to use the little girls’ room and put on my fancy wig and makeup so I can look divine for my Jim over there,” she said, looking at me.

“I need to straighten out, get my life together.” Peg arched her back.

“You’re fine, Peg.” My grandmother helped her through the narrow doorway and down the hall. Peg hesitated every now and then, pressing her trembling palm against the wall, as if to discern whether it, or she, was still really here.

***

It was breezy at the shore. Soon we found a comfortable place on the beach. My grandmother rubbed tanning oil into Peg’s bald scalp, forehead, and the nape of her neck. She shone like a miniature Sun.

Peg let Beth and I drape a necklace of dried seaweed upon her. We pretended it was a string of jewels. Then the two of us scribbled words into the sand with our fingers and played Yahtzee until we lost one of the die. The salty north winds felt good against our skin, and Peg wrapped our shoulders with her purple towel so we wouldn’t get burned.

Later, as Beth and I waded through the shallow waters at the ocean’s edge, we stopped occasionally to work and wedge our feet into the cool sand, then sloshed our legs through the foam a bit, deliberately making heavy giant steps and dancing to keep pace with the sun. We splashed ourselves as we jumped to avoid dark clumps of seaweed or a jellyfish. We scanned the hard bottom for a lonely starfish or stone, or the clam with a secreted pearl.

For a while, we explored large rocks that edged the beach, unearthing small crabs in the sand between, and startling a mourning dove that sped from its cleft into the bright sky. It made a whistling sound as it rose, descended over the water where my grandmother and Peg were walking towards the ocean. The waves beyond glimmered like sparks from an unquenchable fire. On a jetty in the distance, a father and his son cast fishing lines into the sea.

Suddenly, we heard my grandmother shout, “Watch yourself!” but it was too late, both she and Peg were surprised by a spirited breaker that razed them in its wake.

Of course we ran to help, but delighted, too, in the spectacle—my grandmother and Peggy, seated on their asses just a few feet from where the waves trickled to their end. In an instant they were kneeling forward, laughing so hard that they cried.

We helped lift them in between guffaws and groans that the soles of their feet were cramping from shells and stones beneath. My grandmother said that her “permanent is all ruined” while she fussed with her hair.

Peggy answered, “At least I don’t have to worry about that,” and they laughed even harder. Then Lovely Peggy reached for me.

I was mesmerized by her wet silvery scalp, and resisted the urge to touch the crown of her head before I gave her my hand and she rose from the sea. “Jimmy, you’re my angel,” she said, and kissed me on the forehead.

We filled six jars with water that day, and starving, we made a feast of the bread and fresh fruit by a small tide pool in the shade of a bony cliff. In the late afternoon, Beth and I had our roller coaster ride. With hands shielding their eyes from the sun, my grandmother and Peggy waved to us, transfigured figurines on the earth below, their clothing white as snow. The coaster lifted our chariot further into the crystal sky, while on the horizon, heat lightening flashed behind a lacey curtain of gray.

***

It has been a long time since that ride, but when I recall that afternoon, I feel the heady anticipation of the rising, and the delightful fright of the quick fall.

Only a few days later, early on a Sunday morning, my mother came to my room to wake me. She sat on the side of my bed where I had propped myself against a pillow.

She told me that Lovely Peggy had died in her sleep.

I felt the pang of grief, but a sweet happiness, too, as I remembered our December journey, Peg’s persistence and her songs. I imagined Peggy “over there.” Eyes no longer teary, her countenance reflected the brightness of a blazing fire.

Finally she was home with her Jim. Completely awake—laughing, altogether beautiful, and divine—she rose once again to sing her favorite song. The sun’s great light shone upon and caressed her warm skin, like the flesh of a Father’s hands as He cradles His child’s head before lifting. His crossed arms relaxed to kiss her soft cheek. A Father, joyful and tearful at the same time, became hallowed by a loveliness that would forever be a part of Him.

Love and Extinction by Geoffrey Enright

Andrew Moore killed my wife, Julianne Woodrow exactly six months ago. Ran her over with his car after drinking all afternoon at some work party. I couldn’t believe how many people took the stand in his defense, swearing up and down what a good guy he was, how “out of character” it was for him to get so lit. Luckily my brother, Jacob Woodrow, was able to present Andrew’s history of similar behaviour: four DUIs with an assault and battery to boot.

Andrew was sentenced to forty years in prison, which would put him close to eighty upon release. Assuming he’d make it that long. But I know he won’t, me neither, or anybody else hanging out on this planet for that matter. 

In exactly eight minutes an asteroid the size of Kansas is going to get into a slugfest with earth and it’s going to kick our ass. As a matter of fact, the radio just signed off; guy made a point to get in a bit about God. We’re about to see who God is and isn’t looking out for. Suppose it’s as good a time as any to start smoking again after three years without. 

***

You see, the federal government and NASA, that’s who I work for, have known about this asteroid for a little less than three hours. Three hours, that’s it? Yes, that’s it. We’ve never seen anything like it before, a “silent” asteroid that was never picked up until it was much too late. And it is very much indeed too late. At least someone had the sense to give a name to the planet we think the asteroid cane from, not that the record will survive: G9V5. 

Stub out a cigarette, light up another.  I know what some of you are thinking, what some of you may be thinking at least: why is everyone so calm if the world’s down to its final minutes?  There’s a very simple answer for that, we haven’t told them what’s going on, only the immediate members of the team are aware any of this is going on. 

“But what about the guy on the radio, the sign off?” you may say.  To that, I will tell you while the sign off was indeed very real, the reason we fed him was not. At this exact moment in our country we are going through something of a health scare, so we used that to our advantage. 

At this exact moment government personnel are flooding the streets to put a “quarantine” into effect in attempts of catching and stopping the supposed health crisis. Believe what you will about the federal government, but this quarantine was put into play in the hope of guaranteeing that nobody, at least in this country, will die alone. We all deserve to have somebody. 

From where I’m at, on the deck of my penthouse, I can see everyone moving inside, empty stores, and men in biohazard suits with assault rifles gathering everyone up in nothing more than an attempt to keep calm. I’m shocked nobody’s noticed the lack of tents, tanks, scientists, and whatever else they’ve seen in the movies. By the time their panic burns out and the rationality sets back in we’ll all be dead. But for now my cat Lacy, sitting on the deck at my feet beside the chair, doesn’t have a care in the world. 

All I can see now is my wife.  Stub out cigarette, light up another.  Julianne had my eyes, my heart, and my soul from the first moment we met at a house party back in our days at NMU together. She was the only person talking that night who had something to say. Being profound by nature was her gift from the god she believed in.

And her beauty, it was radiant and never ending. Her beige skin, straight black hair and brown eyes… the little arches on her long slender feet…the way her eyes always guided me out from the deepest pits of my soul. 

She may have been the only reason for me to ever consider God, because she was an angel. She was my angel. Always was, always will be. For a few moments longer anyway.

I would love nothing more than to reawaken and find her waiting for me but I just cannot bring myself to believe in such things. And for that, Julianne, I am truly sorry.

The sky’s getting brighter, fast. I don’t know if anybody else has noticed it. Like there was a film over the sky but it’s been since removed. Before long we all might live long enough to die from our suntans. That was a bad attempt at humor, none of us will live long enough for such a thing. 

My skin tells me so, Lacy tells me so as she begins to cry in discomfort from the heat that continues to grow rapidly. I reach down and grab her, scooping her up into my lap. She’s crying like birth now. My lips meet the top of her trembling head.

I whisper: It’ll be over soon, baby, I promise. 

It’s getting brighter…and hotter.  Brighter…and hotter.  Lacy is seizing and leaking bodily fluids into my lap, her desperate cries for help are gargled as she continues to liquefy in my arms.  I’m next, oh my it’s getting so hot. I’m going to die any second, it’s so hot, oh my it’s so hot.

OH MY GOD!

Geoffrey Enright lives on the island of Malta in the Mediterranean with his girlfriend and their dog Tasha.

Flash Fiction by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

Huckleberries

This couple I know: they were high school sweethearts, the Bonnie and Clyde of the northwest San Fernando Valley, undetected.

Some moron had selected the “Chancellor” as the school mascot. A chancellor was some kind of British judge—a little faggot in a long white wig, was how the kids described it. We denied the “Chancellor” and unofficially adopted the Cowboy as mascot. Cowboys were what we were all about, that and the aerospace engineers who were colonizing our living space, taking down small ranches and putting up stucco housing developments. Their kids didn’t walk the roads barefoot in summer the way we did.

The town was changing. Excess warehouses were being taken over as studios for the porn industry. Eventually the town became the PORN CAPITAL OF THE WORLD. The high school cheerleaders made up slutty whore routines, and performed them at halftime, and the Vice-Principal, “Chrome-Dome,” McNellis, supported them. He would not allow a posse of evangelists to deny them their freedom of speech.

Enter this couple, Bonnie and Clyde: he was half man/ half dog, more wolf really, she half reptile/half bird, a plumed serpent in the big-breasted, leather-clad flesh. At least that’s the way they thought of themselves and we, their friends, came to think of them.

On prom night Clyde put his hairy head into the punch bowl. Bonnie slithered across the dessert table like an iguana, her tail flicking aside tortes and meringue. The fat kids grieved the lost pastries. They got on the floor and, under cover of dimness, shoved them into their drooling mouths.

After promming off, B & C smoked dope in the House of Dwarfs. Every one of them had lost their virginity by the age of fourteen. Their garage breathed in and out like a cartoon garage, their soundtrack crazy clarinet riffs.

 I stood out in the road, waiting to be invited in. I was desperate for their acceptance, but the dwarfs had taken a dislike to me, I don’t know why. Everyone in school knew that I suffered from mental illness, but I didn’t think so. I couldn’t act any more sane than I did.

Then Dog Boy and Reptile Girl left the dwarfs to do what dwarfs do after events that are allegedly life-changing, and rode rusted-out dirt bikes into the Mojave to celebrate their Mayan heritage. When the sun came up, they set the bikes down in the cool, exhausted sand, knelt and worshipped the Rabbit in the Moon, then flaaagellaaated themselves like Spanish priests. They pounded their foreheads with chunks of jade with 400-million-year half-lives, royal jade, orange flecked with green. There were blood spots on their foreheads. The sheriff’s squad car roiled up dust in the distance. He wasn’t looking for them.

“I’ll be your Huckleberry,” said Dog Boy.

“I’ll be yours,” said Reptile Girl.

They were ready to move on. They did. They traveled far and wide, but returned for our fiftieth reunion. The rest of us had changed. Even the dwarfs had changed. But they hadn’t.

***

Third

1.

Adelaide of Burgundy became the patron saint of second marriages.

Her first husband, Lothair II, King of Italy, was poisoned. Her second husband called himself great, called himself holy.

Adelaide knew the truth but would not share it. She had taken a vow of silence.

Her husband blessed her for it. He was vexed with loudmouthed women. If it were up to him, he would have all female voice boxes removed at birth. What a different world it would be, he fantasized as he drifted off to sleep.

His silent and good wife, Adelaide was a woman to be emulated, he told his friends at table as their wives looked on with sour expressions.

2.

At age seventeen, I was a good deal younger than Adelaide, whom I’d heard was the saint of second marriages. I was a Paul Simon song: a rock, an island. I was Dostoyevsky’s underground man. I was Camus’s Stranger, who only needed his neighbors’ howls of execration to complete him.

All of this was nonsense to Adelaide.

I was a zombie, undone by a woman I’d met in New Orleans. I was a diamond with a flaw, as described by an Okie girlfriend who, until I told her otherwise, thought The Diary of Anne Frank was fiction.

None of this was relevant to Adelaide. She was a good deal older than me, the saint of second marriages.

I would be her third husband.  

***

My Daughter’s Hair  

Tens of thousands of data centers feed a spiraling multitude of web sites. Rows of servers spread over millions of square feet in warehouses which were once fields with pumpkins shining orange against black soil. Me and my brothers roamed the fields, and had pumpkin fights with the failed ones, trying to be careful not to smash any good ones, most of the time succeeding.

I still live in the old farmhouse, though there is no land around it, not even enough for a garden. The data centers run at max ‘round the clock. I hear the data buzz like bee hives, growl like packs of animals. I smell it burning. I get up in the middle of the night and drink orange juice, but I can’t get the taste of data out of my throat. Nobody thinks of people like me when they turn on their computers.

My daughter’s hair is brown kelp. It streams southward in the current. She stands on the ocean floor eighty feet down. She’s no scuba diver, no mermaid, but she’s invulnerable to drowning, one of the skills she developed growing up with a schizophrenic mother in the midst of data centers. She learned to adapt to being submerged, a massive weight on her shoulders.

Water is heavy. A mere gallon of water weighs over eight pounds, and there are millions of gallons of water pressing on her, yet she wears a serene expression. Her wisdom flows out, flows around her, drifts with the current and blesses people downstream. She is wiser than I will ever be, even if I live a century.

Work by Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois appears in magazines worldwide. Nominated for numerous prizes, he was awarded the 2017 Booranga Centre (Australia) Fiction Prize. His novel, Two-Headed Dog, based on his work in a state hospital, is available for Kindle and as a print edition. His poetry collection, THE ARREST OF MR. KISSY FACE, published in March 2019 by Pski’s Porch Publications, is available here. Visit his website  to read more of his poetry and flash fiction.

This is Only Happening by Adam Scharf

Don’t get me wrong, I like Jane, but God only knows if I like Jane for Jane or I’m just sick in the belly over a breakup. I cling to Jane to make sure that when I snap, hearing voices, raving on the street, it’s at least in front of someone decent. You’d love her. Lovey-dovey as all get out towards me, and anyone who says the right things, believe me. She’s that person you intuitively know things about and have no idea why or how you know them. The friend of the family’s sister who lives upstate. The one you unceasingly heard about since you were a kid, I bet. I’m brainwashing myself into being crazy about her. Into believing all my headaches are out the window. 

Jane’s rich and her bedroom has drapes in it. A walk-in closet to reinvent yourself in. Her house is full of antiques, mostly furniture, and tire tracks through the rose garden. A family portrait advertising an older brother whose piety makes him say dang instead of hell.

She gives monologues unfolding her favorite features on a man. Among other things, a good whispering ear─an ear that’s nice to whisper into. I’ll let slip her least favorite too, sweaty hair on the back of the neck. That’s something we both can agree on.

Jane doesn’t listen, and that’s the greatest thing about her. She doesn’t pretend or anything. After you say something weighty and longwinded she’ll go, “See that lady? I bought that same shirt for my father.”

It’s best to only respond, “Jane, you’re killing me.”

She might, too. In her bedroom I’m usually inches from an unblocked window where I could probably jump out in an “accidental” way.

I know how to do it. I tell her, “Jane, let’s make love with the curtains open.” Then fall out screaming, “Dear God!” the whole way down.

Falling could be the only way out of this. An eye witness might blow it, telling the police, “No, no, he was smiling the entire time.”

Maybe not. Maybe I just read one of those inspirational magnets before tripping and just couldn’t shake the inspiration. You can never tell about a guy who falls the dang out a window.

I’ll break it to you, Jane ashes cigarettes on the carpet, and loves ineffectual questions. Last night she asked, “Gabriel, why are you sad? Can’t you be happy?”

I told her, “Never, I’m a wreck. It being my birthday and all.” It couldn’t be farther from my birthday. I thought it would be funny to tell her it was my birthday. That’s how sick I am.

This morning she asks, “Gabriel, what’s your favorite feature on a woman?”

The free-falling out of a window opportunity looked more and more mouth-watering, but I answered pretending to wield a cigarette in my left hand. “The landscape of the back. The crook of the neck. The curve of the breast. Sometimes I find the scent of the wrist from an old bottle of perfume she put on thinking nobody would smell her that night.”

“What turns you on the most?”

“A cold hand on my chest.”

“That’s boring.”

Boring. Does a boring guy jump out of a window after laughing at the wall for twenty minutes?

It’s nice to hold someone’s hand before falling asleep. The loneliest moment in anyone’s life is when you want to share insignificant crumbs about your day, but no one’s the dang around, or worse they don’t value closeness during mediocre moments. They want everything splashy without sincerity. Kinkade paintings without gusto. I’m going to go ahead and tell you right now what I think: the closest you’ll ever feel to another human being is sharing knowledge of an ending before anyone else knows. Parents knowing they’re leaving the playground before their kids do—it irons them together for eternity, I’m telling you.

Something’s changing between her and me. She’s probably had it up to here with me. I’m a screwball who’s applying her affection to get over someone. It’s a low thing to commit, but I’m sick. She deserves decency. You can tell she’s at the end of her rope when she paces the room like a captive whale in a tank.

She’s told me more than once, “I don’t know why I bother with you. You’re boring,” then places Beethoven on the record player and doesn’t bother starting it at the beginning but right smack dab in the middle of the record. She’s unbalanced, for crying out loud.

This morning it started building, she paced the room letting me have it. “Haven’t we had a nice romance? I dress nice for you. I read your stories. We make love every night. We go ice-skating. Nothing makes you happy!”

She omitted the night I read her diary out loud as we ate grapefruit (according to March 19^th of last year. When feeling pointless and unattended, she drives by old boyfriend’s houses without stopping, knocking, or as much as giving a neighborly wave. As though arriving at the

podium without a speech, nodding, and slowly promenading stage left. That’s the sickness I’m talking about. The rat pulls the lever to feed itself cocaine till it dies.

This afternoon, after draining my glass, I could barely stand, but did it anyway. She asked, “Tell me your best move with a woman?”

“Making love with the curtains open.”

I tried holding myself up on her wall. “Eroica,” is the only record she owns because I bought it for her to play something when it rains. Endless rain, and the wind, scare me to death. She told me I was boring, not at all eye-popping like our first night together. I could tell you about that.

That night I wore my wealthy brother-in-law’s clothes to feasibly appear like I’m raking it in.

She was at a table by herself in a flowered dress. Her gestures made me nervous to say anything to her. I couldn’t think what to say. It didn’t help she was beautiful and had style.

She asked me what I did for a living and I told her I was an oil man. I kept with it because I thought it would be funny to just keep saying, “Oil man,” all night. I whispered it in her ear and she fell to pieces.

Luckily, she loves soft talking and fossil fuels. I figured when I was drunk enough I’d play the rich cliché commanding her to pack her things because we’re going anywhere in the world tonight, business class. When she’d yawn her mouth in wonder, mingled with perplexity, gushing about how she couldn’t possibly accept a gift such as that, I’d bring up the leg room, and ask for a kiss, then call it a night.

None of that happened. No kidding, she used the word, “Absolutely.” I only had a few dollars left to my name so there was nothing to worry about. She had me drive her home in pouring rain to watch her pack in the dark. I was about to throw up over the matter when the craziest thing happened. I told her, “Jane, I have $12 in my pocket, and I’m incredibly attracted to you.” 

We’ve been together ever since.

With Jane, nothing’s off the table. We talk about the whole shebang: marriage, death, and what not to name a kid to increase the odds they’ll say actual swear words. We tell each other everything we’ve ever been afraid of as though we’re already a part of each other.

Tonight’s her breaking point. It’s 8:30 pm. I pretend I’m asleep to avoid what’s about to happen. After pacing the room she’s standing over me from Mount Olympus. “Wake up. I know your problem, Gabriel. You’re hung up on that young thing you mentioned almost a hundred times. What’s her name? Gretchen. The dancer? You say her name when you’re sleeping. I bet anything you daydream about being hilarious in front of her family. You think you’re in the wrong place, with the wrong woman. Some friend who thinks he’s psychic probably told you it would all work out with her. A great sign of immaturity, Gabriel.

“Let me get this straight, the story of your life isn’t happening according to plan. Terribly original. There is no right place. You have this story in your head, your immortal beloved. Your inamorata. Your story isn’t here. I’m here. You’ll love me, but deep down you know somewhere I’m mediocre, and she is too. Someone should let you in on a secret. My English college professor, who I was very close with, Mark Walters, told me this secret, and I’ll share it with you Gabriel. Everything in your life—those tears, these people, your smile, this rain, your achievements, your epiphanies, your losses—they’re only happening.

“There’s no meaning to any of it. You’re weighing yourself down. The cancer metastasizes, or the cat walks in front of the T.V., without a clue who you are. You thought your feelings were illuminating but they’re garden-variety. It’s only happening! You can go someplace and stand there waiting for everyone to recognize you, but they won’t because you’re the only one filled in on the story. There’s no story, Gabriel. It’s just happening. All this is only happening.”

My head is splitting. “Hannah. Her name is, Hannah. It’s not Gretchen. Hannah.” Goddammit, I love saying Hannah. “It’s Hannah.”

“It’s Mark, for all I care.”

Jane throws a pile of her dresses all over the room. She’s going mad. Scattering dresses everywhere. “Watch, I’m showing you it’s okay to be fine. This is happening. All this is only happening. No good or bad with any of it.”

I’m starting to sweat, lightheaded and achy. We’ve been sick for years. Mistaking a longing in our chest for something good.

“Stop taking yourself personally. Your life has nothing to do with you,” says Jane.

She removes her dress from her body, contemplating where to place this one, before throwing it out the window. Naked. The curve of her breast. “Take off your clothes Gabriel.” Jane takes them off for me, throwing them out the window and closing the curtains.

Mounting me on the bed. Rubbing my chest. Kissing my neck. Biting my ear, her laugh bleeding held down by a sustain pedal, bent along the cut and dried entirely. She smells like lucid dreaming. A rose opens laughing its head off. Am I the only one clapping?

People gather at the foot of Mt. Olympus begging for an answer after a thousand years of famine, hereditary fate, and holy wars. Going up hills to read into stars. Sacrificing all sorts of helpless things like animals, and children for answers. It’s been a long wait. Trying not to grin, the professor of English heroically answers like a waiter who just offered to carry his table’s

water glasses inside after it started raining. He gazes at them with that misty-eyed smile the prophets would fail to capture with integrity. A scribe raises his stone tablet with chisel at hand. Mark Walters lowering his gaze extending his palm. “Friends, this is only happening.”

He pauses for an applause break that never comes. Then has the guts to wink and give them words to describe light. A God that knows nothing. The joke is there’s nothing to tell, but clap at yourself as much as possible. As much as humanly possible. Holy hell, make sure you’re the only one clapping.

“Jane?”

“Yes?”

“I think I love you.”

She doesn’t listen.

“Do you want the lights on when we make love?”

“Honestly, Jane. I think I love you.”

“Whisper it to me.”

“Jane. I’m telling you that I think I love you.”

“You don’t really.”

“I want to feel close.”

“Darling, tonight is all we have. We’re breaking up. You’ll leave tomorrow morning, and we’ll never see each other again.”

We’re diachronic, knowing an ending. For the love of Pete, love is manageable. Blushing as though riding the handlebars of my good-looking boyfriends’ bicycle. We’re ironed together from now on. From now on. 

   Adam Scharf was born and raised in upstate NY. He workås as a professional improviser and writer in Orlando Florida. Previous work has been published in Jokes Review Journal and Clockwise Cat Magazine.  

Birthday Girl by Sharon Frame Gay

The faces around the table are blurred. They’ve lost their hard edges, my vision deteriorating. In front of me is a cake gaily decorated in pinks and greens with enough candles to set off the sprinklers in the ceiling.

I am one hundred and four years old today; April the 11^th, the time of year when spring lambs are born. I came into this world in a small town in North Carolina. Father named me Charlotte, after the city where he grew up. He said he wanted to move to the shadier side of the Carolinas, up into the Great Smoky Mountains, where you hear owls as you fall asleep and count the hills and ridges as they rise from the smoke of dawn. Over a century later, I’m still living in the same small town Daddy moved us to after he and Momma started their family.

When I married, I moved from my childhood farm to a house near Main Street, and from there to a tiny apartment above the drug store. Finally, I came to this retirement home. Not five miles away from my earliest memories it sits near these beloved hills.

To prepare for the party, I was bathed and brushed like a poodle in one of those fancy pet salons. The nurses and attendants in the facility fussed over me with lotions and hair dryers until I was exhausted. Then they stood back, smiled, and flourished a mirror. I stared long at the reflection.

Peering back was a very old woman. My face looked like one of those storage bags they sell on television, where they put a vacuum hose in it and suck all the air out. I have dark brown eyes, but they’re cloudy now, covered with overhanging lids, two tiny orbs peering out of fleshy curtains. There are skin tags and age spots scattered across my face and neck like a map of a heavily populated state. Hair, once long and thick, the color of an oak leaf in the fall, is now wispy and white, scalp shining through like a baby’s bottom.

“Thank God I still have my mind.” I burst out laughing. “That’s what they all say.” I laugh some more.

The gals give a hug then leave me in my room in a wheelchair. It’s not time for the festivities yet, they say, so here I sit, fingers laced in lap. The skin on my hands is paper-thin and fragile. I am afraid of banging them on a doorknob, or bruising them knocking against the nightstand reaching for water, so I wear soft white gloves for protection.

I’m in my best nightgown, light blue with tiny white dandelions sprinkled across it, the bodice smocked and embroidered. It’s my favorite piece of clothing, and I insist on wearing it today. On my feet are pink slippers with non slip bottoms.

I never wear shoes. I only walk to the bathroom and back. The rest of the time, I am in this wheelchair, my feet in retirement.

My daughter Esther knit a yellow shawl that I wear every day. I wrap it around my shoulders and pretend she’s here with me, though she lives three hundred miles away.

She’ll be here today, along with my son Gerald and his wife, kids and grand kids. Esther will bring her sons, too, and their wives and grand children, even a couple of great-grandchildren. Esther’s husband Roy passed away five years ago. She still has to work, well into her seventies. After retirement, she’s moving back here, to be closer to me.

I think to myself, Hurry, Esther.

Four years ago, my hundredth birthday was quite the shindig. I suppose everyone thought they would celebrate my natal day, and have a hail and farewell party all at the same time. It was something to behold. The party was in a rented hall, and over fifty people attended. There were speeches, little kids reciting poetry, live piano music, and a potluck dinner. My birthday was announced on national television. A photo of my face peered out of a Smucker’s jelly jar on the Today Show.

 Most folks don’t make it another four years, but I surprised everybody, including myself. Family and friends have dutifully gathered every April 11th and twisted paper streamers through the dining room of the facility, brought vases of peonies and jugs of lemonade and ice tea, and sang “Happy Birthday”.

While waiting for the party to begin, I glance around the room. My eyes rest on a photograph of Peter, my husband, dead so long ago I barely recognize him. I wonder if that will change in heaven. Will I walk right past him, or run into his arms?

He passed away almost forty years ago. I gaze at his face, so much younger than mine now, and try to remember what it was like to feel the bulk of him wrapped around me as we made love, recall the fights, the kisses and the laughter we had over the years. Would he still think I was pretty if he saw me now? Would he sneak his hand up my leg, a sly smile on his face, and will I slap it away, tired and weary, like I was when the kids were babies?

He went off to war decades ago then came home. We had to learn the map of each others’ body all over again. There were shy moments in the dark, his stranger’s breath on my neck, a warrior now who knew things. Things we didn’t share, because he refused to talk about the battles. It was never the same between us, but over the years things softened, grew more comfortable.

Peter was as dear to me as my next breath. The day he died I begged God to take me with him. I cried and yanked strands of hair out of my head, heart yearning. Over time I learned to talk about him the way you talked about a character in a book, fondly, but able to close the cover and move on.

Now they wheel me down the hall. There’s a singular quietness in the dining room, as though everyone is holding their breath. We push through the door, and the room energizes with children and teenagers, middle aged folks, and the other ancient ones who are on a journey in this tired old place.

They light the candles on the cake and sing right away, as though they want to make sure I live long enough to purse my lips and send weak wisps of air towards the cake. Esther steps in and helps, blowing the flickering candles out before the wax runs down into the frosting, turning it hard and inedible.

I clap my gloved hands together and make a big show of opening presents. Talcum powder that smells like another era, new slippers to replace the ones that I have just recently broken in to perfection. Bath soaps and a fresh Bible, with a white cover that looks like leather, and a rose colored book mark. There are sweet cards with bluebirds and posies. I thank one and all, flash a gummy grin and raise my Minnie Mouse hands in the air, give a thumbs up. They all laugh, hug me, then drift over to the refreshments, cheese and crackers, little sausages in puff pastry, cake for later.

One by one, I am approached by my guests. As always, after they kiss my cheek or shake my hand, they wish, “Happy Birthday,” then ask what the secret is to my longevity.

Truth be told, I have no idea. But they want to know, they are eager to know. Their faces peer at me with such yearning and hope that I set out to oblige them.

I tell the stout, sweating young man who works for the local newspaper that my secret is exercising every day and eating plenty of vegetables. I assure the spinster in the corner that it was years of living alone after Peter died and my children left home that afforded me this luxury. To the tightly wound nursing facility manager, whose very breath comes out in spirals of angst and tension, I say that a glass of wine every night is the key to survival. And once, just to see what might happen, I announced to my fellow residents that daily masturbation does wonders to loosen the body and enhance one’s longevity.

I am not sure why I ‘m still here, or what God had planned for me. I don’t know what I did to maintain my body, and give it cells and atoms that are more robust than someone else’s.

What I do know is this: I lived. I laughed and played as a child, and I grew into a woman. My heart was broken and pelted with the heartache of many storms. I got back up and tried again, and again, and again.

I held sick babies in my arms, and a dead husband in my lap, waiting to hear the squall of the ambulance. There were Little League games, weddings, Christmas trees, and funerals. Quiet, magical days drifted into one another like waves on an autumn pond.

I had friends who helped, friends who hurt. Scares. Oh, so many scares. Frights that kept me up nights, cursed my days.

And joy. The kind of joy you can only get when those frights go away and are replaced by love so magical, so sweet, that the sun pours itself into your soul.

My life is like this old nightgown, faded from many washings, but soft as a summer’s morning, yielding and cozy. I remember when it was bright and starched and filled with promise. Over time, it learned to give in, to fold without whimper, yet still cover with a sense of purpose. Every button knows my fingers, a rosary of sorts, as I twist and stroke them in my hands.

On bright days, I ask the nurse to put it on a hanger, set it on a hook outside for a few hours. It comes in smelling of sunshine and trees. I pull it over my head, bury my face in it. Remember.

I asked to be laid to rest in it. Esther shakes her head. She thinks I’m kidding. I’m not. It’s written in a letter to her, in my dresser drawer. I asked her to lay me down in blossoms of pink peonies, strewn around the coffin like a spring storm. I tell her to wash this gown, set it in the sun to dry and place it back on my body.

Until then, I look around the room, touch my collarbone with a finger, my way of getting God’s attention, and whisper, “How about next year?”

Sharon Frame Gay grew up a child of the highway, playing by the side of the road. Her work has been internationally published in anthologies and literary magazines, including: Chicken Soup For The Soul, Typehouse, Fiction on the Web, Lowestoft Chronicle, Thrice Fiction, Crannog Magazine, and others. Her work has won prizes at: Women on Writing, The Writing District, and Owl Hollow Press.  She is a Pushcart Prize nominee.  You can find her on Amazon as well as Facebook as Sharon Frame Gay-Writer. Twitter: @sharonframegay

The Script for Daphne Shields by Scott Bassis

I walked into the Little Havana café. Josh’s radiant smile told me this wasn’t about Time Leapers: The Complete Series. I smiled too, elated by the sight of his gawky handsome face.

“Here it is!” I placed the DVD box set on the table. Josh had lent it to me a year ago, while we were both at Warren University. He mentioned liking it. I expressed my curiosity about it. Before I knew it, he was leading me to his house, offering to let me borrow the DVDs for the summer. If I were able to change the past like the protagonists of Time Leapers, I wouldn’t have hurried away after a quick “thanks.”

“It was good,” I said. I had seen every episode. After receiving Josh’s email sent to my Warren account, I rewatched several to refresh my memory. “That was nice of you,” I added. He kept smiling and staring at me, not once glancing at the DVDs.

“Hungry?” he asked. A leftover onion slice and a glob of dressing sat on his already finished plate.

“No,” I said. I immediately regretted it. I always automatically turned down food. An eating disorder was one consequence of what Hector, my stepfather, did to me as a child. Thanks to him, I had a whole collection of disorders. Unfortunately, I wanted nothing more in the world than to sit here with Josh for as long as possible. “But I’m thirsty,” I said.

I ordered a Diet Coke from the woman behind the counter and tried to think of something to talk about. I planned on discussing Time Leapers until Josh showed no interest in it. TV was how he first got me to speak when I was a freshman and he was a grad student. As a young man, I withdrew into myself. Starting college, my social skills were almost nonexistent.

I wouldn’t look anyone in the eyes.

I hardly spoke.

Josh befriended me. He divulged he used to be as shy as I was, said he overcame it when he realized how dumb everyone was. There was no reason to be intimidated by them. He said them in a way that emphasized they were not the same as us.

At first I resented his efforts to help me. I fumbled with words and felt pathetic. Luckily, he figured out how to be put me at ease. He mentioned Crown of Dragons. He correctly guessed that I was obsessed with it. My shyness evaporated as we debated who would ultimately rule the kingdom.

I returned with my Diet Coke. It struck me I should talk about real life. That the answer wasn’t immediately obvious was a remnant of my former social incompetence.

“What’ve you been up to?” I asked. His email had been brief:

Hi, Pablo.

In Miami ‘til Sunday. Remembered you lived there. I never got Time Leapers back. Want

to meet up?”

There was nothing about why he dropped out of Warren before completing his doctorate.

I’m working in San Fran at Mojo, a software developer. I interned there for the summer.

They offered me a job and I took it. I was sick of Warren. I’d been there for seven years.

The charm of a rich kid hipster haven had worn off.”

I wanted to shout, “What about me?” Of course, it was my own fault for not being his reason to stay. At first, I was closeted. Although socially clueless, I was boyishly handsome, and girls sometimes pursued me aggressively. One day, a dormmate asked me out on a date. I didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but knew deceiving her was worse. “I’m gay,” I said tearfully, as if I were afflicted with a fatal disease.

She said “okay” and shrugged.

Once I realized that being gay wasn’t a big deal, I grew more confident. Speaking to others and meeting their gaze became easier. Still, I wasn’t attracted to Josh, whom I hardly even considered a friend.

He owed me nothing, I told myself now. Yet, my heart felt otherwise.

“It was spur of the moment.” He must have seen the hurt on my face.

“You don’t feel like you wasted three years, dropping out before you got your doctorate?” I asked. It came out harsher than I intended.

“I feel like I wasted three years instead of four.” He stiffened defensively. “And what’ve you been doing?”

“Working. Saving money. I start film school at Manhattan U in September,” I said.

“Going into the film industry? That takes courage, unless you’re a long-lost Coppola.” He scoffed.

“Nah, my only family connections are in the maintenance industry,” I said.

He laughed, breaking the tension.

“We’ll be paying off loans ‘til we’re dead, won’t we?” He sighed.

I nodded.

We chuckled. While we both clearly harbored pent-up resentment, we had to let go of the past. Our pasts were certainly worth forgetting.

In May of my junior year, it finally dawned on me why Josh was so fixated on me. I gazed outside my dorm window. By chance, I noticed him crossing the field. He stood alone. I realized there wasn’t one time I didn’t see him alone. His posture was bent like an old man’s, as if he had endured a lifetime’s worth of suffering. The heat was sweltering.

Nonetheless, he wore jeans and a long-sleeve shirt. It suddenly registered how deeply he was scarred. Only one thing could have caused it. What else would make him need to cover the skin on his arms and legs? What else would make him so afraid to be touched?

By then, I understood that I would never recover completely. I would always be ill at ease around others. I would have issues with food. I would cringe when an image, sound, or smell stirred a horrible childhood memory. I would never be like them, and Josh seemed like the only person I could relate to. Almost as soon as I had this epiphany, that I loved Josh, he was gone. If only I told him, instead of prattling on about how good Time Leapers was supposed to be.

Today in Miami it was close to a hundred degrees, and neither one of us wore short sleeves or shorts. The past mattered and it didn’t, because who else would love someone so damaged?

“How was Warren that last year? Snobby as ever? Even the name’s basically slang for ‘rich kid,’” he said.

“Okay, I guess,” I said untruthfully. It was almost unbearable. The hope that I would see him again was all that kept me going. “Everyone there was pretty nice.”

“It’s called ‘patronizing,’” he said.

He was right. Both professors and classmates would speak to me slowly, as if unsure of my proficiency in English. My shyness didn’t help.

“You weren’t patronizing,” I said.

To the contrary, he expected behavior that seemed beyond me. As soon as I mastered “nice to meet you,” he was bringing up the weather, asking about my classes.

“Only to stuck-up brats, but they didn’t talk to me anyway. They thought I was a weirdo,” he said.

“I never thought that,” I said.

“You’re one too.” He smirked.

“Thanks.” I wasn’t offended. I was flattered. Calling us “weirdos” was the same as saying unlike them; I didn’t want to be like them anyway. I was perfectly content being like Josh.

“See what I mean?” he laughed. “Ahhh!” he yelped. He jumped in his seat, accidentally banging our knees. It was his cell phone ringing in his pocket. Like me, he had an exaggerated startle response. The term was “hypervigilance,” a symptom of PTSD.

He glanced down at his phone. It displayed a photo of a woman, “Rachel.”

If it were a man, I would have been jealous. I assumed it was his sister. They both had black, wavy hair. He muted his phone, ignoring her call.

Beneath the table, our legs touched. His left knee grazed my knee. His right calf leaned against my calf. Neither he nor I moved. Warmth emanated from the contact between us, spreading through me. It astounded me how good it felt. I couldn’t recall the last time a touch didn’t unsettle me, but his face was contorted with sorrow.

In me, he seemed to see his own pitiful past. I sensed how badly he longed to heal me. Love could heal us both; I was sure of it, just from the feel of his legs against mine, stirring me in ways nothing ever had before.

I jumped as someone tapped the window behind me.

It was the girl, Rachel.

Josh sat up, pulling his legs away. With one hand she held a cigarette, with the other she waved him outside.

“I have to go,” he said. He looked perturbed. I was flustered, too, by all the emotion that touch had evoked. “It was great seeing you,” he said, gazing at me tenderly. He stood and headed out.

“What about Time Leapers?” I grabbed it from the table and held it out to him.

“Keep it.” He held up his hand. “It’s on Netflix anyway.”

Before I could say “thanks,” he was out the door. I gazed out the window behind me at him and Rachel waiting for the light. They weren’t siblings, I decided. She was too short. Their facial features weren’t similar. His sister, if he had one, must have looked like the actress Daphne Shields.

Daphne Shields had Josh’s same smile. Like Josh, her sunken cheeks became suddenly full, her eyes dipped down bashfully, then raised disarmingly. Both Daphne Shields and Josh were frightfully thin. They shared the same pasty complexion, blue in certain lights. Each had huge, melancholy eyes, though Daphne Shields’s were dark brown and Josh’s were hazel.

It occurred to me that Daphne Shields was hurt in the same way as Josh and I. Her skittish demeanor helped make her a horror film icon. Few actresses conveyed fear as convincingly.

When not a scream queen she often played a grieving widow or the mother of a sick child. There was a sorrowful air about her. Still, she had great comedic chops. One of her most memorable roles was as a stand-up comic with cerebral palsy, using humor to mask her pain.

Daphne Shields was like us: it was an intriguing thought, not that it had any bearing on my life. No one even knew where she was. She vanished from the public eye a decade ago.

As Josh continued up the avenue, I lost sight of him. I reassured myself that our separation was temporary. We both knew how the other felt. All we needed now was to find a way to be together. Until then, I would have to make do with Time Leapers, my keepsake to remind me that Josh loved me.

Later, I realized I didn’t have Josh’s cell phone number. I didn’t own a cell phone and he didn’t have my home number. Nevertheless, I wasn’t worried. We could reach each other by email.

Since he was older, it felt natural that he should take the lead. I resolved to wait patiently for his message.

***

New York was exactly what I had been primed to expect from movies and TV: imposing skyscrapers, crowded streets, a multitude of ethnicities and cultures. Although the city had fascinated many a filmmaker, I rarely ventured beyond Tribeca, where Manhattan University was located. Without Josh, everywhere I went ─  no matter how impressive, felt desolate. Classes kept me busy. I studied film theory, learned the basics of cinematography, editing and production design. For Screenwriting 101, a complete spec script was due by the end of the term. Still, nothing took my mind off Josh, or the fact that he hadn’t written.

I checked my Warren email account daily. Other than the occasional junk mail, there was nothing. I tried to rationalize it. Josh wanted me to settle in first, or he didn’t want to seem desperate. Thanksgiving finally forced my hand. Surely, he thought about us reuniting.

After an hour in front of my computer, agonizing over each word, I sent him a “casual” email:

Hi Josh, what’re you up to?

Thanksgiving’s coming up. I got the whole week off! Hope to see you soon. Thanks

again for Time Leapers!

Days passed. He didn’t write back. I moved onto plan B. Thealternative, life without Josh, was too bleak to consider. By Googling his name and “Mojo,” I found his work number. My heart pounded and my stomach swirled with butterflies as I called him in the afternoon, morning in California.

“Hello?” he answered. 

“H-hi, it’s, it’s Pablo,” I stuttered.

He didn’t say anything.

“From Warren,” I added.

“Hi. Hello. Yes, Pablo.” He sounded flustered. It heartened me. Seemingly, he was nervous for the same reason I was, because he was in love.

“I, um, thank you again for the DVDs.” It was all I could think of to say. I didn’t want to bring up my unanswered email. I didn’t want him to think I was angry.

“We didn’t have room in our luggage. My girlfriend went a little crazy shopping.” His tone changed. He sounded cool, calculating. It took a moment to register what he said. Rachel wasn’t his friend, the “Grace” to his “Will.” She was his girlfriend. He was straight. At least that was what he was saying.

“Oh,” I said.

I heard him take a deep breath, perhaps in trepidation, fearing I would lash out. Still, he didn’t hang up. I reflected on our time at Warren. Josh had reached out to me incessantly, not relenting until I spoke to him. As my social skills improved, he encouraged me.

But why was he so determined to mentor me?

Why email me out of the blue after a year?

He wasn’t spurred by desire, as I had believed, but by compassion. I wasn’t his unrequited love. I was his pet project.

What about our legs? I thought. If he didn’t yearn for my touch, why let his leg linger there? Why did it feel so wondrous?

I had sensed what he wanted, what we both wanted, under that table. I knew what I saw in his eyes, not only in the café, but always: love.

“That’s nice. I mean, for her, glad she found so much stuff. Thanks anyway,” I said.

He took heavy, rapid breaths.

“You’re welcome,” he finally croaked. “Is that it? I mean, is there something else?” Confusion and distress clung to the line.

“That’s it.” For both our sakes, I hung up. I stared at the phone on my desk. Despite myself, I ached for it to ring, and to hear Josh’s voice. Of course, there was only silence. He made it perfectly clear that he wanted nothing to do with me.

I had always thought of Josh as so far ahead of me. He was once as shy as I was and he overcame it, but terms of facing his sexuality he trailed behind. Not only was he a coward, he was a hypocrite. He told me not to care what others thought, because they were all idiots. Obviously, he cared more about what they thought than he did about me.

I grabbed Time Leapers from its spot on my shelf.I hurled it against the wall, smashing the case, causing shattered discs to fall out. I threw myself on my bed. I screamed into my pillow. I cried.

I cut my tantrum short upon noticing the time. Screenwriting was in ten minutes. Fending off my despair, I got up, slung my backpack over my shoulder and left.

Today’s lesson was on dialogue. Conversation had once seemed so daunting. I finally got the hang of it, but to what end?

I was still friendless, unloved and alone. It seemed all too apparent that I was irrevocably broken. I spent the class ruing having ever met Josh, having ever been filled with the false hope for a life that wasn’t a tragedy.

Professor Ansel stopped early to hand back the class’s scripts. The first half of the script had been due last week; the second half was due at the end of the term. Before this afternoon, I was eager for his feedback. Professor Ansel was an Oscar nominated screenwriter. He had worked in Hollywood since before I was born. Now, just the thought of my script made me cringe.

Inappropriate Touch was the thinly veiled story of Josh and I. I was Victor, an undergrad student; Josh was Daphne, an adjunct film professor. Writing it, I had envisioned Daphne played by a young Daphne Shields, thus the name. The star-crossed protagonists were supposed to run off to New York to embark on a new life together. Daphne’s spineless betrayal of Victor wasn’t the ending I had been building towards.

“Can you stay behind for a minute?” Professor Ansel asked as I retrieved my script.

I glanced down at the script. There was no grade. While the class filtered out, I sat up front in an empty seat.

Professor Ansel organized the papers on his desk. Once we were alone, he raised his gaze. He had a wry look, as if he knew I knew exactly what I had done.

“I like the part where Daphne films Victor,” he spoke slowly, seemingly under the impression that English was my second language.

“She doesn’t. He won’t let her.” I could tell he was testing me. He must have suspected I plagiarized the script.

“That’s right. The flashbacks to his childhood were quite powerful. Who abused him again, his uncle?” Grinning smugly, he seemed not to consider the possibility that I was the author.

“His stepfather,” I said. 

“It was her stepfather too, wasn’t it?” he asked.

“It’s not stated. He just knows it was somebody. She shows all the signs,” I said wistfully.

He waved me closer with his hand.

As I approached his desk, he looked up and down my body in a way that made me shudder.

“You always hide in the back, but don’t think I haven’t noticed you.” Still leering, he grabbed his red marker. He scribbled an “A.” He winked, as if he and I were sharing a dirty secret. I took back my script.

Walking away, I felt his eyes watching me.

“Acting is more lucrative than screenwriting, you know. A handsome face can go far with the right connections,” he said. “Lucrative means pays more.” He seemed to think I needed that clarification.

As it registered what he was proposing, anguish overtook me. It was the opposite of the tender intimacy I had imagined sharing with Josh. Apparently, though, Josh was only ever a fantasy.

I made it to the door before I stopped. Perhaps I had suffered one humiliation too many today, to be accused of plagiary, to be propositioned like a prostitute, to learn the one I loved refused to love me back.

“It’s my story,” I muttered.

“Excuse me?” he said. I turned to face him.  

“I said it’s my story. I wrote it!” I usually held everything in until I was alone. Now I felt my self-control slipping like a façade unable to contain an explosion.

“I reviewed your undergraduate transcript. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for affirmative action, but I doubt you’re capable of…” His voice trailed off.

With all I was dealing with at Warren, my grades were uneven. Nevertheless, I was positive it was the “Pablo Rodriguez” in the byline, not my transcript, which convinced him it was plagiarized.

“It’s my story. I lived it. I was sexually abused. My voice was stolen from me. Everyone else knew what to say. It was automatic for them. The words wouldn’t come to me. My brain couldn’t find them. I didn’t know what was wrong with me.” I groaned despondently.

“Perhaps you should see the campus therapist. Why don’t you go make an appointment right now?” he suggested mockingly.

I ignored him. I thought of something that made me smile.

“It wasn’t complete hell. I had movies and TV.” When I reflected back on my childhood, mercifully, what I remembered most was what I had watched on a movie or TV screen, my consciousness escaping into the lives of fictional others.

“Saved by Saved by the Bell.” He ridiculed me again. He thought I was too crazy to realize it.

“No one cares! No one wants to hear it! I make them uncomfortable!” I snapped. 

“Wonder how that could be.” He sniffed.

“You wanted to screw me.” I sneered. With my self-control gone, I spouted whatever came to me.

His mouth dropped open. He looked horrified, no doubt less by the accusation than by whom I might repeat it to.

“I’ve never been with anyone, not since…” my voice cracked. “I was in love with this guy, the real, Daphne. He says he’s straight.”

“It happens,” he said sympathetically. Bringing up his sexual advances had caused a change in his demeanor.

“He was the only thing that kept me going. I don’t want to live if we can’t be together. I wish I died as a child. It would’ve been more humane,” I said bitterly.

His brow furrowed. “I’m sorry for the misunderstanding, and I’m sorry for all you’ve suffered.” Compassion flowed from his eyes. Clearly, he had picked up a few acting pointers during his time in Hollywood.

“It’s my story,” I declared once more. It was my own wretched life I had put into that script. I at least deserved the credit for having lived it. Before I left, I crumpled the script in my hands and tossed it in the trash. It felt briefly cathartic, as if it were my life I had casually disposed of.

Upon returning to my dorm, I resumed where I had left off, crying, screaming and throwing things around. Eventually, my roommate, Greg, arrived.

“Whoa, it’s a mess in here,” Greg said. Despite the marijuana odor continually wafting from him and his belongings, I was lucky to have him as a roommate. He spent most of his time at his girlfriend’s, and allowed me liberal use of his fifty-inch TV.

“I was looking for something,” I said.

“All right,” he chuckled, incurious as usual. He only stopped by for a roach. He took off as soon as he set down his pliers, but in the interim I regained my composure.

Still, if my anger seemed pointless, so did life without Josh. I curled up under my blanket. I felt as if I could lie there forever. My carrot on a stick was gone.

I received a call on my campus phone. I let it go to voicemail. I couldn’t refrain from checking it longer than a minute.

Even after everything, I hoped it was Josh calling to see how I was.

It was Professor Thorne, head of the film department. She wished to see me in her office to discuss my “threatening outburst.” I had to admire Professor Ansel’s cunning. He had gone on the offensive, painting me as violent and unstable, thereby discrediting any accusations I might make.

Roused from my bed, I stumbled over to Greg’s television. It was instinctive. TV provided solace during the most abysmal times. I flipped through the channels, landing on a rerun of Lost Island. I was a huge fan of the series. It gave me comfort to spend time with the familiar characters. Not even the commercials bothered me. I enjoyed placing the actors’ faces, figuring out how I knew them.

Suddenly, a face I recognized chilled me.

It was Daphne Shields. Those were her eyes, large, dark, beautiful. That was her long, thin nose, which added drama to her every facial expression. Those were her small, but shapely lips, her oversized teeth poking through them like a rabbit’s. The rest of her was monstrous. A double chin subsumed her neck. Swollen purple bags drooped under her eyes. Her gray hair was stringy and unkempt. Her blotchy, rubbery skin resembled a latex mask. She had been transformed into a Halloween witch.

“They’re out to murder me, like they did the president. The one they got there in the White House is a decoy. I did this film in ’96, The Ballot. That’s what put me on their radar,” Daphne stated matter-of-factly. Suddenly, she gripped the arms of her chair. “They think I can’t tell they’re poisoning me!” she seethed.

“Watch Doc Murray’s heartbreaking interview with actress Daphne Shields as she emerges from years of seclusion,” a voice directed over the ominous notes of a keyboard.

“Do you ever think about returning to acting?” Doc Murray asked.

She leaned back, letting out a wistful sigh. “All the time.”

“Why don’t you?” His faint smile held a hint of mockery.

She grimaced. “The faeries appear to me, chirping I can make your dreams come true. You’ll be a star again! But underworld goblins devour them. I did nothing wrong. Still, they follow me: shadows. I trapped one in my cupboard this morning.”

She clapped her hands together forcefully, demonstrating the action. As Doc Murray flinched back, she laughed maniacally.

“The world is wondering, what have you been up to? Your last onscreen appearance was eleven years ago.” Doc Murray assumed an interested face, as if he couldn’t guess the answer from one look at her.

“Nothing, I’m completely alone. You think anyone wants to see this?” She opened her arms wide, displaying her obese frame. “I should’ve died! I should’ve died thin and pretty!”

“Will Doc Murray get Daphne the help she desperately needs?” a voice pondered.

“Why don’t you [bleep] off! You think I don’t know who you really work for!” Daphne raged at the camera, standing outside a parked car. “You work for them!” she howled.

The screen cut tantalizingly to a still of Doc Murray’s face.

“Find out tonight on a special Doc Murray, nine o’clock eastern standard time, eight o’clock central.”

I felt nauseous.

What had become of the beautiful, talented Daphne Shields? How had she turned into this madwoman?

It made me fearful for Josh. Being closeted had to put a strain on his sanity. Even if I was angry at him, I couldn’t bear the thought of him sharing Daphne Shields’s fate. I was susceptible to that too. We were all survivors, facing similar struggles, carrying similar scars.

Compelled by a need to understand how this happened, I watched the full hour of Doc Murray. Daphne Shields couldn’t provide any answers. She seemed vaguely aware that she wasn’t well. On several instances, she begged for help, though when she tried to articulate from what, all that came from her mouth was gibberish.

Doc Murray failed to shed any light on Daphne’s state. His sole aim was to titillate the viewer. He brought up her costars, her famous former lovers. He encouraged her to elaborate on her more bizarre beliefs.

I could only conclude that something or someone led her to forsake the world, retreat into isolation, where her sanity steadily deteriorated. Perhaps a lover hurt her. She had several well-publicized, tumultuous relationships. Perhaps she grew embittered as her career floundered. By her mid-thirties, she was consigned to “mom” roles in forgettable fluff. Perhaps she was degraded by too many Hollywood creeps.

Having encountered one myself, I could certainly empathize.

For days, I couldn’t shake the horror of that interview. It was what convinced me to stop by Professor Thorne’s office before class. Daphne Shields showed me that running away would only make my problems worse.

Per Professor Ansel’s version of events, the crumpled screenplay I had dropped in the waste bin had been hurled square at his head. Forced to appease the acclaimed screenwriter, Professor Thorne stated I would no longer be allowed in the class.

“However, I did personally run a search using our plagiarism checking software,” she said. Reaching into her desk, she pulled out the alleged assault weapon, flattened back into its former shape.

“I’m satisfied this work is yours.” She handed me back the script. “It shows promise,” she remarked, giving me an impressed nod.

“You’ll be reimbursed the course cost. Your GPA won’t be affected. I suggest you take an extra class next term to complete your MFA requirement on time,” she said.

I stood up to leave.

“Professor Ansel will be on sabbatical next term. I encourage you to take the class then,” she said.

“Thanks.” Even if I had been unjustly ousted from Professor Ansel’s class, I walked out of Professor Thorne’s office relieved, and gratified that she recognized my talent.

While I didn’t get the Thanksgiving break I had hoped for, I got out of returning to Miami, where there were too many reminders of the past. I persuaded my mother it was a waste of money; after all, I had that student loan debt hanging over my head. During my week without classes, I avoided Greg’s TV. There was danger in retreating too far from reality. I spent hours each day roaming the city, down to Battery Park, up along the Hudson River piers, making stops at several Chelsea galleries, through Central Park, all the way up to Grant’s Tomb. In Hell’s Kitchen, I exchanged smiles with a cute blond smoking outside “Fierce.” I promised myself I would order a drink there before the semester was over.

Still, my legs could take only so much wandering. I needed something else to occupy my time. I recalled how impressed Professor Thorne was with my script. Professor Ansel thought it was so good that I couldn’t possibly have written it. It struck me that I might have found my calling.

I felt torn between starting a new script and returning to Inappropriate Touch. After Josh turned his back on me, I couldn’t end it as I had intended, with Daphne and Victor together. Yet, I couldn’t just abandon it. I kept thinking of Daphne Shields, hauled into a psych ward, forcing her release a day later, fleeing with her coat over her gown, Doc Murray’s production crew in tow.

It seemed so unfair. Although I couldn’t help her, I could write for her, for Josh, for myself, a different fate.

INT/EXT. TRIBECA MOVIE THEATER – NIGHT

A film premiere in Tribeca: through the large windowed lobby of an old-fashioned theater, elegantly dressed guests drink champagne, eat hors d’oeuvres. A slender figure in a long coat walks by. It’s Daphne. Her hair has some strands of gray. She’s aged a decade or so. She stops to look up at the marquee. It reads, “Inappropriate Touch: A Victor Sanchez film.” She gasps and clutches her heart. She peers inside.

After a moment’s hesitation, she enters. She slips past a security guard immersed in his phone. She weaves through the crowd towards a figure swarmed by guests. It’s Victor. Seeing her, his expression turns to longing. She waves at him. There’s a wedding ring on her finger. He excuses himself. He approaches her.

Daphne: Congratulations!

Victor: Thanks. It’s been ages. How are you?

Daphne: (Shyly, as if suddenly remembering how long it’s been) Good, I’m a professor at Manhattan U.

Victor: (Glancing down at her ring, a note of bitterness in his voice) And married…he must be special.

Daphne: He doesn’t have every film critic calling him the next big thing. He’s a contractor. He falls asleep during any movie without an explosion. He thinks Speed & Fury 7 is the epitome of good filmmaking.

Victor: (Laughing) I hope he appreciates your sense of humor.

Daphne: He does. And you? I bet you have your pick now, any girl your heart desires.

Victor: (His face turns serious) Not true.

Daphne: (Muttering almost to herself) I never wanted, I never meant to…

Victor: Hey, I’m like an Arabian prince. All I have to do is point, my guards bring her to me.

Daphne: That’s racist. And sexist. Watch out, you’re in the public eye now.

Victor: (With a chuckle) I’m hardly famous.

Daphne: Didn’t you get a Silver Indy nod for Dreamless?You were robbed, in my opinion. 

Victor: That you liked it means more to me than any award.

Daphne: Well, I’m sure you have to get back to selling yourself. Don’t snub a potential distributer for little ol’ me. (She lifts her hand up before he can give her another compliment.) I just wanted to congratulate you on all your success.

Victor: (Sounding hopeful) Well, thanks, maybe we’ll…

Daphne: (Sounding unsure) Maybe.

Victor: (He abruptly grabs her hand)I’m here for you.

They share a warm smile. Slowly, Daphne withdraws her hand. Victor follows her with his sight as she slips out the exit. His eyes linger at the door after she’s gone. A middle-aged woman calls his name, stirring him from his reverie.

Victor’s Agent: (Gesturing to an older man in a suit) I’d like you to meet Rob, from Majestic Pictures.

Victor: (Shakes his hand) Nice to meet you.

Fade out

That “nice to meet you,” of course, would have been impossible without Daphne’s guidance. Others left him to suffer. Not her: she made it her mission to save him. It was the perfect ending to Inappropriate Touch. Yet, it could also occur somewhere in the middle. They might run into each other on the street. Victor could track down Daphne’s address, send her an invitation to his next screening.

I didn’t know for certain where this scene belonged. Regardless, it comforted me merely that it existed. No one was there for Daphne Shields, but Victor was there for Daphne. I hoped Josh realized I was there for him too.

I forgave him.

I loved him. I had no choice.

We needed each other, someone to be “us” with in a world full of them. With that affirmed, I set our story aside to write a new one.

Scott Bassis is a young writer eager to establish himself as a serious talent. He has had short stories published in Poydras Review, The Acentos Review, The Writing Disorder, The Furious Gazelle, Open: Journal of Arts & Letters, Image Outwrite, Quail Bell Magazine, The Missing Slate, Jumbelbook, Furtive Dalliance, Fiction on the Web and Rainbow Curve.

Hold the Line by Matt Bender

There’ve been a few times in my life when circumstances led me to consider the chorus of Toto’s 1978 hit “Hold the Line,” which states: “Love isn’t always on time.” When I was young and first started falling in love I thought it was a terrible untruth because love was real, tangible. The chorus is the only line in the song worth pondering. The verses are a slapdash series of It’s not in the way that you ____ me statements, which, while I guess may speak to the elusive nature of love, have nothing to do with whether it’s “on time” or not.

I was driving on I-95 the last time “Hold the Line” came on the radio. One can never be sure, but I believe the frustration I was feeling at that moment and the disc jockey’s decision to throw that song on was the perfect handshake of time and space. If they ever explain String Theory that moment will be in there, along with it being the direct result of me having had an extramarital affair with a groupie for my band, Fit Wizards, in the parking lot after a show.

The band had been playing at this bar called The Brass Teat pretty consistently in the months leading up it. Stan, our guitarist, was renting out a practice space he’d slip into for an hour after work to nail down some of the more difficult, more crowd-pleasing solos required by our repertoire. Our drummer had been playing since he was a kid and could bang out a solo or even a round on the bongos if he wanted to. I played bass. I was not as practiced or experienced as them, but rocked a tremendous and well-manicured moustache, a thing that added stage presence as the other dudes were physically unremarkable. The moustache raised some eyebrows when I first started growing it, but people have since become accustomed. I like to think of it as a mascot, like, “Oh look, it’s the guy with the awesome moustache. Fit Wizards must be playing.”

The drummer’s name is Tommy. My name is Scott. We have a singer, too, but seriously fuck that guy. We’re not going to talk about him.

We had just finished our second set that night at the Teat. I was packing my gear when the Groupie approached me, just walked right up on stage, set her drink on my amp and started going on about how we rock, how our choice of cover songs were the soundtrack to her life. She asked how often we played and if I wanted to go out back and smoke a joint. It’s a cliché at this point: smoking joints leads to heavy petting, leads to her station wagon in the parking lot, a choose-your-own-adventure fest of trying to forget you have a spouse and a kid and probably she does, too, but the sex hasn’t been as wild since the kid came along and wifey sure as hell doesn’t put your dick in her mouth anymore. You wonder if Groupie still does it to her husband. She really does seem to have a knack for it.

Her and I walked back grinning and returned to our respective peoples. I wanted to tell my bandmates, especially Stan, but couldn’t, because our wives were all friends and I didn’t want to risk any rumors getting started. Notice that word: were. Also notice that Stan has a practice space. Sorry to point it all out like that. It’s not that I think you’re dumb, but it’s important to the story and the only thing that’s changed about humans in the last 5,000 years is that our attention span has gotten shorter. I got Stan to lend me a key, exchanged contact info with the Groupie and started meeting her for quick trysts at the practice space.

People get bored. People find something exciting. People fuck. 5,000 years.

I should also point out that I love my wife and kid. Throughout our time together I’ve always tried to be the best dad I could be. The wife and kid aren’t really part of this story, though. Let’s put the whole me having a family thing into the same bin we put the lead singer in.

Groupie was having a great time. She’d been trying to up her meetings at the space and trying to get some free bass lessons while she was at it. Piano had been her mother’s instrument, the one she grew up playing, but something about the way a bass note hums up the spine had an atavistic effect that made her lady-bits shiver.

They say you need to have a real connection to your art – not thinking of it as a job or a hobby, but an essential and serious component of your life – if you were ever going to be truly good at it. She felt she had that for bass, hot in the blood. Fucking at the practice space made sense in that she would show up early to run over some scales and whatever song she was working on for an hour or so before I got there, but then she sucked a bonus year of talent out of me as she pinned me to the floor and took me to the hilt.

She remained a succubus. An artiste. A prodigy.

The only time I ever saw Groupie with her husband was a Saturday afternoon while jogging on the nearby greenway. They were walking on the opposite side of the sidewalk towards me. I only half-recognized her at first and must have had a leering sort of look on my face as I passed them, ogling. I’d forgotten how pretty she is. I started singing The Beatles’ “I’m a Believer” and started one more lap. They were walking behind a big group of older women when I passed them again and I didn’t see them until the last second, slurring “I’m a belieeever!” as I huffed and puffed and jogged and sang like a drunk.

I told my wife I was going to start giving bass lessons a few days a week for some extra scratch, to which she said, “I didn’t know you were good enough to give lessons.”

That hurt. Made it easier to meet with Groupie.

We met so often that going home for dinner felt like stepping out on her. I did start giving her bass lessons, though, and she did pay me. She got some snot-nose kid who lives in her building to also come down for a weekly lesson and he paid me a little more than she did.

I tried to teach him about real music. Got onto James Carr, because he’s one of the most underrated soul singers of all time. His trademark is a track called “Dark End of the Street,” recorded in 1966, and is about a man (presumably Carr) meeting a married (presumably white) woman in the shady part of town. The duality of them having an interracial fling in the 1960’s, meeting in dark locations and fearing they might get caught is heartbreaking and the stuff of real drama in soul music. In the last verse Carr sings about how if they happen to bump into each other on the street and she sees him, she should just “walk on by” and not say anything, kind of like I should have done with Groupie and her man, although it’s very likely neither of them noticed me.

One thing that cracked me up about a lot of the dudes from the Golden Age of Soul is how they would put out records where every song is a testament to love and faith and marriage and the next day you’d see news about James Brown shooting out his girlfriend’s tires, Al Green getting a pot of boiling grits tossed on him, Marvin Gaye’s string of tumultuous and short-lived attempts at commitment. Stan said, “It’s because so much passion is required to belt out some of those tunes that it boils over into their personal lives.”

I think that’s bullshit.

Those dudes lived in a time when famous people could get away with anything, drinking hard liquor and grunting up a gram of cocaine for breakfast. The ladies of soul were, for the most part, much more well-behaved.          

Groupie was an Aretha Franklin fan from way back, back when her parents would put records on and she’d dance around in the living room. When Franklin died in 2018 the whole city of Detroit celebrated for over a week in her honor. Groupie didn’t cry, but she did buy a “Best of Aretha” compilation and listened to it for a week straight while driving back and forth from work. She figured out how to play “Respect” on bass, a skill that caused Scott to laugh and say, “The student has become the teacher.” The whole day had been going well until later that evening when a group of 20-somethings drove by and one of them yelled “Suck my dick, ho!” from the car window.

TLC released “No Scrubs” in 1999 and Gwen Stefani released “Ain’t No Hollaback Girl” in 2004 which, in my mind, makes them thematically-related, the lyrics about dudes (scrubs) with barbed-wire tattoos on their biceps holla-ing from car windows and are you the type of girl who hollas back or not? With all that’s been written and said about street harassment it’s a wonder any dude does it, or even thinks it possible that a romance might begin with a catcall.

The greatest song ever recorded is The Talking Heads’ “This Must Be the Place.” I’ve argued with friends about whether the album or the live version is better but, honestly, they’re both just fucking awesome and you can take your pick. They have some other good songs, but this one is the best.

The original title of this story was going to be “Liberal Snowflake Freaks Out!” and involve an encounter where I detail how I freaked out on Groupie, got caught on camera and it went viral. The wives might not have all been friends by the end of the story, which may or may not have involved me getting busted for the affair and people taking sides. Groupie was potentially in a polyamorous thing with her man, everything cool with them at the big reveal. But hasn’t that been done before?

At least you got a decent sex scene and helped smash the old archetype of love and death and redemption. No Hero, no Sage, no Quest. The music stuff was fun, too.

Matt Bender is the former host of the online FreeSongProject and has been working in the international school system for the past 10 years. He currently teaches American Literature in the garden city of Guangzhou, China – home of dim sum and the Cantonese language. His work has been published in Perfect Sound Forever, Scribble and Stone Highway Review. He also worked as a journalist for Word Vietnam magazine throughout his time in Ho Chi Minh City. Read his non-fictions online at Medium.com/@benderbbender.

Know Guns by J.L. Higgs

“Hey, Dad. Grandpa’s got a gun!”

“What the fuck,” Cheryl mouthed to me. Our eyes locked, and I dropped the suitcases.

From where I was, I couldn’t see our seven-year-old son, Jack. We’d arrived at the cabin near dusk. Though we’d been delayed in the Friday traffic heading north from the city, Hank’s car was nowhere in sight. While Cheryl and I had been unloading the car’s trunk, Jack had dashed inside and straight upstairs to the bedrooms.   

Guns had always been a part of my life. I’d grown up in a rural community. As a boy, we played army almost daily. Our fathers had served during the last war. Even though we were kids, we all expected that when the time came, we’d do our duty as well. In the evenings we watched TV on our old Dumont and the good guys always won. Cavalrymen defeated Indians, the Japanese were beaten by our soldiers, and in the shoot’em up Westerns, the lawmen always triumphed.

The one common denominator: guns.

The scales always tipped in favor of the good guys not just because they were the good guys, but because they were also good with their guns. Back then, the fact that the victors were always white never made an impression on me. Few people who looked like me appeared on TV in those days. We knew Johnny Weissmuller and Maureen O’Sullivan actually lorded it over white actors in blackface.

Between all the kids in my neighborhood, we had everything we needed for our war games. Helmets, canteens, pistols, machine guns that made rat-tat-tat-tat-tat sounds, and air rifles. I liked the air rifles. You could shove their muzzles in the ground, then blast the compacted dirt out their barrels. Sometimes we’d have to temporarily halt our games to settle who shot and killed who first, but when we were called in for dinner, the living and the dead always arose and went home.   

As a kid, I swore when my time came, I was going to be a Marine. They had the coolest uniforms. When my cousin, Tommy, joined up he’d went into the Marines. He was strong and tough. He carried himself with a swagger us younger kids envied and tried to imitate. 

Through him, I met Roy. Roy was the local Marine Recruiter. He shared a recruitment office in the basement of our Post Office with a Navy recruiter named Sandy. A full-size cardboard cutout of Uncle Sam stood outside it with “I want you” emblazoned across his chest and his huge finger pointing at me. The words seemed less a request than an order.

Despite our patriotic leanings, when our turn actually came around, my friends and I wanted no part of it. There was a real war going on in the jungles of Southeast Asia. Many people sent far away returned dead. Others like my cousin Tommy, who survived seemingly intact, came back changed. Whether they were even alive and not the walking dead depended on your point of view and definition of living. That was when I learned that in the real world, being a good guy and good with a gun didn’t always ensure a favorable outcome.

  As I walked to the base of the stairs only one thought went through my mind, Dear God, please don’t let that boy be holding that gun.

“Jack,” I called out. “Where are you?”

“In grandpa’s room,” he said.

“Well buddy, you need to get out of grandpa’s room. I’m not sure he’d want you in there. Why don’t you come down and help me bring the bags upstairs?”

“Dad?”           

“Yeah, buddy.”

“How come grandpa keeps a gun behind his door?” He came into view, half carrying, half dragging the gun.

I glanced at Cheryl. Her eyes were filled with terror.

My throat went dry as I moved closer to the stairs. I’d never imagined ever being on the wrong end of a gun. 

“Jack,” I said. “You know we have rules about touching other people’s things without asking first.”

“Yeah.”

“Well, then you know that you shouldn’t be touching grandpa’s gun.” I swallowed deeply. “I want you to lay it on the floor very carefully. So you don’t break it. Because that would make grandpa sad.”

“Okay.”

I held my breath.

Jack laid the gun down. Then he bounded down the steps and into the front room.

Cheryl grabbed him and held him tightly. She kissed the top of his head again and again. 

I walked up the stairs, picked the gun up off the floor, and checked the safety. Then I pulled back the bolt and looked in the chamber. Nestled inside was a live round. I sat the butt of the gun on the floor, leaned it at an angle, and plucked the round out. Then I put the gun back in Hank’s room.

“Was it loaded?” asked Cheryl as I rejoined her and Jack in the front room.

I nodded.

“Goddammit.” She cursed more in the last few minutes than in all the year’s I’d known her. Anger poured out of her so fast I didn’t even try to keep up. Finally, she stopped and stood there with tears running down her face.

“It’s okay.” I  wrapped my arms around her. “Everyone’s fine. No one got hurt and…”

The sound of a car door slamming made Cheryl charge from my arms and out the front door like she was on fire. Before Hank could straighten up she was on him. Though I couldn’t hear a word, from the way her arms were waving around, she was giving him hell.

Hank just stood there absorbing every blow. Finally, she swatted his arm, then steamed off down the path that led to the pond.

I opened the cabin door and Hank, his arms full of grocery bags, came in. He looked at Jack and me. Without saying a word, he sat the bags on the kitchen counter and emptied them. After placing the perishables in the refrigerator, he put the canned goods in the kitchen cabinets.

“Grandpa, where’d mom go?” Jack dragged a stool over to the kitchen counter. He climbed onto the stool as Hank continued putting away the groceries.

“A walk.”

“Why’d she go for a walk now? Doesn’t she know we’re going to eat soon?”

“She knows.”

Hank had grown up hunting. The prior year, he’d invited me to go deer hunting with him. I’d agreed to go. It’d been years since I’d had venison. Some folks didn’t care for its strong flavor, but I did. 

Sitting on the beat up boards of the stand in a tree, our guns lying across our laps, there was nothing to do but wait. Deer hunting required silence and patience. You waited, listened, and hoped. In the days before, Hank had checked for tracks, droppings, and patches on tree trunks where deer had rubbed away the bark with their sprouting horns. Based on what he’d seen, he’d concluded that deer were passing beneath the stand on a regular basis. So, that was where we waited.

Hank and his four brothers had built the stand. The scrap wood steps they’d nailed to the side of the tree had been replaced many times over. Most recently around the year Jack had been born.

The first time Cheryl had said she wanted me to come home with her and meet her father, I’d shook my head and said, “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“Why not?” she asked.

“I think that’s rather obvious,” I replied.

“Scientifically speaking, there’s no such thing as race,” she countered.

“Yeah,” I responded. “Well, this is America, not some science convention.”

She sighed, looked me in the eyes and said, “You don’t know my father.”

Damn right and I don’t want to, I thought, envisioning pitchforks and burning crosses materializing out of thin air if he were to lay eyes on me.

Seeing my raised eyebrows, Cheryl had laughed. “Don’t be such a wuss,” she said. “Everything will be fine.”

Despite my doubts, I ended up going home with her and was shocked to be proven wrong. From the moment I met Hank, he never displayed a single moment of concern or hesitation regarding Cheryl and me. His approach to raising her had been to try to equip her with the ability to make good decisions. Then he’d accepted the fact that it was up to her to make her own decisions. Nothing was more important to him than her happiness. That included me, and Hank’s attitude was that was fine with that.

The same had been true when Jack was born.    

“I’ll be back,” I grabbed two jackets from the pegs near the cabin door and slipping one on.

As I walked along the path to the pond, I tried to think of what to say to Cheryl. She didn’t hunt. In fact, she hated guns. When we’d learned she was pregnant with Jack, one of the first things she made me promise was, no guns.

At the time that seemed easy enough. I was familiar with guns, but didn’t own any nor did I feel inclined to, but what I hadn’t realized was that when Cheryl had said no guns, she’d meant, no guns. 

No water guns, no air rifles, no BB guns, no kind of toy or real gun, period. Even the game at the county fair where you shoot water into the mouth of the clown to see who can get their balloon to pop first and win a prize was banned. No guns meant, no guns.

Once Cheryl’s no guns policy had been established there were times when it had led to some awkward situations. Like when she was ready to return to work after Jack had been born and she wanted to place him in a home daycare. We’d be interviewing potential care providers and everything would seem perfect. Then she’d look at me and I’d know it was time to ask the deal breaker. “Are there any firearms on the premises?” 

A yes answer immediately eliminated that care provider. Rationales, explanations, reassurances about safety – gun safes, locks, ammo kept separate from weapons, etc… were a worthless use of breath. Any guns, no Jack.                    

Cheryl had never mentioned she was a crack shot. It was Hank who told me. He’d said that when Cheryl was a little girl, he taught her how to handle a rifle. According to him, she was a natural. Her hands were steady, she was calm, and she breathed just right. She could zero the sight and barrel with such accuracy that hitting whatever she was targeting was a sure thing.

As Hank explained it, Cheryl never had any qualms when it came to guns until the summer she turned fifteen. That year he’d sent her away to spend time with her grandmother and the rest of her mother, Betty’s family. After Betty’s death, he’d moved the two of them back to the town where he’d grown up and he felt it was time she got to know them. Unfortunately, when a local boy pointed out Cheryl and said, “ain’t she the girl whose mother killed herself”, she learned the truth concerning her mother’s “accident.”

When Cheryl confronted Betty’s family they admitted she had placed the muzzle of a shotgun in her mouth and pulled the trigger. Hank had arrived home from work that day and found his wife’s brains splattered on the dining room wall and a screaming infant girl. He’d then sold the house and moved back to his hometown.  

Everyone had done their best to reassure Cheryl that what had happened had nothing to do with her. They explained that nowadays people called what Betty had had post postpartum depression. But back then, it had no name. Instead, people figured that sooner or later Betty would stop feeling blue and get back in the swing of things. Following that summer, Cheryl wouldn’t touch a gun.

I knew it was impossible for me to understand how Cheryl’s mother’s suicide had affected her, but sane or not, her mother had made her own choice. Hank then also made his. He’d done his best to raise a little girl on his own and shelter her from the horror of what had happened to her mother.

There was no way he could place the blame on a gun. Guns had been a part of his family’s way of life for generations. Every member of his family that I’d met had a deep respect for guns. They’d established inviolate rules about responsible ownership and passed them down from generation to generation. 

To them, guns weren’t good or bad. They were simply tools in the hands of whoever held them. I respected Hank’s family, and I respected their guns, but in general, I struggled to understand white people’s obsession with guns.

In rural communities where people hunted deer, rabbits, and turkeys, having guns made complete sense to me. When I lived in the country, I’d killed my fair share of destructive varmints, woodchucks that wouldn’t accept the fact your garden was off limits, the same with foxes and your chickens, but Cheryl, Jack, and I lived in suburbia. Why did there seem to be more white gun owners and collectors there? Definitely more than I’d ever known while living in the country, blacks and whites combined. And so many of the weapons they owned were clearly designed for war. 

Were some of these people consciously or subconsciously doing exactly that, preparing for war? Based on daily news reports, things were just as bad in cities. Young black men killing other black men, Latinos killing Latinos. There was nothing to hunt in suburbia or cities, they were just full of people.     

As I came around the bend and into the clearing, I saw Cheryl sitting on the pond’s battered wooden dock. She was staring at the water. I walked up and placed the jacket I was carrying around her shoulders. Then I sat down beside her. Small circles formed on the water’s surface. Each steadily expanded outward like a smoke ring until it could no longer maintain its perfect form. Then it broke apart and disappeared.

“It was an accident,” I said.

“I know,” she replied, a painful sadness in her eyes. “I know Hank would never do anything to hurt Jack.”

“You ready to head back?” I got to my feet.

“Yeah.” She took my hand and standing up.

We walked back toward the cabin side-by-side in silence. At one point I squeezed Cheryl’s hand, and she squeezed mine in return. As we drew close to the cabin, there was a strong smell of smoke in the air. A fire was going in the burn pit. Its flickering flames lit both Jack and Hank’s faces and they were each holding a stick with a hot dog over the flames. 

“We’re hungry,” said Jack. “We started cooking.” He smiled. 

Cheryl walked over to the packages of hot dogs and buns on a plate near Hank and took out two hot dogs.

“There’s sharpened sticks over there,” said Hank keeping his eyes focused front.

She grabbed two sticks, shoved a hot dog on the end of each and handed one to me. I grabbed a bun and walked over to Jack.

“Hey, buddy. I think yours is done,” I said. 

“But I like it burnt.”

“No, you don’t.” I took hold of his stick and pulled it from the fire. Then I slid his hot dog off the stick and into the bun. I handed it to him and he took a bite.

“Good?”

“Uh huh,” he said, bits of hot dog and bread falling from his mouth.

“Dad?”

“Cheryl.”

“Yours looks done.”

“So it is.” He pulled his hot dog out of the fire and blew on it. Then he took a bite taking care not to burn his lips or tongue.

Once we all had our fill, Jack’s being two, Hank pulled out a bag of marshmallows. He stuck a single marshmallow on the end of Jack’s stick, then his. Then he proceeded to show Jack how to roast marshmallows without charring them.

After Jack had eaten four or five marshmallows, Cheryl told him he’d had enough and it was time to start getting ready for bed. Jack opened his mouth to begin his nightly negotiations, but Hank stepped in.

“Mind your mother,” he said. “If you’re quick about it, there’s a couple of empty jars in the kitchen we can use to catch some fireflies.”

With that as an enticement, Jack was gone in a snap.

“Thanks,” said Cheryl to Hank. “Any more sugar and he’d be totally wired tonight.”

“Like his mother used to get.”

“Yeah,” replied Cheryl. “Like his mother used to get.”

Jack came charging back out the door. It slammed behind him.

“Whoa,” I said seeing his bare feet. “You need something on your feet.”

“But…”

“Hey, where’s my jars?” Hank rose to his feet. “Come on.” He scooped up Jack in his arms. “We can get something for your feet and the jars.”                 

As Hank carried Jack back inside, I walked over to Cheryl and began massaging her neck and shoulders. 

“Better?”

“Yeah.”

“You want to catch fireflies?”

“Not particularly.”

“Then I guess we should leave them to it and tidy up things inside before bed,” I said.

Cheryl nodded. We wrapped an arm around each other’s waists and walked back to the cabin. Jack and Hank passed us heading in the other direction on their way to catch fireflies.

The next day, Saturday, passed without incident. In the early afternoon, we went swimming in the pond. Later, Jack and Hank went for a nature walk. While they were gone, Cheryl and I stayed behind and drove ourselves crazy working on a one-thousand piece jigsaw puzzle. That evening Cheryl made dinner and things seemed to have returned to normal.

On Sunday morning, I thought it’d be best to get an early start. That way we’d avoid the weekenders, who were also returning home. When I awakened I could smell coffee. In the kitchen, Hank and Jack had been busy making a mountain of waffles. With his eyes as big as platters, Jack had crammed so many waffles into his mouth, he looked like a chipmunk. 

“You’d better slow down, buddy.” I rubbed his head as I slid onto a stool at the counter. 

Hank handed me a cup of steaming hot coffee. “She alright?” He gestured with his head in the direction of the loft where Cheryl was still sleeping.

“Yeah,” I replied. “She’s fine. You know how she is about guns.”

“Yup. Sure do.” Hank took a sip of his cup of coffee. “We good?”

“Of course.” I picked up my cup, toasted him with it, then took a sip. “Good coffee.”

“You know I’d never want any harm to come to the boy.”

“I know.”

“Well, just as long as you know.”

“I do.”

“Dad, what are you and grandpa talking about?” asked Jack, reminding us of his presence.

“Nothing, buddy. You need to finish your breakfast.” I got up from the stool and headed back to the loft, coffee in hand. 

Cheryl was awake but still wrapped in the bedsheets. When she saw me she sat up and scooted backward until her back was against the bed’s headboard. I handed her the cup of coffee.

“You make this?” she asked.

“No,” I said. “Your father did.”

“Good. You make lousy coffee.”

“Well good morning to you too,” I said.

She laid a hand on my wrist. “I take it he’s up.”

“Yeah. The kitchen’s waffle world.”

“I better go down there.” She handed me the coffee and leaped out from under the sheets. “He’ll let Jack eat as many waffles as he wants. The last thing we need is Jack getting car sick on the way home.”        

While Jack, Hank, and Cheryl continued with breakfast, I began packing. I’d finished with Jack’s things and started in on mine when Cheryl returned and joined in.

“He seems okay this morning.” She balled up a sweatshirt and tossed it into her suitcase.

“Uh Huh.”

“Look, I know he didn’t mean for it to happen, but…”

“I know,” I said. “It’s okay.  I understand.”

Cheryl resumed packing. I snapped the locks on my bag shut, then went and got Jack’s bag from the other room. Outside I skirted the edge of the burn pit, made my way to the wagon, and deposited the bag in the trunk. As I walked back to the cabin, I stopped at the burn pit for a moment, then continued on.  

Cheryl had finished the packing and brought the last of our suitcases downstairs to the front room. I tucked one of the small bags under my arm and grabbed each suitcase with a free hand.

“Let me help.” She slipped the small bag out from under my arm. She grabbed the door, and I shuffled through. We placed the suitcases in the trunk, then headed back to collect Jack.

“Did you notice?” I nodded toward the burn pit. 

Cheryl stopped and stared. Scratched in the pit’s ashes were the words, Jack & Grandpa.   

“That’s nice,” she said.

“Look there.” I pointed at the large clump of ashes after the final “a” in grandpa. 

Her eyes followed my finger, then stopped. Barely visible was what remained of the stock of the gun Jack had found when we’d arrived on Friday.

“He didn’t.”

“He must have.”

Cheryl shook her head and we resumed walking.

“You all set?” asked Hank as we set foot back inside. 

“Yup,” I replied. “We’ll be seeing you.” I waved, took Cheryl by the elbow and pretended to leave.

“What about me?”

“You who?”

“Me. Jack. You can’t leave without me.”

“Darn,” I said, smiling at my son. “I thought we were forgetting something.”

Cheryl took Jack by the hand and the four of us went outside to say final goodbyes. As Cheryl buckled Jack into his car seat, Hank went over to Jack’s open window, thrust in his hand, then quickly withdrew it.

“I’ve got your nose.” He held the tip of his thumb between his forefinger and middle finger.

“Give it back.” Jack squirmed in his seat.

“Alright.” Hank  reached back in and touched Jack’s nose. “Only as long as you promise to come visit me again real soon.”

“Dad, I love you.” Cheryl, gave Hank a hug.

“I love you too, little girl.” He hugging her back.

“Hank.”

“Jim.”

“You take care.”

“You too. Look after my little girl and grandson,” he added as Cheryl and I got in the car.

I started up the wagon, stuck my arm out the window, and gave Hank a wave as we began making our way down the cinder driveway. In the rearview mirror, I could see Hank standing alone waving goodbye.

“You all stay safe,” he yelled. Then he turned away and headed back toward the cabin.

J L Higgs’ short stories typically focus on life from the perspective of a black American.  He has been published in over 30 magazines including: Indiana Voice Journal, Black Elephant, The Writing Disorder, Contrary Magazine, Literally Stories, The Remembered Arts Journal, Rigorous, and was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

He currently lives outside of Boston.

Facebook:  https://www.facebook.com/JL-Higgs-ArtistWriter-1433711619998262