Author: cjacobs

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Portrait of a Borough Boy,
New York

 

The year is 1970-something. Somewhere before Sid Vicious ODs, but somewhere after The Exorcist has been released. Street address: scram, kid. The projects are full, and the overflow is at high tide. His full name is a twelve-syllable nightmare so he goes by “Mike” instead of “Michele” and divorces his confirmation name for the sake of saving time. He is the youngest child of the Trimboli family—an Italian family living smack in the middle of Brooklyn. 

Mike’s brother, Sal, teaches him to walk. Not walk-walk, but walk, the New York way, with his shoulders squared, taking on seas of people like a WWII torpedo. Sal tells him to carry a stiletto knife; they’re a fraction quicker than switchblades, and when rival gangs chase Mike down the block, seconds can be his savior. Mike takes his advice, and Sal takes a boy’s arm and snaps the bone for calling him “Sally” during a pick-up game, grinding the boy’s sternum into the ruddy ground. Mike watches from the pitcher’s mound in silence. Crying never gets out bloodstains, anyway. Mike’s sister, Gina, gives him a fine-tooth comb, and it sits in the front pocket of his chinos, always greasy. This is the style—a leather jacket and ducktail with pomade. Mike likes jock-rock, weed, and women. He likes Bob Dylan and the local stray dogs a whole lot more. Frank Sinatra is infused into his bloodline; the lulls of Ol’ Blue Eyes and his father’s cigarettes, hatted with ash, are burned into his brain. Even twenty concussions into his latest hobby of boxing can’t take this from him—not yet. First, Mike wants to ask out Norma, the pretty Puerto Rican girl from school, and listen to Gina hum flirty pop songs. He will not mention his sister’s music taste to their devout mother whose back was broken by Sal when he fell from the second-story fire escape. He had been in hot pursuit of Mike and slipped. Their mother saw them as she was returning from errands, then reacted with warp speed the way good mothers do. Sal tumbled onto her below, her open arms useless against his gravity.

In the projects, everyone has that uncle they don’t talk about. It’s always the uncle that shows up to parties with the latest European wristwatch, the one who puffs on foreign cigars and is outfitted with sharp charm and manners—the one who probably packs a gun in the glovebox. Mike and his friend Tony talk about this over beers, holed up in Mike’s shoebox of a room, paint peeling, records spinning. Mike sends away to England for his records and plays them until their flimsy, paper covers deteriorate or rip, leaving the vinyl exposed to the world. He tears the covers fairly often, and Gina says it’s because he’s a klutz. Once, Sal had even pushed Mike out a window in a fit of rage for calling him “psycho,” and their parents believed Sal’s “Mikey tripped.”

Tony says his dad has a tattoo of an elephant’s head above his crotch. “The trunk is his dick,” he laughs and splashes beer on Mike’s sunken-in mattress. Tony is a giant; his brain isn’t as good as Mike’s, but that’s alright because his brawn is gold. Mike’s seen Tony throw guys down whole alleys. A friend of theirs even started carrying a tape measure to check how far the guys go; Mike and Tony call him “Professor,” even though Mike’s the one with the highest IQ, the one who tears through Kerouac and eats Vonnegut for breakfast. It’s okay. If Professor is the Superego, Mike is the Ego, Tony is the Id, and they’ve made survival into a sport. Every gang needs a strategist, and Mike delivers. Who else is going to think of hiding emergency weapons in cinder blocks and pipes?

If they’re ever caught alone, the Italian kids have their call for help: “Volare” by Dean Martin. They bellow, “Volare!” at the top of their lungs and nearby respondents follow up with a “Woah, Woah,” to let the caller know backup is on the way. They’ve all used it at some point, and all come flying down the block to save a neighbor or take some blows. 

Tony suggests they drink on the fire escape. He opens the window above Mike’s mattress and barely manages to squeeze out. Mike could suggest Tony go out sideways, one broad shoulder at a time, but this is funnier; Mike wants all the comedy he can get. The boys at school don’t hang out with them as much now, mostly because they’re at that ripe age where everyone keeps getting shot, arrested, or bludgeoned to death. 

Under the quiet moonlight—above the skinny dogs digging through garbage—Mike questions what allowed him to get this far. His entire, sixteen-year-old life is Bleecker Street beneath his sneakers, soaring over rooftops, leaping like his heart and bleeding as red. Their little neighborhood is surrounded by black and Puerto Rican gangs, and there’s always war between factions, boys with oiled hair versus sons with shining, dark skin. Everyone’s got rage.

From their spot on the fire escape, Mike can hear his father listening to the radio, some update about Vietnam slipping out the cracked, living room window. Mike considers the sensation of jumping from a plane, weighted with military gear. He’s not scared of falling. Nobody makes it past twenty here—guns have never made the reaper’s job easier. How much worse can the military be? He’s already fighting for free; he might as well get paid.

Tony twists the cap off another green-glassed beer, then flicks it from between his fingers. It sails down, down, down, and Mike drinks to ignore that he’s still aging after it bangs against the dumpster.

He’s not supposed to belong to someone, but he does. Norma, beautiful and brown, speaking rapid Spanish to match Mike’s Italian makes him glow. They meet in the middle of their mother tongues, have enough similar words to understand when they want to ignore English. He wants her to want him so he asks her out to a baseball game, ignoring that their skin color doesn’t quite match, hoping she’ll do the same. When she says yes, Mike walks home with a jig in his step.

They’re waiting on 161st street for the subway home when Mike notices some guys sizing them up. Norma stays lax, but her chatter about the game dwindles to silence. She squeezes Mike’s hand and asks if they should go back, wait a while at Yankee Stadium. When the tallest of the group turns toward them, Mike can see he’s covered in tattoos—he’s even got one on his forehead—and his skin is the same dark, tea-color as Norma’s.

Norma asks if they should leave. Then she says it as a statement, pulling at the sleeve of Mike’s leather jacket. He tells her, go. Now. Get help. Call his family. Norma doesn’t ask why—she already knows. “Volare” cannot save him; underground, there’s nowhere to fly, no backup waiting down the block. Maybe he should’ve run, too, but what’s new? He’s got a plan. He’s the strategist. Norma bolts out of the subway and Mike hears her start yelling for help as the guys rush him. He holds onto the sound of her voice as he puts all his weight behind a punch. He doesn’t feel his fist crunch one guy’s nose—his adrenaline is singing too loud, lighting up his pulse—and he doesn’t see when one of the guys withdraws a pipe from God knows where. But he does see the guy go to swing, opening up the front of his abdomen for Mike to kick. His foot never lands. At least, not on the guy’s body. The leader, whose forehead tattoos spells “ANGEL” in script lettering, throws something at Mike’s face. When the pain hits, Mike’s ready. Everything blurs, a hissing burn overtaking his sense as he falls to the ground, unsure if Norma’s still shouting.

Mike wakes up in the hospital with bandages around his face, unable to speak. A gang member threw acid in his face, Mike’s uncle with the nice wristwatch explains. “They saw you there with your dame. The dark-skinned one. Didn’t like that she was with a dago.”

Mike doesn’t cry. He’s not even sure he can with all the gauze. When his uncle asks what cracked his skull, Mike doesn’t remember—he was too busy thinking his eyes were melting—maybe it was the pipe, maybe it was the subway platform. All he knows is that after the acid, the leader and his jackals sent him to the ninth ring of Hell. As a Catholic, Mike’s got an idea of what that should feel like.

Dad never swears, and still doesn’t when he sees Mike mummified in the hospital bed. From beneath the cocoon of gauze, Mike hears his dad and uncle whisper. With her bad back, his mother stays when she can, brings him gifts he can’t see, flowers he can hardly smell. The world is pure white noise. The doctors say he’ll need glasses when the bandages come off. His eyesight won’t be the same.

He can talk again before he can see. His dad asks who did this to him, who exactly, and Mike recounts the huddle of boys with tattoos. The leader, a guy Mike recognizes as a Puerto Rican gang member, had that stupid tattoo, “ANGEL;” it was one of the last things Mike saw before he fell.

His father grunts. The scent of smoke lingers on his breath, “Angel, huh?” His dad mutters in disapproval. God-given bodies should not be vandalized—that’s how Dad thinks. “Don’t worry, Mikey,” Dad uses a rough hand to pat Mike’s leg, “He’ll get his, angel or not.” Then, Dad’s hand is gone, voice gruff and low as he drifts toward the door, “God rewards all.” Mike can almost hear the air part when Dad makes the sign of the cross, knows Dad’s doing it quick and sure because he always does. The footfall of Dad’s worn shoes echo as he leaves.

“Open it.”

The box is slight in Mike’s freshly unwrapped hands. It’s been a couple minutes since the bandages came off and seconds since his uncle has come into the foreground of his vision. Everything else is out of focus; Mike squints and makes out his parents standing behind his uncle. His uncle’s wristwatch reflects the harsh, hospital light, so Mike looks to the present on the lap of his gown. It’s small, wrapped with glossy, white paper. There’s a thin, red, satin bow tied around the package—the work of his mother, no doubt. Mike takes the present between his sweaty fingers, which are soft and white from being bandaged so long.

“Ah! How many times we gotta tell you, Michele?” His uncle fumes and shakes his head. Despite his impatience and blurry face, Mike knows his uncle’s grinning—he can hear it. His uncle prods again, “C’mon. Open it.”

Mike tears the paper despite trying to rip it neatly. The ribbon unravels and coils itself on his thigh. The lid slides from place with ease. There’s something flat inside, curling at the edge like warped newsprint. Mike’s fingers shake. He goes to pick it up and nearly drops the box. 

His uncle laughs, “Do you like it?” The light caught by his watch shoots a tiny halo on the ceiling. Mike nods, eyes adjusting, and lifts the piece of tan, serrated skin from the box and reads, “Angel.”

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Gabriela Everett is a creative writing undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago and presently lives in the South Loop. Everett’s previous publications include prose and poetry in Santa Fe University of Art and Design’s lit mag, Glyph, and Columbia’s Hair Trigger 2.0. 

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Just a Song and Dance Man

 

There was a bluegrass band playing his favorite kind of music at a house party in honor of Auntie Jane. He’d wheeled himself as close as he could get to the music room festivities, but a step kept him from going farther. He was stuck in the “talking” room, but from his vantage point he could still hear the band and watch the dancing. 

I was buck-dancing with the Southern women in the family; the Yankee branch of the family calls it clogging. It’s a robust dance, none of this suavely swaying to the music without raising a sweat or mussing your hair. In buck-dancing, you raise your knees high and slam first toe then heel to the wooden floor, adding the percussion line to the music. Dad didn’t buck-dance even before he got his wheels, but he always tapped his feet and clapped his hands at the hoe-downs when we’d visit down South.

I saw Dad tapping his toe and clapping one hand against his armrest, saw a bittersweet smile. The left side of his face still droops some, turning his smiles into wry grins. And, somehow, I knew what he was thinking – the same images flaring so brightly in my mind, of father-daughter dances. Dad didn’t dance much, but he started dancing with me early, letting me step up on his toes, wrapping one short arm around his waist, the other hand grasped firmly in his, he’d waltz us around the room. My school didn’t have a father-daughter dance back then; they do, now. I envied my niece when I saw the photos of her in her lacy dress of white, my brother in his suit, headed off to their dance.

Dad didn’t dance much. My mom had always liked to dance, and I think sometimes she envied me.

Dad danced with me at my wedding with tears in his eyes. He whispered in my ear, “You’ll always be my little girl.” 

We’d dance one dance at cousins’ weddings, and at Mom and Dad’s 40thanniversary party.

Dad never did dance much, but wheeled up to that step, leaning forward in his chair so he might see Unka Jim cuttin’ it up and making a ruckus with the Southern ladies in the family, I knew he wanted to dance, now. I held out my hand to him, and he reached out with his right to grasp it. We swung arms. This time, it was me doing all the leg work, his feet were stepped up on the footrests of his wheelchair. He’d have preferred I was still riding along on his toes. 

He was swinging his arms and gently pulling me forward then easing me back. When I ducked under his outstretched arm the first time, his grin lit up his face.  From then on, it was forward-back, forward-back, forward-back, twirl! He was leading the dance, lifting my arm higher each time. The ladies in the talking room smiled indulgently. When the song ended, we all applauded.

The very next song was “I’ll Fly Away.” Dad never did sing much, but he liked to listen to country music and bluegrass. And he was familiar with this song. It’s one of the songs I sing to him each night before he goes to sleep. I’m not always there in the make-shift bedroom set up where our music room used to be. His bedroom is upstairs. He says he’ll be back up there one day.  For now, his bed is pushed up against the wall where our red upright piano sat. Crowding into the space where our thirdhand, got-it-cheap, Hammond B-3 organ used to sit. I never got very good on the organ, though got good enough to play at church services some. But I could tear that piano up. That room is filled with memories of music, the ghosts of songs still whispering in the air.

I sing to him every night, though I’m not always there in the make-shift bedroom. I made him a tape a year or two ago, me singing his favorite hymns and spirituals, with a few good-old country songs tossed in. It’s mostly me singing, but on a track or two my husband’s playing guitar. I don’t sing every day, like I used to, and a cappella is tough without lots of practice. So sometimes my voice changes key in the middle of a song, but he’d asked for some tough ones: “Amazing Grace,” “One Day at a Time,” “How Great Thou Art.”

“Amazing Grace” isn’t that hard, except when I stand at his bedside, singing harmonies to the tape I made, standing there singing as he cries at the words. “One Day at a Time” is a tear-jerker for him, too, as it talks about how life is hard, but somehow God will help you through, if you take it just one day at a time. It’s got some high notes, and it’s hard to hit high notes when your throat is clogged with unshed tears.

“How Great Thou Art?” That’s a challenge even for pros. It’s a big, dramatic, Pavarotti, diva kind of song, if you sing it as it wants to be sung, rather than rushing through it with a slight lilt that ignores the power of the music and the power of the words. I gave it my best diva, dramatic rendition in a cappella, and I cry just about every time I sing along with that song on the tape, because Dad has whispered to me on several of those nights, as I stood there leaning against the safety rail of his hospital-style bed, stood there in the near dark with just the low glow of the night-light setting off his bedside lamp, stood there as he whispered to me he wants me to sing “How Great Thou Art” at his funeral.

Mom says he cries and sings to the tape each night, and it helps him release the frustration of being trapped all day in a body that betrayed him. He tries not to cry when I’m there singing in person, and I try not to cry, too.

He whispers sweet thoughts between the songs: “I’m so proud of you.” And whispers To-Do lists: “Will you trim back the lilac tree, because your mom can’t see around it when she goes to pull the van out?” And because, “You’ll always be my little girl,” he also whispers protective-daddy thoughts: “Don’t walk alone after dark in Chicago. Make sure you’re inside before the sun goes down, and always lock your doors.”

Slowly the tape moves past those tough, tearful hymns, to the country songs, like “I’ll Fly Away,” which is about how God will rescue all His children from their mortal bodies, and take them home to Heaven, but this has a bluegrass swing, so it can’t be sung somber. Dad and I sing that one every night, even when I’m in Chicago rather than at his bedside. 

And there that bluegrass band was, at the house party in honor of Auntie Jane, playing oursong. And though I was breathless, Dad and I danced. And though I was breathless, Dad and I sang. Dad sang every word. Not in a quiet whisper, where I’d have to lean my ear close to his mouth to hear. No! He sang every word, belted it out, as loud as I’ve ever heard him speak since that awful August afternoon when he had his massive stroke as he was getting all dressed up in a suit to take Mom out for their wedding anniversary; when a romantic dinner at the Hotel Nauvoo restaurant was traded in for a helicopter ride to the University Hospitals.

He belted that song out, every single word, and I so wanted to go grab a microphone from the band and string it across the dancing room, out to the enclosed porch, and let my daddy shine.  I wanted the whole world to hear him sing.

My dad; he’s just a song and dance man.

The next day, after I’d arrived home in Chicago, I called my mom, ’cause Dad had whispered to me, “Be sure to call us when you get home, so we’ll know you got home safe.” Dad was napping in his chair, and Mom said to me, “Your dad wrote you a letter last night after we got home. I meant to give it to you this morning, but I can read it to you now, if you’ve got time.”

I had time.

It said a few different things. It’s hard for Dad to write letters, but he works hard at it, and so crams a variety of thoughts into them. It said a few different things. But mostly what it said was: “Dear Tina. Thank you for the dance.”

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Mother Saint

 

She was dreaming, and the whisper of heartstrings and gentle lullabies filled the blackened hallway like a mist slowly falling with each rise of her chest, a glow coming upon her face as the softened creak of footsteps sounded from down the hallway and her door opened slowly, inch by inch, until she could feel the warmth of heat on her cheeks and the presence of a stranger standing before the bed. Esme rolled over, away from the light and the shadow, and felt the heat now spread across her bare back, over the pale, smooth skin and then into the muscles and deep into the marrow of her shoulder blades. She was dreaming of school, when she was only a girl, but all her classmates’ faces were that of many animals combined, morphed into one another. Her closest friend that of a fish and its gills, a tiger and its mouth, an elephant and its skin (like one she had seen dying at the zoo when she was only a child, with greening cracks in its dry, scaly flesh). The fur of a zebra was smeared across her friend’s once-navy class uniform, dripping on to the floor with hairs as heavy as drops of paint. He was reaching out his hand to her now, and it was only human, but Esme was afraid—so afraid, staring at the young pink flesh wrinkled with fat and softness, fingers unfolding from the palm limp as squid’s legs, that she sat bolt upright in her bed. The stranger looked at Esme curiously and reached their fingers toward her head, but Esme got up off of the mattress and moved through the darkness, an orangey light now flickering out in the hallway, bouncing against the walls of her little room. She rifled through a basket on her carpeted floor and then through a drawer in her dresser against the wall, throwing stockings and garters over her shoulder. The light grew brighter and brighter and brighter. One of the nuns ran past Esme’s open door. Then one of the young orphan girls, too. And, soon, the hall was full of shouting and rattling and thumping against walls and door frames, shadows stumbling through the red-yellow light as it blazed blindly down the hallway.

“There’s a fire in the nursery!” someone yelled. “There’s a fire in the nursery!”

Esme calmly slipped on a pair of bloomers and tightened the red lacing around her waist and thighs. She pulled her chemise on over her head and walked into the clamor of the hall, her bare feet padding against the floorboards. The quiet crackling of fire murmured beneath the shouts of the nuns and unwed mothers and orphan girls as they careened down the white hallway past Esme and the charcoal doors that lined the walls. Their shadows danced black in the orange light, their faces tinged the color of apricot, their eyes glistening with panic. Esme walked slowly toward the nursery as they shoved past her. The door to the room was opened wide. She could see the ebony floor glowing with wavering orange lines as the fire burned in the white cradles. It crawled up the drapes drawn over the windows, smoke swirling in the air, tattered pieces of cloth swinging to the floor. She could hear nothing but for the snapping of the fire and the distant shouts of the women as they scurried out of the convent—and Esme thought they all must be dead: the children in their pinfolds, charred, gone. She approached the closest cradle, the fire within growling, reaching toward the ceiling. She could see nothing beyond the blazing flame, heat enshrouding her body again, but she could hear a soft whimpering begin to croon beneath the deafening roar of the fire, throbbing in her ears. She looked around herself and saw no one— a piece of the wooden ceiling collapsing to the floor in a puff of dust and ash, one of the cradles crumbling to the floorboards, engulfed in flame, everything shaded orange as a sunset trapped indoors. But then, suddenly, a great ball of flame floated up from one of the still-standing cradles, casting a dazzling red light upon Esme’s face, brown embers flying in air. And through the orange blaze she saw a small, blackened body begin to rise; its arms were spread out as wings, its head lifted to the ceiling. She saw its eyes slowly open, shining clear and white.

“The fire came from her fingertips in sparks, that’s how she did it.”

Esme tossed and turned in the mattress, the bed warbling with the squeak and creak of metal. 

“Stay still.” Hands pushed into her shoulders. “Don’t move, dear. Stay still.”

“I can’t see,” Esme whispered, her voice rough and raspy, hardly sounding like her own.

“Just stay still, dear. You—Dorothy, hand me a sedative. Yes, there on the shelf. Thank you. And hold her, please.” A pair of soft hands pressed into Esme’s skin. “Yes, just like that. Now- now, Ms. Anderson, you must calm down. Stay still . . . . You’re going to feel a pinch, and I want you not to move, all-right? Hold very still.” Esme felt the tip of the needle against her skin and thrashed in the bed, kicking her legs and throwing her arms in the air. The soft hands pressed into her shoulders harder and more fingers came to curl around her wrists and her ankles and her hips, nails digging into her skin, holding her down. She shouted and cried and screamed—whispers and gasps drifting through the air, hissing in her ears.

“She’s mad.” 

“She did it.”

“Hold her still.”

“I didn’t see her that evening. After supper we washed and we dressed, and those of us charged with the bastards went to the nursery and fed them, then put them to sleep—as we always did. By the time I was finished, no one else was awake and all the doors were closed so I went to bed. I never saw Esme leave her room . . . but hers was the closest to the nursery and . . . I heard footsteps in the hallway.”

 

Sister Mildred was stroking Esme’s hair; it was blackened and singed, and the golden brown it had once been had dulled to a char gray. The strands were thick and uneven, looking as though they had been caked with dirt—and Sister Mildred said it would have to be cut. There was no way about it now. It wouldn’t grow this way and, if it did, it would be uneven and how would she plait it then? No, better to cut it off and start anew, she said. It would grow back before Esme even reached a hand toward her head. And, in any right, the nun said, she should thank God there was nothing wrong with her pretty face. She had no reason to lament.

But there was pain. It was crawling up Esme’s right leg, sharp and unwavering and her neck was flaring with searing pricks all over her skin, sinking into the muscles of her throat, shocking her bones. She couldn’t speak. Her words came out in harsh groans and whines like an animal was trapped inside her stomach, and she couldn’t move, she could hardly bring herself to turn her head. She lay so flat and so still on the mattress Sister Mildred thought she looked almost dead: callous with ash smeared over her pale skin. But Esme could see. Her vision was fogged and blurred around the edges, but she saw her little room: the white-stone walls, the little ornate lamp hanging over her bed, the black-tiled floors stretching toward the black door. There was a vanity of wood painted vaguely of teal, a small white-barred window with white drapes blowing gently in a breeze Esme could not feel, a white bedside table with a little drawer and a light-colored wicker chair beside it that was pillowed with blankets tinted yellow as teeth. She could see Sister Mildred kneeling before Esme’s head, her coral-beaded rosary clutched in one of her slim hands, the cross swinging over her knuckles as she spoke. It was the color of silver, but the carving had been rubbed raw with age and the passing of it from old to young hands: Jesus slowly beginning to disappear into the cross, deforming into a plain, smooth mound melded onto the crucifix. 

Esme watched Sister Mildred’s knuckles shift from yellowish beige to pink and then white as she tightened her grip on the rosary. She was speaking, but none of her words reached Esme’s ears, humming a quiet monotone purr under the gentle whir of the ceiling fan overhead, her mouth opening and closing like a puppet’s, her tongue moving between rotting teeth. Sister Mildred’s face was fogged, in Esme’s bleared eyes, into a past youth that had once not seemed so distant. Her skin appeared smooth again, but Esme could still spy hints of wrinkles she had once recalled not being there and new purple crescents resting under Sister Mildred’s blue eyes, her thick blonde hair peeking out of her dark habit, making her appear more disheveled and aged than she had ever looked before. The nun smiled at Esme then, her lips stretched across her face—but misery waited behind her eyes, and Esme could not find it within herself to smile back.

The door to the little hospital room suddenly opened and in stepped two young nurses, clad in brilliant white. Behind them a man in a brown tweed suit was drying his hands on an off-white rag. He stepped in front of them, his clean-shaven face gleaming in the sunlight, tinted yellow like cream. He said something quietly to Sister Mildred and she patted Esme’s hand, standing from the floor, one of the nurses escorting her from the room with a wave of her porcelain fingers. Sister Mildred crossed herself as she passed the threshold, her black habit-skirt billowing out behind her, and the door closed with a gentle hand, only the second nurse remaining with Esme and the man, her rosy cheeks deepening in color.

The man said something to Esme, but his words were lost in the space between them, and he began poking and prodding her body, his cold fingers stretching her open eyes wider and squishing her cheeks to look in at her mouth and teeth. He examined her arms, lifting them from the bed and letting them flop to the mattress, heavy as a wet rag. He pulled back the sheet which had covered Esme’s body and examined her leg. Esme was still only in her bloomers and chemise, but the pristine white they had once been was now mucked with soot and ash and she felt no embarrassment come to her. Her leg was pink and red and angry and looked melted like wax dripping down a candle. The man pressed his hand upon it and it hurt, but Esme didn’t so much as flinch. She lay transfixed on the bed as a board, her arms at her sides, her legs stretched flat, all the while staring at the nurse by the doorway. Esme could see auburn curls peeking out from under the nurse’s white cap, little golden ringlets hovering before her ears. Her eyes were black as pitch and seemed to go on and on into the back of her skull, and her skin made Esme think of the ocean, the color of sea-foam as a storm rages somewhere out in the tropics. Her uniform was fading, the white tinged yellow and brown with stains, her skirt trailing to the floor, her blouse tight around her throat, her waist cinched, her sleeves rolled to her elbows. Her hands were folded before her, knuckles white as Sister Mildred’s had been. She stared back at Esme, her eyes unwavering.

“Nurse.”

She stepped to the man’s side. “Yes, Doctor?”

“Would you fetch me Nurse Haddington? And bring antiseptic. And”—the nurse nodded along as the man spoke, her dark eyes locked to Esme’s, not leaving them for a moment.

 

“She set the drapes on fire first and then she went and burned the children one by one, starting at their toes and then their blankets and then the wood of their cribs, and then she crawled up the walls and burned holes in the ceiling.”

The burn wound on her leg was cleaned and then wrapped tightly with pure white bandages. Her neck was plastered with creams and oils and cloths that smelled of citrus, tinny as metal, stinging her nose. They fed her little white tablets in the shape of ovals, smooth as a pebble found at a creek, with a swig of warm water to wash them down. But her injuries ached with hot pain still as if she were yet in the nursery, watching the fires blaze. Though, Esme could tell, from the light seeping through the drapes, that the sun was beginning to set and she was far from the gray walls of the convent.

The fading rays danced against the white of her little room, pink and orange and purple, shifting like the ripple of water in a pond, and Esme thought of the stained glass windows in the chapel—the blue and red and yellow that floated across the gray stone floors, rising as the sun sank, drifting toward the towering crucifix standing at the altar. Esme had never prayed there, she remembered. Truthfully, she could recall no memories of prayer to her mind, and she lay there quietly as her vision stirred, trying to summon one Hail Mary from the depths of her memory.

But when the black door to the room abruptly opened, Esme watched the light fall on the nurse’s face—the one from before, with eyes dark as midnight—and she was torn from remembrance. In her arms the nurse cradled a silver wash basin, a rag hanging over the edge with threads hanging loose, dripping water on to her skirt. She approached Esme lying flat in the bed, her heels clicking against the tile floor.

“I cannot believe they have not washed the ash from your face,” She said, her voice low and gravelly.

Esme only looked at the woman, her eyes straining to see all of her.

The nurse sat beside the bed in the wicker chair, steam floating toward her face in clouds of ivory. Esme wanted to say something to her, but her tongue would not move and she felt as if pebbles filled her throat.

The nurse reached a pearl-skinned hand toward Esme’s head, her thumb resting against Esme’s cheek, brushing the hair of her skin, wiping ash away. Esme stared at her, the nurse stared back. “I’m Dorothy,” she said suddenly, her voice quiet. “You can call me Dottie.” The nurse smiled, dimples peeking out from her pink cheeks. She soaked the rag in the water, white steam wafting around her head, and wrung it, warm drops splashing over the basin rim. Slowly, she brought the rag to Esme’s cheek, her fingers glistening wet like the reflection of a flame.

 

“She enkindled the fire. I saw it. I saw her do it. She had a fagot and a match, and I saw her light each crib aflame. Even the curtains—yes, she set the curtains on fire, and she wore no clothes, and then she went back to her room and fell asleep until we all were screaming. I saw her do it. And then she crept from her room when we woke her, and we had escaped. But she went back to the nursery and just stood there. She stood there. I could see her from window through the smoke. I think she wanted to die.”

The next morning Esme realized she had not stood since the night of the fire. Her limbs felt as though they had melted into the hospital bed and she thought of Sister Mildred’s rosary: Jesus bound to his cross, clutched in Sister Mildred’s warm hands, slowly fading. She thought of the imprint of her own body in the mattress, the outlines of her arms and her waist and her legs in the stiff, white fabric. She thought of Dottie’s hands pressing into her chest—wondered if they had left lingering pink marks there, blooming over her skin with lip-stick petals.

“I told them it was nonsense,” Sister Mildred was saying, her voice wavering, her hands shaking. “You were asleep—like us all. You were asleep.” Her cold hands gripped Esme’s still arm. “You could not have done. . . .” She looked at Esme, seeking, “You couldn’t have done . . . that. You couldn’t have.” Sister Mildred stared at her in the bed, the nun’s heart pounding in her chest. Esme’s eyes were rolled back toward her forehead, pupils glued to the ceiling, tracing the cracks in the stone. Sister Mildred thought the whites of her eyes glimmered something sinister.

“Esme, are you even listening to me?” Sister Mildred asked desperately, shaking the girl’s arm. “Hear me, O Lord . . . You didn’t do it, did you? Tell me you didn’t—you couldn’t have. . . .” Esme’s eyes flicked down to look at Sister Mildred. She stared at her for a long moment: the purple crescents on the nun’s face had grown longer and her hair had become more unruly, deep- set wrinkles Esme could trace with her fingers traveling across Sister Mildred’s skin in places they had never been before, waving and moving with her expressions. Her flesh was pale like snow and her lips looked almost blue; her face contorted as though she were honeycombed with agony in Esme’s stead.

“Vow to the Lord,” the nun said, “That you did not kill those children. Swear to Him.”

Esme opened her mouth and closed it. She looked deep into Sister Mildred’s blue eyes, “I did not kill the children,” She said, her voice ringing out clearer and sharper than it ever had before. This was the first she had spoken in days. “I didn’t kill them.”

Sister Mildred fell on to the bed, wrapping Esme in her arms, weeping into her chest, her tears warm and wet on Esme’s skin. “I knew you couldn’t have,” the nun said, “I knew you couldn’t have.”

 

“Esme has been with us for many years now. She’s a very good girl, always listens, never speaks out of turn—very pious; she attends every service we have. She’s very good with children. She would never harm any of them. She came to us with her own . . . burden. She found salvation in the Lord. After the delivery, it was adopted by a well-to-do family from New York. It is our policy that the mothers never meet the children, but Esme did get a moment to see it once before the babe was taken away. She handled it better than most of our mothers, and afterward she was devoted to God. She would never harm a child—no, not ever. She’s a Christian woman now.”

 

Dorothy came to Esme’s room with a pair of large, silver shears that twinkled in her hands like ice. Esme was still lying flat in the white hospital bed, unmoved since last the nurse had seen her. She felt as if she could feel Sister Mildred’s tears burned into her skin and she was peeking down at her chest, her eyes straining to see if there were any burn marks left there. When Dorothy closed the door behind herself as she came in, Esme’s eyes broke away from her skin in an instant. The afternoon light shone on the nurse’s face, warm and lemony, tinted through the drapes with a soft glow that made Dottie seem almost an angel, like one Esme had seen of stained glass at the convent, rosy and blue and sapphire, her white wings spreading out, her head tilted back toward the sky, her eyes black.

Dorothy set the shears upon the bedside table with a clink and began rolling up her sleeves, fingers curling the fabric underneath itself over and over. Esme watched her move, her eyes straining to the side to look at her.

“I’m going to help you sit up,” Dorothy said, placing her hands under Esme’s arms. “All right?”

Esme nodded, and the nurse lifted her up and set her against the pillows as if she weighed nothing, pulling the white blanket back up over her arms and chest when she was done. Dottie sat on the bed beside Esme, the mattress creaking under her weight, and ran a hand over Esme’s singed hair: blackened, uneven, each strand absorbing the afternoon sunlight. She took the scissors from the bedside table, one warm hand still resting gently on Esme’s head, feeling the bones in her skull and the delicate flesh of her scalp, and then began taking clumps of hair between her fingers, snipping them, the strands floating to the mattress and the floor in golden- black piles. Esme watched the hair fall before her eyes, Dottie solely focused on the shearing, the reflection of light in the silver scissors shining white on her face. Her hands moved slow and smooth over Esme’s skin, growing warmer and warmer the more hair that fell.

When she was done, Dorothy ran her fingers over Esme’s short-cropped hair. It was soft and glowed auburn like embers and Dorothy could feel the heat of her living, but Esme looked ill. Her skin was pale, and her cheeks looked thin and concave, deep-set, gray sickles sitting heavy under her eyelids. Her eyes seemed fogged as they darted over Dottie’s face, and she reached a hand toward Dorothy’s cheek as though she thought she was not really there—the white walls and the white bed and the white table and the pale chair and the faded vanity and the white-barred window with its white fluttering drapes glowing orange around them with a blinding brilliance that made Esme think of flames.

 

“There has always been something not right about that girl. She went mad when they took her son—did they tell you? Half-rats she was. She threw fits and barricaded herself in her room and attacked some of the other mothers. Once, Sister Laverne found her in the nursery just standing over an empty crib—weeping! She was bereft . . . . I didn’t see her leave her room the evening of the fire, but that does not mean she didn’t do it.”

That night, the moon shone silver through the little room’s window, casting a frosted light across the black tiles. Esme was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, her fingers and neck and leg prickling with feeling. She could hear nothing, and everything looked still, silence echoing out around her with a resounding ring. But she felt the need to move deep within her muscles, as soon as Dorothy had left her, almost as if she were already floating up off the bed, her skin not even touching the sheets or mattress, though her only movement had been to breathe.

Beneath the door Esme noticed a soft, flickering orange light grow, spreading out over the silver moonlight, driving it back to the window, burning yellow. She was starting to feel a gentle warmth enfold her body, the incandescence growing as the light spilled across the tiles, beaming upon the vanity and the wicker chair and the bedside table, spreading to the feet of her bed and crawling up the mattress toward her legs. She felt a shifting of air suddenly as though someone were reaching toward her head, a soft finger brushed against her cheek, and Esme sat bolt upright in the bed, standing to her feet. She floated to the door as though she were hardly moving at all, and twisted the ornate, golden knob carefully, feeling nothing. Esme crept out into the hallway, floating down the white-tiled floor, the gray doors lining the walls all shut, all locked. The hall was completely empty and silent, but it glowed and flickered titian; the two white double-doors at the end of it flashing a blinding light around the edges, reflecting orange sparks and a lemony glow in the little barred-glass windows imbedded in the wood. Esme moved to them and stood before them, looking between the black bars of one of the windows. She could hardly see anything beyond the light, but she pushed the door open and stepped into the blazing room, her skin burning white-hot. Through the tinted orange glow, she could see beds lined around the walls of the room alighted, burning, fires growing toward the ceiling, and she could see several small figures standing in a circle in the middle of the room, looking down at a black mass that was aflame on the white tiled floor, yellow sparks flying toward their faces. The figures stood still, silhouetted, blurred. And Esme inched toward them, their forms becoming clearer, her skin growing hotter, her body beginning to ache. She began to hear a quiet murmuring beneath the crackling roar of the fires in the beds, humming out around her, incoherent words whispered through the air like the rising of fog with each falling exhale of her chest. As she got closer and closer to the figures, Esme saw that they were children, their faces that of many animals conjoined, merged into one another. One of them the face of an otter, the fur of a tiger, the mouth of a cat. Another the trunk of an anteater waving before the fire, the face of a dog, the scales of a gecko. The other two the face of a duck and a grizzly bear, the fur of a hyena and the feathers of a peacock, the mouth of a mole and the smile of a sloth. The four of them stood there, their skin and fur melting off their arms on to the floor, dripping heavy as drops of paint, leaving glistening puddles that shifted on the white tiles, reflecting the fires’ light. They all glanced up to Esme as she joined their circle, their faces blank, eyes hollow, tinted coral.

Esme looked at the burning shape they surrounded and saw that it was Dorothy consumed in the flames, her white blouse and white skirt and golden hair now blackened to the color of cinder, her skin still white as rough opal, shining almost like morning dew in the summer. Esme bent to the floor, reaching a hand toward her and Dottie began to rise, her arms and legs hanging heavy, her head slung back, looking to the ceiling. The wings of a raven sprouted from her back and the children all gazed up at her; her eyes slowly opening, bursting black.

---

Katie Johnston is a creative writing undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago. She has been an editor for the Columbia Poetry Review, a production editor for Hair Trigger Magazine, and her essay “The Barriers Faced by Female Writers” was published on the Fountainhead Presswebsite and won the Excellence Award at the Student Writers’ Showcase.

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Poor Little

 

A stifled sniffle comes from the middle of the classroom. The room is filled with more than twenty boys all wearing bleach-white polos and black slacks. Every single boy turns their heads toward the sound expectantly. The sniffle is the beginning of the end for a particular boy, and that boy is named Poor Little Jimmy.

“Why are you crying?” Mr. Reagan hollers at Poor Little Jimmy from his podium in the front of the classroom. Poor Little Jimmy continues to smother his sniffling as Mr. Reagan marches toward the small child. Poor Little Jimmy cowers behind his desk, which is easy because of his small stature. The child wraps his arms around his shaking knees and tucks them close to his chest. Mr. Reagan stomps down the row of desks and stops directly in front of the sad child.

“Why are you crying?” He asks calmly this time.

“I’m n-not cr-crying,” Poor Little Jimmy stammers between gasps.

“You’re disrupting my class, Poor Little Jimmy.” Mr. Reagan kneels down to lock eyes with the scared and small child. “I don’t like disruptions or the troublemakers that cause them.”

Poor Little Jimmy’s eyes dart away from the instructor. He looks toward his classmates who all share the same smirk and stare at the scene before them with delight.

As you might have gathered, this child is not popular amongst his fellow classmates. He’s not liked. He is, in fact, hated by everyone in the classroom. The classroom is their collective world and it is all they know. The collective world hates Poor Little Jimmy. You might even hate him, too, and no one would blame you.

Poor Little Jimmy sees the excitement and hatred in his classmates’ eyes. He has been holding back his tears admirably, but he can’t any longer. The crying is piercing. Some of the boys cover their ears, but some breathe in the distraught noises. A small few become aroused at the mere sight of Poor Little Jimmy’s comically large tears as they roll down his red cheeks one after an- other. The aroused boys grip their wooden desks tight and press their pelvises against the bottom of the desk to suppress their erections. They slam their feet into the ground to stop themselves from leaping out of their plastic chairs and licking the tears and sadness off of him. They thirst for this and for what is to come.

“Can you tell me why you are crying?” Mr. Reagan asks Poor Little Jimmy. The boys be- come rowdier. The ones who reside on the far sides of the classroom begin to climb to the tops of their desks so they have a better view of the show.

“I-I’m s-s-sa-sad,” Poor Little Jimmy finally gets the words out. The classroom erupts into joyous laughter. The boys begin to pound on their desks. Poor Little Jimmy covers his face to the delight of the rest of the boys.

“You’re sad, Poor Little Jimmy, but your classmates seem so happy. Why can’t you just laugh along with them?” Mr. Reagan places his hand on the top of the small boy’s head gripping his dirty blonde hair.

Why is Poor Little Jimmy crying? His name was given to him by his world, so in a way it was always his name and will always be his name. But why is he crying? Poor Little Jimmy is crying because this is all he knows, and he will never know anything else. This is his life. This is his world. There is nothing outside of this classroom for these boys.

Poor Little Jimmy swings his head around trying to release the grip of his teacher. He’s been ridiculed before, laughed at, called names, but this is the first time anyone has put their hands on him. Poor Little Jimmy starts to cry more desperately as he begins to panic.

“Just give me a laugh and we’ll get back to the lesson,” Mr. Reagan tells the boy. He tightens his grip on his hair.

Poor Little Jimmy lets out a few gasps as he tries to collect himself. The boys begin to quiet down and they all sit back down in their seats. The room becomes silent around Poor Little Jimmy. The small boy sits up slowly in his desk.

“Just a little laugh, a little chuckle,” Mr. Reagan encourages him.

Poor Little Jimmy looks at his teacher and lets out three pathetic chuckles. The child retreats back into his desk and keeps his eyes glued to the floor. The silence is so heavy they can hear the clock on the doorway click through the seconds. Everyone waits for Mr. Reagan.

Mr. Reagan has a decision to make at this moment. Does he leave the poor, little child alone and go back to teaching? Does he continue to make fun of the child? Does his decision even matter? These are blood-thirsty, aroused, angry, hateful boys that want nothing more than for Poor Little Jimmy’s humiliation to continue. These boys could take it upon themselves to hurt the small boy. However, if Mr. Reagan gives the child mercy then maybe the boys might also. All these are possibilities, but I feel like you know it’s only going to get worse.

“That was a poor, little laugh,” Mr. Reagan says with a mocking chuckle. The class responds with a bout of laughter of their own.

The calm is gone.

Mr. Reagan laughs hysterically. He slams his hand down on the desk three times as he attempts to catch his breath. Each slam of his hand makes Poor Little Jimmy jump back in fear. He grabs the back of Poor Little Jimmy’s head once more and laughs directly into his face. The spittle and hot air of his breath engulf Poor Little Jimmy.

The boys are animals now. They pound on the desks with their fists as they hop up and down in their seats. Their fists begin to bleed and bruise. Either they are on top of the desks look- ing down on the poor child or squatting next to his desk on the ground looking up to him. They spit on the child. Some begin to play-wrestle amongst the madness. They inch closer as each moment passes.

Poor Little Jimmy resembles a rag doll as he is ripped back and forth by Mr. Reagan. His hair stretches out from his skull and his neck looks like its made of rubber. Mr. Reagan pulls his head back so the child’s face is pointed at the ceiling. Mr. Reagan grips the hair again and pulls it with all his strength back down toward the desk. Poor Little Jimmy’s face slams into the wooden desk and Mr. Reagan falls to the ground. Mr. Reagan looks at his hand to find he is still holding the poor boy’s hair along with a chunk of his scalp.

A look of horror appears on the teacher’s face. He throws the scalp to his side where one of the boys catches it with his mouth. Mr. Reagan collects himself and rises. He turns his back on the bloodied child as the pack of wild boys are moving in closer. Mr. Reagan walks back to the front of the classroom, takes a seat at his desk, and picks up a book. There is nothing more for him to do.

The boy who has the scalp in his mouth is tackled by another boy. They each bite down on the scalp and pull against the other like dogs fighting over a chew-toy. The original scalp biter tugs it away from the other boy and takes it to the corner to play with.

The boys surround Poor Little Jimmy completely. The child is still dazed from the hit to the face and can barely lift his head to look at the pack. He cries softly, a cry of a wounded puppy, as the largest boy of the group moves to stand directly in front of the desk. He puts both hands around the small head of the child and lifts it off the desk. Poor Little Jimmy’s head looks like a red dodgeball in the large boy’s hands.

The large boy keeps the head raised and examines his peers. They all bark and screech. The large boy smiles as the pack becomes restless. The scalp biter has spit out his toy and left it under one of the back corner desks for later. The large boy decides he’s waited long enough. He takes Poor Little Jimmy’s head and slams it down onto the desk. He grunts loudly as he does it. He picks it up again and slams it again. He slams Poor Little Jimmy’s head over and over again. Each time the sound of his head hitting the desk becomes duller as his small head deflates.

The large boy is done. He backs up from the body and allows the rest of the boys to poke at the corpse. They soon become bored. The large boy grunts at a few of the boys to his side.

They rip the small boy from his desk. Behind the desks are a row of lockers. A boy in the back of the classroom opens up one of them and the boys that carry Poor Little Jimmy stuff him into the locker.

The boys are quiet once more as they return to their respective desks. Some of the boys begin to wipe the blood from their hands onto their black slacks, but ignore the blood stains on their white shirts. The scalp biter kicks the piece of scalp he had been playing with into the corner. They all direct their attention to their teacher except for one boy who can’t remove his eyes from the desk where Poor Little Jimmy sat.

“Now, where were we?” Mr. Reagan asks rhetorically while putting his book down on his desk. He stands up to his podium.

The staring boy still keeps his eyes on the bloody desk. He quietly begins to weep at the scene. He doesn’t understand why he is crying when no one else is, but he can’t control it. He looks at his shirt where the trickles of blood of his classmate seem to be growing. He cries louder and rips his shirt off.

“Oh, now, who is making all that fuss back there?” Mr. Reagan asks from his podium. The staring boy throws his shirt onto the ground and cries into his blood-stained hands.

Mr. Reagan walks back down the aisle to the boy. He stops in front of the staring boy and waits for him to look up.

“Tommy, why are you crying?” Mr. Reagan asks the child.

Tommy looks up slowly at the teacher. Tears stream down his face that is now red from the blood on his hands. Snot begins to spill from his nose. He wipes at the snot and looks at his palms after. The sight of his red palms makes him cry harder.

“Oh, you poor, little boy,” Mr. Reagan puts his hand on the boy’s dark black hair. He looks around the classroom at the bloodied boys with a smirk on his face. “What are we going to do with you, Poor Little Tommy?”

---

Benjamin Peachey is a graduate from Columbia College Chicago with a double major in Creative Writing and Contemporary, Urban, and Pop Music. Currently, Benjamin is pursing his Masters of Education at DePaul University while serving as a Resident Teacher in the Chicago Public School system. As he continues his career in education, he hopes to bring his passion for the arts to his own classroom. 

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Portrait of a Half-Empty Girl

 

The interrogation room was starting to feel like home. The metal chairs and matching table had become almost comforting and I had begun to find colors and shapes within the crevices of the muted concreted walls and concrete floors. I thought I was numb, but the somberness of the room left a wave of melancholy that wrapped around my frame like a blanket. 

Tucked away into one of the corners of the ceiling sat a security camera, red-light flashing angrily at me. The detective was sitting across from me, one leg crossed over the other and her blonde hair pulled back tight into a sleek ponytail. Her pen moved effortlessly, almost mechanically, against the yellow legal pad placed in front of her. She said her name was Detective Karlsson when I was first brought into the police station.

Next to her sat a man, one whose name was something along the lines of Baxter or maybe Dexter —I had stopped paying attention the moment he followed us into the room. He sat slouched next to Detective Karlsson, his face red and wet with beads of sweat. He kept tugging at his collar, which looked to be too tight for his fat neck, running his hands over his thinning hair. His beady, suspecting eyes were trained on me; was he supposed to be the “bad” cop?

“Are you cold?” Detective Karlsson asked, pulling me out of my thoughts.

I realized I was shaking. I looked down at my trembling hands and bouncing knees and then back up to the detective before shaking my head back and forth. I wasn’t cold. Rather, my skin crawled as if millions of tiny spiders and creatures marked my skin as their home. I could feel their tiny legs dance across my flesh, marching up my forearm and over the sharp slope of my elbow onto my biceps. It felt so real that I had to keep looking down to remind myself that it was only my mind playing tricks on me. My dirty, caked nails raked across my skin, hoping to drive away the parade of bugs. It was clear that the LSD we had taken in the early morning, before our arrest, had yet to wear off; the severity of the situation was manifesting into a bad trip, one that was beginning to feel suffocating. 

“Okay, Zoey. Before we get started, I’m going to read you your Miranda rights.” Detective Karlsson shuffled through her pages before her eyes found mine once more.

“You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to talk to a lawyer and have them present with you while you are being questioned. If you cannot afford to hire a lawyer, one will be appointed to represent you before any questioning if you wish. You can decide at any time to exercise these rights and not answer any questions or make any statements.” Her eyes focused in on me as she continued, “Do you understand each of these rights I have explained to you? Having these rights in mind, do you wish to talk to us now?”

I nodded once. “Yes.”

“Why do you think you’re here today, Zoey?” the unnamed detective asked.

“Because we killed Riley,” I told him, my features void of emotions, my movements focused on raking my fingers back and forth across the skin of my arms. 

“Riley’s alive, Zoey,” Detective Karlsson said. 

That caught my attention, halting all my movements completely. My eyes slowly lifted from arms, brows furrowed in a mix of surprise and doubt. Were they messing with me?

When we had left her body, we were all under the assumption that she was dead. Even once they had found us, cornered in the booth of a truck stop diner in Virginia, the thought of her being alive had never crossed my mind. Maybe it should have. If we had planned on the possibility of getting caught, maybe I would have been better prepared for how to handle this situation.

“Two hunters stumbled across her in the woods buried under sticks and leaves. But I think you already knew that.”

She was right. That was exactly where we had left Riley, shoved in a shallow grave covered with leaves, sticks, and topped with dirt. Skylar and I each grabbed ahold of an arm and pulled her limp body across the rough surface, leaves and sticks catching against her clothing and skin until we had reached the grave that Berith had dug. I remember telling him that I thought the grave was too shallow, that maybe we should dig deeper; but he told me that it didn’t matter, that no one came to this part of the woods anyway. 

Apparently, he was wrong. 

I looked back down at my bug-infested skin. I imagined them parading across my flesh, weaving through the hairs on my arms with tiny hats and instruments as they played a tune, one that was much too soft to reach my ears.

“How long have you guys been planning this?” The voice of Detective Baxter (or was it Dexter? I’ll just call him Detective B) was as breathless and sweaty as he looked and caused the bugs to scatter in different directions.

“Since June.”

It had been in the works for four whole months. Late nights were spent in Berith’s basement, riding off our LSD high while we talked details over empty pizza boxes and 2-liters as we passed around a bong. His basement was littered with the remnants of these nights, and the air was filled with a dread you couldn’t mask with your strongest air freshener.

It had started as a joke. In fits of giggles, in between bites of pizza, Skylar and I threw out suggestions of Berith’s next sacrifice. A hitchhiker? A homeless person? The girl that worked the counter at our favorite smoke shop? None of these suggestions had seemed to please him. At each of our ideas, his fists would clench until his knuckles turned white and the vein above his eyebrow began to protrude. He wasn’t pleased with us; he was desperate, on edge, in search for the perfect sacrifice, something that would surely get His attention, but Berith couldn’t seem to find the right fit.

Until, with short laughs still escaping our breathless lips, I suggested Riley.

It was as if a lightbulb had switched inside his head, excitement filling his usual darkened eyes. Berith grabbed my face between his cracked palms and planted a kiss on my lips before saying, “You’re a genius, Z.”

“You know, she’s been my best friend since the sixth grade.” It’s as if my mouth had a mind of its own. My words were slipping up my throat and past my tongue before I had the chance to bite them back.

“Who has?” Detective Karlsson asked, pen halting as an eyebrow quirked in my direction.

“Riley.”

I could see the judgement lurking behind the fat man’s eyes.Some friend you are, he’d say if he could.

“If Riley’s your friend, why pick her?” he asked.

“I didn’t,” I replied matter-of-factly. “I mean, I wasn’t serious.” I felt the need to defend myself against their prying eyes. “It was Berith who decided.”

“Berith?” Detective B asked. “Do you mean Samuel?”

“I mean Berith,” I told him. “He doesn’t go by Samuel anymore.”
“Why Berith?” There was a hint of curiosity to Detective Karlsson’s tone as she inched forward

in her seat. 

According to Berith, he had been practicing Satanism since he was my own age, before he had become Berith. A few scary movies and his own burning curiosity sent him deep into the depths of the web where he stumbled across a web page. That night, by the swift click of his finger on the mouse, he found his calling on that page. He spent weeks performing rituals and calling out to Berith until one night, Samuel’s pleas were heard, and He had finally come. Ever since then, the vessel has been split between both Samuel and Berith. 

If I was being honest, I didn’t believe Berith at first. I thought that maybe, he wasn’t all I thought him to be, that quite possibly, he was off his rocker. I had plans of phasing him out of my life until I saw Him myself. He came to me late one night and appeared in the shadows of my moonlit bedroom. He towered high above my twin-sized bed, sharpened claws reaching to graze the legs of my sheet covered-body. He told me things that only Berith would know and revealed to me his plans.

When I woke the next morning, I had thought I was dreaming until I clambered out of bed and discovered holes in my sheets, left by the tips of his pointed fingers. I kept that part to myself, though. By the skeptical glances I was receiving from both Detective B and Detective Karlsson, I knew that they were no believers. 

“Tell me more about your relationship with Berith. How do you know him?” Detective Karlsson asked.

The night that Skylar and I met Berith is engraved in my mind, branded into my memory with hot coals. It was Sophomore year of high school, one year ago, and I had just turned fifteen. At that point in our lives, all three of us girls spent more time obsessing over boys than anything else. Our group-chat was littered with pictures of our celebrity crushes and heart-eye emojis; our sleepovers were filled with long talks of who we had crushes on and who we thought were cute.

Until Riley got her first boyfriend, that was when everything changed. She was the first of us to ever get a boyfriend, and she became so consumed with the honeymoon stage of her relationship that we rarely saw her

While Riley busied herself with her new boyfriend, Skylar and I found comfort in music and the boys who played that music. One night, when the leaves had begun to fall and the wind had picked up, Riley bailed on our girl’s night to hang out with her boyfriend instead. To make up for the loss of our precious girls’ night, Skylar and I thought that to cheer ourselves up we’d sneak out and go to a local metal show our favorite band was playing at.

As if it was fate, as if everything that followed was meant to be, Berith just so happened to be filling in for the bass player that night. I remember finding it difficult to pay attention to the music, my gaze kept gravitating toward him as if my eyes were magnets. I was fifteen, still a virgin, and knew little to nothing about sex. Yet, my hormones and curiosity were at an all-time high; all I seemed to think about in those days were sex, boys, and a little more sex. I spent sleepless nights with my hand creeping under the band of my pajama pants imagining what it would be like — what it would feel like if it were someone else’s hand instead of my own. Who would it be with? When would it be?

Berith was my awakening; he stirred something within me that left me feeling as if maybe he was the one, I had been dreaming of all those late nights. It felt almost too good to be true, as if this was one big joke. I was left in a trance, hanging on to each and every movement he made; I watched in awe as his tattooed fingers strummed against the strings of the bass and his dyed hair flopped over into his vision. I wondered what it would feel like to have those tattooed fingers strum against my prickled flesh or his hair tickle my face. He caught me staring — more than once — but I couldn’t look away, afraid that if I did, he’d disappear into the cloud of cigarette smoke that enveloped the stage.

Berith approached us after the show and invited us to smoke a blunt with him out back. Ever since that night, the moment our fingers brushed as we passed the blunt between us, he’s been our puppet-master, yanking and pulling our strings in whichever direction he pleases. 

But instead, all I say is, “He’s our boyfriend. We met him at a concert.”

“And by we, I assume you mean you and Skylar?” Detective B asked. 

I nodded in response as Detective Karlsson jotted something down on her notepad, and I couldn’t help but think of Skylar. Where was she? Was she in a room similar to mine? Next to mine? Were the bugs crawling across her skin too much for her to handle? Had she caved under the watchful eyes of her own detective?

She’d always been the weak one.

Detective Karlsson trained her eyes in on me once more. “Why Riley? Why her, Zoey?”

“She never liked Berith.” As if that gave reason for murder. “She said there was something about him that gave her the creeps.” I guess I couldn’t blame Riley for that. Berith was kind of creepy, but in a charming way that Riley wasn’t mature enough to understand. 

“We could have all been friends,” I continued. “Berith wanted to like her —he did—but she wouldn’t give him the chance. She’d never say it, but I knew she was always plotting to tear us apart; she’d rat us out to her parents and give us lectures as if she knew what she was talking about. I mean, she was still a virgin! Did she really expect us to take her advice?”

“Anyways, Berith said she was a non-believer. Non-believers aren’t to be trusted. They’re against us. And because of that, Berith said she’d be the perfect sacrifice.”
 “Sacrifice?” Detective B asked, a hint to his already wavering voice that I couldn’t quite pick up on. Was he scared? Was he surprised? “What do you mean a sacrifice?” 

I had become so numb to the story that was my reality that it fell from my lips with ease, as if I had practiced it like a speech. Maybe it was the drugs, or maybe it was the effect that Berith had on me, but I could no longer find it in myself to care — even when I tried. That side of me was long gone.

I was worried at first. I had spent nights lying awake in bed, tossing and turning beneath my sheets, wondering if I could really go through with murdering my best friend. Sure, she didn’t like my boyfriend. But wasn’t that normal? It’s not like I was her boyfriend’s biggest fan. So was that grounds enough to kill her? She was there for me through all the trials and tribulations of my youth — my parent’s divorce, my first heartbreak, having to put my childhood pet to sleep.

I was desperate to find the piece of me that knew right over wrong, the piece that had begun to slip away. I knew that she would know what to do so I tried to reach out and pull her from the darkness. But it was no use. She was tangled among vines of evil far from my reach, unable to guide me. It was when I realized that she was gone that I knew I had to follow Berith. If I didn’t have her then, at least, I’d have him—and if murdering Riley was what he wanted to do, then it was going to happen.

“Berith wanted to make a good impression. He wanted praise. He wanted eternity. He wanted power. But no ritual or animal sacrifice, no matter how many we completed, seemed to satisfy Him. Berith said that we needed to step it up. That this time, we needed a virgin.” I paused, finding my attention drawn to the loose thread dangling from the seam of my oversized sweatshirt. “He could’ve chosen any virgin, really. He didn’t have to choose Riley. But I think he chose her because he didn’t like her. She was starting to cause problems between the three of us, and He knew that the best way to solve our situation was to simply eliminate the cause of the problem.”

Detective Karlsson nodded. This time, Detective B was scribbling something down onto the notepad. “Take me through that night, Zoey. What happened?”

“We took her out to the woods. Berith didn’t think that Skylar and I could get her out there, but we did; we promised her booze and said there would be boys.” I chuckled. Detective B looked up at me, beady eyes narrowed. He was judging me. “Booze and boys were all it took to get her on board. Kinda sad, isn’t it?” I continued. “When we finally got out there, only Berith was waiting for us. I think Riley knew that something was up and tried to get out. She tried making up some stupid excuse about forgetting something in the car, and that was when Skylar and I grabbed her and Berith started the ritual. He wanted us to be the one to stab her, to prove ourselves to him, but we couldn’t do it.” Memories of the night put a stop to my words, flashing across my mind like a motion picture.

I failed Berith. I had held the large kitchen knife in my hand, my knuckles turning a sickly shade of white as my grip tightened around it. I urged myself to move forward, to plunge the sharp end of the blade into her unsuspecting flesh, but I froze. I so badly wanted to be the one to prove myself to Him, to be the one to deliver the final blow; I craved nothing more than the look of pride in his eyes, flecks of green shimmering above me as he watched the red ooze from her wounds.

But I couldn’t do it. I wanted to be solely and unconditionally committed to Berith and His plan, but She wasn’t as far gone as I thought. She still lingered, writhing beneath the vines, reminding me of who Riley had been to me. I couldn’t look the girl I had once called my best friend in the eyes while I killed her. She had stopped me, and in turn, disappointed Him.

The presence of the bugs became more apparent now as I spoke; they jumped from my arm to my neck and slid down my other arm as if it were a water slide. Their tiny legs tapped against my skin as they made it their home, burrowing their heads deep under my flesh. 

My fingernails raked back and forth against my skin, desperate to drive them away. This was not their home. It couldn’t be. As I retracted my hands from my burning skin, a trail of blood was left caked under my nails. I stared at my trembling, blood-stained fingers. It was as red as the blood that had pooled beneath Riley’s body. It was the red that had stained my white converse, even after I had bleached them. It was the red that I saw every time I closed my eyes.

“Zoey?” Detective Karlsson’s voice faded in and out around me. “Zoey?” she repeated, her emphasis breaking past my barrier. “Are you alright?”

I ignored her. “He had no problem with it, though,” I continued. “He just went absolutely crazy.” The words slipped past my lips lazily, a certain numbness to the motions as I trained my gaze on the cup of water in front of me. The water sat untouched, lying still in its plastic home. It was unbothered. It was free. It was peaceful. I envied that. “He wouldn’t stop.” My brows furrowed as the images played back in my head. I shuddered. “He was mumbling things under his breath that sounded like another language. I had never heardanythinglike it before. And he kept stabbing her, over and over and . . . .”

The images that raced across my mind evoked a sense of fear in me I couldn’t quite understand; it was a feeling I was not used to. Seeing Berith in such a state had frightened me,or rather, it frightened Her. It triggered the reality of what we had planned and executed to finally set in and for the first time in all those months, a feeling of doubt filled my gut.

“And then?” Detective Karlsson pressed, inching forward in her seat. Detective B mimicked her actions. Their movements drew my eyes back to them. “What happened next?”

I shrugged. “Well, we finished the ritual, buried her under some leaves and then we went to get burgers.”

---

---

The Pills

 

I always loved salty snacks, especially as a kid. Tostitos were the best for this: plain, without salsa, since I hated the squish of it with its frigid temperature compared to the chip. I wanted to taste the bits of salt sting on my dry lips, stuffing as many as I could into my mouth, feeling the crumbs fall onto my soft cotton pants.

I wasn’t allowed on top of the fridge. Rather, I wasn’t supposed to be up there because a six-year-old shouldn’t be able to even reach such heights.

But I could. That’s where everything was hidden from me.

I craved salt so badly. Even if my parents tried to get safety locks on everything, I still found a way through the baby-gates and lock mechanisms. I was a monster with willpower and stamina that they couldn’t keep up with.

The key was to use the entire cabinet and shelving units to your benefit to make up for your height. I had longer limbs than most six-year-olds and used this to my advantage. I opened both cabinets above and below me because I needed the inner shelves. I used the bottom cabinet to boost myself up onto the counter with the toaster, bread-box, and butter dish next to the fridge. I swung my leg up onto the counter. It was still sticky from my grandma making toast that morning, with flecks of breadcrumbs encrusted onto my palms as I lifted myself onto the counter space. My grandma was blind and always left a mess in her wake, making my mom clean up after me and her. I could smell the burnt coffee, eggs, and sausage from my grandpa’s breakfast, always overcooking everything to get rid of any chance of getting sick, even though it always made me feel nauseated from the smell. My dad always had to remember to make sure the coffeemaker was off because grandpa would make the coffee pot explode from leaving it on for days at a time.

I stood on the counter for a bit, looking down at the expansive kitchen. I wanted to be this tall when I grew up, tall like my dad, taller than my bullies, tall enough to reach whatever height. My toes curled on the edge of the counter in anticipation for the future. I didn’t have a fear of heights or death yet—I was unstoppable.

Keeping myself steady using the cabinet shelves and the top of the fridge, I turned myself around and lifted myself using the bottom of the top cabinet, careful not to step on any of the contents; mostly all baking supplies at the time. I used this leverage to reach out and pull the cabinets above the fridge open and, between all the colorful packages of Chips Ahoy, Oreos, Lays, Ruffles—anything to keep me and my brother sedated for two seconds—the bright blue of the full Tostitos bag waited for me.

I grabbed it with my filthy palms and swung it toward me, knocking the shallow wicker basket off the top of the fridge, small, orange, plastic pill bottles clattering onto the floor, rattling against the tile. Panic set in and I braced against the echo of the harsh sound, waiting for one of the dogs to bark or my grandpa to come out of his room to check on me. I looked around for signs of the house hearing my crimes, but it stayed silent, and I sighed with relief.

I jumped back onto the floor and picked up the contents. Thankfully, the bottles didn’t open. I still had to start my climb once again to shut all the cabinets, replace the wicker basket exactly how it was arranged. I slowly turned the labels to face precisely as they were and put the pill cutter in its place. Details like this were easy, unnoticed by amateurs. I stared at the bottles for a while, standing on the cliff of the counter again.

Blurring. It always happened like this. It still does. A wave crashes against my skull and the room spins as my focus slips away, leaving me in a fog. Static, silence, and gone.

Little half-moons always tasting like chalk, dust bunnies, and the color pink, sometimes the color orange, never the fruit. Sometimes I had to take the full moon. I stared at the disc up in the sky. Fingernail sliver, half pill, full pill, half pill, fingernail sliver. Ritalin was my only friend for most of my childhood. Probably should have told the doctor I was an anxious aggressive psychotic piece of shit before they stuck me on it for ten years at the age of three. Stimulants to counteract my brain so I could focus correctly. On what, I wondered.

Sometime later they’d give me the capsules with small orange balls in them instead, later finding out this was Adderall XR, trying to extend the release of the medicine, just making me miserable longer. I thought they looked like something from science fiction or a cartoon. They never seemed real. For a while I thought every child took medicine like this, like every child took their Flinstone vitamins. Everything was normalized. How many kids were taking pills to just be normal? How many kids had their video games and books taken away to make sure their pills were working?

The pills were only for me—my name written in bold capitalized letters with instructions I didn’t understand. They were for my problem. I was more than a rambunctious, adventurous child; it was always more than that. I was broken, sick, had something that would never leave me, something people would never fully understand even if it felt so simple to me.

“Take one pill every morning with your cereal and a cup of milk and you won’t be a problem in school. You’ll do your homework instead of read and play video games until the pill takes away any actual joy that those things once brought you.”

“Take one pill every morning and hopefully your rapid weight gain and loss will stop—the shaking, the cravings, the stomach aches, the headaches, the dizziness, the blurred vision, the insomnia, all of it will just stop. Hopefully.”

“Take one pill and your parents won’t ask you how you’re doing because you won’t know how you’re doing.”

“Take one pill and the doctors will stop asking you how you’re doing, too.”

“Your grades are slipping so take more doses, take more and more milligrams until you stop being such a problem to your mother—she’s working so hard. Maybe you’ll stop beating your brother up from your outbursts and anger, stop taking out all the bullying you’ve endured onto him. Maybe while the pill is wearing off, come home and you won’t slap him because he’s the only thing near you that doesn’t make you feel weak. Side effects may include absolute static.”

Hate yourself, hate your body, hate your brain. Stare at the walls of your room and not have the language to explain that all you want to do is scream, but the sound stays in your head. Hate your parents, hate your doctor and that fucking assistant, hate your brother, hate your family because no one thought to treat you with respect and just keeps expecting a guinea pig for ADHD medication who will be quiet and happy because she hasn’t said anything otherwise.

Adderall, Ritalin, all of them “didn’t work,” and I didn’t either, Mom.

Only sick people take medication, right, Mom?

Good girls don’t need medication.

---

Sabrina Clarke is a fiction writing student at Columbia College Chicago. Previously, she has won first place in the fiction category of the Skyway Writing Festival in 2016 and second place in nonfiction in 2017. She has been published three times in the literary magazine Horizons, and once before in Hair Trigger 2.0

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Transitions of the Day

 

This existed in cocoons like igneous, like the before. I’ve never recorded in the now, only in

after thoughts, jeered by cursing myself for letting moments pass unaccounted.

Listen back, inward—follow the trachea’s trail. You won’t have to listen long to get the gist.

Don’t say “. . .but;” don’t say “. . .what if;” never say you’re “. . .scared.”

The sensitivity to light—the sensitivity I was born into—strengthens in the early hours

post-sleep, when I rub medicated lotion on my face and examine curvatures in the handheld

mirror.

I call them precautions and cross my fingers.

I know how to deteriorate a body, but I only know how to hold it off for so long.

Let me focus on the big picture here, let me zoom out a little bit.

But instead I lock in on my torso, the skin no longer taut.

Not from babies birthed, or nourishment had.

But from sodium intake and sagging.

I allow the mirror to capture the two freckles at the tip of my lowest rib.

Milky light from the East windows emphasize areas of the physique that were once of concern, and now are rarely even mentioned to the one inside. Milky, I say—but not milky like white—milky like unpasteurized, like murky, like edgeless. And bountiful is the light, when I pinpoint it here and there, quickly, trying not to envision the whole.

I glance down at my balled toes as they slide in and out of the slotted window’s rays. The

ribbed light weaves flesh and the inherent glare of a morning, like pockets of oil on battered

concrete.

Light can only show itself, forgoing the consumption of what it falls upon. But not me, no, I am consuming. Not me, no, I am consumption itself, and I am paying attention. I’m tracking the rays’ progression across the dining room. It comes in stages and disputes itself as it traverses a room.

Beginning: Morning light pierces, illuminating the white-lace window

dressings.

Next: Sun casts from a cracked window, chaotic projections bounce

off of Mother’s faux-Renoir. It’s far from a straight entrance, too many

angles to consider. It moves rapidly here; contemplation over.

Next: In the passing hours it will shift across the table, which exists for

temporary guests; there it will command attention. A shame no one but I

will witness it.

Final: Now I’ve moved down here, under the table I’ve gone. And it’s searching

for me, its only witness to a long-standing, daily tradition. Here, despite

the table’s lofty shadow, a prism’s disbursement inches. I’m perched on

my tucked knees, sucked into my chest—a vacuum.

“I’m here,” I promise.

I extend an arm, then an index finger. I press it into the stray ray—into the deep-jade, illuminated

carpet—I slide the digit outward, beyond the table’s border. The sun, a yellow cast—will you

still stay with me when the healing is done?

This is a game. There are many. “Daughter fetches medicine on the hour.” “Mail the insurance

payment before the final notice.” “How quickly can you perform a sponge bath?” But there are

more.

In my mother’s house I play child, I play servant, and she plays dying mother.

I want to ask to play another game.

She’s been eaten alive by illness and medications that cannot fix, only prolong. How could she let it happen? How can any one person stomach their own descent into frailty, then decrepitness, then death. I spend time accepting the transitions of the day, displacing my attention on the things that have to matter. I make them matter. I haven’t given time to grieve her partial death, I’m far too busy with everything else. That’s the thing really, it is partial death. But what makes up the remains—the living forty percent to the deceased sixty? It’s not life, it’s far too hollow to be. But she’s not all dead—but gone, yes.

In her chambers, curtains remain shut, windows remain blacked, and light remains absent.

She’s redacted the outside, shut out a necessity, tucked away illumination. She hides in those

chambers, too, just another game. But not me, no, it’s in the contrast of her dark room to my

illuminated everything that we each survive in this house differently.

---

Margaret Smith will complete her B.A. in Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago in Spring 2020. Her writing often revolves around nature and personal experiences, brought to the page in short, hybrid-like works. She is grateful for the opportunity to be published by Hair Trigger.

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All the words in your head you could not say

 

You are having a party on your back porch. It is sunny and seventy. There is humidity and roses at the edge of the woods where you planted them hoping they might come up, and the aerosolized heat which drifts up on a straight southern wind from the Gulf of Mexico, some twelve hundred miles away, comes to where you sit now on the back porch. And you know if you were to say, can you smell it, can we all stop right now and just breathe, and smell it, all whom are sitting with you on the porch would think you are crazy. They would know that is your fatal flaw. Actually, two of your fatal flaws—one, you over-disclose whatever is running through your head and, two, you suffer from heightened insecurity over your over-disclosures. You have a third fatal flaw, and this one can actually kill you. You have an illness, a disease, a metastasis running through your body. You have not seen this cell, though others have. It is a genus of breast cancer called Her2. Nice name. Her 2 hertoo Hertwo. You search your rippling surfaces of thought for the wisdom she has brought you. You rarely reveal it to anyone—all these words in your head that speak of death. You would like to talk about death as if it were life—as if it were the same thing as life.

At least the yellow couches are working, if that can be said. Everyone wants to sit instead of stand, and you have thought about this—pre-thought the party and whether it would be good, whether the Humboldt Fog Ash cheese was over the top, whether you should have iced some sangria in a bowl. Maybe you want too much of everything, and that includes a perfect party. You think too much about everything—some people have said this to you, not great friends, but regular friends. You have three great friends and they all think too much along with you. They promote your spinning out. They talk about death, too, even though they aren’t actually dying as you are. Cancel that. They are dying. We all are. 

Your friends have made fun of the Michigan sweet cherry wine that you are serving, being smartly ironic, asking for a glass then drinking it from the bottle and passing it around, saying no one needs a glass. One woman wears paisley prints, one woman ripped jeans with a black-silk shirt. The party is mostly women and that makes sense since, like you, they are gay—whatever that means. In the past, you have thought about it. Now being gay is nothing, or everything, or something in between, sort of in the seams of everything else that you are. It goes along with life and death. It is what it is at the moment. You’ve made a great peach pie. It means everything to have the peaches in season and to have gone out on the tractor that they run on the farm nearby and to have picked them. These are the peaches of yesterday. It was the best you could do.

All at your party commiserate with you about living out in the middle of fucking nowhere and, yet, all are living in the middle of fucking nowhere like you do. Your house is surrounded by trees, then some grass, then a forest understory, then the forest itself. The forest is an illusion as are most in southwest Michigan. It moves a few acres this way and that until it encounters the next neighborhood; the forest runs into houses up the street with pasture, or down the street with beach, and little by little it has been cleared for pasture or beach, or for no reason at all. After the Chicago fire of 1871, most of the forest on your side of the lake was clear-cut and sent over to the other side of the lake where your trees were used to rebuild Chicago.

Most of your friends live in nearby houses among the trees. You have looked up the forest system of Michigan, and it is unique. Fifty three percent of the state is trees. You live in a tropical depression, slightly below sea level, with winds off the lake keeping it warmer in winter. Seven forest systems find their confluence in Michigan. It is the northern most point for the yellow pine, the southernmost point for the Canadian hemlock and white birch forests. The lower peninsula is packed with beech and maple forests. Because of the mists that get swept off the lake and its many low-lying bogs, it is the most easterly point for cranberry crops. Also, the northern border for peaches. Michigan forests are growing, but not in diversity. Currently, there is a sycamore blight; the sycamores along the river have been stripped bare. The bark has been peeled back leaving a tree that looks like driftwood, their white, dying branch-fingers frantically combing the air. This follows the decline of the red pines from red pine scale and a fungal root disease. But the topic you want to talk about is that of the emerald ash borer. It has killed thirty million ash trees in Michigan so far.

Your friends at the party are talking about Poet’s House in New York and having known Allen Ginsberg when he was still alive. If they just looked at your forest they would see the trees fallen and slanting. But they are not thinking of a forest filled with fallen trees. There are other things to talk about. For instance, dogs—your dog. Everyone likes your little yellow dog and pet her as she goes from person to person begging for food. Your wife has told the story of how you picked her out from a sheet of mugshots of dogs who were about to be killed at a shelter in mid-Michigan. Your dog is part-whippet so it runs in vast circles, usually in front of the forest and not in it. The dog makes a white blur, a ghost line as she runs across, in front of the trees. She had a shelter name, but lately you are calling her ghost dog.

When you ask her to come and sit, her eyeballs, ears, and jowls jitter and shake until the moment you give the word and off she goes, racing through air again. You have noticed your own silence at the party and are thinking you should say something. You could talk of this dog, how she sleeps at your side after your chemotherapy, but you don’t. You don’t speak of anything.

There is so much you cannot say. 

You have done the research, you have the words, and you want to speak of the millions of ash trees that have died in the state of Michigan alone.

For a while, the United States forestry service was looking into breeding insect resistant ash trees. When you googled ash trees, initially you hit on links on spreading ashes near trees and whether it was legal to spread ashes among the forests of Michigan. You found there were no state laws governing the spreading of cremation remains in Michigan. The irony was not lost on you. 

You googled ash tree survival and found that the key might lie in finding trees that were resistant to the ash borer. Some universities, the University of Michigan and Penn State for instance, were doing studies on resistant trees. The emerald ash borer had been brought over from Japan. The insects arrived in Detroit, Michigan in 2012 via wood cartons made for cargo ships. They’re emerald colored, of course. They bore only into the bark of a tree separating the trunk from the nutrients in the bark. The tree dies slowly.

The Michigan Department of Forestry was asking for information on ashes, specifically, had you seen an ash that was surviving the emerald borer. If you had, the Department of Forestry would like to come to your tree and take a graft and collect samples from the tree, and perhaps, in some way, you thought, save humanity. 

A few weeks before your party, you told your wife this. You told her you had seen such a tree. One that would save humanity. 

You have also researched your own disease. You know the drugs you’ve been on, the drugs that are currently being studied. You go to clinicaltrials.gov, the national registry for all trials. You type in your Her2 cancer keywords.

You had seen such a tree. There was that ash down the road, healthy and leafed out. And it did not yet have the pencil holes in the bark that were the sign of the ash borer. The tree threw a half acre piece of shade across the lawn of your neighbor with the bocce ball court. The ash was close to the side of the house. It was larger than the house. It branched out across the street, the lawn, then ran along the house, back to the bocce court. The owners of the ash were driving down the street and you asked them if they knew what they had—the last living ash in the neighborhood. The only thing you knew about these neighbors is that they were called the Millers. Telling them about the ash did not improve the microscopic bit knowledge you had of them. Half your life you have wondered what would break the staccato code of not knowing someone. They were wearing white the day you saw them, and their car was also white, and they looked like the saints of the neighborhood. But they took a pass on knowing more about their ash. They did not imagine it as you had, as the Gilgamesh of Ashes, the Hercules of trees, the prophet tree leafed out again. 

You took pictures of this ash for the Michigan forestry service. You had found there was a call-in line for citizens to report surviving ashes. Apparently, the plan was for a forest ranger to come out and inspect the tree and take samples. There was a hothouse at Penn State dedicated to propagating an ash resistant to the emerald ash borer. You followed up with the Penn State scientists. You called them, you sent messages, you sent pictures of your ash when a forest ranger asked for one. And finally, you called the Oregon department of forestry because using your forestry books and tree ID app, you found that your prize ash was an Oregon Ash. The Oregon ash had a lower crown. It feathered out into the atmosphere like the Joshua trees of the desert. Their lifespan was three hundred years. The Oregon ash was nobility compared to the green ashes of southern Michigan. You imagined that a ranger would board a plane shortly and bring a small case for samples and a small vial for seeds and you might entertain them for lunch. You imagined this immense achievement, this breakthrough for trees and humans alike.

Forestry funding had dried up. All the rangers told you this. Ashes were no longer being quarantined; they were no longer being studied. The ashes were a lost cause. The forestry service had written them off. Your conversations were shortened to “Sorry, sorry.” The studies had shown that the emerald borer would not jump to other species of trees. So the plan to eradicate the borer consisted of letting the ashes die. 

You often took the ghost dog to visit the Oregon ash to see how it was doing. You have breast cancer and it is metastatic. And you wanted to talk about it. Most of the funding goes toward breast cancer detection and almost none toward researching your late stage disease. It happens. It happened to the ash tree and to you. You had been told you were an anomaly for surviving this long. Sort of like the Oregon ash of ashes. Yeah, well, no. . . anomaly doesn’t explain it. Anomaly is the container word. Anomaly is a show, it’s a show of what is different in one patient. It is not a cure unless you study the anomaly. But no one studies anomalies. They study masses of patients, not individual survivors. 

Anyone left living in the future will be an anomaly and no one will know how they got there. You have often thought that.

You want to ask why no one talks about cancer, but you know why no one talks about cancer— really why. We are supposed to be concentrating on life. Life happens before death and death happens after, and somewhere there is a line in the sand. No one sees it as a circle, as a spiral, as a space that both could occupy. As I live, I die. As I breathe in, I breathe out. 

Your wife is a filmmaker and a Buddhist. She understands impermanence. A moving picture is an effort to capture what will never be there again, not that it was ever there in the first place. When you walk outside of movie malls you pause with her to look at cars. Cars and their polish of paint seem unreal. The vast field of cars seems unreal. What is real is that you and she are riding waves of thoughts ghosted by scenes from a movie. You look for your car which you can never find. 

You discuss film on the way home from the cinema. She likes Ozu who directed Tokyo Story. The film is about an aging couple who float about Tokyo in a diaspora. They have come to visit their busy children. They are not parents, they are aging parents. Finally, they are welcomed, almost as refugees, by Noriko, their daughter-in-law who is widowed. 

The party has gathered steam because two people have just found they worked at the same nonprofit while living in New York in separate years. Only six months had separated them from knowing each other. So, now they talked quickly, wildly shouting and stiffening their hands when they find a name in common.

Everyone seems to know someone who was connected to others they knew. Just as the conversation about poets was getting going, you stood up and asked if anyone wanted to get out and take a walk. Take a walk where? Someone asked. You explained the disease caused by the ash borer; you talked about the ash tree down the road. You wanted everyone to see the tree that is surviving, even though it is dying—will surely die. You wanted to speak all your thoughts and second thoughts and triple do-overs of your thoughts. No one knew why they should leave your party to see the tree. You want to go right now? Someone asked. And you could think of a hundred reasons to get up and go, now! Each breath it would take to stand under the ash would be worth it. Maybe later. . . . You corrected yourself.

It is stories like these, about the dying tree, that can kill a party. You rarely get invited to parties anymore, or weddings.

You get why people don’t want to talk about it. You’ve been to survivor groups to talk about it—not the tree, but your cancer. Not even the survivor groups want to talk about not surviving. 

And the wine and the bread and the hens outside in the new greenhouse. It makes you think of going to the lake, and sitting in the summer heat just to feel it. 

Someone in the kitchen ask-shouts if it’s organic salmon, and yes! You shout back, Yes, it is! And, Where did you get it? They ask, holding the cracker of salmon in the air. Dinah Washington jazz classics are playing on your new speakers that you ordered for the party. The flowers you picked that morning are like a sunburst behind your friend holding the salmon. It’s a moment, a party moment. The conversation is roiling. Your friend from New York has been asked to redesign Harvard square. The East Coast critics have not seen the design, but have decided they hate the idea of redoing the square. And you will talk of the small building down the road that the county democrats just bought. So you are trying to make this party phenomenal, whatever that means. Phenomenal is a Caribbean-blue when you are actually standing in the Caribbean. It takes your attention. Perhaps there is light in our fingertips. You think this for as long as you can—seconds, minutes, and then you turn, knowing you have to go back to where you came from before you were standing in the Caribbean. 

Parties are like that. A good party makes you realize that you are dying soon. 

You asked your oncologist to change your drug to a targeted therapy, one that the FDA has just approved. Then you visited the head of nuclear medicine in his hospital basement office, which is where all nuclear medicine departments are. You asked him about laser beam radiation for your type of cancer at this late stage. He twirled on his doctor’s stool, but paused several times to look at you. “There are no studies,” he began, and then he continued to think out loud until he arrived at, “Why not?”

You are brushing crushed garlic and olive oil on the bread, then you chop fresh basil and garnish it. As you slide it into the oven, you think, Yes, this has meaning. You hold your fingertips to your mouth. Your hands smell and taste like basil. The front door opens, the ghost dog barks. It is the woman from down the block whom you met while walking your dog. You invited her to the party on a whim. She has worn a sunhat, which you like because no one wears hats to parties anymore. You decide not to analyze this further. You hug her. It is a waning electricity in your chest.

---

Re’Lynn Hansen is the author of To Some Women I Have Known. Her essays and memoir work have been published in Prism, New South, Florida Review, and Hypertext,  and online at Contrary, and Slag Glass City. She has been awarded the New South Prose Prize, the Prism Creative Nonfiction Prize, and The Florida Review Meek Award. Her chapbook, 25 Sightings of the Ivory Billed Woodpecker, is about the personal nature of bird sightings.   She is editor of Punctuate. A Nonfiction Magazine. She has researched early cancer vaccines at Yale’s archives for a memoir about living with cancer and she is among the first to receive a cancer vaccine in trials. Her website is at www.Relynnhansen.com

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The Circumference of the Glare on the Patio

 

Monica has never actually heard real gunfire before. She certainly didn’t grow up with guns in the house. None of her relatives hunted. No one in her family ever served in the military. 

Sure, she’s heard guns in the movies and on TV and even at her friend Jamal’s house, in his messy basement, when friends gathered and smoked weed and many of the kids played shooting games, congregating around the PS4 like it was some mystical talisman.

But these shots, the ones she is hearing right now, right this very second, they are quite real.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

Three shots.   

She is certain it is gunfire. How? It sounds like firecrackers. And, after all, every news report she has ever seen about school shootings, every single one of them, the survivors always said the gunshots sounded like firecrackers.

She is sitting in her Applied Mathematics II course at Rock River Community College, alongside eighteen other drowsy students when it happens. It is hot in the room, the forced heat cranked up way too high for a mild winter day. Outside, through the large windows, the sky is flannel gray and all the winter trees are bare and cold, the branches trembling in the wind. 

Everyone hears the three pops, including Professor Adams who stops in the middle of scrawling a long quadratic equation on the dry erase board. Everyone is bored, but they all immediately sit up at the popping sound from somewhere off in the vast building. When Dr. Adams hears the noise, he turns from the board and looks at the students.

“What was that?” Eduardo Vasquez asks. 

Everyone in the room is on edge. The energy in the class shifts in an instant, like someone has pulled a switch and charged the room with electricity. 

“Sounds like fireworks to me,” declares Dr. Adams, a concerned look upon his bearded face. He rolls the dry erase marker back and forth in his hand.

Monica stands up from her desk. Calm. She has rehearsed this moment many times in her mind. Doesn’t everybody in her generation? 

Get out.

She slings her book-laden backpack over her shoulder, grabs her winter jacket, and marches for the door.

“Ms. Wilson?” Dr. Adams says.

“Ya’ll should leave, like, right now,” she says as she moves between desks toward the door, the other students glancing up at her.

Wraithlike, Monica glides past the other students and straight out the door. She steps into the long and shiny hallway. At the forefront of her mind is exiting the building. Immediately. This was what she always planned to do if it happened.

Escape. 

Why wait around? Why delay and then get stuck putting desks and filing cabinets in front of the classroom door? Why wait for the lockdown when you are, ostensibly, trapped in the building with an active shooter?

Nope. No way. Not going to happen.

The impossibly long hallway is empty. Quiet. Classes are in session. She steps out and looks all the way down where the vanishing lines of the hall converge. This is when she sees him. A lone figure, dark, more shadow than man. He is wearing all black. Bulky, something on his head, too. A helmet? Something over his face, maybe? It is hard to tell.

What is unmistakable is the gun. Long. It looks like it is baring its teeth. Menacing, even at this distance.

Get out. Get out.

Monica stands statue-like and watches as the man moves with purpose across the hall, opens a classroom door and enters. Then she hears an eruption of gunfire. 

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. A mechanized monster. Syncopated. Frightening. 

Monica turns and runs down the hallway in the opposite direction. She knows where the nearest exit is. She has rehearsed this all in her mind.  

The lights in the hall go dark. Emergency flood lamps situated near the ceiling illuminate a halogen path down on the floor. 

More gunshots. Pop. Pop. Then come screams in the distance. Back where the shots occurred. Pleading. Sobbing. It sounds like a chorus of anguish.

An automated voice booms over the college’s public address system: “There is an intruder in the building. Please take appropriate measures to seek safety. Repeat. There is an intruder in the building.”

Get out. Get out. Get out. 

She runs from the gunman, in the opposite direction. But the next sound is unmistakable. Doors up and down the long hallway automatically lock. All of them. 

Including the exits.

Click.

Lockdown.

She knows now she is trapped inside. Why do they do this? Trap people inside with a fire-breathing dragon? 

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. 

She runs to an exit door and pushes hard on the horizontal silver bar. It doesn’t budge, steel-clad immobility. The door has a vertical, slender rectangular window. Monica can see out to a large snow-covered area where, on warm days, students read, eat lunch, drink their Frappacinos. On better days, days that now seem like some wonderful dream, she sat out there, too. It is brilliantly sunny outside with all the snow, the circumference of the glare on the patio nearly blinding. How she wishes she could be out there now. 

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. This time much closer. Locked in, she is now forced to hide, to seek refuge, to pray he doesn’t come near her. She sprints down the hall to a staircase.

Pop. Pop.

A bullet strikes close by, boring into the drywall. Has he seen her? Is he shooting at her? That was horribly close.

She takes the stairs up three at a time. She is young. She is strong. Swimming. Yoga. At the top of the stairs on the second floor, she reaches the massive college library. An amalgam of new and old. 

The new: open. No doors. Tons of windows and natural light. Computers and technology and space for students to work and to commiserate. This is, in many ways, the college student center. Installations of student art are on display throughout. The library is spacious with many alcoves for students to work and hang out. 

The old: row after row of stacks. Shelves of good old-fashioned books towering to the ceiling. Like the athenaeums of yesteryear. A massive collection. 

And a good place to hide.

She runs into the library. No one is at the front circulation desk. No student worker at the coffee cart. Everyone has hidden. Somewhere. 

She runs deep, deep into the stacks.

Pop. Pop. Pop. 

More distant gunfire. He is still down on the first floor. 

Many rows in, she crouches down, surrounded by books. She grew up with books, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games and Coraline. Books make her feel safer, they bring her solace, despite this nightmare scenario. A fortress of books all around her. Knowledge and ideas and imagination. She stays still and she waits and she hopes that the authorities will arrive soon and the gunman is apprehended quickly or that he takes his own life as they so often do. 

She thinks about the little children of Sandy Hook and how scared they must have been. Only in first grade. Why does this keep happening in our country? She thinks of the high school kids at Columbine. And the victims in Orlando and Parkland and Pittsburgh and Littleton and. . . .

A metallic sound. In the library. There is no mistaking it. Shit. He is here. In the library. With her. He is changing the magazine on the monster. He clears his throat. Her heart is hurtling in her ribcage like it is falling through time and space, down, down, down.

Breathe, Monica. Breathe. 

She looks at the books in front of her. The books lined up on the lower shelves. She is in the 300s in Dewey Decimal parlance. The self-help section. The irony is not lost upon her. And then she begins to wonder if maybe she has a way around all of this. Maybe, perhaps, maybe she should try it. Utilizing her powers. Self-help and a little luck may be the only way out.

When Monica was still a baby, her parents suspected she had certain abilities. The first time they noticed things, she was barely old enough to lift her head. Monica was on her tummy in her crib. Mama had just fed her. She jangled the sterling silver rattle for her and the toothless little baby was transfixed by the sound, an angelic bell ringing inside the shiny object. When Mama had set the rattle down on a table next to the crib, Monica craned her lolling head up and looked at the silver toy beyond her reach. She stared at it and stared at it. And then the rattle rolled off the small table and it dropped to the floor with a clang.

Mama turned and looked at her in the crib.

“Why, baby, if I didn’t know any better, I’d think you just moved that rattle with brute mental force. . . .”

Several months later, when Monica was a year old, she was sitting in her highchair. Daddy was listening to Coltrane on vinyl as he so often did around supper time. Mama had served her carrots and peas that she grew without chemicals in her garden pots on the back porch. There was so much love in that little apartment it was palpable.

Then, as babies so often do, Monica flailed her little hands across the highchair tray, sending tiny peas and baby carrots raining down to the floor.

“Now, baby, why’d you go and do that?” asked Daddy, laughing as he chased runaway peas to the corner, his heart in a constant state of love brimming over for his daughter.

Monica leaned over the side of her highchair and looked at the mélange of vegetables so far down on the scuffed oak floor. She stared at them. And kept staring. And then, as her Mama and Daddy looked on, the peas and carrots started to tremble. Moving ever so slightly at first, then, like a film in reverse, the peas and carrots flew back up from the floor and to the tray, landing where they had been.

Monica laughed with glee.

Mama and Daddy turned to each other.

How did she do that?

They took her to see the pediatrician. Dr. Hansen was a no-nonsense doctor. She was at the end of her career, ready to retire, she had raised her own son as a single mom, she had seen just about everything and every ailment, disorder and anomaly a doctor can see over the course of a long and busy career. 

“We suspect Monica can move things with her mind,” Daddy explained. 

Dr. Hansen took this the same why she would have taken a parent saying they suspect their child had an ear infection. She was expressionless. Cool.

She held a wooden tongue depressor in her thick hand and extended it to the child. When Monica reached for it, Dr. Hansen withdrew her hand like a game of keep away. After a few seconds, she moved the tongue depressor closer.

“Do you want this, Monica?” She asked.

Monica swatted clumsily, trying to grab the object, but Dr. Hansen pulled it away from her again. The child looked perplexed. 

Out of reach from Monica, Dr. Hansen unfurled her fingers, showing the little piece of wood, that old stalwart of physician offices everywhere. Monica stared at the object intensely. And then it began to tremble in Dr. Hansen’s hand and, just like that, flew over to Monica, hit her little chest and quickly dropped to the floor.

Dr. Hansen said softly, “Lord, have mercy. . . .”

They took her to a series of specialists, Western, Eastern, Freudians, Jungians, and New Age. A diagnosis? They were all just guessing. Some dismissed her abilities altogether, calling it “trickery” and “hocus-pocus.” The consensus, however, despite the skepticism, was that Monica possessed some sort of psychokinetic ability. “PK,” they called it.

She could move small objects, lightweight objects with her mind.

When she was twelve, Monica was at an arcade with a friend and found she could guide a wooden Skee-Ball into the smallest rings at the top of the game, just by concentrating, earning one hundred points with each toss of the ball. The machine kicked out so many tickets for prizes that the manager finally came out and told her she had to stop. She was like a Vegas gambler on a winning streak who is asked to leave the table with their earnings. Monica was given a stash of candy and stuffed animals and stickers, one of everything in the arcade’s glass case.

But then, like all pre-teens, puberty arrived and Monica’s body changed and, much to her surprise, her telekinetic abilities started to weaken. 

And, then, they were gone.

No matter how hard she focused on objects, she had lost her ability to move things with her mind. 

And, so, here she is in the library at Rock River Community College in the middle of an active shooter situation. She is hidden many rows back in the stacks. There is a back exit out of the library, part of the reason she decided to go there in the first place. Always good to have an escape plan. But this also means she will have to leave her bibliophilic fortress and move back many, many rows of stacks to reach the door.

As she sits there, crouching down, she hears a text message tone in the library. Not her cell phone. His cell? Someone is texting this shooter, this odious person, now, of all times? The sound was close. Two rows of shelves away? Three at most?

The text tone goes off on his phone again. He is closer. “Apex.” She knows this text tone. Standard and boring. 

Monica peers through the open space above a row of books. She can see him. He is pacing like an agitated zoo animal down a row of books three stacks in front of her. He is holding the matte-black monster. It is an AR-15. She has seen it enough times on the news. They all use it. He is dressed, head to toe in black combat gear. Cargo pants with lots of pockets. He appears to have on a bulletproof vest. A helmet. Goggles. This guy came for war. He intends on lasting awhile and inflicting as much death as he can. 

So, why is he here in the library?

If he wants a high body count, would he really be hunting one lone student in the library? Or did he come here to reload?

Staying crouched low, Monica slowly, quietly spiders toward the end of the row of books toward a break in the shelving, an aisle in the stacks. She peers out and can see the circulation desk. On top of it, a small box holds short pencils and another contains little scraps of paper. Students, even in this digital age, find these pencils and paper—throwbacks to another era—useful, and they appreciate the ease of scribbling a call number in their search for a book.

She stares at the circulation desk. At these little boxes. Totally focused. She wants to create a distraction. With all her might, all her concentration, blocking out everything, including her present pulsing fear, she looks at the little box of sharpened pencils on the circulation desk. She knows she can do it. 

The box moves.

It inches slowly to the edge of the desk. The paper box flips on its side and all the little pencil stubs begin tumbling out like timber logs on a flatbed after the chains have broken. One by one they roll out, clattering to the floor.

She peers between the books on the shelves. He turns. And he points the monster toward the circulation desk. 

She makes a break for it, running down the aisle of books toward the back exit, her back hunched over and her legs pumping faster than she’s ever pumped them. And as she is running, she thinks of the scrap paper on the circulation desk and, not even looking that way, but simply concentrating on the small squares of paper, she envisions them fluttering off the desk, pigeons in flight from their roost.

The papers respond. Like playing cards in a game of 52-card-pick-up, flying off the desk one after the other after the other. 

The additional distraction gives Monica time to dash down the aisle. Eight rows of shelving to the exit.

Seven rows.

Six.

Five.

Four.

Three.

The gun breathes fire. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop.

Bullets strike the metal stacks. He is shooting at her. 

Two.

Pop. Pop.

One.

Pop. 

She feels a bullet. It passes by her right ear. Barely an inch away. It strikes a book on a shelf, the binding absorbing the bullet as it shreds through the pages. 

She hurtles down the back stairs to a landing. She turns and hurries down another set of stairs. She reaches the first floor. It is empty. 

Then she hears boots clacking behind her, striking the concrete floor in military precision. He is after her. Coming down the stairs. She turns and he is at the other end of the entryway, pointing the monster directly at her. She concentrates on its teeth. She thinks of the bullets slowing down as it sprays. She focuses all her being on this moment. Tries to slow the bullets, shift them away from her. She feels a graze on her arm. Another on her leg. She falls, and as she’s falling, she thinks of Mama and Daddy and their love supreme.

---

Sam Weller is a Two-time Bram Stoker Award winner and the authorized biographer of the legendary Ray Bradbury. Weller’s debut collection of modern Gothic short stories, DARK BLACK was published in 2020. He is an Associate Professor in the English and Creative Writing Department at Columbia College Chicago. You can follow him on Twitter @Sam__Weller

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The Recessionists: Chapter One

 

It was a bad way to watch the sunset, idling in the back parking lot of the Mormon Church with a quarter tank of gas and three missed calls from Kate. And it was such a shame, too, because it was just the kind of sunset which Cal loved to watch. A cold sky with curls of pink and orange clouds. The same kind of sky he grew up watching from his deer blind when the evening hunt was truly about to begin. When there was, truly, an exhilaration, a pounding of one’s heart against the immensity of the world. Cal sat in his truck with the radio on. Only a handful of vehicles were in the lot. Mostly rusted Chevys and old Fords with snow tires and bumperstickers reading, “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Roll Student.” None of the cars were parked next to each other. The closest they came was a full spot from one another. This was odd to Cal because soon enough, every one of those trucks’ drivers would be sitting in a circle on hard, plastic folding chairs with “LDS” sharpied across the back and a Styrofoam cup of coffee squeezed between their hands. But that seemed to be the point, Cal thought, that outside the meeting, these drivers, these people, could maintain their identities, their “me-ness,” which assured them they were what most people called normal. Inside, however, they lost their “me-ness” and, though they were still individuals, still one single organism capable of thought and feeling and joy and pain, they became a part of the circle, giving themselves up—becoming anonymous.

Cal didn’t want that, he wanted to go home to bed. To get enough sleep so he could look for a job the next day and not feel as if he were fighting with a hangover. His meeting with Stacey was in the afternoon and if he had to tell her that he’d just been fired, at least he could show her a handful of job applications. Passed the church, the sun sank behind the tree line, gravity pulling the light across the frost on the farmer’s field. That’s what did it, right? Gravity? Pulling anything and everything, including light and drunks, one way or the other. Pushing the earth in a circle. Maybe that was what Cal remembered learning once. The sun was now only the light it left behind, falling over the edge of the earth like neon-dyed hair over the side of a bed, and here he was wasting gas to keep the heat on.

The church was small with a brown-brick façade and a set of glass double doors. There was a cinderblock wedged between the doors to keep them open. The building wasn’t like any of the other churches in town, no stained glass, no bells. Had it not been for the steeple, which didn’t rise higher than the trees that surrounded it, it could pass as a municipal building or maybe a funeral home. But there were probably far fewer Mormons in Michigan’s Thumb than there were Methodists or Lutherans or even Catholics—so, maybe, Cal figured, they only needed a small church. It was better, anyway, not haughty, which meant that it drew less eye traffic. The perfect place for a weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meeting.

A couple more cars came, the drivers, not hesitating to pop their vehicles in to park and beeline it for the doors. Cal didn’t recognize any of them and felt that maybe miracles were in fact real, but that they were relegated to mundanity. The green numbers on the dashboard clock flashed over to a quarter to seven. Cal had been in the parking lot long enough to have the sharp air cloud his rear windshield and the edges of the windows. The meeting started in fifteen minutes, but Cal didn’t want to get out of his truck. Cal knew what was waiting for him behind those double doors. Folding chairs and burnt coffee. Pity smiles and fake empathy. Fingers peeling at cups and knees pistoning. The circle listening to a Tom or a Jane or a Quentin as they shared the same stories they all shared every week. I promised myself only one drink after work and then woke up next to a toilet.

It would be easy for Cal to leave, to pull his truck out onto the county road and disappear into the snow and dark. If he left now, he would have enough time to call Kate back, see what she wanted. He had to give up his weekend with Jack, but maybe he’d still want to talk to his daddy. Jack was seven, old enough to feel betrayed, but Cal hoped he was still young enough to not know what a grudge was. He couldn’t leave, though. He had to get out of his car and go in because that’s what the judge ordered and what his parole officer enforced. There wasn’t a damn thing he could do about that.

Kate paced through the doorway between the kitchen and the living room, spinning her phone in her hand like a deck of cards. Her ex-husband never answered when she called, but he always called her back within a couple hours. She hated that. He said it was because he was always busy when she called, but no human being was ever that busy, no lines of fate, speeding along time and space, jumping across the numbers of possibilities and the theories of probability finally crossed at the exact moment when Kate called Cal while he was “busy.” Coincidences be damned, Kate thought. She knew he just liked being the one to make the other person answer the phone. It was a power thing. Control for a man without any. This time she had even left him a voicemail, something she never did. The two of them had an understanding, when one called the other, it was important. It was one of the many small things that don’t show up in divorce papers, but, on a level beyond the law, are still binding like sending any kids to the other parent with clean clothes and making sure you’re not late to your ex-in-laws’ funeral. She’d called him three times and if he didn’t know that she meant business, seeing that he now had a voicemail, was sure to feel like a kick to the side of his knee.

There’s a certain kind of fear a body feels at points in their lives. There’s the fear that makes one think that their life is almost up, like what’s felt when the car brakes lock on an iced stretch of I-75 and the only other vehicles around are semis. That’s the exciting fear, a feeling heightened by time running on fast forward and loud noises and too-quick-but-at-the-same-time-too-slow reflexes. That’s the fear that sells movie tickets. Cal didn’t have that fear as he stepped closer to the doors of the Mormon Church. He had the kind of fear that sat inside someone like a pot of coffee and undercooked eggs. The everyday fear of unpaid bills and having lunch with that one coworker who thinks they’re your best friend. Cal felt it gurgling inside him as he pulled himself farther away from his truck. The kind that lingered with someone, the leveling kind that didn’t care what bills a person had to pay or what their credit score was or if the person was still a virgin. Cal knew this fear, he’d felt it only once before when he walked up to the glass window of the maternity ward and looked at his son for the first time. The comparison shamed Cal, but he challenged any man to say, when they saw their child for the first time—no, when they were first told they were going to be a father, that they did feel some kind of weight slosh in their guts, that they didn’t think, Oh, shit. Now what? for even a second. Anyone who said that all they felt was joy was full of it, Cal knew that. Fear knew that. It made everyone equal.

At the church, Cal pulled himself through the crack between the doors and stood on a dirty entryway rug that was soaked with melted snow and mud. He heard someone pulling a chair across tile floor, the little rubber ends squeaking along the wax, and a few voices indistinct from one another. He stomped his boots, trying to knock the snow off them, but only succeeded in splashing himself with the pooled thaw. A hall ran from both ends of the entryway, the lights were off and only a triangle of dusty light came from the end of the left hall. Cal’s pocket buzzed. He reached into it and pulled out his cellphone. Another missed call from Kate. This time she left a voicemail. She only did that when she really needed him for something that only he could provide. The phone said ten past seven and he could hear only one voice now coming from down the hall. He was late.

“Shit,” Cal said, “I don’t have time for this.” He looked down at his phone, then down the hallway. He flipped open his cellphone and went back out in the cold.

Kate owned a home east of Caro on the northern bank of the Cass River, set back from a dirt road a few hundred yards. A small place with two bedrooms and a bath, new vinyl siding and a roof that would last for another fifteen years. She’d bought it off a land auctioneer’s block, and part of her felt guilty for that. But this was her home. She’d put in the time, worked the hours, dealt with the mess and money and headache of being married to a man like Cal and had grown out of it with some idea of what she deserved.

Her phone rang and she answered it before the first ring had finished. It was Cal.

“I saw you called. What’s up?”

“Did you listen to my voicemail?”

“No,” he said, “Figured you could just tell me.”

“That’s the point of a voicemail, Cal.” The man baffled her sometimes.

“Kate, you didn’t call to argue about a voicemail.” Cal had always had a way about arguing—namely, he didn’t do it. Even if she got started with him and even, like now, when she wanted to duct tape his phone to his head with her voicemail playing on repeat, she found that he still knew how to keep to the matter at hand.

“Jack brought a bullet to school.” She didn’t need to waste time hinting at things, or setting the stage for a conversation about their son. Cal hadn’t been the most reliable husband, but anything having to do with Jack made Cal twist his ankles trying to do what he could. So, when Jack’s principal, Kate’s boss, called her down to his office and she found her son sitting with his chin practically glued to his chest and Mr. Berber leaning across his desk with the pointed brass jacket of a 5.56 shell pinched between his forefinger and thumb, she knew that Cal wouldn’t need nor want any sugarcoating. 

The line was silent and she could hear him shifting the phone from one ear to the other. She heard him sigh and then the crackling static of wind. He’d just stepped outside from somewhere. 

“Well?” She said when the wind died down.

“Can this wait?” Cal said. 

“‘Can this wait?’ You’re joking, right?”

“I’m a late for something.” 

“Your son. Just brought. Live ammunition. To school,” Kate said. “What part of that isn’t registering with you?” 

“I hear ya, Kate,” Cal said, “I do.” He sighed again and Kate could tell he was trying to end the call. “Look, I can come over in, like, two hours. I’m in the middle of something I gotta take care of.” The wind picked up on his side of the line and Kate heard him shifting. His knee was probably killing him.

“Like what?”

“Like something important.”

“Something important?”

“Parole important.”

Kate shook her head and walked to the other side of the kitchen. Down the hallway, she saw that Jack’s door was closed and a sliver of light showed from the bottom of it. He’d been in there since she’d brought him home. Photos hung in the hallway like a timeline connecting his room to hers, the picture of him as a newborn lying next to an ink imprint of his baby feet which hung next to his door, and a framed snapshot of the two of them sitting on a blanket watching that year’s Fourth of July fireworks hung next her door. Cal had paid a frame shop to professionally matte Jack’s diploma from graduating kindergarten and it hung at the end of the hall above a small table with a photo of Cal holding Jack’s hand as they walked across the graduation stage. Kate had to take half a sick day because there was no one to watch him. Cal wasn’t available when she’d called the lumberyard to see if he could take Jack home. She thought about the moments captured in those photos and about the mortgage that she never worried about. She thought about the pen she’d used at the auctioneer’s office, how it bled so strongly, as if it too couldn’t wait to put Kate’s name at the bottom of the deed. She deserved those moments and her 3.95% fixed mortgage rate, but she didn’t deserve this.

“Look,” she said, “That line has run its course with me. Make something work and get here.”

Cal walked in at the tail end of a story told by a big guy with enough muscle to negate the fat around his middle. A tribal tattoo snaked past the frayed hems of his sleeves and down his arms. Had it not been for the man’s face, Cal would have thought he’d have been a tough customer. The man had a boy’s face with thin, cornsilk hair curled on his chin and out from underneath a camo baseball cap. His lips were chapped and he was biting them as he spoke.

“But he don’t wanna see me, and I can’t blame him. I told my mom on the phone one night, I said, ‘Ma, how’s Dad?’ And she just told me he’s been busy hauling sugar beets for Pioneer. I,” the man-boy cracked his knuckles one at a time and shifted his feet on the tile floor. He looked troubled by what he was thinking about saying next, like he had seen someone steal a newspaper from a stand and use it for an umbrella. He didn’t know if it was wrong to share what he was re-witnessing in his mind or if it would just be best to keep it below the surface. “I’m done for tonight. That’s all I wanna say.”

The circle of people thanked him. Jared, they called him. Then, in unison, the faces turned to Cal as he stood in the doorway. A man who was all beard and denim, a shaky older lady, the man who was just talking, and two middle-aged men in overalls shifted enough to face him.

“Welcome,” the denim man said. The older lady coughed and smiled at him, and the overalls leaned over to each other and whispered. Cal cleared his throat and took a seat next to Jared who crossed his arms and grunted through his nose. It was seven thirty, the meeting was a third over, but maybe he could still make that count with Stacey. He just needed to find the person in charge, explain what had happened, and get them to sign his hours sheet.

What was Jack thinking, bringing a bullet to school? Cal thought about the first time he’d taught the boy to shoot, all the rules, the first being, Always treat a gun like it was loaded, and another being, Bullets are just as dangerous. He pictured his son walking the halls of Schall Elementary with that small, almost inconsequential piece of brass loaded down into his pocket. He saw it rolling back and forth between his son’s index finger and thumb, the coolness of it making him smile as he approached the first friend he’d show. He knew what Jack had wanted from this, he wanted to be king of the kids for a day. He wanted his friends to say, “Oh, wow, no way.” He wanted his friends to think he was cool. Cal knew he’d have to stay late to talk all of this through with Jack and that Kate would be a mess, sitting just outside of their son’s bedroom door, holding herself back whenever she heard her ex-husband say something that she disagreed with, Cal wanting to put Jack to bed so he could get at least some sleep. But Cal wouldn’t sleep at all that night, he knew this. He’d rethink everything he’d said to his son and find better, or simply different ways of saying what he’d said. That doubt would clang around his apartment like broken dishes. He’d want to drink and not want to drink, and that tearing inside him would keep him up until the auto-drip on the Mr. Coffee kicked on at six.

Someone coughed and Jared nudged Cal’s shoulder with his elbow. Cal looked up from his coffee. The circle focused on him. Ten sets of eyes, ten noses, ten different stories and reasons and excuses waiting for him to offer his. Cal cleared his throat again. This was what he had practiced for, what he knew was coming. He had the words, knew the answer, My name is Calvin, and I’m. . . but something caught up inside of him, something that kept him from acting and told him to swallow it all down, digest it until it was almost nothing. Was his record seventy-two days sober? Why, how would he know that? What made Cal want to keep track of that? When had that been? Jackson State Prison? Cal looked up to the clock, the meeting still had half an hour to go. Say it, Cal said to himself, say something at least. The boy came back with a Dixie cup of water for the gray woman. She coughed into it and water bubbled over the sides into her lap, her hands shook as she lifted the cup to her lips.

“Hey, man,” the denim shirt said, “Look, you don’t have to testify to God, and we’re not offering you any Kool-aid here, but at least tell us your name.” He leaned forward over his knees, holding a half-full Styrofoam cup.

“My name is,” Cal started. The circle seemed to ring around him, tighter, even the man-boy next to him had uncrossed his arms and was looking toward him. What was his name? Jeffrey? Jeremy? Jared! That was it, a man with a boy’s name, right. But now what was his own name, he thought. Anything, really. He was free to be anyone.

“My name is Ben,” Cal said.

“Hi, Ben,” the circle said. The air vent in the ceiling rattled alive and dust fell from the grating. He slid back from the edge of his chair and lined his spine against the molded plastic. The coffee in his hand smelled fresh and was still warm. Feeling it in his palms, he remembered how cold he had just been while talking to Kate and the explosion of ice he felt in his stomach when she told him about Jack. He sipped the coffee. Somebody had made it the way he’d gotten used to, weak but almost mild. Lukewarm. He knew there were going to be things that, having come back to reality, he’d have to let go, but it killed a part of him to learn that something as seemingly inconsequential as a hot cup of black coffee would be one of them. 

“So, Ben,” the man said, “Would you like to share anything else? We’ve got time.” He smiled, and Cal focused on a small scar on the man’s chin. He’d avoided direct eye contact for years, but he knew that the man in denim would be looking right into his if he looked up.

The sound of the double doors clanging came from down the hall, and Cal felt the eyes of the circle fall away. A woman wheeled around the doorjamb and into the room.

“Don’t mind me. Ignore me. I’m late. Yes, I know. I’m so, so sorry to interrupt.” She made straight for the coffee and poured three seconds worth of sugar from its container before pouring the coffee in. Then she turned to the circle, stirring, a large red purse hanging off her shoulder. She grabbed a chair and slid it between Jared and Cal. “Scoot,” she said to them and like a wave at a football game, everyone around the circle inched away from where the woman had chosen to sit. She sat and her purse fell from her shoulder. She caught it in the crook of her elbow, but still sloshed some of her coffee on the floor near Cal’s feet.

“Oh, oh,” she said. She laughed a little. “I’m sorry. So, so sorry.” She tried to mop at the small puddle with her foot. She wore green thong sandals and her toenails had yellow polish.

“No problem,” Cal said.

“Good,” she said. She stopped her attempt to clean the spill and turned to the circle. “What did I miss?” Cal gauged the others. They were used to this woman, this seemed normal for her and to them, but he also saw that they were tired of it.

“Gwen,” the man in denim said, “What are you doing?”

“Attending my meeting, Josh,” she said. She drank her coffee and Cal could smell the sugar cooking in it.

“You interrupted Ben,” Josh said.

“Who’s Ben?” She asked. The circle looked to Cal. “Him? Oh, I’m so, so sorry. He doesn’t look much like the talking type, though.” She winked at Cal from over the rim of the Styrofoam cup. “New guy, then?” She asked. Cal nodded. “See, Josh? What’d I say? Doesn’t look like much of a talker.”

“Gwen, please,” Josh said. He brought his hands up to his lips as if he were praying to the woman to save him from herself. 

“I’m just playing,” she said. “Go ahead, Ben.” 

There were only twenty minutes left for the meeting and Cal didn’t want a second of it. He needed to be home, or at least at Kate’s home to talk to Jack who, by now, was probably getting ready for bed.

“I don’t really have much to say tonight,” Cal said. Josh let his head drop and Cal could see through the thinning brown hair swirled at the top of his head. He had a tattoo right smack on the top of his head, but Cal couldn’t make out what it was.

“Not a problem, Ben,” Josh said. He lifted his head and smiled around the circle. “Does anyone else have—”

“My roommate is a total bitch, and I fucking hate her.” The circle zoomed their gaze over to Gwen. She drank her coffee and crossed then uncrossed her ankles. She leaned forward and tapped her toes.

“Could you please take this seriously,” the old woman said. Her hands shook, but her voice was clear, although a little burnt from years of cigarettes and probably a few other things. She pulled her cup to her mouth, and the cracked yellow of her fingernails shone like tiny headlights against the white of the Styrofoam.

“You all know me,” Gwen said.

“That’s not the point,” Josh said. “It’s about sticking to the routine, going through it step-by-step.” He closed his palms together again. The clock seemed to have stopped.

“Fine,” she said. She leaned back against the chair, her eyes level with Cal’s. She winked at him. “Hi, everyone, my name is Gwen.”

“Hi, Gwen,” the circle said. Cal came in a half second later than the rest and his was the last voice heard. “Got a timid puppy here, don’t we?” She said.

“Gwen,” Josh said, “You were going to tell us about your roommate—again.”

“Right,” Gwen said. “She’s a bitch. I hate her.” She drank her coffee. The circle stared anywhere but at her.

“Is that all?” Josh asked.

“What? Oh, so, so sorry. I got literally no sleep last night and coffee is taking up a lot of my brain power right now. So, no, that’s not all. My roommate is this girl I knew from college. She has her space, I have mine, the rent gets paid on time. Everything should be easy peasy, right?” She handed her coffee to Cal and began waving her hands as if she were directing traffic. “Well, it isn’t easy. My roommate likes to entertain. Likes to invite all the people we used to run with at school. She likes to drink. Hell, I like to drink, too. That’s why I’m here, duh. But this chick, I tell you, she’s a fish. No, you know what? She’s a whole school of fish. She knows my situation and you all told me I should talk to her about how it makes me feel, what kind of spot it puts me in. I did, and you know what happened?” The circle was quiet. They’d heard this story before, Cal saw. Gwen saw it, too, but it was her time to speak and this was on her mind. She wanted them to listen. She grabbed her coffee back, downed it and began peeling the Styrofoam, spinning a white ribbon from it.

“What happened?” Cal asked. She put a hand on his thigh.

“She cracked a beer and told me I could have one if I wanted.”

“That’s it?” Cal asked.

“That’s a lot,” Gwen said. “It’s almost too much.” She removed her hand and went for more coffee.

“Gwen,” Josh said, “What did we say about removing ourselves from any toxicity? Like Jared here, he knows his relationship with his dad, knows how fighting with him makes him feel even after he tried to make amends so he doesn’t see his father. Is it easy? No.”

“Not a bit,” Jared added.

“Right,” said Josh, “But it’s something we have to do. Not just for ourselves—”

“But for who?” Gwen said. “‘For those we owe it to?’ Is that what you were going to say?” She lifted herself to the counter and sat, tapping her heels gently against the cupboard door.

“It’s for everyone’s benefit, Gwen,” Josh said.

“Remove myself from the toxicity, huh? Then what? Where will I live? You got a spare room, Josh? Gloria, willing to share your single-wide with me? Anyone here a banker? Got a mortgage you could, I don’t know, give me?” She jumped down, slamming her feet onto the tiles.

The circle had nothing to say. Gwen grunted at them.

“I didn’t think so,” she said.

The clocked ticked over to eight and the circle rose.

“Well, that does it for tonight,” Josh said. “Let’s bring it in, give each other some love.” He held his hands out to his sides, taking in Jared’s and Gloria’s, the old woman, who was still shaking from the hands up. A coffee stain had spread along the tile below her chair. Cal knew those shakes. Gloria needed a drink.

Gwen laced her fingers through Cal’s and squeezed. Cal wanted to ignore it, everyone else had merely cupped their hands, but it seemed from his twenty-five minutes of watching Gwen fill the room, of her making it loud and quiet in the space of a single breath, that this would be something she’d do. She’d weave her hands into a stranger’s and believe that’s where she always belonged.

“Alight, one more time, with feeling,” Josh said. The circle shook as it inhaled, but in that moment between breath and prayer, Gloria began to cough. She dropped Josh’s hand and tried to cover her mouth and it was that connection to him that proved to be her anchor. She listed forward and fell, her head cracking against the floor. On her other side Cal still held her hand and at first, he and everyone else in the circle for that matter, thought that she had slipped on the coffee she had been spilling all evening. But she kept coughing and before the switch flipped in anyone’s head, the one that told them that they should be doing something, Gloria began to shake.

“Someone call 9-1-1, I think she’s having a heart attack,” Cal said. He knelt next to her still holding her hand. The woman squeezed his hand and stared into him, she looked as if she were drowning. One of the men in overalls had an operator on the phone and was telling them to hurry, that someone was hurt, that someone was dying. Josh crouched on the other side of Gloria. 

“I don’t think it’s a heart attack,” he said. “I think it’s a stroke.”

“What if it’s a seizure?” Jared asked. Josh grabbed Gloria’s coat from the back of her chair and laid it over her. Her face was chalk, her eyes pushed at the corners of their sockets and tears ran down to her lips.

“Get her some water,” an overall said.

“No, prop her feet up,” said the other.

“Keep her head elevated,” Jared said, “And don’t let her hit it on anything else.”

“Get out of the way,” Gwen said. She pushed the men away and rolled Gloria onto her side, peeling her grip from Cal’s hand. He hadn’t realized that Gwen had pulled away from him, his hand was still cold from hers. Gwen pried open Gloria’s mouth and fished into it. 

“She’s choking on vomit and her tongue,” Gwen said. Gloria shook and closed her mouth on Gwen’s finger. “Goddammit, you idiot,” Gwen said. “I’m trying to save you.” She pulled her hand away and a stream of coffee bile spilled out onto the floor around the feet of the men. “Here,” Gwen said. She grabbed Jared’s hand and propped it against the small of Gloria’s back. “Keep her on her side.” She pointed to one of the overalls. “Get your ass outside and flag down the ambulance. Everyone back up and let her breath a bit.”

Gwen lifted herself from the woman and rushed to the sink. She filled a cup with water and came back, dabbing some of the water across Gloria’s forehead with the hem of her sweater. The woman had stopped shaking almost as quickly as it had taken her to fall. Gwen rested the woman’s head in her lap. She was breathing, but almost too softly. 

“It’s alright, Gloria. Shh.” Gwen held onto the woman and brushed her hair away from her face.

The ambulance pulled onto the icy road, its orange and red lights dancing across the trees and the snowdrifts along the shoulders. Two trucks pulled out and headed the opposite direction into the darkness. Cal felt his phone vibrate in his pocket. It was almost nine. Between five missed calls and two voicemails, all from Kate, there was a text. If you think im just forgetting about this, youre mistaken. Kate, Jack, the bullet, the fact that Cal was supposed to be with them trying to figure out why, for God’s sake, his son would do such a thing came back to him. At his truck, he watched wisps of snow ramp off his windshield. He thought of how Gloria looked as she choked on every breath, how she grasped his hand as if he could pull her out of herself and save her, as if he knew what to do in a time of crisis. 

“Can I bum a ride?” Gwen came to the front of the truck and held out her hand. “I got chomped pretty good.” 

“Putting your finger in her mouth was pretty stupid,” Cal said.

“Stupid only because I got bit. But wouldn’t it have also been stupid to, I don’t know, pat her back like a baby or slap the back of her head? Wouldn’t it have been stupider still to let her choke to death?”

“Well, when you put it that way. . . .” 

“That’s the only way to put it,” she said. “She ain’t got rabies. I won’t turn into a zombie. If you can help somebody, do it.” Cal’s phone vibrated again. Josh came out of the double doors, locking them. He waved to the two of them.

“I have some place I need to be,” Cal said. “Can’t he take you?”

“No way in hell I’m getting in a car with that guy again,” she said. “You fuck a man once and they think they own you.” She circled over to Cal’s passenger side. “And what did I just say about helping people?” She opened the door and sidled in. Cal followed and started the truck.

“Persuasive, eh?” He said.

“The bloody finger wrapped in a windbreaker helps, I think,” she said. “I’m filled with those little grains of gold.” She curled her arm into the bend of Cal’s elbow and the two watched as the circle broke apart into individual lives once again. “Of course, you gotta filter through all the grains of salt, to get to it sometimes.”

“Are you telling me you’re a liar?” Cal slid is hands into his pocket and felt Gwen squeeze him at his elbow.

“We’re all liars, Ben. C’mon, the sooner you get me to the hospital, the sooner you can get back to your life.”

---

RS Deeren is a writer from Caro, Michigan where he’s worked as a line cook, a lumberjack, a landscaper, and a bank teller. His fiction is influenced by these and other odd jobs that sustained him during and after the Recession. An Advanced Opportunity Program Fellow in the English PhD program at UW–Milwaukee and a graduate of Columbia College Chicago’s Fiction MFA program, Deeren’s work has appeared in Rosebud Magazine, Joyland, Midwestern Gothic, Great Lakes Review, and in the anthology Tales of Two Americas: Stories of Inequality in a Divided Nation(Penguin Random House, 2017). He can be contacted at www.rsdeeren.com.