by Melissa Yi
The bun guy managed to get his knees down to the floor, even though he was still in full lotus pose.
Damn it. Anya shoved a purple block at Chris back. He sat on top of it. He’d already been the tallest guy in the class. Now he towered over everyone, plus his knees still pointed into the clouds, like skyscrapers.
"Your hips will open in time," said Anya, passing behind Chris to correct other students. That black woman who’d signed a waiver ended up sitting on a block too, but then her knees aligned with her hips, and Anya smiled at her and nodded.
"Now we will begin the class with the universal sound of Om three times. This sacred, mystical Sanskrit mantra is an invocation to the gods before any prayer, mantra, or sacrifice. Today, let us centre ourselves for the summer solstice. Inhale to chant."
Even though Chris could hear Reece take a breath beside him, he couldn’t bring myself to chant along with the rest of them. He opened his mouth and lip-synched while some very nasal voices hummed, "Ohmmmmmmmmmmm."
Reece sang a high and a little off-key. Chris had to smile.
Anya wandered back from the other side of the deck and started the next round. "Ahhh-OHMMMMMMMMMMMMMM." She sang on-key and loudly, like she was punching the air with her breath. They had to do it a third time, even though people’s voices trailed off uncertainly.
A deep ship horn boomed through the air. Chris figured it sounded better than all of them put together.
Except Reece. He could listen to her all day. She sat, leaning slightly forward, her eyes closed, her face relaxed and trusting, like a child.
"Let’s begin with our sun salutations," said Anya. "Some of you may remember our 108 days of doing 108 sun salutations."
Wait a minute. A hundred and eight? She was joking, right? But Anya was already back to her mat, instructing, "Stand at the top of your mat."
He could do that. He stepped to the short end of his mat, like everyone else. For him, this meant he faced the railings and could look out on the water, although Anya was in the way.
"Raise your hands into the air. Strong and free, like wings."
Chris felt like tucking his hands into his armpits and flapping his arms like chicken wings, but figured this was the wrong crowd for it. Reece swept her arms out to the side and reached into the air, leaning backwards and arching her back.
Chris tried to do the same thing, only his back stopped him. Straight up was as far as he could go.
Anya walked beside him and placed a firm hand along the small of his back.
Chris’s body jerked. He wasn’t used to strange women touching him. Back in his bar days, sure. Dancing, flirting, whatever. But not a teacher.
"Relax," intoned Anya. "Breathe in."
Chris clenched his teeth. His breath whistled.
"Relax the muscles of your jaw. Breathe out."
He exhaled and let his mouth sag, but he could still feel the tension.
So could Anya, because her cool fingers brushed the angle of his jaw.
That did it. Chris took a step back, away from her.
She met his eyes. Hers were so dark that they were almost black, and she wasn’t smiling. "If you don’t want any adjustments, raise your hand."
Chris lifted his hand in the air while staring right in her eyes.
"Very good." She turned away. "Inhale one more time, then exhale, folding your torso toward your thighs, lengthening your hamstrings. Release your back."
Chris felt a small pulse of victory. Chris, 1. Creepy yoga wench, 0. Of course, it meant that he’d probably never learn how to do yoga right, but oh, well. He glanced out of the corner of his eyes at Reece. She’d practically bent herself in half to touch her toes, her eyes blissfully closed.
Chris hastily folded himself in half, but that was worse than trying a backbend. His hamstrings seized up like a kite string suddenly jerking to its limit in the wind. He felt like a wind-up toy stuck halfway down.
"Inhale up halfway, looking up at the horizon. You can touch your hands to your shins, if you like. Ardha Uttanasana."
Chris’s back eased up when he pulled up to touch his shins. He should probably just stay here all day. He made the mistake of twisting his head to check on the bun guy.
"Ouch!" Chris muttered. Not only did his neck stab him again, but the bun guy still had his fingers on the floor, even though his back now formed a horizontal line.
"Yoga should be a source of pleasure, never pain," intoned Anya from the back of the boat. "You can ride your edge, but if you feel any discomfort, relax and return to your breathing."
What was she talking about? He was always breathing. Otherwise, he’d die. Chris inched his hands further down his legs, to the middle of his shins. That was tolerable. The boat rocked some more, and Chris spread his feet apart, trying to ground himself.
Anya was already moving on to the next step. "Exhale, fold forward once more in rag doll, or Uttanasana. If your hamstrings are tight, bend your knees. You should never hyperextend or lock your knees. Keep them soft."
Chris grunted, trying to straighten his legs as much as possible. Soft? He laughed at soft. Soft meant that you needed Viagra.
"Step your right leg back into a lunge."
That Viagra joke was pretty good. He should share that one with Felix after. After all, the guy kept calling him today for no reason. Might as well make his morning. Chris belatedly moved his right leg back a few feet, even though Reece’s legs practically spanned the length of her mat. She’d already stretched her arms up to the sky, arching her back.
So Chris did it too, even before Anya suggested it. This time, his lower back twinged. He bit back a curse, his arms freezing in mid-air.
Anya caught his arms and lowered his hands to the floor, even though she wasn’t supposed to touch him. "Listen to your body. Stay with your hands on your mat or on your hips if that is right for you."
"I can do it," Chris muttered.
"The first principle of yoga is ahimsa, or non-violence. Struggling to do poses your body isn’t ready for is a form of violence against the self. Mentally criticizing your body because you’re unable to do the asana is a form of violence against the self."
"True dat," said the bun guy, who was even more arched backwards than Reece, with his stupid bun pointing at the sky.
"Plank pose. Push-up position," said Anya, and everyone dropped to the floor.
This, at least, Chris could do. He used to do push-ups all the time. On his knuckles, even. He itched to try that now. Show these yoga freaks how it was done.
"Exhale in Chaturanga Dandasana."
Chris glanced at Reece. She was bending her elbows to bring her body almost parallel to the mat, a few inches off the ground.
He could do that. No sweat.
"Hold it here."
Well, maybe he’d sweat a little. His arms started to shake, but so did Reece’s.
"Go into Upward Dog, or Urdhva Mukha Svanasana." She rolled the foreign words with relish, like Oooooordva whatever whatever. What a poser. Although the real award had to go to the bun guy, who was now suspending himself just off the ground using only his hands and the tops of his feet, with the rest of his body in a deep backbend.
"Beginners, do knees-chest-chin and come into a baby cobra," Anya was nattering on, but Chris pushed himself into the Oooordva before she could force him into the baby pose.
Something seemed to snap on the left side of his neck.
He could hear it, almost like a click.
And then the pain flashed from his neck, flooding into his brain.
He collapsed face-first on the mat, pinned down by the agony.
"Chris?"
He could hear Reece’s high-frightened voice, her small hands patting his shoulders. "Chris, are you okay?"
No, he wasn’t okay. "Call," he started to say, but he couldn’t remember what the rest of it was, and the word seemed drawn out and flat. "Call," he tried again.
"You want me to call someone? Is that what you’re saying?"
&
nbsp; Dimly, he could hear murmurs of anxiety around him. Reece was patting down the front of the mat. But she’d seen him tuck his phone at the back of the mat. Was she so worried about him that she’d forgotten?
Or why couldn’t she just use her own phone?
His head spun, but he knew Reece should be able to find her own phone.
"I found it," said Anya, crouching beside him. "We can call 911."
"Don’t. Need," said Chris, but part of him, the smart part of him, knew that he did, even as Anya passed the phone to Reece.
Reece dropped the phone on his back. "Oh, I’m sorry! My hands are slippery."
Not good in a crisis. Chris might have smiled except the muscles of his face didn’t seem to work right.
"I got it, I got it," said Reece, but then she said, "Oops," and Felix’s voice boomed through the speakerphone.
"Hey, buddy, your doctor’s office called. Something about your MRI’s all messed up, I guess. She left messages yesterday, sent the letter to your house last week, but you didn’t answer. She flipped out when I said you were doing yoga, so—"
Reece cut it off. "I just want to call an ambulance!"
"Press emergency call," said the bun guy.
"That works!" said Reece, and Chris could have laughed again at his dizzy blonde, only his head was spinning and the floor was spinning and the boat was rocking, and he puked all over his yoga mat.
"Ugh!" Reece leaped away from him, on to her pink mat.
Anya grabbed Chris’s arm and cranked on it.
The pain flared higher. He cried out.
"Don’t move him!" said the bun guy.
"I have to. He’ll choke on his vomit," said Anya, rolling him on to his left, and Chris started to say no, started to shove her, but then he gagged and started puking again, and she was pushing him one way and pulling his yoga mat the other way while the rest of the class stampeded off the boat, making it rock even more, so he puked some more, no, it was just heaving, his stomach was empty now, except some yellow stuff, and he couldn’t talk, but he was thinking.
He never got the phone calls yesterday.
He never got the letter last week.
Either they called the wrong number, or someone deleted the messages.
Someone intercepted the mail.
There was only one someone in his life.
Squinting through the pain, he craned his neck up to look at her. Her blonde hair was silhouetted in the sun. She was crying on the phone, with her back to him. She looked like an angel. His angel.
Even her back was beautiful.
Like the new black-and-white background photo on his phone. The smooth wave of her naked back.
Who took that picture of her naked?
He realized what had seemed so off about Reece this morning. She hadn’t smelled like eucalyptus oil. She’s smelled darker. More fetid.
Like patchouli.
He gagged.
Anya shoved his neck one more time. The agony ratcheted up one unbelievable, crucial notch.
And the world dissolved into black.
Originally published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in January 2015
Because
Because you were so fat that I could count the rolls through your T-shirt, and know that they’d build across my belly and back in the exact same way.
Because you spent the check every month, and you never gave me a penny, not even if I needed a new eraser for school. "You just ask your fancy teacher for one. Go on, ask."
Because I had to ask, and their eyes would burn me with their pity.
Because you’d spend hours painting your nails, but never let me touch any of the bottles, just because I broke one when I was two.
Because I hated the sound of your crinkling chip bags.
Because when Daddy said he was leaving, you said, "Go, then," and let him walk out the door, even though I screamed and cried.
Because when they put an eviction notice on our door, you just smoked a joint.
Because you made us move to Butthole Town, U.S.A.
Because I have to get out of this place, away from the fucking cows and the falling-down barns.
Because there aren’t any jobs here unless you want to shovel shit or ask, "Would you like fries with that?"
Because the other kids are always in my face, saying who’s having sex with who and who got so shit-faced drunk that he banged his head on the bathtub and didn’t wake up for six hours.
Because of every single "uncle" you put me through.
Because I thought I’d kill myself until I met him.
Because he laughed when he saw you for the first time. Just a little snort, but I heard it, and it made me want to cry.
Because when you met him, you giggled and said, "He’ll never stay."
Because the clouds have wiped out the sun, and all I see and smell and hear is rain.
Because our apartment roof drips, drips, drips, and I’m the one who has to wake up in the middle of the night and dump the water out of the coffee can while you keep snoring away.
Because the snow has melted, and it’s easier to hitchhike in the rain.
Because you wouldn’t let me call him.
Because you took my cell phone away and used up all the minutes.
Because last week, you slapped me across the face in WalMart, in front of the photo counter, when I dropped your coffee.
Because he’s the one person who’s never raised a hand to me. Not once. Not even as a joke.
Because he thinks I’m beautiful.
Because I knew you hid your money in the freezer.
Because he had a gun.
Because he said he would do it, and I didn’t have to look.
Because he loves me.
Originally published in Fiction River: Crime, 2014
***
I wrote "Because" when I was strung out and exhausted at Kris Rusch and Dean Smith’s mystery workshop in Oregon.
Perhaps a month before the workshop started, Kris asked us to e-mail her which historical time periods we were familiar with, even if it was through the movies. Then she asked for our areas of expertise.
For the first, I wrote, "World War II, Nazi Germany." I lived in Germany when I was ten and used to read World War II books for fun. Maybe this explains a lot about me.
Then I chose three areas of expertise: "Emergency medicine, motherhood, yoga."
Kris’s next pre-workshop assignment was to write a crime story set in our well-versed historical period. Bonus points if the crime was illegal at the time, but no longer. For example, selling booze was illegal during the Prohibition, not now.
Ah. I’d given myself only one option. Time to research the Nazis. I wrote a story that evolved into "Blood Diamonds" for Jewish Noir.
At the workshop proper, Kris told us to write a crime story based on one of our areas of expertise.
Eric, the youngest and keenest member of the group, said, "Can we write more than one story?"
"Sure!" said Kris.
Grr. Competition meant that I would now have to write at least two stories at once; exhaustion meant that it would be a grind.
Normally, I have a ton of energy. But I live three time zones away, in South Glengarry, Ontario, a rural area between Montreal and Ottawa. Between my jobs as an emergency physician, a mother of two small children, and writing, I live my life on a razor wire of time division as it is. So add in this workshop, with mystery novels to read beforehand, my own novel to finish, stories to write, stories to critique, a flight across the continent and a two-hour drive down the Oregon Coast, and bam.
I don’t want to complain. I’m a lucky woman who can afford the time and money to go, with a stellar husband who will work full-time and wrangle our kids for a week. But when I wake up at 3 a.m., Pacific Time, and we’re still workshopping at 1 a.m., Eastern Standard Time, I don’t have a lot of reserve.
And in hindsight, just like my answer on the historical periods, I should have offered myself more choic
es for areas of expertise. I was winding up my most complicated medical mystery yet, Terminally Ill , with three different plots, so I was temporarily burned out on medical writing. My mind refused to write about the emergency department.
I wanted to explore yoga. Specifically, murder and yoga, because they’re such diametrically opposed subjects. Or so one would think.
I pounded the anemic Internet connection at the Anchor Inn. (I love the funky, indie Anchor Inn, but twenty writers simultaneously pummeling your wireless access can and will smash your download speed.) I read and read as much as I could about the "dark side" of yoga. And I wrote "Om," which ended up getting published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.
But I didn’t know that at the time. All I knew was that I was tired and no one might like my writing. For my first class with Kris and Dean, the Master Class in 2003, pretty much none of my classmates did like my writing. I can say this with confidence because when we’d do group critiques, only Jerry Weinberg liked my men’s room story (now called "Ninety-Five Percent Porn and Spam") and Jay Lake chose "Dog Island." That was IT. Out of a dozen writers and multiple stories written and pre-written at the workshop. We pretended we were editors, and my classmates would tell me their "editor line," where they stopped reading. They didn’t choose my stories for their hypothetical anthologies. Blah.
But writing is a lot of whistling in the dark. It’s one of those things you do because you love it, even if you get kicked in the teeth, over and over. Like medicine and motherhood, actually.
I kept writing, fuelled by stubbornness and some key one-on-one feedback from Kris at the end of that 2003 Master Class. She’d said, "You are the kind of writer they have to create a new category for."
My eyes had bugged out. Kris and Dean had explained in their lectures that periodically, a writer comes along and creates a revolution in the publishing world. For example. Lawyers and thrillers. Who would have thunk it?
Scott Turrow did. After Presumed Innocent, readers sudden clamored for this brand new category, legal thrillers. Scott had his hands full with a legal practice and couldn’t immediately whip up books for them.
