#272: "I Dreamed of Mark Messier" by Leslie Pietrzyk

***As noted last week, this post will be the final to appear in Redux as I have decided to put aside my editorial duties. Archives will be maintained, and a guide to the more-than-250 authors published here appears below, to your right.

~This story previously appeared in New York Stories (2001)

             This happened several years ago, though I had to look at a calendar before I believed that much time had gone by.  In fact, I think Mark Messier plays for another team now, is retired, has left the country, something, something big, something dramatic.  But what do I know about any of that?

            My boyfriend Andy had been watching Stanley Cup hockey play-offs all weekend, so when I told him Monday morning that I’d had a dream about Mark Messier, he said, “Was he playing for Edmonton or New York?” and I said, “I don’t know,” and he said, “Was he on the Oilers or the Rangers?”, and I said, “I don’t know,” and he got kind of ticked:  “Well, what color was his shirt?”, and I said, “Coral,” and then he got really mad—“No team jerseys are coral, not even expansion teams would pick coral.  What the hell is coral, anyway?”

            Actually, Mark Messier hadn’t been wearing a shirt, because what’s the point of dreaming of a muscley hockey player if he’s got on his shirt the whole time?  But that wasn’t anything you’d say to your boyfriend, not when you were talking around the edges about getting married and no one was getting any younger and there were biological clocks going off all over the place.

            “Well, what else, Lynne?” he asked.

            “It was just a dream,” I said.  “So who cares?”  We were going to be late for work; he was driving, and there was some crash miles ahead of us on the highway.  Whenever he drove there was some crash.  When I drove, we had green lights and clear lanes and no commercials on the radio.  Right now, we were absolutely still.  Every car in every lane was still.  I watched drivers around us whip out their phones to scream at people already at work.

            “I have to know if the Rangers are going to win the Cup,” he said.

            “Not unless their defense steps up,” I said, repeating what I’d heard on the radio in the shower this morning.  I wouldn’t know defense from picket fence.

            “This traffic sucks,” he said.  “The Rangers’ defense sucks.”

#270: "News of the Loch Ness Monster" by Carla Douglas

~This story previously appeared in The New Quarterly  (2003).

My father has his telephone set to ring twelve times before the answering machine picks up. Tonight he gets it on the eighth—just as I’m deciding whether or not to leave a message.

“Hello,” he says, expectant but not hopeful.

“Hi, Dad, it’s me—”

“Oh, yes.” He fumbles with the phone. “Yes, of course, hello dear.”

“Hi, Dad.”

He always knows my voice, but I tell him who it is anyway. He’s going blind—I have just recently learned this, and I presume he needs help making the visual connection. I realize this is something like shouting at people who don’t speak English.

“You’re home. I didn’t know if you’d be there. I didn’t wake you up, did I?”

“No,” he says, “I’m just resting. I’ve just finished my dinner.”

“Uh huh. What did you have?

“A meal on wheel. A piece of chicken with a vegetable and potato.”

Did the people who invented meals on wheels ever intend for them to be anything but plural? I imagine a chicken drumstick on a unicycle, somehow managing to get up the steps to his apartment door and press the buzzer.

“And was it okay?”

“Yes, it was fine,” he says, “very nourishing.” He says noorish—rhymes with moorish.

I have two pictures of my father. Or rather, I picture him in two ways. In one, he is sitting in a bright, spacious living room. He is nicely dressed in grey flannels—slacks, he calls them, or trousers—and a clean, pressed shirt. He could be expecting a visitor. In this picture he is pleasantly occupied; a fresh breeze blows in through the open window, and there is definitely no gold shag carpeting.

In the other picture, the one I see when I talk to him on the phone, he is hunched over his unwiped kitchen table in the dim light of a single overhead bulb, staring at the blank wall. The sink is stacked with oatmeal-encrusted bowls and glasses rimmed with rinds of old milk. There’s a smell, too—sour food combined with cooking odours from other apartments and the open tube of liniment in the bathroom. I am in this picture because I am the one connected to the other end of the telephone.

And what am I doing? Mostly, I’m trying to keep these images at bay. And on this particular night I’m fumbling with a flashlight and candles, because to the east of Toronto, where I live, a blanket of ice has descended upon us and shut down the power grid. I wonder if he can see me in the dark.

My father lives in Niagara, in a renovated red-brick cannery. This sounds quite grand, and it could be. Everywhere, it seems, old warehouses and factories have been transformed into spectacular living quarters, with cavernous interiors, exposed brick, and walls of floor-to-ceiling windows looking out on urban streetscapes full of shops and cafes. On the outside, most of these buildings have retained a period facade, some even sporting signs identifying the original owners and uses—Dempsey’s Candy Factory; Canadian Textiles.

These lofts always seem to be occupied by designers and artists, part of the space being given over to studio, where they work, live, and entertain lavishly. You see them in magazines and on the Home and Garden television channel. Seldom do they have children, but in the rare cases that they do, the family occupies two floors of the building, the parents’ and children’s spaces connected by a system of intercoms, wrought-iron spiral staircases, fire poles, and perhaps even a slide.

My father’s apartment isn’t like this. You would have to be told—and then you still might not believe it—that until the 1950s it was a thriving little cannery, one of a dozen or more in the city that packed soft fruit and shipped it across the country. Peaches, plums, apricots, pears—staple winter fare in most homes before advances in refrigeration and trucking brought oranges, strawberries, cantaloupe, and anything, really, from the south, year-round.

Only traces of its former use remain on the outside of the building. The old, tall windows have been replaced with cheap aluminium sliders, smaller than the originals, and brown siding fills in the gaps at the bottom. But the bricks are pleasingly weathered, and the oversize double doors hint at how the structure could have been transformed, if only the developer had had more imagination.

“… but they always give you too much. I can’t work my way through all that.” He’s still talking about his meal on wheel.

“I didn’t know if you’d be home.”

Usually when I call, he isn’t. Nearly every night he has dinner with his woman friend, a widow he met at his bridge club not long after my mother died. She has become his constant companion. She feeds him, phones him, and fills his head with ideas about how offspring should properly behave. For her fussing attention my father returns a kind of blind party loyalty. She is the final word, the source of all opinion, and he acts as a conduit, reporting all the news to us—mostly about her children’s and grandchildren’s (wholesome, practical and infinitely superior) achievements, but other things, too. She persuaded him to rent this dismal apartment a few blocks from her house. “He’s legally blind, you know,” she told my sister, hurling it like an accusation.

For a time her mere existence provided me with guilty relief, but this soon made way for smug certainty that my mother wouldn’t have liked her either. “She’s not really my type,” my mother would have said, with a sniff. So now I stand on guard with my siblings, ready—eager, even—to preserve our parents’ marital tensions beyond the grave.

#266: "The Conveyance of Sound" by Virginia Hartman

~This story previously appeared in The Hudson Review (1998).

            “The doctor will be here in a moment, Mr. Cameron.”  The nurse pulled the door behind her as she left, and I turned toward Tommy, sitting at the end of the examining table, his white-sheathed arms wrapped around himself in an involuntary embrace.

            “What happened?”  I said.  My voice echoed in the bare room. 

            He looked down at his dangling feet, the only limbs still free.  He moved them aimlessly as if he were sitting on a dock, cooling his toes in the water.  He acted like he belonged here, like it wasn’t all a mistake.  But it had to be.

            “Tommy, what happened?”  I repeated, with a bit more force than I’d intended.  He didn’t answer.  That used to be his way of getting at me—acting vacant, giving me a “Duhhh…” when he didn’t feel like answering.  Now, he wasn’t kidding.  He was sitting at the edge of that table like an idiot—so help me, that’s exactly what was going through my mind—my older brother looking like the village idiot.  I took him by the shoulders of that awful jacket and said, “Tommy, tell me what is going on!”  He looked at me—an unfocused, distant stare—and then he looked away.

            I felt someone’s hand on my shoulder, and heard a soft voice say, “Mr. Cameron, why don’t you join me in the next room?”

            It was a thin, severe-looking, middle-aged woman with black hair pulled tightly back in a barrette.  On her coat was embroidered in cursive writing, “Dr. Landis.”  She was the man in the white coat, I thought.  The one who comes to take you away.

            We stood behind a one-way mirror and watched Tommy from the other room.  I couldn’t shake the sensation that all this really wasn’t happening, that sooner or later I’d wake up.  I’d call tom and we’d laugh about this dream.  I touched the glass in front of me.  It was solid.

            Tommy went back to watching his feet.  The doctor must have been standing back here before, observing my brother and me like two bugs in a jar.  She had probably been sizing me up, too, diagnosing me.

            “Could you please take that jacket off him?” I said.

            “Yes, we will,” she said.  Her voice was a low whisper.  “He doesn’t seem to be a danger to himself anymore.”  She stood behind me, the two of us peeping through the glass at Tom.  “I was hoping that you might be able to elicit a reaction,” she said.

            I was going to ask her what happened, but before I could ask, she began to tell me.  Tommy had called the crisis center shouting, she said, shouting that something was about to happen.  When the operator asked what he meant, Tom said something like, “I just need some talk-back!”

            “Talk-back?  What is that?” I said.

            She didn’t know.  She thought I might know.  She waited, then continued.  After he said this, he accused the operator of not wanting to listen to him, and dropped the receiver, leaving it off the hook.  When the paramedics got to his building he was on the roof, sitting out on the edge of a cornice, dangling his feet, just as he sat now on the examining table.  According to the rescue team, when they pulled him back to safety, he flailed and resisted, but he didn’t say a word.

            The doctor stopped talking.  I felt like screaming at Tommy, “Cut it out!” but with that glass between us, my words would have only bounced back to me, unheard.  The doctor, standing at my shoulder, resumed speaking in her low tone, telling me that it might have been an isolated incident, but then what about his unresponsive state?  Had he been acting erratically?  Had he been depressed?  No, no, I said.  I couldn’t think.  The last thing I heard her say was that they’d keep him there for observation, and then I stopped listening.

            Pulling out of the dark parking lot I passed the “St. Mark’s Hospital” sign, and I thought of the directions Annie and I gave people who were driving to our house for the first time.  We used this place as a landmark.  “Turn left at the loony bin,” we always said.  Ha ha.

#264: "Goosepimples: by Dallas Woodburn

~This story previously appeared in Arroyo Literary Review (2014).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction

He isn’t bothering anybody. He’s just sitting in his car in the parking lot by the freshly mown soccer fields, waiting for his daughter to be done with practice. He isn’t looking at anything in particular, just gazing out in the direction of his pony-tailed daughter and her friends, running forward and back across the field, their cheeks flushed and their toothpick legs like pinwheels in their high rainbow socks.

            But he isn’t really watching them, nor is he particularly aware of the pigeons squatting along the telephone wire in the distance, clumped together like old ladies gossiping, nor of the acute blue of the sky behind them, so blue it almost seems artificial. He gazes towards all of these things but he doesn’t really see them, in the way one stares off vacantly into space when deep in thought or daydreaming.

            He isn’t daydreaming or deep in thought, but the opposite. His mind is blank, blissfully blank, like the clear blue bowl of a sky above them, only an occasional cloud-thought skittering past, dissipating before it wakes him from peaceful emptiness.

            It is a shadow that finally rouses him, falling across his face like a summons. He glances up through the dirt-streaked windshield, expecting to see the shiny red face of his daughter, but instead he is met with the round, shapely behind of a young woman. Tight Lycra shorts grip her perfect, tan thighs. He takes in the smooth-shaven backs of her knees, her slender calves tapering down to exquisite ankles, her running shoes edged in pink trim.

            Quickly he looks away, out at the blue sky, the telephone poles, the gray brick restrooms huddled in the midst of green expanse of soccer fields—but immediately his eyes itch to return to her. She is, after all, standing right in front of his car. Her curvaceous lower half directly at his eye level. Where else is he supposed to look?

            He looks.

#262: "The Jaws of Life" by Todd McKie

                                                                                                            

~This story previously appeared in Conclave (2012).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction

                          

Give us this day our daily bread. And give us, please, the good stuff. Give us something that smells of wheat, not plastic. Give us this day—right now—something good and chewy, baked with care, to sink our teeth into.

          Years ago, newly married and full of youthful enthusiasm, I tried to learn to bake bread. How hard could it be? In our pint-sized kitchen, surrounded by cookbooks, I added water to yeast, salt to flour. I kneaded until my fingers ached. I patted and poked and folded the dough. Eventually I produced six or seven edible loaves, but I also baked some things the dog wouldn’t touch: dense, burnt things more like rustic doorstops than loaves of homemade bread. The successes we ate immediately. Denise oohed and aahed. She made a fuss.

          “Mmm, this is good with butter,” she’d say. Or, “This is so good hot.”

          It was an awful lot of work for something that could be eaten in one sitting, something that only tasted good hot. After a few weeks, I gave up. Ever since, I’ve been glad to pay what’s asked for a good loaf of honest bread.

          Stories should have a bit of historical background mixed into them. That’s what I’m doing when I tell about my early attempts to bake bread and that’s what I’m doing, I suppose, when I tell you that Denise and I are good people. We’ve had, like most married folks, our share of hard times: lost jobs, dreams that disappeared so slowly we didn’t notice them creeping away, a thousand sad things big and small. I don’t recall a time, though, when we were too discouraged, too angry or scared to sit down at the end of the day and eat a meal together. We’re good people who love to eat.

          I  should mention one unhappy fact: Denise and I are fat. We’re not pudgy. We used to be. We used to be ample, heavyset, substantial. Now, God help us, we’re enormous. I guess, relatively speaking, I’m fatter than Denise, but that’s quibbling—we’re both porkers, plain and simple.

#260: "Ant Farm" by Laura Oliver

 ~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor for Fiction

--This story was first published in Glimmer Train Stories (1999).

       After Brian moved out I bought our daughter Erica an ant farm. I thought it would distract her. A flat plastic skyline sat on a slice of sand wedged between two clear plastic panes to form an underground window. Toys R Us couldn’t stock live insects however, so after buying the kit, we sent the enclosed coupon to Uncle Willy’s Ants and waited for our tenants to arrive in the mail. We were not to be alarmed if they arrived “sleepy” the literature stated, which meant, barely thawed.
       We set up the display in preparation of their arrival and read the instructions. “ANTS DON’T LIKE LANDSLIDES!” That meant don’t shake the farm. “ANTS DON’T LIKE LEFTOVERS!” A piece of fruit the size of an asterisk can feed a whole colony for a week, we discovered.
        I think of that now as ants scurry in erratic patterns to nowhere across the family room floor--but these are garden-variety ants that have somehow found a way into the house. Uncle Willy’s ants must have been derailed somewhere, because it has been three weeks and they have not arrived.
       “Don’t step on them Mom,” Erica says. “We can put them in the farm.”
       I am not actually stepping on them. I have bought a few ant traps and am encouraging one to venture inside with the toe of my shoe. He veers off again and again. Finally I pick him up and drop him on it. He scrambles away.
       Things have been like this since Brian left. The house painter I hired turned out to be an evangelist. My son Adam, a freshman at St. Luke’s, announced to Sister Francesca that he’s a practicing Hindu, pierced his ear and got a tattoo.
       “At least it’s not a skull and cross bones,” my son points out. “At least it doesn’t spell anything.”
       “It could have said, ‘Mom,’” I say.

#258: "Remember the Grass" by Tariro Ndoro

~This story first appeared in Thyini  as “Inevitable.” (2015).

~Selected by Kenneth A. Fleming, assistant editor for fiction

You know it is over when your grandmother comes from the general dealer and confronts you about it. You deny it all because perhaps you weren't just ready to deal with it yet. Your grandmother takes you on the next bus to town anyway and just when you've thanked God that the General Hospital is already closed, a young pharmacist tells your grandma that pregnancy tests can now be bought over the counter.

            She buys five to make sure before dragging you to your uncle's house in the township where dust floods the streets and kids ran around with snot on their faces and no trousers on. Unconcerned men laze around on rundown cars with their shirts off because it is summer, just like Mutare, just like the neighborhood you were uprooted from, while guavas fell from the trees and Rutendo played marakaraka with you until sundown.

Your uncle’s wife is surprised to see you, but when she sees the look on your grandmother’s face she acts like a good daughter in law and silently makes tea. Your grandmother refuses to drink it. Sweat beads down her temples, running from somewhere beneath her doek to the bottom of her neck and there is an eerie silence, like the time you snuck out at night to go dancing and locked your her in the house.

Taking the tests is hard enough with your grandmother and your aunt watching as you intently pee into the cup. Like the old ladies they are, there is a great fuss about following all the instructions to a T. The results don't surprise you – you’ve skipped two periods already. You have to wait for your uncle anyway, so your aunt makes another pot of tea – hot water in a yellow metal kettle with the milk and sugar thrown in it already and chunks of bread with only one slice margerined, just the way you've had it every day for the past two years since coming to live with your grandmother.

When your uncle arrives, the tribunal has to be held via loudspeaker on your grandmother’s solar phone, although not everyone’s opinion is heard because they are all headstrong and all loud and all right. Your grandmother is broken, she looks angry but she's crying. You've never seen her tears.

Every family member has something to say about it all but as always your own mother is silent. Your mother was silent too when you'd been caught talking to your Math teacher after twilight, and when you had failed all your subjects that school year and when you were caught changing the marks on her report card. They decide that your uncle and aunt should escort you to your new home.

The journey back to your grandmother’s is tense. From Rusape town all the way to Gunda turn-off no one speaks to anyone else, all you can do is listen to the vague radio somewhere behind the gossiping mothers and watch as the brown grass flies past you, just like the journey from Mutare, the one you thought had a return date on it but didn’t.

       When you arrive they pack everything you had with you when you came – it all fits into one satchel, and even the satchel was a donation but this isn't the time for details. That is why you went to the grass in the first place; it helped you forget about the rural school you now had to attend. It was light years away from feeding the chickens with their pecking, and the pigs with all their hovelly sounds...

Most of all it helped you to forget gratitude. They always forced you to remember that when you arrived you had nothing but the clothes you wore, that your Aunt Rumbidzai had paid your school fees and that it was Aunt Namato who brought you food every month. You were tired of justifying your existence. You hadn’t planned to stay that long with you grandmother. No one had planned it – except your mother.

       And so it is with your uncle and aunt that you walk the 2 km journey from your grandmother’s home to your new husband’s home. You will go without a price because you sold yourself cheap. You walk past fields that smell of fresh long grass and cow dung, fields in which you had lain as he had loved you. It was in these fields and fields further on that you had sat with him and learnt to forget, the world stopped still when you were here, but now it's catching up with you.

As you hear the njiva sing above you, you think of all the days you had played truant with him – he had quit school long ago so his presence came with intoxicating freedom. Out of the trees hanging low, he would pick hute for you as you sat there in the grass, hiding from busybodies.

The welcoming party is meager, one skinny sister in law suckling her baby, and your lover. Their homestead is peculiar in its lack of livestock. Your uncle and aunt leave after saying the necessary and for the first night you will be joining in his hunger, the hunger that that drove you to steal from your grandmother to feed him, isn’t that what love does? That is why Grandmother had insisted you leave with nothing, so you can see for yourself that he doesn't really love you.

But he does love you. Of course he has not been you first lover; your first lover had been the neighbour. But that was before he wanted to play the game with your baby sister too and that got you into trouble. Love stops where marriage begins. That's what they say. It is that way when finally you live with your man. You struggle for money and give birth to your first child on the side of the road and he dies before you get to hospital. You get pregnant again. You fight over something as crazy as five dollars and you make up, but not before he kicks you in the stomach and you lose that baby. Six months later you're pregnant again.

*****

THE STORY BEHIND THE STORY

“Remember the Grass” was inspired by a course in synchronous narrative. One of the readings for the class was “Rooster Pollard Cricket Goose” by Noy Holland which reminded me of rural Zimbabwe and also made me think about narrating a story from the perspective of a character who has been robbed of agency.

*****

ABOUT TARIRO NDORO

Tariro Ndoro is a Zimbabwean writer and an alumnus of the Rhodes University Master of Arts in Creative Writing progamme. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in New Contrast, Oxford Poetry, AFREADA and Fireside Fiction.

#256: "Far-Away Love" by Nahid Rachlin

~This story was previously published in Virginia Quarterly Review (1980).

~Selected by Kenneth Fleming, Assistant Editor, Fiction

                                    

                                                                                   

                                    I am standing at this street corner,

                                    Where we used to meet

                                    But is it the same street?

                                    -- a Persian song

            Soosan sat in the Gelato Lab, eating her plum sorbet while her son, having finished his, stood by the fish tank in a corner of the cafe watching the fish tumbling in the water. They both needed rest. For hours, they had been going from shop to shop in the labyrinthine Grand Bazaar in the center of Tehran, with her doing some the last minute shopping for the party she was giving for Darien’s tenth birthday.

            The café with the bright display of fruit and Cola bottles on a counter, green lights from tiny bulbs in the ceiling beaming, and its air fragrant with floral scents used in sorbets and gelatos was serene. But Soosan was far from relaxed. The closer it got to Darien’s birthday, the more she missed Bill, the American father of her child. How could she forget Bill, the stormy love between them that had come to an abrupt end ten years ago when he had to leave Iran, practically escaping, going back to America? Darien, looking so much like him, a son he had no idea existed, was a constant reminder of him. When the Revolution raged through Iran, with the Shah overthrown and a new Islamic regime about to take over, there was a wave of anti-American feeling that led to 52 Americans being taken hostage. Then the State Department had ordered all Americans residing in Iran to evacuate-- special planes had been sent for them. So she didn’t have a chance to even say good-bye to Bill. The Revolution and then the war with Iraq, which ended just a year ago, brought communication between Iran and other countries to zero. Phone lines were mostly disabled; post office didn’t deliver to other countries or received mail from them. The soap factory where she and Bill had both been working had closed soon after the American employees were forced to leave.

            She had kept hoping the relationship between Iran and America would resume and Bill would return. But everything got only worse. The hostages were held much longer than expected, over a year; the American embassy never opened, and a war, with Iraq attacking Iran kept going, making communication between Iran and other countries nearly impossible.

            She tried and tried to find a way to go to America and search for Bill but it became clear it was impossible for an Iranian to get a visa to go there.  Even if she could, how would she track him down in the vast country? She had no idea even what city he was living in.

            Her thoughts went to when she just met Bill. A young American man stopped by her at a bookstore where she was buying a novel in English. He began to talk switching back and forth from English to Farsi. They realized they both worked at the office of Parsa Soap Factory; she was a receptionist there, and he was an engineer consultant.     

             “I’m taking an English course in an evening class,” she had said to him.  “I see all the American movies shown in cinemas. I want to understand them in the original language.”

            “Maybe we can go to one of the movies together,” he said.

            She shook her head. He seemed to understand that she couldn’t accept the invitation, knew that it was forbidden in this culture for men and women to interact freely before they were married. They would have to see each other secretly.

            “Let’s go to dinner then, I know a good place outside of town.”

            She hesitated but then she agreed to that.

#254: "N.O.M.E." by Hildie Block

~This story was previously published in The First Line (2005).

"That was the best game we've ever had!"  Her eyes were shining as the setting sun glinted off her long dark hair with the pink streaks.  She looked like a little girl instead.  Instead of the 25 year-old with a wasted B.A. in English, suffocating as an administrative assistant that she was.

He dumped the Scrabble tiles into the box without another thought.  She suddenly looked like she'd been stabbed. 
            "What are you doing!"  She was standing and looked agitated.  She was digging her nails into her palms.  The blood started to drip again.  He wondered, not for the first time, why she filed her nails to a point.

He looked shocked.  "Wha' "

"The perfect game!  The perfect game!  It's gone!"

She sat down and looked about to sob.  He looked around the park to make sure no one was looking.  "Look," he said covering her hand with his, "we know we played the perfect game.  We know we did it, finally, we used every tile, and we know the score was exactly even."  The wind stirred the leaves at his feet.  He put his hand in his pocket, fingering the blue velvet box that he kept there like a talisman – the box that would come so close to making a public appearance and then disappear again-- and instead grabbed a clean napkin from lunch.  "Here," he said, handing it to her so she could dry her hands.  She stood, wiped her hands, shook her head, as if to shake a thought out of it and then smiled -- off they went for coffee at the new place around the corner, as planned.

*************

#248: "Who Owns This?" by Nathan Leslie

~This story appeared in Boulevard (2011).

There was this guy.  He called himself Franklin, though I found out later his real name was Charlie Smythe.  Well, Charlie (or whoever he was) liked the name Franklin.  Not Frank or Frankie.  Franklin.  He was proper that way.

            We both lived in the gated community, Meadow Haven.  I was working three nights a week at the Meadow Haven Club.  It was an upscale community pool—just for the residents of Meadow Haven.  The developers carved out a nine-hole golf course, a pool, a line of Jacuzzis, and faux-clay tennis courts.  The works.  Not that most of the Meadow Haven residents didn’t have their own means of entertainment (pools and Jacuzzis of their own), but I worked at the pool anyway.  If Meadow Haven residents wanted to be seen, they’d go to the pool.  That was the difference.  My job was to hand out towels (if needed) and make sure the residents signed their name and address in the assigned box.  I knew most of the regulars, so it was merely a formality.  I was good at being friendly, at smiling my clean-cut grin and validating the Meadow Haven ethos, or whatnot.  I’d get an occasional tip, a lawn-mowing gig.  It was generally relaxing.  There was nothing much to it.

            But back to Franklin.  Unlike most of the other regulars, Franklin always came to the pool unaccompanied.  Of course, our bread and butter were the housewives and their rug-rats.  Each afternoon Franklin would show up in his black Nylon jogging pants, his yellow or green t-shirt, and he always carried a twelve-ounce bottle of Deer Park water in his right hand—in between his finger and thumb as if it were a cigar.  He’d make a federal production:  unscrew the cap, take a small sip, lick his lips, lick his lips again, screw the cap back on dramatically with a flick of the wrist.  He liked being watched.  He liked attention. 

Franklin was a short man with a short man’s complex.  He had an Irish-looking face, with a pug nose and strawberry-blonde hair.  Franklin moved quickly, swinging his arms wildly, as if he were power-walking.  Overcompensation if you ask me.  He usually wore a rhomboid gold earring in each ear, pirate style.  When he took off his shirt I could see the weird, faded places where you could tell he had tattoos removed from his reddish skin.  But whoever removed the tattoos didn’t do such a hot job:  the ghost of his previous tattoos was still there.  When I knew him Franklin was maybe forty—the kind of guy who was not quite my father’s age, but certainly too old to be my brother or cousin.  But I was in college at the time, so my perspective of everything was skewed.

            So I was sitting at the desk reading an Elmore Leonard paperback propped on a stack of towels.  Franklin came up to me.  Most of the residents signed in, took a towel, said hello, and went for a swim.  I felt this guy standing there, watching me.  Just standing there.  Then I heard the smack, smack, smack of gum between his teeth.  His breath smelled like apricots.  Great, I thought, I have to look up from Rum Punch.

            “Hey, bub,” he said.  “Do you know who owns this?”

            I was dumbfounded.  The facial expression I screwed on probably shouted:  “That is a stupid question.”

            “Who owns this?  You do, really.”

            “Right,” he said, still chomping away on his apricot gum.  He crossed his arms as if to defend himself against the oncoming I-gotcha.  “But I still have to sign in.” 

            “You don’t literally own it,” I said.  “But the development owns the golf course, the pool, the Har-Tru tennis courts.  You know, your community association dues and membership fees help pay for maintenance.”  I don’t know why he didn’t see the big picture, but then I guess he wasn’t the first clueless rich guy in the world.

            “Well, I’ll be damned,” he said.  Franklin had an odd way of talking—some kind of aw-shucks 50’s amalgam, with a heavy dose of the new-agey that emerged as we became acquainted.  He was friendly, open-hearted; Franklin always was.  But there was something else there too.  Something.  I mean, “Bub?”  Who says that?  Franklin went on:  he just moved in and he figured he’d see if we needed a sculpture in our lobby.  “You have to have a sculpture,” he said.  He said it might add to the “authority” of the place, the overall “energy.”

            Now you have to understand, “lobby” is far too grand of a word to use to describe the area in which I sat—despite the dues and fees, which mostly covered salaries and upkeep of the facilities.  Aside from the desk, there was a scuffed miniature pool table with warped faux-cherry cues, an air hockey table, and a cheap, triangular, laminated coffee table—management used it for fliers and announcements and the like.  For penny-pinching reasons Meadow Haven didn’t give much thought to the lobby; residents complained it looked like the lobby of a public pool.  No room for a statue, unless it was a little desk-top paperweight do-dad.

            I shrugged, but Franklin kept pressing.  How the lobby needs a statue.  How every lobby should have a statue.  How a statue brings the “energies” of the room to focus.  How a statue makes a lobby feel homey, full.  Like I gave a rat’s ass.  I just wanted to be left to my own devices—to my on-the-job R&R.

            “I’ll have to ask Lynda,” I said.  I propped my head in my hand.  “She’s the manager.”  I let my gaze drift back down to Rum Punch, hoping he’d get the hint.

            “Great, thanks a mil, bub,” Franklin said.  “If you’d do that for me I’d really appreciate it.  And if you want a statue of your own, let me know, will ya?  I mean, I’ll sell you one lickety-split, on discount.”  He made clicking sound with his tongue and pointed at me as if we shared some inside joke.  We didn’t. 

            “Okay,” I said.

            “Just remember:  I’m a sculptor.  I sculpt.  This is my life-force.  Help support your local artist.  We are part and parcel.”  Of what, I thought.  I just didn’t get his whole thing.

            He smacked his gum and signed in, grabbed a towel, glanced at the name.  Even carrying a towel, Franklin somehow managed to swing his arms. 

            “I’ll ask Lynda,” I reiterated, trying to avoid his eyes.  The guy weirded me out from the word go.  I guess there are worse things; he was memorable. 

            Then I let Franklin dissolve into the background.  Went back to my Rum Punch.

#246: "Getaway" by Rachel Vogel

~This story was previously published in Passages North (2009).

~Selected by Kenneth A. Fleming, Assistant Editor, Fiction.

            Ellen lies on a bed at the Plaza Athénée, idly stroking the satin coverlet. She and Jim have been on plenty of weekend getaways, but none like this. We just need some time alone, he has promised, and Ellen wants to believe.

“The water pressure’s weak,” he calls from the shower. He’s annoyed and Ellen wonders how long he will take to ease out of it. In the early days, a drink before dinner did the trick. Now, an entire bottle of merlot can’t shake Jim of the tension he wears like a porcupine coat. Ellen’s sister has urged her to consult a lawyer.

            “Should I call the front desk?” Ellen’s words sound foreign to her, as if another woman has spoken them, a common occurrence since the birth of their child. Spending hours alone with a toddler has atrophied Ellen’s mind. She barely glances at the newspaper each morning before flipping to the ad inserts in search of diaper coupons. She used to read Wittgenstein, for Christ’s sake.

            Ellen looks around the suite, which contains several furniture arrangements they will not use, and lets her eyes linger on a Chippendale breakfront stocked with porcelain knickknacks. It’s funny how all you really need is a bathroom and a bed. Jim would disagree. Their first weekend away, he spent forty-five minutes shuttling around The Four Seasons Miami with the hotel manager. Every room was too small or too noisy. When Ellen finally suggested they settle for a junior suite on the second floor, Jim admonished her. “You’ll never get anywhere if you’re willing to settle.” Where am I going? she wondered, but just in case, she kept her mouth shut.

From the beginning, Jim’s dark eyes and barrel chest made her heart dance in a million directions, and she loved his quick tongue. Sure, it had gotten them into trouble. Like the time he said “fuck you” to the American Airlines flight attendant and security guards “escorted” them off the plane to the cheers of the other passengers. But Jim’s unpredictability provided a certain excitement. Besides, you couldn’t expect to get all of the good and none of the bad in a marriage.

Jim emerges from the bathroom, a towel wrapped tightly around his waist. Ellen loves when he is freshly groomed—the sweet scent of soap, the rubbery feel of his damp skin, the minty smell of toothpaste with just a hint of his real breath coming through. She pats the bed and he sits down. Then he reaches over and squeezes her nipple. God, how she hates that. In six years of lovemaking, Jim hasn’t learned not to go straight for her boobs or her cunt. She likes these parts worked up to, yearns for a delicate path that meanders to an exquisite ripeness. But she wants the weekend to go well. If she offends him—and when it comes to sex Jim is easily offended—he won’t shake it off and they’ll go ten rounds. So she lets him plot his course, even gamely strokes his thigh. In another minute, though, she can’t stop herself from remarking,

            “I wonder if there were any more bombings in Baghdad today.”

            Jim, who follows the war obsessively, grabs the television clicker and looks for CNN. Ellen breathes a sigh of relief. She isn’t ready to succumb, not yet. As he works the remote, she stares at the walls, seeking inspiration. Above the bathroom door, the creamy paper is curling back, exposing a gluey yellow compound which casts a tawdry glow on the rest of the room. The antique furniture, at first glance so elegant, now suggests the tired finery of a brothel in an old Western, while the fringed skirting on a red silk divan dangles like a beaded saloon door. Ellen wonders how many couples have groped each other here, prostituting their better judgment in a last-ditch effort to blow some oxygen back into the dying embers of their passion.

“Can you believe those bastards killed off four more Marines today?” Jim says. An image of blood-drenched bodies and twisted metal floats across the television screen. “Blew them to bits with a car bomb and got away.” He sounds animated, almost gleeful.

Ellen wonders if the attorney’s business card is still tucked in her sequin clutch where her sister slipped it one night after a difficult party.

She wriggles on the bed, a twinge of excitement shooting through her. When Jim turns off the news, she is ready for him.

*****

#241: "House of the Ancients" by Clifford Garstang

~This story was previously published in REAL (Regarding Arts and Letters) (2008).

  

Nick—having learned from his Lonely Planet guide that the Mexico City subway is cheap, but infested with pickpockets—clutches his shoulder pack to his chest. He knows that the obvious anxiety marks him as an American or, at best, a Canadian, but right now, eyeing his fellow passengers, he doesn’t care. He’s been walking all day, like a zombie for the last hour. He’s worn out. The blister on his heel burns. He detects, via the low-pitched growl at the bottom of his gut, that he might soon be laid low with whatever it is that keeps Alexis tethered to their hotel room. And now he needs to know—it’s essential that he knows—that he is headed in the right direction. The guidebook falls open where he’s dog-eared the subway map. He boarded at Auditorio and the train has just left Constituyentes. Good. South, just as he wants, toward Barranca del Muerte. Ravine of Death.

As the train pulls into Tacubaya, a sprawling station where three lines meet, he slips the guidebook back into the bag. At least the flood of new passengers won’t identify him immediately. Unless the shiny Nikes give him away. Or his White Sox cap. Or his Levis and University of Chicago t-shirt.

When the doors hiss open, a family enters: a dark man with a guitar slung over his shoulder, a woman with a babe-in-arms, and two small boys. At the head of the subway car, the man unslings the guitar and hugs it close, plucking the strings tentatively as he sings in a piercing voice that rises above the train’s clatter. The lyrics don’t penetrate Nick’s meager Spanish, but the other riders, who nod appreciatively with the staccato beat, seem to recognize the song. The wife takes a seat with the baby and keeps her eyes low. The boys—Nick has assigned them names, Roberto for the older, and Pablo for the little one—the boys make their way through the car, Roberto down the left side, Pablo down the right, each with a grimy hand extended, stopping before every promising passenger, waiting for a coin or a head shake, or a scowl.

It is tiny Pablo, wearing green sweat pants and a tobacco-brown sweater, who stands before Nick, gazing up at him with wide, dark eyes. The father’s voice sails through the car, an arrow Nick thinks is meant for him, and Pablo bounces his open hand, a hand no larger than a cat’s paw, on Nick’s knee. When Nick presses a peso into Pablo’s palm, there is no smile, no acknowledgment. The boy breaks his gaze and moves on. At San Pedro de los Piños, the boys jostle through the rushing passengers to join their parents, and the family passes into the next car, to be replaced by a grim-faced young man selling DVDs of a rock concert that he displays on a portable player held above his head, sour chords blaring from the machine’s tiny speakers as the vendor maneuvers through the oblivious crowd.

The train hurtles through the tunnel, a passage in time for Nick, back to his Chicago commute, images of Alexis flickering on the black windows, their future together, healing the strain of faded newness, feeling their way toward something solid and lasting.

#236: "When the Saints Go Marching Out" by Roland Goity

                                                                           

~This story originally appeared in Talking River Review (2006).

August 24, 2005:  Ivan boasted a warm, alcohol-fueled grin from his window seat as he and Katrina descended upon Louis Armstrong Airport. It had already been a long day; they rose before sun-up to catch their flight from San Jose, and had a long layover in St Louis (two Lynchburg Lemonades) before catching their connection to The Big Easy, Crescent City, The City that Care Forgot, N’Awlins. Katrina napped beside him with her mouth open, and Ivan nudged her awake. “There it is, baby: a place with class, with history, with style,” he said. “Get out your beads and get ready to party!” 

August 29, 2005: Sheryl and her six-year-old daughter Markeesha sat on the lumpy, sunflower-patterned couch in their Garden District apartment and sang one song after another. By the time they got to When the Saints Go Marching In, they were on their feet and tapping beats on the hardwood floor. When they finished, Sheryl hugged Markeesha whose eyes pooled with tears. Torrential rainfall and triple-digit winds rapped at the boarded-up windows and Sheryl did her best to hide the sinking feeling she had. “You sure Nana’s okay?” Markeesha asked again. Sheryl nodded and sighed with relief. Through fate, her mother was spending the week with friends in Shreveport. 

August 25:  After a night of Hurricanes at Pat O’Brien’s and making boisterous fools of themselves at Preservation Hall, Ivan and Katrina were at it again. They were on Day Two of their planned tour to hit every nook and cranny of New Orleans’ famed French Quarter. And Ivan could hardly believe it. Only two days before he was in Silicon Valley pushing e-commerce solutions to anyone who’d listen; now he was strolling about cobblestone pathways and wrought-iron gates on Royal Street, taking drunken horse-drawn carriage rides in the shadows of stately mansions on St. Charles Avenue.  Jazz music drifted along the street, from bars and clubs and sometimes the sidewalks themselves. The street musicians were so good, in fact, Ivan guessed they’d probably command top dollar in most cities. This was Ivan’s utopia; this was “Disneyland for adults.” Indeed, it wasn’t long until he and Katrina arrived at a bar on Bourbon Street and were coaxed onstage by the long beckoning finger of the bass player in a ZZ Top-style trio: a rangy black man with an old-style ‘fro and instrumental chops not unlike Stanley Clarke, the king of Ivan’s self-congratulatory musical hierarchy. As they danced alongside the band, it seemed somehow natural to Ivan that he and Katrina were now improv entertainers of the Old Absinthe House. Andrew Jackson, Old Hickory himself, often celebrated there back in the day, and at that moment Ivan felt he’d forged a spiritual bond with the great general and president. This marvelous southern city satiated his ego, and as he danced the “po’ fool white boy” before the lively crowd, Ivan wondered what might someday be his own claim to fame. 

#232: "Blind Spot" by Roy Kesey

                                                                                                

~This story was previously published in Harpur Palate (2005).

  

            It’s early, just barely light, and driving to work I get the feeling again, a car hanging right in my blind spot. I whip around but the street is empty as far back as I can see. That’s always how it happens. Things go bad sometimes.

            A few minutes later the feeling comes again, and I check my mirrors, catch a glimpse of a dented grill. I’ve never gotten a good look at the car so I’m not sure how I know it’s a blue convertible. I’ve never seen the driver, no idea who he is, but he’s been showing up more and more often, cutting it closer and closer. I whip around again and the street is still empty and you don’t have to tell me how weird this is. I know how weird it is.

            I get to the warehouse, shut off the engine and just sit quiet until Goat pulls up alongside. Yesterday Old Red sent Goat and me to the docks to see about a crate. It went a little rough, and Goat got his arm broken, and now he’s wearing one of those fiberglass casts, only this one’s bright orange, so I hassle him a bit.

            We go inside and say hi to Vid and Marty. Nobody wants poker or rummy this early so we just sit there and smoke. Something’s happening, no question, but we never get told until it’s time to go, and for the moment we’re twitchy like spiders.

            We watch seagulls for a while. We watch tugs and scows. We tell stories and ask each other what about lunch, and then Old Red comes out of the office, waves me and Vid to the Cutlass, tells me to drive.

            - I got a thing in my eye, I say.

            - What kind of thing? says Vid.

            - I don’t know, maybe some sawdust.

            - You got a hankie, so use it, says Old Red.

            - Vid knows how to drive too, I say.

            - If I wanted Vid to drive, I’d have told him to drive.

            I take out my hankie and pretend for a second, get in and start the engine, and we’re not ten minutes out when that fucker in the blue convertible slides into my blind spot again.

            - Take a right at the light, says Old Red.

            I nod, signal, catch a glint off the convertible’s windshield, look back at the empty lane, look again fast and there’s still nothing there. I ease over, make the turn and speed up.

            - Since when do you drive like a hundred years old? says Vid.

            - Leave him alone, says Old Red.

            So he knows something’s wrong, which isn’t what either of us needs. Old Red always has things on his mind but lately it’s been worse. He points us down to a Chinese restaurant with dirty windows and peeling paint. In the back there’s fifty or sixty small boxes wrapped tight. Then there’s some kind of problem, and before things get cleared up I take a shot to the nose, gives me a real gusher, but it’s mostly stopped by the time we get back to the warehouse.

            - Nobody teach you to duck? says Goat.

            I look at him and he goes back to watching seagulls until Old Red comes and tells us to unload. He leaves with Marty and Vid, and it takes Goat and me almost an hour to put all the boxes away.

#229: "Like Everyone Else" by Tara Laskowski

~This story was previously published in Fiction Weekly (2009).  

It was after the teenage girl died that Samantha Wolewski finally agreed to go out on a date with Harry, the cops reporter who worked night shift. Up until then she’d been dodging him—she was the new obit clerk, her first job out of college, and she wanted to be professional, make a good impression.

But then the girl died. It was a car accident—she had been on her way home from the hairdresser to get ready for her prom that night. Before that, Samantha had only had to write obituaries for old people. There was something about this girl’s picture— a dark-haired young girl looking over her shoulder, smiling brightly, hopefully into the camera. Sam wondered if the girl had hated the picture, if she’d hated the one lock of hair that had separated from the rest and trailed along her red sweater like a snake.

She tried to tell Harry about it on their way to the casino. What happened to the young woman’s date for the prom, her friends? “Would they still even have the prom after that?” she wondered aloud, to which Harry replied with a long, drawn-out story about his senior prom and how wasted they’d gotten afterwards on the second floor of the Red Roof Inn off of I-81.

“How romantic,” Sam murmured, already regretting her moment of weakness that had gotten her here in the car with the only guy in the newsroom who didn’t sing karaoke at happy hour on Friday nights. It bothered her that Harry incessantly cracked his gum. It bothered her he had yet to ask her a question about herself. It bothered her she couldn’t remember the girl’s name.

#227: "Out for a Walk" by Eric D. Goodman

~This story was previously published in The Baltimore Review (2007).

            Last night they’d eaten fried chicken in their urban row house.  The chicken bones remained in his bowl, a skeleton of awful beauty, meat and veins still dangling. 

Now, Thurber’s head rested against Lindsey’s thigh.  He lifted it, looked up into her eyes, and put his head into her lap with the wisp of a sound, almost a whimper.  Lindsey put her hand on the crown of his skull and gently stroked his brown-black coat.  Thurber’s chocolate eyes looked ahead, floated up toward Lindsey, and returned to the blurred blankness ahead as she petted him.  Lindsey’s hand was heavy and slow.

            “You’re a good boy.”  The mellow muttering was sincere, but not entirely true.  If that were true, we wouldn’t be in this mess, Lindsey thought, and then hated herself for thinking it.

#225: "All We Did" by Elise Levine

~This story previously appeared in Gargoyle (2009).

Any man with a ponytail, any man twice our age: this was our thinking way back when, what passed for thinking. Any man changing the marquee after hours as we rode the streetcar past the second-run movie palace. One of us swaggered off at the next stop, dirty slush up to her ankles but so what, her baby-fat body not yet a bulb she’d blown, winter white not yet her favorite color.

            In the aisle of the theater, rows of faded red velvet seats, rank and file, observing

like cattle. Forget-me-nots, in the carpet.

            Spring came. She tried all things. Which when we think about it now, how quaint.

            Pregnant once and never again. Cramped for weeks after.

            She went away. She came back. Everyone who’d stayed looked the same, terrific, inexhaustible. She left again, and when she returned everyone had vanished. She was in need but the buildings were mute. Mother dead. Father too. The sister she never had. Cinema Lumiere an expensive isolation.

Slowly the flowers release themselves from our fingers.

#223: "Dicot, Monocot" by Sejal Shah

~This story previously appeared in Pleiades (Spring 2002).

Do you remember the sixth grade, Margaret?  Blood and Foreign Language beginning the same year.  There was that line between all the girls then.  An extra bone, a horizontal spine—.  A keloid inch scripted onto my chest, a fossil, an unreadable note, the first of all the unanswerable signs.

We counted.  We all counted.  You know what I mean.  Even if we didn't talk about it all the time, you remember.  Even if we never talked about it, you know what I mean. 

Maybe you should have kept it, our book.  I still have it.  You would have tossed it—maybe by the seventh grade.  I still have it, our book.  What do you remember?  Remember, remember.  As if I could hold us at twelve.

Miss Merrill had all of us, every science class in the sixth grade.  Remember that day when all the boys had to leave the room?   (No one could hold us at twelve.)  I don't think they ever told us where they went.  Miss Merrill had the bluest eyes.  Did you ever wonder if they were real?  It was a long time ago.  Did Nick ever tell you I saw him with no underwear?  We were out back by the creek. 

I still have the book.  I know Nick probably threw his out.  Maybe your mom made him.  You don't take stuff like that to California.  Toothed monocot.   Do you know that the weeping willow is a toothed monocot?  We knew this once.  We had a page for the silver plants.  We snuck into the Jones' backyard, but I was afraid of Daisy. 

Dusty Miller:  Lobed dicot.  Lamb's Ear:  smooth.  We didn't know then:  the silver rubs off—.  The conifers are the next page.  Pitch smeared under the plastic covering.  We draw pictures of the leaves next to the leaves themselves.  You will not remember this.  We are only eleven.  No one counted at eleven.  Did I ever tell you about your brother?  It was a long time ago. 

You moved to California, Margaret (how could you?).  You didn't even take our book.  I still have the gingko we found at the end of my street (Monocot lobed).  A Japanese tree splitting itself into two—mitosis, mitosis—leaves like fans; pleated.  We thought they were special, but there were whole trees of them.  The tulip tree was one street over (Dicot lobed toothed).  By the end of November, we could have found our way there by counting rows of bark, the first language beneath our hands. 

Do you remember the most special one?  The one we went into Elm Lane for?  We weren't allowed, and we went anyway.  (No one could hold us at twelve—.)  We found a tree that had leaves like stars.  Sweet gum; we looked it up in the book (there must have been a book).  (Dicot lobed toothed).

I didn't put anything special on to save them.  We were only ten or eleven.  What did we know about fixatives?  I think we glued them to the paper.  I think it was probably Elmer’s.  I think we had to use my mother's sewing needles to open the bottle, you know how it always stops up. 

It had been so long when we stopped hearing from you.  We never found out who spray-painted “Ozzy Lives” near the creek.  You were going to be a ballerina.  Crimean Linden, Verbanica Magnolia, White Oak, Pussy Willow.  What did you become when you grew up?  Saucer Magnolia.  Star Magnolia.  No one could hold us at twelve. 

Did Nick ever tell you he saw me without underwear that one time?  We had a page for the silver plants.  It was out back by the creek.  And did you become a dancer?  A weeping willow is a toothed monocot.  Or did your bones get bigger?  It’s OK if your bones got bigger.  You know you can't help it, your bones. 

*****