I look into her sleep-softened face and tuck the blanket around her. I’m careful not to bind her too tightly, or wake her. She will sleep another hour before she needs me. You could set a clock by Miss Aline.

A coffee mug and book sit on the table by the recliner—a thriller like my own husband reads. That means Terry, instead of his wife, sat with his mother last night.

A Mason jar of Louisiana irises is on the table, too, so I crack open the mini-blinds to see if they need tossing. The light shines across the bed, and I tiptoe closer to Miss Aline again. Cheeks pink. Breathing steady. Her left side’s still a little frozen from the stroke, but her mouth is not turned down so much anymore. She’s improving.

I take the Mason jar with me into the hallway, and hear the upstairs shower shut off as I step out the back door. Outside, the sky is patched with clouds, and I skip between the light and the shadows, like I did when I was a kid, and toss the wilted purple flowers over the back fence. Later, I’ll cut a fresh bouquet, or maybe a blossom from the big magnolia that keeps Miss Aline’s room shaded and cool. Sick folks like flowers. I have learned this since I started sitting.

I leave my shoes, dampened from the morning dew, on the back door mat and enter the kitchen barefoot. Terry’s pouring coffee. He’s wearing a T-shirt; his starched work shirt hangs on the back of a chair. He won’t put on the shirt until he’s ready to leave. Two weeks working here and I know his habits. It’s something I’ve learned to do—to notice my employers’ habits and avoid what bothers them. Be a few minutes early and count on staying a few minutes late. Bring my own lunch because they do not always remember I need to eat. Shut off my cell phone and answer the house line on the first or second ring.

I also learned not to skip parts when I read, because you never know how much the sick person hears. I always say good morning, good afternoon, it’s time for your bath, let’s sit you up now. And I put Miss or Mister in front of the sick person’s name, whether it’s a child or a hundred-year-old man, because being called Miss or Mister gives them a last bit of dignity in their final days.

I call Terry by his first name. We are distant relatives. His grandmother was a healer too, a traiteur, like mine, though his folks never embraced the Cajun ways. Terry went to college, became an engineer. I stayed home and learned to care for the elderly and the infirm. Learned that I have my grandmother’s gift of looking into a person’s face and seeing if they will die today. Or, if not today, sometime soon.

“You want coffee?” Terry asks. His face is pale. He looks worse than his mother, and she’s the one who had the stroke.

I shake my head. “She had a good night,” I say. “She’s getting stronger.”

He sips his coffee and stares out the window over the sink.

“Terry,” I persist, “she doesn’t need round-the-clock care. Her right side’s okay. She’s got that bell if she needs you. You don’t have to wear yourself out sitting up with her.”

“I’m fine,” he says.

“You don’t look fine,” I say. “And I don’t feel right taking your money when Melinda’s not working and she could easily—”

“No,” he says, interrupting.  I am taken aback. Terry is never rude.

Something’s wrong here, but I don’t see it at first.

He sighs. Outside, a car door bangs, and then Melinda comes in, her hair still damp from the laps she swims at the Civic Center pool every morning. She’s carrying a donut sack and two go-cups of coffee. She sees me and stops short.

“Oh, I’m sorry, I only got two,” she says, holding up the coffee. Her face is red. I can’t tell if she’s embarrassed, or if it’s the heat.

“It’s okay, I had mine at home,” I say. I ask Terry to scoot over so I can rinse out the flower vase. While I do, they have a quick married talk—what are you doing today, will you be late, what do you want for dinner. I wait until they finish before I turn around.

The sun has slipped between the clouds. A ray hits Melinda full in the face. I drop the Mason jar to the floor and it cracks into pieces at my feet.

“Oh!” Melinda’s cries, and Terry says, “Don’t move!”

Melinda says she’ll get a broom. Terry approaches me, but he’s not looking at the glass, and I’m not either. I’m staring at the anguish on his face. He saw it. Of course he saw it. His grandmother was a traiteur too.

“What’s she got?” I whisper, but he shakes his head like he doesn’t want to say because she might hear. It doesn’t matter. Whatever it is—cancer, tumor, heart attack—it’s coming to take her. Soon.

I lay a hand on his arm. “I’ll stay, as long as you all need me.”

Before he can answer, Melinda bursts in. “Are you all right? You didn’t get cut?”

I can’t look at her. Not yet.

“No, Miss Melinda,” I answer, looking away. “I’m not cut a bit.”

Ramona DeFelice Long’s fiction and non-fiction have appeared in literary, regional, and juvenile publications. She is self-employed as an author, writing instructor, and private editor. In 2013, she was awarded a literary fellowship from the Delaware Division of the Arts as an Established Artist in Literature-Creative Nonfiction. She maintains a literary blog at ramonadef.wordpress.com.

Read Ramona DeFelice Long’s comments on Tammy Lynne Stoner’s “Racing Josephine.”

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Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
I found this to be an incredibly effective, well-crafted story. Despite the brevity, there’s a great sense of build, and the reader is given just enough detail to be immersed in the action without being overloaded.  Then, just as we’re coming to grips with the world that the author has created, there’s the revelation—the twist that makes the whole thing resonate. The result is an efficient, stunning and powerful story that is perfectly rendered. Just great.

Adults had recently started asking Stephen the question more than they used to. Maybe it was because he was meeting more adults now, especially doctors and nurses. Or maybe it was because he was in third grade and had reached an age when he was supposed to be thinking ahead. Regardless, he hated how adults responded to his typical answer by saying something condescending about patriotism or “what a smart boy” or “must be university influence,” as if his parents’ academic positions were responsible. Stephen knew it wasn’t because of any of those superficial factors. He wanted to become an astronaut so he could go to Heaven and talk with God. It was now more urgent than ever, if he wanted to help his mother in time.

* * *

He was three when he first realized it was possible. He remembered the evening philosophy lecture his parents took him to. He had not understood most of it, but afterward he held on to the hem of his mother’s wool skirt while some of the words echoed in his head: Ultimate Good, heavens, Supreme Being. He knew his mother had once said something about the heavens while looking at the stars, and his grandmother had told him Heaven is where God lives. Even then, it made sense: God lives in Heaven, which must be where the stars are. He wondered what a house made of stars would look like.

The student who had been talking to his mother about the lecture leaned down to Stephen’s eye-level. “Hi, Stevie,” the student had said, light glinting off his dark-rimmed glasses. Stephen hated it when anyone but his mother called him that. “Stevie, what do you want to be when you grow up?”

Stephen had tried to hide in the fabric of his mother’s skirt, but it didn’t work. The student wouldn’t go away. “Let me guess. Do you want to be a professor like your parents?”

Stephen shook his head. His parents weren’t professors; they were philosophers. He could see it on the page of words his mother had given him to learn: her careful writing on the rose-colored stationary, spelling out P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-Y and P-H-I-L-O-S-O-P-H-E-R.

The student had laughed. “Not a professor? Okay, let me guess—a doctor? Or do you want to be President like Eisenhower? No? How about an astronaut so you can travel to outer space!”

Stephen didn’t know what the student meant by outer space—the space outside what? He looked up at his mother.

“Outer space is what’s beyond the sky,” she said.

Stephen thought about that. The sky is where the stars are. People could actually travel to the stars and beyond? That must mean they could visit God’s house. He stared at the student and nodded. That’s what he wanted to do.

Stephen’s mother had looked down, surprised. “You want to be an astronaut, Stevie?” Stephen had ducked behind his mother’s skirt, but he’d felt sure ever since: he wanted to be an astronaut so he could visit God.

After that, Stephen read all that he could about space travel in the magazines that laid around the house or the college lounges he visited with his parents. At first he didn’t understand much, but he looked up the long words in dictionaries or asked his parents to explain them. He knew lots of people were excited about space exploration and that there was a race between Americans and the Soviets to see which would be the first country represented in space.

Stephen knew he needed to beat all the other astronauts—and cosmonauts—to be the first person in space, to go beyond the canopy of the stars and enter heaven. If other people beat him to it, they would make a horribly long line to tell God all about their interminable adult problems, and then God would get bored and Stephen would never be able to get God’s attention.

Stephen needed God’s attention urgently. No one else seemed to know what to do, and his mother was just getting worse. There was no way to know if God was listening when he tried to pray the way his grandmother had taught him. Even if God was listening, how would Stephen hear God’s response when he was so far away? But surely God could tell Stephen what to do, if Stephen could only get to Heaven to talk to him face to face.

* * *

After Stephen’s mother got sick and the initial flurry of activity died down, everything had become too quiet. His mother was always in bed in the morning, never listening to the radio while she made breakfast, never helping him get dressed, like she used to. When he came home from school, she was usually asleep again instead of at the kitchen table grading papers. His father had told Stephen not to bother her too much, so he kept the radio off and stayed in his room or went outside.

For a while, Stephen had tried every way he could think of to get sick too, so he could stay home and be with his mother. He piled blankets on his bed or sat close to the heater while his dad got the thermometer, but his dad had quickly caught on to his trick. He tried visiting the kindergarteners who had chicken pox, but their parents wouldn’t let him. His dad also said that if he kept faking sickness, no one would believe him if he really did get sick, and he would have to go to school anyway. So Stephen finally gave up and went to school as if everything were the same as it had always been.

* * *

Sometimes Stephen sat in Miss Huygen’s class and planned out exactly what he would say when he met God, and what he would take with him in the rocket. What if God only allowed him to say a certain number of words, or what if he started running out of oxygen? His parents would be upset if he didn’t come back, so he had to plan carefully.

But Miss Huygen didn’t like his planning.

“Stephen? Stephen? Would you like to come back from your daydreams and focus on math now?”

Stephen hated it when teachers interrupted him while he was thinking. He also hated it when teachers asked questions that weren’t really questions.

Patricia Fulton poked him in the back with her pencil. “You’re supposed to say, ‘Yes, ma’am.’”

Stephen muttered, “Yes, ma’am.” Then he turned and glared at Patricia. She stuck her tongue out at him, and he imagined what he would say to God about her if he got the chance.

* * *

Stephen had a corner of the playground that was his own, between the sandbox and the brick wall. By third grade, everyone knew how the playground was divided, and the other children’s running games always stayed out of Stephen’s corner. The tall swings were the girls’ territory, and the boys had to stay away or the girls would start screaming. The boys had the open space on the other side of the see-saws, and they always went immediately to the ball bin and picked something for the game of the day.

Stephen often took a pen and paper with him out to recess. He was working on a letter. So far it read:

Dear NASA,

I need to get to Heaven to talk to God because my mother is sick. Would you consider accepting me into your astronaut program early?

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Stephen Howard

Stephen smoothed the letter against his legs, trying to decide if it was okay. His parents had taught him how to write letters, and he knew he had all the parts he needed, but something seemed missing. He chewed on the pen clip and then added another sentence before the closing: “I am a good student, and I can learn quickly.” It still didn’t seem right. He read it again and then stopped.

He couldn’t send the letter like that. If people realized they could get to Heaven with spaceships, they would have done it already to get God on their side. People would be working night and day without rest—more than they were already working—to get to Heaven. People must not realize rockets can take you to see God, he thought. It was his secret.

He looked around the playground to make sure no one had seen him writing the letter. No one was looking, so he tore up the paper and stuffed the shreds into his jacket pocket.

He started a new letter on another sheet of paper. He needed a different reason to convince NASA to accept him early. Maybe they would believe his cause even if he didn’t write what it was specifically that he knew.

Dear NASA,

Would you please accept me early into your astronaut program? My teachers say I am a good student, and I can learn quickly. Additionally, I have special information that makes it urgent for me to be the first person to travel into space.

Thank you.

Sincerely,

Stephen Howard

He looked at it again and added his middle initial to the signature, a careful J like his dad’s. Stephen wondered if they would come to his house to demand what his secret was. He hoped not; that might disturb his mother.

“What are you doing?”

Stephen looked up to see Paul standing nearby, holding a rubber ball in one hand as if he’d just picked it up, staring at him.

“Are you writing a letter during recess?”

Stephen quickly turned the paper over, ripping one side. He tried to think of something that would send Paul away.

“Are you writing a letter to Santa Claus?” Paul’s voice was on the verge of laughter.

Stephen hoped Paul wouldn’t start yelling to the rest of the playground to come and see. “I’m writing an important communication about a professional interest in a significant matter which is none of your—or anyone else’s—concern.” Stephen knew using big words sometimes worked; he hoped Paul was the type of person who would be intimidated by what he didn’t understand.

Paul stared at him. Stephen stared back until his neck itched. He pressed his advantage. “Please do not disturb me any further, or I will have to take precautionary measures.” Stephen stared another few seconds, then slowly looked down at his sheet, as if in dismissal. He could see Paul’s shadow on the gravel, flowing over onto his notebook paper. Stephen held his pen poised over the paper, his heart beating so fast his hand shook.

The shadow wavered for a minute and then moved away, carrying the oblong shadow of the ball back to the other side of the playground

* * *

When Stephen got home after school, he stood in the doorway to his mother’s room and tugged at a splinter in the doorframe. He wondered how that splinter got there; every wood surface in the house was waxed or painted, glaring still with newness, though the house was as old as he was. He’d never noticed any paint chipping or fading or wood pulling apart like this. He pulled at the thin splinter with his fingernails, but he couldn’t get a good enough grasp to separate it from the doorframe.

“Stevie, are you going to come in?” his mother called. She sat up against the headboard, watching him, the chenille bedspread bunched around her legs.

Stephen poked at the splinter, feeling it dully jab into the cushion of his fingertip. If he pushed hard enough it might get lodged, and then maybe his mother would take it out for him.

“Stevie?”

Stephen walked slowly to the hard-backed chair and stood behind it. He wasn’t used to seeing the seat of the chair; his mother usually piled it high with clothes. Stephen’s dad had put the whole pile in the closet, where it was patiently gathering dust until someone could come to do the wash properly.

She was sitting up in bed today, which Stephen thought was a good sign. Her smile was pale, but she seemed awake enough to see him. She patted a space on the bed. “Come sit down,” she said. She was wearing a headband, stark black against her red hair.

Stephen sat next to her and put his hands under his knees. He didn’t like looking at her from this close; he could see how thin she’d gotten.

She reached for his hand. “What have you been up to, Stevie? What have I missed?” She waited, and Stephen shrugged. “Anything important?”

Stephen thought through what he could say about the past few days. Miss Huygen had called on him to read a paragraph out loud; he’d stood reluctantly and mumbled in the direction of his shoes until the giggles grew louder than his reading, and Miss Huygen asked him to sit down. During lunch, the new girl from California sat at the other end of his table, leaving three empty seats between them. When she got up to throw away her trash, she’d stopped by his chair and told him her dad worked at the university, like his dad. He’d nodded, but didn’t say anything, and eventually she walked away. After school, he walked behind her and her brother and sister for a few blocks; she’d seen him but didn’t say anything.

“I went with Dad to the store on Wednesday,” he said. “We gave Mr. Jenkins the list because we didn’t know where to find anything.” He shrugged again and traced the ridges of fabric on the bedspread.

“Stephen,” his mother said slowly, and then stopped. She was paler now than she had been a moment ago. He waited. “Never mind…” she whispered and then closed her eyes, breathing deeply.

Stephen sat still, trying not to disrupt her if she was going to sleep. The doctor said sleep was a good thing. He wasn’t sure if he should help her lie down again or let her fall asleep sitting up.

He heard his dad open the front door and plod down the hallway toward the bedroom, his footsteps surprisingly heavy as usual. He stopped at the doorway briefly, then moved to the bedside. He kissed Stephen’s mother gently on the cheek and eased her into a lying position. Stephen shifted out of the way. She stirred a little, and her eyelids flickered, but she stayed asleep.

“It’s the medicine,” Stephen’s dad whispered. “The doctors said she’ll be like this for a while. It helps to let her sleep.”

Stephen nodded. He stood in the middle of the room, feeling like a stranger. His dad stood next to him, hands in his pockets. After a minute, Stephen’s father smiled the ghost of a real smile and put his hand on Stephen’s shoulder. They walked out of the room together, and his father closed the door.

* * *

Later that night, Stephen snuck into his parents’ office and found the drawer with stamps. He pulled off a blue rectangle, licked it, and positioned it carefully on the envelope. It looked lonely in the corner all by itself. He wondered if the letter would arrive faster if he put on more postage. He pulled off two more stamps and pasted them in a row.

For the sending address, he wrote simply, “NASA, Washington, D.C., USA.” He didn’t know any more of the address, but he supposed the post office would know where to deliver it.

He opened the front door slowly, so his dad wouldn’t hear and get worried. The mailbox creaked when he reached it, and the sound echoed down the empty, dark street. He carefully positioned the letter so that the mailman would immediately notice the three stamps. He pulled the mailbox’s little red flag up as far as it went. At the door, right before going back inside, he turned to check that the flag was still standing over the mailbox.

* * *

After he’d gone to bed and turned off the light, Stephen thought about what it would be like when NASA accepted him into their program. He’d imagined it many times, so the images ran like a newsreel through his mind. Scientists with clipboards would watch all of his training sessions. The day of the launch there would be a crowd of families, including his parents, cheering for him in his space suit. They would shut him in the rocket, shiny like one of his grandmother’s cooking pots, and he would wave from the window until the countdown started. Then there would be loud rumbling, and he’d start to climb, rising higher and higher until the people and bicycles and cars and streets and houses looked like wooden toys.

He’d pass through fleecy clouds soft as cotton balls, and he’d see the broad shape of his state recognizable from the maps that hung on his classroom wall. A while longer and he’d pass through more clouds, the higher ones, and he’d see the ocean from the rocket window, at first barely visible on the horizon, and then growing as he rose still higher.

About this time, he’d turn on his oxygen—flip a thin metal switch like the ones on robots in magazines. Maybe he’d sleep, or maybe he’d just watch from the window as the rocket climbs steadily higher. Suddenly he’d look up and see the looming, full moon: the mountains and crevices and craters of the moon that he’d read about, huge and menacing from close up.

Then he’d notice the heat. It grows hotter and hotter until his clothes are soaked through. Even though he can’t see it, he knows that he’s getting nearer to the sun.

He has to keep in communication with Earth, just to let them know he’s still alive. He hears Morse code tapping out, “Everything okay?” over the scratch of the radio waves. He taps back, “Yes, everything’s swell. Jupiter’s moons are incredible.” The dull hum of the engine is punctuated only by the tapping of the messages back and forth.

Then he sees the edge of the sky, dark beyond all imagining. The stars look like live fireflies pinned against black felt, but Stephen knows they are really small holes in the sky through which shines the brightness of the world beyond. He taps quickly, “Very close now. Out of contact soon.” There’s eager tapping in response, showing that everyone on Earth is waiting breathlessly.

And then he reaches the barrier of the sky like the roof of a tent. His rocket runs up against the fabric of the firmament and stretches it, the whine of the motors increasingly frantic, pushing outward until the fabric rips and he passes through.

He’d make a new hole in the sky, the first star ever caused by a living human. And he would enter Heaven.

He expected the light to be overwhelming, golden and tangible all around him. It’s not heat-producing light, like the sun; the temperature feels very comfortable inside his narrow rocket.

The ship comes to a rest, and Stephen quickly snaps loose the bolts, unlatches the door, and steps out into the light. The grass is golden in paths like pavement, but organic and living. People are standing around, talking, laughing—happy-looking people like in the pictures in the Bible at his grandmother’s house.

He walks through these people toward a raised platform. The platform is clear, and through it he can see down to the planets and other lower spheres. He thinks it must be made out of the special glass that’s transparent on one side but reflective on the other, like windows of the buildings downtown.

God sits on the throne on the platform. His skin is dark from being in the sun so much, like Mr. Richardson down the street who was in the Navy. He has a long, bushy beard the colors of a sunset.

God is surprised at first when he notices Stephen—a traveler! Someone who reached Heaven in a rocket! He beckons Stephen to climb the stairs to the throne, and Stephen realizes as he gets closer how much larger the throne is than he thought, like when he climbed the steps of the Washington memorial and was surprised by the size of the Abraham Lincoln statue.

God curiously asks Stephen how he did it. Everyone listens as Stephen explains. God asks a lot of questions, and Stephen finally has to tell God, as politely as possible, that he has important business. He says his mother is sick. Then he asks, “God, what will help her get better? What can I do?”

God has to think a while, with his chin on his hand, like Stephen’s dad when he’s thinking. Then God looks at Stephen again and gives him the answer, finally, and Stephen finally knows just what to do.

God might have a few more instructions after that, maybe what to tell people when Stephen gets back to Earth. Then maybe there’s some court fanfare to escort him back to his rocket. Stephen climbs the ladder, waves good-bye for now to God and all of Heaven, then bolts himself back in and points the rocket toward Earth. He shuttles back quickly now, without a moment to lose before doing what God has told him to do to save his mother.

In his dreams, Stephen tried to imagine the different things God might tell him to do, but he couldn’t think of anything plausible. After a while he gave up. He just hoped whatever God told him to do wouldn’t be too hard.

* * *

Stephen’s dad came home from work early on Wednesday and tried to cook dinner. Mrs. McKinnon usually cooked even when Stephen’s mother wasn’t sick, but she never came on Wednesdays because she had church. The previous few weeks, Stephen and his dad had made sandwiches, but Stephen’s dad didn’t really like sandwiches. He said he was going to try to cook this week even if it killed him.

When the oven door slammed shut and the smell of burning filled the house, Stephen put down his book. He pulled a chair under the smoke alarm and nudged it with a broom until the little box on the ceiling dislodged. He didn’t want the alarm to wake his mother.

In the kitchen, his dad was in a fencing pose, poking at a pan of blackened meatloaf with a fork, his other hand straight up in the air in an oven mitt.

“Zeno’s paradox,” his dad muttered. “It’s still not done in the middle.”

Every pot and pan from the cabinet was strewn on the counter or the floor. There was a streak of mustard across the right side of his dad’s beard. Stephen wished his dad would just let them go to his grandma’s for dinner.

Stephen’s dad scraped off the burnt crust and carved out the undone middle of the meatloaf, and they filled their plates with what was left. It looked like dog food. Plates and napkins in hand, they faced the round kitchen table with three chairs.

“How about eating in the living room again?” Every night his dad said they wouldn’t make a habit of eating in front of the TV, but they hadn’t sat at the table once since Stephen’s mother got sick.

Stephen settled onto the couch. His dad pulled the coffee table closer and put his feet up, balancing his plate in his lap. “Don’t knock over your milk, Stephen,” his dad said, as usual.

They’d missed the opening sequence on the Huntley-Brinkley Report. The commercial break ended, and Huntley went right into the main story.

“Today a Soviet astronaut became the first man in space. According to…”

Stephen stared at the screen, frozen. Someone had made it to space? What did God tell him? What would he tell everyone else about God? Stephen’s hand shook against his glass.

“…the rocket Vostok took 108 minutes to orbit the earth. Cosmonaut Yuri Alexeyevich Gagarin landed unharmed.” Huntley frowned at his notes and kept talking. “In Washington, members of the NASA Mercury spaceflight program issued congratulations while expressing their hopes that the American program will not linger far behind.” The screen switched to show David Brinkley in the Washington newsroom.

Stephen’s dad scratched his head. “A man in space. How is this possible?”

Stephen concentrated on the four letters behind Mr. Brinkley’s torso—NASA. The screen showed the letters in shades of gray, but he knew they should be white with a hint of red. President Kennedy’s face filled the screen, but Stephen only saw his lips moving. He had an echo in his head: “Russian cosmonaut… first man in space. Russian cosmonaut… in space.” Someone had beat him to it. When would Gagarin report what he’d seen? Stephen felt like crying.

The screen switched back to Mr. Huntley’s suit and tie. “When Major Gagarin reached space, he is reported as saying, ‘I don’t see any God up here.’” Huntley frowned into the camera. “Americans across the country…”

Everything in Stephen stopped. What did he mean, “No God up here”?

The closing credits came on. Stephen’s dad pushed back the coffee table and shut off the TV, muttering about the idiocy of a technological race. He kept muttering all the way down the hall.

Stephen stared at the black screen a long time. If God wasn’t up there, was he anywhere? What if he wasn’t—what if God didn’t exist? He stared and stared, until the blankness of the screen was all he could see.

Eventually, Stephen realized his foot felt numb. He moved it slowly, kindling the sharp needles of pain as sensation returned.

If God didn’t exist, then there was no one he could ask to help his mother. There was no one else who could help.

Stephen poked at the books on the coffee table, moving them out of Mrs. McKinnon’s perfect order. He pushed his hand into the couch cushion, watching the fabric bend inward toward his knuckles.

His mother’s voice, calling from the other room, startled him.

Stephen walked quickly to her door. “Mother?” He knocked and opened the door to look in. She was lying down, eyes closed, her dark red hair muted in the half-light. The veins stood out in her hands resting on the bedspread.

Stephen stepped quietly to the side of the bed, trying to tell if she was awake or asleep. Had she actually called him or had he imagined it? Her breathing was shallow and regular. He stared at her a bit longer, trying to figure out what she needed. Eventually he picked up the empty glass from her bedside table and took it to the kitchen.

* * *

The window above the sink was dark. He could barely see the outline of the tree in the backyard, inky black against the blue-black sky. It was a clear night. Stephen leaned forward to look at the stars. How could it be that there was no God up there?

Stephen left the cup on the countertop and went out the back door. Sitting on the bottom step of the back porch, he could see the full range of stars stretching in a canopy away from the roof of the house. He found Orion’s belt and traced the curve of his bow. He found the cheerful North Star. If there was no God, what was behind the stars—nothing? They suddenly seemed very far away.

Stephen had always felt so sure God would be there, just beyond the stars, just out of reach but not impossibly so, if he could only use something to take him closer. A rocketship had seemed the perfect solution, but a Soviet had tried that. If God wasn’t up there, he thought, then there must be nothing… no golden grass or happy crowds of people, no clear pedestal made of one-way glass.

Stephen picked up a twig and threw it as high as he could. It arched against the speckled sky and landed with a dull plunk on Mr. Donovan’s shed. He felt abandoned, like the time he thought his mother had left him at the store.

Stephen started counting stars, beginning on the horizon. He got to one hundred and twenty-eight before losing track of which ones he’d counted.

There had to be something beyond the fabric of the sky, he thought. There had to be.

Stephen traced the path the Russian must have taken, up from the eastern horizon, between stars, to that clearing in the middle of the sky. He sat there, pointing straight up, when he suddenly realized his mistake.

The Soviet cosmonaut had traveled into space, but he didn’t go anywhere near the stars. Stephen stood up and looked at them again. How had he forgotten? The stars were so much further away. The Soviet hadn’t gone nearly far enough—he had only just barely made it out of Earth’s atmosphere, probably. There was still the vast distance to the planets, and beyond them, to the canopy of the sky. God hid behind the edge of the universe, much further away.

Stephen smiled. God was still up there, undisturbed, waiting with his answer. Stephen turned and went back inside the house to take his mother the glass of water.

Christine Kindberg lives in Chicago and is a full-time nanny. She studied creative writing and theology at Wheaton College in Illinois, and her work has previously appeared in Mused: The BellaOnline Literary Review. She is currently biting her nails, waiting to hear back about her applications to MFA programs.

Read Christine Kindberg’s comments on Hannah Lackoff’s “The Dead Do Not Come Back At Night.”

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
“Stephen Dreams of Visiting Heaven” is at once charming and painful, a hopeful story that makes us ponder the supreme power of the universe and a thoughtful child’s understanding of it. We want Stephen to get what he wants, to succeed in saving his mother from her illness and misery, to find his way to Heaven and meet God with his personal request, even though our logic defies such possibilities. We want to help Stephen understand the ways of the world, hold his hand on the journey, and for this we know we’ve been touched, connected to a fictional character that comes alive in our hearts and minds.

I sat in the doorway sometimes and watched her stretch her left arm across her stomach, and raise her right arm above her head like a spiral staircase.

“Like a dancer,” she told me.

My family called it old age, the doctor called it heart failure. For years I confused the two.

I found out later that on the night she died she woke up my grandfather to say, “Rosebud. That’s funny, right?”

* * *

I learned about cremation when my grandmother peeled the labels off three travel-sized decaf coffee containers, dumped the coffee into the garbage, and wrote her name on the sides of the canisters.

The family queued up three cars deep in the woods to bury the first container. My grandfather dropped it and the dry soil flaked up around the dent when it landed. He got down on his knees and began digging with his hands until he came to a thick, ungiving root. He stood up and nudged the container into the hole with his foot.

“Got a grip?” he said.

We all stood around talking like news anchors and thinking like janitors. I was almost out of junior high and I had touched my first breast five days before, a girl named Katherine. Love seems circular now, but at the time I could only summon static in a line too short to bend.

* * *

My older sister, Wendy, calls me all the time and quizzes me about our grandparents. This is part of her ongoing diet of incomplete truths.

“You’re hiding something, I know it,” she says, driving to my house, where she will attempt to repeat the conversation.

“I’m not hiding anything,” I say. “I’m just an idiot.”

Wendy’s divorce is a long process that for now exists only as a future thought. The majority of her time is spent weighing death against do us part. She pulls into my driveway and, before hanging up, says, “Don’t you remember the kind of love that Hoyle and Amelia had?”

The truth is that I do remember their love. But what would Wendy do with that information? Wendy’s natural instinct is to eliminate the family element in favor of distance. Comfort to her is a nice pair jeans and the horror that she may someday not fit into them.

When she opens the door, I railroad her into a discussion of our own lives that is ancillary at best.

* * *

I considered appendix scars and death for most of the summer. Death because of my grandmother and appendix scars because of Katherine, who had one. I began to notice them everywhere. I’d wait for windy days and sit in the park with binoculars, looking for shirts that had blown up for just a moment.

When I started visiting my grandfather after my grandmother died, I would sit down with deli meat and thick slices of cheese on a paper plate in front of me while he recounted his lifelong courtship.

I had already known my grandparents drove around the United States for most of the 80s, living out of a teal camper, but I never understood why.

“Your grandmother would have said we were making a sketch.” He brought his hands up to explain, but put them back down again. “Tracing the land. She said it was already drawn, already written, and the best we could do was go over it and pass it off as ours.”

I flipped through scrapbooks and listened to stories about a beach, a mountain range. I would complain about my neck—iron deficiency was a term I heard on television—and crane it all around looking for a clock.

My grandfather clasped his hands together and looked up at me. “Pretty boring shit.”

“I’m meeting up with a girl.”

“What does she do?”

“She plays volleyball.”

“Fine.” He leaned back. “But what does she do to you?”

“She makes me feel pretty good, I guess.”

“Fair enough.” He put the footrest down and made the noises he needed to make to stand up, made them again and sat back down.

* * *

In 1936, Hoyle showed up at Amelia’s for the first time, twenty minutes late after stopping at the McGill residence and offering to shovel their sidewalk and driveway for a dime. Amelia’s mother let him in when he got there, told him he shouldn’t keep a girl waiting. He nodded, walked into Amelia’s room, and said, “I’m sorry I’m late, but I can buy you ice cream now.” He held the coin out in front of him, between his face and Amelia’s.

“Hoyle,” Amelia said, grabbing the dime. “Do you have enough to buy me the moon?”

“It’s not for sale,” he said.

“Do you know why it’s not for sale?”

Hoyle began to pull at his fingers behind his back. He looked at Amelia and said, “Because nobody owns it?”

“Everyone owns it, Hoyle.”

This girl makes no sense, he thought. He rolled his eyes and said, “Fine, why don’t we just go there then if it’s public property?”

“Good, we’ll go after school tomorrow.” She put the dime in his pocket and took his hand. “Let’s go ice skating at the pond.” Her hand was small and soft, and when his sweaty palm slipped away from hers, she stopped and grabbed it again—this time locking fingers—and said, “Got a grip?”

I’ve told Wendy none of this.

* * *

As long as the heat didn’t make me leave shoeprints in the blacktop, Katherine’s house was within jogging distance. So, on the days when I would visit my grandfather, I would also run to see Katherine, dripping sweat, no questions asked.

One day Katherine said, “My grandma died a couple years ago. I think she was made of magic.” Then she asked me what my grandmother was like. I said nothing, which rounded out a mysterious quirk of my personality and functioned as the truth.

We sat in her hot tub and talked about bands we liked and cars we’d drive in high school until her parents came back from work. I walked home a different way, avoiding my grandfather’s house for fear of seeing him there, alone, and having to decide how alike we really were.

* * *

When our grandmother was spending those last several years mulling over the banalities of dying, Wendy was already busy accessorizing our family. This manifested into a sweet yearning, a kind of sorrow particular to Midwestern bankruptcy.

She reminds me monthly of a trip to Memphis I took with our grandparents shortly before they sold the teal camper. “Tell me if I’m envisioning it right,” she says. “Hoyle in Tennessee, Amelia in Arkansas. Nothing but the Mississippi River between them. Talking on walkie-talkies so they can each take a picture of the other taking a picture of the other.”

“Yeah, that sounds about right. Except I was there, too.”

“With Hoyle or Amelia?”

“Grandpa.”

“Fine. So they’re there doing all that stuff and you’re standing there doing whatever. Hoyle takes a step to the left and holds the flashlight up towards where Amelia is on the other side. Says Hello? and Is this the right spot? into the walkie-talkie. After not hearing anything he gets back on the walkie-talkie and asks if she’s taken the picture yet. Then Amelia asks him how cold does he think the water is. Then, nothing.”

I told her the story once, when I was eight years old, right after I got back from the trip. She’s envisioning it right because she always envisions it right.

After my grandmother didn’t say anything, my grandfather and I jumped into the camper and drove to the other side of the river. We got out and saw a pair of empty sandals, one and then the other leading towards the river. He shook his head and said Goddammit. She was fifteen feet away, where she had been the whole time, barefoot but dry. They stood there on thin legs with fat veins.

Wendy extends her fingers and waves them slowly out in front of her. “And they wade into the water slowly, West Memphis shaking in the background.”

“Right.”

“It’s beautiful, don’t you think?”

“I remember it being cold.”

Wendy hates both the real and fabricated parts of my aloofness. She would also hate that I was with my grandfather when he sent the second coffee canister down the Mississippi River, not long after burying the first one. She would hate that I watched him run along the bank beside the canister as it went with the current, that I watched him stop and feel his heart through his shirt, watched his legs give way and fold. What she would love is the image of me helping him up and watching him look down the river, his shoes untied and his face blank enough for her to draw West Memphis in his eyes.

* * *

“Forget the old people shit,” my grandfather said, setting a different scrapbook on my lap. And there he and my grandmother were, riding a gigantic stuffed rhinoceros in front of a Sinclair station near Montgomery, Alabama. They were carving cherry belle radishes at a Pagan Women’s Shelter in Millsboro, Delaware. Cleaning Vermont’s stray dogs in ’88 and then passing out sandwiches to homeless Californians in ’91. Raking leaves with Cincinnati girl scouts. Dumping canteens of water at the base of a Nevada sand dune and making castles from the sludge.

I reached the end of the book and looked up at my grandfather. “Katherine asked about grandma the other day, what she was like. I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything.”

He held up a hand and nodded his head.

There were more pictures. Hoyle balancing on the train tracks behind the haunted Denny’s in Billings, Montana. Amelia hanging out of a TECO car in Ybor City, Florida. Amelia at the Stations of the Cross near the base of the largest cross in the western hemisphere in Groom, Texas, looking at the camera as if to say, My face, it’s dirty too, you know?

* * *

It was mid-day and muggy, but the sheet over my grandfather was a drought, and had been since the night before when he pulled it up to the bridge of his nose and fell asleep and died. Weeks before, we sat in his living room and I told him about Katherine’s hands—both pinky fingers broken at birth, a nice settlement from the hospital and a charming predilection toward penguin flippers—and he asked me how she holds things: porcelain or tin. I was about to answer when he said, “I’m going to die soon.”

I glanced at a picture on the table: Amelia throwing rocks at Mount St. Helens.

When I found him, I took the sheet off slowly. The day he told me he was going to die, he also told me to grab the third coffee can from the nightstand and unscrew the lid. She wants to enfold me, he told me. To have me as her center. Until the moon goes up for sale.

I steadied my hand and began shaking the ashes onto the bed around my grandfather. I started at his head and moved down his neck, slowly, even slower past his shoulders, tracing down his arms and past his thighs, over his calves, around his toes and back up in symmetry before curving back over his head and reaching the beginning, the end.

* * *

Katherine died, too, shortly before we graduated from high school. Icy roads, semi-truck. It was a single car accident so ordinary that we felt it as a tragedy, but were forced to treat it as a shame. Wendy brings it up when she wraps herself too tightly in the love of our grandparents and has to unwind.

“What are you doing when you think of Katherine?” she asks. “And then what do you do right after thinking of her?”

Like most things, I tell her that I don’t know. Like most things, the truth is that I can’t tell the difference.

Ryan Werner is a janitor living in the Midwest. He is the author of the short-short story collection Shake Away These Constant Days (Jersey Devil Press, 2012), and runs Passenger Side Books, a small chapbook press. Learn more about Ryan at www.RyanWernerWritesStuff.com, or follow him on Twitter @YeahWerner.

Read Ryan Werner’s comments on Wendy Fox’s “The Car.”

______________
Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
This quiet story of love and loss really struck a chord with me. The piece is beautifully delivered, and the understated tone matches the themes perfectly. There’s something wonderful about how this piece so perfectly describes the indescribable, and how the narrator seems forever just on the outside. That discord made the piece work that much more effectively for me. Really well done.

So it shocked everyone when Albert announced that he had inherited a loft in Pioneer Square—a neighborhood of artists, bars, and bookshops—from a relative that he was not even aware of. It turned out that Albert was the closest living relative of the late artist, Jasper Rincon, an eccentric painter reputed to be a notorious womanizer. Jasper had taught at the Cornish Art College, and had a reputation for inviting female students to “pose” at his studio loft in Pioneer Square. Rumor had it that Jasper had affairs with most of them, but no one ever saw the paintings.

Jasper died of a heart attack in bed. It was widely believed he had not been alone. When the police did a DNA test of the sheets in Jasper’s bed, they came up with so many samples from hair and skin flakes, body lotion, lipstick stains and toenail clippings, that they deduced an entire community had been sharing his bed.

Albert received a phone call from Jasper’s estate saying he was a third cousin twice removed and, being the only relative on file, the loft was his to do with what he pleased.

Out of character as it was, Albert decided to move. He rationalized that it was close to work—he would be able to walk—but in his secret-self Albert knew he was taking a leap of faith. Albert was an awkward and lonely bachelor. When he found out that he was related to Jasper Rincon, Albert looked at himself and wondered why his life had taken the turn that it did, while Rincon’s life had turned out so differently?

The loft that Albert moved into was fully furnished. Jasper wasn’t much for planning, so there was no formal will. Along with the pots and pans and various sundries, Albert also acquired Jasper’s bed.

* * *

Albert sold his house in Ballard to a conservative woman who worked at a credit union. She was very impressed by the uniformity of the boxwoods that lined the walkway. After signing the papers she asked Albert if he’d like to have dinner with her and Albert accepted. Her height, he guessed, was 5’8″. She was willowy and attractive. Ordinarily a woman with her looks barely noticed Albert. But she was a numbers person like Albert, not shallow.

Their conversation over dinner came easily. They discussed the care and maintenance of Albert’s boxwoods. She had not bothered to dress up, and neither had Albert, but he had worn a nice sport shirt, creased pants, dress shoes and argyle socks. She, he noticed, had put on lipstick. Albert liked that she was a no-nonsense girl. She shared his distaste for debt—she’d paid cash for the house—and she obviously knew the importance of making two columns of numbers match. She knew more baseball statistics than Albert. She was a Lutheran, but did not attend church. It was more of a culture to her than a religion. Albert found himself very attracted to her.

After dinner she invited him in and offered him a glass of wine. That seemed like a good sign. But once inside her new home, she rummaged for a couple of juice glasses and poured wine from a box. She excused herself and came back in a tee shirt, still buttoning a pair of shorts that revealed long slender legs. She didn’t seem a bit shy around him. Collapsing onto the only comfortable chair in the room, her bare legs swung over the overstuffed arm. She left Albert to sit on a yet to be unpacked carton marked “Bedroom.” She asked Albert about the whereabouts of certain faucets and electrical hook-ups. After finishing her wine, she announced with a yawn that she had to go to bed. She had a busy day in the morning.

It was clear to Albert that although she had raised his expectations, she viewed him solely as the prior owner who perhaps could help her get acquainted with her new property. His heart sank.

Albert had no idea how to tell a woman that he was interested in her. She might misunderstand, or worse yet, she might laugh at him.

Albert thanked her for the evening and let himself out. He stopped at a liquor store and bought a bottle of Cabernet on his way back to Jasper Rincon’s loft. Once inside, he uncorked the wine and drank a glass straight down. Albert was angry, primarily with himself but after the second glass of wine he was able to transfer some of that anger to the credit union lady who had so hastily rejected him.

He began pacing. First he paced back and forth. Then he paced up and down. Soon he was pacing the circumference of the loft in big steps to work off his frustration. He counted the steps across the width of the open space and then the depth. It was cavernous. 722 steps across the width and 965 steps in depth. What was he ever going to do with all this space? He already missed his little house that now belonged to that credit union woman.

Albert was coming around for the third time when he lost count at the 863^rd step. Losing count was unusual for him. There was something different underfoot at the 863^rd step. He stamped his foot. It echoed. He stamped again. The floor was hollow. He stamped at the 860^th step. It was solid. 863 was hollow… 864… 865… 866… All hollow. He stamped around the floor making a rectangle of all the area that felt hollow. It was 45 steps long, and 40 steps wide—the size of a small room.

It took another 45 minutes for Albert to locate the wood plug covering the handle that lifted the boards to the secret room beneath the floor of Jasper Rincon’s loft. It took considerable heft to lift the door, which was an almost seamless fit, but he was happy to find it was spring-hinged and, once free, lifted quite easily. There were stairs.

Albert descended the stairs into the dark space. There was no apparent source of light. In the center was a small square of open floor. The rest of the room was filled with stretched canvases, some as large as 6′ x 4′, but most 5′ x 2.5’, 3′ x 2′ and smaller. As his eyes adjusted he began to focus on the images before him. He was surrounded by paintings of beautiful women in a variety of poses. Some were dancing. Some bathing. Some seated. Some lying down. All however were naked. And all of them were beautiful.

* * *

Albert wrestled one of the larger paintings out of the hidden room, up the staircase and into the loft. The canvas was stretched over a wood frame and measured 6′ x 4′. Albert set it on the floor between two clerestory windows that faced west into the night. Moonlight lit the canvas, which was painted in oil. A woman’s figure sat on a platform in front of these very same clerestory windows, her legs folded beneath her, her head resting on her feet, her hands wrapped around the back of her head, her brunette tresses flowing over her ankles, her fingers crisscrossed like the wings of a large moth.

Albert emptied the last of the Cabernet into his glass and knelt before the canvas in the moonlight. His eyes wandered across the painting but always returned to the woman’s left shoulder where a tattoo of a lizard peaked over from her back. The lizard’s eyes were red—it’s body green—it’s face almost black. It was looking at Albert. He reached out toward the woman’s shoulder to touch the lizard, but it seemed to pull away. He withdrew his hand, then reached again. The lizard stepped aside. Albert traced the curve of the woman’s spine, touched her hair, her knees. He tried to run his hand up her thigh, beneath her breast, but the image was two-dimensional. His fingers felt the coarseness of Jasper’s brushstrokes that were invisible to his moon-drenched eyes.

The wine gone, Albert’s head cloudy, he got on all fours, and then up on his feet. He closed the door to the hidden room full of canvases of naked women, and went to bed.

* * *

Albert awoke with an erection. He felt something walking up his arm to his shoulder. He smelled fresh brewed coffee. He touched the feeling on his shoulder thinking it might be a bug. It was not a bug. Albert grabbed a finger. He opened his eyes to see a woman smiling at him, her index finger caught in his grip.

“Good morning, sleepyhead,” she said.

“Who are you?” said Albert.

She was brunette, pretty, with full lips, full breasts, a small waist that rose gently from her hips. Her legs swished in the sheets like the tail of a mermaid. She was naked.

“Who am I?” she said. “Well, that’s what I get for sleeping with an old artist.”

For a moment Albert thought he knew her. But how? Had he gone out again last night? His tongue was dry. A dull ache throbbed in his temporal lobe.

The woman extricated her finger from his grip, and grabbed Albert stiff cock.

“Now do you remember me?”

She gave Albert a peck on the lips and tossed back the sheets. On her left shoulder was the lizard with the blackface, its red eyes peeking at Albert as she leapt out of bed.

“I wish you hadn’t cut your hair,” she said. “I got your coffee,” and she was gone. She disappeared behind the screen that hid the stove, the sink, the table and chairs that substituted for a real kitchen. The bathroom was equally exposed on the opposite side of another screen.

Albert lay in bed trying to remember what happened the night before. He remembered the credit union lady, the bottle of wine, the room beneath the floor. He remembered carrying the canvas upstairs to the moonlight. He remembered touching the painting—the lizard. He did not remember going to bed.

He touched his pulsing cock with his left hand. It too had a memory. Albert put his hand to his face and he smelled the unmistakable scent of a woman.

Pulling on a tee shirt and the pants he had failed to hang up the night before, Albert went behind the screen. He found coffee freshly brewed in the Mr. Coffee machine. The woman, however, was gone.

Albert called out, “Where did you go?”

There was no answer. He went back to the bed. On the pillow he found several strands of long brown hair.

* * *

Albert searched the loft but he couldn’t find the brunette woman who seemed to have stepped out of the painting. He took his coffee cup and a slice of dry whole-wheat toast wrapped in a paper napkin and walked over to the clerestory windows where he had propped the painting the evening before in the moonlight. There she was, hair tumbling over her arms, hands laced like moth’s wings, and the lizard with the red eyes, motionless, staring at him over her shoulder.

Albert finished his toast. He put the cup on the window ledge, and folded the napkin neatly. He located the plug in the floor that covered the latch and pulled open the door. He was late for work. But what was he to do with the girl?

Albert lifted the big canvas and steered it awkwardly down the stairs, descending one careful step at a time. He maneuvered the painting of the woman posed in her half lotus, down to the secret room beneath the floor and settled her in the place where he had found her. He wanted to thank her, but thought better of it. Foolish.

Yet, foolish or not, Albert took a moment to gather the images before him in his mind and sort them like a mental deck of cards. He selected one, a blond woman perched on a stool near the clerestory windows in Jasper Rincon’s studio where he had painted her. Her eyes followed Albert as he moved about the cluttered space as though urging him, seeming to say, “Choose me. Choose me.”

“I will,” Albert promised, and then turned and ascended the steps. He closed the lid to the secret room.

Absurd. This is absurd. He went to the shelves by the bed where Jasper kept his clothes in lieu of a closet. He took his Ralph Lauren pinstripe three-button suit from the nail where he’d hung it on a wooden hanger. He made a mental note to put up a clothes rail. Once dressed, he withdrew the shoetrees from his Ferragamo wing–tips. But before he could slip them on, he saw peeking out from under the shelf a pair of Jasper Rincon’s shoes. They were brown, cut-to-the-ankle boots. Albert slipped the shoetrees back into his oxfords and picked up the brown shoes.

The leather was soft and smelled rich, the color was dark, reminiscent of blood, and the soles were heavily stitched as though someone—not a machine—had made them. Albert sat on a low stool and slipped the shoes on. Remarkably, they fit. He stood and took a step, then another. Like gloves, they molded to his feet.

Shrugging, why not, Albert locked up the loft and went down the three flights of stairs to Yesler Avenue. The sky was gray, but Albert could see light behind the clouds. A taxi came past. It was the yellowest automobile he had ever seen. A man on the corner asked Albert if he could help a brother get something to eat. The man’s blue eyes held his own, as though there were a light behind them. Albert reached for some change, but instead, he peeled a bill from his wallet. It was a Franklin.

Although Albert was late for work, he walked slowly and deliberately. He felt rooted. He was aware of the lifting and lowering of his feet. He was aware he was walking in another man’s shoes.

* * *

After work, Albert thought about calling the credit union lady. Maybe he’d been hasty, over sensitive. Perhaps he should give her another chance. He weighed the despair he’d felt when he left the credit union lady against the thrill he’d felt waking up this morning in Jasper Rincon’s bed with the young woman and the lizard peeking over her shoulder. He decided to pick up a pizza and a bottle of wine and he went home.

Albert set the pizza, a large—he liked cold leftovers in the morning—with sausage and mushrooms, on the counter next to the sink. He went behind the divider to the bed and inspected the pillow. The long brown strands of hair were still there. The pillow smelled of musk and vanilla. His memory of the morning became physical.

Albert took off his suit and trousers and decided to put on one of Jasper Rincon’s old white shirts and baggy pants.

* * *

One by one, Albert brought the women who posed for Jasper up the stairs from the hidden room beneath the studio. One by one, he studied the paintings for hours in the moonlight by the big clerestory windows. One by one, they were there when he woke up in the morning. And, one by one, they disappeared behind the screen that divided the bedroom from the kitchen area, and then vanished. Albert soon stopped wondering where they went.

The women were not all young. Nor did they all have perfect bodies. But they were all beautiful in Jasper Rincon’s paintings. And they were all beautiful when Albert opened his eyes to find them lying beside him.

Once Albert got used to the routine of it, he realized that this was not a perfect arrangement. He fell asleep alone each night, and although he awoke with a beautiful woman, knowing he had been loved, he could not remember it. The playful female body next to him and the feminine scent on his shaft were his only proof. But it was proof enough.

More and more Albert wore Jasper’s clothes. After the shoes he put on the shirts. They were loose fitting and not suited for ties. Jasper apparently didn’t own a tie. Gradually, Albert abandoned his Ralph Lauren Polo wardrobe altogether and adopted Jasper’s looser, baggier look, preferring comfort to formality, function to form. Albert’s coworkers noticed the change coming over him and talked behind his back.

One of Albert’s workmates told him he was beginning to look like his crazy old uncle. It was true. His cheeks were more sallow. There were rings around his eyes and the crow’s feet had deepened. He walked slower. He gazed deeply at people when he talked to them. He seemed to daydream in his cubicle. He was caught doodling. Eventually his boss told him his attire was a poor reflection on the office and he would need to conform. A week later Albert was fired, told to clear out his desk.

Albert took stock of his financial situation and decided not to look for another job. With the time he gained, he decided to study painting. He enrolled in classes at the Daniel Smith Art Store. He learned to paint landscapes and still life. He painted birds and flowers, with water and fabric. He learned to sketch, and how to work with shadows and depth dimension. His instructors said he was quite remarkable for someone who came to art so late in life.

What Albert had discovered was a similarity between art and numbers. There was an order in nature, not so different from a balance sheet, but a lot more physical. Of course, there were differences as well. Albert could influence nature in a way he could never influence numbers. Numbers were constant. No matter how many problems he solved or columns he balanced, he would never create anything with numbers.

One day, after months of trying to replicate what he saw, Albert had an awakening. His challenge wasn’t to copy nature, but to release it.

* * *

Several months into Albert’s study of art, he took a class in figure drawing with live models. The class was given in a secluded room on the second floor of the art store. He had to climb a set of steel stairs to get to the room, which was like a windowless cage that hung from the ceiling. It was there in that room that Albert came face to face with real people, human beings, disrobed and posed for hours while a roomful of artists stared and penciled and charcoaled their impressions. No two artists’ sketches resembled one another. It was as though each artist was creating a different human being.

Albert poured himself into the work with an urgency that surprised even him. He soon learned that he favored diagonal poses to verticals and horizontals. He fell in love with triangles. He drank in gestures and loved to draw hands and feet. Drawing necks became an out-and-out obsession.

Then one day a middle-aged woman posed for the group. Her hair was raven. A scar snaked across her abdomen suggesting a cesarean birth. Her small breasts sagged somewhat. There was a slight thickening at her thighs. Yet, she had an uncommon beauty—her features simultaneously childlike and shrewd.

Albert made 20 sketches of the woman. He was very pleased with the outcome. His teacher praised the work lavishly and said Albert had made a real breakthrough.

That night, instead of retrieving one of Jasper’s nudes from the basement room, Albert put his own sketchpad on the easel by the clerestory windows in the moonlight. He opened a bottle of Cabernet and flipped through the pages of his sketchpad. There were the drawings of the raven-haired woman. Albert chose the sketch he thought the most expressive. In it, her eyes were closed, her neck pressed to one side, cheek resting on her shoulder, arms crossed with one hand lifting her small breast.

Albert studied the pose. He was pleased with the work. He could still smell the model’s musky scent as he had in the artist’s cage at Daniel Smith. It was a smell of cloves and tobacco.

Albert finished his wine, left the sketch out on the easel, and went to bed.

* * *

The next morning Albert awoke with an erection. First he smelled the cloves and tobacco. Then opening his eyes he saw her, lying on her side, her eyes closed, her arms crossed. At first he was embarrassed. This was not one of Jasper’s phantoms. This was that woman, the model from the studio. He reached out and traced the welt from the cesarean on her belly like a string of little knots in her skin.

“Are you real?” Albert asked.

She put her index finger to her lips and signaled for him not to talk.

“Are you going to disappear?” said Albert.

After a few moments, she touched his face, and like all the others, slid from the sheets and was gone behind the divider to the kitchen. He had long since stopped wondering where they went. They were gone. All that was left was their fragrance, their hair on the pillow, their imprint on the mattress, and the blood pulsing through his veins.

Albert felt more alone than he had at any time since he’d moved into Jasper Rincon’s loft. The hidden room in the basement filled with canvases of beautiful women haunted him. Had every artist suffered this? Was Jasper Rincon a lonely man, with all his reputation, with all his women?

Albert climbed out of bed and went to the clerestory windows where he’d left his sketchpad the night before. There was the raven-haired woman, as real on the pad as she had been on the bed. And just as far away.

* * *

Albert phoned the credit union lady on a Thursday. He heard the hesitancy in her voice across the line. He made an excuse about the garden, telling her there were things he had left undone—things she really needed now that summer was coming.

She was cautious. After all, when you buy a house, you are not required to provide permanent visitation rights. But in the end she relented.

Albert arrived that Saturday morning in a little pickup truck. The sun was shining. He noticed the grass was cut and the boxwoods trimmed exactly as he had left them. He sat across the street from the house for a moment, drawing the scene in his mind. Strange, the house looked so small and sterile. He saw one louver of the venetian blind tilt at one end. That would be her eye level. He’d forgotten the color of her eyes, if he had ever known.

Albert ignored the bell and instead knocked on the door. He heard rustling inside. The door opened. She pretended to be surprised.

As he remembered, she was tall and very thin. She was dressed in jeans and a sweatshirt that said University of Oregon. Her face searched Albert’s like she was expecting someone else.

“Good morning. I’m Albert.”

“Yes. Albert,” she said. “You’ve …”

“Changed?” said Albert.

“I wouldn’t have recognized you.”

Albert showed her the plants sitting in the back of the pickup. “They really belong to you,” he lied. “I bought them before I decided to sell the house, but never picked them up.” Nothing could have been further from the truth. Albert had designed this yard expressly for its efficiency.

He showed her the hydrangeas, the bags of dahlia bulbs, the sarcococca, also called sweet box that would perfume the front entry, and the weigelas for attracting hummingbirds. If she would allow him, he’d like to help with the planting. Living in Pioneer Square, he missed getting his hands in the dirt.

The sun was unusually warm for this early in spring. Albert suggested she might like to take a walk. He sensed she had no friends coming by, no dinner parties to prepare for. She accepted and went inside the house. She emerged again, having changed into a red cotton blouse—two buttons opened at the neck—a fresh pair of jeans, red sneakers, and no socks. She had put on lipstick, eyeliner, and she smelled of Chanel.

They walked down the hill to the marina, past the statue of Leif Ericson, until finally they reached the beach. Albert slipped off his sandals and squeezed sand between his toes. She was reluctant to take off her sneakers, but soon the grit began to scratch her feet, so she slipped them off. Her toenails were crimson, but chipped.

Albert greeted every new puppy, and there were many, as though each were a dear friend. They watched children play in the sand, smelled barbecue coming from the picnic tables, and watched cormorants dive for their dinner. He felt her hand brush his as they stood in the icy water, while sailboats flit across the bay. After a time he could tell she was getting cold. The sun was dropping in the sky. They had been gone for hours. They retraced their steps back to her little house.

On the porch Albert pressed his palm against the small of her back as she unlocked her front door—this wispy woman who had scared him so much when first they met. She turned to face him. Her neck craned from her blouse like a Modigliani model. Albert asked to see her hands. He took them in his and turned her palms up. Her fingers were long and graceful, worthy of a Sargent or a Gainsborough. Her life line was short. Her heart line troubled. Her physique was long and triangular, like a Picasso.

Albert said goodbye and turned to leave.

“Will you be coming back,” she said, “to plant?”

“I’d like that,” he said.

“When?” she asked.

He would draw her with charcoal on paper at first. Then oils, on canvas.

“Soon,” he said.

Max Detrano grew up in Hoboken, NJ. He’s been a waiter, a carpenter’s assistant, a printer’s assistant, an art importer, a book buyer, and an independent publishers’ rep. He studied writing at Denver University and the University of Washington. Max’s words have appeared in such diverse publications as: Small Press Magazine, Alaska Airlines, The Sun, Northwest Magazine, The Seattle Weekly, and 10,000 Tons of Black Ink. He writes with friends at coffee shops in stormy Seattle, WA.

Read Max Detrano’s comments on Candida Pugh’s “What I Wouldn’t Do For You.”

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
A story written to haunt you is a story written to stay with you, and “Jasper Rincon’s Loft” manages to stick to your bones because of its inherent charm and the exciting fantasy world it creates. A fantasy world that just about anyone might want to experience. We are immediately drawn into the protagonist’s world, and delightfully pulled along as he finds his way, as he finds himself, and all along we’re thinking: good for him.

“The Dead Do Not Come Back At Night” by Hannah Lackoff (February, 2012)

“A Hunk of Meat” by Max Detrano (February, 2012)

“Seven Miles Deep” by Tom Graham (October, 2012)

“Jasper Rincon’s Loft” by Max Detrano (December, 2012)

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

As their child transformed from pea to lima bean to lemon, Brian ran his fingers across slabs of granite countertop that were bigger than the entire bathroom of their condo. It takes only a drop of water cycling into ice to crack rock, but the finishes were glossy and smooth. The flecks of quartz sparkled. He wandered through the houses and tried to see Jenny brushing her brown hair in the master bath, or himself shaving at the sink. He thought of the little specks of razored-off whiskers that sometimes dotted the white cream, and how he was always very careful to get it all down the drain. He thought of how they had their toiletries organized in miniature tubs under the sink, of the early days when he had woken up and she was gone. He would stare at himself in the mirror and wonder if he’d done something wrong, if she was angry.

Married now, sometimes they fought, just as he had feared. They even fought when Jenny found out she was pregnant. He was drinking a beer and she had tossed the home test casually onto the coffee table.

“Two lines,” she said. “Bingo.”

He wasn’t sure what it meant. “How many lines are there supposed to be,” he asked.

“Depends on what you’re after,” Jenny said.

“Okay,” Brian said. He thought he was being even, measured. “What are we after?”

Jenny looked at him, frowning. He heard each bubble of carbonation in his beer fizzing.

When their friends asked them if they had been trying, Jenny said they weren’t trying but they weren’t doing anything to prevent it, either.

We aren’t? Brian wanted to know.

“Well, I’m not,” Jenny said when he asked. “Have you been doing something? I was doing something, but I stopped.”

He considered this. He had never asked about Jenny’s birth control—not when they were dating, not now that they were spouses—it seemed secret and narcotic, something that wasn’t his business. He couldn’t tell if Jenny didn’t care what he thought, or if she had done what he had done and not inquired.

One day Jenny had moved into the condo, and after this had gone on for awhile, she had become his fiancée. They married in a small ceremony and her mother had gotten very drunk at the reception. It had been a nice night.

They’d only just celebrated their second anniversary and the kitchen was already a tangle of prenatal vitamins.

“I guess we need to move then,” he said.

“I think we do,” Jenny said. “Hopefully soon.”

When they looked at houses, he imagined himself slogging through miles of commuter traffic with only the company of drive-time radio, and he felt a rift forming in the marriage. Brian also thought he and Jenny were arguing more lately—was it because she was hormonal and he was terrified? He found this explanation to be extremely likely. Before the pregnancy, if they had had heated words, one of them would take a walk to a local place and meet a friend, or read the paper, or have a slow cocktail at the counter. He liked how just a little separation, just the tiniest bit of distance, cooled them both. He liked how it was accomplished very easily, without a production. With every foot added to their prospective deck, he’d be farther and farther from the place, where he could just step out for a few minutes, but then he would see himself, fuming, surrounded by the wide hallways and entryway arches of beigy new construction, trapped by rows of fake wrought-iron fencing and hedge work.

In the middle of house hunting, he called his father. They had not been close for some time.

“Don’t understand why you are renting anyway,” his father said. “Just throwing away money.”

Perhaps it was not a rift, just a little fissure.

* * *

When it came to real estate, his boss told him it was impossible to negotiate with a woman with child and so he (Brian) should skip the negotiations all together and pick some boundaries, like not moving north of Park or south of Evans, and that even if they found the perfect home just a few blocks off, he should hold his ground and refuse to offer. Better yet, he should refuse to even look at it. Brian took a softer approach, and went to every showing Jenny was interested in. As their lowball offers were consistently declined, the clacking of their real estate agent’s heels against concrete driveways faded to the smoosh of tennis shoes and pencil skirts and blazers for jeans and hoodies.

Jenny was not ill much but she was changing. Her belly was growing rapidly. She was more contemplative and more interested in cooking. For years, she hadn’t done much in the kitchen besides heat water for coffee and now she left work early and Brian came home to full meals spilling off their tiny kitchen table and mounds of dishes like debris from a war zone. She took off her wedding ring, the ring she had chosen, and placed it on her jewelry tree where Brian figured it would hang indefinitely with all of the other things she might never wear again, like heavy necklaces of bright glass beads, chandelier earrings, and silver bracelets. When he asked her about the ring, Jenny said her hands were swollen, but Brian thought her fingers looked as slim as ever, perfect, in fact, as she plucked leaves off cilantro stems or cubed potatoes.

When their real estate agent told them she didn’t want to work with them anymore, they both caved and put an acceptable offer on an acceptable three-bedroom ranch that was farther from the city than Brian liked and smaller and more used than Jenny had hoped for, and they moved in one weekend, packing up everything from their old life and watching the hired labor fill a truck.

It seemed so final to Brian. It seemed like they had so little.

He was surprised, almost, when all the boxes were unloaded into the new house that their contents were unchanged. It was almost as if by not breaking or spilling or getting lost or just vaporizing that his socks and records and thermal mugs were complicit in the move. Like they had agreed to the move and willed themselves to survive the transport, to be unpacked in a mortgaged space where neither he nor Jenny really wanted to live.

“I think this will be fine,” Jenny said, after their first night in their new bedroom. “It feels okay. I forgot how nice the tile is in the shower.”

“I’m glad you like it,” Brian said.

“I didn’t say I liked it,” Jenny said. “I said I thought it would be fine.”

* * *

On the weekend of the move, Jenny told Brian she had put in notice at work; she was already seven months pregnant and she didn’t plan on going back. Brian suggested that they could carpool for the last few weeks and she could take her leave, and then decide. She said it was already done—no taking back a resignation now. He thought she might miss her job at the law office, where she was in accounting and which he thought she liked. The women had thrown her a shower, and the partners had given her a check inside a card signed by their admins. He thought she should have consulted him. She’d worked hard and was in a mid-level position, and before she was pregnant (a fact that he enjoyed, but people were often surprised by his wife), she flashed wide smiles at parties and wore flowery, cleavage-baring shirts.

“I think it makes more sense, anyway, that we are closer together in the day. What if the baby comes and I’m stuck in traffic,” Brian said.

“I can call the ambulance,” Jenny said.

Brian thought an ambulance seemed unnecessary, but he didn’t say anything. At work—he was in sales—his boss had continued to remind him not to attempt negotiations. His boss had four children by three different wives. Brian did not aspire to be like him, but he could not deny that the man had more experience than him.

It was difficult and also ill-advised for Jenny to lift very much, so as they organized, Brian brought her boxes, opened them carefully, and then set them on a stool for easy reach. He was surprised at the quantity of packages that were directed to the baby’s room—where had these things been hiding in the condo?

Jenny had decided they should wait to find out the sex, so the nursery had been painted a smooth, wasabi green. Every day when he was finally delivered from his commute, there were more parcels on the doorstep: a crib, which needed assembly, a stroller, which looked suitable for off-road terrain.

On the weekend they went shopping, in preparation. They purchased a bedroom set for the area Brian had hoped could be his office, but under Jenny’s direction was becoming a guest room. He shrugged and swiped his Amex through the slot in the terminal. He accepted the receipt, folded it into smaller and smaller squares, and shoved it into his wallet. He arranged for delivery, and he followed his wife across the store’s parking lot and into the next store, her belly a compass leading them through shop after shop, where he pushed the cart and she calculated.  His feet hurt and he hated the plastic smell of the merchandise and he badly wanted a beer. She was frustrated with what she saw as the relative lack of gender-neutral clothing and wondered out loud why it was so impossible to make a few things in green or yellow.

“You wear blue,” Brian said. “It’s not only for men. I have a purple shirt you always say looks nice on me.” The cart had one wobbly wheel and it squeaked on the waxed floor.

“It’s not the same when they’re little,” she said. “I think I would feel weird.”

“How many clothes does a baby need for one day, though,” Brian asked. The wheel protested.

“One day?” Jenny looked at him.

He heard his boss in his head. No negotiation. No negotiar. Nich zu verhandeln. “Yeah, I mean, by day one,” Brian said, “we’ll know if it’s a boy or a girl. I’m saying how much green stuff do we really need, because pink and blue will be fine after that. Or any color.”

“I don’t think it will be fine, Brian.” Jenny said.

“I think it will be fine,” Brian said, and he wished they were not having this conversation in public.

“What if it’s not fine,” Jenny said.

Brian pushed the cart around the corner. They were standing in a tall aisle of diapers shrink-wrapped into large bricks and he questioned how these could be realistically maneuvered into the trunk of the car.

“It will be fine.” The skin around his lips felt dry. He wasn’t really sure if they were talking about onesie colors or something else, but he wanted to be right. He wanted her to believe him.

* * *

The baby coming was very alarming to Brian. For months, he had felt a knot in his belly—he speculated that maybe it was sympathy pains or indigestion, but he knew it was fear. He wondered if he should have prepared more, if he should not have fought Jenny so much on the house, because now he did not have an office. Now they had five times as much space as the condo, but they were running out of space anyway. He could admit there were some things that were nice about living out of the city center. Parking was nice. If they were going to have to do all this shopping, the proximity was nice. His commute was not nice, but it was not unbearable. On the drive home, he liked listening to a call-in radio show that offered advice to mostly women. Once he thought he heard Jenny’s voice on the line—the program used a voice disguiser in some cases.

My husband is not excited for our baby, the caller said, her voice graveled through a machine. I asked him if he wanted a boy or a girl and he said it didn’t matter.

Does it matter? the host asked.

No, said the caller. Not to me. But I am surprised it doesn’t matter to him.

* * *

As it turned out, Brian was not in traffic when the baby came. He and Jenny were sitting on their sofa—a new sofa—on a Saturday morning and she gave a little grunt.

“Are you okay?” he asked, but she was already up, maneuvering away from the upholstery as her water broke, beautifully, he thought, all over her jammy pants and house slippers.

And then it was happening. He drove carefully to their new hospital, there was valet so he used that. The attendants brought a wheelchair for Jenny and she accepted it gracefully. There was some waiting, some paperwork. Mostly, from his perspective, waiting. When he went to Jenny in the room, she was in recline, and sweating. He had a hard time understanding it. Women had been having babies for thousands of years, but somehow the process had not sped up, unlike, say, intercontinental travel or building a fire. He wondered if there were some drugs the doctor should be using or if there was something Jenny should be doing differently—or something he should have done, like driven her to yoga classes. She had talked about yoga, but after he got out of the car at the end of the day, he was incapable of getting back in. He had told her to drive herself and she had given him a sad smile.

“It’s couples yoga,” she said, and the idea scared him enough that he went straightaway to take a shower.

After some more time passed, he was hungry and the hospital vending machine offered questionable granola bars and candy. He chose a Twix that was stale and demoralizing.

He was thinking of getting a new car. For as long as he had known Jenny, she had never had a car. He wasn’t sure she should be at home all day with the baby and no car. He was also tired of running errands. As he waited, he thought about the car situation extensively. Jenny in the car, driving carefully with their baby. The child in the car, strapped in securely. The shine on the wheels, the new paneling. The gauges, glowing brightly against Jenny’s cheeks and carefully illuminating the temperatures and pressures of the vehicle, in constant, quiet confirmation that everything was functioning normally.

It was hours later when their daughter came. Jenny gripped his hand—still, her fingers did not seem swollen—and Brian’s thoughts went blank for a moment, as if he had gotten an electric shock or the wind knocked out of him, and when his head started firing again, he had a feeling like the time he successfully plunged out the garbage disposal and the pipes freed with a satisfying gurgle, and the knot in his stomach moved some.

They had a girl, tiny and new, with crumpled ears and gooey hair.

Jenny’s face when she met their daughter—he had never seen anything like it.

He had to sanitize his hands and put on a gown over his rumpled clothes, but he held her while she screamed a perfect, whole sound.

“Hello,” Brian said. “Your mother did very well, I think.” He brushed his lips across her wrinkled forehead.

Her body was warm in his arms.

He thought that things were changing.

* * *

Jenny’s mother came on the overnight flight and when she arrived she was angry at TSA and also everything else. Brian thought she had a ridiculous amount of luggage, but later recanted when he saw her packing included snacks and a large bottle of whiskey, which he would have picked up for her, and he told her so, but she said she wasn’t sure if the store would have her brand. She had to have her brand.

They called their daughter Stella, which Brian had argued was a southern-sounding name or a kind of beer, but his mother-in-law’s name was Lucy Estelle and Jenny told him it was Latin for star.

He was surprised at the baby’s lull. He had taken time off work—his boss told him not to worry if he wanted to come back early, he wouldn’t judge!—and had expected total chaos, but Jenny and her mother chatted in low voices and Lucy bleached the bathtub so Jenny could soak and, on day two, she cooked two huge pots of soup and two massive casseroles and divided everything up into labeled containers in the freezer. Stella mostly slept.

“Just in case,” Lucy said, “you have a couple nights when all you can do is reheat.” She winked and sipped from her whiskey. Brian went for a beer and clinked the neck of the bottle to the glass of rattly ice and liquor.

Brian had always thought his mother-in-law, in addition to being a drunk, was pushy, but he was grateful for her then, when Jenny was napping and Stella was fussing. She shoved his daughter into his arms and demanded that he change her or feed her from Jenny’s pumped milk or walk in a circle and bounce her.

On night four, Brian woke to Lucy leaning over him—Jenny had been up every other time and was dozing deeply. Stella was screaming.

“Get up,” something about the dark always urging a whisper, “and go to your daughter!”

“I’m up, I’m up,” Brian said.

“She needs you,” Lucy said.

Brian padded through the unlit house toward Stella, Lucy trailing with a blanket and a bottle. He knew she was training him for Jenny’s sake; Brian didn’t have younger siblings or young cousins, and his father had not been the hands-on type.

He liked that: needs.

He cradled his daughter’s head with his hands.

* * *

When he had first met Jenny, they’d been at the show of a local band and he’d spilled beer all over her shoes. She was nice about it, though her friends were not—they sneered at him and told him he would have to buy her another pair. He was excited he would get to see her again. He had left Jenny with his number and said it was up to her, and the next day she called and said, Nordstrom¸ Daddy-o, and he picked her up in front of her building and they hung out in the mall like teenagers might have.

She chose a pair of suede platforms but, when he was checking out, confessed her shoes from the other night had been from Payless.

“That’s okay,” he said. “Should we go somewhere else?”

They spent the afternoon on a coffee-shop patio until finally Jenny said that she really wanted to get going so she could try on her new shoes. When Brian said he would drop her home, she said no. Your place.

* * *

Brian did get a new car, while Lucy was still in town. He chose a cherry-red sedan and he fully admitted that his salesman training had dissolved when he thought of his daughter. He had been completely upsold on safety features. The interior was gray, and he felt it was extremely sharp. He asked for one of those large bows that he had seen on television, but the dealership told him they only had those in winter and they were extra anyway.

He told the man who was helping him that the car was for his wife, who was at home with their daughter. The man told Brian that if it were him, he would give the old car to his wife and keep the new one.

“Kids, you know,” he said. “They make a lot of messes.”

“I’d rather have her in the newer one,” Brian said. “More reliable.”

“But that upholstery will show everything, man. Just wait.”

“Okay,” Brian said. He was all right with waiting.

After the financing was sorted and the signatures collected, Brian understood he had no way to get the cars back without Lucy or Jenny, so he gave the man another $50 from his wallet to follow in the old sedan and one of the maintenance staff followed them both.

He liked his life, he decided. He liked the women: Lucy, Jenny, Stella. He kept his radio silent and he repeated their names as he drove. The car was smooth against the pavement, and the wheel responded to even the slightest touch. Brian thought they were a little like the pioneers then, the three men and his two cars, caravanning across an unfamiliar landscape, headed toward a new idea of home.

Wendy Fox received her MFA from Inland Northwest Center for Writers. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in P·M·S | poemmemoirstory, Washington Square, Painted Bride Quarterly, and others. She was included in the 2006 English-language Tales from the Expat Harem, the no. 1 bestseller in Turkey. In 2011, she was a top-five finalist in the Minnesota State University at Mankato’s Rooster Hill Press short fiction competition, and her story Ten Penny was selected as part of a series by The Emerging Writer’s Network for 2011 National Short Story Month. She currently lives in Colorado.

Read Wendy Fox’s comments on Stephen McQuiggan’s “20 Gestures.”

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
Whether we care to acknowledge it, life is about making sacrifices and compromises, especially when we put the needs of our loved ones before our own. Often when we give so much of ourselves, the tiniest things, like having our most fundamental needs met, can fill us with renewed enthusiasm, even a profound joy, and Wendy Fox beautifully captures this soulful intoxication in “The Car,” reminding us of what it’s like to be human.

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Comments on this story by Ryan Werner, author of “Trace”
In making room for the unexpected, we must adjust not our expectations—the old news of the situation—but instead adjust our outlook. In “The Car,” we see the importance of the present and near future bearing down hard on a couple who wish to master themselves separately and together. In the spirit of pioneers, their personal daily revelations turn beautifully into the possibility of success.

The afternoon of the gunshot, Mum and Dad had been sitting on the front veranda, overlooking the brown cliffs, the air was dry and heavy, heat radiated from the hills. Mum was lazily stirring tea, Dad reading the Euro Weekly News. Kate was on the floor between them, lying on her stomach, reading Metamorphoses, which Dad had first extracted from some bookshelf two days before and hurled at me with a sharp, “For once, sit still.” Being seven, the book seemed foreign, incomprehensible, but Kate had taken it, reading sections at a time, translating them to me later, creating scenes for us to act out in the lemon orchard.

I had watched Kate reading from across the portico, and staring at my arms, believing the sun was about to transform me into a lizard, like the yellow and brown ones watching us from the walls. I wanted to climb into her lap, tell her about my potential metamorphosis, show her how the shade was moving anti-clockwise and circling around, but our parents were there, so I kept my mouth shut. Instead, I stared at Mum, who, after a few minutes, looked up, pursing her lips, words about to emerge. Kate, catching the gaze, closed her book and walked over to me, taking my hand, as she asked our parents for permission to leave.

“Go on then,” Mum sighed, with a wave of her hand. Dad didn’t even twitch, and I wondered whether he had heard. Mum then tagged on, “Just don’t go too far.”

I skipped down the dirt path, Kate following, the sunlight burning our bodies, smacking our eyes shut, and once we were a good enough distance from the house, I said, “Let’s look for the well.”  The well was mythical, an invention of Kate’s, I think. We spent hours wherever we were searching for it. Kate taking my hand whenever our parents began to raise their voices, saying, “We’re going to find it today. I know we will.”

The well lay precisely on the border between the backwoods of the unknown and our yard—wherever our yard was, whether in Fowey or St. Ives or Benamargosa. It was difficult to find the well because it was merely a dark opening in the earth, only a meter or two across, covered by green grass or wet snow or slippery mud (depending on the locale and the season). Nothing marked it.  But, it was dangerous—a deep, deep hole, a wide open mouth, a place where you could lean over the edge and fall into the depths of, and beyond.

Scrambling through the orchard, we searched, the bushes and trees rustling with life, buzzing with the reedy siren of cicadas. Taking sticks, we poked at the grass, the reddish-brown dirt, regular Robinson Crusoes, running along the incline and back through the groves, throwing lemons as missiles, peeling them open, sucking and pulling our cheeks in, heading down towards the barren riverbank, where, we liked to imagine, a collage of foliage, a rainbow of color and scent, once grew—once upon a time when the river flowed strong and fast.

I don’t know how long we had been gone, but as we were crossing the imaginary river, we heard the gunshot. At the sound, I ran towards the house—away from the dried up river bed where Kate and I were playing—up the dirt path, through the lemon grove, slipping on the rotting avocados, tripping on the bones that Sally constantly buried and unearthed. Because I approached from the back fields, the terrace’s chain-link fence separated me from my parents standing in the white kitchen. I scrambled up it, intending to slide over, but I had forgotten about the wire barbs on top, and my arm caught as I fell down into the prickly bushes—landing hard, blood dribbling down, caught in the no-man’s land between the fence and the thorny shrubs. I stayed, quiet, crawling into position, one hand on the fence, the other on the shrubbery, the distant scene unfolding before me like a silent film, although the sliding doors were open and my parents were shouting.

The stage was set: Gun. Mum. Dad. In my memory, the three are connected: my parents assembled for an old western-style shootout. Even though I know this is not true, not what happened.

My mother was gesturing, red fingertips, her movements large, dark hair pinned back into a chignon. My father was stoic, grasping his Ruger pistol, which I recognized because it was his favorite, hauling it with him whenever he hunted foxes or hares back home in Cornwall—but had never used (at least not to my knowledge), relying instead on his 17 Remington or Winchester 3.

Dad extended his arm then, took aim with the small handgun, and I flinched, caught between the shrub and fence, thinking: my father means to kill her; he means to kill my mother. Then the thought metamorphosed. The gun was not aimed at her but outside, onto the terrace, and for a moment I wondered whether it was directed at me, until I noticed the three puppies sunning on the terracotta titles, eyes still unopened (despite the first shot), and I knew. He meant to kill the puppies.

Kate appeared behind me a few minutes later, falling to the ground far more gracefully than I did, shushing me and clearing a twin viewing screen in the shrubbery.

I put my lips close to her ear. “What’s he doing?”

“He wants to kill the dogs.”

“Why?”

“There are too many strays in Spain.”

“Can’t we take them?”

“It’s too many. They didn’t even want Sally, let alone her pups.”

Mum put her hand on top of Dad’s, pushing the gun down until Dad dropped it to his side. He pointed to the dogs, then at her, throwing his hands in the air, an exaggerated gesture I didn’t expect from him.

“Why’s he angry? Does Mum not want him to kill them?”

We watched as Mum motioned to the area around the dogs and threw her own hands up in the air, then moved to the sink, filled it up as if she were about to wash dishes. She again motioned to the puppies, and, grabbing the gun from Dad, she placed it on the floor against the wall, near the kitchen table, letting it stand guard over our rows of muddy shoes.

“I—I’m not sure.”

Mum came out onto the terrace then, scooped up the three puppies in one handful, took them into the kitchen.

Kate pulled me toward the fence, “Let’s go, wolly,” but we were stuck, and instead, she drew me close to her, burying my head against her chest, her arms a circle around my head. I still heard the splashing of water, and Kate whispered to me the tale of three puppies that magically metamorphosed into a family of fish and swam away together.

We stayed outside for a while, coming back to the house at dusk, entering through the kitchen—the sink empty, the gun gone. Dad was nowhere in sight, but Mum was drinking red wine from a long, thin glass. She looked at us, our tattered dresses, stained with dirt and blood and grass, our muddy shoes.

“Shoes and dresses off. Don’t even think of getting dirt in here.”

My parents divorced later that year, and Kate and I spent even more time traveling—mostly throughout Cornwall but farther afield too, to Manhattan and Brazil and South Africa—the map of the world a game board, the pawns called upon when it was convenient or strategic or deliberate.  And, for the most part, I forgot about the puppies. A faint, raised mark, on my upper left arm was the only reminder.

* * *

The next time I saw that particular gun I was fifteen, and it was December. My father pulled me outside, his fingers sitting just under that scar on my left arm, the Ruger bumping against my side as he dragged the gun and me along, towards the stable.

Buttercup, my 29-year-old Arab gelding, looked at us as we approached. I held my hand out to him, but, with no sugar cubes or even an apple or carrot, he was disinterested.

Dad shoved the gun towards me. “Take it. He’s sick and suffering. And useless.”

I looked at Dad, my palms began to sweat.

“It’ll hurt less than the tumors. Quick and painless—less agony than anything else.”

I wanted to object, but he was so expectant. I searched for my other voice, but Kate had started at Oxford a few months before, and I was alone.

“Come now. Do it. Someone else will clean up the mess.” He took Buttercup’s lead and held it tight and then came to me, roughly pushed me into position, standing tight against my back, his arm alongside mine, his cheek resting on my head, the gun light in my grip, positioned perpendicular to Buttercup’s forehead—close but not touching—in the center of an imaginary X formed by a line from his left ear to right eye, right ear to left eye. I didn’t want to look at Buttercup. I wanted to close my eyes, blink away the situation, but it would have been worse for him had I missed, so I looked into his brown eyes, took aim, and then Dad squeezed my finger against the trigger until I heard the shot.

* * *

A month later my mother shot herself with the same Ruger. I did not know how my father’s gun ended up in her possession, but I knew that it did, parsing together the story through snippets of conversations at her funeral, so that while dirt was thudding on her coffin, all I could think about were the puppies and Buttercup, and I supposed that Mum finally decided someone else could deal with the mess.

At the cemetery, I stood in front of the hole in the ground, not knowing what to say or do. My father was reserved, Kate leaning against him, weeping silently, and I stood next to her, as she tightened her grip on me, her hand weaving itself in and out of the hollow gaps between my fingers. It began to snow and white flakes grazed her eyelashes.

I don’t remember much else about that day, but I remember being alone with Kate for the first time since September. We had spent Christmas batted between Mum and Dad, visiting cousins and relatives and people we had never met but were expected to know. I tried telling her about Buttercup over winter-term but stopped, somehow sensing that my tragedy and I were simply suspended in her mind, waiting to be filed away, and, instead spent most of the half-term finishing coursework and revising, while she cleaned and recleaned her room and then left, only to return to Cornwall a week later.

We walked slowly through the snow, and she said, “They should have told you that Mum was depressed, ill.”

“Ill?”

“It doesn’t matter anymore. Let’s go outside. We need to get out of here.”

We walked into the dusk. I wanted to go towards the sea, but I knew Kate couldn’t bear the sound of the waves (for the same reason I hated the howl of the wind) so we walked through the garden, down along the house, as the snow began to turn to rain.

I waited for her to speak, but finally I asked, “What are you looking at?”

“Nothing.”

I stared into the sky, wishing to see what she saw. “Why’d she do it, Kate?”

“I reckon she thought life wasn’t what she expected.”

She continued walking beside me, pinpricks of water—phantoms of the snow—sprinkling down, the naked trees surrounding us. As Kate took my hand, and I looked at her, needing to explain how much I needed her, missed her. “Maybe I’m having a mid-life crisis.”

“You’re not even sixteen.”

“Maybe I’m going to die young.”

We were silent then, and she was crying, and I wanted to walk away. I only wanted her to hold me like she used to, feeling like I had fallen down the well, plummeting farther and farther away from home, and I needed her to understand, but by the time I found the words, she was already gone, back to Oxford.

* * *

In the weeks that followed, I searched for the Ruger at my father’s, certain it ended up back with him. It seemed important that I found the gun, although I had no intentions of doing anything with it.  After three months, I uncovered it, lying in the lower left-hand drawer of his office desk—innocent as a pencil—buried amongst bank statements and staples. Dad was in Sao Paulo at the time and had mistakenly left the drawer key on top of the desk.  I lifted the gun out of the drawer, expecting it to be heavier, heftier, remembering it to be more unwieldy. I examined the barrel, the grip, the trigger, wondering how mother had felt, the puppies and Buttercup. I wondered: staring into a gun, did everything change?

I took aim, pointing the Ruger first at my father’s desk, then at a blossom I noticed on the floor, dragged in from the garden. It was green, pinkish inside, ripe and ready to burst. It made me angry, its mere appearance promising that soon the scenery would be swallowed in an eruption of growth, of color, but in my mind, the velvety softness was already giving way to a crinkly autumn leaf, and I knew that the fugitive flower would soon be burnished by the summer’s heat and chilled by the winter wind, time forcing Earth into new revolutions.

Everything had changed, but I knew Kate would be home that summer, and I had believed, hoped, that she would make it right, as she always had before, but there was a dark part of my mind that knew everything always did and would change. And, thinking of Mum, of puppies and horses, feeling the Spanish heat on my face, the pulsating throb in my arm, I took aim at the bud and pulled the trigger.

Allison Ivans Coulson is a writer of fiction and non-fiction, and she has studied at Johns Hopkins University and the University of East London. Currently she is pursing an MFA in Creative Writing at Hofstra University while working as a middle school English teacher. Her work has been featured on chicklitshorties.com and The Rusty Nail.

Read Allison Ivans Coulson’s comments on Colleen Fullin’s “Times Ending, Times Beginning.”

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Notes from Denis J. Underwood, Online Managing Editor
First pass, the writing drew me in immediately. I very much enjoyed the vibrant descriptions. Some of these brought forth childhood memories of places where I had spent summers, of childhood friends I had passed the time with—fortunately, without being involved with such tragic and stressful events. Subsequent readings revealed themes like metamorphosis that were present throughout the story and really resonated. In the end I found some solace. Finally, the gun is used without fatal consequence. Has the chain finally been broken? There is lingering uneasiness after reading this story.

Thus he was at an overpriced L.A. sushi bar, dunking the last of his ahi tuna in soy sauce and wasabi, when he received the fateful tweet. “Critical failure of ballast release, #JimCameron expedition in danger.”  He liked to think millions of phones erupted at that moment with the same message. He liked to think that everyone, decades from now, would remember where they were when they got the Cameron tweet, but as he looked around the news had gone unnoticed; no other phone received that crucial vibration. But five minutes later the plasma screen, hanging above the bar, promptly switched from a Law and Order rerun to Brian Williams soberly announcing the news that set the world watching.

The film would open aboard the Mermaid Sapphire. James Cameron standing aboard the ship like a postmodern Jacques Cousteau, wearing thermal underwear and a black synthetic wool cap, posing for pictures before his tiny one-man sub Deapsea Challenger, which would dive seven miles beneath the surface between the impossibly high walls of the Mariana Trench.  The shot peels back to reveal the cameras and microphones surrounding him where he’s delivering his departing speech and thoughtfully stroking his white goatee: “As a child I was obsessed with the ocean and to this day, it is the last frontier on earth, as mysterious as the surface of an alien planet.”  Of course, we all know what awaits him at the bottom of that trench, his wide gung-ho grin becoming all the more tragic.

Cut to the months of preparation. A montage glossing over news hysteria, complete with footage of the practice dives, the Rolex/National Geographic co-sponsorship, and the eerie dry-run in the New Britain Trench, where the ballast release fails, but the fail-safe rusts out as planned, returning a cramped Cameron to the surface.

William jotted down these notes into his iPhone. Just a few hours before he had watched the Deepsea Challenge iPhone app display a stylized map of the ocean floor, pointing out historic landmarks of depth as Cameron rushed past them in his three hour descent. Oddly, the most efficient means of communication with the sub was in the form of texts, which were then tweeted upon arrival.

1000 feet: The deepest dive using scuba equipment. “The boiling temperature of the surface is starting to fall away to cold now, marine life present but distorted through turbulence.”

3300 feet: The beginning of the “midnight zone,” where light from above can no longer penetrate into the depths. “Well there it goes, the rest of the trip is going to be a long dark ride until we hit bottom.”

2.5 miles: the resting place of the Titanic. “Read my manometer. #Titanic, one of my favorite depths.”

6.5 miles: the depth that the Trieste (the only other manned vehicle to descend into the Deep), reached as a viewing window cracked and the walls trembled.

Just under seven miles: touchdown.  “I’ve hit bottom.”

Cameron had loaded the sub with three sets of cameras. One was on the inside, in order to keep a visual diary, and two were on the outside, in order to film the Deep in perfect 3D.

We see the reception of the text back on the Mermaid Sapphire, the crew huddling around the communications room. There are cheers and shouts of jubilation.

One anxious looking man in the corner asks, “But the Rolex, is the Rolex still functioning?”

The Rolex has been attached to one of the robotic arms of the submersible, as if the arm was in fact wearing the timepiece.  Cameron moves the arm in view from the window to deliver the stunning report: “The Rolex watch is functioning and keeping perfect time.”

On the boat the cheers are renewed and this time the anxious man joins in.

For the moment, Cameron is in a place outside the world. He checks in every hour with the Mermaid Sapphire, but we see that there’s something in the way of disappointment for Cameron. The abyss is after all, black and dead. The surface of the trench is simply silt, the lights from the sub barely illuminating the darkness. He can see the wall of the trench on his left, and he sends up some preliminary photos, as well as taking samples of the sediment around him.

* * *

Cameron decides to cut the expedition short. The left hydraulic arm has failed due to a pressurized leak, and the sonar for topographical mapping isn’t functioning either, but when he flips the large switch to engage the ballast release, the sub doesn’t move. After a two hour descent and three hours on the bottom, he is going to have to wait another five to six for the fail-safe to engage.

Here, we cut again to Cameron before the dive. He says, “Actually, the greater danger down there, somewhat counter-intuitively, isn’t asphyxiation but hypothermia.”  There’s no climate control in the sub. He has been provided with a sleeping bag should it get too cold.

Back on the sub Cameron is bundled up, more than eight hours under, and he’s shivering violently. He attempts to keep warm inside his sleeping bag. Unfortunately, condensation has been building up inside the sub, and the moisture adds to his discomfort.

* * *

Until this point, the crew of the Mermaid Sapphire had still been under the impression that the fail-safe ballast release would function as intended. Unfortunately, two, then three hours past the deadline for the fail-safe, the sub had not so much as budged from its resting place.

Thus came the second tweet, the second tweet William would remember along with, at least, the rest of Hollywood, certainly. “Fail-safe ballast release failure. #JimCameron safety in jeopardy.”  He nearly choked over his vodka-Redbull. Again he looked up at the television above the bar, and countless heads were swiveling at just that moment where the muted news was displaying: “Critical update in the James Cameron expedition.”

The girl sitting next to William at the bar said, “Who’s James Cameron, is he some explorer?”

For the first time we see panic aboard the Mermaid Sapphire. In the communications room the head sub technician, Ron Allum, known as “The Professor” is contacting Cameron via radio as a large group of the crew crowds around him. “Access the hatch below your left knee.  You should be able to reach the wiring on this side.”  Given the failure of the fail-safe they’re attempting to repair the conventional mechanism. The Professor gives Cameron a long set of instructions, cross certain wires, attempt to bypass whatever is causing the interference.

“Well,” Cameron says, “any change?”

“…no, no change…”

He takes his hand off the radio transmitter. The technique here would be to dramatize the situation, moving the camera shakily around the room as the group of scientists talk in somber tones. “Do we have any idea why the fail-safe mechanism failed?”

“I have a theory,” one will say, perhaps the small one with a tie-clip and unfashionable glasses, who will be set up in some previous scene as being somewhat of the underdog. He refers to some of the preliminary images that Cameron was able to transmit. “See these darker points along the trench walls here and here? I believe these are caused by a halocline, the same process that creates blue holes. I’m going to suggest, that perhaps one of the reasons Challenger Deep seems to be an outlier, even in terms of the Mariana Trench, is that its actually an extremely large and ancient underwater blue hole, boring down into the earth and thus fresh water, so the fail-safe wouldn’t rust out as intended.”

Silence falls over our group of scientists. One asks, “Will we be able to recover him?”

According to almost all sources the following line was never said, but one man in the room states, “Well. He is seven miles deep.”

Meanwhile, we see Cameron anxiously awaiting any news from above.

“…Jim… this is the Mermaid Sapphire… do you read us…”

“Yeah,” he says, “What’s the story up there?”

We can barely make out the words through the static, “…we think the fail-safe, um, failed, due to a peculiarity of your depth. We think you’re in fresh water…”

“How is that possible?” he asks.

“…we think it might be an ancient aquifer, random chance, just bad luck…”

“What do we do?”

“…umm. Jim. We may not be able to recover you…”

The camera closes into Cameron’s face. We see conflicting emotions of anguish and disbelief.  He pounds his fists against the side of the sub.

Cut again to Cameron before the dive. “If something should go wrong,” he says, “if for some reason something prevents me from returning to the surface, it’ll be a slow death. It’ll be a race between freezing to death and asphyxiation, but I’ve got 60 hours worth of O2, so freezing wins.”

* * *

In his L.A. apartment, William was buzzed awake by a vibration on the table. “Rescue operation under way, #US Navy plans to use the 1960s DVS Trieste.”William immediately got up and turned on his 65 inch plasma.

He caught the tail end of the report, “Race against time. The Trieste will be in place for the dive in about five hours from now. Then it’s another five hours for the dive. By that time Cameron will have been in the sub for 37 hours. The Mermaid Sapphire is still receiving communication from Cameron, but have growing concerns over possible hypothermia. You can keep track of the status of the Trieste via the National Geographic DeepseaChallenger app.”

We see the Navy ship tie up to the Mermaid Sapphire. Its cargo is the now ancient bathyscaphe Trieste, the only other submersible that can achieve the depths of the trench. It will be manned by two SEALs. We can see as the Trieste is slowly lowered into the water, the large crack still present on the viewing window. (Of course this was long repaired, but it’ll be added in as a poignant image.)

As the Trieste descends, The Professor explains how the rescue operation will work.  “The Trieste was designed as a much larger craft. It measures out to be 150 tons as opposed to the Deepsea Challenger, which is just under 12. We’ve affixed a large electromagnet to the bottom of Trieste. They will locate Cameron via sonar. The hope is, that they will be able to snare his submersible with the electromagnet, and the buoyancy of the Trieste will be enough to carry them both to the surface.”

With the Trieste descending, we cut to Cameron as he delivers his last transmission. He appears exhausted, his face beginning to have splotches of red and black: the beginning of severe frost bite. He is engaging in paradoxical undressing (the hypothalamus beginning to misfire as the heat-loss is becoming particularly deadly.)  He has shed his sleeping bag. What we see now parallels the very first shot of Cameron, proud and stalwart. Here he is the same, but out of an increasing delusion.

“Do you read me Mermaid Sapphire,” he says.

“… we read you…”

“Is Ron there?”

There’s a shuffling on the end of the line.

“… Jim.  It’s Ron…”

“Hey Professor.”  His words are beginning to sound slurred, the cold slowing down his processing.

“…hey yourself, Jim…”

“I need you to do me a favor.”

“…anything…”

“I think this is going to be my grave.”

“…James, we’re coming to rescue you…”

“No,” he says, “It won’t work. There’s something out there in the dark, looking at me.”

“…You know that’s impossible…”

We can’t know what is running through his mind here, maybe only drawing from his films. Perhaps, in order to deal with the impenetrable dark, he is creating an alien antagonist, residing in the comb-like holes in the trench’s wall.

“It’s out there,” he says, “The Trieste may find me, but I’ll already be dead. So you gotta do me a favor.”

“…okay, Jim, what?…”

“Destroy the footage of my cameras.  It’s crap anyway.  Nothing but darkness and diatomaceous ooze (this he didn’t actually say, it’s appropriated, instead, from the Trieste‘s 1960 dive).  It’s the abyss down here Ron, and you know what Nietzsche said about the abyss?”

“…What did he say?…”

“When you look into the abyss, it looks into you. We’re not meant to look into the abyss, Ron. To bring the footage back up would be to bring the abyss’s eye to the surface.”

“…that’s crazy talk, Jim…”

“Is it?”  He laughs. “Yeah, sure. I’m gonna rest now, the creature out there can take it or leave it.”

“…Jim?  Jim do you read me?  Respond…”

Cameron moves away from the radio.  He lies down as best he can within the cramped space. The radio still crackles in and out.

“…Jim?  Respond Jim…”

On the Mermaid Sapphire,The Professor repeatedly tries to reconnect with Cameron to no avail. Hours later he’s still making attempts every 15 minutes, greeted only with silence. As the Trieste falls into the sea, we hear a repeat of depths in military jargon, deadly serious, lacking the joviality of Cameron’s initial descent. The film has gone quiet, and we are in purgatory. We know outside this radio station, however, life continues. It’s as if Cameron has become a permanent fixture of the deep, a reminder to future explorers, like the frozen bodies of Everest: momentous and unrecoverable.

* * *

William received the tweet, “Contact made with #JimCameron, Trieste on the ascent,” nearly six hours before.  Now he was back at the same bar idly flirting with the bartender all the while keeping his iPhone before him with the app open and watching the ascent, excruciatingly slow with the added weight of Cameron’s sub.

Nobody knew what they would find when they sawed open the Deepsea Challenger. He had been out of contact for 9 hours. If the scrubbers behaved admirably, he should have had enough oxygen, but given his state in the last communication, it was unknown if the hypothermia had advanced too far.

Like Apollo 13, it only really got interesting when it failed. The world watched on the edge of their seats as the news camera zoomed in on the hull, sparks flying from the blowtorch.  Everyone in the bar was suddenly quiet; conversation and the clink of glasses ceased. The pressurization of the cabin popped as they removed the hatch. They reached in to find Cameron alive, but barely so.

The way he had imagined it, Cameron would pop back to life, exposed to the warm tropic air.  He wakes up and after a few minutes huddled in blankets, we see touches of black on his face, his hands are wrapped, but nonetheless it recalls the end of The Abyss (1989) where Bud strolls triumphantly out of the alien craft, despite his assumed death warrant at the bottom of the ocean. We see that same cocky grin, knowing that this isn’t the end of Cameron, but one insignificant trial in his career.

As he watched the footage of Cameron, however, William’s image of the return was quickly corrected. Instead, he was unclothed, though found lying underneath his layers, an unconscious attempt to re-heat. Cameron was loaded into a gurney. He was not Bud; he was someone on the brink of death, and the world was yet to know if he would survive, much less become stronger from the ordeal.

Cameron lost his feet and several fingers. He was left with some brain damage, which resulted in a severe stutter. He declined interviews. Incidentally, the sub’s Rolex was discovered to function perfectly.

It was almost a year later when William met Cameron again.  He had finished a script for Seven Miles Deep and Cameron had expressed interest. When he entered the study, Cameron was waiting for him. He wore a black turtle neck, matching the discoloration of his face, and two gleaming prosthetic feet were visible below his pant legs.

“I read your script,” he said.

“Yeah?” asked William, “What did you think?”

“The footage from the sub is unusable.”

Cameron pressed a remote, and a wooden panel slid away to reveal a television screen.

“Here,” he said. Bubbling underwater turbulence, blue giving way to black.

“Here,” again. Blackness all around, the distant image of what might be a rock face. The camera pans to the ground, a flat, apparently dusty surface, panning again to the Rolex.

“And here.” An ascent, turbulence again, only blackness to light.

“You see?” said Cameron.

There was no humor in his voice. William nodded.

“It’s unusable,” he said, “Not an ounce of material. Why bother to film black in 3D?”

“Well…”

“And the ending’s wrong,” he said.  “You have me returning. This line here, about the men trapped on Everest. That’s more like it.  Maybe that could be a film.”

William learned after his meeting that Cameron already had a film in the works. He had abandoned his previous pursuits; Avatar 2 and 3 were taken over by Lucas, and Cameron focused his attention on Hadopelagic. When it came out years later, the world had almost forgotten about Cameron. It was decidedly avant-garde. It depicted a man living in a Bathysphere, deep in the trench. He received shipments from above, but he was trapped, the darkness his only companion. Meanwhile, the world was increasingly shallow, an orgy ever ongoing on the yacht above. There were large portions of the film left black. The movie began and ended in a sort of stasis, never resolving the solitude of this man, and the world continued as though it always will. The movie flopped at the box office, but many hailed it his best work.

Tom Graham is a writer who lives and works in Seattle, WA.  He received his MA in English and creative writing at Western Washington University.

Read Tom Graham’s comments on Anthony Spaeth’s “Ilpohechatoka!”

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Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
There are some stories that just leap off the page at you with their creativity and execution, and this was definitely one, for me. The melding of truth and fiction is executed seamlessly in a way that makes the situation that much more visceral, and the momentum of the action kept me hooked through the entire piece. That there’s plenty more going on here—a fantastic use of twisted parody that plays on the power of celebrity, the dangers of obsession and the loneliness found in the sudden recognition of one’s mortality—made this a story that we simply had to publish.

Mrs. Bushnell, across the hall, cracked opened her door. Anton caught a glimpse of her on the way out, her hair the color of Kraft macaroni and cheese. She looked out whenever they passed. Anton pictured her behind her carved mahogany barricade, ready to deprive him of his privacy. She didn’t have to hover. He and Max made their daily treks on a schedule.

Outside it was snowing. Anton moved slowly because Max’s gait was troubled and uncertain. White flakes piled up on the silver fur and periodically Anton brushed them off. He felt the grinding of the dog’s old joints shivering up the leash.

“Oatmeal this morning, my man,” he mumbled, bending to scratch Max’s ears. “Good for the bowels.”

Riverside Park was another three blocks away. This early, before the cops came around, Anton had always let Max off the leash. He’d tool around the grass, stopping at each tree, sniffing. “Checking his pee-mail,” Anton told anyone who glanced over.

This morning the German shepherd stood at Anton’s side, not moving, not even looking around with his clabbered eyes. “Go on, old man. Put your nose in gear. There’s still plenty of smells out there.”

Anton fingered the letter. For three days it had nested in the pocket of his jacket. Now and then, he’d heave up from his easy chair and go to the closet to reassure himself it was still there.

“Fifteen years,” he said to the top of Max’s head. “She waits fifteen years. And what did I do to her? I still don’t know. Sheesh.”

The dog lifted pleading eyes.

“Go on, do your business.” He sounded harsh, he knew. But if he grew soft with the dog, things would fall apart. The center couldn’t hold. Who wrote that? Wordsworth? When he was a schoolboy, he knew. In those days, he knew a lot of things. Now all he knew was how to drag this poor dog around when the dog didn’t want to go.

“You should put him to sleep,” Mrs. Bushnell had grunted last Tuesday as she bent to retrieve her New York Post. “It’s criminal to drag him out when he’s hurting so bad. And in this weather!”

Anton had no retort and, anyway, her door had already shut. He argued with her all the way to the park. It was his decision to make. He had a right. His dog. His pain. What did she know? Goddamned old biddy.

Max hobbled up the stairs, Anton holding up his rear with a towel sling to make it a little easier. Mrs. Bushnell peered out. “Have a good walk?”

“Yes, thank you.”

He used the towel to dry the snow-soaked fur. Months ago Max loved the feel of a towel. He would burrow his way into the warm terrycloth, nosing Anton as the towel withdrew. But now, as soon as Anton paused, Max dragged himself over to his pallet, still damp.

Anton went into the alcove that served as his kitchen and started water boiling for oatmeal. “We’ll make it from scratch, okay, buddy? What do you say? Healthier, right? It’ll take a while to cool, but that gives you time to rest up, eh?”

When he spooned the lukewarm oatmeal into Max’s bowl, the dog’s nose lifted. But his head drooped back onto the pallet.

“C’mon, old buddy. Get up. Time to eat.” Anton smacked his lips, as if the gesture might persuade the dog to eat. But Max didn’t move. Anton slumped at the rickety farm table and reluctantly shoveled oatmeal into his own mouth. He had to keep up his strength. Max needed him.

Anton thought about the letter again. What made her write now, after all this time? Years ago, he would’ve hacked off an arm, if that would’ve brought him a letter from her. He waited for years and then he bought the dog. Anton had been sitting at the same table, eating oatmeal, thinking about how no one would miss him if he disappeared. It was an odd sensation, as if he’d vanished just by thinking about it. He’d felt a little queasy and had set his spoon down on the newspaper, next to a photograph of a small dog, too small to pull a drowning boy out of the Hudson, although the paper said he had. Anton had wondered if the story was true. He thought it would take a lot more dog to rescue him. When he was little, he’d had a German shepherd. Butch. He had followed Anton everywhere. Once, when Anton was six and they were playing in the woods behind his home, Butch had stopped sideways on the path in front of him. Anton tried to go around the dog, but Butch blocked him. Anton cried and pushed the dog, but Butch wouldn’t move. And then, for no reason Anton could see, Butch let him go. Anton’s father said that night Butch knew there was danger. “What danger?” his mother had asked. Anton’s father shook his head. “We’ll never know but mark my words, that dog saved our boy’s life.”

After he’d given up on his daughter, Anton had turned to the classified ads at the back of the newspaper. “You’ll be lucky,” Mrs. Bushnell had told him, “if this puppy doesn’t bankrupt you. You get sick ones from those ads. Believe me. There aren’t any bargains to be had there.”

Right after he got the dog, Anton had taken Max to the woods in New Jersey—he’d had a car in those days—and there he’d immediately lost him. “I’m an idiot,” he told himself, pacing the trail, calling out to a dog that didn’t yet know his own name. “I’m a confounded ass. I don’t deserve a dog.”

After forty-five minutes, he was close to giving up in despair when a young woman came around a clump of bushes with Max frolicking at the end of her belt, his jutting ears dwarfing his surprisingly delicate snout. The woman’s shorts had slipped down to the swell of her hips. She had a face like fresh butter. “You let this dog off-leash? How old is he?” She unhooked her belt from Max’s collar. “You’re a damned fool, Mister. People like you shouldn’t be allowed to have animals.”

“Really. Oh, jeez. Thank you so much. I’ll never let him off the leash again. I swear.”

“Yeah, right.” She clicked her tongue and marched away, hitching her belt.

Anton believed he’d been a reasonably attractive man in those days. Too old for her, but presentable enough. He’d just turned fifty. There had been a few women in the two years following his divorce, but nothing serious. After Maxine (in whose honor he’d named the dog), he hadn’t wanted to live with any woman. He wasn’t bitter; he didn’t think he was bitter. Maxine had left him for the guy who owned the corner supermarket, six blocks from their apartment, the apartment Anton still occupied. The couple had moved out to Long Island—her new husband probably bought another store out there. And he guessed they must be pretty happy. Maxine always wanted more than he could give her.

He didn’t mean money. Maxine wasn’t like that. She’d wanted passion and he just didn’t seem to have much. A line from Trollope came back to him: “It’s dogged as does it.” That was him. Dogged. No. That wasn’t the line. It was “It’s doggish as does it.” Damn. He couldn’t remember anything anymore.

Four years ago he’d retired, when Markham Insurance Co., Ltd., offered a buyout to senior staff. Belt tightening, they’d called it. It was more like deadwood pruning. He and the twenty-six others who’d jumped at the early retirement package watched their empty desks fill up with men and women a third their age.

When Anton retired, Max was nearly ten. At that time, the dog was already beginning to limp from the arthritic erosion that now made him reluctant to walk a block. That first year at home, Anton told himself the dog might last another year, maybe two. It would be hard, he thought, hard to let go. He’d never been good at letting go. When Maxine left, he called her and went by her place every day. Begged her to give him another chance. She’d cried and begged him in return: Just go away, Anton. Go away and leave me alone, please.

He often fantasized about traveling to South America for a holiday. No more trips was one of the hardest parts of losing Maxine. She’d always made sure they had somewhere to go, something to do, someone to see. Now he endured the prolonged silence of the apartment.

He took a night course in Portuguese and picked up some travel brochures on Rio de Janeiro, poring over photographs of the Cristo and of Sugar Loaf, to which you could only travel on a tram dangling more than seven hundred feet in the air. He thought about taking Max but a story in the New York Times reported airlines leaving crated dogs on the tarmac to cook to death. Anton couldn’t risk it.

So he devoted himself to Max’s old age. He read incessantly about arthritis and its palliatives. He cruised the Internet in search of nutritional aids, herbal preparations, nostrums promising relief from aching joints. Max persevered, whether through Anton’s ministrations or his own spirit, Anton didn’t know. But since Max gave his own survival full measure, Anton couldn’t bring himself to do less.

He switched on the television. A female judge—he didn’t know which one, he never paid much attention—was shouting. He turned the volume down so that Mrs. Bushnell wouldn’t complain. Whenever he watched Jeopardy, his favorite show, he turned the sound up so he could hear, but Mrs. Bushnell frequently knocked on his door to ask him to please turn it down. Then he’d move the coffee table aside and shifted his easy chair forward until his knees almost pressed against the screen. If he bent slightly forward, he could hear well enough. Someone at the drugstore had told him it was possible to set up his television so that he could read what people were saying. But Anton had never figured out how to do that.

The judge kept yelling. Anton turned off the set. He didn’t like judges.

He’d had only one encounter with a courtroom. It hadn’t been during his divorce; Maxine had handled everything and he didn’t need to appear. She didn’t ask for anything, he didn’t ask for anything. Beatrice was nineteen, on her own, and Maxine planned to marry the supermarket guy. Anyway, she worked as a lab technician and made more money than he did, he was sure, although he’d never seen her paycheck.

No, his single encounter with court had to do with his daughter. When Beatrice was twenty, she went to court to stop being his daughter. The supermarket owner adopted her. Maxine had apologized to Anton in the courthouse hallway.

“It wasn’t my idea,” she said, twisting a Kleenex. “I just want you to know that, Anton. But Abel couldn’t refuse. I mean, Bee insisted and he felt it might seem like he was rejecting her, you know?”

Anton had nodded, his throat too tight to force out any sound. Beatrice erupted from the courtroom and, without a glance at him, called out, “Come on, Mommy.” The word had lodged in his temple, like a migraine behind one eye. Mommy. She had thrown her father in the garbage but she spoke to her mother like she was a four-year-old.

He pulled the letter from his pocket and smoothed it out on the farm table.

Dear Dad,

It’s been a long time and I’ve gone through lots of changes. My therapist says I need to try to fix some of the damage that’s happened to me over the years.

I need to talk about my issues with you. I know you were hurt. But you can’t live your life for others, even if the things you do hurt them. That’s living for somebody else and not for yourself. I could never do that.

Call me. It’s urgent.

She’d scribbled her number across the bottom and signed the letter without a flourish: Bee. No “Love, Bee,” as she used to write on the postcards from camp. No “Hugs, Bee,” as she had written to her grandparents to thank them for Christmas and birthday presents. No “Sincerely, Beatrice Bonner,” as she had scrawled on the bottom of letters accompanying her college applications. Just “Bee.”

He pondered that “Bee” at the end. Was it good or bad? Beatrice would’ve seemed cold. But she had written Dear Dad. Did that count for anything or was it just what anyone would write at the beginning of a letter to a parent? Maybe it was the only salutation she could think of. She could hardly write Dear Anton, could she? But had she reflected on that Dear at all? His index finger traced the letters. It would mean a lot to him if she’d really meant Dear.

Why did she do it? The old question. You’d think he’d be sick of asking it. No answers came to him, not in the darkest part of night, not under the glare of noon. The shank of the day. The phrase came back to him. Didn’t it mean the best part of the day? He had already lived through the shank of his life.

He woke around four in the morning from a nightmare, his stomach clenched, his breathing like the chuffing of a dying engine. Dying. He had dreamed about death row. Maxine came to visit him in his cell. She was blithe, happy. She talked about her new home, somewhere in Southern California. “It never rains,” she kept saying.

As Anton lay in the dark waiting to grow calm, he remembered Bee on the night of her junior prom. She wore a torn tee shirt and dirty jeans. He’d tried joking with her about it but she looked through him.

He was supposed to drive her to the prom. She was meeting her date there. He thought that almost as strange as her outfit.

“Your mother wore yellow,” he’d said. “Bouffant, it was called.”

“That’s hair. She wore organza.”

He clicked the turn signal on, frowning.

“She only told me about fifty-two times in the last week,” Bee said, turning her face to the window. It was raining. The lights of the stores flickered across her face, creating drooly smears down her cheeks. After a moment he realized she was crying.

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing.”

She insisted he let her out at the corner. A glare poured through the open doors of the school gymnasium. The rain had stopped. A cluster of girls came out in stiff pastel dresses. They giggled on the lawn. He waited for Bee to walk toward them but she didn’t move. He supposed she wanted him to drive away but he wasn’t going to leave his child out on the sidewalk in the dark. Neither of them moved. At last, Bee slapped the hood of the car and shrieked, “Go on, would you, damn it!”

But then, without waiting for him to leave, she pivoted away from the car and the gymnasium to cross the street. He spotted a figure in the shadows and his heart seized, but Bee hurried over to whoever stood there and they embraced. When they stepped together into a puddle of light, he watched them kiss. Two girls.

His hands trembling, Anton had jammed the car into first and pulled away. A trill of faint laughter pursued him.

But what had he done to deserve being “divorced” by his daughter? He’d never said a word to her. He hadn’t even said anything to Maxine. Two years later, Maxine made an off-hand remark about Bee’s girlfriend. Not like girlfriend, but girlfriend.

“You didn’t know?”

He’d rubbed his chin. “Know what?”

“That Bee’s gay.”

He’d flushed, feeling caught, as if Maxine had found out about him watching Bee and that other girl kiss. “Did she tell you she’s gay?”

With a cynical laugh, Maxine shook her head. “Oh, Anton, I guessed a long time ago. Don’t you have eyes? But yes, she told me.”

“Did she say I knew?”

“Why would she say that? How would you? You never intuit anything.” Intuit was one of Maxine’s favorite words. She intuited things. He never did. That was his problem. He didn’t pay enough attention to people, to feelings.

Max whimpered. “What’s the matter, old man? You need a pain pill?” Anton went to the kitchen cabinet where he stored the numerous pills and herbal concoctions for the dog. He took the vial of Tramadol down. Max was eating these like candy lately. Well. Not exactly. Anton pried open the dog’s mouth and plunged his fingers to the back of Max’s tongue. Involuntarily, Max swallowed.

“You’ll feel better in a bit.” Anton stroked him, remembering trips to the park, Max chasing a ball at top speed.

Anton had considered moving somewhere else so Max wouldn’t have to contend with stairs, but if he left his rent-controlled apartment, he wouldn’t be able to afford to stay on the Upper West Side. If the vet was right, Max probably wouldn’t live through the spring. And Anton would’ve given up living in the greatest place in the world for a few months of a stair-less existence.

He’d do it, if he thought it would make a big difference to Max. But more and more, Max seemed oblivious to everything but the need to sleep. When Anton called his name, even when he said, “Want’a eat, Max?” the dog didn’t respond.

What a joke, clinging to his Upper West Side apartment because New York City was the greatest place in the world to live. What did he do in New York City that he couldn’t do anywhere else, including Podunk, Iowa? He didn’t go to plays. He didn’t eat in fine restaurants. All he did was walk the streets and look at his fellow New Yorkers, wondering if their lives seemed as empty and hopeless as his own. Wondering if they too were down to their last dog.

The telephone rang, startling him. No doubt another telemarketer. No one else called him these days. Anton lifted the phone, half looking forward to hearing a voice, even a voice urging him to spend money on something he didn’t want.

“Daddy?”

Anton’s mouth opened but all that came out was a sob.

“It’s Bee,” she said, unnecessarily.

“I know,” he croaked.

“Why didn’t you call?”

“I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know? What does that mean?”

He felt the muscles at the back of his neck loosen. His head slid forward in shame. “I don’t know,” he repeated.

“You see?” she demanded. “You see? That’s how it always was. You were never there when I needed you.”

“That’s not true.” But he was still hanging onto that opening “Daddy.” She’d called Maxine “Mommy” and she loved Maxine. Now she was once again calling him “Daddy.”

“It is true. Oh, your body was there. But did you notice me? Did you see me? You never did. You never asked me who I was!”

“I’ve missed you every day for fifteen years, Bee. Next month it’ll be fifteen years.”

“So how come you never called? You never fought for me. You never fought for anything or anyone in your life. I thought—” It was her turn to choke up.

He remembered begging Maxine to come back to him, humbling himself when he knew she was sleeping with the grocer. But he couldn’t say that to Bee.

“I thought if I went to court—I just thought you’d fight for me. You didn’t say a word.”

“I didn’t know—”

“What?” But he said nothing. “Did it occur to you that I needed you, Daddy? Didn’t I write that it was urgent?”

“But, Bee, c’mon,” he pleaded. “How could anything be urgent after fifteen years? It didn’t make sense.”

“Daddy, I’m dying.”

His breath shot up through his chest, an arrowhead of pain. “What?”

“I have cancer. Stage four endometrial.”

“But they’ve caught it—surely they can—”

“No, they can’t. It’s too late. I’m in a hospice.”

The ungenerous thought crossed his mind that she had not told him this in the letter because she had wanted to witness his shock on hearing it.

“Honey, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.” He heard himself and winced. It sounded as if he were consoling his daughter over a missed train. “That’s awful,” he said but that sounded worse. What did he feel? It wasn’t easy to feel anything after all these years, after all the misery he’s endured.

“Yeah, well.” She sounded resentful. “I want you to come out here. I need to talk to you before—before I go.”

He turned and looked at Max. The dog was snoring. “Bee, I can’t.”

“What does that mean, you can’t?”

“See, I—I have this dog.”

“A dog?”

“He’s old. He’s close to—” No. He couldn’t say Max was close to dying. “I—I don’t have anyone to take care of him, Bee. I can’t leave him.”

“Oh, that’s just great. Just wonderful. I’m very happy for you and your dog.”

The click was the same, whether the other person threw the phone or quietly lowered it into its cradle, he thought, although he knew Bee hadn’t quietly lowered the receiver.

Anton was trembling. He sank into a chair and called to Max but the German shepherd didn’t move so Anton got up and went to him. He took the massive head between his hands and lowered his face to it. The dog lay quite still.

“What should I do, old buddy? Just tell me what to do?”

He knew what he should do, what a good father ought to do. He shouldn’t let his daughter die alone. But where was Maxine? Maxine had been Bee’s comfort all these years, Maxine and her grocer. What was his name? Neanderthal? No. That was Anton’s private name for him, validated by the low growth of hair on the man’s forehead. But it was close to that. Neman? Newman? That didn’t help. And where were they? Yes, now he recalled. Maxine had contacted him nine years ago, about some annuity that had been left in his name as well as hers. She’d told him they were moving to California. But where?

He remembered. They were moving to Garden Grove. She’d given him the address, just in case, but Anton had only pretended to write it down. He had thought how ironic it was for a grocer to live in a garden. Nedermeyer. That was the man’s last name. Abel Nedermeyer. Anton had said once to Maxine that her new husband should be named Cain, not Abel. Maxine hadn’t laughed. He used to make her laugh. Once she’d said he was a very funny man, but Anton hadn’t been funny in a long time.

A man with a faltering voice answered on the fifth ring.

“Abel?”

“Yes?”

“Is Maxine there?”

“Maxine?”

Did he no longer recall his wife’s name? Perhaps Anton himself had gotten it wrong. After so many years, was it possible he’d somehow altered her name to suit his memory? “Your wife,” said Anton.

“Who is this?”

“I need to speak to Maxine about our daughter, Bee.”

“Anton? Oh, I’m sorry. You didn’t know. Maxine died six years ago.”

Anton felt he’d been smacked by a linebacker on a football field. Winded. Dazed. How much was he supposed to take in a single day? “How?” was all he could manage.

“She was caught in a hostage situation in a bank. Stupid, really.”

For the briefest moment, Anton wondered if Abel meant that Maxine had been stupid to be murdered. But what twisted in his gut was the conviction that it was his fault. He should’ve been there to protect her. Ridiculous.

“What’s going on with Bee?” said Abel.

“You don’t know?”

“I haven’t seen her since the funeral. Truth is, we never got along too well. I gotta confess, Anton. That Lesbian stuff—well, it was a big problem for me. I wish Maxine had clued me in. I found out the hard way, you know?”

“She’s dying,” Anton said, brutally.

“No kidding?”

“I better go. I just—I just thought Maxine would, you know, that she’d be the one—well, never mind.”

The afternoon light had settled on the teapot. The phone lay in his open hand. He’d clicked it off but hadn’t found the energy to return it to its base. He didn’t know quite where he’d been all those hours. He hadn’t cried, hadn’t even felt anything. Some invisible blanket muffled the world outside, casting him deep into a safe, empty place. But as he looked around, Bee reached in and twisted his heart. Anton began to weep. Max crawled across the floor and lay with his chin resting on Anton’s foot, looking anxiously up.

“I’m all right, Max. Just—just kind of—sad.”

He leashed the dog up and they made their painstaking way down the hall, Mrs. Bushnell’s eyes following. “Where were you at noon today?” she called.

At the park, Max peed and even sniffed a couple of trees. On the way back, his hind end wallowed around more than usual, and twice he fell over. Anton struggled to get him back on his feet on the icy sidewalk.

“Not much longer, huh, old man?” He could’ve meant until they reached the apartment or until Max’s life was over. Anton wasn’t sure himself what he meant. But could he give the dog up? Could he betray his daughter for a few more months, maybe a few more weeks, with Max? He dropped some hamburger into the dog’s bowl and sank into his easy chair, not bothering to turn on Jeopardy. The pills, the health food remedies, all the nostrums, remained on the shelf. He couldn’t find the energy to push them down Max’s throat.

Candida Pugh is the author of “Bridge of the Single Hair,” a novel that won Kirkus Best of 2011 in the indie category. She lives in a north Chicago suburb with her husband and German shepherd.

Read Candida Pugh’s comments on Allan Shapiro’s “self-awareness.”
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Notes from Chad Peterson, Managing Editor
This piece is utterly heartbreaking, and I flew through it, getting more and more deeply invested in the main character. There’s a lovely sense of momentum, and a strong build to a crushing finish. This was a story that I had to sit with for some time after finishing, as Anton’s mistakes and missed opportunities, juxtaposed against his relationship with Max, and the dog’s own declining health, resonated so strongly with me that I literally had to catch my breath. Really beautifully done.

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Comments on this story by Max Detrano, author of “Jasper Rincon’s Loft”
Two relationships collide in Candida Pugh’s story, “What I Wouldn’t Do For You,” at a moment of crisis and closure. Anton, who reluctantly gave up his only child, Beatrice, when his ex-wife, Maxine, begged him to “Just go away,” filled that void with a dog that he named, Max. For fifteen years Anton had no contact with either his ex-wife or his daughter. Now, when the dog is dying and needs Anton, he gets a letter from Beatrice. She needs him too. The timing couldn’t be worse. “Years ago, he would’ve hacked off an arm, if that would’ve brought a letter from [Beatrice]…” This is a story of closure and denial—memories and reconsideration—the drive to reexamine one’s conclusions to see if any of them are still valid. What does it mean to be a father? What does it mean to be a friend?

The twenty third of April – Gesture Day – the one day of the year we were allowed to smoke.

The Reverend did his usual spiel, a recruitment drive sprinkled with some empty platitudes. He began to talk about “Ricky”; he hadn’t even bothered learning Mickey’s name. Perhaps it proved in his God after all—if he had known some of the strokes old Mickey pulled he would have been joining him in that gumhole.

I felt the scorch of morals, and the furry teeth of boredom gnaw at my mind. I looked round to see if all Mickey’s buddies had shown to see the last of his nine lives—the buddies he owed, the buddies he shafted, the buddies who had undoubtedly helped buy him his ticket on the Pine Express. We were all looking at each other, a stealthy appraisal of who would be next down that muddy chute. I nodded over at Daddy Fitz, Mickey’s old workmate.

Fitz rang me when Mickey collapsed on the factory floor in the middle of his shift. The first thing the boss said, Fitz told us, was “Somebody clock him out.” He looked at the butcher’s wreath that adorned the grave then winked at me, a private joke. Mickey hadn’t eaten meat in years—he’d swapped all his pork vouchers for backstreet tobacco. The cancer that devoured his meager body wasn’t smoking related though, how’s that for funny?

The thought of cancer makes me yearn for a cigarette. I check my watch—it’s over an hour walk to the designated Smoking Zone. I feel like a vampire on Summer’s Solstice; no time, no time. Farewell Cat, I say to myself, you’ll be running Hell in a fortnight.

I turn away and that’s when I see her, all dressed in red like she’s come to dance on Mickey’s grave.

She seems to shine. I’m mesmerised by her skin. She seems so… healthy. Well, okay, so everyone is healthy these days, that’s why they’re all so unhappy, but hers is a different kind of health, not the enforced kind we are all supposed to “enjoy.”

I doubt she attended JUNK DAY yesterday, when you were allowed a burger or a pizza. She was the antithesis of the franchises, even though she embodied the Agency’s drive for perfection. She probably works for the Agency, I realised, and immediately grew angry. Anger is all the rage nowadays. I hate zealots, especially the health fascists who refuse to see their idea of health is a spiritual disease.

God, I need a smoke, a proper one, need it bad. How much longer would they drag this farce out? Damn you Mickey.

It clouded over as I met her eyes, and her dress turned a deep shade of scarlet. Looking down at my shoes, my embarrassment is mirrored in their shiny black surface. At last the Reverend winds up his voodoo and I nod to Fitz and Kenny and we’re off.

“See you Sunday,” says the preacher, and Fitz says, “Maybe,” and we all laugh because church is compulsory, and because we’re about an hour away from a cigarette and everything seems funny.

Okay, so Gestures aren’t “proper” smokes, not like the ones in the good old days, the ones whose names linger in my mind like a long line of venerable monarchs—Winstons, Gallaghers, Benson and Hedges—but compared to dried banana skins and grass clippings they are the brand of the Almighty himself. We call them Lungbleeders because it’s rumoured they make your lungs sweat blood after every draw, and love them all the more for the myth. They say each Gesture is 98-percent grit bin or bus shelter, yet to us they are pure Ambrosia.

People don’t get that. It’s like when we were ordered to quit, the first thing they told us was to cut out routine cigs, but every cigarette is a routine cigarette.

Leaving the graveyard I’m daydreaming of a smoke and a pint, back in the days when you could still smoke in bars, back in the day when there was still such things as bars. We thought those days would last forever; how quickly we were marginalized.

Memory’s not the friend it used to be, now it’s just a curse, a tumour that can never fully be removed, for its tentacles spread throughout the senses. Even when we don’t remember consciously, our body does. We are awash with smells that sadden, phantom kisses that linger, and sounds that make the heart race faster.

Today everything reminds me of smoking, of my one nasty little habit.

It’s rumoured this will be the last GESTURE DAY, that they will call it quits to keep the quacks happy, but they say that every year, and every year we trek to the field regardless.

We made it to the church, its doors opened to reveal the electronic turnstile in the nave, the one where you had to slot in your ID card to verify your attendance. There were cards on the black market that were supposed to log you into the system up to four weeks in advance but they weren’t reliable—Mickey was forever trying to palm them off on us but we wouldn’t bite, the Cat had been jailed countless times for Spiritual Neglect.

And there she was again, her hair over one eye, dress red as debt, an ungainly rucksack on her back pulling it out of shape, her long painted nails tapping on the railings as she waited for us to pass.

We filed by quietly, stung to silence by her presence, but she shot out a pale arm and stopped me. Up this close I saw that her skin was completely hairless, without scar or blemish, and I wondered briefly if they had finally gotten round to making those humanoid robots the movies had been predicting for years.

“I know your brother,” she says, her voice unexpectedly harsh. “Where’s he living now? I know he’s not in Coldfall anymore.”

“You’ve made a mistake,” I tell her, relieved she has me confused with someone else, “I don’t have a brother.”

“Don’t give me that,” she smiles, and I wonder if it wasn’t Eve who tempted the snake. “Of course you do. His name’s Callaghan.”

Fitz and Kenny stiffen at the name of Mickey’s dealer.

“Look, I don’t know who you are, but you’ve got things all mixed up. I don’t have a brother. Now, if you don’t mind, I’m choking for a smoke and the day’s a wasting.”

“Suit yourself,” she says, “but tell your brother Mickey’s sister Kate was asking after him, okay?”

Mickey told me his sister was dead, told me a week after she croaked they found the cure. Who was this Kate, was she an agent, or did Mickey have a health nut for a sister that he was too embarrassed to tell us about?

“Who the hell’s that?” asks Kenny when we’re safely out of the churchyard.

“Beats me,” I say, looking at my watch. “We can figure it out later, right now I’ve a butt to catch.”

I chance a look back as we reach the main road; she is still watching us, a red blight in the distance. As if on cue the day darkens. As we make our way into town the first raindrops fall like spots of blood from a uterus.

Everything’s a blur. Factories pump their waste into the air and exhausts sputter out a ground fog. There have been days when I’ve been so desperate for a smoke I felt like wrapping my lips round one of those pipes and taking a deep hit of carbon monoxide. Walking into town is like a junkie getting a hit of methadone.

Today we can smoke and not have to hide our yellow fingers, or rub orange peel on them to mask the smell. No gum today, no sprays, no unctions; it’s an expensive business pretending not to smoke.

The remnants of yesterday’s JUNK DAY tightens the arms of dog owners, as they struggle to hold back their charges from the Styrofoam trays that still litter the streets, the feces rattling in the clear plastic containers just below their tails. The rain comes on harder.

“Typical,” moans Fitz. “You think they’ll put up some cover this year?”

I don’t bother answering. I have a bad feeling about GESTURE DAY. It’s already got off to a bad start what with Mickey and Kate in the devil dress. We should have been halfway through our pack by now. What game was she playing? I try not to think about it. I came last in imagination and don’t care to strain myself on imponderables.

As we hurry down the main drag I see my nemesis approaching. I don’t know his name, only that I hate him. He’s jogging again, even though it’s not a designated day, which means it’s voluntary jogging, in his too white, too tight shorts pulled up way too high. His orange coloured girlfriend jogs alongside, her fake breasts stationery, jutting dangerously as they trot by.

He makes me feel small because I’m headed to the Zone, like a leper with a dose of pox. His armpits reek, leaving vapour trails behind, but he bears his odour like a medal because they say deodorant gives you cancer.

Fitz, who wears his lungs on his sleeves and refuses to be brow beaten by the fitness fascists, can’t resist hawking up a glob of phlegm at their feet. No doubt the CCTV will capture that and report him to the Hygiene Dept, but it’s worth it to see the joggers scatter like he lobbed a grenade. Yeah, I’ll even help Fitz pay the fine—the look on their faces is worth the credits—jogging is an ignoble act at the best of times.

My smile slips from my face as I watch their haughty backs pick up pace, then catch a glimpse of red. Is she following us? That dress is a little loud for stalking. Agents usually tend to be more discreet, but nothing surprises me about the agency nowadays.

Only last week I passed a patrol car and saw one of them smoking in full view, flaunting it, blowing the precious smoke in my face. We used to call that a back street kiss, but I felt no romance only an all consuming rage.

“De maximus ni curat lex,” said the laughing Agent, flashing his gun to move me on. The Reverend translated that for me: the law does not apply to giants. The arrogance of it shocked me, though the Reverend backed him up.

“He threatened me with a gun!” I protested.

“My son, bullets, and vibrators for that matter, are genius extensions of our animalistic urges. As is the need to smoke. We must not condemn those who cave in to such weaknesses, we must help them. After all, this is why we have Gesture Day.”

Gesture Day—already it was slipping away and I hadn’t so much as coughed.

“Listen guys,” I said, “has anyone any credits? I think we should grab a cab to the Zone, at the rate we’re going we’ll not even be light headed by nightfall.”

Kenny grunted, shaking the wet hair from his eyes as he fumbled in his pocket. They knew it made sense even though pay day was a long way away.

I was eager to get away from Kate, lose her in the Zone. I was nervous of her intentions and her bizarre insistence I had a dealer for a brother. If that were true would I really be trudging through the rain to stand in a bloody field?

It’s easy to find a cab; they are the only vehicles allowed on the roads at the weekends.

“Let me guess, Gasping Central?” says the cabby.

“Yeah, by way of the gym. Thought I might work up some health coupons before I pollute myself like a heathen,” laughs Fitz and the cabby joins in. I think he might have been a gasper once himself.

I look out the rear window and see Kate flagging down a cab herself.

“Step on it mate,” I say nervously, “I feel the need for weed, y’know?”

“Doing my best pal, these things are electric remember.”

We hummed up the road, the crowds starting to build as the populace make their way to the Zone, that Elysium field that spent the rest of the year as pasture for free range cows and Slop Out Day.

I relax a little. The best part is thinking about it, anticipating the hit. It’s like a song that comes on the radio just as your optimism reaches a crescendo and the sun comes out and it’s instantly your favourite song. You know by the first chorus this is the song that will always remind you of this day, whatever this day may hold.

About half a mile out the taxi pulled up. “No parking from here on in guys,” says the cabby. “I could drive round for an hour or more and still not find a spot. The fare’s the same, and you’ll feel vaguely cheated for the rest of the day, but you’ll get a smoke that much quicker…’

Kenny stuck his card in the slot and logged up the credits as we all clambered out.

There were a phalanx of taxis behind us so I couldn’t be sure which one was Kate’s, or if she had even made it this far. Ahead of us, at the end of a tapering road, was the electrified gate flanked by armed Agents busy checking doctor’s passes to make sure no first timers were trying to sneak in.

Behind the gate, rising like a poisonous jellyfish, was a haze of blue-black smoke. We couldn’t help but cheer; in a few minutes we’d be adding to that pall. Gesture Day—best goddamn day of the year, better than Christmas, even if you had just buried your best mate.

The line is still thin and moving along nicely; the people who have camped out to get in early have relieved a lot of the usual bottlenecking. It isn’t long before we are flashing our IDs and getting our medical cards stamped and taking our packs.

20 Gestures.

I fondle the pack in a daze, staring at the picture of Christ casting the unrepentant smoker out of paradise, almost salivating at the thought of tearing them open right now and smoking them like pretty maids, all in a row.

We buy a disposable lighter between the three of us and I feel the usual crippling anxiety that it won’t work—two years ago one blew up in Mickey’s hand—and we’ll waste time having to scrounge a light. On Gesture Day trying to get a light is like trying to steal fire from Neanderthals, but Fitz hits the lighter with his thumb and it blazes like the Second Coming.

I’m coughing already, coughing myself grey, as I expel my very essence, spraying my fellow gaspers with hot saliva. They are hosts for my virus, passing on this glorious affliction, hopefully infecting enough people to make this world sane again. I start to sweat; you sweat when your engine’s overheating, and when your engine overheats it smokes.

I take out a cigarette, torch it, inhale deeply.

The harsh tickle, the sudden tension as the heart begins to race, to gallop toward nirvana, nostrils steaming, skin prickling with an electric kiss, all thought concentrated, purified, slicing through the muggy stew of the everyday, and I feel for an instant that I soar.

I inhale, I bury, I exhale, I exhume.

I pollute my body to free my mind. Suddenly the world makes sense. This is why we do this, why we hide and hawk and splutter in the dark; to feel alive, to feel.

We smoke, the air around us filling up with the acrid haze billowing from our healing lungs, and I feel the wired strife that has been building all day leave me. Oh sweet cigarette, my heart is an iPod full of songs of love for you! That once so familiar sensation returns, like something has crawled from my throat and died on my chest. I don’t draw on the cigarette as much as caress it.

The field is full, hardly room to move your elbow, not that it matters, the smokes never leave our mouths; no-one breaks the embrace save to light another, then another.

I see Kenny and Fitz rake their first two down to glowing spear points then reach for a third. Someone once said, “If you tell the sons of Adam not to eat an apple they will devour an orchard,” and I laugh at the truth of it all. Third light’s bad luck they say, but we felt only bliss in our good fortune. Soon we would blanch and cover ourselves in vomit, but for now we believed in God, and God loved us.

We were a squadron of Lungcancer Bombers, strafing the field with mucus patterns, shining brighter as we inhaled our victory. In that moment I would have voted for the Director again, because he gave us this day, because he gave us 20 Gestures.

Then the cramps started. I left Fitz gagging, and Kenny wandering like an untethered balloon, as I searched for the toilets. I found the usual rank of huts by following my nose; they could make House Detective systems that could trace smoke through solid brick and set off alarms in Agency HQ, but they still couldn’t devise a Portaloo that flushed.

By the time I returned night was falling, the sky full of ashtray constellations. The field was beginning to empty, though there were still a few hundred stragglers scavenging for butts, a task that would have made Sisyphus laugh. Then, as one of the guard lamps sweeps the Zone, I see her, the rucksack biting deep into her thin shoulders.

The guards on the gate must have left already. Once all the cigarettes had been handed out security tended to be lax; they knew none of the smokers would part with them. They were meant to stay and search people leaving, make sure no tobacco left the field, but they usually left that to the attack dogs.

Had she been searching for us all day?

She marched over, reaching Kenny and Fitz just as I did.

“Hello Callaghan,” she says. “I see it’s not enough for you to pollute yourself,” she nods at my cigarette, “you have to murder other people too.”

“Listen love, I’ve no idea why you think I’m Callaghan, or what you mean by murder, but—”

“You murdered my brother! You got him hooked on that filthy weed and he got cancer. I hope all those tumours in his gut made you a rich man.”

“Mickey’s cancer wasn’t smoking related, if it was he would’ve been jailed as soon as it was diagnosed, you know that. And like I keep bloody telling you, I’m not Callaghan. These are the first smokes I’ve had all year.”

“Where do you think those smoke clouds are going now? Do you think they just vaporise up there?” She was crying now, “No, they linger, sucked in by dreaming children and pregnant women, by innocent, decent people. You might not be Callaghan, I don’t really care. You’re all the same, dealing death to all around you without a second thought. Well, it’s your lucky night. I’ve found a cure to stop you smoking.”

I saw the transmitter in her hand, the heavy bulk of her rucksack, the protruding wires, and I didn’t need to consult the Agency’s seasonal urine colour chart—it flowed down my leg in a stinging rush.

I dropped my cig and ran without even shouting a warning; we are all only heroes in hindsight, once we have edited events to our own satisfaction.

The explosion hammered the night and I flew on a fist of scalding air high over the Zone, flaming bodies soaring beside me, falling angels, and I landed hard on the surface of a planet deaf to its own death rattle.

My motto had always been “We can’t live forever so why live at all.” It consoled me, justified every illicit smoke and furtive sausage, all my small rebellions against the Agency, against Big Mother. Death to me was just another form of boredom, indistinguishable from life, but now I wanted to live, even if it was behind the wheel of this corrupted body. I needed to live.

I could hear screams, see men shaped flames scatter wildly, and I got to my feet and ran, barely hearing the ‘copters above the roar of my boiling blood. It felt like I was bleeding from a thousand different wounds as I fled through the gates and back out onto the streets, lurching into an alley before I collapsed. The Agency snooper trucks sped by, a brash carnival of flashing sirens, as I struggled to breathe.

I had one smoke left, and I thought long and hard about lighting it. To hell with the jail time, I mightn’t live long enough to be sentenced anyway. Then all the light and noise tapered down to a tiny dot and I slipped into the silent dark.

When I awoke sunlight was licking the edges of the alley. I got unsteadily to my feet, trying not to vomit. I never thought of Fitz or Kenny, they knew the dangers of smoking as well as I. All I was worried about was getting home.

I blamed the Agency. Health, joy, happiness (none of it worth a PC damn), where had it gotten me but here, half sautéed in a filthy backstreet.

A new day dawned—Token Day—and I began to panic.

This was the one day a year the drinkers got a bottle of Monkey Blood gin. The streets would not be safe. Even the guards kept a low profile on Token Day. I crawled further back down the alley, in between some bins, and decided to wait it out. I smoked my last cigarette. Then the raucous cheering started as the drinkers took to the streets like a horde of broken toys. I inhaled deeply, and shut my mind to the carnage that lay ahead.

Stephen McQuiggan is a factory worker from Northern Ireland. He appears in forthcoming issues of Bards And Sages and Morpheus Tales, and in upcoming anthologies from Angelic Knight, Cutting Press, Crowded Quarantine, and Horror Library Vol 5.

Read Stephen McQuiggan’s comments on Myra Sherman’s “Night Shift.”

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Notes from K. Anne Unger, Editor
The reader is plunged into an intriguing and surreal world where characters function the only way they know how in an oppressed society in Stephen McQuiggan’s “20 Gestures.” The story’s gripping landscape is created by the voice of a character so cunning and quick-witted it demands our attention even if the protagonist’s goal is simple: smoking as many cigarettes as possible during the course of the day. It’s easy to become involved with this story, to stay engaged and entertained even if you’ve never experienced this universe before.

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Comments on this story by Wendy Fox, author of “The Car”
In fiction it feels like we are always struggling to get the details right, even when we are writing about a world that closely resembles our own, and so I admire writers who can tackle a landscape that requires even more invention, with an alternate vocabulary, a different landscape, and a new set of rules. Stephen McQuiggan’s “20 Gestures” puts the reader immediately into a dystopia—at least, it’s a dystopia for his character—but anchors us with the familiar: the shop boss who demands a fallen worker be clocked out, the funeral of a friend, a dress “as red as debt.” Recognition helps pull the reader through the story as McQuiggan’s character navigates a place we don’t necessarily know. What stayed with me from “20 Gestures” was the sense of terror, whether it is the reverend who commits the departed without knowing his name, or suicide bomber who has mistaken your identity, and yet, in this world, it is the day after that is worse.