“The Intruder” by Rebecca Burns (November, 2011)

“Ghost Train” by Eli Hastings (February, 2011)

“Ilpohechatoka!” by Anthony Spaeth (August, 2011)

“Watchers” by Ewing Eugene Baldwin (October, 2011)

Congratulations to our nominees! Wishing you all our very best.

Ingrid sighed. A quick but bloody end avoided. Next to gutting, she detested the sharp flick of a penknife separating a bird from life. Plucking she did not mind. There was something satisfying in grabbing handfuls of soft feathers and exposing the creamy plump flesh beneath. She always felt surprised at the paleness of a bird’s skin, such light beneath dark.

She knelt down and undid the wire from the guillemot’s webbed foot. She’d set the trap last night, having nursed a taste for roasted bird all day. Hunger took her like that. She was not one for a balanced diet—cravings were given into and sustained, until boredom replaced desire. She lurched from taste to taste, leaving one craving behind before plunging headfirst into the next. Last week she had longed for mackerel, and landed several fish from the rocks at the end of her beach. There had even been enough to take to the smokehouse four miles away. Angus was only too pleased to see her and hung up her fish next to the fleshy amber slabs destined for the island shop.

The guillemot would feed this week’s hunger. Ingrid slung the warm bird over her shoulder, feeling its head bounce comfortably against her back, and set off for her cottage a few hundred yards away. The weather was hot for this time of year, not yet May, and she regretted the thick sweater. Her cottage would be cool though, her single roomed home facing the sea. She hissed through her teeth, the nearest she allowed herself to a hum, and scanned the rocks behind the sandy shelterbelt.

Then she saw him. Tall and long against a blue sky, breaking up the smooth horizon. He stood rigidly, hands up to his forehead as he stared into the sun. He was there again.

The hiss died in her throat, and Ingrid nearly stopped. But she forced herself to walk on. She would not let him guess she had seen him, and that he unsettled her. Yesterday, when he first appeared, she thought he was a tourist, come to explore. She had spent all day in her cottage, door firmly shut, in case he blundered down onto her beach with his banal questions and entreaties for postcard-sized bits of information. No, she was not a sea-bird expert. No, she had not lived here all her life, she wasn’t even a native. No, he wasn’t welcome. But, of course, Ingrid would have said none of those things, so kept inside the cottage.

He definitely wasn’t a tourist. Tourists, in Ingrid’s limited experience, did not act like he did, standing so still. In the estate shop they fingered the local jams and jars of potted herring, buying armfuls of over-priced tartan trinkets to take home on the plane. They tended to drive everywhere rather than walk. Those who thought themselves children of nature hurried so noisily up to the cormorants that the graceless birds lumbered out of the way with barely a squawk.

This rock-like man was something else, if he was not a tourist. Ingrid knew all the islanders and he was not one of them. He was off the chart and was therefore… unpredictable. Anxiety spread like spilt tea in her stomach and Ingrid lengthened her stride. By the time she reached her cottage door, her torso could hardly keep up with her legs. The guillemot thudded wildly against her shoulder blades and was slung irreverently on the wooden table as she arrived home. She closed the door with a slam, the noise unwelcome and lapping out indignantly towards the sea.

She paused by the table, trying to remember how long it had been since she was last disturbed. No one came to check on the cottage. The laird was happy for her rent to be deposited into his account every month, and Ingrid’s bank took care of that. There weren’t enough birds on her beach to interest the naturists, and the cottage wasn’t en route to a broch or one of the island’s circles of standing stones. Of course, those in the village eight miles away or working on the laird’s estate had been intrigued when she had first arrived but recognised her unarticulated desire for privacy. The edges of the islanders’ sympathy and Ingrid’s silent plea for privacy pooled together comfortably, like the clear streams running down to the loch behind the beach, from which she drew her water.

The shadow on the shelterbelt was not following the rules. Maybe he doesn’t know the rules, Ingrid thought, as she stood to the side of the cottage’s one small window, and looked out at him. She crossed her arms. Well, he could stay there, for all she cared. If he came down to speak to her, he’d be disappointed. She wouldn’t even answer the door.

But these sort of determined thoughts were unusual and unsettled her. They felt alien and strange in her mind, like meeting a once-loved cousin after several decades. She knew she ought to embrace such firmness and resolution, and that safety lay that way, but she felt nervous.

It was easier to pretend the man wasn’t there. Ingrid reached for the curtains and drew them shut, blocking the man out. She sat down, eyeing the guillemot. She popped her lips, welcoming the distraction.

The sun was high by the time she had finished, and a pile of black and white feathers lay at her feet. The bird was ready for the oven, and a bucket of entrails stood by the door. She had become quite adept over the years in scooping out the insides and keeping the flesh. Ingrid moved to the sink to wash her hands. She would have to go out again.

She gripped the handle of the bucket and, pausing slightly, swung open her front door. She fixed her eye on the line of the sea and marched, head down, purposeful. She didn’t look behind her, back towards the dunes. Instead she walked into the cold surf, right up to her knees, barely conscious of her socks and sandals. She tipped out the bucket, watching the bloodied mass flop into the water, watching it being swallowed up and becoming one with the brine again. The guillemot came to her from the sea, and now she was giving it back. Well, the organs anyway, the most essential bits. She liked the even symmetry of the relationship.

As the heart and lungs floated away, Ingrid turned around. She scanned the land behind her cottage, but saw no one. The man had gone.

But Ingrid was not flooded with relief. Instead, she felt she had moved into a new space, a fragile bubble of reprieve. The beach was no longer an inviolate domain; it could be plundered and disturbed. She felt tears only a blink away and this made her furious. She could not remember the last time she had cried. So she dumped the bucket in the sea, washing out the last particles of blood, and stamped back to the cottage.

The persistent lull of the surf irritated rather than soothed that night, rolling out a rhythm of anxiety. Ingrid sat up in her narrow bed. The clock said midnight; she supposed that must be right, though she had forgotten to wind it up from time to time. It was not unknown for her to go days without realising the little traveling clock had stopped, and for her to be governed only by the emptiness of her stomach or her tired bones.

When she first moved onto the beach, fifteen years ago, Ingrid liked to sit out on the sand as darkness fell and pick out the birds swooping over the sea. They were little balls of animation, lighting up the pale blue of her days. They were the only glinting things she could bear—she had given up making jewelry soon after moving into the cottage, money never being an issue—but soon even watching birds became hard. She wanted to wipe them away, to clean the air of them. Like the seaweed. It irritated her with its lines of green spit, so she started gathering it. She heaped it in piles at the end of the beach, far away from the cottage. It took a month before she accepted what a futile task it was, but the sweat and stretch of her muscles whilst rolling the seaweed together was welcome. Eventually though, the cottage drew Ingrid in, holding her in the folds of the walls. She stopped sitting on the beach with the birds for company. Instead, she lay in bed, smoothing her hand across the white plaster in an echo of the surf.

Tonight, after seeing the man, Ingrid’s legs were restless. The man was troublesome; he was not a bird or a piece of flotsam, ready to be flapped away or scooped up. Ingrid stretched out her calves, pushing the bedclothes back. An idea took form, like rainwater in a fissure. She swung herself round.

She slipped on her sandals and pulled a coat over her nightgown. Stars threw down pale light, but Ingrid felt her way easily along the sand. She headed towards the rocks, using them to mark the edge of the beach, where she used to dump the seaweed.

Her back sang and her arms felt on fire by the time she had finished. She stood back, rocking on her heels and squinted over her efforts. She had made a line, a stone line running from the grassy shelterbelt to the sea. Her cottage was behind it, caught between the rocks set in nudging distance from each other, and the bank at the other end. Ingrid wiped her hands, pleased. These ancient chunks given up by the island would speak where she could not.

She walked back to the cottage, and sleep came easily.

But the following day, the man was not on the shelterbelt behind the beach. Instead he stood with his boots scuffing Ingrid’s line. She knew he was there before she saw him; it wasn’t his shadow falling across the window, or the sound of his feet on the sand. But, as she heated coffee on the stove, she felt him. And as she did, muscles in her upper arms began to tingle. Ropey tautness entered her body, pinning Ingrid within her skin. She felt pared, as though only her skeleton remained and all softness, all the warmth the life on this island had given her had bleached away. And so it was that Ingrid knew who the man was.

She clutched her coffee cup as she opened the door and walked outside, even though the porcelain burned her fingers. She took the scalding into her flesh gratefully.

He was older—of course he was—and something had happened to one side of his face. A stroke, maybe. Ingrid paused at her side of the rock line and stared at him. She would not have done that once, not so openly, but shock was behind it. She thought she would never see him again. And here he was, clothes hanging off him, whippet-thin, hair thin and weak. Ingrid brought her coffee mug to her lips, to cover her shaking mouth.

He went first. “They tell me at the shop that you don’t speak.”

His first words to her in fifteen years, and immediately Ingrid felt inadequate, at fault. She had failed; her decision to forgo language was not a way to heal, but was a blunder, a mistake, a slight against him. He had a way of unpeeling her.

But silence was, as Ingrid had learned over the years, a weapon. She lowered her mug and glared.

“To think we couldn’t shut you up as a child. How long?”

How long what? Ingrid raised an eyebrow, a skill she never failed to take pleasure in. How long did it take to stop dreaming about him? Nine years. How long did it take to gather the courage to escape and find this place? Three years, if you count from the moment the idea crept unbidden into her mind. She hid her maps and books, and her money, so he had no idea of her plans. How long did she hope he would leave her in peace and never come looking? Forever.

But, of course, he meant how long she had stayed silent. The answer to that was fourteen years. She had talked occasionally to Angus at the smokehouse, that first year of renting the cottage. But then he asked her for something she could not give. Her retreat into muteness puzzled him at first, and then hurt him. But now he understood and communicated with her in different ways; the stay of his hand on her shoulder when she walked into the hut, the way he brushed hair from her eyes.

“It’s not important,” the man said and shifted. Ingrid noticed his deliberate movements. He had lost none of his cat-like grace. She gripped her coffee mug tightly.

“So you waited until you’d got the money from that big contract—Prices of London, was it? And then took off?” The man stroked his chin. “No word, nothing, for fifteen years. You left your studio behind, all your tools.”

Ingrid breathed in, never taking her eyes from his face.

“Prices say you’ve not made a new piece in fifteen years. They have a couple of brooches left that they have on display. Twenty-thousand each. How much does this place cost?” He nodded towards her cottage and Ingrid moved, instinctively, to block his view.

He laughed. “Ingrid. I haven’t confiscated anything of yours since taking away your dolls house. You know that, of course.”

Ingrid did. She remembered how he moved on to other forms of discipline.

“I’m not angry, you know.” He put his hands in his pockets. Ingrid watched as his knuckles flexed. “Not about you disappearing like that, or cutting me out. Not even after you stopped sending me my share—you owed it to me, Ingrid. I paid your tuition and set you up in your studio, if you remember.” He sighed and looked out at the sea. “It took a change of bank-manager before I found out where you were. The old one wouldn’t sell me the information. This new one is young and… malleable.”

And then Ingrid saw it coming. The pause before a carefully chosen word. She recognised the signs. He had always taken a slight break between words and deeds. As a child she had hoped he would think more, talk himself out of his temper, but he never did. So, knowing what was about to happen, Ingrid reacted without thinking; she swung the coffee mug in an arc and smashed it into her father’s face.

A gasp and he fell to his knees. A scarlet ribbon slid down the side of his face, the side that betrayed his stroke, and he brought his hands up. He swayed. Blood dropped onto the sand, isolated glints of ruby red that were swallowed quickly. Ingrid watched, fascinated.

“Ingrid… please. I’ve come to talk, only talk.” Her father held out his hand, eyes closed. He looked as though he were feeling his way around a dark room.

Ingrid held the cup high again, but paused. A rattle of fear shot through her body. What had she done? He would kill her. Why didn’t she let him say his peace and then leave?

Except she knew he had not come to have a conversation and behave like a civilised person. Still, she brought the mug, now empty, to her side.

Her father leaned over heavily and sat on the beach. His breath came quickly, and Ingrid was reminded of a guillemot, caught a few weeks ago. It had thrashed around in the snare and by the time Ingrid found it, the bird had worked itself into a frenzy. She hadn’t been able to get near its neck, so had used a rock instead.

“Of course you don’t trust me.” Her father swallowed. “But what can I do now? I’m old. Your mother finally left me. You’re all I’ve got. I just wanted to see you.”

His eyes were wild and he looked exhausted. White bristle covered his skin, though not completely; pink flesh wobbled beneath. Ingrid shook her head. So Mum finally plucked up the courage as well? Better late than never. Did she leave with her bones intact, or did he give her a helping shove on her way?

“Ingrid. This silence of yours is pointless. You have to speak to me eventually.” Her father looked properly into Ingrid’s face. “Do you think you can cut me off so easily? I found you.”

Yes he had found her. Like she knew he would, though it had been many years since she had let that particular thought take form. Her father’s reappearance affirmed that their separation was not as complete as she’d hoped; instead it was stringy, layered, not clean and permanent. Here he was, wheezing on her beach, talking his way out of danger.

That was why she didn’t talk. Speech was so false and ambiguous. Her father could say the softest things whilst beating her body; he did this out of love, she would appreciate his effort when she was older. Ingrid remembered the exhaustion of trying to combat him, trying to open a dialogue and persuade him to leave the strap where it was.

“Ingrid…” his voice was low, almost a hiss. “Sit down beside me, we need to… talk.”

That pause again, and Ingrid was snapped out of her reverie. He was so insidious; she hadn’t been aware of the lull that clouded her mind and the silent way her father was getting to his feet. The break in his speech was a warning and an opportunity.

She reached down and, in one smooth movement, picked up a rock from the border she created and brought it down on the crown of her father’s head.

He fell easily. It surprised her how quickly his body crumpled. There was a faint “oh” of surprise and a bubble of air burst from his lips. He fell onto his side and his hands twitched.

Ingrid moved forward, stepping over the border. She almost tripped over her father’s shoelaces, tangled in a mass. One eye was open as the man lay on the sand. It twitched and roamed rapidly.

There was barely any flesh on his bones. Before he had been thick and strong. His arms were once bigger than her legs. Ingrid crouched down. His arms were now stick-like and brittle. She held her father’s wrist, feeling a faint pulse.

Then she stood and looked out at the water. A guillemot circled low over the water, stretching out slim wings and landing gracefully. Ingrid smiled, remembering the roasted bird left on her counter. And then she ducked down again, holding out her penknife.

The blood was easy to scuff away and roll into the sand. Harder was the heave and drag, pulling the body towards the rocks at the end of the beach. She worked quickly, desperate to take her hands from her father, and conscious that someone might—just might—wander by on the shelterbelt. She reached the rocks and pushed her father up against them. Then she hurried back to the surf, searching for seaweed.

Half an hour later, all she could see was a green mound. The seaweed was piled high, already pungent in the morning sun. Ingrid stood back, considering. She would have to pile it up every day, to keep the body hidden.

She turned back towards the cottage. Her heart felt so light she thought she could open her arms and soar alongside the guillemots and cormorants. She would have to pile the seaweed every day for years. She would be tied to this beach for an eternity.

Rebecca Burns is a married mum of two who has no time. She writes at night when her kids are in bed, and when she should be tidying the house or paying attention to her husband. Around 20 of her short stories have been published in online and print journals, including in The London Magazine, Menda City Review, Random Acts of Writing, Per Contra, Controlled Burn, Bartleby Snopes, and Foundling Review. Visit her website at www.rebecca-burns.co.uk.

To read Rebecca Burns’s comments on Alison Grifa Ismaili’s “Shape-shifters,” click here.

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
“The Intruder” is a perfect example of effective storytelling through lyrical prose, imagery and tone. Despite the peaceful and tranquil environment we are immersed in, we understand immediately the protagonist’s struggles, that she’s hiding from something, not just the world, that something is desperately wrong, that something went terribly wrong in her previous life. She speaks not a word, but we feel her profound and unutterable suffering.

You whisper the words “Don’t, please” and smile, turning your back on the empty room with the single light and make your way to your bed. You sit on your bed and stare at the room and look at your phone. It doesn’t matter what her name is, but you say that too, in a whisper, and then you stare at your hands and take another drink.

Night now and the air is thick and difficult to inhale. You try to sleep, but you can’t. You realize you should be more polite so you whisper the words “Please don’t.” It works, and despite the air, you fall asleep. You dream of pulling out your thumbnails, saying to yourself, “The point is the pain.”

You awake the next morning, and though it doesn’t matter what her name is, you say it again, and then again, even as the water from the shower fills your mouth. Then you say, “I’m sorry.” It is important to be polite, especially when being apologetic, even if your anger may be justified, almost drowning from saying her name in the shower. Angrily, you say, “I’m sorry,” but it doesn’t make you feel any better.

This is not the first morning this has happened, nor was the night before the first night you stared into the empty room with a single light in the building across the street. But for some reason, you feel different. And since you feel different, you are different. And since you are different, you stare at who you are in the bathroom mirror. The difference is apparent. “My name is Samuel L. Jackson,” he says.

His name is Samuel L. Jackson, sometimes Samuel L. Fucking Jackson, sometimes just Samuel L. He smiles all the time and when he says, “Don’t, please,” it sounds different, even when he says it while he’s smiling.

You follow Samuel L. Jackson as he walks into your bedroom to get dressed. You turn away politely, though you suspect he wouldn’t mind if you watch him. He thinks your politeness is funny and he laughs at you, but he does not yell the words, “Look into my eyes!” like you are afraid he might. Perhaps he is being polite too.

When you hear him zip up his fly, you turn back around. He is staring out the patio door into the empty room with the single light in the building across the street. It doesn’t matter whether the light in the room is on or not during the day since nothing can be seen in it anyway, even if you just want to see its emptiness. You hear Samuel L. Jackson say, “It isn’t empty if you can’t see inside it,” but you’re not sure you agree.

“I’m not sure I agree,” you say.

Samuel L. Jackson looks you in the eyes and smiles. You wait for him to say, “Look into my eyes!” but he doesn’t. He only smiles.

You appreciate his smile and then you say, “I’m sorry.”

Sometimes they throw Samuel L. Jackson into empty rooms with a single light, but he always finds a way out, even when they lock the door behind them. Sometimes he jumps out windows, leaving a red curtain to billow through the broken glass as he lands on the roof of an adjacent building. They’ll return to the room with guns drawn, one of them holding a pair of pliers, which they had intended to use to pull out his thumbnails, but they’ll only find an empty room. They’ll see the broken glass and the red curtain and realize how hard it is to contain a man like Samuel L. Jackson, and even harder to pull out his thumbnails.

Down steps and open doors and you’re following Samuel L. Jackson outside. It is safe to be outside now. She is not waiting for you at the door; she is not walking towards you when you reach the sidewalk; she is not drinking coffee in the place where you’ll be going. Samuel L. Jackson knows it doesn’t matter what her name is and therefore, you know it doesn’t matter too. You don’t even check your phone to see if you missed her call. But when you accidentally whisper her name, Samuel L. Jackson looks you in the eyes and says, “Please…don’t,” in a way you’ve never heard him say such a thing before. You look away angrily, and apologize as apologetically as you can.

Samuel L. Jackson never walks. Even when he jumps out windows of empty rooms, there is usually a car waiting for him, either that or he takes a cab. You prefer to walk. You prefer to walk late at night with no particular destination in mind. You remember that night in Paris, walking along the Seine in the cold rain. Samuel L. Jackson wasn’t with you that night. Perhaps if he had been, you’d have driven, and you wouldn’t have seen what Notre Dame looks like at night.

But you have not walked in a while, and you are not even sure if you are still capable of such a thing, so you gladly follow Samuel L. Jackson onto the bus and happily take a seat next to him in the front.

A man sits across from you. He is a normal man. He is nothing like Samuel L. Jackson.

He stares at you, perhaps because you are staring at him. You look over to see Samuel L. Jackson staring at him too, except he is also smiling. You look back at the man and try to smile. You wait for the man to ask what you are looking at so you can say, “Don’t, please,” while Samuel L. Jackson calls the man a motherfucker. You have never called a man a motherfucker before and would really like to hear what it sounds like. The man doesn’t ask, “What are you looking at?” Instead he just narrows his eyes and says, “Why are you crying?”

You don’t understand why the man would ask a thing like that, especially after turning to Samuel L. Jackson to see no tears in his eyes at all. Just that smile on his face, like how he always has a smile on his face. You turn back to the man. You open your mouth to say something, but it’s Samuel L. Jackson who speaks, and when he speaks he’s speaking to you, and what he says is, “Please don’t.”

So you don’t.

The bus stops at a grocery store and you follow Samuel L. Jackson off the bus. Normally you avoid grocery stores. There are many people who aimlessly roam the aisles and whether they do so in desperation or utter calmness, it never fails to depress you. Even more depressing is the awareness of what other people eat. The lights are bright and whatever song is playing will undoubtedly repeat itself endlessly in your head for the rest of the day, no matter what that song may be. So naturally you avoid such a thing, and yet, you follow Samuel L. Jackson inside as if there was no other normal thing in the world to do, as if it were normal to be normal.

You watch people aimlessly roam the aisles and the lights are bright. “Let It Be” is playing persistently in the background and you have to resist the urge to vomit. You know what Samuel L. Jackson is going to say so you quickly recover before he has a chance to say it and you follow him deeper into the store. You are sweating profusely.

You buy a large quantity of alcohol. You buy many cigarettes. You buy underarm deodorant. At one point during checkout, you feel like you might lose it. The clerk at the register asks you for your ID and your knees go weak and you start shaking all over. Samuel L. Jackson takes you by the arm, turns you around so you are facing him and says simply, “Look into my eyes.”

But you don’t, cause you can’t, and you quickly hand the clerk your ID. The remainder of the checkout is accomplished without incident.

You return home. It is getting dark and you look forward to another night of staring at the empty room with a single light in the building across the street. Perhaps tonight will be the night you see someone staring back at you. Perhaps tonight will be the night someone will turn off the light. Samuel L. Jackson is on the phone while you are pouring yourself your first drink. You light a cigarette. You take a drink. You ask Samuel L. Jackson whom he is talking to.

“It doesn’t matter,” he says.

“If it doesn’t matter then why are you doing it,” you say.

Samuel L. Jackson smiles, he’s always smiling. “Don’t,” he says, and then a little later, “Please.”

So you don’t, and you stare at the room in the building across the street, and you can’t wait until it is dark enough to see how empty is, but then a knock comes from the front door, and then another.

You follow Samuel L. Jackson to the front door. You are aware of everything now. You can feel each nerve running the length of your body. You can feel the painless nature of your thumbnails, as they are not being pulled out from your thumbs. You can feel the politeness of your approach to the front door.

Samuel L. Jackson opens the door and before he closes it, she walks inside. She does not say hello. She only says, “So what’s wrong?”

Samuel L. Jackson is still smiling after he closes the door and you wonder why he would still be smiling at a moment like this. He does not look at you. He does not look at her. He only says, “Follow me,” and you wonder whom he is talking to.

You follow them into your room. They are already standing at your patio door. They are already staring at the empty room with the single light in the building across the street. You are standing in the doorway. You are aware of where you are. You are aware of who you are. You are told to turn off the light.

You turn off the light and then you wait. You take a step forward. You look out the patio doors at the building across the street. You look for the empty room but you can’t find it. You hear yourself say, “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Samuel L. Jackson laughs and tells you to turn the light back on, so you do. You expect to see something, but you don’t. You only see Samuel L. Jackson smiling back at you. He’s always smiling back at you. You look around the room for where she might be, but it’s a small room, and though she’s a small girl, there’s no place for her to hide. You turn back to Samuel L. Jackson.

You want to say, “I don’t understand.” You want to say, “It doesn’t make sense.” You want to say, “Why doesn’t it make sense.” But you don’t, and you don’t even have to say please first.

Instead, you walk to the patio doors and direct your attention to the building. The light is on. The room is empty. Except this time, a red curtain billows out a broken window.

Samuel L. Jackson laughs. Then he pours you another drink and lights another cigarette.

Soon you sleep.

Samuel L. Jackson refuses to spoon.

Allan Shapiro is a writer and a social worker living in Los Angeles.

To read Allan Shapiro’s comments on A.K. Small’s “The Diving Board,” click here.
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Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
Creative and unusual, fresh and funny and, of course, very, very odd. And yet, this story grew more and more intriguing for me the more time I spent with it. The unusual voice is wielded expertly by an author who seems both comfortable and confident in what he means to accomplish by it. And despite the “theatre of the absurd” bent (or perhaps because of it) there’s a sense of emotional weight to the piece, with great use of repetition (“Don’t, please.”) and a strong forward momentum that I found riveting. In the end, this story provided a welcome detour for me, and I’m pleased that we’re able to find a place for it in 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. It is certainly deserving.

We very much appreciate your help in funding and/or spreading the word about our project!

It is others’ eyes that tell me. Ron Miller, Mother’s cousin, his watery cataract eyes—he passes in his pickup, waving, never a query. This passing is to investigate me. His farm is in the other direction, he is seeking a truth, Ron is, and too late will he conclude, will he act. I see me in his eyes: sunken, hollow, my beard black and gray-flecked, my teeth blackened, my cracked, lumpy hands caked with grime, a Folgers’s coffee can filled with my deep-yellow piss on the seat next to me.

My body: this rope of muscle, this bone-bulged thing, this skin bag of pus and piss and putridness. Me sitting in the truck, not a drop of well water, not a speck of soap, and I become fascinated by my own smell, heavy rot and nicotine puke. But the watchers cannot smell the wild animal I have become.

Job Swenson—I dream of crucifying him—always stops. He rolls down a window in his Land Rover, and I have to do the same or I would be seen as acting like a crazy man. Job might tell and one of the local sheriffs, on a lazy day, might get a notion to come take a look at me. After all, I have been sitting below my own house for two weeks, watching the days grow longer, watching the pregnant buds turn to leaves, watching the lilacs burst, longing to smell them. Watching my wife.

Job with that wry grin. “Hey, Todd, how are you?”

How am I, Job? How do I look, you prick?

Tit for tat, I grin. “Good, Job.”

Bad, Job. Bad as it gets.

“You look parched. I got some iced sun tea in my thermos.”

“No thanks, Job, not thirsty.”

“Sure?”

Unsure. Unfit. Unhinged.

“I hear you’re staying over by Brighton.”

They are talking about me.

“Where you all hear that, Job?”

“People talk. You know.”

“Yeah, man, I know. At my brother Skip’s place. You know.”

In the Alton asylum, for killing our cousin with a Civil War saber, last fall.

“So I’m watchin’ his place for him, Job. What does a river rat need anyway but a bed, a TV, a can opener, some cans of pork and beans?”

And jimson weed, bringing down visions, floating me beyond the blue horizon—seeing through solid matter, seeing through brains and words, through skulls to the vivid color, which is truth.

Job, he is a decent man, I give him that. He mediates when folks are riled. “Well, it looks like you are watching your place, too, Todd. I don’t mean to pry.”

“No offense taken, bud. Talia Ann and I are separated, that ain’t a secret. But I still got the farming to do. She has the secretary job in Shipman, and my boys…”

The three boys in the Lincoln jail, attempted bank robbery.

“Your family’s going through tough times, Todd. You know, to save you all that traveling, Brice could—”

Job’s son Brice could do my chores: Feed the livestock. Weed. Irrigate.

Guard Talia Ann.

“I got it covered, Job. Just waiting for her to leave, is all.”

I wait for her. I watch.

Job scratches a poison ivy patch on his elbow. “Okay, Todd, I’ll shut up about it. I saw your mother in Gillespie at the Subway yesterday.”

* * *

The night before she abandons us, Mother at the table, the .45 automatic right of her plate, by the knife and fork like it was part of a place setting. She eats and watches Daddy. He sips Jim Beam, watches her, as if a wife with a .45 is a normal thing. Skip, Janie and I stare at our plates, don’t dare watch a thing.

Cut-saw-chew-drink.

Mother screams, “That is the last, the last time, hear me. Hear me? I will kill you, you rabid mongrel, you hit me again.”

Cut-saw-chew-drink.

Daddy stands. Mother strokes the barrel of the .45.

“Sorry to disappoint, Sara, going to watch the TV. Hope I don’t get back-shot.”

Daddy walks into the front room, calm as can be, whistling that Andy Griffith Mayberry tune.

Middle of the night, Janie comes in my bed, weeping, begging me, “Stop him, stop him, Todd.” She moans, little skinny ten-year-old Janie. “Stop it.”

Mother leaves the next day, and all I ever see of her after that is accidental meetings in town, passing by on the highway, her children forever drifters.

 * * *

“Why you all care about me, Todd?”

“We’re neighbors.”

My boys, Dicky-Boy, Deunite, and Eddale burned down two of your barns, Neighbor, stole your four-wheeler, whipped your son Brice bloody all through school. I poached your deer, and you know it, you Land Rover-owning prick neighbor.

“Have a good one, Job. See ya soon.”

This afternoon, to be exact, about the time Talia Ann is due home, Job will drive by to see she gets in the house safe. Brice will come by at sundown, to see she is in the house, safe. As if decent men, by showing their sincere faces, could make anything safe. As if there was such a thing as safe.

* * *

And there are other watchers: the rural route mail carrier, so nervous about the melting man he drops mail on the road and leaves it to blow into the ditch or stick to the hot tar. There’s the endless parade of my relatives, most of which have not spoke to me since we were kids, for my branch of the line is Calhoun County trailer trash.

This is said by a biddy in earshot of my wife and son Dicky-Boy, at the Kroger’s: “Them Brodersen trailer trash, Calhoun County breeds that type. Why don’t they stay there?”

Dicky-Boy, hot with Brodersen pride, follows her to her fancy ranch home in Grafton, up on a bluff on the Illinois River, catches her in her backyard, taking out the garbage by the light of the Hale-Bopp comet, and sneaks up and cuts out her gossiping tongue.

Oh my beloved family.

* * *

My red house on the hill, which I used to smile at when coming around the bend of the road, up from the Illinois River, from Macoupin Creek, and there, half a mile away, below a canopy of high green oak trees, my house inviting me. In this place are your sons—your saplings which extend the Brodersen family tree, the roots stretch all the way to Bavaria—and your wife, your Talia Ann, who, when she was young, when you saw her naked, you thought of peaches, of a perfect peach, and her sex tasted of peaches and salt lick and earth and there was the heat of her.

I am a sixteen-year-old hellion. I have pulled my back baling hay—dollar an hour, working till sundown. I stagger out of the barn, pain shooting down my right hip. This slip of a red-headed girl, Talia Ann Jones, farmer’s daughter, bends over, ninety-five pounds of girl, hands on her knees, and says turn back to back with her, lay back on her, trust her. And I lay upon the back of this gal, my arms limply hanging out from my swollen soaked body, like Christ on the cross of Woman. She clutches my biceps, rises up slightly, until my booted feet leave the ground, until my body begins to stretch out, pulling me back into line. She bears my weight, and I open my eyes and see the blue sky full of soaring scissor-tailed barn swallows, darting, and gobbling stirred-up insect hordes from the hay cuttings. And I am healed.

I lie on Miss Jones, August heat pressing down. This is what I feel: beyond the sun another heat, rising from the girl’s groin, and this heat makes me groan, this sound makes the other hay balers laugh, makes me spring off the girl’s back and limp away before anyone notices my erection. I run into the dark barn and clutch at my middle, in a frenzy.

It is all sex: black loam, groin smell of the marsh, silken parachutes of seedlings across the blue sky, fluidity of women, romance of the moon. We name it love to show we are beyond the rutting cows, the squealing hogs in heat, the endless mounted insects, birds, the pollination of flowers, struts of cocks, the roost of all species, and the colored lures of nature, the cry and song of all that we know as beautiful. It is all sex. The Big Fuck.

One day that fall, I walk home early from school—I have faked the flu and biked to the farm to watch the snake migration up from the marsh to the high hills, the autumnal preparation for hibernation. Instead, I discover my daddy fucking Janie, now fourteen, from behind, in the barn, and I see Janie’s radiance. The Big Fuck.

And I hear Janie’s hoarse whispers, “Yes, Daddy, Yes, Daddy.”

And I hear the crazed hogs running madly across the feedlot, excited by this fucking, wanting to fuck Janie, to fuck the sows.

And I hear Daddy yell, “Jesus, Jesus, Jesus.”

And Jesus yells, “Jesus.”

* * *

The year after Talia Ann and I marry, Job Swenson comes speeding along Bunker Hill Road, a mile ahead of a portable saw mill on wheels. “This guy is offering two hundred dollars for old oaks, men, we must save the oaks. Some of our trees three hundred years and older: bur oaks, pins, whites. Don’t fall for easy money, men; picture your land without the century trees, the songbirds and the shade. Newly planted oaks would take many generations to mature, to covet.”

Job tells us the Sioux Indian saying: “In our every deliberation we must consider the impact of our decision on the next seven generations.”

“Two hundred and ten years,” Job tells us. “What do you want your legacy to be?”

Me thinking, Fuck the world. The Big Fuck.

Legacies are for men in Land Rovers, for land developers, for lawyers and moneyed liars. River rats born along muddy streams, who are told by a government when they can hunt and trap, what crops to grow, how many fish to catch, what is endangered, and to love our black and brown and yellow and red neighbors, even as they rape and rob you, men like me, endangered from birth, we have no legacies.

The sawmill finds willing businessmen in overalls. Ron Miller sells one grove of bur oak; Hans Dieter Miller sells an acre. Janie Brodersen, father-fucker, sells an entire savanna.

I say of mine: “Take ’em all.”

Job weeps. “Jesus wept.”

Talia Ann Brodersen had disobeyed me and gotten a secretary’s job and stopped being a proper farm wife. This night, she would behold, high above our red house, empty space, ghost oaks. Decades of brimming garbage bags, rusted hulks of cars and pounds of broken glass and old furniture we threw amidst the trees, rust piles and junk heaps now nakedly revealed. The tall green canopy a wavering ghost, and she would see the consequences of disobeying.

And she does, Lord yes.

She is so shocked she drives the car off the road into our corn field. She screams. She runs down the road, arms open wide as if to embrace the trees the way she once thought of me. She wanders among raw, leaking stumps, a cloud of gnats surrounding her. She mourns. She sees that all is meaningless.

I, her teacher.

Our raped road: wild raspberry bushes and buckthorn filled in the spaces; the land thorn-infested, my boys stabbed by cow parsnip and stinging nettle. All of us scarred and marked by stigmata, scabbed by the new life that armed itself against us.

And Job doesn’t say an unkind word.

Talia Ann Brodersen goes to the Baptist church and finds Jesus Christ. And then she finds Jimmy Hagerman, Sunday school teacher, counselor, and—though I didn’t know it then—seducer of unhappy women. She attends Sunday services, Wednesday night prayer service; she visits the sick and shut-ins—in the waking hours beyond her job. Sister Talia Ann.

An old boy I know said he saw Jimmy and Sister Talia, back seat of a car on the river. That night, I drive to Layman Hagerman’s house and watch the shadows fuck.

I rage. I hear a great horned owl mocking me. I trap and kill eighty-five great horned owls and hang them from cottonwood and willow trees in the marsh, and Job Swenson, not knowing it was me, takes me to the marsh to show me the carnage. He sobs, and I sob—not for dead owls, but for all the empty trees that have no hanging owls. And I am more powerful than infinite blazing suns. And I re-find God.

Me.

Me-god.

And this is the first time I tell anybody who will listen: “She serves me divorce papers, I will kill Talia Ann Brodersen.”

Some card laughs, “Alert the sheriff.”

Some fisherman tying flies: “Take heart, son, Hagerman don’t hang on to one woman long, soon you all be in harness again, complaining like the rest of us. Yep.”

I won my peach tree called Talia Ann. I planted her in my red house on the hill, and I spent twenty-five years pruning her, shaping the bitch.

* * *

I stalk my wife day after day, melting in my old pickup, in choking smoke, and in the blasting sounds of twenty thousand, one hundred and sixty seconds, which come to two weeks, fourteen drive-bys of Ron Miller, twenty-six coffee cans of piss, fourteen tracks of the moon, four days of clouds, one day of rain, eight days of searing sun, thirty-two flights of vultures, seventy passing freight trains, six dances of sandhill cranes, and the rising, by half a foot, of corn and soybeans and hay.

Talia Ann Brodersen, day after day, getting ready for work. She pats the hound dogs in their cages, drives down the hill to the road, passing by me in the truck, not so much as a glance.

I go up to the house after she leaves and rummage through her underwear drawer, a pile of neatly folded panties that I bought for my viewing pleasure, now they’re just something to wear. She washes Hagerman’s cum out of them, smoothes and folds them—and there is this note:

I know you come into the house. Have the decency to bathe before you handle my things. I am moving to my folks’ place next week, from where you stole me. I do not fear you.

* * *

Yesterday morning, driving by me, Talia Ann rolls down her window and flings a sheaf of papers onto the road. I wait until she drives off before retrieving the papers. I scan the words until I find the key word: Divorce.

That night, the moon a bloodshot eye, Me-god shoots Janie and Daddy with the .45. They are sitting up in Daddy’s bed, watching Hardcopy. Me-god watches a minute of it, enough to know they will be—their corpses will be—on Hardcopy before the week is out. Me-god shoots them to pulp, shoots the screaming out of them, the shit out of them, the sex, until Daddy is Janie is Daddy, the mix of torn flesh like thick red porridge.

The next morning, seven a.m., Brice Swenson drives by and stops. “Morning, Todd.”

“Hey, Brice. How you?”

“Okay. You’re out early.”

“So you. Kinda busy here, guy.”

“I’m driving up to Peoria, to interview for Bradley University.”

“Good luck. Brice?”

“Yeah?”

“If going to Bradley University helps you see one-tenth as clear as I see this minute, you will be a wise man. You all take care.”

“Yessir.”

Brice is terrified. What does he see, looking at me? Blood-flecked arms.

I mentally check my surface; feeling for change, discovering that I am smiling crazily. Me-god leaking out of my mouth like vapor. I cannot pull my mouth shut, I am too purely happy.

Brice drives west to the bend in the road and stops. I watch him in the rearview mirror; see him pick up a cell phone. I start up the truck and drive backwards, straight at the Land Rover, the pickup nearly turning over from swerving, the coffee can of piss spilling, forming a putrid-smelling puddle. Brice peels off toward the river.

I throw the truck in drive and head straight for the red house on the hill. An alligator snapping turtle the size of a platter comes out of the corn—I have lifted that bastard out of the road a thousand times, for we are kin, but this day I hit him. He spins up from under my back tire, lands upside down, twirling like a carnival ride.

Talia Ann Brodersen, in a blue business suit and white tennis shoes, stands at the top of the hill.

I brake, grab my .12-gauge Remington, climb out of the cab and march up the hill.

“Is this about Jimmy Hagerman, Todd? If it is, he dumped me, like all men have dumped me. And I shall never have another.”

No, you cunt, you won’t.

“Men need firearms to be warriors. Women are the true warriors. We endure, without weapons, without superior physical strength. We split our insides open to let children break free, and we endure. We watch our bodies wither and our men lose interest, and we endure. We nurture, we live in the shadows, and there is nothing between our acts and the grave, and you are a coward, Todd Brodersen.”

Who is Todd Brodersen?

“And I do not fear you.”

She turns her back on me, and in that moment I see her the night we separated: naked from the waist up, her usual way around the house after the boys were jailed, and I come to get my things. She makes no move to cover herself. It is hellishly hot; she carries a plastic spray bottle and mists her drooping breasts, fine spray runs down the front of her and her breasts glisten with tiny drops of dew. I walk up behind and take her fallen breasts in my hands and lift them, and we sit in the rocking chair, her on top of me, back against my stomach, and she peels off her shorts and we rock and fuck, my hands on her ribs. And she tells me what possessions to take, what to leave, even as she rides me, even as she whinnies like a horse. She wishes me good luck and stands, her body pulling off mine with a sucking sound. This was the end. One lip of her cunt pasted against the inside of her leg, my seed dripping down. This was the end, like frogspawn in the marsh, jelly and ooze. This was the end.

She opens the car door. I fire from the waist and her right shoulder explodes, splatters of blood on hot metal and gravel. She falls to her knees, her back to me, a run in her stocking, a sluice of blood spurting from an exploded artery. She does not pray but looks up the scarred hill where lightning once cracked and smoked a tree, where our innocent infant boys played soldiers, where we had picnics, and on winter nights, where we smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, where we were young lovers in the oak Garden of Eden, and where we once climbed seventy-feet into the crook of an oak and watched bald eagles soar in the winter wind across the valley.

Where now it is the rotted, fetid, regretted Garden of Gethsemane.

Talia Ann Brodersen gasps, “Oh God, my God. Please kill me.”

I fire again, in the small of her back, smoke rising from bone, and some organ purple and throbbing in the fist-sized hole in her back. Beneath skin we are nothing but gut, bone, gelatinous compost, and she drops down in a sea of blood and moves no more.

I hear Brice up the road, screaming like a girl.

I say to my wife, to my peach, “I told you not to divorce me.”

I drop the shotgun, walk back to the pickup, climb in and drive past Brice, who is running for the red house. He will learn things up there that Bradley University cannot teach him.

When I get to Carlinville, I walk into the coffee shop and my waitress Erma, wincing because of my stench, brings me heavily creamed coffee and tomato juice. The good old boys stare at my blood and filth, can smell the sweat and piss. There is a word for all of this: murderer.

Erma brings the check. “Todd, I am going to bathe you, darling, you keep coming in here like this. You been deer poaching? You look like a homeless man, and you gonna drive away all my customers.”

I pull money from a pocket.

“What’s that?”

“Hundred dollar bill, Erma. What’s it look like?”

“I can’t change no hundred, guy.”

“It’s yours to keep. I got no use for it—not where I am going.”

I cross the street to the police station and stand for one last free moment. A lot of law enforcement people are about to have busy days. I approach the front desk. The uniformed man there, “England” written on his brass nameplate, looks at me like I am the apocalypse.

England adjusts his gun. “Help you, bud?”

“Hey there, Officer England. This place has held me and my brother Skip, on several occasions.”

“Is that right. Your name is?”

“You all must be new, or you’d know that.”

“I am fresh out of Desert Storm, sir, this is my first post.”

“God bless you, Officer England.”

“Thank you, sir. Your name?”

“I was in the bad war. Nam.”

“There ain’t no good war, sir. Name?”

“I disagree, sir. My name’s Todd… Me-god.”

“Me-what?”

“I have just killed my daddy, my sister, my wife.”

The officer nearly topples back out of his swivel chair, groping for his sidearm.

“I have just killed my daddy, my sister, my wife.”

I hold out my blackened hands, as if pleading. England finally gets the gun out and levels it at me. “Sergeant Birch, get the hell in here! Now!”

Sergeant Birch runs in, gun drawn by the force of his partner’s voice, probably.

Me-god thinks: Time to go.

Me-god recalls the secret forest glade where Todd futilely dreamed of a life the way storms purpled up and swelled over the valley; his own purple storm, and how he cherry-bombed fish and ripped and raged and flattened. Talia Ann, the girl-tree whose belly, at the first birth, Todd listened to for the sound of dreams stirring in seed and egg, train whistles slicing through loneliness, men on the moon, which the family watched on TV with popcorn and chocolate bars and glasses of root beer—the ruination of the moon; little Janie squirming on Daddy’s big lap; loss. Loss and sorrow.

“Shoot me.”

“We will, buddy, you move.”

Me-god holds out his arms, leaden and paralyzed, movement nevertheless, but—just like Todd’s mother—they don’t shoot.

Officer England, his hands on his gun shaking. He would shoot a foot off, is all.

Sergeant Birch aims with his eyes closed. Me-god could kill them both. Instead, he raises his hands, like Todd did when he was baptized, like he did when Skip scored four touchdowns, like he did when Daddy saw death and squealed and shit and pissed. He smiles at Officer England.

“Where you live, Mr. England, sir?”

“Why you want to know that, sick sonofabitch?”

“Listen to them cicadas, man. I live for them.”

“Is that right?”

Me-god says to Officer England, “Where you live—you all have oak trees?”

Ewing Eugene Baldwin has had 20 short stories published and 15 plays produced, including Off Broadway in New York and at the former Body Politic Theatre, in Chicago. His play, “Water Brought Us and Water’s Gonna Take Us Away,” about the Underground Railroad in Illinois, was commissioned by the U.S. Forest Service and produced at Prop Theatre and Columbia College. A commission by the U.S. Department of the Interior allowed him to act as Chicago producer of the National Tuskegee Airmen Oral History Project. “Watchers” is one of 12 short stories in his new book, “Nothing Ever Happens.”

To read Ewing Eugene Baldwin’s comments on Dan Reiter’s “The Day Laborer,” click here.

______________
Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
“Watchers” was, for me, a particularly powerful piece that grabbed hold of me quickly and never let me go (and gave me a vigorous shake every now and then for good measure).  From its bold, audacious opening through to its equally bold (if disturbing) end, it drags readers along on its odd journey, whether it’s a trip they want to take or not.  There’s some gripping language, great metaphor and wonderful use of implied dialect, but what sold me on this story more than anything was the fact that I could let go and completely immerse myself in it.  That’s a valuable thing (and a difficult one to achieve).

I’d tried to explain to Mami that I was not getting a good grade in Trig this marking period, but she said to just do the damn return. She said she didn’t have any time, and I knew that my brothers Fernando and Rafi were clueless, neither one of them ever having a real job. So I downloaded the forms at the library on 115th, got out my Texas Instruments calculator, and tried to do the numbers myself. When I’d finished, I figured that Mami owed Uncle Sam a grand total of fifty-three cents.

“Just write the check,” Mami had said on her way out the door. Like usual, she was in a whirlwind.

“Don’t you want to see the math?” I asked, but she was already gone.

I dug her checkbook from out her underwear drawer, wrote down fifty-three cents, and signed it Alba Alvarez. I wrote CENTS in big capital letters so the putos wouldn’t think it was dollars. Mami would have whooped my behind if I’d paid them more than she owed. And ever since then, I’d been on the lookout for the shape-shifters.

That’s why I had to blink a couple times before the hunched silhouette became an owl. A bright flash of sun cut through the smokiness of our bedroom, and I could see her perched on the black-chipped railing like an overseer to our cilantro plants and the soggy guts of Phillie cigars. She had her proud brown feathers all puffed out with two little spikes on top of her head, and she was looking straight at me with massive yellow eyes, her hooked beak more like a single claw piercing the white billowiness around her face.

Right then, I heard heavy glass tumble to pieces on the floor. I turned around to find ’Buela staring past me out the window, water and jagged glass shards from a vase scattered around her pink house slippers.

“Ande diablo lechuza,” she whispered with her eyes wide and wet in the wrinkles of her face. Then she took off running.

I heard her screeching about the lechuza down the hallway, and that’s when Fernando stirred on the mattress below.

“What the fuck?” he grumbled in a sticky-mouth yawn. I could smell the fermented foulness of his breath from where I was standing.

“Mami says to get your lazy ass up,” I told him.

“Shut up, little man.” He rolled over.

“She says to get your ass a job.”

Fernando tried to grab me, but I was too slick for his gargantuan fat ass. I sprinted out of the room that I shared with him, but was careful to sidestep the broken glass and the shallow puddle that ’Buela had left on the floor. Let Fernando clean it up. Not that he would, but for a second I pictured him rolling out of bed and stomping down on the crunchy splinters with his Fred Flintstone feet.

In the living room, ’Buela was already saying Ave Marias above my nieces, Zayinna and Rosie, and she called over her shoulder for me to contact Mami at work and tell her about the lechuza. I told her I would, even though I knew I wouldn’t. Mami was a day-shift supervisor at the Key Food on 187th Street, and she was studying for her Associate’s at Bronx Community at night. We’re not supposed to call Mami for anything unless the house catches on fire or one of us is near death—“near” meaning like a subway ride—forty-five minutes to an hour away. If Fernando gets arrested, Zayinna gets sick, Rafi gets in a fight, the TV or the Bustelo coffee can with all our money in it gets stolen, we aren’t supposed to call. Personally, if the apartment burns down, which it probably will one day because of Fernando and his friends smoking blunts in the stairwell and being stupid all the time, I’m not calling Mami. I’m just leaving, easy as I please. I might take my nieces with me—might—but I’ll be out of here. Let the rest of them deal with it and Mami’s wrath.

When I left the house to head to school, I heard ’Buela telling Zayinna and Rosie to stay away from the windows. Even though my head was fuzzy with numbers, the thing with the IRS poking at me, my homework, timing the C train just right, I heard Fernando yelp in pain and I thought that maybe, for once, the santos were on my side.

* * *

By the time I got home that afternoon I found a small bowl of uncooked rice on the crusty radiator next to the window. In the days to come, the bowls multiplied—sifted rice and spices, sweets and liquor—placed strategically around the house to ward off the lechuza. Glasses of water high up on shelves or under Zayinna’s bed, made holy by ’Buela’s rosary. Fernando, Rafi, and Mami didn’t seem to notice, but I did. ’Buela and all the old school believed that if you saw or heard an owl at night, it would steal the souls of the young children in the house while they’re sleeping. I couldn’t imagine what it meant to see an owl in broad daylight on Manhattan Avenue and 109th Street. The only forms of wildlife we ever saw were the armies of cockroaches stalking the drywall, and the rats and crackheads sifting through the trash in the basement. But any which way, I knew it had to be bad. So I tiptoed around ’Buela’s rice bowls, and kept an eye and an ear out for la lechuza.

* * *

The city was heating up, and I circled June 25th—the last day of school—on the red dragon calendar that we got from the ghetto Chinese food place. I felt a new bounce in my step as I looked forward to broiling days at the pool on 110th or the long rides out to Far Rockaway on the tin-can A train. I almost forgot about the owl, but sometimes I’d run into ’Buela sweeping in the hallway and I’d get tripped up in her broomstick. On those quiet mornings before the bustle and the arguments and the trash talk began, she’d look at me with her dark eyes filled with old-school stuff. Sometimes when the light filtered through the curtains in a certain way, I thought she looked magic, like a sorceress, only shape-shifting behind a cotton house dress and Ms. Clairol’s carrot-colored hair dye.

Weeks passed and no word from the IRS, which made me happy when I had time to think about it. Weeks passed, and no more owls. But still, no one picked up ’Buela’s rice bowls.

* * *

The shit hit the fan when the white girl showed up while Fernando and his baby’s mama were having a fist fight. ’Buela let her in our apartment, I think because ’Buela hated Fernando. Just because he was her grandson didn’t mean that she was blind to the fact that he was no-good scrub.

The girl sat with me, Zayinna, and Rosie on the plastic-covered couch, and we fixated on Sponge Bob with the volume up high so we could pretend not to hear Lettie screaming, “You think I won’t tell her? You think I won’t tell her you fucking me?”

Then the two of them barreled down the hallway, wrestling each other out the front door and into the stairwell. Lettie was screaming and we heard them banging into the sweaty plaster walls and Fernando yelling for her to shut the fuck up, fucking puta. This is how it always was when Lettie came down the street with Rosie to ask for Pampers money.

I looked at Fernando’s girlfriend sitting on the couch, but she didn’t look at me. I studied her lean, clean profile and how her nose kinda tilted up, squished in between her high cheekbones and small eyes. The heavy hot-oil smell of plantains smothered the living room, and I wondered how this girl had gotten mixed up with my brother.

Fernando could hold a job like a basketball net could hold marbles. He always had a few bucks in his pocket, but he didn’t get it from any real job. I figured he stole things. Sometimes North Face jackets would appear in our closet, car radios, iPhones, sneakers. Once I tripped on a desktop computer duct-taped in a broken cardboard box and wedged into the small space between our beds. It disappeared just a few days later. I never said anything. Mami was just ausente, running from one minute to the next. ’Buela had stopped cleaning our room altogether when Fernando lost his shit one day about her dusting some crappy ass speakers.

But Fernando couldn’t do anything. Once, he tried to get in on selling weed to the college kids up on the hill, but he was too dense to know how to do the measurements. I had to help him with the math so he didn’t get his ass kicked by whoever he owed money to. I cheated him twenty dollars that time, and he had no idea.

At first, I couldn’t understand what a nice college girl—or any girl, really—could see in Fernando. But then I remembered this crush I had on Daniella Hutchinson two summers before. She was this Belizean chick in my history class, and I would have sliced up my whole body and jumped into a pool of lemon juice just to make her like me. I’d saved up every single dime I earned working off the books at La Casita and spent it all on her. All the greasy counters I’d wiped, the drains I’d unclogged, prying gum from the undersides of tables with a butter knife, I would have done it for all eternity for Daniella. But she was bad news with a capital B. There was trash talk that she was sleeping around with all of JFK High School—with everyone but me. I still loved her though. I didn’t care about the rumors of her giving head to Malcolm Shaw in the stairwell. It was one of those dangerous kinds of loves I’d read about in books at the library—the kind that leaves men walking around with their spines like Pillsbury dough crescents, mumbling and wearing galoshes without any socks. I didn’t care. With Daniella, I was looking forward to nonsense syllables and cold, wet feet and my heart full of love.

I snapped out of it when she asked me to buy her a gold chain for the West Indian Carnival, and then a few days later she dumped me for some big black dude twice her age and seven times my size. It took me months to get myself together again. So in a way, I kinda understood why Fernando’s girlfriend stuck with him even though he only had three brain cells and was cheating on her with his baby’s mama. Love makes you stupid sometimes. Like Lorena Bobbit, or Tiger Woods, or ninety percent of the people on Judge Judy.

That day the white girl surprised me though. The santos really must have wanted to toy with Fernando because when he came back into the apartment, his eyes small and his face crinkled with red scratches from Lettie’s acrylic tips, the girl didn’t cry like usual. Instead, she bolted off the sofa and kicked him right in the nuts. I burst out laughing, but poor Zayinna and Rosie sat horrified, their eyes like gigantic moons on their munchkin faces. Poor Rosie, just a baby-baby girl, started wailing.

The white girl threw a heap of gold-plated jewelry at Fernando—junk chains he had probably bought for her in Bootleg City. He tried to grab her hands, but she bit him hard on the knuckles and clawed at his eyes. A second later blood burst from his lip when she landed a punch with her girl-fist. It was truly better than a Tekken videogame.

And then, as if the toe-to-toe was not already the best ever, the thing that made me respect her for real was when she kicked Fernando in the balls again and turned on her light heels and took off like she was Marion Jones before coming clean on the UPN 9 News. It was classic, and for a minute I felt like her and I were almost the same person. I thought about all the times I had to run to avoid getting my ass kicked, and how I’d acted like a cabrón.

I couldn’t help myself. I opened up the curtains to see her sprinting down the street in the sticky afternoon heat. Running for her freedom, running to save her ass, running for the sun. Me and the white girl.

“What are you smilin’ at?” Fernando asked, his lungs still pounding.

“You so stupid, Fern,” I said, turning from the window.

He was too winded to swipe at me, and I grabbed my backpack and headed to the library to check out Vampire Lestat. Miss Crowley had called and said that someone had finally returned it.

That marked the beginning of when Fernando went off the deep end. I’d hear him trying to call the white girl late into the night and cursing every time she didn’t pick up her phone. One minute he’d be promising his love for her, and the next minute he’d be telling the voicemail lady how she’d never find another man like him. He even asked me to help him write her a letter. I rolled my eyes, but I helped him anyway, I think because I was bored. We worked the whole corny thing out, and then when it came time to mail the letter, he didn’t even have her address.

“Why don’t you just take it over to her dorm room?” I asked, after we’d tried Googling her.

But he didn’t think he’d make it past security. And so his first and only love letter sat collecting dust next to his knock-off colognes and my spiral notebooks on the broken dresser we shared.

Then he started hanging around the bar where she worked. Would just sit and stare at her until closing time, probably just to scare her. I could imagine him plopping himself on a barstool in the corner and sneering at her while she served the Upper East Side pendejos.

One night Fernando came home around five in the morning, slamming the doors and throwing things around the room. I pulled the covers over my head, my only shield from his caveman grunts and curses. My head was so full of static that I fast-forwarded to the next year when I’d start my college applications. I reminded myself to apply to faraway places like Honolulu and Anchorage and the University of Guam. The University of Port Moresby, the University of Kabul.

I heard another set of footsteps enter the bedroom, and the overhead light switched on. It cast a red glow underneath my bed sheet.

“Slow down, Fern,” Rafi was saying. “Chill.”

Apparently, Fernando and the girl had another fight in the bar. Something about some white boy showing up and Fern shattering one of those new glass partitions at the bus stop. In our neighborhood, nobody would have even looked up except for los viejitos playing dominoes by the corner store. But on the Upper East Side, somebody had called the cops and Fernando had to make a run for it.

I heard him jerk open the closet door and pull out a large crate, scraping against the uneven floorboards, then metal clicking on metal.

“Fern…Fern…” Rafi’s voice was different. “You’re losin’ your shit.”

“What the hell are you doing?” I threw off the sheet.

Both of them looked at me surprised. Fernando was a mess in his big jeans and sweaty wife-beater.

“Shut the fuck up, puto,” he said.

“Calm down, Fern,” Rafi said.

“You shut the fuck up!” I heard myself screaming. “She hates your tired ass, just like everyone else. And how you got a loaded gun up in this place? There are other people who live here, you dumb fuck? What the—”

“David! Calm down.”

Suddenly I smelled kitchen smells like chopped lettuce and Dawn dishwashing soap, and Mami’s calloused hands were on my temple. I felt her boney hip against my cheek.

“It’s all right,” she said, and I realized then that I was crying. I wasn’t sure how long she’d been there and how many times she must have told me to relax.

I looked up and Mami’s face was soft in a way I hadn’t seen in a long, long time. Rafi leaned on the doorjamb with Zayinna in his arms. She had one hand rubbing the sleep in her eye and the other pulling her ear, not exactly sure if she should cry or not. Only Fernando was trying to hold in his laughter till he couldn’t anymore, and he cackled thin and smoky, his big stomach convulsing.

The box of Fernando’s stolen firearms was open on the floor next to the closet.

Mami told me to get up and she led me toward the bathroom, where she turned on the faucet and handed me a washcloth. The water was cool as I rinsed the heat and stupid tears from my face. She hovered over me for a minute and then left. In the next room, Fernando’s laughter suddenly stopped.

I heard Mami’s voice muffled through the wall. Something, something, and then she said, “You get the hell outta my house.”

I sat on the toilet with my face in the washcloth. I pushed my fingers into my closed eyes until weird shapes and colors made their way across the darkness. I thought about this history teacher at school and how he was always saying that reality is what we make it, how we create the world we live in. That’s a stupid thing to say to kids like us. Then, I thought about this girl I had met at Upward Bound last summer. She was from Yonkers someplace, but someplace not ghetto. And you could tell by the way she smiled with her teeth small and even in a perfect row, that she was free.

When Fernando slammed the front door, I finally came out and went back to our room. There was a pile of mismatched clothes on Fernando’s bed. I opened the closet door, and the box of handguns was still there. There was also a sawed-off shotgun wedged into the far corner. I traced my fingers along the hard black metal and then shut the door again. Mami was in the kitchen fixing her lunch for the long day ahead. Apparently she wasn’t going back to sleep. I couldn’t really figure out what it all meant. I wished she had kicked him out a long time ago…before the white girl, before Lettie. I wished she’d saved enough money in that stinking coffee can to send me away from here.

The sun was already up, peeking over the tops of the buildings, and I had about an hour or so to crash if I wanted to get to school on time for my math Regents exam. I dozed off in my room, my thoughts drifting, wondering if those were the hoo’s of dirty city doves on the fire escape. The last thing I remember passing over my eyelids before the blackness was the doves turning into la lechuza, humongous, with her wings spread and her yellow eyes wide.

* * *

We only had a half-day at school, and it was still early when I got out of the train and saw the ambulance pull away down our block. Really, it could have been from any building on the street, but I knew it was from ours, and I took off running. I pushed open the broken entry door and bounded up the two flights, sidestepping wads of gray gum and spit. Mrs. García and the other lady neighbors were in the hallway, their bright housedresses skirting their thick diabetic ankles. They looked at me with their bronze faces turning the color of ashes.

The door to Apartment 2C was already cracked open and I found ’Buela on the living room couch with her head in her hands, a plastic rosary looped around her fingers. The combs she kept in her hair were on the porcelain table, leaving a mess of orange tangles around her shoulders.

“’Buela, qué pasó?” I asked. “Qué pasó?”

One of the rice bowls had been kicked over. Thick red and muddy shoeprints marked the floor tiles that ’Buela had kept spotless since she moved in with us from Santo Domingo when I was just a little boy.

Down the hallway the red footprints turned into splatters of chaos. Small bloody starbursts, crushed on the floor and the walls of my bedroom. The closet door was open like an ugly, vomiting mouth. The box inside was pulled out with its lid half twisted.

I raced back to the living room, shouting, “’Buela, ’Buela! What happened? Where is Zayinna?”

But when I got there, ’Buela was holding the shotgun. The heavy metal was rising up and down slightly and evenly against the pink flowers of her housedress. Her finger was tight on the trigger, and one ancient and faultless eye trained on Fernando. My massive big brother had gone the sick color of mucus. His arms opened at his sides, his hands spread. He stood dumbly right inside the apartment door.

“Do something,” he said to me in English through clenched teeth.

I shook my head. “No way, bro.”

And we all stayed like that until the police arrived a few minutes after.

Alison Grifa Ismaili is currently in the third year of an MFA program at Louisiana State University, where she enjoys experimenting with multiple genres. In her former life, she was an English teacher in faraway places like Managua, Guayaquil, Rabat, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

To read Alison Grifa Ismaili’s comments on Renée Thompson’s “Twelve Pencils,” click here.

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Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
This story, for me, worked extremely well. It had a strong momentum from the outset that pulled me through the action with a sometimes violent energy. The family is depicted honestly and completely, but without over-sentimentalizing their situation or the strain in their relationships. Overall, I found this piece to be a thoroughly engrossing and very powerful read.

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Comments on this story by Rebecca Burns, author of “The Intruder”
This is a persuasive piece, as moving as it is humorous, which conveys a real sense of place and captures the uplifting, occasionally painful idiosyncrasies of family life.

The title is very apt; David the young narrator is painted in a sympathetic but strong light, seeking his own identity set apart from his hideous older brother. He turns to books, the education system, anything to counter the shifting reality that surrounds him; a shifting reality caused by a chaotic family life. Books help to clear adolescent, foggy emotions—the teenage crush he feels is actually “one of those dangerous kinds of loves I’d read about in books at the library.”

A clever and well-pitched use of imagery support the running theme of painful relationships; David admits he “would have sliced up my whole body and jumped into a pool of lemon juice just to make her like me.” This perfectly captures teenage infatuation, and this juxtaposition of physical agony and emotional fulfillment is replayed in a later scene where the narrator watches a fist-fight between his brother, Fernando, and Fernando’s girlfriend, following the revelation that Fernando had been unfaithful— unsurprising to the reader, given the way he had been portrayed in earlier scenes.

The story also contains well-placed cultural references, recognizable even to readers not from the U.S. The line: “the thing that made me respect her for real was when she kicked Fernando in the balls again and turned on her light heels and took off like she was Marion Jones before coming clean on the UPN 9 News,” is just right; we, the readers, know exactly what the narrator means by this comparison—we are drawn into the story by such phrases. And we can see what is inevitable, what the ending will be. When it comes, the lack of clarity over the fate of the young niece, Zayinna, means one thing—that David must come into his own and finally assert himself.

A compelling and convincing story, well-executed.

You could always rely on a Saturday to roll along slow and regular. A man could start fresh in the morning and keep on till quitting time; no one came around to bother him. A man could make his own pace and stick to it. Like pushing a lawnmower through tall grass. That’s what Saturday was—steady, straight lines. It was an honest day.

By Old Eddie’s reckoning, Saturday was about as far away from Monday as a man could be. And Monday was the worst day of all. Shit, on Monday they might start you on trash pickup, then pull you away to scrape concrete off a back porch, or hose down some entryway, it wouldn’t be half an hour before some garage flooded out, or a window broke, or a yard inlet got slopped over with stucco mud. By lunch break, Old Ed would have five or six tasks started, his tools laid out all the over the site, his boots cooked in mud, and all the while the trash piling up and overflowing the cans.

Old Eddie didn’t credit the Good Lord with a whole lot, but he did think it a mighty fine thing of Him to have invented Saturdays.

Old Eddie was sixty-two, which was ten years younger than the drywall man, and two shy of the electrician. But years don’t always determine a man’s age, and if Old Eddie hadn’t been the oldest man to work on the site, he’d been the slowest. Back last summer, when the Mexicans were still swarming, a favorite game of theirs had been to sneak up behind Old Ed and stake a sixteen foot 2×4 into the ground, then take bets on who would win the race to the dumpster—Old Eddie or the stick’s shadow. Every half hour or so, one of the masons would jump out to the road to update the odds. It was a fine diversion for a while, but the shadow had Old Eddie outclassed, and in two weeks time the takers on Ed’s side had all but abandoned him.

To judge him by build alone, that is, if you stripped Old Ed down to his underwear and stood him straight up in a hot lamp (and ignored his face), you might mistake him for a male model. His body was trim, taut, and dense with muscle. His skin glistened like an overripe plum. Through some trick of nature, Old Eddie had maintained the physique of a twenty-year-old defensive back. But he wore his blue jeans loose over his toned quads, and his bulging, glistening pectorals shrouded beneath a thready green sweater with a maroon stripe across the breast. To flesh out this disguise, Old Eddie walked with the jerky, indignant limp of a broken-down horse. Looking at him fully clothed, if you weren’t perceptive enough to note the tensile veins in the hands and neck, you might think he was a very sick or elderly man. His face, with its almost nonexistent nose, wide lips, and tall, brown, hairless forehead, bore a striking resemblance to a wetland gopher tortoise. This, along with Old Eddie’s shameful record against the shadow, led the masons to endow him with his nickname, La Tortuga.

Today he ranged through the muted light and climbed a mound of wet, unsodded earth where some weather-beaten lumber laid in a jumbled pile. He lit up a cigarette and stood studying the clouds, watching them heave and roil in the north. It had rained most of the night, and a menacing purple glow seethed in the sky, as if the dawn were giving birth to night. Rusty nails jutted at odd angles from the lumber. The ends of the posts appeared stained in the smoldering light, stained with what looked to be blood.

The wind shuddered through the oaks, scraped at the branches. The townhouse buildings were just coming into light, the eaves dripping and sparkling. Old Eddie squinted at his watch. It wasn’t seven o’clock yet, but he put on his gloves anyway. It didn’t hurt a man to start early on Saturday. Nothing much could hurt a man on Saturday. It was the best day of the week. So long as you didn’t count Sunday.

The wind flung aside some low clouds so that a shaft of pink sunlight broke through and gleamed on the long crescent-shaped scar on Old Eddie’s forearm when he raised the hammer. He hammered the nails out by their tips, slammed them back the way they came, eased the heads out with his claw; one by one he flicked the bloody spikes to the ground.

“Smell like rain,” he said.

“Father-in-law!” The falsetto voice came from the bottom of the swale. Marcial, the Mexican concrete finisher, stood down there, grinning like a child. “Mucho trabajo, Father-in-law?”

Old Eddie scowled. “Ain’t much of no trabajo left ’round here, long-hair.”

“Father-in-law, you want to see something? Peces?”

Old Eddie spat on the ground. “What? You sledge a stake through another plumbing pipe?”

“Conyo, Father-in-law, you know peces?” Marcial wriggled his hands together. “Peces?”

“I ain’t got one fucking clue what you saying, long-hair.” Old Eddie had worked the most part of his life alongside these Mexican boys, but he was still lucky to understand half of what came out of their mouths. They was damn good workers, though. Hell, he reckoned ain’t no big project would ever get built without them. But when it came to making sense, Mexicans was just plain fucked. Still, Old Eddie kept a special place in his heart for Marcial and the flat crew. Like any Mexican gang, they started early and worked late, humped till their backs broke, but the difference with Marcial and the flat crew was that they cleaned up after themselves. To Old Ed, that was the sign of the good ones. The fucking masons, now, they were enough to throw a man off Mexicans for good. At least a dog had the sense to go off a ways before he took a piss, but them mosquitoes just up and emptied out right where they worked and went on living and eating and working in the smell of it. No, Old Eddie couldn’t abide the masons. He had mixed feelings about the Mexican worker. Once in a while you’d come across a great one, someone like Pump Man, who could beat the hell out of any five-man team with a two-inch concrete hose and not spill a drop of mud, but for every professional like Pump Man there were ten spindly masons, a hundred pounds of spattered mortar, and twenty plates of beans and dried tortillas dumped in the muck for the crows and rats and palmetto roaches to pick through.

If you wanted to get a big job done, you needed a Mexican crew. Old Eddie didn’t try and deny it. There was just too many of them, and every one showed up ready to work. Old Eddie didn’t try and understand where they came from either, it seemed to him Mexico was one big old labor pool, only everyone got paid in cash, and the work vans was more crammed up. But men was men, he knew that. Mexican, black, whatever. Some good, some bad.

Marcial’s little black eyes sparkled. He waggled his hands again, rousing a toothless laugh out of Old Eddie.

“What the fuck you talking about, long-hair?”

“Come!” Marcial cried. “Father-in-law, come! I show you!”

Old Eddie laid down his hammer and followed Marcial along the chain link fence. Rainwater had grooved the sloped soil and polished it like clay. Tiny rivers flowed down in veined rivulets. They arrived at a puddle of brown standing water at the bottom of the gulch.

“Mira,” Marcial said.

“What?” Old Eddie bent over the puddle. Something wriggled beneath the surface. He drew back. “What the fuck?”

“Peces!”

Old Eddie leaned over the puddle again, cautiously. Two tails were stirring up the water. “Shit, I thought it was a snake. Look like a couple a catfish in there.”

“Peces, Father-in-law!”

“I ain’t your father-in-law.” Old Eddie thrust out his jaw. “Now how in the hell catfish gonna get in a mud puddle? You put ‘em in there?”

“No,” Marcial laughed. “You put them in, Father-in-law!”

One of the fish slickered out of the puddle, kicked up the bank, and began to dry heave in the mud. Old Eddie wrinkled up his face, had the idea to boot the thing back in the puddle, but he let it be. The one in the puddle looked like it was drowning in chocolate syrup.

“Son enigmas,” Marcial said. His elf-face grew solemn as he kicked the struggling fish back into the water.

“That’s it.” Old Eddie nodded. “Might as well let ‘em enemas go out together.”

* * *

The plumber was a jovial giant, a curly-headed Pole by the name of Wojchekowski. He sported a Santa Claus beard, chain-smoked, and liked to invent tall tales. This idea of two catfish in a mud puddle tickled him. “I bet they got sucked up in a tornado,” he said as he pulled a bent cigarette from his front shirt pocket and lit it. “I heard about that happening. Twister plucks ‘em right up, they swim around in the clouds for a while, then down they come with the rain.”

“That seems sort of far-fetched,” the general contractor said. He was a shy, dark haired boy who looked too young to be in charge of a project this size.

“Well I suppose so,” the plumber said, taking a happy puff. “Could be a bird picked ‘em out of a creek, didn’t like the taste, dropped ‘em.”

The puddle frothed up and both catfish skittered out of the water. The men watched them squirm down the bank to writhe out their death throes in a dryer part of the gulley.

“Little guys look about tuckered,” the plumber said. “Maybe I should scoop ‘em into a bucket and toss ‘em in the pond.”

Marcial tapped Old Eddie on the wrist. “Peces, Father-in-law.”

One of the catfish slipped under the chain link fence and disappeared in the tall grass on the other side. The other one flipped over, its eyes bulging, its white belly exposed.

* * *

When the men came out from the lee of the building, they snapped their hands to their hats. A cold wind was wrapping the site, sweeping the oak leaves in crinkling waves over the asphalt. “Soon that plumber will be bragging how he caught a trout in a raindrop,” the general contractor said.

“Give it a week and it’ll be a whale,” said Old Eddie.

A styrofoam plate fluttered around a building corner, sailed toward them. Old Ed rose on his toes and snatched it from midair.

“Nice grab.”

“Shit, youngster.”

They passed the mustard-colored façade of building 19, with the low stone accents still damp from the night’s rain. The clouds were smothering the blueness out of the east, spreading outward like black smoke. And now came the first droplets of cold rain on the men’s arms.

A bolt of lightning exploded a hundred yards away. Old Eddie’s knee buckled, and for an instant he was back in the nightmare sawgrass of Moc Hoa, his arm bloodied to shit, the mortar fire rattling his bones, his backpack slicing into his shoulders. Then the double-flash was gone, filled in by sheets of gray wind.

“What happened?” the general contractor said. “You trip on something?”

“Nah, youngster, I ain’t trip. Sometimes my right knee quit working when it about to rain. It’s sort of my, how you call it? My clue to go inside.”

The men climbed the trailer steps, stamped out their boots, and removed their hats as they came inside. The general contractor wiped his hands on a towel, ran his fingers through his curly hair, poured some coffee into two old yellow mugs. “You take it black, right?”

“Mm-hm.”

“How about a donut? The granite guy brought them in this morning.”

“What’s this?” Old Eddie took a white powdered from the box. “You trying to soften me up for something?”

The general contractor pulled out a folding chair, sat down. “I guess this job’s about done, Ed.”

“I know it. I was just waiting for you to say it.”

“I could still use you this week and next.”

“That’s good,” Old Eddie said. “That’s real good. Gimme some time to tie up my loose ends.”

The rain pulsed on the windowpanes. “Looks like another good one about to come through,” the general contractor said.

“Sho’ does,” Old Eddie agreed.

Beyond the windows, the sky flickered white, hesitated, flickered again. A delayed thunderclap rolled up and shook the walls. “That one be about three miles away,” Old Eddie said. “You can tell by counting the seconds.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Mm-hm. Learned that in ‘Nam.”

“I didn’t know you were in ‘Nam, Ed.”

“Shit. Sixty-eight. Only time in my life I was gone from Tampa.”

“You got drafted?”

“Naw, man, naw. I was just stupid as shit, that’s all.” Ed took a bite of the donut, wiped the whiteness off his lips with the back of his hand. “Those days I was living at home, doing much of nothing. Couldn’t make it playing football. My old man lent me his car one night to go to a party. Wasn’t long before some dumbass mothafuckas started fighting and some fool got hit in the head with a bottle. I took off as fast as I could. Down the road another car come and sideswipe me. Banged Pop’s car all to shit. Hmph,” Old Eddie smiled, shook his head ruefully. “I thought my old man was gonna kill me when he saw it. But he just stood there, all calm-like, and he say, ‘Ed, you go to bed. And get dressed up nice in the morning, we going somewhere.’ Next day, he drove me to the draft office. Six weeks later, they tossed my ass on a plane to Saigon. Artillery. I seen some shit, man. I seen some shit.”

“Jesus. I can’t imagine.”

“I seen what napalm do to a man’s skin, make it all patchy, curled up and crispy and orange. Me and my old man didn’t get along much after that.”

The general contractor put his hat on, walked over to the window. “I’m sorry, Ed.”

“I seen some shit.”

The rain was in full downpour mode now, the whole of the site grayed out.

“Fucking rain,” the general contractor said. “Those banks are gonna be washed to hell.”

“Too bad you ain’t get the sod in time.”

“Now they’ll need to dry out. Maybe we can rake them out together on Tuesday.”

Old Eddie smiled, took a sip of his coffee. “All right, youngster.”

“Well, Ed, I guess you can call the van and head on home if you want.”

“I think I’ll wait it out, if you don’t mind.”

“Me too,” the general contractor said. “If I don’t put in a full day, I get restless. Can’t sleep at night.”

“Ain’t no good going home. A man need to work.”

“Hell, I can’t sleep anyway,” the general contractor said. “Most of the night I lay there and make myself crazy thinking about the baby in her belly.”

“This gonna be your first?”

“Far as I know.”

“Yeah, man. That’ll do you. Every man gotta go through it sometime. When he don’t know who he is, or where he be going. Some find out, the rest just keep looking. Those be the mothafuckas get in trouble.” Old Eddie finished off his donut, took a meditative sip of his coffee. “You’ll be all right, man. You taking it the right way.”

“I wish I had another job coming up,” the general contractor said.

“Ain’t no one starting nothing new. Everyone scared, I guess.”

The general contractor looked meaningfully into the slitted eyes of the old laborer. “It’ll turn around soon, Ed. I’ve got your number.”

“You call me, Robert. I work for you any day. Just keep me away from that mothafucka foreman you used to keep out here. He got me pinned wrong, man. Ordering a piss test at the labor pool. Fuck that. I done changed my ways a long time ago. I don’t do no drugs.” Old Eddie hung his head. “I’m an alcoholic. Hell, I admit it. I take a six pack after work every day, but I don’t do no drugs, Robert. And those Fridays I was missing last year was because I had to finish up my meetings with my parole officer. All that fuckin’ mess is over with, now.”

“I know it, Eddie. You’ve been solid on this job, all the way to the beginning. And you’re the best forklift operator I know. Here, Ed.” The general contractor stood up, took a folded check from his back pocket, handed it over to Old Eddie. “It’s a bonus.”

Old Eddie opened the check, sat looking at it for a while. Slowly, he stood to his feet. His eyes were moist. He spread his mouth open, revealing the pinks of his upper gums. “Thank you, Robert! Thank you Robert, and thank you, Lord!”

“The foreman was against it,” the general contractor said. “He’d rather have given you a ten-dollar gift card to Publix.”

“Shit.” Old Eddie wiped his eyes and wrapped the general contractor up in his arms. They hugged with open palms. Old Eddie’s back was smooth and hard as river stone.

“I had to make sure about them zeroes!” Old Eddie said.

“Well, I want you to know how much I appreciate you, man.”

“I’m gonna get a car, man. Fuck this labor pool shit.”

“You get it, Pops.” The general contractor smiled, held Old Eddie at arm’s length. “And take yourself a week off. You’re gonna need some rest before the next project.”

* * *

Spring thunderstorms in Tampa are cruel, sneaky as a slap in the face, and just as fleeting. The Mexicans call them the mucho agua storms, the rednecks “belly washers.” Waves of gray sweep in to shred at sky and earth, fill the low places with water. When they are done pouring out, the clouds whisk off to the east, the rain eases to pulses, then patters, and the black wool of the sky frays into a silvery haze, which in turn rends apart to bare the glowing sharpened edges of white-blue cloud, and behind that, shifting scraps of blue sky.

“I need a favor, Ed,” the general contractor said. He opened the window and wiped the dripping sash with a paper towel. “The EPC wants me to remove some nuisance vegetation from the wetland buffer zone. Something called a Peruvian primrose.” He smiled, raised a finger, disappeared into the trailer bathroom, then came out with a 21″ black-handled machete. “The guy said to chop it back so it doesn’t hang over the grass.”

Old Eddie eyed the knife, stood to his feet. “Now just what kind of rose you want me to chop down?”

“You’ll know it when you see it. It’s a little yellow flower that grows out of the bramble.” The general contractor handed over the blade. Eddie clenched the rubber grip, felt the old familiar weight in his palm.

In the same way the first shaft of a sunrise can tempt open the petals of a flower, a machete can open up a man’s spirit and set him to blissful occupation. Eddie worked without gloves, lopping off the sparkling green and yellow tufts with steady, pendular swings of the arm. It was Saturday, cool and fresh. The sky was yawning.

A sand crane popped out of the bush and hobbled down the swale. The bird’s wing was snapped. Gangly, black-tipped feathers dragged pathetically along the grass.

“What, you get hit by a car?”

The crane stopped, retracted its long gray neck, cocked its eye at Old Eddie.

“What?”

The bird spooked, tried to flap its wings, nearly toppling over, then hopped to regain its balance, and limped off in the direction of the road.

“You going the wrong way!” Old Eddie called after it.

The wind eased into late morning, and the sun heated the wetlands so that certain smells were allowed to waft up from the brush—pine sap and wild ginger, roasted arrowroot, oak musk, boar scent, moss, pepper, buckthorn, honeysuckle, fish rot, algae, dank cypress bark. Old Eddie hacked steadily into the thickening tangle, and pretty soon he slipped off into a dream-like state. Drawn ever deeper into the sawgrass, he drifted away from the buildings, down into the marshes. The branches clambered about him. He fought his way after the trail of the yellow wildflowers.

Now, as the cool, foul water seeped over his bootlaces to drench his socks, Old Eddie had the nagging thought that he might be going in too deep. But he kept on anyway, sweating, unable to stop, driven to madness by the shimmering blade and the flowers. A thrumming sound pulsed in his ears—was it his own heartbeat? He worked rhythmically, merging with the mud and the plants, a wild man carving his way through the thicket. Alligators scuttled into the deeper gulleys, toads huddled low, crows gathered in the high branches to watch the strange dance between man and bush.

At one point, Old Eddie ventured a look behind him and saw that he had gone too far, but he turned and gouged on anyway, cutting ever deeper into the thicket.

Two hours later, around lunchtime, Old Eddie had carved a meandering, hundred-yard path through the cypress dome, extending from the northwest corner of the site all the way to the far south end. When he surfaced from the wetlands, his sweater torn, his face and hands bloodied, the whites of his eyes were showing. He felt inhabited by some ancient spirit, gazing in madness at the bright façades of the townhouses as if for the first time. In this burning state, Old Eddie saw an image floating before him, it was the face of the old Indian concrete truck driver with the long black braid, the one who had told him the buildings would all sink into the mud some day.

Old Eddie limped toward the trailer, trying to hum away the visions he was having—visions of vines interlaced over the roofs, windows shattered by yellow wildflowers, and catfish flopping about in the black, fetid water that was creeping up and flooding the building foundations. He paced his strides, took a good while coming down the road. Eventually, his jaw slackened, his eyes calmed again, and his heartbeat slowed to a steady drum.

When he came in sight of the retention pond, he froze in place, struck by another holy vision.

It was Pump Man, standing in a golden light at the pond’s edge. The Mexican’s face seemed much younger, somehow, smoother, wooden, as he stood meditating over the water. Old Eddie wanted to ask him what the hell he was doing here, and why he was holding a bucket, but he was hypnotized, lulled into a trance by the stark honesty of the man’s stillness. So Old Ed stood there watching, and Pump Man remained still as a sculpture, in noble profile against the sun.

Why was Pump Man here on a Saturday, holding a bucket of water with three tilapia swimming inside? It was a mystery, even to Pump Man himself. The concrete had been poured out over two months ago. Pump Man had no business on this site. Probably it had to do with his mother’s death in Guadalajara, three nights before. But Pump Man wasn’t one to contemplate his actions. He simply bent over the pond and poured the fish in. They were embarazado, and soon the retention pond would be teeming with baby peces.

As Old Eddie watched this ritual, he felt an electric tingle, some animalistic memory, or a telepathic bond he could not translate. He was on the verge of a momentous revelation, though he did not know it. He saw in his mind the gasping catfish swimming off into the tall grass, and the other flipping over onto its back. A vague dread, an uncertainty, passed over him like a cloud. But before he could grasp its meaning, the lunch cart bumped through the front gates and bleated its horn. Old Ed remembered the check in his pocket now, and he walked on, a bit taller, his heart bumping cheerfully in his old chest—at perfect peace with the world on this Saturday.

Dan Reiter works with his hands. “The Day Laborer” is an excerpted chapter from his upcoming novel, The Project, which explores the lives of construction workers during the boom times at the beginning of the century.

To read Dan Reiter’s comments on Jared Yates Sexton’s “The Right Men for the Job,” click here.

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Notes from Denis J. Underwood, Online Managing Editor
The rich descriptions in this excerpted chapter drew me in from the start. A sense of place, one where dread lurks just below the surface, is firmly established from the start. The banter between the workers and the exploration of their cultural eccentricities bring to life an exotic locale and a unique slice of Americana. Here, there’s constant encroachment. Man toils to control nature and nature strives to take back what has been lost. How much time does Old Eddie have left? He’s lived a hard life. He’s wounded, like the crane. But he’s resilient and perseveres. There’s rebirth, rejuvenation, not only in Old Eddie, but in the way nature reasserts itself on the job site.  I was thoroughly relieved to make it out of the swamp with Old Eddie. To see him happy.

______________
Comments on this story by  Ewing Eugene Baldwin, author of “Watchers”
Old Eddie is a cog in a wheel of progress, for which there is no antidote. He focuses on his piece of the world, where nature and man-made materials clash. He observes a broken-winged sandhill crane and passes on the chance to capture it and get it help. Unemotionally, he sees oddities–catfish in puddles, rituals of foreigners–and labors in the seam of a strange and incompatible fabric of plants and concrete and plastic, where color blooms in manmade ditches and animals with million year lineages are now reduced to living along the margins of “progress.”

Old Eddie senses the menace and uneasiness in this world, but he cannot afford sentiment or to dwell on environmental consequences. Who would fix his broken wing? He is brother to the crane, to the catfish. In the menace is a living, modest to be sure, a living nevertheless. Eddie is one of those marginal creatures, no expectations except to get through that day, the next day and apply practical meaning to future days.

We don’t see the Old Eddies and the Mexican workers; we drive blindly by, after the destruction and reconstruction, or stop to avail ourselves of the services in each new structure. We don’t walk behind the buildings and observe the netherworld. We avoid the neighborhoods of the laborers.

“The Day Laborer” skillfully takes us to a place as foreign and menacing as a third world country.

Dear Kent:

Thank you so much for your interest in the Coushatta culture. I really appreciated your hyper-inquisitive email. Of course, we don’t actually live in teepees. In fact, we never did, because we are not Plains Indians. That’s a completely different culture. It would be like asking a Norwegian how he keeps his igloo warm. The only teepees I have ever seen are the fiberglass ones we sell at the “native arts” store. To be frank, I don’t even know what a fucking wigwam is, so I don’t have anything to say about that.

Anyway, it’s apparent from your email that you’ve seen a couple of cowboy movies and therefore think we “Indians” get our names from the first things our mothers see after we’re born. Wow. I don’t even know where to begin with that one because it’s so ridiculously ignorant. The actual truth is we never used to give babies names at all. In the old days, we just called babies “poskoosi” (which means baby) until they did something special, and then we would start calling them that, sort of like what you would call a nickname. For example, when my great-great-grandfather was little, he kicked some embers over in the fire and burned his house down. He ran away into the woods and the whole village saw him go. So they called him Waliika, which means “Running Away.”

But the other thing most people don’t understand about traditional Coushatta names is that you’re not stuck with the same one forever. You can reinvent yourself, so to speak. If you do something really memorable, it sort of wipes out the old name and replaces it with a new one. Like, by the time my great-great-grandfather was old, people had stopped calling him “Running Away” and started calling him “Two Feathers” because he was very proud of the fact that he had the right to wear two egret feathers in his hair—one for each white man he had killed.

Yours truly,
Ford Battise

* * *

From: fbattise@actribe.org
To: knewton@cchs.org
CC:
Subject: names

Dear Kent:

You and your mother will be happy to know I’m in Mrs. Gandy’s D-Hall. Principal Davidson has duly reprimanded me for my email concerning Coushatta naming traditions, which he said carried with it an implicit threat. Ms. Mahala lectured me on the fact that I ought to be more aware of my own flaws, forgiving toward others, and generally thicker-skinned. According to her, it was a sin for me to be so snippy and quick to judge. She suggested that maybe you really didn’t know how we named our kids. Maybe you were genuinely curious about us, but just not so careful with your words. God, she’s dingy. It’s like talking to a stump. It just goes to show you, Kent, you don’t have to be very smart to teach high school.

Anyway, I’ve been given two weeks detention to reconsider my epistolary crimes and misdemeanors. That ought to teach me to tell true stories about my great-great-grandfather. At least, I presume they were true. Who can really say, Kent? Not me. Not you. We weren’t there or anything. We’ve just heard about it, you know?

But let me take this opportunity to further elaborate on the Coushatta culture so that we, separated by some seventy miles of Highway 59, including numerous strip malls, video stores, and natural gas wells, can better understand one another. We Coushatta are a backwards and hidebound people. We’re practically in Louisiana, for God’s sake. But for all our Luddite idiosyncrasies, still we have magic picture tubes in our living rooms. This medicine is big heap strong, Kent. Using our magic windows, we can view all the Jews and blacks and busty blondes of the outside world. In fact, this medicine is so powerful that we Coushatta already know the jokes that have been made about the subtle, austere, occasionally drunken redskins; in a perversely post-modern twist, we Coushatta have appropriated these stereotypes for our own misuse. We are thoroughly westernized in this respect, Kent: We not only recognize and abhor our pathetic, Stone Age culture, we also wonder why we are flagellating ourselves over it since everyone else is pretty much just as fucked up as we are. If not even more so. The fact is, Kent, we sometimes make fun of our own naming traditions. Get it?

The relevance of the following will become apparent to you about mid-way through the second paragraph, so be patient. I have two friends. Their names are Christopher and Becky. Christopher Ryman and Rebecca Bryce. Two Christian-named friends who are, in fact, both Christians, or at least have been at some point nominally and perfunctorily baptized. Each friend also professes some abstract belief in Christ’s paternity, divinity, resurrection, etc. His wisdom. His teachings. They are aware, in broad strokes, of the Sermon on the Mount and St. John’s apocalyptic writings. But they can’t tell you a goddamn thing about the Great Spirit or the Twin Manifestations, Kent. Ask them about that and you’ll get a blank look. “Yeah, I think my old nana used to talk about that crazy shit with the birds or whatever.” That’s what they’d tell you if you asked. Because the Twin Manifestations are two herons—mirror images of each other—that more or less track the Taoist concept of yin and yang. But I digress.

Sometimes Chris and Becky and I play a very deconstructionist game with our quaint Coushatta naming tradition (see prior email). We pretend that someone’s name is whatever we would say about them if we were muttering under our breaths. You know, something mean. For instance, my mother is The Woman Who Holds Us All Hostage By Threatening To Kill Herself. And my father is Closet Homo (The Disguise Is Wearing Off). Chris’s parents are The Goddamn Village Drunk and The Goddamn Wife of the Goddamn Village Idiot. I can’t remember Becky’s parents’ names, but she has an older sister called Chief Spreads-Her-Legs. So ha-ha. Good one on us.

Anyway, you get the picture. The point I’m trying to make to you, Kent Newton, of somewhere in the Cypress Fairbanks Independent School District, and probably of a plush five-bedroom McMansion with a kidney-shaped swimming pool, is that we Coushatta are an interesting and complex people who live fascinating lives, full of nuance and humor. We don’t wear beaded necklaces or sleep on the ground or hunt ‘em buffalo or smoke’em peace pipe. None of that is true. So, when you joke about how we name our babies “Liquor Store” and “Discount Cigarettes,” we’ve already thought of that, Kent. You’re ten years behind the curve. Maybe twenty. And you don’t even know it. Plus, our jokes are better than yours. So don’t flatter yourself, you stupid pale-faced prick.

Sincerely,
Ford Battise

* * *

From: fbattise@actribe.org
To: knewton@cchs.org
CC:
Subject: mothers

Dear Kent:

I see we have this much in common: hysterical mothers. Funny story. I was just talking to my mother in the living room. Apparently, the school district requires two parental meetings for any suspension or detention period longer than one week. Principal Davidson (“It-walks-like-a-duck”) had Mom down to his office today to talk about you and me and my grades and my progress reports and so on. And you know what she did when she got home, Kent? When she got home, she threw open the front door and she had this real wild, crazy-looking gleam in her eyes. She squints when she’s angry, Kent. That’s what she did. She squinted and she cried and she stood there in the living room and she balled up her hands and pressed them against her cheeks until they left red marks. Then she told me all about how disappointed she was. How ashamed. It really revved her up to have something to gnash her teeth about. I mean she was virtually binging on despair.

You know what she said, Kent? She said I don’t love her. She said that no one really does. She said she has eighty bucks and anyone can buy a pistol. Anyone. Go get a pistol and blow her brains out in the living room. How would I like that?

But instead of killing herself, what she did was she put her hands over her eyes and lay down on the couch and started crying. That long, inconsolable cry that is also part moan and part scream. It’s reckless, Kent. Unhinged. It sounds convincingly insane. The letter from your mother was wadded up in her hands. The Principal gave it to her. For your information. To complete the scene for you. (By the way, who the fuck uses pink stationary to lodge a complaint about someone else’s kid? Your mother must be totally fucking certifiable, Kent.)

But I have to say, I actually learned something from this whole experience. Which is why I’m writing you. Because of you and your hysterical mother, I actually grasped something valuable and new. You are my—muse is too strong and gay-sounding—you and your mother are my inadvertent teachers. Like the retard who makes you appreciate the beauty of rain or the baby who reminds you that everyone on earth spends their first two years shitting in their pants. And here it is, Kent. For many years, I’ve labored under the delusion that my mother might actually commit suicide as a result of one of my numerous misdeeds—such as ditching school or getting drunk or taking mescaline or having indiscriminate and numerous sexual partners. The Great Eagle Spirit knows Mom’s threatened to kill herself often enough. And, from the outside, I guess it would not seem like such an idle threat. She looks the part. Her hair is always frayed and messy. She’s fat and miserable. And after all, her father (tribal cop) shot himself in the mouth with his service revolver while sitting in his recliner. So you’d think she at least has it in her to pull the trigger, genetically speaking.

But now, having just spoken with her about my reprehensible behavior toward you, I realize Mom just doesn’t have the guts to take it all the way. She’ll talk about doing it, sure. Threaten to kill herself until she’s blue in the face. But she’ll never really hang herself or swallow glass or whatever else she’s got planned. There’s nothing for me to fear about that. Because she’ll never really do it, not on my account, no matter what I do. She just doesn’t care that much about other people. She’s into her own thing, Kent, which is sitting around feeling screwed because the world has fucked her over. It doesn’t really have much to do with you or me or Principal Davidson. We’re just props in her show.

And you, Kent Newton, of the National Honor Society and the JV football team, are to thank for that realization. Which occurred as follows: Mom, couch-bound and disheveled, said I didn’t love her and this deal with you proved it. My anti-social behavior. My unwillingness to listen. My contempt for adults, especially her. She said I was nicer to my friends than I was to her, even though my friends were really not my friends and were always getting me in trouble. Something like that, Kent. I can’t remember exactly. I was kind of on autopilot at the time.

Anyway, she went on and on about how my grades were tanking and how I was heading down the wrong path by threatening that white boy from Houston. Her anger was in full bloom, Kent. Someone unfamiliar with her would probably have thought she was on meth or something. She was that spun up. She stood. She flailed her arms around the living room while she was yelling. She did this thing where she was opening and closing her hands a lot, unconsciously, for no apparent reason. There was no talking her off the ledge, Kent. She was going to kill herself for sure this time.

And that’s when it dawned on me that the only thing she had over me was the threat to kill herself. Because, beyond that, I really didn’t give a shit. About her. About the alleged consequences of my actions. I’d heard it all before, you know? A few times. But it was then, as she lunged toward me, screaming, her voice gone hoarse, that I recognized she was basically right. I really didn’t love her much at all. Not much. I preferred the company of others. Almost anyone other than her. Because she never joked. She never made me laugh. All she ever talked about was her crappy job. Her crappy husband. Her crappy house. Her crappy life. She was just this black hole, Kent. Everything everywhere was being sucked toward her maw so that it could be destroyed. And nothing in the world was ever going to fix her, Kent. She didn’t want to die. Not really. What she really wanted was for the whole world to recognize her for her suffering. And that was just never going to happen. It was making her nuts.

So, Kent, as I sat there waiting for the latest storm to pass, waiting for her to throw me out of the room so she could experience her misery alone (all because I’d hurt the feelings of some bed-wetter on the Debate Team), I did what I have always done in those circumstances. I said I was sorry. I said I’d been wrong to email you back. I gave her a hug. I rubbed her shoulders a little. I promised to act better and to try to do what she wanted.

And I probably will do that for awhile, Kent—you know, keep out of trouble, come home early and so on. But, because of you, Kent, I realize what a charade this has been and will be. Her screaming and crying and me pretending to care. She won’t kill herself and I won’t actually give a shit, whatever she does. Whatever you do. As far as I’m concerned, you and your mother can both get bent.

Yours Truly,
Ford Battise

* * *

From: fbattise@actribe.org
To: knewton@cchs.org
CC:
Subject: my mother is a fall-out victim

Dear Kent:

Guess what my mother did yesterday? You’ll never guess in a million years. Seriously. She took hold of a bunch of her hair and cut it off with the poultry shears. A big gob of it. She’s got this enormous bald spot now. Front and center, too, like someone zapped her bangs with a dog razor. She wasn’t messing around, Kent. She really went for it. That was a new one. I mean, it was really almost inspired.

The poultry shears are bad medicine at our house, Kent, since they are intimately connected with the gory dismemberments of numerous chickens. But you should have seen Mom when she did it. She was standing behind the kitchen counter. I was on the other side of the bar, sitting on one of the barstools, swinging myself back and forth. And there she was, Kent, yelling at me. Something related to the refrigerator door and my not making my bed and ultimately to the fact that I didn’t love her and no woman could ever love me because I didn’t love back and was ungrateful and didn’t appreciate the sacrifice she’d made staying married to my father all these years. You know? Then she gathered up this big knot of her hair and held it between the blades of the poultry sheers. It was kind of a non-sequitur when she did it. I mean, she never explained the relationship between my responsibility for her misery and the immediate need to butcher her hair. But I got it. I mean, I more or less understood it wasn’t a rational act. It was intended as a metaphor for her frustration.

So there’s the microwave whirring in the background, Kent. I could see two lumpy baked potatoes slowly spinning on the tray in synchronous orbit. Then Mom held up the shears to her bangs and asked me if I wanted her to cut it off. She might as well, she said. She was practically a nun anyway. So how would I like that?

I didn’t say anything back, Kent. What do you do there? A part of me just wanted to say, “Yeah, go ahead. Knock yourself out you crazy bitch.” But I didn’t. Not even. I just kept quiet and stared at her and waited to see what would happen. And, when I didn’t say anything, she took those shears and went clip clip and this big hunk of her hair comes out in her hands and she glares at me and throws it in the sink.

I gotta say, Kent. It was pretty effective. I mean, being known as the grandson of the chief who killed himself was one thing for me. That’s plenty. That’s enough. But being known as the son of the craziest lady on the whole reservation . . . well, I’m honestly not sure if I can handle that. The mixture of pity and schadenfreude. You know? Being looked down on by everyone, even the losers.

So you see, Kent? Not only have you taught me that my mother will never kill herself, you actually helped her learn a new trick. If she wants me to do what she says, she has to threaten to cut off all her hair and walk around the reservation looking like a fall-out victim. Letting everyone know this is the house of the mentally unstable. Here is the place where someone’s problems are actually demonstrably worse than everybody else’s. And she might be crazy enough to keep it up, Kent. She might. I don’t know. I guess I’ll just have to ride the lightning for awhile. But how can she top this? I mean, she’s set the bar so high I think she maybe hasn’t left herself enough room to work with.

Sincerely,
Ford Battise

* * *

From: Fordb@actribe.org
To: knewton@cchs.org
CC:
Subject: last day of D-hall

Dear Kent:

Last day of D-hall, mofo. Four solid weeks of reading about White Fang and Old Yeller and getting my homework done on time. Got an A on my Physics exam, too. An isobaric process is a thermodynamic process in which pressure stays constant. Quantum entanglement is a property of the quantum mechanical state of a system containing two or more objects, where the objects that make up the system are linked in such a way. . . . But now it’s Friday, Kent. Fri-day. Kids are already out smoking pot in the school parking lot. Some of them are headed down to Galveston, or at least that’s what they say. Who really knows? And I’ve got plans too, Kent. The weekend’s all laid out before me. Becky and Chris and I are all driving into Livingston together. We’re gonna get some pizza and go to a keg party in the woods. Everything’s actually fairly golden, Kent. Crisp and golden. I feel like I just pulled out a baby tooth or popped a zit or something. You know the feeling I’m talking about, Kent? Release?

So, my mom came to school today. She had to, per the aforementioned rule concerning lengthy detentions. “At least one of the student’s parents must have an in-person meeting with the principal or vice-principal at the completion of the detention period. Otherwise the student cannot be reinstated to the classroom.” Or something like that.

So we’re in Principal Davidson’s office—all three of us. You know, a principal’s office? Probably just like yours. Fake plants and shit. Diplomas and family pictures and weird meaningless awards. And Davidson’s sitting there in the middle of all this at his cheap-ass desk with his fraternity beer stein full of pens and his pencil sharpener bolted to the corner of his desktop. It’s fucking ridiculous.

When we come in, he stands up and welcomes us. He spreads his arms. He bobs a little bit. It kind of reminds me of a jack-in-the-box. Then he sits us down and looks at us in what I guess is supposed to be some sort of meaningful, paternal, sympathetic sort of way. He’s a nice enough guy, really. Coke bottle glasses. Sansabelt slacks. Too short of a tie. Get it? And he rolls into this pre-programmed speech about all my aptitude. I’ve got shitpiles of it. It’s virtually coming out my ass. I’m good at this. I’m good at that. My Physics teacher thinks I’m gifted. I could get straight As if I wanted to. I did that thing in the poetry contest. And so on.

But he barely gets past the prologue before Mom’s bent over sobbing in her hands. Real, grief-stricken sobs too, Kent. Heaving sobs, once she gets going. She’s letting it all hang out. They could probably hear it in the Teacher’s Lounge. That’s how loud it was.

And Davidson stops, literally mid-sentence. He clasps his hands together, a mixture between wringing and praying. He looks like he’s just going to try to wait it out. And so Davidson and I are just kind of sitting there, staring at one another. He’s kind of like, “What the fuck?” and I’m kind of like, “What the fuck did you expect?”

When Mom looks up at us, her face is all covered in tears and mascara. She’s got that strained, trying-not-to cry look. You know what I mean? With the ripples and the trembles in her face? She sniffles for a minute and then she lets loose again. Shrieking and crying and saying how sorry she was. Sorry I was so much trouble for the principal. Sorry for messing up the school. Sorry for that other boy’s mother. And she starts explaining to Davidson all about how my father lost his job and how she used to have this thing where she stood in line and bought concert tickets, but that’s out now with the economy. She’s totally unglued, Kent. She says she can’t control me anymore and she doesn’t know what to do. Doesn’t know what to do! Should she send me off somewhere or something? That’s what she wants to know. Do they have a program?

And while this is going on, I’m still looking at Principal Davidson and Principal Davidson is still looking back at me and we have this thing. There, in the middle of his wall maps and plastic trophies and my screaming, freaked-out mother with the butthole in the middle of her forehead. Davidson just gives me this slow, brown-eyed look. It’s like he’s saying, “I remember exactly where you’re at, kid. Exactly.” It almost feels like I can read his mind about it.

And suddenly, I get it. The tie. The paunch. The duck waddle. The hush puppies. I just get it all about him, Kent. Through and through. He’s mailing it in. He’s always just been mailing it in. So then he looks up at my mother, who’s waiving her arms around and screaming, and, totally pitilessly, he says, “Why don’t you just settle down, Mrs. Battise? It’s a few weeks in D-Hall. It’s really not that big a deal.”

You should have seen my mom’s face, Kent. She looked like she was choking on a watermelon. I thought her eyes were going to pop out of her head. Davidson waits for her to sit down. And eventually she does sit down. Davidson kind of shakes his head back and forth and says, “Look, what’s done is done, Mrs. Battise. Something like this happens every year. I don’t know why we keep the pen pal program on the curriculum, anyway.” He turns to me. “Ford, listen up: Why don’t you just give us all a break for a month or two and we’ll see if we can’t manage to struggle through one more year together? Right? You don’t want to be back in here, do you?”

No. I honestly didn’t.

Which brings me to my point, Kent. My keen Indian senses are telling me you quit narking on me. No more reprimands from the principal. No more pink letters from Mrs. Newton. So the question is, why did you stop telling on me, Kent? I wonder. I wonder a lot. Perhaps it was mercy. Maybe so. You know, you might have looked at all this shit and thought, “Well maybe it was an assholeish thing to do. To tease this poor Indian fuckwad about his stupid name.” And so you just let these last few emails slide. On the other hand, maybe you just blocked my address from your email account and never read another word from me again. Could be one. Could be the other. And it’s nice, Kent. I like that. The uncertainty of it. I might be telling you a story or I might be just talking to the blackness. You might be there or you might not.

Sincerely,
Ford Battise

Anthony Spaeth is a lawyer in Houston, Texas. His work has recently been published in (or accepted by) Jelly Bucket, Red Fez, Spork Press, Thieves Jargon, and The View from Here.

To read Anthony Spaeth’s comments on Dan Winnipeg’s “Sugar Bowl,” click here.

______________
Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
This is really a remarkable piece, to me. That so complete a story can be told outside of a traditional narrative framework is fantastic, and that it can be done with such brevity is even more impressive. I’ve long been a fan of the epistolary format, and it’s executed extremely well here. There’s a dark humor spread throughout the piece, but also some very real emotion and familiar situations that raise questions in me as a reader about my own history, my own perceptions. And despite the fact that it’s all done without any real scene work, we still come away with a very complete sense of the characters—from Ford and his mother, to Principal Davidson and Kent. All in all, a very impressive achievement and a very engrossing story.

On most days, Heath attended Woodland High. He had no father. His mother, Beverly, a big woman, managed Ruby’s diner. Embarrassed by her red and white striped suit or maybe the way it was so taut across her large bosom, not to mention her ugly opaque stockings and silly hat, Heath never told anyone about her. At school, he kept his distance, which made popular kids, especially the opposite sex, hover near his locker. When they asked about personal stuff like his rhymes and his hair, where he got it all from, Heath shrugged, then sometimes divulged that he was the spitting image of his father though he’d never seen him.

His favorite day was the last day of school when Ruby’s high season kicked into gear, his mother was so busy wiping down tables and yelling orders at part-time waitresses that she hardly came home at all. Heath then knew that true freedom was on its way, that all he had to worry about were things like impressive dives off the three-meter board into the deep blue water of his neighborhood pool. So, that first week of July, when he walked with his baggy trunks riding low on his hips around the Belmont Hills Swimming pool, Heath tried not to semi-nod at all the girls that blatantly stared at him and at the tooth that dangled from his chest. They’d freeze, burning the soles of their feet on scorching concrete, in the hope that he might sweep his bangs from his eyes and rap something to one of them. Except Heath never did.

What he liked was to climb up the diving board, his long legs sprawled open à la Spider-man. On the ladder, the electric blue chlorinated water hypnotized him and urged him to jump. But Heath calculated. He took his time. He moseyed his way across the narrow bouncy board, making up lyrics to himself.

“Life’s a hazard even at the top,
Don’t get caught up in it or you might jump.
Bastards want you. They’re trying to destroy you.
Don’t push up on girls, or they might fault you.
Then, you’ll be getting a full time job, like your damn mother,
And, never find joy coz you’ll keep living like f-in sore loser.”

At the tip of the board, Heath made sure that all the girls’ faces tilted toward him before he plunged. The view from up there was always shocking. Everything felt sharper, more exciting. It was as if the whole world gazed at him. Sometimes, at the very edge, Heath would close his eyes, stop rapping, and think for one second that he was the sun. In the dry breeze, a current of pleasure shot through him. The world below momentarily sparkled. The picnic tables, the hot dog stand, the lawn, filled with towels and squealing girls, even the toddlers running with fluorescent floaties on their arms, were all bright and shiny. Sometimes Heath tucked and spun. Sometimes he shot upward and dove. Sometimes he put his back to the water and flipped.

By week two of summer, Heath knew that Maggie from Baldwin Academy would be the last girl to inhale again after his dives. Through his bangs, Heath had been observing her. She’d wait for him to cut through water, to poke his head back up and to shake his heavy hair. She’d even sit up straighter to make sure he safely placed his hands onto the silver ladder. She’d allow herself to breathe and to release her grip from her own plastic lounge chair only once he’d come out of the deep end and began free-styling. He liked that a random private school girl could stop her own breath to monitor his. This must be love, he thought.

The first time Maggie said something to him, they were standing by the snack bar. “What are you getting?” she asked.

She stood in line behind him and Heath’s friend, Paul. She came up to Heath’s shoulders. Though she wore a pink bikini and her voice was high, something about her, Heath thought, was kind of boyish. Maybe her legs, the way they bowed like a soccer player. He didn’t like all the freckles on her face either, the way they fell down her arms like dirt. Aside from her long strawberry-blond ponytail, Maggie reminded Heath of Paul.

“Hot dog and a donut,
Maybe a fat drink.
Life’s too short to dilly dally
When you’re on the verge of gettin’
In the thick o’ things,” Heath sang.

Paul backed him, pumping his lips into his fist. For a little while, aside from their mouths pushing out and making music, the whole line was silent. But then Heath stopped.

“Dunno,” he answered, making sure that his chest faced forward and that his hair fell in his eyes.

Maggie sighed. “I’m getting French fries and a milkshake,” she said. “Want some?”

What grade was she in? Seventh? With only two dollars in his hands and the remnant of dry cereal for breakfast, Heath would have liked a shake, but he wouldn’t share with freckle face in a million years. That would give her the wrong idea. What would he do with a girl like her? “Nope,” he answered.

Paul bought an ice cream sandwich. Heath: an extra large Mountain Dew. When they left the snack bar, Heath made sure not to turn toward Maggie. He focused on the sound of his flip-flops smacking against the concrete. Under the sun, he and Paul sat on the pool wall. They banged their bare feet against the stone, looking at no one and at everyone.

“That girl with the pink bikini has it for you,” Paul said. He wiped his sticky hands on his swim trunks. He wore a purple SPF sun shirt that was way too big for him. Chocolate stuck to his upper lip and he smelled like sunscreen. “I saw it when you were free-styling. The way her eyes went all googly. Bet she’d give you a blow job.”

Heath grinned, then gulped Mountain Dew. “Yeah?” he said. “Wanna jump from the board again?”

Paul pushed his hand down his swim trunk. “Nah. The word blow job’s giving me a boner. People will notice.”

Heath checked out Paul’s hardly swollen trunks, the ones with little crab designs on them. He shrugged then glanced in Maggie’s direction but she was turned sideways on her lounge chair. She shared her snacks with a fat girl.

“Come on, Paul. Don’t be a wuss. Let’s swim,” Heath said.

But before the two of them could get up, a woman three times their age wearing a loose fitting linen tunic and a cowboy hat stopped in front of them.

“Is one of you Heath?” she asked.

Heath stared at his toes. He semi raised his hand as if he were being called in class.

“I’m Isabelle,” the woman said. “Maggie’s mom.”

“Dang,” Paul spurted. “I smell trouble.” Then, getting up, he pulled on his swim trunks and added, “See ya in the pool, Sucker.”

The words trouble and sucker resonated. Cymbals in Heath’s ears. All at once, noise amplified. Children yelled. A lifeguard blew his whistle. Heath and Isabelle didn’t say anything for a moment. She sat on the wall next to Heath where Paul and his boner had been seconds before. Her thigh, the one crossed on top of the other, seemed to glimmer beneath the tunic’s thin black linen. She was barefoot and wore red nail polish on her toes. The afternoon was hot. It was hard to concentrate on anything.

“Maggie’s mentioned your name,” she said, then cleared her throat. “She’s a sweet girl.” Again, cleared her throat. “Don’t hurt her feelings, all right?”

Heath nodded. The way she cleared her throat was the beginning of a song. He could hear it marching around in his brain next to the cymbals, that first line of beats shouting at him.

“Do you ever look people in the eye?” Isabelle asked.

Maybe because she was a grown up, Heath felt he had to. He pushed his bangs from his face and looked at her.

Isabelle smiled, an inviting yet puzzled kind of smile. “I had no idea your eyes were so blue. Maggie’s right. You’re handsome for a teenager.”

Heath took huge swigs of his Mountain Dew. He tried not to think about the difference between his mother and Maggie’s mother.

“See ya around,” she said. Then pushed herself off the wall and left.

Beneath her cowboy hat, her hair was the same color as Maggie’s except brighter. Like Heath himself, Isabelle was tall and willowy. Except that from the back, her hips were wide, wider than all the girls that traipsed around here. And, her hips, they swayed ever so slightly beneath the linen shirt in a way that made Heath want to run after her and ask if he could ask Maggie out on a date. Not because he wanted to ask Maggie out, but because he’d get her mother’s attention again. The crinkles around her eyes would dance and Heath would feel the same energy he felt up on the board, down here on the ground.

But Heath, again, controlled himself. He jumped into the water and wondered if Paul was right about the blowjob, and if Maggie was always this nice, if she’d offer him food again, even though he’d been kind of mean to her. He also wondered about her Isabelle? What she might do with a boy. But then overwhelmed at the idea, at what her wide hips were capable of, Heath chased Paul across the deep end. They played Marco Polo. When Heath looked up and out to see if Maggie was sitting up straight, like she did when he puffed his chest out on the diving board, Heath was disappointed. Maggie and her mother had left. Their towels were gone. Their fat friend, too.

* * *

At home, late at night, Heath couldn’t get comfortable. He lay half-asleep in his sweaty bed. Like a worm hooked on a line, he squirmed. His bedroom window was open. Crickets buzzed. His mother yelled and clanked the dishes he didn’t do. All the noise made him crazy. Words flooded his dreams—Jump. Bang. Blow. Push. Me. Pimp. Old lady. I can’t get enough of you. Blow jobs. Crabs, don’t go. I said no. No snacks. Snack on me. Yeah. I said, snack on me, Candy boy. Heath woke, startled, his heart beating like the best rap song of 2011. Relax. He pushed his face into a dirty pillow and smelled sleep. But then, all he could think of was the black linen, how Isabelle’s skin glimmered beneath it as if the sun had gotten trapped there. Trapped between her thighs. Isabelle’s thighs. Is. A. Belle. Izzy.

“Izzy,” Heath called, his teeth biting down into his pillowcase, his own narrow hips grinding into the creaky twin mattress.

* * *

For the next few weeks, Heath befriended Maggie. But her mother didn’t seem to notice. Most days, Isabelle reclined on a plastic chaise, reading from a fat book with her cowboy hat low on her forehead. She seemed slightly annoyed to be by the water with swarming bees and overfilled trashcans. Once in a while, she shaded her eyes and watched as kids jumped from the diving board. Heath made up lyrics after lyrics about her. Her grownup body parts came surging in his head the way beats did. All he could think of now were slender wrists, round shoulders, the space between her front teeth—and her hips, their width, the way her spine curved into a J.

The sick sensation he felt when he looked at his mother yanking on her egg white tights in the morning turned into crazy longing when this other mother lifted the black linen tunic above her head, revealing a one-piece bathing suit cut high on her legs. Oh, yeah: Izzy. That black spandex sucking her in, making her catch her breath. Under his shaggy bangs, Heath couldn’t stop staring.

“You keep looking over in Maggie’s direction,” Paul said, swatting at a lazy bee one early afternoon. A white streak of sunscreen covered his nose. “Why don’t you tongue her already. Then get back to free-styling.”

Heath shrugged. Maybe, he thought. That might calm him down.

“Come on, Fucker! Go get that,” Paul said. “Or, let’s go get popsicles already.”

“I don’t want popsicles,” Heath said, then added, “Be right back.” He marched, as in a dream, to where Isabelle was reading. “Hey,” he said, wondering what on earth he might say next.

“Hi.” Isabelle lifted the cowboy hat from her forehead. Sweaty strands of short hair stuck to her temples.

“Can you follow me in the locker room. I need to talk to you.”

Maggie who’d been sunning on a towel lifted herself up onto her elbows. Her pink bikini shone too bright in the light. “Me, you mean?”

“Nah,” Heath said. “Her.” He pointed his chin in Isabelle’s direction. “It’s about lyrics for a song. I wanted an adult to hear them.” He tried to smile through his bullshit.

“I guess.” Isabelle sighed as she stood up from her chair and plopped her book down. As they walked near the kiddy pool to get through to the locker room, Isabelle waved at one of the mothers who knelt in the water. The woman held a small child in her arms. Heath wondered if Isabelle was the kind of mother who took baths naked with her baby. The thought made him giddy, light on his feet.

“Alright, sing,” Isabelle ordered seconds later inside the empty boys locker room.

In her black bathing suit, she crossed her arms under her breasts and waited. One of the showers was on but no one was rinsing. The smell of damp bathing suits and feet lingered. A pair of goggles had been carelessly thrown on the middle bench, the one Heath and Paul used to change everyday. Maybe, they could sit down.

Heath swallowed then approached her and swept the bangs from his face.

“You’re not rapping,” Isabelle said.

Outside, children laughed. Sunshine filtered through dirty windows. The hair around her face had dried and stuck out like a halo. Her eyes were round, perplexed beneath arched eyebrows.

“This is about Maggie, isn’t it?” she whispered.

Heath shook his head. He touched his shark’s tooth once, then leaned over and kissed Isabelle full on the mouth, the way he’d dreamed it and practiced it so many times with his pillow at night. He clutched her hips with his hands and pressed her to his swim trunks. His lips swallowed hers. Their tongues met. For what felt like an eternity, warmth flowed between them like the best song ever sung. Heath’s brain wrapped around itself. He saw the pool’s blue water, the way the board rippled beneath his feet as he spun and spun into the summer air, then he saw his mother dancing at Ruby’s holding up a tray full of shakes. How sharp the whole world was, that electric current pulsing through him down here on the ground.

Isabelle’s smack caught him off guard. Heath lost his balance. An unexpected blow against his cheek. Swift and painful.

“What the fuck?” She backed her hips away, wiping at her swollen mouth.

Heath’s bare feet pressed into the damp concrete. More, more, he thought. God, this mother. The red nail polish on her toes. Her cheeks went from flushed to pale. He tried to explain.

“I just—”

But Isabelle was already turning around. She banged her knee against the edge of the bench, and firmly wrapped her fingers around the locker room’s door handle.

“Izzy wait.”

“Izzy?” Isabelle smirked. “No one calls me Izzy.”

“Sorry,” Heath said. He shoved his bangs from his face, showed her the hurt and confusion in his eyes, and wished for lyrics or words to flood him. But nothing came.

“Not because you’re sexy can you get away with kissing whomever, whenever. Who do you think you are, little punk? Stay away from my daughter.”

She left slamming the locker room door behind her.

No! Wait. You got it all wrong.

Heath went straight to the diving board. He would show her she wasn’t “whomever,” that it wasn’t “whenever.” This was Belmont Hills Swimming Pool and he loved her. He counted his steps to the ladder. Adrenaline shot up his spine. Sixty-nine.

“Wait for me,” Maggie was now saying, trailing him in her too bright pink bikini. “Heath wait. God, what did my mom tell you? How embarrassing!”

But Heath couldn’t hear her. He focused. He hummed his mother’s old song, the one Beverly sang to him when he was little, as he climbed the ladder. 99 bottles of pop on the wall,
 99 bottles of pop. If one of those bottles should happen to fall, 98 bottles of pop on the wall.

“Wait up,” Maggie kept saying. “Heath!”

98 bottles of pop on the wall,
 98 bottles of pop. If one of those bottles should happen to fall,
 97 bottles of pop on the wall.

By the time Heath walked his way to the edge of the diving board, he was still counting, humming, and concocting the most miraculous dive of them all. Birds flew ahead blurry in the sky. Isabelle was watching. This grand dive’s for you, Baby. Afterward—after the dive—after he’d tuck and spin, after he’d unfold his body like a giant kite into the summer sky, after the whole slew of girls applauded his exploits, Izzy would slip into the deep end and corral him. Yes. Heath knew it. Under the water, she’d fold her legs around his waist, Heath would grab her hips, and they would kiss for a very long time. Heath curled his toes on the very edge. The rough texture scraped him.

“Izzy!” Heath yelled.

Beneath him, the pool like a blue popsicle was postcard still. Not a wave rippled. Long shadows cut through the blue. The sun dipped in the sky.

“Watch me!” Heath yelled once more.

He lifted his arms above his head, his palms touching. He jumped up and down, straightening his toes, allowing the board to bounce more and more until he leaped so high into the air that he lost his whereabouts. Hips, legs, swollen lips, slender wrists—all of it disappeared. As he tried tucking his knees into a summersault, his chin stuck out. Gravity pulled him down, and Heath banged his forehead against the corner of the board. His lyrics, beats, and rhythm, his high school dreams, and all the words he clasped resounded within him. One huge bong pierced through his skull.

As Maggie and Paul shouted his name, as all the girls tilted their heads upward and shrieked, Heath saw Isabelle, the red of her nail polish dripping on his fingertips. Then, his body and mind went slack, the fall causing a great splash below. When the paramedics fished him out and pushed wet bangs from his face, when they gave him mouth to mouth, felt a tremor coiling up his arm and air returning to his lungs, someone, perhaps yet another mother, cried, as she leaned by the side of the pool and stared at the gash on Heath’s forehead.

“Jesus! Whose son is this? Whose son is this?”

And, there was no answer.

A.K. Small is a graduate of Vermont College of Fine Arts and has studied with various writers, including Ann Hood, Caroline Leavitt, Dave Jauss, Brad Barkley, and Roxana Robinson. She also holds a BA in English from the College of William and Mary. She attended The Wesleyan Writers’ Conference and Bread Loaf, and was invited to join the Tin House summer workshop. She is a member of the International Women Writers Guild and is currently at work on her first novel, The Rules of Adultery. She resides on the main line with her husband and three daughters.

To read A.K. Small’s comments on Nancy Werking Poling’s “Woman with a Snubnose Revolver,” click here.

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
“The Diving Board” makes us understand that we don’t always know the true motivation or drive behind other people’s actions. We never really know what our friends and colleagues are dealing with at home, their relationship with their parents or spouse, friends and neighbors, not really, not if we don’t ask, and not if they don’t tell us. Instead, it’s more often easier (and natural) to make assumptions and form perceptions about people we know, and people we know of, based on their actions (and sometimes by how they look), never really caring about the pain behind their motivations. Heath is not an abused kid, but he is numbed by the intense embarrassment he feels for his mother, shaping the perceptions he has of the world around him, and most critically, of himself.

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Comments on this story by Allan Shapiro, author of “self-awareness”
A most interesting little character study. A teenager trying to work through love and sexuality. Fatherless and practically motherless, there really is no clear definition for Heath as to what love is, no basis for comparison except the love he received from his mother, probably only when he was much younger. Add a massive amount of teenage hormones and things become quite confusing, except for the character’s desire, of course.

I also love the closed setting of the swimming pool, like a hotbed of teenage sexuality, with Heath above it all on the diving board, separated from it, but also almost the reason for it, as if it is all there only for him.

And finally, I loved the poetry/rap in this piece. For me poetry, and prose for that matter, is all about trying to put into words things that have no simple definition. And for Heath, it’s almost reflexive, as if he has no control over it. And the one time he needs it, when he’s feeling very powerful things that don’t make sense to him, his words fail him, and he fulfills those feelings with action, which eventually leads to the tragedy of being human, not a God on a diving board.

Great work, and like all great works, completely open to the reader’s interpretation, malleable and engaging, meaning different things to different people.

CHICAGO—10,000 Tons of Black Ink (10ktobi) announced today its new publishing model to pool together talented writers from around the world to collaborate with each other, share accomplishments and resources, and take advantage of professional growth opportunities. The magazine will offer writers who have been published in its online publication a biweekly online critique group, a chance to build their resume by contributing articles to its blog and have their accomplishments promoted to writers and publishers around the world on its social network.

When 10ktobi transitioned from a biannual print publication to featuring regular online publishing and an annual “Best Of” edition in 2009, it made an unprecedented change in its publishing guidelines so that contributors select another published piece and write a short statement about the writing. The contributor’s notes appear with editor’s comments as to why the piece was chosen.

“10,000 Tons of Black Ink strives to promote dialogue between writers, editors and readers and to support the writing community as a whole, and we are always searching for new ways to set the magazine apart from other journals,” said Chad Peterson, managing editor of 10ktobi.

During the 2011 reading period (March 15 – September 15), the magazine is offering feedback from its reading panel to any writer who is not accepted for publication. Learn more by visiting the section “Submissions Accepted for Publication” at www.10ktobi.org.

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10,000 Tons of Black Ink is a Literary Writers Network (LWN) publication, featuring regular online publishing and an annual “Best Of” edition. LWN is an organization dedicated to literary excellence through the advancement and promotion of emerging fiction and creative non-fiction writers. LWN offers a bimonthly Chicago writing group coupled with an online writing community and special literary reading events throughout the year.