Perle Besserman

The doctors in Mexico City learned early not to cry. Sergio, a visiting surgery fellow in our Roosevelt Hospital residency training program, would describe the operations he’d performed in cemeteries without so much as a catch in his voice; and his eyes were dry when he talked about his fiancé being gunned down by riot police during a student demonstration. Though he was only thirty-two when Andrew and I met him, many of his friends were already dead.

Sergio had grown up in the hills outside of Cuernavaca in a villa with a pool bordered by red tiles where he swam every day from the time he was five. At eighteen he was offered a place on the Mexican Olympic Swim Team but chose to join a peasant rebellion instead. The only revolutionary among his three brothers and two sisters, Sergio had left home after antagonizing his father by announcing his intention to become a “barefoot doctor.” (Felipe Ruiz owned the biggest Mercedes dealership in Mexico and feared that his son’s activities would alienate his politically conservative clientele.) Sergio’s mother, a copper-haired Englishwoman born and raised on a farm in Surrey, was the horsy daughter of a French-Jewish millionaire and a devout Anglican Englishwoman who had once been a chambermaid. Alicia Ruiz had adapted well to her new life in Mexico; she simply transplanted her interest in horses to managing her large household staff, playing bridge, and overseeing charitable fundraisers. The Ruiz family took frequent holidays in Europe, visiting on occasion with Sergio’s millionaire Jewish grandfather in the south of France.

Sergio was short and brown-skinned with the quick movements of a jack rabbit. He was shy and wore round, thick-lens glasses with tortoise shell frames that made him look even more scholarly than he was. When he’d been a kid, he said, his teeth were so crooked that he hardly spoke to anyone at school because he was ashamed to open his mouth. His mother made him wear braces and take dancing lessons in the hope of socializing him. Every Wednesday, he and an awkward young girl from a neighboring estate were chauffeured to a dancing school run by a portly French woman in a purple long-sleeved gown with white lace wrist ruffles. Paola and Sergio sat in the back seat of the Mercedes like two cardboard dolls, not talking, each terrified of looking at the other, Sergio in black short pants and an Eton jacket that was too tight across his chest, and Paola in pink tulle and white gloves. Of course they fell madly in love and both went on to become medical students and revolutionaries together, until the day Paola got gunned down in Oaxaca.

Whenever Andrew was on-call, Sergio and I would share a bottle of wine in a funky bar habituated by down-and-outers a few blocks from the hospital in the dappled shadows under the West Side Highway trestle. It was a picturesque and sad place, a fitting backdrop to Sergio’s stories, and, on our off-hours, we soon became regulars. Andrew, whose tastes were more upscale, had joined us once or twice but always found a good excuse not to return afterward.

We were sitting at our usual table, half-heartedly watching a baseball game on the TV above the bar, when Sergio asked me to come down to Mexico City with him to work for “la revolucion”.

“This isn’t real,” I said, “I’m dreaming this conversation, this place . . .”

“I can’t believe I’m here myself,” Sergio gazed, as always, a little past my shoulder. It was his habit never to look me straight in the eye. We were both a little bit in love with each other but didn’t want to acknowledge it because I was married to Andrew.

“Did you always want to be a doctor . . . or did you ever want to be something else?” I asked to change the subject.

Bluntly, almost angrily, Sergio said, “A woodcarver once, when I was a kid.”

Then, instead of lifting his hand from the table and caressing his beautiful surgeon’s fingers, which was what I really wanted to do, I found myself promising to come to Mexico City and work for la revolucion.

“Good. We drink to that!” Sergio poured the last of the wine into our glasses.

I noticed that the bottle was slightly chipped at the mouth and that I was drunker than I thought and would probably be sorry tomorrow for what I had promised so cavalierly.

“We’ve been drinking ground glass,” I said, thinking, damn you, Sergio, and your social justice routine. Why don’t you just take me to your apartment and make love to me?

The sun disappeared behind a cloud, and I thought I saw Rosie, a bulky singer of off-color ditties who’d taken a liking to us, expand and float toward the doorway.

“Rosie’s blotted out the sun,” I said dreamily.

“No,” said Sergio, “it’s someone else. Another Rosie.” Was he drunk too?

The conversation trickled off, giving way to the toot of fog horns on the Hudson. Now it was raining outside, though it had been a perfectly sunny day when we first sat down.

“God, Faye, do you realize what a momentous occasion this is?” Sergio grabbed my hand suddenly and shook it hard.

“Looks like Rosie’s going to serenade us,” I responded muzzily. Rosie had in fact approached the bar, placed one purple-veined elephant leg on the brass rail, and was preparing to launch one of her unsolicited performances.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sergio said, his glasses misting over in the now steamy bar.

“Where to?”

“The movies . . . anywhere . . .”

“What about Andrew?”

“Call him and tell him he must come too.”

“Hi, dearie, Rosie cawed at me as I passed her at the bar. And I recognized instantly what I could never have seen while dead sober: Rosie was a transvestite.

“Didn’t you know it all along?” Sergio asked as we were heading cross town toward the Lincoln Square multiplex in a Checker cab papered with stickers denouncing everything but Marine World in Florida.

“That Rosie was a man?”

“Yes.”

“No, damn it. I once even peed in the woman’s toilet with him standing in front of the mirror at the sink applying make-up.”

We both laughed.

* * * *

A month later I was on leave in Mexico City training as a demonstration marshal, studying crowd control, and helping Sergio organize the university’s medical faculty and students in a protest march against the imprisonment of a union leader named Vallejo. I didn’t know it then, but Sergio’s Mexico City demonstration, along with several others around the country, had been planned as a dry run before the Zapatista uprising. Not that knowing what was coming would have changed anything once Sergio had worked his revolutionary magic on me. We didn’t become lovers. I’d half hoped we would, but Sergio was too ethical for that. He slept on the sofa in the living room of the flat in the Pedregal we shared with an older American medical student named Margo who’d divorced her husband and left her two daughters with her mother in North Dakota, in order to attend, as she put it, the only medical school in the hemisphere that would have her. Margo had been an army nurse in the States before deciding to become a doctor. Her porcelain-white skin and baby blue eyes belied her tough anti-American persona, but she had yet to shed her military boot camp training. She’d moved in only two days before me but her side of our shared bedroom was already meticulously arranged when I arrived, everything in its proper place: medical books in sparsely occupied bookcases, spotless desk, personal items tucked out of sight in khaki rayon bags. Margo sat on the edge of her bed eyeing me suspiciously as I unpacked my hibiscus-flowered suitcase and stuffed my things into drawers in no particular order. Later, when we got to know each other better, she confessed that my “Hawaiian luggage and hick outfit” (a checked gingham pinafore and wooden clogs) that first day, had convinced her I was a CIA plant, and I told her I’d automatically assumed that, being military, she was a lesbian—and we both had a good laugh because—-as events later proved–neither of us could have been more wrong.

Every day, we’d join Sergio and his radical friends in a Zona Rosa café called The Laughing Horse. We’d sit there for hours on tiny, cramped white wire chairs around dollhouse-sized tables, planning for the demonstration, arguing politics, stuffing ourselves with soggy guacamole and stale tostadas, and drinking too much Tequila.

It was at the Laughing Horse where I watched Sergio fall out of love with me and in love with Margo. A TV Soap star named Felix unsuccessfully tried convincing me to have an affair with him instead. Humberto, a penniless film director, finished cutting his documentary on the last days of Trotsky in Mexico, to which I had contributed most of my money, and our motley group celebrated the event by cramming into an ancient Volkswagen beetle and driving around the Paseo de Reforma honking the horn and shooting colored streamers out the windows. The documentary’s scriptwriter, and owner of the Volkswagen, got a flat tire and forced us to abandon the car right under the nose of a policeman with a head-bashing baton at his waist and a prominently displayed revolver strapped to his chest. Felix, the black-haired Soap star, had begun pawing in the direction of my breasts, muttering something about existential decisions. Margo, who had drunk too much tequila, pushed him off me, hissing into his face that he and all men were filo da puta. After which, threatening to kill himself, Felix lunged into the mad Mexico City traffic. Fortunately, Humberto snatched him out of the road just in time to avoid being run down by a door-less and windowless bus jammed with farm workers.

On the morning before the march, Sergio announced over a poached egg that he and Margo were going to be married. Margo was out taking an anatomy exam, it was drizzling lightly. I had just closed the door and returned from the hall after having paid the bread man. I placed two fresh rolls on the table in front of Sergio and stood watching him eat. Seeing him sitting there, in his crisp blue denim work shirt, vulnerable as only a man eating his poached egg can be, no longer buck-toothed and shy but still wearing thick-lens glasses and not looking me in the eye, made me want to cry.

“When’s the wedding?”

“Friday, at noon, in the City Hall.”

“Will you throw me out of the flat?”

“Pobrecita,” he said laughing.

“Well, I can’t live here with you and Margo. I’ll have to find a new place,” I said, turning to the stove.

“Of course not, you’ll stay here.”

“No, I can’t,” I said, hating myself for throwing money at Humberto in order to ingratiate myself with Sergio and guilty for no longer being in love with Andrew. I turned up the flame under the coffee pot then poured warmed milk halfway into a mug and waited.

Sergio buttered a roll and placed it on my plate. “You know, I used to sneak the best food from my mother’s pantry and bring it to the peasants who worked on our estate. By the time I was twelve I was an avowed enemy of the capitalist government in the United States, an urban guerilla in my own country.”

The coffee pot hissed. I poured some into my mug, stirred in a spoonful of sugar, set the pot back on the stove, and sat down at the table. Through the curtain-less window, a sudden ray of sunlight pierced the smoggy drizzle illuminating the roll on my plate. “We’ll have good weather for the parade tomorrow,” I said.

As I’d predicted, the sky was blue and cloudless the next day. The air was clear, free of the usual stink of diesel fuel; there were no cars, no scooters, not even a city bus in sight. Everyone was in a holiday mood: even the policemen on their balky horses were laughing. Onlookers were already lining both sides of the Paseo de Reforma three rows deep behind the sawhorses when Margo and I arrived at the designated meeting point. Banners fastened to street lamps billowed lightly in the wind—-red, yellow, royal purple, and dragon green. Office workers leaning out the windows of their buildings signaled their solidarity with the gathering marchers by throwing handfuls of heart-shaped confetti. Sergio was up ahead, testing the sound system on the speakers’ platform that had been constructed in the Zocalo. As principal organizer of the event, he’d been responsible for obtaining a permit and, after bribing the appropriate municipal authorities, a promise of no police harassment.

Slipping on our white armbands and taking up our megaphones, Margo and I began organizing the demonstrators. We had drawn lots for marching partners earlier that morning, and I was greatly relieved not to have drawn horny Felix, but soft-spoken Humberto, who was gay, and whose stylish tweed and leather-patch-sleeved jacket, ever present pipe, and directorial confidence were far more reassuring. Humberto and I had just linked arms and were waiting for the signal to start marching when a low-flying police helicopter swooped down and buzzed the crowd.

“CIA, GO AWAY!” shouted a student in a brown corduroy suit, pumping his fists as he leapt from his cross-legged seat on the pavement behind the sawhorse. His companions immediately jumped to their feet and joined the chant. A young woman pretended to shoot the helicopter out of the sky with her thumb and forefinger: “CIA, GO AWAY! CIA, GO AWAY!” The helicopter was so close now that three men in civilian clothes could be seen peering out of the open door. Oblivious to the jeers of the crowd, two of them were waving enthusiastically.

A small ruckus exploded out of a side street. Word came that horses were being turned on a rowdy cluster of marchers. Together, Humberto and I hurried in that direction to confirm the report, which, it turned out, was only a rumor—but worrisome nonetheless, for, after all the initial gaiety, there was a definite whiff of paranoia coursing through the crowd. Fortunately the marching signal—-a white handkerchief tied to a pole being waved from across the street–prevented it from spreading. With arms locked, in rows extending fifteen across, the marchers surged ahead chanting “Free Vallejo!” The last and loudest line to join us, a phalanx of Labor Unionists, spewed from the side streets, leaving the monument start point deserted. Their hoarse cries demanding Vallejo’s release blended with ours, creating for one fleeting but exalted moment the unearthly harmony of a Gregorian chant.

Directly in front of me a woman pushed a toddler in a pram waving a Che Guevara paper flag. We were just approaching the first cross street when a man suddenly bolted from the sidelines and, aiming directly at the Che Guevara flag, pitched a tomato. Instinctively breaking ranks and pulling away from Humberto, I jumped in front of the child–and caught the splattering tomato’s juice and seeds in the chest. The woman with the pram marched on without acknowledging me; but the Unionists who had seen me take the hit were stomping and hollering their approval. Egged on by their cheers, I turned to face them, dipped my fingers into the mess and pretended to lick off the “blood” before rejoining Humberto in the line.

We encountered our first group of hecklers in front of the Hilton. Flashing my stained chest at them, I shouted “Cowards! Free Vallejo!”—which set the hecklers to booing and the Unionists to chanting even louder and drowning them out. Unaccountably buoyed by their battle cries, I could no longer distinguish friend from foe: the hecklers, the mustached policeman rocking back and forth on his horse alongside me, the woman pushing the pram, the girl with the defiantly bobbing blond pony tail, the fist-brandishing Unionists, the marching band now segueing into an incongruously rollicking version of Guantanamero; however, my moment of ecstatic oneness was interrupted when the music suddenly spiraled out of control, panicked drum beats, short blasts from the tuba piercing the air like cannon fire, and now—unmistakably– human screams coming from the direction of the Zocalo.

Tearing through the seams of our carefully organized formations, the marchers in front of me were scattering. Raising the megaphone to my lips, I shouted for them to get back into line but no one heard me, or if they did, they were too intent on scrambling for safety to regroup. Humberto had grabbed my free hand and was pulling me forward. I dropped the megaphone and felt it crumple under my feet. The girl with the pony tail to the right of me was gone. The scruffy boy in sandals with her had fled too. The woman with the pram had abandoned it and, carrying the child in her arms, was seeking refuge among the dispersing onlookers behind the no longer existing sidelines where the no longer laughing mounted policemen and their frenzied whinnying horses were chasing down onlookers and demonstrators alike through a maze of bunting. Still holding hands, Humberto and I joined the blind scattering mob but were unable to move either forward or backward. Our efforts at threading a sideways path toward the curb were equally unsuccessful. From the Zocalo, clearly now, came the steady burst of gunfire.

Many of the musicians, too, had bolted and were now scattering through the streets. A beautiful black woman holding a trumpet high over her head pressed against me, her hair brushing my face. Tugging at my monitor’s armband, she screamed in English, “They’re shooting! They’ve opened fire at the Zocalo. They’re killing us!”

Flailing their truncheons, the mounted police plowed into the crowd. Still holding my hand, Humberto zigzagged back and forth trying to avoid them. A heavyset girl in a pink dress wasn’t as nimble and, having taken several blows to the neck and head, was bleeding. I reached out to help her but was blocked by a policeman wedging his horse between us. Leveling a barrage of curses and maneuvering the horse only inches from my face, he swung his truncheon first at the bleeding girl, then at me. The girl fell and Humberto dragged me away screaming. Weaving through the melee, he didn’t stop until we’d reached an eerily empty side street behind the Reforma. It was only after he’d propped me sagging against the wall of a cold stone building that he finally let go of my hand. The windows of a nearby shop, an elegant handbag boutique that had been looted, lay shattered on the sidewalk.

“Home, Humberto. Take me home, please,” I gasped, falling against his chest.

Miraculously, Sergio, unhurt, was in the flat when we arrived. His shirt was stained with blood, his thick-lens glasses were shattered but he was still wearing the frames. Margo, he said, had been slightly injured; it was her blood on his shirt. She was in the hospital but there was no need for me to venture out; he’d arranged with the emergency room doctor, a friend, to get her back to the flat in an ambulance—-maybe later, maybe tomorrow. He was leaving for Cuba right away. He might contact me. On the other hand, I was not to worry if I didn’t hear from him for a while. He was being monitored. Then, almost off-handedly, he added, “Andrew called. He said to get on the next flight out and come back home.” Standing for a moment in the doorway, Sergio flashed me the victory sign. “Good luck, Faye,” he said. Then he slipped out of my life as casually as he’d entered it.

* * * * *
Papua New Guinea
2004

I might have caught a glimpse of Sergio again three months later, on January 1st, while NAFTA was being celebrated in Mexico City, the same day the Zapatistas emerged from their jungle training centers and took control of five major towns in the state of Chiapas–where, ignoring Andrew’s tepid recall–I’d joined Medecins Sans Frontieres as a staff doctor. It could have been the thick-lens glasses worn by the serape-wrapped peasant in sandals running past our makeshift hospital tent; or that I needed to see him again, to thank him for teaching me how to serve. Maybe it wasn’t as noble as that, maybe I just needed to prove I was no longer an armchair revolutionary living vicariously through him. Whatever the reason, I can’t say for certain it was Sergio. That was ten years ago, and I haven’t seen or heard from him since. Not that it matters.

Amanda Viviani

Anne-Marie and Emily both wore eyeliner and purple iridescent lipstick by sixth grade; they blotted their shiny mouths in the third-floor girls’ bathroom and traced thick lines onto their lips. Except Celeste was the first to buy department store lip gloss and leggings. Celeste was always first, and she liked it that way. Hannah always followed Celeste, even when she stole her mother’s Dunhill cigarettes and smoked them in the basement laundry room. Celeste taught them all how to inhale, and how to hold their cigarettes like Sandy in Grease. Her indigo lips pursed and released white wisps of smoke through the screened window slowly as she sat atop the Maytag dryer with her back straight like a queen.

On weekends, they didn’t bake chocolate chip cookies anymore but nibbled on carrot sticks and called up boys. Older boys, boys from the tenth grade and sometimes even older. Late at night they burned what they said was incense and giggled loudly under blankets.

They lived in big houses of brick and expensive stone facades, houses on the outskirts of town that loomed up like temples before neatly manicured lawns and intricate landscaping. Sometimes their mothers would be outside planting hostas; most of the time green-suited men from the lawn-care companies would finish the job.

At school they held court the way they had since second grade, with Celeste at the helm the same way she had been since the minute she was born. While everyone played basketball in the gym before class, they occupied a spot at the bottom of the bleachers, away from the bounce of sports equipment and squeak of tennis shoes. They crossed their legs and talked in low voices, close to each other’s faces, or, when they wanted to be noticed, would lean back on their hands and push their small chests forward. They spent hours getting ready in the morning, just to look as though they hadn’t.

They all had sleek, thick hair in rich colors, hair that floated back into perfect place when it was disturbed. Of course, Celeste was a blonde, a coveted platinum that needed no rinses or dyes. They wore all sorts of jeans, the popular distressed kind that looked as if the fronts had been bleached out and then rolled in mud; the skinny, stretch-denim pants whose lack of rear pockets made them possible for only the thinnest of females. They made sure that their Lycra or rayon tops were fitted tightly, with necklines that dipped to the most appropriately inappropriate level.

They poured over issues of Cosmopolitan and Glamour, giving up the crush confessionals of Seventeen for advice on “How to Please Him.”

“I’ve done that before,” Celeste scoffed, as they giggled about the sexual exploits of a 30-something writer.

“Right,” said Anne-Marie, with a drop of sarcasm. Celeste threw her a look, but she never said anything to Anne-Marie, because Anne-Marie was beautiful.

“It sounds gross,” Hannah offered, and Emily snorted. Then Celeste threw her a look, because snorting was something they just didn’t do.

Celeste had discovered blow jobs by fifth grade, but it was Emily who supposedly had experienced the real thing the summer before eighth. After that, they all looked at Emily when she ate popsicles, to see if she looked any different.

At lunch, they had the first table, the seating capacity and arrangements of which varied from day to day. Not that any of them really ate. They preferred seclusion, or at least anywhere that was void of some 500 pairs of teenage eyes. Anne-Marie, who had an ongoing relationship with Pizza Hut and Taco Bell, remained tall and lithe and never over 100 pounds. She showed them all how to stick their fingers down their throats, but Celeste preferred less messy methods.

When their parents had parties, they wore tight dresses and waited for their fathers’ friends to notice their cleavage, then slip an arm around their waists and say how much they’d grown up. At these parties, their mothers were all sociable and whiny, and their fathers drank scotch from crystal cocktail glasses. Everyone was beautiful and sparkling and loud; the women had shrieking voices to go with their thickly sequined dresses.

There were school dances, which they never went to at the junior high. Instead, high school boys asked them to homecoming and the winter formal, where they wore short little dresses with heels, but made sure they stood by and yawned for the full three hours.

“Want to dance?” Emily’s date asked her at the start of all the slow songs, but she just shook her thick red hair and smiled at him. They all made sure to ignore the homecoming queen, and the spring princess, and the prom court. Sometimes they danced, to the fast songs, moving so precisely that everyone would stop and stare at them. There was something comforting about being so beautiful that boys stopped looking at their own dates altogether, just to look at you.

At 14, the only aspirations they had were to model, or perhaps go to college, for the parties. Anne-Marie’s father wanted her to go to Sarah Lawrence, but his girl was intent on watching E! Fashion television and snacking steadily on celery stalks.

“You’ll never stay beautiful if you don’t take care of yourself now,” she’d lecture, thin thighs cocked and applying her mother’s Lancome eye cream.

Celeste rolled her eyes and asked, what did she think plastic surgeons were for?

Emily and Hannah silently vowed to never eat pizza or donuts again and added eye cream to their mental shopping lists.

They’d begun drinking coffee already, and drinking it black, although some of them emptied pink paper packets of sweetener into their silver Nissan mugs when no one was looking.

They had rules, laws that they’d seen their mothers live by, and their mothers were beautiful and successful. Never eat past eight in the evening. Low-fat ice cream tastes just as good as regular, you’d swear you could never tell the difference.

You can tease the boys, said their mothers, but don’t let them lose interest. Ever. There were too many other girls, and other girls were sly. Other girls were catty. Other girls were just jealous. Then their mothers fixed any stray wisps of hair, tucking them back into their Ivana Trump coiffures, and wiped away the lipstick that caked in the corners of their large, round mouths. When they reprimanded, their hands flashed with fat diamond rings made from four-carat gems purchased at cost on winter vacations in the Caribbean. Their faces were never bare, always made up with age-defying foundation and rouge that sat high on the apples of their sallow cheeks.

Their fathers, who had been affectionate and warm a few years ago, now only smiled at them with tight lips and gave stiff hugs. They were afraid of their daughters, painfully aware of their new bodies and the older boys who followed them down to their bedrooms on Friday nights. Their fathers made sure that work kept them too late for dinner most days, but always remembered to get their wives expensive jewelry for Christmas.

Celeste’s father was gone so long and so often, that she would sometimes forget the color of his eyes or how tall he was. But when he came home – together they tried to avoid each other, and together they made it work.

Her father brought home a friend for a week, a business acquaintance from the east coast. Mr. ___ drank imported beer in the living room and stared at Celeste when she arrived home from school. He shifted his weight on the buttery leather sofa and ran manicured fingers down the leg of one trouser, pulling the creases taut.

At dinner, Mr. ___ leaned in close to her when he wanted a dish passed. He flattered her mother and talked business with her father. Afterwards, when everyone was having their wine in the living room, Celeste slipped his wallet from the breast pocket of his coat in the mudroom – as she was inclined to do when she was curious. He was 33, he had a platinum card, and $200 in dirty, creased bills. Celeste replaced the wallet and pocketed half of the cash.

When she started back for the living room, he was standing there, leaning against her mother’s china cabinet with thick arms folded against his chest. He smiled at her with his eyes, and she wasted no time returning the favor.

On Saturday nights they went to high school parties. They knew people – some important and some not so much, but it was enough. A quartet of sophomore boys pulled into the driveway; they all wore ratty baseball caps backward and sucked on hip flasks full of sweet, syrupy liquor of a bright color, a drink that was so thick with sugar and booze that it always made them throw up at the end of the night. They shouted and caroused, driving too fast and listening to their music to loud. The girls laughed at them, swiping shots from the small bottles they’d tucked in their purses. But they didn’t really like these boys, they were too stocky and Celeste said she hated the smell of them when they thought they could kiss her. Anne-Marie thought they were repulsive. Nevertheless, boys were boys, and boys with a car were even better.

At the party they balanced plastic beer cups on their knees and whispered together, bare shoulders sparkling with spaghetti straps and cheap drug store glitter. Boys came up behind them, kissing their cheeks, offering drinks or back rubs or dances. They licked salt off their forearms and sucked lemons with tequila, they chain-smoked in an upstairs bathroom and tossed the butts in the sink. They were childish, they were disgusting, and they were beautiful. Altogether, they were so lovely.

They went back to Celeste’s house that night, arriving home long after the TV stations had shut down and the stoplights in the middle of town were flashing yellow. The sky had a weak light to it, and they tiptoed through the hazy purple, stumbling and giggling.

Emily held her stomach and said she felt sick; Hannah tripped over the stairs and laughed. One by one they ended up in a spare bathroom, holding thick handfuls of sticky, smoke-scented hair back while someone threw up, resting their heads on the bathtub ledge and wishing they were dead.

Celeste, who was leaning against the doorway and reveling in just slight intoxication, shook her head in disgust. She thought them all rather pathetic.

She found that Mr. ___ was having a cigarette out on the patio, holding it in his thumb and index finger like a joint, one leg resting casually over the other knee. He was dressed as though he had just arrived home himself.

“Care for one?” He waved the box flippantly at her, speaking clearly but very quietly.

She took one; they were Nat Shermans, black paper with a gold filter. She liked that he didn’t reprimand her the way most adults would. He just watched her with a half-smile, and when she brought the cigarette to her mouth he did the same.

“And where have you ladies been tonight? It’s pretty late,” he remarked.

“To a bar,” Celeste lied coolly.

“Really.” He widened his eyes in mock surprise. “You might have invited me along, I was out myself.”

“Where did you go?” Celeste blew the smoke out her nose, the way she’d seen her mother do.

“The Green Room. On the east side of town.”

“Oh, we don’t go to the Green Room,” she said dismissively, with a wave of her hand.

“You don’t, huh?” He grinned and lit up another one.

“No. It’s too quiet.”

“So where do you like to go, then?”

“Oh, here and there. Anywhere that’s not too boring.” She smiled like a little chorine, pleased to death that she was keeping up her lie so smoothly.

“Well, my date and I liked it very much. It was nice – nice for the Midwest.” He paused and let the silence fill in, drinking from a cup that she hadn’t noticed earlier.

“You had a date? Who is she?” Celeste asked this the same way she always had, curious but not demanding.

“Oh, just an acquaintance. Not a girlfriend. Business, you see.”

“Ah.” Celeste had come to know what “business” dates meant. She swiped another smoke from between them.

“Do your parents know you smoke?” He chided lightly, offering her the blue flame of the lighter anyway.

“Probably not. They don’t know most of what I do.”

“They should. They should worry, I mean. You’re quite pretty, you know.”

“No, I don’t know.” But she did, and soaked up the compliment that made her move a little closer to him.

Mr.___ didn’t mean to then, but he kissed her, right under the burned-velvet sky, on her parents’ patio. He was careful, and when he opened his eyes he noticed where the mascara and eyeliner had smudged down beneath her lower lashes. The glitter gel from earlier was crusted to her skin, on the sharp turn of her shoulders and the pale flesh that lay over her bony sternum.

What he liked about her was the slowness, the deliberate delicacy of her movements, coupled with innocence, and the fact that she didn’t get up and follow him afterwards.

She watched, and stayed just as quiet as she had the whole time, watching his retreating back; with her head on its side, it looked as though he were walking on the wall. The floor tiles were cold on her cheek.

In the morning, they were all asleep in one room, sprawled on the floor in wrinkled skirts and tank tops, their hair wild and makeup smeared across the pillows. Celeste was huddled on the bed, hugging her knees up to her chest and breathing deeply under the quilt her grandma had made,

There were still dolls on her shelves, the expensive collectible kind that could never be taken out of their boxes, but stared blankly through cellophane windows in big fluffy dresses and cotton-candy hair. Her bed was carpeted in stuffed animals, some old and worn, some brand-new with tags on their ears. Sometimes she tossed them off the bed at night, but most of the time she slept with them. And when she slept she held her blanket up to her face, just to smell the scent of being a little girl again, because they would have to wake up and do it all over again the next weekend.

“You’re so beautiful,” the boys would say. “Don’t you know that?”

“No,” with a coy smile.

But they did.

Kirsten Clodfelter

Alone in Michael’s car, I steal moments of sleep without meaning to. I try to keep my eyes open, and each time they close I instinctively jerk myself awake. It’s early, a few minutes before seven. My husband thinks I’m at the gym, and in twenty minutes he’ll start to wonder why I’m not back at home getting ready for work.

Michael is inside Kara’s Coffee buying breakfast. This is where we go after we’ve left the quiet safety of his bed, the same thing we’ve been doing for the last eight months. Together we force comfort from this small routine.

I want to distill these final minutes that he and I have together before we start our separate day; I want to slow everything. But then I think of Dylan at home, of how he’ll ask with enthusiasm about the distance and time of a run I didn’t really take. The familiar anxiety wraps itself around my chest and pushes outward, as if my ribcage might snap from the pressure and burst through my skin—like a tree splintered by lightning and then uprooted as it falls. All I want in this moment is to already be back home, brushing my teeth and towel-drying my hair, listening to Dylan call out the newspaper headlines through the bathroom door.

The sun heats through the windshield glass, but it’s not enough to counter the cold edge of this November morning. I watch a blonde woman push a baby stroller down the sidewalk while she talks on her cell phone. She’s wearing a ski hat with a yellow pompom on the top. In one hand she holds a jerking dog leash, though I can’t see the animal from where I’m sitting. The line extends into nothingness—an invisible pulling force, and I let the landscape of the parking lot blur. Far off, someone blasts a car radio, and for an instant I dream of a parade.

Whenever I tell Michael that it’s difficult to answer questions about a future with him, a future without Dylan, he looks anywhere but at my face. While he’s inside the coffee shop, I try not to picture the way he busies his pale eyes with anything else in the room during these conversations, a conversation we had again this morning. He no longer gets angry, or speaks of what’s fair, and this resignation has started to haunt me even when we’re not together—it snakes up from the drain in the bathtub while I’m taking a shower, it hijacks radio waves and crackles through my alarm clock in the darkness of the bedroom each morning. Michael no longer asks me if I’ll leave with him, but the guilt has already woven into my bones; my body is heavy now, I’m tired constantly.

Throughout the day, while we’re apart, I recall moments with Michael from our hurried mornings. Last week: He lies with his head across the top of my bare thighs, his face upturned, smiling. When my phone rings, he sits up and begins to untwist the sheets. While Michael makes the bed, I stand by the dresser and talk to Dylan, my voice low, saying all of the things a happy wife would say to her husband. For a few minutes after I hang up, Michael and I occupy separate spaces in his room, trying to remember the way back to each other.

I always imagined heartbreak as a type of shredding, with the clawed organ left as tangled threads in a pulp. Even now, after all these months, I’m surprised to find that it’s a divide—two perfect halves, symmetrical fruits. One that beats Dylan’s name; the other, Michael’s. But when split evenly, there’s nothing left for me. All that blood just stills.

Michael returns to the car with two lattes and chocolate croissants. He buckles his seatbelt even though the car is in park, even though we’re not going anywhere. We spread napkins across our laps for a breakfast picnic. When he hands me my coffee, he asks, “You okay?” and then he squeezes my hand in his.

I don’t answer, and in the silence that follows, I think again about goodbye. Then I talk just to avoid leaving, to postpone the ache that will make up apart. “It’s too cold today,” I tell him, “It’s not even winter yet.” It’s a silly thing to say, but my voice tangles once it hits the air; it’s quieter than it sounds in my head, and I find myself swallowing anything else that might have been there.

Michael slides the thermostat to red as far as it will go, and a blast of warm air rushes out of the vents. He cups his hands around mine and rubs. He missed a spot along his jaw when he was shaving, and I point it out, kiss him there. I laugh, but the sound is hollow—it tinkles against my teeth and the roof of my mouth as it leaves my throat. I’ve made this decision a dozen times before. I’ve always come back. This will be the last time.

I study the dirty laces of my running shoes, my unpainted fingernails. I press my lips together and turn away from him. He shakes his head when I finally being to speak, as if he can deflect each sentence as it slips from my mouth. As if this will make it untrue. As if this will make me stay.

There are a hundred apologies. “I can’t,” I say, “my heart breaks over it every day,” and then I’m silent; there’s nothing that will make it hurt less. In the stillness of the car, Michael relaxes his hand so that our fingers are no longer touching. He closes his eyes against my words, and as I reach for the door handle I worry that eventually he’ll stop seeing me at all, my silhouette etched against that darkness.

Sam Ramos

Jerome’s collar put pressure on his windpipe and his backpack dug into his shoulders. It was the discomfort typical to every morning’s train ride and he soon forgot it. His thoughts drifted back to where they’d been since the previous night when Meg shut off the T.V. and arranged her body to face his. He’d heard her words and a moment later he took her in his arms. He looked over her shoulder at the room and wondered when, exactly, it became his family’s (was it the instant she told him, or would it be when the baby was carried into the apartment for the first time. Had it been when Meg first learned about the pregnancy, then stood in the room alone, imagining the things he imagined now. Or had the room been their family’s always, before they moved in, before they themselves were born), and he was confronted then with a realization that the future exists.

He’d had girlfriends, a couple of them very serious, and he’d considered the possibility of marriage and children. But as each relationship came to its end, his endearment to love itself began to dissipate, until he wasn’t sure he believed in it, or if he wanted to.

Then he’d met Meg at a finance conference in Houston. He saw her take a seat in the first row of an auditorium with a stage and podium at the front, but hadn’t been immediately attracted to her. She appeared dour and her limp eyelids and pursed mouth communicated a feminine impatience he found intimidating. He forgot about her and turned his attention to the carousel of rehearsed informative presentations that lasted until lunchtime. Two or three hundred brokers congregated in an adjacent room decorated with simple white-clothed tables and a buffet of Subway sandwiches, soda and fruit. Jerome attempted to locate someone from his branch but failed and sat at a table by himself. The tables had chairs for ten people each and his slowly filled. Men in suits, bent over their plain lunches, betrayed their dignity, and women with mousy hairstyles and moustaches caked in skin-colored make-up sat up straight chewing delicately under the delusion that elegance was attainable there. One chair at his right remained. Meg seated herself there without speaking and took a couple of bites in his peripheral vision. Then she said, “I hate Subway.”

“If you hate this,” he replied, “you should try their sandwiches.”

Meg laughed. They noted each other’s nametags then fell easily into a refreshingly familiar conversation. She explained that she grew up in Houston and considered leaving but hadn’t gotten around to it. He told her he was living in Chicago but wanted to move to New York.

“I’ve always wanted to move to New York,” she said.

“You can come with me,” he said, aware that he was flirting. Aware, also, that she knew it.

“Really?” She leaned toward him and smiled, a large smile that accentuated the wrinkles from the edges of her nose to the center of her chin. Her skin was the first he’d come across that he might describe as olive, and she had freckles on her high cheek bones. Her hair was black and cut to the bottom of her neck. Jerome chose then to see her as beautiful.

They moved to a panel of executives they’d both been assigned to and for the rest of the day Jerome found himself watching her from several brown-cushioned chair rows back, attempting to get to know her silently. She rarely looked his way, but he was sure she knew he was looking; as sure as if he was tapping on her shoulder.

They ate lunch together the last two days of the conference, choosing to take their sandwiches outside the hotel where they leaned against the Regency’s sidewalk marquee and observed the humid bustle of downtown Houston in the summertime. After they ate she would smoke and he would watch her expert exhalation and the casual crossing of her small chest with her jacketed arms. Her nails were painted red and her fingers were pale. He took notice of her details between the ebb and flow of their increasingly personal conversations, just on the other side of an irreversible confidence.

At the end of the conference they shook hands in the lobby of the hotel and parted, but not before exchanging email addresses. Jerome emailed her from his laptop before boarding a flight to Chicago: I think I might miss you already.

He shut the laptop and lined up at the gate, aware that he’d taken a risk with a woman he might never see again.

When he returned to his Lincoln Park apartment and retrieved his email he saw her response: I’m pretty sure I miss you too, friend. I guess things like this really do happen.

She didn’t leave his thoughts. One bright afternoon he sat overlooking the Loop from his office window and strained for half an hour to recall her smile. After several minutes of apprehension he sent her an email explaining that he’d been thinking about her. She responded with a long monologue about how she hated her work, why she’d started going to a gym, and she even mentioned, at one point, a stuffed bear she used to own. It was a brown teddy bear with a green bow tie, she wrote, and she’d spent an hour in her mother’s garage the previous day trying to find it. Thereafter Jerome and Meg exchanged emails several times a day, until he asked for her phone number and every night, before bed, they spoke.

The things he told her were not things he had never told anyone else. He didn’t have any deep secrets that he only shared with her. But she made him feel immediately that what secrets he did have were important to her. He was reassured that even those secrets culled from the darkest places would never turn her away from him in their after effect. He disclosed himself to her and by winter it had dawned on him that she was doing the same.

It was New Year’s Eve and he was standing on the top of his building. On the other side of the roof, facing the skyline and the lake, his friends were drinking champagne and preparing for the fireworks at Navy Pier. He stood alone against the rail facing north, huddled in his long winter coat, his cheeks burning against the hard wind, his phone in his hand.

“Meg,” he said, “I’m pretty sure I’m in love with you.”

“What,” she said.

He rolled his eyes at the poor reception that insinuated itself between them.

“I love you,” he said.

“I love you too,” she said, without hesitation, but with a widening sadness that accumulated at each word’s passing.

“I’d do anything to kiss you right now,” he said.

“That’d be wonderful,” she said, and Jerome felt his cheeks warm up against the freeze as he realized that what they’d exchanged was just as good as any tender, small physicality.

In February he flew to Houston. He paid for a hotel but he only stayed there once. After the first night he stayed at her apartment where they slept together, frantically consummating their unlikely affair. He could smell and taste red wine on her tongue and on her lips, and in their months apart he was returned often to the scent and the clean white sensation of her fresh sheets.

The following spring Meg came to Chicago. There was no pretense of a hotel. She slept with him in his room and in the morning they jogged together along the lakefront past family barbecues and men playing basketball. The evenings were reserved for friends and dinner parties where they drank beers until midnight when they went to his room and embedded themselves in each other.

It was a little more than a year after their first meeting when Jerome announced he was ready to move to New York, and he wanted her to come with him. There’d been an understanding all along that one day they would live together somewhere and New York presented the opportunity. Meg agreed and their transfers were approved shortly after. They moved into their Upper West Side apartment in the fall, when trees above the western wall of the park were orange and shedding into busy playgrounds and against quiet stone church steps. The apartment was on Amsterdam Avenue just north of 86th and across the street from a cluttered computer repair shop and a Middle Eastern restaurant called Mataam Al-Mataam.

Their first year together was characterized by the adventure of a new life in the most exciting city in the world. They excelled at the game of discovery and took extreme satisfaction in the buildup of restaurants, parks, bookstores and museums – places they could claim for themselves. Even more satisfying was the excavation of each other. They both breathed a sigh of relief at each layer of revelation that exposed a more perfect, more loving incarnation of the person in whom they’d placed so much hope.

They worked in the same office downtown and took the train together every morning. After a few months, however, Meg became depressed with work, and each day her depression threatened to invade the rest of her life, and then his. She slept at odd hours and had unpredictable bouts of nausea. The exhilaration they’d shared began to shift until Jerome worried he alone preserved it. Their morning commute became an exercise in silence. Meg could only concentrate on the interminable tedium of the day ahead, and Jerome stayed quiet with her as though in common mourning over some long dead friend.

It was late, past three, when Jerome woke and the bed was empty. He left the bedroom and saw the light on beneath the door of the bathroom. He knocked. There was a cough inside and a moment later Meg told him to come in. He opened the door and she was sitting against the bathtub, her legs curled under her.

“You were sick,” he said.

She nodded then said yes in a quiet voice made of air.

“What is it,” he asked.

Meg closed her eyes and let out a long breath. Her shirt and pajama pants made her body seem insubstantial and hollow against the tile. Her feet were dimpled with pale spots and shaped into crescents of thin bone and veins. She was always tired now and looked it. Gray pools had formed under her eyes and her mouth didn’t close all the way as if she was too exhausted to keep her jaw up. She shook her head.

Jerome sat next to her, his back rested against the sink cabinet, and ran his hand over her hair. He understood it wasn’t the work itself that made Meg unhappy. Instead, she suffered at her looks into the future, which revealed an unending tide of narrow, uncolored years. Meg imagined a life of events, but had yet to experience one. The future she’d invented for herself was one of revolving encounters that turned on her own initiative. The move to New York had been Jerome’s doing, not hers, even if it had taken her own resolve to decide upon it. Now she wondered where her own direction went, and if she could find it.

“You should quit,” he told her.

Her breath rattled out of her with her eyes down on the toilet’s porcelain. Her hair fell in her face.

“I can’t,” she said.

“I want you to.”

Her eyes lifted. She had to know whether he understood his own assertion, and if he meant it. Jerome was used to taking risks. She was not. She needed his faith to be real first, before she moved. If she looked close she could see it, in his sober expression, and in the calm posture of his body like architecture on the green bathroom rug. Meg knew Jerome could go on without her, but in the bathroom with the pink stream of her sick still floating in the water like a constellation, she confessed she couldn’t continue without him.

“Of course you could,” he said.

Jerome sat with her and waited but she wasn’t sick anymore. Then he gave her his hand and helped her up from the floor.

It took several weeks, but after many assurances that he and her savings would care for them, Meg was convinced to quit. They didn’t speak on the train ride home after her last day. She sat next to him, a box of personal items removed from her desk on her lap, and though it wasn’t obvious, he knew she was smiling. The train shook in the tunnel and their heads bobbed equally and in unison. Her fingers were wrapped around the box’s edge and he wanted to touch them in congratulation. He kissed her on the cheek because it was all he could do, then looked again through the window opposite into the passing blackness.

***

She’d decided she wanted to go back to school and was beginning to figure out where when she learned she was pregnant. They could have everything they wanted, he was sure. Jerome didn’t believe in God, but he thought, if such a thing could exist, his life had been blessed. He lived in a constant state of awareness, conscious always that bad things might happen, though they never did. He began, in his early twenties, to feel an obligatory appreciation for what seemed to be a string of good luck from the moment he’d been born to the moment he stepped on the train that morning. It wasn’t a dramatic luck – the kind that lottery winners had – but a common one that built over time into a balanced, healthy life. There had been no great tragedies to come to terms with. His body was fit and his intelligence was competitive. His parents were still alive and in good health. He had Meg, and now a child was coming. If he was not appreciative, Jerome feared, it might all be taken away. By whom he wouldn’t take time to consider, worried he might unearth some religious tendency leftover from childhood that had never been entirely bleached out of him. All the same, by acknowledging the grace that had enabled him to live fully to that day, he was acknowledging God in his life. Jerome wasn’t entirely comfortable with the realization but found it natural and so accepted it until some further date when he might root it out and dash it away.

Jerome transferred to another train, walking quickly out of habit among the other hurried travelers. A young man with dreaded hair stood in a white t-shirt and stained jeans over an open guitar case and sang a version of “Falling Man” that required him to stomp his grayed sneakers every few beats in exclamation. Jerome boarded the train and stood in the middle of the car over a sleeping homeless man whose assortment of plastic bags occupied the seat next to him.

The train screeched around a bend and the tunnel lit up in intermittent notions of luminescent orange. A middle-aged blonde woman a few feet away in a beige pants suit stumbled forward and a disembodied hand reached out to stabilize her by the elbow. The woman stood up straight without looking back at the person who’d assisted her. Instead she took a more firm grip on the vertical metal pole at her side; a gold ring with a red stone pressed into the thick flesh of her fourth finger.

The train became more crowded until he couldn’t see the woman anymore. His view was obscured by the raised blue-jacketed arm of a man in front of him. The train whistled and rocked and everyone in the car stayed still, so used to the motion of the track that they hardly noticed it.

Jerome thought again of the baby, as far away as it was, so very close by. His belief in fate began to creep back up on him and it both comforted and irritated him. He wanted to believe that people had the choice to make of themselves what they wished, but he was just as sure that there was no escaping an action once it was committed, and that any action once done was always intended. If a person could only map out their life at the end looking back, and see how they might be born and grow, and then love and then die, it didn’t mean those events hadn’t been laid out long ago in some cartographic society of the otherworld. Jerome found the thought suffocating and attempted to reason around it but failed. He was frustrated by the smallness of mind in an infinite reality.

Jerome tended to ponder too deeply the busy chasms of his terror, and it caused him to hate going to bed alone. When he was a boy he contemplated for long hours at night what death might be and what the end of the universe looked like. Decomposition was especially troubling to him. He’d conjure a face, sometimes, that floated gape-mouthed in his imagination and somehow became more grotesque by the instant until young Jerome forced it away. His insomnia lasted into adulthood until he began leaving the T.V. on to distract him from his own thoughts. It became the only way he could sleep at all. When Meg came to New York with him and they moved into the same bed, he’d found her presence enough to subdue him. He only rarely lay awake dreading the day his parents were gone, or shaken by the thought of his own death, in an airplane, or at the end of a long life when all that was left would be himself and the open entrance to the darkness.

Jerome stumbled on a reservoir of concern for their baby’s well-being. He recognized the flipside, that fear was love and that one wouldn’t go on without the other. He would transform out of devotion into a father.

The train came to his stop and Jerome deboarded onto the shining gray tile marred by years of gum and streaks of shoe rubber. He adjusted his collar and tie while he walked, aware and proud of the click of his stiff heels, then pushed his way through the gold revolving doors into the lobby.

He crossed to the elevators. On the way up he noticed one woman in front of him, petite and wearing a black dress, staring at the ground while everyone else looked up at the numbers as they flashed by. He wondered where she was, and felt, though she couldn’t see him, that he was involved with her. He made out her white knuckles and the short brown hairs on her neck against the paleness of her skin. Then the doors opened and they stood on the platform to wait for the next elevator up, the woman now somewhere behind him. Jerome attempted quietly to distinguish himself in some subtle, just perceptible way for the woman, in case she’d felt him watching her. He tapped his fingers against his pant leg, hoping his silent communiqué might reach her across the vast extremes of the wasteland between strangers.

He reached his desk and sat to check his email. There was a message sent from Meg that morning: Have a great day, Daddy. I love you.

Tears came and he rubbed them away with the ends of his thumb and forefinger. He wrote back: I love you, honey. Thank you.

He answered more emails and returned phone calls left over from the day before. After an hour he crossed the gray carpeted office for his morning’s first coffee. He was pouring a cup when Andrew Barkow asked him how he was doing. Andrew stood leaned against a wall, his wide frame exposed beneath his blazer, a permanent troublemaker’s smile on his face. Behind Andrew a long window on the far wall posed the question of the city far away and little compared to the clear blue sky beyond it. Jerome almost told him then reconsidered. He wanted to hold onto it just a little longer.

He went to his desk and placed the coffee down where it dipped against the mug’s lid and over the side streams of brown hot liquid poured to the faux wood beneath. Jerome took a tissue and wiped his fingers and the desk then tossed the damp paper into the wastebasket.

Jerome’s small office was bordered on three sides by gray removable partitions and on the other by a white dimpled wall with a beige runner. There was no window but he found the wall’s blankness as receptive to daydreams as any window view might be. He was leaned back in his chair with the end of a pen in his teeth, his gaze somewhere deep in the space of the blankness, when without knowing why, he lifted the phone to call Meg. It started to ring and his words began to form when an industrial scream interrupted his thoughts and a loud boom made him drop the phone. A muscular force shifted the building one way then back as though the continent quivered to the wreck of all above. His body and other vulnerable objects were lifted from their places so that pens, paper and wires were left exposed and lost after the lights went out. He heard shouts – a man shouting – and a great buzz that rumbled beneath and around him. Jerome sat on the floor, against a wall, somewhere near the cubicle opening that served as a doorway. He was stunned by the unknowable power that had shaken him out of all life and into whatever improvised zone it had awakened. He couldn’t tell if the force had come from inside or outside, but he knew the buzz born from the scream was inside with them now. Jerome smelled smoke, and he was aware, after a moment, that the floor had become hot, and felt with each breath that he was swallowing conflagration itself. He grasped that something unexpected and terribly wrong had happened. Everything went still and quiet for a long minute, except for the buzz whirring in the invisible floors below.

Marcos Soriano

“Teach me how to pray,” she says, and gets down on her knees. Becky Sims, a wispy, straw-haired freshman. Eyes blackened with mascara, a wash of rouge painted over blemished skin. You’ve only seen her once before, in the first meeting of your “Mystery of God” course. Now she kneels in front of you, barely a breath away, on the Persian rug that covers your office floor. The resource bookshelf looms at her back, all thick vertical tomes, and for a moment you feel as though the books are prison bars, and you’re trapped in a cell with the girl.

“I want to know the words,” she says, weaving her thin fingers together, holding her clasped hands in front of her chest. She turns those inky eyes toward you. The collar feels stiff at your throat; each cuff a cotton shackle. This isn’t the first time you’ve felt this way.

In seminary you shared a dorm with a ruddy faced boy from Boise: Patrick Brennan. Wistful and shy, the pink in his cheeks like a constant blush, Patrick looked to you for guidance during his first year. You quickly grew fond of him, and began taking him along for hikes through the wooded hills. Marching hither and yon, throwing your arms open to vistas and declaring “This is God’s glory,” you imagined yourself a great teacher. Finally after months of such excursions, you led Patrick to an icy spring, stripped off your clothes, and dove in. He stood ashore, trembling.

“Come in, Patrick. There’s nothing finer.”

Slowly, with eyes cast down at the earth in front of him, Patrick began to remove his clothes. His cardigan, his shirt (freezing up at each button, then willing himself onwards), his undershirt, his belt. When he’d gotten to his briefs, so pale white against the rosy hue of his delicate thighs, he darted a glance at you, and caught the angle of your stare. Face burning crimson, he re-dressed and retreated, leaving you feverish in the cold water. You’d been found out. The swirling current offered no cover from God’s rigid gaze, and Patrick never spoke to you again.

Now, so many years later, Becky Sims kneels before you. Her eyes are shut tight, her hands held together so fervently that white spreads from where her fingers touch. You can see the florid glow rising under her makeup, blooming upon her neck and upper chest. A heat builds in your own cheeks; you grow slightly dizzy; there is a prickling in your loins. This young girl before you, desperate for what you can give.

Before you know it you’re on your knees with the girl, gripping her hands in your hands, praying. A creature lives within all of us, it buries itself in the depths of our bodies, bound by muscle and bone. A creature that yearns for miracle light, but digs like a tick. You hold Becky’s tiny hands in your own moist grip, and say a prayer for her. You say a prayer for Patrick Brennan. You say a prayer for yourself.

Marcos Soriano

Cradled within his palm, slightly brighter in color than the pink of his skin, was a single pill. Roughly triangular in shape, and no larger than a child’s first tooth, the pill had cost him more than the equivalent of a year’s lease on his Volvo V70.

It was love itself.

He’d spent more than three weeks searching for it. He’d met with strangers in dark alleyways and the backs of booming clubs. He’d paid dearly for hints and clues. He’d made telephone calls to numbers with unknown area codes. He’d spoken passwords, and driven to isolated locations, and carried enough cash to make himself feel queasy. And now he had it.

Love itself.

A high percentage of dopamine and norepinephrine, to provoke the euphoria of first attraction. Androgens and estrogens for the heat of lust. Oxytocin and vasopressin to smooth the rush with the dreamy bliss of a long term relationship. A perfect chemical symphony.

He held it in his palm, gazing at it, but seeing Sophie instead. He saw her hair in its morning tangle, her eyes thick with sleep. He saw her in their shower, head bowed and arms crossed as if she were praying. He saw her at the other end of the dinner table, her eyes glimmering in the candle’s flicker. And he saw her as he’d seen her last, a month before, hanged from the banister, her neck stretched long, her bare feet dangling. She hadn’t left a note.

He put the pill in his mouth, and tried to swallow, but his tongue was dry, and the pill caught in his throat. He reached for the bottle, to wash it down. He raised the bottle up, and gulped hard, kept on gulping until the bottle was empty. Even after he’d forced the pill through, and the chemicals had started to do their work, he could feel where it had caught. He could feel it, and it brought the tears to his eyes.

Ryan McCarl

It began, to pick an arbitrary beginning, with a key that would not turn in a lock. I hauled my first load of bags and boxes into a Mass Ave complex, struggling through two heavy gates with my car against the curb. Up a slow, sweating elevator, and I gratefully dropped everything in the hallway, inserted the key, and turned – and nothing happened. A half-hour of phone calls later it came to light that the place for which I had signed a lease that morning would remain occupied by the current tenant for another month. Profuse apologies from the real estate agent, and for me a restless night in a hotel.

I got a new set of keys and a new one-bedroom, and when the second move was complete I struggled a twenty-five-dollar air conditioner into the window, threw on a fresh shirt and shorts from the sprawled-open suitcase, and sat uncomfortably on the air mattress, sinking to the floor. A chair and desk would have to come later. I knew no one in the city.

Afternoon light filled the window, and the question of the night awaited my response. I had no response and a to-do list that was empty. Louder than the birds and car-horns and air conditioner’s drone I heard the chaos that is in me, the thoughts that will not be centered.

The night approached: I could see it in the window. The world open before me and I open before a world that does not know me.

I made an acquaintance at the bar near Harvard Square. She was curious about what I was writing in my leatherbound journal between sips of a Boston ale.

Three days later she sent me a message and asked if I had plans for the weekend. And I had to give the sheepish response that everything had changed, that I was back in the safety and stasis of my hometown, writing from a familiar coffee house, compulsively checking my e-mail between job applications flung hopelessly out into the ether of inboxes. I no longer lived or worked in Boston; would not be back in the near future, so far as I knew.

How did it come to this? Well, it was a Thursday night, my second or third night in the city. And the real estate agent called to say that the lease for the new room was prepared, the old one was void, and I would need to come in the following morning to sign. Twelve months at eight hundred dollars a month. A good place, overlooking the edge of Harvard Yard. Walking distance to a first job at least as good as any other.

But I am not the sort to comfortably sign twelve-month leases, and I immediately saw my opening, a swiftly-closing emergency exit door. The chaos in my mind rose to a fever-pitch. Memories of other options believed in, pursued, and gone: paths opened and unwalked. Rosy dreams of teaching flashing past images of a businessman in a suit, walking off a plane into some foreign flag-lined airport with a full wallet and a copy of the Journal under his arm.

And the next day it was over. The sun rose over the Mass Pike, hovered forever over the upstate highways of New York, and died as I charged forward into Ontario. The caffeine kept falling off and I kept stopping to recharge, and I fought against the fatigue of a sixteen-hour drive. By the time Flint passed in the Michigan darkness all the hopes of being homeward had passed: I was exhausted and afraid, unemployed and in debt.

I had explained myself over and over to friends and family on the drive, which keeps one’s mind off the infinity of the road but just the same drains our word-exhausted reasons into dust. I had no money; I would have to empty two retirement accounts in a rock-bottom market and swallow the loss to cover the credit card I would soon fill again. God that I might find new work, closer to home.

I am back from Boston and have several homes and none. Other doors have opened and closed. Ladders I have climbed so proud to reach new heights of discontent. I stand and live in the unimagined neighborhoods of the world, I occupy the career-dreams of others, but my heart rages against all reason and I reliably run chasing after something else, no different really than the dogs that destroy the grass in a yard by chasing whatever opportunity happens by.

Terry Sanville

I hadn’t seen him for days. The seat next to me on the bus to San Fernando Junior High stayed empty. There were rumors: a fiery car crash, a crippling polio attack, the Russians kidnapping his whole family. The Sanders’ Studebaker was missing from their driveway. My mind conjured fantastic tales. But on Saturday afternoon, something bounced against my bedroom window and I saw him climbing our walnut tree.

“Aaron, where’ve you been? I was worried.”

“Sorry, Akela. I didn’t have time to tell ya.”

“Tell me what?”

“My parents dropped me at Aunt Barbara’s in Newport Beach. No big deal.”

“Why’d they do that?”

Aaron hesitated. “Don’t know. Pop said somethin’ about a job in LA.”

“But why’d your mother have ta –”

“Hey, I don’ know. Okay?” Aaron scowled.

“Probably more secret spy stuff, huh?”

“You got a screwy mind, Akela, ya know that?”

“Mother says I have a vivid imagination…going to be a writer, or maybe an artist.”

“Yeah, well before ya do, ya gotta help me.”

“We’ve got all tomorrow to do homework.”

“Not that,” he said, impatiently. “Come on.”

Following my normal parent-avoidance procedure, I climbed out the window and shinnied down. It was easier to just disappear than explain everything to Mother. Ever since my first period she wanted to track my every move…as if the neighborhood coyotes could smell me.

We slipped out the back gate into the rolling hills that surrounded our row of pink and green tract homes. Aaron headed upslope toward a grove of trees. I struggled to keep up, inhaling the scent of wild oats and sage. At the top, I was dripping, my T-shirt wet between my tiny breasts.

“Come on, let’s climb her.” He grasped the trunk of a huge oak, its gray bark patterned like alligator hide. Aaron climbed like a trapeze artist ascending to his high platform. My own technique involved bear hugging the tree and scooting upward, losing skin and some pride along the way.

Halfway up, the trunk divided into three massive limbs. I straddled one, Aaron balanced easily on another. The wind whistled through the brittle leaves. The branches rolled slowly beneath us.

“See the way they twist in the wind?” he asked.

“Huh?”

“The limbs.”

“Oh.”

“When we lay the floor, we can’t nail it to anything. The tree would tear it apart.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Our house…ya know, our very own house.”

Even before our family moved to California from Hawaii, Mother had warned me about haole boys who wanted to play “house,” a variation of the “Doctors and Patients” game, only with more serious consequences. But this was different. What did building a tree house have to do with anything? Why was Aaron acting so creepy? The week before, he’d sleepwalked his way around school, followed me like a stray dog, and stayed late at my place to finish homework.

My puzzled look must have made him mad because he bolted into the treetop.

“Aaron, come down. Tell me about your… your house thing.”

He stood on a limb no thicker than my wrist and bounced up and down, his slender arms holding onto almost nothing. The wind whipped black hair into my face and I struggled to scrape it away. When I did, he was poised on the branch next to me.

“What da ya think of my idea?”

“Why do you want to build a tree house?”

His face darkened. “Don’ know. Just thought it’d be, ya know, fun.”

“But we’ve never built –”

“If ya don’ wanna do it, JUS’ TELL ME.”

“You don’t have to yell.” I looked away.

“Sorry. I…I just thought it’d be…be our own hideout…away from….”

“But a tree house is a big job…we’ll need to use your father’s tools and – ”

“I’m not touchin’ none of his stuff, ” he growled.

“You in trouble with your Pop?”

“Yeah.”

“What for?”

“Him and Mom were yelling at each other. I…I can’t stand that…told him to…to SHUT THE HELL UP. But he wouldn’t…kept calling her a…a…” Aaron swiped at his eyes and looked away.

“Jeez, Aaron.” I watched his whole body shudder, like the time I had the shakes from chicken pox. Gradually, he quieted. I reached forward and touched his arm. “Hey look, building a tree house could be really cool. But my family doesn’t have anything to build it with.”

The only object my father owned that might be considered a tool was the slide rule he used to teach math.

Aaron sniffed and wiped his face on his T-shirt. “Jus’ let me worry about tools.”

“But where are we gonna get wood?”

“Those houses they’re building down the street. There’s always stuff layin’ around, and we can take –”

“You want me to steal?”

Aaron smiled weakly. “They don’t use half of what they got. They’ll never miss it.”

I stared into the valley at our postage stamp homes, at Aaron’s father, lying face down on a lawn chair in their back yard. His parents liked to sunbathe…they were darker than me. I couldn’t see his mother.

“But how we gonna get the stuff up here?” I asked. “It won’t be much of a secret if we drag it through the weeds.”

“We can do it at night, take it up the hill in back of the Writson’s, then across the top.”

“You’ve got this all figured out, don’t you?”

“Yeah…sort of. Come on, Akela. It’ll be…be just for us.”

Aaron scrambled to the end of the limb, face flushed, eyes wide. He reached for an overhead branch, pulled himself up, and circled the treetop before rejoining me. Leaning forward, he kissed my lips, his nose leaving a smudge on my glasses. His breath smelled of Juicy Fruit. It was better than our first time. I felt his eyes boring through me. Shivering, I kissed him back.

***

Thanksgiving passed before we finished collecting the materials: timbers, planks, two-by-fours, rope, bolts and nails, and an old carpet from our garage. Hauling sheets of plywood was the toughest. We stumbled uphill in the darkness, the moon reflecting off high clouds, while my parents camped in front of the television, believing I was upstairs with Aaron, doing homework.

On New Year’s morning we climbed the hill. It had rained the night before and my jeans got soaked in the wet grass. But our supplies were dry, under a tarp that used to cover the old boat in back of the Foley’s house. Aaron wouldn’t tell me where he got the tools.

He pulled folded sheets of binder paper from his pocket and spread them on the ground. “See, I figure we can build it like this. My Pop made me learn how to sketch things, like when he builds cabinets.”

“Those look great. But…but do you think we can do it?”

“Yeah, sure. You can help with measuring and lifting…and I’ll do the… the rest.”

We spent that morning measuring distances between the limbs with a long tape. At first, it was hard for me to balance. I almost fell and Aaron grabbed my braid to steady me. But after a while I lost my fear and could concentrate on the work and not the height. By the end of the first week we had the floor beams cut and positioned. The frame balanced on the three main limbs, lashed with ropes, moved as the tree moved.

As the days grew warmer Aaron became more angry or sad, I couldn’t figure out which. We hardly talked. He quit the baseball team a week after making the cut. During our homework sessions he didn’t try kissing me or anything. The only time his face lit up was when we worked on the tree house. It was almost summer before we finished it, a single large room with a window facing the valley, slanted roof, and a ladder leading to a padlocked side door. Inside the swaying house, we sat in silence, his arm wrapped around my shoulders. I felt a strange vibration going through him.

“Are you all right, Aaron?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“What’s going on? You’ve been, ya know, weird.”

“Just stuff.” He began pounding the carpeted floor with his fist.

“Is your Pop yelling again? Maybe I can – ”

“You can’t help. It’s all screwed up…all blown apart.”

“I was just trying – ”

“DON’T.”

We sat not touching. Boards creaked. Finally, he took my hand. “We could, ya know, live here, just you and me, away from all –.”

“What? Here? You crazy hoale boy…we could never… my Mother…”

Aaron scrambled up, his face bent into a grotesque mask I’d never seen before. The ladder shook and rattled as he plunged downward. I sat frozen, watching him tear across the hilltop, running madly through the waist-high weeds, his red-blond hair blasted like flames by the wind. The oak’s limbs bucked and tossed, the tree house moaning its pain.

After that day, Aaron wouldn’t sit next to me on the bus. When school let out for the summer, he all but vanished. Mother must have noticed. I was eating lunch when she started in with her third degree.

“How is your boyfriend, Aaron?” she asked, smirking.

“Why? What do you mean?” I played innocent, ignoring the boyfriend dig.

“He seems…seems troubled, and he hasn’t come around.”

“Uh huh.”

“Did you two have a fight?”

“Noooo.”

“I should talk with his father.”

“Please, just stay out of it,” I whined. Why would she want to talk with his father when she’s a good friend with his mom?

“Something’s not right,” Mother continued, “spending too much time in that tree house.”

“You know about the…”

“Of course we do. What kind of parents would we be if we didn’t?”

“Don’t tell Aaron you know, okay?”

“I won’t. But I really should talk with Howard.”

“Why…why not talk with his mom?”

Mother stared at me, wide-eyed. “Oh Lord, Aaron didn’t tell you?”

“What? Tell me what?”

Her bottom lip trembled, cheeks paled. “Aaron’s mom, ah…left a few weeks back.”

“What do you mean, left?”

“Well…Betty fell…fell in love with another man and…”

“How could she do that?”

“It happens, Akela. The heart will have its own way.”

A dull pain surged through my chest. “Aaron should have just told me.”

“It was probably too awkward. But I really need to talk with Howard and – ”

“He hates his father. I’m the only one…left.”

The summer heat suddenly made our house suffocating. I bolted from the table and ran outside and up the slope. I was mad at Aaron for not telling me, angry with myself for being stupid. I had so little experience with love and betrayal. But I knew what it would feel like if my own mother left. Just the thought made my heart hurt.

Halfway up the hill I looked downslope. Mother stood in our backyard, hands on mountainous hips, watching. I whirled and continued climbing to the grove of trees. Something seemed out of place, the branches weren’t arranged right, or something new had been added. Creeping into the shade of our oak, I stared at jagged pieces of the tree house scattered on the ground. I gazed upward. High above me, Aaron swayed stiffly from a thick rope, his eyes open, mouth gaping, swollen tongue sticking out.

The sound of my scream shook me. It went on and on. I dashed to the edge of the hill. Mother charged toward me through the weeds, her green muumuu billowing in the afternoon wind. I sobbed and stared into the valley, at lines of houses snaking their way into every crease. My body felt beaten, pummeled, and I waited for Mother to fold me into her soft embrace. But I knew even then that she could never take the ache away.

J. Andersen

The assignment was simple, the man, not so. All I had to do was spend a week poking, probing, and if necessary, pulling from him the information required. After waiting a half hour at the pub, I was about to leave, flustered, when I saw my quarry enter…sharp, exact, and malign. He headed straight towards me, glowing cigarette leading the way, hat at a jaunty angle, worn sports jacket highlighting his small frame. Extending my hand to meet his, he ignored my bodily presence completely, focusing his unseen eyes on my hip pocket. “So, are y’gonna get the fuckin’ drinks in, or wot?” he barked. “Er..yes, yes, …of course” I stammered, quitting my cleverly rehearsed introductory speech and ice-breaking jokes. I was now forced into a servile position, “Get us a stout” he said, and I walked off to the bar, arousing the suspicions of the regular customers who looked as if they had to be dusted from time to time. A blonde woman with thick, pouty lips eyed me suspiciously from the confines of her faux fur jacket, which was thirty years out of date, but suited her nonetheless. Turning quickly to the long oaken bar, the roar of a darts game covered my request to the barman, who was polishing already clean pint glasses with a cloth. I had to raise my voice to meet his hairy ears. Nodding, he returned with two fresh pints “That’ll be four and twelve,” he said, taking my five pound note, and depositing the change on the clean, dry bar. “And just one other thing, if you don’t mind” which I didn’t, eager to gain information from any and all sources, “why on Earth would anyone want to interview HIM?” he asked, pointing to my subject, who was now slouched in a corner bench, signaling his impatience clearly by tapping his foot. The best answer I could manage was “Well, er..it’s just that he’s sort of a…’cult figure’ in other parts of the world. And, he’s never granted an interview before…until now.” I beamed at this last bit of information, and at this proud moment, the rather beat looking blonde laughed and blew smoke out of her pert, snub nose “He must be really hard up this week,” she snorted “’cos normally, a man like Andy Capp would’ve beaten the shit out of you by now!” I forced a laugh, a grin, and a paltry wink, and made a realistic exit back to the table, not wanting to keep Mr. Capp waiting.

After years of relative silence and obscurity, THE Andy Capp was about to reveal to me, your faithful reporter, his inner workings, hopefully. He seemed a man of few words, and rather reactionary reactions. I wanted to chart the course his personality took, and try to make sense of it all. A straightforward assignment enough, as it were, if he were willing, which he was about eight pints later. We came to the agreement that I would stay at his house for the week, and tag along with him as unobtrusively as possible—he made special note of this last condition by making a fist and holding it under my nose—all this, in return for buying him his libations.

By midweek, having exhausted the magazine’s expense account and some of my own savings, I was nonetheless impressed, or at least awed by Andy’s lifestyle, and decided to carry on with what would be my most important assignment to date, both personally and professionally. On Saturday, he managed to play an entire game of soccer with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Not only that, but Andy also scored six goals, and started, fought, and won three separate fights.

A routine developed. I slept uncomfortably on the floor while Andy napped—frequently, and paid his bar tab every afternoon and evening. Covering his expenses like a generous blanket. I also bought drinks for Andy’s friends, and the seemingly identical looking women he courted at the pub, but had to make myself scarce while he romanced them up against walls in urine-soaked alleyways. I also met Andy’s longtime friend and companion, Chalkie, and bought his drinks too.

The week came to an end, quietly, as we sat in the front room of the Capps’ small townhouse, me thinking about the week spent together, he probably thinking about how many more drinks he could wring from my wallet. Who was this man, exactly, and why hadn’t he spoken more than a few grunts to me all week? Why was he so reluctant to bare his soul, when his physical body required so little to sustain itself? And why did I have to pawn my watch, and hitchhike to the airport? As if in answer, Andy suddenly looked me up and down from his perch on the sofa “Let’s go” he croaked, his voice strained, and he pointed in the opposite direction of his local public house. An hour later, in a distinctly uncharacteristic tea house, and refreshingly sober, Andy let Andy fall out before me. The drinking, the darts, the women, and finally, the cap. In my memory, he had never taken it off. It was on his head at every twist and turn of his rather exhaustive yet routine life. Never to be adjusted or altered in position by tumbling fights on each and every Saturday afternoon, never knocked askew by a chance meeting with Flo and her rolling pin. Never sent flying into the street as the result of a slap from one of the girls with the pert noses, bobbed hair and fake fur jackets. I finally asked the question, “Why?” why he never took his hat off, even at bedtime, and presumably bath time as well.

Tilting his head sideways, and then lowering it, Andy’s delicate, nicotine stained hand grasped the brim of his peaked cap. Taking a deep breath from his cigarette, he lifted the cap upwards, making a slight sucking sound, and placed it on the table, lost and lonely. Trembling slightly, I stared at the shadowy space where the hat had been. Andy broke the fearful silence with a strained, gravelly whisper “You want to know why I never take me cap off, you speccy bastard?” Knowing full well my answer, Andy raised his oddly pointed head, and looked at me…directly. Shaded for years behind a cheap twill hat, two bright, blue orbs, book ended by iridescent whites, with ebony pupils pinpointing an exact center, stared at me with an honest intensity. Never had I seen eyelashes that long or sensuous, on man or woman, and a sparkle glinted from them, even in the grim Northern dusk. Those eyes spoke reams of poetry and magic to me, and I wondered aloud why. Why had this man never shown his gift to the world, as success in the cartoon would be guaranteed, not just a marginal spot in low-level dailies? In answer, Andy shrugged and wiped a large tear from his left eye. Again, he addressed me with more words than he had used the entire week, putting his cigarette out on the table, along with, it seemed, his carefully constructed defenses. “A long time ago…” he began, voice aquiver “I promised me mum I’d never abuse these eyes..that I’d never exploit them…’cos some folk don’t have ‘em. She didn’t. Not even pupils.” He leaned closer to me “And her…just a poor orphan…..Annie…”.

Bruce Bromley

She thought that she wanted him to stay in the same place, but she did not know where that place was.

She wanted to be able to return to him, to come back with bags of vegetables, coffee, and cheese, to open their apartment door and smell the rosemary soap he showered with on weekday evenings before Noah was born. She would track him through the kitchen, down the hall, into the living room where he would be standing before the window, spotting the snow that must always be about to fall. The back of his legs would glisten with water that had not dried. She touched his tail-bone with her hand: “Keep it there,” he said, the bone screened by her hand.

She could not protect him.

She carries the weekend shopping up the stairs, imagining the scene behind her apartment door. Louisa, her husband’s mother, would have wanted to read to Noah, but she chose, as usual, to do her nails. Noah is evaluating a monster movie in which the dead stalk the living in houses whose cardboard walls are about to come down. “Stop jiggling on the bed,” Louisa insists, the nail polish tumbling to the floor. “They all look alike,” Noah replies, referring to the living and the dead. He will not be interested in distinguishing them; he won’t hear her key twisting in the lock.

When she opens the door, Noah is at the kitchen table, scratching paper with a crayon. Red and shaped like a missile, the crayon dwarfs his right hand.

“Did it hurt him?” Noah asks, shaking the table as he draws.

“Where’s your grandmother?” she responds, trying not to look down. She opens the refrigerator and finds his half-eaten tuna sandwich on a shelf next to an empty pint of apple juice.

“You drank your juice,” she says, facing the back of his neck, exposed by the shortness of his hair. She sees herself wanting to shield it with her hand.

“Look,” he directs her, holding up the paper cemetery of stick-men without heads, without clothes, piled at the bottom of the page. Their heads seem to bounce in the upper right-hand corner, as though they had been bowled there.

“It hurt,” he tells her, giving her the paper and the crayon.

When she looks in her bedroom, her husband’s mother is lying on the bed, asleep, painted nails leaning on her thighs. Disturbed by the pillow, Louisa’s hair crouches on her face, shadowing the vertical line between her eyebrows so that the line merges with her nose. Her lips are the color of her nails, smudged at the corners, as though she had been talking. A woman on the television sprays kitchen stains with an aerosol that encourages the stains to disappear. Turning off the television, she notices how the polish puckers at Louisa’s cuticles, emphasizing the grey, ridged skin below them. It will be time to wake her.

But she does not wake her.

What she wants, when she enters the living room, is not to remember the ruin of the car, the ruin of his face that she could not identify under one of the wheels, as if the car had birthed him on a road from which he would not rise. She wants to forget the duplicates of his face stiffening in picture frames on tables she cannot yet discern. She does not want the light that the room can offer her. She wants to walk through the room and approach the window, while in the apartments overlooking the park, lights blink on, disclosing the snow that does not fall, the anonymous father and son parking a car that will not engulf them, permitting them to move up the brownstone’s steps that are always there. She wants to wake Louisa and send her home. She wants to sit at a table with Noah and draw a body uniformly whole. It will not smell of rosemary soap or require the kind of protection that was beyond her. Together, they will position it on the page, and to them it will seem almost incapable of breaking.