The Fictioneer

Spring 2015

Oddly formatted Mast Head:

Acquisitions Editor
Fiction Editor
Nonfiction Editor
Poetry Editor
Associate Editor

Rubie Grayson
Eric Rancino
Esme Howler
S.R. Stewart
Nicole Pomeroy

Editorial Assistant
Editorial Assistant

Ani Manjikian
Lou Peterson
Cover Art by S.R. Stewart
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Savor every word; lick every page; toast to happiness.

The Goods
Poems
Francis Daulerio
Excerpt from If & When We Wake
Fiction
Mick Bennett
Excerpt from Boardwalk Man
Devin Holt
AP Style
William Alton
Excerpt from Girls
Bruce Reeves
The Hummingbirds vs. the Wasps
Joshua Flowers
Green Books
Adam Phillips
Presentation
Love
Joseph Johnson
The Host
Nonfiction
Jeremy Jusek
Book review: The Morrow Plots
Editor's Note

Poems

Francis Daulerio
Kept Out of Reach
I have a childhood
somewhere inside me,
stashed away like baby teeth
in a medicine bottle.
Now Im old enough to open
it, so I open it
and peer into the white.

Cognitive Dissonance; or, Following a Death

Sometimes when I venture
into the basement to borrow a hammer
I swear to God
I hear you put your glasses down
on the table
and walk away.

Cracking Back Through

Fast forward
through the thaw
We sprout
from our homes,
muddy boots,
almost warm
if not for the wind.
Let existence explode,
pump life back into itself,
and
grow.

You can read more of Francis Daulerio's poetry in his latest book
If & When We Wake available at Unsolicited Press.

Fiction

Mick Bennett
Excerpt from Boardwalk Man
When Ronny and I arrived in Key West, my mind wandered as it
had when I lived in north Jersey, California, or Chicagowhich by the
way is a hell of a city to be in for St. Pats. I missed Belmar. With my
missing, memories crowded my thoughts. For some reason, in Key
West I thought about Sophie the most, about our last summer all those
years ago, right after my adventure at Avon Eds featuring his Everly
Brothers soundtrack and the two overly madeup, seventh grade girls.
After I paid my fines and left courtEd didnt leave jail for years
Sophie spoke one sentence to me for the next month. One sentence in
one month. Try it sometime.
I loved Sophie. The first time I made love with the first woman I
made love to, we conceived a beautiful baby girl. What happened to all
that? I stopped asking years ago.
In the early sixties, my corruption of minors charge didnt cause
headlines in the Asbury Park Pressjust a note in the police log. It
didnt even make the Coast Advertiser, a Belmar weekly favored by
burglars that featured engagement, wedding, and fashion show photos
along with blurbs about Mr. and Mrs. Blowhard Jones set to sail on the
Queen Mary. My story had legs of its own.
I got shit from the under thirty, younger borough crewsome for
being so stupid, some for not scoring jailbait pussy. The older men
with children took it more seriously. Im sure they said more behind
my back. I was grateful for their restraint.
Away from the open kidding, silent looks followed me. A
housewife poking her head out the door to watch Denny and I collect
brush from her curb, a shopper at the Acme recognizing me and then
leaving the aisle. I believed such people watched to make sure I
witnessed their repugnance. At massthe only time I got within five

feet of Aliceall the eyes followed me back from communion. At

first, my stare studied the carpet.
Then one Sunday I raised my eyes and looked back at them. I
turned my head, swept the crowd, and smiled. You stupid people dont
know about me. I looked at Mother and my sisters. Mother looked
confused. After I married Sophie, Mother had told me, My prayers
have been answered.
They sure as hell hadnt involved a thirteen-year-old girl. I smiled
wondering what requests shed send up now.
Denny said to me the day I got back to work, Seamus, what were
you thinking? What the hells the matter with you?
We were picking up branches from around Silver Lake after a big
thunderstorm. I put hands on his shoulders and led him to the other
side of the truck, its big engine idling between my words and the
houses across the street.
It wasnt all that bad.
Whats wrong with you?
You hypocrite. We never asked what was wrong with us. What
were we thinking? Besides, I barely touched
Let go! his arms flew up.
I wasnt holding you.
Piss off!
I couldnt tell Sophie to piss off. I wished she had said the
equivalent to me. All I got was silence and something elseshe would
not leave me alone with Alice. From the time I got home from work
until the time I went to bed, she would not leave me alone with Alice.
We rented a little cottage on Sussex and Edown west from Lisa
and Robins placeand it had two tilt-ceiling, spare rooms upstairs,
the location Sophie had in mind in her one sentence: Youre sleeping
alone.
I went along. If she felt that way, I was okay with it. I believed I
deserved punishment. The shit I took at work and from Denny was

one thing. That I could handle. When Sophie rushed to Alice, the
second she heard me close the front door home from work every
weekday and Saturday afternoon, it tore my heart. Shed scoop Alice
up from her Bozo Blocks or from her nap, hold her tight, and look up
at God or the ceiling on the way to the kitchen.
That was her fortress. Shed latch the little swing gate Id put in the
kitchen doorway to keep Alice out of the kitchen and away from the
hot stove while mommy cooked. Now the gate kept Alice in and me
out. Before Id sit at our little table, Alice in her highchair with some
finger food, sip a beer and keep the girls company as Sophie prepared
dinner.
I got tired of that damn fast. I started to wish theyd sent me away
for a time like old Ed. There wasnt a drop of patience in me, and in
my anger and resentment, I began to search for a petty crime. A cigar
smoked on a deserted boardwalk bench, a whiskey bottle hidden in a
ceramic drainpipe. I wasnt looking for absolution. Just some
accommodation.
I picked an after-work drinking session with Joe Foster and Butch
Peters, two men in their thirties, working men by then well worn from
the twin grinding wheels of routine and cynicism.
If she wont let you in the fucking kitchen to get a beer, what
choice is there? Joe said to me one afternoon at Tessingers. He
bunched burly shoulders and slapped back blond hair from his
forehead.
Shell be pissed Im spending money out.
No choice, Butch answered. Short and dark haired, tattoos
covered his forearms. At two hundred and fifty pounds with hands like
vice grips, Butch lived up to his nickname. His real name was Herbert.
I saw exactly one unfortunate man call him Herbie.
He laughed without opening his mouth and spilling his tobacco
juice. Most mornings Butch brought a pint of Mogan David 20 proof
wineMad Dog 20/20with him to work. He wore his thinning hair

combed straight backa ducks ass without the ducks front.

Fuckin bitches, Joe mused.
Not for me, Butch shook his head. Thats your problem right
there, he pointed at my beer glass.
Rheingold?
Thats your problem. Set us up, he waggled a hand back and
forth from my Rheingold to his.
Usual, Butch? The bartender said. His bow tie was the real thing,
not clip-on. He put ice in two glasses and poured us two Canadian
Clubs. Each time he held the pour spout over the shot glass, turned
the glass when full, and for a fraction of a second held the spout down
as the whiskey coated the ice.
Far from a first taste of liquorthat was Sean Hanlons concealed
Irishthis was the start of my summer with the three-headed monster:
booze, perceived slights, and anger. Before that, drinking had been a
cold one after coming home, beers on nights out, at ballgames with
friends. I discovered the more whiskey I drank, the more people had
wronged me.
My last drinks were neatButch kept buyingand by then I was
too interested in how he managed to drink whiskey with chewing
tobacco in his mouth to give a damn about the time.
On my way home, I thought of running because I knew I was late.
That was a mistake. All that Canadian came up next to a sycamore tree
down the block from home. I was so pissed off and proud of my
crime, I hoped Sophie heard and recognized my up-chuck.
She hadnt, but she had locked the front door. Keys were a
problem. They dropped, and then stuck in groups, refusing to become
individuals. I thought about windows, the back door, waking Alice.
When Sophie hit the porch light and opened the door, saw the
vomit on my legs and shoes thanks to that sycamore, she finally spoke.
Come in, she said. I dont remember anything else about that
night except a vague feeling of triumph at her words.

Next day, after my head and I got home from work and Hanleys
Liquor Store, the kitchen gate was gone. I was free to pass.
I opened up my first-ever bottle of house-kept liquora bottle of
Bushmillspoured some into a Flintstones glass, took a sip, and
waited, almost hoping for Sophie to say one word.
I grabbed a can of Schaefer, stuck in the can opener, and when the
steel opened up pop, Alice turned in her high chair, made her happy,
high-pitched cooing noise, and said, Daddy home.
I was home. Id broken through the obstacles. Id dealt at mass with
Mother, the Marys, and the congregation, at work with Denny and the
others.
I was so goddamn certain of everything I opened up a second hole
in my can, took a long-day pull and smiled at Alice, Yup, Daddys
home, because nothing could touch me.
Safe behind my walls, I walked out the front door, gazed down the
street, and shook my fist at the horizon. All summer, bottle by bottle,
my fortress grew.
That same summer I first brought liquor into our home, my fellow
borough workers Joe and Butch smelled blood. If they had their way,
no man should be married. No man should have any contact with the
opposite sex other than fornication. Most of all, no man should stoop
to or go out of his way to speak with a woman. Fuck em, leave em,
drink. Their fins circled me each day at quitting time.
Where the fuck you going? Butch asked when I climbed on my
bike.
Home to honey to make nice-nice. Never apologize. Its a sign of
weakness. Joes head swirled with John Wayne movie quotes.
One day I told them, You two are like the Three Stooges episode
where they join the Woman Haters club. Down with every fellow who
sings my life, my love, my all.
Come down to the Sander with us. Well have you home by six.

The Sander was a bar on F Street and Sussex. In those days, Belmar
wasnt bar happy. There were just a few places in town and practically
nowhere to drink along the beachfront. On F Street, you could find
luncheonettes, drug stores, barbershops, gas stations, and car
showrooms. We even had a movie theaterthe Rivoli. It sat right next
to the Sugar Bowl where the elementary school kids went for sodas,
shakes, and burgers.
Joe and Butch would fill me with whiskey and degrading stories
about girls they knew in town. Some nights by the time I got home, I
felt so tired and loaded I hit the sack without dinner. Maybe a few
complaints about what money had disappeared from the checkbook
before I crashed. It wasnt every night, but it was regular.
One hot Saturdaywe worked six days a weekJoe, Butch and I
got off work at noon. We hit the Sander. The beer went down cold
and fast. Three cigars laterin those days I went through maybe ten
Swisher Sweets a dayI realized Sophie and I were supposed to go to
her parents for a cookout. I paid up, hopped on my bike, and headed
home.
The place was locked. A note taped to the door read At Mom and
Dads.
Sophies parents lived on Inlet Terrace. Their house would have
held three or so of our rental cottage. Inlet Terrace surrounded a
manufactured lagoon. Ocean water flowed in from Shark River Inlet.
In 1918, the lagoon witnessed past and future Olympic Gold Medal
winner Duke Kahanamoku compete against swimmers from the New
York Athletic Club. I didnt know him then, but Ronny grew up on the
Terrace, a few doors down from my in-laws.
Sophies father, Carmen Constantine, owned an awning business.
Almost every house on the Terrace and every big rooming house on
the north end of town had awnings, and Carmen made them all. His
father started the business. The house had been his and his wifes.
They croaked within weeks of each otherCarmen called it a lovers

ending even though both had been senile for yearsand the house
and business passed to him.
Sophies mother, Rosemary, a very shy Italian womannot exactly
commonhad been married before she hooked up with Carmen.
Rosemary had Sophie and Carmen Jr., who enjoyed his old man only
when they installed awnings on different houses. Sophie, though,
wasnt the apple of Carmens eye. She was the whole goddamn
orchard. Sophia, he called her. Never Sophie.
Visiting my in-laws' gave me as much pleasure as trying to explain a
baseball game to two foreign gymnasts. Carmen Jr. had his own place,
and he never hung around home. That left Sophie, her parents, and
me, the handsome blond working-class Irish kid married to the darkhaired, wealthy beauty. Every one of my friends told me youre the
luckiest bastard in town to be married to Sophie.
Two hours late, I coasted down their driveway.
Carmen, Rosemary, and Sophie sat in the backyard around a table.
A bright yellow umbrella with white fringe shaded them. On the table
sat tall, weeping drinks; cheese, crackers, veggie sticks and dip
underneath a cute, little bug net; and of course Carmens big cigar
ashtray. Carmens cigars were long and fat enough to splint a broken
forearm.
Alice slept in her portable playpen underneath her very own
umbrella. The thought of Alice toddling into the lagoon scared Sophie
to death.
In the driveway, I set my bikes kickstand and started down the
yard.
There he is, Carmen roared in his boss voice, better late than
later. He wore shorts too tight for his belly; knee-high, white socks;
and seersucker button-down. Stocky, with thick forearms and grey
flecked, curly hair, he practiced ways of letting you know he was in
charge.
Youll wake Alice, Rosemary shushed. Hair beauty-shop perfect,

my mother-in-law always smiled when she spoke, but a second later

her eyes would fall and smile fade as if someone had just told her to
shut up. For the two years I knew her, I never saw her wear the same
dress twice.
Carmen stood up from the table and walked over to Alice. He put
hands on knees and peered down.
Alice. What kind of a name is that for my grand- daughter? Makes
me think of that Alice in Wonderland.
Hello, all, I said. Carmen looked me up and down after he
checked his watch.
Rosemary got up and gave me her usual tentative hug.
How are you, dear? She looked up at me as if Id just fallen down
stairs.
I stood there. Great. Worked hard today.
Work hard or hardly worked? Carmen laughed. After about
three highballs, he fancied himself the Lithuanian Jack Benny.
I walked over to Sophie. As soon as I got close enough to touch
her, she straightened and said Hi, before walking back to the table
where she sat down and dipped a carrot stick.
Sorry Im late. I sat across from Sophie.
She turned her cute little upturned nose towards daddy. What time
are we eating, Popa?
Any time you want. Everythings been marinating. All I have to do
is start the coals. You want me to start them, Sophia?
One of us could probably stand to eat something.
Yes, I think so, Rosemary chimed. Come on, Carm. Lets you
and me go get the sausage and peppers. She practically pulled Carmen
out of his chair. They walked together up the yard.
Their house had very steep back stepstwenty or more between
two halves of white, concrete terraces full of flowers. Twin garage
doors stood under the houses first floor. A curled, concrete retaining
wall rose from the driveway up to the top of the right hand garage

door. Privet hedges bordered each side of the yard, which narrowed
slightly before it reached the bulkhead walkway along the lagoon.
As soon as the back door closed, Sophie started. I looked straight
ahead. It was easier to quarrel if I didnt see her. Our good looks were
all we had.
We talked about this for days. Dont be late Saturday. Papas going
to offer you a position. Please dont be late.
I know. Im sorry. Is Rosemary pissed off?
I dont know. Papa is.
Carmens been pissed since he gave you away. How long have we
been married?
About two years.
Spell that second word.
T-W-O.
Too many letters. Did your father put a cooler out?
Ill say this for him. Carmen always set up a cooler full of Carling
Black Label for me when I came over. He never touched beerbooze
before the meal, then wine with it.
He likes you more than you know. Why dont you take his offer?
It would mean more money for us.
I grabbed a cold one. An opener hung from the cooler handle. I
dont want to work for my father-in-law. With a festive whoosh, beer
sprayed from my can.
He wants you to learn the business.
I dont want to install awnings.
He wants to teach you about business.
He wants you to have more money.
He wants to teach you
He wants his daughter to have more pretty things.
Stubborn, Sophie said. Bull-headed.
You cant set things right for yourself by doing somebody elses
idea of whats right.

Oh, my. Did I see the irony in my words? Of course not. Even
though my father had died, when I found out Sophie was pregnant, I
did what he would have thought was right. I married her.
My wife poked me so I would turn. I looked into her eyes.
Here they come. Think about it. For me, will you? For us?
Sure.
You two settle down? You ready to enjoy the evening now?
Carmen put the platter of sausage and peppers on the tablelong,
fresh sausage thick as an eel and giant red peppers sliced in half.
Alice yawned awake just as three ducks flew out of the lagoon.
They waddled around the yard. Lying on her tummy, peaking at them
through the playpen mesh, Alice jabbered, pointing at the ducks as
they surveyed the territory.
Get outta here! Waving his arms, Carmen ran at the ducks.
Filthy things. They shit all over my boat.
Little ears listen and repeat, Sophie said.
Sorry, Sophia. Youre right. Carmen went over to the playpen and
lifted up Alice.
Is she wet? Rosemary asked.
Carmen patted Alices bottom. He smiled and made some cooing
noises, his forehead touching Alices. You take her, he brought her
to Rosemary. Give her mamma a break, huh? I got coals to light.
He poured out charcoal from a big bag into his grill, circled lighter
fluid around a few times, and tossed on a match. The flames rose up.
Little curlicue puffs of soot lifted into the air, twisting in the fires heat.
With the coals going, he came back to the table, filled his highball
with ice, poured four thick fingers of gin, and then fizzed the glass
with tonic. He squeezed a wedge of lime into the drink and brought a
chair and his cigar ashtray next to Sophie.
While your mothers inside I have to tell you. You remember the
Hoopers? Three houses down?
Sophie gazed out at the lagoon. She sipped her ice tea. Sure.

You heard Helena, the daughter, died.

In June.
Did you hear how she died?
She had a seizure. She was an epileptic, right?
Carmen lit his cigar. The smoke curled and blew at me across the
table. This I got from Joe Dane, the next door neighbor. He looked
across at me. You dont know these people, James. The Hoopers, Ida
and Samuel, an elderly couple, had a daughter, Helena. She was early
fifties when she passed. This woman played the harp. A harpist, good
enough to play Carnegie Hall. Unfortunately, she suffered from
epilepsy. The Hoopers are Christian Scientists. You know what that
means?
They run a newspaper?
Carmen didnt even blink at wisecracks. No. They dont believe in
doctors. No medicine. Everythings in Gods hands. Helena lived with
her parents. Samuel rarely left the house. Sometimes, Joe Dane told
me, hed see old Samuel through a window. A long, white beard down
to his chest, all stooped over. Joe would see Ida moon bathing in the
nude on their veranda. This Ida took the cake. One summer a few
years back, she had fences installed across both sides of her bulkhead
walkway. Nobody could walk all the way around the lagoon to visit
neighbors. Remember, Sophia?
He took a long pull on his highball, puffed a few times, and started
again.
When Helena was little, Samuel Hooper bought this house of
theirs for Ida. For Valentines Day. Look at the house sometime. Its
three houses down. Slate roof, terraced veranda in back. Just a
beautiful place. They gave Helena private lessons. Like I said, she
became a professional, a concert harpist. She never married, never left
home. Samuel and Ida watched their daughter grow from a child into a
middle-age spinster right in the same house. Of course, they grew old
right along with Helena.

Ida was always strange. Ive been on the Terrace longer than Joe
and Phyllis Dane, so I know. Before the nude moon bathing and
fences, there were stories. As kids, we threw an egg or three at the
Hooper house more than a few mischief nights. We never saw Samuel,
but Ida came out to curse us. She poisoned dogs that crapped in her
yard. Mrs. Hancock, I think, paid for an autopsy on her cocker.
This is what Joe told me. It wasnt in the papers. Even the cops
hushed it up. Joe told me several days before Helena supposedly
passed, he noticed a peculiar odor coming from the Hoopers during
that hot spell we had in June. Joe didnt think much of it. Probably
they havent been seeing to their trash. Thats what Joes wife, Phyllis,
said. Trash day came and went. Joe saw Ida haul out a can and carry it
back the same day after collection. One thing struck him odd: as hot as
it was, Ida wore a coat. She wore shorts with a heavy, woolen coat.
Days passed. The smell didnt go away. Then one night, Ida ran
screaming out of the house. She staggered over to Joe and Phyllis
place and rang the doorbell, screaming her eyes out. Joe answered
while Phyllis called the cops. What he saw in the porch light took years
off his life. Thats the way he put it. Idas hands, arms, and the inside
of her forearms up to the elbows were burned. Her skin was blistered,
blood red in places. She shivered, crying for help. Minutes later the
cops, ambulance, and practically every municipal vehicle with
BELMAR FIRST AID written on it showed up at Hoopers.
They found Samuel in his wheelchair in the living room-dining
area, along with a cot set up for him to sleep on. He didnt know what
day it was. They found Helena upstairs in her room on the bed, her
body surrounded by bricks, some of them still hot. Bricks heated in the
oven downstairs and carried upstairs by Ida to warm the deceased
body of her daughter. Four days this went on. Helena was the smell.
No telling how long it might have continued if Ida thought to use
potholders.

I dont remember much about the cook out that night at my inlaws'. After that story Carmen told about Ida Hooper, I watched him
sear those sausage and peppers on his grill. I didnt eat. As daylight
waned, Rosemary poured Carmen into bed before she drove Sophie
and Alice home. Who knows what they discussed? I rode my bike.
I do remember the conversation between Sophie and me from the
moment I opened my front door until I went upstairs to a spare room.
You couldnt say one word, she said from the kitchen.
What?
Not one. Not even, Ill think about it, Carmen. Thanks for the
offer, though.
The job again.
The job again. Just who do you thinks going to hire you after
what happened with that girl?
I thought we werent going to bring that up again. Nothing
happened.
Sophie came out from the kitchen. She held a dishtowel. Im
bringing it up.
I thought she was drying her hands. She squeezed the towel as if
trying to take lifes air from it.
What are you doing?
Never mind.
Let me see.
She spun around and hurried into the kitchen. I followed her. She
ran the sink faucet, her hands underneath. When I came close, I saw
blood swirl with water down the drain.
What did you do?
I cut myself.
Let me see.
She covered the back of her left hand with her right. I couldnt see
where the blood came from. She twisted her back to me. Its fine.
Sophie.

She looked up. Just leave me alone. Look, she turned and showed
me, its nothing.
Blood ran from a gash behind her knuckles. She returned her hands
to the stream.
Take your hands out of the water.
No.
I moved to pull her arm. She twisted back.
Itll stop.
I saw the layers of white skin peel back under the faucet stream.
Thats going to need stitches. How the hell did you do it?
I dont know. She kept her hand under the water.
In my twenties, I morphed into a logical, professor-type when
intoxicated. Nothing could happen without reasonable explanation.
What do you mean you dont know? How do you cut yourself on the
back of your hand and not know?
I just did! Theres the knife! she pointed.
On the drain board in plain sight. How did I miss it?
What were you cutting? Turn off the water. Put pressure on it. I
looked at her hand again. You need to get stitches.
She snatched a towel from the rack on the stoves door, put it on
the gash, and walked out of the kitchen.
Where are you going?
Our bedroom door slammed. I heard the bolt slip.
Sophie? I said to the door. I tried the knob. It turned, but the
bolt held the door shut. Sophie. You need to get stitches.
Its fine, she sighed. Go to bed. Its fine.
Are you sure? Nothing. I waited, turned the knob one more
time. Call me if you need me.
I went in the kitchen expecting to find a gory mess. A thin line of
red ran down from a single drip on the baseboard into the white
porcelain sink. I picked up the knifeone of the steak knives from the
set we received as a wedding present. After two years, we still kept

some of our gifts displayed prominently. The box of steak knives sat
on the countertop next to the toaster. I opened the flip top. Sure
enough, one knife missing. Case solved.
I opened the refrigerator. If I leaned some weight against its door, I
could open the big handle quietly. Same for shutting it. This was way
before magnetic doorsold fridges used to be death traps for kids.
A beer in each fist, I headed for my banishment room. I forgot the
can opener. Back to the kitchen. Why not a drop of Bushmills to help
me sleep? On the top shelf, right behind the Quaker Oats. Then up the
stairs I went.
The rest of that night is bits and pieces. I dont know if a young
drinkers brain is more nimble than an older drinkers. Perhaps the
young brain has more cells. With the help of memory mixed with a
police report, I pieced together the evenings follies.
After finishing my beers, I softly closed my room door. The ceiling
spun. I moved into temporary sleep before a new darkness stopped the
spinningwalking west, headed for F Street. The Sander started the
deluge, so I headed there. Just a few blocks. I practiced walking straight
on the way to F Street, had it down pat by the time storefronts and
cars lighted my world.
The Sander offered an atmosphere of dimmed drinking. Walking in
from F Street left me blind. My eyes had to grow accustomed to the
darkness. Two machines lit the placea jukebox at the far end of the
bar and a bowling machinesome people call it shuffles bowling
stood against the wall opposite the bar. The only other source of
illumination came from underneath the bar where the rack booze,
glasses, and sinks lived. I took a barstool.
Once I could see, I counted five people in the place including the
bartender. In the dim glow lifting from below him, he might have
passed for Lionel Atwill in Son of Frankenstein.
I knew all the old horror classics. They ran on WOR-TVs Million
Dollar Movie. Either that or WPIX-TVs Chiller Theatre hosted by

Zacherly. One show Zacherly talked to a cubic foot of quivering Jell-O

during every commercial break. Its alive, its alive! hed declare in his
Dr. Frankenstein voice.
Whatll you have? Old Lionel blinked a few times as he watched
me, waiting for me to twinge a finger.
I didnt know what I wanted.
I asked you whatll it be.
Ah, Rheingold draft.
He huffed a breath out, brought a draft glass from underneath, and
pulled the tap. You got ID?
I took out my license along with a dollar from my wallet. He leaned
down into the bar light to read my birthday aloud from my license. He
placed my beer on a coaster before he took my money.
Outta one. The cash register dinged. A white, pointed .25 tab
lifted up.
Excuse me. I wanted a mug of Rheingold.
He put three quarters and a nickel on the bar next to my beer. You
ordered a Rheingold draft. I gave you a Rheingold draft.
I meant a mug. Mugs a better deal.
Look, pretty boy. You want a mug; Ill give you a mug. Itll cost
you another forty cents.
A mugs almost two drafts.
Boys got you there, Phil, a voice said. I turned my eyes. It was
one of two men down the bar.
Phil laughed to himself. He moved down the bar to the voice. The
jukebox came to lifesome country song I didnt know. The cowboy
singing the song lost his woman. The bar lost my interest. I gulped
down my beer, belched, and stood up to move on.
I walked about two doors down before it hit me. Pretty boy. Or just
boy. One person could call me boymy father. Nobody in the Sander
filled that prescription. I turned around to go back inside. Perceived
slights plus anger.

The patron from the end of the bar, the one who called me boy,
had his back to the front door. It was his turn on the bowling machine.
Leaning forward, he bent to slide the metal disc back and forth in
rhythm with the flashing red bonus lights that pulsed above the pins. I
stood alongside the machine. I planted both hands on its side edge. His
eyes up, he followed the light a few more times. Then he straightened
to look at me.
Could you move?
I folded my arms. Ninth frame, huh?
Yeah. He moved the disc back and forth, back and forth.
His opponent sat behind me at the bar. Phil had his face buried in
the bulldog edition of the Daily News. I watched the disc slide into the
pinsonly one ding. I looked. I leaned back on the machine and bent
my head down. He had a 7-10 split.
I grinned at him, You know how to make that?
He stared at the pins before turning to me. Will you get out of the
way?
Out of the way who?
What?
Who? Whatd you call me before?
I didnt call you anything.
Behind me, I heard a newspaper rustle.
Yeah, you did.
Behind me again, Easy, boy.
Okay, I held up both hands, took a half step toward the bowler,
and snapped my right fist at his face. Well, if youre right handed,
especially if youre drunk, dont ever lead with your right. He hit me on
the chin, and then I half fell, half stumbled into a good punch just
above my eyeI had a lump over my eyebrow the next morning. I
managed to grab his hair to knock his head against the wall.
Then I was on my back with an ass in my face. Somebody held
both of my legs out straight. I got turned onto my stomach with what

felt like an elephant near the bottom of my neck until the cops came. I
remember getting comfortable with the weight on my back and not
being happy about the cops cuffing me, standing me on my feet, or
giving me the bums rush into their cruiser.
I became very docile after my arrest. I kept my voice low and
pleasant. I threw out an occasional comment about familiar members
of the Belmar PD, not to mention the DPW.
My night in jail cost me one weeks suspension from work. I
received two citations: public intoxication and disorderly conduct. That
kept me in booze for a good month courtesy of Joe and Butch, who
didnt mind switching to Tessingers. I was no longer welcome in the
Sander.
I had found my anger. I didnt realize its source at the time. Up
until my father died, I can remember watching guys get into fights. I
stood back and laughed. Except directed at myself,
anger just didnt live in me. Born in Sean Hanlons death, fortified by
strangers stares and self-doubt, my anger grew steadily that summer.
I began to play pool at Tessingers and other bars. Pool, alcohol,
and time became my angers fertilizers. The pool tablemy
phosphorus. Id root to that son of a bitch for hours. One more game,
Seamus. One more game. All that alcohol became my nitrogen. It
allowed my anger and resentment to grow, to bear fruitfisticuffs,
missing teeth, facial abrasions. The time away from my wife and child
became my potassium. My resentment grew stronger with each missed
meal, each lost first of my daughters childhood.
Then in the fall, I left. Just like that. I got an off-season room rate
at the Commodore, fixed Chef Boyardee on a hot plate, and washed
my dirty dishes in the common shower. Sophie did fine. Carmen gave
her a job and paid her rent until she got on her feet. She had
boyfriends but nothing permanent until Alice graduated from third
grade.

She lives with her husband, Stan, up near Long Branch. She visits
Alice all the time.
Mick Bennett is the author of Missing You in Belmar, NJ and the forthcoming
novel Boardwalk Man published by Unsolicited Press.

Devin Holt
AP Style
We were an army of interns at the Bay Believer. An army of interns
eyeing each other suspiciously, everyone waiting for someone else to
make a flaw. There was a rumor it came out during our brief
encounters in that small conglomeration of vending machine, coffee
pot, and sink we called a kitchen that a staff writer position would
open at the end of the term. No one knew where this came from. It
was like an urban legend or one of those things that happened to a
friends friend or a cousins cousin.
But the rumor was enough to keep us busy. To keep us typing in a
furious, intense style with a clickety-clack racket worthy of a
construction site, and make all of our phone calls at full volume. We
had to make sure everyone knew that we were the busy intern, after all.
The one with scoops to scoop and quotes to quote. Brandon
practically screamed his calls into the phone.
Hello this is BRANDON from the BAY BELIEVER, Im calling
about a rumored SHORTAGE OF PICKLES?!?
That guy lived to be first on the scene, even if it was just a blog post
about Burgermeister.
I was in arts and culture with Hannah Breeley. We hit it off right
away. Both of us were dedicated San Franciscans who spent years
toiling in the city's underground circles. Hannah was Mistress to the Fog
in the paper, and Writer, Editor, Rugmuncher by card. She had bleachedblond hair, and showed up to my interview in jeans and a tank top,
which gave me a good view of the tattoo on her right shoulder. It was
the Rolling Stones tongue logo, but with the tongue pierced. I asked if
she was a big Stones fan.
No, Hannah told me. But I am a big fan of tongues.

For the first three weeks, I was the only intern in our pod. Anytime
I had a question (or a joke) I would just slide that rolling chair on over
to my editor's desk and fire away. It was perfect.
And then Jun showed up.
Jun was from Stanford. Undeniably hot, she walked into our section
wearing a green V-neck sweater and a black skirt, with her long,
straight black hair tied in an intricate bun. There was not a single hair
out of place.
I was supposed to do news, she told Hannah. But they were all
full so Terrance said I could work with arts and culture. Is that ok?
Certainly, Hannah said. More fingers, more posts, thats what I
always say.
Hannah introduced us. Jun smiled a big smile perfect fucking
teeth, of course and said she was very glad to meet me. We shook
hands for less than a second. When Hannah left to grab the allpurpose Bay Believer business cards for Jun, both of our eyes narrowed.
Somehow, Jun managed to look all the way down to my feet, back up,
and then roll her eyes before Hannah came back.
*
My friends thought it was glamorous, but there was a lot of data
entry behind those first few bylines. A lot of time updating the
calendar, and many, many hours getting busy with the copy and paste.
Our emails were a cavalcade of press releases, and they all had to be
added into Yrobase. Yro, as we called it, was an internal calendar
system that could only be updated from the office. The idea was to
rewrite the PR people's mangled copy into something legible, and plug
it in with the venue info and price so the event was searchable in the
Bay Believer's best and baddest event listings on the web. Our quota
for the week was somewhere between fifty and 10,000.
Jun was relieved of this duty right away.

Oh no, thirty is totally good for now, Hannah told her on the
Wednesday of Juns second week. Well make up for it later. Just try
to get me that piece on the underground taxi service today.
Maybe it really was because Jun was swamped silly with that
damn mustache rides thing. Or maybe it had something to do with
those fishnets Jun had been wearing a different color every day
and how friendly those two were getting. Either way, five minutes
later they were cracking up at Hannahs desk. Apparently, there was a
water skiing squirrel on YouTube, and it was just hilarious. I watched
in the reflection from my computer screen as Jun leaned over
Hannahs chair for a better look at the screen. Her hand rested on the
back of the chair, and her hair fell down onto Hannahs shoulder. Juns
fingernails were painted light blue, the same color as her fishnets, and
very lightly touching the back of Hannahs neck.
A water skiing squirrel.
*
The following Monday I showed up right at ten. Jun was already at
her desk. Hannah wasnt.
Good morning Jun, I said. That was a nice piece about Airbnb
refusing to pay taxes, and how their service will affect couch surfers.
Bitch.
Jun, nails green, hair up, black leggings and boots instead of
fishnets and heels, lifted both corners of her mouth into a smile that
showed off her two, tiny dimples.
Oh, thanks, she said. I loved your history of skate spots in SF.
That was really interesting. I didnt know about any of those.
Thats because youve never skated a day in your life. Thanks, I said. I
guess I better get busy. Bitch.
I turned on my computer with a blog post about OutLoud radio, a
preview for the Day of the Dead procession, and 275 emails to get
through. I started with the preview. I decided to leave out the fact that
many kids in the Mission call it Dia de los Gringos now. After all, as

Hannah would have said: This is an event we are recommending. I

worked just long enough to wonder if Jun really did like my history of
skate spots before she turned around.
Hey Blake, Hannah just chatted me and said that we missed our
quota for Yro events last week. She's out sick but says we both need to
enter extra today.
Thanks. Good to know.
Then she picked up the phone on her desk and dialed seven
numbers. Jun used English for the first few sentences, and then
switched to Cantonese. Five minutes later, she was gone, leaving an
empty chair and a whole lot of unentered Yro events. I sat perfectly
still and stared at my screen for ten full minutes. I did nothing else.
The cursor never stopped blinking. Yrobase Content Editor System:
Please Choose Target. Blink, blink, blink.
Jun had just been on the phone with Rose Pak.
Rose fucking Pak.
After ten minutes, I went to the kitchen and poured a cup of
coffee. Then I turned the mug over and watched the coffee swirl
around towards the drain. The steam came up from the sink and
created a warm, humid cloud around the mug. It was a Bay Believer
mug. We Believe in the Bay!
When I got back to my desk, the screen had finally gone blank. My
eyes wandered to the partition, where one of the news interns, Valerie,
was typing furiously, and then to Jun's desk. Her screen was off too,
but a small, black notebook was sitting on her desk. Two or three
pages in and there it was, standing out like a tree in a flowerbed.
Bay Believer Yrobase account: waiguo77
Sure enough, jun@baybeliever.org had the same password.
*
My next scheduled day was Wednesday, but I didn't go in to the
office. I had permission from Hannah to chase a story. Jun might have
Stanford, fluent Chinese, and real reporting skills on her side, but I had

something too. I knew the city, and that's what really matters in the
arts and culture section.
There had been a controversy brewing in the Castro for months.
People, mostly men, of course, were going to a small parklet in the
neighborhood to hang out naked. Now the Castro is pretty
freewheeling it's the gay district, famous for Harvey Milk and clubs
that blast techno all weekend but this caused a stir. A little skin at
Gaypride or Dore Alley is one thing, but all day every day? That's
enough to get up the most dedicated liberal's nose. A city supervisor,
Scott Wiener, (seriously) was pushing an ordinance to ban the practice.
It was like a clash of San Francisco generations, pitting the radical
queers against folks who just wanted marriage equality, good jobs, and
to be thought of us as normal.
When I offered to do a first person about a straight guy's
experience hanging out with the Castro naked guys, Hannah was
thrilled.
Fuckn awesome! she said in a gchat. I even got an emoticon:
yes, please! Do it ;)
But before I left the house, I had to check Juns email.
I found it in her chat folder. A terse, quick little exchange from that
morning between Jun and Hannah about the quality of her Yrobase
entries.
um, hey somethings up with yro, Hannah wrote.
?
seems there r some typos
Idk what you mean?
Typos and mislocations in your yro entries yesterday"
And some more in MT
I savored this email with a deep breath that filled up my lungs,
arms, and fingertips. I swear I could taste the tension. Those
disturbingly cute dimples on her cheeks tightening, her face turning
pink as she gulped down a scream, trapped in an embarrassment no

matter what she did. Jun and I both knew damn well she hadnt
entered more than a few Yrobase entries on Monday, because it could
only be done from the office. But Hannah didnt know that. She had
been out sick. And Jun couldnt admit she hadn't entered them,
because we were supposed to do extra that day, Rose Pak on the
phone or not.
In my daydream, she glared at my desk, squeezing the armrests on
her chair until her knuckles went white. Then she went to the
bathroom stall and threw up.
*
Randy was from Walnut Creek, about thirty miles out of the city.
Like most of the eight or ten guys scattered around the benches, he
was white, fifty-ish, and sported a scraggly beard. Randy said he was
told to take an early retirement last year from his job at the
Vagabond Inn in Rancho Cordova. He was the hotel manager. For the
last six months, Randy had been getting up at 5 a.m. to ride BART into
the city and sit in the Castro plaza naked.
It just makes me feel so free, he said. And it gets me away from
the wife for a few hours.
At this, Randy chuckled and slapped his knee. Then he reached over
and slapped mine.
The other men were similarly dispossessed of jobs, home life, or
anything important to do during the day. Most of them didnt live in
San Francisco. There was Ramon, the only Latino, on unemployment
ever since Best Buy went under, who lived in Daly City; Trevor (a
novelist who claimed to have only slept three hours a night for the last
15 years) was from the Oakland Hills, and there were other gloriouslynude folks from Pittsburg, Marin and, of course, Berkeley. The two
San Franciscans appeared to be close friends but not a couple (they
wouldnt say), and lived in Bernal Heights. They complained
incessantly about the cost of parking meters in the Castro.

It was a friendly group. They had their own rules about towels
(always bring one to sit on), restaurants (don't push yourself onto a
business that doesn't serve naked people), and strangers (be friendly).
By 11:30 the sun had come out from behind the fog, my goosebumps
receded back into my skin, and I worked up the courage to snap a few
photos.
Only about half of the people there were gay. Randy summed up
his sexual orientation like this: Im bi as they come, he said, leaning
over and emphasizing the word come.
I go both ways. Just like a broken arrow.
Then another round of knee slaps. First his, then mine, with a little
squeeze. Hannah is going to love this, I thought.
And that's when I saw Jun.
She was walking up 17th St., just past the streetcar stop. She turned
left to walk towards the Castro Theater when she glanced in our
direction, and stopped moving. We made a cold eye contact from
across the street for about five seconds, and then Juns eyes wandered
down to my feet and back. It was hard to tell from so far away, but it
felt like she lingered a moment when her eyes got to my business. I
sucked in my stomach and acted as casual as a naked writer on a bench
can.
Then I just said fuck it and waved.
Jun turned her head to the left to look down Castro St. She hiked
her laptop bag a little higher up on her shoulder, and turned back the
way she had come. Her feet hit the pavement twice as fast as they did
before. It gave her hips a nice little bounce.
Our silent exchange didnt go unnoticed.
Thats a real looker over there, Randy said. You sweet on her?
When I turned my head back towards Randy, he was sporting a
shit-eating green and stroking his fully erect penis. It looked to be
about seven inches.
*

The article was a smash. I went with the part about Randy hitting
on me for the lede, then worked my way through the politics of the
issue, and closed with a quote from the only woman who showed up
all day, a former stripper named Eagerling Vagabond.
The constitution guarantees me life, liberty, and the pursuit of
nakedness, she said. And I plan on taking them up on it.
Hannah loved it. One of the staff writers, Kain Jeeoszan, stopped
by to congratulate me on a great article, and even Terrance, the
managing editor, gave me a nod during our weekly calendar picks
meeting.
Nice job on the naked guys, kid, he said, tilting his coffee mug
towards me. Just be careful with that second person. Itll take over
your article if you let it.
Coming from Terrance this was a huge compliment. Even during
our meetings, he rarely spoke to anyone but Hannah. Terrance reigned
quietly over those, staring at his computer screen and sipping coffee
while Hannah explained the merits of each event on the list. She
brought a large sheet of paper, with four or five possibles written
down for each day of the week. Terrance would grunt his replies: love
it, nope, or who cares?
Watching them together, I often thought Terrance, who was still
new, was determined to bring some Midwestern sensibility to The
Believer. His buttoned-down shirts and masters from Northwestern
were a stark contrast to Hannah's ripped jeans, constant sick days, and
feminist sex blogger background. Hannah pushed for the avant-garde;
wild Burning Man parties and transgender film festivals. Terrance
thought the Folsom Street Fair was cutting edge. He wanted to focus
on the seven must-sees. (We cant have nine events in the 7 Days
by the Bay section, he would always tell her.)
The week of my naked article, our events included a live drag
parody of Friends, a discussion about the sharing economy with
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky, and a popping workshop with a dancer

from New York named Mr. Wiggles. I was assigned the drag show and
dance class. Jun took the discussion. After the meeting, I went to the
kitchen. I poured half a cup of coffee and carried it across the room to
gloat, silently, with my reflection in the vending machine. Jun came in
after a couple of minutes.
Blake, she said, her face expressionless, even. I know it was
you.
Jun was standing about six inches away and leaning on the vending
machine, right in front of the Fritos. She was wearing a green, V-neck
sweater that came down just far enough that you could probably catch
a glimpse of her bra by leaning in. I was taller, but looking at Jun made
me feel small. Her slacks hugged her hips at the perfect point between
business casual and too tight, and her keycard for elevator access hung
from her belt. Jun looked like a hot, motivated employee. I looked like
an intern.
What do you mean? I asked, with the most sincere fake voice I
could manage. Jun smiled. Those dimples.
Its ok, she said. I understand. May the best man win and all
that.
Jun walked over to the coffee pot and picked it up.
Here, let me top that off for you, she said. No hard feelings.
I didnt move. Jun cocked her head sideways and made a quick,
flicking motion with her index finger. Cmon now, Im not going to
pour it on you.
Something about her demeanor worried me. She was just so
confident, like I was a little bug who got in a bite but would soon be
squashed. I walked over anyway. It was probably the dimples. When
she poured the coffee I leaned over a little bit, and sure enough, you
could see her bra. It was pink. A pink bra. Jun set the coffee pot down
and then stared right at me. Her eyes were dark brown, and made my
heart beat just a little bit faster. She didnt make any effort to move out
of my personal space, and I didnt step back.

You know, it really was a good idea Blake. Made for a cute, little
piece. To go down there and get naked with those guys. Not
everybody would be willing to do that.
Thanks.
It was all I could get out. Juns proximity had frozen me in place.
She smelled like one of those flowers so delicate they had to put it
behind a fence.
You know, when I read that it made me think of something Vic
Wesun said once. You know Vic Wesun?
From the Chronicle?
Yeah.
Of course, I had heard of Vic Wesun. His Sunday columns were the
type of thing a moderate San Franciscan would tape on their
refrigerator. He was famous for his wit, and political feuding with Ron
Ditmmed over at the San Francisco Bay Guardian. The two of them
played dueling editorials over rent control, the gross receipts tax, the
America's Cup, and everything else that happened in the city. They
were also good friends, and lectured together. The idea that I hadn't
heard of either one of them was ridiculous. An insult.
Well he used to come to Stanford with Ditmmed sometimes. We
would have these daylong intensives with people like that a lot. You
know Ron Ditmmed right?
Um, yeah, Ive heard of him. Hes just the reason I became a
writer.
Jun raised an eyebrow but continued.
Well Ron Ditmmed, this hero of yours, used to come into
Stanford with Vic Wesun every so often. We would talk about story
ideas, you know, like what makes a good feature, how do we define
newsworthy, using public records, that type of stuff.
Juns flower was beginning to smell more poisonous than delicate.
Is this going somewhere? I asked.

She giggled and put her hand on my forearm. I could feel the hairs
on my arm reaching up to meet her fingernails. They were dark green
today. Classy and cool.
Sorry, right, sometimes I ramble. Anyway, Vic used to say good
stories come from listening.
Uh huh.
He used to say that too many beginners tried to do stunt
journalism. That stories like that were good for blogs, but would never
fit in the Chronicle.
My spine stiffened and I sucked in a little too much air.
Well we're not at the Chronicle are we?
Jun grabbed my forearm, and put on the most sincere fake
expression she could manage.
Oh no, she said. Dont get me wrong. I think that kind of stuff
is great. Thats what I was going to say. I mean, just because something
doesnt fit into the big papers doesnt mean it has no place. Thats why
we're here at the Believer right? To be different. To fill in the gaps. I
mean, isnt that why they call them alt weeklies?
And who cares what those guys think anyway? Just because Ron
Ditmmed says (and here she made air quotes) journalism is a
profession, not an adventure doesnt mean we cant do what we want,
right?
I stood perfectly still, and focused on letting each breath come all
the way in through my nose, and then back out. The smell of Juns
perfume made its way into my mouth and landed on my tongue, with a
taste like sweet, forbidden citrus that could kill you. There were too
many words running around in my brain to say anything. I wanted to
tell her that this was the fucking arts section. That we were supposed
to do crazy shit; that I actually live here, and, sorry, but I dont have
time to pal around with Rose Pak because I spend my weekends
working, not chilling in my parents fucking mansion down south
because I actually have to PAY MY FUCKING RENT!

But I didnt say any of that. Instead, I let my shoulders sag down
and my eyes move from Juns face to the coffee mug. It wasnt Juns
proximity, hotness, or confidence that kept me quiet. It was the fact
that she was right. The naked people story was cool, but wouldnt cut
it in the big leagues. You would never see that piece as a feature in the
Chronicle or Bay Guardian. The Believer probably wouldnt take it either
if they actually had to pay for it. In a newsroom wide contest for a staff
writer, I didnt stand a chance against Jun, and we both knew it. Even I
would hire someone with her Stanford pedigree and Chinatown
connections over my street smarts and SF State BA.
My attempts at sabotaging her work were as pointless as they were
immature. And they would get me tossed from the Believer internship if
anyone found out. I felt stupid just thinking about it, and kept my eyes
glued to the coffee cup. Jun didnt move.
What happened next felt like it came out of nowhere.
Hannah popped her head into the kitchen and gave us the hurry-up
voice: Hey lovebirds! Come here, big meeting happening pronto.
Jun jumped a bit, as if she was startled, and bumped into my coffee
cup. The coffee spilled out onto my shirt and then dripped down onto
my jeans. The hot liquid seeped all the way into my boxer shorts and
stung then end of my dick bad.
Jun gasped. Oh my god, sorry! she yelled, with her mouth in a
tight circle that could have been a stifled smile.
Hannah giggled. Whoa, watch out there sugar, she said. If you
two are done staring at each other, we have a meeting in the big office.
Interns too. Blake get yourself cleaned up and come on. Jun, right now
or youre fired. Just kidding but come on for real.
Hannah disappeared around the corner. Jun grabbed a paper towel
and handed it to me, then took the mug from my hand and set it down
on the counter.
Careful with that, she said with a tiny smirk, and then walked out.
There wasnt much coffee left in the mug, but a tiny bit of steam

was still floating up. It was a Bay Believer mug. We Believe in the Bay!
*
The big office was a conference room with two rows of tables and a
large, blank marker board on the wall. I had never been in there
before. The interns were seated together in their respective groups next
to their editors, and the general assignment writers and sales staff sat
or stood at the back of the room. Terrance was standing in front of the
marker board with the editor-in-chief (a grumpy, short man with long
hair and an ugly beard who never once spoke to me directly). All three
of the interns from the news blog were wearing fedoras. Jun was, of
course, sitting right next to Hannah. Hannah was wearing a tank top
and Jun was so close it looked like her tattoo was licking Juns sweater.
No, but I am a big fan of tongues.
The door rattled as it closed behind me and everyone turned their
heads to look. Terrance stopped the meeting to explain that I was late
because I had a little accident, but he said that I was allowed today
because my naked story made the trending list. Awesome. A little accident.
Thanks, Terrance. Then he turned things over to Chief Grumpy.
The meeting was about next weeks cover. The writers and editors
debated the merits of various ideas. Monique, the food section editor,
wanted to do something about the emerging trend of gourmet food
trucks serving insects. The news crew was all about the Twitter tax
break, and arts and cultures proposed cover was a feature on
superhero-themed fisting parties (take a deep breath first if you Google
that). We won. Jun jumped on it like a kangaroo in a trampoline
factory.
Whoa, that sounds crazy, she said to Hannah, leaning over far
enough to bump her shoulder. Can I help with the research?
Hannah giggled again.
Hells yeah, she said. You can even help with the drafts. More
fingers more posts, you know.
Her tattoo was definitely licking Juns sweater now.

After the cover was decided, the editor passed the meeting back
over to Terrance, who had been absorbed in his laptop the whole time,
only glancing up occasionally to cast a glance at Brandon, who didnt
seem to understand that interns are supposed to sit and listen.
Terrance stood up.
So we have a little announcement for the interns, he said.
At the end of the term, were going to have an opening. Its only
part time, and whoever gets it will still be very poor. But it will be a
start, and it will mean features, editing, and many meetings like this.
How you perform from here on out will be a big part of our decision,
but theres also something else.
Terrance lifted up his coffee mug and took a long, slow sip. All of
the interns leaned forward in their chairs.
We want each of the interns to write a story. Youve got a good
four to six weeks to work on them so make it good. Feature worthy.
No, scratch that, make it cover worthy. It should be about 1500 to
2500 words, but definitely not longer than 3000. And something that
relates to your section, so dont bring us silent theater if your thing has
always been restaurant openings.
The best feature will be a huge part of our decision, and yes, we
are going to fact check them. So check your quotes, and for Gods
sake, dont misspell anyones name.
These were more words than I had heard from Terrance during my
entire internship. As soon as they came out of his mouth, a thick
tension fell across the room, as if everyone just remembered they were
in hostile territory. When we left Valerie stared right past me. Brandon
didnt even try to hide his contempt.
Nice coffee stain, he said, sneering at my clothes.
One of the fedoras from news stepped on Juns foot. Hannah leapt
to her defense.
Hey, buddy, watch the landsharks, huh?
*

Two things happened on the day our features were due: there was
an earthquake, and a car hit me. The earthquake was a lot worse. Not
because it went all Loma Prieta or anything, but because if it hadnt
happened that day, or even that time, I might have gotten that staff
writer position. Ok, thats not true. But I had a shot at making the
freelancers list.
Next to blowing my chances at the Believer, getting hit by a car was
easy. I was skating down Potrero Hill on De Haro, just before
Mariposa. Some hipster in a blue Honda Fit pulled a California rollthrough and I went up on the hood. Although, full disclosure, I wasnt
at the top of my skating game that day. My mind was somewhere else.
It was on Juns story.
The night before I had called my old friend Kale. We used to live
together in this crazy arts warehouse in the Mission called BryantSpace.
Kale was the guy who could get the projector running. He answered
on the third ring.
Parachute House, Kale said, with the sound of loud, thumping
house music and about fifty people talking in the background.
I thought maybe Kale could help me get a look at Juns Google
Docs folder. I just wanted to get a look at the competition I told him,
thats all. The curiosity was killing me. After some back and forth, Kale
agreed to help. He told me to send him everything I had on Jun. Her
email address, old password, and a link to her Facebook page, which
was set to private. He emailed me back within an hour. He sent
everything I needed, and a message: Dude, do you know what that
old password means?
I didnt.
What I did know, now, was how good Juns feature was. Damn
good for an intern. The story was about the Chinatown ghost scam. A
small crew of Cantonese speaking immigrants was working old ladies
in Chinatown. One member of the crew would befriend someone in
Chinatown, and then they would serendipitously bump into another

member of the group, who was raving about the powers of a special
healer working out of the Alemany Flea Market. Over time, they would
convince the mark that some problem in her life or even an
imaginary curse caused by a ghost could be solved by this healer.
The ceremony, of course, would involve bringing a lot of money, or
something valuable. You can fill in the rest.
Juns take on it was well researched, interesting, and written in clear,
simple language. It really was a cover worthy feature. I didnt stand a
chance. Unless
Unless something happened to it. If the story was, say, riddled with
typos. Or broken links. I knew it was wrong, but I pulled up MT, and
sure enough, Juns new email password worked on her MT account.
And thats what I was thinking about when I rolled up on the hood of
the Fit.
It felt kind of like someone tied me to a giant bowling ball and then
threw it across the room. All of the air in my lungs shot out in a quick
gasp, and the force pulled my headphones off my head, cutting E40s
voice off. My skateboard rolled out towards the curb, and the coffee
cup I was holding went up in the air, landed in the street, and
somehow rolled over without spilling a drop. I threw my forearms up
in front of my head, which saved me from face planting into the
windshield. Mr. Hipster and I shared a brief moment of eye contact
through the glass. He had a small mustache, and dark, curly hair.
To be fair, Mr. Hipster turned out to be cool. He stopped to make
sure I was ok, gave me his insurance information, and insisted on
giving me a ride to the office. His real name was Matt. He was a
software engineer. And played in a band. Thanks to his help, I got to
the office early. Not early enough to beat Jun though. She was waiting
in the lobby when I walked in. We took the same elevator. Talk about
awkward.
It was just the two of us. I stood on one side with my backpack on
the floor and my skateboard leaning against the wall. Jun was directly

across from me with her business casual skirt, Moleskin day planner,
and a small, black purse. Both of us had a folder in our hands, which
contained the hard copy of our feature. Technically, we were supposed
to print the story out and put it in a blind pile. But everyone knew that
what really happened was the stories got uploaded to MT and the
editors read them from there. I figured Hannah would probably read
Juns story first. So it all came down to how early Jun got up, and
whether or not she double-checked the story in the morning.
Jun stared me straight in the face as the elevator moved but I never
said a word. I just watched the floor numbers pass by on the small row
of lights above the door. We were on our way to floor 17. The
earthquake hit around 11.
There was a quick, heavy shake followed by a loud clang from
outside the elevator walls. The sound echoed up and down in the shaft,
like giant marbles in a dryer. Jun gasped and dropped her planner. She
leaned back against the wall and grabbed the handrail behind her with
both hands. Her notebook and planner fell, and one side of her face
twisted up while the other went down. I moved to the corner. I
grabbed the edge of the elevator door with my right hand and pulled
in, while pushing my left hand against the left wall. To keep my
balance, I shoved my head into the center wall, just above the buttons.
The rattling made my head shake so much it bounced onto the metal
repeatedly. (This is not what youre supposed to do, by the way.)
Later, we found out the earthquake lasted for about twenty
seconds. It felt like an hour. The elevator went completely silent when
the shaking stopped. Jun understood first.
This thing isnt moving, she said. Isnt moving at all.
We stayed quiet for two or three minutes. Nothing happened. The
emergency alarm button didnt work. The phone in the elevator was
disconnected. Jun tried to call the office on her cellphone but only got
a busy signal. I didnt have any service. Jun called 911 and they put her
on hold. On hold. At 911.

She hung up. It was bound to start eventually. Neither one of us sat
down. We stood there and stared at each other in the oppressive
silence. Jun broke it.
So, Blake, whats your feature about? she asked through clenched
teeth, dragging each syllable out and finishing it with a sharp,
downward tone.
Profile piece on Ren Yaez, I said. Hes an artist in the Mission
facing an Ellis Act eviction. Its noteworthy because hes the one who
brought the Dia de los Muertos celebration to San Francisco, and now
he cant afford to live in the neighborhood he helped create.
What about yours?
Mine, really? You know what mine is about.
How would I?
Jun glanced up at the ceiling, sucked in a lungful of air, blew it out
hard enough that her new bangs rippled, then looked back at me.
I dont know how you did it Blake, or what your problem is. But I
know it was you. Somehow, you got my password again. But I fixed it.
I fixed everything. The fonts, the typos, my links all the way down
to my fucking Oxford commas.
She didnt raise her voice or change her expression at all. She just
stared straight at me. I put my hands in my pockets and looked down
at my shoes. They were old Vans, their once vibrant color faded to a
light blue.
Im sorry, I said. It was stupid. I just
Jun blew air out of her mouth with her lips held tight against her
teeth. It made a noise that sounded like pshaw.
Whatever Blake, she said. It seemed like we were getting along
better lately but whatever. Have it your way.
I pulled in a breath and faced her.
It was a great story Jun. It really was. And I am sorry. It was stupid
and petty and Im sorry. I guess I just didnt know what else to do.
Everything you write is so much better, and a staff writer position at a

place like the Believer is once in a lifetime kind of thing, and

My voice trailed off again. Jun just looked at me and snorted out
another pshaw. I let the silence sit there for about thirty seconds,
and then started talking just to make some noise.
There is something Ive been wanting to ask you for a while
though, I said. Since were stuck here and all.
A thin, blank stare.
Whats up with you and Hannah? Youre always flirting with her.
And all of that research for the fisting story? Is that for real, or are
you just getting your hustle on?
A slightly mischievous, dimple-inducing smile spread across Juns
face.
Well wouldnt you like to know, she said, one eyebrow tilting up
above the other.
Actually, I was sure I did know. I only asked because I wanted to
see if Jun would admit that her sexy girl routine was a show. Juns
Facebook account had revealed several photos of her with some dude,
which, along with everything else, stopped abruptly a few months
before she came to the Bay Believer. The guy in the photos was tall and
white, with blond hair and blue eyes. He was probably a software
engineer. And in a band.
And what about that day in the Castro? I asked. What were you
doing down there? Were you spying on me?
Jun laughed and shook her head.
No, stupid. I live down there.
This I hadnt seen coming. Her city location on Facebook was set
to Palo Alto.
Wait, you live in the city?
Well, yeah, Jun said. How do you think I ended up at the
Believer? I love SF.
I thought you stayed down in Palo Alto with your parents.
Jun rolled her eyes and then looked at the wall.

My parents are ridiculous. You dont even want to know. Theyre

like doctor this, lawyer that, engineer maybe. Being a writer? No way.
Thats not even up for discussion. I moved here to get away from
them. I live at 19th and Eureka with my brother. Hes gay. Theyve
only talked to him like twice since he came out, and that was five years
ago.
But I thought you went to Stanford?
Juns hands started to shake and she clasped them together. She
leaned her head back on the wall and looked at the ceiling. I could see
the beginning of tears shining back at the harsh, white emergency
lights. There was a very faint smell of burning plastic.
Not anymore, she said. I went for a while, it was great, but after
everything with my parents... Jun let this sentence float between us
for a second. I lied on the intern application. And I made up that
whole story about Ditmmed and Wesun. I cant even get credit for
this. Everywhere else turned me down the Chronicle, the Guardian,
Hannah was the only person who didnt check to see if I was actually a
student.
Now I really felt like a fool. A fool and a jackass. Here I was
starting a war with this girl like she was an over privileged bitch, when
really, she had given up as much as me. Probably more.
Wow, Jun. I really am sorry about everything. I dont know what
else to say. I guess if it makes you feel any better Im sure youll get
hired if anyone does.
You really think so?
For sure.
Im sorry too, Jun said. I was kind of mean.
Dont worry about it, I said with a small laugh. I should have
known better than to pick a fight with Jun Vee.
Jun looked down at her planner and notebook, which were still on
the floor. A few pages of her ghost scam story were poking out.
I dont know, she said. Your stuff is so hip. Youre really dialed

in to all the scenes. With a little fine tuning it could be great.

Thanks, I said. Thanks for real. But theres no way theyll take
me over you. Doesnt matter though. I got some bylines and had a
good time. Maybe Ill make the freelancers list.
Oh you definitely will, Jun said, a small smile growing on her
face.
As for what happened next, I still dont understand it. All I can say
is this: Have you ever been trapped in an elevator with a hot sworn
enemy at the exact moment when months of pent up tension
evaporates? I have.
Jun leaned over to pick up her things. Then she paused, staring at
the papers like she was trying to put together a paragraph. She reached
behind her head and pulled the small stick out of her bun. With one
quick shake, her hair fell down around her shoulders. Then she stood
up. I walked over immediately.
I pulled her in with her sweater and then reached my arms around
to her back. Jun shoved her tongue in my mouth and dug her
fingernails into my chest. She wrapped her legs around me when I
picked her up, and I perched her hips on the corner where the two
rails met. Jun bit my neck and then put her feet back on the floor. She
dragged her hands all the way down to my waist, where they found my
belt buckle. We were breathing at the same pace, with deep, heavy
lungfuls of air. I pulled my head back and stared into her eyes. It felt
like being sucked into a sweet, poisonous flower that paralyzed you
with pleasant endorphins.
I reached under Juns skirt and pulled her leggings off with a loud,
audible rip. The outside of her panties were already wet. Jun giggled
and then licked my neck and nibbled on the edge of my lip. I peeled
off her underwear and set her back on the railing. Too bad were not
on my desk, Jun whispered, biting my ear. I bent my knees to find the
right angle and then entered her. I didnt wear a condom. Jun gasped
and reached her arms around me while my temples pounded in my

chest and my dick throbbed with pleasure. I was starting to come when
Jun slapped me in the face. I froze. I had gotten so lost in the moment
I didnt notice when she told me to stop.
Blake put your fucking pants on, Jun said. This thing is
moving.
I looked around, confused, like I had just woken up in a strange
hotel room. Jun was right. There was an undeniable slow rocking of an
elevator moving up. I pulled out of Jun in a rush and three large drops
of come fell on the floor. I grabbed frantically at my pants while Jun
tore off what was left of her pantyhose and stuffed them in her purse
with the wet panties.
We werent even close when the doors opened. I was threading the
belt through my jeans. Juns makeup was smeared and she was still
pulling her skirt down. We were both obviously sweating, but I had the
real indictment: my dick was still hard, and poking out from behind my
jeans. Standing in front of us was floor 17, and most of the Bay Believer
staff, who all wanted to go downstairs now that the elevator was
working.
Kain Jeeozan looked confused, like he wasnt sure why anyone
would have sex in an elevator but it might make a good column.
Hannah covered her mouth with both hands to stifle a laugh. She
didnt look the least bit jealous to discover a girl who always flirted
with her getting busy in the elevator. Valerie and Brandon both looked
at us, then at each other, and shared a smile.
But it was Terrance who had the most visceral reaction.
Disapproval rang down from his tallness like a thick cloud of fog
determined to ruin a picnic. Terrance, the Midwestern transplant who
thought Guerrilla Queer Bar was a paintball league and Howeird Street
Fair was actually weird. Terrance had never heard of the Billboard
Liberation Front and derided the Guardian as socialist toilet paper.
He definitely hadnt been in San Francisco long enough to think of
elevator sex as an office social activity. Terrance only said one word,

but it spoke volumes: What?

The lines in his face dragged themselves down until even his
forehead looked angry. His mouth fell open and his head slowly tilted
to the side. Then he said it again.
What?
No one else moved or spoke for what felt like an hour-long
earthquake. Jun and I both looked down and held perfectly still. The
pages of her Chinatown ghost story were still on the floor, scattered
around like forgotten recycling. Finally, the elevator bell dinged and the
door closed on its own. Hannah broke the silence before it shut.
See you later lovebirds, she said.

William Alton
Trapped
The storm brought wind and rain. It brought tree limbs to the
ground and ripples to the water in the wetlands at the edge of town.
Wild flowers tossed their petals up and cherry blossoms twisted in the
gutters. The storm brought you to my apartment.
We sat together in the living room getting drunk. We smoked
cigarettes and talked about depression and loneliness. We ate devilled
eggs and brownies I made the day before. You closed your eyes for a
second and spilled your beer.
Are you tired? I asked. A little, you said. I offered you my bed. My
couch was comfortable enough. You can sleep with me, you said. I didnt
know how to respond. Was this about sex or sleep? I didnt want to get
it wrong and ruin a good night. You laughed. Take a hint, you said.
We showered before bed and you kissed your way down my body. I
held you and smiled. I moaned when you touched me. Flesh pressed
against flesh. You never once opened your eyes, letting me lead you to
orgasm.
In the morning, the storm had passed over us. We stood on the
patio and surveyed the broken branches, the leaves torn free. We
walked down the street to your car. You kissed me then and promised
to come by after work. You drove away and I wondered whod watch
your kids.

Sick Daughter
A plume of smoke drifts out of the fireplace into the room.
Everything smells of pine burning. She sits on the hearth, poking at the
fire, opening and shutting the flue. She is warm here. Outside winter
struggles with spring for dominion. She makes a mug of cider and
takes it out to the patio to smoke a cigarette. Her daughter lies on the
couch with a blanket and a book. Shes been feverish and sick for days
now.
Her daughter rises and makes her way to the bathroom. She starts
the shower and lets the hot water soak through her skin to the bones
that lie there. After her cigarette, she sticks her head through the
doorway. Going to the store, she shouts. Be right back. But no ones
listening and when shes gone, its as if she evaporated.
At the store, she buys cigarettes and beer. She picks up a steak and
potatoes, more soup. She goes home and finds her daughter on the
couch again. Where were you? her daughter asks. The store, she says. You
shouldve said something.
She makes soup and brings it to her daughter. Her daughter sits up
and sips the broth. She watches her and goes back to the hearth. Her
daughter is healing, even in the cold room. Things are beginning to
come together. Tomorrow, shell return to work.

Home for the Night

Every day passes with the unstoppable forward momentum of time.
Each day begins, swells and shrivels into night. Jennifer wakes,
showers and eats toast before work. She gets in her car and aims it
down the street. She drives with caution, watching the rest of the cars,
the pedestrians, the houses built like blocks in the city. At work, she
does her job and looks forward to stepping out for a cigarette, a
chance to get away from the computer and desk shes slave to. When
the day ends, she drives home and sits in her kitchen drinking vodka
and grapefruit juice. There is no one in her live. She is alone. The men
she knows are all too familiar. Theres never going to be anything
important there.
When the vodka runs out, she walks down to the liquor store and
buys another pint. She picks up cigarettes and grapefruit juice and
walks home. She stands in the middle of the living room and wonders
if there will ever be someone to fill up the silent hours. She needs
someone to talk to, but she doesnt know how to meet anyone.
Every once and awhile, she goes down to the bar and sits at a table
watching the men. They come in packs and shes no good at cutting
one out. She sits and watches and one night a man sits with her. They
talk about families and work. They talk about food and cooking. He
seems interesting enough. They talk about sex.
Jennifer brings him home for the night. Shes nervous and out of
sorts. Hes smooth and comfortable. They drink the vodka she has and
smoke cigarettes in the living room. When he kisses her, she leans into
it, hungry and scared. They explore each others bodies. They lie on the
couch, their clothes coming off piece by piece. They make love and lie
there for a long moment. I have to go, he says. I thought you were staying the
night, she says. My wife wouldnt like that.
She stares at him while he dresses and makes his way through the
front door. She locks the door behind him and closes the windows.

She stands naked in the living room remembering why she never goes
out.

You can read more of Bill Alton's stories in his short story collection "Girls"

Bruce Douglas Reeves

The Hummingbirds vs. the Wasps
The goddam wasps were at it again. Michael watched them through
the watery ripples of the Victorian glass windowpanes, as they drove
the azure-shawled hummingbird away from the Nature Company
feeder's scarlet nipple. He was impressed that the usually aggressive
hummingbird had enough smarts not to get stung. Michael and Judd
tried to keep the feeder wasp-free, but the little devils always returned
to chase away the tiny, arrogant birds and suck up the pink sugar water
themselves.
Mr. Knightly crouched on the oak bookcase, white-tipped tail
thumping, head tilted back like a dowager peering through bifocals.
Every day, he positioned himself between Judd's old hurricane lamp
and a silver-framed photograph of Judd and Greg with Gore Vidal so
he could watch the duel. Long ago, he gave up hope of catching the
hummingbird through the glass, but occasionally a low growl rumbled
under the white ruff at his throat. Apparently, a cat could be as
irrational as any human being. Random thoughts were flashing through
his own head, images of Judd and himself, fragments of their history.
He couldnt stop his mind from wandering, even now, at this peculiar
moment in their lives.
Shoving up the lower half of the window, Michael squirted the
wasps with a yellow plastic toy pistol he kept ready. The spray of water
scattered them in confusion, but the moment he stopped squirting they
darted in faster than the hummingbird, again claiming the nipple at the
end of the glass tube.
"Shit."
"Good try," said Judd, coming up behind Michael. He scooped Mr.
Knightly into his arms, balancing the fat cat's furry bulk against his
shirtfront.

"But no help for our frantic friend." Michael pulled the window
shut, noticing again the sun-blistered chocolate brown paint on the
sash. One part of his brain went through the cycle of thinking he ought
to scrape and putty and repaint and then deciding that he didn't have
the energy.
"You shouldn't stand in front of the window like that." Judd patted
Michael on his tanned butt. "You'll give the neighbors more of a thrill
than they can handle."
Michael turned, risking eye contact with Judd. "Only the
neighbors?" Judd's shoulder raised in an almost imperceptible shrug,
then he walked away. The gesture and expression, Michael thought,
made Judd look his age, and then he felt disloyal for noticing. He was
only ten years older than Michael, but hed gone through a lot in those
years.
Michael followed Judd across the room, built as a sleeping porch
but long ago transformed into an office overlooking the hillside
garden, windows replacing screens on three sides. He'd just come in
from sunbathing with a book on the redwood deck. If the uphill
neighbors stood at their living room windows they could see into the
study, but Michael's attitude was that if they looked they deserved what
they saw. He hadn't taken Judd's lectures on propriety seriously ever
since they walked into the kitchen on the other side of the house and
saw their downhill neighbors, Tony and Anne, going at it like rabbits
on the gentle shingled slope of their roof.
This view of the terraced garden, those patches of day lilies and
agapanthus, the curving beds of spike-leafed iris, the brazen busy
lizzies and gaudy primroses: Michael couldn't look at them without
feeling the ache of tired muscles--and without seeing Judd's sweaty,
sun-browned back bent over shovel or trowel, digging, mulching,
weeding and nurturing.
Transplanted easterners, Michael and Judd had not easily put down
roots in the Berkeley soil, but they'd responded to the challenge of

gardening around rocks and through inhospitable sand and clay.

Theyd learned to mulch and to compare and rank different qualities of
fertilizer. Before coming to California, Judd had never had as much as
a flower box, but--Michael reminded himself--maybe the lush
California weather and aggressive fertility of the Bay Area were what
he'd needed at that point in his life.
"What time do we have to be at the lecture hall?" asked Judd.
The cat wriggled out of his arms, its paws thudding on the oak
floor. In a few minutes, itd be back on the bookcase, whiskers
twitching every time the hummingbird zoomed into view.
"Not 'til seven," said Michael. "Will he be there?"
"Sure. Why not?"
Was the question as casual as Judd tried to make it appear?
Have you made up your mind? Is that what this is about?"
Michael leaned against the heavy old desk, his arms folded across
his naked chest.
Dont do this, Michael. Its not like that.
You cant live here with me, pretending that everything is the way
it was before. Cut him loose or cut me loose. Go ahead, pack up your
books and pictures, take Mr. Knightly, and go, if thats what you want
to do. Or Ill move out."
For a moment, Judd seemed unable to respond, then he said, "I
dont know what I want. Please let me know when you decide.
Michael raised an eyebrow, a fierce glint in his blue eyes. I cant help
it. Curiosity runs in my family.
Dont be nasty.
Ill be nasty if I want.
I dont understand my own feelings, okay? So dont push me,
Mike. I know Im causing you pain and Im sorry. Look, maybe I
should just move out, nowstart my new job and life without either
of you. I dont know. Youd be able to get on with your own life, at
least.

I dont want to get on with my life, not without you. Sounds

pathetic, doesnt it? Maybe Im not a scientist, maybe Im only an
English department hack, but Im not a fool.
Judd looked as if hed been slapped across the face. Michael
suddenly felt guilty; although why he should feel guilty, he didnt know.
Okay, maybe I do care for Troy. Maybe I Shit, I dont know.
Judd seemed almost to be pleading. I dont want to hurt you, but I
cant make a choice. I love you.
So youve said. On several occasions.
Im a confused jerk, I admit it.
Michael smiled. Were making progress.
There was something faintly repulsive about Judds expression, he
thought, part guilt, part conciliatory, and part like a middle-aged boy
trying to look cute.
And, Judd went on, straining to find the right words, even if I
decide to leave, and I dont know if I will, II don't see why we--you
and I--can't stayfriends."
"Ah, yes. Friends. `I want to assure you, Judd, that whatever
happens, wherever you wander in this big, goddam world, you'll always
be my pal and if you ever need me, I'll be here, waiting for your call.'
That civilized enough for you?"
Michael was helpless to stop himself: One consolation when you've
been hurt is to injure in return. Okay, it doesn't ease your pain, but you
can enjoy a morbid satisfaction in seeing the other person flinch.
Maybe even groan or weep. This, Michael remembered bitterly, was
often how hed demonstrated his love. But not with Judd--not until
now. Michael lowered his eyes so that he wouldn't have to read the
emotions crossing Judd's face.
"I'm gonna shower." Judd stepped around the desk and went
through the door to the bedroom.
"Coward," Michael called after him.

When the shower's urgent roar filled the silence, Michael retreated
to the living room, collapsing on the sofa. The black leather felt warm
and sticky against his bare skin. Suddenly, he had no energy to move.
The prospect of showering and dressing and walking down the hill to
the campus was more than he could face. Even breathing was too
much work. From where he sat, Michael saw flashing shards of
emerald and ruby careening back and forth in front of the red plastic
nipple, still trying to evade the dive-bombing wasps. Mr. Knightly was
back at his post, chalky ears pointing at the frenzied hummingbird.
"Filthy bastards," Michael said to the cat. "You'd think they'd let
somebody else have a turn." Mr. Knightly's black and white tail
thumped twice on the bookcase.
The cacophony of the shower climaxed in a clatter of rude noises
produced by the ancient plumbing: in a moment, Judd would emerge
in a nimbus of steam, dark hair plastered to his head and the wiry hairs
slicked down in that hollow between the muscles of his chest. Michael
fled to the kitchen and thrust beans into the coffee grinder. A strong
cup of Peet's Viennese blend would propel him through the evening-and if that didn't work, he'd get drunk. There was always a temporary
solution, hed learned, even if seldom a permanent one.
Slopping water into the coffee maker, he looked up and saw Judd
reflected in sections across the half-dozen small windowpanes above
the sink. He didn't turn around.
"Remember when we watched Tony and Anne...?" said Judd,
behind him. The empty green shingle roof sloped in the sun in front of
them.
"I remember." Michael liberated a mug from a hook, holding it on
his palm as if he were about to hurl it through the window. "Coffee?"
They had collected the mugs during the past three years, each one
unique. This one was shaped like a toucan, the gaudy, multihued beak
curved into the handle. They'd bought it and two others at The

Cannery in San Francisco. The first three of the collection, the

beginning of their domestic life together.
"Sure. One for the road."
"Bastard."
"I didn't mean anything by that."
"That's the damn trouble."
When Michael turned, he saw the towel hanging from Judd's
waistB-a large multicolored striped bath towel. That towel had a
history in their lives, too. Every damn thing had a history. Michael
pushed past him and stomped flat-footed into the bathroom.
"Pour the coffee when it's ready," he called back, the bathroom
door slamming behind him.
What is love? Desire? Companionship? Fear? Michaels mind was
whirling. Demons were inside him, chewing, eating, digesting.
Something in his brain was cruelly free-associating. The world was too
indifferent, too cruel, to willingly deal with aloneat least, for him.
Some people prided themselves on being tough, independent. He
wasnt one of them.
Later, as they were hiking down the hill to the campus, Judd
noticed a tiny triangle of toilet paper glued with brownish blood to
Michael's chin.
"You cut yourself."
"Don't worry. It wasn't fatal."
The steep walkway, built decades ago to connect with a longdefunct trolley line, crossed the corkscrew road of Panoramic Way half
a dozen times as it passed cottages so old that Jack London and Robert
Louis Stevenson were said to have visited them and new redwood and
glass houses so pricey that no professor existing today on an academic
salary could afford them.
Stepping on a silvery eucalyptus pod, Michael skidded over the
slanting corrugated concrete sidewalk. The cracked and broken
pavement had become layered with a slick mulch of leaves, pods, and

twigs. Like most public places in Berkeley, this walkway winding down
the hill was going to hell. The crumbling beaux-arts concrete
balustrade was pockmarked with age and covered with lichen and in
places the rusty metal rods of its skeleton thrust out like grotesque
bones. There was no money to fix the infrastructure anywhere.
Glancing down, Michael saw Judd's naked shin between his trouser
cuff and loafer. Judd had dressed for the occasion in his beige
corduroy suit, blue shirt, dark knit tie, loafers but no socks. Michael
tried to distract himself by thinking of tonight's events. Maybe if he
forced himself to worry, he'd forget to be miserable.
"Nobody'll come," he said. "The whole thing'll be a fiasco."
"Troy said he'd be there."
"That makes it okay, then!"
"I thought it was nice of him to come."
"Why shouldn't Troy come tonight? He might even find a poet of
Geoffrey Allen Walkers stature interesting."
Judd braked at the top of a cascade of concrete steps, waiting for
Michael to catch up: "It's not his field."
"All the better. Expand his horizons." Michael scratched his head in
a blatantly insincere demonstration: "What is Troy's field? Something
to do with bugs, isn't it?"
"It doesn't have anything to do with bugs."
They darted across the street in front of a straying VW van, passing
a row of tree-sheltered frat houses. The gray hulk of the stadium
loomed behind brown-leafed trees. Ever since Michael had learned
that the Hayward fault's subterranean wound meandered beneath these
giddy mansions and the stadium's stolid arches, he couldn't walk past
here without imagining the earth cracking open and shaking everyone
like so many alarmed insects out of that pseudo-Roman coliseum and
its ivy-draped neighbors. He wouldn't have minded at that moment if
they all were dumped into the fiery bowels of Hell, where they'd skip
like Dore's damned across molten rivers of flaming ego.

"Ive got it," Michael said. "Troy runs a fancy machine in the
chemistry department."
"Michael, in your heart, you're convinced the sciences are inferior to
the humanities."
"Hell, the scientists are sure they're superior to us poor slobs who
wallow in the imprecise swamps of the humanities, so why shouldn't I
protect my poor psyche as best I can?"
"He's an electron microscopist in the biochemistry department."
"Sure. I remember, now."
"You never forgot."
The Campanile bells struck seven bold notes as Judd and Michael
confronted the gray, red-roofed building where the lecture was to start
in half an hour. Their relentless tones embraced everything on the
campus within a perfect unifying shell.
Somebody should atone for something, Michael decided, but he
didnt know which of them it should be, or how. Cause and effect, he
always thought, was part of life and you couldnt escape it. Once upon
a time, saints would renounce their physical world, leaving behind
anything that might give comfort or pleasure, but he was no saint and
already beyond either comfort or happiness. What they needed was a
good witch doctor to flagellate them, stick needles through their skin,
and give them vile potions to make them vomit. The survivor would
be pure and innocent. If there was a survivor.
For three years, Michael and Judd were happy together. Judd was
older than Michael. Sometimes, Judd talked as if forty-four was the
threshold of old age. Michael hated it when the bastard acted as if he'd
done and felt everything and now was ready to tend goats on the
slopes of Oregon's foggy coast. But it was Judd who was excited about
the future, now, about to start a new job, a new phase of his career.
Would he be moving in with a new lover, too? When would he admit
it?

Most of the time, they'd avoided scenes. Whatever happened,

Michael wanted to get through whatever he had to get through without
disgracing himself. That included this evening.
Only a little over three years ago, Judd sat in Larry Blake's
Rathskeller telling Michael that without him he'd have no reason to
live. Three years ago, Greg had been dead six months. Three years ago,
Judd asked Michael to move in with him. It hadn't been easy for Judd
to take that step.
For a decade, Judd and Greg had been as close as any married
couple, compatible in every way. Quiet, bald Greg and passionate,
dark-haired Judd had complimented each other, each bringing out the
best in the other--everyone had said so. Greg's calm, scholarly exterior
had belied the buoyancy of his personality and the sharpness of his wit.
Well known across the social and intellectual strata of the university,
Judd and Greg were invited together to parties and events. Professors
abandoned wives and children for students half their age, wives fled to
New York or Los Angeles to "discover" themselves among strangers,
couples shattered in all directions, but Judd and Greg endured.
Until Greg's illness. Cancer. A pure life was no guarantee of
survival.
"It didn't occur to me that we wouldn't go on together forever,"
Judd told Michael, later.
Friend to both, Michael had watched Greg's slow death eat at Judd.
Somewhere along the way, sympathy had turned to love. Suddenly,
Michael had known that he had to be with Judd, not just for a day or a
night, but indefinitely. He didnt dream of forever, because he didnt
believe in forever, but at least an open-ended dream that could feel like
forever. Eventually, Judd had risked loving Michael, opening himself
up to the possibility of another loss.
This evening mattered to Michael, professionally but also
personally. He'd written letter after letter, made international phone
calls at all hours, day and night, arranged for airplane and hotel

reservations, and handled an incredible number of details to make it

happen. The lecture was open to the entire campus community, but
the auditorium held at least a thousand and it was hard to predict if
even a writer of Geoffrey Walker's fame would fill such a space. Tom
Wolfe, perhaps, or Robert Stone. But any poet, even Walker?
An awkward silence collapsed around Michael and Judd as they
waited on the granite steps of the auditorium for Troy, who was
predictably late. The greenish light from a bulb over Judd's head
picked out with startling clarity the white strands salting his dark hair
and moustache. These white hairs, which began to appear during
Greg's illness, symbolized to Michael the need that Judd had used to
have for him. He felt the same affection for the creases at the corners
of Judd's eyes. The bruises of life added to the beauty of the beloved.
(Even a clich can be true, dammit.) At least, in California they didnt
have to hide their affection. It wasnt even illegal, the way it still was
some places. They were free to suffer just like anybody else.
He turned away from Judd toward the gray spike of the Campanile
asserting itself above rows of gnarled sycamores. Did those damn
wasps ever let the hummingbird tank up from the feeder? He pictured
the wasps hovering like enemy helicopters around the red nipple while
the hummingbird searched like a fighter plane for an opening. Then he
felt Judd's hand on his shoulder and started as if he'd been struck by a
malicious specter.
"Shit, you're jumpy. I said Troy's here."
Michael managed a civilized nod at Troy.
Lets get this show on the road, Troy said. It cant all be boring.
Then he slammed Michael on the shoulder with a fist and tossed a
cool, self-possessed smile his direction. Just kidding!
A nasty twinge cut through Michael when he saw Judd and Troy
together. He couldnt avoid obsessing about Troy being young enough
to be Judd's son--if, of course, Judd had been so inclined--an
irrelevant, masochistic thought. He wasn't sure what his own crime

was: that he wasn't twenty-four instead of thirty-four, that he wasn't a

scientist instead of a specialist on twentieth century British poets, but
he felt that if he'd planned the situation better he wouldnt be so afraid
that he and Judd would no longer be together as the year staggered to
its painful conclusion.
He didn't understand what it was about Troy that attracted Judd. As
far as hed seen, Troys personality was peculiar, at best. Maybe it was
the scars. If you looked at Troy from one side, he was handsome in a
banal way--and, yes, sexy, in a rough, proletarian style. But when he
turned, angry burn scars slashed from his hairline past a deformed ear
and along his neck until they disappeared into his collar.
When Troy was in his teens, a plane about to take him from Los
Angeles to San Francisco crashed moments after takeoff, fuel tanks
igniting and turning the cabin into an inferno as shrieking passengers
scrambled for emergency exits. Instead of graduating with his high
school class, he spent the next year of his life in burn and plastic
surgery wards.
When bad things happen to good people: a subject for a poem. No
doubt, many poems already had been written on the subject. And who
said that Troy was good, for that matter?
They hiked down the steep center aisle of the old auditorium to the
reserved front row section. Above them, the coffered ceiling suggested
Roman decadence, but there was nothing decadent about those old
wooden chairs. White-maned retired faculty, skinny students hiding
under masses of hair, and current faculty and guests pretending to be
civilized were settling like fussy birds into the auditorium seats.
Michael felt that he should've been entitled to pick up Walker at his
hotel and to sit with him on the stage, but he was too junior for that
honor, despite his labors leading to Walker's appearance. So he sat here
with Judd and this boy, this evil spirit from another world, wondering
why his life was so screwed up and what the hell he'd do about it.
***

Almost midnight. The witching hour, it was called by some asshole

or other. Michael balanced between a high-backed, winged leather
chair the color of port wine and a walnut bookcase, watching penguinshaped Andrew Smithwick and his glossy wife, Katharine, mercilessly
charm the great Geoffrey Allen Walker. So far, Michael's primary
contact with the tall, white-haired poet had been a brief introduction
and handshake. (Although Walker had offered a radiant smile and
patted Michael on the shoulder in an elaborate, if brief, show of
gratitude when told that he'd worked long hours to make this visit and
lecture so far from Hampstead possible.) Even Judd had managed to
spend more time talking to the lanky, boney-faced poet.
On the drive to Professor Smithwick's house after the lecture,
Troy's only comment was that he thought Geoffrey Walker was the
most beautiful old man he'd ever seen.
"I want to grow old like that," he said.
"You've got a few good years, yet," Judd told him.
Thick tree trunks and knobby branches still covered with leaves
blocked light from street lamps and the moon, sending shadows over
the moving car. Michael shivered. Death to somebody, he thought.
Painful death.
The old guy was great, Troy added. You know? Damn good.
Michael silently agreed that the lecture had been a success. Walker
talked about the danger of art, the risk of creation, and the terror
aroused by true beauty. The audience, respectably large, seemed not
only to stay awake but actually to be interested in Walker's
observations, a few of whichit had to be confessedwere rather
scatological.
Now, in the cocktail-tinted atmosphere of this academically elegant,
bookcase-lined living room in this nineteen-thirty imitation Jacobean
manor in the Berkeley hills, the English department was getting
contentedly drunk.

This was the kind of event that Greg used to love. He'd been more
of a social animal than Judd, certainly more than Michael was or ever
could be. Greg had collected the autographs for Mr. Knightly's album.
When Michael first met Judd and Greg, they showed him the leatherbound album thick with autograph letters and cards from literary and
theatre greats addressed to Mr. J. or John Knightly. The album had
both the original correspondence that Greg wrote for Mr. Knightly
and the responses from the notable and famous. How witty Greg's
letters were, how funny and erudite! And Greg wasn't above taking
advantage of a situation like this, getting Walker to autograph a photo
for Mr. Knightly's album. He could've got away with it. Not Michael.
And Judd didn't bother, any more. Mr. Knightly's album was a closed
book.
Returning from getting himself a fresh drink, Michael discovered
tall, white-haired Walker now with Judd and Troy and two grad
students. Troy was keeping his good side toward the little group, so
Michael saw only the scarred part of his face. Apparently, Troy had
made a remark meant to be funny, because he looked expectantly at
Walker, who obliged with an austere yet friendly smile. One of the grad
students rushed on, sloshing booze from his glass over his own hairy
wrist and onto his wash-and-wear pants.
"You can't say it's wrong to modernize Shakespeare per se," the
bulky, pudding-faced grad student said. Flaming hair leaped from his
scalp as if he'd been given an electric jolt. "You have to take each
production and see if it works in itself. I mean, I saw, oh, the Beatrice
and Benedict one done in romantic nineteenth-century Viennese style
and it was charming, because it worked in itself. But this Hamlet didn't.
Work in itself."
"Could be," said Troy, "that was because of student acting." He
arched his head toward the red-haired grad student. You know:
acting! Ive heard it makes a difference.

The grad student gave Troy a "Who are you?" look, but Walker
murmured graciously, "Maybe he's right." He seemed to be taken with
young Troy, although Michael didnt see why. "Even an original
concept can fail in execution."
"The animal side of Claudius," said Troy. "I thought that was pretty
interesting."
The grad student--Michael seemed to remember that his name was
Owen--shook his head. "That was Claudius as George F. Babbitt. I
wanted to tell him to forget about kinging and open a used car lot."
Michael sawor thought he sawfrom Troys expression that
hed never heard of George Fucking Babbitt.
From his position, Walker could see only the undamaged side of
Troy's face and his taut, muscular torso. Morbidly, Michael waited for
the inevitable. He saw in Walker's eyes that he wanted to move on, but
was lingering because of Troy. Then Troy pivoted enough for Walker
to see the pink scars and reconstructed ear. The poet's expression
registered shock, pity, and finally a restless desire to escape, all in a
blurred instant. Michael actually was glad that Troy hadn't seen the
transformation.
Everything in the room, even the people, seemed hideously hardedged to him, as if a giant hand had drawn around it all with a Magic
Marker, turning the room and all its contents into a page from a childs
coloring book. Just as he heard Geoffrey Allen Walker ask for the way
to the lav (the old guy probably had a prostate problem), he turned
away from the party, trying to block out the chatter, music, and
clanking glasses, and gazed out a window beside the walnut bookcase.
Beyond the rooftops and the wide branches of the bay and sycamore
trees that sheltered the hillside neighborhood gleamed the white tower
and chateau-like silhouette of that Victorian fantasy made of
whitewashed lumber and dreams where Walker was staying: the
sprawling, multi-gabled, Claremont Hotel. A little nineteenth century
decadence in Berkeley.

Glancing along the bend of the street, Michael saw two lean, sweaty
joggers running through yellow pools of light splashed from the old
street lamps. The woman's breasts jiggled up and down under her tank
top and with each stride the man's genitals danced beneath his loose
shorts. Michael imagined the man and woman stopping to pull off
their damp clothes and hurling themselves onto Professor Smithwick's
newly laid sod lawn, between the sloping driveway and pink flagstone
path.
A commotion near the entry hall caught his attention. Apparently,
Walker was packing up his wisdom and saying goodnight. Andrew
Smithwick was going to drive him to the hotel, but first the poet shook
every hand in the house. Michael gave the old guy credit: he was
patient and gracious. Plenty of people, plenty of other poets, would've
told this gang to shove it, by now. Finally, from the narrow window
Michael watched the pear-shaped professor tuck the long-limbed old
poet into his Volvo and back the car down the driveway. Troy ran after
them, hurling himself down the brick steps, but was too late. Whatever
hed had in mind, Michael thought with satisfaction, wasnt going to
happen. The low, gnarled branches of a pair of aged oaks gestured
toward the sedan as it disappeared around the bend of the narrow
street. The party continued, without the guest of honor.
Then Michael saw the glass hummingbird feeder hanging from a
cord outside the open window, sugary drops balancing on its red
nipple. Michael wondered if wasps drove away the hummingbirds here,
too. He reached outside, nudging the redwood-framed vertical window
open a few more inches, to touch the nipple at the end of the curved
glass tube. The feeder jumped away from his finger, shattering on the
paving stones below.
"Fuck!"
Now that Geoffrey Walker had made his exit, Michael felt no
restraints. Maybe the great poet hadn't noticed that he, Michael, existed
as an individual, but the proximity of the famous guest had

condemned him to good behavior. He found the liquor table and

poured a sturdy glass of vodka, gulped at it, and staggered backward
across the room until he bumped into the curved embrace of a baby
grand. The keyboard showed its teeth in an evil grin. With the suavity
of Cole Porter, he slid around the bowed side of the piano and settled
on the bench in front of the keyboard--and all without spilling a drop
from his glass. Accompanying himself, he sang several repetitious and
questionable songs about life, liberty, and the raunchy pursuit of
happiness (or the pursuit of raunchy happiness) until Judd appeared
with Katharine Smithwick at his elbow. She snatched up the vodka
glass, muttering something about rings on the polished piano surface,
and Judd eased the shiny cover down over the ivory fangs.
"Take it easy, Michael."
"I am taking it easy, lover. Slow...and... easy."
A few minutes later, Michael escaped Judd's surveillance and
maneuvered circuitously (and cleverly, he congratulated himself) back
to the buffet, where he found himself confronting Mrs. Smithwick's
sun-burnished cleavage again, as she presided over the remains of pate
and cheese and quantities of crudities and dip.
"Michael," she said, stopping his hand as it reached for the vodka
bottle, "what is it? I don't know you very well, but enough to know
that something's wrong."
"Why should anything be wrong? Everything is right as rain." He
giggled. Trust an academic to talk fancy.
"Do you want to tell me about it? People say I'm a good listener.
"Vodka and sympathy, huh?" He looked sharply at Katharine's face,
tanned from many mornings of tennis at the Claremont Hotel courts.
Nothing to tell. But answer me this: you see that guy over there? The
blond guy talking to Judd?"
He pointed to Troy. The scars were not visible.
Katharine Smithwick nodded. "Yes. I see him."
"Who'd you rather screw, him or me?"

***
Michael stumbled down the curving road, sliding over slippery
leaves, having rude conversations with mailboxes that made obscene
gestures at him from posts at the ends of driveways. Tripping on a
shard of pavement pushed up by a sycamore root, he pitched forward
onto both knees, ripping his new chinos and skinning his palms. He
remained in a praying position, staring at the stinging red streaks on his
hands, until he became aware of a scrambling noise in the dark. A
charcoal-masked raccoon shambled from behind an azalea and
swaggered down the street, its ringed tail swinging back and forth with
arrogant nonchalance until it marched up the brick-paved driveway of
a house with likely garbage. Groaning, Michael heaved himself upright.
When he reached the tree-lined Claremont driveway, he hesitated,
staring up at the half-timbered chalet poised on the hill like a white
luxury liner riding the crest of a fuzzy green wave.
Fearing that it was about to plunge over onto him, he jerked back
against a rough-barked palm tree. Then, head down, he charged up the
drive and through the yawning glass doors.
A motley collection of middle-aged men in dinner jackets and their
plump pastel dates had just spilled from a ballroom into the lobby. As
blossoms from this aged bouquet scattered across the marble floor,
Michael darted into the cocktail lounge, groping through dim, watery
light to the bar. Berkeley and the San Francisco bay sprawled beyond
the wide window, pointillist patterns of light and dark. He ordered a
beer and gulped at it while staring at the fragments of civilization
strewn below.
A large, pink-haired woman in a silk blouse on the next barstool
smiled at him. He liked her confiding expression and kewpie doll
features.
"Today is my anniversary," she said. "My fortieth wedding
anniversary."
"Congratulations."

"Franz is taking a leak."

A tall, weathered-looking man appeared behind the pleats on the
woman's shoulder. His gray hair was combed into a pompadour above
a creased forehead. White sideburns bushed out next to long earlobes.
Michael had never seen such large earlobes. Did the man grow his
sideburns to call attention to their magnificence or to try to hide them?
Franz looked quizzically at Michael, who thrust out a hand.
"Congratulations," Michael grinned. "Forty years is a long time."
Allowing himself a grimace, the man took Michael's hand. The
handshake was brief and awkward, but Michael was moved by it.
"Yeah." Franz looked down at his wife's curly pink head. "But it
don't seem like it. Not all the time."
Michael reached into his pocket and pulled out a twenty-dollar bill.
"Let me buy you a drink--let me toast your anniversary."
"That's nice of you," said the woman, before her husband could
answer.
Michael got the attention of the bartender and ordered three beers.
"To you," he said, lifting his glass.
"Franz and Maxine," said the woman.
"Franz and Maxine," Michael repeated. "Happy fortieth
anniversary. And many more."
"Thank you," said Maxine. She looked pleased.
Several couples left the cocktail lounge, opening up tables next to
the plate glass windows. Franz picked up the two beers in front of his
wife and himself.
"Maxie and me're going to sit over there. Thanks for the beers."
Michael lifted his glass in a silent salute to their backs.
People used to believe that hummingbirds didn't have feet, that
they had to stay aloft forever, endlessly beating their wings. That was
how he felt.

"True beauty has terror in it." Michael read this once. Did Geoffrey
Allen Walker's poetry contain terror? Michael tried to remember.
Auden's did.
He needed to discuss this with Walker before he left Berkeley. All
of humanity was waiting for the word on this subject. Lives were at
stake. Futures held in the balance. Then he'd write a brilliant paper,
giving everyone the comfort of his freshly acquired wisdom, win
tenure, and have a glorious new life. With or without Judd. Based on
the terror of true beauty. All he had to do was find Walker.
Michael lurched through the ornate cavern of the Claremont lobby,
wading across emerald and gold carpets, maneuvering through sudden
archways, stumbling onto balconies angled above floodlit tennis courts,
and quivering blue pools in which late-night swimmers glided like
somnambulistic carp. His brain was crammed with shards of past
years, remembering beauty and terror, but as he searched for the
white-haired poet, he thought: I'm still young. Even if Judd leaves me
dry and high. High and dry. Even if he does, I still have a future.
Collapsing on the round Victorian settee in the center of the
Claremont's overstuffed lobby, Michael dreamed of hummingbirds and
wasps and cats and hawk-nosed poets. Then, jolting awake, he saw
Walker's tall figure drifting toward him. The man was really there,
leaving slender footprints on the plush carpet.
Michael struggled upright, stumbled across the swirling floral
pattern, stopped in front of the poet, and announced that he had an
important message. Then he reached up and grasped the poet's fuzzy
white head, pulled it down, and kissed him on his wide, pale brow.
The hummingbirds never won, but that didn't mean that they gave
up.

Joshua Flowers
Green Books
My car came to a stop, sliding in the dirt driveway. The sun was
bright behind the dark brown house, its light blinding me, leaving a
faint silhouette of the homes shape. I got out, the sound of the
shutting door ringing in my ear. Even with the suns light consuming
the real house, I could still see it clearly; reassembling its pieces from
my memories like a puzzle.
The walls were these deep browns, like the walnut tree in our
backyard that we tore down when I was 10. The roof was grayish black
and so thin and compact it looked like the roof was halfway to
collapsing. There were windows into the house, all of them dark except
for one with gray curtains hiding its contents away. Even with the sun
in my eye, I was able to find that gray, covered window. The spot had
become fixated in my mind. Whenever I thought about this house, that
gray window was the defining characteristic.
I started walking to the side so the sun wouldnt be as bad. The
grass was overgrown, longing to be mowed by the usual red machine. I
passed the mailbox; the front cover had been broken off during a
storm before I was born, so there was a replacement cover made of
wood that had been lying around in the garage unused. The piece of
wood was too big and was cut to try to mimic the shape of the
mailbox, but instead of looking like a natural addition, it was more
Frankenstein in its patchwork appearance. The front would come
down at any provocation, the metal of the box loudly shaking to hold
up the wooden door.
Right now, it was down, with over a dozen letters stuffed into the
box, all leaking out with many individual envelopes popping out in

their own direction like the grass of the yard. What was addressed to
Cynthia and what were addressed to him? I liked to imagine most of
them were for him, bills and bank notices who never got funeral
invites. I put my hand out, and grazed the tip of my finger against their
paper corners. The name of the papers matching the carved letters on
the facedown door: 119 Memorial Avenue, Lorrenses. I shut it back
up, pushing against the resistance of the letters still trapped inside. I
took a step back to admire the halcyon image from the childhood. 119
Memorial Avenue, Lorrenses + Regin. There was a heart sticker by the
plus. An unconscious guilt grew before being frightened away by the
sound of the door crashing down. The letters stared back at me,
betrayed and rejected as I moved through the lawn.
The house had come into full view and I could now see its features.
The walnut brown clapboard walls had started to gray and chip, and
the roof had compacted even more. Now I was legitimately afraid of it
caving in. What was most disturbing to me was the absence of the gray
window. Every window was open, letting air into dark abandoned
rooms, but the one that was always closed, that was always hidden by a
gray curtain, was open like any other window. I stared at the spot in
disbelief, like my eyes had transplanted the image of the others onto
that spot, but the longer I stared, the more the image of the gray
window faded in my mind.
Hes really gone.
I dont think I said those words till now. Maybe I said them once in
disbelief at the news, like it was some recurring joke Ive been saying
over and over and finally someone decided to join in on the fun. Still I
didnt really believe it, not even at the funeral with everyone dressed in
black. I went up, gave an uninspired eulogy while expecting him to pop
out of the coffin like a jack in the box. For him to yell, Gotchya! Now
you and I are stuck in the same room together! That is a terrible
thought; he would never say anything corny like that. He was gruffer:

so youve come running back to the funeral. Well, its good to see ya.
No, maybe he wouldnt say good to see ya. Maybe hed be pissed it
was too long. I suppose it doesnt matter.
As I walked up to the porch, I could see a transparent shade sitting
on the steps. He was small, red haired, eyes following the grass shift
with the winds touch. His hair was curly, a thing that closely
resembled old pictures of his father. The translucent boy was resting
his chin on the palms of his hands, elbows touching knees. For a
second I pitied the boy as memories created the scene. He was in a
green striped shirt, sleeves cut a little too high. His white sneakers still
had mud caked underneath from playing in the yard a few days ago;
they wouldnt be clean until another rainstorm. I walked past the boy,
to the door. With each step, the shouting increased in volume, their
conflict flooding my ears. I couldnt hear the words, each becoming
muffled as they tried to pass the wooden door, but the emotions were
always the same. My hand hovered by the frame, tempted to knock,
hoping the echo would stop the two and that someone would come to
the door. I turned to the brown dirt driveway, and to my gray Sedan,
the only inhabitant here.
With memories becoming a little too hard to bear, I went to sit
alongside the small specter on the steps. I sifted through my jeans for a
cigarette, the slender white stick so frail I could snap it in half and let
the tobacco fall down like dirty snow. Instead, I lit it in my mouth,
savoring the split second sensation of burns in my lungs before
expunging it into a cloud. The little child and I sat there and watched
the grass change and shift, as the wind would push down tug at
different parts of the lawn, subtly changing the lighting and shadows
into something new. What this created was a moving green painting
that shifted colors from one green to the next. There were spots that
were dark, disappearing into light. Waves of green swam from one side
to the next, washing away any inconsistencies, and only leaving one

shade before everything started to change again. I didnt notice my

cigarette burn away to the filter, like the boy didnt notice the yells had
softened and disappeared. There was a quietness now, with the only
sound coming from the wind brushing the grass, the boy had faded
away like the shouting.
I went up to the screen door and knocked on the wooden frame.
Cynthia? Hello? You home? Its me, Bill. Cynthia? Is anybody in
there? Are you home or not home? Keep saying nothing if youre not
home. Okay. Did you lock it? If you locked it then I am going to have
to break in. Okay; we are going to find out then on the count of three:
One, two, three. The metal doorknob turned down with little
problem. As I opened the door, I was disappointed by how welcomed
I was and how I didnt have to drop the resale price by a few dollars.
Inside the home the green spire wallpaper remained, all pointing up
to the ceiling. It was odd walking through the house; I could feel the
decade of separation disappear as I navigated the floors, stepping over
little black ghost feet imprinted on the wooden floorboards. I followed
them through the hallways, catching glimpses of my shadow reenacting
its youth as it lay on the floor, arms and legs spread out, trying to
escape from the sun. I can remember the sweat dampening my
forehead, no matter how many times I tried to wipe it off it would
always be wet. My limbs had melted and I was a puddle, that was the
response I gave whenever Mom asked what I was doing down there.
The feet brought me by the stairs, I saw a slightly older me, red fuzz
on my upper lip, reading on the third bottom step. It was always
quietest in this junction, Mom was in the kitchen, or lounging with the
TV and my dad was, without fail, in his study. Id always hear his
frustrated grunts and swears escape through the tiny slit of his never
quite closed door. To escape, I would read on the stairs, things like The
Odor of the Chrysanthemums; the first story to tell me something was
wrong in my home.

The footprints took me past the stairs and into the kitchen; three
more shades were acting out a typical family. The boy was sitting at the
table, his legs too short to reach the floor so his bare feet swung back
and forth, stretching his toes in the middle of every arc to try to brush
against the floor. Across the table was a man, gray curls wrapped
around the back of his head, trying to escape the receding hairline like
dry sand moving up a beach to escape the waves. In his hand was this
thick and heavy book shaped like a brick. The boy thought he could
make a house in the backyard if he found enough big books; it would
be his secret fort. At the counter cleaning dishes in the sink, was a
slender woman, her long red hair morphing to the shape of her back.
She was humming some popular song at the time whose tune still
stayed with me enough I could hum along with her. The boy couldnt
see her face, but he stared at the back of her head like he could, like he
could see the brown eyes they shared through the red she gave to him.
The illusion of the past flickered out of clarity as my phone rang,
vibration shaking their images. I flipped it open to a familiar voice.
Sweetie?
Hey, Ma. She let out a shriek of excitement at the sound of my
voice.
How are you doing? Have you dropped by the house yet?
Yeah, just got here. Guess where I am?
Either in your old room or your dads study.
Nope, actually Im in the kitchen. I walked over to the side of the
sink. Remember all the conversations we had here?
They escape me in my old age, I do remember your dad constantly
reading and getting all fussy at me. I swear I should have ripped that
book out of his hand, flung it out the window, and made him do some

cleaning. Looking back, I was practically his maid. How did I lose over
20 years of my life to him?
By not divorcing or murdering him.
Youd be surprised how close the murder part came.
No, thinking back to the shouting which lingered with the same
familiarity as the humming, I wouldnt be that surprised.
I looked back at the woman doing dishes, all her features dark gray
and translucent like smoke, but they were still there. She was a rose
past the crescendo of her youth, signs of wilting apparent in the petals
as they started to age and slump down, but even there was beauty as
the bright reds deepen to wine. This was a woman who did not have a
child in high school or college. This was a woman who waited till the
moment she wanted a child and no sooner or later than that.
So, have you rifled through his crap yet?
Nope, havent been up into his study yet.
Really? I thought that would be the first place youd go.
I got a little lost remembering everything, I can picture a lot of it
so vividly I feel like I could travel back in time on accident.
Well, dont travel back till you clean everything out of there,
okay?
Just the study, right?
No, Bill, the whole house.
I let out a soft sigh that I immediately regretted as my mother
heard.
The house needs to be empty before we can sell it.

You mean before Cynthia sells it. Its her house now.
Well, I lived and suffered in it much longer than she has and Im
going to get some of that money. Theres nothing she can do stop
me.
But shes the one married to him.
I was married to him first.
And then you divorced him. And then she married him.
It doesnt matter, I am getting some of that money.
Right. Right.
Is she there?
No, I think I got back before her. Shell be here later though.
Well, you should stop being weird in the kitchen, and dig through
the study. That man was such a pack rat I wouldnt have been
surprised if he hid gold somewhere like the Jew he was.
Anti-Semite, Ma.
What? Oh! Damn it. Sorry. And Ive been watching what I say so
well too. Well, at least I am getting better. You know how it is, when
you are raised that way my mind trailed off as she started to go
through the motions.
Bored, I turned to the wispy being next to me.
Brub brub brub? I said to her, moving my lips but not my tongue
to make the sound.
The ghost gave me a look and went back to the dishes.
Brub?

Nothing.
Brub? Brub brub brub brub.
The ghost kept to the dishes, my mothers voice still going through
the speakers.
The man with the book had disappeared, but the child was still
there and he stared at me a little fearfully. He asked, Can I have some
more cereal?
Sure, the wisp with the long red hair said.
Brub? Brub brub brub brub? Brub! Brub brub brub.
She turned to me with a look that made me flinch at eye contact.
Just get him the cereal.
Brub! I said, waving my arms in defeat.
I turned to the pantry where the cereal was kept. The door was tan
with a white knob handle like a seashell. I opened it expecting to see a
gold box of Cheerios to tower above my head, some lesser food
leaning against its tall frame.
There were no Cheerios.
Inside was a can of refried beans.
Staring in disbelief, I could feel the entire scene behind me dissipate
into the air like smoke.
Bill! my phone screamed.
Yeah?
You werent listening, were you? God, you were being weird
again.
No. Not really.

Why did you have to inherit some of the worst traits from your
father? I could imagine her pinching the skin above her nose and how
her face sagged as she sighed. Well I guess its better than my racism.
Yeah. No. I mean, Im sorry, Ma.
Its alright. Im sorry. Anyway Ive got to go, dont hate being
there too much.
I wont.
I love you, sweetie
Love you too, Ma.
It wasnt until the echo of my phone snapping shut that I felt
loneliness standing in that kitchen and in this empty house. There was
no one sitting at the table, no one cleaning dishes in the sink. The
illusion of the past had ended and now I was left alone in this place
with walls that started to become strangers again.
There were no shadowy feet to follow back, no distant echo of a
child traveling the hall, no ghost of myself reading at the steps. There
were only brown steps with white paint underneath. The house was
silent except for me, no banging pipes, no wind tapping on windows,
nor pattering of rats in the attic; only the sound of stairs creaking
underfoot. On the second floor, as I approached the study I had
originally come to see, I saw my reflection in a mirror hanging at the
end of the hallway. My face had sagged and fattened, hairline slowly
moving up at the corners of my forehead, stubble red and patchy like
sandpaper skin. My whole body seemed to become heavy as I noticed
all the time on my back. , some things remained unchanged. I stopped
in front of a green door slightly ajar because of a broken lock. I didnt
have to look at the door; I just stopped, still facing the mirror. That
door was always there, and would always be there. I pushed my hand
out against the frame. It was only a tap, but the door creaked open the

way it always did to announce I was outside, the joints of the hinges
twisting painfully at the subtlety.
Like before, I had an image of what would be in the room. There
would be a man, head completely hidden as he scrunched down at a
desk, only his back visible like a hill hiding its other half on the other
side of the valley. There was no natural light here piercing through the
gray curtain, only the dim artificial light of a single lamp, and the rest
of the room having to suffice on whatever leaked its way. The light
added color and shadows to the smoke that chamber-gassed the room
that would suffocate your lungs the moment you stepped inside. With
the imaginative mind of a child, I always thought of the place as a
devils cave.
When I turned, I saw an empty room, empty of the smoke and dim
light. In its place were natural colors as the sun poured in through the
uncovered window showing off the gentle greens of the walls. The
curtain was gone; leaving a lonely hanger. There was no man hidden by
his back, only an empty chair and desk surrounded by stacks of brown
boxes, so many that they occupied more space than his physical body.
This was just an empty room.
With the first step, I could start to picture it again. A green book
flying towards my face, green cover wings outstretched, feather white
pages bellied out like they were trying to escape from the bindings, this
bird propelled by angry shouts. It was unsettling how still my skin was,
constantly expecting to shift underneath an impact.
Not going kill me then, huh?
Every step was cautious, my body prepared to dodge. I was a little
disappointed by the lack of events as I reached the desk. On it was an
ugly green ashtray and lamp, neck twisted so the bulb was facing away
towards the corner. There was something missing in this room, some

missing link to connect the smoke-filled cave to this empty sunlit

room.
I went over to one of the brown boxes. There were at least two
dozen in the room, all piled up to the side creating a cardboard
mountain. Brown tape sealed it shut, but I was able to rip it open.
Inside were green books, all like the one I remember chasing me away.
The box was filled with them, and when I opened another box, and a
third, they were all filled with the same book. Grabbing one at random,
I held it in the air, twisting and turning it to see it from every angle.
The front and back covers were leather, smooth to the touch but
rough enough so the skin wouldnt slip. The books were small and
thin, maybe containing a hundred pages at most. I didnt open the
book, half expecting a lock somewhere. Maybe if I opened it, ink
would explode in my face. Still there was this curiosity to peek inside.
I went over to his desk; wheels sliding back as I sat down. The
book laid down, the green leather soaking in warm sunlight. Even with
the contents hidden, I could see the pages had turned yellow from the
oil of his skin.
What are you hiding in these books? Inside my mind, I could
animate his hate written out; everything in big giant bold letters
scratched in red pen, every word screaming at me. There was a sense
of excitement to feel his shouts again, to reaffirm the image of the man
I had known the longest in this world.
I opened the book.
I was surprised to see how clean his penmanship was. It was this
mix of print and cursive, all the letters slanted slightly to the right. The
ends of his ss, rs and other flowing letters seemed to break off in an
oddly natural way, like they were vines still growing on the page. The
petite print reminded me of him teaching me to write; shouting about
how my cursive was sloppy and I needed to shift the paper

underneath. None of it made sense to me, and after a short while, he

gave up trying to teach me. The difference in discipline was apparent,
as my writing was more scratchy and uneven. I scanned the first page;
a little unsure of what the words were forming until I realized it was a
story.
This was the story of someone named Sam. He was tall, dark, and
apparently walking through the woods. The story was very wordy in its
descriptions, so instead of lingering on the lines I scanned through
paragraphs, picking out the important bits. He was traveling with
others; one generic sounding girl and another one with a foreign name
I couldnt pronounce. He might have been Indian. The road was
bumpy; he keeps going on about how bumpy it is. Oh, theyre in a cart;
I guess it would be bumpy. Now there are very long descriptions of
trees. Still traveling. I flip ahead a few pages, looking for some sort of
break or indication of how long this travel was, but there was none and
this story seemed to go on forever. Theres talking. Stuffs maybe
happening? Description. More Description. Theyre out of the cart.
There is shouting, very dramatic as all the letters are capitalized and
ending in exclamation points. The cart catches on fire from fiery breawhat? I read the line again: the cart caught on fire from its fiery breath
that wrapped around the outside and inside like it was rushed by
burning water. Confused and a little excited I backtracked through the
words, passing by the roar fiercer than a lion, the reptilian eyes with
black keyhole slit pupils, the red ruby scales shining with spots of
sunlight, and I stopped at the word dragon.
My face was clenched up tight in a laughing smile, my eyes squinted
and tearing up as I kept repeating aloud to myself: Theres a fucking
dragon. He wrote a stupid fantasy story with a dragon in it. I thought
back to the flying green birds hed throw, maybe they were dragons
this entire time, a beast hed dispatch to guard literary treasures like this
titleless tale. I shut the book unfinished, the dragon serving a better

end than one Id have to slog to. Holding the book to my face, I
wondered how I could have felt any caution for such a stupid thing. I
flung it back at the box like I was flicking a stone against the surface of
a lake. It hit the side, shaking the mountain slightly, and sunk down to
the bottom of the floor.
God were you serious? Thats what you were hiding from me?
So fucking stupid. I reached into my pocket and pulled out a cigarette,
flame from my lighter inspiring a few giggles, the dragoney exhale I did
creating laughter.
You want to know something funny? I had a plan to poison you
once. Just once. I was gonna put a little bit of something on the filters
of your cigarettes. Quick coat of your pack and I figured youd be dead
in a day. Now, the thought seems like wasted effort if this was the big
deal. Seriously, you were writing some fantasy crap and felt the need to
guard it, like a mistress or something? I had bruises you know. When
one of those corners hit me on the head, it hurt. A lot. I think one time
I started bleeding, you ass. When I cleaned it off in the mirror, you
never said anything. Youd pass by the bathroom a dozen times; always
peeking in, but you wouldnt say anything. A sorry wouldve been
appreciated.
I brought the ugly ashtray closer to me as the gray tail of my
cigarette was getting ready to fall off.
You are ridiculous. Remember that time you told me to never
listen to Ma that everything she said was to poison me against you?
You were so drunk; I dont think Id ever seen you that drunk before.
Actually, Im surprised you werent drunk more often. Sucks you were
right, she did poison me for a little while, but you were very easy to be
poisoned upon. For a time I thought you were the real devil. If
someone came up to me and said, You know, he ran over my dog
with a tractor. He drove right over olyeller and when I said dont run

over my dog he just screamed fuck you and backed up. Id believe
that. You dont even own a tractor and Id believe that. That was
always you: fuck everybody else, just leave me alone.
I dumped the cigarette into the ashtray. I was about to continue
when I remembered why the ashtray was so ugly. He used to have a
nice green glass one. It was shiny, heavy, and the side had square
decompressions like the top of castle watchtowers. One day, when I
was little, I snuck in to the study and started throwing things, the
ashtray was one and the moment it shattered on the floor my play was
done, and I retreated to my room across the hall hoping he wouldnt
know it was me. He did and he yelled at me; he yelled at me till Ma
came and dragged him to the side yelling at him, but he instilled an
immense guilt in me.
When Fathers Day came, I made him a new one out of clay during
class. I formed it to match the old one, with everything being uneven
as I did this with my hands. I made tiny impressions in the side, and
when I showed it to my teacher so she could harden it, she gave me an
odd look, like no other parents smoked. Still, when I gave it to you,
you smiled. No, you also laughed, I think that was the first time I ever
heard you laugh; the sound was so rare I am not sure it ever existed.
But you took it and you told me how much you loved it, despite it
being so ugly.
Resting the cigarette in the tray and leaning back in my chair I let
out a long sigh, one that was very low toned and turned into a high
pitch yelp when surprised with a Boo! from behind. I turned to the
gray woman with strong arms that looked like they could carry the
world.
Well, will you look at this, Cynthia said, standing outside the door
like I used to, only smiling. I swear you look just like him in here.
Oh, hi, Cynthia. How long have you been standing there?

Not long, but long enough to scare you. She looked over to the
boxes. Well, youve been busy.
What? Oh shi-ah. Im sorry.
Dont worry about it, as long as you get something done before
you leave.
Right. No, definitely. Ive just been sorta, uh, lamenting, I guess?
Well I suppose you have a lot to lament about. So how have you
been? I havent seen you since the funeral.
Oh, Ive been great, just working. Now Im here helping.
Not much, from the look of it.
Its weird, you know? Ive never been in here much. It was always
sealed away, his hidden secret, and now
This is just a room. He tried to keep it secret when we started
dating but I kicked that stupid door in. If you want a real secret, open
up those boxes.
Actually I already looked. How often did he write?
Better question is when was he not? Did you read through one?
Yeah, I said, gesturing to the book lying on the floor. It had a
dragon.
Lots of them do. And other stuff. You should take some time and
read through a couple. I think his last one is still in the desk.
I opened up a sliding drawer and there was a green book lying
inside, a few different pens and pencils rolling around by it.
Was he good? I asked.

Good? He was terrible, but that was fine. He knew he was bad,
but he put a little bit of his heart in everything he wrote so thats
something. I found a reason to like most of them for one reason or
another. That said, he had his moments.
He let you read these?
Like I said, he tried to have his stupid secrets and I kicked down
the door. Anyway, Im going to go down and clean up. Give it a read,
but remember youre here to clean up, not lollygag.
She turned around the corner and I heard the stairs creak as she
went down leaving me alone with the book. Before I opened it, I
finished my cigarette, eying the book like it was about to do something
on its own. Maybe it would walk off or fly away. I was afraid it would
disappear the moment I took my eyes off it. With my tan filter pressed
firmly into the ashtray, I opened up the book, my heart beating loud.
This book was different, newer. The pages still had a yellow tint in
the beginning, but there were still many white untouched pages. I
flipped through and the last third was blank, blue lines, empty and
clean compared to the dense letters and words that populated the rest.
The first entry wasnt a story but a poem; about caring for a garden.
He described the beauty of the flowers, and how he started to stop
paying attention to them and they all wilted. At first he was sad, but
our garden has browned, but new buds have started to grow and a
new garden formed for him. After that was another short story. A man
was on his hospital bed. A nurse came by and removed the wilting
flowers. He asks her if his son has come to visit. She says no, but that
the day was still early. I skipped the rest. Another short story. A man is
at the grave of his father, laying down fresh flowers he had picked. He
was expecting a ghost or something to rise from the ground to greet
him, to hit him, to do something to torment him. When no one came
he just sat down, staring at the face of the grave like it was the face of

his father. The man waited, and nothing happened. The only thing
thats happening is a description of the surroundings. I feel there was a
deeper meaning behind the words, that he was trying to tell me
something, but I cant see it. Eventually the man gets up and says, I
forgive you, but I also dont, and then walks away. The next few are
letters, all with Dear Bill on the top. He recounts some parts of his
daily life, like how he helped pull out someone car that was stuck in the
mud, or taking dancing lessons with Cynthia. Hes also talking to me;
asking me how Ive been. There are certain phrases that repeat through
each letter: Im sorry. Please dont hate me. Please write back. I
dont blame you for hating me Please come over sometime. The
toughest to read was I love you, Bill Most of the letters ended with
something dismissing the entire effort. You wouldnt write back, its
too late now. Why do I keep writing these stupid things if Im never
going to send them? Who am I kidding? Im never going to send this
out. If my pride, or whatever it is that keeps me from calling, wasnt
so stupid, maybe things would be different. In between there were
various stories and poems, but they all blurred together in my head, a
single emotion in all of them becoming too heavy for my
consciousness to bear. I dont know how, but I got to the last page,
one last letter. The words were shaky; at some point, the fluidity I once
saw had deteriorated and I could hear an old voice speak to me.
#

Bill,
I dont know how many of these Ive written. I really dont. Not
just to you but also to others: my momma and dad, your ma, Cynthia,
even a few angry letters to myself. I never send these out. I keep saying
this time but now it has become such a joke to me I dont think I
could ever seriously do it. You will never know how much I want to,

and you will never know how much I also dont want to. I want to
keep the joke going as long as I can, because I am terrified of not
getting anything back. I keep writing these, because the joke still gives
me hope. Ive never told you this, but Im a scared man. Right now, I
am thinking about you reading this, and it is causing me so much
anxiety I think my heart might finally break. God, my hands are so
shaky right now. I dont know how Im holding this pen. Im sure this
is written somewhere already, but these books have always been my
secret, since I was a kid. I had to hide them from my dad, and I just
always hid them. It was the only thing I knew to do with them. I was
terrible at it though. I wouldnt be surprised if youve already read
through a few. Your mother has. God that was an awful day. I wanted
to kill myself. That woman has never been one for gentleness. What
are you doing now? Right now, as Im writing this? I can imagine, I
always liked to imagine what youve been doing since you left. Maybe
youre in bed sleeping through the day like you did during the
summers? Maybe there is a girl with you. If there is, I hope you love
her. Maybe youre not sleeping, you could be working, or maybe youre
doing something amazing like playing in a band, like the one you had
when you were 12. Do you remember? You got the kids together and
took all our pots and pans, and just started banging them together in
front of the lawn. At first, I hated it, but now I look back at those
times with longing. Maybe youre even writing a letter to me? (There
were small wet dots by this line; like rain had touched the paper.) I
wish I could send you this, but I know I cant. For a while, I hated that
I couldnt. For a long time I hated that I was too scared to show you
these, but now I think Im all right. I thought there would be regret,
too much regret to handle, but I think I am at peace with this kind of
ending. Ive seen it coming for so long, but I didnt want to think
about it. Now that Im here, I actually think I like it for the sad poetry
in it. There is another ending I wish I could have, but this one is just as

good in its own way. If I did have a regret, its that Ill never have a
chance to fill up these last few pages. I love you, Bill.
Love, your hardheaded father, Jack.
I think this is the one Ill send.
#
I kept my head cradled in my hands, my eyebrows mashed against
my knuckles. Everything was a blank slate, no thoughts, no emotions;
the only thing I knew for sure was that I was breathing. He did not use
any of the pleases or Im sorrys that were in the other letters, just I
love you. My fingers tightened into fists.
I looked back with one eye, peeking over my shoulder. There was a
boy there, peaking inside through a slit between the door and frame,
his bright curly red hair shining through the gray smoke of the room.
He looked in with a single brown eye, both curiosity and fear swirled
inside the pupil. The longer he stood there, the more he pushed into
the room and the more I could see of his face. It was pale, freckles
lacing through the skin like blush. There was an adventurous spirit in
the intense way his lips were pursed tightly. This was a cave to be
explored, and in it were untold treasures to be found. All he had to do
was get past the devil guarding it.
I didnt want the boy here; I didnt want anyone to see me. I
grabbed the book, my thumb pressed against the inside on the spine,
and I flicked my arm at him, but the book didnt leave my hand. I
flicked again, but there was no force in it, no fear or hate or contempt
to drive the book out of my hand. I put it back down, resting it open
on the same page.
Go away. I hid my face away into my hands. Please, just go
away.

There was a creak in the floor as weight stepped inside the room.
Please, just go away.
There was silence, the floor didnt move or sway, the door didnt
creak as its joints twisted open. I was just alone in my silence.
Well, this is a familiar sight. It was Cynthia.
Go away.
You got to the end didnt you? Ive read through a couple No, a
lot of his letters. I didnt read that last one. I thought it would be in
bad taste, I guess. You resemble him, in the good ways, the ways
people forget exist. Are you okay?
I exhaled through my nose, it was long and I could feel something
heavy leaving me, it sounded a little like a long sigh. My hands
loosened from the fist, fingers waggling in midair like they were typing
at a keyboard. I turned to Cynthia, only enough so that I could look at
her with one eye, the eye that I saw the boy with.
It was good. It was a good letter.
I told you he had his moments. You must be hungry, come down
to kitchen. Its burrito day, Ill make you something for diner.
Burrito day?
Yes burrito day. What? Are you telling me in the twenty plus years
that man raised you, you never knew about his love of burritos?
Oh god. You are serious. My head slipped from my hands and hit
the book laughing
There are only three things that man loved more than burritos.
Only three? What are they?

Ill tell you another time, now come on. If youre the good half of
him then I am sure youll love these. Also, bring down some of those
boxes. You still havent done anything yet.
Sure. Just give me a minute.
No rush, Ill tell you a few stories. It takes a little while for them to
warm up in the oven.
She left me alone, her footsteps exited by the creaking stairs. I
opened the drawer, grabbing a pen. I wrote a short eulogy before
leaving the room, leaving the cardboard mountain one box closer to
the ground. There was a young boy spinning in the chair, reading a
green book he fished from the floor, but there was another book in the
room. This book lay on its back, opening up to a page with letter
written in beautiful unsteady letters. Beneath that letter was another in
penmanship so messy it broke out of the blue lines and was nowhere
near as elegant:
.#
You idiot, I would have at least written back.
Your hardheaded son, Bill.
#
P.S. I like the one with the dragon.

Adam Phillips
Presentation
The teachers manning the doors nodded curtly and the
rambunctiousness, the fucking around, of the teenagers temporarily
died at the bottlenecks, revivifying as they funneled beyond the
damping presence of authority, into the auditorium. The walls were tan
brick, hung with two-story plush burgundy tapestries. Somebody
turned off the lights, plunging the place into utter, subterranean
darkness. Girls screamed. A boy shouted Im being molested and everyone
laughed. The light resumed, a male teacher, bald, thin, with his hand
still resting on the switch, frowning consternation upon the hundreds
of possible culprits. The percolating noise of a crowd in an auditorium
carried for the next ten minutes, a simmering Babelism from which the
occasional sharp cry or barking laugh leaped. Unnoticed, an
unremarkable youngish woman, shortish and plump, glasses and a bun
in her dishwater hair and a white knit shawl, clearly not the main event,
had crossed the stage to the podium. Okay everyone, she said.
Excuse me The teachers cinched inward from the periphery,
constricting upon the students, shushing, leaving hard eyes to linger
upon individuals, pointing at phones to be turned off and mouths
from which gum needed to be removed. Thank you, said the
woman. In just a moment, our speaker, Rose Weissman, will
begin She ran through the standard litany, cell phones off,
courteous silent listening, remain seated barring an emergencyA kid
farted and everyone laughed.
The old woman emerged from the wings, older, even, upon closer
inspection than one had initially thought, skin like crepe paper beneath
a geishas quantity of makeup, her flouncy curled wig an unnatural
reddish brown, wearing a flowered blouse beneath a polyester blue

jacket, polyester blue skirt, clunky clogs, crossing the stage stoopshouldered, supported by a slightly younger old woman guiding her by
the elbow. Situated behind the mike, her handler tentatively backing
away as if placing the final wall in a six-story house of cards, the old
woman gummed her mouth wetly, three, four times, then in a voice
like a chunk of gravel caught beneath a rubber-soled shoe on a cement
floor, said, in a thick Romanian accent, First...we will watch the film.
Dracula, whispered a boy, and his friends laughed. Groo,
whispered another. A projector screen descended, whirring like a
helpful robot, from the rafters. The lights went out. The film began to
play. A change flickered over the young faces...They knew where these
sepia children were headed. They knew more than the children, smiling
in their plaid dresses and short pants, knew themselves. Someone's
phone went off and everyone looked around. They tried to extend the
moment, but it wasn't that remarkable, or funny, and they were quickly
compelled to return to the film. But they had seen this before. They
pinched their friends, passed their phones back and forth. Everyone
was on a train, then barbed wire in the distance. A kid farted and
everyone laughed. Chris Tucker's shrill voice shrieked from
somebody's phone and everyone laughed. The teachers hissed. The
train discharged its passengers. A kid fell asleep and his friends plugged
his mouth and nose until he woke up sputtering. In the distance, drab
concrete buildings. A dead-looking clearing with all the grass
trampled
Suddenly, the image on the screen warped and shrunk to a hot red
spot and went black with a sound like a chunk of metal lodging in a
dog's throat. After a moment's residual silence, the audience began to
bubble. Welcome to Idaho! shouted a young male teacher. The
adults laughed, looking back at him nodding. The bodies, barely
tethered to their seats, began to move. The teachers looked at one
another, shrugging, touching their watches, shrugging. Bring the
lights, said the old woman and somehow amongst the teenage

pandemonium, everyone heard. The lights came up. Each boy and girl
in the auditorium felt as if the light specifically revealed him or her.
Twisting the microphone from its stand, she stepped in front of the
podium. We don't need the film, she said. I will tell you. I will tell
you the story. She pointed and everyone in the auditorium felt as if
she pointed at them and them alone. The lights were behind her and
the shadows moved upon her face. The children squirmed in their
seats and she watched them, and they ceased to squirm. They had
nowhere else to go. They couldnt even look at one another. In the
first note of her voice, they heard the bolt thrown, the far off steel
door slam, the click of the flint.

Adam Phillips
Love
*This article, minus the final segment, has twice been slated to appear in Esquire, first in October
of 1982, and again in April 2005. Both times the story was pulled at the eleventh hour. Both
times my editors, first Lee Eisenberg and then David Granger, did me the remarkable service of
keeping its contents a secret. The original title was to have been Moon Boy, which had been
changed in 2005 to A World Fell Out of the Sky, and which has been changed again.

First, before the story of the massacre, before the story of my

months-long abduction, or the meteor glowing at the bottom of the
canyon (which is entirely true; usually when someone swears that
something is true, it isn't; but this is), before the story of the boy...
Before I delve into any of that, I have to relate the history of the
boy's father. People had been afraid of Jim Thomas as far back as he
could remember. Ever since that hot, dusty, thirsty summer day
wandering aimlessly through town as the smallest in a pack of similarly
desultory kids. When the older boys had coaxed him into picking a
fight with the second littlest amongst their ranks, and the other boy
had declined, Jim had thrown him down into a culvert, breaking his
arm. Jim's life might have gone otherwise if the next few moments had
transpired differently.
The other boys, realizing their culpability, had leaped down into the
culvert to twist and stomp the vomiting shrieking boys arm until hed
agreed to say hed broken it falling out of a tree. Five-year-old Jim had
watched from the edge of the culvert with great interest. Jimmy's face,
serenely absorbing the violence, would come back to one of the boys
with karmic irony a decade later as a teenage Jim broke his jaw and
blinded him in one eye with a motorcycle chain.
***
Elk Valley, population 1,200, is a mean little clearing in the dark
forests of Northern Idaho whose primary claim to fame is a 1979 USA

Today article crediting it with the highest per capita high school
pregnancy rate in the nation. The washed out dirt roads and
dilapidated trailers had produced a prodigy in Jim Thomas. By the age
of fourteen he'd accumulated a miasma of bloody legend swirling in
his wake: biting off a bottom lip in a bar fight, stomping fingers from
hands and eyeballs out of skulls, nearly eviscerating a reluctant
paramour with a rusty nail...Amongst a population rife with fifthgeneration loggers, shell-shocked vets, survivalists and neo-Nazis, Jim
Thomas had distinguished himself as a formidable psychopath.
It aint that I was afraid of him, says Eric Turner, a nose-tackle
sized man with a beard over his collar who, from a distance, could be a
fiberglass statue of Paul Bunyan. It's just I didn't want to have to kill
that dumb son of a bitch over whose turn it was on the fucking juke
boxAnd that's what it would have took. That or kick the shit out of
him and spend the rest of your life looking over your fucking
shoulder.
For years, the rugged inhabitants of Elk River suffered Jim Thomas
like an obnoxious co-worker, until he fucked up so egregiously that
even the small mean heart of the town recoiled, and the body spit him
out.
***
As I investigated the expulsion, the first few people I spoke to
swore the girl had been seven years old, ten, thirteen, and that she'd
been locked in a trunk beneath his bed, sexually mutilated, branded
with a coat hanger. While none of that is true, it speaks to Jim
Thomas' pariah status that his generally reticent neighbors were so
eager to see him luridly crucified in print. Especially when the truth
leaves so little doubt as to what sort of man we're talking about.
The girl was sixteen; sitting at the bar, drinking Long Island iced
teas. This was not the first time. Nor was it the first time that a man,
this time Jim Thomas, should take the adjacent stool, buy her a few
more drinks, and lead her out the door. Within the rustic cloister of

Elk River, statutory rape laws are enforced about as rigorously as

jaywalking in New York City, meaning no real problem had occurred
until an hour later, on a narrow dirt road several miles out of town,
when the back driver's side door of Jim Thomas' parked Skylark
banged open and the girl fled nude into the forest with a split lip, a
black eye and a broken nose, nearly freezing to death sneaking back
into town through the woods.
Still all of this might have occupied the fringe of the acceptable,
had the girl not been a third cousin of the Tuzils.
The Tuzils, a sprawling dynastic nexus of cousins and in-laws
sprouting from a nucleus of six brothers who'd come west from West
Virginia for obscure and protean reasons, own seventy-five percent of
the real-estate and one hundred percent of the industry in Elk River.
Ostensibly, this is how the clan keeps itself in Jack Daniels and ATVs.
In practice, the Tuzils earn a far greater portion of their living moving
weed back and forth across the Canadian border. In order to do so
safely and efficiently, they've got to have the respect of every non-Tuzil
in Elk River.
Eldon Tuzil, the eldest of the brothers and a dead ringer for Jack
Palance circa 1970, describes the business with Jim Thomas: The
thing with that was, the second people start thinking they can take
liberties, that maybe you don't exactly entirely mean what you say, that
they can start deciding what to listen to and what to ignore...Our jobs
get a hell of a lot more dangerous...
One night while Jim Thomas sat drinking by himself in the Green
Owl, the other half-dozen patrons suddenly got up and left as twenty
men filed in from behind the bar. Elroy Tuzil, the youngest brother,
describes what happened next: We could hardly believe that stupid
son-of-a-bitch had come drinking in our bar. Anybody else, I'd have
figured he either knew what was coming to him and had just decided
to face the music, or else he'd come in with a fucking bandolier of
hand grenades under his shirt. But Jim Thomas, shit...It's hard to figure

somebody who can't spell 'figure.' I think every day must have been a
brand new adventure for that stupid son-of-a-bitch. Anyway, I told him
'Look, Jim, I understand Monica ain't exactly some wilting flower that
you waylaid on her way to church, and to be honest maybe slowing her
down a notch ain't the worst thing that could of happened, but we
can't have it. We can't have you walking around town unanswered.' I
said a normal case we'd fuck him up a little and make sure everyone
could see him with his jaw wired shut and both legs in casts, but that
he wasn't a normal case. And what I meant is that that fucking son-ofa-bitch, we'd have to kill him right there, elsewise the second he gets
out of the hospital he's coming back for us, and we're just having to
kill him anyway.
So I said 'You got an hour to get out of here.' I told him he didn't
have to move to fucking Timbuktu, but that in an hour, we couldn't be
seeing or hearing about him no more. I said if you forget, if you fuck
up, if you come into town for a beer or to round up some pussy from
an old girlfriend...that's it. He said 'What if I don't go?' an I said there
were people in town he'd never seen before, and he'd never see again,
and that fifty-nine minutes from now they was gonna start knocking
on doors and poking bushes. He finished his drink, and after he passed
through that door, that's the last anybody, any of us, leastwise, ever saw
or heard of him...Until the murders, a course...'

Jim Thomas walked to his trailer, lashed some tools to the back of his
dirt bike, and rode into the densest, darkest shadows of the forest until
it felt as if the black woods had swallowed him. He got off the bike
and began to fell trees. This went on, practically unbroken, for days. A
wanderer happening upon the scene in the shallows of the night
(students from the University of Idaho, a hundred and fifty miles
south, have long been in the habit of taking meandering
psychotropically-fueled walking tours from the U. up into British

Columbia) might have recognized something mythological, Biblical,

legendary in the dark figure hacking at wood with ritualistic
relentlessness, black eyes glinting, clearing the earth for some cryptic
purpose. And this is not far from the view Jim Thomas held of his
own exile into the woods. Where you or I might see a mentally
unstable young man unfit to live amongst people, Jim Thomas read
portents of legend. Only now, expelled from the philistine confines of
Elk Valley, could he become what he could become.
After felling the trees, limbing and splitting the logs, he built a small
cabin from notched planks, caulking the gaps with a mixture of moss
and mud. Then he set about building an identical cabin at the other
end of the clearing. Then he laid down on the dirt floor and slept for
three days. When he woke up, he rode over the mountain to Cross
Junction, pop. 198, and signed on with a logging outfit. Within a
couple of days, a co-worker, Rodney McCarthy, had moved into the
mirror-image cabin.
Rodney brought two children and a past that has proven impossible
to elucidate. There may or may not have been military service, and if
there was, he may have successfully deserted or been dishonorably
discharged. There may have been jail time for either rape or check
fraud. Though the only pictures I could obtain are blurry, I'm nearly
certain he was once a third-string fullback for Weber State during the
1976 season named Robert McCarver. It is unclear whether the two
children belonged to him. Whoever he was and from wherever he'd
come, he indisputably needed to disappear into the impenetrable
woods of Northern Idaho.
Which brings us to the story of the boy. Within a year of creating
The Compound, as Cross Junctionites would come to call it, Jim
Thomas had gotten married, sired a son, and been left to raise the son
alone. He said he almost took me up over the mountain and dug a
hole ten feet deep and buried me, says the boy, Jim Thomas Junior,
(who by the time I met him had taken the name Ken S. Brautigan, an

aggregate of his three favorite writers, as a symbolic abnegation of any

connection to his father). He said it would of worked, nobody would
ever of knowed. He had his shovel and his hikin boots on, had me
slung over his shoulder in a garbage sackBut at the last second it
dawned on him I'm his legacy. Actually, that dumb motherfucker
wouldn't of knowed the word legacyBlood, he said. Got to keep the
proud Thomas blood pumpin in the world.
***
This article, the article I've kept submerged for thirty years and had
recently decided I would simply delete, the modern equivalent of
taking it out back to burn...this is not the article I had traveled
thousands of miles to write. I hadn't intended to write about the boy,
the girl next door, their violent fathers, the Podunk shithole town
where they lived. I hadn't even known any of these people or places
existed.
Then I got into a lover's quarrel in the Spokane airport, setting into
motion the concatenation of events that would send me plunging three
hundred feet to the bottom of the canyon, waking with the shotgun in
my mouth...
***
I'd gotten shitfaced on the connecting flight from Minneapolis. I
don't remember what the fight was about. I do remember, with a
bright flash of shame as if the events transpired yesterday, shoving
Jamie, who in the original version of this article I had described as my
partner of twelve years (upon his very recent death I eulogized him as,
among other things, my partner of forty-five years), onto the baggage
carousel. I remember fleeing the airport, flooring the rented Bronco
through the parking lot. I remember catching sight of the camping
gear stacked in the back seat and punching the dashboard, so hard it
cracked...
The plan to go backpacking had come via a friend, Theo, who of all
unlikely things had grown up in Northernmost Idaho. For years, he'd

been talking about a top-secret hiking trail, unknown outside his hick
hometown, leading to the most beautiful wilderness destination in
North America. A field full of wildflowers, a glittering lake, purple
mountains, and the place's inimitable namesake...A pair of giant
plutonic granite horns, perfectly curved and fifteen feet tall,
implausibly rising up out of the ground. The White Devil.
When this friend had found out that Jamie and I would be passing
within a hundred miles of it en route to my next assignment, hed
broken down sobbing at the blessed and unlikely coincidence. Theos
father had made a deathbed request for his ashes to be sprinkled into
White Devil Lake. But one thing had happened after another, and the
ashes had been languishing, unscattered in their urn, for nearly a
decade. Now Theo was too crippled with MS to get out of his car,
much less hike fifteen miles. So Jamie and I had arranged to fly into
Spokane a day early, and hike up to White Devil with a sandwich bag
full of ashes I'd smuggled onto the plane.
With all the booze and fighting and getaway car driving, I'd
forgotten all about it, until I saw the loaded backpacks.
By that point, my drunkenness had faded into a surly martyrdom,
and I think I said it aloud: If these motherfuckers want ashes spread so fucking
bad, let's go spread some fucking ashes.
Two hours later, after a dirt road had become a rutted two-track,
and that had become a vague gap in the dense underbrush, there it
was, the secret trailhead, just as Ben had described. A stump with a
loop of rusted rebar jutting out of the top. I laced up a pair of boots,
hoisted a backpack, and headed into the woods.
At several points over the next ten hours, as the trail continuously
branched and circled back and sometimes disappeared altogether, I
might have admitted I was lost and turned back. But I didn't (see
martyrdom, surly above.) Only well after dark, when the wolves
began to howl and the bushes rustle, did I concede defeat.

Parting a wall of foliage, I plunged back into the forest and stepped
right off the edge of the world.
Every year, this magazine publishes an issue entitled What It Feels
Like To... featuring first-hand accounts of experiences not everyone
has had. What it feels like to be struck by lightning. To drop acid. To
get your lights punched out. To wake up buried alive. Next time, I'm
going to contribute apiece called What it feels like to fall threehundred feet. In a nutshell, it goes like this: You take a step no
different from the eighty billion you've previously taken, and suddenly
the earth, which you'd come to regard as a foregone conclusion, no
longer exists.
In that first instant, I could see the bottom of the canyon directly
beneath me, which proved to be an optical illusion when, about forty
feet down, the wall sloped out and I hit it. My instinctual reaction was
to go loose (I lost four teeth on the steel toe of my boot), which
apparently is your best move, as explained by Mr. Everest Pete
Athans, one of the world's foremost high-altitude mountain climbers:
Human nature is to try and stick that landing, and if you do that
you're fucked. Not only are you almost for sure shattering both your
legs, but now you're going end over end, meaning you're basically
throwing the top of your head at every rock and root in your path.
Or as the Taoists say, A drunken man who falls from a cart,
though he may suffer, does not die.
As the world jerked and spun and I listened to myself grunting and
whimpering, the salient thought in my mind was what a fucking
ludicrous way to die. In this day and age. That I, of all people, would
suffer such a primitive, hayseed, slapstick death. Then every thought
including that one got eclipsed as, with a sound inside my head like a
(over the years I've written many different similes here: a melon
splitting, a lightbulb breaking inside a towel...but the only thing it really
sounded like was what it was; a rock hitting a skull)...the lights went

out. I woke up some time later. Which brings us to another piece I

might contribute this spring. What it feels like to look down the bores
of a shotgun.
It took a while for my half-pulverized brain to register what the
blurry shape was repeating.
Who's with you? it yelled repeatedly, scanning the rim of the
canyon. I croaked and mumbled but a fair number of teeth had been
knocked out of my mouth, and I had a hard time articulating myself.
The gauzy lump flipped the gun around and hit me with the stock, and
I went back to sleep.
I awoke in the dark, wrists and ankles bound, lying on my side on a
pile of animal hides alongside a slow, wide, gently flowing river. I could
make out the details of a camp: laundry on a clothesline, a stack of
firewood, and out in the middle of the river, a tent on top of a large
boulder. It immediately struck me as an odd place for a tent, and then I
noticed something that made even less sense; the rock was glowing
softly, with the same iridescent viridescence as the stars children stick
to their ceilings. The glow seemed to seep into the water surrounding
the stone, trembling in the current.
As I lay looking at this inexplicable phenomenon, wondering what
the fuck it could be, that question was pushed from my fading
concussed mind by a more pressing inquiry, the same one posed again
and again by the gun-wielding smear. And the answer was nobody. Not
for the next month.
***
Up in northernmost Alaska, just south of Barrow, lives a man with
the simultaneously epic and asinine name of Kai Crabbe. As a
fourteen-year-old, Kai Crabbe stole his brother's birth certificate,
shipped off to the Korean War, and distinguished himself by blowing
up a jeep full of North Korean soldiers with a grenade. Or a jeep full
of North Korean farmers. The reports, even his own, are conflicting.
He then spent the next thirty years, he says, fomenting, spying, and

assassinating in places such as Iran, Chile, Watts, Memphis...all of

which the U.S. Government vehemently denies.
When he and a handful of retired/discharged/AWOL vets with
similarly distinguished/fucking horrifying resumes purchased and set
up shop within a defunct 1920's era Arctic exploration facility, the
federal government assumed the usual script; a bunch of gun nuts
preparing for the impending Christian-Muslim-Jewish war and the
resultant apocalypse. But then some very disturbing things began to
happen.
When the feds caught wind of a population explosion within the
camp, they uncovered a much different animal than the anticipated
droves of skinheads and Southern Baptist morons and soldiers of
fortune. Along with actual soldiers, including a retired general and a
former Presidential military adviser, Crabbe had recruited a couple of
surgeons and pediatricians, an economist, a legion of farmers,
engineers chemical and civil and robotic and hydraulic, professors of
English and history and law and mathematics, a folk musician and a
Shakespearean actor...All the lynchpins of, for example, a new society
forged from scratch. Shortly thereafter, Kai Crabbe ran for a seat on
the state senate, won, and began to attract national attention for his
speeches.
No war on foreign soil. Absolutely open immigration. When a
reporter for the Anchorage Daily News asked him about the
government's responsibility to stay abreast of burgeoning terroristic
threats, he replied I know exactly how to immediately rid the entire
world of anti-American terrorism...If there's no America, such as it is,
then these fanatics would have nothing to fight against. They'd have to
go find somebody else to kidnap and bomb. The more he speaks, the
further he diverges from the FBI's rubric. Put a quarter million dollar
cap on annual individual income and the rest goes into the socialist
kitty for public works, public assistance, public education, and universal
health care. No gun control (as in I can go into Safeway and purchase a

bazooka). No drug prohibition (as in I can go into Safeway and

purchase a twist of heroin). One day he flies a banner emblazoned
with a picture of Marx behind him, and the next day, Richard Nixon.
As soon as he announces his candidacy for the U.S. Senate, the ATF
descends upon his camp demanding subpoenaed tax documents. A
battalion of lawyers brandishing restraining orders and legal precedents
and assault rifles rush to defend the gates, and a three-day standoff
ensues. Finally, after 72 unbroken hours of nationwide media coverage,
President Carter orders the troops to withdraw.
Let me repeat this: the nation watches, on live television, as Kai
Crabbe and his fellow expats chase off government storm troopers
who'd come to invade his home in order to collect fucking taxes.
Unwittingly, and quite stupidly, the U.S. Government had instantly
transformed a seditious novelty candidate into Henry David Thoreau
mixed with Ethan Allen.
A month later, in the middle of a speech in Ketchikan, Crabbe
sustains a superficial gunshot wound in the neck. The would-be
assassin, Darrel McNamara, is an unemployed elementary school
custodian from Kodiak with an I.Q. of 70. Unlike most assassination
attempts, since Kai Crabbe employs no security (and in fact forbids any
of his camp-mates from assuming this position), and most of his
audience is moderately to heavily armed, the attack took no more
planning on Darrel McNamara's part than simply raising the deer rifle
slung over his shoulder and squeezing off a round. During the hour
that McNamara is held in the tiny Ketchikan jail, reporters are allowed
unrestricted access to his cell, and when an intern from the University
of Alaska's student newspaper The Northern Light asks him Did the
FBI tell you to do it? McNamara answers Yeah. The FBI. As more
legitimate media sources begin to consider the connection,
McNamara's lack of mental capacity, instead of rendering the
possibility dubious, lends it credence. He's a perfectly unlikely cat'spaw. The American public sympathizes with McNamara, and

apotheosizes Crabbe.
No pair of outside eyes had ever been allowed inside the
compound. I was to be the first. There were strict conditions
controlling my approach, my stay, my exit. I was to drive up to Valdez,
where a Cessna would meet me and transport me to the camp. Once
inside, I would stay for a month, during which I would have absolutely
no contact with the outside world. No calls home, no drafts dispatched
to the magazine. Esquire had signed a contract stipulating that if any
of these rules were broken, not a word could be published, under
penalty of annihilating litigation.
Crabbe's mouthpiece, a polite and engaging young man named
Arnell Bailey, freshly matriculated from Harvard business school, had
explained that Crabbe's people felt it might take awhile to acclimate to
the atmosphere within the camp (The beards and rifles, he'd said,
laughing), and that they were concerned I wouldn't be able to properly
assess their project on its own ideological merits until I'd had some
time to get accustomed. Although it would delay publication of the
article, and Jamie had insisted it was just a way of covering up my
murder long enough to hide the evidence, I had to admit they had a
point.
So that was the article I'd headed north to write. And that was the
reason why nobody would know I was missing until early winter.
I awoke in the morning to him pacing on the rock that had been
glowing the night before, looking up along the top of the canyon,
talking animatedly to himself. Still with the shotgun. My brain had
regained its equilibrium, and now that I could clearly see whom I was
dealing with, I found myself wishing for the days of the amorphous
blob. It was a fucking kid. A well-armed, nervous looking kid. He saw I
was awake, and came over.
Who you with?
Nobody.

Bullshit. You got no reason to be out here. Why you out here?
I'm a reporter. This...I'm heading up to do a story on these
survivalists in Alaska. I stopped to take a hike...White Devil...And got
lost... It sounded like I was lying.
Where's your rig?
In that instant, my mind flashed back to an interview I'd done ten
years earlier with a notorious mobster named Mike Mayo. Mike was a
made man with the Italian mafia in Atlantic City, and he had the
nickname God, because it was his job to interrogate you and decide
whether you would wake up tomorrow morning. By his own
admission, he'd given the thumbs up or down over a thousand times,
determining the mortal fates of pizza boys who'd knocked at
inopportune moments and Saudi Arabian princes who'd refused
business proposals, and every type of person in between.
And the thing that came back to me in that instant, looking down
the twin bores of the gun, was Mike saying that if you don't know
whether to lie or tell the truth, tell the truth. Not because it's the
upright thing to do, but because you're less likely to fuck up your story
down the road. Also, if youre guessing what somebody wants to hear,
youre going to feel like a real asshole if a lie gets you killed when just
telling the truth would have saved you. And if it gets to the point
where somebody's deciding whether to kill you, with all other things
being equal, most people are more likely to kill a liar. This flashed into
my mind, and I heard my mouth saying, It's basically buried in the
middle of a couple of miles of forest. I don't think I could find it
again...
A reporter... He spoke the word as if I'd said my job was
cancer.
That's right.
You're gonna have a lot of people lookin for you pretty soon...
I told him the whole story, the fight with my boyfriend in the
airport, the spiteful ill-advised hike, and the intended clandestine

rendezvous with militiamen that would obscure my disappearance for

at least the next month. I talked fast, repeated myself, lost my train of
thought.
When I was finished, he shook his head, wincing. He said Shit.
That's too bad. I couldn't tell which part of my, or his, situation he
was lamenting. Then he said, I guess I coulda told you this straight
off, saved you thinken about it the last ten minutes, but whatever I
figure out about... he motioned to indicate my presence, my existence,
this...I don't see no outcome where shooting you is gonna do any of
us any goodYou got people looking for you, that ain't going to make
em stop. They wouldnt even know it.
Theres nobody looking for meI'm telling the truth
I really got no possible way a knowing that, do I?
I shook my head. No, he did not.
The shit thing for you...for me too, really, is right at the moment
I'm not seeing any outcome where I could even think about letting you
walk up out of here. He shook his head, spat sourly. If you come up
with something, Im sure as fuck listening
Of course, at that time I had no idea what had happened, no
appreciation of what he was protecting.
For the next two days, I watched him, and took stock of my
surroundings. What the fuck was this kid, who looked to be about
fourteen or fifteen, doing living down here by himself? And why
couldn't anybody know? Runaway, was all I could figure. Runaway, and
overestimating the quantity of interest and resources that were likely
being expended to find him and bring him home. He didn't look, or
talk, like a kid whose parents would be mobilizing the National Guard.
The camp was impressively well stocked, with racks of venison
hanging in the trees, rabbits and salmon smoking on a long spit...Three
times a day he brought me meals, meat and greenery and berries. The
kid could barely look at me. As I watched him going about his daily

business of spear-fishing, heading off into the woods with the gun and
a metal bucket, cleaning fish and dressing deer and washing produce, I
could tell my presence was causing him great anxiety. This made me
nervous. As did the fact that, I could hear him inside the tent, talking
to himself in a voice that seemed to oscillate in and out of pitch, to
rise and drop and whisper.
Each night, I would lie awake struggling to formulate a plan, an
alternative to getting shot and stashed in the forest. And each night
after dark, the boulder would begin to softly glow, and I would watch,
trying to figure out what it was, where the soft light was coming from.
Although it was bizarre, and impossible, and should have been
eerie, there was a warmth coming off the rock, and a gentle vibration,
like a ceiling fan above your bed in the summer, and in spite of my
precarious situation, each night the gentle humming of the boulder
would draw me down into a deep and immediate sleep.
And the next thing I knew I'd be waking up beneath the glaring
autumn sun to the kid and the gun, and the bottom of the canyon.
About a week into my captivity, I woke up in the middle of the
night feeling wrong. I couldn't lie still, the glands in my neck were hot
and rubbery, the inchoate grain of a headache gnawed at my brain
stem. I was watching the shimmering green reflection of the rock on
the black river when I noticed the figure squatting on the far bank,
long black hair trailing into the water. Not the kid. Salvation. I called
out for help, and the face came up...
A girl. Pale, skinny, big dark eyes. A look of complete and utter
panic twisted her features as she scrambled up the glowing rock and
into the tent.
The next morning, I woke up sick. So sick I no longer wondered
about the girl in the night, no longer cared what the kid intended to do
with me. Bringing my breakfast, he stopped ten yards away, fear
suddenly shadowing his face. Jesus. You look like shit.

Right then the headache broke open like a bomb full of strobe
lights and poison. I turned and sprayed puke ten feet into the river. I
felt my muscles seize, my head rhythmically knocking against the
rocks...
For the story of my illness, I have to defer to Ken Brautigan.
Hovering outside the range of the blood-laced shit and vomit spewing
from my floundering body, he says in that moment, I figured you was
dead. I thought maybe I'd stove in your brain hitting you with the
gun...I mean, I've seen some shit, but that was crazy...
When he attempted to pick me up, in the grips of my delirium I
fought with him, finally punching my weight, knocking him out and
running off down the riverbank. He found me a mile downstream
bleeding from the back of my skull, splayed out in the rocks, having
apparently tried to climb up the wall of the canyon.
I tried just draggen you, but that was a fucking disaster for both
of us, so I ran back to camp for a buck hide and a couple of poles and
rigged up a sled...Your eyes was rolled up in your head, foaming at the
goddamn mouth... Here his voice drops, he clears his throat, rubs the
back of his head, looks off into the forest: If you had a pulse, I
couldn't find it. He transported me back to camp and laid me out,
spread-eagle, stripped down to my underwear, on the rock. I think I
remember that. I recall a sudden wash of cool green peacefulness
extinguishing the clatter and fire of my unconscious delirium. I just
tried getting as much of you on there as possible. We laid watch for a
couple of days...I was pretty sure it was gonna work, but still, goddamn
I was glad when out a nowhere you sat up and asked where the fuck
you was...
I awoke three days later with the girl pressing a cold rag to my
forehead and the boy looking intense and nervous. I stood. I could feel
the heat and vibration of the stone permeating every cell in my body.
The wound on the back of my head had healed to a scrape. Less than
seventy-two hours had elapsed since the boy had found me bleeding in

the rocks.
A friend of mine, Dr. Andy Wilper, who runs the VA hospital in
Miami, says that the severity and sudden ferocious onset of my
symptoms indicates spinal meningitis or a significant brain injury, of
which, he says, almost certainly kills you, under those circumstances,
my recovery could only have been one of those impossible
possibilities, an unnatural miracle. We're talking Norman Cousins.
We're talking that mysterious .000001% who for no discernible reason
wakes up right in the middle of dying from a brain tumor with no
tumor. (Twice I reminded Andy of the kid's testimony that I had no
pulse for upwards of an hour, and three times Dr. Wilper declined to
speculate on that possibility).
The kid and I looked at one another. I pointed at the rock beneath
our feet. The stone was porous, delicate, and light. I kicked at it and
received a reverberation, indicating hollowness.
Can you tell me what this is?
Well...Somewhat...
He told me how, traveling from his home to the canyon, a two-week
hike, he'd gotten tangled up in a spool of rusted barbed wire
submerged in a fetid swamp. I did what I could, but that shit was
festerin within a couple a hours...And a course we had to keep
moving...Could be someone right behind us, and coming fast, far as we
knew...By the time we got here, shit, I could smell it, shit weeping
out...I knew I was done. I collapsed on this rock, more or less just
thinken it looked like an all right place to die...
I woke up not knowing if I'd been asleep for a day or a year, an
surprised to be alive...An I'll be goddamned but those cuts were damn
near healed...
We stood there for a moment, looking at the gently throbbing,
murmuring, iridescent surface of the rock.
I slept through the clock, late into the next night. When I woke up,
a campfire was burning on the rock, and he was sitting next to it,

watching me. He and the girl.

He dropped down to untie me, and then asked me to come up.
There were three stumps pulled around the fire. Motioning towards the
girl, nervously, he said, This here's Clementine. She said hello, and
nothing in her look revealed whether or not she'd confessed to our
accidental prior meeting.
He said, No reason not to tell you why left home and came here.
For better or worse, we're sort a in this together, now. And I couldn't
tell whether it was a threat, or a plea, or a flat statement of fact.
*This transcript is typed from a recording made on October 28, 1980, a week
after Ken Brautigan initially told me the story sitting by the fire. I will attest to the
consistency of even the most minute details between that first night, and the
retelling.
I've got two versions of the events transpiring on the night of July
4, 1980. One is the official account, compiled on July 13. One is the
testimony of the principal first-hand witness. I'll begin with the latter.
Fourth a July. The old man asked me if I wanted to go into town
with them for some beers at the carnival and fireworks, which must a
been some big right a passage bullshit in his mind, because he got all
sulky I didn't. I might of humored just him, but with that dumb
motherfucker Rodney in on it...I'd rather eat a bowl a pig shit. Aside
from not being able to stand that son-of-a-bitch, those two together's a
sure thing they're getting throwed in jail, and there I am sleepin in the
park. So I just stayed home reading, and went to sleep kind of early...
Later, when the commotion woke me up I jus figgered the old man
had eaten shit staggering into the cabin, which wouldn't a been the first
time. But I looked and there he was, laid out snoring. I realized the
noise was comin from outside...
I go out an look across the clearin...the door to their cabin was
hangin open.

I saw Rod an Robby...an I saw Clem.

Now Clem, you gotta understand...my whole life, I'm within fifty
yards of her an I start sweatin bullets, heart racin, trippin over my
tongue...When I was four years old I punched a little hole in the caulk
over by my bed, where the old man wouldn't see, an I'd sit there half
the day watching jus to catch a glimpse at her bringing in the wood,
hanging up the wash...
Anyhow, there's her father and her brother that night, pushing her
back and forth, tearing at her clothing...I'd suspected...I guess if I'm
being perfectly honest, maybe I knowed...that those types of things
went on, had been going on, in their household...But now here it was,
taking place right in front of my face, an now I can't deny it any
longer...I don't suppose I need to paint any clearer of a picture than
that.
I grabbed the shotgun hangin by our door, an I walked acrossed the
clearing, into their cabin...
All three a them just stopped an stood there, lookin at me...Now I
know there are some things I might say to put myself in a little better
position, here, an it's true I never been so goddamned angry in my
entire life, but I'd be lying if I said I went crazy for a minute, or don't
remember what happened next, or any of the other bullshit people
tend to say in situations like this...
In fact, to be perfectly goddamn honest I even stopped for a
second an ran through my choices...I could tell em if I ever had to
come back over here, I'd come in shootin. I could grab Clem an steal
Rod's jeep an go into town to the police...
But I didn't do neither a those things. I'd knowed, deep down, what
I intended to do ever since I took the gun off the wall.
Rod's first move, he grabs Clem an hides behind her...which I think
tells you plenty about that cowardly son-of-a-bitch
So I turn to Robby, hes just standen there looken stupid, an I shoot
him.

Between the explosion of that big old gun an what's left a his son
laying there at his feet, now Rod's barely hanging on, eyes rolling like a
horse in a lightning storm. I walked right over to him, he's screaming
let him out a the cabin or he's breaking Clem's neck, an to her I say,
plain as day, 'Duck'...an he's so hysterical he don't even realize what I'm
talking about. She ducks, I hit him in the mouth with the butt of the
gun, an I finish it while he's lying there on the ground.
I told Clem stay there while I go an check on the old man, but she
says the hell she is, an I don't blame her. Getting across that
clearing...Jay-sus. I knowed for a fact that outta the six guns in our
house, the only unloaded one was in my hands. I'll bet it took an hour
to cover fifty yards, diving behind stumps every time a fucking cricket
chirped. When I finally got my face stuck into the cabin, I just about
burst out laughing. Here I been sneaking up on Charles Manson and
there's the old man, still shitfaced splayed out an snorin away...
The shells I needed were under his bed. I sent Clem out...An that
one...That one I admit was a different situation. An just as surely, I
admit I don't regret a thing I done that night. I'd do the exact same
things over again, if that's a decision I had to make.
Could we of snuck out of there just as easy with him drunk an
passed out as we could with him dead? Yep. But right in that moment,
I seen what happens next. I seen how far we have to run before I
know he aint jus going to run us down. How many years gotta pass
before Clems not hearing him creep up every time the wind blows.
After it's done, I go outside, theres Clem sitting on a stump, an Im
glad because she seems okay, and both of us have just been cut loose,
in a way...But now I got a dark thought to deal with, because I'm trying
to figure what the hell we're gonna do next, an it don't take very long
to rule out the choices.
The one thing we had going for us was time. A couple gunshots
echoing through the forest ain't nobody going to notice that. Let alone
Fourth a July. I figured, with the holiday an the weekend, an neither a

those two dipshits getting the perfect attendance award at work, we

probably got a week till somebody notices nobody's been comin down
off the compound. Probly another week till somebodys moved to give
a shit and come up lookin.
But even with that head startBoth of us fourteen an Clem lookin
like shes twelve, conspicuous as fuck, there aint gonna be no
cannonball run to MexicoAn just hidin out in the woods, I could
probly do it, but that aint much of a plan, leastwise for a woman.
An I confess I started to despair, out there in the dark woods
amongst all them bodies.
But right at that moment, somethin made me look up into the sky...
An there it is. Burnin ball trailin green fire, so close I hear it
sizzling, droppin down past the tree line...Meteor. Suddenly all that bad
feeling, all that worryin, was just erased...I know that don't make no
actual sense. I ain't some hillbilly or aborigine wondering where the sun
goes every night and sendin up smoke signals to bring it back...But I
also think there are different parts of you, other than your brain, that
know things. And right then I knew. I knew we were gonna be all right,
and I knew something or somebody was showing me something, and I
knew exactly what to do.
I pointed at that glowin arc cut from one horizon to the other, an I
looked at Clem an said 'Right there. That's where we're goin. We
rounded up all the shit we could carry, an set out.
We walked for two weeks. By the end that line across the sky had
become this little ghostly scrap, but I jus kept my eyes on it, right up to
the edge a this canyon...
When I first stood on the rim up there, looking down, an saw the
rock lodged in the river...
I remember this bible story from kindergarten, some guy wandering
around dealing with all this shit his whole life, an then finally he gets to
some place, not even where he was tryin to get to in the first place,
some place he's never even seen in his fucking life, but right as he sees

it he knows finally he's comed home...I'm butchering the goddamned

story, but you get its point...
Anyway, looking down into this canyon...that's what I felt like.
I also have in my possession the official report, compiled nine days
after the murders. Three victims, all shot in the head with a twelvegauge shotgun. Two of them laying face up on the ground, so pointblank that splinters of skull were driven ten inches deep into the dirt.
All the victims' pockets had been turned out, their bodies robbed of
possessions: Robbie's elk horn handled hunting knife, Rodney's
wristwatch and leather boots, a lightly blood-spattered flannel shirt
taken from the nearly headless corpse of Jim Senior.
After finishing his story, he sat looking into the fire for a minute.
He said, So thats why were here.
Somehow, counterintuitively, now that I had the grisly details of the
story in my possession, I no longer feared the kid. I flashed back to a
1970 interview with Mike Siler, a highly decorated colonel serving
during the Vietnam war, who'd found himself in hot water after
publicly voicing some pro-Vietcong sentiments while still on active
duty. Mike had told me I never understood the hatred, the
dehumanizationGuys pissing on corpses, making jewelry out of ears
and toes, screwing dead bodies, stringing up heads. I never thought any
less of the guys I was going out to kill than I did the guys I was willing
to die for. Just opposite sides of the white line, we're standing on.
Sometimes guys would be wanting revenge, saying 'Those fucking
gooks are nothing more than animals. They send little kids and women
running up to us holding grenades. They eviscerate their prisoners and
hang em in trees.' And I'd say 'Well of course they did. You got a better
way to blow up a helicopter? What were we gonna do with that
helicopter? Give em a lift to the goddamn movies?' See, none of that
shit is in the least bit psychotic, or even odd. A guy hitting his little kid,

that's fucking bestial. But ripping an enemy's guts out and stringing
him up to break the will of the next man in? I understand that. That's
utilitarian. That's bringing the appropriate tool to the appropriate job.
And so it was with the violence Ken Brautigan had just confessed.
A problem you wouldn't wish on your worst enemy had been foisted
upon him, and he'd done his best to solve it.
I was thinking out loud, stating the suddenly obvious; If this had
fallen out of the sky, a rock this size...that wall of the canyon would be
in Arizona right now...
Yep. I been to school, too. I ain't fucking stupid. I know that.
We looked at one another.
Except it didn't.
Cept it didn't.
The next morning, he showed me the weaving mass of salmon
lodged against the upriver swell of the boulder. Carrying a sharpened
stick he jumped down right into their midst. The fish flared away
briefly and returned. Even after he'd skewered a half-dozen of them,
the remaining throng continued insouciantly sidling against the meteor.
They could easily have passed around either side of the rock, but they
refused to leave it. They were drawn to it. At first I'd just pull em out
with my bare hands, but those fuckers can bite...The spear's easier.
That evening, Ken called me over, pointing into the tree line. Look
there
Watching us placidly was a majestic ten-point buck and a couple of
does.
Sometimes Ill hear em sneaking right up against the tent at night.
He motioned at the racks of venison strung from the trees. Those
sons-of-bitches'll jus stand there looken at me while I press the gun
against their heads
A couple a times, I been caught out on a errand, once a big old
grizzly and the other a half dozen wolves...Both times, they came on,
and then...it was like they smelt me, or something, and pulled up, and

let me walk right out of there...I guess some of this shit, he stomped
his foot on the rock, must leak into you, or something.
Fifty yards downstream, Clementine was hanging laundry on a line
stretched between trees. He looked at her, the sky, the forest, with the
deep faraway eyes of a man taking in his past, present, and future, all at
once.
He nodded. So this is the plan. The long and short of it.
One night, sitting at the campfire, I asked him So what was
your old plan? Before any of this happened?
For a full minute he sat nodding, looking off into the forest, and
just when I thought he'd forgotten or decided not to answer, he
answered in a way that initially seemed off topic. He said, I don't
think the old man would ever have sent me to school...I think he
intended not to.
But somehow somebody in town knowed I existed and must a
made a note of it, because six years later when I don't show up for the
first grade sure enough, here's Chris Jakowski the cop cruising up to
the compound, telling the old man that if he ever makes him
bushwhack his way twenty miles through the goddamn forest again he
was gonna turn out both a those cabins and he fucking guaranteed he
was gonna find himself a nice big sack of cocaine, even if he had to
put it there hisself...
An after that I never missed another day of school.
I loved school. Right off, man, I could tell this was the one. This
was my one chance of gettin down out of those fucking woods. I
started readin everything I could get my hands on...elementary school
library, junior high library, high school library, public library...At the
end a my second grade year, we took a readin test, and the teachers
said I was ten years beyond where I ought to be. I'd hear em scheming
when they didn't know I was still around, how they couldn't jus sit by
an watch what I been given wasted up there liven like a fucken animal.
I'd hear that an I'd say hell yeah, make it happen Miss Collister

I remember one time, third grade, I'm getting this award...I knew
not to tell the old man, but somebody did...an just like I thought he
goes fucking ape shit. Saying they were just making fun of me, I must
of cheated, I must be a ass kisser...Hell, he couldn't even decide on a
reason to call it bullshit...I knew how to deal with him angry, but shit,
that was a whole other type a show. He was scared, fucking cornered...I
ain't been afraid of him much in my life, but right then...I came to
understand that's a slippery goddamn slope I was standen on. From
then on, I was always careful to hide my learning. Like other kids had
to hide their Hustlers, I'm stashing fucking Finnegan's Wake under my
mattress when I hear the old man come stumbling in.
That dumb son of a bitch pitchured us as some kind of Swiss
Family fucking Robinson out there, him showing me the ropes so I
could just go on being him after he's gone...In the second grade I
could build a snare out a grass that would hold a rabbit. I could dress
that rabbit with a shard of rock and cook it over a fire I built sparking
flint into pine needles. I could build a house out a sticks, divine water,
set a bone...It ain't braggin to say I had a proclivity for it.
But I didn't give two shits. I'd play along. I just, a month before
everything happened, got a job at the Tastee Freeze, an the little bit a
money I could withhold from the old man I been saving, an right as I
turned sixteen, cause that's when the old man said he'd be taken me
out a high school, I was gonna hit the road, head down to California,
take my GED an apply to UCLA...Get a job teachen school. Come
back for Clem... He looked at the girl. She smiled, blushed, and
looked at her lap. Course I didn't know how that would of gone.
It wouldn't of gone nowhere, she said softly. You runnin away
an then thinken I'm just gonna jump into your car the second you
come sneaken back... Both of them were smiling.
See that, he spread his arms expansively. Ever thing happens for
a reason.
He grew pensive, nodding off into the darkness. Seriously,

though...This? Self-sufficient, private, me an her, maybe add a couple

fifteen kids into the mix...That would a been the whole point a that
plan, or anything else I mighta done, anyhow. Even if things would a
gone differently. Even if things would a gone perfect.
I jus didn't end up haven to earn none of it. The whole thing jus
fell right outta the goddamn sky.
While I didn't resign myself to living there forever, neither did I
spend much time thinking about escape. First, I'd asked the kid if I
could leave and he'd said no. He was worried I'd get just far enough
out to fall off a cliff or get eaten by a bear or otherwise die in a way
that might lead to my body being discovered, and the authorities
retracing my steps. During that same conversation he'd very kindly, but
unequivocally assured me that if I tried to run, he would stop me.
Secondly, there were some things happening to me that I wanted to see
through at least a little longer. Since tumbling down into the canyon,
I'd shed forty pounds of flab and gained twenty pounds of muscle
(whenever I was certain of being unobserved I would admire my
shirtless reflection in a highly burnished skillet; I hadn't looked like that
since a stint in the Army in the early sixties). The bone structure of my
face had resurfaced through the puffiness. My mind had cleared. The
veering, over-correcting mood control of coffee, weed, wine, cocaine,
and Valium had been replaced with sleep, natural food, and exercise.
As the exterior accoutrements of my life in Miami had fallen away, the
earrings and fake tan, the highlights and four-hundred-dollar
sunglasses, so had the internalized disguise, the defense mechanism, of
hedonistic nihilism. The stupid clich I'd become had been knocked
right off of me, and things had begun coming back that I had been
missing for a long time.
One evening I returned from foraging firewood right at sunset, and
they were sitting on the rock, holding each other, looking up into the
colors...

My whole life, before and since, has been spent chronicling violent
bullshit and the beast in humanity...but that was a moment of
perfection. Beauty in the universe. And I couldn't help but feel, as trite
as it sounds, that I'd been brought here just for that.
When December hit, the kid had to kill a couple of black bear to
make parkas out of the hides. We started to lay in smoked meats and
fish. I began to catch the kid watching the sky, talking to himself.
When the temperature dropped precipitously, we discovered the only
tolerable place was the rock, which kept the space above it ten or
fifteen degrees warmer than the rest of the world.
I asked How cold does it get out here in the winter?
He nodded grimly.
Snow?
Shit. Six feet. Ten feet.
As if participating in our conversation, the sky suddenly unleashed
a torrent of thick white flakes clogging the top of the canyon.
The three of us watched silently as the blizzard struck the rock's
soft green glow and dissolved into a harmless light mist, ten feet above
our heads.
The kid rubbed his hands together, shaking his head. Well I'll be
damned. I should a known. I shoulda goddamn known.
Over the next few weeks the kid built a homemade still, announced
we had enough food laid in even if the hard snows lasted well into
May, and I started working on the novel I'd been talking about for
twenty years. Although I still thought of home, I thought more
frequently, and vividly, of the combined sabbatical and vision quest of
the long winter. I'd grown a thick beard and long hair. Every morning I
hiked along the bank, through the snow, at dawn, three miles out and
back, and then I wrote until afternoon dusk, at which point I repeated
my morning hike. We'd eat dinner and drink hooch. I felt like
Hemingway, Jack London, Stephen Crane, Kerouac...

When the noise woke me up, the kid was already throwing all of his
shit off the rock into the river. He grabbed Clementine with one arm
around her waist and jumped down high-stepping through the water,
grabbing me by the collar, running us to the canyon wall where all
three of us pressed flat, eyes turned skyward, looking for the
helicopter...After a minute the kid ducked and bolted, across the river
into the trees, coming back with two hunting rifles. He pressed one
into her hands. In that vivid moment, I was disappointed he hadn't
brought three.
And in that moment within the kids twisting, distorted face I saw
two competing identities I wouldnt have imagined existed. The
desperate, trapped murderer and the terrified child.
He licked his lips. They're here.
An hour passed, with the three of us tucked into a pocket in the
wall of the canyon. Then another. Eventually the kid crept out, looking
like he expected to be shot from every direction at once. Everything
was silent.
Clementine whispered, Maybe it was just forest service. Maybe he
didnt see
Ken shook his head, spat into the rocks. It werent forest service.
An I seen the pilot whip around, seeing if he just seen something.
The kid looked at me. Time for you to get outta here. He frowned at
the surrounding tundra. I can tell ya. I can get you outta here.
Right then, listening intently, looking up and down the canyon, it
was if I suddenly caught a glimpse of the future. I'll never know where
the idea came from.
What if you can go?
He shook his head, irritated at my wasting his time. I know I can
fucking go. An I told you that aint gonna happen. He glanced at the
gun in his hand, then all along the canyon rim.
Whats downstream?

Shit, man, it dont matter whats downstream, an I dont-

What if you could take it with you?
The canyon was cut between the uppermost peaks of a massive,
gradually descending, tiered mountain range. We sat directly below
Chance Lake, which eventually contributed to most of the large rivers
west of the Rocky Mountains, via a sprawling dendritical nexus of
lesser rivers and streams.
So, half dozen miles downstream, shit starts breaking off...Most
are dead ends. There's probably four five dozen lakes an ponds tucked
into all them cliffs and forest between here an Bonner, where the Priest
River really gets going...
That's a lot of remote territory...Probably a few of those little
ponds you can't get to at all, other than by river...
Probly.
With Clem watching the sky through the scope of a deer rifle, Ken
and I retrieved a couple of the poles he'd used to hang venison. From
upstream, we worked them under the meteor, establishing leverage,
rocking with all our weight...The rock shifted, turned within its crater,
and started to pull up out of the mud with a momentous sucking
noise...
If you're going to go...Because once we get this thing moving...
He took a slow last look around. Well. Shit.
They left under a bright full moon, the kid propelling them through
the silver water like a gondolier, the girl sitting on a blanket. The glow
from above and the glow from below.
I left as soon as they'd drifted from sight. Fifteen miles out, to the
landslide, just like he'd said. I climbed the gentle slope right up out of
the canyon. They picked me up near the end of the second day. A
couple of BLM guys walking the Canadian border checking for illegally
baited beaver traps.
My official statement, retold a dozen times to various entities,

corroborated perfectly with reality until the moment I woke up at the

bottom of the canyon. At that point, I replaced the boy and the gun
with months of intermittent concussion-induced dementia. I vaguely
remembered subsisting on berries and fish killed with a rock, stacking
fallen branches to form a shelter, utilizing the propaedeutic survival
skills I'd acquired during a brief stint in the army. It must have been
the onset of winter and a near certain death that had ultimately
inspired me to start walking. And I got lucky. I could have been
walking into Siberia, for all I knew of the area.
I was flown to a hospital in Seattle for observation. The doctor
looked at my newly hewn physique and said Shit. I need to spend a
few months stuck at the bottom of a fucking canyon. I was back
home in Miami less than 48 hours after I'd been rescued.
Before the kid left, we'd buried all the shit he wasn't taking with
him. But we'd done it in a panic, and I couldn't attest to the
thoroughness of our work. For years, at idle moments I'd half-expect a
couple of guys in blazers to show up at my door with some questions
for me. But if anyone has ever retraced my steps to the site of my
ordeal, Ive never heard about it.
Ive always been ashamed of the fifteen minutes of minor fame
that followed my emergence from the woods. First, that's a quarter
hour more than I've earned through a lifetime of writing about things
that actually happened. Instead of focusing on my imaginary ingenuity
or fake bravery or any number of other admirable qualities youd
attribute to a guy whod supposedly survived in a canyon for three
months, all of the reportage seemed to consist mostly of a before and
after picture. The before photo taken after a winter of heavy drinking
and pills, and a night of clubs, so that my face is bloated and flushed,
both ears pierced with a dozen gold rings, my hair cut into an
unfortunate frosted Prince Valiant, some red drink spilled down my
fucking sweat-stained white shirt. This shares a split screen with a
picture taken right as I arrived to the hospital. Somehow, the pear-

shaped effete South Beach fag accidentally doesn't die in the

wilderness, and comes out looking like Randy Savage. Esquire gave me
a twenty page, feature article and put me on the cover. There were
plans for a book, a movie...Until the article came out.
I'd nearly forgotten that right out of college I'd wanted to be a
novelist, until I'd quickly discovered I couldn't write about shit that
hadn't happened. Quoting from the article: Each day's sunset was an
unlikely gift, I began to see the surrounding wilderness as a sentient
enemy.' Okay,' I thought, 'bring your fucking worst. Let's see who wins
this, At times, it felt like I'd left my God at the top of that long,
brutal fall. As soon as lines like these were let out into the world, all
plans for future development were canceled.
In many ways, this story, the impossibility of publishing this
story, has ruined the rest of my career. It's ruined my respect for the
profession, my enjoyment at being part of it. It's vitiated my creative
drive, undercut my earnestness, and rendered my lifes work otiose. I
could never approach the thing with a serious purpose, again.
Ironically, the notoriety of disappearing and arising from the dead has
propelled me through doors that would never have opened if it hadn't
happened. I was the first man into Heaven's Gate; I traded letters with
Eric Rudolph via a secret drop-off point while he was hiding in caves
in North Carolina. I drove a jeep through Liberia with Charles Taylor
sitting shotgun. I lived in a steel mansion on Mount Elbrus with Putin
for a month, and I read the ransom note the terrorists had left for Jon
Benet Ramsey over Tom Kobys shoulder.
But I never really gave half a shit for any of these other
assignments, because I knew in my heart, there was only one story that
needed to be told. I tried for analogues, approximations, stories that
carried some similarity, some semblance of the same message. But
nothing approached it.
Because nothing ever came out like it ought to. No karmic justice.
No true love. The bad guy never definitively loses. Nobody ultimately

wins. Good intentions either get all fucked up or are revealed as not
good in the first place. Nothing has a linear, legible point.
Except for this story. In this story, the bad guys are only ever bad,
and they get their fucking brains blown out. The good guy gets the girl,
and his own private paradise. And even if they went over a waterfall a
mile downriver and died, I'm still calling it a win. Beautiful, poetic,
romantic...A perfect fucking story and I couldn't tell anybody. I've
experienced a lot of guilt over the years, thinking (hyperbolically, but
not impossibly) about the impact this story might have had. On a
single life, or the fate of the human race. The hope it might have
spread, the faith, the...something. Something lacking in even the very
best inside coverage of the Unabomber and Elian Gonzales and
Enron.
But of course, I couldn't raise the alarm, call on the choppers and
attack dogs. Just in case. So I focused on the pointless and ignoble, and
I grew a little jaded and bitter, and I got old. Then I got old, and I
thought about it less. But not never. And every so often, like a
recurring illness, the malaise would flare up. Then last night I received
a letter.
The letter contained reassurances, and gratitude. And, just as upon
our first meeting, a question.
Right now, Im thinking about that question.
And I think that by the time you're reading this story, there's a very
good chance I'll have responded to that question. And received
directions. And disappeared.

Joseph Johnson
The Host

He frequented these parties, his wife being an esteemed professor

of Victorian literaturea woman whose publications on the advent of
the English middle-class tween rocked the panels of three academic
conferences. He was her benefactor. More than thisas a result of a
fortunate sequence of inheritanceshe was the benefactor of much
good literature.
Being unbound by the trivialities of employment (meetings,
commuting, labor), he was, instead, liberated to lavish his hours on
literary matters with a focus of energy and resources that most writers
at these parties envied. His affluence bought him time to watch life, to
ponder its complexities, and to critique the state of the contemporary
author.
At this particular party, he stood with a group of three novelists
who, in the mans opinion, ranged from the mediocre to the dreadful.
The man believed his own potential as a writer more exciting than the
published sentiment and vulgarity of these three hacks. He felt
demeaned to attend authors who published drivel. Still, he spoke.
I have an excellent idea for a novel, he said. Several novels.
The novelists listened. The man did not elaborate. He was
confident that these authors, like all such authors, were parasites,
looking for hosts with true talent and vision.
At one of these parties, the man chatted with two guests. One was a
nodding woman in her forties. The other was an aging author who had
recently won a great literary prize (though, in the mans opinion, he
had not deserved it, his work being, at best, derivative of mid-career
Delillo).
The man said, again, how he could write a novel that he had

remarkable ideas for several novels, and that if a literary age should
ever return to America, he would have little difficulty becoming this
generations Updike or Roth. The prize-winning novelist nodded, but
an agent snatched him up (literary parties being little more, the man
understood, than scavengings for diminishing publishing dollars). The
woman remained. She asked the man to say more about his ideas.
Im not at liberty, the man said.
I specialize in this sort of thing, the woman said, Im what is
often called a ghostwriter.
A ghostwriter?
Yes.
So you write other peoples books.
I help them write their books.
Anyone I might know?
Many people.
And how does that work?
It depends on the client, she said. In some cases, I just help with
structure. In other cases, I have to extract the entire novel or memoir.
Usually a memoir.
Extract?
Like honey. I often meet people who have ideas but dont know
how to formalize them.
I know how to write, the man said.
Im sure you do. She reached into her purse and pulled out a
card. But sometimes people need help getting started. She handed
the card to the man. He took it. This was the occasional obligation of
these parties.
This last year I had three New York Times bestsellers, she said.
Three years ago, I had a Pulitzer.
The man pocketed the card and returned to the party with renewed
caution. He imagined which novelists at the party used ghostwriters.
He scoffed at Faux-Delillo. Him, for sure.

A few nights later, the man browsed his stack of journals and
reviews. He perused an articlea non-fiction piece, one compelling
enough that the man delayed returning to the pages of the latest
Pen/Faulkner finalist. The article described a lost Central American
city, one discovered after a dam had collapsed. A whole city (60,000
people) was, by some forgotten or covert governmental act, evacuated
and flooded in the 1940s.
He knew it would make a good story. Perhaps someone had been
murdered there, and the body surfaced sixty years later. There were
surviving family membersa sister, perhapswho remembered.
The womans card was on the table. The man picked it up. Perhaps
he should transfer those first two or three books from imagination to
paper. It should be a simple process, really.
He dialed the area code and pictured the woman. The Extractor.
He imagined some real parasite, something like a vampire who
consumed great ideas and discarded the host body. He was the host.
She would steal his ideas and take the simple steps of putting them into
a book. The man stopped his call and thought he should remember
that idea: The Literary Vampire. It would make a brilliant novel, he
said to his room, and he smiled and planned the great party he would
host to celebrate its publication.

Mitchell Krockmalnik Grabois

Muslim Mom
A Muslim mother kneels before her son as she dresses him as a suicide
bomber for Halloween.
Shes a lot stronger than she looks. Her back is moon-burned.
If she didnt suffer from Muscular Dystrophy, shed run away to join
ISIS.
Shes hungry.
She doesnt want to be a vampire who lives forever.
She doesnt want to be an American.
She wants to liberate the Boston Bomber.
She doesnt know how to put on mascara or lipstick.
A thousand joules of energy course through her leg bones, and make
dancing unnecessary and obsolete.
She wears yoga pants and moves heavy things in her mind.
She sometimes even gets flummoxed by the mechanics of brushing her
teeth.

Eternity
I sat facing the door of the restaurant, drank sweet tea until my
teeth hurt, and wondered about the rate of diabetes in the Deep South.
I didnt feel inclined to change my behavior. Id change it when it was
too late.
I waited for Tiffany to walk in, my illicit schizophrenic lover. Shed
greet me casually, as if she hadnt escaped, and tell me how important I
was to her, that shed been slipping into a bad space, and would I talk
with Dr. Tuna Fish about increasing her medication, maybe try her out
on that new anti-psychotic shed dreamed about, the one whose name
starts with a C? Sitting there, I felt more sympathetic toward our
patients than I ever had. I felt their mule-stubborn, tires-skidding-onasphalt denial as if it were my own.
Im not a Freudianyou might say Im an anti-Freudian, but
Tiffany insisted on telling me her dreams. I dont think they were really
her dreamsI think she made up little stories just to fuck with my
psychologist head. Her last one, before she escaped, was this:
Francisco Cortez enters a bay with fifty Spaniards. There they meet
ten-thousand hostile natives. Cortez carries the banner of the Sacred
Virgin. Hes on a suicide mission animated by Her Spiritus Sanctus.
Just as the natives ready to begin their slaughter, a beam of light shines
directly onto the flag, on the Virgins face. This gives her a halo that
blinds the natives. Ten thousand fall to their knees in surrender. While
their faces are downcast, Mary, Mother of God, snickers.
My interpretation: Tiffany fancies herself Mary, Mother of God, a
recurring delusion. I am the natives, who are blinded. I think Im more
powerful than Tiffany, but she knows shes more so. She is gone and I
am sitting in a crappy restaurant, still traumatized by her escape,

mourning her loss. In my head, I sing a golden oldie from the eighties:
I aint missing you at all.
In the john, I take a piss and read the graffito above the urinal:
EternityToo Long To Be Wrong.
Someone had written it there just for me. I paid my bill.

Drown
My parents were napping in the bedroom. A fan spun lazily above
them in the afternoon dimness. They thought I was napping too, on
the day bed on the screened porch, but a fly landed on my forehead
and woke me. The fly meant to wake me. He was not a messenger, but
an usher. I was two, nearly three. I waited to remember my basic
identity, then swung my legs out and slid off the thin mattress. I
pushed against the screen door until it opened, and I slipped out.
Something else that had belonged to my suicide uncle: a square
wooden coin bank about the size of a fist.
I toddled down the narrow street of the bungalow park. It was
nineteen-fifty-five, a round-sounding year. The sun cast dappled
shadows through the maple trees. Little pebbles under my feet hurt
me, so I picked my way around them.
The sides of the coin bank were painted with dots to make a die.
He gave it to me for my fourth birthday.
At the pool, the gate was open. No one was swimming or lounging.
Someone had left a beach towel on a lounge chair and, next to it, a pair
of sunglasses on the cement. I put them on. They bobbled on my head
and gave me odd visual effects. I sat down at the edge of the pool and
put my bare feet in the cool water. I looked down to the bottom at an
unidentified round thing. The sun shone on the pools surface. Even
that early, my suicide uncle was trying to warn me about chance. Will
life make you happy, the die asked, or will the octopus arms of
melancholy wrap themselves around you and drag you to the depths,
where extinct sea creatures with luminescent scales and misplaced eyes
will menace you?
A huge mass of possibilities began to coalesce by the side of that
pool. I felt certainty begin its approach, an unprecedented feeling. No

one had yet asked me what I was going to be when I grew up, a silly
question for a two-year-old, but I had a sense of the future looming. I
was on the brink of knowing who I was meant to be. I sensed the
importance of the moment. My identity was on the tip of my tongue.
This errant trip to the pool would provide a shortcut through years of
uncertainty and struggle.
And if you find yourself there, will your family and friends still love
you
I sat patiently waiting for the answer. I felt alternatively big and
small, another feeling Id never had and didnt understand. Then my
mother, whose approach I had not heard, grabbed my arm and pulled
me to my feet. She knelt and hugged me fiercely. You could have
drowned, she cried. You could have drowned. Her anxious tears
anointed me
or will they conclude that life is too short to share your endless
grief?
That was the theme for the rest of the day and the rest of our stay
in the bungalow camp. You could have drowned.
But didnt she understand? I didnt drown, but the critical moment
had been interrupted. The future that had been about to reveal itself
slipped away. The moment of enlightenment passed and never
returned.

Nonfiction

Jeremy Jusek
The Power of Place: The Morrow Plots Review
I have been an avid fan of Matthew Gavin Franks poetry for a few
years now. I have found myself naturally drawn to his rapid pacing,
esoteric style, and natural ability to illuminate place. In The Morrow Plots,
Frank captures the enticing yet harrowing history of one of the most
famous landmarks in Illinois.
This collection brings to life the Morrow Plots, the oldest
experimental cornfields in the United States. Created in 1876 by the
University of Illinois, the fields were established to research crop
productivity and soil efficacy. The agricultural experiments were highly
successful and have become a source of local pride.
Despite the scientific history of the fields, which I do believe Frank
tackles with grace and a certain frankness (Im not sorry for that pun),
what truly drew me to The Morrow Plots was its ability to speak to the
fields cultural history and darker past.
Franks poetry chucks the Confessional approach so popular in
modern poetry in favor of stark Imagism. He excels at elevating the
mundane to the heights of human experience. His writing frequently
draws parallels between quaint imagery like cows and corn and the
sprawling wisdom of small-town life in the Midwest. In Types of
Symphony, the violence of small towns are exposed, yet our futile
lives are shown to be held at the mercy of Nature, unable to overcome
behavioral failings with materialism:
When the sun rises behind the black
cow, everything
around the cow brightens. This
is the rule. The milk pails

upturned by the night,

the river, the landowner in bed
biting his lip. No one is exempt. The wife
who has pulled their daughter awake
by her hair. In her scalp, needlemarks
of blood struggle
against her skin, nothing
a hairbrush can fix,
nothing to undo the knot.
Later in the same poem, the speaker introduces readers to the
symmetry between life and death that is so apparent on farms, stating I
cant tell / if the cow is a sign of doom / or hope.
Franks collection makes frequent mention of the large number of
murders associated with the Morrow Plots. Apparently the fields were
excellent at harboring corpses. Horrific crimes around the university
frequently ended with the bodies being dumped in the fields, and
unclaimed remains were sometimes appropriated by the university for
experimental use.
In reaction to the violence, he gives the fields their own spiritual
character. Sometimes they appear to be serene and at others,
downright malevolent. In his poem Into Snow, Frank asserts that
the grisly history of the plots is impossible to avoid. The speaker is
following a hearse in his car and can hear the body prattling around in
its coffin. The field responds, engaging the speaker directly:
The braking is always sudden.
I would have reached
for your hand. A crow drops dead

bounces from the roof

of the hearse. The smallest
crash. Forgive me
for veering off the road
into snow. I was only trying
to look at the cows.
Despite the speakers apparent innocence, he is acutely aware of the
spiritual aspect, declaring elsewhere in the poem Something is angry / at
us for being here.
Beyond the story and personality of these unique fields, readers are
bound to find a refreshing perspective of life waiting to be unpacked in
each poem. The writing is exclusively Franks. Readers will quickly
learn to open themselves up to the surprises in his enjambment and
novel juxtapositions. Some of my favorite lines include:
everything in their hide
concealing the impala
genetics, the antelope
will comfort them.

We can blame these pigeons,

arrowing this unshaded corn,
for lending life to the screamless
stretcher.
And my personal favorite:

A mesquite jealousy
in humplessness, the stockings
we save for just an occasion.
Franks images do take some work. Having read the collection
twice, I can safely say there remains more for me to discover. The
writing in The Morrow Plots is fearlessly experimental and flows with a
generous pathos. If you are looking for a challenging yet enduring
collection, I highly recommend this book.

EDITOR'S NOTE
Spring is here, but not for much longer. Thank goodness we made our
spring issue into spring. It was a hard run to find enough material to fill
the pages, but let's clap for another amazing issue of The Fictioneer! Many
of our editors are moving into new job titles and room is opening up for
some interns. Curious? We are looking for submissions readers for the
upcoming submissions period. Curiouser?
As always, we are thirsty for fiction that rocks and poetry that evokes an
emotional response. Our summer is going to be your summer.
Summertime is about fresh new attitudes and that is exactly what we
plan to do this summer with the literary journal. We are going to give it
a makeover.
The next issue of The Fictioneer will look and read much differently than
this issue. It will be rich with images. It will scream super short fiction.
And it will dance in vibrant poetrywe are adding a regular, "Little Miss
Editor" column and are asking readers to submit questions about
anything in the writing industry.
Again, thank you for your support in our endeavorsyour readership
sails our boat. (oh god, so feely touchy clich).