by James Thomas
If you look close, you can see me in her photo—I am the elongated stain in the northeast section of her mirrored sunglass frame. It’s our anniversary and I should be smiling but she is—after a summer of murder, she’s the one smiling—and since I’ve never seen her offer an expression like this before I’m mostly stumped, car-struck and nervous, but you’d never know because the lens blocks my face, and anyway, as I said, I’m simply a spot on the glass, a smudge, a smear, a white-crusted bird dropping.
Yesterday she stuffed the roses I bought down the disposal. I came back in to retrieve my forgotten wallet and found her feeding limbs into the manic metal mouth. A motor tore up the stems and stamens, the thorns and chlorophyll. She stood over the sink watching. She ran water. She might have been weeping, I’m not sure, but I do know for a fact that she was laughing.
She couldn’t see me, didn’t realize I was there, but I had a feeling we were both wondering over the same thing, the ease of destruction, how simple it is to kill a living thing, unborn child or store-bought bouquet.
LEN KUNTZ
The Hard Dance
Before she leaves for the weekend, my daughter asks me if I’ll teach her how to slow dance.
When she was young she took hip-hop classes, so chubby with all the other blades. The following year, chubby gave way to fat. She wore sweats and only continued for my wife’s sake, for mine. In those outfits the spandex looked like a mudslide and I found myself looking away at the other girls who were more fit and prettier, blonder, with clean teeth.
When I put my hands on her hips now, she winces.
I yell, “Damn it!”
She says it’s okay, it’s just a few small bruises, it’s not what I think, Russell wasn’t even around when it happened, he was in Chicago, he was, he was.
I pull her close. Her pulse throbs through her wrist. He’ll be holding her like this, I think.
In the ceiling I see a new crack, a gray streak of crooked lightning from where the house has settled. Then I notice others a few feet away. Those’ll need to be fixed, I tell myself.
When we put the sign in the yard my daughter went berserk, tossed the toaster through the kitchen window. “I know why you’re doing this!” she screamed. “You two can go ahead and move if you want, but I’m staying.”
Now we sway, our shoe tips brushing. We cut odd concentric paths round and round right there in the living room where I watched her take her first step.
She squeezes my hand. She leans in and tells me she loves him. She says he makes her happy.
DEBRA MARQUART
Dylan’s Lost Years
Somewhere between Hibbing and New York, the red rust streets of the Iron Range and the shipping yards of the Atlantic, somewhere between Zimmerman and Dylan was a pit stop in Fargo, a superman-in-the-phone-booth interlude, recalled by no one but the Danforth Brothers, who hired the young musician, fresh in town with his beat-up six string and his small town twang, to play shake, rattle, and roll, to play good golly, along with Wayne on the keys and Dirk on the bass, two musical brothers whom you might still find playing the baby grand, happy hours at the southside Holiday Inn.
And if you slip the snifter a five, Wayne might talk between how high the moon, and embraceable you, about Dylan’s lost years, about the Elvis sneer, the James Dean leather collar pulled tight around his neck, about the late night motorcycle rides, kicking over the city’s garbage cans, and how they finally had to let him go, seeing how he was more trouble than he was worth, and with everyone in full agreement that the new boy just could not sing.
DEBRA MARQUART
This New Quiet
The day after the fire, all their equipment charred in a ditch and blown to ashes, the thin axle of the truck lying on its side like the burned-out frame of a dragonfly, they gathered in a living room on a circle of old couches. The players sat forward, their eyes studying the swirls in the worn carpet.
They who had the power to make so much noise sat in this new quiet. They did not speak of debt or creditors, nor did they speak of lost guitars—the blond Les Paul, and the mahogany Gibson double-neck that sang sweetly in its velvet case as it rolled down the highway.
They sat in silence, trying to find the new words the fire had left on their tongues. Outside traffic rushed by, the clatter of passing trains, the honk of angry horns, as the sun dialed its way around the room and disappeared.
In the half dark someone stood. It was the tall blond guitar player who rose, wobbly in his black boots. He stood in the center of the spiral, raised his thin hands to his face and blew out one long exhale. It hissed through the room like a wild balloon losing steam.
When all the wind was out of him, he gulped one deep breath, swung a long arm like a knockout punch through the sheer emptiness of air, and said, Fuck. It was only one word. It was inadequate for the moment. But it was a good place to start.
ROY KESEY
Calisthenics
There was a perfect rectangle and he walked outside, down the block, and now the restaurant. The restaurant girl, beautiful through the window. He did a jumping jack but she turned away.
Farther on a woman and she smacked him against a wall. The wall smelled terrific, cool and damp and cementy as he fell. He hit the ground, chipped a tooth, looked up at her huge against the sun.
A ride and some questions and painted bars for a while. Sweet sweet cement but his tooth hurt a lot. A guy offered him a thing and took him by the scruff of his neck. Then someone came for him. She said things and he nodded a lot. Most people were mostly right.
At home the person was still saying things and to make his tooth hurt less he imagined that it was an elephant. The restaurant girl, was she calling out to the cook? He hoped that she was and tomorrow he would find her and ask her.
Night. The television had things and he watched them. The restaurant girl would just now be getting home and still have grease on her hands, sweat on her face, he was sure of it. Time, time. The television things moved. She only wanted for him to be happy. He did a toe-touch, and then another.
ROY KESEY
Learning to Count in a Small Town
1
stands in his garden at dawn. On the trunk of his apricot tree is a swallowtail fanning its wings still wet with birth. Ven, he calls to his wife. Ha nacido la mariposa.
2
pushes her cart through the supermarket, around and around in the cool air. Her mouth is crusted with dirt. When she tires, she rests. She buys a bag of dog food, and the clerk knows she has no dog. He nods and hands her the receipt.
3
hasn’t yet learned to swim. Her brother taunts her from the far side of the river. The light on the water hurts her eyes. She looks down at her feet and wishes they were smaller.
4
leans on the bathroom sink and stares at himself in the mirror. There is more yellow in his left eye than in his right. The phone rings. He goes on staring.
5
hammers on the podium, shouts about immigrants. In the park outside the auditorium, men are playing softball, swearing and spitting, and their wives pretend to watch.
6
leans back in her hammock and knows that the afternoon heat will never end. The stink of tarweed weights the air. Crows harry a red-tailed hawk through the sky.
7
just makes it to his mailbox. Inside is the water bill and a postcard from his granddaughter. I hope you’re okay, she has written. I hope everything is fine.
8
never leaves her apartment. She rests on the floor, stares out the screen door at the dusk and her empty bird feeder.
9
sits up in bed and lights a cigarette. If she holds her breath she can hear the television in the next room.
0
has heart trouble. From his barstool he listens to conversations and has thoughts of football. He asks for one more drink and the barman says, Sorry, bud. We’re finished here. It’s time to get you home.
KATHLEEN MCGOOKEY
Another Drowning, Miner Lake
A woman drowned last night in our lake, she was drowning but we didn’t know: we saw flashing lights, a police car drove by our house. Drowning: the helicopter landed and all the cars backed out of the driveway. We heard on the police scanner it was a woman or a girl. Though her chance was slim, the sun set as usual, gorgeous and temporary despite the rain, a small sweet promise to our skin from the world. Promise of green, a gray dawn, a day that stretches long and without kisses or appointments. As much as we’d like to think we’re elevated, we’re not. We thought she was a little girl but it turned out she was older. We hadn’t known her and still we swam, knew this about her, swam to the diving raft and someone’s yard light shone white over us. No one can blame the lake; concentrate instead on saving yourself, myself, the self I have covered with wings, because today the lake is simple and gray and going through the motions, calm—flat as a plate, polite as any gilded mirror.
KYLE HEMMINGS
Supergirl
On TV seasons ago she played Supergirl. Now running along the slip of beach, performing her mile jog and panting, she slowed and collapsed before my sand castle. Her body was no longer a fiddle, but rather, a cello.
“It’s what being out of work does to you,” she said with that innocent air of the everyday tragic, that inarticulate murmur between words.
We turned and forked our hands into sand, piled clumps of wet sand onto the castle. We were still like kids, I thought.
Later, we rolled over and welcomed the sun into the plexus of our pale bodies.
“You still don’t love me, do you, Supergirl?”
She turned one slow sleepy eye toward me.
“It’ll be the way it always was. I’ll be your mermaid and I’ll fuck like one. But when it comes to love, this old Supergirl will fly away.”
She closed her eyes and turned her head toward the sand.
“That season ended a long time ago,” she said.
I reached for her breast under the white bathing suit. It felt like ice, or maybe an imitation ice sculpture of a breast, melting.
KYLE HEMMINGS
Father Dunne’s School for Wayward Boys #1
There must have been a black-holed galaxy of eyes watching us, Father Dunne’s special boys, who secretly wished to be crucified. We tucked our plastic rosaries into our back pockets, the same ones where we once kept rainbow-colored condoms. There were awkward confessions in the corner of a room that always made us shiver with long-suppressed intimacies. Our hearts would never again be open to visitors.
The proctor with early dementia sang at night through the only open window for miles. Something about stars on a string and how his mother did amazing needlepoint until her fingers went stiff. We told the star-crossed priests with traces of old acne that our mothers did tricks to save our bodies. Our pen knives were confiscated so we sharpened our pencils and used them for weapons.
A young girl wavering between celibacy and punk mother-lust despair came to visit us each night. In a dim light, she blushed pink. She sowed our loins in different patterns with her brilliant coordination of tongue and complex fingering, then walked away, blending with morning sky. We became a wet dream. With magic marker, we drew the shape of open vaginas on the wet cheeks of incoming students. Asked who among them were ever caught red-handed. We grew more rebellious under our sheaths of lethargy. We sabotaged track and field events with competing schools. After graduation, we committed insidious crimes with a light touch and a good pen knife. We lifted what every straight-edge bleary-eyed sucker thought he could possess: love. We were expelled into the next life.
MELISSA MCCRACKEN
Implosion
“Spontaneous combustion,” he says. We’re on the couch in my apartment and he is braiding, unbraiding, rebraiding my hair. I laugh. Spontaneous combustion sounds funny—calls up an image of his thin body bursting in a “poof,” leaving only wispy smoke trails to drift skyward. In truth, it is probably a messy death, but I can’t shake the image of him just disappearing.
He is telling me how he would like to die if he could choose. “Maybe a meteor falling on my head,” he says. I think of cartoon cats crushed by space boulders that have been pulled to earth by wicked mice. The shocked look on the cats’ faces just before impact always cracks me up.
I say that I want to slip away quietly in my sleep. I almost add “alone” but think better of it. I shift around on the couch, present him my feet for a massage. He says, “Front page headlines . . . blaze of glory . . . infamy.”
I shake the braid from my hair, toss my head, tease him with the wordless promise of hair in his eyes, across his chest, in his mouth. “How about implosion?” I ask, which I immediately regret. I already know that he will die of a broken heart.
MELISSA MCCRACKEN
It Would’ve Been Hot
The first and only night he and I had sex his apartment building burned down and though the “official” cause was 2B’s hotplate, I wanted to blame him as I huddled in his winter coat and boxer shorts beside the fire truck—blame him because he’d been reckless and impatient, hadn’t used a condom or even the couch, instead mauling me in his hallway, all long before I said, “Do you smell that?” and he threw open the front door, drowning us in choking smoke before he slammed it shut, coughing, and I tried to yell “back stairs” but I couldn’t breathe, yet I saw him reach up with the flat of his palm and place it against the now-closed door (like in those old school-safety films) just to see, had he bothered, if it would’ve been hot—the same way he reached out, as the firemen pulled away, and placed his hand against the small of my back in a gesture I guess was meant to be tender but instead was after the fact.
RANDALL BROWN
Cadge
They borrow things from her—not just dye-free Tide, the organic jumbo brown eggs, a cupful of lactose-free milk. They borrow her brown Coach bag, her Barbara Heinrich pearl-gold bracelet, her Donald Pliner shoes, her Jane Bohan ring, her black Prada dress, her Infiniti G35, her pool for birthday parties, her house for the meet-and-greet for parents of new students. They borrow her wireless Internet access, two feet of the south property line, the occasional Sunday paper. At one time, they borrowed her social security number, her Platinum American Express, her CAP account.
They borrow her husband. They fly him to Cleveland, Dallas, Palm Springs, Atlanta, Boston. They borrow him for dinner, for Saturday meetings, for Sunday golf with clients flying in from Japan, India, California, skiing in Tahoe with the attorneys from Frisco. They borrow his easygoing charm, that fierce determination for that thing beyond the thing he has.
Take them, she tells them. I don’t want them back. She takes longer and longer walks, farther and farther from home. She imagines the notes posted on her front door.
There must be more, one of the notes will say. And a note from her husband.
Long ago, he knocked on her apartment door, she answered with “What do you want?”—and found him and his wrinkled bow tie. “Twenty-seven times,” he said. She stood behind him, on tiptoes, with no idea how to tie it, but the first try—voila! Wrapped like a present. At the wedding, it began. Her father said, “I need to borrow him for a moment.” How far that moment has stretched, continues to expand.
Her husband’s note could say Missed you! But it won’t. I’m missing something, it’ll tell her. She’ll come home to find out what’s gone, the something her husband can no longer name.
THERESA WYATT
Gettysburg, July, 1863
One soldier took a bullet which shattered his femur. The next day he woke up in a cellar with a woman leaning over him picking wax from his beard. She apologized, said the doctor needed light to amputate in the dark. Candles melted down to nothing were stuck everywhere, even in her bonnet.
STACE BUDZKO
How to Set a House on Fire
Before you light the gas, light a cigarette under the old red maple in the front yard, under a hunter’s moon, and take a last lo
ok. Before this, walk through the ranch house with a miner’s lamp and pesticide sprayer topped off with high-test racing fuel. Before it was your house it was your father’s house and before it was your father’s house it was his father’s too. Before foreclosure on the family farm, before the new highway. Spray the gaps in the oak floorboards and get in the heating ducts, hit the horsehair plaster and take out electric sockets, then run a heavy gas line out to the barn. There is the combine. That is a backhoe. At one time chickens lived here. Before leaving, make sure the hay bales drip with fuel. This was feed once. On your way toss your house keys into the water well. Before doing anything, make a wish.
After filling the birdbath next to the old red maple with the remaining octane call Herm up at the fire station. After he gets on the line tell him to come over and bring a truck or two—with crew. There’s not much to see now, really. After he asks why, tell him. Say how the fire line went from where you stand to the well and then zigzagged to the barn and after the farm equipment blew to the sky tell him how the furnace did the same. A chain of events, explain, it was a chain of events. After the windows kicked out there wasn’t much anyone could have done. And after Herm asks if you would do it all over again, tell him you would. But come anyway, Herm. Tell him that.
