Carolyn Kegel's work has recently appeared in Night Train, Emrys Journal, Wilderness House Literary Review and Bartleby Snopes, where she lost the Story-of-the-Month contest by two votes.  She is extremely competitive; at cooking, pinp-pong (she was camp champ!) and especially, contests.  It's becoming a problem, but her husband doesn't mind at all because the meals are improving.

Bells (September 21, 2009. Issue 9.)

It was the beginning of June when Elizabeth was poor and had been saying for days that it was better just to not want anything; but the weather was good and it was hard to see pretty things and not have a spring dress with flowers up and down.  The phone rang and Jim asked what she wanted for lunch, but all she could think about were the pastel colored peaches, $3.95 a pound, and the ripe purple plums along Market Street.  She could taste them, like summer when she was a child, and watched her father hunched over the kitchen sink, the red juice dripping down his chin, and she didn’t want them as much. 

Jim meant lunch in a restaurant, but Elizabeth was in a bad mood.  It wasn’t just the dress and the peaches and the plums.  It was uncommonly hot that summer and she couldn’t sleep at all.  The line kept going through her head.  The one the man in the elevator said, “You know what I have to do.”  It began to echo like a thread of bells, each word a chime, ringing, standing still as it rang, one note after another, until the street was alive with the sound. 

Jim lived in a white building that was gated, like an elevator door.  Regular people with jobs to go to and stereo equipment, lived there, dashed in and out wearing black pants and tee shirts; but Jim only had a mattress on the floor, a card table, a folding chair and a couple hundred books.  Sometimes his aunt sent boxes filled with deodorant and toothpaste.  Things she knew he couldn’t buy.

So Elizabeth lay across his unmade bed.  Jim said he couldn’t do anything, couldn’t call his Daddy and ask for a couple hundred.  Nothing. After a while they both got up and looked down at the street.  The sounds were almost deafening now, glass breaking on cement, a scream. 

Directly below was Eddy Street with its methadone glaze in the faces of strangers, the glint of sunlight refracting off the pavement, incessantly and silently pressing into you; if you look you are a part of this, it’s like the holocaust; you cannot say you do not know.  

“But it isn’t,” Jim said.  He stood looking at her with his arms at his sides.  “No one’s doing anything to these people.”

She thought about that as she left.  She had no way to pay June rent and it was getting late.  She’d always been such a good girl.  She wore smart little cardigans all year long and she tried to belong, to do the things good people do.  Sometimes you just get to a place and it really doesn’t matter how you came.

She was a target on a dartboard in the Tenderloin, but on Market Street, she disappeared.  All the good people in their suits and sneakers looked right through her there, like she had no yellow hair, no pretty eyes; but there was nowhere else to go when you can’t go home, and you have to be somewhere; you have to be able to stand still and think, so she kept on walking eastward through the sound of bells and into the hubbub of Union Square because in San Francisco you cannot push a body any farther.  There is no more land.