poetry

Grown Wild

Carla Barger

Row after row mother toiled
pulling bright swollen beans from the vines,
a daughter bent-backed, brow beading,
while Grandma sat on the porch and cried. 

The garden had grown wild in secret
though mother had phoned every day.
Grandma had gasped, always winded,
exasperated at the need to explain.

I’m minding the corn, snapping beans,
boiling down blueberries for jam.
The frost will come early–—so early!—
and I still have so much to can.

But a neighbor explained to mother
how he’d see Grandma at night dirty, afraid,
ghostlike in flashes of heat lightning,
and wandering the rows every day,

whispering like droplets to onions,
laughing with crickets and peas.
While the corn matured and grew heavy
and the peppers grew tangled with weeds

Grandma frantically twirled in the moonlight,
a wild thunderstorm on its way out to sea.

Ghost

Carla Barger

 /ˈgōst/
noun

 1 :  a disembodied soul: Just days before the stroke, Grandma dreams that she is standing at the edge of a field of wildflowers across which a stranger beckons. She hesitates, touches toes to petals, then refuses, unable to crush beauty into dirt.

 2 : a faint shadowy trace: The powdery scales of a marsh moth smacked against the cool glass of the hospital window. From underneath the thin blanket grandma’s hands float free, pinch at the air around her that is swarming with the unseen world. The dream fills the room for those who did not dream it, the stranger’s unuttered voice louder than our own.

 3 : a false image in a photographic negative: Coffee tins full of them in her dresser drawer— here she is with Great Aunt Dovey, here with Uncle Joe. We finger the brittle strips gingerly as if they too might turn to dust, holding each one up to the window until the light reveals her alone— someone’s hand on her shoulder, the puff-sleeve of her blouse crushed, the pattern of petals nothing but a series of dark dots.

Behind her a blanched field of wildflowers in monochromatic bloom.

Barn, Moth

Jeff Burt

The roll of the earth extinguishes
            the last flame of daylight,
                        a pitch, a yaw, then night.

A moth tumbles through
            the incandescent light
                        of the yard lamp

into that indeterminate
            strip of obscurity
                        where radiance diffuses

into absence and reflection,
           thin smooth glass
                        that shines like a jar

holding the glow of harvest
            and beyond the unlit cornfield
                        and darkness of my longing.

I miss your voice,
            at times a bellicose bar
                        beating against the metal of time

at times a filament drawn so thin
            one electric word wired to another
                        brings radiance to all around it.

The Infinitive to Listen

Jeff Burt

Threatened by the sprawl of an oak
and unremitting sun
the timber and truss of the roof age,
crack, dry and rot,
the roofline no longer an erect V,
sides sagging as if the ink
that drew them had become wet
from the winter’s rain.

I spy bumps and swales in the linear run—
squirrels have planted acorns
in the shingles, pushing up a corner
of a square and tamping down,
but the shingles appear more like
Fedoras with the brim curled from overuse
of a gripping tip of acknowledgment.

I have lived here too long, perhaps,
to go on explaining to prospective buyers
about picking holly sprigs
bent over the eaves in the winter
and how one has to dress the outside lights
from the power feed and grounding hub
on the roof or risk a sudden electrical flip,
flop and pitch to the yard below,
the dent in the gutter from a branch
of the cedar across the street that sailed
like a straw in the gusts of a winter storm,
the little pocket in the beam
where a chickadee had her nest
and a crow or jay could not pierce,
the flat area where in spring
one year recovering from a torn calf
I bathed in sunlight and read Chinese poetry
until I saw every bush, shrub
and stripling as an ideogram,
learned how complicated
the pen-stroke graphic 
of the infinitive to listen is,
with speaker, hearer, past
and present, whispers
and blares of vocables
held in a single image,
with not a single vowel,
phoneme or syllable
to explain the entirety of to listen.

We have no heirs to this house,
only to our home, which travels
in the lives of our children.
I have learned this roof is a brushstroke
that cannot be spoken.

Ode to Reflection

Karen L. George

Stunning, the way one object reflects another, contingent
on density, distance, medium between, angle of giver to receiver.

How, closer to earth, a bird's clone crystallizes,
and sun through colored glass casts tinted replicas.

Water my recepor of choice—lake, stream, veneer of ice.
Creek water shimmers trees on mud or sand bed

overtop minnows making squiggly doubles
beneath my silhouette as I lean over the bridge rail.

How shadows travel and lengthen as day unravels,
the juncture when a mountain veils an entire valley. 

Motion layers the allure—a fish breaks the pond skin
while waves intersect the sway of tree twins.

The bathroom light on the vinyl curtain imprints green
bamboo on white tile like dark trunks on new snow.

Everything echoes something else: a grimace on a face,
a yawn. Mirrors and glass yield images in reverse.

Even our eyes. Light travels cornea to retina, converts
to impulses, so our brain interprets what looms before us.

It’s More Than 12 Steps Across the Desert

Robert S. King

My shadow is quite drunk,
but the desert will dry me out.
In the alcoholic bath of my own sweat,
I empty the bottle,
then stagger into the sunburned land
of footprints walking in circles,
of a clumsy surfer on tsunami dunes.

I seal a message to myself in the bottle,
drop it in the waves of sand
where I am going down for the third time,
still wanting that bottle back, full
of 100 proof whose last drop
tastes like a tear that falls forever,
and staying dry is staying in the desert
among mirages of monsoons,
downpours where the happy hour sign winks
and the bar is set low,
where courage is drained by the ounce
and the next step is backwards.

Prevarication

Lisa J. Parker

At the edge of yard
I watched blackberry vines for readiness,
pushed against nascent buds as red to purple to black,
vines inching taller against their cling and twine around
silvery anchor cable on the telephone pole.

Mama warned of electrocution when she caught me
shimmying half its length toward a tangled kite, told me
my hands could be burned clear off, I might end up
in a wheelchair like cousin Jimmy
who worked for Dominion Power and got thrown 50 feet
to the ground where the imprint of his body
burned into the grass.

I wondered what wild thing could make a blackberry
stronger than a man, ran my fingers against vines until
they touched cable, pressed my luck
until I grabbed the whole cable in my fist, held it
tighter with each passing minute until slowly the fallacy
of my mother's warning became clear
and I walked bowl after bowl
of blackberries in to her, never another thing mentioned,
even years later, the countless syrups and preserves
she spooned or spread over bread she pushed
into my mouth when I was too sick to feed myself,
her careful conservation the only thing that could sustain me.

Hillbilly Transplant Writes "Where I’m From" Exercise With Imposter Narrative

Lisa J. Parker

City girl, Brooklyn-born, rough raised
by loud women cursing store-bought pickles,
and men who couldn't carry their own weight,
by subway tunnels where I learned to hold my breath
and perfect the hasty walk-not-run when rats
hugged the tile walls of transfers between Prospect Park
and Brighton Beach, or not-quite-men
proved themselves to each other with catalogs
of come-ons as I passed.

I am summer drought brazen-cracking the hydrants,
standing in the sting of its water until
my jeans adhered to me and the waves of heat
finally rolled off.

I am kitchen windows sweating streaks all year long,
neighborhood Babushkas who cooked constantly, sour cherry jams,
pickled garlic, my Ukrainian neighbor whose chewy black breads
I teethed on, her sister whose quick clap under my chin
taught me early to say spasiba to everything no matter how small I was,
no ingrates tolerated in the swarm of warm aprons, these women
who guarded the gates to every doughy, salty treat of my childhood.

I am backseat of the movies at Sheepshead Bay,
learning the indelicate truth of neighborhood boys.
I am feet whose callouses came early, concrete
and hard grass, 5th floor walk-up, my Latvian neighbor
who would only paint my nails if I let her take a razor
to my heels, the pads of my feet, and then soak them
in sudsy warm water while she talked of love.
I am my mother’s Matryoshka, each doll its own lacquered red,
sun-yellows and brilliant greens, flowers of her homeland, peasant
and princess, each piece a story, a variation from that tiniest doll, a baby
fashioned from a single perfect piece of wood.

Cold to the Bone

Annette Sisson

Boots, two pairs of socks, feet
cold to the bone. White sheers ruffling
at the window, register breathing softly.
Sun lifts the room into light.

I unzip the brogans, peel away
thermals like leaves from cornstalks—
extend bare toes to the pane,
poaching the warmth collected in glass.

My sister calls. And calls. In Indiana
the pack of snow is splotched, gray
with muck. It buries her sidewalk. Her busted
shovel can’t take the weight of wet snow. 

I buy teas, cat treats, pack a photo
of our mother stirring at a hot stove.
I wonder how to quell the chill,
deliver boxes of warm jellied toast,  

pry hope loose like windshield ice,
send her a morning with arms like sunlight.

Moth

Marcus Whalbring

One bigger than my nine-year-old hands.
Its scribbles of legs were stuck, frozen
to the cement of the classroom windowsill.

It looked in through the mist of the harsh March air
at me as if it had flickered from the flowered light
of some dream I hadn’t flown through yet.

Nothing in its stare seemed less than planetary.
The dead engine of its wings stalled with frost.
I was a child still, frozen in the moment until

his teacher’s coat flapped over her shoulders
on her way out to free it with her fingernails
and lay it in a bed of dead daylilies.

Won’t fly, she said, shedding her coat again,
but it’s alive. Frost filigreed on windows dissolved
by afternoon, but my thoughts were stuck

in the morning, how she’d balanced the moth
on her hands with such care,
the way one would the last flame on a cold planet.

Fiction

Captain Marisol

Charles Haddox

My Aunt Concha welcomed us into her tiny apartment under the elm trees lining Calle Pípila in Cd. Juárez. The door of the apartment faced the sidewalk. There was no yard, but the elms rose out of boxes to shade pedestrians as well as the fronts of the presidios, one story apartments plastered with stucco on the inside and outside. A red-handled mop stood beside the door, drying, drying. Its grey hair, its grey curls, scented with lemon. Her place sparkled. The floors smelled of soap and pine oil. We had chicken soup for lunch in her rather outdated kitchen, and for dessert she let us pick out a candy from a pink tin box covered in plastic daisies that had probably once held Marías or some kind of shortbread.

“One. No more,” my Aunt Concha said in Spanish. She always said the same thing.

My Tía Concha. When my mother was a child, Concha was a party girl. Now she dressed in black and wore a black lace veil and was very thin, with a stern, withered face that had once belonged to a girl who could dance all night at the local casino. She was an old lady, and we were children. Aunt Concha was actually my great-aunt, a sister of my mother’s father, who had passed away when my mother was a child. Since Concha never had children herself, she always grew tired of us after a very short time. My brother and I were sent to play in the park just down the street so that she and my mother could drink coffee and talk about politics, about the family spread out on both sides of the border, and about the old days, when everybody lived in Guadalajara and northern Jalisco.

The sunlit park, shaded in places by tall Chinese elms and light green ash trees, was a world of wonder. Yellow and black butterflies soared on the breeze like flecks of light. Whiptail lizards, furtive as fish, rustled in the grass. Regal mockingbirds whistled and tittered as they looked for mates or defended territories. An escaped pet parakeet sat on the head of Vicente Guerrero’s bronze bust (the park was named for him) and ate a discarded peanut.

On a little pedestrian bridge at the edge of the park, which extended across a steep, dry gully, Don Freddie and his daughter stood like sentries. Alfredo Marquez was nicknamed Freddie, even though he was Mexican. His daughter was Marisol. Freddie was slight and ascetic in appearance, with a long black beard and small, childish hands. His daughter was also rather small for her age. She was eleven. Freddie was a librarian at the local university, but he was also a kind of living astronomical clock. The heavens had outsize influence on his daily behavior: when Orion sat in the sky, he was brave as a tiger, but when Leo raised his brilliant mane, he would run and hide; when Venus, queen of the stars, arose, he was amorous with all the women of the neighborhood, including my elderly aunt, though the presence of Aldebaran in winter would sometimes put a temporary check on his adolescent behavior. When the moon was full, he could only eat bread and tortillas, but when Mars burned red among the constellations, he ate carne asada and barbacoa. The ardent morning sun made him happy and optimistic, but a fading sunset always brought him profound melancholy. On that Saturday afternoon in the park, with the sun sitting high in the sky, Freddie was sober and alert as he stood with his daughter on bridge sentry duty.

“Buenas tardes,” he said to my brother Tomás and me.

Marisol just nodded to us from under a blue baseball cap. She was a year older than me, and I liked her a lot.

“What’s the password?” Freddie asked us in English.

“Chupa chorro,” my brother said.

Marisol gave him a gentle whack but let us onto the bridge.

The air surrounding that old stone bridge was cool and fresh—a celebration of pleasant caresses and murmured music. The scents of melon and lemons and freshly cut grass enveloped us in rare perfume. We played all afternoon on the bridge, pretending it was a ship. Marisol was the captain, as she was the eldest of the kids. Her father was the boson, and I was the navigator. My brother was the chief steward. At one point, Señor Freddie sent him to a nearby beverage stand to buy lemonade for us.

Marisol found a stout wooden beam under the bridge (below deck) that had been discarded long ago, along with empty tin cans and a rather gruesome cat skeleton. After dragging it onto the bridge with her father’s help, she kept an eye out for minor peccadilloes on the part of her crew that would give her an excuse to make us “walk the plank.” Cursing was forbidden. Everyone had to be addressed by their titles. Shirttails were to be tucked. Gig lines straight. Marisol was clever, but also a little bossy.

“Disciplina, marineros,” she would insist.

Even her father seemed overwhelmed by her, and our antics on the bridge eventually wore him out. He retired to a nearby bench, leaving us alone. That’s how Juárez was in those days. Children could play by themselves in a public park without the least thought of harm. Don Freddie read a newspaper bought from a roving vendor for a few minutes before promptly falling asleep, the newspaper over his face. The three of us kids ran up and down the pink tezontle bridge and even climbed over the side with a ladder made of fallen tree branches, down into the deep, dry gully, which was filled from end to end with weeds and trash.

Marisol would call us back to the ship, careful not to raise her voice in a way that would wake her father.

I stared at her pretty green eyes as she tied an old bicycle wheel to the side of the bridge with bits of copper wire. Green or blue eyes are called “colored eyes” around here. Marisol was completely engrossed in her effort to provide the ship with a steering wheel—but it wasn’t long before she was back to giving commands.

“Navigator, tell me how far it is to Palm Island.”

“I’d use my sextant to study the mar y sol, captain, but unfortunately, my hands are full, because she’s making me hold her shoes and her cup of lemonade.”

“General Order Seventeen. All jokers and complainers will be sentenced to walk the plank.”

“Besides,” my brother Tom chimed in, “you’ve already done plenty of studying.”

I whacked him on the shoulder.

“Cut it out, asshole,” he said to me in English.

“One more time and you’ll walk the plank, steward,” Marisol warned him. She knew all the American curse words.

To show us how serious she was, she wedged her salvaged plank into one of the rectangular embrasures on the parapet lining the bridge. It extended far over the gully. She sat down next to it with a pensive look on her face.

I approached her carefully. She was using a lip balm stick she had taken from her little tooled-leather purse.

“Why don’t you have a mother, captain?” I asked her.

“Because she’s dead, navigator,” she said matter-of-factly.

I didn’t know what to say.

“Why doesn’t La Señora Concha have a husband, navigator? Is he dead?”

“I don’t think she ever had a husband, captain. Who’d want to marry her?”

“Who’d want to marry you?” Marisol said with mischief in her eyes.

“How about you?”

“I’d rather walk the plank.”

“Come on,” I said. “I’m not so bad.”

I pulled a pizza-parlor arcade token out of my pocket and gave it to her.

“Pirate’s gold, captain,” I said.

She took two twenty centavos coins out of her purse and put them into my hand.

“Ship’s wages, navigator.”

“Pieces of eight.”

“Time to explore Palm Island, sailors,” she said as she lowered herself over the bridge and onto our makeshift ladder.

When we arrived back on board, our lemonade cups were attracting ants. Marisol ordered my brother Tom to throw them overboard.

“What did your mother die of?” I asked Marisol quietly.

“She died when I was born. That’s why my father’s crazy. Let’s set sail for Shark Island, sailors.”

I brushed an ant off her shoulder.

“Crazy. Just like my aunt.”

Freddie was calling, “Marisol, Marisol.” He had woken from his nap. His voice sounded melancholy and forlorn, but we knew it was just because of the falling dusk.

Afternoon

Bruce Meyer

You posed with your arms slung over each other’s shoulders, holding fish in your free hands with a dock in the background.

I never knew my own father. But yours? He was a father you were close to, a father who would listen, who’d be there, an ‘old man’ who would tell you what’s what but in a kind way. A father who took you out for a damned fine steak on your eighteenth birthday because you were a man and steak is what men eat. A man who stood you a drink as if you were an old friend.

Sister Macklin said he’d hang on for the rest of the afternoon and a can of warm pop and a questionable sandwich of dried out white bread and a slice of ham was all the respite you were given. The generators had failed. The corridors were sweltering. Ices  melted in the freezer. The tea and coffee machines weren’t working, and though it was a hot day everything you touched was cold. I tried to take your hand but you turned to me and said, “No.”

We’d only just pulled the tabs on the warm Cokes. We’d only just taken one horrifying bite from the sandwich when Sister Macklin appeared, her black hair rolled under her white nurse’s cap, her forehead sweating from doing the flights of stairs and the return trip awaiting us as we had to navigate the stairwells lit by dim evacuation lights to the seventh floor, all so we could look upon a man who was no longer there. The dying leave us breathless.

You entered the room. The sister, perhaps to spare you or give you a moment that is so important between a father and son – not between a father and son and the son’s boyfriend – was right out of Hamlet.

You had to go in alone. You had to cradle the truth in your arms, tilting the head this way and that, saying nothing but mouthing pain none the less.

You had to be told the truth of his demise straight from his spirit. I felt as if you’d walked into the fog on a battlement and a horrible truth was about to be revealed to you. That’s all it was. The truth. It wasn’t horrible. It just was the truth.

I never told you that just before you left his room and stood talking in a low voice to the sister, I went to him and opened one of his eyes and I was the last thing he saw or didn’t see. He probably didn’t see me. If he had, I would have felt I violated your relationship with him.

The eye did not look at me as much as through me. I asked his forgiveness but none was forthcoming. How could it? He’d said all he had to say during his life. It wasn’t forgiveness. It was just acceptance. The way he accepted his own death. The way he believed he would never see a grandchild of his own. It was just a loneliness. Isolation. Living with so many ends unanswered for, so many threads that could not be neatly tied up into a neat conclusion he dreamed of knowing in his isolation. It was abandonment. You were there, but no matter how close you stood, leaning over him the night before so he could whisper secrets in your ear, he was abandoned. And he abandoned you because that’s the way death leaves things.

His face had collapsed in on itself, his false teeth taken out for mercy’s sake, and the round O of his mouth caked with what looked like dried oatmeal but is the crap that comes out of the mouths of the dying.

I looked in that one eye. It wasn’t seeing anything. It was just there, staring. But as we climbed up the fourteen staircases, sixteen if you count the fact the cafeteria is in the basement, I heard you growing short of breath, huffing, and then the sound of a sob, your shoulders going up, and your hand gripping the stair rail. I thought, “Don’t hold back on my account. Don’t show me your grief if you aren’t.” I was the jealous lover that Keith Douglas describes in his poem about the dead Panzer man in the burned out tank. Vergissmeinnicht. I don’t remember the lines and even if I did you would hate me for thinking of them.

I wished we’d all gone fishing together. I wanted more than anything to have been a better part of your life. I could see what I had missed, what I could never understand.  Long conversations. Steak on my eighteenth birthday. The advice poured shot by shot at the kitchen table.

And as you stood there weeping into your hand, standing like a shadow over the body of your father, I could picture you and me together, maybe not in the past but someday, somewhere, maybe if I had kid of our own, and we’d be standing there with our arms around each other’s shoulder, the little guy proudly holding up the undersized fish we caught and should have thrown back, and some guy hanging around the dock we hand our camera to and hearing him say, “Smile” and clicking the shutter because it all is over in the blink of an eye. And what we fail to love or be loved by makes us see what we have or should have had, or ought to hold on to even though it is slippery and it fought for its life on the end of a thin line. And as an afterthought, after the hook is removed from the fish’s mouth, you persuade the child that all things deserve the lives they have struggled to live. You lie flat on your stomach and lower your hands over the side of the dock. The fish is inanimate. It stares at the sky. And then, to the boy’s amazement and yours, its opens and closes a gill as it is submerged, its tail awakens, and it disappears into depths we will never completely understand.

Aurora Borealis

Zach Murphy

Leo showed up 35 minutes late to his stepbrother Tim’s funeral. He also dipped out right in the middle of his own speech.

“I always preferred funerals to weddings because at least with funerals people cry over something that is permanent” wasn’t the best line to open with.

After hiding out all day, Leo emerged from his humiliated sulk and decided to go for a walk through his hometown of Duluth, Minnesota.

The evening clouds watched the waves crash against the jagged rocks of Lake Superior while Leo trotted along the Canal Park boardwalk.

He thought about the time when he and Tim were kids at the beach and Tim buried him beneath the sand and nearly suffocated him to death.

He thought about the time when Tim convinced him that lightning bugs were evil creatures that were out to electrocute people. Even as an adult, Leo still had nightmares about them.

And he thought about the green T-shirt. That stupid green T-shirt that Tim always wore. It was forever ironed into Leo’s brain.

Leo stopped to sit on a weathered bench. A few feet behind him, there was a bush where a group of lightning bugs were congregating. After a few minutes passed, one of the lightning bugs landed directly on Leo’s shoulder and he froze with fear. But when he got a closer look at the blinking creature, he admired its shine and realized it was quite a peaceful little thing. He was even disappointed when it zipped away.

Just then, he thought about Tim again. He was mad at himself for missing him. And he knew that if Tim knew about this, he’d make fun of him for it.

When Leo got up and continued on his walk, the wind diminished, the waves calmed, the clouds cleared, and an effervescent green light glowed brightly across the sky.

As Leo gazed out at the stunning sight, he shook his head and smirked. “Fuck you, Tim.”

Neon

W. T. Patterson

New Orleans, Garden District. Magazine Street sits quiet on a lonely Tuesday night, the humid air thick enough to chew. A neon sign flickers green above the entrance to a two-story dive, Tommy Rouge’s, where inside, two patrons sit against the bar tipsy off spirits and stories. The high ceilings and low fans do little to mask the lingering high watermarks from Katrina that run the walls, black and fluid, like old whiskey in a dirty rocks glass.

The owner, Bobby Rouge, doesn’t tell his only two patrons about the financial troubles. He wipes the sticky counters in obsessive circles staring into the string lights that line the jukebox and thinks about whether or not to unplug the second floor’s unused pinball machines to save money, to sell the scuffed up pool tables with dents from too-rough shots and circular, flammable stains thanks to sweating beer glasses. The disaster insurance for fire would payout enough to live comfortably in retirement. He wonders if his father, Tommy, would be disappointed that his son couldn’t keep a bar afloat in a city known for boozing.

The air inside is dense with the savory smell of dried liquor and sweet with old, spilled beer. Outside, young people pause and look at the empty second floor balcony with iron tables and chairs, with flickering electric candles inside of purple glass holders, with sun-faded cardboard signs for domestic beer near the door, and decide to keep walking. Bobby has noticed a significant shift in patrons with the uptick in microbrewers and craft beer connoisseurs, even though he believes beer is beer and gets a person drunk just the same. A bar is a social experience, he tells himself, not an art adventure.

The wood paneling along the inside walls is bowing, it has been for years. Bobby’s only two patrons laugh on their cushioned stools, a man and a woman, probably thirty years between them. The woman wears a flowing sundress and blue jean jacket, her smooth legs crossed at the hips, frizzy blonde hair wild and unkempt. She raises her arms, glass in hand, and sways to the slow jazz rendition of Satchmo’s St. James Infirmary as though she isn’t mid conversation with a man twice her age. Her eyelids droop heavy with liquor and Bobby gets the sense that something else is going on with the woman, something deep and pained.

The man smiles and sways with the woman dropping the conversation mid-sentence to mimic her movements. He laughs with a smoker’s gruff. Sun damaged skin wraps his body, baggy Hawaiian shirt unbuttoned to the sternum, loose cargo pants running into worn out boat shoes. All evening he has sat facing her, knees apart, leaning forward and back to the beat of Allen Toissaint and Johnny Dodd’s Black Bottom Stompers. He has purchased all of the woman’s drinks and Bobby has obliged, happy to have the business.

“All I’m saying,” the woman says, her words slurred and rounded, “is that there are things you can say, and things you cannot say anymore.”

“What can I not say?” the man asks, smiling so large that his teeth reflect the neon sign for drink specials glowing pink behind the bar.

“Things,” she says, and bites her lip. She leans forward. “Certain things.”

“Things are things,” the man says, and takes a sip of his brown drink, still dancing. “I can still say things, don’t mean you have to like the things I say.”

“I’m just saying,” the woman says, leaning forward and touching the man’s lips with her pointer finger, long nails painted green. “There are things you can’t say.”

They both laugh. Bobby pours them another round and says it’s on him. He knows better than to cut them off this early, even though something feels unusual about the pairing. All those years growing up and learning the trade behind the bar with Dad, the solo years after Katrina when his father’s mental and physical health slipped away, he knows when something is awry and these two, he thinks, ain’t exactly trouble, but ain’t exactly saints either. The dark wooden stairs to the second story flash orange with lights from the pinball machines upstairs and Bobby checks his watch. Ten PM. Too early. The smokes in his shirt pocket poke against his chest. He knows he should quit, but damn if they don’t soothe his nerves.

The man reaches forward and pinches the bottom of the woman’s wild, frizzy hair.

“I love blondes,” he says, swaying, smiling.

“I’m a blonde, my mother is blonde,” the woman says. She lets him touch, indulges him, part of her starved for attention.

“Blondes are my weakness,” the man says. He laughs at his own honesty, then coughs thick and gurgled from deep inside his chest.

“Put your hand on my leg,” the woman says, and grabs the man by the wrist. She plops his callused palm on her exposed thigh. The slap of skin on skin snaps through the space. It fills the empty bar with promises, a taste of things to come.

Bobby tosses a damp, worn-down washcloth over his shoulder and leans against the top shelf liquor along the back mirror. He thinks about sharing a bed, what his ex-wife might be doing with her new husband out in the Midwest, what his son is up to in New York City. They’ve made it clear that they want nothing to do with Tommy Rouge’s, and left New Orleans years ago.

Bobby’s son Terry might have had a kid out of wedlock. He’s seen pictures online, the baby sharing the family’s long crooked nose, but it could belong to someone else. He’s never reached out to ask even though he feels compelled to send his son money. Money he doesn’t have. Money like his father did for him. He figures the time will come, because all things come back around, even if they don’t feel possible. It’s why he hasn’t sold the bar. Katrina killed the city once, but then it came back twice as strong. This lull, it’s nothing more than an intermission between sets for musicians bar hopping Frenchman street. Soon, the horns will fire up, the stand-up bass will walk, and the drums will swing.

The man coughs into his balled fist, then wipes it on the counter. Bobby leans forward and wipes with his rag. The woman giggles a type of desperate, flirtatious giggle. The ice clinks the edge of her glass where red lipstick marks smear the rim like a shriveled slice of watermelon. She looks at the man’s balding head, at the oily thin hair brushed across the open top.

“Say something you’re not supposed to say,” she says.

“What am I not supposed to say?” the man asks.

“If you think you’re allowed to say it, don’t say that,” the woman says, and arches her back. Her chest pushes against the thin fabric of her sundress and jean jacket.

“I think all sorts of things,” the man says, bending forward. His hand squeezes her thigh. “I say things, too.”

The woman lifts her arms and sways to the New Orleans Jazz Viper’s rendition Brother, Can you Spare A Dime? She moves like the melody is a hot shower, the water cleansing and smoothing her skin after a long day. The man leans back and lazily claps to the rhythm. Bobby wonders if he should cut them off, but if they leave, he knows he’ll be alone.

At one time, the crack of the pool table sliced through the shouted conversations of shoulder-to-shoulder crowds. The glowing neon signs had to be replaced every few months after the spontaneous zydeco outbursts that twirled bodies into walls where lovers whispered beat poems against the wooden panels dodging the occasional rough’em ups that loomed with alcohol and crowds. At one time, Bobby bought a state-of-the-art sound system and had it installed. Small speakers no bigger than the box Terry’s baby shoes came in hung in corners pumping local music into the room.

Now, whenever he walks by other bars on the nights that he closes early, Bobby hears the deep electronic bass of bounce, of radio pop music, of songs written by a computer. He’ll put a cigarette between his lips and stare into the purple glow of sky wondering what he’d ever do if he left the city he loves. A city, his family tells him, that he loves more than them.

“Ever been with an older man?” the guy asks. He flashes a crooked smile. His teeth glow pink and green.

“I love an older man,” the woman says.

“As an older man, that’s something I know I shouldn’t say,” the man says, and sways with his shoulders. The brown drink spills onto the bar, but not much. Bobby wipes it with the damp rag from his shoulder, then grabs well whiskey. He pours a splash and winks at the guy. The guy laughs a deep, gurgled laugh and turns back to the woman. The dark wood stairs leading to the second level flash orange from the pinball machines again.

Originally purchased as an investment, a source of passive income to sustain an already thriving bar, Bobby took his father’s advice and called a wholesale warehouse specializing in “retired” carnival fixtures. He financed six machines using the mortgage on his home–not bar–as collateral.

“With enough quarters,” the salesman told him over the phone, “you can pay’em off in three months. Everything after is bank, padre.”

When the units came, Bobby didn’t realize that they were so bulky, that they ate up space where paying patrons might otherwise stand. They jutted into walkways, crowded high top tables, and, on busy nights, served as a table of their own. Their flashing lights and primitive blips seemed alien in the two-story bar, a crude orange and black screen flashing the three letter names of record holders.

For a while they worked, the quarters stacking nicely into ten-dollar rolls, but three months turned into three years of payments with interest. Bobby couldn’t keep up, and his wife told him to get rid of the damn things. She didn’t care how. If he didn’t figure it out, she told him, in another few months, she’d be gone, too.

Even young Terry lost interest, though most of the units held his high scores from playing over long, lazy afternoons waiting for his father to open. This was before the move to New York, before he may or may not have had a kid of his own.

The carnival company eventually bought back two machines for the amount of the remaining payments. A third went to a private buyer. The remaining three sit along the wall near the bathrooms and by the stairs. Bobby would be surprised if he opened up the front to find any quarters in the slot. The closest they ever got to use was during the middle of the day when tourists brought their young kids inside to look around and soak up the classic NOLA architecture. These same families snapped pictures of the high ceilings and low fans, the second story’s iron grate with fleur-de-lis tips, the jukebox containing only local jazz and blues. Even the speakers in the corners crackled and fizzed like a record player, a far cry from the crisp electronic thrum pumping through the clubs up on Bourbon. They always left without purchasing drinks, naturally, but if Bobby was lucky, one of the parents might ask to buy a Tommy Rouge’s tee shirt with his father’s mantra Unlike lovers, a place cain’t never leave ya to commemorate the trip.

“I love blondes,” the guy says again. His words have become oil slicks inside his mouth getting worse with every sip.

“I’m a blonde, my mother is blonde,” the woman says. She uncrosses her legs, and re-crosses to the other side. She pushes the man’s chest when he temporarily looks away.

“Sounds like I’d like your mother, too,” the man says.

“Now that’s something you shouldn’t say,” the woman says, and pouts. She quickly laughs to prove she’s not actually upset. The man puts his hand back on the woman’s exposed thigh and leans forward like he has a secret.

“I’m old enough to be your father,” he says, and they both howl with delight.

Bobby’s insides clench. This same man has spent too many nights hunched over the bar weeping over an estranged daughter he never sees. This conquest toward a younger woman feels compensatory, feels like some Freudian mishap waiting to happen. But he also knows they’re both adults, and pain is pain, and comfort is comfort.

The jukebox kicks on the Preservation Hall Jazz Band’s rendition of When the Saints Go Marching In and the woman stands up. She swings her hips and shoulders back and forth in opposite directions. The man stands and does a stumbling two-step. Bobby taps his foot remembering every reason he hasn’t left, how the city lives in his DNA, why he’s a lifer. In that moment, all three are connected to each other under the neon glow of pink and purple and green in the sweat-filled momentum of a shared experienced.

The man turns in a circle wagging his finger in the air. The woman turns around and shakes her rear pulling the dress taught against her backside. Bobby slaps the countertop with finger-drums. He thinks about stepping out for a smoke, but then thinks no, not with customers inside.

The woman sits down still bopping with her shoulders. She sips from her glass and winces at the burn. The man sits down on his stool and rubs his eyes cracking a joke about the spins.

“What’s the difference between an alcoholic, and someone from New Orleans?” he asks.

“Tell me, what is the difference between an alcoholic and someone from New Orleans,” the woman says, flipping frizzy, untamed hair out of her face.

“An alcoholic needs a drink,” the man says, and claps his callused hands to the rhythm of the song. “Someone from New Orleans already has one.”

Bobby laughs. It’s one of his favorites, no matter how many times he’s heard it. They wouldn’t get it in the Midwest, he thinks, or in New York City. He hears his father’s voice barking deep in a memory, something about booze revealing the face of God, of the women who come and go, come when they want something, and go when they get it. Bobby wonders about his own mother, who she is, if she’s still alive, why she never went looking for him.

“This is my first time in this city,” the woman says, leaning forward over the bar.

“Won’t be the last,” the man says.

“There’s a first and last time for everything,” the woman says. Bobby thinks she’s still trying to flirt, but something about her words ring truer than true.

“What brings you to the city?” Bobby asks, inserting himself into the conversation. He knows this is a bartending faux pas, a gamble, an invasion of privacy, but he’s been at this long enough to know when to listen to his gut. He’s used the same distributors for thirty years—the same trusted people his father had contracts with, though most have since retired and sold off their shares—even when the young guns sidled in with promises of better variety for a fraction of the cost. He sunk money into a sound system, which more-or-less paid off, chose the bar over family to remain in the only city he ever loved, has chosen to let his son live his own life, make his own decisions like a real adult living in the real world. He tells himself he’s made the right choice, that he’s surrounded by people who love him, that he’s never really alone. Looking at this man and woman, something isn’t adding up.

“Came here to find my biological father,” the woman says. “Hired a P.I., got as far as the city, couldn’t bring myself to look at the name or actual address.” She goes stiff after an evening of expressive motion. Bobby looks at the man’s shining head, the small strands crossing the scalp, into his swimming, hungry eyes.

The jukebox clicks off and it’s silent, save for the omniscient buzz of the neon lights and the whoosh of the lazy, low-hanging ceiling fans.

“Daddy issues,” the man says. He smiles and licks his lips. His eyes are almost fully closed. “Baby, I ain’t ever been a man to back down from a challenge.”

“Let’s call separate cabs,” Bobby says, and picks up the cordless phone charging next to the framed liquor license at the end of the bar. The woman waves him away, drops three crumpled twenties onto the counter, and pulls the man from the stool onto clumsy feet. She ducks under his arm and holds him steady, both of them laughing as they tromp toward the door. They push open and step onto the dark of Magazine Street, turn left, and are gone.

Alone in his bar, Bobby checks his watch and considers calling it an early night. He clicks off the neon lights and feels the room say goodbye.

Bobby locks the doors and pours himself a whiskey neat. He lights a smoke, flips off the rest of the downstairs lights and walks to the second story, sits on the corner of the used-up pool table, and watches the pinball machines flash the high scores with the initials of his son.

“Could be worse,” he says, and takes a long, slow sip until it is gone. He balances the half-smoked cigarette on the edge of pool table as the embers creep toward the sticky wood, then walks downstairs and out the delivery door. He wonders if his son will answer this hour, and what the cost of a small place might run in the big city.

Truth and Toe Shoes

Melissa Ridley Elmes

They say there is a time for everything, and the time for me to hang up on my mother this evening was 7:33 p.m.

It was my fault, this time. I shouldn’t have brought up the Kavanaugh hearings. We had spent over an hour arguing over the difference between The Truth and someone’s lived experience as truth, and no matter how many times I invoked the Wife of Bath’s “experience, though noon auctoritee” or tried to explain to her the fundamental concepts of factual relativity, model-dependent realism, or how lived experiences of trauma and privilege affect human understanding of “truth” and “fact,” she wouldn’t budge. It was when she started in on how since Christine Ford did not have any “facts” her story was a lie, and how poor Brett Kavanaugh had been dragged through the mud for nothing because she was used by the liberal media, that I finally snapped.

“Yeah? Well THE truth is that you are a judgy Fox News-swilling bitch, and MY truth is that I’m fucking sick of it! Call me when you decide to be a decent human being instead of a demonic force of evil. Also, your daughter-in-law says “hi,” not that you care!”

I hit the red phone button to hang up on the call with all of the force my index finger could muster. For the thousandth time in my adult life, I wished for one of those phones you see in old films and television shows, the sort that you could slam into its cradle with a satisfying, solid plastic thwunck! that reverberated with a follow-up metallic-sounding thwingthwingthwing that might have come from the ringer or from the electronic components inside, but definitely signaled the end of a call much more satisfactorily than a sore fingertip did. With an inarticulate growl of frustration, I flopped my head onto the back of the couch and closed my eyes, rubbing my temples.

A noise alerted me that I was no longer alone. Opening my eyes, I saw Desiree’s head pop into view at the doorway dividing the common space of our apartment from the bedroom. “You done now?”

I nodded. “And I don’t have to call her again until Christmas. At least there’s that.”

She looked at me sympathetically, then walked across the room and sat down next to me on the couch, drawing my head to her shoulder. I sat there for a moment, taking in her warm, solid strength. Then I let out a shuddering sigh.

“How can anyone be so—wrong?”

“I know.”

“I mean, she just has no understanding at all! None! And she doesn’t even care! She’s happy to be so ignorant! She rolls around in her ignorance like a pig in shit!”

“I know.”

“She’s all, ‘oh, I’m just a small-town Idaho girl, I don’t know anything, I never went to college, I think those liberal professors are trying to brainwash our youth, only Republicans are right about anything, women who come forward like that with sexual assault charges years after the fact are just liars trying to ruin those poor men’s lives.’” I let out another wordless howl of frustration.

“Hey.” Desiree pulled my head off of her shoulder and looked me in the eye. “Hey. Stop this. It won’t do any good, and you know it. She is who she is. You are who you are. You can’t change her, and she surely can’t change you. But you also can’t let her destroy you every time you talk on the phone. Look, she is a thousand miles away,  fifteen-hundred miles away. You don’t have to do this. Don’t beat yourself up for her.”

I sighed gratefully and sank my head back down on her shoulder. “Thank you.”

“No problem.” She stroked my hair gently with one beautiful hand, her other arm wrapped firmly around my shoulders, hand tucking in just where my breast met my armpit, fingers lightly resting on the gentle swell. I wrapped my arms around my middle and huddled into the curve of her side. We sat like that for a while. One of my favorite things about my wife is her ability to sit perfectly still, to be alone or together without a word, sometimes for hours, a silence more intimate than any conversation could ever be.

In the security of her embrace, with no need to speak, I let my eyes roam around the room, reminding myself of my own reality, my own truth, so far from the lonely and painful one  I’d fled from when I left home for college. The first thing Des had done when we moved into this apartment, shortly before our wedding almost three years prior, was head to Home Depot and buy a hundred- and fifty-dollars’ worth of paint. But the deposit! I protested. She just laughed: “Girl, we go and paint them right back again! But if we’re going to live here, we need it to be our space, not this generic white space. I am not a White Space kind of woman.”

I had never in my life painted the walls of my bedroom, much less an entire apartment. My parents wouldn’t have stood for it. They liked a clean, white wall with minimal decor, a holdover from my Navy father’s constantly being redeployed and thus, our constantly having to move, necessitating the prevention of wall damage that had to be dealt with in order not to lose rental deposits. Des, on the other hand, had never met a space she couldn’t or wouldn’t decorate. Her parents had lived in the same house for fifty years, she had carte blanche to decorate her room her way, and I loved looking at photos of her bedroom in all its stages: cotton-candy pink when she was five; a rich purple when she was eleven; sunny yellow, a strange pinkish-red with a black accent wall, and then teal, as she progressed through her teens. I was wildly jealous of her freedom to create a space that was entirely hers.

She dangled that carrot in front of me that afternoon at Home Depot: “Come on, Abbie, now’s your chance. Whatever wall color you want. I will live with whatever you pick, except white. Go for it!” Hesitantly, I pointed. She cackled with glee: “Yass, Girl! I knew you had it in you!”

The color I had selected for the common space of our apartment was a warm terra cotta that changed tone throughout the day with the pattern of the sun: bright, rich orange in the early morning, melting to a comfortable orangey-brown in the mid-afternoon, and then fading further into a gentle brown-orange in the evening. We paired it with a cream trim, and I thrilled at how these choices complemented the heart pine color of the wooden floor. The couch and loveseat were a rich, dark brown leather with blue and cream-colored accent pillows, and we had added a blue-and-cream area rug and blue curtains. Desiree’s friends’ art hung on the walls, and our photographs—of college, of trips, of our wedding, of just us—mingled companionably with my books and her signed toe shoes on the wall of built-in shelves to one side of the room. On the other side of the room, I looked through the window at the night sky—we were lucky to be on the unimpeded side of the apartment building, and five floors up. A bright harvest moon peeked in through the glass at us, observing, reminding: See? Everything actually is okay.

I broke the silence when I was ready. “Des?”

“Hmmn?”

“She’s never even met you.”

“Umm-hmmn.” I could feel her nod.

“She’s never seen this apartment.”

Desiree nodded again and pulled me closer into her warm.

“How is that loving your child? How does she pretend to herself she cares about me? She doesn’t know anything! She doesn’t know!”

I felt her shrug. “Abbie, you’re doing it again.”

I nodded, and felt the tears come. “I’m sorry.”

“No need to apologize. I know it hurts.”

The tears slipped down my cheeks and I let them and so did she. It was our way. Desiree was a big believer that you felt your feelings, and you released them. Like a thousand other things she brought into my life, this post-phone call ritual enabled me to feel sane, to feel like I wasn’t broken, to feel like I did have a place in this world.

When this wave of feelings subsided a bit and the tears stopped leaking from my eyes, I took a deep breath. Desiree, feeling the muscles in my body preparing to move, released me on cue. I shifted my position, so I was looking at her, and pulled one of the pillows into my stomach, hugging it against the hollow ache that replaced her arms around me.

“I love you,” I said, my voice small in the giant space between us.

Her warm, sad eyes softened. “I know. I love you, too.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know.”

She let me look at her, with a dancer’s understanding of audience admiration, the need humans have to gaze at the beautiful thing in front of us, to take it all in. Even off-stage, even in the security of home, her poise was innate, her confidence breathtaking. I traced her face with my eyes—the long, angular cheeks, the high cheekbones, the wide forehead, down between the almond-shaped, golden-flecked amber eyes, the impertinent slope of her nose with its upturned tip, the freckle next to the wide and generous mouth with its slightly off-center smirk, always just a second away from flashing a toothy grin. My eyes raised back to meet hers. Only then, when she saw I was done, when she saw I was full, did she speak.

“Do you want to know The Truth?”

I swallowed and nodded.

“The Truth is, you are the thing I love most in this world, and My Truth is, I miss you and I want you back.”

I sobbed. “Oh, God. Oh, God.”

She reached for me again, pulling me in to her, my head on the pillow between us. Cradled across her lap, I gave voice to grief and pain and frustration, a torrential outpouring of the feelings that threatened to destroy everything, the feelings I couldn’t hold in and couldn’t let go of and couldn’t share. I lost myself in my senseless, wordless primal response. I don’t know how long it lasted—an hour? Two hours? More?

When I came to my senses again, I felt Desiree’s tears dripping onto my bowed head. I wiped my snotty nose onto the pillow, leaving a streak of slime, and sat up to look at her. Her tear-stained face was pale, lined with grief—for herself, for me. She wiped the remaining wetness from her cheeks and looked at me, waiting for me with her infinite patience and grace.

“I have to tell someone,” I said finally.

She nodded.

“But, I – but, I – but—”

“Sssh.” She held a finger to my lips, demanding I look at her. “You know what happened. I know what happened.”

“You weren’t there.”

“I don’t have to have been there. I saw you after. I know you. I believe you.”

“They won’t believe me.”

“We’ll make them.”

“But it’s been too long.”

“No.”

“They’ll say I’m just trying to ruin his life. Or that it couldn’t happen because I’m a lesbian.”

“No.”

“They’ll ask me why I didn’t report it right away.”

“And you’ll tell them why. You’ll tell them it’s because you were afraid no one would believe you, because you’re afraid everyone will judge you the way your mother judges you, because this world, this society, is so damned unfair to us. Because you had just found the life you wanted and you were terrified it would be taken away from you.”

The tears came dangerously close to the surface again. “It was.”

She shook her head. “No.”

I looked to the window, gazing past the glass pane at the world and considering all of the pains and hopes and desires it contained. Desiree stared at the bookshelf that held our shared life in suspension. I joined her eventually, looking over the photos, the books, the toe shoes. Des had a tradition of displaying the final pair of shoes she wore on stage from each ballet she was in. There were five new pairs since the last phone call to my mother, the last time I was here, the last time my need for Desiree’s supporting presence outweighed my inability to forgive myself for being hurt and hurting in return. Five productions; five, six-week preparations and eighteen performances, five finales. Almost another year. I let my eyes linger on the books, the ones I hadn’t taken with me, the place-markers for my return, when I was ready to return.

Desiree noted the direction of my gaze. “What are you teaching next semester?”

“Intro to Gender Studies. Advanced Research Methods. An independent study.”

“And then?”

“A sabbatical. I’ll be working on my book.”

She unfolded her long, slender body from the couch and walked over to the window, looking out at the moon. Impulsively, I stood to join her, wrapping my arms around her, drawn to her in the indescribable way I had always been drawn to her. She reached up and cupped my face with one hand, the other curling over my arms.

“Can you stay, this time?” She asked finally.

I shook my head, tears welling in my eyes again. “No. not yet.”

After a beat, I felt the tension in her body as she took a deep breath. “Will you ever?”

She wasn’t asking me if I would ever stay. She was asking me if I would ever tell. If I would ever let go of the things that stood between us. I wanted to say “yes.” I wanted to promise her that I’d go to the police tomorrow to file a report, that I’d call my mother and tell her the truth, that I’d been raped, by that neighbor’s boy, that nice, wealthy Christian conservative boy she hoped I’d end up with, that he’d done it after I had married my wife, after I had moved away, after I had thought I’d put that world and its people behind me, that the entire time, he’d gloated: “Think you’re a lesbian? You don’t seem so gay to me right now! Admit it, you want this! You want dick!” That he’d laughed, and actually spit on me when he was done, and tucked his shirt back into his pants with so much smug satisfaction I wanted to kill him then and there, and gone downstairs to join the Christmas party-in-progress. That I had dragged myself into the bathroom, sore and with his sperm leaking down the insides of my legs, and washed up as best I could, and gotten into my car and driven away without speaking to anyone—to anyone—because what could I—the rebel, the liberal, the lesbian—say, that any of them would believe? That I’d driven the two days back to this apartment with the stink of him still on me, and stumbled in, terrifying Des, who wasn’t expecting me home for another three days. That she had begged me to go to the hospital, to call the police, but I had refused, believing I had already waited too long, that no one would believe me, that I had fucked everything up, like I always did, like my mother expected of me. That everything since then had been wrong—except for her.

“We only had a year, here.” I said finally. “Just one year.”

“We have as many years here as you want. I’m not going anywhere. You can come back, you can stay, I’m here for you, this is here for you.”

“Not until I tell.”

“You will. When you can.”

I closed my eyes, willing the violent memories away, willing myself back into the present, to my lived experience, to the reality of this woman I love and who loves me so wisely and so well. Standing there in the light of the moon, in the space we carved out for us, in the truth we made that was more true than anything in my old life, I thought again, for the hundredth time, the thousandth time, maybe I can tell.

Creative Nonfiction

A Thief is Born

Michael DuBon

Dad comes back after cheating on Mom because there’s no other way for our family to survive. Mom can’t make it with kids on her own. And so my parents are back at work together folding towels, washing plates, breaking up fights, and cleaning bathrooms at the Cal-Neva casino in Lake Tahoe, NV, while my cousin Bianca and I are left with my twelve-year-old sister Michelle or left to find ways to entertain ourselves in and around our Incline Village apartments.

Bianca, small and round and brown like me, has also grown a want for want. We might have home-cooked food and a roof, but we want more. She is eight, I am seven, and so she is my mentor.

I have never seen Bianca’s dad, and every once in a while, I wonder why he isn’t around. Much later, I will learn from my mom that Bianca’s father left her when we were both too young to remember him. Betty, Bianca’s mom, and my mom hate each other, but for now, they try to pretend they don’t because they have to live next to each other. I sense this already at a young age because Mom is always calling Betty, “Hija de la gran puta.”

But Bianca and I love each other as a brother and sister. She is my first true friend. We spin around on the living room carpet until we see it become a gigantic blonde cookie beneath our feet. We take creamers from the Raley’s to pour in a glass. We rent a Super Nintendo cartridge for $1 at the Video Maniacs and play it all day on the console in the store. She teaches me how to buy pizza from the adjoining Café. And then she teaches me how to steal; how to keep my hands innocuous and out of pockets; how to pretend to browse items; how to assess a situation.

Bianca and I walk from our apartment to the Village Market, a tiny grocery store. Our feet make tiny wet sounds upon the small puddles and brown snow on the mostly clear path. Large piles of snow lie pushed to the side, and we stand so small; it feels like we stroll through tunnels of ice and snow. The winter sun soaks into our dark hair. The snowcapped pine trees bristle with the wind and drop long, sharp icicles.

We stop at the entrance to the small shopping center. There’s the video store Dad takes me to where he rents me He-Man tapes. There’s the comic shop Dad takes me to where I might get a cheap X-Men comic. There’s the pet shop Dad takes me to just to look at cute animals and my favorites, the kitties. Bianca and I always window-shop as we walk by.

We stop at the stairs that descend to the lower levels of shops. Our breath puffs fill the air between us. From her jacket pocket, Bianca produces tough little green, blue, and chrome circles of plastic and cardboard: Pogs. The biggest, heaviest, chromiest one is called a slammer, she tells me. She hands it to me. Its heft fills me with importance.

“That’s so cool your mom got those for you, Bianca! You’re lucky!”

 “My mom didn’t get them for me.”

“How did you get them then? You don’t have money.”

“You don’t need money how I got them, Michael.”

My eyes audibly widen, like those old Tom and Jerry cartoons we watch when there’s nothing else on TV. This is what I have been dreaming of for years, a method through which you don’t have to pay for anything, and a place where you can have whatever you want—as much—no, more—than the fair-skinned kids.

“How?!”

“Come with me. I’ll show you.”

We stand in the toy-knick-knack-aisle of the market. The soft rock that I do not know yet is soft rock plays in the background: “I was born in a small town…” The natural blue light fills the store through its front windows. Adult customers tower above us, their legs like stilts. Their shoes shuffle by. The chatter of the market rages on, the front door chimes, the registers continually beep. The smells of the bakery bread, the misty produce section, and the people all blend together.

“So here’s what you do,” Bianca says. She looks up at the camera that’s right above the aisle. I follow her gaze.

“Those round black things—” She smacks my arm down. “Don’t point at them, tonto! Those black things are cameras.”

She takes a tray-like package of pogs off the slim metal merchandise pole.

“Come over here. We have to go to a different aisle, where there’s no black thing.”

She scans the aisles and finds the least populated one without a camera.

“How do we get it for free, though, Bianca? Tell me already. I don’t get it. What do the cameras matter?”

She moves close to me, so she doesn’t have to talk loudly. “Just wait, Michael, jeez. And be quiet! You have to wait for the right time for this when no one else is around.”

“Why?”

“Just wait—okay see? No one is here, and now I can show you.” She extends the side of her poofy coat with one arm and envelops the package. With her free hand, she tears the cardboard backing carefully from one corner of the pog pack and lets the pogs spill into her inner jacket pocket. Finally, she hides the spent evidence under the aisle’s racks.

The brisk air outside the sliding double doors feels like a breath of reality. Bianca’s very steps sound confidant, and I half-jog behind like a doggy.

“And so you have to take the package off because the codes on the back set off the machines.”

“But Bianca,” I whisper in a not whisper. “That’s stealing.” I expect that saying the words will make Bianca quit her brisk pace, so we can stand and talk about this. But she keeps on walking, and I keep on trailing.

“So?”

“Well, so my mommy and daddy said that was bad.”

“So?”

 “Look, didn’t you want some pogs? These are for you.”

“What? Those ones are for me?!”

“Yeah, they’re for you, dummy.”

“Yay!”

“Yeah, yay. So see, you know my mom and your mom and dad don’t have money. So if you want something, you need to get it yourself.”

She makes it look easy. And it is.

I can’t swim. I can’t ride a bike. I can’t read. But I can soon steal all on my own. I do just as Bianca has taught me: checking for cameras, casually looking up, looking around, and scoping out the joint; feeling for the weakest corner of the packaging and tearing quickly and quietly; hiding the empty packages; stashing the merchandise in my underwear or pockets and positioning the items so they don’t look odd in my pants. I decide to use my backpack on my own. 

I now have some measure of control. Even the Anglo kids with the most opulent snacks envy the sheer variety of snacks I possess, everything from Hostess cakes to those cursed Fruit Roll-Ups. And I have my snacks for lunch too. I will top your rice cake for a chocolate rice cake, and mine is free and all mine. I’m the snack king. I’m the emperor of treats. Yo soy el rey del sabroso. And I am no benevolent ruler; whenever Becky or David ask to share some of my snacks, never once having offered me any of theirs, I take pleasure in lying, saying, “Sorry, I only have a little bit,” just like they have said to me so many times before.

I am making a difference in my world.

One spring morning before I leave the apartment for Mrs. Mace’s first-grade class, I look into my horde, my backpack, and I see I’m out of snacks. There’s not even any unfrozen Otter Pop juice. The rain pours outside. The thunder crashes. The pine trees smell so deliciously of pine and sap and dirt and rain. I want some Quaker Oats s’mores granola bars, and I will have them. I don my Power Rangers raincoat and my Power Ranger’s Velcro shoes. I splash through shallow puddles along the way. But one is too deep, making half my sock wet and gross.

I return to my usual haunt, where all this theft began, The Village Market. Inside the double doors, I survey all that I may own before me. The familiar beeps from the checkout counter reassure me that I don’t need those beeps to come and go as I please. Those sensors by the front door are nothing to me. The adults are too self-involved to notice me when I’m careful.

I know what I want for right now. I can get the rest after school.

I have improved upon Bianca’s methods. First, my backpack is an even better tool than pockets—you can fit so much more. Second, since I do this so much more than Bianca now, I check for cameras, and I check for people much more efficiently; I have the whole grid of the store and the position of each camera memorized. Third, I’m just better. I’m the best at stealing.

I unzip my backpack. Sometimes the zipper sounds deliciously loud, like a mouth that has waited long to open with a sigh. The boxes sigh similar groans when I tear their cardboard strips off. The granola bars crinkle to the floor of my bag.

I feel the thrill of anxiety, and I picture  big brown moths tickling the walls of my stomach with their broad wings. I walk towards the front aisle of the store, my throat ever-drying. I have to gulp but can’t. My steps feel heavy. But this dangerous flutter is familiar, a constant companion through all my stealing experience. I see the double doors. I’m going to step out and feel the cold air on my face and the puddled water underneath my feet. I’m going to go snack loudly in class. I’m going to get away.

I feel a hand on my shoulder.

“Hello there. My name is Charlie. You’re coming with me, Michael.” We walk to his manager’s office in the back of the store.

Immediately I have some vague memory about this brown-mustached man. But I don’t know who he is. I can’t believe I’ve been caught.

“I’m really disappointed in you, Michael.” His blue eyes look tired like my parents’ eyes look tired. He takes the granola bars out of my backpack and puts them on his metal desk. He grabs his coat off the rack and makes sure my jacket is zipped up.

He takes me by the hand. We walk outside, back into the reality of the rain. Car lights reflect off the oil-rainbow puddles. I don’t know where we’re going.

 “You stole those granola bars,” Charlie says.

“Yes,” I say. Maybe starting with the truth will lead me to a day-saving lie.

“Why?”

Dang. He’s got me already.

“I don’t know,” I reply after a long silence.

But that is only half true. I kind of do know. I know that I was hungry. I know that that hunger made me more hungry. I know that I wasn’t going to stop until I was full. I feel full now, with guilt. I’m growing sick with it. The heavy raindrops on my raincoat hood each sound like the taut snap of a belt strap.

Still, I’m glad it’s rainy. The racket of fat rain means we don’t have to talk as much.

I see my playground. He’s taking me to Incline Elementary, my school, just around the corner. I imagine waiting in the office with Charlie, the rectangle-rimmed glasses of the receptionist shining under the fluorescent lights while she calls my parents. I need to pee.

We stop suddenly. We stand on the sidewalk outside the playground fence.

“Michael, I know your dad. I’m going to talk to him. You tell him he needs to come talk to me. You have to. Now go to school.”

 He lets go of my hand, and I run to school.

Mrs. Mace, my first-grade teacher, always looks at me funny or doesn’t look at me at all. When it was my turn to be “Child of the Week,” where we get special attention and prizes, Mrs. Mace pretended I wasn’t there.

“Is Michael here?” She asked among the uncaring din of children.

“I’m right here, Mrs. Mace!” I shouted from behind her.

“I guess Michael isn’t here. Chris, you’ll be child of the week again this week. Okay?”

I turned quiet. I thought maybe she made a mistake, even though it didn’t feel like a mistake. And then I knew I would never be the child of the week.

Mrs. Mace doesn’t look at me any more funny than usual when I walk into class thirty minutes late. She just lets me go and tells me what to do and what all the other students are practicing; they’re reading a list of words for a spelling and reading test. She hands me the list of words like apple and book. At least I know the alphabet now because of the alphabet song, but these words are too hard for me, and I can’t even worry about that because I’m in so much trouble. I’m dead. Plus I have no granola bars. Plus I’m going to get the belt. Plus Mommy is going to be mad and cry. Plus Daddy is going to be sad and yell.

My head hangs low on the walk home to our apartment across the street from school. I’m so scared. This is scarier than Freddy and Chucky and the rest. This time I’m the monster that’s done the bad thing. I’m the one with the dark and terrible secret. I’m the one who hurts indiscriminately. I’m the one no can love.

Mommy’s dark eyes light up when she turns and sees me close the door. She got off work early because she didn’t feel good, she says. She smiles her beautiful smile that spreads far out so you can see her teeth and part of her gums.

“Mommy, I have something to tell you.” The rain drips off of me.

“¿What, mijo?” She must see how bad I look. Tired. Guilty. Sad.

“I um.”

“¿Michael, qué? Tell me.”

“Um.” The kitchen smells of spice and bouillon, and it’s too strong, and my nose doesn’t like it.

“Michael.” She grabs me by the shoulders. “Please tell me.”

“You know Charlie at the store?”

She thinks for one moment. “Sí. What about him? What about Charlie?”

“He caught me stealing today, and he told me he needs to talk to you and Daddy.” My tears overtake the rain on my jacket, and I bawl.

“Ay, Michael.” Mommy says. She’s choked up.

“¿Por qué? ¿Pero por qué?”

“I don’t know!” I sob more, and I bury my face in my hands. The steaming bean pot whistles.

“Are you going to hit me?”

“No.”

“Is Daddy going to hit me?”

“Probablemente, Mikey.”

I bawl more. Mommy takes me in her arms.

Dad does hit me with the belt after Mom tells him. I hear the belt cut the air before the first blow lands, and he tells me “¡Eso! ¡No! ¡Se! ¡Hace!” Each word is punctuated by the sting and pain of each of the whips to my butt. And then Dad, exhausted, drinks two shots of whiskey and watches fútbol. I am so bad. I have made him more tired. It stings.

The next day Dad and I go get an ice cream at 7-Eleven. My favorite is It’s-It, a big chocolate-covered cookie ice-cream sandwich.

“Do you see why stealing is bad, mijo?” He walks with his strong hand over my little one. “You have to work for what you get in this life. Nothing is free. Mommy and me work all the time. And we want stuff too.” He laughs. He smiles. I see his big white teeth and don’t see his missing front tooth. “It’s not just you who wants stuff. And I wish I could give you everything you wanted.” I look up at him. “But you can’t get everything you want, and you have to work for everything you get. Do you understand?” His brow furrows.

“Yes, Daddy.” I think I do, but do I? I will stop stealing for now only because my want to be good for them currently outweighs my want for everything else.

 Now, though, this beast of want lives inside of me. I want the big toys, like Power Wheels. I want never-ending It’s-It’s. I want every cartoon on VHS from He-Man to Lion King in my own personal media library. My parent’s love alone is no longer enough.

We walk home together. Dad holds my hand and tries to pull me up every time I slip on the ice.

B.G.S.

James Giffin

I’ll be homeless again, and soon, but I don’t bite my nails; I stay in my underwear, tap-tapping cigarette ash into one of the open bottles within arm’s reach.

In my sticky residential hotel this afternoon, it feels like someone cracked a frying pan over my head. My heartbeat pulses loudly, deep within my temples. Everything from my throat to my eyes is dry and I might be having an arrythmia, a jitterbug seizure, some sort of an attack.

The goal, of course, is to return to the prior state of intoxication as quickly as possible. Arrangements must be made regarding money, where to get it, and who to give it to.

In the end, I always must brave the wilderness. I sweep up yesterday’s clothes from the floor: a musty T-shirt with its crew neck stretched out, the jeans I’ve been wearing for a week, socks stiff from foot sweat and a little blood. The corners of my feet are smashed up so that toenails slice into their neighbors, and my shoes are worn thin around the ball of my foot, heel, and big toe.

My amygdala is boiling all the way to the liquor store, down impossible Market Street and across another.  I don’t want to think about what I look like: dripping sweat, knotted up and skittish as I mutter my requirements over the tall counter. The forced contact with the liquor store man is grinding. Not only is he a live person with judgements, but he happens to be beautiful, which makes his judgements all the more cutting. He takes a break from his phone conversation to hand me my two quarters. “Thanks, boss,” he says.

I run through red lights to get back inside the hotel as fast as possible. I am naked and must hide my body. I don’t trip, though I’m damn near blind, eyes pink and puffy from overexertion. I wonder if the liquor store guy is making jokes about me on the phone when I go in there. Like, Whoa! What happened to this guy? except in Arabic. He probably doesn’t even remember me by now, though; along with the homeless and decrepit, I have apparently become invisible. People only see what they want to see.

Hot water spewing from the tap starts to fog up the chipped mirror above the sink, distorting my reflection. The steam curls like smoke, an unfurling mushroom thinning as it rises. My used Styrofoam cup spits up overflow from too much pressure before I jam the knob back off. I shake out a congealed glob of crystals from a gunky container of Folger’s instant coffee and stir the hot liquid with my finger. I’m ready to drink now. With a swift crack, the plastic bottle of Taaka opens. I take back-to-back swallows using the coffee for chasing the vodka’s foul, unfiltered flavor away.

Breaths finally stop catching in my chest and come easier. I lean back in bed, able to think for the first time today.

I’ll have to drop some stuff off at my storage unit in the morning before I check out. The lighter I am on my feet, the better.

* * *

Evening.

I’ve just arrived at a creaky, classic three-bedroom flat in the Mission, and, after I caught him snorting some white powder, I’ve discovered someone who might like to party the way I do. “It’s only Neurontin,” he says apologetically.

“That’s interesting,” I say, producing a bottle of Dexedrine from my jacket’s inside pocket and putting it out on the table.

He says, “I’m Sean.” Sean snorts back a line after carefully shaping it with a BevMo membership card. “But you won’t remember that.” Snort. “Let’s be honest, you’re going to wake up in the morning and if someone asked you, you’d be like, ‘Who the fuck is Sean?’” He says it’s easier to remember him by his nickname. “My name’s Sean, I’m tall, and like in-your-face gay—” I observe his stretch-fit faded black jeans, torn sleeveless shirt headlining some forgotten indie glam rocker, and wiry handlebar mustache. This is Big Gay Sean. “So everyone just calls me that, it’s easier to remember.” He gets out his cellphone. “Girl, what’s your number?”

I was raised in a moderately strict household which cherished literal and metaphorical silence, and I believe this is why I now treat everything as if I might break it. Sometimes I can feel so deprived of sizzle that I overcorrect and end up swallowing firecrackers, and Big Gay Sean—B.G.S.—fizzes with such pop and spark that when I’m around him, it’s like being electrocuted with wonder. Those who are new to his gemmy brilliance, not yet acclimated to such a continual output of sass, snap into fits. He’s the one-man fag show of the evening. A burst of silliness and pep to awaken the excitable child within, he electrifies each room he twirls into with booming, blinding spectacle. Like an emcee chauffeuring those he encounters through his own odd world. All the celebrities rolled into one and showered with the strobe of paparazzi sensationalism. So glamorous. He glitters in an oddball, slapstick, endearing way so that my eyes are superglued to him, and I’m completely enchanted. I’m in a star-struck wonderland.

B.G.S. is the type who pretends to trip on the sidewalk and break his back, all hoping for a pop of Dilaudid in the emergency room. The way General Hospital works, he tells me, is they send electronic prescriptions directly to the in-house pharmacy on the first floor. It feels underground, a bunker in the thick of the building, past the reception area and information kiosks. Technicians point to blank lines on perforated carbon triplicate forms: sign here and here. “Easy,” he says to me on the phone after being discharged. Except that this go-around he suspects his records—tucked away electronically somewhere in a database that’s probably easy to hack into and full of misdiagnoses—are starting to overshadow his credibility. “This little whore in her little white coat handed me fifteen fucking Vicodin pills,” he says. “Not Percocet. Not morphine or fentanyl. Vicodin.”

For a whole day he’s loudly absent. It’s ten-thirty in the morning when he wakes me up with a phone call asking for money to pay for the refill. I have to go inside a Wells Fargo so I can withdraw exactly eleven-something dollars, whatever I can without going negative, and for that he slides me a few of the pills. I don’t feel dogshit from three Vicodin, but it’s not like I have anything on my calendar. Plus, hanging out with my new friend is like a thrill ride or a scary movie; I’ve got the flutters from not knowing what’s about to happen.

“Have you had to sleep on the sidewalk yet?” he asks me, right after inviting me to a sex party at the Armory. (“Best thing is, you don’t have to have sex with anyone you don’t want to!”) I tell him I haven’t yet city-camped, haven’t yet arranged umbrellas and shopping carts for optimal protection, or splurged on a tent from a sporting goods store on a wet first of the month. I’ve never stayed in shelters either. I can fight off biting predators in the park and chatter through the freeze, but scuttling in line to reserve an infested bed every night? I’d rather reach for my rattling pill vial, slap some more amphetamines into my mouth, and prowl the shit-smeared streets until dawn, finally crashing on some grass under the crisping sun. B.G.S. agrees that this nocturnal routine is depleting, a daily burden producing bloodied feet and anorexia-thin limbs. It’s difficult to stay bathed and dressed in clean clothes while running around meeting people on their schedule all the time. I feel deprived of my human rights without a shower, forced to live in my own repulsive filth.

“Hey, girl,” he whispers between cigarette puffs. “I just got a badass idea.” His eyes are strained and bloodshot as he details the ideal scenario: the two of us teaming up to boost our chances of landing a room with the luxury of keys. The mere idea makes us giddy. With the last of our G.A. money, we begin to brainstorm ideas over cocktails in the Castro (“cocks” is what B.G.S. calls them) and we have plenty. In fact, we drink such dangerous amounts of alcohol that our continued breathing would baffle scientists. Screwdrivers and Bloody Marys for breakfast and boozy happy hour bars by noon or one or two, getting eighty-sixed, progressing to whole bottles before nightfall. I don’t even get hangovers anymore. Or maybe I do, but they’ve become so normal that I can’t tell if I’m in pain or not.

Between sips, B.G.S. introduces me around to dozens of his friends. That’s what he calls them. It doesn’t matter where we go or what part of the city, they’re everywhere, and something about this makes me slightly suspicious. Time slips past us languidly in the sweet, sticky summer steam. We get stuck in an Inner Mission/Mission Dolores/Upper Market constellation of venues, Muni stops, apartments defined by their rent and square footage, convenience stores lit up with yellow neon signs for beer, and dive bars that open at six a.m.

One of these blessed early bird watering holes, The Mix, has a back patio for smoking cigarettes. I’m introduced to a highly effeminate Asian person named Alex, who confuses androgyny with fashion. Under a tilted beach umbrella, seated on a stool circling the center table’s ashtray, he wears an Armani Exchange T-shirt and black Calvin Klein jeans frayed at the knee. Throughout our entire first conversation, I hear nothing he says; I am considering his sex. I determine it to be female but switch back to male pronouns when I notice B.G.S. is using them.

Alex is asking if anyone knows of any housing opportunities. He’s got a wad of papers listing different low-income apartment application sites, words printed in bold, deadlines in UPPERCASE letters, but I never get a chance to look through them. B.G.S. doesn’t seem too interested, and the Long Islands keep arriving, courtesy of the man in the group wearing too much concealer and winking at me like he has something in his eye. B.G.S. belittles Alex’s opinions, refuses to agree with him on anything, and rolls his eyes when Alex compliments his shirt, but later whispers in my ear, “How great would it be to look down and see your dick sliding in and out of those tiny butt cheeks?”

Unfortunately for the both of us, Alex is more interested in me. I let him give me a blowjob or two, only because I figure one of us should be nice to him. He isn’t actually homeless, though he is in a hurry to leave the gloomy basement of his homophobic parents’ house in Ingleside. He doesn’t like me to stay there with him. We’re both embarrassed by our situations, but we use each other for what we each require, and it doesn’t feel any more unethical than in any of my other friendships. His floor of the house is littered with unopened bottles of Kaletra, an HIV medication, and when I ask why he doesn’t take it, he recedes into himself reflexively like a turtle. He crushes his eyelids together, shoulders rolling, and starts to hiccup little silent sobs. He goes someplace most do not know exists, a place where I’ve endlessly waited on grim iron platforms for safety-bound trains which never arrive. I’m cross-legged on the edge of his bed, with my limp arm latched to his shoulder, saying, “It’s okay, man. It’ll be all right. It’s okay. Everything’s going to be fine,” because sometimes there’s nothing left to do but lie. I don’t exactly have the warmest feelings for Alex, but when I think about how B.G.S. and I made fun of him behind his back, I feel like I have a parasite in my guts. He tosses up junk from the floor searching for something to write on. Finding a piece of graph paper, he writes one large Chinese character on it with a Sharpie and folds it into my hand. I leave in the morning to meet B.G.S. at the park, knowing I’ll never hear from Alex again.

* * *

B.G.S. is flip-flopping around topless in cutoff jean shorts at Dolores Park, with each cottage cheese pock mark and inopportunely placed coil of body hair exposed to all. He’s leaping from one island of blankets to the next. We’re at the very top corner with the best view of the city, the one where all the gays hang out in speedos sipping champagne. The gays, they fake-chuckle at each other’s comments, adjusting Ray-Bans, flipping from stomach to back or up on their knees, shiny from sunscreen. “Gay beach” is what they call this part of the park, but I once heard my friend Jason say the “fruit rack” and so now that’s what I call it too. It’s where B.G.S. and I end up when it’s so sunny during these summer days. The go-go boys and spotlight nightclub dancers are practically naked while I’m dressed like it’s snowing, chugging Dewar’s from the handle. B.G.S. is strutting around and talking to random folks. What’s up dearest, how are you? I watch him forget the day of the week in a conversation and laugh it off. Some aren’t having it, but his what-you-see-is-what-you-get attitude gets him way more smiles and way more attention than I get.

“Did you say Austin?” B.G.S. is asking the group of guys sitting next to us if he overheard them correctly. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to eavesdrop, but I lived in Austin for a few years…” and suddenly everyone’s in a circle pooling booze: splashes of Bacardi Silver in plastic cups with sun-steamed bottles of Blue Moon to chase it with. He recounts war stories from the glory days, even though he is only twenty-nine (according to the occasional low whisper, he has been for years).

“Did I ever tell you about the time my hand got bit?” he says, ready to spring into a new routine. “‘By what?’” he mimics incredulously. “What do you mean, ‘By what?’ By a human, that’s by fucking what. Bitch nearly took off my thumb.” He was sucking off a straight guy, he says, and the dude started to come when his wife walked in on the scene. Face soiled, B.G.S. made a big show of sweeping everything up with his index finger and letting it all slowly dribble into his mouth. He turned to the man’s wife, who was apparently frozen. “I said, ‘Now there ain’t none left for you, bitch.’” He stood up to leave. “Then she bit me,” and he nods with wide eyes at everyone’s contorted faces. “I know, what a psycho.” I hadn’t been watching, but now I spin to look at him. My eyebrow muscles pinch, and I must appear gray because I’m about to regurgitate my lunch of alcohol.

At Dolores, we meet and fall in with a lazy crowd of fag hags and hipsters whose home base is an ex-warehouse in the Mission called The Box Factory. It’s now a residence, a kind of commune, with industrial architecture, ultra-high ceilings, and vast, open space. The master tenant holds film screenings here, with projected images lending flashes of color to the largest white wall. She also throws hyperkinetic parties with noise and alcohol and cocaine in abundance, with no nearby neighbors to disturb.

B.G.S. is just now beginning his San Francisco stage career. He’s six-foot-three, but when formulating his drag persona, he selects a blonde beehive wig that boosts him to over seven feet tall. Getting ready before a Box drag show, there will be three or four queens and me, holding their bags and wardrobe accessories, and it’s all concealer, vanity mirrors, curling irons, and gaudy shades of lipstick. We drink wine from plastic cups while B.G.S. lip-syncs Whitney Houston ballads, clutching his mascara-streaked face as the wig shifts tectonically. Headfirst into the streetlamp-illuminated rolls of fog, jewelry clinking against the glass flask of vodka, the queens cackle at each other’s jokes while searching their secondhand vinyl purses for misplaced iPhones. As an entourage to The Stud we take up the whole sidewalk. Zip this up, baby? they keep asking. I try to keep up. Light this for me, hon? Heels slapping asphalt, B.G.S. scrambles up to club entrances and hugs the security. Our covers are waived at the door and red velvet ropes are unclipped.

I meet a fun, gawky guy named Fil at an epic drag queen lineup sensation event at the Factory. There’s so much glitter, it’s amazing any of us can see at all. It’s under my fingernails and in my underwear. Slight, little Fil wears skin-tight jeans, a snazzy olive jacket, and most notably, platform sneakers which make his feet three times bigger than they really are. He follows me around the party, docile from the booze but certainly not without intent. I don’t really know yet if I’m attracted back, so I don’t return much of his attention. But slight, little Fil is sweetly persistent. He tells me he wants me to go home with him to his apartment on Dore Alley, and stares at me for a response underneath all the noise.

During a particularly rough bout of kissing, Fil cuts his lip on one of our teeth and a few drops of blood land on my arm. When we realize what it is, Fil spasms in panic, hysterically swatting at the syrupy red liquid.

“We have to stop,” he says.

“Why?”

His composure starts to crack. “I have this virus in me. It’s in every drop of my blood. Okay?” He looks at me hard. “What the fuck do you mean, ‘Why?’”

Naked, I retreat to the bathroom and wet a rag, like it’s all I’m capable of doing.

* * *

In the sticky, overcast, mid-morning span of gray, we scuffle down the sidewalk, this large cement arc veering left as we head south on Folsom Street. Its rigidity makes my bones ache and ankles swell. I can’t wipe away the sweat fast enough from my face. B.G.S.’s scratchy voice is hammering out meandering, meaningless sounds.

“I told that motherfucker he could suck the shit out of my goddamn ass, is what I did. See this?” He points down to the ground. “This here’s the sidewalk, he doesn’t own it. He was in my way; I don’t care if he had a walker.” He itches his nose and says, “James?”

“I need Tylenol,” I say to him, but what would really fix me is a drink.

“Know what?” he continues. “I thought you were kind of a dick when we first met.”

I stare at a bush sprouting from a cement-framed square of earth in the sidewalk ahead of us. “What?”

“Then we got shitfaced together. I yakked, but you were like, totally fine.”

“So?”

“So you’re the only person who can keep up with me and not die or get arrested. You always make it back at the end of the night, even if you can’t remember doing it.” A look of panic slices through his eyes. He’s let a secret slip, but quickly swerves back into control.

“That’s what you like about me?” I say again and swallow a ticklish string of spit creeping down the back of my throat. Is this even meant to be a compliment?

“Honey, you should list ‘binge drinking’ as a skill on your résumé. I mean, you can drink more than me.”

I already know this. I assume I can outdrink anybody because I’ve always been able to. A wave of suspicion rushes in and I look up at him. “Is that the only reason we’re friends?”

His reaction time is long even for being intoxicated. “No, but I mean, you know, it helps,” he says while looking for something to look at. The musty stink of urine steams up from the cement.

I lift an eyebrow, but don’t push it. “I’m just so fucking nervous all the time,” I admit with so much resignation that I almost start to cry.

“Don’t have to be Freud to spot that one, boo. I don’t know what bug got shoved up your ass, but I bet it’s got a stinger.”

I ignore his attempt to humorize the situation. “I’m not like you. Meeting new people… it isn’t that easy for me.”
“The first step,” he says as he lights a cigarette and inhales, “is opening your mouth.” He winks at me and emits a stream of carcinogens that ghosts into the breeze. I lurch on, envious of the smoke’s ability to make itself disappear.

* * *

They verify the check at Wells Fargo, of course, and I can’t blame them. I wait patiently, whistling in my head, as the teller phones the lawyer group listed in the upper left-hand corner of the check, or whoever. Got to make sure I’m not just some wacko off the street with a criminal career of forging paperwork. It’s very San Francisco, where nobody accepts credit cards or lets you use the bathroom without buying a six-dollar scone. But I have nothing to conceal. I stand taller and with more confidence than I have in months because I fucking earned this measly bullshit, I overpaid for it with my mind’s and my body’s pain. My family members can’t trust me, and perhaps shouldn’t; over two-thirds of my friends don’t want anything to do with me, and the few who remain by my side are strained and stretched thin. For fucking up my life, this check for just under seven thousand dollars certainly doesn’t cut it. But I’m hungry, and it feels like winning the Mega Millions.

Last year, when the dust settled after my big neuropsychiatric meltdown, I found myself, above all, broke. I found out about a class action lawsuit against the drug company who makes the pill I took. I forgot all about it: the mailed packets of paperwork, letters from doctors, prescription records. Finally some of that hoop-jumping from long ago is paying off. I discovered an oasis inside my P.O. Box today… what might happen tomorrow? (Especially since I have cash?)

B.G.S. says he knows of a residential hotel, a place on Sacramento Street in Nob Hill. He says he knows the manager and that the place is alright. The manager’s name is Anthony, and when we get there, his eyes scan me as they would an intruder. When he turns to the till, I know he can still see me. I can’t tell if he’s picturing me naked or dead. He scribbles some jargon onto a perforated receipt from a pad and extends me my room key.

“I got next week,” says B.G.S., and I don’t really care if I believe him or not. I don’t even care that there’s technically no overnight guests and that we’d have to sneak around. I don’t care much about anything except the liter of vodka in my backpack. We settle into our new ten-by-fifteen-foot home, and I immediately toss back half a dozen shots using an empty prescription bottle as a glass.

B.G.S. leaves to go to the Power Exchange and probably fucks somebody who doesn’t have a name. I’m happy to get some space. He comes around every other day or so, between binges. And every other day or so, there is a noticeable amount of prescription pills missing from my backpack. Which is great—how do I accuse my friend of stealing medication behind my back? It’s too saddening to contemplate, being taken for a fool by someone I can supposedly trust. When he is around, at the end of the night we observe the twin-size bed and mentally strategize before climbing in. With two bodies so close, the soupy heat in the building makes it impossible to sleep, and B.G.S.’s hands keep trying to pull my dick out of my underwear. I mentally cringe and push him away.

After making a little too much noise at The Cinch this evening (mostly B.G.S.’s hoarse growl demanding more Kamikazes from the bartender, who had cut him off), we retire to my accommodations with a welcome liter of Smirnoff. His hand behavior is unusually grandiose. He alternately shrieks unintelligibly and groans over his knees, one palm wrapped around his forehead. He takes forever in the bathroom, which is communal. It’s next door to our room, so I can hear grunts and curses and something hitting the pipes, like he’s slamming himself against the porcelain.

This morning, which is actually this afternoon, he isn’t jammed up against me in bed. He isn’t in the room at all. I call his cell phone and listen through the wall for it to ring. It doesn’t ring, though; it goes straight to voicemail.

Someone knocks at the door. I wipe the dots of sweat from my face with the tummy of my undershirt and confront the door’s peephole with suspicion. It’s Anthony.

“That friend of yours can’t come around here anymore,” he says when I open the door. “I had a tenant call the cops really late last night because she found him drunk in the hallway.”

“Oh. Okay.”

“Were you aware of that?”

“No.” I sleep super heavy, so all this is actually news to me.

“Well he can’t come around here anymore. Not even supposed to be having overnight guests.” When Anthony’s shrill, twangy voice trails off into silence, his eyes—little, nystagmic stones set deep in his face—caress me for too long of a moment. He’s not pulling off the menacing landlord act well from a foot below me. He has his knuckles on his hips, and he’s pushing his chest out to reinforce the concept that police visits at three a.m. are frowned upon.

“Absolutely, I understand. My bad. Sorry, Anthony,” I say, squirming. I think for a beat. “Was there any damage?” Maybe I could owe him some money if it isn’t too much. A payment plan perhaps. It feels like I shouldn’t burn bridges with someone established in San Francisco decades more than B.G.S., who (now that I think of it) seems to have just breezed in.

His hardness softly morphs into curiosity. “No, no damage.” I don’t know where to look, so I close my eyes and count to three (a panic move) but before I get to three, Anthony says, “Are you okay?”

It’s sort of a stunning question. Most people couldn’t give half a nasty fuck about me. That, or they think Jesus hates me and I should be eradicated from Earth, tossed into Hell’s kiln. I slow down and try to analyze what’s being asked of me. “I guess,” I say, a bit dazed. I remember what B.G.S told me: The first step is opening your mouth. Out of nowhere, an automatic reply gets pushed out of my throat like vomit. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “That’s the way it works, right?”

He inhales slowly through his nose. “If you’re lucky.” His eyes wince right after he says this. “I don’t mean to sound pessimistic. You seem like a bright kid, just apply yourself. Plus,” he continues as I break eye contact, “you must have family.” He looks me over one last time. “Checkout is tomorrow at eleven, drop the key on my desk.” The hallway’s wood flooring creaks under each step as he walks off to the stairwell.

I accidentally slam the lightweight door because the window is open. Around me, the floor is a battlefield in the aftermath of combat. Orange prescription bottles lay still like dead bodies, leaking stale, back-washed vodka. I consider the bottles through a haze, a hangover that’s not a hangover anymore. Anthony’s word family is buzzing in my ears. I think about my parents. Right now, mom is hearing dad open the front gate that screeches and bangs like a tambourine. I can hear it everywhere. Maybe they’ll mention my name over dinner tonight. That would be nice. Maybe they’ll say, “I bet Jim’s up to something these days that’s going to work out great for him. I just know it. Something’s clicking with that kid right about now.”

I should try to be as light on my feet as possible by the time I check out tomorrow, so I start packing a reusable grocery bag to run over to storage in the morning. I stop to look out the window at the late, golden afternoon. I’m sweating from its heat. People are getting off work, the sidewalks are getting busier with passers-by on their way home. I spot a gay couple smiling and walking hand-in-hand, both attractive, about my age. They turn off Polk and buzz themselves into an apartment building, which I imagine anchors their perfectly happy lives.

Elbows off the Table

Jay Stringer

A bolt of lightning flashes inside your body, tingling even the bed of skin under your fingernails. This is a new feeling for you: too quiet to be anger but much louder than pain. You’re a teapot left on the burner well past the screaming.

“No, he’ll be alright, Toni,” Dad tells your Mom.

Alright. Dad says you’ll be alright. No. No, Dad says you are fat.

Dad says you will have a heart attack if you keep eating like that.

Dad says it isn’t any of your damn business whether or not he smokes, to get your ass up off the couch and go play outside, for you to worry about your own self before you start telling people how to live their lives.

Eyes averted to the saucepan, Mom is in the corner bowing before her domestic altar.

“Eat your salad, honey,” she says. She adds three drops of salty tears to the boiling water, just so the macaroni noodles won’t stick together.

Sweat drips off your nose and onto the rusty brown pillows nestled in the bed of green. You can eat these. Mom says these croutons are low fat. She wants you to be healthy. She wants you to be around so you can take care of her when MS steals her bladder at forty-nine.

There’s a roar of thunder churning in your guts. You’re bubbling like that Diet Coke bottle after Mrs. Silvers force-fed it a sleeve of Mentos in science class. Your throat feels like the roll of sandpaper you used to smooth down your Pinewood Derby Racer for Cub Scouts.

“Eatshesaid.”

You’re consumed in fire bursting out from the inside. All you need is water. Water slurped from the bathroom sink would soothe your throat, if you could just excuse yourself—

But your Dad says, “No! Elbows off the table!”

You dig in, thinking only of running away. You forget how to chew. You forget how to slow down. It hurts like you’re trying to swallow a cocklebur. Your untrimmed fingernails carve into your neck. You are new to the concept of dying.

And then, you can’t breathe.

Gulp.

And then you can’t speak.

Gulp.

And then you can’t get up.

You should have never snuck those cheese slices from the refrigerator after they went to bed and never opened your mouth about your Dad’s bad habits and never opened your mouth to eat at all. Then you would’ve remembered that death has no respect for the young. 

In a moment, in a twinkling of an eye, flash. You break the sixth commandment. You are so light on your feet that your Dad will say, “Damn boy you shoulda been a quarterback” when it’s all over. You are running faster than death. It would be the last time you could outrun your mind.

Prepared to meet thy God, you dive into the warm, blue, Finding Nemo comforter on your soft three-quarter mattress. You suck in deep, so hard it’s painful, like breathing in knives. So hard, your organs seize inside.

You can take in air again. You wonder if this is how your first breath tasted, like the one you took when you almost drowned in your Aunt’s pool: chorine, nasal spray, the adhesive side of an envelope. You feel it cooling down your body from your raw, pink neck to your squirming toes.

And then, stillness.

You are confused. You outran death. You can’t get enough of the mothball and must-laden air.

That would be the last time your father would hug you. That would be the last time you would have dinner for a while. The spell will only break when your Mom lets you see her cry as she begs you to just eat something, please.

Though your parents would take you to the doctor, and then a counselor, and then a doctor again to try to find a diagnosis for a condition they don’t understand, even though they have it too, you’ll never get better. For years after, you will feel the same crouton buried deep in your body, next to your heart, where it will be for the rest of your life.

Body Projects

Ashley Williams

From shoulder to shoulder, clavicle to cleavage, my chest is marred with a blue tribal tattoo adorned with black, blue, purple, and pink stars. Ink striates under the skin forming hazy clouds from needles that punctured too deep. Scars of crooked lines feel like braille upon my breasts, and what it reads is “look at me.” The color is splotchy and undersaturated on my sternum, where the purple ink had wept from raw wounds; it didn’t want to be there any more than I wanted it there.

I got the tattoo when I was twenty-three. Phil, my boyfriend of five months, carried the nickname Tattoo-Phil. He did tattoos out of our house when he needed extra money. Phil was (and probably still is) many things: a pool player, a tattoo artist, an independent contractor, a hustler, a bowler, and an alcoholic. He was also generous and loving, intelligent and charismatic. The relationship was unhealthy most of the time; he was ten years older than me, and that gave him power and control. He used his admirable qualities as weapons. He was generous until you forgot to do the laundry. Charismatic until his tenth beer. Loving until he thought you were being a fucking bitch for not letting him drive to the liquor store for another case. I was defenseless, a puppet under his control.

The day I got my tattoo, I shivered in a spaghetti strap tank top while the stencil was placed. My back remained ramrod straight because you only get one shot to get the right placement. Once I checked the placement in the mirror, I was instructed to get on the pool table and brace my head upon the railing. The cold, unforgiving slate of the table made my body tremble.

The design was a piece of flash art that Phil pirated to expand his portfolio. He had the whole set-up: machines, ink, and even a small ultrasonic cleaner. We had agreed on him placing the whole stencil of the chest piece, so we could see how it looked. He was only supposed to tattoo two nautical stars close to my shoulders. When he started, though, the pain was more excruciating than anything that I’d ever felt, like a hot scalpel filleting my chest open. Like a needle was exploring the very depths of my breast. When you get a chest tattoo, the pain radiates out. So it’s not just pain at the point of contact, but also pain that expands like a wildfire encompassing hemispheres of mammary tissue.

What I didn’t know at the time was that Phil was a “scratcher.” “These are the people,” according to Karen Hudson, author of Living Canvas, “who know just enough about tattooing to be dangerous. They ‘scratch’ their friends, causing irreversible damage through scarring.”

I felt him continue lines that weren’t supposed to be there. I asked him to stop. Told him I didn’t want anymore. But he pushed my shoulders to the table and kept going. I cried, muffled sobs, chest heaving. He told me to stop being a pussy. It was my fault. If I would just calm down, it wouldn’t hurt so bad.

Hudson explains, “It’s very, very rare that a person is so sensitive that it makes them cry. When this happens, there’s a good chance their body was overly stressed to begin with.”

During the third hour, I vomited. After brushing my teeth, I swallowed a hand full of Advil and went back to get it finished. I couldn't, after all, leave the tattoo half-colored in. It would eventually look badass when it was finished. Right?

****

The tattoo machine was created by a New York City tattooist named Samuel O’Reilly. His design centered on Thomas Edison’s 1876 patented “Electric Pen,” which perforated holes into a material, creating a stencil in which to pour ink. O’Reilly modified the pen by adding needles and a reservoir for ink. He was granted patent (# 464,801) on December 8, 1891. Prior to that, tattoo equipment consisted of mallets and piercing implements that were made from thorns, fish bones, oyster shells, thread and needle, razor blades, bamboo slivers, nails, or glass. According to the Smithsonian, some of the first instruments were found by renowned archeologist W.M.F. Petrie at the site of Gurob, which dated back to 1450 B.C. Machines now are made for precision. They can be adjusted for depth and line width and are powered via electromagnetic motors which pierce the skin at a rate of 3,000 punctures per minute. Whatever you do, don’t call it a gun. Most artists think of the machine as “a tool for creating art—not a weapon.”

****

I went to the Laser and Light Surgery Center on a Monday afternoon for a tattoo removal consultation. The office was little more than a few treatment rooms in an office suite. I read through the paperwork, one of which was a list of alternatives to laser removal, such as makeup and covering the tattoo with another tattoo. As if this wasn't my last resort.

Makeup rubs off on your interview clothes when you try to conceal your shame. And a tattooist at Skin Deep took one look at your tattoo and shook his head. "The lines are so thick there's scar tissue. I can't cover that up." So laser surgery was my only option. Sitting in the chairs that lined the hallway was a man with salt and pepper hair in a black leather jacket. I tried to guess what regret he was getting blasted away. I didn’t make eye contact, though, because I didn’t want him to try and guess mine.

I have gone through great efforts to conceal my chest tattoo because people stare. Some women look at me like I'm a slut trying to take their man. Pastors, co-workers, professors, doctors, men, their eyes trace along the lines of my collarbones and follow the stars down the slope to my cleavage. Wondering how far it goes. If I'm as freaky in the sheets as my tattoo implies. Ninety percent of the time, I hide my ink under hoodies and t-shirts. I don't want people to think I'm unintelligent or aggressive. I don't want people to think I'm seeking their gaze. I don't want to offend people with my appropriated tattoos. I don't want to feign the confidence that belongs to this tattoo. I just don't want to deal.

****

My only visible tattoo is a ladybug the size of a quarter on the back of my neck. At the time, the ladybug not only signified my independence, but I hoped it would bring me luck. I went the night of my eighteenth birthday, January 19, 2002. It was unseasonably warm that winter, and I remember wearing a canary yellow Tommy Hilfiger t-shirt. Before walking into the shop, we smoked a fat joint with the tattoo artist in the parking lot to calm my nerves. It was me, my best-friend Roxanne, and friend Tracy (she was our Stoner Mom because as an adult, she watched over us when we were high) and her boyfriend Kevin, who joined me to celebrate the moment. Tracy and Kevin were authentic hippies from the hills of California and hated it when we called sodas “pop” because they thought we were saying pot. They let us chill at their house as long as we shared our weed.

I paid the mandatory $40 shop fee to sit in a chair for five minutes while the tattooist worked. It didn’t hurt as much as I expected, quite the opposite. The tattoo is located on an erogenous zone, so my body was warm with gooseflesh during the whole process. The tattoo was so tiny that the tattooist pierced my tongue for free.

That night, I went home, tongue swollen, speaking with a lisp, and sat on my mother’s couch smoking a cigarette. She arched an eyebrow at me and scolded me by my childhood nickname, “Nikki,” but that was it. I guess she thought what’s done is done. Either way, my little act of rebellion had little consequence.

****

In The Seattle Times, writer Taya Flores explains, “For some, getting a tattoo not only honors the dead, but also provides an opportunity to bond with living family members.”

My step-sister Tracy Jo died the morning of January 25, 2008. She had an artificial heart valve and couldn’t afford her blood thinners. A massive clot formed around the valve. During her open-heart surgery, the clot broke off and found its way to her brain. She died at 7:32 am from a stroke. I went with my stepfather and mother when they received the news. At her funeral, my son was crying, and Teddy, Tracy’s six-year-old son, rubbed his back and told him, “Don’t be afraid, it’s not a monster in there. It’s just my mom.”

That night, I found myself in a tattoo parlor. I needed to focus on a different kind of pain, even if just for an hour. I selected a butterfly with a hidden ladybug in the middle. It wasn't original, but it meant something to me: she had her wings and took a part of me with her.

A week later, still grieving and barely able to make it through the day, I went back to the tattoo shop. I was still seeking the pain, but I also needed a reminder to focus on the living. I had my son and Tracy’s son to raise, and I couldn’t lose myself to grief. Plus, Tracy in her raspy, cigarette worn voice would have told me to get up and do something before she kicked me in the ass. But she’d say it with a chuckle because, as tough as she wanted to be, she was always a silly, soft-hearted woman.

The new tattoo was a tribute to my son, a promise that I would love him eternally and a permanent reminder to him that he was a piece of me. The pain from the tattoo that night felt euphoric. A six by six-inch heart and a gray banner with Paul’s name graces the middle of my upper back. The needles sent vibrations up my spinal cord. And the numbness in my head slowly receded.

****

In her Tin House essay, “Her Tattoo is My Name & My Name is a Poem,” Amy Lam writes about Holland Christensen, a white woman who unknowingly got the Charlotte Hornet’s second-string point guard’s Chinese name, Jeremy Lin, tattooed on her. Coincidentally, Lin and Lam share the same kanji symbol.  Lam explains that the traditional Asian naming convention is based upon family poems. It’s a way for Asian-Americans to remain part of their tribe. Thus, Christensen’s negligence to research kanji characters angered her. “I wanted this white woman to be the proxy, a wall to spit on” (55).

During World Wars I and II and the Korean and Vietnam wars, skin art increased in popularity. During that time, American men, especially sailors, brought tattoos back from their foreign destinations, so a lot of the early tattoo history in America was appropriated from foreign artists and designs. Lam states that she’s “familiar with the impulsive desire to offer a part of yourself to a stranger with electric needles […] But to condemn her for her catharsis would give me absolutely nothing.”

Part of my chest tattoo consists of a tribal tattoo that is heavily influenced by traditional Hawaiian tattooing. In order to get the traditional kakau tattoo, Hawaii-based tattooist Keone Nunes stated that his clients have to bring their genealogy report because that will help him decide which design he will ink into their skin. Nunes prays before, during, and after the tattoo placement. The process is heavily rooted in spirituality and tradition. But my tattoo wasn’t part of a tradition. It just looked “sexy and badass.” I wonder if Kunes, like Lam, would want to take his anger out of me.

Another tattoo that I collected just months after my chest piece was finished was a koi fish half-sleeve. A substantial black outlined fish, with faded yellow, orange, and red scales breaches the surface of a lake decorated with by cherry blossoms. The background is a haze of purple mist to add richness and contrast to the koi. The style of the koi originates from outlawed Japanese tattooing called Irezumi. Traditionally, anyone with that style was considered low-class or unsavory. “Japanese tattoos often showcase the culture’s reverence for nature—namely, animals and flowers.” Cherry blossoms are a symbolic flower of the spring, a time of renewal, and the fleeting nature of life. Koi fish, a native of Japan, are "symbolic of numerous things, but given their extraordinary lifespans, they are most commonly associated with longevity, persistence, and overcoming the trials of life."

Cultural appropriation—co-opting specific elements of a culture that is not your own—is often applied to American people who get tattoos in styles that are distinctly traditional in another culture. When I got the traditional tattoos, I just enjoyed the style and didn't have a clue about the meaning behind them. However, despite needing a touch-up, I'm glad I have the koi tattoo. I may not have honored the tradition when I got the tattoo, and that ignorance, I regret, but the symbolic meaning behind the koi and cherry blossom has become deeply personal to me. Someday soon, an artist will fix it because I want to pay homage to the original artistic influences and a tradition that I admire.

****

“Don't worry about me / The heart is supposed to bleed” –10 Years, Fault Line

It took me a long time to put myself back together after my relationship with Phil. I was seeking something, a reason, an answer, absolution. Over the next two years, I felt so many needles penetrate my skin that I currently don’t know how many tattoos I have. The 10 Years quote is tatted across my back, hidden snugly under my bra strap. The song and quote helped me cope. I don’t want anyone to see it, but knowing it’s there helps me remember my strength.

Surrounding the heart, in four corners are  an anchor, a lock, a key, and a four-leaf clover, and to me, the images symbolize staying grounded, love, freedom, and hope. My shoulder blades have matching old-school swallows, one red and one blue; yin and yang; the person I was before and the one I am now. These tattoos tell the story of my recovery.

I have a two-inch tattoo of wet, dripping cherries on my left butt cheek. It's absolutely horrid, with the lines blown and color faded. It looks like a four-year-old child used chalk pastels to tattoo me. There is absolutely no meaning behind the tattoo. I forget it's there most days. But when I catch a brief hint of it, I smile. I got the tattoo during a Halloween Tattoo party hosted by Tracy and Kevin. I don’t remember the artist or what he looked like. We were in the throes of the party when I asked Tracy asked to pour me a Cherry-bomb. She scrunched nose and squinted her eyes, trying so hard to focus on my request. "Did you say Cherry bottom?" We rolled with laughter, the way that stoners laugh about something that's not that funny. Somehow, I ended up with a cherry on my bottom that night. That tattoo documents a friendship, a night, a single moment that brought me happiness.

****

Tattooing is a process of injecting pigments, lakes, or dyes into the intradermal layer of the skin, which is the area between the dermis and epidermis. Tattoo inks are considered cosmetics in the US; thus they are not regulated or recommended for subcutaneous use. Many of the inks injected into the skin contain heavy metals, toxins, and nanoparticles. Reds and blacks contain various mixtures of iron oxide (FeO); blues can contain copper carbonate, cobalt aluminum oxides, and chromium oxides; purples can have manganese ammonium pyrophosphate; whites can contain small amounts of lead.

From the moment tattoo ink is injected into your skin, your immune system, aka white blood cells, begins attacking the ink particles, assuming the metals are foreign matter. The problem is that the metal particles can be immensely bigger than a white blood cell. A tattoo fades over time because your white blood cells continually eat away at the ink. However, they never having enough time to completely remove the metals from your skin. A Pico Laser penetrates the epidermis and uses thermal heat to shatter the pigments into smaller pieces, making it easier for your immune system to remove the color.

No single laser can remove all tattoo colors. Different dyes respond to different light wavelengths. Black and dark green are the easiest colors to remove; yellow, purple, turquoise, and fluorescent dyes are hardest to fade.

****

Tattoos are a form of non-verbal communication with various meanings. My body art is a complex narrative of conformity and alternative constructs of doing gender. It's a record of my low self-esteem and body dysmorphia. It's a loss of control and power taken back. The lines of toxic metallic pigmentation that scars my skin is a story of the last fifteen years of my life: shaky, bumpy, faded, unfinished, yet vibrant and beautiful in places.

It took me a long time to come to terms with the trauma of my chest tattoo. Even now, I battle with the shame of not putting up more of a fight. I have to remind myself that I did not let Phil tattoo me. If I would have pushed his hand away…I should have protested more…I shouldn’t have let him put the whole stencil on. But that’s all bullshit because if he cared, he would’ve stopped instead of mutilating my skin. Faced with that reality, I was ready to take back the piece of me that Phil claimed.

In the treatment room, which was set up with two boxy white machines on either side of a cushy treatment chair, I read over the aftercare instructions. Bandages and triple antibiotic ointment for seven days, which is not unlike aftercare for tattoo placement. On top of one of the machines was a laminated chart of the Kirby-Desai scale risk assessment for tattoo reduction and removal. I read over it and the questions I had prepared on a notebook.

The doctor entered the room and stood with his arms crossed over his chest. “How can I help you?”

I pulled the collar of my shirt down. “I would like to remove this.”

 The doctor snapped on a pair of gloves and ran his finger over the tissue on my sternum and clavicle. He didn't ask any questions—he'd probably heard it all before—besides he wasn't there to heal my wounds. The doctor sat on the circular rolling chair, with his perfect posture and coifed hair, and said, "The treatment will be $250, and the blue will be hard to get rid of. We can treat the color, but the scarring would still be there. We offer packages: buy six get four treatments free."

To him, I was just a number on the Kirby-Desai scale: 17. I’d need one treatment for my fair skin. One treatment for the multiple ink layers. Three treatments for the location on my upper trunk. Four treatments for the various colors. Three treatments for the moderate amount of pigment in my skin. And five treatments for significant scar tissue. I would need seventeen treatments at $250/piece to rid myself of this tattoo. This doctor would make $4,250 over 170 weeks removing my tattoo.

I told him I was only there for a consultation, that I was afraid of the pain and was too nervous. He graciously offered to do a spot treatment so that I could see how it felt. I asked him to remove the top two blue stars on each side of my collar bone—they were usually the most visible—and he agreed. While the doctor warmed up the machines and gathered the iodine-tinted safety goggles, I removed my t-shirt for easier access. That morning, I pulled a brand-new tank top from my drawer where it had sat for years, unused because it didn't hide anything. 

The doctor didn't look at the koi fish on my arm or the collection on my back but grabbed the tubing coming from the box to my left. Chilled air drifted out, cooling my skin, preparing it for the blast of heat to come. The snap from the laser was painful, like a pop of bacon grease, except at an interval of a thousand pops per minute. I gritted my teeth, held my breath, and watched the second hand of the clock tick. The pain was negligible and didn't reverberate into my tissue. After he finished, he globbed some ointment on the wounds and bandaged them.

At home, I pulled the bandages down and looked at the twin wounds in the mirror. The skin was inflamed with angry red welts. Over the days to come, the welts transitioned into yellow bruises and peeling skin. The pain receded into a pestering itch.

****

In his book, The Body and Social Theory, Chris Shilling, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kent at Canterbury, discusses the intentional modification of the body (size, shape, appearance) as “body projects” that are important in constructing and representing identity over the life course. I have used my body to communicate a wide range of personal and cultural messages: self-expression, rebellion, the visual display of my personal narrative, tributes, and even therapeutic reasons. But the message on my chest is not my own; to me, it's a brand that says "you are mine."

Five weeks after visiting the Laser and Light Surgery Center, the wounds were completely healed. The doctor said it could take up to ten weeks to see the full effects. The cobalt is still vibrant blue, but some of the particles have faded to the point where you can see wisps of lines from Phil's "scratching" technique. And on the right star, if you look closely, there is a one-millimeter gap of missing black ink. I have taken back one-millimeter of my skin, which gives me hope that one day, I will erase all of Phil's message. My body is a project and is far from complete.

On Blood Loss

Rachel Wyatt

Once, a nurse told me that I was lucky because of the quick peek of a thick, indigo vein on the inside of my left elbow. I get about a tablespoon of blood drawn every six months to make sure my thyroid levels are balanced. My thyroid gland doesn’t produce the normal level of hormones, and it is common practice to check patients with underactive thyroids twice a year to make sure their medication is still at the right amount. They never have to stick me more than once, but I still hate the way the needle slides under my skin. There’s a scar now, a tiny, darkened spot indicating where to open up my vein. I can feel the blood leave in splashes timed with the pulse of my heart. Drawing blood isn’t like filling up a syringe, a smooth flow. Blood moves and while the needle does some of the work, it’s mostly your own heart that pushes blood up through the needle so that your blood splatters against the glass sides of the syringe before sliding down into a tiny red sea. I turn my head away from the needle and mentally try to separate my left arm from my body. It helps to wear a jacket sleeve on just my right arm, leaving my left arm bare. My right arm, warm, is still mine, still safe; I don’t want any sensation from where I’m losing blood. A woman my size has about 3.5 liters of blood in her body and is constantly producing new blood cells. I will never have enough blood drawn to be in danger of physical harm. I have nothing to be afraid of.

People think that blood is one color. It’s not. Thick clots come out as black; the blood that dries in the cracks of your skin is dark brown. Blood has a green tint when it’s mixed with bile from your gallbladder, the only two things left for your stomach to throw up when you’re sick with the flu in 7th grade. It’s violet, spreading across your then-boyfriend’s cheap blue sheets. Delicate pink and foamy when you’re rinsing stains out of your clothes in the sink. More translucent than you’d expect when it spills from your hands onto the tile floor, scattering in a pattern like oil on water.

I lost consciousness for the first time in 8th grade health class. My teacher was describing how Princess Diana bled out after her car crash. I pictured my own neck, artery open, my blood spilling out too fast. I felt it in my neck, too, a tingle from the bottom of my left ear down to my collarbone, pushing my throat closed. At the time, I thought I could feel the artery in my neck. Later, I would realize I was feeling my Vagus nerve going into overdrive. I went to the front to ask for a pass to the nurse’s office and then I was slumped forward on my teacher’s desk and she was standing up over me. She pulled her chair around and helped me back into it. Another girl in the class pushed me down the hallway to the nurse’s office. The chair had one bad wheel and we kept veering toward the wall.

The Vagus nerve is actually two nerves on either side of the neck, but only my left side lights up and sparks when I see or picture blood, pushing my throat closed. When the nerve is overstimulated, as in the case of a phobia, blood pressure drops. The nerve also secretes a neurotransmitter, acetylcholine, which is essential in breathing and is disrupted in the case of panic. The combination of low blood pressure and near-hyperventilation lead me to the ground while a room of people who have the exact same nerve as I do remain standing, calm.

There is an evolutionary theory for the fear of blood. If our ancestors were losing a lot of their own blood, they were probably being attacked; if they fainted at the sight of their blood, they could appear dead and, therefore, less appealing to the animal attacking them. Blood pressure also drops when you’re unconscious, slowing the rate of blood loss. I printed out copies of research articles on the matter, thinking that one day I would show them to someone—classmates who asked what was wrong with me; the school nurse when she told me to go back to class, I was fine. Black ink that would say, louder than I ever could, There is nothing wrong with me. There is a reason. I pulled psychology articles, too, that told me that we are all plagued with a huge, mostly unconscious fear of our own mortality. When we drip red, we’re reminded of it. I’m not weak. I’m aware.

But I watched my classmates leave health class on their feet or ignore a paper cut and struggled to convince myself I’m not broken.

My nose started bleeding in the middle of a work shift once. I was straightening cat food cans when I felt the rush through my sinuses, and even though I started running then, I left a trail of blood down the right aisle of a Target in southern Indiana. On the bathroom floor, toilet paper pressed against my face, my walkie-talkie went off, a manager calling a cart attendant to clean up a biohazard. Some 16-year-old making minimum wage had to block off an entire section of the store and spend twenty minutes mopping up my blood and disinfecting the floor. A manager followed the trail of blood to the bathroom and knocked on the door. I was silent, caught in a grip of panic, blood in my throat and rushing to my cheeks. I didn’t want anyone to know it was my blood splattered between the groceries and cleaning supplies, that I was so easily reduced to a ball of a person on the floor, so easily prone to losing a vital part of myself. I didn’t want them to see me bleed.

Blood doesn’t want to leave your body. Like any liquid, it has surface tension, a weak force that attempts to keep the molecules together. Surface tension is why blood swells at the tip of your finger, falls in a drop. Blood falling through the air forms perfect spheres, but they aren’t nearly strong enough to withstand the shattering force of gravity driving them into the floor.

My worst nosebleed started as thick drops on my then-boyfriend’s light blue pillowcase. I ran to his bathroom, but soon I couldn’t control the blood. His floor was covered in toilet paper, wilted white flower petals broken from a stem soaked too long in red dye. The blood was coming so fast it dripped down the back of my throat and, when I tilted my head forward to try and combat that, blood fell over my lips. Before, I’d thought keeping blood out of your mouth was as simple as keeping your head tilted back and lips closed, but if you try to speak, try to explain where your bottle of Xanax is, you can’t avoid your tongue brushing against your lips. The “p” in “purse” presses your lips together, giving fresh blood a quick transport to your tongue. “Hurry” is worse; there’s no way to make the “hu” without opening your lips.

I would find out months later that the cause of my severe nosebleeds was a slightly deviated septum. The center cartilage of my nose created an angle that left a sizable vein particularly susceptible to rupture. Even though my nose bled for the better part of an hour, I didn’t lose nearly enough blood to put me in danger; it isn’t physically possible for that to happen with a nosebleed. But it’s not the simple blood loss. It’s the black clots of blood that feel so vital but just get thrown in the trash, the stick of your own sweat growing cold on your skin, the black dots of panic that block your vision, the awareness that something is wrong with you and you can’t stop it or control it.

I ended up curled in the fetal position in his bathtub, letting the blood swell into a puddle underneath my cheek because my hands were shaking too much to hold a tissue to my face. I remember feeling utterly weak that night: shaking hands, pale cheeks, damp skin. But, more than that, it was having me leak everywhere. Few things are more personal than blood. It’s yours, it flows through your body, through your brain and heart and lungs. Those cells have been everywhere in my body. There is an intimacy that is crushed or, at the very least, becomes clouded. When I bleed, I’m everywhere. Part of me is rinsed down the bathtub drain; thrown out with the trash; shipped off in a vial for tests. I know, rationally, I will make new blood cells, but I’ll never get over the shock of watching something that was inside of me and that made me whole dripping onto the floor.

Extremities are a problem, too. I scraped my toe once on vacation. Fingers and toes don’t clot as quickly as parts of the body closer to the heart. By the time I walked back to the condo my white sandal was slick with blood and I slipped every time I put weight on my right foot. I made it to the bathroom before I hit the floor, somewhere between unconsciousness and pure panic. I remember my parents over me, discussing whether I needed to go get stitches. I shut my eyes tighter and turned my face down so I couldn’t see anything. When my parents tried to get me to stand up, I curled up—bleeding foot exempt, sticking out from my ball of a body—and pretended I couldn’t hear them. I didn’t have to get stitches, but I’ll always have the white half-moon scar from where my skin fell away from my body. The scar swells out from my skin a little, like blood is still ready to flow at the slightest invitation.

Growing up, my parents had a giant medicine cabinet stuffed with pills and bottles. There seemed to be a cure for everything: headaches, scratches, upset stomach. I grew up with the belief -- or maybe in hindsight, just the illusion -- that I could control my body. For the most part, I can still convince myself that this is true, that my body will not betray me, but when I bleed I’m opened up to a deeper, much darker truth. I cannot stop my blood. I have to wait for it to taper out, for the clots to form, and there is nothing I can do to change or speed up the process.

After getting blood drawn once, the nurse taped the usual cotton ball to my vein and then wrapped my elbow in a disposable bandage that would normally have been used for a gash or tear in the skin. When I walked out, my dad raised his eyebrows and asked how big of a needle she had used, but it felt appropriate to me. I kept the wrapping on for three days, until the tiny cut had begun to heal.

I don’t get nosebleeds anymore—I had the angled vein cauterized, burnt shut with silver nitrate—but I don’t think I’ll ever shake the habit of running my hand under my nose just to make sure no blood is leaking. And when I get a paper cut, stub my toe, scrape against something, I’ll keep that moment of dread and of closed eyes, of vague hope that there won’t be much blood. And every six months I’ll be back in the clinic, left arm exposed, the thick vein ready for a needle, for draining, for a bandage, and, when the puncture heals after a week, for the darkening of the small, pinpoint scar inside my elbow.

Fiction

Camber

Philip Glennie

It was the powder that did it, the miles of machine-groomed trail that wove through the lonely town and the vast Alberta parkland beyond. He’d never thought of himself as someone who’d become addicted to exercise, thinking this was reserved for those lithe specimens who lectured about runner’s highs and tried to convince you that the stabbing huff of intense cardio was anything other than vanity-fuelled masochism. Booze, coke, Christ, even cheeseburgers, now those were things a guy could get addicted to. Funnily enough, it was a fear of becoming an alcoholic that’d pushed him into cross-country skiing to begin with. Getting into the sport was all but inevitable when he first moved to Camrose from Kingston, Ontario. Even in the summertime, there was little to do in his new town other than sip a flavourless mojito at one of the chain restaurants that skirted the heavily trafficked Highway 13. The historic downtown area offered nothing to a person of his age and interests, save for maybe the Alice Hotel, which had cheap beer and video lottery terminals, and which he feared would become his self-destructive oasis once the temperatures dipped below -30C.

It was at a mixer for newly arrived university faculty that he first became aware of how seriously the people of Camrose took their endurance sports. Staying close to Melanie’s side, he toured the room and met faculty members of all genders who were rakishly thin and more often than not of Norwegian descent. Later that same evening, when a group of these faculty invited Melanie and him to the Alice Hotel, they quickly descended into a conversation about the finer points of cycling, running, cross-country skiing, and of the various nationwide competitions they’d participated in over recent years. They also drank heavily, and between these counterbalancing extremes of drinking and intense exercise, he detected a space in which he might be happy. He learned that the faculty were all members of the local ski club, which was staffed on a volunteer basis and which maintained over 15k of perfectly groomed trails that were made available for free to the townsfolk. In their Norwegian ancestry and commitment to fitness, he saw the beginnings of an identity for Camrose, a sense of place that he’d found painfully absent in the chain restaurants and box stores that occupied most of the town’s acreage. The summer was nearly over and he was grateful for it, because he was much less enthused by the thought of joining the faculty’s running club. Jogging had always been a painful chore for him. His five-foot-ten, two-hundred-and-twenty-pound frame was too much for his knees, which at the age of 34 became sore enough to stop him dead at the 5k mark. But cross-country skiing?

“I think that’s something I could get into,” he said to Melanie, who turned to him with a smile and put her hand over his on the bar table. It was an act of encouragement that communicated her appreciation of his willingness to uproot his life and move across the country with her. For a humanities professor seeking a tenure-track job, you needed to go wherever you were lucky enough to find a position, and if you wanted your marriage to remain intact, you needed a partner who’d go with you. His own passions had never been place-specific, as they were solitary pursuits like writing and music, and for that same reason mobile. Still, he hadn’t anticipated how strongly that first drive into town would depress him, and he knew Melanie could feel it from the passenger seat beside him.

Now, the trick would be getting a handle on the basics of cross-country skiing without humiliating himself in front of his sinewy Nordic neighbours.

When he walked into the Edmonton ski shop a week later, the first thing he noticed were the antique snowshoes that hung from the wood-panelled walls, their darkened grains and crusty leather bindings exuding an authenticity that was lacking in the fibreglass skis that leaned against the sales rack. Nonetheless, he approached the rack and picked up a pair of skis, glancing about the store in search of help. Idling behind a distant sales counter was a sandy-haired kid of university age with a thin, muscular build that was accentuated by his long and equine face. The boy met his searching eyes with an enthusiastic nod and crossed the store with a loping stride.

“Hey man. Think you want to have a look at those?”

He glanced at the skis in his arms, which he hugged as though he were gathering sticks for a life-saving bonfire. He handed them over to the kid, who led him to a rectangular wooden box at the end of the rack and laid the skis across its surface.

“‘Kay, so if I could just get you to hop up here and try to balance on the skis, we’ll see if they work for you.”

He placed his chunky Blundstones atop the two skis and felt the muscles in his feet straining to stay balanced on the narrow bindings. “So with thin skis like this,” he said, “am I supposed to stay in those two slots that run along the side of the path?”

“Those are called the track,” said the kid, who cleared his bangs from his eyes with a flick of his head. “And yeah, that’s for classic skis, which these are. The other kind are skate skis. Most beginners start with classic.”

He felt a prick of shame in the base of his neck. “I’m not sure how I’m supposed to move forward.”

“Right. No worries.” The kid bent down and slid a slip of paper under one of the skis, moving it back and forth beneath the part that was directly beneath the boot. “See here? This middle section under your foot isn’t touching down because each ski is a little bit bowed. When you put all your weight on this leg, though…”

He followed the kid’s instructions and shifted fully to his right. The kid tried to slide the paper again, and this time tore it. “So yeah, when you put all your weight on one foot, this middle part of the ski presses against the snow. That curve in the ski is called the camber. If we apply a sticky wax to that middle part and a glide wax to the front and back of each ski, they’ll press down and grip the snow when you push off each foot.”

 A dim light flickered behind his grey eyes. For months, he’d felt that the world around him had lost its definition, as though he were sitting in some distant room and viewing life through an old television screen. But this felt real, like he was learning something new and valuable, and he was surprised at how closely he was able to follow the kid’s ensuing explanation of different grip waxes – Red, Blue, Green – which were designed for temperatures of increasing coldness.

“I’ll take them,” he said.

He’d moved twice before in his life, once to Nova Scotia for his undergraduate years and again to Ontario for graduate school. On both occasions, his above-average comedic timing and love for weekday drinking had quickly made him all the friends he needed. On any given day, it wasn’t hard to find a fellow scholar who’d go five rounds at the nearest bar. Better still, it’d only take one pint before these friends would dispense their views on nearly every aspect of human experience, be it personal or philosophical. He hadn’t been able to recreate this success a third time, though. All social events were tied to the university, and Melanie had asked him not to get too drunk or candid with her colleagues, whose opinions would matter when she came up for tenure in five years. Working from home as a remote marketing consultant had made the move painless from a professional standpoint, but had narrowed even further his chances of meeting anybody independently of Melanie. When he wasn’t sitting in the basement of their vinyl-sided bungalow, playing guitar or writing short stories, he’d visit the local Canadian Brewhouse to watch Edmonton Oilers games, chatting with the fresh-faced staff who smiled politely but never asked him anything about himself. Some of Melanie’s young colleagues would occasionally ask him to meet for a coffee on a Saturday afternoon, but he found them just too cerebral about everything. Yes, he had a PhD himself, but there was a difference between the people who attended grad school and the ones who went on to secure a tenure-track job.

When they’d first met in their Master’s English program at Queen’s, he and Melanie had bonded over their mutual love of critical theory, still reeling from the thrill of having their skulls exploded by the writings of Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, and Franz Fanon during their undergrad years. Hours after their peers had left the grad club, they’d still be there, tilting back their sixth or seventh pints, riffing off one another’s observations. Every moment between them seemed to bring about a new epiphany. Melanie’s spirited commitment to social justice made him feel like he was becoming a better person through sheer proximity to her.

Not long after writing his comprehensive exams, though, he’d become fed up with the self-congratulatory way his professors described the competitiveness of the academic job market, and decided to finish his degree as economically as possible and enter the private sector, where after three years of part-time, commission-based straggling, he landed a full-time job with a marketing consulting firm. Melanie had used these same years to continue with her thesis work. She’d emerge from her home office in those days and ask him to attend on-campus talks about Treaty lands and the plight of LGBTQ++ students on campus. He followed her to all of them and would nod with vigour at the points being made. But the fatigue was always there, the desire to go home and rest instead of sitting in an uncomfortable auditorium chair. He knew that he was indulging his privilege as a cishet white man, that he couldn’t possibly imagine the threats and indignities that marginalized peoples faced on a daily basis. But he didn’t care and didn’t know how to make himself care.

It was around this time that he realized how often he cried. He’d always been one to indulge a good cathartic discharge three or four times a year, but these became more common after Melanie announced with glittering eyes that she’d landed a tenure-track job in rural Alberta. When he was alone again, he found that the objects in his TV room seemed as distant as the moon in the evening sky. He tried to articulate his feelings to himself aloud, but only managed a loud, stupid “Uhhhhhh” that filled the apartment, as though he were a bat trying to test whether the walls were truly there.

It wasn’t long after their move to Alberta that he began complaining to Melanie more often about his work. She’d come home from campus, and he’d list off every stupid annoyance he’d had to endure that day: executives who debated one another for hours before realizing that they were arguing the same point, colleagues who’d rather “bounce their ideas” off him than perform the hard work of articulating things for themselves, all of it done without any regard for his plummeting blood sugar. Melanie would stare at him with the silence of a psychoanalyst, never so much as nodding at one of his points. He tried to be more specific, complaining about a much younger co-worker named Jessica who seemed hellbent on correcting him at every opportunity. In one instance, he’d asked her to start making her edits directly in his documents without sending them back with her trademark tracked changes. Jessica had replied that if he didn’t see what she was fixing, he’d never learn from her.

“I mean, who the hell says that?” he demanded.  

“She’s pricking your male fragility,” Melanie answered.

“Damn right she is! I mean seriously. You don’t find a comment like that a little bit rude? What if I’d said the same thing to her?”

“It wouldn’t mean the same thing.”

“Jesus, why can’t you indulge me from time to time?”

“I do that all the time. You just don’t know it.”

The world kept nudging him forward, but he couldn’t tell if it was pushing him toward a better life or the edge of a cliff.

On his first trek onto the ski trail, he kept his eyes directly on the grooves in front of him to keep from falling. He tried to remember what the kid at the ski shop had told him, placing all his weight on one ski and pushing off of it, then doing the same with the other. He only lifted his gaze when he sensed that he was being watched. On a hill to his right, three young snowboarders in orange and camo-coloured jackets were taking turns on a homemade jump, but they’d stopped to watch him pass. He lowered his head again and pumped his legs as hard as he could to reach the nearest patch of birch. Once he was out of the kids’ sight, he noticed strange clumps of brown hair littering the trail. He glanced farther up the path and spied two crimson patches on the snow that were roughly the size of living room rugs. A sensation of dread passed like a ghost through the walls of his stomach. He’d been eager all day to finish work and go for his first ski, and didn’t want to turn back so early in his journey. It was another fifty feet from the scattered tufts that he found the deer’s mutilated carcass. It lay just off the side of the trail, half-concealed by ruby strands of young birch. Four coal-black hooves had the remnants of forelegs clinging to them. No body, no head. A spinal cord remained, picked so clean that it looked as though it’d been stolen from one of the biology labs at the university. The ghost passed through his gut again. His hands tightened around his poles, fuelled by the fear that he might need to use them as spears at any moment. He turned and headed for home, glancing back over his shoulder every few seconds. When he emerged from the birch, he came across the three young snowboarders again. He thought about warning them, but was embarrassed to show his ignorance of local predators and the things they were capable of.

The next day, he returned to the trail and found no trace of the deer’s carcass. It’d snowed heavily the night before. The trail was freshly groomed. He hesitated over the creature’s absence, unsure of how many coyotes or cougars might be lying in wait for him in the surrounding trees. But however horrible, he knew that this fear was preferable to the lobotomized fog that would envelop him if he returned to the couch in his basement. He put all his weight onto the camber of his ski and propelled himself forward, pumping his legs and arms. He saw no one else on the trail, and kept going. When the path finally looped back toward the town, he stopped and stared out over a farmer’s field made completely white by winter. He blinked hard and felt a crunch at the corners of his eyes, where his tears had frozen. As he stood staring over the field, he realized that the tears weren’t the product of a cold headwind. He was crying.

It didn’t make sense. Wasn’t exercise supposed to be an antidote to depression? Here he was, working out as vigorously as he’d done in years, and he was crying? He sniffed a shard of frozen snot down his palate and left the trail, setting off into the farmer’s field, ploughing through powder that was so dry and deep that snowshoeing would’ve been faster. He only turned around when darkness had fully descended. The temperature had dipped so low that he couldn’t produce enough heat to overcome it. It was eleven-thirty in the evening by the time he made it home. He collapsed through the front door of his house, and crawled away from Melanie, who was crying and demanding to know where he’d been. He called in sick to work the next day.

It took him three days for his muscles to recover, and when they did, he put his skis back on and repeated the same route, staying out again until deep into the night. There was no thinking behind it; the sheer absence of anything better to do left the activity unrivalled for his attention. He was proud of himself for exercising so much, feeling like he’d finally broken through the wall of discomfort and avoidance that’d made his thirties the flabbiest decade of his life. On his fifth trip, he stayed out so long that he came home with the tip of his nose gone black from frostbite. Melanie dropped her glass of water when she saw his face and drove him to the hospital, where the dead flesh was removed and his nose bandaged. Melanie insisted on sitting with him when the diminutive doctor with a tightly tied bun of black hair sat down across from them and asked whether he wouldn’t mind answer a few questions. He told her about moving to Camrose with Melanie, about his newly discovered love for skiing, and even about how much he cried when he was alone.  The woman held him with steady eyes for a few moments, then tore a page out of her book.

“I’m going to write you a referral to a psychiatrist here in town,” she said, “and I really think you should follow up on it.”

Melanie pressed her hand tightly over his as he received the piece of paper. He turned to her and smiled, and continued to hold her hand as she drove the two of them home. When they got back, she went to her office to check whether she’d received any emails from students complaining about their midterm grades. He walked into the kitchen to clean up the water and broken glass Melanie had left on the floor when she’d rushed him to hospital. He tossed the rag in the sink, grabbed a beer from the fridge, and walked into to the bungalow’s small living room. On the coffee table, his laptop lay closed. Beside it sat his cell phone, which he picked up to find that there were no messages or missed calls.

He glanced back to the unopened can of beer in his hand, which was very cold, and set both it and the cell down on the table. Tears returned to the corners of his eyes as he glanced toward the house’s front entryway, where he’d left his ski boots.