damselfly press

What Gretel Knows

Gretel is a six-year-old beagle and the keeper of my secrets. Sam, for instance. She smelled him on my hands and face, even after I’d washed up. Or maybe it was my step that tipped her off; maybe she heard the guilt in my gait. Or was the shame on my face?

A dog’s mind is too wide and pure for judgment. Gretel’s foremost concern is my happiness, which she endlessly encourages me to pursue. Still there are times when I walk in the house after being with Sam and she gives me a long, questioning look. Do you know what you’re doing, she telegraphs. Are you sure this won’t wreck our lives?

More than once she has found me in the kitchen helping myself to a juice glass of Chardonnay at two or three o’clock in the morning. There I am, sitting at the table in my robe, back lit by the stove light, then click, click, click, I hear her nails on the linoleum and she is standing in front of me, her brown eyes kind and searching.

Last month she caught me reading Hannah’s diary. I wasn’t looking for punishable offenses, I was only hunting for clues as to why my daughter despises me. By the time Gretel walked into the room and saw the green binder in my hands, I had read nearly half the entries.

These secrets must weigh on Gretel, which might be the reason she sighs like she does. All dogs sigh, but Gretel’s long groans seem to come from the depths of her being, as if she is trying to get free of herself, to utter the unutterable.

Even as a young woman I was not especially keen on sex. In this respect at least, Alan and I are a match. No more than twice a month we make good-natured, uncomplicated love; a ration that suits me just fine and seems to keep Alan satisfied. . Given this agreeable arrangement, I can’t explain what happened between Sam and me, or why it’s still happening. I love Alan. I do.

Sam is a lepidopterist. While he lectures on both butterflies and moths, he is especially devoted to moths. He has written three books about them, including a children’s guide. In search of exotic species, he travels all over the world; last winter, in Singapore, he came across a dozen or so giant Atlas moths. He said you could hear the whoosh of their wings as they cruised the cherry trees.

We met on a muggy, moonless night in August. Sam had run an ad in the local paper inviting anyone interested to join him in Turner’s Park for a moth hunt. I knew next to nothing about moths and had no idea what this excursion would entail, but it sounded more interesting than the book I was reading, certainly better than anything on television. It was indeed a night of surprises, the first one being the number of people who showed up—sixteen in all, half of them young boys, the other half adult women, my age or older.

Sam’s preparations amazed me. Earlier that day, he had painted a syrupy patch on three dozen trees along the trail, then marked each tree with an orange ribbon. Moth bait, he called it, a homemade elixir that contained stale beer, brown sugar and rotten watermelons. Guided by our flashlights, we walked quietly along the path, stopping to inspect each painted tree. Sam had covered the lens of his flashlight with red cellophane—less disturbing than white light, he said—and it was true that the moths didn’t stir when he aimed the beam on the trees. Some of the trees had nothing on them but slugs and carpenter ants, but many hosted some kind of moth, the names of which Sam whispered into the night:

“Glossy Black Idia….Copper Underwing….Cloaked Marvel.”

Captivated, we studied the creatures with budding reverence, as if in those deep woods we had all fallen under a spell. Why had I never noticed how exquisite they were, how intricate their markings? Why had I never seen their furry little faces?

“That’s an Oldwife Underwing,” murmured Sam, shining his light on a charcoal- colored moth that had opened its wings, revealing another set below, twin brown fans with bright orange stripes. Hidden jewelry.

“Do you think we’ll see any Luna moths?” I asked as we walked to the next tree.

“Too late for Lunas,” Sam said. He has a deep voice, almost mournful; his walk is slow and long-strided. He is, in fact, exactly what you might think of when you think: lepidopterist—lean, bespectacled, with a long narrow nose and deep lines running down his cheeks.

“And they wouldn’t be on these trees anyway,” he added. “They don’t eat.”

“They don’t eat!” blurted one of the boys.

“They can’t,” Sam replied. “They don’t have mouths.” His words hung in the darkness, allowing us to absorb them.

I couldn’t imagine the things he knew. At home in the dark, here was a man who was spending his time on earth learning the names and habits of moths; a man for whom these fluttery, powdery bugs were reason enough to be alive. Though months would pass before we mated, I was drawn to him that very first night.

There is no mention of me in Hannah’s diary. Evidently I am not worth comment. When I was pregnant with Hannah I used to imagine the two of us strolling hand-in-hand through meadows and forests; I saw us sharing sunsets, gazing at the Big Dipper. Even before she was out of her crib I knew this wasn’t likely. Hannah wanted action: talking toys, musical mobiles. Her favorite possession was a pink plastic phone which she babbled on for hours and dragged everywhere. Now she has a shiny red cell phone to which she is similarly attached.

Not long ago I was sitting at the kitchen table looking through a book I had borrowed from Sam. In front of me was a photograph of a Verdant Hawk moth, a species from Africa. I was admiring its powerful green wings and sturdy body when Hannah’s sudden voice startled me.

“You and your moths!” she said with a shudder. “Why don’t you study butterflies? They’re a lot prettier and you wouldn’t have to be outside in the middle of the night.”

“Actually,” I said, “there are lots of pretty moths.” I looked up from the book. Hannah was standing beside me, her dark hair hanging in her eyes. “And quite a few of them fly in the daytime.”

“Whatever,” she murmured, walking out of the room.

Maybe we’re like moths and butterflies, Hannah and I, sharing a few traits but living in separate domains. It helps to think so, at any rate. To know this divide is not our fault.

By day I manage a gift shop, a faux log cabin heavily scented with potpourri and filled with the sort of things tourists expect to find in a small New Hampshire town: maple syrup, hardwood bowls, pine-scented pillows, miniature birch bark canoes. Selling these quaint curios doesn’t require much effort and in the slower months I have ample time to write—not that I do much of that anymore. After college I did manage to publish a handful of poems in some decent journals, but at some point I lost momentum, then I lost heart.

Alan is a sales rep for a large organic fertilizer company. Nine months of the year he travels the byways of New England, stopping at nurseries and box stores. He doesn’t grouse about his job. I know the driving must get tiresome, if not hazardous, and how many times a day must he repeat himself, explaining the benefits of microorganisms and carbon-based compounds?

I’ve wondered if Alan, in his travels, ever has any dalliances—surely there’s plenty of opportunity. It’s not hard picturing that blue Sebring nosing in and out of seaside motels having trysts as trackless as windblown leaves. I have seen other women, friends even, look at him with a certain avidity. He still has a boyish smile and all his hair, and for someone who spends so much time behind a steering wheel, Alan is remarkably fit, thanks to those gadgets he takes with him: chin-up bars that fit in doorframes, stretchy bands that hook around his feet.

Sam and I were in his backyard, that first time, studying the moths that came to a sheet he had strung between two trees. In front of this sheet hung a bug zapper he had disabled—the black light inside was all he wanted. (Sam loathes bug zappers and refers to them as “indiscriminate killers.”)

What we were hoping to see, on the cool May night, was a Luna moth, though Sam said the chances were slim as the species was in danger.

“Why?” I asked. “Pesticides?”

He nodded. “The BT they’ve put in corn seed—the pollen goes everywhere.”

We sat in lawn chairs under the stars, blankets on our laps. Sam’s white sneakers shone in the grass. We could hear small frogs leaping into the pond at the edge of Sam’s property. The tree tops were black against the sky and the night smelled of pine and marsh.

We’d been sitting there for nearly an hour, watching the various moths and bats that flew through the night, when what we wanted to see came floating across the yard. The soft green glow of its wings was unmistakable. You could almost believe it had come by way of the moon. I caught my breath as it cruised over our heads, trailing those long tips, before deftly landing on the sheet. We both rose at the same instant and approached the creature slowly.

“A female,” Sam said. “The males have thicker antennae.”

“It’s amazing,” I whispered. I peered at the luminous wings, edged in maroon, the four transparent spots that resembled large eyes, a device to fool predators.

“I wonder if she’ll attract any males,” I said. I had read about moth pheromones and knew that the scent from a single female could draw males from several miles away.

“She’s already mated,” Sam said. “The females mate even before they make their first flight, then they find a tree and lay their eggs. This one has done all that.”

“And she doesn’t eat, right? How much time does she have left?”

Sam shrugged. “Not much. Maybe a day or two. Their life span is about a week.”

I smiled at him. “What a tidy life. You’re born, you mate, you fly, you lay eggs, and then you’re just a lovely thing. Free to be. And you don’t even know you’re going to die.”

That was the moment Sam turned to me and touched my arm. His fingers rested there, lightly. In the glow of the black light his face was serious, questioning, and it didn’t take long for me to close the space between us. That’s where we made love, that first night, on a blanket in the wet grass, not four feet away from a Luna moth. I had no second thoughts. I had no thoughts at all. It was as if we too were running out of time and only doing what we must.

Two years later I don’t know why we persist. Falling upon one another on a pheromone-drenched night in May is one thing, but where is the urgency in our random couplings now?

“What are you thinking about?” Sam asked last week. We were in bed and he was idly running his hand down my side. I had my back to him. His dresser was a couple feet away. I saw a gray sock sticking out of the top drawer.

“It’s different now,” I told him.

“What’s different?”

“Us.” His hand paused on my hipbone. I stared at the dresser. “It feels like stealing for no reason.”

Sometimes I think that what I like most about the affair is being in Sam’s cottage, which is musty and dark and nothing like the house I live in. There are books and papers everywhere, odd pieces of furniture covered in snug coats of dust. Sam lives like the bachelor he is (he was married, briefly, in his twenties), with a clutter of dishes in the sink and sheets that need laundering. This peaceful disarray soothes me—I’ve never so much as washed a cup, nor does Sam expect me to. Sam makes no demands. He is happy to see me when I can manage it; beyond that, I don’t kid myself. If Sam had the chance to see a Black Witch moth or me, I know I’d be curling up with a book.

Gretel never gives up on me. Every day of her life she waits for me to have some fun. She cannot understand why something so easy should be so elusive.

“Like this,” she seems to say, dropping onto her forelegs, rump in the air, tail wagging. “Just do this!”

Obliging her, I will sometimes start to run; I’ll put some excitement in my voice, and she will leap and bark encouragingly. It doesn’t matter to her if this eagerness isn’t genuine. She only wants the effort.

We have no idea how it happens, how the death of a caterpillar gives life to a moth. Here is this plump green crawler, busily sawing through sassafras leaves, shedding one loose-fitting suit after another, until, with a hidden nudge from nature, it stops chewing and gets down to the business of dying. If the weather is still warm, it will spin a silk sheath and wrap itself in a leaf. If winter is approaching, it secretes a hard shell and spends the cold months underground. In either case, the bug begins to disintegrate, bit by bit, leg by leg, breaking apart in its own digestive juices. But then, in this wretched dead sea some rebel cells start swimming. Having served no purpose in the larval life, they are finally called to muster. Their task: to make something marvelous, a creature—with wings.

I can’t walk past a moth anymore without stopping to peer at it, to marvel over its tiny, unfathomable dramas. Some nights I walk out on my porch just to see who’s showed up at the light. Sam says that moths are not attracted to light so much as they are pulled into it; stunned, they stay there. Turn off the light and they break away.

I do that. There are times when I step off my lighted porch and slip into the welcoming shadows alongside the house. The night absorbs me. There, under impartial stars, in a perfect wedge of darkness, I disappear.

- A native Vermonter, Jean Ryan lives in Napa California. She has published a novel, LOST SISTER, and her stories and essays have appeared in various journals including the Massachusetts Review, Pleiades, the Summerset Review and Earthspeak. A collection of her stories will be published by Ashland Creek Press in 2013.

Nos Vemos

Listen to an Excerpt

The woman sat across from me. Her long dark hair fell around her like a cloak. She looked at her feet. I took a deep breath, hopefully not revealing that I was as nervous as she was.

“¿Cómo puedo ayudarte?” I asked. She shook her head. “Por favor.” I said. “I need to know how to help you.” She shook her head again. I looked at the file in front of me. Check for bruises. My heart started to beat faster. “Necesito,” I began. Bruises? I didn’t know the word, I didn’t have my dictionary—I hit myself lightly on the arm, raised my eyebrows in her direction. I hit myself on the leg, on the other arm, anywhere that would get across what I needed from her. 

She pulled back her hair.

I turned away, heat blazing in my cheeks. I felt like I was watching her undress. Her hairline was a soiled cocktail napkin; purple and yellow bruises spilling under her skin. The bruises got bigger as they leaked towards her ear. I tried to look at her eyes, to make her understand that what she was doing was a brave thing, a good thing, a strong thing. Her eyes slid to the floor, tears dripping from them and running down her cheeks and chin. I handed her a tissue. When she looked up to take it, I saw that the tears were not from fear; they were not from anger. All I saw were floods and floods of shame. She crossed her arms over her abdomen and pulled her knees up to her chin, dropped her head to her chest. She was naked again, even though she hadn’t taken off her clothes.  I fought an urge to escape, reject and pretend. I trembled, weak in the face of such strength. She had come this far; I would not leave her alone.

I took another deep breath. Calm down, I said. This isn’t the first time.  Women come in for help all the time. Remember the one from last week? She came in; you did the interview.  She’s safe now; even the bruises around her eyes have faded.  This is just like that. You can do this. 

I ignored the woman’s screaming eyes. They kept looking to the door, voy a escapar, voy a escapar. My stomach twisted around my intestines. This time was different. This isn’t going to end well. I curled my fingers around the seat of the chair, clenched my teeth. I was ready; I was going to do whatever I could. Beneath my resolve, I wanted to give her an ice pack and run out the door, pretending that stuff like that never happened to people like her. Unfortunately, stuff like this happened a lot to people like her. I reconsidered the option of flying out the door.

I swallowed, tried not to look at her hairline, which was suddenly the only thing I could see. “Está bien,” I told her, even though that was the biggest lie I’d told that day. What had happened to her was far from bien. Try horrible, temoroso, terrible. Try that man is a cabrón.

“Necesito que salir,” she whispered. I looked at her, fading away against the upholstery of the chair, her hair drawn around her.

“Leave where? Where do you need to go? ¿A dónde?”

“Mi esposo.” She put her hand to her face like it was a telephone.

“You need to use the phone? To call your husband? To go back to him?”

I gestured towards the phone and then to the door, and then pointed at her. “Sí?”

She nodded. “Necesito que salir, necesito que regresar a él.”

The phrase pounded in my head. Regresar a él. Regresar a él. Go back to the man who hit you, who held a gun to your head, who called you worthless, who told you that he would kill you and no one would notice. Wrong, cabrón, I would notice. People would notice. You can’t get away with this.

And then I laughed at myself. As if my saying anything to him would change anything he would do. As if I could do anything really, except play cleanup crew, except pick up the pieces. I felt like all the king’s men, when I really wanted to just tell Humpty to never climb the wall in the first place. 

The woman was using the phone. Talking in rapid Spanish to her husband. Sí sí, she kept mumbling. Sí, por supuesto.

She looked at me with eyebrows raised, hope in her dark eyes.

Funny, I thought. Qué cómica. She gets hope in her eyes when she thinks about going back to him, when she thinks about leaving here, the safe place where no one hits her.

“Él habla inglés. ¿Puedes darle a él las indicaciones?”

My throat felt like a coffee stirrer. I couldn’t get enough air.  She wanted me to talk to him? To talk to someone who abused his wife? Who hit her and kicked her and treated her like a dog? Why would I want to talk to someone like that?

A little voice inside of me whispered. Why wouldn’t you? Isn’t this the reason you joined the shelter? To have the chance to actually change something?  I wished I was back at school with my books, where abuse was a concept, and rape victims were ideas. They weren’t people, they were abstractions, statistics and stories that I would tell myself.  Like you tell yourself about the 24 car pileup on I-25 or the woman who thought she had a wart but really had brain cancer. As if thinking about the worst-case scenario would keep it from touching me. I had been building a wall around myself, and now this woman was asking me to knock it down.

I was sucking and sucking through the coffee stirrer and I couldn’t get enough air. The room began to spin. The woman’s face was on my left, then on my right, then on my left. I closed my eyes, waited until my feet were on solid ground again. I could do this.  I couldn’t get enough air to answer her, so I nodded and took the phone. He needed directions, so he could come get her. That’s all, that’s it. You’ll talk to him for maybe 30 seconds.

The black cord twisted around my wrist, the coils chafing my skin, cutting into it. I tried to untangle myself but I couldn’t.

“¿Hola?” I asked.

“Hello.” A deep voice answered. My throat was a wrung out towel that someone was still trying to squeeze dry. My lips and tongue buzzed, and I clenched my teeth shut to keep the bitter biting comments to myself. That last thing I wanted to do was to make this man angry. I didn’t want to make it any worse for the woman when she went back to him. I’d heard a story about a woman whose husband had threatened to scrape all her skin off with a knife and hide her body in a wall in the basement.

“You need directions?” I asked.

You need a jail sentence? You need a gun at your head? You need a kick in the ass?

“Yes. Directions.”

The words curled into my ear like smoke, and lingered. I could see him suddenly, kneeling down on the floor beside her after he had pushed her there, whispering things to her, cariñosamente. Cielito, amor, princesa, corazón. I could see them on the kitchen floor; her leg twisted like it was made out of rubber, not bone. Her shaking shoulders up against the cabinets under the sink, his muscled arms trying to hold her, her bloody face twisted as she buried it in his neck.  I could see her wanting to believe him, wanting him to be the man he promised he would be, wanting him.

I could see her leaning into the hand that had struck her, wishing that it was the touch she used to know. I could see her watch his face discreetly, trying to gauge when and where it would happen next. If his eyes blazed, then she could bet on another attack soon, and she would stay out of the bathroom. The tile was hard, the edge of the tub was solid. There were razors in there.

If his eyes were tearing, she knew she was going to be ok for a while. She would breathe again, she would begin the process of lying to herself again, she would pretend that he was just having a bad day, that he was really the man she had married on the beach at home in Veracruz, with his midnight hair and sparkling smile, his nunca voy a salir, and voy a amarte siempre. She had thought the promise that he would never leave her was romantic, that his promise to her to love her forever was sweet.  So she would pretend that things would get better.   I could see her brushing the crumbs from her shirt, wiping the blood from her lip, whispering, lo siento, amor. Es mi culpa, mi culpa.

Mi culpa. Yeah, right. Cabrón.

“Directions?” he asked again.

“Where are you coming from?”

What gives you the idea that you think that you can treat her like that? What did her eyes look like when you shoved her up against the counter, when she “tripped” and hit her head on the side of the tub? When you slapped her from the refrigerator to the stove to the cabinets? Was it like playing pinball? Did you enjoy it?

“The Publix on Spruce Street.” 

“Take Center, turn right on Palermo, left on Miami. Go straight until you see the parking lot behind the McDonalds. You can meet her there.”

“Gracias.” He paused. “¿Cómo está ella?”

My hand gripped the receiver. 1.  2. 3. 4. 5. Do not throw the phone against the wall. Do not throw the phone against the wall. I wanted to pretend that it wasn’t just his voice on the phone, but that there was a miniature version of his body in the black plastic curves. His mouth was the curve between the ear and the mouthpiece. His promises were the coils of the cord.  I wanted to imagine this and then slam the phone against the wall. Again and again and again. But she was already fragile. She didn’t need to see me flip out.

But ¿cómo está ella? Really? He wanted to know how she was doing? I thought about taking a picture of her and sending it to him. Maybe this time he wouldn’t see the woman who he thought did everything wrong, the woman who he thought understood nothing, the woman whom he thought was too stupid, too scared, too simple to leave him. Maybe this time he would see the hurt, the anger, the helplessness, the hopelessness, the rage and the strength like I did. The strength that took a quiet form, perhaps, but the strength that had come from somewhere inside her and had willed her fingers to pick up the phone and dial our number. Or maybe he would see the bruises at her hairline and regret what he had done.

I didn’t hold out much hope.

“Ella está bien.” I lied. I would not give him the satisfaction of knowing that she was actually shaking in the chair, that she was using her hair as a shield, that she looked like she’d been crying. I would not give him that satisfaction. Él no la merece.

“Gracias.” He repeated. “Nos vemos.” I actually hoped that I wouldn’t see him later, that I would never see him. The image of him in my mind was already etched there permanently. I would have to do nothing except close my eyes to conjure up his blazing eyes and his guilty hands.

The dial tone pounded dully in my ear. I turned to look at her. My head hurt, my heart hurt, my stomach hurt. It felt like there was a dead body on the floor between us, one that neither of us would look at. I was afraid it was a before and after picture, the before on the chair, the after on the floor.

“Gracias,” she whispered through her hair curtain. “Muchísmas gracias.” I nodded, sick to my stomach. She got up from the chair, her hand brushing my shoulder lightly as she left the room. “Nos vemos,” I whispered, “See you later”.  I realized that it was a hope and a lie, and useless.

- Allison Pinkerton recently graduated from Furman University with a degree in Sociology and Spanish. Through her studies, she realized a passion for social issues and the underserved. Recently, she decided to use fiction as a vehicle to bring those issues to the public. She attended the Kenyon Review Writer’s Workshop in 2011.

Pilgrimage

I never pass through Oak Ridge without visiting the old house. I invent excuses, hairdresser and nail appointments, implausible runs to the grocery store. I point to yard sale signs in nearby neighborhoods from which I can steal away on foot, or I grope in my purse for wads of bills and push them at my two children.

“Daddy will buy you ice cream,” I say and ruffle heads dusted with downy hair.

They love Oak Ridge. They know something will happen as soon as they cross through the tunnel. And they all yell tunnulllh in their childish voices, my husband grinning at me, as the lights strobe away behind us. The sun gets bigger and wider ahead, and I have trouble breathing. My hands clench on the steering wheel.

The wailing syllable quivers, as Tim takes an unobtrusive breath and rejoins, breaking the rules of the tunnel game.

Meaghan calls him out on it, but they don’t have a squabble. Not in Oak Ridge. They’re watching me with their bright eyes. Mommy who tucks them in at night. And later, Mom who takes away their ipods. And later still, Mom who buys them condoms and birth control. “For acne,” I say. “Just be safe.” And I hug them, because there’s so much to lose in this world. And because losing is so easy. Their bright eyes watch me. Mommy who always has an adventure in mind for Oak Ridge. Or she might be having an affair. Or she might be seeing an old friend while, now, they cruise around in her SUV and try not to remember how Dad used to drive them to get ice cream before he left. Maybe she’s a drug dealer. Maybe she’s an addict. Maybe. Maybe she’s got another kid they don’t know about, a daughter or a son. Maybe that’s why Dad left.

But now, today, who cares. And they rummage in the glove compartment for my stash of cigarettes. They light up, turn on the digital radio. Tim closes his eyes and maybe thinks of Lily Ketchum and of how her hips move when she walks up the gymnasium stairs. Meaghan opens the car window to let out the smoke and inspects her fingernails, which she can’t stop chewing. They’re disturbingly short, and red gashes fill their cuticles. She doesn’t know what to do about them. Perhaps she’s afraid they’ll never look womanly and that she’ll never be perfect, and life is stupidly short and what if she never marries or what if she marries and has kids and ends up like Mom. She squeezes her lips together, wishing.

The owners know me by now.

Their children know me. I am the aging woman with the Gucci purse and the ironed collars and the face that causes their parents to shoo them out when I arrive—out, out to play in the back yard with its wooden swing set, and out to the curb to catch the bus, and out to run errands, “here’s a fifty, just go,” and out to the movies, too, or to the mall or bookstore, or now, out to pick up diapers for their own kids who happen to be visiting.

They no longer ask what I’ve come for. I don’t think they want to know. That is why they send away their children. Such lovely children. “And how they’ve grown,” I say, the nicety saccharine on my tongue.

“Time flies, doesn’t it.”

“I don’t want to be a burden.”

“Oh, not at all. Something to drink?”

“No. Thank you.”

They are kind people. They no longer carry the phone with them, just in case I turn out to be a thief or a murderer or worse.

They follow me softly several yards behind, as I enter their house and pad into the living room and down to the basement door, shine of new paint on it. The whole house smells of blueberry muffins. This is what babies do to a home, I think. The kind of spruce and polish that seeps into the food, into the air, into the thick, powdery carpet. For a moment, it’s the first time again, and outside my babies are in their new plastic car seats with their pink gums pressed to their fingers; and my husband’s fingers gently touch first a nose and then an ear, a nose again, a dimple, waiting for me.

“Just to see,” I say to him, sitting in the passenger’s seat. The gray van smells salty clean and pungent.

“Will it help?” He’s concerned for me. For us. He’ll try anything. Later, he’ll try prescription drugs and therapy and alcohol, video games, marijuana, and prostitutes.

“It can’t hurt.”

They unlock the basement and let me in, and my knees pop as I descend the steps. I grip the handrail and find it, too, smoother than I remember. Darkness seeps out from the edges of the twisted energy-saver bulb overhead. In corners, the darkness curls around old toys. A tricycle, a child’s worktable complete with plastic hammer and screwdriver. Darkness curls around a forgotten loveseat, too, its upholstery frayed, little chunks of batting punching through. Around a crooked floor lamp and Christmas boxes.

I kneel at the far end of the room. I kneel on the bare concrete floor, and the skin of my legs sticks to the raised chinks and strips of cement. I finger the lip of new paper that covers the wall before me and listen.

In the SUV, my children are performing a ritual, too. They open their doors and stub out their cigarettes on the sidewalk. Tim paces the length of the car, flips open his cell phone, and decides not to call. Meaghan leans against the door, holding her arms to her chest, her hands in her elbows. A warm breeze tousles her hair, and she inhales cut grass, old wood fences, the faint nose-wrinkling odor of cows.

In the darkness, I listen.

“Promise.” His voice breaks.

We are too young to promise, I say now, but my lips don’t move. My body doesn’t move. I listen.

“Promise you’ll remember,” he says, and his hair is black and bristling like the legs of a spider. My hand trembles in his. It trembles, too, against the paper on the wall. Tulips. They have put tulips over it, I think, and I restrain myself from ripping them off, breaking their little stems.

“It’s the most important thing,” I tell him. My voice is girlish and trusting. I love him. I will promise him anything.

His lips taste like the peaches we ate for breakfast. I have never kissed a boy before, I say, wanting more. I grip his hands, then, and my voice is so far away when I tell him how I’ll come here, I’ll come here and put my fingers here, just where our names are, here, and here, and then he’ll always be safe.

I am still listening, and my fingers still huddle over the deep engravings, imperceptible now because of the wallpaper; I am still here, kneeling, listening; and I force away the other voices crowding this one small memory. Like a black pebble in a valley pregnant with stones, and this small, forgotten one at the very bottom. But I have taught myself to push them aside, the other voices. And so I do now with ease, as I kneel, shoulders hunched, head bowed, my breathing deeper, slower, meditative. I push out the new babies in their car seats, and the whisper of stubble on my cheek and the bright pain of my daughter’s pop-fly exploding against my face; I push out the starry nights and the cold showers, Tim’s first word, the thunder of airports and of hurricane warnings, cheering crowds, blaring traffic; I push away estrogen pills and birthday cakes and job interviews, PTA meetings, sweaty palms, high school dances, pimples and broken arms and strep throat, lacy dresses, church services, cookies and pomegranates, wedding rings and honeymoon islands, aneurisms and urns, red wine. Peaches.

I have cut through the wallpaper with my fingernails.

His lashes are long. They remind me of palm branches and I almost say so, but his eyes are black pebbles as we bring our lips apart. His eyes are hungry and desolate. I will never see him again. His hands are soft and small. We are so soft, both of us, and small. We make our promise in the empty house, and I am filled with purpose.

My heart contracts in a burst of affection.

“Safe,” I murmur. “Safe.” I trace the lines, like grooves in a tree, in a coffin, in a crucifix. I murmur into the wall. And my breath goes out of me.

I know he can hear me. He can see me, kneeling here, keeping my promise. I know.

They pull down the street just as I exit the house. I feel a sharp, icy ping of shock, and recoil from their concerned faces. My lips form a word I do not speak, and then I buckle in. I reapply my lipstick.

We drive silently, and I sniff, detecting cigarettes. My breath catches and I pick tulip petals out from under my fingernails.

Up front, they speak softly together. I listen but can’t hear them. It seems their voices are a long way off.

Finally, they turn, and Meaghan asks me about the house.

“I was visiting a friend,” I say.

“Who?”

“Just a friend.”

They’re angry, but I push them aside. They tumble away like so many smooth stones.

- Lora Rivera holds an MFA from the University of Arizona and works as fiction associate for the Claire Gerus Literary Agency. She writes literary and young adult fiction, as well as juvenile fantasy. Her stories and poems appear in many print and online journals; a full list can be found at www.lorarivera.com. She lives in Tucson with her husband and three cats.

Mother of the Bride

Janie tries to hide that she hates the man who is dancing with her daughter.

The music isn’t so bad, a cover of one of those jazz standards that she knows well enough to hum. The shiny-faced band leader’s Louis Armstrong imitation has gotten better as the night’s gone on, although his voice doesn’t have the same sweet hoarseness as she heard on the records she once listened to with her father.

It’s not just her new son-in-law, who on most other occasions she thinks is a good match for her stubborn daughter. Tonight she also hates her husband, Michael, who has tried on his tuxedo after dinner several times this week. You’d think you were the one getting married, she told him.

Does it looks all right? he asked. Fatherly, yet handsome?

She even hates her daughter.

Janie nearly crushes the slender stem of the glass in her hand. The view through the empty glass leads her eyes to the window.

Outside, the wind has started to scar the surface of the lake.  Women begin to put their shawls on, men who are normally idiots offer up their coats, looking surprised and pleased as they make the gesture as if they’ve stumbled on an unknown treasure, their buried chivalry.

Her father hated weddings, too. He swept her mother off to Las Vegas so he could get married in his favorite Hawaiian shirt, with only two tired blackjack dealers as witnesses. When Janie was little, invitations with their curlicue writing came in the mail, and she would trace the embossed letters with her small fingers. Her father would open his checkbook.

When she was older she slung her arm around his thick neck as he slowly copied out his signature and asked him what he was doing.
This way, everyone gets what they want, he said.  He ripped the check from his checkbook and folded it into the envelope.

But what do you get?

He reached up and squeezed her hand. More of this, he said.

Janie’s friends have whispered to her all night that she looks young enough to be the bride. She’s taken her hair down and had it blown dry and she can feel it around her shoulders. Normally, she’s got it up in a tight knot behind her head, in accordance with the look she’s tried to bring to the principal’s office at the city’s second-worst high school –-severe, she thinks, but fair.

The music swells and she looks up and she sees Michael now twirling their daughter around the dance floor, installed like tiles on the grassy lawn, and she can feel something pressing against her throat, hard.

Her father, her daddy—does she still think of him as Daddy? Janie is three years away from sixty, so that is ridiculous–did not know how to dance. At her own wedding, there had been no dancing, just a justice of the peace, a woman whose bifocals slid down her narrow nose as she read from her script.  Just the two of them, and the woman, who had a slight stammer that Janie imitated later, in their hotel room at the shore, so that she could stop thinking about the reason they weren’t having a real wedding—because she couldn’t bear the moment where she’d have to walk up the aisle and into Michael’s arms alone.

Michael hadn’t seemed to care one way or the other about weddings. When they get invitations from her former students, she declines, always, and sends a nice check. That’s what they need, she says, and Michael agrees. But after Sarah told them she was getting married, Janie watched Michael through their kitchen window the next evening when he got home from work. He climbed out of his car and flipped back the seat to grab his briefcase, which he’d thrown in the back. Then as he was walking across the driveway, something seemed to pause him, as if he’d heard a gunshot.

Janey leaned forward, wondering if she should call the police this time or just call Michael inside. Then Michael started to dance.  His feet shuffled to the side, to the back, they came together and parted again. His feet spun him in circles, his arms opened to hold someone who wasn’t there. He swayed his way around the car, ending up beneath the window from which Janey watched him, but seeing only his daughter in his arms. Then he brushed himself off, picked up his briefcase, and came inside to her.

Janey’s hands start shaking and she sets her glass on a table. One of the servers picks it up, almost a moment after she sets it down. Janey looks in the young woman’s eyes and sees a moment of pity, and she is angry at this girl, too. Earlier she saw her and the bartender, still with a goggle tan around his face even though it is June, flirting and trading jokes as they filled up the large tubs of ice with beer and soda. This is what a young girl should be doing, Janey had thought, not mourning a father who killed himself the day after his daughter’s high school graduation. That was a job for a woman.  

“Kerry, I need you back here, now,” a voice says. The girl smiles again and steps away, her youth kicking her into a near-gallop. She sweeps one long red braid back over her shoulder and pushes herself and the trays she carries through the kitchen door.

Janey is not going to cry. There’d be no way to hide that she was crying, not because her daughter was so beautiful, but because she hated her so much. Janey makes her way across the room, mumbling something about the cake cutting if she feels someone turn to look at her.

She gets so close to the dance floor that her heel slips on the shiny surface, where so many feet had crossed before. So many fathers and daughters, wrapped up in each other’s arms, not seeing anyone else. And she can’t stop looking. It’s like the fights she sees at school–her one weakness, she knows. Three seconds before she wades in with security guards behind her to stop it, she watches the crowd pour out away from the fighters like a whirlpool in reverse, and she sees their arms and legs pushing at each other, at once looking ordinary and more beautiful than anything she’s ever seen.

Now Michael and Sarah spin toward her. She puts her head down and moves away. Soon they will turn and she can be alone and hate them in privacy while she plucks petals from the wedding cake. Anyone would think she’s a nervous mother of the bride, making sure everything is so perfectly perfect.

But her husband and daughter keep moving toward her.  They pull away from each other, stretch out their arms, and draw her in.  The three of them together: Michael, handsome grey Michael, who has danced with her late at night in their silent kitchen, much like the one at the cabin here, one that she thought would be too cold; her daughter, her small child, who will always have something that she won’t. And Janey. But that’s how it is, your children are supposed to have things that you don’t. You are always dancing, she thinks, with the things you can’t hold on to, with the things you always will. Over their heads Janey sees the young waitress again, her red hair coming loose from the braids. She is now folding napkins and resetting them on the table, smoothing down creases and dusting away crumbs.

- Cameron Walker has an MFA from the Rainier Writing Workshop at Pacific Lutheran University. Her stories have appeared in The Missouri Review and Aspect Journal. She lives in California with her family.

Things We Think About When We Drown

My grandmother drowned twice, and both times she fought her way back up to the surface.

The first time, it was mid-summer, 1952. The whole of northern Minnesota was struck by a heat wave that wilted everything but the desire for water. Nowhere was hit harder than Abilene. Humans were boiled down to animals; nothing survived but loose skeletons and lust. People wandered the streets, to-do lists fluttering out of their hands, forgetting errands, misplacing names of old friends, forgetting everything. The roads stretched outward from the heart of the town like shimmering tentacles, curled up at the end. The world contracted inward that summer, my grandmother says.

By mid-July, work started to let out at noon, and everybody migrated toward Horseshoe Lake. The water would boil with limbs, mist thrown ten feet in the air by the churning. Everybody was there. For the first time in weeks, reality sharpened. My grandmother was thirteen that summer, and in old pictures, she is a wiry snip of a child, breasts just starting to surface, every limb confident and well placed. Her hair hung perfect on her back.

On the day of the drowning, she was in the midst of the girls from her school, way over in the northern tip of the lake. With the heavy glint off the water, it looked like the girls were one entity, a slick sea monster threading up and down between the weeds.

A small tangle of boys moved closer. My grandmother was perched on the shoulders of one of her friends, pounding the air with her fists and kicking water. One of the boys emerged from the pack. He spoke to my grandmother. Briefly. Her head dipped down, the blond bright in the sun. She slipped off her friend’s shoulders and swam to the boy. He challenged her to a contest and set forth the rules: they would hold their breath under water as long as they could. The winner would get something from the other. The boy wanted to pull her hair. It was a bet from his friend, the short one with the buck teeth. In a fit of daring, she asked for a kiss. The boy shook his head, blushing, angry. She insisted. Finally, he nodded. All the friends, boys and girls, howled. The boy took a deep breath, his face blew up like a balloon, and he squinched his eyes into little slits. My grandmother watched him, then let all the air out of her lungs, and slipped under the water, eyes wide open.

The rest of the kids screeched and jumped around, throwing insults back and forth like baseballs, waiting for the loser to pop up, shamefaced and gasping. As the seconds ticked by, the insults slowed down, and it was oddly silent by the time the boy emerged. He breathed deeply, fighting off his friends, who surrounded him like locusts. Everybody looked expectantly down at where my grandmother went under, but there was no motion except a stream of bubbles linking her mouth to the open air. For fifteen seconds or so there was nothing, then one of her friends noticed that her body had gone limp.

By the time the kids dragged her to the shore, the adults had been alerted, and everybody crowded around, pushing and shoving to see what looked like it might be Abeline’s first ever drowning victim. A doctor was found, sunning himself with his wife down on the beach, visiting from Minneapolis. He was fifty, still muscular, and stripped down to swimming trunks. He leaned over my grandmother’s tiny frame, checked her pulse, started the push and pull of CPR. A mother covered her mouth, put both hands over her daughter’s eyes. “Oh, god,” somebody muttered quietly.

The doctor kept working, and finally, after a long minute, my grandmother spluttered and sat up, coughing out lake water, tasting bottom feeders. The doctor patted her on the back. The crowd breathed a collective sigh of relief. As my grandmother continued to draw in ragged breathes, the doctor did something odd. He gathered her into his arms and held her like a baby, rubbing her arms and legs. She was as cold as death.

When my grandmother told me this story, she said that her first memory of regaining consciousness was the warm pressure of the sun-heated flesh of the doctor pressed against her. The incredible heat of a full grown man holding her, tight and long, warming her frozen flesh.

“Drowning was the first time I felt cool that summer,” my grandmother loves to say. “And in that damn heat wave, there were a couple times later that summer that I almost wished I could feel that cold again, let me tell you!” This is the way my grandmother always ends this story, and in my childhood, I couldn’t help but believe her.

Years after the first time I heard that story, I’m slouched in the third row of the ninth grade classroom at Abilene High, turning this story over and over in my head like a pet rock, polishing the parts I like, skipping over what feels rough and uncertain. Around me, the room sighs and shifts. We are ready for lunch.

Ms. Smith is pacing back and forth in the front of the room. We have been studying history, and today, we are going to watch the footage from the moon landing. Before the film starts, Ms. Smith tells us a long story about how her father had thrown a party for the moon landing, and everybody on her block came. “Lots of people,” she tells us, “still didn’t have a TV set then.” Somebody in the back of the room snorts, unbelieving. “It’s true,” she told us. “I was your age, then. I was fourteen when we landed on the moon.” She stares out at us sternly as if this meant something, then flicked off the lights and turned to the projector to roll the tape.

As soon as the dark falls, I can hear the boy behind me start to scoot his chair closer to me. In that moment, I am absolutely sure that if I could just get smaller he’d leave me alone. Shrink until I don’t take up as much of his field of vision. Implode, silently. In the muck of the late May classroom, my legs are sticking to the chair. The whole bulk of my body feels heavy- rounded edges and wide expanses that betray me at every turn. I don’t fit into dresses. My wrists are as wide as table legs. Somewhere under the tumor of my flesh, I know the real me is hiding- slim and slow, with eyelashes that curve over my cheeks like a doll. Sometimes, when I pass by billboards of beautiful girls, I actually salivate. Just wait, I tell myself. Someday.

Everybody is whispering and passing notes, movements rendered bizarre by the jerk and flash of the film in the sudden dark. Ms. Smith tells us the moment everybody had been waiting for was when Armstrong stepped off the little landing machine. She tells us to think about what that moment had meant for the country. This epic moment is marked in our classroom by a couple yawns from the second row. The speakers are broken on the projector, so the narration of the moon landing is my class, hissing dirty jokes and insults up and down the aisles.

The chair behind me scoots closer. Suddenly, I feel a knee start to dig itself into my lower back. My whole body freezes. I can feel a slow quiver start in my stomach. His knee presses in, deep, and starts to move around, experimenting. The feel of his awful knee on my exposed back fat literally makes me want to vomit.

I keep my eyes ahead. Ms. Smith is looking the other way. All I want is for somebody to make it stop, but I would rather have my fingernails pulled out than tell on him. I lean slowly away, but he is still there. My back is wide open, raw hamburger under his roving knee. I am sure my spine is exposed, white bone poking out through the fat like dominoes. Ms. Smith turns toward us, and the knee recedes like a tide. My body takes a breath. Relief floods my mouth like copper. I have never felt so ugly.

After lunch, I am walking back to the classroom alone when the two boys who sit behind me, Rayon and Jesse, step out from behind the drinking fountain. I can’t help but look down at their knees, wonder which one of them it was. In the distance, there is the sound of girls laughing and boys shouting in the lunchroom, but here, it is eerily quiet. Jesse steps forward. My hands hang by my sides like dead birds. He reaches out and grabs my shoulder, and Rayon takes the other. I offer no resistance. The only thing worse than them doing whatever they’ve got planned is exposing myself as bigger and stronger than them.

They march me down the hall like some kind of police escort. Somebody, I think, is going to come out of one of these open doors and make them stop. Any second now. It is as if nobody else has ever been born. The three of us move in perfect sync, our feet making a military drumroll down the tiles. Finally, they stop in front of the kitchen.

A mere ten yards away, all the lunch ladies are clustered together, peering into a large pot. All I have to do is say something, and they would hear me. They don’t see us as the boys hustle me past. We glide across the kitchen like panthers, and they move into the maze of freezers and storage in the back. Finally, they stop in front of one of the walk-in freezers, and Jesse pulls the door open. With a fluid, almost tender push, I find myself standing inside, listening to them pull the lock shut. The walls are so thick I don’t even hear them walk away. Perhaps they are still there, ears pressed to the thick, pimpled walls, listening.

At first, it’s not so bad. The cooler fan makes a gentle whirring hiss, and I’ve always been comforted by the sound of machines. There are multiple rows of white wire shelves, piled high with packages wrapped in paper, and those big white buckets with matching lids that cafeterias have. I take a quick little walk around the perimeter, hoping against hope that there’s a second door or some kind of escape latch for the door I came in. Nothing. I’m going to have to bang on the door. Oh my god, I think.

I imagine myself falling out the door, my whole class gathered around, watching. Fat and frozen, like some kind of hideous arctic beast. My back feels bruised, and I feel more than ever like I might throw up. Under my stomach, something that feels like panicked birds are starting to flex their wings. The sharp brush of them across my insides is pushing me closer and closer to total meltdown. I take a deep shuddery breath, and sit down on a huge plastic pack of shredded cheese. I close my eyes.

The second time my grandmother drowned, she was a lot older. Twenty five. My mother had just been born, and she had left her at home with a sitter for the first time. My mother was four months old, and my grandmother had been asked out on a date. Not the father of my mother, who was a no-good mechanic from the next town over with a wide, flat smile, but a younger man, a college boy who was the same age as my grandmother. His name was Ernest, and he was studying Animal Husbandry at the University of Minnesota. They decided to go swimming.

It was the same lake as years before. It was later in the summer, August, but not nearly as hot. The evening was elusive and gorgeous, and my grandmother was having a great time. They were eating ice cream in the car, and when the lake unfolded out of the darkness in front of them, it was like a sheet of velvet glazed over with diamonds. My grandmother was wondering if maybe she should try to marry this Ernest. That night, it seemed like she had finally outrun all the mistakes, all the hurt.

Ernest parked the car under a low stand of white pines, and they ran together, laughing, down toward the water. Ernest had a small, shrunken chest, but an absolutely glorious head of curly black hair that bounced as he ran into the water. They dove off the dock, and my grandmother says the water cut her like a million glorious knives, and that a new body emerged. In the middle of the lake, they found themselves again and floated together, treading water.

“I’ve never seen stars like this,” Ernest said. “Not recently, at least. You can’t see them in the city, I mean.” My grandmother laughed. “I’d die without the stars. Don’t you miss them?” Ernest looked deep into her eyes. “Yes,” he said. “I do.” It felt like the universe was finally snapping into place. My grandmother saw all the ghosts of the bad men who populated her history stream past her in the water. Tonight, they were immaterial and powerless. She touched Ernest’s chest. She felt, she told me once, like for the first time in her life she was young.

Later, they lay on the beach, giggling and talking about nothing. Ernest cajoled her into the water for a final swim. In the story, this is where the moon darkens, and reality bends itself. Somewhere in the water, Ernest told my grandmother that he wanted to make love to her, out there in the lake. My grandmother said no. He insisted. She said no again. He lost his boyish charm, and my grandmother suddenly realized that he was not a child after all. She reached out, hit him in the face. He looked at her, arms hanging loosely at his sides. He reached out, placed one hand on each of her shoulders, and pushed her under the water. She fought. He was so much bigger than her, she might as well have not struggled. He held her there for two minutes, while the moon continued to shine and the cicadas sang. Finally, he let her go, then turned and headed back for shore, not waiting to see if she was dead or alive.

After a few seconds, she spluttered to the surface, gagging and pushing water out of her lungs for the second time in her life. She staggered for the shore, sensed more than felt through her foggy vision, and finally collapsed in the mud. For a few long moments, her world was the simple in and out of breathing. Then, she got up, found her dress, pulled it back on, and walked up the parking lot. Ernest was sitting in the car, engine running, smoking a cigarette. He didn’t act like he saw her, but he leaned over and popped the door open when she walked up. She watched him ash out the window, assessing her odds. The town was nine miles away. She wasn’t wearing shoes. She got in. He locked the door, and the car nosed off into the night. From that moment forward, my grandmother’s life unfolded exactly as she was always afraid it might.

In the cooler, I try knocking on the door yet again. Nothing. I pound. Still no response. Finally, I yell, the thing I’ve been dreading. My voice curdles and cracks, and I feel myself blushing, even here. After a few seconds, I realize nobody has heard me. What an idiot, embarrassed at the sound of my own voice. I take a breath, decide to settle in for a while. I pile three fifty pound bags of rice together, climb on top of them. I will pound on the door every couple minutes. Somebody will come. I can feel myself moving into survivor mode. If nothing else, my mother will notice that I don’t come home on the bus. She will call the police. Everybody will search. Rayon will crack. Somebody will tell. I won’t die in here, that’s for sure.

Maybe they won’t come for a couple days, and I will start to starve. I will emerge skinny, normal, beautiful. The real me inside will finally emerge, victorious, energetic. I will join the cheerleading squad. Maybe I’ll take up the flute. I will become competent, talented, and perhaps a little bit sexually daring. I entertain this fantasy until I realize that I’m in a cooler, literally surrounded by food. Something about the uniform greyness of the cooler makes it almost impossible to keep your brain in one place. My thoughts are starting to separate, cojoin, coagulate.

Right before lunch started today, I came back to the room for my sweater. Ms. Smith was standing at the window, staring out at the playground. The film was playing again, bouncing dead images off the chalkboard. At first, I thought she didn’t see me, and I was fumbling for my sweater in the closet by the door, when she suddenly started talking. “Did you know,” she said, “when the Native Americans had signed away all their land, the very last bits of it, the up and coming generation, kids who could only remember freedom through stories, they started something called the ghost dance.” I held my breath. It didn’t feel like she was talking to me. It felt like if she turned around to see me, she’d be disappointed, like she was expecting somebody else.
She waited a moment, still facing away, then went on. “They thought if they got enough of their people to dance this special dance, the white people would disappear, shoot straight back up into the sky. They all wore special shirts even, to protect them from bullets. It was desperation. Pure desperation. And I’ve just been sitting here, thinking… the dance, I can only imagine it looked something like the moon landing. Stupid, right?”

She turned back to the room, and gestured to Neil Armstong. After his first gingerly step onto a frigid alien landscape, he started to run. You have to think the pressure must have got to him, and the relief of not dying on that first step must have been the final straw. He loses all composure, and there’s this fierce sense of play. He forgets the camera, it seems. Anti-gravity pulls him up, but his weight keeps pulling him down, so his movement becomes this push and pull between himself and the environment. He pushes off the surface, and the air almost holds him up for a second. It looks as if he might float away. Then, he gently comes back down, and his feet shatter the surface of the moon. Space dusts goes everywhere, and he is up again, leaping through air that would kill him to breathe. Dancing right through all that poison.

Ms. Smith and I watch together for a moment, holding our breath, waiting. “I think,” she says, “that the ghost dance must have looked exactly like this.” I wait for a heavy moment. “What happened to them?” I ask. She stares blankly.
“Who?”

“The kids, you know…. in the ghost dance.”

She smiles.

“They died, Phoebe. Most of them were shot.”

Inside the cooler, I lay down on the rice, feeling the chill traipse into my deepest bones, into secret corners of my huge bulk. My heart slows. The sacks are freezing. I force myself to get up, to knock on the door one more time. Nothing. It almost feels impossible that there is anything out there anymore. Maybe this is how Neil Armstrong felt. Endless space, outside his door. You could float out. Weightlessness, finally.

In my head, the largest lakes in Minnesota stretch out in all directions, golden, murky, endless. A sense of finality pervades. The silence is as big as the sky. Then, suddenly, without warning, my grandmother surfaces in the middle of the lake. Her head snaps back and she gasps toward the sky, sucking in greedy breath after breath. Reveling in survival. For a single moment, for the space of one long inhale, the oxygen is enough.

- Rachel Nelson is a writer and performance artist currently working out of Minneapolis, Minnesota. She grew up on an isolated farm in the Cascade Mountains in Oregon, and graduated from Hollins University in 2007. She is interested in deconstructing physical and emotional places through memory and identity.

Identical Me

My mother became a doll maker in Tehuacán after my father died when I was less than a year old. Doll making helped my mother pass the time during her widow’s withdrawal from the world, and unwittingly, helped disclose a unique talent. This was 63 years ago before all the North Americans came down here to sell their white haired dolls wrapped in bright pink packages.
She started out making simple dolls with cottony stuffing and stray buttons for eyes. As time passed, she refined the craft until people in the town started asking her to make dolls for their daughters. Before she knew it, she became a busy woman with a booming business.

Needless to say, I had the best dolls in town, and I was the envy of all the girls in my school. They especially loved the dolls that my mother made in my likeness. Each year my mother would take my measurements so she could make the doll’s measurements correspond with mine. She special ordered the chestnut eyes with golden flakes from Europe. She even saved my wavy tresses after hair cuts and used my hair on the doll’s head.

Of course, the birth of a doll made in my likeness became a colorful ritual celebration. Everyone we knew came to see the introduction of a new me. We would rent a hall and each year the crowd grew bigger reaching to over 200 people on my 15th birthday. At the celebration, my mother would make me sit next to the new doll, which was always covered with purple velvet and waiting to be unveiled. She’d line up all the other dolls in order according to age.

Once the unveiling was complete, everyone would comment about the way I had changed from year to year. “Ah, she’s big-boned like her mother.” I heard someone declare on my 15th birthday. That comment was too much for me to take, so I decided to discourage my mother from making the 16th doll.

“Mamá, please don’t make any more dolls that look like me,” I begged as I saw her gather her supplies to make a new me.

“Don’t you think this obsession is just a little, well, twisted?”

“Twisted? What kind of silly talk is that? Shame on you. You should be flattered. Do you know how many mothers have begged me to make dolls in the likenesses of their daughters? Hundreds have asked. But I save that for you.”

I already understood the great mechanism that was my mother would be hard to fight. She was a force in my life. She was a strong wind pushing me in the direction she wanted me to go.

“Can’t we skip a year?” I persisted even though I knew her answer.

“Skip a year? I won’t have a complete set. I wanted to make a doll every year in your likeness until you’re married. The last doll will be you in my wedding dress. That was my original plan and I have to stick to that.”

She concentrated on her pattern a moment before she spoke again. “Believe me. Some day you will appreciate the effort I made for you, when you have your own children, these dolls will mean something to you. I would promise to do it for your children, but I’ll be dead by then.”

The words were never there to answer my mother.

Finally I said, “I don’t want a party this year.” I wanted a party, but I didn’t want her to invite the dolls. If I were this specific with my mother she would never accept it as my honest wishes. So I had to side step. Ok, manipulate, carefully.

“No party? This is your 16th birthday. I have some special things planned this year.”

I groaned. “Shouldn’t I be able to make some of my own decisions about how I want my birthday party?”

Turning sweet as she always did when she was tired of arguing. “Oh, Daughter, we’ll see. You might change your mind.”

I didn’t change my mind, and I stood my ground. As usual, however, my mother didn’t listen.

As my birthday neared, I watched my mother working on my look alike. Of course, she didn’t want me to see the doll until it was completed. I did get glimpses as my mother closed the door to her workroom or through the window before she noticed me and closed the blinds. I saw my body parts all over the table ready to be assembled, my hands, palms up, every palm line matching mine, the back of my bald head before my mother put my own hair on one strand at a time.

Once, I even got a full view of the doll’s face. Seeing myself look back at me with an expressionless face made my heart stop. As I stared into my unblinking eyes, the doll smiled raising one side of its mouth unsteadily as if it were drunk. I jumped away from the window and fell to the ground.

In the dining room down the hall, I could hear my mother hum while she set the table to eat. She always feigned innocence when she was most guilty.

The day came, my sixteenth birthday. I had managed to talk my mother into a smaller get together. I had insisted with a warning. If the celebration were too big, I wouldn’t show up for my own birthday party. It was the only threat that made my mother agree to the terms. She explained my rudeness to others with a simple explanation. “She’s a teenager now. She’s moody. What can I do?” People nodded with soft understanding eyes.

That evening, ten guests arrived dressed casually. They mulled around in our living room. The atmosphere was gloomy. This wasn’t how I had wanted things.

After a time, they took their seats in front of the figure sitting in a chair and covered by the purple velvet blanket. My mother told me to sit in my chair by the figure. The other dolls were standing clumsily together in the corner of our small living room.

“I don’t want to sit next to the new doll this year,” I told my mother. She didn’t seem to hear me as she pushed me in the direction she wanted me to go. Before I knew it I was sitting beside the lump of purple velvet. Our guests talked amongst themselves quietly.

I looked over at the 15 other dolls set up in a group. There I was as a one-year-old. My mother was just learning how to make dolls at that time so it doesn’t really look like me. At five, she’d managed to make my dimpled hands just right. I was chubby and funny looking at 10 years old, but my doll look-a-like was slimmer, more acceptable. In fact, as I examined the dolls, I realized that all the dolls looked just like me, with one exception. They looked better than me. I wondered if this was how my mother truly saw me or if this was the way she wished I looked. I shivered.

I found myself staring at that lump of purple velvet beside me. I wanted to smack it off the chair. I glanced back at the guests. They weren’t looking at me. Without moving my head I slowly turned my eyes toward the lump of purple. Mmm… Smacking it wouldn’t accomplish anything so why do it? I asked myself. Because it might feel really good to smack it and hear the thump as it hits the ground, I thought. Hitting that doll won’t make you feel better. Don’t do it, I told myself.
I won’t. I won’t, I told myself back.

But then before I could stop myself, my right hand reached out and backhanded the doll. It slumped to the side. I thought I’d feel relief, but instead I felt angrier so I gave it a punch with my closed fist. It wobbled around a bit but still didn’t fall off the chair. My hatred and my anger escalated. I looked around to see if anyone noticed. No one was even looking at me.

I was about to hit it again, but I saw my mother walk in the room. She took her place beside me. She positioned the doll up in the seat again and whispered to me. “How did that happen?” I shrugged my shoulders. Our guests were taking their seats. I squirmed in my chair fighting the urge to pounce on that dummy that looked like me. My mother began her speech.

“You are our closest friends, and you were all here when I unveiled the first doll of this long line of unique dolls made in the likeness of my daughter, Pilar.” My mother gestured toward me with a sweep of both her arms. “Each year you may have noticed that I improved the dolls making subtle but very important changes. I’ve perfected the look in the eyes, the skin tone and its texture, the wrinkles on her knees and on her throat.”

I brushed my throat with my fingers. I had wrinkles on my throat?

My mother kept talking. “I’ve even worked with the small hairs on her arms.” She took a deep breath before she said, “This year I did something even more amazing. Behold!” She carefully took the blanket off the doll.

The doll made a few jerky movements before it said, “Hello.” I gasped, but our guests all had very pleased looks on their faces. They looked from the doll to me back to the doll again. I doubted whether the doll had actually spoken.

My mother said, “This doll is my finest achievement. Notice every detail.”

My mother’s voice faded into a low hum in the background of my mind. I glared at the thing sitting next to me. It looked straight ahead pretending it didn’t see me. I was sure of it. But then it turned its head and looked toward me, not exactly at me. I expected to see pure evil in its expression, but I was surprised to see a tear fall from its chestnut eye. I leaned over and wiped the tear away with my index finger. It sparkled like a diamond before it dried up.

I heard clapping and realized our guests were applauding my mother. From my seat I watched her. There was something in the way she held her hands, in the tilt of her head and in the set of her mouth that made me see my mother as a woman, just a mother who saw a special image of her daughter, something no one else really saw unless they were looking at their own daughter. I looked back at the doll. If this was the way my mother chose to see me, than so be it. I wasn’t going to stop her anymore.

Eventually, I joined the family business, and I made a good doll, but nothing compared to the dolls my mother made. Hers was a realistic fantasy of soft baby dolls with big brown eyes and full bronze lips and dancing dolls with wavy dark hair and long black eyelashes. We had fun designing clothes for the dolls and we made a fortune. We expanded the business and opened doll factories all over Mexico.

I never did get married. As for the dolls my mother made in my image, she made 53 all together. She was making the 54th doll when she died. She was 75 years old. I found her passed out over the pattern, which called for a broader waistline and a flabbier chin. Yet, the reflection of me was to be thoughtful and knowing. She always thought I was more than I was.

- Kendra Paredes Hayden has written a collection of stories called “Beyond the Colored Mountains” that take place in Tehuacan, Mexico. One story, “The Ugly Woman” published by The Louisville Review at Spalding University, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize.

Ed is Orb

The truth about mattresses? Generally speaking, the best times we have on them have more to do with our company than anything else. I’m in the business of selling furniture, not sex and so this is what I tell customers. Your spine should look the same lying down as it does standing up. Most mattresses don’t provide enough support to maximize spinal structure without sacrificing comfort.

A perfect mattress supports your backbone equally at each vertebrae allowing for complete relaxation while maintaining shape. The perfect mattress? In the store we simply call her The Lady. Her full name is the Ultra Foam Stabilizer. Topped off with three solid inches of body melting memory foam she is fantasy realized. Priced at 2 grand, The Lady costs more than most customers are willing to pay. The majority looks at her tag and refuses to even sit down. They protect themselves from ever experiencing such unrivaled and unattainable comfort. So until Ed arrived, The Lady was left alone.

For the first few days Ed slept in our store, I thought perhaps he was a stalker or serial killer, only I knew neither would waste their time on me. I was too easy a target to matter.

I named him Ed in his sleep.

He was a handsome older man, his skin mahogany, his face thin and angular, hair shock white. The faint scent of lavender lingered in the air after he walked through. The first time he came in, he was bleary eyed, exhausted and walking with a syncopated stumble, repeatedly saving himself from tumbling onto the floor. He bee-lined for the Lady. In my six months at the Furniture Palace, I had never seen such purpose. Ed sunk into her. Even through his dreary haze and empty, half-moon eyes he knew what he wanted.

“Hey Miss,” he called out to me, “I’m going to take a nap. Turn down the tunes, will you. I want to take this baby for a test-drive.”

He never said whether or not he would buy her, which interested me because I work on commission. As a salesperson, I knew better than to push. Pushing usually causes a customer to say no, when if left on their own they might say yes. If Ed bought The Lady, I would earn half my rent in a single day. Once Ed became a regular, I stopped caring so much about material concerns. As far as I know, he was the only regular we’d ever had at the Furniture Palace. I was like the waitress in the movies who brought ‘the usual’ to the man who frequents her booth. Instead of bringing Ed coffee with sugar, hold the cream, I killed the music when he walked in to nap. Over time the idea of him lying on someone else’s mattress produced a hard pulling feeling inside of my chest. I couldn’t call it adultery, but it was certainly betrayal.

Technically I shouldn’t let Ed sleep in the store, but couldn’t convince myself to ask him to leave. I wouldn’t have allowed anyone else to nap daily in our store, but it’s equally true that no one else would have tried. This is what made Ed so special. He tried. And he offered no explanation. It was as if there was something between him and The Lady and it could not be interrupted. I didn’t enable him. I just didn’t stop him.

When there were no customers, I spent my time pacing the store, adjusting chairs and couches and beds and desks into straight lines. 20 laps around the showroom was a mile. I probably walked four or five in a day, stealing fudge from the customer courtesy plate when I walked past. I eat until my tongue burns from the sugar, and even then cannot stop.

It is my opinion that the job of the shopper is harder than the job of the salesperson. I know the pitch. Our Polyurethane Advanced Foam is better than our Deluxe Foam Top. This is true now and will always be true. A cheap mattress will last you four or five years. A quality mattress will last twenty.

From my observations the job of the shopper is to decide if he/she is worth the purchase. The shopper or if it’s a couple, the shoppers, must measure and judge and place themselves along the gradation of mattresses. They decide their own value. When a couple disagrees, it’s devastating. Their inequality is exposed. An Advanced Polyurethane might discover she’d been dating an Air Mattress all along. I’m no relationship doctor, but even I know, it all comes down to softness and support.

I am very talented at selling furniture. We don’t get too many customers, maybe only fifteen in a whole day, and some might be repeats from the day before, returning after shopping around at our competitors. On average, over one third of the customers that I talk to buy something. The trick is to visualize a piece of furniture as a force of change in someone’s life. First, when a customer comes in, I ask them what they are looking for. Then, while they are looking, I chat with them about their work. Later, I comment on a piece of furniture that caught their eye. Usually it isn’t something they were looking for. People usually look for something they think they should have, but end up buying something that represents the life they wish they had. I try to sell furniture as the bridge that will take them from their working life into their dream life.

On the third day Ed came in, I sold a shiny red Dante armchair to a pig-nosed sports coach looking for a wooden file cabinet. I had caught him eyeing the chair from all different corners of the room. “Go ahead, try it,” I said. “It won’t bite.” The man sat down and put his hands over the wooden ends of each arm. He rested his fingers between the grooves on each claw. He was sitting very straight. As he sat on the chair, I saw him survey the store, taking in the lamps, the Apex Transitional, the Prairie Dog, the Flaming Bush. Everything that lay before him, he counted and appraised.

I brought the plate of fudge to him. “May I interest Your Majesty in a bite of chocolate?” I said. The man giggled and took four.

He paced the store for fifteen minutes, and then bought his throne. I gave him a whole plate of fudge to take home. “You’re worth it,” I told him as he left. Ed sat up in the bed when I said this. Without saying goodbye, he walked out the door.

The next day, I waited until Ed stirred in his sleep, and picked up the plate of chocolate. I took off my shoes and walked towards him. The Lady is designed to insulate you from surrounding distractions. In fact, you can lay down next to someone, roll over, scratch your foot, get up, go to the bathroom, lay back down and jack off and the person next to you won’t feel a thing. The Lady will not budge.

I stood over Ed. His pants were hiked up at the ankles exposing black dress socks that must’ve gone all the way up his skinny calves. Ed is the kind of man whose body defies definition. He is thick on the top and skinny on the bottom, a mismatch. When he woke up, it was with alarm as if the whole building were on fire.

We looked at each other for a long time. The whites of his eyes were actually yellow, as if they had been stained with age. His pupils were so dark they were black and his left was larger than his right. While we stared at each other I had the distinct feeling that as long as we didn’t break our gaze, we were both naked. I am 23 and have not been naked in front of another human being since the age of thirteen.

“Would you like some fudge?” I asked, finally. “There’s hazelnut and dark chocolate. You don’t have to pick. You can have them both.”

“I’m lactose intolerant,” Ed replied.

“Dark then?” Our fingers brushed when he took it from my hand, and I could feel our energies crackle. “Did you sleep alright?”

Ed looked away as if embarrassed by the intimacy of my question.

“How was the mattress?” I tried again, shifting as best as I could back into store decorum.

“Not bad,” Ed replied as if we hadn’t had this conversation many times before. “What are the measurements on the queen?”

“60 by 80 inches,” I replied, looking at the warped thickness of his fingernails. “But it’s a good idea to allow some room for overhang.”

“You’re like a walking almanac,” Ed said, kneading his fingers into his scalp. “You know everything there is to know.”

“It’s my job.” As I walked away, I could feel his eyes on me, taking in the weight of my ass. I tried to sway, to make it move for him. No one had ever stared at me with such intensity.

“Did you know,” I said, turning around, “that the weight of a mattress is directly proportional to how long it will last?”

“No,” Ed said, “I did not.”

Weighing in at 243 lbs, I had the urge to tell him that I would last a very long time.

“See you tomorrow,” I said when he left the store.

“Goodbye Sugar,” Ed said.

“Goodbye Sugar,” I repeated to myself after he walked out. The shape of Ed’s body was still imprinted on the mattress. Before the memory foam on the mattress rose back into a flat plain of white, I ran my fingers along the symmetrical moth wings left by his butt, the delicate trapezoidal plateau of his arched back.

The night after I offered Ed the fudge, I saw a news program all about a new kind of mattress made with magnets. It wasn’t actually news because at the end of the program, a 1-800 number scrolled across the bottom of the screen and a woman named Mona tried to sell them. Even so, the information in the program revealed a whole side of mattresses I had never known existed. According to Mona her magnetic mattress pads created a mystic subfield of untapped energy. During your sleep this energy would open the closed windows inside you and free your caged Eagle. From the diagrams on the program, I could see that the magnetic subfield worked almost like a snake, entering you through your mouth and then working it’s way down your spine, taking field trips out to your fingertips and back until it reached your pelvic area.

“The pelvis is the portal to the new you,” Mona cooed. “Inside of each of our pelvises is an energy vortex.” This was represented on the human body diagram by a glowing red orb, which Mona tapped three times with her middle finger. “Only by accessing our energy vortex can you transcend your humanity and reach for your other. Embrace the animal within. Access your primal power.”

Mona turned and looked right through the TV and into my eyes, into my very own pelvic orb. “Transform yourself! Learn never to say never again!” She preached. Oh the possibilities! The unlived life! Love reborn! Just watching Mona and the program I could feel the orbiting energy vortex inside of my own pelvis. It was pulsing and warm and it wanted nothing more than for me to reach out and touch it. What would I be capable of, I wondered, with this power released? I am a large woman. How vast would I be if I came unhinged?

The next day, I walked the store all morning waiting for Ed and decided to make my own Self-Actualizing Magnetic Mattress. Since I sleep on an old futon, a bottom feeder in the mattress hierarchy, it didn’t make sense for me to test it out myself. Besides, to be scientific, the magnets needed to work their magic on someone who was unaware, someone I could observe, someone like Ed.

That night I took all the magnets off my refrigerator and shoved them in my bag. Most of them were rectangular advertisements that came with take-out. I drew a series of diagrams and finally decided that a figure eight layout would maximize the subfield and allow for deep penetration. The next day I got to work early and placed the magnets between the mattress and box spring. With the few magnetic letters I had I spelled the words ED IS ORB at the very center of the figure eight.

I could barely look at Ed when he arrived. I simply waved and watched from a green armchair as he walked to the back of the store and into my subfield. His eyes were red and his cheeks sagged. I don’t know what he did that made him so tired all of the time. No sleep was ever enough for him, but maybe today, it would be different.

I watched him as he slept. His stomach rose and fell and a peace fell over him. His shoulders relaxed and his jaw dropped open. He slept for an hour and a half. It wasn’t until he woke up that I could see the difference.

Rather than waking up bewildered, he seemed to carry the release sleep afforded into his waking life. It appeared as if all of his face muscles had let go. I know that can’t happen, because our muscles work in pairs, when one is loose, the other is tight, and vice versa, but Ed seemed to have achieved this, breaking a long cycle of clenching. He looked as if he’d happened across some great and comforting knowledge. Serenity exuded from his being. I wanted to climb a mountain and find him long-haired and meditating and sit at his feet. “Be my guru.” I breathed. I wanted to dive into him until I too could walk in perfect equilibrium.

“Did you dream?” I asked Ed.

“No.” Ed said. “I never dream.”

“Maybe you just forget them?”

“I don’t think so.”

I examined the mattress after Ed left to see if I could feel what had changed him. I stood over it and finally touched it. The Lady was warm where Ed had been. I breathed in his lavender smell and ran my fingers over the place where his head rested. I picked up a piece of his curly white perfect hair and held it in the light.

That night I dreamt I was making eye contact with Ed. The longer we looked, the deeper his eyes penetrated and I could feel him searching within me. He was gentle at first but firm. “What are you looking for?” I kept asking Ed, but he wouldn’t answer me. “What is it?” I could see that the inside of my body was made up of rooms. There were halls and bathrooms and staircases and bedrooms and all of them were empty. As Ed walked from room to room, he ran his finger along the wall. I felt heat. A fire burned somewhere in the house of me. My heart beat so hard that even in my sleep I could feel it throbbing in my teeth. “Maybe it isn’t here? Maybe I don’t have it?” I whispered, my voice staticky and robotic, omnipresent as if from loudspeakers in the walls. But Ed kept searching. When I woke up, my body was drenched in sweat. I felt turned on and exhausted.

Like all scientific experiments, mine required multiple tests in order to produce conclusive evidence. Revelation was immanent, but could not be achieved alone. I needed Ed to sleep again, but the next day he did not show. That was a Friday. I was anxious all weekend anticipating his return. On Monday when he didn’t arrive at his usual time I began to worry. By 4:00 when he was still not there, I broke store policy. I lay down on The Lady. “Magnetic deities,” I prayed. “Guide your soldier Ed. Bring him to the store so that we may work our magic upon him.”

And then I was asleep. I don’t know when Ed arrived, or how long he had lain next me. I was simply aware that I was both dreaming and awake at the same time. I could hear his oceanic breathing and feel his body heat pressing red into my skin. It was then that I discovered that Ed and I could speak without using our mouths. He listened to my thoughts.

“Darling,” Ed said to me in my dream. “Sweetness.”

“Me?” I asked.

“Who else?” Ed responded. “There is no one but you.” His voice so deep it was more vibration than sound.

And then it happened. A crossing over. A devastating awareness.

I don’t know what I was expecting. I had never felt this looseness, the expanding vastness, the space that goes on without end. Anything was possible in that moment. I could see futures unrolling before me, a great wheel of opportunities and myself standing bewildered in the center. Would I learn to diet and drink wheatgrass shots until I believed in myself and began a career singing broken-hearted songs to the wrong men in the smokiest dive at the end of the world? Or would I lose control of eating all together until I became 500 lbs and found that I couldn’t get up off the couch? I could see myself, waiting like a cow chewing its cud to slim down enough to shuffle to the bathroom.

Our bodies lay side by side stretched out on The Lady and slept. I had described the way the memory foam lifts to meet each curve of your body to customers, but never before had I felt it. She didn’t meet me halfway. She supported me. The endless mattress stretched out in all directions, the moon low in the sky with a chain hanging down so that it could be turned on and off. I rolled. I dove. I swam. I came up for air and filled my lungs and went back under.

Everything was moving. Not just me, but the ocean and the air and even on the atomic level I could feel the particles bumping up against each other, not wanting to rest, possessed and aimless specks. I cried out. The Furniture Palace is so still, the lines of furniture bleak and rigid, the structure of it all lifeless, and what was I? A thing with legs like all the rest. Amidst the greatness I emerged and in the open space, I was capable of anything. I could see it so clearly. There was no energy vortex. There was no magnetic subfield. There was no Furniture Palace. There was only this.

- Anya Groner currently lives in Oxford, MS where she is pursuing an MFA in fiction at the University of Mississippi and writing her first short story collection. Besides writing, Anya enjoys playing the fiddle, cooking, and weekly crafternoons. She is a recipient of a John and Renee Grisham fellowship for writing.

Juliet

I met her on a sweltering afternoon in Bombay, on the kind of day your feet boil within your shoes. I asked her if the bus had already gone by, and she told me the story of her life. As I watched her speak, I wondered what kind of person actually spills out her soul to another within the first fifteen minutes of being acquainted. But she talked on and on, because it was, according to her, ‘God’s will’ that she should confide in me.

She was a beautician by profession. Slim, her hair streaked with brown and white, she had hands that were orange and a deep brown, the strongest testimony to her occupation, coming from years of working with henna. She had a couple of hairs on her chin, which I wondered why she didn’t trim, considering her familiarity with the beautification process. She came to Carter road to drop her daughter at a parlour nearby, insisting that she snap out of her adolescent lethargy to get a job and make something of her life.

She told me she’d had to hurry and pack her lunch, eggs and bread, and to make countless sacrifices of clients in order to get her here, for the little fool didn’t know her way around Bombay. I had a vision of a typical Christian Bombay family life, sadly recreated through broken memories and stereotypes: fluttering white curtains at a barred window, pictures of Jesus and Mary on the walls, the aura of a lifestyle that hasn’t changed much for the past few generations. By the time I had tuned in, she was halfway through a detailed introduction to the business of cutting hair. ‘It’s a science’. There are projects to be done (‘consisting of four haircuts, two pedicures…’) and then finally one is turned loose to a client and left to find one’s own feet.

Just around now the bus came, and we thankfully scrambled in. Two other buses of the same number came around, causing great confusion. One was 45 minutes late, the other was on time and the third was early. We boarded one of this medley of the past, present and future, whereupon Juliet began to discuss bus routes with me and instructed me as to which would be most convenient for me on my way to Kalina. I listened with half my attention, as I always did when people launched into detailed directions.

My poor sense of geographical orientation is legendary, and by force of habit, I tune out because I know I will get lost nevertheless. I usually nod as though I understand, because people have the annoying habit of not moving on to the next point until I recognize the damn landmark that they have picked out from some remote corner of the world. Like ‘You know what Aliah’s boyfriend did? Arrey, the one who stays near that bridge in Matunga? You don’t know the bridge? It connects Mahim to south Bombay…accha, you know the tea shop near there? Its famous for its filter coffees…” and I spend all that time vaguely echoing the speaker’s expressions (brilliant trick, works every time),wondering what this description has to do with what Aliah’s boyfriend did in the first place.

Having completed her expansive explanation of bus routes, she started on ticket prices. “If you go by the 384, you’ll save, say 50 paise either way, so coming and going…that amounts to four rupees saved a day! You have to look at these things, no…”

When the conductor came around, the same woman who talked of saving 50 paise on each bus trip, and who had known me for less than a quarter of an hour, paid for my ticket and looked mighty offended when I tried to pay her back.
“You are younger; I cannot allow this,’” was all I could get out of her.

Returning my change into my wallet, I wondered what life must be like being a beautician and supporting two young daughters all by yourself. Her husband, named Romeo in some warped game of fate, left her and set up a house in Goa. Since then she had been caring for her girls, one of whom grew up to work in a call centre and refused to support her now.

“They eat my food, but don’t give me anything…If only she had set me up in some parlour today…”

She gave me a crooked smile, which looked suspiciously like a smirk. I smiled back. Like most people who talk a lot (and most people do), she wasn’t paying much attention to what I was doing, so I could relax, provoking a torrent of conversation with a single statement.

As I watched her speak, I wondered how she had managed all these years. Single handedly, with no help to support her daughters. She seemed to see it in my eyes and smiled.

“’I managed. You always do when you have no choice. Going insane is like drowning. I thought I would drown someday. But I kept treading water. I had occasional glimpses of what it was like to be insane, but I kept afloat. I swear I don’t know how.”

Soon it was time for me to go. After sincerely admitting that it was nice to meet her, I got off the bus. Crossing the road, I looked back and found her waving happily at me. An interesting person. I left her behind, thinking that was all I would see of her, and wondering if I was late for college, already putting her out of my mind.

The next day, walking to the bus stop, I saw a familiar figure in a red salwar kameez.

I stopped next to her, saying “Hi aunty,” lapsing into conversation with her again like we’d known each other for years. When the bus came, I tried to con her into buying her ticket. But the moment she saw what I was up to, she took the ticket when I offered her one and smoothly slid a 10 rupee note into my hand before I even knew what she was doing. I sighed and put it into my bag. Some people tend to get very ferocious in these money wars. Best not to mention it further.

Today it seemed she wanted to expound on her theological beliefs. She confessed that she had wanted to take my number the first time she had met me, but I had slipped away.

She said, “God told me that I should do this. The moment you got off the bus yesterday, God told me you were a good girl but the signal had already started.”

God had also told her to talk to me and tell me about her lord. A firm believer, Juliet had the firm conviction that she was in a world of non believers and had resigned herself to it. Taking out a book out of her bag, she handed it to me. A small booklet of 50 pages, it was some kind of brightly coloured religious pamphlet.

“Return it to me if your parents shout at you.’”

I assured her they wouldn’t and she went on.

“The first time my client handed me one, I ignored it. Then sitting in my parlour, I read this and ran to her, telling her to give me all the copies she had. Since then I have been giving these to people. Read this and you will feel blessed. I know I am. They say ‘there is that blessed woman,’ even when they see me walking on the road. My husband deserted me, but I did not give up. You see this, it will do you good. Read this prayer first, and then this one. You will feel the difference.”

She was warming up to the topic. “It explains things in a very clear way. I’ll give you one example. Suppose your mother asks you to make her some tea. The Devil and the Lord are standing outside the door. And you say, ‘Mama, why’re you’re asking me to…’ and grumble about it, then the Devil steps in and your entire day is sure to go badly. On the other hand, if you say to her ” Yes, mother, I will certainly make you some tea,” your day will surely go well.”

I listened. My religious beliefs were nowhere near hers, but it was like a refreshing breeze to have someone talk enthusiastically about their faith. For me God was something personal, a private faith without the interference of religion. There was a direct connection, which could be opened up at will. God was at once a very specific and a very vague concept. For her, I can’t even begin to imagine. Her faith was her whole life. I wondered if one word from me criticizing it would make her give up. But I wasn’t about to try.

I got off the bus again, thinking I would meet her many more times, and that this was just the start of an interesting relationship. Looking forward to meeting her the next day, I reached the bus stop. But she was gone. That night, I sent her the phone number of an art class for her daughter that she had asked for.

I still haven’t heard back from her.

-Tanushree Vachharajani completed her undergraduate studies in English Literature from St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai, India, and is currently pursuing her Master’s in English Literature from Mumbai University. She won second place in an all India short fiction contest, published papers in school and college magazines, participated in Ithaka, the St. Xavier’s theatre festival, and worked as a script writer for Tinkle, a popular Indian children’s magazine. Her most recent work, a short story titled The Sun Bronzed Room, has been in published in Ascent Aspirations, a Canadian based magazine.

He Said, She Said

His worst nightmare is that she’s still thinking about that guy from her college days, the one with the long hair who played the guitar, the one he’s sure she must have dated in the most vertical of relations. He wonders if she remembers his songs, if she could play them by tapping on the curvy thigh that he loves. He wonders this while he sits in a wooden chair at a bar watching the female who sits across from him.

Her worst nightmare is that he thinks she is unattractive now, thighs too big for her waist, that he actually finds their waiter more attractive as he places their beer on the table smiling at him. She doesn’t know what he feels at that moment, she is uncomfortable thinking that he might be attracted to him. She wishes she could be inside his brain, gray matter swirling, squishing around. Maybe she would rather not see. Yes, that’s it; She would rather not know when he would leave.

As he takes a deep drink of the beer, and looks over her bare brown shoulder at the waiter, he wishes his hair were like his, thick and wavy. That way she could let her fingers dance on his scalp.

She sees his finger tapping the side of his glass to some inaudible rhythm; the condensation makes his fingers white with cold. Now she wonders why her throat feels like her Barbie doll’s might have two decades ago when she spun her plastic head, round, round, to see how much the plastic would allow (thirty twists). That was the only Barbie she ever owned and begged please please please to have and to hold. I will take good care of her, she said. Headless Barbie didn’t last long, ended up in a red plastic tub with other abandoned toys, a pink My Little Pony, two Smurfs that looked exactly the same, a minesweeper G.I. Joe. Her parents told the doctor that she had a short attention span as he handed over a prescription. She told them the toys were plastic and none looked like her anyway. She didn’t mean to hurt the doll, she told her mommy, and she just wanted to see.

Throat closing, she takes another sip of beer. This place is dark, yes, dark enough, she thinks. Dark enough to hide my brown skin, but maybe he doesn’t notice, or maybe I am his type. Does he go for girls like me, does he think I’m some foreign princess who will dance seven veils and feed him grapes? What are girls like me like? She giggles because that is what she does when she has nothing to say; nothing to say with her throat that is closing, and lips that seal shut, pink skin that holds back words that want to tumble out and ruin everything. She promised to be more positive, she promised her mother. She moves her hair out from behind her ear to cover the pimple she is certain is forming on the crest of her cheek.

There is a place he remembers when he was much younger when he looks into her eyes like dark amber with flecks of gold, ancient leaves caught in molten rock forever. He sips his beer, wondering if he is so far from his youth that he will be denied return passage, that he will never recapture that day of fishing with his friends at the lake, camping with his buddies, talking about tomorrow like it was never going to come, talking about things they were meant to talk about, not opening doors meant to stay locked. Fishing, pulling, coaxing the soft-scaled trout from the river, how things should be. He dreams of returning to that lake, flicking that line back into the water and waiting for a fish to bite, and never would a fish bite, he would be there forever. Maybe she will come fishing sometime, he thinks, maybe she will come.

The waiter returns, still smiling.

He wants a burger with fries, hold the mayo, extra mustard—not to be picky or anything but he hopes it will be medium, really medium, not overcooked like it always is.

She wants a Caesar salad with chicken—and hopes it will be filling enough because she hadn’t eaten much today.

He wishes she would order a burger with him.

She hopes he notices her sparse eating habits and is proud of her shrinking thighs.

They both smile when the waiter disappears and take a sip.

Maybe she could still call that guy, Whatshisname, the one who was too eager like a young Dalmatian waiting for his kibble to drop into the bowl, the one who called her ten times the first day, fifteen the next, the one she needed to walk away from because he might be Notrightinthehead. The one her co-worker Doreen at the publishing house set her up with because she was that type of person—the voyeur sneaking a glance over the bushes, not the one sitting at the table at the café. Whatshisname. She felt pulled together around him, she felt ten steps above his twelve. Maybe she has his number somewhere, that little scrap of napkin, it wasn’t in her phone’s memory anymore. After he broke into her apartment she erased his phone number, a ritual cleansing that left some residue. Whatshisname will answer.

He thinks the glass is dirty, slides his fingernail down the side of the half finished glass of beer, and removes some invisible scab of food. Did he pick this place, or did she? He doesn’t like the typical American bar-food, with its deep-fried, diced chunks, parsley-sprigged, and iceberg-shredded deep dishes. Why isn’t she speaking? Is she nervous, tired, or bored? She’s bored, that’s it. She wishes she were at a small club watching some other guy play bad music like it was his job. He can’t ask about that, he can’t ask because she would think he was crazy so he says–Long day?

She smiles as softly as she can but not too wide as to expose what she considers to be fleshy gums. She is surprised that he is concerned with her well being. What a guy, what a gentleman. She puts her hands on her thighs and says –Yeah. You?

He is glad he asks the right question. You never know it’s the right question to ask until you ask it, he thinks. He looks back over his day full of screaming customers, crazy, deranged, aggressive people grabbing, how much does this cost, and where are the eggs? Have they been moved? Four hours of foreign hands touching things, asking things, wanting things, fifteen minutes of a gulp of fresh air outside then four more hours of touch/ask/want until he escapes back into his real life. The life that is outside the store, the one that is only dimly lit by the escaping sunlight, the one all those people all day long don’t consider real. He is a moment in their day; they are eight hours in his. Four hundred and eighty minutes per day, twenty-four hundred minutes per week, and he sleeps for the other three thousand, three hundred and…

–Yeah, fine.

She wishes she had enough money to buy a new pair of pants. She wonders if he is going to ask her to split the bill and almost gives herself the hiccups because she doesn’t have any money with her. Well she has that ten-dollar bill in the corner pocket of her purse next to a crumpled tissue. She doesn’t think it’s fair that she assumes he will pay, she just realizes now that the salad she’s eating is probably more than ten dollars with the beer. She’ll drink it slowly in case.

He’s wearing a retro Toys “R” Us t-shirt, baby blue torso, navy blue sleeves. She remembers a dream she had ten years ago where she was a superhero. In addition to the usual power of flying, she also had the power of super strength. She lifted cars full of families over flooding rivers, hoisted houses slipping off of mud slick cliffs, rescued zoo animals from a flood, reunited puppies with their mothers, and threw a boulder at a Toys “R” Us near a ghetto to open up the entire store to all the neighborhood kids.

When she woke up from that dream ten years ago she was disappointed at the graying white walls that surrounded her on four sides, even more disappointed when she realized she wasn’t alone in bed. When she got her first real job as someone’s paper slave making less than minimum wage with no benefits—she knew that this couldn’t be all that life was cracked up to be. Not hers. Not now. Parents are liars, damn good ones too, she thinks. It’s much better now, the hoops through which we so willingly jump.

The food arrives and they devour their meal in their own way. He takes humongous bites of the four-inch thick burger. He leaves barely enough space between the bites to breathe but he is content, he is hungry and happy there are enough pickles on the burger. She peppers her salad and wonders if it would be weird to ask for Tabasco, she decides it would, arranges a decent amount of cheese and lettuce and chicken on each fork bite, and wishes each bite were covered with something sharp to her taste buds, something that would bite back.

He slides back a bit in his chair, adjusts his posture because he feels taller. His little brother is taller than him, father too. Little brother was real good at sports, on some scholarship somewhere in the Midwest for ball. But he doesn’t like sports. Hates gyms, big cars, and people who chew gum like they wish they were chain-smoking a whole pack of cigarettes but can’t because they promised their girlfriend or boyfriend they would quit with them. He thinks people should quit on their own. He did. But he never liked smoking. Does she smoke? Nah, she’s got nice teeth. Beautiful smile. It would be a shame if she did. He bites his cuticle. Thinking about smoking makes him want to smoke again, he hates himself for this.

The check comes too soon and they both reach to grab it. There must be another couple waiting for the table. They guess it’s crowded; it is Friday night. She wonders what the big deal about Friday night is while he grabs the check away from her and she lets go easily, but lets her hand brush against his. It’s calloused. He works with his hands. Hers used to be calloused when she played the guitar in a band in college that only lasted a few months. As they walk out of the dark wooden restaurant and into the dark concrete world outside he puts his arm carefully around her back, not to seem too imposing. She lets his hand graze her thigh, but just for an instant.

-Olivia Chadha is the author of two comic books written during a stint as a scriptwriter. She holds a Master’s degree in Creative Writing from University of Colorado, Boulder and is currently working on her Ph.D. in English at Binghamton University.

ISO

Daniel had kept the ad with him for weeks—at first figuratively. He chanted it like a mantra on the bus as he gripped the aluminum bar, pretending not to notice the BO of the blonde who was always on the 6, and who consumed enough coffee that it leaked from her pores. ISO ARTIST IN NEED OF INSPIRATION. RACE, AGE, SEX NOT IMPORTANT. It had been a lonely little ad nestled among the abstruse acronyms that had become the new personals lingo over the last few years: Bi-c-F iso LBTQ F, C or P acceptable, prefer J. He didn’t even know what they meant anymore.

It was his morning ritual to wake up with a bloody Mary and the Personals section. This way, he was waking up with hundreds of losers all at once, a feat that otherwise would have taken him years to accomplish. He’d never been tempted to answer an ad before this one; reading them had just been his morning amusement, his grown-up version of the funny pages. It was the very openness of the ad that intrigued him, the impossibility of rejection. The desperate outcry of all capital letters.

Later, he kept the ad with him literally. He picked up the thin strip from his dresser each morning and placed it in his breast pocket. After he almost put it through the washer, he moved it to his wallet and took it out several times each day, reading it at his desk, at the bus stop. He took to using it as a bookmark until it was too crumpled to read. He did this with fortunes from fortune cookies, too, until they were too pilled to read, or until they came true. Whichever happened first. Like the one he was sure had been about Veronica.

Sarah’s voice wasn’t what he had expected. It was sprightly. Bright. It reminded him of the NPR report about the Elton John song “Tiny Dancer.” He wondered if she would look like the girls in L.A. who had inspired Bernie Taupin to write the song. Or if she just sounded like them and would look like someone entirely different. A few times he wanted to ask the blonde on the 6, “Are you her? Are you?” but he just smiled down at her, and she smiled back. He’d never realized before that she had freckles.

He’d called twice and hung up before he worked up the nerve to say something. Both times from payphones, though they’d been harder to find with the advent of cell phones. Everything around him was changing—payphones, the personals columns. Where would it all end? He was only thirty-three, yet some days he felt like an old man. Like it was all going by too fast.

The first time, in front of the Amoco, his nerves had gotten the better of him. He’d realized that he couldn’t make a serious phone call with a mohawked teenager staring him down, waiting for the phone. The second time, a train had gone by, and he hadn’t been able to hear if the phone was still ringing or if someone had picked up. When the train had passed, he was standing with the receiver to his ear, and a recorded message was asking him to hang up and redial. He hung up and walked home, not wanting to chance another train. He’d talked to her the first time from the library. He’d gone to pick up his reserved copy of The Sheltering Sky and had seen the payphone on his way out, and it seemed right.

When they met, he wondered if he was on some sort of hidden camera dating show. It was all just too absurd. She was dying. That was her part of the deal. She didn’t even have to try to fulfill it. It was just happening. She was alone. That was the part he could fill. He would get attached. She would die. He’d have something to write about—he was a writer, wasn’t he? So far, she’d met with a painter and a playwright, neither of whom had taken her up on it. They’d said it was ridiculous. He wondered if the waiter was part of the set-up, but he was sure he’d seen the guy at Cuppagiano’s before.

She’d picked Cuppagiano’s because it was equidistant from their apartments. “I would have done it over ice cream,” she said, “but that’s how my dad told me about my mom’s cancer. Ice cream sure as Hell doesn’t make everything better. Maybe coffee will.”

He’d been stunned. She stabbed a plastic fork through a slice of apple and a walnut meat in one stroke. A single v-shaped blue vein throbbed above her left eyebrow as she chewed. He knew then that there was no turning back.

He isn’t even sure how it’s happened, but he’s moved in. One day she just said, “My place is twice as big as yours and it’s rent-controlled. I don’t want to think of someone trawling the obits for an apartment in this building. It’s right next to the South Town line. You know they will.”

Now he is here and she is everywhere. There are books on shelves and in stacks on the floor, some of them opened to her favorite passages or points where she’d been interrupted, spine up, tented over other books. “That’s so I’ll remember my place when I get back to them someday,” she snapped her gum.

Occasionally he would find a pair of her panties in between books as he moved them to make his way through the rooms.

“Laundry’s not a major priority now,” she would say whenever she saw him picking them up from the floor.

She’d stopped wearing bras last month.

“I’m not spending my last moments corseted,” she wrote in orange dry erase marker on the bathroom mirror. She’d gotten the idea after watching Braveheart, when they both yelled “Freedom!” along with William Wallace. Daniel had shouted, pumping his fists in the air, and she had jumped onto the arm of the couch and whipped her bra off from under her T-shirt. Since then, two pink bras and a black one remained eternally drying over the shower curtain rod. Some days he had the urge to fit the delicate cups over his nose and mouth like an oxygen mask. To breathe all of her in as if he could save her that way. He never did it because he didn’t want to think of his face in her demi-cups if he was there when they hooked her up to a ventilator, but he started collecting her hair from the drain catcher on days when she showered before him. He pressed them in the center of a folded pair of his boxer briefs and kept them in his top drawer. Something about the copper strands seemed permanent. Like something with so much color shouldn’t be ephemeral.

It was working. Just knowing that she was dying got him writing. Two stories in journals this month. And a poem. A goddamn poem. He’d never written poetry. He’d asked for it, though, hadn’t he? He’d agreed to take on the burden in exchange for art. He was sure worse things had been done for art—the entire patronage system, for instance. And shouldn’t this be ideal for him, the commitment-phobe? This was a relationship that was guaranteed not to outlast his attention span. He knew. He’d started going with her to treatments.

They weren’t even treatments anymore. They were talks. Discussions. Philosophizing about the nature of God. Of the afterlife. Or what if there wasn’t a God or an afterlife? How would she feel then? She winked at him a lot during these sessions. Winked and snapped her gum.

“You’re the one who’s dying,” he’d say to her in the car on the way home. “I’d think if you can’t take these seriously, you’d stop going.”

“Who’s to say this behavior isn’t fear giving rise to comic relief?” she’d say.

At night he’d think maybe her self-analysis was right because she’d ask him to hold her.

He didn’t know how to deal with having an erection over her. He knew he didn’t want to sleep with her. A few months before he couldn’t have imagined being so close to a woman and not wanting to sleep with her. Something seemed wrong about putting a part of his anatomy inside someone who was in some ways to him already dead. It seemed even more wrong to know that he’d then go on to put it inside of other girls who would someday be dead, too. All of this death. He would wonder if he was causing it. He had gone with her to price coffins because she hadn’t wanted to go alone.

Veronica, in high school, hadn’t wanted to go alone to the low-cost clinic the next county over. His brother had been in the Navy, shipped out somewhere he’d never heard of at sixteen and couldn’t remember now, and she begged Daniel to drive her. She just knew she’d be too nervous to drive. She made him promise not even to tell Sam. She’d kissed him quickly on the lips when he’d agreed and then whispered, “Our little secret.” She was a senior and had seemed so sophisticated to him with her new Mustang and trademark coral lipstick. At the time, he’d gone mostly for the thrill of being alone with his brother’s girlfriend and driving a sports car. It was only in the past year that he realized she’d been a scared girl, trying to act tough. He wondered how many actions in his life had been influenced by women who didn’t want to be alone.

The coffin salesman had thought they were a couple of kids yanking his chain at first. “Death is a serious business,” he’d punctuated by pounding the table. Daniel burst into tears. The man tried to recover, to say anything, but got up slowly and left them alone at the desk of his own business. They sat together in his office for a half hour then realized he wasn’t coming back from the rose garden across the way. He was on a bench, dabbing his brow with a handkerchief, waiting them out. Finally, Sarah decided to leave. She took his hand and slipped him a tissue, then drove them home. “Maybe I should just be cremated. Don’t you think I’d rise from the ashes faster that way? A firebird?” She rolled down the window and let her red hair whip about her head. Sometimes he hated her that she was the strong one.

Once, he saw a car in front of him hit a cat. It had lain twitching in the road and though he’d always been told never to touch a hurt or frightened animal, he’d gotten out of his car and stroked the soft, striped grey fur until it stilled. This, perhaps, had been the most formative experience of his writing life. He’d written about all kinds of deaths from this experience. From the point of view of the dead, the dying, the killing, old people, babies not yet born. Later he’d wondered if he should have kept on and driven over the animal, too. Maybe he had wished for this after all.

Maybe he had caused it by wanting so deeply something to write about. Something profound. Some experience that would make him feel shrunken and old inside of his thirty-three year-old body. The way he’d felt inside of his sixteen year-old body when he heard that Veronica’s uterus had ruptured an hour after he dropped her home from the clinic, and her parents had found her dead on the kitchen floor. The way his brother must have felt when he came home paralyzed from the Gulf War at twenty-two, and realized that the only child he would have had had been aborted four years earlier. When he visited Veronica’s parents years later, he’d imagined small vestiges of his brother’s future floating in a pool of blood between the kitchen island and the water cooler.

Sarah didn’t want to see his work. She felt that that would be an unfair influence. “The muse should never read, just inspire,” she’d uttered levelly the first time he handed her a journal with his name printed boldly on the back cover, under the heading New Fiction by . She did, however, ask that he bury her with copies of them the way that Rossetti buried Lizzie Sidell with all of the poems he’d written for her. Of course, Rossetti later had the body exhumed to get his writings back, but nearly everyone gave two contributor’s copies. And who else did he have?

He knew that these new writings were not yet him but that he would grow into them and that they would fill him the way heat fills one’s fingers under a hot faucet in winter, growing and stretching its way up through the body until it reaches the heart. He felt grateful to have realized early that we are not defined by what we have but by what we have lost. He knew that when he was an old man, in his mind, she would still be twenty-four and fragile. And he would love her, looking back on a friend who could then be his grandchild. This made him unsure of his place in time. In the universe. And he wondered if this was the nature of death. The forever floating between past and present.

He pictured years of bending to touch her grave in disbelief when the cherry petals plastered the headstone in spring rain and brushing the crackling leaves away in fall. He knew he would not visit her in winter. He knew, somehow, already, that he would be consumed with worry for her in the winter. She felt so cold to him sometimes now that he couldn’t bear the thought of her under the snow-covered ground. In winter he would take long walks and hum Stravinsky.

-Shaindel Beers is a Professor of English at Blue Mountain Community College in Pendleton, OR. Her poetry, fiction, and social commentary have appeared in numerous journals and publications. She was compelled to send work to damselfly because her boyfriend has a damselfly tattoo. She is Poetry Editor of Contrary Magazine.