Poetry

A Few Good Rules for Living from My Aunt Ouida

John Dorroh

Dragon bellies are for rubbing,
and artifacts and fossils are for arguing:
which came first-- the chicken or the egg?
Who gives a shit? None of that matters
anyway. It’s how you treat your dragons
that matter. It’s how you clean up a mess
in the store that perhaps you didn’t make
that defines your degree of dignity.

Roses are for smelling and sharing
and respecting the fact that their thorns
could be used to win a fight. Beautiful
things often carry a cost.

Patches of fog are for driving into, for
helping you juggle imagination with
theological sobriety. We breathe fog
every time we open our mouths. Don’t
be afraid as much as you are cautious.

Grease fires are for extinguishing. Never
laugh at those running around in the kitchen
with a red fire extinguisher for they may have
a family at home that looks better without
melted skin.

And bourbon is for drinking on the rocks
with friends around a fire pit on a chilly
October night. It makes the other stuff
seem so petty.

Fire Scar

Terri Drake

Following the fire road to fairy rings
locket of scars pocket of fog
going to meet my ghost love – meet my muse
in the fire scar the redwood’s blackened cavity
Tell me muse how do we live with such damage 

going to the scorched church where I commune
with you with fog with god
where I write my way
back from the unmoored night  

Inside the redwood apses, hardened candlewax
some ritual where I tried to wish you
back to life. O fairy rings O sacred grove
where the soft light softens the surround

close the windows my muse has already flown
the stain of redwood leaves like rust
like old spilled blood like ancient history

the woodpecker’s incessant rapping
I imagine you longing to get in
wild nights in the cathedral
sacraments of flesh

going down to sleep in the fire scar
disturb the bats am disturbed
could carve our initials in the trunk
but would rather ink you
in the private places of my skin
keep you a secret not graffiti

heading to the fire scar
heading ceaselessly back to our fire scar
passing our love skiff unmoored on the riverbank
going to write you back to life
there’s a book of light
that has us in it
no matter how unsightly
we may seem
sleeping in our mortal skin.
on our backs in the fairy circle
the blue sky dome its blue
eye gazing directly upon god
the early morning light
outlines our bodies
where there were scars
now a smooth translucent skin
you are venerable
I am divine 

Ephemeris

Amy L. Fair

A faded galaxy of planets
or tight constellation of stars,
the pale birthmark
on your neck casts spells.

I am not one for ceremony,
but this nebula rises above me,
and pulls prayer
from my mouth like jewels,
or teeth.

That Long, Vacant Room

Amy L. Fair

She was a raven
from an old man's story,
but I saw a witch
with heavy pendants in her ears
and a box full of beads
and tarnished charms.

She sat down on the ground near me
and her knees interrupted her,
confessed her transgressions.
She brought strange dreams
or visions
like frosted bundles of sage.

I didn't ask,
but she said
love isn't always possible.

With both hands,
she slipped
into that old man's mouth,
made up a bed
in that long, vacant room
and rested her head
there, on his teeth,
and pulled his words
up, out of his throat
in her dreams.

Eucharist

Andrew Gibson

just as the morning envisioned itself
with a wet slap
a knife in hand
and jelly leaking from both ends
the communion wafer
was so satisfying
while all the candles melted
into blue soap
around our four feet
Mary
Madonna
my blue flame, my tugboat
you stole my heart from the panther’s jaws
dragged it up a tree
and I heard you thank God for every part of me

The Soil of Edmonson County

Megan Hutchinson

is as red as a newborn’s blood
and filled with enough clay
to make an earthside sculpture
of baby Sylvie.

She, like the fallen babies
beside her, was practically born
into death.

No one knows why,
during that thirty-year span,
the babies of Edmonson County
died within a year of their birth,

or why they were buried,
one beside the other
like a cluster of oyster
mushrooms after the rain—

baby Sylvie at the head
like the patron saint of small,
fleeting souls, with not even
a moldering flower to her name—

but there they lie, little lambs
and doves and angels resting
in that soil, tight and warm
as a mother’s womb.

Southern Gothic Shopping Spree

Gene Hyde

Mom went in there a
Week ago. Smiling, she said
Kudzu was on sale,

And they have Green Stamps!
She musta got lost in that
Leafy verdant vale,

Dodging sprightly vines,
Snagging stamps, adrift on the
Cut-rate kudzu trail. 

Chef's Kiss

Daniel Romo & Steve Castro

My mortality is on the menu, though I’m only a sous-chef from Kenosha. When I was hired at this bistro, I never imagined the special of the day would be my life. Will the diners send back my fear of dying alone and say, "This trepidation is overcooked and lacks creativity. I want a concern with more kick." The Crème Brûlée on the other hand was to die for. While heating up my coffee in the microwave, I saw the most beautiful of sunrises inside of said microwave. When I told the pastry chef about it, he opened up the microwave, saw nothing, and said, "It's a sugar high from the three Crème Brûlées you've ate this past hour alone." The pastry chef was probably correct. I wonder what I was high on when I stirred my coffee, and my sugar cubes morphed into talking translucent minnows? Our Headwaiter told me that our most loyal customer just came in with a coupon that read, "If you buy the daily special consisting of the sous-chef from Kenosha's mortality, we'll throw in a front row seat to his funeral."  

Throwing Salt Over Both Shoulders

Daniel Romo & Steve Castro

That potato soup was so heavily impregnated with salt, it could have given birth to Lot’s wife. I crossed my arms in protest, but then I thought better of it and crossed myself before eating my meal in penitent silence. On another continent across the pond, a homeless cross-eyed young man crossed the street on his way to take vengeance on his enemy. He had no place to live ‘cause he was double-crossed by his former business associate, who was aptly surnamed Du Cros. Du Cros loved to over salt his food. Du Cros’s wife was never a biblical cliché, but her sodium levels were higher than Jericho’s walls. But this really isn’t about diet, or revenge, or well-known Bible references. This is about a man whose taste buds are so sensitive, each bite he takes reminds him of the lives he’s lived, the women he’s (un)loved, and the distance from heathen to Heaven.

It rained last night

Peter Shaver

Under the strawberry moon,
it’s all empty
and nothing moves.

I sell my soul
for a twelve-hour shift
with shit pay.

Clock in and out
without a word,
and leave.

In the gold light
of the morning, 

storm clouds explode.

Cats wander over stone fences,
into the woods

where everything is alive.

A rain puddle stills
to pure brown eyes.

Life and Death at the Castle

Shyla Shehan

This place heals me
and wounds me.
I face west on castle grounds,
execute salutations to the sunset
stretching through up-dog and down.
Enchanting ivy grows lush
and wild over thresholds 
and across archways. It climbs 
the outside of the towers and creeps 
into windows and door frames.
Finches build their own castle nest 
inside the aviary. They lay eggs 
and have offspring that can’t survive—
voices lost in the middle of a song.
Three levels below, termites feast,
hollow the bones of this beast,
gather their numbers
and plan to ascend. This place
heals and wounds, though...

Won’t it be fascinating to witness
the chew through?
Hounds released, 
the topple of the towers,
ivy burned to its roots, 
and the un-caged birds 
set free.

Hallowed

Karla Van Vliet

The girl prays, her hands the form of a wolf
as if to reconstruct the shape of him,
her face in his pelt, his scent the wet earth
of den, of sanctum; prays holy, holy,
his body’s wild offering, its mystery a fire set
in her belly, such raging flames, candescence,
curling licks consuming the dry tinder –
what grows, from ash, the heat cracked shell,
her voice rises both desolate and according;
cast alms in the mountain’s bowl.

Fiction

A Few Seconds of Consciousness

Ace Boggess

She woke me. I was dreaming, and her palms eased gentle pressure against my shoulder blade and bicep. “You were groaning and talking in your sleep,” she said, her tone babying, kind, reassuring. “You were having a nightmare.”

I felt dazed, my eyes opening to a blur and black. I didn’t remember dreaming—not the spies who plot against me some nights as part of a cinematic adventure, not zombies stalking after I’ve binge-watched The Walking Dead or something comic like Z Nation. There was no shadowy stranger who chased me until I walked backward off a cliff and woke up startled, out of breath. I didn’t drown in my recurring childhood visions of sitting in back of the station wagon while my dad drove us toward a tidal wave, turned left to find the wave there, too, approaching from the front, then left again, the same.

She said groaning and talking, which fit more with something sexual, tender, or romantic, but I didn’t recall that either. There was a brief opening of my eyes to see darkness, followed by closing them to see it there as well.

Did she save me from monsters, sleep apnea, an ex-girlfriend arguing about the cost of my mp3 collection? I recalled none of these later. I slept as if drugged, awoke once to the shushing of her voice as if she were humming my name like a mantra: “Shawn, Shawn, Shawn.”

Wish I had responded with her name in the dream language of a Catholic rite, “Dirige nos, Eloise,” followed by a prayer not worth remembering.

I never played this role: the rescued. I was the one who gently nudged my exes when their nights turned sour. There was Genevieve, tall and creamy-skinned, whose head held a haunted house of blank-faced men that hurt her. How many horrors did I save her from? And Carol, whose round face wore sadness like a porcelain mask—every other night she envisioned me in flagrante delicto with a woman not her, her biggest fear that I’d cheat on her. Which, of course, I did as prophesied. Then came Sheila, short and dye-dark-haired. She never told me her dreams. They were awful. She screamed in her sleep as though pierced in the spine by an icicle spear—sudden, chilling agony. She cussed and flailed her arms about, one time waking me with an unintended elbow to the chin. Finally, there was Cynthia, who looked like me but with longer, slightly sandier hair. We had the same wide forehead, the same sunken, black-banded eyes and somewhat-overweight bodies. For four years, I held her while she whimpered like a scorned animal. Sometimes, I woke her and she calmed. Others, she slept through my attempts at comfort, even if I shook her and said her name. When I asked her what troubled her, she always said, “My stepfather,” and left it at that.

Now, I was the nightmare keeper. I was the lost wanderer in a dystopian dreamscape. But what did I witness? I couldn’t account for it in the few seconds of consciousness before I drifted off again, and when I awoke that morning, I barely remembered Eloise’s touch and whispers.

I felt cheated. Nothing’s more personal than a nightmare, and I had been robbed of one before it could leave an impression on me, before it could define me in some small way I didn’t understand at first and now never would.

What disturbed me so? Were there guns, knives, teeth? Did the graveyard of my sleep city come alive with phantoms? It could’ve been a tiger sizing me up from the underbrush—I always thought a tiger would be the perfect villain for a nightmare, its addition leaving any bad dream worth remembering. Was it that? Much worse?

The last time I had a terrible vision, one from which nobody woke me, it involved a snake in an unlit basement. I was packing up everything in the house—whose house, I can’t say—before effecting my escape to somewhere new. Through dark, I saw boxes stacked on top of boxes. In one of them, the serpent lurked. It lunged and struck my ankle. I cried out in pain, but the snake disappeared before I could figure out if it were venomous. Had it murdered me? Had it tricked me by playing a mysterious game of tag? I lay on the floor for what seemed like hours, clutching my leg and calling for help. No one came—not friends or family, none of my former lovers, not even the movers in their puffed blue jumpsuits. I had nobody, nothing, just hours of agony and dread that the viper—if it was a viper—might come back.

Now that was a nightmare worth its salt.  I think it meant I had a fear of leaving or moving on. My relationship with Cynthia would end soon. I knew that already, though I refused to admit it at the time. So, the pieces fit. It made sense, and it was interesting. Maybe my subconscious razzed me, its passive-aggressive way of telling me to get going.

Before the serpent dream, I had the same nightmare three times about being yelled at in a coffee shop by a dead celebrity I was obsessed with at the time. I always found the same setup, same wood-paneled coffee shop, same beginning—my fault as I bumped into him and spilled hot coffee down his back—but a different dead celebrity. First, the long, wrinkled face of William Burroughs berated me in words that each seemed to drag on forever. I had listened to the Dead City Radio album on YouTube a few nights before, so clearly heard his drawn-out phrasing as he hurled obscenities I didn’t always comprehend. The second night, I doused Kurt Cobain, who, in a weird coincidence, once made a record with Burroughs. Kurt wore that olive sweater I always pictured him in, now stained down the back with coffee. His eyes were calming as he cussed me and my wretched existence. The last night brought me Hermann Hesse, whose voice I had never heard.  For some reason, he sounded like a preteen girl as he squinted at me, punched me in the chest, and told me to “Get some goddamned serenity.”

I loved my night terrors. I found them clever vignettes from lives I never lived. I collected them and wrote what I recalled in a little moleskin notebook.

Not this time. I kept nothing from the night except Eloise’s fingertips and kind voice: You were groaning and talking in your sleep. Maybe there was more. Maybe she would recall something specific I had said. I decided to ask her.

She didn’t get up until a couple hours after I did. It was Sunday, and neither of us had to work—she at the bank, I at the courthouse where I handled deeds and tax forms. We weren’t churchgoers, so nothing compelled us to leave the house. She slept, and I waited, sitting at the kitchen table and staring at my mug of joe. My auburn bathrobe hung open around my stained white tee and boxers with cats on them. That’s how she found me. “Morning,” she said as she came down the stairs.

“Good morning.”

“You’ve been up a while.”

I saluted her with my mug—green with a Marshall University logo on it.

“Did you sleep okay?”

“I think so,” I said, “other than that nightmare. How about you?”

“Fine, fine.”  She hesitated. “Oh, yeah. The nightmare. I already forgot.”

“Thanks for waking me, by the way.”

She smiled, her pale lips glowing under bright blond hair as if roses backlit in a glass case. “What was it about, anyway?” Her voice sounded concerned, but also a little unnerved.

“I have no idea. I was hoping you could tell me.”

She scowled and shrugged, her red and gray flannel nightdress rising with the motion to reveal flushed thighs. “I don’t know,” she said, her voice like a sigh. “Why would I know?” She turned and reached for the cabinet with the mugs, her flannel rising even higher in the back.

As she poured her coffee, I said, “You told me I was talking in my sleep. What did I say? Could you make anything out?”

She didn’t reply, staring at her coffee as she scooted over the floor toward the chair across from me.

“Were they real words or, like, sleep words?”

When she had herself situated, she said, “Oh, they were real enough, I think. Keep in mind, I was half asleep.”

“What did I say?”

“Something about fire. I think you were being burned.”

“Ouch,” I said, rubbing my forearm as if to put out a flame. That sounded terrible, but not something I’d forget right away. “What else?”

“I don’t know. You grunted a lot. You were shaking. I heard you mumbling stuff.”

“Stuff like what?”

She looked away and shrugged as if she didn’t understand why I kept pushing. She was anxious, and I couldn’t figure out the reason. Had I talked about old girlfriends? Had I said unpleasant words about her? “You know…,” she finally replied.

“I don’t,” I said. “Tell me.”

“A name. You said a name.”

All the more worried, I pressed on. “What name?”

“I….”

“Come on, El. What name?”

She hesitated again, looked away, looked back. We stared each other down like dueling cowboys.

“El?” I said.

“David,” she gasped. “There, all right? You said David.”

I felt my jaw drop but forced it closed before it could become offensive. David, I thought. There had been no nightmare—not for me. David was her ex. He was the villainous spy, the skin-sloughing zombie lurching after skin to eat, the bile-spewing Kurt Cobain. She had told me about him. It was a long time ago, but she clung to the abuse. He did things to her that left my worst nightmares feeling like merry-go-rounds. Things involving broken bones. Things involving lit cigarettes. I shuddered as I considered the stories about him—the ones Eloise had been willing to share. Now I understood. She hadn’t saved me from my dream; she had saved herself from hers, using me as a life preserver and pulling herself back onto the boat of reality. 

I smiled at her but said nothing. I could tell she didn’t want to talk about it. So, we pretended. We pretended David was a man-sized lizard that tortured me in my sleep since childhood. It shot fire from its eyes. Scary. And just this once, El came into my room, slipped inside my dream, and stood between me and the beast. She wrestled it to the ground, forced it to tap out, and that was that. I would never have a troubled sleep again.

In the Woods

Ada Hardy          

It would be a good place to abandon a dog.

From the high curves of Donner Pass Road, the mountain pines seem to go on and on, stumbling up the rocky shoulders and then massing into one vast greenness that climbs the gentle slopes of the Sierras. Erin leans against the passenger-side door and searches the passing landscape for the unlucky creature that she’s created. Filthy, obviously–muddy enough that you can’t tell its real color until you get it cleaned up in the bathtub. A big doe-eyed golden retriever with a limp, a smart dog who knew that there would be no one there when it returned from chasing the ball, but who did it anyway to spare its owner the misery. Out here too long, its ribs countable beneath its matted coat, its nails curled into its paw pads.

She tries to imagine the wheedling and the whining it would take to get her father to admit it into the car, and reality, now with one foot in the door, pushes her a step further. She thinks of the way such a little thing as a new dog would, upon their return, ruin her mother’s day, and she drops the daydream immediately. The past hour on the road has been relaxing; it’s a rare trip that doesn’t include her mother, and the thought of fighting with an adult again just makes her tired. She is sixteen now, and she lives on angst and heartbreak, strumming their chords deep into the night to the saddest tune she can think of. Abandoned dogs are sad. Mothers? Just infuriating.

The parent driving the car isn’t all bad. She feels, on days like today, that they’re united against a common enemy. They stopped outside Auburn for coffee for him, a hot chocolate for her, and sat at a picnic table in the weak winter sunshine without having to fill the silence. Her father is still a mystery to her, muted by the force of her mother’s neuroses, but she can always count on him to be delighted by an enormous dog. Quietly, the golden retriever becomes a mastiff.

They are going to the mountains to pick out rocks for the yard, big cookies and cream chunks of granite that cost money down in the Sacramento Valley but are free for the taking higher up if you’re discreet about it. There’s no real reason for Erin to come along today; she’s extra gas in the car, an extra lunch later on, and she won’t earn back her cost in the lifting. But she knows why he’s brought her. It could have been his own idea or it could have been her mother saying, “Get rid of her, I’m sick of her,” and either way, she’s grateful because now she can breathe.

Her father turns the car onto a side road. The only sounds are the birdsong, the slamming car doors and the crunch of pine needles under their shoes. It doesn’t occur to Erin to wonder how he knows where to go; he just does. He moves through the world with competence that she takes for granted. He builds things, tears them down, plays peacemaker, knows about taxes and landscaping and the location of wild rocks in the Sierra Nevadas.

“Wouldn’t it be cool if we saw a bear?” she says.

He laughs. Not a real laugh, just a sort of “Hah!,” but when she glances over at him she can see that he’s amused. “Maybe if we’re in the car,” he says.

“I’ve never seen a bear. Remember when Grammy and Grampy would spend the summers up here and there was a bear that got into all the garbage cans? I always hoped I would see it, but I never did. Or a mountain lion,” she adds.

He looks at her like she’s nuts. When he turns away, he shakes his head, and she feels adrift. She had meant to draw him into a conversation but has lost him somewhere, as she usually does. There is something wrong with her, she’s sure: some fundamental way in which she’s never settled perfectly into this family the way that her non-adopted friends fit into theirs.

For the first time it occurs to her that maybe he’s brought her here to abandon her.

It’s not a thought that has any bearing in reality. There are places for kids like Erin to go. She has biological parents out there somewhere, though whenever she brings it up her mother has been quick to point out that maybe they don’t want to know her. Erin is under the impression that she has worn out her welcome in one family and is quickly doing so in the other. But she’s secure in her mother’s possession, knows well that, despite her threats to take off when she’s eighteen and never see them again, she won’t escape that easily from her mother's control. If she is to be abandoned, it won’t be in the woods. So she is free to wander the mountains like an abandoned dog, looking through bungee-corded trash cans like a bear, asleep in her thin cotton hoodie as a bank of insulating snow forms around her.

The pretending is sweet, and it doesn’t take any effort. That’s what she loves most about her father and why she worries for him: his passivity makes him whatever she wants him to be, and there is little he does to ruin the illusion. She can pretend he’s leaving her here and adore him for it at the same time.

They come across the rocks sooner than Erin thought they would. Of course; how would they get them back to the car otherwise? Her father bends and pulls one from the banks of a meltwater stream, and rocks it back and forth in the water until the mud washes away. He judges it. It has to be perfect somehow, and he’s good at perfect, or at least the illusion: the diagonal lines of the back deck, the caulking around the bathtub. The wild granite will have to fit together in an aesthetically pleasing way—not exact, but like nature could have maybe had a hand in the arrangement of the rocks under the living room window. Erin tries to make suggestions, but they’re clearly not right, and so instead of arguing, he just agrees as though he’s taking her advice, and picks different ones entirely.

“Why don’t you go see if you can find some more,” he tells her. “I need about ten.”

This is it, then, she thinks bravely, and stands. When you’re sixteen and wallowing in your own sadness, heartbreak is easy to manufacture. Tears come unbidden to her eyes and she turns away, the obedient Dickensian orphan aware she’s about to be left in the forest, colluding in her abandonment. She sniffles as she walks, and tries to stem the tears; her father will wonder why she’s crying when he catches up, and it’ll ruin the fantasy. It’s such a delicious one, too, ripe with the sympathy she craves. The specter of her mother’s scrutiny lifts, and relief washes in.

Erin has found no suitable rocks by the time she hears her father’s footsteps. “By the creek,” he says, watching her tug at an enormous piece of granite that the ground refuses to surrender. The ones in the water come up more easily, and she stands over him as he lifts another. It comes up with a great sucking sound, and the water and mud rush to fill the hole it left.

“You want these ones?” she says. He has made a pile. “Dad.” When he doesn’t answer, she pulls her sleeves up and carries one to the car. Her father has the keys, so she sets it by a back tire and goes back for another, again and again until she can’t feel her hands. In the car, she presses her knuckles against the hot skin of her stomach and waits for her father to finish arranging the rocks in the trunk.

They turn onto the main road. Her story shifts. She has been rescued. The cold that’s gotten under her sweatshirt is the cold of a month of mountain nights, and the vague hunger of an approaching lunch has been eating her for days. She has lived on wild strawberries and roast squirrel for weeks, but nothing now; it’s too cold. She is going to be okay. There will be a hot bath and a filling meal and a warm bed at the end of things, and the arms of strangers who will protect her. People with whom to start over, and in her fantasy, this time she gets things right.

As they descend the Sierras, the pretending gets harder.

He has been sitting on something, Erin realizes, and she knows what it is the moment he sighs. They are stuck in traffic close to home; this is the last opportunity he has to say it, unless he detours and keeps driving.

“I called around to a bunch of group homes yesterday,” he begins. His gentleness is clumsy, or maybe Erin just isn't used to hearing it.

She stares steadily out the window.

“None of them would take you because you’re not a ward of the state and you haven’t committed a crime.”

So they’re not giving her up. They can’t. From the corner of her eye, she can see his head turn to her, assessing her reaction. She wonders if he is disappointed. She probes at her own feelings, wondering if she is.

“Look. You have to try to get along with Mom. I know she doesn’t make it easy. Maybe if you just try to breathe once in awhile. Count to ten.”

Erin laughs, silently, bitterly. They are so far past counting to ten.

“She loves you. You know that, right?”

“Yeah. God. Okay.” Get her out of this conversation. Let her sink back into where she’s spent the day.

And he does. He doesn’t like to linger on life’s discomforts; he will take, as always, the past of least resistance, and it’s easier now to let the conversation die.

Erin tries to think of something sad to bring the fantasy to life again, but reality, abrupt and ruinous, dogs her the rest of the way home.

The Minor Indignities of Age

H. S. May

Research has shown that even old people don’t care to be around the aged. He had read about a study that said so, maybe in the Times. Perhaps that is why he had just been eased out. Let go by another man his age—a friend, or so he had believed. The friend had said his job as a vice president was being eliminated. He knew with certainty that after a month, the company would create a new position lower down the ladder that was half his pay, for someone half his age.

His first reaction when given the news was disbelief, and then rage. After all he had done for the company, to be turned out like a stray cat. He had promised to sue as they ushered him out. But he knew age discrimination would be almost impossible to prove. There was no chance of finding another job, not at age sixty-two. He wasn’t actually elderly, just an “older man” and overqualified.

He had been sitting in his condo for an hour, the day after he was let go, trying to read a book, becoming increasingly depressed. He needed to get out, to be around people, and wanted a drink in the worst way. But he had sworn it off a few years ago after the head of personnel had warned him of an alcohol dependency. A visit to the coffee shop then.

He put the book under his arm, headed out the door, took the elevator down, and walked a half block to the coffee shop, where he waited in line. He liked the place. It wasn’t a Starbucks—outsider art on the walls, old furniture from the Salvation Army, not overly clean. The young woman in front of him had purple hair, a tattoo of a serpent on her neck, and at least a dozen piercings in her nose, lips, eyelids, and ears. He decided that Miss Piercings must be the young woman’s name. She was perhaps twenty and also carried a book under her arm.

Miss Piercings finally reached the cashier and fumbled in her backpack. “Fuck, I left my wallet at home.”

“I’ll pay for it,” he said, hoping to strike up a conversation.

Miss Piercings looked at him with suspicion. “If you’re trying to pick me up, grandpa, forget about it. I’m not a hooker if that’s what you think.”

“No, no. That’s not it at all.”

“Fine with me then. But don’t expect anything for it.” She shrugged, the cashier gave her a knowing smirk, and Miss Piercings ordered a nonfat macchiato. She moved down and waited for the barista to make her drink.

He decided on a nonfat macchiato himself. He had never had one and thought it would be a novelty, something in common with the young woman. The nonfat was a plus—his doctor had told him to avoid cholesterol and put him on Lipitor for his heart.

The cashier took his order with studied indifference, inscribed hieroglyphics on a paper cup, and pushed it down to the barista. He moved along next to Miss Piercings, who ignored him. She picked up her cup, went to an empty table, and began reading her book.

In the fullness of time, the barista handed him a steaming cup of white frothiness and espresso. He looked around. The place was full of people, sitting in twos and threes, everyone young and trying their best to avoid his gaze—no free tables. Miss Piercings glanced up and shrugged again. “You can sit here if you want,” she said, pointing at the chair with her book.

“Thanks.” He put his book down on the table. “Do you use sweetener? In the macchiato, I mean.”

“Nothing artificial,” she said, not looking up from her book. “Sometimes honey, but they don’t have any here.”

He took a sip. “Not bad.” Miss Piercings was attractive, as young people often are to those who are old. Why the tattoos and piercings, he wondered? But it would be impolite to ask. He could see the roots of her hair, a nice brown under the purple. She would find it painful and expensive to get the tattoo removed when she was older and needed a job. Perhaps the piercings wouldn’t be noticed with the right makeup. When he was younger, he might have asked her out, even with the hair, the piercings, and the tattoos.

Miss Piercings continued reading. He could see the cover—The First Bad Man by Miranda July. “What’s the book about?” he asked.

Miss Piercings sighed, turned down the page, and put the book on the table. “You wouldn’t understand.”

He looked down at the cover. “You know that the first bad man was actually Adam. So that would make the first bad person Eve.”

“Very deep. But I don’t think that’s what Miranda July had in mind.” Miss Piercings reached across the table and turned his book around. “The Hidden Eisenhower—are you kidding me?”

“I’m reading it for my book club,” he said. “I prefer fiction, but the others like biographies and history—mostly politicians and generals. Teddy Roosevelt, Churchill, George Washington, Eisenhower.”

“Dead white males,” said Miss Piercings.

“Are you referring to the members or the books we read?” Miss Piercings laughed. “Is your book for school?”

“Hardly. The English department is still obsessed with Harold Bloom. As it happens, it’s for my book club, as well.”

It struck him as odd that this young woman, a veritable child, could be in a book club. Reading groups were for people in middle age and older. “You’re in a book club?” he asked.

“Me and about a million others. It’s online.” She mentioned a famous actress he had seen on HBO. “You sign up and get her recommendation every month. You can post comments—I do it all the time. Pretty standard book club. You could join.”

“Really?”

“Anyone can join. If your AirDrop is on, I’ll share a link.” He hesitated, having no idea what she was talking about. Miss Piercings sighed. “Give me your phone and I’ll turn it on. You have to put in your passcode,” which he did and handed it to her. Miss Piercings punched the screen three times and gave him the phone.

The screen was alive with colorful images. He looked down at the cover of his book—a black and white photo of Eisenhower sitting at his desk in the Oval Office signing papers. This was the third book on Ike the club had read.

“So, I can join this club,” he said, “just by putting in my name and a passcode?”

“Yes, but no one uses their real name. You can make something up. You could be Old Dude.”

“I would rather be someone younger.”

“Sure. Anything you want. But I’m going to call you Old Dude.”

“So, what’s your book club name?”

 “Emily Brontë’s Granddaughter. I’m a Brontë fan, but I would never have let Heathcliff behave the way he did.”

“Brontë didn’t have any children, so you couldn’t be her granddaughter.”

“It’s intended to be ironic,” she said. “You know about irony, don’t you?”

“I’ve heard of it. Should I call you Miss Brontë?”

“You can call me whatever you please, my good man.” This she said with a lilting voice and an English accent.

“I’ve been thinking you should be called Miss Piercings, because of the facial jewelry.”

She reached her hand to her face. “I rather like the name, Miss Piercings,” again with an English accent. “I’ve needed a new name, and Miss Emily Piercings it is. It could be from a Jane Austen novel.”

 “I have a fondness for Jane Austen,” said the Old Dude.

“Of course. Everyone loves her. But she is rather old fashioned.”

“Do you have a Mr. Darcy?”

“No, I have a Miss Darcy.”

“Very modern indeed,” he said. “I’ve never had coffee with a lesbian.”

“How do you know you haven’t? You shouldn’t stereotype people, you know. I’m what you would call transgender, as a matter of fact.”

The Old Dude looked at Miss Piercings carefully. She was tall for a woman but slender. She could be a model, he decided, except for the tattoos and piercings. He supposed there must be a telltale sign somewhere of her birth gender. Her voice was a little deep, her wrists larger than average. But there was nothing obvious.

“You must be kidding,” he finally said, then hesitated. “Sorry, that was rude of me.”

“I’ll take it as a compliment. It’s comforting that you can’t tell.”

“Has it been difficult?”

“It hasn’t been a walk in the park, but it’s behind me now. My girlfriend has been understanding, but we’ll probably break up. She thought it was a heterosexual relationship when it started. She’s pretty confused at the moment.”

“I can relate.” He fell silent trying to figure out what he had just heard.

“You remind me of my grandfather,” said Miss Piercings. “He died.”

“I’m only sixty-two.”

“That was about his age. I miss him.” She paused. “I shouldn’t have mentioned death, you being old and all.”

“No need to apologize,” said the Old Dude. “Mortality comes up a lot nowadays. When I was your age, I couldn’t imagine dying. But it happens to everyone.”

“I suppose so.” Miss Piercings gave a skeptical shrug. She took a drink of her macchiato. “My parents won’t talk to me anymore. They don’t approve. My grandfather would have, I’m sure. Not that he could have understood why I did it, but it wouldn’t have made any difference to him. He wrote me little poems when I was growing up—little funny rhymes.”

The two fell silent and sipped their drinks. Miss Piercings suddenly looked down at her watch. “Got to catch my bus.” She drained the macchiato, rose from the table, and hoisted the backpack. “See you.” She walked out the door.

 The Old Dude sat sipping his macchiato, thinking of his encounter with Miss Piercings. He had read about the modern phenomena of changing one’s gender and had followed the controversy about bathrooms, of course. But Emily Piercings was unimaginable. The Old Dude got up, forgetting Eisenhower lying on the table, and walked out the door.

It was a brutal August day, and the heat took his breath away as he left the air-conditioning. He saw Miss Piercings at the bus stop down the block, rummaging in the bottom of the backpack. He felt in his pocket for change. Did they even take change on the bus now, or did you need a card of some sort? He walked toward the bus stop.

The bus arrived, Emily Piercings got on, and the Old Dude followed, having run the last twenty yards. He rested for a few seconds after climbing into the bus, trying to catch his breath. His heart was racing. He dumped a handful of quarters into the machine by the driver. Miss Piercings was reading her book, sitting in the last row. He took a seat in the front.

The bus moved haltingly, stopping every two blocks, working its way toward the university side of town. A black woman got on the bus and sat next to him. He wondered if he should smile and decided he should not. He kept looking back to check on Miss Piercings; the woman moved to a seat across the aisle.  

Emily Piercings got off the bus through the middle door in front of a rundown duplex. The Old Dude followed through the front. They were the only two at the stop, which was awkward. Emily Piercings shook her head, rolled her eyes, and walked down to where he was standing.

“You are my first stalker,” she said. “Perhaps you should get a medal, some sort of recognition.”

“I’m not really a stalker,” said the Old Dude. “I just wanted to talk.” His heart began racing again and he touched his chest.

“When a man follows a woman to her home unasked, he is, by definition, a stalker. You are an unusually bad one, though. I saw you leave the coffee shop and get on the bus, for Christ’s sake. I could call the cops—that would be an old school thing to do. But I haven’t had the name and sex on my driver’s license changed, and the police sometimes don’t understand. Why don’t you cross the street and get on the next bus downtown?”

“I’m really sorry,” he said.

“It’s okay. But some women wouldn’t understand.” Miss Piercings turned, walked up the sidewalk, and into the duplex.

The Old Dude pulled out his phone and called a cab. He supposed there weren’t many left now that everyone used Uber, but he didn’t have the app. The dispatcher said it would take fifteen minutes before he could get a ride.

The cab hadn’t come after twenty minutes. He was sweating in the sun and thought about moving down the block to the shade of a tree. But he thought he saw the cab, and waited, then it passed by. His breath grew short and his heart raced uncontrollably. His head felt light; his left arm began to ache; he fell to the sidewalk and hit his head; blood dripped from his forehead, clouding his vision. It felt like an elephant was sitting on his chest. He cried out, “Help me. I’m dying.”

The last thing he remembered was Emily Piercings leaning over him, saying, “Are you okay?”

                                                            ******

He awoke in a pale green room, hooked up to a half dozen beeping monitors. Bags of fluids led to a needle in his arm, and a tube fed oxygen into his nose. I had a heart attack, he thought. He realized that his chest was wrapped in bandages.

He looked over and saw Emily Piercings sitting in a chair reading her book. “What happened?”

“They cracked open your chest and did a quadruple bypass,” said Miss Piercings, looking up. “Ninety-five percent blockage, they said.”

“I feel pretty good.”

“I would feel pretty good too if I had that much oxycodone in my veins. You will have to quit the drugs, so don’t get hooked.”

“I guess I’m lucky they did the operation in time.”

“Yeah. I signed for it.”

“You did what?”

“They didn’t want to do the operation without permission from the next of kin. Would have done it eventually anyway, but they were screwing around making phone calls. The way the doctors talked, it sounded like you might die.”

“You said you were my next of kin, and they believed you?”

“I told them I was your granddaughter, and my mother was on safari in Kenya. They just wanted someone to sign the form so they wouldn’t get sued if you died. I signed it Emily Piercings.”

“I don’t even know if I have insurance. I lost my job.”

“Glad I didn’t give them my credit card,” said Miss Piercings with a shrug.

“I owe you my life, I guess,” said the Old Dude. “When I was a boy, in cowboy movies, if an Indian saved a person’s life, the Indian was responsible from then on for the person he saved.”

Miss Piercings shook her head. “They are called indigenous peoples now. In any event, I can’t be responsible for you. I’ve got my own problems. I just didn’t want to see you die in front of my duplex.”

“Thanks anyway.”

“No problem,” said Miss Piercings with another shrug.

A pretty young nurse in a pink uniform came into the room. “You woke up,” she said with a smile. “Welcome back to the land of the living. How’re you feeling, sweetie?”

Sweetie—an epithet the young reserve for the old, infirm, and helpless—one of the minor indignities of age. If he were the nurse’s age, she would have never called him that. But at least I’m alive. “Okay, I guess. Do you know what’s going to happen to me?” he asked.

“You can leave in a few days, a week maybe. You’ll need someone to take care of you for a month after you get out of the hospital.” The nurse looked skeptically at Emily Piercings. “Is there someone we can call?”

The Old Dude considered his options. Two grown children, one in LA and the other in London; both blamed him for the divorce and rarely called. A boy from his second marriage was still receiving child support. “No close relatives,” he finally said.

“So, could you call someone from work or a friend?” asked the nurse. “They won’t let you out of here unless you have someone to take care of you.”

“Maybe I can hire somebody.”

“You can if you have to,” said the nurse, “but it’s expensive.”

The nurse busied herself with her stethoscope, listening to the pulse in his neck, then his chest. “Still ticking,” she said brightly, then looked at the monitors. “Blood oxygen fine. The doctor will be in shortly.” She patted the Old Dude’s hand, smiled, and left the room.

“Bummer about you not having anyone to take care of you,” said Miss Piercings. “Wish I could help, but I can’t take you home with me. It’s tense right now with my girlfriend.” She got up from the chair. “I’ve been here all night. I’ve got to go.”

The Old Dude could tell he was making Miss Piercings uncomfortable. Young people hate the feel of hospitals, the sick, and the dying. Who could blame them?

“Thanks again for saving my life,” he said.

“I said no problem, really.” Miss Piercings began edging toward the door. “See you at the book club. I’m going to change my online name to Emily Piercings, so you’ll know when I post something.”

“I’ll be the Old Dude.”

Miss Piercings hesitated, turned back, and came over to his bed. “Take care of yourself, Old Dude.” She kissed his forehead. “I get coffee at that place we met. It’s near my job.”

“Maybe I’ll see you there,” he said.

“Maybe so.”

Miss Piercings looked around the room. “Where’s your book?”

“I must have left it at the coffee shop,” said the Old Dude.

“You’re going to need something to read.” She handed him The Last Bad Man. “You can have it. I know how it ends.”

Wild Child

Yvette Naden

My throat is full of moths.

Please, don’t make me start again. I don’t want to open my mouth, to repeat myself. If I do, I fear I’ll choke their little bodies into the sink. I fear their wings will continue to flutter, flicking bloodied spittle into my open mouth.

I don’t want to start again, but I can see you drifting. You always used to drift, like when you snuck behind that cardboard box on the farm where the warmth of the sun couldn’t find you. Instead of covering your ears to block out the noise, you closed your eyes. You built a raft out of partial thoughts and you drifted away. A few times, your feet slipped into the water. Salt powdered your nostrils, clumping like cotton in your ears. You managed to haul yourself back onto that raft, drowning out their voices, voices which will claim a few hours later that they were only joking, that everything is fine.

It’s almost amazing what we can force ourselves to believe.

I can see you. In the smallest corner, curling into your own shadow. You face peeks out in a crescent moon. You can’t hide from me. And, as it turns out, I can’t hide from you either.

I’ve never heard of two ghosts haunting each other. But here we are.

I’ve been sitting in the same position for hours, forgetting to stretch. My spine concertinas. Scoliosis. The genes diluted over the decades, yet my Father still walks with a limp and my natural position is hunched over a book, neck jaggedly protruding from my shoulders like a disused church bell. I wonder if we’re simply dilutions of our ancestors. If the last Briton is a mere echo of the first. In a way, I almost hope we are. I hope that the family curse is merely a single drop of blood in my veins. Then again, neither one of us believes in curses, or family for that matter. I’m only telling you this to prepare you. To remind you. To drag you back through sheets of the countless minutes we spent writing in that notebook, the dog-eared pages like wrinkled bandages as we brought pen to paper. The paper which I’m using now, coiled like an Ammonite in front of the fire. You say nothing as I crumple poems to ash, lighting match after match to keep the hearth burning. I won’t be the first Hamilton to set fire to the voices of others.

You’re wincing. I can see that you’re starting to remember. Or perhaps I’m starting to forget. Perhaps we’re locked in a paradox. After all, the two of us shouldn’t be sitting in the same room. We’re not breaking the rules by a simple technicality: you’re standing and I’m crouching. Curling over, hoping I can disappear into your shadow. Tiny fingers clenching into tinier fists and yet you stand tall.

I can almost taste the memory in your eyes. The static of Crewe, the smell of the Nantwich chippy. Both stripped away by the smog of Manchester. Invisible and yet it dances on our lungs. We cough every five minutes, suddenly missing the stasis of the village air. I can see your smoky eyes reflected in a puddle. I can’t tell if it’s urine, petrol, or rainwater. Perhaps it is a mocktail, a concoction of all three. You remember this, don’t you? You’re twelve and gasping at the Psychics department, which is shaped like a tin-can, pretending to listen to Mum as she talks up a storm. Her eyes are shooting stars, but they will soon dull and you will sit atop the stairs, listening to her sobbing, tearing tissues from a box you can’t bring yourself to give to her.

You look up, staring at where Mum is pointing. A rolling pin is pressed over your lungs. Manchester Museum. A fallen monolith of sandstone. Cream plasterwork with windows which appear as spiderwebs in your eyes. I watch as you run across the road, a motorbike missing you by a hair’s breadth. Mum is already on the other side; she has the road safety of a blind movie star, strutting over the tarmac with a too-wide smile. You wonder if she does this on purpose. To give you a heart attack at first, imagining that you’ll be the first pre-teen to die of cardiac arrest. Then perhaps because she’s hoping that one day, the cars won’t stop.

I smile as you search for the entrance to the Museum. There’s an archway, a great wide mouth of stone; it presses a kiss to your forehead as you step over the flagstones. I follow you through the glass doors, up the steps. Free entry. You take off at a run, ignoring the way a Mother pushing a pram shakes her head. Your Mum, little Emma, is not the type of woman who bleats, saying,

“Don’t run off. It’s easy to get lost in here.” No, you become your own navigator. I am your ghostly companion as you tear across the sun-bleached stones. You gasp as you spot the Liger, an organic crossover, lying in its case. Its eyes brim with glass but you keep staring anyway, as if expecting it to yawn and stretch contentedly. Mum catches up with you, not breathless despite the stairs.

“What did I tell you? Look at that. They bred a lion with a tiger. Isn’t that amazing? Beautifully preserved too, not like those amateurs down in Chester.” She crosses her arms, smiling proudly. When she walks away, towards the tropics exhibit, you watch the Liger in its case. You meet its gaze. Black, bottomless eyes, and you’re falling. Glass shatters, cutting your skin. You step away, wondering that just because the creature had been alive once upon a time, did that mean it had lived?

Someone once said that to be alive is power. That’s a lie, you realise, as you wander the halls of the dead. Here, each taxidermist’s treasure becomes a landmark. Each stare – from a dead peacock or raven – holds its audience captive, ready to perform. The easiest performance of their lives: they stand or lie or sit in static as people gawp and stare and snap pictures for an Album. Immortalised just like that. Did you know that taxidermy comes from the Greek ‘taxis’ and ‘derma’? It means arrangement of the skin. Their final expressions, their final positions pre-determined by a person with a license. They’ve achieved fame with the power of glass eyes and galvanised wire. A stuffed fox with eyes aflame, a field mouse which scuttles with the prowess of a Danseur Noble.

You look around. Toddlers are traipsing behind their parents, a man is taking pictures on his phone. A young girl goes to stick chewing gum on the glass case containing a horse, right over its brown muzzle, until her Mother intervenes.

And you turn back to the Liger. It refuses to meet your eyes.

And I sit here now, watching the world as it slowly inches along without me. Without anyone. Snow wraps its arms around the trees, the tarmac, the neighbour’s sports car. There is a Santa standing lop-sided on the drive, silently battling the wind. You remember the Liger, don’t you? Locked in a glass case, watching the world go by.

You never knew how it felt. But you will. And I do.

2020: the year we too became Museum Exhibits.

The Lightness of Ash

Richard Spilman  

First, it was he and his mom and dad together, and he was always with them, and every time he said, “I want,” the world burst into motion.

During the day, when he wasn’t at preschool, there was Mrs. Bolton, who let him watch TV as much as he liked. At night, there was music. And games and puzzles with a blaze dancing in the fireplace. Sometimes they went out to eat, but when they didn’t, he and his mom would often bake—it was their thing, she said.

His mother was small and pillowy, his father nervous like a bird.

Often, he and his dad would explore the wooded hillside behind the house, or they’d make stuff in the garage. His dad liked woodworking and would give the boy sandpaper and nails and let him do what he liked with the scraps. Sunday night was for grownup movies, which often bored him, so he’d play on his DS or watch the fire on the grate until he fell asleep.

He loved to watch his father prepare a fire—laying the logs crisscross or like a teepee or spread out in points like a star. He loved how the flames would slip between the logs or erupt through the hole in the top or crawl from one to another like climbers on a jungle gym, never once the same. “Fire is a living thing,” his father said. “It has to have space to breathe.”

When his mom was cooking, he’d watch the rings of blue flame on the stove, but they bored him, chained to their little holes. He liked better when steam rose from a pan and turned the wall into waves.

When his parents didn’t speak to each other and his mother drank most of the wine, the room would go cold, and he would shrink in its chill like a flower. Usually, they made up before he went to bed, and his mother would join their hands together and say, “All for one and one for all,” like the Musketeers.

In kindergarten, he learned words and numbers and, on his own, the names of so many dinosaurs his parents said he was going to be a scientist. They took him to zoos and parks and museums. From the stream that came down through the woods, he would gather rocks with interesting patterns, which he put into a box his father had made for him. His mom bought him a polisher, and they kept his favorites in a little bowl on the coffee table. Some he and his dad set into molds filled with mortar, which, dried and sealed, they lay in the garden as a path.

Then it all stopped.

His father stayed away on business and came home late—there were fights all the time about where he had been and what he’d been doing. Even when they weren’t fighting, his parents stayed apart, and he had the TV to himself.

By first grade, it was always his mom who took him to t-ball. Between t-ball and soccer, his dad moved out. They fought over him. Neither seemed to want him, or want the other to have him. On school days, he stayed in an after-care program and played on computers.

Without warning, they sold the house and moved into apartments, and there was no hill and no woods. So he broke things. A vase his mom liked, the cellphone his father kept answering. But nothing changed.

Mostly he was with his mom, and since the apartment noises frightened him, he slept in her bed. It took a while, but he got used to the bumps and cries from the other side of the wall and to the wash of cars outside. He’d wake to find himself in his own room, but that was okay. As he watched shadows play above the window curtains, he discovered that night too had its flames, and they comforted him.

His mom didn’t cook much, and since she was trying to lose weight, most of what she cooked he didn’t like. There was no garage to work in, no woods to walk in. Instead, they gave him toys and got mad when he didn’t like them. His father travelled all the time; his mother complained she couldn’t go anywhere because of him.  

That winter, when they were together, he asked his dad to build a fire, but the fireplace in that apartment was just show. “Look at it this way,” his dad said. “The sun is a fire, and there’s fire in lightbulbs and the engines of cars, and in your body, even in the rocks. It’s everywhere.” They made a game of looking for flames in odd places, like clouds and trees, but it wasn’t any fun.

Then there was a new man, on both sides, and the new men were nice the way babysitters are nice. His parents talked mostly with the new men, and if he wanted to say something, he had to wait his turn. So he stopped talking, and they said he was being rude.

More than ever, he got what he wanted, but he never liked what he wanted for long.

Kids at school made jokes about his father’s friend, so he stopped talking to them, too. When three boys wouldn’t let him alone, he fought them, and after that, Mrs. Bolton, who lived not far from the school, picked him up and took him home with her, and she read to him from old books with hard covers that smelled like the attic. Uncle Wiggly. Mother West Wind. They were kind of dumb, but as he listened, the woods behind the old house came alive again; he knew the animals, and the animals knew him.

After school let out for the summer, his parents sent him to camp, but it didn’t last. One of the counselors, a high school girl with braids, asked what he wanted to be when he grew up, and he said, “Dead.” They made his mom come from work, and she blew up, “What the hell can I do?” and he hid under a table.  Going home, she said, “I’m going to lose my job because of this shit.” She bought a bottle of wine, a big one, and wagged a finger at him, “Not one word.” Later, when she was drunk, they made mac and cheese and she apologized. “It’s not your fault.”

The rest of the summer, he stayed with Mrs. Bolton, and in addition to the soap operas and the books, she taught him to embroider, even after his mother told her to stop.

Sometimes, when Mrs. Bolton didn’t feel like reading, he read to himself making up most of it from the pictures in the book. So there were two sets of stories, his and Mrs. Bolton’s, and he loved them both.

Behind her house, was a small stream and, across the stream, railroad tracks on a low hill. He would count the cars of passing trains, how many of this kind, how many of that. She had a big barrel in which she burned trash, and she let him light the wooden match and throw it in. Only when there was lots of stuff could he see flames, but ashes would float out of the can and dance until they fell into the stream.

His mother got a job where she could work home some of the time, which gave them more time together, but now there were things he couldn’t touch and times when she could not talk to him.

Once, before the divorce, friends of his parents came to visit, bringing a girl they’d adopted from overseas, who did not know the language. She went through his toys, one at a time, silently, playing with each and then setting it aside. He tried to talk to her, but she acted like he wasn’t in the room. His father was that way with men. Before the boy got used to one, there was another, friendly but distant, like they were waiting for him to disappear.

At summer’s end, his mother cleaned house, throwing away most of the garden mosaics—and most of the dinosaurs, too, since he seldom played with them. When he cried, she said, “We only have so much room.”

He began to hide things.

On the next visit to his father, he took the box of rocks and the remaining mosaics, and his mother said, “Good riddance.” His father hung one of the mosaics from suction cups on the window of the boy’s room. All the rest, he put in the closet. When they were alone, his father asked what he thought of the men in his life, and the boy pointed to the mosaic in the window. “It’s like that,” he said. “There’s Seth and there’s Jerry.” He couldn’t remember the others.

“Where’s Jack?”

Jack was the new one. The boy rummaged in his rock box and took out one with green and brown stripes. “This is Jack,” he said, and his father hugged him so tight he couldn’t breathe.

“God, I love you.”

In first grade, one of the assignments was to make a family book and talk about it. For once, his mom and dad sat at the same table. They helped him put the book together so he wouldn’t have to answer a lot of questions. But so much had been left out, he barely recognized himself.

His mother saved the school stuff she liked, even from pre-school—pictures and tests and awards. She kept them in plastic bins and occasionally went through them to show him how sweet he’d been. It made him madder about the dinosaurs, so one day, while she was working, he went through a box, taking out what he didn’t like, and burned those things on a picnic table behind the apartment building, using a lighter his mother’s new boyfriend had left behind. She didn’t notice. The house smelled like smoke, anyway.

It had been hard to do, but he liked the little black spot on his thumb and how the flames changed shape depending on how he held the paper. The next time he tried it, the boyfriend came early and caught him, and from then on, they watched him and his father watched him, too. A few weeks later, he stole another lighter and burned some junk mail, just to show he could.

It was strange how scared they got, going through the apartment on their hands and knees. They sat him down and told him what terrible things happened when kids played with fire. The boy told them he wasn’t playing. He just liked how fire made everything stupid disappear.

They took him to a doctor, who asked if anyone had touched his private parts, and the boy refused to talk. His father wanted to find another doctor, but his mother refused. Another session and another. Even when the boy talked, he didn’t say much, because the doctor asked about the divorce and his parents and his parents’ friends, and wrote everything down. Finally, when the doctor’s back was turned, he took a lighter he’d hidden a long time ago and set fire to papers on the doctor’s desk.

The doctor didn’t get mad. He picked up the papers and put them in the wastebasket and took the lighter away, and for a while, the two of them watched it all burn.

“Why did you do that?” the doctor asked.

“I wanted you to stop.”

“Stop what?”

“Stop blaming people.”

The doctor shook his head. “I’m . . .” but then he stopped and held one of the boy’s hands in his. “That was a piss poor way of doing it.”

The boy laughed at the language. “Yeah, but it worked.”

After that, if he was mad, he just said so, and they’d talk about something else. But the doctor also prescribed pills, which made the boy feel dopey, so he made a deal with his mom: as long as he didn’t bug her, she wouldn’t make him take them.

At school, a girl tried to give him a lighter, but he told the teacher and she got put in “reflection.”

“Why did she do that?” he asked.

“Because it’s fun to get other people into trouble,” the teacher said, looking over the tops of her glasses.

His father now had bronze hair. Jack was still his boyfriend, and they stayed pretty much at home. Jack gave him an Xbox and often played with him.

His mother used her credit card to give her boyfriend money for the down payment on a car—$3,000—and after he got the new car, he got a new girlfriend and moved out. “We’ve got to scrimp,” his mom said, waving a handful of mail at him.

His father wouldn’t help. “It’s not my fault, your taste in men.”

Later, just before school let out, the boy came home to find the outside door part-way open and the mail on the kitchen table, along with a half-empty bottle of wine. And his mother on the couch, sleeping with the TV on.

He got a can of Coke from the fridge and sat at the kitchen table opening mail. Two he could tell were bills, and one of those had a red line across the top. By now, he knew all about bills, with or without red lines. There were more in the drawer next to the sink, what his mother called “the shit drawer.”

He hated the man who had taken his mother’s money, but he didn’t hate his father for not helping, because when his father gave him money, he had to hide it to keep her from borrowing.

He considered changing the channel, but then she’d wake up and start crying, and he hated when she cried. So he got the lighter from her purse.

It wouldn’t change anything, and it would piss her off, but at least he’d feel better for a while. He took the envelopes from the kitchen table and a handful from the shit drawer and went out to the picnic table.

One by one, he set the papers aflame and let each scuttle across the cement and onto the grass, where yellow butterflies went from clover to clover. Some he crushed into wads so that he could watch them writhe as the fire ate inward. Like the fires his father used to make, each burnt a little differently, opening like flowers as the flames took them.

Toward the end, a breeze came up, making it harder, but when they were lit, they would flutter out of his hand like birds and glide toward the parking lot till they blackened and fell to the ground, still burning.

Creative Nonfiction

Trail Magic

Amy Bee              

My friends can give you a ride to Bishop, but the driver’s on mushrooms, she says, eyeballing the tan lines that stop at our ankles, our scratched-up calves, our grimy backpacks. Other day hikers flow around us like we’re two giant boulders in a river. Aaron and I exchange looks. After eighteen days in the High Sierra, hell yeah, we’ll take a ride from a guy on shrooms. We grab our packs, socks, shoes, trekking poles, and each other’s hand, hobbling with stiff legs and aching backs behind the smooth, clean curve of our rescuer. She guides us to her friend’s car, where a woman with skin as pale as a desert mouse greets us, opens the rickety red door, and hands us each a peach before piling us in. A man with golden-orange sunset hair reaches from the driver’s seat to toss a jumbled mess of hiking gear into the trunk. We fold ourselves into the leftover space, Sunset Man looking deep into our eyes, grinning until we grin back, until all four of us are grinning, any collective shyness absorbed by an impromptu road trip.

He slaps the steering wheel and starts the car and questions us about our journey in a voice as raspy as a rusty gate. After days and days of walking, we are suddenly moving, engaged in motion no longer tied to our own effort and volition. I cup my peach gently with one hand and clutch the door handle with my other. We’re flying over cracked and rutted blacktop, the landscape speeding past as if we’re viewing it from the eye of a tornado, and is this how life has always been? A forward momentum where details can only be gleaned and glimpsed?

Aaron slurps his peach, pointing to the one in my palm and then pointing at his mouth: Eat the peach, he says, in that silent way married people talk. I shake my head. Not yet. I’m dazed and exhilarated, watching through my window as green foliage and cool rock crumble into the buttery soft grasses of the foothills, our road cutting through the splendor, efficiently whisking me away from my beloved Sierra Nevada. The towering shape of mountainous peaks and summits crowd the rear window, like a family waving good-bye, steadily shrinking into a memory. Aaron nods in understanding. Our knees touch, our eyes glazed with overstimulation, giddy as we imbibe on sensory overload. Can you believe…isn’t this just so…is this real…our hearts flutter back and forth.

Sunset Man fills the car with his tales, his fiery eyes framed in the rear-view mirror. Mouse nods, tripping along in her own quietly animated way. I want to tell them how the scent of their soap is like standing in an ocean of lavender and honey, how it collides against the wall of our sweaty stench and roils over like a tsunami. Outside, the earth opens and expands; the air paints itself in bittersweet hues of purple and burgundy. Bishop twinkles in the dry valley, a distant star looming, growing in intensity. I want to tell them how I’ve never been exhausted into happiness like I am right now. Sunset Man veers onto a gravelly vista and slams the brakes. We all spill out of the rickety red car and seep into the everywhere. I want to tell them how I can see the universe breathing in unison with me. How the sky reaches for a horizon it never meets. Mouse is humming like a little bird, rubbing warmth into her chilly paws. Aaron scurries into the underbrush to take a leak and scare the quail. Sunset huffs and puffs, circling the group like a wolf, a lone wolf afraid of being left in the wilderness. I stand to the side, my silhouette straining to stand out against time. I want to tell them so much. I do. Instead, I eat the peach.

Bartered Time

Gregory T. Janetka

It's ten years since her husband died and over sixty since they wed. A war came early in their marriage, separating them. Although he never made it overseas, to her, he was always staring down death. Every night she fell asleep praying for his safety, and every morning she woke dreaming of his warm body.

In their circles, he was referred to as “the dabbler,” owing to his wide and varied array of interests—dentistry, ham radio, photography—anything that struck his fancy. It was a revolt against a poverty that left school inaccessible. For several years he was absorbed by jewelry making, forging, among other trinkets, the ring that hugs her finger to this day. And yet, for all this dabbling, he never looked farther when it came to women—he had many passions throughout his life, but only one love. 

As the hostilities of the world waned, they were together again and soon joined by two little girls. Money was scarce. They fought and cried and swore, but more often they laughed and made love, remaining together until his death, two years after their golden anniversary.

And now, if you ask her about him, she says, “I wish I'd gotten married,” forcefully waving her hand as if to shoo away the daydream. The faded photograph of her husband on the windowsill is one of the few personal possessions in her room, but it means nothing to her. Nestled among photos of other strangers, it may just as well have come with the frame. Times of nursing him through colds and the flu, of picnics with the kids, of his unromantic but utterly charming proposal while out foraging for mushrooms—these, as well as the year he spent dying from a blood disorder—are gone, wiped out, never happened.

Her voice retains the same cadence and inflection, but I no longer know where the words come from. She looks like her but isn't her. She's nobody, nobody who continues to speak, breathe, eat, laugh. Her actions aren't mechanical or instinctual but still born of humanity. Yet, for all practical purposes, this 78-year-old woman has existed no longer than the better part of two years. Each time I visit she's cordial, but there's no resemblance of the familiar, of babysitting me so my parents could have a night out, of our special trips to the mall for pizza, of sitting with me in the car when I wet my pants at the zoo and couldn't stop crying. She's become closer to the volunteers and nurses than to me, allowing any mention of family to disappear down any of the number of twisting halls of the home.

I wish I'd never gone abroad. She was coherent when I left, wishing me luck and giving me $20. For the first couple of months, she sent letters each week, usually recipes from the Tribune that I'd never make. While I spent my erratic days drinking between (and during) exams, I'd come back to my room to find her letters and know such things would go on forever. After returning to the States, I started stopping by each week to see her for a few hours, although I would spend more and more of that time in my car crying. I drop in on Thursdays—my one day off—the same day as the local high school volunteers.

I can't stop replaying an incident from when I was nine. She was watching me while my parents took in a play. Assured everyone was as indestructible as I was, I began horsing around, pulling her back and forth, begging her to play some game, or watch some show, or go somewhere. Who knows what I wanted; all I know is I knocked her down, causing her to fall and hit her head against the worn corner of an armchair. The sound was sharp and hollow. Maybe that's what broke something and started this. Who knows? Then again, I'm always finding ways to blame myself, give myself power in this powerless world. Regardless of the cause, this is how things are. When I arrive at the home, she's sleeping off her early lunch, her breathing shallow. Taking a seat beside her to wait for her to wake, I watch her fall over and over again, hearing that ugly crack of her skull echo through the room.

She coughs herself awake, groggy from sleep and the sun. I smile and give her time to get her bearings. Then, setting myself up for heartbreak, I introduce myself as her grandson and wait for a flicker of recognition. She replies with a forced “hello” and the assurance that she had not been sleeping. I struggle to come up with open-ended questions, end up inevitably complimenting her sweater, and we pass the time in a mutual haze. 

When conversation draws to a halt, my eyes wander the room for something to work with. Daytime television commercials yell over groans, cracks, and coughs—the beauty of the aging human body—but there's never much talk among the residents. Individualized cocktails of meds are passed around in tiny paper cups. The nurses at the desk, in between visitors and confused residents, gossip about last night's reality shows. A shriveled man sits in the darkened dining hall. He's there every time I visit, alone, dressed in the same checkered pajama pants and green shirt, going through the same motions. Other than an old wicker basket containing sugar, salt, ketchup, mustard, and crackers, the unset table is bare. No one ever pays him any attention. Examining each package of crackers as if inspecting a diamond for purity, he settles on one, eats them plain, brushes his mustache with his handkerchief, grunts, then gets up and hobbles off stage, his mouth flopping open and closed. Returning in short order, he repeats the process four or five times before disappearing for good, just as the staff arrives to set up for the second lunch.

The field of drooping white heads perks up when the volunteers arrive. Lindsey, a girl of sixteen, draws laughter and smiles from my grandmother, whereas my efforts elicit little more than blank stares and half-hearted grins. Sitting alongside, I watch my grandma regard this girl, this stranger, with the warmth and kindness she lavished on me for so many years.

The two of them have in-jokes and poke fun at the other residents as I look on. While we share blood and genes, I'm no longer family, but for that matter, neither is she—to anyone. We are unpersons together, only she doesn't know it. During family gatherings, we'd goof around while everyone else discussed who was dying of what; now my words fall flat. It's as if she made a conscious decision to forget the past, the loss too much to bear, and I happened to be collateral damage.

Losing her before physically losing her, my twentysomething selfish heart became determined to make myself part of her life again. Relatives—everywhere when I was growing up—died, moved away, became generic Christmas cards, and I grasp at the few connections remaining. My grandma used to love telling me stories, and so I tell her one. Forget remembering; this is starting over. On my next visit, I sit in the car until the volunteers arrive and walk in with them. Before Lindsey can get to her, I rush to my grandmother and introduce myself, careful to use a name not found in our family tree.

“Hello Malinda, I’m Charlie.”

She smiles and relaxes her hold on the cane she always has in her hand, seated or standing.

“Have a seat, Charlie.”

She motions toward the couch with her free hand, and in the movement, her ring catches the sun. Despite everything else, she never removed it. The idea of my deception stings, and I whisper apologies to her and my grandfather but continue the charade.

“How’s your day? Been outside at all? It’s beautiful right now.”

“The sun'll only age you,” she says. “Don't want to start looking like the rest of these old codgers!” She winks and chuckles to herself, then asks about my family.

I change the names but otherwise leave the family history—our family history—intact, and for the first time in years, she unwittingly takes great interest in her own relatives. She listens, asks questions, and even pats my hand in sympathy in response to my father's cancer. When she looks out the window and says, “I don’t have any family left, they‘re all dead,” I express my regret and feel my heart break clean in two.

She begins to remember me—as Charlie—from visit to visit, and I shoot a bitter eye at Lindsay for trying to steal my last remaining grandparent. But it's dementia I'm angry at, not a teenage girl willing to give up her free time to provide companionship to the forgotten. We laugh again, and I relish the warm moments, even though they haunt me at night. She doesn't often retain details but shocks me when she brings up something from weeks earlier.

Short of getting her back, it's everything I could ask for. Her favorite game of tooling around in a stolen wheelchair, making fun of the other residents, is ours now, not Lindsey's. She even asks me some of the same pestering questions I'd grown tired of as a child, telling me I'm too skinny and insisting I “at least have an apple.”

#

When I sign in, she isn't in the lobby. I take the elevator to the second floor, walk past the breakfast nook, wave to the fish in the tank, and go to her room. No answer, and no longer a name on the door.

I lost my grandma a second time, Charlie lost his new friend, and this time no stories or clever tricks can change that. The hallways melt and reform as I hold onto the wall, but no tears come.

In the elevator, there's a list of upcoming birthdays posted on circus-themed paper. Lindsay's at the card table, playing games with another white-haired old lady, and I hurry past, straight into the dark dining room. The man in the green shirt sits alone, eating dry crackers. He's earlier than usual—the tables haven't been cleared yet from the first lunch, and for once, he looks appropriate. Grabbing an untouched green apple, I say, “Thanks,” to which the old man, thinking I spoke to him, says “Thank you, son,” and smiles, spitting pieces of dry cracker onto the table.

Lucky Thirteen

Sarah Key     

I
Under the blue Bicycle cards, my grandmother’s calico quilt was frayed, but my mind stayed with the game. Clock Patience, my favorite game from 150 Ways to Play Solitaire by Alphonse Moyse. It would be hours before our mother was home from law school. Our parents had recently divorced, so my sister Jen and I had moved with my mother into our grandparents’ summer apartment. My sister was downstairs watching The Brady Bunch. By age eight, she was already a master of multi-tasking, stomach-down on the floor, her head bobbing between screen and book. I liked the quiet of the cards.

II
There is no skill involved in most solitaire games other than the ability to pay attention. With Clock, each time a new hand is dealt, there is a one in thirteen chance of winning. Each re-deal, my odds are the same. The illusion is that the more hands in a row that one loses, the more likely the next hand will be won. But that is a false perception.

III
Looking back, I wonder what possessed me to waste so much time on Clock. Or was it a waste? Time itself is a human-imposed numbers game, dividing years into days into hours into minutes into seconds. Maybe it was a way to beat time which had been divided into a before and after with our move from a public school in Alexandria, Virginia, to a private school at the Jersey shore. Long division had been covered before fourth grade in my new school, and I struggled in math for the first time. I had nothing to hide from the clock of cards on my bed, the way I hid from my new friends that I had divorced parents. The cards were totally in my control. Or at least it seemed that way.

IV
Games have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. My sister and I have always been serious rule-followers. Jen especially could not abide any rule-breaking in herself or others. The first thing Jen did when playing a new game was to read and memorize the rule-book. She did not like to alter the rules in any way. Cards were the game of choice in my family, though there was also watching University of Oklahoma football games, but that was more like a religion.

V
My granddaddy started playing gin rummy with us as soon as we were able to hold ten cards. The stakes varied from a nickel to a quarter, real money back then. He never went easy on us. He took our money without trying to teach us where we went wrong. Granddaddy Hugh liked to bet illegally on Oklahoma sports teams. Mother opposes gambling of any sort. Jen and I savored winning itself. We didn’t need money to sweeten the pot.

VI
My sister and I became excellent card players. We were so competitive with each other that many a game of spit, war, crazy eights, and concentration ended in tears. Gin taught us the basics of remembering cards played and how best to strategize with suits and numbers. We often beat the grownups.

VII
Considering how often cards were my favorite distraction, I never thought about how cards connected to the calendar: fifty-two cards for fifty-two weeks in a year; four suits for the four seasons; two colors for night and day; thirteen cards in a suit for thirteen lunar cycles in a year; twelve court cards, Kings, Queens, and Jacks, for twelve months. Why in fifty years of card-playing did I not think about that before?  These reminders of the natural world reveal how far our rage for order reaches. Cards give entry to the lowest-tech cave of human-made rules. The metaphorical power over worlds and timelines is the same, however, whether using computer screens or cards made of paper: the illusion of control. Deciding when to turn a card over in Solitaire is power. I have been manipulating the calendar.

VIII
My friend Allen introduced me to a new card game. Called Thirteen, it is reputedly a popular card game in prison, but I never asked Allen how he knew that. I wonder how Allen’s prior life as a bouncer at a strip club called The Naked Eye prepared him to become a Thirteen master. Also called Three Thirteen, it is a gin-based game in which eleven rounds are dealt out, starting with three cards each, adding one card each hand, four, then five, on up, ending with a thirteen-card hand. After losing again and again to Allen, I would press him to play again. No matter how many times in a row he beat me, Allen was always up for another game.

IX 
When Allen heard my sister was struggling after a break-up with her boyfriend of fifteen years, he told me Jen could come visit him any time in San Diego. He would sleep on the couch and give her his bed for as long as she needed. He offered this, never having met Jen, whose rule-following had led her to law and a partnership in a large Washington, DC firm. Though I had trouble seeing Jen in Allen’s Imperial Beach apartment, the offer moved me.

X 
After years with a troubled man, and taking on too many family financial burdens, my sister had developed a serious anxiety disorder. The strong, funny sister I grew up with was buried in anxieties that crushed her as if an earthquake had collapsed a building upon her.  For a couple of months, I moved in with her. She was no longer able to watch sports, reality TV, read true-crime novels, all the things that provided relief from her high-stress job. I tried everything to snap her out of it. We meditated, took walks, went to museums. Some days there seemed no escape from the anxiety that came in waves.  Crying episodes possessed her with such force that often, she was knocked to the ground.

XI 
One day as she was rolling on the floor sobbing, I had an idea. Why not go back to our childhood of cards; perhaps it was a distraction worth trying. I would teach her a new game. If Thirteen worked in prison, maybe it could give Jen relief from her prison. I taught Jen how to play Thirteen. For the duration of the game, she stopped crying. From then on, it was my magic pill. Whenever I couldn’t bear one more second of seeing her in pain, I would pull out the cards and say, “Thirteen?” like some crazed game show hostess. For some reason, this card game was just the right balance of focus and rules for her brain to cling to without making her feel over-taxed or anxious.

XII
The patience I had developed as a child playing Clock solitaire came in handy. The endurance to watch my sister worsen day after day and show her that I believed she would get better was like waiting for a winning hand. I clung to the illusion that the more days in a row she was down, the greater the chance she would triumph tomorrow. For the first time in all our years of playing cards together, I was tempted to let her win.  I had more practice at Thirteen, so I was better. It seemed cruel to keep winning.  But she would know if I let her win. I believed that as she played more, she would get better, and she did.

XIII
The optimism of Thirteen is that your luck can drastically change from hand to hand. You have eleven times to start over. After a string of bad luck, starting over becomes more and more important. If players are evenly matched, and luck goes back and forth, either player is able to win the whole game if she has a strong showing the last hand. Thirteen helped us get through a hard time. My sister and I live hundreds of miles apart, but we speak on the phone every evening. I am still watching the Clock and know even if Jen is no longer downstairs watching TV, that more games of Thirteen are in the cards for us, as one day we will want to teach my new grandson how to play.

Two Parties

Chris A. Smith        

That night we lingered in my driveway, seven or eight of us, shooting baskets and drinking beer. It was the last night before everything changed.

We had all been at a house party, circulating between the muggy backyard heat and the bone-chill of the living room, where we tried not to spill beer on the Turkish rugs and Barcelona chairs. The outlines of these parties had become comfortingly familiar over the years--drinking skunky MGD, blasting Jane’s Addiction and the Dead, hanging out with people I had known since grade school.

When it was time to leave, three of us sat in a friend’s car down the road, headlights off, doing whippets and listening to hip hop. We cued up Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full,” the song that sampled Israeli singer Ofra Haza’s ethereal wail.

Thinking of a master plan

There ain’t nothing but sweat inside my hand

As we huffed our nitrous oxide balloons, Rakim’s baritone wobbled on some sublime frequency. The air in the car vibrated; the beat turned itself inside out. I leaned my head back, undone for a moment, melting into the warm vinyl seat.

Then we drove through the suburbs of Detroit, windows down, the rushing air clearing our heads. We headed for my house, the usual site for the after-party.

It was August of 1990. I had just graduated high school, and nobody was watching over what I did. My parents, who had separated the previous year, were locked in a War of the Roses-style divorce, and I was learning to operate in the yawning spaces between them.

In those days, my mom rarely left her bedroom, and I went days without seeing her. In some ways, this was for the best, because she thought I was conspiring with my father against her. She cut my dad’s face out of all our family pictures and rekeyed the locks after discovering I had spoken to him. For dinner, I’d microwave hot dogs or make a turkey sandwich, trying to avoid her until I could retreat to my room upstairs.

My dad hadn’t moved very far away, but I had only visited a couple of times since he’d left. I asked him about the man-sized stuffed teddy bear that had materialized in his foyer; was it a gift from a new girlfriend? He said he wasn’t seeing anyone. Later I got a call from my stepsister-to-be, inviting me to the wedding in Atlanta.  

My house was old and rambling, of vaguely colonial style, its white bricks crawling with ivy. The backyard, where I had sledded in winter as a kid, tumbled towards a desultory creek and the “pumphouse,” a decrepit, mossy building that looked like something out of a slasher film. I was an only child, and had the house’s upper floor to myself. I spent most of my time in the rec room, sprawled on the blue-and-white checkered couch, reading and listening to the stereo my dad had left behind, a tank-like, audiophile system with wood-grained speakers as tall as my sternum. As chaotic as my life felt back then, my house—it had long ago ceased to feel like “our” house—had become, paradoxically, a refuge.

That night in my driveway, Eric drove to the rim in a frenzy of dribbling, the ball loud on the asphalt. Carlo, a half-foot taller and fifty pounds heavier, swatted the ball into the bushes, eliciting a muted roar from our little assembly. All of us were off to college soon—mostly to Ann Arbor or East Lansing, close enough for weekend laundry runs. I was on my way to North Carolina, where I knew no one. I desperately wanted to get as far away from my family as possible. But now, as my departure loomed, I was quietly terrified. This was the life I knew. This was my normal.  

Midnight passed. Bugs spun dervish circles under the floodlights. Eric tossed me a beer from the 12-pack in his trunk. I had learned to skate and snowboard with him, first got drunk with him in the woods nearby. I looked around at my friends; these guys were all I had. And this night, I realized, was the last that we would all be together, just like this.

I plopped myself down on the rough rock wall at the driveway’s edge, suddenly unable to remain standing. A few seconds later. the sobbing rose up and washed over me. I was helpless, overcome by a mix of loss and gratitude that even today I can’t fully parse. Doug, the gentlest of us, put a paw-like hand on my shoulder. We had always mocked him for his temperament, but I was glad he was there. The heaving subsided, and my head began to throb as I stared at my feet. I couldn’t remember the last time I cried.

###

By the time I had my first summer break at college, my mom had moved to a smaller house. The move had surprised me; I hadn’t expected her to do it so quickly.  After my freshman year, I came home to work as a camp counselor because I didn’t know what else to do, and I lived with her. I missed the old house, and out of a vague sense of unfinished business, I decided to throw a party there. The place hadn’t sold yet, and I still had a key.

That first summer, we all came back, and none of us came back. A friend who had been straight-edge was now a stoner. Another talked incessantly about film. I had been a punk-rock kid, but that spring I had pledged a fraternity. I was having trouble reconciling these sides of myself; they would never fit, in fact, but I didn’t know that yet. That summer, I put all of my punk and metal LPs in leftover movers’ boxes and sold them to a dingy used-record store on Woodward Avenue. I still regret that decision.

Maybe twenty people came to the party at the old house: close friends like Eric and Kyle and Tony, other high-school types, and a smattering of new people like Susie, whom I had met at a party in East Lansing. She was everything I wasn’t: outgoing, spontaneous, endearingly loud in her enthusiasms. During the divorce, I had walled myself off from strong emotions of any kind, and my life since then was marked by a utilitarian blankness. The psychological term, I’d learn later, is dissociation. Someone at college nicknamed me “Little Buddha”; others thought I was just a burnout—too many drugs, too early in life.

Susie and I only lasted a few months, but she sparked something in me, a fire I couldn’t access on my own. We snuck into condo complexes late at night to soak in their hot tubs; closed down hockey bars in Windsor, across the Detroit River in Canada; and went to dollar movies where the audience shouted advice at the screen. At The Silence of the Lambs, we roared at Clarice Starling: don’t trust that cannibal!

We all hung out in the kitchen, its 1970s beige linoleum faded by the sun, the cabinets’ brass knobs scrubbed dull from decades of use. I leaned against the marble counter, where I’d eaten countless breakfasts as Gordon Lightfoot and America played on WCAR. I had written a shameless rip-off of Sartre’s No Exit for drama class at this very counter, drinking coffee late into the night. I watched the party happen as if from outside myself, drifting, emptily content.

The house was empty—this was before home staging became routine--and the den opening off the kitchen looked cavernous, our shadows dancing across the walls. The sliding glass patio door banged open and closed as people went out to smoke cigarettes or pack bowls. Our voices echoed through the empty rooms, the sound hanging in the air before finally, grudgingly melting away.

Toward the end of the evening, I wandered off by myself, a ghost on his final rounds, to the sun room with its blue shag carpeting, where I had opened presents under our Christmas tree—a fake tree, because of the cats. The living room, where I had slept next to the fireplace when a midwinter ice storm knocked out the power for days. Then upstairs, to my bedroom. The door was still plastered in punk stickers, a mosaic of skulls and flames and leering, iridescent devils riding skateboards. A realtor’s nightmare, no doubt.

Opening one of the windows, I climbed out onto a flat portion of the roof. A susurration of voices wafted up to me, Susie’s husky shout and Eric’s staccato laugh, along with snatches of music from the CD player. Someone was playing Nine Inch Nails.

I sat out there for a while, knees pulled up to my chest, overlooking the driveway where I had launched myself off kicker ramps and played clumsy basketball. The landscaped hillside was running riot from months of neglect, once-manicured bushes a little sinister in the spotlights. The air was cool and still; a perfect Michigan summer night.

I breathed out, and some of the tension drained from my limbs. Then I stood up and stretched. Time to leave.