pathetic.
July 16, 1988
Dear Ted,
I'm told that you get many, many letters from women. Women who believe you are innocent. Women who want to marry you. This is not one of those letters. I am not one of those women.
You are my last resort. If you were any other man I would beg and plead for your help, throw myself on your mercy, but I have seen up close the twisted thing that happens to you when a woman begs.
I knew the first time I saw you on TV. It's not my fault the police couldn't catch you, couldn't keep you when they did. Do you remember me? I must have been one of your first. Fifteen years ago. Before you perfected your craft.
Were you surprised when nothing about me appeared on the news or in the paper? Nothing about a coed found in her apartment with bruises on her neck, evidence of sexual molestation and no sign of forced entry? Nothing on the radio about a young woman with long brown hair who into the ER, telling authorities about the man who beat and strangled and raped her?
I never told anyone. How could I? I invited you in. I wanted you. You were so handsome, so smart. You hadn't started using the cast or the crutch yet, but you walked with a slight limp, just endearing enough. When you looked at me I was sure you peered right into my soul, knew the very essence of who I was, and you wanted me. I still remember my fierce desire. I couldn't wait to get you home.
I never told anyone. I had few friends to tell. A dead mother, a distant father. I hid the bruises with clothing, make-up. No one noticed me anyway. You saw that immediately: I was invisible, desperate, pathetic.
I never told anyone. Not then. Not ever. Not even your son.
Yes. Your son. Adam. The light of my life. I never considered not keeping him. He was safe inside me and I would keep him safe. I would keep him safe. My love grew ferocious. I stood guard, ready to protect him from the world, from his genes, from himself. I watched. I paced. I charted every milestone. I smothered him with love.
I told him his father was a handsome brilliant man, on his way up in the world. We were madly in love, thrilled to be having a baby, but you were killed in a tragic automobile accident. I never got over it. I never married.
Adam was happy, friendly, active, good in school, kind to pets, sociable. Nothing to make me worry. He grew into a teenager and started asking questions. Why didn't I have any pictures of you? Where were his aunts, uncles, grandparents? I was never a good liar. I think he began to suspect I had no idea who his father was. Every now and then I saw something in his eyes, in the set of his jaw. But it passed so quickly I could never be sure.
And then last year he stopped playing soccer, saying he just didn't like it anymore. He grew weak and pale. He had bruises he couldn't explain. I asked if someone was hurting him, abusing him. Was he using drugs? He denied it all. He said he was fine, I was just being overprotective, as usual. I should back off. When he was at school, I searched his room but found nothing suspicious. Then he got strange spots on his skin. I was frantic. I dragged him to his doctor. They drew his blood.
Leukemia. Adam has leukemia. I won't bore you with the details. The tests. The chemo. The radiation. The hope. The recurrence. The doctor says the only thing left to save his life is a bone marrow transplant. I am not a match. None of the donors in the bank are a match. I'd told the doctor his father was dead. "Are there any other living relatives?" he wanted to know.
You and your son are both waiting to die. You are running out of appeals. He is running out of treatments. I am useless. You might save him. A few cells from your pelvic bone could save his life. Your cells, alive after you are gone. You are his last resort.
I can tell him the truth. Or not. Your call. Your son.
I wait to hear from you.
Carolyn Bisbee
“Tell me again why we came here.”
“So I can think. So we can talk.”
“You can’t think at home? We have to fight our way through some wild forest for you to think?”
“This isn’t exactly the wilderness, Richard. It’s a park. There’s a subdivision right up over that ridge. And this is a jogging path; it’s not like we have to machete our way out of here. If we keep walking, we’ll end up in the parking lot where we started.” Don’t be such a jerk, I want to say.
“Okay, whatever. So I’m the wussy city boy. You’re the one who gets paid to hang out in the woods all day playing with bugs. You’re the only girl I know that even likes bugs.”
“I’m not “playing” with bugs. It’s research. It’s my job. Besides, slugs are mollusks, not bugs.”
“Fine, sure. Are you done thinking yet? Can we just get out of here?” He looks down at his clean, white trainers which are rapidly collecting muck, and disgust makes his face ugly. Then he looks at me and the ugly is still there.
Now I know how a slug feels. Slugs are universally viewed as disgusting; slimy little creatures that are reluctantly accepted as an unexplainable, unavoidable nuisance. What, people ask me, is a slug’s purpose in life? Other than grossing everyone out, ruining the party, wasting everyone’s time? The minute a slug shows up, all anyone can think is, What is it doing here? and When is it going to leave? Leave a slimy, snotty trail if you must, but just leave.
I pretend not to see his look; I’m not ready to let go, so I keep walking. Richard walks beside me like a reluctant three year old. Don’t know why I’m surprised. He’s mumbling to himself and kicking at clumps of wet leaves in the pathway.
“I don’t know why you still want to talk about it,” he says. “It’s not like we haven’t been talking about it for ages. Why do you want to beat a dead horse?”
“I saw a dead horse once.” I keep walking, eyes straight ahead. “When I was a kid. It was in a neighbor’s field. It was on its back and the legs were sticking straight up in the air, all stiff like. It was big and round and bloated, and there were flies all over it; thousands of flies eating away at it. Even from the road I could hear the buzzing. It was really gross, but I had to see it up close. Up close I could see maggots crawling all over it, and its eyes were all milky looking and bulging. I guess I wouldn’t want to beat that dead horse. It’d probably explode.”
“Jesus Christ, Samantha! Why can’t you respond to a question like a normal person?” He sounds like he’s going to puke. I keep walking.
“The thing is,” I say, “is that I don’t get it.”
“If you had been paying attention, you would have “got” it weeks ago. Actually, months ago. And it won’t matter how many times we talk about it, you don’t get it because you don’t want to get it. But just in case I wasn’t clear the last fifty or sixty times I said it…I don’t want to be in this relationship any longer. I want you to move out of my house. What is there not to get?”
I keep walking.
I spend a lot of time in the woods even when I’m not working. I am more comfortable with the company of slugs and bugs than with people. I guess I thought if I brought Richard out into my comfort zone, the conversation would end differently – that I would magically say all the right things and dazzle him with my confident self. Instead, I’m the same spineless wimp that I thought I left behind at the house. Richard’s house. The one I have to leave. I tell him I don’t have anywhere to go. He doesn’t answer.
I wonder where a slug thinks it’s going when it leaves where it has been. Slugs are snails without shells. A snail’s shell is its home, which would make slugs homeless. They might hang around somewhere as long as they’re allowed, but that doesn’t make it home.
“I guess I could go stay at my sister’s if I had to. Just until I can find a place.” I was the one who hesitated about living together in the first place, then caved too easily. I hate moving. I hate the uncertainty of it all.
We walk without talking. Richard speeds up so that he can get a step ahead of me. I imagine tripping him; I see him splat in the muddy mess of rotten leaves in the path. Perfect hair messed up, perfect complexion plastered with detritus, perfect off-white, hand made, virgin wool Fair Isle 
sweater (dry clean only) soiled beyond redemption. Add a nice pile of dog shit and the dream is complete. I’m lost in the beauty of the moment when he suddenly backpedals with a girly shriek, knocking me out of my dream.
I catch him before he hits the ground, stand him back up and walk around him to see what caused his terrified recoil. I know I can’t be lucky enough to find he has stepped in the dream dog shit, but I’m still hopeful. “Sheesh, Richard! It’s only a banana slug!” It’s a beauty – at least six inches long, bright yellow, its dark head and tentacles waving in the air independent of each other, trying to identify the behemoths that almost trampled it. I kneel down to get a closer look. I can hear Richard behind me making more disgusting sounds.
“It’s amazing to me,” I tell him without looking up, “that slugs have survived so long without evolving. They’re basically a stomach attached to a foot. So vulnerable…and so despised. People have come up with hundreds, maybe thousands of ways to kill them and all you really have to do is pour salt on them. Sucks the life right out of them.”
He sniffs, dons a protective suit of bravado. “They’re gross and completely worthless. What amazes me is that you actually have people who want to fund your pointless research.”
I decide I’m not going to have this argument. I find a large leaf and carefully slide the slug onto it then set it off the path under a fern. “I guess they are pretty gross. The frogs and snakes and birds like them, though. Pure protein. And the sliminess makes them easier to swallow.”
“I don’t suppose we could get going now.” He sounds pale. I examine the mucus trail the slug left behind; a low-tech fiber optic line broken only in the place where I butted in. I watch the slug start to slowly undulate with muscular contractions; on the move again. I brush my knees off and stand. Richard lets me take the lead this time.
He says he wonders how we got together in the first place. He says, “I guess it’s because you were so different from other women I’ve dated. So much smarter, stronger. Not helpless.” He says it as if he’s realized otherwise.
“Why? Because I’m not afraid to pick up bugs?”
“Yeah, I guess. And because you’re not what you would call high maintenance. You know, one of those girls that demands attention all of the time.”
He’s right. I don’t demand attention. But I want it; I need it. He’s too self-absorbed to notice and I’m too spineless to ask.
“There is a lot of research being done on slug mucus these days,” I say. *They actually excrete two different kinds. Did you know that it contains pheromones? Pretty handy for mating purposes.” I stop to move another wanderer out of harm’s way. “And they’re hermaphrodites, too. So a slug can follow any mucus trail and be guaranteed sexual satisfaction at the other end.”
“Fascinating.” He doesn’t sound fascinated; he sounds impatient. I pick up the pace.
“Yup,” I continue the lecture, “and their sex organs are at the back of the head under the mantle. That’s the part that looks like a foreskin. The anus is also located there. I guess you could say they have shit for brains.” I laugh. Richard doesn’t. I realize I don’t care.
“They actually do double duty when they mate. One slug screws the other and gets screwed by the other. Then they both end up laying eggs. The really interesting part is the apophallation.” I stop talking, keep walking. We go maybe a quarter mile before he has to ask.
“Okay, I give. What’s apophallation?” It’s clear he wants to know but hates asking me. He has said he feels I’m trying to emasculate him with my education and IQ. It never mattered that it wasn’t true; it was one more unraveling thread.
“A slug penis is shaped like a corkscrew. So when you get two of them both trying to do their business, they get tangled up. If they can’t get loose, one or both will chew off the other’s penis. Sometimes they even chew off their own. It’s not a huge loss, really. They can still function sexually with their female parts.” I can feel the empathic pain in the guttural sounds behind me.
I walk slower, more deliberately, wondering if he will let himself catch up. “I suppose that’s the real secret to their survival; understanding the necessity of the sacrifice,” I say more to myself. “If they stay entangled, it’s not only that they both die; the eggs die, too. I guess that means survival of the fittest is sometimes just a case of being a strong woman.”
I can sense him a little closer behind me. I keep walking.
“So, the salt thing,” he says. “That’s really all it takes to kill them?”
“Yeah, Richard, that’s all it takes.”
“Do they feel it? I mean, do they feel pain?”
“I used to wonder that a lot; I guess it’s one of the reasons I wanted to research them.”
“So, do they?” He sounds like he actually cares.
“Slugs aren’t very complex, biologically speaking. They do have a nervous system and pain is a primal nerve stimulus. They move so slowly that their reaction can be easily overlooked. But, yes, they do feel pain.” Richard doesn’t answer; I feel him absorbing this. “Slugs don’t have the ability to vocalize, either. No one hears them scream.” I keep walking. We are both silent as we follow a long, straight stretch in the path.
“I’m sorry I’ve been a jerk.” My heart leaps. “And I’m sorry things turned out the way they did. But I can’t go back, Samantha. I just can’t do it anymore.” My heart sinks.
I think to myself that I’ve done my crying, my yelling, my deal making and my groveling, my denying. Now I kind of wonder why. We are each lost in our separate thoughts as we walk together. When I consider life without Richard, I see something. Survival, maybe.
“Did you know that slugs have two sets of feelers? The lower ones are for smells and the bigger, upper set are light sensors. If a tentacle is amputated, it will grow back.”
We go around a bend and the end of the trail is just ahead. “One of the most popular ways people kill off slugs is the death-by-beer method. Put some beer in the bottom of a shallow pan and the slugs will crawl in and drown. Not a bad way to go, if you ask me.” I notice then that I am smiling. Richard chuckles quietly behind me.
“I guess I’ll think twice the next time someone offers me a beer,” he says. We finish the last stretch and step into the brightness of the parking lot.
“See, Richard,” I say, looking him in the eye. “Right back where we started.”
by Ethan Swage
Yesterday, post–heart–attack, I died. Today, post–purgatorial–suspension, I began my second life. Throughout the tumult, all I have retained is straight reporting—the Five W’s and an H—roughing out a black–and–white timeline of my passage from light to dark. But I never would have pictured my journey back into light as being so . . . dreadful.
After being inexplicably expelled, peanut–sized, from the suprasternal notch at the base of my neighbor Mary Bry's neck (which, I suppose, qualifies her throat as a makeshift womb), I tumbled down her torso, slapped painfully off the front edge of her toilet seat, and then landed between big toes Right and Left on her bathroom rug. I breathed, shallow and harsh, sputtering out umbilical threads of my pre–birth existence.
Suddenly aware of toes clenching and unclenching around me in menacing waves, I clambered up Mary’s quivering left leg, hell–bent on reversing the rebirthing process. Her husband, Chet, had once compared Mary to a rusted hunk of steel: cold and unyielding, something you dare not touch when it's iced over unless you want to remain stuck to it forever. Could she function as a mother, I thought, aware that one slip, one momentary weakening of my resolve, in which time the Mom tattoo would begin etching itself indelibly into my skin, might bond me to her forever like a mouse cemented to a glue trap. No, I would not allow her to be my mother—not today, not ever. Especially not after Chet had planted such an ominous image in my head.
As I ascended her stomach, a familiar, briny whiff trailed a miniature shadow that passed by from above. Again the toilet seat slapped, and another unfortunate rebirther landed on the rug between Mary’s toes: sibling number one—perhaps an Irish twin, considering my newly–condensed timeline.
Sibling number two 
followed with its own abrupt slap, and I realized that I should hurry back in before Mary’s notch closed for business. No telling when it might reopen, if ever. Her middle finger was still there, still coaxing, swirling in tight, gentle circles she had synched with the cadenced clenching of her thighs and toes.
As soon as sibling number three appeared, I quickly disappeared, sliding past her finger, through the warm, accepting pool, and back into her throat. Her salty mother’s milk instantly flooded my lungs—but somehow breathing no longer mattered. My senses, as well as my bodily functions, had fused into an all–encompassing sensory guide that transmitted changes in maternal tide and temperature instead of passing slivers of time. I felt warm. I felt secure.
Then I felt the surge.
Mary leaned forward, dropping to her knees on the same rug that had padded my fall. Her throat ratcheted, aided by a repeatedly–thrust finger, and once again I found myself on her bathroom rug. A self–induced C-section, of sorts, I imagined, thankful to have avoided a headlong tumble into the toilet seat this time around. She gazed down at me and, smiling wryly, swallowed hard.
I thought I heard a muffled squeal (so much for sibling number four!). Wide–eyed, I plunged both feet solidly into the Mom Glue Trap, swallowing my heart back down into my chest. I quivered uncontrollably as I gazed up at Chet's rusted hunk of steel, suddenly gripped by the thought: What if I was just a fur ball she need to rid herself of to clear the way? If so, then number four was just an hors d'oeuvre to whet her appetite before—
On behalf of the HR department at Gargantuan Industries, I’d like to congratulate you on winning the lottery. Management has empowered me to extend a heartfelt welcome on this, your first day, and express their satisfaction that we were able to come to an agreement. We know your employment will be marked by great success.
I like to start new hires off with an office tour, so we’ll just clear up a few details before you see your nest—we don’t like to call them cubicles—so cold, you know? Our nests are much more intimate and it’s really inspiring what some of our people have been able to do with sixteen square feet. But you’ll see that for yourself.
Let’s review some of the terms of your employment. As you know, you participated in our reverse compensation auction during the interview process, which means your salary and benefit package is currently tied to that of your colleagues at the Harare, Zimbabwe facility. Two five kilo sacks of millet and two liters of water will be paid every other Friday during the rainy season, and one sack of millet and one cup of water during the dry. As per your signed agreement, these amounts could change without notice if another of our offices around the world tenders a lower bid. Management reserves the right to substitute rice, tapioca, or powdered fire retardant as market conditions require.
There’s been some misunderstanding regarding the health plan so I’d like to spend a little time on it. A rumor going around the internet alleges that our employees are unable to see a doctor. This is completely false. We maintain agreements with board certified doctors and hospitals throughout the country, and I want to emphatically make the point that a doctor of veterinary medicine is just as entitled to the honorarium as any other “doctor.” Further, I can personally attest that the Cozy Kat Clinic just down the street cured not only my bronchitis, but also my fuzzy little Tiddle’s conjunctivitis, during the same office visit. Everyone is complaining about the ruinous cost of health care these days, Gargantuan is doing something about it.
Now just a couple points about our work rules and we’ll be off. The centers of the corridors are reserved for executives above the level of Pasha. Your employee handbook contains an explanation of “Sidling” as we define it, as well as a schematic. Please take some time to familiarize yourself with the proper technique for negotiating the halls—we’ve had some unfortunate tramplings.
Do not make eye contact with the vice-presidents. I won’t say anymore about that. Just don’t. The same applies to shareholders, with the additional rule that employees are required to lie down with their necks and bellies exposed until the shareholder has passed. If the shareholder should begin to tear into you, simply remain calm and think of dividends. One additional sack of millet will be paid in compensation if you’re unable to return to work for more then six months, however, your salary will be stopped. We like to have our injured employees eager to return.
Let’s go for a little walk, shall we? Down this hall, here, is the entrance to the central office pit. You’ve been assigned ladder 4, which descends eighty-five feet to nesting level C. We won’t go down just now as, for some reason, the employees become upset when they see me. You can get comfy in number 475—that’s yours, a little later. It may seem cold and dark at first, but you’ll be able to see your screen better without extraneous illumination and the constant fifty-two degree temperature pretty much guarantees productivity. Additional heat and light are available for a nominal fee, deducted from your pay sack. The same applies to restrooms.
Come over to the windows and take a look at the Major Shareholders Complex. Incidentally, the firm has recently added window privileges to the benefit package, so employees are no longer charged for enjoying a last view of the sun on their way down into the pit. It’s just something we like to do for our people. Now, the Major Shareholders Complex is strictly off limits to you and me—the guards shoot immediately if you don’t smell right—but take a look at what a hundred billion gets you in the way of architecture. I was favored with a five minute peek inside after it was completed. The floors and walls are made of solid gold and lobster tails with drawn butter come out of the restroom faucets. Nothing is too good for our investors.
Always remember that we exist entirely for the investors, along with the hedge fund which owns us this month. They have the weight of the world on their shoulders, all those widows and orphans depending on them. It’s a little funny; the investors actually look like pampered, well-fed white males, you know? Don’t be deceived if they appear arrogant, though. Their egos were terribly bruised when the recent economic downturn affected their net worth. The company has had to provide emergency humanitarian dividends payable in gold bullion to keep them from pouting. Oh, but that reminds me. I should have mentioned it before: Due to some unforeseen expenses, the firm has eliminated bonuses for ev
eryone below the level of Sheik until further notice. I know it’s hard, but these are tough times. The silver lining in all this is that, in the past, some employees have complained of the difficulty in finding any use for their bonus millet, so now everyone should be happy.
Over there, beyond the blast-proof glass, is the entrance to the Executive Pavilion. You can just make out our Group Vice President’s office—No! Don’t look! Sorry… I didn’t realize Mr. Crusher was in. We almost never see him during daylight hours. He likes to work at night. He’s not a bad boss, but I have to caution you against leaving your nest for any reason, especially if you’ve recently cut yourself. You must understand, Crusher is in charge of head-count and he takes it seriously. Very penetrating guy, Crusher, a credit to the firm.
So here we are back around to the pit entrance. Before you descend to your little nest, I’d like to invite you to look in on one of our employee enrichment meetings. I don’t want to brag about them even if the meetings were kind of my idea, inspired by a recent remark from one of the shareholders. I happened to be saddle-soaping his whip at the time and I think he forgot I was in the room. It almost made me angry when he mentioned they were looking into replacing us with chimps… but then my competitive spirit kicked in and empowered me to make a difference!
So now about a dozen of us get together during the rest intervals to discuss management’s concerns while grooming each other and searching for fleas and lice. I hung some tires from the ceiling for us to swing on while we debate the best ways to shave expenses—and I’d like to see the chimp that can hang from a tire and cut the millet budget! Poor, stupid apes. The best part was when I told Mr. Crusher about it, he smiled and invited me to come to his office tomorrow evening for a little chat. He actually smiled at me. Oh, you’re going to like it here!
“It’s amazing,” Bertha says, contradicting the expression on her face.
The feeling of failure begins to thicken my blood and constrict the beating of my heart. I rub my palm into my eye, trying to smother my exasperation. I don’t want to have to justify it, I shouldn’t have to, I think, as I kick the dusty studio floor.
“I’m not finished yet,” I lie in return.
“Is that so? Oh, OK,” she says, not even giving me time to regret my blatant cowardice. But her relief, too, is insincere. She knows what my words mean. She’s said them to me about her own work at times when it was clearly untrue. We have discussed not saying them.
“But it’s not far from completion. Why? What’s wrong with it?”
“No, it’s good. It is. I pictured it being different. That’s all.” She wants to say more but she restrains herself. She isn’t even looking at me when she speaks.
“I mean,” she continues, then pauses, as though really studying it, “it’s similar to the last one.”
Now I realise: she doesn’t understand. I can’t look at it, or her, anymore. I pretend to tidy up my work bench but all I do is turn the tools out of alignment, one by one, then straighten them back up again. If she touches it, feels it under the grain of her fingertips, she might know what I am trying to do.
“You can touch it,” I say.
“No,” Bertha looks at me and spreads her palm over her heart. “You spent so much time on it. I just couldn’t.”
She is an artist too. She knows what she can and cannot touch.
“Just touch it, Bertha, for Christ’s sake,” I say. My irritation has been betrayed. “Feel it. It’s alright,” I add with artificial calm.
“No, Adam, I’m not going to touch it. It’s taken you almost a year!”
“If you look at it properly you’ll understand why it took me that long. It’s alright, touch it!”
Arms folded, Bertha turns her back to my sculpture, her eyes wide and not leaving mine.
“No,” she says.
Then she goes, leaving me in solitude to wonder if failure equals time lost.
The light shines on my sculpture while I sit in the shadows of my studio, staring at it, willing it to flawlessness until I develop a headache. I can do nothing but envisage it smashed to dust. After last time, I tried so hard, so hard, to do better, to make it, to make something, perfect. It did not take me an entire year for nothing.
I think of Bertha’s reaction. I struggle to believe it.
I escape from my studio and all it contains, into the night. A biting breeze cuts through the darkness, soothing the pain in my head. I have a peculiar dislike of my studio anyway. Working in a studio is such an artificial way to be artistic. I should have shown the sculpture to her somewhere else, I think, on neutral ground, where she could have been honest and not pretend she was reluctant to hurt me.
**
Martin has been one of the first to see my work in all of my twelve years a sculptor, but this time I am showing him with reluctance. Whether they are required to reinforce the first, or to contradict it, second opinions are sought for comfort. I need comforting and had therefore already failed.
“So?” I ask.
He thinks for a moment, then licks his lips and says, “It’s quite good. It’s unique.” He takes an exaggerated step to its side, frowns and bounces his head from side to side, weighing something up. Then he adds, “As unique as your last one was.”
“My last one,” I mutter and walk away. “This is different to my last one.”
“How exactly?”
He looks at me, one eyebrow raised, and I wonder if he is mocking me. He is not, actually, but I wish he was. It would be easier to deal with.
“What’s wrong with it?”
“Nothing really. But you’ve been working on it for, what, 12 months? Frankly, I was expecting more. Due, in part, to our conversations.”
The blame is mine, then.
“Martin, come on now,” I plead over my shoulder. “I’m finding all this a bit hard to take. Are you being serious?”
I was sure this was going to be something, I want to add.
He half-nods, as though hearing my thoughts and sympathising. Then he pushes his glasses up the bridge of his nose and motions toward my sculpture.
“May I?”
I gesture my approval. This is verging on madness.
“Adam, it is good,” he says, done inspecting it. “Honest. It’s just very different from your previous work. The style you’d developed, your techniques, the scale, the material – it was all working well for you. Very well. There was no need to change it all, not so drastically.”
He stops, wanting me to respond. I have nothing to say.
“This is not your best work,” he continues. “And I’m sorry – if you’re still of the belief that it is a masterpiece I suggest, for your own sake, that you convince yourself otherwise. And quickly.”
He lifts up his palm, as though about to give me something.
“I’m sorry,” he says, this time really apologising.
When he is gone, I wonder if my approach has been too insular. Martin knows what he is talking about, and that is the most worrying thing.
**
I have given the project much thought, giving the most consideration to discarding the idea entirely. Sleeping is difficult. I cannot understand the reactions of my friends, or whatever they are, and they can’t comprehend mine. The only thing I find consolation in is reminding myself that their art is and never has been better than mediocre; her art is so determined, desperate even, to say something and be heard. His art is too inorganic. His work says it is made by man like an advertisement, like a lawnmower is made by man. Their art is shit, I tell myself.
But I have reached a decision: I will start again and this time it will be perfect.
I will start from the beginning.
At my studio I drop all my sketches, all my photos, all my notes and measurements of the previous sculptures into the bin and set them on fire. I watch, and feel in the fire’s warmth on my face, two years of work turn to swirling grey ash. Then I drive through the windy night to the water. I throw my sculpture into the thrashing waves and imagine it sinking to the invisible depths, where it belongs. Almost.
Driving home I feel both liberated as well as caged. At once, I have freed myself and erected the walls of a new prison, where I will spend another year of life. How can I do this to myself, for now the third time? The human mind is wonderful at denying reality, greedily refusing it like a bitter, jilted lover.
**
“Before I show you my work, I’d like to say a few words.”
Martin and Bertha brought some friends, so there are five of us in my studio for what is becoming an annual gathering. Further fortifying the ritual is the darkness of the room, but that is due to the heavy rain clouds outside.
I begin: “This is my third attempt at... well, at perfection, what in my mind is perfection. In my 13 years as a sculptor I’ve made a lot which has failed to meet my somewhat lofty expectations. Perhaps my sculptures were of high artistic merit, perhaps not, but to me, their creator, I still felt my best was yet to come. Then, as though from above, an idea was given to me, an idea for a sculpture that would be perfect.”
I smile at their faces, trying not to read them, nervous. I want to make an Immaculate Conception analogy but can’t think of how to word it and I want to stay away from gods and godliness. I have always spoken better with my hands.
“It’s my belief that anyone who takes their art seriously has the desire and operates with the intention of making something lasting; something which will define them. Making something lasting – I don’t think any earthly notion, upon being fulfilled, satisfies more.”
I pinch the velvet sheet that hides my work.
“Tonight, I present to you what I hope will define me.”
Yielding to my tug, the sheet slinks off my sculpture.
At first I think it is the swish of rain outside, the gurgle of water in an overflowing drain. Then I realise what I am hearing is a low chuckle. Martin is laughing. I immediately regret such a melodramatic introduction and feel my face prickle to a blush as I glare at him. Soon, the room is silent again.
“What is this?” he demands, as though I offended him personally. “It’s a prank isn’t it? Where is the real sculpture?”
“Adam? What’s going on?” Bertha says. The other two look at each other and frown.
Three years is over one thousand days. Why, why would I waste more than one thousand days and nights on a joke? I don’t know whether to be furious or mortified or to join them in laughing.
“What’s going on?” I spit. “I have no idea! I don’t know what game you idiots are playing. It’s quite obvious you people no longer have any notion of what art is and I’m wasting my time showing this to you. You’d all rather laugh and have your little jokes while I create history!”
This group of artists, artists manqué, have betrayed me.
“This cannot be the sculpture you’ve spent the year on. It’s no better than a maquette,” Martin exclaims.
Rising out of my fury are wonderings of where the idea for this sculpture came from. It has been so long I can’t remember. Maybe it came to me in a dream envisioned during a feverish sleep. It actually feels like I saw this sculpture elsewhere, not only on a podium in my imagination, but in a room, alone, surrounded by white walls. For reasons unknown to me, I am sure this is my masterpiece, I can feel it, and I am determined to prove it. I’m not so delusional to think this is perfection, yet be the furthest I have ever been from it. Why would I waste all this time?
When the others leave, Martin stays.
“So it’s really that bad,” I say. We are in virtual darkness. I don’t want the light on.
“Adam, it isn’t bad and it isn’t good. It’s nothing, and we’re talking three years of nothing. I just don’t know what you’re thinking.” The street light outside reflects off his glasses when he looks in my direction, two rectangular stars in a universe of black. “Is this your ivory maiden?”
“I’m not obsessed, no more than with everything else I’ve ever made,” I reply, not necessarily telling the truth. “The idea for this, however, is somewhat more prominent in my mind. It’s almost tangible.”
“But why this? What does it represent?”
Do I have to explain myself? Again? I shake my head.
“If I can equal nature, if I can create artificially what happens by chance over eons, then my job as an artisan, the job of every artist, every person, and the job of nature, is done.”
Though I cannot see him, I know, etched onto his face, is a look of puzzlement and I want to tell him not to worry about it, to go home.
He confirms his misunderstanding by saying, “That’s what this is?”
“Yes and no. It’s what it has become.”
“You’re aware that in the time you’ve spent making these tiny sea shells you could have made close to ten other sculptures without once trying to split the fabric of the universe?”
“Please don’t poke fun.”
Just speaking is beginning to irritate me.
“Well, if you’re going to do this,” Martin says, “we may as well do it properly. I will help you.”
**
I decide I need a trip to the beach.
The day is cool and overcast, the air thick with the water’s smells. A pair of children play on the water’s edge, watched over by their mother. Only the odd swimmer and a school of surfers, sitting on their boards at the headland, punctuate the sea. I polish the sculpture on my thigh like it is an apple. I think the idea just came to me, whole and complete, as I was walking along the beach. I seem to recall it forming as the cool water enveloped my numb feet. It was delivered to me, without a need for alteration, conceptually absolute. It is only me, my humanness, which fails the instructions. How accurate the memory is I don’t know. It would have happened almost three years ago from this day if it true.
I am about to lob the sculpture high into the muddy sky like the sculpture before it, as far out into the water as my arm can throw, then I have an idea. The spade-wielding children are playing up ahead, flinging sloppy sand over their heads and digging a crater into the beach, giggling each time a wave reaches over to them and destroys their work. As I pass them I drop my sculpture into the wet sand, just when a wave sweeps the shore. I walk up to where the sand is dry and sit down.
My sculpture spins in the shallow swell, rolling as the sea throws net after net over it, trying to claim it. Then, one of the children spots it. He watches it emerge from the surf, then hops up and grabs it. He holds it up, peering at it like he is a travelled conchologist.
“Mum!” he shouts. “I found a shell.”
His mother is seated on a towel not far from me and reading a novel. He runs over to her, puts it in her hand and they study it together. The wind tugs at her voice, so I do not hear what is said, but I see her put it to her ear.
I am overjoyed.
She shrugs and nods at her son, placing my sculpture of a shell on the towel. The child runs back to his sister and his mother continues reading.
I now know what I have to do.
**
I considered the advice Martin had to give me but it was what I saw at the beach that I kept in mind as I once again took leave from the world. It is hard to know what it is anymore. When something is pondered on for so long, with such intensity, it begins to blur and melt. I suppose I should have left it. For a while. I should have focused my energies elsewhere and come back to it now and then, just so it couldn’t transform into the forgotten. But it’s okay because I’m done now. I have done what I set out to do four long years ago.
I love it and I hate it. I suppose that is the relationship you will inevitably have with your magnum opus. It defines you, it is you, you created it, almost by magic. So you love it. But you hate it because you cannot break free from it, ever. It follows you and nothing you do will better it. You will always be compared to it, as though you and it are separate, as though you are now a lesser being, as though it removed your humanness. But, in a way, that is what I want – what every artist wants.
Of course, one thing repudiates all that. All that only happens if you show it to someone. A masterpiece is not a masterpiece if it is a masterpiece only in your mind.
Again, I invite Martin and Bertha, that motley collective, to my studio. Last time I was nervous, just slightly, but anxiety’s tickle was indeed there. This time, however, I am not. This time there will be no speech, no performance, no explanation. I know what I have done.
They arrive on time. I open the door and smile, weary yet triumphant.
“Here it is,” I say, nodding in its direction. I almost add an invitation to touch it, to put it to their ears and listen to the sound of crashing waves emanating from its hollow, but I don’t. It is perfect and I do not need to say a word about it.
“Adam...” Martin exclaims. “My God.”
I chuckle to myself.
“What have you done?” he says, picking the shell up. He inspects it, even puts it to his ear, then passes it to Bertha. She barely wants to touch it.
“What about all we spoke about, all that we planned?”
“Unnecessary.”
“But this is the same sculpture,” he says. “Again.”
He puts his hand to his head and squeezes his temples. Bertha keeps her face down, hiding her expression out of the light.
Once perfection is reached, where do you go, I wonder?
No one called Bernice a beautiful woman anymore. At 42, her jowls drooped and the wrinkles between the caramel folds had a notch for every year of sag, every fleshy manipulation. In a year that was a lot of work for Bernice, grasping, pulling and screaming—more than most. Still, her eyes could take on a coy look and her rather large low-hanging breasts were well supported by the underwire in her bra. Saddlebags for sure, but a well-shaped ass.
“I have a well-shaped ass,” she thought as she wiggled it on her morning walk from the apartment of the unnamed man she had met at a bar the previous night. It was still early morning and she was still drunk.
The guy turned out to be a terrible lay, not even able to get it up enough to fuck her for five minutes last night, before falling asleep on her naked body. Oh, that infuriated her, and made her—he made her—dig her fingernails into his ass as hard as she could. It didn’t have the intended effect, however, as he grumbled something like “Fucking bitch,” and rolled over her.
“No,” she thought, she would not be that insignificant. Not if she could help it.
She moved down then, and took him in her mouth, helping him up with her hand. He didn’t get much harder, but moaned a little, so she worked, violent with enthusiasm.
“Come on asshole,” she thought, “we’re not done yet!”
But unexpectedly, the flaccid organ went off like a pop-gun, shooting a feeble few drops of disinterested fluid.
“God damn you, you small-dicked little piece of shit!” she screamed. “Don’t you know how to please a lady!”
She continued yelling the reprobations as she spat his meager elixir back in his face, but he didn’t even notice, just went to sleep—muck dripping from his forehead. She curled up in a ball of anger and dejection.
“I’ll have to seek vengeance,” she thought, “but in the morning.”
She drifted off in her usual drunken haze, angry, plotting.
She got her vengeance in the morning, but she wasn’t thinking of that now on the way home. Nor was she thinking about her childhood—she never thought of that. Her thoughts went more along the lines of “I have a well shaped ass. Why can’t I ever be loved? At least by a man who would love my ass but say that he loved me. At least to lie to me a little. They never even lie anymore. They used to lie about how they love me. You gotta be hard in a hard world, not like a little limp-dicked prick. God I hate soft dick! And men’s faces. I hate their big fat faces with ugly big noses and those nasty jaws, moving all the time, spitting a little as they make their stupid jokes and fake come-on lines. Bastards all look like animals—like barnyard animals. Fucking pigs—literally, pigs lying around in the dirt, their underwear perpetually stained (I’ve seen them all and all their underwear has shit stains and yellow urine marks). Why do you think that because you fart louder than me, you’re superior? Who the fuck plays a game like that other than pigs playing in their own feces? And motherfucker does your fart stink. Men must be made of shit. At least on the farm they castrate pigs. I wish I could castrate some of these big fat faggots that I fuck. Then I’d laugh. Just get rid of some useless hog meat on this earth. I’d be doing the world a favor and I’d be doing it with a well-shaped ass.”
Bernice smiled a little self-confident smile and strutted her stuff. The coffee smell on her fingers made her think of getting a little breakfast, which in turn made her remember that she just ran out of the essential antacids that would allow for an undertaking such as eating in the morning. Luckily, there was a drugstore just a block away and she was already walking in that direction. If it hadn’t been on her route, she knew that she wouldn’t have gone because she hated to change her course like some uncertain, wishy-washy tramp.
On the way, she reviewed how she woke up that morning, the man still snoring next to her, her anger having only compounded overnight. She thought about just how wrong that man was for her or any other woman (unless she had it coming to her). How a man like that deserved some lessons in life.
When she woke up that morning, the first thing she saw was the bottle of lotion on the nightstand, and didn’t need to think twice about what it meant. A man like that—a fat, ugly, smelly, stupid man, with lotion by the bed. It might as well have “masturbatory cock lubricant” written on it in permanent marker. She searched in her purse and found what she was looking for—nail polish remover. She took the bottle of lotion with her to the bathroom, squeezed out half the contents into the toilet, and refilled it with a mixture of the nail polish remover and his own toothpaste.
“Put that on your little dick, faggot,” she thought.
She walked into the kitchen and saw the package of coffee—pre-ground. Perfect she thought as she took out her pack of cigarettes and mixed the tobacco from four of them with the coffee. She used her hands because she was a good cook and her mom always taught her that good cooks use their hands. A smidge of tobacco here, a pinch of pubic hair there and voilà!
She heard him waking up and put everything away quickly.
Waltzing into the bedroom she crooned in a singsong voice, “Good morning sweetie.”
The look on his face—delayed recognition and immediate irritation.
“Oh yeah, you still here?” he asked. “Did you need me to call you a cab or something?”
“Well I was just hoping, honey, that you and I might finish a little of what we started last night…” she almost whispered, lasciviously, slow dancing up to the bed where he sat.
“Ahh…, you know, it’s already late and I have to get going with my day,” he said. “Besides, I’m all hung over.”
“Don’t you worry baby,” she whispered, “Momma gonna take care of you,” and she reached down for him again, fondling with full knowledge that this time she had the power of morning-wood on her side. She went down again, but this time, unlike last night, he participated, pulling her up off him and then back down again to the bed, mounting her. Though she never thought of her childhood, moments like these were nothing if they weren’t nostalgic.
As he penetrated her she moaned, “You’re so big...” and kept up that wail unceasingly while he rode her. He flipped her over, as she expected he would—men’s selfish desire transcending even the human need to look into each other’s eyes. Even when having sex with a woman they were too self-involved to notice—just masturbating really. Accustomed to that egotism, she had integrated it, made it a part of her lust.
He entered her. She moaned again, but this time, “Oh I’m such a bad girl aren’t I? Tell me what a dirty girl I am big man, you tell me what a whore I am.”
To which he replied without inflection, “You are a whore.”
“Yes say it!” she cried out. “Treat me like I deserve, slap my ass, slap it, slap it!”
He did as he was told, only to incite her to more demands, “Yeah, now fuck me in my ass, in my sweet ass. Look at it, don’t you like how it’s shaped? Punish my little ass hole like the slut that I am. I deserve this, don’t you want to hurt my little bitch ass? Teach me Pappi!”
He did everything that she said except for punching her in the back of her head with his right fist while his left pulled her hair back, his body pistoning in and out of her bowels. That he didn’t have in him, which she thought was typical of a bad lover, a weak man, a faggot. It’s what she needed to fake the multiple orgasms, and he just couldn’t deliver.
At the drugstore, the little man at the counter gave her a bored look and moderately welcoming nod.
A dutiful march straight to the antacid section, to reconnoiter—the pills found. She picked up three of the packages, placed them one atop the other, and made a careful inspection of the directions on the back, looking up every few seconds to survey the store.
The man at the counter picked his nose and read a foreign paper. With eyes fixed on him as if he was a slow moving pack-animal, she used a fingernail of her free hand to perforate the side of the little antacid box between the two that she held in her other hand. She thought of beautiful blue dolphins swimming with her in the ocean. When she looked beside her there was a man swimming with them. It was not just any man either, it was Jesus.
The mission successful, she broke through the package and quickly pocketed the pills, carefully replacing the now defunct package behind the other ones on the shelf. Swaggering confidently to the counter, she smiled at the man who reluctantly turned his eyes to her.
“May I help you?” he asked.
“You don’t want to help me,” she replied.
“I’m sorry ma’am, what I can do for you?” He had a thick accent, something with rolling “r”s that made her 
think of body odor and people copulating with donkeys.
“Oh you so the man huh? You want to help me? Ok big man, here’s how you can help me. Go find me some lube for my ass. I need ass lube too, make sure it’s for the ass. I don’t need none of your usual cock grease or warming lotion or nothin’ fancy. You see, my ass gets real real rough, you know, ‘cause this bitch likes to work that shit. Look at it,” she said as she turned around and rotated her rear end slowly, sensually. “You know you wanna hit that! Well get me a little gravy for that meat and I’ll think about it—know what I mean? If you wanna ride the dog sled, you gotta have some motherfuckin’ snow. Know what I’m saying Eskimo?”
But it became more and more clear to her that he didn’t. In fact, he had no idea what she was talking about.
“Fuck you then, greasy, you little brown faggot,” she said cordially.
“May I help?” was his reply, clearly not having understood. “Don’t understand. May I help you ma’am?”
“Ok, ok, you can help me. That over there, see, over there,” she said pointing to a humidifier on the top shelf behind the counter. “Yeah, give me that.”
The man hesitated, almost asserting by his pause that someone like her couldn’t possibly pay for a high priced item like that.
“Why you hesitatin’? Why you hesitate? Oh, you don’t think I can afford this? Well look at this. Feast your donkey eyes on this,” she said as she pulled wads of money out of her overstuffed handbag. “Yeah bitch, I got funds, I GOT the motherfuckin’ funds, so be quick about it. Snap snap,” she said, snapping her fingers. “Fetch dogboy, fetch.”
The little man may not have fully appreciated the spirit of her request, but he recognized money. He reached up and precariously balanced the large box with his fingertips until he was able to bring the whole thing clumsily to the counter. The tag said $70.
“Seventy dollar,” he said, looking at her challengingly.
“Oh that’s what it is, well here, take this bill,” she said handing him a crumpled hundred-dollar note. A second glance and he rang it up, taking her hundred and giving back change.
“You know what bitch, why don’t you keep that shit,” she said, crumpling the change up and throwing it at his face. “Because that is how I roll. And here is what I think of your goddamn humidifier.”
She ripped open the box that held the humidifier and threw the contents on the floor.
“Here’s what I think of you and your faggot shit!” she yelled, stomping with her high heels over the wrapped plastic parts strewn around the dirty tile-floor, as the shocked man looked on from behind the counter.
“This and this and this!” she yelled, now kicking and smashing parts with her boots. “Oh yeah, and this,” she said, straddling some of the plastic remains and pulling up her skirt.
She urinated a hot stream of angry yellow piss with a look of such satisfaction that one could have thought, been sure, that she was in love.
The little man cried, “No! No!” from behind the counter and ran around it, to her, without any clear idea of what he would do when he got there. Before he reached her, the damage was done and she was pulling down her skirt, content. Still he approached her, if only out of the momentum of his advance, stepping in her urine, which marked his gym shoes as he hovered uncertainly.
“I know you liked that, you sick fuck,” she said to him, reaching down and grabbing his crotch. He let out a gasp and a gurgle. She held on to his package for a second, looked into his bewildered and frightened eyes, and made a little grunting laugh.
“Yeah, you know you liked that,” she repeated, giving his confused crotch a few not-so-gentle squeezes. “Fuckin’ faggot, I’d rather fuck my brother than you.”
It might have been a hard life, but that morning, as she slammed the door on her way out, she was victorious.
by Andy Henion
Shay saw him first. He was sitting in the wicker chair wrapped in a quilt and drinking a mug of hot tap water. I imagine most seven-year-olds would have screamed upon discovery of a stranger in the basement, but Shay simply shouted up the stairs that, Dad, there’s a man down here. When I got to the landing she was standing in front of him, arms folded, blocking his view of a television program on bear attacks.
“Sure enough,” I said. “And you are?”
“Alan,” said the man. He half rose from the chair to offer a trembling hand. His fingernails were filthy and as the quilt fell from his shoulders I saw that his clothes were old and torn and streaked with dirt. He was homeless, and he was warming himself in our suburban home.
I shook his hand and it was cold and grimy, as advertised. I said, “Give me one reason, Alan, why I shouldn’t call the cops.”
Alan said, “Because I’m you, only grubbier. The harmless sort. A forty-something overachiever who trends liberal in the voting booth, reads mystery novels and enjoys the occasional taste of the very bud growing behind that door.”
Shay’s eyes grew wide. “You smoke Daddy’s special medicine too?”
Alan smiled and said, “You bet I do, sweetie.”
“Daddy smokes his special medicine every night.”
“Shay, honey, go upstairs and do your homework.”
“It’s Saturday,” she said.
“Upstairs,” I said.
When she was gone I silenced the television and sat across from Alan.
“Who are you?” I said. “Sheriff’s office?”
He shook his head and leaned in. “DEA,” he whispered, then sat back and laughed.
“Don’t flatter yourself, fella. I’m just Alan, that’s all. Alan the Homeless Guy.”
“Alan the Homeless Guy,” I repeated, minus the mirth. Then: “So, you can smell it, huh?”
“You can smell it,” he confirmed.
“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said. “Why are you here?”
He nodded: fair question. “Your neighbor across the street is looking for a manager for his golf course. I was the best links man in the state until I fell on hard times.”
“Glanville,” I said. Our neighbor. We were feeding his two calicos, King George III and Mr. Snuggles, until he returned from a Pacific isle in a few days.
“The sliding door was unlocked,” Alan said, nodding at the pane.
“And you heard us coming home,” I said, “and you decided against leaving the way you came.”
“I couldn’t feel my toes,” he said. “At some point you put your faith in your fellow man.”
“And you’re expecting, what, a couple hours to warm up? A pair of long johns for the road?”
“Actually,” said Alan, “I was hoping to stay, at least until your neighbor returns.”
“Stay?” said my wife, standing on the landing. She was petite and stepped like a bird. She moved toward the homeless man.
“Angie,” I said. “Alan here—”
Angie held up a hand: She had heard. She proceeded to examine Alan with a squint, the way she did with her new clients. Angie was a veteran social worker and an excellent judge of character, or at least she thought so, and after a few moments she nodded and told Alan he could stay in the basement until he got back on his feet. Then she instructed me to retrieve the bag of clothing we had prepared for the Salvation Army.
“I’m going to brew a pot of coffee and thaw some pumpkin bread, Alan, how does that sound?” Alan said that sounded wonderful, Angie, thank you for your hospitality. Then she turned and headed up the stairs, my wife, nearly ten years younger than I and blessed with the tightest of backsides.
“Cute,” said Alan.
*
After Alan shaved and showered and reported to the dining room dressed in my old clothes, my wife and daughter could not contain themselves. They giggled and high-fived and pointed at the two men sitting at the table.
“You’re twins,” Shay shrieked.
I shook my head sheepishly, but she was right. From the blond brush cut going gray on the sides to the weak blue eyes to the broad shoulders, we could have been brothers. Alan grinned and looked down at my hands. I was the one trembling this time. I put them under the table.
“So, Alan,” said my wife. “Tell us about yourself.”
He grew up on a golf course in Columbus, he explained, and went to Ohio State just like his hero Jack Nicklaus. In college he met the most wonderful woman in the world and married her straight away. She supported his quest to join the pro tour by working midnights at a pharmacy. Although he didn’t make the tour, he hired on as assistant manager of a pro shop, eventually rising to managing partner. It was good money, he said, and a job he was good at. He and his wife would have twins—a boy and a girl and both of them excellent golfers.
“Are they in elementary school?” Shay asked.
“No, sweetie, they’re older. Actually, they’re both going to Ohio State, just like Mom and Dad did.”
“Tell us about these so-called hard times,” I said, eliciting a glower from Angie.
“Absolutely I can do that,” said Alan, turning my way. “It’s pretty basic stuff. I started drinking and then I started snorting cocaine and pretty soon I lost my golf course and my family and I was living on the streets.”
“How long ago was this?” I said, and this time Angie shook her head and told me that it was none of our business.
“It’s totally fine,” said Alan. “You have a right to know. Five years ago now. For the past eighteen months I’ve been clean and sober and working part-time at the shelter. Best of all, I’m thinking about golf again. The passion’s back, you could say.”
All of this bored Shay. “Do you play Yahtzee?” she asked. Alan waggled his eyebrows at her and said he played like nobody’s business and Shay ran downstairs to get the game. Angie took the opportunity to take a jab at me.
“Are you still going to the office? Again?”
I was a bankruptcy attorney and business was booming. I had been working fourteen-hour days, weekends and holidays, taking as many cases as possible to pad our savings account. It all went back to the trembling hand; to the rioting cells in my body. For her part Angie didn’t understand my hoarding behavior. She said family was most important right now. I told her I agreed—that I was protecting my family the best I could.
Now, as I thought about this stranger alone with my wife and daughter, I told her I’d be staying in tonight to play a little Yahtzee. I managed three games (winning one) before bowing out and slowly retreating to my basement office, stopping twice to steady myself on the steps. By the time I fell back in my chair I was retching on pumpkin bread.
I lit one up. Then I took three pills, two purples and a white. The combination had a way of producing anxiety, a sweaty hallucination or two, yet it was only way I knew to stop the pain. Or slow it down, anyway.
A couple hours later I had just dug into my paperwork when he knocked. It was after ten.
“I miss the party?”
“I thought you were clean and sober.”
“Weed doesn’t count.”
I agreed with him on that much and fired up another. We sat smoking and talking. I told him I wasn’t much into golf but rather preferred full-contact sports. He described with unsettling detail some of the things he had seen as a street person. The way he had been treated, he said, led him to conclude that human beings were for shit.
This brought a reflective pause as we finished up the blunt.
“So this helps with the pain?”
“Not for what I have,” I said, and winked.
Alan smiled and shook his head. “Your secret’s safe with me.”
A moment later he said, “How long?”
“Six months, give or take.”
“And you haven’t told Shay.”
“Not yet,” I said. “But we will. I will.”
“She deserves to know.”
I looked at our guest, wanting to admonish him for his meddling, but there was no condescension in his tone, no raised brow of superiority. He was a modest guy, a straight-shooter, and I felt a stab of disappointment. Why couldn’t he be a raging asshole? Alan wasn’t our first houseguest—Angie’s teenage troublemakers came and went, a night here, a weekend there, despite agency policy—but I knew he was the first one who could have a lasting impact on my family.
I thought suddenly of the movie where the man whacks his wife’s lover on the skull with a snow globe, an odd if efficient kill. But I was getting ahead of myself. I was perspiring. I wasn’t the murderous type.
“You’re not looking good,” said Alan.
“I was picturing you with blood running down your face,” I said.
“Maybe we should turn in,” he said.
*
I sat in bed watching my wife sleep but fearing for my daughter’s life. Her bedroom was on the ground floor, sandwiched between ours on the second floor and the stranger’s in the basement. It was paranoia, I suppose; Alan didn’t strike me as a violent man. But I couldn’t let it go. So I showered off the pot smell and headed down to her room.
Shay was on her side with her mouth open: a drooler like her old man. I eased onto the bed and scooted up behind her. She stirred but didn’t wake. On the ceiling was a sea of glow-in-the-dark stars I hadn’t noticed before. I heard the faint sound of music and realized she had fallen asleep with the plastic buds in her ears. I recognized the song as one of my favorites from my youth. Angie must have downloaded it for her from my collection.
I pulled the blanket over us. I inhaled the scent of her hair and thought of her future as an astronomer or a folk singer or maybe a social worker, like her mother. I worried about some little prick breaking her heart. I regulated my breathing and remained as still as possible, trembling only slightly. And eventually I slept, no longer thinking about the man in the basement.
*
When the cancer was diagnosed throughout my bowels and vital organs, the doctor pronounced it inoperable, gave us the standard spiel about seeking a second opinion and then came around his desk to deliver a lecture about the importance of catching it early.
“Help me spread the word,” he said, opening his arms above me like an evangelist. “Consider yourself a walking billboard. Tell all your friends, your family members. You can help me save lives.”
“He said that? You can help me save lives?” Alan was sitting in the wicker chair.
“Just like that,” I said. I was now in a makeshift hospital bed set up in the basement. But I was feeling better: a second wind. A good day among the bad.
“H. Christ,” he said. “Fuckin’ doctors, anyway.”
I was drinking warm Irish beer, Alan coffee, while we watched our respective alma maters bang heads. Ohio State clung to a three-point lead over Michigan in a cold, muddy contest.
“I’m curious. How could you not know?”
“I pretty much ignored it for years. Passed it off as heartburn. Lactose intolerance. At one point I had a colonoscopy, but when it came up negative I felt like a hypochondriac. You know how it is.”
“So they missed it,” he said.
I shrugged. “Who’s to know about these things. They throw a bunch of medical jabberwocky at you, recommend Treatment X, Treatment Y, but I said screw all that. I’ve watched too many relatives die in a cold hospital room when they would have rather been at home.”
I drained the last of my beer and watched the Ohio State punter shank one to the sidelines.
“So, tell me about your interview.”
Glanville had arrived home two days ago. Angie had set up the meeting, thinly guised as lunch at our house. Alan had worn one of my suits.
“I knocked it out of the park,” he said. “Best interview I ever gave. Problem is, he’s already filled the spot with his brother-in-law.”
“Huh,” I said. “So all this for nothing.”
“Hey, I’m just getting warmed up. I’ll find something soon, you watch.”
“And in the meantime, what? Continue eating the food and courting the wife of a dying man?”
“Indeed,” he said with a big grin. Ever the wise guy.
*
A couple weeks later I had another good day, a decent day at least, and decided to go in and clean out my office in the early evening. It was a Friday, two weeks before Christmas. Angie was at work dealing with the latest emergency; Shay at a cousin’s for the night. Alan offered to drive me but I told him I could handle it, and not to expect me for a few hours. I hadn’t been outside in weeks.
The fifteen-minute drive was no problem. There were only two people in the office, a couple of law clerks who promptly buried their heads in their work rather than interact with The Sick Man. Which was fine with me.
On the way home I stopped at an old haunt and ordered a beer and a shot. I didn’t recognize any of the patrons or the bartender, a wrinkled specimen who looked like he had escaped from a nursing home.
The pain had reared up. I took a handful of pills. I longed for a joint.
I thought. About everything. We had finally told Shay—talk about anticlimactic. “I already knew that, Dad,” was her response. Yet rarely did she come down to the basement anymore. I knew I was looking rough, with dark circles under my eyes, sunken cheeks. She was playing soccer now and she was fast like me and determined like her mother. God I’d miss watching her play.
Alan had fixed just about everything imaginable around the house; unlike me, he was quite the handyman. He had even started cooking meals and cleaning floors—earning his keep, I suppose. He would come down every night to watch a little TV, smoke some herb. I couldn’t bring myself to hate him. Not all the way. I respected his courage to walk into a stranger’s home and fall in love with his wife.
I wondered if Angie had told him yet. That we had decided on divorce before the diagnosis came down. That our marriage had digressed to one ceaseless, bitter quarrel.
“You okay?” the ancient bartender asked.
“Not so much,” I told him, and dropped a twenty on the bar. “I’ll be dead soon.”
“You and me both, buddy.”
It had started to snow. The pain doubled me over several times on my walk to the truck. Still, I remembered how much I loved the outdoors, the crisp air a magnificent shock to the senses. I wondered suddenly why I was spending my last days shut inside a dank basement. I resolved to get out of there and go the way I wanted to—if only I could drive my sick ass home first.
I was a mile away. The oncoming vehicles were drab smudges. Horns blared. I pressed at my temples for clarity.
When I finally pulled in I didn’t dare attempt to maneuver the truck into the stall. I opened the garage door to find Angie’s car in its usual spot. Stepping out, I fell to the driveway, skinning my face. I went to my hands and knees—a familiar position these days—and lurched forward. It took three or four minutes, but I made it into the house.
And heard a ruckus from the guest bedroom. Moaning, grunting, the beating of walls.
I crawled closer, as far as the kitchen, and laid my cheek on the cold linoleum and listened to their fucking. It seemed to go on forever. I had never heard these sounds from my wife. I was angry, spiteful, but worst of all I felt like a visitor—an unwanted visitor—in my own home.
*
At three in the morning I put the gun in his mouth. It was a little .38 I had bought a few years back when Angie was getting threats of a sexual nature from one of the hooligans on her caseload.
Alan’s eyes opened in surprise.
“And Merry Christmas to you,” he managed around a mouthful of barrel.
I sat there for a bit, dripping sweat, feverish. I had meant for this to be quick: one for Alan, one for me, end of story. I had expected him to struggle against the weaker man, but goddamn if he didn’t just lie there looking up at me. He wanted my wife, but he also wanted my blessing, the son of a bitch.
I pulled the hammer back. Alan nodded slightly, ready for what was next.
And laughed. The gun was clanking against his teeth.
“Damn it to hell,” I said, trying to steady my hand. “There’s three of you.”
“Shoot the one in the middle,” Alan said.
And that was it. I slumped to the floor, letting the gun fall to the mattress. So I wasn’t a killer. A noise rumbled out of my throat: relief, mostly.
I felt a hand on my back, a reassuring rub. “Let me help you up,” he said, and the homeless man half carried me back to my deathbed.
*
The day after New Year’s, with everyone back to school and work, Alan took me for a drive. He was dressed in a pair of my best slacks and my favorite sweater; I wore his homeless clothes. The pills were stuffed in my socks and underwear. Otherwise, he said, they’d get stolen in the first hour.
“I have a confession,” he said. “I’ve never read a mystery novel in my life. And sometimes I vote Republican.”
“You cocksucker,” I said, and we laughed.
The weather had broken. It was fifty degrees and sunny. This would make some of them aggressive, Alan explained, so be aware.
“Got it,” I said.
“You know, most people in their last days, it’s all about being with family, reliving the good times.”
“I’m not feeling it,” I said. “I’ve had my good times, made loads of money—”
“On the backs of others, no less.”
“Thank you, smart ass.” I looked over at him. It was like looking in the mirror. I said, “You know, I look at it this way: I already agreed to move out, right? I’m just keeping a promise.”
We got downtown and Alan made a few turns and soon we were in the ragged part of the city, with homeless people sitting on sidewalks and milling about in vacant lots. I had never realized there were so many.
“I’m taking you to the farmer’s market,” Alan said. “There’s a wall there that used to be mine. Me and Dezzy and Barb. I wonder if they’re still around.”
It was a white wall, covered with graffiti. Dezzy and Barb were not, in fact, present, but many others were. I looked at their tattered clothing and bloodshot stares.
“They won’t care that you’re sick,” he warned.
I nodded. “You know, when my daughter left for school this morning, she asked me when I was going to die. As if I were holding up progress.”
“Kids say the damndest things,” said Alan.
“Honest things,” I said.
“You sure you want to do this?”
“You know, I’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll grab a private room at Mercy, let the nurses give me sponge baths until the money is gone.”
He reached across me for the door handle. “Adios, partner.”
“Ha. Listen, man, bring them by every once in a while, could you? Tell them it’s a shortcut to the mall or whatever. Just drive by so I can see them.”
“I can do that,” he said. But he never did.
Outside the dorm, I caught sight of myself in the window, a scraggly thing, a long grey London Fog raincoat like a sad cape, the Filson hat covered in dry flies, the Timberland boots, unlaced, the jeans made of holes. I had weed in my pocket.
"Hey," she said. "You made it. You an outlaw?"
"Yeah."
At thirteen, I'd run away from home, walked the four hours to my grandfather's house in Huntingdon Pennsylvania. My grandfather had once been a peddler to faraway farmers, the backdrop of his trek endless corn stalks, the smell of manure, plows and furrows.
"Do you want to come up?" she asked.
"Sure."
My grandfather and I had spent the weekends with Westerns, the men tiny specks set against rocks and cliffs and sky and sometimes caves.
She lived in a single, the walls covered in Adam and the Ants posters. The Smiths. The Cure. Melting clocks. Home, the women symbolized in those movies. The thing heroes don't get, not ever, the opposite of the hardness of those cliffs and sky.
"Bruce asked me to marry him," she said. "Bruce Wayne."
I set the baggie on her desk, next to her typewriter. I'd once pretended I had a poetry class and that I couldn't type just so I could give her some money, so I could write about her and have her finger each word. Silly things like that.
"Really," she said. "That's his name."
"I know. It's 25 dollars. I gotta go."
She wadded up the money. I opened the coat pocket, and she shot it in. Never a miss.
"Maybe we could go to the roof later," she said.
That Boston night sky, full of lights that my grandfather had stared at as he wound his way through Amish country, and his grandfather as he dug out the hollow named for my family. Graduation loomed. I'd taken a job with a pharmaceutical company, would be driving those same roads as my grandfather, selling drugs, the only one of my friends college had prepared for the real world.
I walked out the door, down the hall. I felt her waiting behind me, then her quick footsteps as I waited a floor below.
"Off you go," she said. "Waddling this way and that." She called down the stairs. "It's a stupid coat, you know that. How silly it all is."
Freshman year, we'd met, those strange chemistries that sometimes take place. We both saw it, the blue spark that shot between us. We both said, "It's you." Something had happened later, over a summer, a disappointment, maybe, of finding it too soon.
I thought of running back up the steps, kissing her in that doorframe before leaving forever, a tiny hitch in my step. Outside, that whole night of deliveries, I looked up at the roof, and each time the space seemed to shrink until everything felt small, infinitely so.
He was lying along three chairs in the Accident and Emergency waiting room. Though the strip lights buzzed and News 24 droned in his fore-brain, he was not all there. Two strangers occupied the room with him, all in mutual ignorance, all alone in their private heartaches
He checked her. She slept.
He didn’t want to think - how she’d just found out she was pregnant - how they didn’t have enough money for the taxi home - how they had to wait five hours for the first bus of the day. He didn’t know what to think. He went outside, through double sliding doors, under the guise of wanting a cigarette, but really in search of some silence to order his scrambled brain.
He was going to be a father.
That was as far as his thoughts got before they stalled.
He hunched in the cold, his breath as white as the smoke he exhaled. He stared out at well lit carparks, the one-way system and the pay meters. It was cold enough for snow, and a chilled wind licked around his collar. An expressway roared distantly. There was no silence here, just humming hospital fans in false darkness.
He went back to his chairs, ignoring the newcomers, three women, all sitting in stunned, teary silence. He tried to sleep.
He was spoilt by those few years in the town. Once he was moved to the farm, certain things couldn’t be changed. His Nain saw this, and understood an absolute where his Taid could never admit one. So he was taken out to the fields, with cap, crook and dogs, into the undulating movement of uphills and downhills. This held his attention for a while, especially the trips to the furthest fields in the little red tractor, where he sat on a bale of hay in the box in the back.
But the softness was still there, and was brought to a head by Playschool. The Forestry-framed hilltops, sacks of feed and blocks of salt-lick couldn’t compete with the wonders of the square window and Big Ted and Little Ted. Taid insisted on leaving straight after breakfast, but Playschool started at ten. He cried, Nain intervened, and Taid stomped out alone.
Three days later, once Playschool was finished, he marched out by himself, under the guise of going to meet Taid at the cattleshed, but knowing that he would not. He played with the dogs, tried to call the woodshed home, and explored until Nain called him in.
Soon he was allowed to wander further, beyond the dry-stone walls around the house. He gravitated to the farm buildings, the barn with its bales, and to the duckless pond where he caught newts. He learnt the secret corners of the farm, which only one of his size could appreciate.
Taid became aware of his wanderlust, and saw a new way of hardening him up. He was given tasks to perform, helping to feed the chickens and dogs every morning. He was given a Border Collie pup to care for, and a wax cap like Taid’s, with an identical sprig of mountain heather. He was every inch the little farmer.
School started, and the farm became a weekend paradise. The Christmas snows arrived, and lambing season started. He fed the lambs with no mummies, but was deemed to small to walk the fields on the lambing watch. The snows became deeper, and he was made housebound. School was reached by Taid’s Landrover Defender, and all his free time was spent by the fire, watching telly. He had a non-speaking part in the nativity play in the village chapel, as the third King, which he chickened out of at the last moment.
For Christmas he got a bright red romper suit and a red plastic sledge. He was dimly aware of his mothers concern, and his Taid’s insistence that he would stick out for miles around. All other gifts paled in comparison. He wandered out all Christmas day, in fields so still and frozen it felt like the world had stopped turning, and he was all alone. He tramped the long road to the black gaping maw of the Forestry under a ice blue sky, and turned home as thunderheads rolled into sight. He felt like he would remember that day for the rest of your life.
He found he wanted to be an explorer. Not a farmer.
One day, not long after his birthday, Taid called him outside into the snow, because he wanted some help.
‘We’re going to catch tomorrow’s dinner,’ he said, pointing at the black cockerel strutting amid its harem on the scrapes and ash pile. ‘You stay here, and I’ll go around the other side.’
He went slowly to the other side of the pile. ‘Walk slowly now,’ he called. ‘Fresh chicken is so nice’.
The wilful death of another creature had never occurred to him, and he stopped still with the weight of it. He was being asked to help kill the bird. He had seen the sprung mousetraps under the sink, the geese hanging in the pantry, but had never killed anything. He’d given the orphan lambs names.
He began to cry.
The cockerel stalked past him, and despite Taid’s urgent shouts, he would not move. Finally giving up, Taid stalked into the house, and never asked for help again.
Taid died not long after, and the rift was never mended. For the want of a black cockerel, he missed out. He was moved back to the town, and things moved on. Some questions were never answered.
Something woke him. He felt an overlarge hand on his shoulder, and detected the scent of heather. The cobwebs of dreams blew away as he sat up. Instinctively, he looked over to where she lay.
She was still sleeping
He went out again, and the lights in the car park had switched off, and dawn was not far from coming. His thoughts no longer raced, but beat with a measured pace. Calmer. Possibly a little grownup.
The cold reminded him of a day on the farm, in hip-deep snow, the stream frozen over, icicles hanging from the branches of the damson trees, all the way to the ground.
This time, there’d be no black cockerels.
He rolled a cigarette from the dwindling supply of tobacco, and walked to the bus shelter to see when the first one would arrive.
by Wes Prussing
XX
Elise slapped the snooze button for the second time. She kicked off the goose-down comforter flipping it on to Marshall who was on his side, his back to her, still asleep, still snoring lightly. She rolled quietly over and gently spooned her body up close to his, resting her head at the base of his neck.
Gradually, their breathing fell into sync and she pulled his body in tight hoping to draw in some small portion of his unflinching resolve and steady determination. When the alarm sounded yet again she disentangled herself, rolled over and hit the off-switch. Still on her side she drew up her knees and locked her fingers across her shins. She remained like this for some time listening to the electric ticking of the clock, imagining a similar low-voltage pulse emanating from somewhere deep inside her. At length she glanced over at the clock and was surprised to discover that nearly twenty minutes had passed.
She swung her legs off the bed and stood; naked and vaguely nauseous.
Snatching a terrycloth robe from the bedpost and stepping into her slippers she shouted, “Wake up, Marshall. Babe…wake up.”
From beneath the covers came a hoarse: “Huh? What? What time is it?”
“It’s almost eight. I must have fell back to sleep—sorry.”
“It’s what? Eight?”
“Almost, we overslept a bit.”
“No problem. I’m up, I’m up.” He reached over to the nightstand and tipped up the face of his wristwatch. “We’re okay. There’ll be hardly any traffic today. We’ve got time.”
He sat up and yawned with a distinctly audible relish then fell to the floor and began doing push-ups. “You go ahead and shower first,” he huffed, as he mentally counted reps. “I’ll head down and get breakfast going in just a sec.”
Elise went to the linen closet and gathered a stack of towels. As she padded toward the bathroom Marshall crept up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist.
“You feeling okay?” he asked. “You seem a bit out of it. Everything all right?”
“Yes, I’m fine. Maybe a little tired. I didn’t sleep very well.”
He slipped his hand between the folds of her robe. “Wow…you’re ice cold.”
She nudged him with the stack of towels. “Let go Marshall, you’re all sweaty. How many of those crazy push-ups are you doing anyway?”
“I du-know. A hundred.”
“Yeah, right.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“Well, you’re certainly sweaty enough. But…you know I love you just the way you are, right? You don’t have to prove anything to me. I fell in love with your brains, not your muscles.”
He kissed the top of her head. “Yeah sure you did. Hey, race to you the shower. Last one in has to—.”
“No you won’t buster, I’m first. Besides I need to wash my hair and I’ve got little enough elbow room as it is.”
“Okay, fine. But save a little hot water for your incredibly bright but very sweaty boyfriend.”
“Calm down there Schwarzenegger; I won’t be that long—besides a cold shower might do you some good.” She slipped from his arms and in a pensive tone added, “I just hope they have some heat on today. Remember last Tuesday? It was ice cold. And then there’s that ridiculous paper gown you have to put on the moment you walk in the door. Why do they need to keep it so cold?”
“Beats me,” Marshall answered, peeling off his tee-shirt. “Germs, I guess.”
“Well it’s a wonder everyone there doesn’t come down with phenomena.”
She deposited the towels on the bathroom vanity and got the water in the shower running. When she could see a sheet of vapor hanging just beneath the tiled soffit she stepped in and pulled the curtain closed. Immediately her pours opened. She scrubbed furiously; the washcloth a tight knot in her fist, her capillaries blossoming like tiny bouquets of pink daises. Soon the heat began to coax pinpoints of perspiration from her pale skin. She continued scrubbing while nudging the hot water valve even higher, fogging up the mirrors and dampening the porcelain fixtures. Finally she turned the water up as hot as it would go and let the exquisite needles of heat dance across her body. She lifted her head and arched forward letting the water beat against the small of her back then rolled her shoulders forward, shaking her hands furiously against the unyielding torment that she not only invited but embraced. She continued showering until the water finally began to cool. She dried herself with a towel while staring dreamily into the vanity mirror, wondering, not for the first time, if the visceral chill that had settled into her bones would ever dissipate.
XY
“Coffee’s on hon. You almost done up there?”
Marshall waited but received no reply. He continued with his breakfast preparations. From the Sub-Zero refrigerator he began gathering up deli-sausages, a carton of eggs, butter, cream cheese, jellies and jams. He set a cast iron skillet on the front burner and fired it up.
“How many eggs, babe?” he shouted, louder this time.
“Be right down,” he heard her call out. He glanced at the kitchen clock and shook his head. Typical.
He selected three extra large eggs from a new carton, placed them in a glass bowl then wedged the carton back into the fridge. He dropped two slices of pumpernickel bread into the toaster and gave the pan a quick spray with a nonstick shortening. Humming to himself he adjusted the burners while beating time on the butcher block with a wooden spoon.
A few minutes later Elise appeared in heavy robe with a white bath towel wrapped turban-like round her wet hair.
“Coffee ready yet?”
“Yup, cream’s next to the microwave.” He slid the sugar bowl down the granite countertop. “Sit down and relax, I’ll have a plate fixed up for you in just a minute.”
She poured a cup and sat alone at the table cinching tight her robe to cover bare legs. “I don’t know Marshall,” she said between sips. “I think the instructions said that you’re supposed to fast or something, same as a blood test, I guess. I think I read something about twelve hours—or maybe it was only eight. I can’t remember exactly.” She grabbed her purse from the baker’s rack they had purchased at yard sale and removed a small brochure. “I think it was here near the back,” she said thumbing through the pages. “Let’s see…God, my brain’s just not working this morning.”
Marshall snorted. “They just say all that so you won’t get sick to your stomach or anything. A little bit of breakfast won’t hurt you. I didn’t want to mention it, but you’ve been looking a little anemic lately.”
“I can’t find it,” she said wearily and slid the brochure into the napkin holder. “Maybe I should eat something, though.”
“Coming right up,” he said.
She sipped her coffee quietly lost in thought. At the counter, Marshall began removing thick links of sausage from the butcher’s salmon-colored wrapping paper. He glanced back at her as he worked. From where he stood her face was blocked from view but he could see that her fingers were wrapped tightly around the coffee cup, her knuckles red and chaffed. He thought he detected some trembling when she set the cup back in its saucer. He turned back to the stovetop and said, “There’s really nothing to worry about. It’ll be over before you know it – you’ll be home in time to watch Oprah.”
“It’s Saturday, Marshall. Oprah’s not on.”
“Oh, right. The View, then”
“Not on either. And you know darn well I never even watch those shows.”
“Never watch—now wait just a minute here…you are a woman, right? Isn’t that against some sort of code you guys got going?”
He waited for a quick laugh or a jab back at his faux-sexist remark. When it didn’t come he began again: “Look, it’s natural to be concerned, okay. That form they had you fill out. It’s just to cover their asses—you know that, right? You can ask Ted. Call him at home if you want, he won’t bill us. Ninety percent of all malpractice suits are bogus.” He paused and gingerly plucked the bread from the toaster. “It’s practically fool proof—the procedure, I mean. It’s like getting a wart removed.”
She sniffled and murmured into her cup.
“Huh?”
“I said, some wart.”
He let it pass, picked up the spatula, and began rolling the sausage links as they browned in the pan. After a minute or two of silence he guardedly asked, “Have you said anything to your mother?”
“I was going to. I actually picked up the phone last night. But—you know, she’s going through all that stuff with Noreen and everything. This is the last thing she needs to deal with right now.”
“Hey, it’s entirely your call babe. You know that, right?” He placed some paper towels on a small plate. “You know how it is with your mom. She’s got a lot of hang-ups. She’s still living in the past. I’m not trying to be mean or condescending or anything. It’s a generational-thing actually.”
Elise sighed. “Maybe I’ll just tell her after. What can she say? She’ll have to at least be supportive.”
Setting down the spatula Marshall went over to her and began massaging her shoulders. He sensed a subtle change in her tone; a fissure in her resolve that he had not detected before. “You do whatever you think is best, okay. I’m behind you a hundred percent.”
Elise reached up and placed a hand over the back of his fingers. “Marshall, what if I get sick, I mean right in the middle of it all. I mean if I feel this awful now what will happen—.”
“You’ll be fine,” he stopped her. “You need to stop worrying. You’ll be fine. Look, I’ll fix you up one of those small egg sandwiches you like, with the crust cut off. It’ll help settle your stomach.”
“OK, but no sausage, okay. I’m feeling queasy enough as it is.”
“Leave everything to zee master chef, madam.” he said, in his best snooty-butler voice. He picked up the pan and gave it a few of good shakes. The sausages sizzled and spat grease into the air. He let them cook for another minute or so then forked them onto a cushion of paper towels and set them aside. He poured most of the grease into a plastic container they kept in the fridge leaving just enough in the pan to help the eggs along. His mind was sifting through all the new issues Elise seemed to be dwelling on. They’d gone over all this stuff a dozen times already. Why the sudden apprehension? A vague ache had begun throbbing in his bottom left gum. He placed the pan back on to the burner and turned the heat down. Rubbing his jaw he turned toward her, “Damn… this is really getting bad. Probably should get it looked at again.”
She looked up. “That same tooth? Is it getting worse?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “Not as bad as it was the other night but it’s definitely not going away.”
“I can call my dentist and make an appointment for you. He’s very accommodating when it comes to emergencies.”
“That’s all right. I’ll go see Shuller next week. He knows my history and everything. He’ll fit me in if it gets really bad. They’ll probably want to pull the damn thing this time. Three hundred bucks on a root canal and it’s worse then before.” As he said this a connection formed in his mind. Teeth, bone, tissue, flesh; all the same when you got right down to it; all ephemeral to one degree or another. He wondered if she saw this too. “But you’re right, hon. I gotta deal with it. If it’s gotta come out, then it’s gotta come out. Shuller warned me. I should have considered an implant from the get-go.”
He slid the bowl of eggs next to the burner, selected one and tapped it on the side of the pan. “Say babe, grab me the pepper would ya.”
Standing on her toes she grabbed the antique wooden pepper mill from the cabinet over the microwave. She squeezed in beside him and held it over the pan.
“These are for me so give’em a couple of good twists,” he said, cracking a second egg into the pan.
She cranked out the pepper. “Enough?”
“Yeah, yeah that’s good.” He cracked the third egg against the pan. “You want yours over easy, right. No pepper, no salt?”
“Yes, just let one side get—.”
The pepper mill hit the tiled floor with a hollow thud and bounced under the table.
Elise screamed.
Into the bubbling grease fell a milky, yellow embryo; a tiny completely formed chick, nearly limpid, with a delicate web of pink veins. Its dark, inky corneas were heavily hooded giving it a sad and sleepy-
eyed expression. One wing was tucked neatly under its stubby beak as if it were sucking some invisible thumb.
Right away the chick’s flesh began to cook as small patches of germ feathers blistered and floated into the air. The tiny body trembled on the beads of boiling fat and grease, leaping about as if still alive, still feeling pain.
“Oh God,” Elise cried. “Oh God, Marshall!”
Elise’s sudden outburst jarred him. He looked down in astonishment, letting the eggshell fall into the pan.
“It’s a chick Marshall… a baby chick. Look…Oh God, I think it’s still alive.”
He picked up a fork and tentatively poked at it. “Don’t be ridiculous Elise. It’s been in the refrigerator for over a week for chrissake.”
“Don’t poke it Marshall. Maybe—.”
“Calm down will’ya.” He lifted the pan off the flame. “Geezzzz!.”
Elise hung on his arm, her heated breath on his neck.
“Watch yourself babe,” he said, and moved the pan over the garbage disposal. He tipped it slightly and let the chick and broken eggshell slide into the sink. The other eggs still looked fine so he slipped them onto a plate. He flipped on the garbage disposal. Instantly it spun to life sucking the tiny knot of tissue through the black rubber flaps. There was a brief crunch of cartilage and egg shell and then, just as quickly, just the low hum of the blades spinning and churning the water.
Marshall watched until the detritus had disappeared into the black void. “Well, that’s that,” he said. “Grab me another egg from the fridge will ya, there’s a full carton on the bottom shelf.”
Elise was now next to the stove with her arms crossed, holding tight to the lapels of her robe.
“Babe? Elise?”
“I can’t Marshall.”
“Just check—.”
“Please Marshall. Aren’t you listening? I can’t. I just can’t. Her voice cracked and tears began running down her cheeks.
“You can’t what?” he asked, dropping his arms so that the frying pan swung at his side like a pendulum.
“I can’t do it, okay? I don’t know what I was thinking. Nothing feels right about this.”
“Whata-ya taking about?”
“Oh, Marshall,” she sobbed. “That little chick; you saw it. How can we?”
He set the pan on the burner. “Come here sweetheart. Let’s just take a moment and calm down. I know your hormones are ragging and everything. Let’s just take a step back and discuss this rationally.”
She pushed past him and darted through the kitchen door. “Oh God, I feel sick.”
“Where ya going?” he called after her. “Please Elise, at least come back and talk to me.”
She paused in the hallway and steadied herself against the wall. She swallowed hard and looked down at her slippers. Then she threw up.
She tried to cup her hands below her mouth but it was too late. She heaved violently feeling all the acid and bile that had been collecting in her gut for days drawn up and forced out by some foreign force. She stepped over the puddle of vomit and dragged her quivering body up the stairs.
Marshall let her go. He went to the stove and stacked the sausage links next to the eggs he had saved. He sat at the kitchen table staring down at the food. He was suddenly ravenously hungry. He picked up the salt shaker, his brain in overdrive, then slammed it back down with enough force to rattle the silverware. Their plans were ruined. The entire morning was a disaster. What had gone wrong? After all the talk about their future and what it all meant.
Upstairs he could hear the soft padding of footsteps moving from the bathroom to the bedroom and back again. He thought about their plans; one more year of law school to go. All those loans, not to mention the huge credit card debt they carried as a couple. And the wedding? Elise had had it all planned out; early June, right after his bar exam.
He picked up a piece of toast, took a bite and flipped it back on to the plate. Damn it! How could he let this happen? Everything had been set. The next few years meticulously mapped out.
He wondered if he could call and reschedule the procedure. Maybe Monday? Give her a day or two to calm down. She’d get over this, he was sure. His head hurt just thinking about what he would need to do to get her back on track. And on top of everything else his bad tooth was throbbing again with a renewed intensity. How was he supposed to even think?
He jumped from his seat, retrieved his iPhone from his briefcase and returned to the table. What the hell was Shuller’s number? He scanned his address book and found it under ‘dentist’. He figured the office was probably closed on Saturday but he’d leave a message anyway. Maybe they could fit him in early in the week. He pressed on the name and put the phone to his ear.
Across the table, sticking out of the napkin holder he spotted the brochure Elise had been looking at earlier. On the cover was the picture of a smiling, short-haired woman strolling insouciantly past a group of obviously successful and impeccably groomed young men as they gazed rapaciously after her. She looked happy and successful—a woman pleased with her life and in total control of her environment. He picked it up and turned it over. On the back, in bold font, he found the telephone number and website address.
He hit the ‘end’ button and set the phone on the table.
First things first, he thought. The tooth could wait. He needed to get control of the present situation before things got out of hand and their life together forever altered.
Leaving the phone on the table he tapped the speaker button and entered the clinic’s number with his index finger. With his free hand he dunked a link sausage into the cold, congealed egg yoke. He tossed his head back and guided the dripping concoction into his narrow mouth, chewing vigorously and deliberately on his bad tooth.
He listened as the i-Phone’s speaker toned the ringing sound at the other end. As he waited for someone to answer a startling and liberating revelation came rushing into his head; a notion he had briefly but imperfectly entertained in the past but that now exploded with perfect clarity. How could he have failed to recognize its significance? Embrace its righteousness?
He gazed over at the imposing twin doors of the stainless-steel Sub-Z, at the built-in Bang & Olufsen sound system mounted tastefully beside the hand-carved wine rack, at the new, gleaming iPhone blinking back at him from the table.
“Modern Woman,” came a hurried, abbreviated greeting. “Can you hold?”
“Yes I can,” he answered, directing his voice down into the phone. He selected a piece of toast and scooped up more egg yoke. On the phone’s tinny speaker the Mamas and Papas were singing ‘Monday…Monday…Can’t trust that day....”
He popped the toast into his mouth, eased back into the chair and began humming along. Overhead the footsteps began again; heavier then before—quick and deliberate.
He looked up and he smiled; a distinctively sly and self-satisfied smile—secure in the world’s new promise that there really is nothing dwelling within any of us anymore—no pain or pleasure, no blessing or curse—that can not be effortlessly extracted and perfunctorily washed down the drain.
Today there are clouds in the shapes of tiny animals falling from the sky. Jared, standing in the middle of a quiet street, the kind of street they show in movies, when all the actors have left, looks up, tries to catch them. They are in the form of all kinds of animals, species-- bats, giraffes, squirrels, orangutans-- because the world is a varied place, and today, nobody is feeding them. Today, the sky is tumescent, full. Today, the sky unloads.
*
They are at the Cedar Knolls Reservation, traipsing past the heath of briers, snarling paths overtaken by woody plants, close-knit families of aspens, sumac. It is mid-afternoon, and her name is Sheri. Sometimes he calls her “Cherry-pie” because when they first met at a party, he replayed the words to that song: Everybody wants a piece of my cherry-pie. She’s just so sweet.
The party was at her apartment and after the friends left, they slept together. She offered him some coke and urged him to fuck her in the ass. No, he said, he wasn’t into either. She sighed and lied stiff. He tried missionary, but she fell asleep and he lost whatever urge he had. In the morning, she made him eggs over light with fried slabs of boiled ham, instant coffee. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see her again, but she kept calling. She works in Payroll for a trucking firm, can multiply digits in her head to the nearest tenth.
He has a college degree in American History and works in a post office, really outside it, stocking trucks with parcels, big rectangular boxes. He drinks coffee with men nearing a pension. Their conversations are bare trees. Jared is twenty-nine. Sheri is twenty-five.
She sits down by a brook, stretches herself out. Be careful, he tells her, you might get sunburned. Stop, she says with a huff. She closes her eyes. Sheri is plump, not in a Rubinesque sense, he thinks, because with her, it is asymmetrical, fat around the hips, bulky thighs, the breasts, small, belonging to someone far away. But the face reminds him of cherry-pies, her flesh, the color of a lightly baked crust.
He feels that here, on this sun-dappled day, how everything breathes with quietude, it’s a moment outside of time. As if watching from some point in the future, he will look back at this moment as something that can both float and remain still, summoned at will.
Today, the animals are happy in their hiding places.
They saunter across hiking paths, then she steps into a thicket, loses her balance, falls inches from a felled tree, skinny, bark yellowed. He rushes to her rescue. “Are you alright?”
She is laughing. “Don’t help me, “ she tells him, “I can get up.” She gently pushes his arms away, brushes her jeans. Her face flushes; her eyes blue-glisten.
“You’re so serious, “ she tells him later as they walk back to her car.
And maybe this is what he likes about her, her giddy armor, her charisma like an arrow, the way she oversimplifies him, makes him feel light.
In a dense part of the reservation, Jared captures a frog. His voice surges with excitement. “Do you know how hard it is to catch one?” he says to her.
He takes this as some kind of sign, perhaps of good luck, because he has never caught one.
“Wait,” she says, shaking her head, smiling a toothy grin, “I have to take a picture of this.”
She steps back and shoots the Polaroid.
Jared looks down at this slimy small thing squirming in his hands. It looks scared, jittery as only a frog can be. He lets it go, watches it for a few seconds. It disappears. He wonders if frogs are capable of thoughts, fragments of them, like his at times.
Back at her apartment, they eat dinner, drink Tequila in shot glasses, have sex afterwards. He comes too quick. She tells him of a dream she had of being overcome by waves, dragged to some unknown beach, miles of it, barren, not one person in sight.
A wave? he says, but I‘m so skinny.
It wasn’t about you, she tells him.
*
They continue to see each other on weekends. She calls him sometimes during the week. On Saturdays, they drive in her car, always hers, go shopping. She picks out Lean Cuisines, tells him she needs to count calories. He wants something fatty and rich. She persuades him that he will acquire a taste. Her father, she says, died `too young, a heart attack.
Mostly they spend the weekends at her apartment, he, sleeping over, his mother back home sometimes questioning whether this is serious. She knows how hard he took it when his last long-time girlfriend of five years stated their relationship was a merry-go-round, that he was somewhat “passive,“ easily bored, and she vanished into her career, into the carillons of a national insurance company. He spent months brooding in a room upstairs he decorated with strobe lights and various posters of old rock stars. He lost himself in music, distanced himself at work.
In her small living room, he is sitting on an old recliner, cushioned seat. She comfortably nestled on the couch, her cat, a stray, takes in everything with her eyes, sometimes a shade of silver at a distance, sometimes a droop, barely a blink. Sheri says she loves animals, that she can understand them, marvels at how they never scream the way humans do when giving birth. He nods. They study each other.
One weekend, she introduces him to her family, the mother, whom Sheri labels as too “scatter-brained,” her brother, whom she loves but pronounces as “too weak.” Her sister’s marriage that after a miscarriage is deteriorating, the brother-in-law growing shabbier in appearance.
In the apartment, she often talks about her job at the office, her dealings with truckers, how some offer her coke in exchange for sex, how she was infatuated with an ex-trucking supervisor, a Vietnam vet, one she accompanied to a motel.
Jared shifts his position in the chair, takes a sip of his Kirsch. He loved any drink with even a hint of sweetness.
“How long ago?”
Her eyes fix upon the sleepy cat.
“A while back. I just loved that man. I’d eat his shit.”
“You still see him?”
Her eyes swerve slowly over to him. She shakes her head, slight, almost undetectable movements.
In turn, he sometimes tells her about his ex, what attracted him to her, her soft skin, her high IQ, her ability to speak French, the times at her dorm, her kindness, (for the most of their relationship), some early good times, those semester breaks.
“What happened,” she asks, taking a sip from her drink.
“It just didn’t come to anything. . . She went cold on me.”
“That sucks. I mean about the college degree.”
“What?”
She flicks her head, pushes some auburn strands from her eyes.
“I work with girls who have one. They get promoted faster. And me. I run circles around them, train them, cover up their mistakes, and the only way I make any money is by working overtime.”
“You work too much.”
“Thank you. But I‘m single. I have bills.”
Sometimes the conversation switches to her father, how she still thought the world of him, what she loved about him, how he’d make her laugh, a gunny bag of practical jokes. She couldn’t stand to be around serious people, she says.
Before the weather grows cold, they drive to a nearby town, browse the old antique shops, knickknacks, typewriters and silver platters, portraits of children wearing large hats with ribbons, sailor dresses. Jared remarks how these knickknacks tell so much about people, who they were, their world, now lost, but maybe not. They watch a baseball game from a bar.
At her place, he peruses her CD collection, marveling at some of the old ones, collections by seventies’ groups--Led Zeppelin, Yes, Stooges, some Stones. She tells him he can borrow them. He promises he will give them back. No rush, she says, when you’re ready. She is very generous, he notes, although at times, she can be unyielding, saying she inherits her backbone from her father. Maybe his heart was weak, but nothing else.
He doesn’t categorize this relationship as love. Maybe a low-grade variant of it, a step-son without a name. Someone to talk to, sleep with. Who knows where this will go. She says she thinks she’s in love, but she can never be sure. The last guy she loved, fucked without condoms, fucked her any which way he could, then, went back to an old girlfriend. She is not Jared’s ideal, if he has one. He wants a girl of fine bone, mysterious as porcelain sculptures, his mother’s glass animals that speak from their stillness.
Or maybe the grass is growing under his feet, he thinks. Maybe he can’t hear or name the sound it makes. Maybe the grass is growing inside him, catching tiny falling animals. On the bed, their chins lodge in the nook of their arms.
She tells him that he will always be the kind of person who needs a crutch, that she can see him working at the post office until retirement. Not that there is anything wrong with that, she adds. She gave up her crutches years ago, she says. He looks at her curiously.
“If you could be an animal, “ he asks her, “which one?”
Her answer is swift, direct.
“A lion. It can do what it wants and get others to do what it wants. And you?”
“A giraffe.”
She rises, lights some incense scented candles strewn around the apartment. She falls back to bed. This time he works hard to make her come, but she doesn’t. On coke, she tells him, she can come easier.
You mean the guy, he says, can make you come easier because he‘s so, you know.
Yeah, she says, that’s what she means. She sits up and presses her lips, slaps his shoulders. No, she says, she had it right the first time.
The smells of cottonwood and Citronella wafts through the bedroom. The smell of a kerosene heater. There is a strange kind of warmth. That tingles.
*
They’re watching the cat give birth to a kitten. It’s so tiny, he says, and when do the eyes open? The cat is lying on her bed. She strokes its back. Isn’t it amazing, she says. Over the weeks, he grows attached to the kitten. But it hardly grows, so blind, funny-awkward in its movements. The vet says the kitten will probably not live. Jared cares for it, feeds it special milk from a bottle. It lives.
*
Jared in his upstairs room. What he likes about her: She’s unpredictable, can grow either way. When she does grow, she is very strong in that direction. But the decision to grow which way must be hers. He, for the most part, is her passenger in the back seat.
Giraffe: So why do you think humans and giraffes are so different?
Jared: Well, for one thing, you can't talk.
Giraffe: I'm talking, right?
Jared: Because I gave you a voice.
Giraffe: Really. I forgot. Are you an only child?
Jared: Does it show? All those hours alone.
Giraffe: You wear it like a coat of dead leaves. And your father?
Jared: He turned into a flying squirrel before I had a chance to give him a stable personality.
Giraffe: Such bad timing.
*
In the restaurant, she tells him not to grow too comfortable with “this,” with anything really. He asks for clarification. She chews her chief salad with slow deliberate motions. She says that things happen when you grow comfortable. Like what, he asks, holding a fork inches from his lips. Like anything, she says.
“Do you feel superior because you have a college degree?” she asks.
He is beginning to lose interest in having sex with her. Their movements there do not coordinate. This decision, he prides himself, is his.
On the phone, he is telling her that he can’t make it this weekend; he has a family obligation. There is a silence yawing over the phone. And plus, he says, I don’t think this is really going anywhere. The weekends he’s not showing up are becoming more frequent.
“Is it me?” she says.
“No.”
“It is. Tell me what you don’t like about me. Be honest.”
He likes this feeling for once of holding something, something both big and small in his hands, this ability to crush it.
“We’re just different. That’s all. We need different people.”
He listens to her breathe on the phone. The breaths are long and deep as seasons.
“Okay,” she says with a low rasp, so uncharacteristic of her voice, “fine.”
She hangs up.
*
Jared is in his room, listening to a Stones CD he borrowed from Shari. He’s watching the snow fall, a flurry of it. It’s not sticking to the streets, but it might if it keeps up. Occasionally, he still sees her, but now it’s different. She barely acknowledges his presence in conversations. One time, when he popped over, she was sleeping. But he had called her first!
At night he masturbates to the thought of her, not because he wants her, but because he wants her when she doesn’t want him. She is now on top of everything. When he comes home from the post office, he must fight lions to keep from reaching for the phone. The lions are winning.
He calls her. She greets him with a comical tone, “Oh, hi. A little busy right now.”
He can hear sex sounds in the background, a guy’s voice. She sounds out of breath.
“Who’s there,” he asks.
There is a low rumble.
“Say hi to Jared,” she says to Mystery Man.
“Hi Jared.”
Jared stares at his sneakers. They’re old, but comfortable as hell.
“Listen, “ she says, “can I call you back? I’m really tied up right now.”
When he does see her, she is verbally abusive, humiliating him over his lack of taste in clothes, even openly insults him in front of her family. He wants to lash out, but the lion is too strong, and knows his handles too well. He feels small as a bird.
At work, he can’t concentrate. He tells a co-worker that his girl is giving him a hard time, throws some details his way. The guy shrugs, tells Jared, you gotta wear the pants or else they’ll wear you.
Three weeks before Christmas. Late morning. He answers the phone. His mother is in her bedroom, folding clothes.
“Jared?”
He feels the wind knocked out of him.
“Sheri?”
She’s giggles. Then, there’s a weird tone to her voice, like she’s high and afraid to come down.
“Listen,” she says, “just want you to know. . . Just know this. . . . It really hurts. It really does. You have no idea.”
He wants to ask her if she’s drunk, but she doesn’t drink this early.
“What hurts? What?”
He can hear her swallow.
“This. Jared, what am I talking about? This.”
He pushes the receiver away from his ear, waits for his mother to pass by.
“What hurts, Shari? What? I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t understand. I know you don’t”
Her words are slurred.
She mentions something about a party at her place that lasted until morning. Another silence. She says something. Faint. Away from the phone. Jared tries to get her back on the line.
“What hurts, Shari?”
“This. The razor. What else would I be talking about, Jared? Don’t play stupid.”
“Razor?”
“Yup. Oh, boy. Look. There goes some blood. It’s forming these uhm streaks. Steaks down to the floor. Shit, now the floor.” Her voice tapers off.
Jared lifts the phone from his ear. His legs tremble somewhat. He’s always a klutz in an emergency. Not that there have been many. Her voice from the phone, mumbled, grows louder.
“Hey, Jared. Don’t pull that old trick. I know that one. Keep me on the phone, while you try to get help. Don’t try it. Don’t try. I know that one. “ She starts to laugh. There’s a whimsical tone to her laugh.
He tells her that he will call her back, that someone is at the door. She asks him if it’s a girl. He hangs up.
Pressing the wrong numbers several times, he finally manages to reach 911, tells the woman the location and nature of the emergency. He wonders if Sheri will die, lock the door to the apartment, not let anyone in. And by the time, the police do break in, it will be too late. All his stupid fault. Didn’t she show the signs of a bipolar over the last couple of months? Or was it something else? Signs of something. Of what happens when you get too comfortable.
*
In the mental health ward of the hospital, he visits her. She is sitting on a bed, greets him with a scowl. He asks her how she is feeling. Her eyes grow smaller. She warns him not to tell her that he told her so. He says he wouldn’t say that, but he wants to.
He is feeling heroic, but stupid. Is there such a thing?
Her roommate enters, smiles at him, a girl with long brown hair and crooked smile. She changes her shoes and quickly leaves, nodding her head at Sheri, saying softly, “Excuse me.”
Sheri explains that the girl used to be a nurse, that the attendants sometimes kick her. Jared doesn’t know whether to believe this.
“How are you feeling,” he says.
She shrugs.
He asks if there is anything she needs. Stupid question. She shakes her head no.
They walk out to the visitors’ lounge, watch some TV. She introduces Jared to an older patient as an “old friend.”
After an exchange of useless words, small talk, neutral subjects, he tells her he has to leave. So soon, she asks. I’ll visit you, he says. He rises. She looks up.
She says in a soft voice, her eyes meeting his head on, that she will get even with him.
“For what,” he says.
“For saving me. Maybe I didn’t want it.”
Jared stands there for a few moments, then bends down, pecks her on the cheek.
He leaves.
*
Months pass. Almost Spring. Whenever Jared calls, the phone either keeps ringing, or Shari makes excuses as to why she can’t see him. Since her release from the hospital, he has slept with her once or twice. The sex was banal. Later, she tells him that the therapy is going well, but is there really a point to it, that she is back with an old boyfriend, and although it isn’t what it use to be, it was nice to see him again. She says she is changing, no longer the girl hiding sad clowns under her bed.
He calls her from home. For once she picks up and stays on the line. Her voice is chirpy, musical. He is looking for any excuse to visit her. The Cds. He tells her he wishes to returns the CDs. What he doesn’t tell her is that he’s returning the photo of him crouching, smiling at the camera, holding that petrified frog. Maybe this will rekindle something in her. What, he doesn’t know.
She opens the door. She is dressed in a robe, although it is early afternoon. She smiles, offers a slight giggle, and takes the CDs and envelope. She doesn’t invite him in. He tells her that he’s giving back that photo she once took of him and that frog.
“Thanks,” she says, “but you could have kept it. Don’t you want it?”
She closes the door.
A month later. He is in a bar. It is night, rainy. After his third beer, he digs into his pocket for change. He has just enough to make this phone call, to make her see how much she has hurt him. If hurt is what you call this. He would call it bleeding in an invisible way. On one occasion, when he did see her, he broke down and cried, for no apparent reason. He might have been crying more for himself. He hated the thought of his masculinity unpeeling, but hoped she would feel sorry for him. He wants people, things, when they are growing out of reach, day by day. It’s one crazy formula he can never apply to word problems.
He dials the number. It keeps ringing. He berates himself for his weakness. But there is a perverse joy in this, submitting to someone who can drive all night, while you have no idea how to get home. The voice sounds sleepy at the other end.
“Hello?”
“Sheri. . . Cherry-pie?”
“Jared?”
“Uh-huh. Look, I just called to see--”
She hangs up.
*
Giraffe: I once had a similar problem. I lost a really sexy female, eloquent, real class, to our aggressive leader. They eloped to a Savannah.
Jared: And?
Giraffe: What comes around goes around. They were shot by white hunters who tried to pass off their meat as quail. Nobody eats giraffe anymore. We got a bad rap.
Jared: What a romantic way to die.
It happened on the way to Cape Cod. Rhonda just had to spend some time at the house in Chatham. She needed to be by herself, for the sake of her marriage, if not her sanity. It was late October about four in the morning on a Saturday. The fight was intense this time, and she stormed out of the house telling Cliff almost as an afterthought where she was headed. He didn’t try to stop her. Over twenty-five years of marriage seemed to be falling apart and there was nothing either of them could do about it. It seemed as inevitable as the ocean waves crashing to the shore that she so much needed to hear about now.
She was on Interstate 495 which was practically abandoned at this time of day. She hadn’t seen another car for miles as she relived the latest fight in her mind while listening to music on the satellite radio station. As the song currently playing imposed itself on her consciousness, she realized it was one she hated. No, couldn’t keep that one on, she thought as she glanced at the radio buttons deciding which one to press. In that brief period, that split second of time, she inadvertently allowed her car to drift toward the outside lane cutting off a speeding SUV approaching to pass her. The SUV swerved to avoid contact, but at that speed control was nearly impossible. Rhonda heard the squeal of tires and looked up at her rearview mirror in time to see the vehicle go off the road headed toward the median.
Her mouth dropped open in shock; she hadn’t seen the SUV at all. Where did it come from? Last time she checked her mirrors there was no one else on the road. He must have been flying to catch up with her that fast. She lost sight of the vehicle and could only see wisps’ of dust in the darkness behind her as the SUVs headlights disappeared. What should she do? What could she do? It wasn’t her fault was it? She only looked away for a second, that guy shouldn’t have been going that fast anyway. She sped up biting her lower lip as she kept checking the rearview mirror looking for signs the driver recovered control and was back, but saw only the reflection of her red taillights on the road behind her. She continued on almost unconsciously making the decision to proceed as planned to the comfort of the house by the beach. She needed to be there even more now.
An hour or so later she approached the Sagamore Bridge, the beauty of the Cape Cod Canal hidden by the darkness, outlined only by some lights scattered on the shore on each side. Still no traffic as her thoughts bounced from the incident on 495 to the events earlier in the evening with Cliff. She could no longer absorb the music that was playing on the radio as she passed through the pines on Route 6, reaching the Chatham exit before she knew it. If someone had asked her to describe what she saw since crossing the bridge, she would not have been able to do it. The last part of her journey was a blur and it was as though her car was able to find its own way to the place it had traveled so often over the years.
She pulled into the makeshift driveway in front of the quaint three bedroom house covered in gray weather-beaten shingles so prevalent on the Cape. She loved this house with its white bar fence speckled with rose bushes, rhododendrons surrounding the front door, and pine trees scattered around the small property. It was at the end of a quiet dead end street providing the privacy they craved and the solitude she needed now. She went in, put her bag in the bedroom and turned on the heat to warm the place up on this chilly October morning. By now the eastern sky was brightening with the promise of a rising sun.
She decided she wanted to be on the beach to see the sun come up; sleep was out of the question anyway. Even though their house was a short walk to a small beach shared by the neighbors, she was drawn instead to her favorite, Harding’s Beach, a short drive away. She passed by the empty booth and parked in the vacant lot in a spot facing the beach. She took her shoes off as soon as she hit the sand enjoying the feel of the cool grains between her toes. The sun’s light was just beginning to hit the beach as she proceeded from the main beach past the large dunes down to the second beach, which was the one they frequented in the summer since it was less crowded.
The wind was strong off the ocean, blowing the dune grass in waves imitating the ocean’s flow. The sun’s light revealed the seaweed covering portions of the beach as well as the clam shells, driftwood and other deposits the ocean deigned to leave behind. She buried her hands in the pockets of her jacket and raised her hood to provide some shelter from the cool biting wind. Nevertheless she enjoyed the solitude of the beach, not another soul to distract her save for a couple of gulls looking for some easy prey the receding ocean may have deposited.
The sound of the waves crashing against the beach calmed Rhonda as usual, but was not enough to keep her from thinking of the SUV and its fate. Perhaps the driver regained control after all and was able to bring the vehicle to a safe stop and got back on the road at a time when she would not have seen it. Or maybe he was there waiting by his SUV after having called AAA for a tow. While these were reasonable possibilities, she couldn’t shake the vision of an overturned SUV with an unconscious driver trapped inside. Damn that Cliff, she thought, if it weren’t for this latest fight she wouldn’t have been on the road in the first place.
The fight was over something silly, as usual lately. But the real issue between them was unfaithfulness, which invariably came up no matter what the immediate topic was that incited the fight. Yes, she strayed some time ago, regretted it, and asked his forgiveness, which he gave. But she always thought he never got over it. Now she suspected him of having an affair, which he denied. But she could tell the signs, late nights at work, dressing better, just the way he carried himself lately. She had no doubt that he was getting his revenge by having his own fling. So no matter what disagreement they had, in the end he would throw her indiscretion in her face, and she would accuse him of cheating.
But she couldn’t focus on that now, she needed to decide what, if anything, to do about the incident early this morning. She decided to walk back to her car via the secondary parking lot and through the access road to the main parking lot to get a bit out of the wind blowing in from the ocean. She passed by the now fruitless bearberry bushes on one side of the road and the large marsh area on the other. The fly catching boxes scattered throughout the marsh stood empty of their summer feast as she contemplated what to do on the slow walk along the road. As much as she didn’t want to, she felt the need to talk to Cliff; he was the only one to turn to. He could tell her what to do. Yes, she must call him and get his advice. If nothing else, Cliff was calm in the face of pressure, and a problem solver.
As soon as she got back to the house she called Cliff on her cell phone.
“Hello,” she heard, his voice already calming her.
“Cliff, it’s me,” she said.
“Yeah,” he said in a monotone, no “where are you” or surprise in his voice. The anger obviously remained.
“Cliff, I was involved in an accident.”
“What,” he said, alarmed now, the charade of non-caring broken. “Are you okay?”
“Not that way,” she answered, “I mean I think I may have caused an accident.” She went on to detail the events on 495 earlier that morning.
“Jesus,” was Cliff’s first reaction followed by a long sigh.
“Cliff,” Rhonda pleaded, “what should I do, I don’t know what to do?”
“We have to call the State Police Ron; there may be somebody dead or dying out there.”
“Maybe not, maybe there wasn’t even any damage. And anyway, even if there was, don’t you think someone will see the vehicle in the daylight and call the authorities?”
“What if they don’t? What if it’s in a ditch or some trees or something and not visible from the road? What then? Maybe the driver’s hurt and can be saved if someone gets there on time. We can’t take that chance. Do you want someone’s death on your conscience?”
“No, no, I guess not. Of course, you’re right, but will you call? I don’t think I can do it, I’m too scared, I’d break down on the phone.”
“Yeah, yeah I’ll call, where on 495 did it happen?”
“I don’t know exactly, it was dark, and my mind was on other things,” she said, a little attitude creeping in on that last part.
“Well, any sense of how long you were on 495 after entering from the Mass Pike when you saw the SUV?”
“I don’t know but if I had to guess, I’d say about twenty minutes.”
“Alright,” he said, a hint of frustration in his voice realizing that was about the best he would get out of her. “I’ll give them a call. Sit tight.”
They hung up and Rhonda put her cell phone on the table and sat cradling her head in her hands. The bright morning sunlight shining through the kitchen window belied her dark mood. She spent the day cleaning the house; reading a romance novel, although finding it difficult to concentrate on what she was reading often going over the same page again and again; and going for long walks either around the neighborhood or on the beach.
She hadn’t heard from Cliff all day, and as night fell, she resisted the temptation to call him. She knew he’d deal with the situation in his way, and would only be annoyed by her pestering him. As she was reclining on the couch, the flash of headlights reflecting off the ceiling through the front door caught her eye. A few seconds after hearing the slam of a car door, Cliff appeared at the front door. She rose and ran into his arms, comforted by his presence. Her eyes were closed as she rested her face against his chest. When she opened them it took her a few seconds to recognize the blue and red flashing lights pouring through the front window.
Image credits as yet unknown.