We’re going to add something new along with your monthly Works Progress: an essay or two about writing and craft, and maybe some reading recs. It’ll be fun and infrequent. Don’t worry—we’re still doing mostly stories.

We’ll be back with a great one on Aug. 1, after our usual summer break.

In the meantime, here’s a post from Mark about a weird editing trick.

-The Editors

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This spring, I found myself doing revisions on two book manuscripts.

It was a pretty dumb situation, particularly while also trying to teach and freelance and get toddlers to playgrounds. More to come about all that soon (the writing projects, not the playgrounds). But for now, I want to zero in on one particularly dumb piece of the editing, which was adding quote marks for every single line of dialogue, across ~600 pages.

I’m not sure exactly when I started not using quote marks. It had something to do with Junot Diaz and Bolaño and stream of consciousness Hemingway, me copying as opposed to some firm philosophy. But eventually it cohered. I liked the way a lack of quote marks put description and dialogue on the same level. I liked how the equality could enrich both sides, and how it let you focus more on conversational snippets, and silence. And at its best it all helped add up to a headlong tone, pulling the reader along on a rockless river to the very end.

Recently, though, I’ve been rethinking the quote marks. I’m a little more worried about clarity than I was while getting hooked on The Savage Detectives. (I’m also no longer 22.) Short attention spans leave less leeway for games in the text. As Laura Miller complained in Salon way back in 2009, “what writer of serious fiction today can possibly afford to put readers off for the sake of a little highbrow preening?” Well, not me. And crucially, this stylistic choice runs into some obvious problems in nonfiction, the genre with which I earn most of my daily bread. Previous generations of nonfiction writers could essentially make up their dialogue, which I think was bullshit and just another unacknowledged way that modern journalists are not working on a level playing field with their forebears. We actually try to record reality, not nonfictiony half-fiction. But that’s another story. For my book about gig work I carefully transcribed a year’s worth of conversations, chit chat, and monologues between delivery bikers and Uber drivers and the customers we served. The veracity is part of the appeal. So it didn’t really make sense to forgo the usual tool to denote, “yep, this is entirely real.”

Since I was already now on the side of the grammatical right in creative nonfiction, it was a quick jump to give up the ghost and add quotes to my fiction, the second book.

I did feel bad about it at first. This is a novel about who owns one particular plot of land in Brooklyn over the course of 400 years. It’s all a little mystical and also violent and yes, I hope, headlong, and I liked my old style. I liked playing fast and loose with an occasional description. I like the line of dialogue that can pop out of nowhere, like here:

To him it felt like armor, or possibility, and yes, the future. For the first time this country seemed to be offering him something. A bounty. The sugar scent was on his cheek now, it intoxicated him far more than Joris’s weak ale.

What are you drawing?

A voice behind him. He whirled. And there was the widow Hester, hands clasped, arms a triangle, glistening like the turtle shell.

I was still pretty sure that the reader would get on board with all this after a few pages, gaining a little thrill to encounter “what are you drawing” and be as surprised as the character. But these days I also don’t want to risk leaving someone behind. So I started—on page one—reading over the book and adding quote marks.

This was unbelievably painstaking. When I started I figured I’d need a few hours and then could turn to a freelance article. This turned out to be laughably naive. Some pages had fifteen or twenty quote marks to add, and my fingers started feeling carpal tunnelly after an afternoon of repetitive clicks. There ended up being 4,350. But it wasn’t even just the mechanical adding that took so long. I basically had to reread to make sure I found every conversation in the text, and then reorient around question marks and explanatory dialogue-adjacent phrases.

It ended up taking a couple days of almost-constant work. But there was a payoff—and this is the tip for editing I clickbaited up top. This strange style of re-reading—half skimming, half careful examining—was the perfect mode to catch other high level problems. Awkward repetitions stood out. Baggy paragraphs looked really baggy. It became obvious if a character wandered too much or strayed from his or her mission. Clustered (added) quote marks usually meant things were happening, the book was active and moving and working well. If too many pages went by without a line of dialogue in sight, something had probably gone wrong.

I ended up trimming around 10 or 20 pages from a 300+ page book and improving the rest, simply through this almost-automatic editing. The book got sharper on a line level, and also as a mountainous whole.

There are other ways to access this kind of half-conscious state, strangifying a manuscript enough that necessary changes become clear. In my newspaper life I’d sometimes read over a column on my phone before filing it by laptop. Like lots of people I also print out longer manuscripts when I edit, and eventually read them out loud, and that works in a similar way. I had a student once suggest using a digital tool to read your work back to you, which sounded fun. But I did not expect that a pretty rote and annoying task like the quotes would have any benefit at all.

So, maybe it’s worth another skim of your novel to take out or add a bunch of proper nouns. Or to do something dumb like change double quotes to single ones. It might surface all sorts of other ways beyond control-f that the book could improve.

And certainly, the upsides of this handcrafted editing show what you’d lose by letting Claude add all the quote marks—something I was way too scared to even consider, not least for all the humanist, philosophical reasons that friend of Works Progress (and my main human editor) Charlotte Alter has been exploring on her Substack.

Our own brains and practices might be the source of editing machines as yet unknown.

“Thanks for reading.”

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We here at Works Progress couldn’t resist a story with an intercepted landlord letter on the first page. Enjoy this taut and lyrical journey, Sun Tzu and rain and all.

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On Fridays, we hear a rhythmic thumping that stays through the night. It’s almost certainly dance music, but there’s nowhere to dance around here. Once, on a particularly loud night, we set off to investigate, chasing the music deeper into the neighborhood. At times we could even hear a man’s excited, undecipherable voice. Each time we turned a corner, I expected to see a house lit up with party lights. But all was asleep, and as we followed the noise, it diminished. Eventually we were against the riverbed at the edge of the neighborhood, and, defeated, we turned back. The rhythm was the loudest on our porch, seeming to come from the sky itself.

There sticks with me an idea of spite. A general outpressing, a spitting of blood at the camera. But what against? There is only my coffee, steaming away into the morning.

We intercept a letter from our landlord, one not meant for us. We’ve been suspicious, so I slice it open like a good spy. The uncanny mockups confirm the worst: our house will soon be turned to rubble, with a new build sitting in its place. The landlord and his family will move into this monstrosity, despite living just a few minutes away. It’s a horrible thing to happen to two sentimental people. I get tender towards even the bricks.

After we get the news, the lights in the house start fluttering more often. I will avenge you, I think.

It rains more in the winter, but it’s good rain. Soft rain, and after it’s done, if you’re walking near, you can hear it whispering down the neighborhood walls. But our own house drips heavily, gutters being long-clogged. How might I fight for this place? Late night sabotage of the destroying machines? Lash myself to the walls, only for the wrecking ball to run me through? People love to say “it is what it is.” This has never soothed me, because of course it is. The reason I’m upset is precisely because it is.

With the rain comes the rainbows, sometimes doubled, in complete arcs against the clouds. Sure, I’m no sailor, but I do wonder what this means beyond the seemingly endless niceties of this place. Smug condescension, it seems like.

I’m wondering about the postcards I sent previously. Should I have ever expected something back? There was never any return address. Of course, I could just ask about them through text, but I would be breaking some rule, or maybe revealing something. So there lies my phone. They say communication works two ways—this is the difference between communication and infliction.

Step right up, come one come all, be my nemesis! Today it’s the guy in the giant oncoming truck with his brights on. He’s got tinted windows, the coward, so I doubt my glaring gets through. I’ve resolved that if I could go back in time, I would stop with extreme prejudice the man who created LED lights.

It’s been said that the body keeps the score. I practiced combat sports when I was young; perhaps there are still some useful vestiges of these buried somewhere in me. I can recall the tenets lining the wall of the studio, painted in huge, red letters: courtesy, integrity, perseverance, self-control, indomitable spirit. We would recite these each day, shouting into the mirrors, yet I would always mess up the last one, yelping out abominable spirit instead. This seems to be the quality that stayed with me, plus memories of kicks to the face, ungodly contortions, broken bones under spotlights.

There was a treaty signed at The Hague in order to prevent damage to cultural property in the event of an armed conflict, cultural property referring to anything that is the “common heritage of mankind”: belonging not to one individual but to all, to be protected for future generations. This does include buildings, though I fear I haven’t done enough to cement our place as a cultural landmark. Maybe if they just gave me more time. Among the common heritage of mankind is the moon, and most of the ocean—so if things take a turn for the worse, we’ve got options.

Good fighters don’t wince. I’ve been a chronic wincer for as long as I can remember, and I must break the habit. I start practicing with a ball and paddle, bouncing the red rubber thing right in front of my nose for fifteen minutes, twice a day. Then, after a week of this, I knock something off a high shelf and towards my face. My eyes crunch shut automatically. Okay, okay, the body keeps the score. So how do I win?

We fly home for the holidays, West to East, East to South, and here are the rolling hills, flecked with rotting barns. Here are the skies like nowhere else. But it’s getting worse. Garish new restaurants, rows and rows of new housing developments, constant earthworks. At the top of one hill, a fresh Dollar General to replace the one destroyed by a tornado. Also destroyed: an elementary school, yet to be rebuilt.

Rain here, too, coming down behind the long blue curtains that surround my temporary bed on the bottom floor of my father’s house. There were many other places before this one—spare bedrooms, empty rentals, dirty carpets—where my brother, sister, and I would stay with him. Long nights, but I don’t remember them all. Forgetting is the one default mercy.

Gift from my father: Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. “Good for business!” reads a quip on the back cover. There’s a rope coiled in the corner of his garage. He shows me his guns on the wall, points out which ones are from which movies. We have the same wrists, I’ve noticed. I remember once being coerced into visiting a shooting range with him. It was a gray building off the interstate, with long gray tunnels underground. Nothing down there but echoes.

It’s Christmas Eve in my mother’s house, and my stepfather is reclining with a glass of port, watching car crashes on TV while we others wrap presents. He’s installed garish white lights around the house perimeter, creating the look of a just-landed spaceship. He’s brought a little vacuum robot that bumps into table legs and nibbles at our toes. But he’s a good man, who has fixed many things. Our mother brings me and the siblings in for a hug. Yesterday, she told me she wanted to do nothing but sit and look at me. In our fold, I face the top of her head, an almond pool. On TV a motorcyclist flips over the median.

Somewhere in this house, in some dark and unopened drawer, there is a stack of spiral notebooks. Inside wait pages and pages of smudged, thick-penciled instruments of mass destruction, each more convoluted than the next. They belong to me and my younger brother. I was the first—by the time he was dreaming up his own cruel devices, I’d graduated to real projectiles. Towards the end of that period, I obsessed over the inverse relationship between a weapon’s size and its power. I condensed them smaller and smaller until I hit a wall—everything pales to the world-ending pinprick.

Thus saith Sun Tzu: Supreme excellence consists of breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting. Appear weak when you are strong, and strong when you are weak. Let your plans be dark and impenetrable as night. Check, check, and check.

My mother tells me the two guardian oaks in the front yard have been slated for some kind of mutilation. Too close to the cable lines, apparently. They’ve been marked, each bearing an orange spray-painted X. She lost the two pines in the side yard last year. She wants to fight it, she tells me, but it’s not clear who her opposition is. Apparently, men had shown up to inspect the trees. She tried to reason with these men, but they couldn’t tell her who’d sent them. As if the breeze had simply blown these clandestine men into her yard.

On the giant living room TV tonight: the body of a young man my age has been found upriver without his pants. Tomorrow, the anniversary of a shooting. Chances of rain, and we’re warming up.

Not long ago, if I had walked down this road, it would have led me into the woods. Now I take the hill down through the new development—seen from up high, the whole area seems to be made of shingles. The hundred roofs overlap like a mountain range. I descend down the pristine sidewalk, breath going gray under white street lamps, wondering if Sun Tzu has anything to say about cutting your losses.

We begin our way back to the doomed house. The airport breaks me down, but the plane seat is comfortably dark. We’re flying over the mountains; pricks of light are tucked into their curves like signal fires, and in the sky with us are the flashes of other planes, other people going elsewhere. Then the clouds cover everything. Shadows mostly, then the glow of a city buried underneath. Nothing above but the planes. Oh, and of course the moon, beaming into my little window. The onrush of a conquering force is like the bursting of pent-up waters into a chasm a thousand fathoms deep.

Whenever we’re gone for a while, the scent of “old house” returns. I imagine it creeping back into the stale, dark rooms when they’re empty. Nothing inside has moved for weeks, and yet a smell that has incorrigibly seeped into the bones of the century-old house begins to stir. In silence, it reclaims its territory. And then here we are, breaking into the place in the early hours of the morning, flicking on the lamps—these lights seem weaker, the dark having acquired a resolute thickness. I scrunch my nose at the smell. It comes to mind that perhaps this house is not alive, as I imagined it to be, but long dead and waiting for burial.

I’m caught running in the rain, as if in the final confrontation of an action movie. I’ve always liked when the fighter’s hair was disheveled, slicked to their head; this exhibited how far gone they were more than anything else. I step lightly and dodge puddles. Sticks are reaching up and dragging my feet like so many—stop. Who wishes to fight must first count the cost. They are just wet sticks, and I kick them off me.

Spring wind is oooohing through the pipes. Outside, there are children shouting, riding back and forth on plastic tricycles on the sidewalk. Petrified leaves, having held on through winter, finally give in and drop to the ground. Once a week, the men come and blow them off our brick porch. The men move slowly and with no discernable pattern, yet somehow, when they’re done, our compost bin is always full up with leaves and our porch is swept clean—when my mother came to visit, she identified the intricate pattern in the bricks as herringbone. Now, I see the patterns in the wooden floors, the window panels, the shower tiles. All gone, soon.

But what does it matter? Surely there will be patterns in the new build, laid by skilled workers. Greater patterns, still, in the lives of those who will live in it, fighting their own battles. Sometimes the landlord comes by—he is a kind, charming man, and when I meet his eye, my resolve shatters.

I go on a night walk. Motion lights pop out from some of the darkened houses as I pass. Far off through the sidewalk funnel of trees, a woman follows her dog towards me. One of us must get off the sidewalk—more lights come on as I cross the street. The stripped-bare branches cast shadows over me like nets.

Like with Saddam: Ladies and gentlemen, we got him.

A delivery driver blasts me with his lights as he pulls off down the road. He trots out of the car, leaving his door open, and music rolls out onto the street. I’m passing the car when he returns, and he starts singing a few words to the song before seeing me and, startled, ducking quick into the front seat as if my presence is some reminder of his obligation to silence. I want to stop him from peeling off into the night, tell him that it’s okay, that he’s allowed to sing. But would I not lay down my life for Silence? Am I not Quiet’s devoted four-star general?

The next-door neighbors have a light in their driveway that shifts between an array of colors. It’s right outside our bathroom window, the frosted one which usually sparkles with daylight and casts a soft glow into the room. Sometimes, when I can’t sleep, I sit on the edge of the tub and watch the colors—blue, purple, red—slowly filling up the window. If it isn’t too late in the evening, I can hear the nearby train bellowing. It’s more like remembering a train than hearing one, but it does seem louder at night, like the air is softer and easy to puncture. So it is almost quiet. I’ve heard tell of a room in which it’s so quiet that men go mad inside. It’s not immediately clear how this could be torturous, though soft spikes do line the walls of the chamber like the insides of an iron maiden. Supposedly those who enter can hear the blood pumping in their veins. But here, it is almost quiet.

In the early morning I run in a park filled with gentle, sunlit slopes of grass. On the tallest hill, a man stands playing a golden horn. Well, not playing really, just bleating sour notes at the sky. The taller grasses shift in the wind. I take a wrong step and slip, feet in the air, into mud. Lying there in the damp earth, I gasp in disbelief. The sky is entirely blue today, as if the very idea of rain and its various arched projections was a thing of nonsensical make-believe. Then, faintly now, comes the horn, its odd notes filling the empty space above me. I listen for a while. This will do, I think. This place is enough. But the rain will come. Even if the sky has forgotten it, the rain will come. No roof here—nothing to do but keep running.

Lo, there are the clouds, hanging thick over the house when I return. I leave my shoes outside, strip off my mud-caked clothes and toss them in the washer. I’m in the shower when the rain arrives, and then there is water falling everywhere, inside and outside, and I feel so incredibly redundant for all this fist-shaking at the sky. I turn the water off, and my skin glows with warm blood. Is this not victory? Or at the very least, stalemate?

In the perpetual wet, moss has started to grow along the driveway. It’s turned blue and green, like a map of the world. And blades of grass are slowly piercing the damp doormat.

Peace proposals unaccompanied by a sworn covenant indicate a plot. Yeah, yeah.

At last, at last, I receive a postcard in the mail! But once again, though it bears our address, it isn’t meant for me. One of the former tenants, I presume. We get their mail constantly: bills, coupons, the rare letter. When we leave—and we will inevitably leave, I’ve counted the cost—and this house is reduced to nothing, and a new one is standing in its place, a hopeful family will take up residence within. They will likely receive some mail addressed to us, and through this small loophole we will never be erased from this place. Just like the intended recipient of this postcard sent from a faraway continent. The picture on the front is an overgrown field draped in a thin fog, the dark blob of a treeline in the background. Over the field stands a strange, pale arc stretching perfectly from one edge of the postcard to the other. It’s translucent, almost glowing. On the back of the card is a bit of information about this phenomenon and a note in handwritten cursive. “Such a beautiful sight!” it reads. “Was there really no better name than fogbow? Something like ‘rainbow ghost’ sounds better to me.” There is a crude sketch of a ghost, or someone in a white sheet. “I miss you so much. Hoping that the winter was not too cruel over there, I guess now it’s just rain rain rain! If you ever want to see some snow, you know where to find me. Again, I miss you. All my love.” I affix the postcard to the fridge, and I hope for fog.

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Grayson Burke is a writer and photographer from Nashville, currently living in the Bay Area. His fiction can be found in The Baltimore Review and forthcoming in SWING, and his photos can be seen in Aint-Bad and UNCLE. He is currently writing nonfiction on Substack @outofstamps.

We come to you just a few days after a new baseball season has begun with Tommy Vollman’s “Dreams,” a story for anyone who’s ever run their fingers over the seams of a ball and felt they had the world in their hands. May good contact be plentiful and bad hops scarce this season.

The Editors

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I woke up sideways and in a slight panic, the hotel top sheet still tightly tucked at the foot of the bed. My sleepy eyes bored into the turned-plaster ceiling, and I considered the cascade of choices that brought me to room 21 of the Super 8 Pocatello. Slowly, I gathered my bearings. 1500 miles east, school was in session, but my books lay idle on the desk in my empty dorm room.

16 days ago, I left Milwaukee—nine weeks into my college’s spring semester—and headed west to play baseball. I streamed through 11 games spread across Billings, Orem, and Ogden, but in Pocatello, I crashed, and whatever momentum I’d briefly gathered completely and wholly disappeared.

In many ways, my crash was inevitable: I’d fooled myself into believing that a $600-a-month, free-agent contract was somehow sustainable. Reality, it seemed, was hell-bent to show me otherwise. At 18, I knew just enough to nearly hide the fact that I knew almost nothing at all.

***

The end of my baseball career snuck up on me like a late-afternoon shadow; my last at-bat tucked beneath the blanket of cold, April air that covered Bill Derham Field. My breath streamed silver as I dug in and twirled my bat, the smell of pine tar and clay rich in my nostrils.

I earned those final pitches—three pitches to last the rest of my life—the sum total of which was an inside-out line drive to left-center, a hit bookended by a head-first slide into second base. I stood up and dusted off like I’d done hundreds of times before. The moment held a stark familiarity save for one glaring, impossible-to-ignore aspect: I knew at that very moment, as much as I knew anything, that I was done. I knew then that I had, in fact, just taken my very last at-bat.

I played out the rest of the game in center field, packed my car, and headed east, back to Milwaukee and my dorm room, back to the friends and classmates and city that hardly knew I left.

There’d be no Rookie Ball season, no late-spring and long-summer grind, and no more dreams of earning one chance—one spot—just to earn another and another and another after that. In a sense, I suppose I simply gave up, quit, and drove away. Which was not like me.

***

That first night in Pocatello—the one at the Super 8—was awful. And the next one, in Omaha, was even worse. I made a choice to leave baseball behind, but leaving proved easier said than done.

On the third day, I planned to drive straight through—Omaha to Milwaukee was seven hours of easy highway—but I couldn’t. I surrendered to Dubuque, and the calendar in the hotel lobby reminded me that I should’ve been in Billings, playing my way on to Butte.

Maybe, I thought as I crashed sideways on the hotel bed, I’ll just stay here. Maybe, my thoughts grew darker and deeper, I’ll just disappear.

Instead, I fell asleep and dreamed.

***

In some sense, I suppose I knew I was dreaming, asleep on top of a still-made hotel bed in the outskirts of Dubuque, but my mind put me at Fenway Park, smack in the middle of the morning. My dream—or whatever it was—assembled quite nicely; the pieces easy to place against one another and organize. Gone were the tricky currents that usually plagued my sleep and made it so difficult to navigate my dreams. Before long, I sat in a vast swath of empty, green seats about halfway up the lower stands on the first-base side, just behind the dugout. The stadium stood mausoleum-silent save for a gentle tide of bird rustles rhythmically partitioned by the click, click, tick of the sprinklers that sprayed wide ribbons of water into the velvet sea of grass. The sun cut a semi-circle just above the Monster, and the temperature hung absolutely perfect. Fenway Park spread out exactly as I’d always imagined it: cramped and crowded but well beyond the lengths of my comprehension. If I hadn’t known better, I’d have characterized it as formidable.

I gazed at the Pesky Pole, then let my stare arc around the right-field wall, past the Triangle, all the way to the Monster. My eyes got lost in the contrasts and harsh geometry—straight lines and diagonals cut, painted, and rolled with precision and specificity—impossible to take in all at once. I imagined my cleats tracking across the outfield, eyes on a fly ball despite the sky’s protest. I could almost hear the clay and crushed aggregate as I crossed onto the warning track: schick, schick, schick.

Those things—all of those things—had been my dreams for as long as I could remember.

What were they, I wondered, now that I’d left them?

I glanced to my right toward the unmistakable grind of metal cleats on concrete, the sound of something doing precisely what it’s not designed to do.

A man approached.

He weaved his way through the rows of empty seats—neither rushed nor slow—his cleats the continued harbinger of an awful, ear-wrecking sound. He was thin and fit with a spry, wiry build—about 5’10”, 180 pounds. His smile shone wide and vibrant, and he wore a Boston uniform—their classic home whites.

I didn’t recognize him, though. He was too short to be Jim Rice or Ellis Burks. I couldn’t place him to save my life.

I twisted farther in my seat to steal a glimpse of his jersey number, and when he turned to gaze at the field, I saw it: 19. I ransacked my mind for his name.

“What?” he said as he strolled through my row. “You were expecting who? Yaz? Jimmy? Who?”

I shrugged. To be honest, I hadn’t expected anyone. I hadn’t even expected to be at Fenway. It felt right, though, to be there, as if Fenway Park—and nowhere else—was exactly where I needed to be in those confusing, drawn-out moments.

“Dana,” he said as he sat down next to me, an empty seat between us. “Dana Williams.”

He extended his hand, and I shook it.

“Tyne,” I smiled. “Tyne Darling.”

“You a ball player?” he asked.

I nodded. “Yeah—well,” I added, “I was. I mean,” I fumbled, “not anymore.”

He squinted as if to angle past my strangeness. “Been there,” he followed. “Man,” he said, “I been there. Got called up in ’89. June 19th against the White Sox. Back down July 2nd after Toronto.”

I shook my head. “Damn.”

“Yep.” His voice grew a little sharper. “And I can see you doin’ the math.”

I smiled.

“13 days.” Dana paused. “Eight games and five at-bats.” He shifted in his seat and leaned toward me. “One hit—a double—one run, and easily the best stretch of days in my whole life.”

I nodded once again.

“Precious days,” he followed.

I wanted to ask him more, to know why he’d used that word: precious.

“And most importantly,” he said, “two innings out there.” He pointed to left field.

“You played in left?”

“Yep,” he smiled, eyebrows arched. “Against Texas. We were losing bad. Ended up 10-3, I think, and Jimmy came out. Turnpike gave me the nod in the eighth. Played two innings in front of the Monster.”

“Felt like a lifetime.”

I tilted my head, and Dana continued.

“Something happens out there, out in left. When you stand in that grass, beneath that thing, time slows down and wears a circle around you.” He grinned and looked right into my eyes. “You become aware,” he said, as if confiding in me, “that these are your dreams. These moments,” he sighed, “are absolutely everything you’ve dreamed.”

I stared down at my boots, and silence became an eight-lane highway that stretched between us.

“You dream, Tyne Darling?” Dana asked, finally. “Do you still dream?” he stressed.

I squinted out at the Monster, not daring to look him in the eyes. “Yeah,” I lied. “I do.”

I shifted again, more uncomfortable by the second, and turned to face him. I didn’t know what I planned to say or even what I would’ve said if I’d had the chance. But it didn’t matter. In a flash, Dana Williams was gone and so was Fenway Park—the Pesky Pole, the Monster, the patient click, click, tick of the sprinklers—all of it, gone, and I was awake, my eyes cloudy at first, then focused on three red numbers: 1:37.

I was back in the hotel room, back in bed in Dubuque, where I’d never left.

My mind wheeled a million miles an hour. Anxiety threatened to tear me clean in two, but before it could, the darkness devoured me whole.

***

I grew up afraid of the dark.

As a kid, I often spent weekends at my grandmother’s house. I don’t think I ever made it through a night there without a terror of some sort driving me from bed. I’d wander out in the hallway—panicked and out-of-sorts—and every time, my grandmother gathered me up, took my hand, and walked me downstairs to the couch. There, beneath the quaking amber light of a fluted floor lamp, her voice cascaded stories about baseball: Ted Williams and his .400 swing, the grit of Thurman Munson, Clemente and how often he very clearly hit off his front foot. Other times, she’d simply marvel at the sheer power of Henry Aaron. There were stories about Johnny Bench, Charlie Hustle, and the dynamic Big Red Machine. While she spoke, her gentle fingers traced shapes and spirals on my forehead. Sometimes, she talked about Josh Gibson, Cool Papa Bell, and Buck O’Neil—players she saw with and against the Tigers at Crosley Field when the Reds were on the road.

For my grandmother, baseball was far more than the fodder of bedtime stories; it was spiritual, a consciously-balanced state of mind.

***

One night, on what must’ve been close to my grandmother’s last, she told me about Bob Gibson and the things he did in 1968. By then, I was plenty old enough not to be plagued by the strains of my own bad dreams.

“Fiercest competitor anyone ever saw,” she said. “He’d hit a batter, then come down off the mound just to see if they wanted to make something of it.”

Her hazel irises shifted in the low light, and I realized I’d never before seen my grandmother’s eyes when they weren’t set behind her sleek, oval lenses. The sight seemed strange, if not alarming.

“Someday,” I whispered, “I’m going to be like them.”

“Like who?” she asked.

“Like one of them,” I repeated. “One of the ball players you always talk about.” My eyes fell closed, and a certain softness shaped the words I spoke. “Just like one of them,” I added.

For a moment, my grandmother sat quiet. With my eyes still closed, I imagined her smile.

“Dreams,” she said, my hand so tender in hers, “are what happen when you’re brave enough to let yourself believe.”

I shifted, and my breath pushed deeper, more relaxed.

“And I hope you do,” she continued. “I hope you become whatever you dream.”

***

My grandmother died a few days before I turned 10. She passed away as she watched the Cincinnati Reds beat the Atlanta Braves in 14 innings. I kind of hope she died after the Reds walked it off and not before.

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Tommy Vollman is a writer, musician, and painter. For many years, he was a baseball player. He has written a number of things, published a bunch, recorded a few records, and toured a lot. Tommy’s work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and the Best of the Net. His stories and nonfiction have appeared in The Southwest Review, Two Cities Review, Hobart, The Southeast Review, Red Rock Review, and North American Review, among others. He has some black-ink tattoos on both of his arms. Tommy really likes A. Moonlight Graham, Kurt Vonnegut, Two Cow Garage, Tillie Olsen, Willy Vlautin, and Albert Camus. He's working on a short story collection and has a new record, entitled “Cloverfield.” He currently teaches English at Milwaukee Area Technical College and prefers to write with pens poached from hotel room cleaning carts.

We’re really thrilled to have this excellent party story from Emily Neuberger. When the second wife of a billionaire invites you to a place with a wraparound terrace, you go. See what you see…

Happy almost spring,

The Editors

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My first job out of college was executive assistant to the president of a major publishing company. I got the job at my college graduation. There wasn’t service inside the stadium, so I kept going up to the top tier to check my phone. I listened to the voicemail instead of the keynote speaker.

Until then, my work experience included many facets of childcare and the office assistant at my university department. I didn’t realize that an office assistant is to executive assistant what a house cat is to a tiger.

During my interview when I met my boss the first time, she and I had worn the same color nail polish, which I’d thought portended great things. Yet whenever she appeared at my desk, my words went heavy in my mouth and I spent every conversation conscious of the skin on my face.

I was to interrupt meetings when important calls came through, yet even the passing of a Post-It was beyond me. I was both too pompous and too ashamed as I hovered on her threshold, agents and authors gawking at my awkward intrusion, waiting for a personal invitation.

I regularly terrified major executives by forgetting to invite them to quarterly meetings during a time of heavy layoffs; once, I left a household name waiting in the lobby for twenty-five minutes. When I realized it, I watched my boss, one of the leaders in the industry, actually run through the hallway.

I excelled only at reading the manuscripts on submission. But the easy things, like mailing edits to authors or booking lunch reservations, I managed to fuck up like that was my real job.

My boss took all this with more grace than I deserved and spent my first review telling me a generous story about a mistake she’d made as an assistant. She was in charge of inviting people to an important book launch, and she spent an afternoon addressing and stamping envelopes. Only the night before the party, she woke up in a panic. The envelopes were empty. She had forgotten to put in the invitations. I recognized her generosity in sharing but privately didn’t think it applied; one giant mistake could happen to anyone, while I was burying myself under an avalanche of incompetency.

She understood this, too; she gently told me that this job wasn’t for everyone, and I should focus on what I was good at. I entirely missed the point. Even though I was intimidated by her intelligence, I didn’t listen to her advice, and stuck it out for two and a half more years, determined not to fail, until she gently broke it to me over sushi that I did not have a future in the industry.

—

A year before I left the company, one of our authors invited me to her launch party. She was a literary writer, one of the few I’d hoped to work for when I’d started, back before I knew how much of trade publishing was comprised of nonfiction peddling pseudoscience.

The party was hosted by the author’s friend, the second wife of a billionaire whom my boss called a “true democrat.” By now I was used to this sort of hypocrisy; this was the summer of 2017, and we were still blinking our eyes in the shock of the Trump presidency. The day after the election last fall, both of us got to the office early because we couldn’t sleep. We swapped stories about our slow, horrific realization that Hillary had lost — me at a watch party in a bar with a bunch of young women wearing blazers, my boss at a corresponding party at Megyn Kelly’s home. “She’s actually on our side,” my boss told me, and I felt I didn’t have the right to argue.

Just one other assistant was invited to this party. Lots of us were similar, at least from the outside: white brunettes, city transplants, with impressive educations and nimble minds full of pop culture, literature, and politics. The superiors all saw us as kids on our parent’s dime (the better to exploit you with, my dears) but while that was true of some of the girls, who got blowouts, lived in Manhattan, and dated men in finance, there were many of us who babysat on the side, took home the free food, and fell asleep on our long commutes home. I was firmly in the purse-bagel camp.

Tara, the other assistant at the party, was also in that camp and determined to ascend. She worked in publicity. “Holy fuck,” she said when we got into the art deco elevator. She’d been telling me on the subway ride to the Upper East Side that she and her boyfriend were opening their relationship. I listened with quiet terror.

It became clear to me, the moment I got inside, that “apartment” was not the correct word for this residence. When the elevator opened, I confronted an eight by six Liechtenstein.

“Um,” I said.

A person in a tuxedo appeared and asked if he could take my purse. I handed it over without asking if he worked there.

The Lichtenstein was the least of things. In one sweep of the room, I saw a Georgia O’Keefe painting, a Jeff Koons mirror shaped like a Gummy Bear, and, in the living room, a Chihuly chandelier. The domestic setting made them seem grander than their siblings inside of museums. A month earlier I’d gone to the Chihuly show at the Botanic Garden with my mom, and I wished I’d held on to my purse to take a photo to show her.

—

My boss reminded me of my mother, if my mother was childless, Soul Cycled, and had a penchant for statement eyewear. One night nearly everyone had gone home, except Tara and me. We’d just attended a panel where the assistants listened to the editors talk about how they established themselves. My boss told a story about coming to New York broke, leaning on competence long enough to survive the attrition when she earned responsibilities interesting enough to prove herself. It was the same story almost all the executives told, though many of them omitted family money. My option if I ran into trouble would be to move back in with my parents. A safety net, but one much closer to the ground.

I felt, as I always did when I heard these stories of ascent, that she was leaving something out. She mentioned all the steps between where I was and where she’d ended up, yet somehow, I had no better clue how to get there than before. I wanted her to describe exactly how she’d climbed the ladder, so I could learn and climb it myself.

After the panel, my boss returned to her office, then stopped outside it and looked at Tara and me. She was wearing a beautiful plaid blazer and patent leather brogues.

“You know, girls,” she began, as if picking up a dropped conversational thread, “people will tell you that you can do it all. A family and this business. But really you do have to choose. Don’t believe anyone who says otherwise.”

Then she went into her office.

Tara and I looked at each other, wide-eyed, then took our tote bags and went into the elevator, where we could talk about her without being overheard. There were plenty of moms in the business, though the first one who came to mind was an editor I babysat for sometimes, who, when I asked her how she got everything done, smiled and said, “I only sleep every other night.”

—

My author and the hostess were both women of about fifty, artistic, smart, the sort of women who weaponize their taste and know someone in every trendy business in New York. The Billionaire was about twenty-five years older, short and bald, with an overbite. I wondered what it must be like for my author, who was successful in my eyes but a single mom who survived on a literary fiction writer’s earnings, that her girlhood friend married this man.

They made some speeches, thanking us for coming and congratulating the author on her book, and then Tara and I felt permitted to fall upon the food. There were three stations: charcuterie, sushi, and dessert. There were no utensils except for the tongs to pull out the meats, which were cut into pieces the size of my face.

“My kingdom for a fork.”

A man my father’s age made eye contact over the table. “Eat it with your hands.”

I blinked.

“Your hands.” He dangled a piece of fat-marbled meat before me with a pair of tongs. I took it, afraid that if I didn’t, I’d get into trouble and ate it while he watched.

At that point in my life, I was too self-conscious to know that I could be a Pretty Young Thing. I felt sure that all PYTs must know this about themselves, and since I often felt like a walking head buzzing with thoughts like a beehive, I couldn’t be. When men behaved like this, it embarrassed me; I felt I had hoodwinked them. The truth was I was twenty-four and pretty.

Tara and I went over to the couch and took in the artwork and the people. I was wearing a secondhand designer dress that still looked cheap. Tara’s dress I placed as H&M. The other women almost exclusively wore caftans in rich colors, or loose black clothing. All wore sculptural jewelry. Tara and I found a catalog on the coffee table with all the art inside the place. I spotted most of the art around the living room, but there was one piece I couldn’t locate.

“It says there’s a Rembrandt,” I said.

Tara was more interested in identifying the party guests. None were famous of face, but she seemed to know many of them through their achievements: reviewers, gallerists, moguls of all stripes.

To me, the presence of a Rembrandt eclipsed any opportunity for career advancement. I’d visited Rembrandt’s house with my boyfriend in Amsterdam, and he’d gotten in trouble for sitting on what turned out to be Rembrandt’s portrait stool. My mother, who’d done bookkeeping but loved art history, had taught me to appreciate his use of light in his paintings, but the visit to his narrow, tall home had converted me to a fan. Each floor was dedicated to a hustle: one for living, another for his portrait studio, another for his school, another for where his students copied his most famous paintings and sold them at reduced price, and, my favorite floor, where he mixed his paints out of plants and stones. I loved that one of the greatest painters who ever lived had had to diversify his income. I associated him now with powdered lapis lazuli on a terra cotta tray.

While I paged the catalogue, I was eating a little crostini with pesto, then dropped it face down onto the white carpet.

We both went still. Then we looked up. No one was paying attention to us.

Slowly, never taking her eyes off the crowd around us, Tara put her foot in front of it so I could pick up the bread from the ground. It left a grassy mark the size of a quarter.

I started calculating how much I’d have to pay to get this rug cleaned. A month’s rent?

Tara stared at the green mark. “Run.”

We abandoned the couch and our plates and began to surf the party.

“Do you want to find the Rembrandt?” I asked her.

She looked at me like I was crazy, and I felt childish, a kid running under the elbows at a wedding reception. She turned to a man in a lime green suit and introduced herself as a publicist; she didn’t mention the word assistant.

The home spanned the whole floor, with a wraparound terrace that had views of the entire city. I thought of the Lion King. Everything the light touches…

I wandered for a few more minutes before I came upon the host couple. I thanked them for having me in a way my mother would have been proud of and narrowly saved myself from asking if there was anything I could do to help clean up.

“Your collection is amazing.”

The wife peered at me through thick glasses. I got nervous then and said the first thing that came to mind, which was, “My boyfriend and I —” I was always mentioning my boyfriend then, as if he was an achievement, “—recently went to the new Broad Museum in Los Angeles. It’s amazing that they made it free.”

The woman gave me a tight smile. I recognize now that they probably knew the Broads personally, and might have seen them as competitors, and my comment as a passive-aggressive suggestion. I was merely showing off the small bits of information that I knew about their world. A much clumsier offense.

“Is all your art here?” I asked.

“No,” the Billionaire answered. He was smiling at me. I found his energy bumbling and friendly, a chubby, hairless Professor Flitwick. “We have four homes, and we rotate the collection among them, and loan pieces to museums occasionally.”

I summoned the courage to ask after the Rembrandt. He blinked wet round eyes and I felt I’d intruded somehow. “It’s mentioned in the catalogue,” I said.

“Ah,” he said, and a smile stretched across his wide mouth. “You want to see it?”

“Yes.” I felt like I’d passed some sort of test.

He stepped away from his wife, who glanced at me, raised her eyebrows, then turned back to the party center. “It’s upstairs. Come, I’ll show you.”

I looked across the room to check on my pesto spot. It was still there. “Thank you.”

I followed him up the spiral staircase lined with Diane Arbus photographs. We passed my boss on the way.

“We’re going to see the Rembrandt,” I said.

She gave me a look I now realize was apprehension, a warning. “Have fun.”

I just smiled at her.

The Billionaire and I emerged onto a second floor as large as the first, and he took me through the children’s rooms, where four adolescents played video games on enormous geometric beanbag chairs. They didn’t acknowledge either of us. These children were already so much more powerful than I could ever hope to be; in fact, entertaining hope to be this powerful would rot me from the inside, turn me into a sort of Gollum. I thought of growing up here, in this place, in this life, and felt an emotional vertigo.

The Billionaire led me up the stairs again to the third floor.

We arrived at the master bedroom. He stopped at the threshold. By now, we were very alone, the children’s floor a buffer between us and the party. I could not hear the guests. The rug in the room was special, he told me; it spanned the room, which was, of course, larger than my apartment. I don’t remember why it was special, though, because by then it had occurred to me that he could do absolutely anything he liked to me and I’d have no recourse.

Creepy men struggled to find an entry point. I wasn’t all that innocent, but I had been taught in my midwestern Catholic way that anything short of body dysmorphia was prideful. I was embarrassed to imagine anyone trying to seduce me. This attitude disarmed older men who, in hindsight, had begun the prescribed path only to encounter my wholesome defenses. They then seemed to relax, let out their inner nerds, tell me about the things they were interested in, because I really did want to know, and assumed they only wanted to tell me.

So I followed the Billionaire into his bedroom, afraid that if I didn’t, it would be rude.

We passed the bed — larger than my kitchen — and he led me into a dressing room off the side.

“I keep it here,” he said, and I was relieved that we were still heading to the artwork, not just the most secluded room in the place.

The room was messy and doubled as a study. It was the only room I’d seen so far that looked like it could be in someone else’s home. The desk had pens and Post-It notes on it, and one of the dresser drawers hung open like a lolling tongue. Even the windows here were normal-sized, though they still showed an emperor’s view.

“Here it is,” the Billionaire said. He walked me over to the dresser. He was a head shorter than me. There were other, ordinary things on top: uncapped cologne, loose change, a discarded tie.

He picked up a glass rectangle.

“I keep it here so I can actually look at it,” he said. “It’s the only thing in this whole place I’d save in a fire.”

I was wondering if that included his wife and children when he handed it to me. I hadn’t been expecting this and my heart skipped a beat.

I held the Rembrandt in my hands.

I’d expected a painting, but it was a copper plate, the kind used to make prints. In it, an angel appeared to a group of shepherds. It was difficult to make out the design against the copper, though there was still ink dried into the grooves from when Rembrandt had used it himself. I turned it in the light and the drawing came out. It was glorious, how the scratches seemed to change before my eyes into a group of men, an angel, mere lines suggesting the rays of the sun, the tiniest nicks on their faces projecting profound awe. The whole thing was smaller than a postcard.

I stared at it for a long time, hoping that in some way, seeing and touching this object would change me, smooth me, deepen me, turn me into the sort of person who could exist alongside these things and shrug. But all that happened was my eyes filled with tears, because it was beautiful.

I both loved and hated that it was hidden up here, away from other people. I had long wondered how someone could possess the means to, if not end world hunger, significantly reduce it, and not do so; the thought provoked the same mental pain that happened when I thought too much about outer space. Yet I understood owning this Rembrandt and keeping it here, just for myself.

“Thank you,” I said.

I held it a moment longer, then put it back on the dresser.

“I want to show you something else,” he said.

I followed him. He took me into a bathroom.

Everything inside was white. The tub looked like it required swimming lessons to safely use. “This is my favorite piece in the house.” He smiled at me and pointed.

On a tiled pillar, directly across from the bathtub, hung a black and white photograph of boobs.

I stared at them for a long while. The Billionaire smiled at me, his front teeth making an impression on his bottom lip.

Finally, I said, “Those are some great boobs,” because they were. I, a small-breasted woman, found it important to express admiration for better-endowed women, so I didn’t seem bitter.

“Isn’t it gorgeous?” He stared at the photo, sighed. “Life.”

My heart was pounding now.

“I think my friend is waiting for me,” I said.

The Billionaire didn’t protest, just hummed a little as he led me back down the stairs. I rejoined the party, and retrieved my purse, and tried to say goodbye to Tara, but she was on the terrace in the middle of a group of women from the Met.

I ran into my boss calling an Uber in the lobby downstairs. She looked at me over her red-framed glasses. “Did you see it?”

“Yes.” I tried to explain the copper plate to her but couldn’t. She just looked at me for a long time and then told me to remember this.

“These sorts of experiences don’t happen twice,” she said.

And it didn’t. A year later, I sold a novel, and my boss and I had our sushi lunch that precipitated my exit. “If you’re a writer, write,” I recall her saying when I first began, but hadn’t listened. She said nothing of the kind in our final meeting, but I had already lost the privilege of her advice, never having listened to it. Still that push was a kindness. A month after that, I got a job in a middle school, where I could be myself if I kept it PG. I wore clogs and jeans. And I made three times the salary.

My new job had no glamour. Instead of crisis about book advances and upset celebrities, I dealt with menstrual accidents and tears. And yet sometimes, in the middle of the crush of odorous adolescents and overstretched teachers it occurs to me, as if it happened in a dream, that I have held a Rembrandt in my hands.

-30-

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Emily Neuberger is the author of A Tender Thing (Putnam, 2020). Her writing has appeared in The Prairie Schooner, The Missouri Review, swamp pink, The Common, Joyland, The Sun, The Bennington Review, and elsewhere, and in 2023 she was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in Brooklyn with her tuxedo cat and runs the reading series Sunday Stories.

What starts as a campus drama ends with much higher stakes than tenure or a paper in Acta Mathematica. We’re excited to welcome Claude Clayton Smith back to Works Progress—he’s always worth your time.

Happy February,

The Editors

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Chance made us colleagues . . .

—Anonymous

I WOULDN’T HAVE had to help Dolores die if I hadn’t been faculty adviser to the university chess club. I’d been stuck with that chore during my first year on campus, after the Dean reminded us newbies that community service, which often entailed volunteering for unpopular duties, was a factor in awarding tenure. OK, I’d told myself, since I’d been in the chess club way back in middle school, I’d reacquaint myself with the game and get on with it. Being in the math department, I suppose I was a logical choice for the chess club, given the other Assistant Professors in my cohort that year. Dolores was in Sociology, a second woman in Modern Languages. They flipped a coin, Dolores lost, and so she was saddled with the Society for Creative Anachronism. I forget what the other woman had to take on. At any rate, it was after the meeting when extra-curricular duties were assigned that Dolores asked if I’d mind playing a game of chess with Spencer. Apparently, chess was his only interest. To which I replied, “Who’s Spencer?”

“He’s arriving next week. I’m his foster mom and I intend to adopt him.”

A snag in the paperwork had prevented Spencer—a pale, gangling fourteen-year-old with a mop of red hair—from accompanying Dolores to the university from Utah, an out-of-state move for both of them. There didn’t appear to be a man in Dolores’ life, nor did I ask, although my wife Eleanor was curious. In retrospect, I guess I considered that being a foster mother was somehow appropriate for a new Assistant Professor of Sociology. Dolores had done her doctoral dissertation on a comparison of recidivism in paroled prisoners with those who had been in foster homes before incarceration. I forget which group had fared better—all this by way of chatting before that meeting—so I said, “Be happy to.”

Incredibly, late one afternoon a few days after his arrival, the taciturn and pimply Spencer beat me handily at the tiny frame house Dolores had rented on the edge of campus. I had played hastily—Eleanor and I had dinner plans—and wasn’t really concentrating. Or so I told myself. Still, I was piqued to have been bested. When Dolores asked if Spencer might join the chess club on campus, I discouraged the notion, since he’d be starting ninth grade at the local K-12 school. Didn’t they have a chess club there? Dolores said she’d inquire.

A few weeks later, returning home from a dinner for new faculty members hosted by the Dean of Arts & Sciences—Dolores and I and the woman in Modern Languages were in the same college—Eleanor wondered aloud if Dolores might be a good match for my colleague Dave Schlossberg. Dave had recently divorced and seemed out of sorts. Eleanor had just made friends with his ex and felt sorry for him, so I said I’d mention it. Surprisingly, before the month was out, Dave invited Dolores for a beer at The Depot, the faculty watering hole, telling me, when I ran into him outside his office, that he’d found her at once “engaging” yet “distant.” They “dated,” if you could call it that, several times, then the relationship petered out.

Toward the end of the second semester that year I received a call from the secretary in the Sociology Department saying that an envelope addressed to me had found its way to her desk through campus mail. “It looks official,” she said. “You might want to fetch it rather than wait on it.” As everyone knew, the campus mail was notoriously slow, thanks to a new program that employed a number of work-study students, several of whom had been caught stealing checks from letters intended for their classmates, which they cashed on a lark at the bank on Main Street. When the scheme was discovered, the students were expelled, and the head of the mail room—a twenty-year employee of the university—was fired. His large family, already on food stamps, was then relegated to the county food pantry.

Indeed, the letter waiting for me across campus was important. Acta Mathematica, one of the most prestigious journals in my field, had expressed an interest in a paper I’d submitted on fractals—the focus of my doctoral dissertation—and wondered if I’d be open to revisions per their suggestions. Would I? I couldn’t wait to tell Eleanor, who’d borne the brunt of typing up my dissertation. I thanked the secretary for notifying me, and as I left her office, letter in hand, I noticed that the door to the office with Dolores’ nameplate on it stood ajar. So I nudged it open, intending to ask how she was getting on.

What I saw disturbed me greatly. Dolores wasn’t in, but Spencer, dressed all in black, was rifling through the top drawer of her desk so intently that he didn’t even look up. When he finally did, he said, hesitating just long enough so that I knew he was lying, “I’m locked out. Have you seen my mother?”

“No,” I said. “I—I was just going to ask her when we might play chess again. You owe me a rematch, you know. To even the score.” My voice rang hollow.

“How about this afternoon?”

“Shouldn’t you be at school?”

Spencer’s red hair was much longer now, pulled into a pony tail, and his Goth clothing seemed a cry for attention. When I telephoned Dolores later from my office, she said that Spencer was having a tough time at school, accepted neither by the town kids nor those of the university faculty. She didn’t seem concerned that he’d been going through her desk. “We keep a key hidden outside,” she said. “He was likely just looking for loose change. He’s smoking now. I found an empty pack in his room.”

“Well,” I said, “I’ll be over for a game of chess later on. I just have to see if Eleanor has anything on the agenda.” Eleanor had found a part-time job at a library in the next town over, and I usually had dinner ready on the days when she worked. Our young son Oscar, in third grade that year, spent his afternoons playing Pee Wee baseball.

“They want me to consider modeling snowflakes rather than eroded coast lines,” I told Eleanor, showing her the letter from Acta Mathematica. They think it would be less esoteric and more familiar. I was thinking just the opposite, but hey—it’d be a big drop in the bucket towards tenure. We can’t take it for granted, you know.”

“Between that and the chess club,” Eleanor laughed, “how can you miss?”

“Speaking of which, I had a game with Spencer after my last class today.”

“Oscar’s seen him at school dressed like Dracula. He says the kids think he’s weird. They call him Carrot Top, like that comedian.”

“I thrashed him thoroughly. Checkmate in ten moves. Guess that didn’t help.”

When I told her about catching Spencer in Dolores’ office, Eleanor just shook her head. “Poor kid.”

* * *

At the start of the following year at the local school, Spencer got himself suspended for smoking violations, wasting those few days out of class walking back and forth along Main Street, or sitting against the brick wall of the bank, chain-smoking. Dolores was now officially his “mother” and took pride in referring to him as “my son.” Dave Schlossberg, seen often in those days in the company of the Assistant Professor of Modern Languages, had told me confidentially—which meant that his girlfriend and probably everyone else on campus knew—that he’d seen black and blue bruises on Dolores’ arm when she’d taken off her sweater during some committee meeting, only to realize her mistake and hastily put it back on.

Later that school year, following further suspensions for a variety of infractions, Spencer was finally expelled. Unable to find him a tutor, Dolores arranged to home-school him, though busy with her own courses on campus. Whether Spencer ever really graduated from high school—Dolores insisted he’d earned some sort of certificate, perhaps a high school equivalency diploma—remained a mystery. She then arranged for him to begin a course in automotive repair at the local community college. Colleagues learned never to ask how he was doing.

* * *

Several years later, as time for tenure evaluations neared, Dolores and I were selected by the Dean of Arts & Sciences to represent the University at a conference of affiliated institutions on the reconstruction of General Education requirements. Stated simply, the theme was: What to do about the plethora of new technologies? I hated committees of any sort, let alone professional conferences of “learned societies,” but since this one happened to be in Toronto—where I’d never been—I found myself looking forward to it. I was still smarting subconsciously from the fact that Acta Mathematica had held my revised paper for so long that I’d actually forgotten I’d submitted it, and when I did remember and sent them a “tickler,” they’d admitted, “with sincere apologies,” that it had “somehow been lost.” It finally appeared in Random Structures and Algorithms, a publication, to be sure, but hardly top-notch.

The upcoming Toronto conference brought to mind the Acta Mathematica mini-debacle of yesteryear, since the role of mathematical journals in General Education was the work group to which I’d been assigned. On the flight up, I suppose I projected my sour mood on Dolores, cynically imagining that she would advocate for the death penalty instead of life imprisonment in her assigned breakout group. Then I came to my senses, and as we talked, she proved keener than ever in her belief that the values of adoption should be entrenched in whatever Gen Ed courses could accommodate them, regardless of any technological “accessories.” It would lessen abortion, help childless couples, encourage men or women without partners, etc. In turn, recovering my equanimity, I resolved to recommend that the recent standards set forth in Educational Studies in Mathematics be adopted by my own group. They were quite rigorous. Mindful of tenure, I hoped my recommendation would impress the Dean.

Then we found ourselves in Toronto, skittering from the airport taxi into the lobby of an immense hotel, which we never once left over the course of the next three days. Meetings held at adjacent buildings were accessed by subterranean tunnels. It was December and it was freezing, so I was glad to stay inside. The temperature, however, was a bit tropical, and as Dolores and I entered the elevator, she removed her button-up sweater. That’s when I noticed what Dave Schlossberg had noticed years earlier—fresh purple bruises on her left upper arm. She got off at the fourth floor. I went on to the fifth.

Dinner that night was a revelation. The ballroom-size restaurant was crowded, and our table was at the far end. Directly above us was a bar on the second-floor mezzanine, where a number of participants—you could tell them by their blue and white nametags—had evidently arrived early and were carousing on their university nickels. Beer mugs were lined up along the railing.

“Isn’t this grand?” Dolores exclaimed.

I’d never considered Dolores a social being, but off campus, as we were now, she was uncharacteristically animated. As we’d entered the lobby upon arrival, she’d stopped for a long conversation with the bellhop who’d grabbed our bags from the trunk of the taxi. And then, learning that the manager behind the front desk had once been in the Peace Corps, she began to tell him about her older sister, now married with three kids, who’d once served in Africa—Burkina Faso, to be exact. The line of those waiting to check in, myself included, grew longer as the manager replied, “And you?”

“I’m in domestic service,” Dolores winked. “On the home front. I adopted a teenager and am adopting another.”

That’s how I learned about Cassandra—Cassie, as she preferred to be called—a fifteen-year-old “waif” (Dolores’ term) from South Carolina, who’d be moving in with Dolores and Spencer at that tiny frame house on the edge of campus. “Did you know,” Dolores said as we consulted our menus, “that sixty percent of American households have some form of personal experience with adoption?” I didn’t, but had no chance to reply. “And yet tens of millions know very little about it.”

“Interesting,” was all I could say, trying to imagine Spencer playing chess with his new “sister.” Spencer was supposedly commuting by bus to the local community college, a branch campus of the larger state university where—Dolores insisted—he would be eligible to complete a Bachelor’s degree after his program in auto mechanics. He’d wanted a car for the commute (“Ain’t I workin’ on cars, Mom?”), but to her credit Dolores vehemently denied him even a driver’s license. I had no idea how he was doing in his studies—no one did—and you couldn’t guess anything from Dolores. And now Cassandra was entering the picture, a dour, dumpy fifteen-year-old.

“My father was in the Peace Corps years ago,” Dolores went on, “one of the first to work in South America. My mother always got a kick out of that: ‘Your father joined the Peace Corps to teach the indigenous people of South America how to plant corn— when they practically invented it! We met at the American Embassy in D.C. when he was home on break, and he never went back.’ My father’s mantra was noblesse oblige. My older sister took it seriously. As a kid, I had no idea what it meant.”

And now you do? I wanted to say. I was stunned by all this information, unsure how to reply. So I just smiled and looked up, as if in search of an appropriate response, when something caught my eye. A half-empty beer mug, trailing droplets of beer like a comet, was descending as if in slow motion from the balcony railing above us. Landing smack in the middle of our table—Wham!—it launched a basket of dinner rolls skyward, splattering Delores and me with whatever was on tap at the second-floor mezzanine bar. The sound it made, akin to a gunshot, sent people scrambling under the tables nearest to ours, while diners at the far end of the room were scarcely aware that anything had transpired. It was a Friday evening, after all, with a TGIF in full swing overhead. What the hell—we were all out of town for a long weekend, ready to solve the problems of education in America by tweaking the requirements of university General Ed curricula with a dash of technology. And now Dolores and I were wet to the waist.

Dolores looked at me—she said later that the blood had drained from my face—and laughed hysterically. “Tonight,” she said finally, holding the offending beer mug on high while aping a popular TV beer commercial of that era, “let it be Lowenbrau!”

I insisted, of course, that we be given a free meal, but Dolores pooh-poohed that suggestion, in a gesture of solidarity with our happy colleagues above. The latter were hanging over the railing, mouths agape. Dolores exchanged waves with them, then we returned to our rooms to change clothes, and I didn’t see her again for the next three days. Except once. Late that night, getting off the elevator at the wrong floor after a Math Society cocktail party, I saw her ducking into her room down the hall in the company of another woman. Come to think of it, I also glimpsed them in the breakfast room early the next morning.

* * *

By the time Dolores and I were coming up for tenure, her “daughter” Cassie was pregnant, insisting that she wanted to keep the baby. This, of course, put Dolores in a difficult position. She was an advocate for adoption—no problem there—but there were limits to the definition of “community service” when it came to the university.

As soon as Cassie turned sixteen, Spencer married her at the county courthouse, driven there by Dolores. Taking my own car, I stood in as witness to the brief ceremony. Random Structures and Algorithms had just accepted another article of mine, regarding the statistical characteristics of crystal growth, and so I was feeling fairly confident about tenure. The chess club had done its part, winning an informal though unofficial collegiate tournament of area colleges it had organized at my suggestion. Given her record of “domestic service,” no one was giving Dolores any chance of tenure until she announced that Recidivism Revisited, a book she’d allegedly been pecking away at intermittently since coming to campus, had been accepted for publication by an obscure academic press in England. She included a contract among the documents in the portfolio she submitted for tenure, but the committee requested to see the manuscript itself. The book proved to be her doctoral dissertation, to which she’d added a hasty Preface about the “progress” of Spencer and Cassie, who’d set up shop as a married couple with their infant daughter in her tiny frame house on the edge of campus.

One Friday afternoon during the latter months of that academic year, I saw Dolores talking seriously in a corner booth at The Depot with an older, tenured woman from the Phys Ed department, who coached the field hockey team. Dave Schlossberg, who’d insisted I have a beer with him—it was his birthday—said he’d seen them there often. Catching my eye (Had I been staring at that booth?), Dolores waved briefly and smiled, as if we’d just returned from our Toronto junket. Then I excused myself, needing to get home to Oscar, as Eleanor was working overtime at the library.

Denied tenure, Dolores appealed to the university committee, citing her “work” with the Society of Creative Anachronism. As their adviser, taking her cue from my suggestion to the chess club, she’d encouraged the members to engage in competitive games with institutions around the state, with optional discussions and exhibits on pre-17^th-century combat, arts, culture, history, whatever. But that initiative had fallen apart, and the group’s student president admitted that Dolores had hardly attended any meetings. In fact, some members had no idea she was their adviser.

Tenure decisions were made in one’s sixth year at the university. The seventh was intended as a year of grace, time to settle in with new projects and prospects for the future, or to prepare to move on. I was tenured and promoted to associate professor. But that summer, Dolores and her children and grandchild disappeared for good. Incredibly, Eleanor and I received a family photo in a Christmas card from her in December. Dolores was smiling, Spencer looked glum, Cassie looked haggard, and the baby was screaming. They were staying with Dolores’ married sister and her three children. It must have been quite a household, because her sister had just divorced. Further, according to the enclosed note, Dolores had taken a job as a social worker, checking on welfare cases to see that those receiving food stamps were actually looking for permanent work. She was also tracking down deadbeat dads, etc.

“What a thankless job,” I said.

“Somebody’s got to do it,” Eleanor said. Then she paused. “Poor kids.”

The following year Dolores’ Christmas card—there was no photo or note this time—came from a new address. Checking it out on Google Maps, I discovered that it was an apartment building in Anacostia, the worst section of Washington, DC, an area known for its high rate of violent crime.

Because of Dolores, I’d developed a relationship with the Phys Ed professor, who, as it turned out, had bought the tiny frame house that Dolores had been renting, to rent and manage it herself. You could tell she’d been attractive in her youth, but was graying now, with that short ducktail hair style that seemed characteristic of the female coaches on campus. Once, over beer with her at The Depot, she admitted that whenever she’d gone on dates in high school or college—whether it was bowling or just putt-putt golf—she had a habit of beating her male companions, which seemed to discourage them. Why she was telling me this, I couldn’t imagine—perhaps it was the beer—but when I mentioned that Eleanor and I had received a Christmas card from Dolores, she said that Dolores was staying in touch with her as well. In fact, she’d visited Dolores and her family in Anacostia during spring break, while in DC for a conference of the National Association for Sport and Physical Education.

Taking early retirement a few years later, the Phys Ed professor moved to The Villages in Florida, an increasingly popular and raucous place for retirees, and we received a Christmas card from her a few months later. There was no card from Dolores that year; nor ever again. But as we learned in a brief note from The Villages during the following Thanksgiving, Dolores had been found stabbed to death in the basement of her Anacostia apartment building.

I don’t think the university—ostensibly relieved that Dolores had left of her own accord—ever learned of this tragedy. Or if so, it was never announced. Despite my own quiet inquiries, I could find nothing about her murder in the newspapers or online. And when I wrote the Phys Ed professor in The Villages to ask if she had any details, my letter was returned as undeliverable.

-30-

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Claude Clayton Smith, Professor Emeritus of English, Ohio Northern University, is the author of eight books and co-editor/translator of four. His own work has been translated into five languages, including Russian and Chinese. The second edition of his book QUARTER-ACRE OF HEARTACHE was published in 2025. He holds a DA from Carnegie-Mellon, MFA in fiction from the Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa, MAT from Yale, and BA from Wesleyan. For details on his writing and teaching career, visit his website: claudeclaytonsmith.wordpress.com.

This special edition of Works Progress comes to you a few days early this month with Casey Wiley’s timely “Xmas Eve,” a frigidly poignant story about an amateur wrestler’s trek through his Christmasified neighborhood in search of a little companionship, and maybe a dinner, if he can only find Killer Sheila’s house.

Wishing you a joyful holiday season,

The Editors

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After stepping unsteadily from the bus crossing town, wet snow falling on hard packed old snow, Russet wiped at his eyes and tried to read the faded address on the envelope in the cold wind. But before he could ask the driver, wearing a limp elf hat, about Killer Sheila’s place, the door slapped shut. His jacket too thin and too small, vision shifting, tears on his cheeks, Russet grabbed a sign to steady himself (NO PARKING SNOW REMOVAL), the metal pole frigid in his bare hand. He was sure he was late for the dinner. Had Killer Sheila said exactly when? The houses here all appeared the same: the color of sand or concrete, thrift shop leather shoes, shedding siding. Packed close together, they were like one long house with hundreds of exits. How could anyone know which house was theirs? Did just anyone come and go then? Sleep here, sleep there. Never sleep.

It was dark and growing darker. Russet took a few tentative steps down the icy sidewalk where a trimmed fir tree lay on a nub of frozen front lawn like someone had forgotten to bring it in or had just plumb given up, close enough, the thought that counts. Or maybe they had tossed it out the door. Clutching the envelope, he reversed on the sidewalk and limp-slipped several blocks in the other direction in falling snow, sliding on cracked ice mirrors. He passed bowing porches stuffed with couches, road cones, MAGA signs, hula hoops the faded colors of tropical ideals. A fish tank filled with boots, Styrofoam candy cane hooked over the edge. Highchairs, barking dogs, bowling balls, screen doors torn off. An inflatable snowman the size of a car hummed on an iced lawn, a deflated Rudolph next to it, a pressed imagination. Russet’s basement apartment across town was no better. He hadn’t even decorated, not one thing. It was empty but for a mattress before the TV and a plastic kiddie pool for icing his knees and back after matches. Flattened Sheetz plastic ice bags floated in the tepid water like lifeless jelly fish.

Russet knew he was late, he had to be late. And what time was it anyway? His back hurt. His neck hurt. His eyes, or just behind his eyes, hurt, his vision blurring, shifting. The world was both real and an image of itself, a haunting ghost. The only time Russet’s head wasn’t pounding was when he slept and he didn’t sleep much on nights he spent in the ring. Tugging the jacket around him, he limped faster, snow falling, slipping. Many of the houses were dark. Where was everybody?

At a sagging duplex, Russet thumped up the steps to ask for directions but paused at a child’s drawing of a grinning Christmas tree flapping from the storm door. He tried to smooth the paper, the green and red marker bleeding in the wet snow, but a dog’s bark tore from inside, the sound chasing him slipping down the block and up another where he eventually slowed, gasping and hacking, before a nativity scene, the third one he’d passed. The wind whipped. He couldn’t find the envelope with the address. It wasn’t anywhere. He gazed desperately down the sidewalk, another. Where had he come from? He called, “Sheila?” Glanced down a side street, one after, like Sheila’s place would be lit by the star of Bethlehem.

How could all those figures in the manger before him seem so content in this world? Christ, two doors down was a house with the top caved plum in like an upside-down roof in a cartoon. Snow fell into the house. Like if that’s the only house you saw, you would think: War. Staked on the iced lawn before it was a faded, hard-plastic Santa, red cheeked, the size of a child. A bulb shining within. Plastic reindeer were tipped before Santa. See, life isn’t so bad now, is it kids? And then the roof falls on your head.

But every plastic figure in the nativity scene was so focused on the baby lying in the manger. He was wrapped in a blue sweatshirt with a snarling white lion or tiger emblazoned across his little chest. Not one figure in the scene was spacing out like people do, wishing perhaps they were somewhere else. Not even the cow resting on dirty snow beside the manger, nor the faded plastic flamingo. Certainly, not Mary. It was like every being in the world was waiting on that kid, the only kid that mattered, and Russet had to look away. His Mama had walked out when he was six. He hadn’t seen her since. He’d hated her for leaving him with a monster, and eventually that hate had hardened within him. She could be dead for all he knew. But recently, the tears had snuck up on him like a cheap-shot in the ring, a folding chair to the back of the head, and he desperately wanted to see her.

Russet called out again, spotting half a block down a glassed bus stop shelter (SEE IT SAY IT poster), where a figure lay twisted in a tattered sleeping bag. Hurrying over, Russet slid hard on ice into the bench, cracking his knee. The figure didn’t move, the eyes closed. Of course, it wasn’t his Mama. How would he recognize her anyway? She certainly wouldn’t know him. Before crossing town earlier this evening, he’d first checked the bus station for her and then the bus, pacing the center aisle, tears on his cheeks, like a crazy person.

Bending close, Russet smelled the acid of the man’s breath and offered to buy him a cup of coffee at a gas station—just did he know where one was? The figure unmoving, Russet grabbed the man’s cue ball shoulder through the sleeping bag. He was colder than cold. Russet didn’t even have a phone for help. It was hard to keep the man’s image together in front of him like he was fragmenting to two people. His nose was split plum down the middle like two noses, the gash starting to crust over. When Russet leaned close to try to feel for breath again, the man twisted suddenly, nearly toppling off the bench.

Russet grabbed him. “I won’t hurt you.”

“The hell?” His voice sounded like a construction site.

“Are you okay?”

The man in the sleeping bag coughed. One eye remained squeezed shut. He pushed up to his elbow. He wore three winter hats tugged down hard but he had on this beautiful pair of eyeglasses. Bright blue tortoise shell and not bent or anything. And clean-shaven. His front teeth had been knocked clear out.

“…That what happened here?” The man pointed a finger with a cracked nail at his own eye, the open one, bloodshot. “You’re looking at me while the other one’s watching for the bus.”

“Got hit once and it broke.”

“Just like that?”

Russet tried to snap his fingers but they were too cold. First grade. With his Mama long gone, Russet’s father had turned on him.

“Champ?”

“Yeah?”

“Step away.”

Russet realized he was hugging the man in the sleeping bag. All of him cold.

“Sorry,” Russet said hastily, releasing him, wiping hard at his eyes, and asked again if the man was okay, which was as empty as working for no pay and told him, “Nice glasses,” set a couple ones on the bench and then a few more, and limp-slipped off, not looking back.

—

Russet passed a brightly-lit gas station, backtracked and went inside where it was never nighttime. He had to shade his eyes, light crashing about his head. Christmas Muzak played, some synthesizer Jazz thing. He thought back to the house with the caved roof. Santa and the reindeer had probably been long staked on the lawn before the roof collapsed, he thought. But then who tonight had turned on that light inside Santa?

At the counter, Russet tried to focus on the clerk, splitting to two people. He asked if she had ever seen a lady in her mid-sixties come in, named Cherry.

The young woman working squinted at him. She wore puffy winter gloves like cartoon hands, but it wasn’t cold inside. Short, wild hair colored like a rainbow, T-shirt like one too. Nametag: Bo.

Then he asked her about what he could remember of the address on the envelope. 5th or 6th, maybe. He didn’t know why he was still asking about this dinner, as late as it was. “Or is there a Seth Street?”

“You okay?”

He grabbed the counter.

“Should I call someone?” Bo reached for something under the counter. Then she looked closer. There were freckles even between her eyes. The freckles were splitting before him. “Do I know you from somewhere?” She looked away suddenly like trying not to stare. “Are you okay?”

“…I cry all the time.”

She stepped back like the words had pushed her. “I’m gonna pretend I did not just hear that.”

“Sorry,” Russet mumbled, squeezing his eyes shut. “Comes out of nowhere.”

“Do you want to now?”

“When I want to, I never can.”

He’d never cried like this before; he’d never cried, period, but of course he had, all those memories stuffed away like a tube sock balled in a wrestling boot. He grabbed a sleeve of powdered donuts the size of chaw cans, and by the register, Slim Jims.

“Do you have something to cut with?”

“Step back.”

He backed into a metal rack. “Sorry, to slice that like fancy salami, I mean.”

“No amount of slicing’ll make that fancy. You gonna do it here? Or just walk off with my knife? Say if I give it to you.”

“Sorry.”

Eyeing him, Bo removed a glove. Her hand was thin and pale like a doll’s hand. She dug in her jeans’ pocket and produced a chunky Swiss Army knife. She pulled her glove back on, then held the knife out over the counter. When Russet stepped forward, she closed her gloved hand over the knife.

“Sorry,” he said again, feeling stupid.

“You don’t have to keep saying that.”

Thinking suddenly of Killer Sheila’s daughter, he said, “Do you have kid toys?”

Bo withdrew her hand. “You sure you’re okay?”

“I cry all the time.”

“You said that.”

With his eyes shut the two of everything faded, or usually. Two knives, four winter gloves. His father, raging. But there were never two Mamas.

When he opened his eyes, Bo had torn open the Slim Jim and was slicing it on the counter. Little processed meat discs like scattered pain pills. Bells jingled from the Christmas Muzak. Bo had short arms too. He noticed people’s arms. Not so much muscle, but length. He imagined how people would grab him, whip him around. Bearhug him. Drop him. Other than in the ring, Russet couldn’t remember the last time anybody had touched him. Hugged him or held his hand, let alone brushed past him at the Weis or leaned a shoulder into him on a crowded bus. But in the ring, the feeling of another body crashing against him was glorious. The weight of another body pressing down on him, sweat-stink and chaw breath, the sparse crowd roaring. Never stop.

“The toy for your kid or something? They sleeping?” A new-age version of Silent Night was playing now on the radio. “I used to love Christmas, now I work it, get time and a half. Now I like it about half as much.”

“You should have some,” Russet said, eating a meat disc from the counter.

“Just after you pay.”

He dropped his few remaining bills on the counter. Bo had trouble collecting any meat discs with her puffy glove fingers, so Russet picked up several for her. When she held out her gloved hand, he dropped them into it and stepped back.

“I swear I know you from somewhere,” she said, chewing.

“I’ve been going to churches Sundays.”

“I do not go there.”

“I’m only looking for my Mama. Soup kitchens. Bingo, everywhere.”

“Only?” She removed a glove and popped a few more discs into her mouth.

“Last couple weeks, it’s all I’ve been doing. I used to not think about her. She got me this squid comic one day when I was a kid, and she was gone the next. That was forty-one years ago.”

“Jesus, how old are you?”

“I’ve been crying a lot.”

“Stop telling me that.”

He squeezed his eyes shut again. “She was scared of him, my dad. I was. Am.” The monster was dead somewhere in Ohio. “Do you sell medicine for headaches? She was really skinny.”

“Drugs?”

“No thanks, or—”

“No, her.”

When he opened his eyes, Bo was still split. He clutched the rack behind him. “I was six.”

“Just the skinny ones, usually, see them in here. Twitchy, seen it all,” Bo continued. “Some nights? Wandering like zombies, licking Gatorades. What do I do with that? No offense to your mom. And Merry Christmas, or almost, by the way.”

“AA meetings, thrift shops, the library, checking every old lady sleeping at desks, but I don’t even know what she looks like. I never forgave her for leaving. Bus stops, diners.”

Bo grinned suddenly. Her teeth had these little gaps between them like a kid’s teeth growing in.

“You’re a wrestler!” she exclaimed. “Seen you at the Shriners. You wrestle Friday nights, right?”

He nodded.

“Seen you lose, no offense!”

A week back—or was it two?—Randy the Clown had dumped Russet on his head on concrete outside the ring. When Russet came to in the locker room (really a janitor’s closet), his head pounding, the old clown, leaning over him, was splitting to two clowns. Both clowns were whooping, face paint glopped like cottage cheese. They were going on about how the (sparse) crowd had gone wild. Splayed on the locker room floor, Russet had felt tears on his cheeks and realized he was crying. He was thinking of his Mama reading him that squid comic. He leaned into her warmth. Her smell, what was her smell?

In the bright gas station, Bo mock flexed. “Hell with it, I’ll just drive you around, this party can’t be far. But damn, a wrestler. Just two problems: No car and I cannot be near a party and not go in.”

“Who’d watch the store?”

“Distant third problem.”

Russet slid the remaining meat discs into his pocket. Grabbed the donuts, backing away. “See, I don’t know if my coworker intended it as a party?”

Bo was already rummaging through stuff on a low shelf behind her, below the cigarettes. “Wait. Terry Thunder? Linda Legs? Amy T-N-A?”

“Her name’s Sheila.”

“Killer Sheila?” Bo did a little dance behind the counter. “She’s so hot!”

“She’s the best wrestler I’ve ever seen.”

“And you’re going on a date with her!”

“Nothing like that.”

Bo glared at him. “I will never kiss you tonight no matter how drunk I get.”

“Sorry, I like…the other ones.”

“What are you saying?”

He hesitated. “Men.”

“Do I need to call the manager?”

The store was so bright like some police interrogation room. “Sorry, I—”

“I’m just fucking with you, you have no idea when somebody’s fucking with you, do you, Russet Pipes? Can I call you that? And where’re you going? I’m cool. I always thought I could be a wrestler. Thought I could be a lot of things. Make movies. But do I ever film anything on my phone? I gotta meet her!”

“At least I should call ahead.”

“Tell her I’m cool.”

“I don’t have a phone.”

“Jesus, what’s wrong with you?”

“I told you I—”

“Yeah, yeah, just where’d I put mine, you can use it.” She pulled a puffy coat from under the counter and tugged it on, digging her hands around the pockets.

“I don’t have her number.”

“She invited you, right?”

“And I’ll take this.” Russet plucked a keychain of a cat with a diamond-studded bowtie off a rack by the exit. He backed into the door. “When I get there—”

“Where’d I put my phone, did you take my phone—”

“…I’ll ask her about you coming along.”

“And some friends!”

—

A block away, gasping and hacking, Russet slipped and fell hard, cracking his cheekbone on the icy sidewalk. He didn’t move. Maybe this is how it would end. No one would find him until Christmas morning—the anonymous, local wrestler, sometimes plumber. He was never champ, but he could take a hit, people might remember; he made other wrestlers look good. Maybe a little Suzy would find him on the way to church Christmas morning. And it would be too late. What if his Mama tottered past and didn’t even know him? The pain in his cheek dull at first and then stinging like a great hand squeezing the side of his face, he pushed up and looked back. The gas station was lit bright. Snow falling, kind of pretty. Out front, someone stood on the sidewalk smoking.

“Russet!” the figure called, flexing. “Pipes!”

Eating the rest of the Slim Jim discs along the way, tugging his jacket closed, Russet again spotted the man with the split nose sleeping on the bus stop bench, wrapped in the sleeping bag.

“Here,” Russet said and tucked the donut sleeve under the man’s arm.

The man didn’t say anything. He didn’t move. Leaning close, Russet could hear his rough breathing, like a car scraping a building. The man didn’t resist when Russet lifted him up over his shoulder. It was like lifting a child, the weight of him. Like he was barely there.

“…I’m gonna save you, I’m gonna save you,” the man with the split nose repeated quietly, over Russet’s shoulder. The words like breathing.

“Thank you,” Russet said as they trudged on.

—

The snow was picking up. It was late. They moved slowly, unsteadily. The man with the split nose smelled sweet, not quite like candy. Here and there, cars were parked diagonally across snowy front lawns like someone had veered off the street, skidding toward a house, ducked and rolled, absconded on foot. Let the Neon be somebody else’s problem, only starts half the time anyway.

A sedan rattled by with these big plastic antlers on either side of the roof.

“Rudolf!” the man draped over Russet’s shoulder called hoarsely.

—

In front of the house with the caved roof, Russet took a break on the icy sidewalk, setting the man with the split nose down.

“Your friend has a beautiful home,” the man said, adjusting in his sleeping bag. His legs weren’t strong and he leaned against Russet.

“That’s not it at all,” Russet said. “But who do you think turned the light on?”

“There isn’t one on. Nobody lives in that dump.”

“In Santa here, I mean.”

“Is that a trick question?” the man said. He pointed a crumpled hand at the plastic Santa. “You?” he said.

“No,” Russet said. “Who?”

The man shrugged. “It was always on.”

—

His head pounding, Russet carried the man slowly past a trimmed fir tree dropped on an icy lawn—the same tree where Russet had gotten off the bus, or different. But the man patted at Russet’s back repeatedly until Russet stopped.

“This is my house,” the man proclaimed, hanging over Russet’s shoulder like a sack of tools. A wreath adorned with holly berries hung on the door.

Russet’s wheezing breath was tiny cries. He could feel the tears. He couldn’t remember anymore where he had come from and where he was going. They’d walk forever. Maybe they had been. He could live in this between space. This nothing space, with a stranger.

“But if you want to save me?” the man with the split nose continued. “Do not bring me inside.”

—

The two men finally stood outside a tall house painted three different colors, like one for each story. A kid’s bike with training wheels was tipped on the porch. Russet stuck the fir tree in a snow pile next to the driveway.

Standing uneasily next to Russet, the man with the split nose offered a bite from the donut he was eating. His cracked lips were dusted in powdered sugar as if two Pennsylvania hills converging. His legs, now emerged from the sleeping bag like a calf’s legs at birth, knocked out at the knees as if someone had jerked them that way. Socks were pulled over his sneakers.

Four metal mailboxes were nailed beside the door. “I don’t know which apartment,” Russet said. “I don’t even know if this—”

“I’m glad at least I have some donuts to bring,” the man with the split nose interjected, eating another donut, swaying in place now. Russet took his arm. Even through his sweatshirt, the arm felt like grabbing a bingo marker.

“What’s your friend’s name?”

“Killer Sheila.”

The man with the split nose didn’t even blink at the name. “Sheila!” he called, knocking his head back. “Killer!”

A dog barked somewhere. That car with the antlers rattled by again, or one like it, slowed, and rattled on. The house’s front window by the porch was framed in tinsel and colorful Christmas lights. Half of them blinked. It was dark inside. All reasonable people were asleep by now. Two cars were crammed in the driveway, their bumpers kissing. The driver-side window was plumb open in the car closest to the house, snow wafting in, takeout garbage strewn on the seats. A photograph of a cat was taped to the dashboard. Snow covering all of it.

“Killer!” the man called again.

“Shut up!”

The two men looked up. Some guy had poked his head out a window way up there, the third floor or an attic. Even from here he was tan, or it looked that way in the light from inside his apartment.

“Killer Sheila?” the man eating donuts called.

“Shut up!”

His buzzed hair was frosted with blond dye or snow. He had this little head, kind of itty-bitty, no bigger than a child’s. He couldn’t have been very big. In the locker room, Russet had seen the bruises on Killer Sheila’s neck and chest, and probably these were from wrestling, but he’d heard the rumors from Randy and Linda and Maxx about her boyfriend. One time in the locker room, Sheila saw Russet watching her, shirtless, those bruises impossible not to notice on her broad back, one dwarfing her muscled forearm, and she barked at him to turn around or she’d make him. And but she really was the best wrestler Russet had ever wrestled, and lost to. She had to know that, right? She was graceful in the ring, strong, she fell hard and sold it, and she was good on the mic. She could take anyone. So, if this boyfriend knocked her around, why didn’t she defend herself? Maybe she had and none of it made sense.

How long had Russet’s Mama put up with the beatings before she broke?

“Are you going to let us in?” the man eating donuts called up, his words slurred. “We brought a tree!”

“The fuck?”

“For dinner!”

“Dinner?” the man shouted down. He didn’t need to shout. Somewhere a dog barked.

“Is she okay?” Russet offered.

“Who the hell are you?”

“See, I was supposed to come here,” Russet offered. “Is my understanding? And I realize I’m—we’re—several hours late.”

“Technically,” the man eating donuts offered, “I’m not late because I came as soon as I heard. But I am hungry.”

“Is that a sleeping bag? Fuck are you two?”

“Russet Pipes? And—” He looked to the man eating donuts.

“…Wind.”

“Did you hear that?” Russet called up.

The man in the window shook his head.

“Wind, he said.”

“Don’t give a dump who you are, there’s no dinner!” the man shouted. “Do you know what time it is? Or there was, for me and my lady and definitely not for Russet Whatever-the-shit and Wind and a sleeping bag! Fuck your tree! You’re both all bloody, hell’s wrong with you!”

Russet looked down at his hands. The right one had dried blood on it. He felt the side of his face, tacky and cold. He was bumped suddenly by Wind scouring the icy ground.

“Just my hat, have you seen my hat, we lost my hat.”

The third hat wasn’t on the snowy lawn or the cracked walkway or the front sidewalk or anywhere. When Russet looked up, the man in the window was gone. A pickup truck passed. Another. Christmas music played somewhere, Russet thought from the truck, but when the truck was long gone, the music continued.

Wind sat gingerly on the front steps, moaning, “Oh god, oh god. I used to be married,” he moaned into his crumpled, dirty hands. “Oh god, oh god. She was beautiful, or not beautiful, you saw my house.”

Russet nodded tentatively then shook his head no. “We’ll find your hat or I’ll get you one.”

“But more,” Wind continued, sliding to two people, “she was perfect.” One of the two Winds offered Russet the last donut from the sleeve. The other of him dropped his gaze. “I was no beauty either. And my kid, I had a kid, or she said we did, and I believed her. I believed everything she said.”

Standing there in the cold before the house, Russet offered, “I cry all the time.”

At that, Wind knocked his head back and grinned, flashing those missing front teeth like he knew something good would appear above. Perhaps an angel, a Christmas one, Gerald, or whatever his name is. Who wouldn’t want two of those? The angels would fly the two of them up through that window to retrieve Sheila or fly them home or perhaps there was someplace better.

“I want to thank you for carrying me here,” Wind said.

“I miss my Mama.”

Wind thought for a moment. “Those tears you cry? What if they’re hers?”

Russet wanted his Mama to hold his soupy head for as long as it took. Perhaps, there would be two of her to make up for lost time. No, that’s not fair: two of him. One old and limping and bald and lonely and one only six years old. Just a kid. They’d all cry together. He’d tell his Mama about the sudden tears, about looking for her everywhere recently, and he’d tell her about still having that squid comic. About how when she’d left he’d read it over and over safe under his bed. He’d tell her about first grade, the worried looks and the look-aways. About summer, every summer since, and about how sorry he is that she took the beating for all those years. How could he have hated her for that?

He had so many questions for her. Maybe she’d left the state. Maybe she sang—sings. Maybe she dances. Maybe she likes squids too, or never thinks about them. Maybe she wouldn’t even like him very much. He was nothing special. But he wanted to show her something; holding her hand—the feeling like birth—he’d take her to wrestling Friday night at the Shriners. He’d assure her that the pain, the pounding was okay.

Again, from the porch steps, Wind offered the donut, just a nub now.

“…And I’m scared she’s dead,” Russet said.

“I said there’s no dinner!”

That man with the tiny head was glaring out the upstairs window again, this time smoking a cigarette. Wind pushed unsteadily to standing and tottered and fell into Russet. For the second time, it was like catching a child. His Mama had caught him, over and over, until she couldn’t.

“Look,” the man said from the window above, more calmly. “If I listed off everything I’m scared of….” He trailed off as he blew smoke into the cold night and gestured with his hand as if that explained everything. Then his face twisted. “Christ, you crying?”

“The funny thing is I can never cry!” Wind called back.

“The bald one!”

Russet was still holding the other man up, and when Wind’s legs gave, the two men toppled to the cold walkway like empty beer cans. Just look at them, the two of them balled together on this holy night. Wind, pinned under Russet, clutching the bawling man.

“He is crying!” the voice shouted down from the window, sounding joyous, like people had to see this. A Christmas miracle. That dog barking. Jingle Bells played.

“It’s okay!” Wind called skyward. “I’m gonna save him.”

“That,” the voice boomed down, “I would like to see!”

—

After the man upstairs had thumped the window shut, Russet climbed the steps and rattled the locked door.

“Which mailbox?” he asked, fishing the cat keychain from his pocket.

“Three,” Wind declared, without hesitation. “My lucky number.”

Russet dropped the keychain in.

Wind peeled the second hat from his head and tossed it to Russet. “Let’s go home.”

But instead of following Wind, Russet peered into the dark glass of the door. All he could see was his pitiful reflection. He looked away, tears on his face. He could search for his Mama forever, and maybe he would, but this house was right here. Would he ever find it again? He tugged at the handle a second time, the glass rattling.

“Hey!” he heard Wind hiss behind him.

Russet pounded on the frame, shouting, “Sheila!”

That’s when he noticed the two little boys standing just on the other side of the glass, like spirits appearing. They wore matching snowman PJs. The older one was saying something lost to the glass.

“What?” Russet shouted. “Are you hers too? Is she okay? Are you?”

The older kid looked confused like he was expecting someone else, perhaps Santa. The younger one started to cry.

At that, the downstairs lights blazed, and some big guy in boxer shorts with a shaved head tore down the hallway toward the front door and the bloody figures beyond, one in a sleeping bag tugging the other—screaming something about the best wrestler he’d ever seen—down the porch steps. The man in boxer shorts eased the kids aside like curtains and grabbing a bat, fumbled at the locks, shouting.

When Wind went for the fir tree, Russet scooped him up and scrambled out to the street, running in the slush and ice and the cold Christmas early morning stinging like hundreds of angry whips, dogs barking, the man in boxer shorts shouting after them.

—

Back across town, upon entering Russet’s basement apartment, a sheet tacked over the regress window, hot dog singed to a hot plate, (“You even got yourself a pool,” Wind commented, toeing the plastic), some infomercial for knives was on the TV. An old, tan guy in a Santa hat chopped carrots fast-fast on a cutting board, proclaiming, “Zow!” with each chop. “Zow! Zow!”

“This,” Wind declared, “is a castle.”

-30-

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Casey Wiley’s work has been published in Pinch, Salamander, Passages North, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Hobart, Barrellhouse, Gulf Stream, Salt Hill, The Chronicle of Higher Education, among others. A recent story was selected as a finalist for the Barry Hannah Prize in Fiction. Casey loves gardening and exploring Pennsylvania with Rachael and Oscar. You can read some of his work at caseywiley.com.

Poet, polymath, immigration expert and friend of Works Progress Natan Last is fresh off an excellent New Yorker poem that unfortunately belittles the Mets. Luckily we have him writing on baseball again, and there’s no Yankee propaganda in this special-edition poem.

Natan is also the author of Across the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of the Crossword Puzzle, which is out now and makes a game-winning Christmas present.

Until spring training,

The Editors

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Ringless

A coach flaps his arms like a snow angel, an A on his helmet. I went

Gloveless, a better grip on the Louisville slugger

Whose mottle & grain are a capsule in advance of the forest,

        Treelines rising for the Wave with prehistoric sluggishness.

My callused palms have never held an axe, but how different

.

Could it be? Pinched epidermis, threat of outdoors, striped uniform, a home.

Mom unpins the traced-hand turkey from the fridge to make a point about growth.

When I give a fist, my dad high-fives it. Paper beats rock, he coaches—uch, another writer.

        Our fam steals signs at trailheads now brambled over & calls them heirlooms:

4 MILE LOOP, silhouette with walking stick. That’s grandpa for you.

.

We crossed ourselves as the Single A affiliate dipped for the west coast,

Said goodbye skywritten ads over Brighton, tipped our caps to the mermaids’ vanishing Y’s.

Once we saw a botched proposal on the Jumbotron. Like the Wave,

        We stood & we sat. Me? I’d’ve done branches, traced WILL YOU

On the Fort Tilden inlet, abused the plausible deniability of tides. A— & A—

.

Forever, carved on a tree ‘til deforestation, on a desk ‘til the school is repossessed. Coach says

Can’t wear rings if you pitch, the batter could think it’s a sun.

Baseball, like a forest, is the everywhere game: down in the lineup.

        I dreamed I was lumberjack strong, snapped oaks like pencils,

Beheld the always concentric O’s to prove, at scale, shock is the most loyal fandom.

.

I picture the thwarted groom, staunch as a Douglas fir as he’s frisked

By ballpark security for the ring—the annulus. That night my favorite player

Went O for four, went down swinging in his last at-bat & angrily snapped

        The Louisville slugger, in half, on one knee.

That wood that before it was dead was perfect.

-30-

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NATAN LAST is a writer and immigration policy advocate. He writes bimonthly crosswords for The New Yorker. His essays, poetry, and academic research appear in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Drift, Los Angeles Review of Books, Hyperallergic, Narrative, and elsewhere. He has worked for the UN, the Asylum Seeker Advocacy Project, the International Rescue Committee, and as an advisor to the federal government on refugee resettlement. He lives in his native Brooklyn.

How do you fit romance, politics, a moon colony, and some cows into a speed-time-distance word problem? Read Bryan Hurt to find out.

Happy All Hallows’ Day,

The Editors

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A says what B did was wrong, even though B doesn’t think so. B admits the optics aren’t great, but B didn’t hurt anyone or do anything that wasn’t consensual or break any rules—legal, moral, or otherwise—so maybe A should mind their own damn business. Anyway, it’s not like A hasn’t engaged in some questionable moral behavior.

Take for example, that time A put their ex, C, on blast for no apparent reason, revealing C’s mental health struggles to everyone on the internet—all because, what, A had a bad day or something? Not that A’s entirely wrong to condemn some of C’s recent activities. B agrees that C’s public support of the politician D is ugly and irresponsible, and probably a sign of C’s mental illness.

Both A and B agree that D is irredeemable, a terrible human being, the worst of the worst. Once, back when they were still friends and drinking together, A joked they wished the assassin’s bullets hadn’t missed. Two inches!

D’s sins are much-alleged and often proven, and so don’t bear exhaustive repeating. D raped people. D cheated hard-working people out of their money. D openly admires past and present world dictators, especially those who have committed violence against their own people. Some people say that D’s behavior is explainable, if not excusable, because of D’s horrible father, E, who was belittling and abusive. E said D was fat. E said D would always be a disappointment.

Just like D, E did terrible things. E was a slumlord. E was a racist. E rented his shit-hole apartments to people like F for way too much money and then evicted them just so he could rent them to other hard-working suckers whose skin-color he liked better.

From that perspective, maybe it was understandable, then, that F burned down E’s building. After all, F’s apartment was everything. F and his wife lived there. F’s five-year-old daughter. F’s daughter’s goldfish. Where were they going to live now? Who’s ever heard of a homeless goldfish?

So, yes, he started the fire (rags and gasoline) because what else was he going to do? How else do you make rich people regret something?

G was just an innocent bystander. G’s apartment was three floors above F’s, and G knew what was happening as soon as he smelled the smoke wafting through the floorboards. Oh no, he thought. The life he’d worked so hard to build. The life he’d scraped together out of hard work and nothing. He put down his coffee and shuffled to the door. He could feel the flames already on the other side, licking against the door handle.

G had lost everything once already, which was why he was in New York in E’s shitty apartment in the first place. You see, many years ago G fled Europe because of H and what H was doing to his people. G’s mother and father and aunts and uncles and trainloads of other people. They went into the camps and only smoke came out. It went on like this for years and years. Millions of people.

Some people say that H wouldn’t have been so bad if not for his art teacher. If only the art teacher had been kinder and encouraged H’s meager talents. But the art teacher, I, was a frustrated artist. It’s like they say: those who can’t do, teach. Which was too bad, too bad, because maybe if he’d been a better painter, or had put his ambitions elsewhere, he wouldn’t have taken his frustrations out on H, and someone like H would never have happened.

I wasn’t terrible at painting, just not good enough to be great at it. I’s paintings were full of rage. When you looked at them you could feel I’s rage in the brushstrokes. He painted landscapes, cityscapes, portraits of people sitting, staring, and half-smiling, and they were all so rageful. You’ve never seen so much rage in a haystack, rage in a cow, rage in the half-smile of wrinkle-faced old woman. It was the rage of being good not great. Of seeing the gulf between good and great and not being able to cross it.

But in the future, in the far-flung future, people will study I’s paintings and see greatness in them. Look at that rage-filled cow, they’ll say. Look at that rage-filled building. In the future, I’s paintings will hang on the sterile white walls of the municipal buildings of the Moon and Mars colonies.

Because the far-flung future will be built on rage. Rage, it will be discovered (as it’s always been known), can do great damage to the distance between good and greatness. J knew this (D’s distant relative). J was in charge of building the Moon and Mars colonies, and he didn’t care how many people died or got hurt in the process. All he cared about was that the colonies got built (on top of mountains of bones and the skeletons of rocket ships) and that he would be remembered forever.

We can’t say why J was like this. Perhaps it was because he was distantly related to D and E, and that he also admired H and I, and science shows that some behaviors are genetic. It wasn’t because of J’s parents, who, despite their terrible lineage, were kind and supportive. J’s father, K, was especially big-hearted. Back before the last pygmy hippopotamus died, he gave away half his fortune to save the dying species. He cried at the drop of a hat. A minor chord. A baby bird that had fallen out of its nest. An abandoned glove on a park bench. K was always crying. When J came home from school, he’d see his father crying in front of the daytime news. All his generational wealth, all his privilege, and what had he accomplished? He hadn’t even been able to save the pygmy hippopotamuses.

The hippos, of course, were useless. It didn’t matter whether they lived or died. What have they ever done to justify their existence? They didn’t even taste good. It was just like a billionaire to spend his money on something so frivolous. That’s what L thought. L who owned the toxic waste factory. L made sure his factory dumped its toxic waste into the river where the last of the pygmy hippos lived, just to stick it to the bleeding-heart billionaire. Plus who cared? Plus who was going to stop him?

M poisoned the pill factory. N killed cats. O hunted people for sport. P was just a regular rage-filled person in the rage-filled future. He ran raging through the streets, smashing store windows.

Q lived on the Moon. His job was to sit in front of the red button. “Don’t press the red button,” J said, “unless I tell you.” But then Q discovered that his fiancé, R, who was stationed on the Mars Colony, was cheating on him. Then all he could think about was pressing the red button.

Press.

Don’t press.

Press.

Don’t press.

Press.

Kaboom.

No more Moon Colony.

R learned about the Moon Colony while she was in bed with S, scrolling on her tablet. Was it wrong her first thought was Phew? At least she didn’t have to worry about Q anymore. It wasn’t that she hated Q, or wished him dead, but he’d been taking the news of her relationship with S so badly. He refused to move on. The constant messages. All those crying emojis. She was sad Q was dead but relieved she could continue loving S without feeling guilty about it.

S was in love with R, but he was also in love with T, U, and V. He had love, so much love, and thought it would be selfish to not share it with everyone. After R finished crying on him about Q, he took his tear-stained shoulder to bed with T. T was his favorite lover. He knew someone with so much love shouldn’t have favorites, but R was needy and possessive. U was sad and cried after sex. As a child she’d lost her parents when a madman poisoned a pill factory, and she wouldn’t move beyond her tragic backstory. V thought everything was funny, even S’s penis. “Look at the turtle,” she’d say when he took off his pants. “Hello, Mr. Turtle.” S’s penis was not a turtle. T, however, was aloof like a cat. Did she want him or not want him? Intriguing!

T liked light sadomasochism. S liked it when she tied him up and blindfolded him. Today she handcuffed him to the bedpost. “What are you doing?” he said, after she snapped him to the bed and stepped out of his eyeline. All he could see was her bedroom porthole and the vast expanse of space outside. Stars and nothing. Then V stepped into his line of vision. Then U. Then R. Then T.

We heard you had so much love, they said. We heard that you’ve been sharing it with everyone.

“Hello, Mr. Turtle,” said V, her pruning shears snipping the air in front of her.

W, in the oxygen garden, couldn’t hear S’s screaming. He also couldn’t find the pruning shears. Where had V put them? Forgetful V! So cute! Always laughing! It was a shame that V was in love with S, that lout, always strutting around the Mars Colony in his epaulets like he was so important. W should tell V that S was sleeping with everyone. It would be painful to hear, yes, but that’s what friends do. They tell painful truths, and W was nothing if not friendly—and an ally.

He was an ally to V but also to all women. He’d read all the books and understood women’s struggles. Feminism! There were so many waves of it. The first, the second, the third, the fourth, the fifth, all the way to the current wave. He liked to picture actual waves breaking against actual cliff faces. Those plucky women. Always trying.

Maybe once he told V about S’s many infidelities, she’d finally see him as more than a friend and move him out of her friendzone. She’d realize that her perfect man had been there right in front of her all this time, working alongside her, trimming and tending to the plants that provided the very air they breathed here on this otherwise barren and inhospitable planet. W: her friend and coworker.

He wished he was a poet so he could poetically express how their love was like the plants they tended together. It was the air. It had roots. It grew and propagated. Oh V! He lifted his eyes to the transparent dome above him so as to gaze out at the starry heavens. What was that he saw floating out there in the vacuum? Small and flesh-colored? A finger? No, not a finger. The errant biomass landed on the tempered titanium-silicate glass pane and left a bloody streak. He saw clearly what it was. Circumcised. Then the lonely organ careened into space and drifted until it was swallowed by the cosmos.

*

Back on Earth, and now back in the present, the cow looked up at the sky as if it could see the streaking lights of the meteor shower. Stupid cow. Stupid meteors. X resented being awake so early. The sky was blue-black and filled with falling stars. The eastern horizon had just begun glowing.

X resented his job, but what can you do? You have to work to put food on the table. While the cow looked at the sky, X stunned her then slit her neck. He pushed her onto the belt that fed her to the next station. He did this again and again. Stun, slit, push. Dozens of cows each day. Hundreds.

Y hung the cows on the hooks until their blood drained out, and then she skinned them. Then she cut them in half. Then she cut them in half again. Sometimes, X sent her a cow that wasn’t quite dead so she looked into its scared, alive eyes and beat it on the head with her special cow-beating hammer. Sometimes, after work, X and Y went out together for beers and delicious cheeseburgers.

Z was a baby, but an evil baby. You could tell just by looking at her. Her eyes. So evil! That’s why her mother tossed her out the car window. She landed in a ditch, swaddled and still alive, and waited, evilly, for someone to find her.

And then what happened?

*

The ditch sat between a field of cows and the road A used to bike to work each morning. While A biked, and Z waited, and the cows chewed grass (and waited even if they didn’t know they were waiting), A thought about how mad they were at B.

Bad B.

Careless B.

Immoral.

Which brings us back to the problem posed at the beginning of this story.

If A is biking west at fifteen miles per hour and Z is waiting evilly in the ditch, can you, dear reader, use all the clues we’ve planted above to figure out what B did that was so bad, allegedly?

-30-

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Bryan Hurt is the author of the story collection Everyone Wants To Be Ambassador To France (Starcherone/Red Hen), selected by Alissa Nutting as the winner of the 10th Annual Starcherone Prize for Innovative Fiction. He is the editor of WATCHLIST: 32 Stories by Persons of Interest (OR Books/Catapult), which included stories on the theme of surveillance by T.C. Boyle, Etgar Keret, Carmen Maria Machado, among others, and has served as Editor in Chief of The Arkansas International, which won a Whiting Literary Magazine award under his stewardship. His work has been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and named finalist for the Calvino Prize and Horatio Nelson Prize in Fiction. He’s received fellowships from the Sewanee and Tin House Writers’ Conferences. Bryan holds a PhD in Literature and Creative Writing from the University of Southern California, and last year was a Wolfson Fellow at the University of Cambridge. He lives in Fayetteville, Arkansas and is currently an Assistant Professor of English in the MFA program at the University of Arkansas.

A vicious dog bite down to the bone is just another day for an EMT and his partner as they try to separate the constant grief from the small joys in life.

The sound of these sirens will stay with you.

- The Editors

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“It’s the uniform, brother!”

They both laughed. He looked down at his boots. The radio on his wide thick hips. His arms, bulging and rounded coming out the sleeve of his shirt. The man who had spoken was standing at the end of the line and was nothing but smile. He could smell alcohol and weed. The cashier licked her lips. Her eyes all glow, all hunger. He could feel the lust, tight in the air, and her fingers were long, thin, and quick. She handed him his candy bar.

“Here’s your receipt.”

Her number was on the front in big bold black scrawled over the small print. She smacked her gum, smiled again, gave a slight wink, and as he rounded the end of the counter where the man stood, she let out a slight delicious moan, and said, “See ya soon, sexy.”

He stuffed the receipt in his pocket. Made his way out of the store. The weather had shifted. It was getting colder, and the wind had picked up. He swung open the passenger door of the ambulance and stepped up and in. His partner was still inside the store. He unwrapped the candy bar, took a huge bite, and leaned back in the seat. He pulled the receipt out. Stared at the number. Imagined her lips against his.

“Jesus.”

The driver side door swung open.

“Fucking place. Damn people.”

Steve grunted as he settled behind the steering wheel.

“Man, I can’t believe how busy that place is.”

Steve turned the ignition over and the ambulance rumbled awake.

“I got a phone number. Look.”

He held the receipt up and Steve grinned, shook his head, “You sexy bitch.”

*

The address was wrong, and a woman came bounding down the sidewalk toward the ambulance carrying a small child. He opened the side door, and she handed him a boy. He put the boy on the cot and started yelling out questions to the woman and Steve jumped up onto the ambulance through the back doors.

“I got a dog bite left arm. It’s deep.”

“Get his clothes off. All the way down. Gentle!”

They stripped the kid to his diaper. He was two and the woman was some aunt and the kid had been dragged by a dog and mauled. The kid never wailed. Never fought them. No tears. They found bites on his two fat squishy legs. Both down to the bone. One on each arm. Ripped open to adipose tissue. No blood. Nothing on the face and the boy just stared and watched as they examined him and wrapped the bites in trauma gauze.

“You guys need help?”

It was a firefighter from the engine.

“Need you to drive. Going to St. Andrew’s.”

The firefighter slammed the back doors and made his way up front to the driver seat.

At the hospital, Steve made sure the police were contacted. The boy’s femur was snapped. They delivered him to the trauma bay where the ER doctor and his team took over.

“We need to contact DHS. We are going out of service after this and heading back to the station.”

He agreed and remade the cot in the area between the doors. He watched the gray light of evening chew away at the sun and behind him the ER leaked its tragic bruising sounds.

*

“They’re telling me there’s not enough info to start an investigation.”

He stood in the doorway and watched Steve’s rage pound out his eyes, from his mouth, and through his skin.

“I’m fucking done.”

He left Steve to his rage and walked down the dark station hallway to the kitchen. He pulled the receipt out of his pocket, studied the number, recalled the cashier’s eyes, her loud thick lips and all the tension between their bodies. The station was quiet, and nobody seemed to be around which was odd. He figured the other ambulance crew were in their bunks and the fire crew staffing the engine were probably working out or upstairs in the dayroom watching TV. He sat down at the kitchen table, took out his phone, opened YouTube and scrolled his home page. He couldn’t focus and kept thinking about the cashier, the boy, the aunt and her sketchy words and behavior, the city and its noise, Steve and his attitude, the deep anxious taut silence and dark station.

“Hey, I need you to fill out what you witnessed on this report and what you were told.”

He turned in his chair and saw Steve leaning around the corner of the doorway. He looked old, tired, half-mad. His uniform dirty, ragged. The colors faded in the shirt and pants. His big belly tight against the material and slipping over his belt. He made his way back to the report room and sat down in front of the computer farthest from the door. He stared at the box on the screen where he was to write his take about the boy and the aunt and the dog that mauled him and dragged him down the sidewalk and tore his skin and snapped his tiny femur bone in its jaws.

*

He stumbled half-awake to his truck. The morning air was crisp and the sun spit through the sky looking to lick and lap its yellow heat across the concrete and asphalt and all the skin. He had texted the cashier before he fell asleep in his bunk, half-hard from imagining her exposed body, and they were meeting for coffee, breakfast, probably something more, after when they both understood it was lust and only lust and he was too tired for more, too tired from the fentanyl overdose and chest compressions, the DHS fight, the boy chewed by a dog left unattended by a family too busy with their bullshit. His partner and his burned-up mind. All the weight from the years beneath the sirens and their dangerous delectable enticing roar.

-30-

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Korey Wallace’s flash fiction has been featured on the podcast NoExtraWords. His story “A Way” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and his work has been published in Helix, From Whispers To Roars, and the Ocotillo Review. He lives in Des Moines, IA.

It’s 1969, and everyone Simon knows is against the war—especially Izzy, who he hopes will be his girlfriend, even if she thinks love has to be unchained or it’s not love.

Ride along for their fateful trip to a D.C. protest, tear gas and all.

-The Editors

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1.

I was not an idiot.

Of course, I was against the war.

In 1969, at Wesleyan, everyone you knew was against the war, except for a few football players and wrestlers, holdovers from the earlier fraternity era; and Gil, a budding politician, my only right-wing acquaintance, whose dad was a whiskey magnate, and a member of the John Birch Society.

Sure, I was against the war. But in truth I was more interested in playing my guitar, reading poetry, getting high, and trying to find a girlfriend amongst the cadre of women recently admitted to Wesleyan as an experiment in coeducation.

Yes, yes, I was against the war; I despised Nixon, I fretted over napalm and the endless bombing of villages. But the war was also a little more abstract for me than for some of my friends, because I knew I was never going to be drafted. I had fairly bad childhood asthma, and my father, an insurance executive, knew important people in Albany, a famously corrupt city government. And it was well-known that educated white boys did not get drafted in Albany.

I should have felt worse about this than I did, but mostly I felt relieved. Some of my friends went to amazing extremes to get out of the draft—feigning madness, or getting profoundly drunk and vomiting all over a desk at the draft board; and then there was Rick, who was from a small town in Iowa where every 18-year-old male was likely to be whisked off to Saigon. He fled to Canada, and I never heard from him again.

So, yes, I was in favor of liberating Vietnam from arrogant American intervention. But I was equally in favor of my own personal liberation from the largely gray and sexless three years I had spent in Middletown, Connecticut. And this wistful dream was tied up with Izzy, an amazing actress and campus activist, who I was hoping might become my first real girlfriend.

Except that she wasn’t interested in being anyone’s girlfriend.

“Read Norman O. Brown,” she told me, after our first, tentative fondling, gazing up at the autumn sky above Foss Hill. “Love has to be unchained or it’s not love.”

This seemed irrelevant to me, but I nodded enthusiastically. She was always quoting Love’s Body by Norman O. Brown or One-Dimensional Man by Herbert Marcuse, or dizzying monologues from the play known as the Marat/Sade, a famous British political/sexual extravaganza which Izzy desperately wanted to put on at Wesleyan’s ’92 Theater.

She was tall—almost as tall as me, and I was a gangly 6 feet; she had long auburn hair, often tied up in a messy bun or unruly ponytail. She was from Palo Alto, and was always going on about the San Francisco Mime Troupe, told me it was almost a religious experience, and how she wanted Wesleyan to have its own agitprop/improv theater company, and was I interested in helping out?

I was. I was so interested. I would have been interested in helping her with even the most colossally unlikely project. Which is how I ended up going to the Moratorium.

It was Jed’s idea, really, and he was often engaged in colossally unlikely projects.

Izzy was friends with Jed and Rachel, the only married undergraduate couple any of us knew in college. Jed was a theater major, and very politically active; he often proclaimed his allegiance to SDS and could quote whole paragraphs from the Port Huron Statement. He was trying to create a contemporary Julius Caesar, with Caesar portrayed as Nixon.

“The assassination is going to be fun,” Jed declared to Izzy, though this was as far as they had gotten in conceiving the production.

When news of the Moratorium reached Wesleyan—November, in D.C., a huge march to show the strength of the burgeoning student movement against the war—Jed immediately declared that he and Rachel and Izzy must go. Rachel, who did not say much, and was always smiling, as if high, suddenly grew very serious, told Izzy, “This could change everything,” which totally sold Izzy on the long drive to Washington.

I was not totally sold. I was not so eager to be part of any vast assemblage of protestors. I felt claustrophobic in crowds and did not really picture myself marching down Pennsylvania Avenue, shouting demands.

But Izzy wanted me to go. “We need you along, Simon,” she said, stroking my hand. “We need somebody quiet and thoughtful to balance out the crazies.”

The phrase we need you was pretty much all I had to hear.

Jed and Rachel owned an almost cliched VW van decorated with flower decals and 2 Stop the Bombing bumper stickers. We left that Friday morning, lurching down I-95, munching on baloney sandwiches which Rachel had mass produced for the ride. We guzzled Pepsi and cheap red wine and smoked some hashish procured from our classmate Chip, a State Department attache’s son, who traveled back and forth to Morocco on his diplomat’s passport.

I brought my guitar, and played mostly the Dylan songs from Highway 61 I was trying to learn. I was not bad, and getting better, and we all bellowed along to “From a Buick 6” and “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues.”

It was a long trip in the rattling van but everywhere we stopped—the Howard Johnson’s, Esso stations, minimarts—we saw the smiling stoned faces of other students, hippies, radicals, heading to the Moratorium. Even I was swept up in the optimistic breeze blowing through that day. There was much whispering of plans in the bathrooms, and many flashings of the peace sign and the raised-fist power sign on the highway, and in parking lots all the way down.

The four of us took turns driving, though Rachel commandeered the wheel about halfway there and drove like a maddened trucker through the increasingly heavy traffic approaching D.C., while Izzy dozed with her head in my lap, an almost indescribable thrill.

Because Jed grew up in Indianapolis, he knew Paul Moore, the Episcopal bishop of that city, who was now the bishop of Washington. Bishop Moore was famously anti-war; he owned a huge house near the National Cathedral, and had opened it up for “well-behaved” peace protestors, which included us, though we were only semi-well-behaved.

The house had many rooms, all of them full of teak tables, deep red chairs, ornate rugs, and on all of the furniture in all of the rooms sat or sprawled out dozens of student protestors, most wearing torn jeans, work shirts, billowing peasant dresses, hats and scarves of various kinds, all talking loudly, laughing, lounging. No one was smoking or drinking in the house, that was going on outside on the manicured lawn. A few blond children were running about, gaping at the visitors, and an older woman in a somewhat severe mauve dress was handing out apples from a large bag, saying, “Eat this apple, then talk to me, dear, tell me about yourself,” and some did, while others looked away.

“Why the apples, I wonder,” Izzy said. “Maybe she thinks we all have bad breath?”

We threw our sleeping bags into a pile in the corner. We wandered around the house, like tourists. Izzy wanted to get high, and I was—shocking, I know—willing to go along with her desires. We went out to the yard, which was abuzz with jabbering and singing, where Izzy produced two yellow capsules.

“I think it’s mescaline,” she said, as we gulped them down.

Things got a little hazy after that, as they do, and we giggled and chattered and lay on the grass among dozens of others, where there was much talk about the evening pro-peace prayer service at the National Cathedral. I was not especially interested in this event, since my head felt like it was separating from my body and Izzy was obsessively drawing an imaginary circle on the palm of my hand.

But Jed found us, said we needed to go to this service, that he promised Bishop Moore we would go to support him. And soon there was a parade of scruffy youths heading down the street to the gleaming cathedral.

Which was impressive, filled with candlelight, shadows, organ music, a choir singing “Blowing in the Wind.” We sat way up in the far balcony, so that in our foggy state the bishop and all the figures by the altar looked like dolls or puppets. I could barely hear any of the homilies, sermons, prayers, but when we all rose, held hands and sang “We Shall Overcome,” and Izzy’s arm was winding tightly around my waist, the whole place shimmered with possibility.

2.

We slept sprawled out on the floor of the large living room, but when I opened my eyes, it did not feel like time had passed. We gulped coffee from silver vats, and grabbed more apples, and nibbled on doughnuts, and were a little giddy with the idea of marching in some huge pick-up army of peace-loving freaks.

Everyone around us began drifting down toward Pennsylvania Avenue, jabbering and smiling, some holding thermoses, as if off on a 5^th grade school trip. Rachel insisted that the four of us have a group hug, in case we got separated, though we vowed we would not.

It was warm for November, but Jed was always cold and wore his buckskin jacket, which, with his long blond hair, made him look a little like Kit Carson. The rest of us wore sweaters and sweatshirts, and Rachel was all in red.

“I want to stand out in the crowd,” she said. But there were too many people for anyone to really stand out.

I had never seen so many people. I have no idea how many; later they said it was more than half a million, but it was so vast a crowd it was hard to see anything but a dense forest of faces. Eventually, we did start marching, and there was chanting and yelling. Izzy joined a group chanting, Ho Ho Ho Chi Minh the NLF is gonna win, which I found hard to make myself say. I liked Stop the Bombing better, and then there were loud cries of The people united will never be defeated, which sounded hopeful, though I was not convinced it was true.

The march went on for hours in the dim autumn sunlight. When we finally came to a halt, near some fountain, there were so many people milling about, I felt dizzy. I wanted to splash some water on my face, so I tried to make it over to the fountain, but I couldn’t get past the still-chanting crowd, and when I looked back I did not see Izzy or Rachel or Jed, and I was so turned around, that I pushed my way in an altogether different direction, thinking I saw Rachel’s red skirt, but it wasn’t her.

As the sky started to turn purplish, a man with a walrus-like moustache and megaphone made announcements at the far end of the sidewalk.

“We are not done here!” he exclaimed. “We will march to the FBI Building! We will stop the infiltration by those pigs of our anti-war movement! If you don’t want trouble, don’t come. Otherwise, follow!”

I did not want trouble, though trouble hung in the air like an acrid smell. I pushed myself to the opposite side of the street and up on a mound above the sidewalk I saw a familiar looking man, in a buckskin jacket, handing out leaflets. Was it Jed?

It was not Jed.

But it was someone I once knew, and as he thrust a leaflet in my hand, a leaflet which declared Fools! War only ends when your minds are free! I blurted out “Nate Balin? What the fuck are you doing here?”

He glowered at me. I was too stunned to glower back.

Nate Balin lived across the street from me in Albany when I was growing up. Older, troubled, scary, he threatened to beat me up many times. Eventually, he ran away from home. He was rumored to be doing LSD experiments in Millbrook with Timothy Leary, or immersing himself in the world of shamans in northern Mexico, or somewhere else weird where no one in Albany wanted their children to be living.

“I used to be Nate Balin,” he snarled. “And who are you?”

But just as he said it, he had some memory flash. He grinned a sort of lopsided grin. “Young Simon Gold?” he said. “We meet again. Are you as much of a fool as ever? And why should I not be here? I am called to be wherever I am needed. And I have a message for all who seek peace. Only I can help find it. Listen. I am now called Father of Dreams….”

I could tell he was about to expound on why he was the only one who could help achieve peace, but he had the same menacing gaze I remembered all too well from running into him on our shared Albany street, the same look I had often turned away from.

I turned away again.

“You don’t look like the father of anything,” I said. “I’ve lost my friends, and I have to try and catch up with them.”

He shrugged as if this were utterly uninteresting. “Lost,” he sneered. Then he pointed across the fountain, said, “Some heading that way,” and I walked away from him quickly. I did not look back to see if he was still glowering at me. I was pushed along by the crowd, as I pointlessly tried to find Izzy or Jed or Rachel, or any idea of where I was or where I was going.

3.

The crowd seemed to screech to a halt, like we’d hit a wall en masse. The daylight was fading. We were at Dupont Circle, someone said, and there were angry cries and a whole brigade of police and National Guard and raw rage. There were so many men in uniforms, some with clubs and guns, and one man in riot gear with what looked like a bazooka, a giant brown tube, aimed right at us.

“Tear gas!” someone shouted, and then smoke was everywhere, accompanied by groans.

“Get out, hippie scum! Go home!” the police were shouting and just as I turned to run from the tumult, a gray canister landed at my feet, and I was sprayed almost directly in the eyes with some kind of scary toxic stuff, which caused me to weep and cough, and bend over, and almost fall down.

It was dark and I found myself leaning against a lamp post wondering if I was going to die or throw up or just stagger around in utter confusion for the next few hours like a character in a clamorous bad dream.

Which is what happened.

I had no idea where I was, where my friends were, where Bishop Moore’s house might be. I was stumbling along a wide, dark avenue. Was this the same lamp post? Was that the same coughing and crying clutch of protestors I passed a few minutes or hours before?

Then, looming above me was someone familiar, but not someone I wished to see. Nate Balin again, laughing, laughing at me.

“Poor Simon,” he said. He had a low, deep voice but it always sounded to me like fingernails on a blackboard. It made me shudder. “False consciousness led you here. What you believe? False! What you seek? False! When, when will you see?’ he demanded.

“I don’t think I want to see whatever it is you see,” I managed.

And I ran in the opposite direction. My eyes were a little less teary now, my brain possibly recovering from the tear gas trauma, and I saw a small band of exhausted protestors with wan smiles, drifting up a hilly street off the avenue. I made my way to them somehow, and as I trudged in this subdued throng, the neighborhood started to feel familiar, big houses, sculpted hedges, impressive trees. The group paused silently in front of a white house, then, someone burst out of the door, and it was Jed.

“Hey! Simon! We were wondering what the hell happened! Izzy thought maybe you got arrested. Glad you made it back.”

I rubbed my eyes. “I have no idea how,” I pointed out.

Then Izzy came out, her hair wild. She hugged me like I was her long, lost love, which did not feel like a terrible thought. “Oh, Simon, are you OK? I was really worried.”

I tried to look stalwart, something I was never good at. “Got gassed,” I said.

“Wow! Wow! That is so cool,” Izzy exclaimed. “God, I wish I had gotten gassed.”

“No, you don’t,” I said. “It was stupid and ugly and I’ve been wandering around for hours, and I saw this guy, this guy I used to know, and he said it was false consciousness, false consciousness is why all this happened to me. Do you think that’s true?”

Then, Izzy kissed me, my first real, passionate kiss.

“You don’t believe that, right?” she asked.

I thought about the hopefulness of the drive to D.C., how it faded a bit in the crazy crowd of the march. I thought about cheers and chants then Nate Balin’s glower, and the cops’ angry rant and glinting weapons.

“What we’re doing, it means something, right?” Izzy kept asking.

I was going to blurt out, Does it?

But when I looked at Izzy’s hopeful face, her eyes were lit up like all the stars in the sky. And even though I was not sure in that moment about anything but her luminous eyes, I managed to smile.

“Sure,” I said. “Sure. It means something.”

-30-

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Stephen Policoff’s first novel, Beautiful Somewhere Else, won the James Jones Award, and was published by Carroll & Graf in 2004. His second novel, Come Away, won the Dzanc Award, and was published by Dzanc Books in 2014. His third novel, Dangerous Blues, was published by Flexible Press in 2022. His stories and essays have appeared in Provincetown Arts, The Rumpus, New Guard Literary Review, and many other publications. His memoir, A Ribbon for Your Hair, will be published by Heliotrope Books in 2026. He is Clinical Professor of Writing in Global Liberal Studies at NYU.

What happens when a fire-breathing pet gets loose?

A surprising and intricate dragon story for your August edition.

Happy reading,

The Editors

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She knew she should be grateful, but when the collar shattered, Pet cried. She hadn’t wept in two thousand years, at least not like this, heaving sobs until the ribs under her wings ached and her belly turned sour. Her eyes were so tired that even the living things in the dark grew blurry, and she changed her sleep pattern to diurnal so that she could see her prey. She ate without flavor, wandering the countryside with lazy flaps of her leathery wings, feeling the lack of a collar like a vibrant aura. It threw off her flight, she dizzied quickly and landed frequently, surprising youngsters who watched the goats. The boys stared at her, suspiciously chewing on grass like their wards, but she was too enervated even to growl. So the peace was kept and she rested in soothing mud. Occasionally, she’d kick over a barn when the mood took her, or sometimes set a haystack aflame—but only if there had recently been rain.

She had forgotten what a spectacle she was. The Wizard had always taken credit for her tricks, collecting money from crowds. Sometimes he used her to threaten or impress.

(The way he chucked her under the chin when she flew a loop for him on cue…. The mice he peeled for her so that their fur wouldn’t tickle going down! He was thoughtful, really, even if he’d kept her leashed like a common dog.)

Landing in a village, the women met her eye, accepting how formidable she was. The men grabbed pitchforks and hoes and it made her laugh. Silly men.

(She had forgotten she could laugh. The Wizard liked her glowering. The Wizard liked her mouth shut because her breath put him off his lunch. She had watched him slice the tasteless soft white muscles of the chickens into tiny strips for himself as she salivated for the dense, rich chewy luxury of their tiny hearts and the peppery musk of their other slippery bits. He invariably saved these best parts for her, serving them after his own meal on a carved silver tray he presented piled with bones to give her the pleasure of extracting the morsels with her triple-forked tongue.)

The men poked at her and infinitesimal pains where a grandfather’s magic sword or an uncle’s historic halberd found a chink in her scales reminded her of how vulnerable she had been as a baby.

(The Wizard had saved her, had stood up to the circle of villagers ready to skewer her. She’d mewled in the middle of the courtyard, sand clouding her eyes where the boys had thrown it, angry frightened adults in a ring around her, shaking their heads at the loss of the only dairy cow of the village – how could she have known that villages value some lives over others? She learned only after the Wizard had captured her and named her Pet, she was kept shackled to the wall of his cavernous study—she had never explored the narrower parts of the house when she was small enough to fit through the doors—but she enjoyed his instructions and had learned quickly: this is a sheep, if they have more than a hundred, the loss of one will not hurt them. This is a cow; in the spring there are sometimes calves and in those places you can request the old cow as a sacrifice or offering. This is a child of a human and if you eat it you will be hunted and made an enemy; if you save it you will be venerated as a hero. Old humans can be eaten only if they are alone on the paths in the mountains—if the village has cast them out, then eating them quickly in one bite is a mercy, for they will soon perish of the cold or the heat or in the teeth of lesser predators. When she showed she understood, he would wrestle with her, laughing at her growing strength. If she learned a new trick, he would dance his fingers across the strings of a hollow gourd and his voice would change to music. Her unfettered delight would cause him to smirk, as her eyes rolled back in waves of pleasure. And at the end of busy days, when they were tired, he would take a small book in hand, sit in the soft chair, and beckon her into his lap as he turned the pages, stroking a gentle hand from her head to her tail. Scratching behind her wings where she could not reach--the same hand that might grab the wand to punish her or slap her snout when she was disobedient. He knew her scales were too thick for this to hurt. It was merely a symbol. An indication that he wasn’t pleased. So often. So very often.)

She shakes off this memory of childhood. She looks around for what she needs: water. She scents it in the air but does not see it. Usually a scent this strong would emanate from a body of water – a lake or a river. This scent had compelled her to land in this dusty courtyard, though it meant she would be surrounded by buildings. It made no sense.

There is dust and more dust. No water. Yet, she tastes the deep cool liquid on her tongue. Pet knows it to be clean and cold. But where is it? A girl on the cusp of womanhood follows her wild gaze and speaks sharply to the other villagers. Pet tilts her head, narrows her eyes, looks at the girlwoman, and tastes the air. The girl redoubles her shouting and waves her hands in a frantic dance.

After looking from the girl to Pet and back to the girl, the men lower their weapons. A reek of trepidation rises in the clearing as the sharp tips of shovels and swords lower. Pet sees their fear as a cloud of orange dust, like mites or flies. The scent of it fuels a forgotten rage in her, fires up a furnace that she hasn’t used for a hundred years or more. It is instinct to react this way to fear—she is unable to control it, even after all this time in the Wizard’s care. She has tried.

To be more pleasing to her Wizard, she has changed everything. When he is pleased with her, he places the flat of his palm on her cheek and strokes soothingly. When he is truly delighted, he presses his lips in a rose on her face. Times like these, his eyes shine with seeing her value. She is reflected in his eyeballs. She is not alone in the world. She belongs.

Ironic, this name, Pet: He is deeply absorbed in his important work and only pets her when he wants a favor.

(He was. He was deeply absorbed in his important work.)

The womangirl was small but fierce. Dark hair fluttered waist-length and free, and her eyes glinted with curiosity. Her skin rippled with sunlight and smelled of plums. She had woven shells and bones into her hair that clattered pleasingly when the girl moved. Her feet made no sound on the hard packed dirt. Her hands moved like dragonflies: quick quick slow and then stopping altogether. They moved again: quick quick slow. A baby cried in a woman’s arms behind the girl. The older woman slipped the baby deep into softness to stifle her cries. The baby suckled peacefully and this gentle sound reawakened Pet’s torturous thirst.

She screamed and the villagers clapped hands over their ears and cowered. All except the girlwoman.

(She was so small and after removing her from danger, the Wizard fed her and then slipped the pretty collar around her neck with great love. She remembers bending down to accept the gesture. Remembers a momentary thought – just a flash – wondering if she should trust this Wizard, but believing in her heart that he wanted what was best for her. In truth, he wanted what was best for himself, which meant owning her. She knew that now. Did she mind being owned? It was hard to know. She had only been free a few days. Finding food was difficult. Remembering the rules was difficult. The rules had changed, perhaps. She felt continually disoriented in this, her freedom.)

As she paced within the tight circle of villagers, the cloud of trepidation blossomed from the men. The mercury in her blood flowed faster. She felt the quick course of the silvery white rush. She remembered her weapon. If she sent the mercury out through her face glands, it could deflect and defend her. If there was open flame nearby, the stream would become toxic, exploding in a reaction that could render a whole village dead in minutes—unless there was a strong breeze (or a Wizard) to move the airborne poison to another location.

Without breaking eye contact, the womangirl indicated a structure in the center of the village—a round squat house with a peaked roof, smaller than a cow. She held out her palms as if to say wait, stop, no, and walked closer to the tiny house-like oddity. Pet’s desire for the water she smelled kept her riveted.

The girl pulled a rope and pulled and pulled. The scent of the deep water made Pet dizzy and she swayed a little on her feet. The village girl eventually made some sounds that brought four villagers to her aid. A bucket sloshing water – a bucket! Sloshing water!—emerged from under the peaked roof and was brought before Pet, who drank and swirled her sinewy neck to the little house, nosing the roof off and thrusting her face into the delicious coolness below. But the water was low – too low to reach – and Pet reared her head back to growl. She knew that patience was called for. She did. But the water was so close! Perhaps if she could just dig it out she could be sated and go.

The village women were grabbing younger people to themselves and turning to run.

The running was everywhere, like a scattered ant nest, swarming. Men picked up their pitchforks and discarded halberds and shovels and some of them ran, and some stayed to poke at Pet’s tail. Pet flicked them off like the flies they were, a nuisance. The water was just there, and the digging was fast and easy in the dirt. Yet, she had somehow collapsed the top of the tunnel into the bottom and rendered the water unreachable again.

She needed a break, but she needed water more. The frustration made her howl and shake her head and flap her wings and many villagers went flying. Once Pet realized she was causing mayhem, she stilled her body, contrite. She missed the Wizard. There was never a question of doing the wrong thing when he was around. The girl with the kind and wise eyes was nowhere to be seen, had Pet killed her? It was horrible to be free. Horrible. She went back to digging, tears dripping onto the sand. She blocked out the noise behind her, the fires lit, the torches.

Pet focused on the water. Now that she had decided she would ruin whatever needed ruining, she broke large pieces of the narrow enclosure, throwing them wildly over her shoulder, probably breaking the structures in the village as a consequence, but she didn’t care. She was lonely and missed her Wizard.

(He had been awful to her, awful. He had a spell that would make her stop breathing and he would use this until she fainted if she so much as growled at him. Yet, he played such beautiful music for her when she did what he preferred. But when was the last time he had played this tune? Fifty years ago? Seventy five? She remembered it like yesterday, but there might have been months, even years when he forgot about her and went on his journeys alone, telling her she would just slow him down. And then the day she broke him. How he had hated her, how he had hissed I knew I should have killed you, how his skull had crumbled underfoot, how she had flown into the sky like a new star. She had done this. She had freed herself. Did she regret it?)

The water was better than she had dreamed. The cold rush down her long throat was clean of fish, clean of silt; this water was rock water from deep in the earth, she had never tasted anything so delicious in her life. She drank and drank and drank in joy and drank some more. A sound brought her to her senses and she paused in her lapping to listen.

It was music. The sounds that the Wizard gave her when he was most pleased. A warm glow rushed from behind her ears and down her long neck and spine. She sighed. A breeze played across her wings, coaxing her to flight, but the music held her. There, in the shadow of the church spire, the girlwoman ran nimble fingers over taut strings held in a white ribcage. Pet sighed and stretched her wings above her head, fluttered and slowly lowered them to her sides. She settled on her front feet and hunched over her hind feet, nesting in the dirt of the courtyard.

The girl’s music danced in the air, streaming like cool water over Pet’s back and upturned face.

This. This was what freedom could bring. (If only the Wizard’s words didn’t pop up and ruin everything; if only he would just stay dead and leave her heart alone.) Her head swayed back and forth with the melody, and by this time, the womangirl had closed her eyes, so she never saw Pet’s adoring and grateful gaze as the enormous dragon lofted herself up into the sky. She only knew that years later, when the Great Beasts came to repossess their lands, she and her children were miraculously spared from the fires; no dragon would harm them.

It is possible that some humans would have found this new life intolerable, sequestered as they were at the apex of a bare mountain with only a goat and a sheep and a cow and some chickens for company, the seven of them in a tiny cottage, wedged high on a rock. She wrote songs to honor the rest of the village burnt en masse. Everyone they had ever known melded into a towering pile of charred limbs mixed with the burnt rubble of their homes and the sickly-sweet roasted scent of their farm animals. The massive dragon that kept them sometimes brought them treats: a cat, or a large door, or, more recently, a large, illuminated book, and seemed to honestly enjoy discovering the humans singing.

Was it good that they had been saved for this fate? It was a question Sandella often pondered as she turned the pages of the book, waiting for her power to grow.

-30-

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M. M. De Voe once ran away with a group of jugglers. She has also danced for the Pope and ridden on the top of an elevator. She can be read in various anthologies, literary magazines, poetry collections, horror magazines, sci-fi dailies and on her free weekly Substack called “This is Ridiculous.” Kirkus Reviews called her story collection (A FLASH OF DARKNESS) “ominous, masterfully-crafted psychological fiction.” Follow her @mmdevoe on Twitter or @femmekafka on Instagram or mmdevoe.com. She is the founder and Executive Director of Pen Parentis, a literary nonprofit for writers who also are parents.

A tollbooth worker on the GW Bridge whiles away his days handing over change and watching the cars and the people in them pass him by. Life, it seems, is doing the same, until this story takes a sharp turn that would make any driver tighten their hold on the wheel.

Fasten your seatbelt,

The Editors

Programming note: We'll see you August 1 after our usual early-summer break.

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“Is this what you’re going to do with the rest of your life?” Mustang with the ‘Ayatollah Assahola’ sticker in his rear window asks me.

“God willing sir, God willing,” me and my smile answer back to him.

Collecting tolls is a good, steady job with a future. Meaning the need to drive and charge people for crossing the George Washington Bridge will outlive me for sure. Mustang wanted to insult me, it’s been like this since Moses wore short pants, but worse since the hostage crisis, the gas lines, and price spikes. People don’t see a human in this booth for some reason. I am like a dog chained to a fence who can’t defend itself. The one that you can throw rocks at risk-free. So I choose to eliminate the need for any defense. Now Mr. Mustang is the one with the wounds. He hates, he suffers. That much was clear before he spoke, from the scowl that rolled up and appeared just before his brave, pasted attack on the Ayatollah. Now that he has failed to wound me he feels frustration, he feels shame too. I feel good, better than before he rolled into my life, and I was pretty good then.

One guy gave me a $10 bill for the $1.50 toll, and it was smeared with what I hoped was chocolate. It was not. Man’s inhumanity to man continues unabated. How one must suffer to take the time to feces up a perfectly good $10. Did he do it on the move, or at home? How did he store it before he gifted it to me? Did he catch a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror with his pants down, ass out, and maybe for a fleeting instant wonder what his resting mother would think of the once beautiful boy she beamed down on so long ago? Maybe someone hurt him first, with the shit $10, and he is paying it forward. I gave him back not just clean money, but I picked out the very most crisp and clean bills, like what you see on TV, banded in a briefcase and exchanged between ambitious high-end hoods when one offers the other the opportunity to count it and the other hood graciously explains there is no need to count money between gentlemen.

Rage palpitates up here on the GWB, and sometimes it smells. My booth is paradise compared to what’s just outside. Yet many outside degrade or pity me all day long. I sometimes see myself as sibling to those divers submerged in the shark cages, keeping composure as massive sea monsters thrust at their protected world.

The other guys, the Black and Hispanic guys, get called terrible things all day long and it makes them into worse versions of the people who abuse and disrespect them. I made the mistake one time of telling Rufus how to react, and he pushed me right over the bench in the locker room and stormed off, I think to prevent himself from punching me. Lesson learned. The ladies have it worse. All day long they hear shit. Scary stuff. Sometimes. Magdalena started getting heavier last year, I asked her if she was pregnant, like as in ‘congratulations.’ After I apologized she explained that she was binging on Twinkies to become less attractive to the driveby eye rapists.

The gas crisis coincided with another more local crisis, right there in my little shark cage. Constant cramps. Then pus. Then blood. Colitis. At first I could usually get someone to cover for me, while I evacuated the booth and then myself. But it got worse, as untended problems will. In off hours, or at less busy crossings, you can throw up a cone in your lane and run to the can. But not on the GWB. You put a cone up during rush and when you get back it will be like Lord of the Flies right there on the bridge. So diapers it is. “For my mother,” I tell the clerk at Genovese. I’m just thirty-seven so no one wants to believe I need diapers. Which I don’t. The job with me in it needs the diapers. Anywhere else you can go to the can as much as you need. I see at my wife’s place half the office is out front smoking every twenty minutes. If I worked there I could manage my problem differently. Hey, some people can’t even afford diapers. I make enough to live and save some from every check.

She’s fucking. Around. Behind my back. I can live with it. She is more good than bad as far as it affects me. My mother likes her, my wife helps out taking her to doctor appointments and so forth. She listens to me…she does me the courtesy of appearing to listen to me actually. But that’s a form of caring and respect because pretending takes effort. Believe me I know because I spend the day experiencing the opposite. I am called ‘transactional’ by her, and ‘Mr. Glass Half Full,’ said as if it’s a title, or something I should get on my license plate. I know she means it to be a negative, but in 1979 America I choose to take it as a positive. I am surrounded by people less happy than me, even though I have my share of shit. More than my share. Literally. Sometimes. Most of the time.

Here comes a station wagon, full of kids and two pressed up against the back window like they are suctioned to it. Tourists I bet and that means they are going to let the kids roll down that back window and attempt to give me the money. A toll booth on the GW Bridge is like the Statue of Liberty when you stare at corn your whole life. Yep, Indiana. Chicago was much closer, but they chose us instead. That means I have a sacred duty to ensure they didn’t make a mistake. But the kid has arms too short to reach me, so I lean way out with a comical, exaggerated face and gesture stretching to complete a transaction and their memory. I guess they are visiting the Big Apple, gas prices be fucked. The lady in the passenger seat has just a couple wispy hairs so maybe they are running out of her time to do this as a family. I like the idea of a place so simple and happy that they let the kids hand the money over. New York and New Jersey people would never do that, they know that the cars behind them will beep and yell “Move ya fuggin’ joik awfs” while looking right at the kids transacting with me. As is the case now.

Booze helps with the colitis, relaxes my interiors for some reason, puts the stabbing goblins down for a nap. I gotta be careful, drinking on the job can get me fired, but so many of us in and out of the break room smell of booze I don’t know how Mr. Jansen could single out any one of us. “Don’t give him an excuse to stop pretending not to notice,” I say to myself. Timing matters. First thing in the morning, take a shot. Vodka smell dissipates by noon when the goblins return to make my innards outards again. But by then I am on lunch and can get to the can. Pain, pus and blood. Holy fucking trinity - am I gonna make it!? But it’s manageable even with the close calls. The anxiety that you might mess yourself is much less so. The feeling about a situation, I tell my wife, is always the thing. Not the situation itself. Annoys the fuck out of her, and I don’t know why. If I knew why maybe I would know a lot more and she wouldn’t be periodically visited by alien dicks.

I guess I have resigned myself to the possibility that I will die from what festers down below as my doctor warned, because I am dragging around a family history of gut cancer, and also because I will not submit to the ass rape required to check it out. My doctor says not to worry, that I will be unconscious…like that’s better! Drugged and violated. “I will have a say in how I die by deciding what I will not do,” I tell Mercy, my staring-out-the-window wife.

She loves me to the extent she is capable of loving anyone. I don’t take her limitations personally, that’s about her, not me. Fucking around is a way of distancing herself. I transact, she self-obviates. I can’t choose to have my wife stop betraying me, but I can choose how I feel about it. I at least have a wife, and periodic sex, and someone to help with my mother, and be in the apartment so that they don’t find me as a fossilized corpse oozing emulsifications out my holes. Alone.

Ok great. Guy just threw a bunch of change in my face. Hits me in the eye and half of it sailed past me out the window on the other side of the booth. He looks familiar. Maybe I did something to him. I know where I know him from! He waits tables at the restaurant around the corner from our apartment. Going to Manhattan midday? From Secaucus? Assuming he lives near the restaurant? Why not take the tunnel? Well, if taking it out on me stops him from taking it out on a wife that’s ok. I got another eye.

This one poor girl. Stripper in the city, living in Leonia. I say that because “Living it up in Leonia!” would be a stupid bumper sticker for her to have otherwise. It’s kind of stupid anyway. Who cares about Leonia? Or even has an opinion? She can make anything cute though. I choose to believe she is being ironic. She loves a daughter, not just has one. I can see it when she has to bring her into the city. The car seat is set up correctly and everything. The kid is happy, well dressed, fed, and too young to know about the hard choices that keep her that way. The mother used to always pay with a $20 bill. Then she stopped and started paying with fake $20s. I want to believe that she is not reduced to counterfeiting, that someone is passing them to her. So two Fridays ago I decided that today is the day I hand her back a note with her change. “This bill you handed me and the last few are fake. Don’t want you to go to jail.” She mouthed me a ‘thank you,’ without eye-contact, but she wasn’t surprised. So I am not surprised that I don’t see her anymore. If she’s caught she will go to jail and be separated from the beautiful little reason I believe she takes the risk in the first place. Most of the world is fucked. More fucked than me in my booth. I got a diaper but if I’m found out there’s no jail time.

Ok the guy from the restaurant just drove by again. I think. I’m pretty sure it was him, but he barely slowed down and didn’t pay. There are signs all over that say the lanes are monitored by camera with fines and up to a year in jail for blowing through without paying. But the cameras don’t usually work, and even when they do the pictures are so low-quality that convictions are supposedly close to impossible. Wait, I made that point a couple weeks ago in the restaurant and maybe he heard it? It’s a small place, and I was a little drunk. Drunk=loud where my mouth is concerned, and the place is tiny. He looked angry too. Now I am remembering him. He also couldn’t stand composure and peace. Mine specifically. He thought that I was acting superior, when he spilled soup all over me. It was on purpose, he didn’t like me for no then-apparent reason. But what he really hated was my reaction. The lack of it. I told him that it didn’t bother me at all and everyone makes mistakes, and I forgave him, though no apology was tendered. I remember his eyes reducing to small slits, with only the most intense anger escaping out from under his lids. I didn’t register it then, being too used for too long to my peace causing distress for another.

He was angry. The next time he not only slowed down, he paid, and then shot me perfectly in the center of my forehead. Why pay? That’s probably not the first question you have. But it’s the only one I have left. After you die the big questions get cleared up, but not the smaller ones of less consequence. My wife. Former wife. Who cheats. Did it with him. He is in love with her, and he thought her emotional vacancy with him would be replaced with warmth if only I was elsewhere. I am now, and I wish I could have told him that it wouldn’t work. For his sake. And mine. By extension.

So much sadness on that planet. I had a good run and I still say I am doing better than the left behind. I am not worried about my mother; she has just months left to live. Two months to be exact. My brother and his wife are moving her up to Springfield. Too bad. On the other hand, her care was my one worry, my one misfortune that hadn’t been cleared up or made irrelevant by the hole. In my head.

I could always control my reactions, my feelings about things. It was a superpower. But also a curse. Other people were always annoyed by my equanimity. I think now that maybe this is why I had no compatriots or confidants. People can’t trust what they can’t understand. Happiness is a strain of leprosy. What other people felt about me didn’t get to me. Until it did. I am just an observer now, floating like a satellite far above the Earth. Maybe I will be reincarnated like Hindus believe. Until I get it right. But I wouldn’t live differently if I were. If they’re right I guess I will continue forever trapped in birth-to-death cycles. Eternal. Like misery.

-30-

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Thomas Behan is a writer from Northern Virginia USA and his work has been or will soon be published in many literary journals including Isele Magazine, Radon Journal, Cinnabar Moth Literary Collections, and The Brussels Review, as well as The George Washington University Press. His literary fiction short story “Symbiosis” was published in Secant Publishing's anthology "Best Stories on the Human Impact of Climate Change," and that story is nominated for the Secant Publishing Prize. His collection of short stories, “Life in the Demilitarized Zone,” has been published by Alien Buddha Press.

We're really lucky to have this story from Dan Murphy, who served as a US Marine from 2003-2009 and takes us back to a time before Fallujah became "a heavy-gauge chain around your neck with a chintzy participation trophy hanging from it."

Buckle up,

The Editors

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When your team leader shakes you awake and says “Brief’s in ten mikes,” lay there a minute looking at the springs of the top rack. Imagine the warm quiet of your bedroom back home. Don’t fall back asleep. When he comes back and says “Yo!” eight minutes later, get the fuck up. Put on the dirty set of cammies, with the salt stains chalked around the collar, cuffs and chest. Save the clean set for when you get back.

Flies outside the hooch will spasm when the door opens, so close your mouth as you exit. Move with urgency. In the briefing room, note that you are last but technically—look at your watch—not late.

If your squad leader says the mission objective is “deny the enemy the ability to operate in sector 44,” be relieved that you don’t need to write down or remember anything because the mission is simple: drive or walk around and hope you don’t get attacked.

If it’s a day patrol—and you’ve only been in country a few months and it’s mostly the Iraqi Army that gets hit—plan on watching scratchy bootleg DVDs of 24 in those clean cammies when you Return To Base (RTB is the only good news you know of). If Gunny’s sober and has the generator working, grab a bag of ice and bring it to the staging area for your squad to cool down their Camelbaks. If the generator’s down, fuck that drunk shitbag.

Have with you at all times something to dip and shoot. Insert your shaded Oakley lenses and keep the clear ones and NVGs handy in your drop pouch in case you’re out all night.

If it’s a mounted patrol, bring coffee in a travel mug. Mount something big and lethal on your truck with as much ammo as you can fit. Keep your rifle handy for Well-Aimed Shots. When you see that the last guy left a Glacier Cherry Gatorade bottle half-full with dipspit, curse him. Also his squad and his whore mother before you rinse it out and pack a lip now that you’ve got yourself a pretty solid spitter for patrol.

If it’s a foot patrol: sweat through your boots.

Take a second before you pitch and heave on your flak jacket and become 70 lbs. heavier and climb into the turret of a six-ton bullet-and-bomb magnet and roll out into 130 degrees for hours with optional fuck-my-life stroll through streets lined with refuse and human excrement among residents who range from liberated to neutral to downright miffed with regard to your presence and non-residents who have made up their mind to harry your chances for clean cammies and 24. Take a second to recall that you volunteered for this.

Squirm, marvel under the flak jacket’s weight pressing on your collar bones, and joke with your squad about the over-under on number of discs herniated. “They’re saying the average grunt shrinks an inch every tour,” somebody will say without irony.

If you’re lead Vic gunner, grab some candy to throw at kids. Stow it in your left cargo pocket with the tin of Cope Straight (hard-dick) or Skoal Wild Cherry (pussy). Additionally, grab some Tootsie Rolls for the Chocolate Girl show. Stow these in your right cargo pocket with the plastic MRE packaging you keep there to dress the sucking chest wound that, if you ever see one, you’ll probably forget how to treat.

Geared-up and walking out to motor pool, you will still—even 50, 75, 127 days in—brace yourself for the added gravity of the sun’s direct and routine malice. When the wind blows, wonder what hair dryer is that big.

Standing in the turret, lock your knees and find that sweet spot where the rubber gasket of the opening in the roof cradles your lumbar and supports at least some of your body armor’s weight. This is as good as it gets.

As you roll out the wire, flip-off the Marine on guard because you know him and he’s a good guy, so fuck him. Stand tall and gaze at the open desert to the north. Brief ranks of date palm trees leaning in the wind, dust eddies, twirling flowers of plastic. Gaze as the convoy rounds that big looping loop of an overpass east from the Train Station and south to the city. If the sun is low, snap a few pictures of all the murderous orange haze, the shadows diving and careening off a cityscape that is beautiful from afar but far far far from beautiful.

Where the ramp spits you into the city limits, note the half-moon cavity cratered into the northbound side of Route Ethan. The spot 2nd Platoon got hit a week prior on their way back in.

When your driver yells to you over the engine’s chugging fuzz, “How we doing up there?” tell him, “Hot.”

When you get about 200m east down Route Alice, look for Chocolate Girl’s house. It’s the tan, concrete one about a football field past another tan, concrete house the whole platoon lit up that one time, and two doors before the Mercedes-sized scoop of earth that’s gone unfilled since you arrived in-country. Throw the turret’s ratchet lock so it won’t spin on its own. Retrieve the Tootsie Rolls from your pocket and take a hasty measurement of your ground speed. Compensate for the truck’s latent velocity and height relative to the wall and toss the Tootsie Rolls into Chocolate Girl’s courtyard. Patience here is important. It’s easy to forget that candy doesn’t maintain airspeed like a baseball or a frag. Don’t over-think. Listen for a cheer from the guys loaded up on the 7-ton behind you confirming that a girl on the third-floor balcony, who nobody bothers to pretend is probably older than everybody knows she probably is, flashes her bare torso for the patrol as it leers by. Try not to think about your little sister. Later, when word comes down that Chocolate Girl’s father complained to the city, which complained to the battalion commander, who writes a memo, try not to question whether anything was ever meaningful to you.

When you turn south on Route Charlie, tighten the fuck up. Hunker the fuck down. Get small into the mesh saddle. (In an hour, your ass will itch, but for now it’s good to go.) Disengage the turret lock to let that bitch glide so you can light targets up, inshallah, as they emerge.

Scan your sector. Watch the road in front of your truck.

Turn your weapon system side-to-side so you can maintain a low profile and keep eyes on the road through that deadly gap between the forward blast shield and the turret. With your non-dominant dickskinner, compulsively check ammo and EOF gear. Watch for wires protruding from or running along the patchy quilt of garbage in the road and lining the curbs. Also watch for newly-laid asphalt. Be aware of other vehicles on the road and their proximity to you and instructions from your vic commander. And listen. And look. And brace. And wait.

Men with killer mustaches stare blankly outside homes and shops in their practical dishdasha man-dresses, watch you pass, perhaps smoking, perhaps with fists on his hips. If you’ve been in-country a few quiet months: wave, smile. There is a purpose to all of this. If you’ve been in-country long enough, stare back and sling a rope of dipspit in his direction. When its tail dribbles down your chin, leave it there.

In neighborhoods relying on generator power, you encounter superhighways of wires strung across the street in sagging hammocks that are unaccommodating to the snagful horns and spires of your gun truck. You can:

A) reroute to avoid this obstacle (you fucking Democrat);

B) lock the turret in place, angle the gun high, and take the whole grid down (hard-dick);

C) lock the turret in place, angle the gun down and do your Boy Scout best to lift and guide the wires out of the way to minimize the damage (Democrat-lite);

or D) keep the gun up so the wires catch and brace the turret in place manually until they are pulled tight enough that, if you release at just the right moment, the stored tension will send you for a neat little twirl (a spinning little tea cup).

Deciding which bulky and/or suspicious plastic bag or disturbed gravel or animal carcass could be the lucky number is touchy calculus. Consider the potential hours spent waiting in the sun for EOD to arrive and see what’s what, multiplied by units of the subsequent resentment members of your patrol will reserve exclusively for you should the lucky number turn out to be, in fact, a fucking plastic bag, disturbed fucking gravel or a dead fucking dog. Weigh all of this against the dark possibility that the bag is an IED, the gravel is a pressure plate IED, and the dog is an explosively-formed projectile IED (an EFP—acronyms make things known, let you imagine a cozy handle on the thing) designed to punch a hole in the hull of your vic and your life. All of which dependent on how Chocolate Girl’s father is handling things.

Learn the difference between an explosion that is far away and one that is close and one that is a flash-bang negligently deployed inside the truck behind you by PFC Shmuckatelli. Which ends the patrol early to medevac a concussed, burned and pissed off Corporal to the hospital at the MEK. Be tactful about this random spurt of luck should it flick your pink little clit. Not too jubilant that you get to feast at the four-star chow hall all the fobbits are getting fatter at.

If the explosion is far away, yell “Boomski!” and pack another lip.

When the vehicle commander asks you, “How we looking up there?” say, “Fucking hot.”

Be On the Look Out for cars on the BOLO list: red Opels, blue Bongos, and white Opels. Also blue Opels. Stop, harass and search. It’s unclear if you look for Opels because:

A) there’s intel that drivers of suicide-vehicle-borne improvised explosive devices favor an affordable, no-frills, works-every-time model;

B) the movers and sheikhs conning your S-2 shop import and sell affordable, no-frills, works-every-time models for no money down and of 0% APR financing for 12 months;

or C) poor people complain less.

If you spot a BOLO, run it off the road and menace the driver from the car. If you have one with you, sic a terp on him. If not, say “Tafteesh.” He knows the drill. Pat-down (gloves on, hold your breath), doors open, trunk agape, all clear, have a good one.

If any vehicle not made in Detroit approaches within 100 yards of your patrol, learn quickly that the legally-sanctioned Escalation of Force—Show Shout Shove Shoot—is perfect-world doctrine. Conference room stuff. Where time conveniently slows so a 19 year-old knuckledragger can assess the car moving towards his unit at a particular distance and respond accordingly by Showing them your flaccid flag or waving frantically a hand-held Stop sign. Muster a motivated “Qif!” or “Awguf!” from the short list of Arabic words you’ve mastered. Notionally, they will stop. If they don’t stop and the car encroaches further, register the ineffectiveness of Showing and subsequently escalate said response according to said conference room doctrine by Shouting via pop-up flare. Remove the cap. Place it over the firing pin at the other end, leaving approximately a quarter-to-half inch of give (crucial, this last). Point the business-end at a shallow trajectory towards the subject vehicle, holding the canister with your non-dominant dickbeater over the top, like a spotting scope, or a dick. Slap the cap and fire that fucker hopefully straight into Chocolate Girl’s father’s windshield.

Or throw a flash-bang.

Notionally, they will stop. If they don’t stop, Shove them by putting a Well-Aimed Burst through the engine block. If you miss or they still don’t stop: Stop them. All within the seconds it takes a speeding Opel to, dependably and with minimal servicing, close with and destroy. You. Close with and destroy you.

If the boomski is close, somebody with authority will initiate a response. Sit back. Do as you’re told.

If it is very close. You learn that boomskis are like epiphanies of light that come and go faster and more violently than in movies. That they are not cleanly churning balls of fiery wonder that send henchmen whirling acrobatically through the air and little boys home high, excited for the sequel. Learn that boomskis go somewhere, every bit of them. That Hollywood doesn’t really explore how shrapnel works. At very close range, boomskis, you find, collapse the flat earth between the palms of two clapping hands. In a blindfolded flash of what inexplicably feels like electricity and drops you back down to the earth as if snapped-to from a blackout. In that brief chest-caving interlude, the reel of bodies vaulting and spinning is paused: it is reversed several frames and erased. In its place, during that crack the hands are still pressed together, homes, sanity and, yes, bodies and their subsidiaries are scattered in inconsiderate and incredible arrangements, revealed only when the reel inexplicably restarts. The choreography and stuntmen will go uncredited. A whole day of work unpaid. After, boomskis leave behind a maze of dust and a cracked sense of normal.

Some days, maybe nothing happens. Most days.

You drive, circle, tafteesh.

But say it’s a night patrol. And Chocolate Girl’s father and brothers have started burying double- and triple-stacked 155mm shells. Which every few nights uppercut Humvees and leave them looking like discarded Tootsie Roll wrappers. Wrestle with the urge to make known to your buddies the existence of a none-too-little sentimental letter you have written to your father. “Just in case.” Before mounting up, take a moment to yourself. Somewhere quiet. Secluded. Like a porta-shitter. Come to terms with dying. Badly, maybe. Contemplate being maimed. Pray, earnestly, that you will bring 100% of your dick and at least one dickbeater home. Look at a laminated picture of you with your girl—whether or not she’s still waiting or you even still care—because it seems the thing to do. Maybe run your finger down the dust-clouded plastic over her cheek. Remember.

What you should not and cannot yet do, is understand that pretty soon the letters Fallujah will forever be on the tip of your tongue. That its sewage will line every street you ever walk down, that you will still smell it in your dreams and on vacation in interesting and more hospitable impoverished nations. It is not yet a heavy-gauge chain around your neck with a chintzy participation trophy hanging from it. All of that will come later. And stay. Right now, frankly, you just cannot afford the extra weight.

If your command is not too much of a hard-on: a 15-ton up-armored troop carrier will replace the Humvee as lead Vic. Trade in the machine gun for a 50,000 candle-power God-light mounted in its place. Sweep the road without blinking. Tell the driver three miles per hour is way too fucking fast. Do not blink. There are no more days, months, deployments, only the next moment of uncleared road. You are so terrified that you have stopped sweating. Almost. You hold every breath. Do not for one fossilized second unpucker your asshole or blink.

Sometimes it is very close and you don’t even see it. Because it is behind you. And because vic 2, 3 or 4 did not follow exactly in the same cleared path. Or because Chocolate Girl’s father and brothers and uncles and cousins used a remote detonator or hardwired that bitch and are watching you even now. Maybe one night—say, if an EFP, in conjunction with an accelerant, has been employed, because Chocolate Girl’s whole fucking tribe is committed now and hooked in with some pros who have spent the last couple years honing their skill set in Ramadi and Baghdad—perhaps one night those Hollywood flames do begin to tickle and lick before swallowing the Marines riding in whatever crumpled wad of truck remains. It is a pyre that will burn a long, long time in the bow, aft, port and starboard of your brain. And in which case, screams.

When nothing happens. It just gets late. The sun is westbound, and you’re northbound on Ethan, returning to the Train Station. You spot a big fat trash bag 100 yards out and audaciously plopped right next to the boomski crater that hit 2^nd platoon. It’s got a little tail running out of it, an antenna, maybe. You point it out and your vic commander calls a halt and raises the net. “Bravo COC, this is Bravo 3 Papa…Be advised we have a possible—”

Boom.

You feel the air shudder, hear shrapnel plink on the truck, which is quickly filled with the cluck and crackle of Marines laughing their asses off because it was barely a firecracker, kid stuff. Probably some horny teenager showing off for Chocolate Girl.

“COC, this is 3 Papa. Disregard, we’re RTB.” In which case, sweet.

Be sure to leave your spitter full for the next guy.

-30-

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Dan Murphy lives in Brooklyn. He holds an MFA from NYU and is working on his first novel. He served as a US Marine from 2003-2009 and now works as a private investigator. https://dan-murphy.com/

"John Lennon wanted to produce him, Bob Dylan knew his name, he gave Jimi Hendrix guitar advice. Some of those things were even true."

Enter the fuzzy but still optimistic mind of a post-prime rocker, the kind of guy who once sold the second-most pop singles in the UK after The Beatles. It's a gas.

-The editors

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He lounged inside the dim palace, his Clarendon Gardens flat that wealth and fame had afforded him. Before noon and already sipping brandy. A mirror lay on a side table with two lines of coke dusted across it. Leftovers from last night, this morning? Guitars were strewn about, unplayed, while the velvet curtains breathed in the London air. They blocked light and street noise, but the plush furniture and leather accessories did nothing to please him. Deep into 1974 and he felt like royalty in exile. Once indomitable, top of the charts, prince of pop, talk of the town, now reduced to gossip column quips on his weight, or his recent singles' failure to crack the top ten.

His wife burst into the living room, trembling, distraught. “Marc, I'm leaving.”

“Darling, have a drink. You told me the same last week. Last year too.” He waved for her to join him on the couch. The television played static as he awaited the BBC to begin broadcast.

June remained standing, blonde hair tied back severely while she clutched a carry bag. In a short suede jacket and new bell bottoms, she looked on the verge of an overseas journey, or a cross-continent train ride. “I know about Gloria. Thought it was just a fling, but it's been a year.”

Marc reached for his glass, failing to grasp it. “I know you know.” Confusion clouded his mind. “I told you.”

“That's all you have to say?”

“You're my wife, I want you to stay. We'll go on as three. It'll be a stone groove, man.”

“Not for me,” June said. “As your fan, your business advisor, you've lost half of your band. And Tony's not going to stick around to produce—”

“I don't need anyone.” He attempted to rise from his slouched position. “I'm the Cosmic Punk.” Why hadn't that expression caught on? “This is just a lull. I've got a whole new musical vision mixing funk and soul.”

“Marc, you have to clean up, get back to work. You never used to drink more than a pint of bitters or a glass of champagne. And lose weight.”

“I'm not fat!” He felt his stomach surge angrily against his belt. The British papers went on about how he'd ballooned from 8 to 11 stone. “I'm retaining water.”

“Right, you're bloated,” June said. “How can you connect with the kids or record buyers like that?”

“I saw my future in 1970 and it came true,” Marc said in his whispery voice. “I saw it again in a dream the other night.” He smiled. “I can get it all back, but it has to be in the next three years.”

June's mouth twisted downward. “Why, what happens then?”

“I don't know. Maybe I become a movie star or a poet. There's so little time. ” He scratched his forehead.

She stared at him, one eye twitching. “I came in to let you have it, but there's no point. You're oblivious.”

“If you're with me, stay. If you're leaving, leave.”

June rushed out of the living room.

“Wait,” Marc said. She couldn't be serious. People threatened things to him then changed their minds. It would blow over. It had to. He needed her common sense. June meant so much to him, if only... He became distracted by the nearby tray of half-eaten food. Munched on a piece of a crumpet, swallowed the yoke of a poached egg, and speared a sausage. It tasted cold and hard. When had breakfast been served, at dawn? “Come back,” he yelled to no one.

Marc spooled the reels of his super 8 film of Born to Boogie. Soon in the darkened room amid the flickering celluloid, there he was fronting the band in all their 1972 glory at Wembley, playing to ten thousand delirious fans. The kids, the groovers, the heads. Look at thin Marc strut. He quietly sang along with himself on “Hot Love,” his first #1 single. Ringo Starr filmed the concerts. Fans who would have mobbed the drummer during Beatlemania, ignored Ringo at the height of T. Rextasy. Marc reminded himself, that was only two years ago. He could London Bridge the gap between, get back there, where he belonged. John Lennon wanted to produce him, Bob Dylan knew his name, he gave Jimi Hendrix guitar advice. Some of those things were even true.

He tried giving Ringo a bell. Maybe they could shoot Part 2. Some flunky answered. Apparently, Ringo was out drinking with Harry Nilsson. God, their bender could go on for days.

His booking agent and confidant Mick Marmalade entered the living room. After surveying the empty brandy bottles, the powdered mirror, food remnants, and sputtering film, he said, “You at it already, sire?”

“Where's June?”

Mick gestured at the window. “Loading her things into the boot of a cab.”

“She'll be back.” Marc winced. For once not certain, when he'd been cocksure most of his life. He pointed at the concert film. “Can you get me another show there, man?”

“Wembley?” Mick's face fell. “Not possible now.” He scratched at his chin in thought. “But maybe opening for newer pop acts.”

“That's jive,” Marc said. “I'm the original, the pioneer. They're just following my trail.”

Mick paced the floor. “I can get gigs at clubs up north, in Denby Dale, Scunthorpe, or—”

“I don't play rooms, man. Halls, theaters. I'm a superstar.” He sighed. “You're sacked.”

“You sacked me yesterday.”

“And I will again tomorrow,” Marc replied. They made eye contact and cracked up.

“Let me see what I can find.” His agent didn't appear certain of anything.

Marc thrust himself off the couch. A dizzy head-rush followed. “I forgot, booked recording time at the studio. Need to get ready.” He knelt down to snort the last lines. “Check outside, man. A hundred fans camped outside earlier, young girls. I might need to sneak out the back way.”

Mick wore a doubtful expression. “If you say so.” When he pulled the purple velvet curtain back from the window, Marc squinted from the sudden blast of daylight. “No one out there,” Mick said. “Just a housewife wheeling a pram.”

“Must have moved on to King's Road,” Marc replied. “I saw them earlier.” He turned toward the food tray, spying the remaining sausages. He reached.

“Wait till after the session, sire,” his friend advised. “You always play better hungry.”

Marc shuffled across the room toward his wardrobe closet. He dressed up for recording sessions like a gig, made each run-through of a song a performance.

#

Tony waited at Trident Studios. He expected Marc to be late, and he was. Tony hid his shock at the eventual arrival. In the five months since they'd recorded together, the small, beautiful man had transformed. His face swollen, jowls evident, eyes flashing wide, facial skin slack from alcohol. Tony realized the secret of handsome men: they kept their expressions limited, taut, camera-ready. Rarely ate and smiled only slightly. While Marc was wincing and gurning, pouting and mugging, somehow looking grotesque when that seemed impossible only a year ago.

“Did you bring songs, Marc?”

“I have a notebook full, man.” He grinned and gestured. “I'm a superstar, and don't you know it.”

Tony laughed. “Yeah, I know.”

New bassist Jack Green had ditched today's session after waiting an hour for the star to show. Tony would have to play bass, maybe keyboards too. “Paul's here. Mickey went out for some crisps.” Tony paused. “Let's record whatever today, but I think we need a break.” He fingered his mouth. “A year off, for you to get back in shape, write some new material. So we can do something better than Tanx.”

“Tanx was epic, man,” Marc said. “Don't listen to Melody Maker and NME. They're jealous. I've had too many chartbusters. They loved me as an underdog, then rained on my hit parade.” Marc arranged his feather boas atop his peach satin jacket, and tossed a silk scarf over one shoulder. “You told me yourself that 'Electric Slim,' 'Broken-Hearted Blues,' and 'Highway Knees' were some of my best songs.”

“They were strong, Marc.” Tony noticed his Brooklyn accent flattening the r sound into “Mahhk.” He frowned while drinking from his coffee mug. “But three songs out of thirteen. The rockers sounded like you'd done them before, and the soul stuff was...” he wanted to say shrill but couldn't, “not realized. Half-baked.”

“Look, man, I'm T. Rex, you're not.” Marc stood, head of curls bowed. As if, meanwhile, he was still thinking. “What are you suggesting?”

Tony smoothed his long straight hair down. “We had a magic formula. You did your Chuck Berry thing with hooks, then I added strings and Flo & Eddie on vocals. All of our big hits had that recipe.” He knew Marc was superstitious.

Marc rubbed his sweaty face with a hand. “I added Gloria and the black chicks singing backup. That's the new direction for Zinc Alloy, space-age funk, cosmic soul.” When Tony didn't reply, he sank down into a leather studio chair. “But for singles, it's cool to use the old formula. Bring Flo & Eddie to London.”

“Well, they want to be paid, Marc. And Paul Fenton and Jack want more than 40 quid a week. I need a percentage too, not just a flat fee.”

“Money, money,” Marc shouted. “Doesn't anyone care about art except for me?” He pulled a flask from his ruffled vest and sipped at it. “Let's Rock.”

#

Tony strapped on a bass in the performance room while Paul sat on the drum stool with a quizzical expression. He being new to their circus. Ten minutes later, Mickey Finn drifted in and squatted down at his bongos. Habitually a clown, making faces and leaping about in concert, today he seemed bored. His angular handsome features had been a perfect match for Marc—an onstage foil from 1970 through 1973. Now he served as a stark reminder: Marc's face and waistline had swollen, but Mickey remained much the same. The importance of his bongos to their success was questionable, but somehow it had worked. Set T. Rex apart. According to Marc's superstition, to remove his percussion from the band's mix would surely curse them.

Tony watched the impatient star posing and strutting with his guitar through the control room window. Studio engineers wanted separation at recording sessions so each instrument could be mixed individually. Marc would have none of that. He demanded they do a couple of takes, all live, together as a band. Tony rerecorded the lead vocals later, since they got lost in the bashing drums. Marc stumbled in on his 4-inch platforms, gave a look to each of them, then started counting off, “One-two-three-four...”

“Wait,” Tony said. “We don't know the chords.”

Marc flashed a look of disbelief. “It's in E. Just watch my hands.”

They always did, since even if he wrote down the changes, there was no guarantee when he would shift.

Marc got a monstrous tone, all velvety overdrive, from his Les Paul through a Marshall stack. He just grooved on the throbbing E chord as he hammered the 6^th note and staggered the beat. What had been a Chuck Berry—then a Stones—trademark was now his rightful boogie inheritance. He spit out nonsensical phrases about emerald slippers and dark wizards from the forest glades. Right when no one expected it, he lurched to a G chord and sang an almost East Indian cascading wail over it.

Tony was excited until Marc kept repeating the one-chord vamp with an eventual second chord release for ten minutes. Finally it crashed to a halt.

“Beautiful, man.” Marc squatted on the carpeting, his face glowing. Something about the weight gain had made his perspiration copious.

“That's a cool start, like a verse.” Tony chose his words carefully. “But it needs a chorus, and maybe a bridge.”

“I'm simplifying,” Marc said, out of breath. “'Get it On' had four chords, so I removed two.” He glanced at the others for affirmation. “Rock is about feeling, not music theory shit.”

They stormed through three more shambolic tunes—all groove, without any hooks. Marc shouted out, “Forever boogie,” or “I'm the king of boogie,” and lastly, “Boogie assassin!” He shook his matted corkscrew hair and lunged about, trying to enthuse the others, until the brandy he'd been quaffing sent him toppling ass over platforms into the drum kit. Expensive Neumann microphones suspended on stands crashed to the ground. Nigel Burke, the engineer, ran out of the control room in a panic. Tony helped Marc up.

“With your strings on top, Tony, and the singers' soul harmonies, we'll have super-hits.”

Tony's smile felt so clenched it almost hurt him. “That's enough for today.” He studied his watch. “You have the BBC interview in a half-hour.”

“I can't do that jive.” Marc rubbed his nose. “I never listen to that DJ.”

“The benefit gig next week will get coverage everywhere,” Tony said. “Your photo in the papers. Maybe an interview, not just a gossip column sighting.”

“If you think so...”

“Marc, your manager BP would want you to do this. You can promote Zinc Alloy & the Spiders of Tomorrow.”

“The Hidden Riders of Tomorrow.”

“Please, Marc,” Tony pleaded. “And be nice to Andy. You need good press.” He put his hands together in prayer. Would he eventually quit or be fired?

Marc nodded. “Yeah, okay.”

#

BP Fallon picked up Marc in the Rolls he'd never learned to drive. So many of his songs about cars, yet he remained an eternal passenger. “A quick detour to Fulham Road,” Marc told him. BP showed a slight knowing smile on his cherubic face. “Better wear a disguise.” Marc doffed an outsized top hat.

The car blocked traffic and passersby were stunned by the sight of an outrageously dressed man rushing from a white Rolls Royce into The Great American Disaster to emerge clutching a burger and fries.

They arrived a few minutes late at BBC Radio London studios. Two nervous female assistants ushered him into the broadcast room where the D.J. sat speaking into a microphone. They delicately placed headphones over Marc's curls and wheeled his chair toward another mic.

“This is Andy Merkin for the Beeb. And look who just popped in, the former superstar from years past. Does anyone still remember T. Rex?”

Marc restrained his anger. He needed this. “The kids remember,” he replied in his softest voice. “The groovers, the sliders, the beautiful people. I play for them... and the gods.”

“Marc, you once sold the most pop singles in the UK after The Beatles. What happened? How did you fall?”

“Nobody fell,” Marc said. “We had hit after hit. The Beatles were four people, and that level of success was too much for them. I'm just one person, writing, singing, performing, running the record company.”

“So you had a nervous breakdown?” Merkin allowed a snort of laughter.

“No, we planned this. To become album artists, not just a singles band. I started out in the underground.”

“The tube?” Merkin rested his chin in one hand. “Well, you haven't had any major hits, so I guess your plan succeeded.”

“You don't have to be so jive with me, man. If you don't dig my sound, what do you like, Alan?”

“It's Andy. At the pub, I listen to Slade and Suzi Quatro.” He coughed. “You've claimed to have invented glitter rock or glam rock, but never actually played it.”

“Yeah, I started it on Top of the Pops in 1971. But my influences were Elvis Presley, Chuck Berry, and Bob Dylan.”

“And Donovan?”

“I think my voice is original, a style I developed.”

“May I play you something?” Merkin cued a pumping rocker with a vibrating, affected vocal.

Marc shook his head about, tapped his shoes. “That's me. I don't remember exactly. Probably a B-side from an Electric Warrior single.”

Andy Merkin smiled wide. “No, that's The Kinks singing 'King Kong' from 1968. So, did Ray Davies invent your style?”

“I loved them, when I was young. But Ray doesn't usually sing that way. For me it's a full-time job, man.”

“Okay, here's a more contemporary song.” Merkin started “Rock On” by David Essex.

Marc breathed. Don't let him get a rise out of you. You're a superstar. “Yeah, David is basically doing me here. The 'Hey kids' lyrics, and the string arrangement is like what Tony Visconti adds on my records. But no guitar. So it doesn't rock, it throbs.” Marc paused. “But I dig the bass player.”

“What of the other glam rockers, like Roxy Music, or what Bowie's doing on Diamond Dogs?”

Marc giggled. “I haven't heard that yet.”

“But you're mates, right? He wrote 'The Prettiest Star' for you.”

“I played guitar on it.”

“Didn't Bowie write 'Lady Stardust' about you?”

“Ask him.” Marc swiveled back and forth on the leather chair. “I dig Mott the Hoople. ‘Honaloochie Boogie' and 'Golden Age of Rock and Roll.' I could cover those, man.”

“You mentioned in an old interview that you had a book of poetry and three science fiction novels.” Andy allowed a long pause. “And yet I've never seen one at a bookshop.”

Marc said so many things back when he was high on stardom. “Those books exist. But I'm not in publishing or distribution, so I don't know where to find them. There's so little time.”

“I see...” Merkin leaned in closer. “Your Tyrannosaurus Rex songs about witches, elves, and unicorns. That's all a load of codswallop, right? You were singing to sixties acid heads.”

Marc rose for a moment, saw Merkin appear stunned, then sat back down. “That's cynical, man. There are other realities. I read Tolkien and sang about it, years before Led Zeppelin. This Indian guy is teaching me to leave my physical form, like in Dr. Strange comics.” He sighed. “Music is escapism, not just marketing and sales.” Marc glared at Merkin. “I don't play for the jivers, the bread-heads, the ripoffs.”

“So I suppose you think I'm a jiver?”

“I came here to talk about a benefit show for underprivileged children.”

“Aren't you just playing that concert to raise your public profile?”

“No, man, I wear bigger platforms to achieve that.” Marc pointed at his shoes and grinned. “I'm donating my time for free. Are you giving anything to the charity, Andy, or are you against the kids?”

“I, I am all for the young people,” Merkin sputtered.

“You've slagged me this whole interview and you haven't even played one of my songs.” Marc threw his hands in the air so staffers could see his frustration.

Merkin froze as loud voices spilled from his headphones. His mouth flatlined. “And now a big hit by T. Rex, 'Children of the Revolution.' He cleared his throat. “A big thank you to Roly Boly, Marc Bolan, for dropping by.”

Marc lunged at the DJ. “You bastard. Nobody calls me Roly Boly.” He grabbed him by the jacket lapels and shook Merkin until one tore. “You'll always be square. You're the old guard, hair combed over. Long sideburns and you wear flares to seem hip.”

Suddenly the compact room filled with BBC associates on one side and BP Fallon and Mick Marmalade on the other, pulling both men apart. Fists swung as curses rang out. A wave of people falling forward then backward.

“If I was younger and stronger, I'd teach you a lesson,” Merkin shouted. “Sod off, now.” His voice shook. “You're over. The kids don't care about T. Rex anymore. But they'll remember me forever. I'm their Dandy Andy.”

#

It was September of 1977, only weeks from Marc's thirtieth birthday. He felt better, even with the news that Elvis had left the building for good in August. After a long slough, a crawl through muddy trenches, he was razor thin and on the way to a comeback. Marc's afternoon TV show, a tight new band, and decent material helped. Marc and Gloria had been celebrating at Morton's in London. He was so drunk and tired now though, as she drove home fast, very fast at four, or was it five a.m.? Speeding across Putney Bridge, he meant to tell her, “Slow down,” but instead said, “Life's a gas.” She glanced over then squeezed his hand.

Marc was in a half-world between consciousness and sleep as he rose above their Mini. Astral traveling—just like Dr. Strange. Higher and higher. Below, he could see Knightsbridge, Muswell Hill, Cambridge Heath, and the grumbling tugboats barely moving on the Thames, and then even Ladbroke Grove where he'd lived with June before stardom. He floated through a portal, fusing with the celluloid of his movie Born to Boogie. There he sat cross-legged on the carpeted stage strumming “Spaceball Ricochet,” much as he had done in the folk duo, Tyrannosaurus Rex, at hippie festivals. All the kids, the heads, and the stone groovers in Wembley were transfixed by his every word. And Marc decided to remain there forever, where he could sing to the thousands flocked around him, about the people of the Beltane, the goblins, monsters, and dwarves who thrived amongst the woodland rock, and where a metal guru met a mystic lady under the mambo sun to birth the stars beneath the monolith. Someday, they would ride a white swan up a raw ramp to see their planet queen.

All that fairy nonsense the press had accused him of, actually true, to be fully realized by himself. He didn't need Telegram Sam to tell him that Tony Visconti was his main man, or that he alone could connect James Dean's car to Chuck Berry to Highway 61, because “Bobby's alright!”

Marc laughed.

The brute impact caused a vibration at the core of the world, one people would feel for years, for decades, even if they didn't sense it then or the next morning, even if they hadn't been born yet, or didn't live in England, or didn't know of him, had never boogied in their lives, or wrote him off as teeny-bopper, bubble gum music, trudging through their days serious and stooped, with no glitter to their overcast skies. Yet somehow, beneath the surface, under the skin, deep in the coils of their brains, some little perfect morsel of joy—a spark from that brief instant when one is young, beautiful, and truly alive—had been plucked out. And all that lingered was a void, a mysterious sadness for what could not be rightfully explained, much less named.

“He just made me happy and feel less alone,” a sixteen-year-old girl said later of him.

#

Squint toward the firmament above. Make a wish on a star. The science teacher pointed to the domed ceiling of the Royal Observatory's planetarium. “Most everything came from hydrogen and helium; they expanded and cooled. Over billions of years, gravity caused gas and dust to form galaxies, stars, planets, and maybe us.” She fingered her gray hair. Sixty-three and pondering retirement.

One of her students asked, “So gas is life?”

The teacher heard a busker somewhere outside the hall strumming a G chord on a folk guitar, like the intro of a song she half-remembered. She imagined a whispery, tremulous voice riding above the strum and felt a shiver of her youth. Her smile spread wide and contagious. “Yes, and life is a gas.”

-30-

'Life's a Gas' will appear in Talley's forthcoming collection, Destroy Me Gently, Please, from Serving House Books.

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Max Talley was born in New York City and lives in Southern California. His writing has appeared in sixty journals, including Vol.1 Brooklyn, Atticus Review, About Place Journal, The Opiate, Whiskey Tit, and The Saturday Evening Post. Talley's literary fiction collection, My Secret Place, was published by Main Street Rag Books and his genre collection, When The Night Breathes Electric, debuted in 2023. www.maxtalley.com

Do enjoy "Stolen Future," our March story. We promise this will be the most fun piece you read about art grant writing, a sperm bank heist, and a desert tortoise.

Don’t try this at home,

The Editors

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An art opening in Las Vegas. Wine and cheese and harp music. Surreal desert landscapes.

I make land art, said João Alcantara. Out there.

He pointed in some direction.

There is lots of land out there, said the tall woman.

No one is doing much with it, João said. One day they'll build more cities. Or solar panels to power the cities they already built.

The woman nodded.

Are you an artist too? João asked.

In Utah, she said. I play the bass guitar in a Mormon band.

I didn't know they had Mormon bands.

It's just a joke. We're a regular band.

Now João nodded.

The tall woman: In the day I work in a sperm bank.

João: What a job.

It's normal.

Do the porno rooms exist?

They're like time capsules. They have magazines and DVDs.

Are there any strange people that make deposits?

Mostly older men. Don't know if it's strange. Men of a certain age think a lot about their mortality. We learned that in the training.

I see.

Sometimes young guys in their twenties come in. That's sometimes weird. Sometimes they have good reasons like they have Hodgkin's Lymphoma but sometimes they just seem like pervs.

There's a joke about the woman in an elevator at a health clinic. There's a man in there with her who says he's going to the sperm bank on the fifth floor. She asks him how much they're paying for sperm these days. A lot, he says.

The tall woman nodded. João didn't know if it meant she'd heard the joke before or if she wanted him to continue.

João went on: She goes back to the clinic. When she gets there the elevator door is closing and she waves at the people inside to hold the door. When she makes it, someone asks her what floor she's going to.

João and the tall woman simultaneously puffed out their cheeks and held up five fingers.

That's a classic one, she said. But it's not that kind of sperm bank. They freeze their own. It's not donations. It doesn't work like that.

So they don't get paid?

They pay. It's not cheap to freeze your sperm.

João now understood his misunderstanding.

The woman looked past him, maybe at one of the paintings, but kept talking, as if to the landscape.

The deposits come with these gigantic insurance policies.

On their sperm?

People who make deposits do it because soon they'll be impotent for some reason. Chemo, age, forced vasectomy. It sounds kind of pro-lifey, but these deposits are like their kids in a sense. If they spoil or get lost–

When you say gigantic–

I think the standard is a million dollars.

Does it happen often?

The policy is included in the deposit fee.

I mean do the samples spoil or get lost often.

It's never happened at my work. They take it all really seriously.

How are the samples stored?

The freezers are really cold. They have to be below a certain temperature always. They have backup generators for if the power goes out, and backups for the backups.

So it's pretty much impossible.

Pretty much. The only thing I can think of is that something happens in transit.

From the penis to the cup?

From my work to the lab where they do the in vitro. We just do storage. When people want to actually use their sample it gets sent off somewhere else.

So if it gets lost in the mail.

Right.

~

Land art is not a lucrative field, and João was never a day job type of person. He'd been living off of his girlfriend, Elke, for most of his time in Las Vegas, making only symbolic contributions to rent and groceries when he was motivated enough to buy a pile of second-hand clothing at Saver's and sell it to college students at a ludicrous profit. But now Elke had left him and returned to Köln to take care of her sick father. Now he was couchsurfing, not unhappily. Still, if he could snap his fingers and be back in Faro, he would.

João's financial precarity was more justification than inspiration. That came from his amusement at the idea.

He looked up Las Vegas clinics. He booked a free consultation.

~

And if I want to make a withdrawal–

Of course, just give us a call.

And how does it go from there?

You'll let us know what facility will be taking care of the in vitro fertilization. There'll be some paperwork, and then we send your sample to them.

Pretty simple.

Yes, sir.

And what–I'm sorry for all the questions–

It's no problem.

I'm wondering what that actual transfer looks like. You know, if something happens–

It's all a secure process, refrigerated vehicles, airplanes if necessary. We understand the importance of preserving the integrity of the samples.

Good, good.

They sat there in the consultation room for a moment longer.

If you don't have any other questions, I'll take you up to reception and you can discuss appointments and payment.

~

It occurred to João that the money he needed to raise just to make the deposit would be more than enough to get him home, or even to live more comfortably in Las Vegas for a while longer. But now he was having fun.

Once, in his first year living in Las Vegas, he had been awarded a grant from the Red Mountain Institute to build a piece of land art called Damn, Hoover! near Lake Mead. That project was a big success, and the organization's director wrote to João after the opening to be in touch whenever he was ready for the next project. He never did–there was never another project–and now he looked for the man's contact and quickly wrote an artist's statement.

Pacific Desert is, like all land art, an ecological reckoning. Raised on the southern coast of Portugal, the desert was never part of my world. That was until I moved to Las Vegas and it became the entirety of it. Now, the salted water of my beloved Atlantic feels like an entity of another universe. And yet. Not far west of here, just over the mountains, lies another behemoth of an ocean. I can only imagine that for the people of the Pacific the desert that is their neighbor is as abstract and unimaginable as it was to me before my arrival in it. Pacific Desert aims to change that. Pacific Desert is an effort to join these two distant worlds, to bridge the gap between desert and coastline, between cacti and coral, between dry and wet.

All bullshit. João knew his audience.

~

João! Hey brotherman. I read your pitch. Artist statement. Fantastic shit. Moving shit.

I'm happy you liked it.

Yeah, man, cool shit. Really. Anyway. Brass tacks: let's get down to it. How much you gonna need?

I need a truck. I need money for gas. Motels in California.

Sure, sure.

Money for permits. I'll need an assistant. I can find a student who will do it for cheap, but something for him. Food on the trips. Will need some equipment. Ropes. Wheelbarrow.

Good. Reasonable. You're a reasonable guy. Salt of the earth. Let's talk numbers.

Maybe eight thousand.

The sound of heels landing on a desk came through the phone. A leather chair squeaking backwards.

Eight. Good, sure. I can do eight.

That's great. Thank you.

Pleasure, man. The arts are everything.

I should be up front that this project will take a while. Land art takes time, a lot of time.

No worries, bud. I know the schtick. Take your time. I'm not going anywhere.

~

Six weeks later the money hit João's account. He called the clinic right away and confirmed an appointment for later that week.

When he got to the clinic he filled out paperwork. Reason for deposit: lesbian friends want baby, I want vasectomy. The stereotypical receptionist laughed happily when she read it over. Her voice was sing-song. She chewed gum.

Telling it like it is! she said. You're a funny fella.

He gave her a check for eight thousand dollars.

Soon the nurse, the same one from the consultation, led João to the Sampling Room. The room looked like a therapy office. There was an armchair and a cushioned bench, both wrapped in plastic, which from a certain angle showed streaks of cleaning product. The walls were decorated with beige-scale photos of desert plants. Between the chair and bench was a rack of magazines, their covers occulted by a panel of cardboard.

Are there videos? João asked.

Just the magazines, she said, but I can give you the wi-fi password if you'd like to use your phone.

Don't worry, he said.

The nurse set the sample cup on a side table next to the armchair.

All inside, please, she said.

Then she went away.

João took a magazine at random and looked through it. There was a spread full of women with peanut butter and jelly on their breasts, surrounded by adult men in schoolboy outfits. Another of a blonde woman working naked in an emergency room. João got most caught up reading an article about the all-new 83 Bronco.

When he got through the magazine he put it away, took off his pants, and masturbated to the thought of Elke's older sister, Hella.

He got it all inside and put the cup inside the metal cubby in the wall, as instructed.

Just give us a call when those friends of yours are ready, said the receptionist on his way out.

May be sooner than you think, you know how they like to move fast.

If that's not the truth! Bye bye now!

~

The question, then, was how long to wait. João considered suspiciousness, biology, and the realistic boundaries of his patience. A month would be too suspicious. Two, how boring. Six weeks was a cliché. Seven, then. Or five. Impatience won.

Over the next five weeks, João spent about half an hour, on most days, planning. Mostly that meant just sitting and thinking. One day, during the third week, it meant grilling sardines in Rebar Robby's backyard.

Rebar Robby was a handyman from Las Vegas that João had hired to help with Damn, Hoover! He was a good worker. Very strong, very crazy. He always had a handgun in his waistband. His backyard had chainsaws, leafblowers, a backhoe, and a jackhammer, all just lying around. João liked to play with the jackhammer, which Robby let him do in exchange for grilled sardines. On this day, during the planning period, João told Robby about the plan, about what he was thinking, and what kind of cut Robby could get if they pulled it off.

Kinda fruity for me to help steal your jizz, said Rebar Robby. But fuck it. That's some serious cashola.

~

That was awfully quick! said the receptionist over the phone.

I had a feeling, João said.

Have they picked out a fertilization center? she asked.

I'm sending you a message now with the information. A place in Los Angeles. Dr. Friedman.

Great choice. We've worked with Yoni before.

I want to ask–I feel stupid–I got the vasectomy already, and with the lab in California, I'm just–they won't be happy if something happens.

Don't worry, sir. LA is easy. We send samples there all the time, nothing's ever happened.

How is it transported?

By car, we hire a service. Very professional. There's really nothing to worry about.

And the turnaround time? Just to keep my friends updated. When will it be sent?

Let me just–

Keyboard sounds. Hmms.

We can get it out two days from now, she said. On Thursday. It would be at Dr. Friedman's that afternoon.

Good. Perfect. Thanks very much.

~

Early Thursday. A clear day. Chilly. The morning moon above Red Rock's peaks.

João Alcantara and Rebar Robby sat in Robby's license-plateless Scion boxcar in the clinic's parking lot. João in the driver's seat, Robby shotgun, Robby's pistol in the glove box. On the radio, frantic jazz. Robby's head twitched with the hi-hats.

The receptionist appeared at quarter to eight and went into the clinic. Fifteen minutes later the sign above the front door lit up, and soon after, two nurses went inside, neither the one who'd helped João.

João kept glancing at the clock. Robby kept telling him to be patient. Robby was very patient.

Finally the car. It had to be. A small white van with a big back. It pulled into one of the parking spots in front of the clinic, and a man with a hat, earbuds, and a clipboard got out and went into the clinic.

That's it, Robby said.

João started the car.

The sperm courier reappeared holding a Styrofoam cooler under his arm. It was perfect how the clouds of cold billowed from the back of the van when he opened it and put the cooler inside.

Showtime.

Robby said this earnestly, and it was.

~

Jean, Primm, California, alien solar farm, Nipton Road.

They climbed out through the hills behind the van. The jazz station fuzzed out and João shut off the radio. The road rumbled beneath them.

Soon, said Robby.

They came over a peak and had a long stretch of downhill ahead of them. Several miles ahead was a rest stop. João kept seven seconds between him and Robby and the van. There were two minivans driving slow in the fast lane. Otherwise the road was empty.

Rest Stop 1/2 Mile.

Robby: Go. Now.

João pressed the accelerator. In a moment they were on the van's tail.

Good perfect stay there.

Robby opened the glove box and took out the pistol. He opened the window and rushing air shouted into the car.

Steady now!

Robby leaned out of the window. João turned his head to watch but swerved the car some and snapped his eyes back to his white knuckles at ten and two.

The gunshot killed the sound of the wind.

The van's back tire exploded with a puff of dust.

Rebar Robby. Just perfect. Already back in the car. The window already up.

Sparks flew as the van leaned onto its stump, the metal wheel scraping against the asphalt below.

João was mesmerized by the image. He only noticed how close it had gotten when he was right up on it.

Jesus! Robby yelled.

Robby grabbed the steering wheel and pulled it sideways. They swerved around the car and passed it in the shoulder.

Take the exit, he said.

The van followed them into the rest stop. João and Robby got out. Robby waved at the van as it pulled up next to them with an awful scraping noise. The driver parked and got out. He took out his headphones and put his hands on his head. His goatee looked like it had been lined up in the last half hour.

Jesus man, Robby said to him. You okay?

What the fuck happened? said the driver.

Your tire went, said Robby.

No shit fool, said the driver. Shit fuckin blew the fuck up.

Must've hit a rock or something, said Robby. Desert driving, homie.

The driver took out his phone and pushed down his shades to look at it. Then he held it up to the sky.

Fuck bro, he said. Yall got service?

João took out his phone. He really didn't have service. He shook his head regretfully.

I don't have a phone, said Robby. 5G man. Bad shit.

Good for you bro, the driver said. He shook his head. Just watch the car for me.

He put his phone back to the sky and wandered towards the bathrooms.

Rebar Robby flashed João his ugly smile. All big yellow teeth.

Easy money sardine man.

The driver disappeared behind one of the buildings.

João moved quickly. He opened the latch on the van's back. The cold whooshed at him and when it cleared the cooler was right there, just on the floor. He opened it.

It really was all too easy. The sample just by itself. Clearly labeled: Joao Alcantara.

João took the cup of solid semen and closed the cooler. Then he closed the van door. The driver still somewhere looking for reception.

Vamos, said João.

Let's go find dude, Robby said. Destroy suspicion.

You, João said. He shouldn't recognize me.

Fine. Start the car.

Robby went jogging towards the corner the driver had gone around. João got back in the car and put the sample into the cupholder. He turned on the engine.

Robby got in a minute later and grinned at João.

Dude isn't suspicious at all. He's worried about getting home in time for the Lakers game. Soon we're counting moola.

~

Rebar Robby was asleep. João turned the air on hot and took the exit for Nipton Road.

He drove East a while, past several dilapidated houses surrounded by cars on bricks, air conditioning units, refrigerators.

He turned off Nipton and followed the new road into the Mojave Preserve. By now it was all Joshua trees.

He pulled into the shoulder. Picked up the sample, held it up to the light, gave it a shake. It was at least halfway thawed. It jiggled.

João got out of the car and started walking on the desert pavement through the Joshua trees. He was looking for the right one. He didn't know what that looked like but knew that he'd know it when he saw. With his eyes on the branches he almost tripped over the real answer.

The desert tortoise looked up at him as if to say: do it.

~

An art opening in Lisbon. Wine and cheese and bossa nova. A small room packed full. Everyone there to see the only piece of art in the world that mattered.

Futuro roubado (Stolen Future)

by João Alcantara

The soundless projection runs on a loop against the gallery's back wall. The people watch in rapture: A desert tortoise, its shell covered in human ejaculate, walks slowly across a desert landscape.

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Arel Wiederholt Kassar is a writer from San Francisco, living in Las Vegas. His first novel, The Desert Spring Movement, is forthcoming from Bench Editions in 2026. Find him online at arelwk.com

“Four-thirty on a Friday afternoon and every chair is filled.” Welcome to a nail salon where everything is about to change. Beth Sherman’s “Something Less Dangerous” brings us four perspectives on a tragedy in less than a thousand words.

-The Editors

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The Off-Duty Cop

Donna gets her acrylic nails touched up every two weeks at Lulu Island, the table near the door next to the wooden cat whose tail jerks back and forth like a metronome. Today, the red on the lilies is chipping, the tiny leaves smeared, her cuticles ragged. You staying safe? asks Viv, the usual joke. Whose head you bust this week? And Donna tells her it’s been pretty boring actually – traffic tickets, a court appearance, driving the patrol car, one domestic violence call where the wife refused to press charges. Soothing to have someone pull on her fingers without wanting to nuzzle her breasts, corkscrew her legs. Not that she doesn’t love her husband. But she prefers a gentler touch. Viv’s hands smell like cucumbers. As Viv massages first one palm, then the other, Donna’s knuckles relax. Viv’s knees touching hers like four sparrows in a nest. She feels tension slip from her neck. The cat’s tail ticks off the seconds. Above Viv’s head, a poster of mountains in Korea, lush green, serene.

The Salon Owner

Four-thirty on a Friday afternoon and every chair is filled. The room hums with voices. Snatches of sentences Viv doesn’t pay attention to. She should hire another girl. Not enough staff for the mani-pedis. She should get a bigger place, leave this strip mall where the sandwich shop went under and the laundromat is failing. Maybe put a massage table in the back where the girls eat lunch and re-heat the towels. Her kids will have finished their homework by now and started eating the Pepero biscuits she left for them. Next time we do leopard print, okay, she says to Donna, pointing to a laminated book. This girl’s too pretty to be a cop, thinks Viv. She should have been a lawyer or an architect. Something less dangerous. God forbid Viv’s own kids wear a uniform when they grow up. With her brush she smooths out the imperfections in Donna’s painted lilies, evening out the red. Focused, happy. Outside, a crashing sound, metal colliding with glass and as the car shatters the plate glass window, hurtling through the salon, flattening everything in its path, Viv remembers she never made dinner.

The Driver

The bumble and rush of traffic on Deer Park Avenue, pissant idiots slowing him down, his SUV threading between other cars, passing them like it’s a video game, and he’s winning he’s winning, skiing through red lights as the idiot cars honk and it’s better than the too big silence at home, his broken easy chair, his wife leaving so long ago she doesn’t look like her picture anymore, taking the kids, the three of them fleeing the dead end house with the empty bottles in the kitchen sink, littering the bathtub, piled in the trash, and there are two red lights, four lines of traffic, the double yellow line wobbling, stop honking you wonkerdoodles his heart flibertitipsit, eyeballs blinking, stomach riding the loop de loop and he’s going so fast he’s faster than the wind faster than his poor body alone in this world the car spinning like that time they went to the beach with the kite, clipping a tree skidding across the parking lot, slamming through glass before everything slides to black.

The Clerk

It sounded like a bomb went off. I ducked under a table. Honest to God, I did. And when I went outside to see what happened, the window next door wasn’t there anymore. That guy drove all the way through the salon and crashed into a dumpster in the back parking lot. On TV, they said he was doing 70. Can you believe it? They said he’d had 19 beers, although how they could tell it was 19 and not 18 or 22, I don’t know. He pleaded Not Guilty, the jerk. My God, it was awful. Blood everywhere. People mowed down in the middle of the afternoon when all they were doing was having their nails done. The owner, Viv, she used to say come in anytime, honey, your cuticles need a trim. But I never did. And that cop who was killed? She worked in New York City in a bad neighborhood and here she dies getting fake nails. We closed early. On the news, they showed the body bags being wheeled out, one after another. Four dead, 14 injured. Some poor little girl lost a leg. It could have been me, you know? That’s what I told the TV reporters after. It could have been me sitting there instead of here with the washers and dryers and all the lost socks. Feeling sorry for myself cause I never went to college and I’m in a dead-end job and I don’t have a boyfriend. Well, that part I didn’t say out loud. He could have veered left and crashed into our window.

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Beth Sherman’s writing has been published in more than 100 literary magazines, including Flash Frog, Gone Lawn, Tiny Molecules, 100 Word Story, Fictive Dream, and Bending Genres. Her work is featured in Best Microfiction 2024 and she’s the winner of the Smokelong Quarterly 2024 Workshop prize. A multiple Pushcart, Best Small Fictions, and Best of the Net nominee, she can be reached on X, Bluesky or Instagram @bsherm36.

It's holiday party season, and that means a lot of work for Jeremy, an actor/cater-waiter who would rather be watching hoops than passing hors d'oeuvres. But then he gets booked for a big NBA party, and couldn't his life be about to change, right now?

Take a champagne flute, Happy New Year,

The Editors

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It was the busy season - the stretch between Thanksgiving and Christmas where the city is non-stop catered events. Office holiday parties, private events in Upper East Side apartments, huge galas thrown by the real estate crowd. Themeless excuses for companies to get drunk. There was work almost every day of the week, and Jeremy had worked 11 of the last 12 days, shifts ranging from 5 to 12 hours a pop. He knew some of the other caterers had been pulling doubles. He’d asked one of them how she could work so much. She looked at him and said, “You gotta get it while you can get it, baby.”

That’s what got Jeremy so ecstatic when he got to the Javits Center and saw a giant ice sculpture of a trophy with a basketball on top. An NBA party? That was different.

Jeremy had always liked basketball, but that fall and winter he’d taken his fanhood to another level. He listened to four different NBA podcasts every week. He split a League Pass subscription with a buddy from high school and specialized in late night games. He chose watching Utah-Dallas alone at 9 p.m. over going out. Preferred falling asleep on the couch with Marv Albert’s and Reggie Miller’s voices echoing in his head to sleeping in bed. Someone on Twitter said they were spending more time following the NBA because it was a distraction from all the bullshit of the world. And Jeremy agreed, even though the person who tweeted that probably worked in politics or immigration law or climate or something important and stressful, and Jeremy was an out-of-work actor who catered a few times a week.

It was not common to be excited at the start of a catering shift. Jeremy worked for a guy named Tom Palonko, a name Jeremy always suspected of being entirely made up. Palonko worked with multiple catering companies across the city and provided supplementary staff as needed. His emails included a mishmash of font sizes and colors, with some things highlighted for no good reason and other key information left out, with a follow up email correcting the previous email. NOTE – this event is Tuesday the 13^th NOT TUESDAY THE 14^TH but you should’ve known that SINCE THERE IS NO TUESDAY THE 14^TH – PLEASE RECONFIRM. There had to be a more efficient system to wrangle some 1099’d cater-waiters, but Jeremy admired the dedication to this web 1.0 form of communication.

Jeremy was an actor, but things weren’t going too hot. He’d moved to New York after college with another actor friend, Oscar. The plan was to stick it out together, but after a few months of trying to find representation, Oscar landed an internship with a magazine, which quickly turned into a full-time gig. A year and change had gone by, and they were still roommates, but Oscar wasn’t auditioning anymore, and Jeremy felt like he was on an island. He’d done a little summer stock theater, met a few actors, which was how he wound up catering, but he felt like he was always missing out on something more exciting. To make money, he catered.

Sometimes there were fancy guests and he’d angle himself and his tray of tuna tartare in front of a celebrity or politician. “May I offer you a pig in a blanket? And by the way, I really admire your work,” he’d say to a bit player he recognized from a mini-series he’d binged. At the rehearsal dinner for a tech billionaire’s daughter, the catering captain was very particular about the billionaire host getting offered every tray of canapes that hit the floor. Jeremy had seen the billionaire on the news – he was flirting with running for president at the time – and relished the opportunity to sell him on some braised short rib sliders. The guy refused every offer, but, Jeremy had to admit, looked him in the eye and said, “No, thank you,” every single time.

After a few months on the job, Jeremy adopted a mantra he’d learned from Russ, an old-timer who captained the Brooklyn wedding circuit in the summertime: get in, get paid, get out. At the start of every event, Russ gathered the crew together for a meeting, going over the schedule of events, the menu, who would be butlering white wine and sparkling water, who would be bussing, what kind of dinner service they were providing (buffet was Jeremy’s favorite – tons of leftovers). Then Russ would look to the group – usually 10-12 caterers, all about 20 years younger than him – and say, “You know, no matter what happens tonight, we’re all gonna go home. The night will come to an end, and we’ll go to our separate apartments. So just… just keep that in mind.” It worked for Jeremy.

But tonight was different. This was the NBA. Where amazing happens. Perhaps it could even be amazing for him. Here was his chance to charm someone into a position where his love for hoops could pay the bills. Maybe he could end up in a commercial campaign. Or on a podcast. At the very least, some free tickets.

The captain was going over details – what time they needed to be room-ready, introducing the floor and sanit captain – and Jeremy got a quick selfie with the championship trophy carved from ice. The head captain, a grey haired guy with a severely pointed, Marvel-villain looking goatee, cleared his throat and reminded everyone that, “we will not be taking photos or posting anything online.” Then he went over assignments. Jeremy was butler/bussing – passing prosecco on silver trays as guests arrived, and then using that same tray to collect used glasses and plates for the rest of the evening. An incredibly dull assignment usually given to the least reliable caterers. Perfect.

Just before go-time, the caterers got hustled off the floor so the photographers could take a picture of the empty room. Jeremy lined up with everyone in the staff holding area, and got ready to eat. They usually served family meal before these big events started. Tonight it was a classic assortment of dry chicken, a chili-like soup, some super leafy salad, and either sweet potato or squash. Massive hunks of unknowable, unseasoned gourd. Jeremy ate, crushed a diet coke, changed into his black shoes, threw his black shirt on, tied his tie, and hit the NBA-ready floor.

As he approached his butlering post, he wondered who the first person to walk in would be. Maybe an agent? Would they be invited to these things? That could be neat, too, working for an agent, learning how to negotiate deals. He had some ideas for how players could make more cash on the side via social media. That would be a great thing to pitch. You gotta get their face direct to camera more often, more selfies! Actors know…

A few unrecognizable folks trickled in, but Jeremy kept his eyes trained on the entrance. He saw a tall silhouette make his way up the stairs with a slow, measured gait. That had to be a player. But who? Muscular, 6-foot-7, at least. Was that Paul Pierce? He was on the Nets now so that would make sense. The guy got closer. Jeremy squinted, but he couldn’t change reality. The man was anonymous. Jeremy realized he wasn’t even that tall.

The room was getting busy. His first tray emptied quickly, and he walked back and forth between the service bar and the floor, getting a fresh tray loaded with six more flutes. He was on edge, trying to scout out his targets. His tray emptied again and he turned back for a refill. All the while Jeremy scanned the crowd, convincing himself there were some NBA stars present, willing them to appear.

But the crowd did not seem unusually gargantuan, and he didn’t recognize anyone. Also, there were a ton of white people here. It started to dawn on him: it was the middle of December and there were seven games tonight all over the country. If he wasn’t here, he would have been flipping between them. Why would any NBA players be taking a night off from playing NBA basketball to attend a Christmas party in New York City?

This was not a glamorous party full of NBA stars and media personalities. This was just another office party where the office happened to be the National Basketball Association.

---:::---

The monotony of the evening started to sink in. At big dinners with table service there was a rhythm of pouring wine, taking orders, serving people individually. It could get a little stressful, but it made the night go by more quickly. But tonight? Just circling the room with a tray looking for empty glasses and trash? Mind-numbing.

A look at his watch told him it was only 8:30. The party was scheduled to go until 11. There was just no way.

He knew other cater-waiters would sneak a drink during a shift. And there were definitely a few who’d show up stoned. He guessed there were probably a few guys who would have a joint at work, too, but those were the professional stoners and you’d never know they’d partaken. Getting high on the job wasn’t something he’d normally consider.

But a couple weeks back he’d caught up with a buddy who gifted him a weed gummy, which was still in his backpack. It should stay there, certainly—but the long basketball-star-less evening loomed.

As he wandered through the crowd he started to take stock of his ‘career’ to date. He’d auditioned for a few things over the past couple months, and even had a callback for an off-off-Broadway show about a pastor who gets abducted by an alien. He thought that one went well. But a week went by and he had heard nothing. He googled the show later that month and saw they went with someone who seemed taller and more handsome. Classic.

After a few more mindless trips around the room, Jeremy went for a rummage in his bag. Anything better than this boring job. He popped the edible and went back to scouring the floor for soiled dishes.

He wondered about the life of a wine glass. How it would go from party to party, crated around in a big pink lug. The Party Rental guys dropped it off early in the day, then the catering crew would empty the lugs and set up the bars or the tables. And then that glass would get served to a guest, and the guest would walk around with it, and talk with it, and drink from it, and then some other caterer would come clear it, and empty out the dregs, and put it back into a lug. And then when that lug was full it would get shoved into a pile with the others, and at the end of the night, the team would put all of those lugs into one place, and eventually the rental guys would show up and load all of it on to their truck and take it back to the headquarters out in Jersey. Soon the glasses would be sent out to the next party, where the same thing would happen again. No change.

As he was turning to head back to the floor, a captain stopped him. The pointy goatee guy. Intimidatingly tall. Jeremy wondered if he hooped. For a split second, he thought maybe he was busted. But he didn’t even feel high! The captain held out one finger and listened to his radio, getting some really important news from the front. Then he focused back to Jeremy and said, “I need you to stop what you’re doing and go to coat check.”

Jeremy looked back coolly, put his tray down, and started walking to coat check, which was way on the other side of the building.

He never worked coat check. It seemed easy and he was always a little jealous of the people who got to work it. You just basically chill, hang coats up and give them back. There were even tips that they didn’t share with everyone else. No one ever tipped you for picking up their dirty glasses.

It was on the long walk from the kitchen through the party, past the bar, past the charcuterie displays, past the servers passing desserts, when Jeremy noticed the shift. A slight slowness. Or an awareness of his slowness. Which, maybe he was always this slow but it took an edible to make it clear? He noticed his arms were swinging while he walked, and thought that it was a weird swing, so he tried to stop swinging them, but then his arms were just dangling by his side like big dangly lumps of uselessness, so he shoved his hands in his pockets and kept walking.

He was wondering about his speed or lack thereof when he finally got to coat check, which had been set up in the initial corridor where he’d checked in with the captain that afternoon. It looked completely different now that it was dark, and all the decorative lights were turned on, and the music was playing. Festive, for a corridor. The coat check station was set up on one side, behind a bunch of pipe and drape. Ten-foot-tall curtains enclosed all the coat racks, while a few attendants stood at a table in front to greet guests. Jeremy ducked between a slit in the curtains to get into the coat area when he saw the horror – mountains of coats, all piled up on one another.

He stopped and took it all in. There were a few other caterers trying to dig through everything. He walked over to one and asked what happened? “Fuckin dominos, man. Shit’s a mess,” the guy responded, as he threw a coat in the air. Jeremy nodded, not really understanding. He found a familiar face, someone he’d worked with in the past, asked her what had happened. “The coat racks were set up too close to one another, I guess, and one had too much heavy shit on it, and so it toppled over, and then all the other racks behind it fell.” Jeremy nodded and whistled. He looked back at the ground and could hardly tell where each new coat began.

A handful of caterers were trying to get the racks back on their feet. Jeremy walked down to the front of the domino pile and joined in. There were a couple dozen coats on each rack, and maybe 20 racks had toppled over. As they lifted each one up, most of the coats stayed on the ground. When you went to pick them up, you realized that half of the coats had fallen off their hangers. This meant they were separated from the numbered coat check tag someone had put on the hanger.

They were looking at hundreds of coats and hundreds of hangers with numbered tags and no way to know which one belonged with which except to guess based on the way they fell. Like a forensic detective but with North Faces and cardstock.

It was getting late. The first few guests were trickling out, handing their numbers to the person working the front of coat check, and waiting. Jeremy watched as the woman taking tickets smiled at the guests before turning away and allowing panic to overtake her face. She yelled out “Where is 267?” and they burst into action.

It was chaos. Guests flooded the coat check table, thrusting their tickets at the cater-waiters. There was a log jam. The smiling ticket taker fled. Guests were upset, asking what was taking so long, demanding to be taken in the back so they could find their coats themselves. One of the catering captains wired for more back-up, and another 10 caterers ran down from the party. Soon, each of them was at the front, grabbing a ticket from a random guest and asking them for a detailed description of their belongings.

Jeremy, now dealing with the competing effects of weed, stress, and adrenaline, got into the action, getting a ticket from an older gentleman who said he had a “black peacoat.” Jeremy, thinking about the dozens, perhaps hundreds of black peacoats he’d seen in the back, politely asked for the brand and size, to which the old guy responded, “I don’t know, I think it’s got like a blue tag? Pretty sure it’s a large. Can’t you just do your job?”

It stung, but Jeremy retreated. What was his job anyway. Armed with tiny nuggets of information – black coat, blue tag, large – he turned back to the breach. His fellow cater-waiters ran to and fro, desperately searching for the correct coat, hoping against hope the tag they held in their hands matched a tag on a coat somewhere.

The coats tangled and spun, and he remembered the old catering captain Russ and his words of wisdom: this will end and we will go home. It didn’t feel so definitive tonight.

He wondered, when did Russ come to New York? Was he from here? Was he an actor? He didn’t seem like he was From New York, the way some of the others made it clear they were all caps FROM NEW YORK. And he was a handsome guy, or at least a guy that looked like he probably used to be handsome. So he was probably an actor, and now he was a catering captain and… was that it? Did he still audition? Did he have a family? Would Jeremy?

He lunged for a black coat with a blue tag. As he grabbed for it, he felt a competing tug. Another cater-waiter had spotted it at the exact same time. “What size you looking for?,” she asked. “Large,” Jeremy responded. She inspected the tag. “This is a medium. Mine.” And she snatched the coat from his hands, sprinting around the corner, barreling through the other waiters back to the front, her trophy held in front of her.

Just as he figured he’d be searching for this black coat, blue tag, size large until every other coat had disappeared, it was in his hands. No interfering caterer to contest. It was a clean victory. No casting director smiling politely while they put his name in the NO pile. No headshots sent off into the abyss with no response. No other actor with more connections or a better smile to steal the role. A tangible win. He rushed back to the front of the coat check area, holding the coat in his hands, proud of himself, feeling empathy for the other cater-waiters who had not been so lucky, and mild disdain for the guests yelling at them all to hurry up.

He got to the front, looked around and realized: he totally forgot whose coat he was holding.

-30-

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Matt DaSilva is a New York City-based actor and writer. Mattdasilva.com.

This one stopped us in our tracks when it came in over the submission email transom, a story about a very strange penal reform policy: A last cruise for the condemned. We hopped on the ship right away and have been thinking about it ever since.

-The Editors

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Because my execution was finally scheduled, I was spending the next week, the last of my life, aboard the Milagro with my mother. The air was warm and salt-heavy. A pink sky so vivid I had the impulse to shut my eyes. But off in the distance dolphins flipped and flopped. I couldn’t look away. A dozen tiny silhouettes set against the sinking sun.

My mother gave her goblet a good shake, ice shards chinking to glass. I’m not sure this is about having a good time, she said. This is your funeral, isn’t it?

You always wanted to go on a cruise.

Not with one hundred convicts, she said. But with your dad.

My mother sucked down her second margarita when a man stood beside us and cleared his throat. He was small. Spaghetti arms dangled from his sides and elvish ears reached past the flat top of his head. He said there were no tables left. That the bar was out of standing room. He asked if he could join us for dinner. I won’t say a thing, he said. Won’t bother you none. He again cleared his throat, pressing his feet to the ground.

My mother smiled something thin and polite. There’s room, she said. No stragglers on my watch. She slid deeper into the pleather booth, my thighs stuck to the material, sweat gathering beneath me, and the man slipped in beside her. You’re Terrence Dolan, I said.

His hands shook as he popped out a Dramamine, his blister pack half gone. You a big movie person? he asked, tossing the pill back with a quick swallow of water.

You have no idea, my mother said.

Terrence directed that trilogy of films all shot underwater, I told my mother. The Water Chronicles. We saw the first one at the movies together.

But I haven’t been to the movies in nearly twenty years, she said.

Terrence gave a small snort. He said, Yes, each movie takes nearly a decade. I tried filming them back to back but no one wanted to fund that. Called it an extravagance.

The latest one was scheduled for later this summer, I said, eyeing Terrence as he unrolled his napkin over his thigh, patting away the wrinkles.

Then what happened? my mother asked, her lips sniffing at her margarita’s straw. She was slurping another drink as if her life depended on it. Maybe, in some way, it did. Terrence shifted in his seat before saying, Then I went to prison.

Oh, my mother said. Of course.

Terrence rubbed at his face. My mother knew better than to ask for the full story, but I could tell she was itching for the truth: her eyes drilled into the poor man. She wouldn’t look away. And she chewed her straw and sipped. Chewed and sipped. The goblets were so big, she still had a third left. I said, Is it true you got a nickname on set?

It’s not that exciting, he said. Terrence the Tank.

Because you only shot in tanks? I asked.

He blew air past his lips, reddened from nervous nibbling. He didn’t like being aboard the ship, I thought, being amongst criminals from death row. He was better than all that. He gnawed his lower lip before speaking. No one knew the film was being shot in a tank, he said. The idea to film underwater came later. When I arrived on set and asked for a tank, no one understood. We weren’t going to shoot it all in a tank. Terrence let out a drawn-out sigh, more for theatrics than anything else. He’d told this story plenty of times before, knew where to pause for emphasis, which words to spotlight. But each time we prepped for a scene, he said, I thought it would be better that way, better than just using green screen. Everyone was annoyed at first, especially the actors who hadn’t signed up to be underwater for ten cold hours a day. But eventually everyone got used to it. Had the tank ready all the time. So, Terrence the Tank. By the time the second movie prepped, we had created our own technology, advanced the tank. It’s a whole thing.

My mother’s eyes had glazed over. I too had expected something else. When I told Terrence this, he frowned. I had wanted the full story, the one that ended in bloody murder, he knew this. But a server came to our table and took our orders. The food came quickly after. Lobster tails Terrence suckled after dipping them in butter sauce. A shrimp cocktail glass my mother slugged down until not a drop was left. And I stared at my steak floating above a pool of blood. Had I asked for it rare? When we were done, Terrence swiped his mouth, bowed his head, then walked away. A famous director on board, my mother said, her voice low and thick. Who knew?

He reminded me of Dad, I said.

Both old, my mother said.

The people on this ship aren’t so bad, I said. Unless you feel unsafe. Do you?

She considered the room, the peace and quiet despite the circumstance, despite the many lives coming to some violent but inevitable end. Armed guards were posted up at the entrance, and a few patrolled the ship, though I didn’t expect they’d have to do much of anything the whole week. We were a calm crowd. Subdued by the facts of life. Actually, she said, I feel the safest I’ve ever felt. Like a sense of communion. Like, I’m family, we’re all family, and they’d never let anything happen to family.

I looked around. What she said rang true. Whether I liked it or not, these were my people. For one more week, these were my people.

***

Another drawing of my father sketched. His raw-boned frame in a half-filled tub. What I’d thought then was the height of the disease; I had no idea it would get worse. Beside me, my mother dozed now in bed. Over the years she had grown into a lightweight: the last margarita she had during our dinner with Terrence the Tank had knocked her out. I’d spread myself across the sofa, the sketchbook my mother had gifted me for the cruise on my thighs, while reading about Terrence in the online tabloids. His marriage to a pop star was on the rocks, rumors swirled of a looming split. Between the two of them, an accumulation of various awards over a stretch of years. A Grammy. An Oscar. I exited the browser and focused on what played in the background: The Water Chronicles.

It all came back to me. The kingdom tucked in Earth’s deepest trenches. The statuesque, underwater species framed vaguely by racist stereotypes. The special effects, too, remained immaculate, and still so far ahead of their time. In one scene, a character escapes an underwater attack by an enemy tribe. I watched the actress, enraptured. How her face twisted into something frightening. Something in pain. She looked as if she was actually fighting for her life, and it occurred to me that she was. I closed the laptop.

A soft snore slipped from my mother’s mouth. Her lips were two red lines. Mascara wrapped her eyes. I unbuckled her short heels and settled a blanket over her sleeping figure. Her tawny skin textured like an orange peel. From the sofa, I considered the room. The prints of sea paintings that hung from the walls wallpapered in a pattern of tiny anchors. There was a TV and a mini-fridge and a microwave and a coffee table and two beds. Tiny portholes looked out into the black water. But the air was hot and still. I felt trapped, just as trapped as I did behind those bars. This was no different. The ship just a floating prison. Whatever special government program that landed us here just an excuse to execute more people. I emptied out my lungs before swallowing more air. The feeling persisted.

***

I drained a gin and tonic at the piano bar. The bartender’s eyes rested over me after he introduced himself as Perry. He said he had some party favors if I was interested. Before I could say anything he pressed a colorful shape into my palm and I shut my fist.

What’d you do to land this job? I asked.

They give me danger pay, he said. I only need to work a few of these a year. Besides, the folks are pretty pleasant. Just want to cherish those final moments with their loved ones rather than cause trouble.

Bet you’ve heard some wild stories, I said.

Perry wiped a wet glass with a rag. He had oily, pockmarked skin that made me feel a smidge better about mine. What I mostly see is a lot of regret, he said. It never seems like it was worth all the trouble. Do you regret what you did?

I did what I did to save my father. It didn’t work. And now my mother’s losing me too. I think luck was never on our side.

I’m sorry, Perry said, wiping another glass dry.

Then: It’s an orange Tesla.

I felt it in my fist before I scanned the room. The slow twinkle and hum from the piano. The people who spoke softly, sipped slowly. Nodding to the music. I was surprised by the decorum. We had one week left on Earth, why was everyone acting so proper? I threw the orange Tesla back with the final dregs from my glass. Perry grinned, and when he laughed, it was something hard and fiendish. My skin rose with small bumps. I’m in the wrong place, I said.

Down a flight of stairs, and I pounded into the more clubby bar next, where the dancefloor lit up in colors and a disco ball spun from the mirrored ceiling. Sweat sprung from my forehead and spilled down my spine. Beams of light passed and passed, my fingers prodding the air, pinching at the traces of color, there one second, gone the next. I glittered, I danced. It was the most free I’d felt in years. And I only stopped once I saw I was alone in the center of the dance floor. That no one wanted to dance up against me anymore. That I was too obviously on drugs. But wasn’t that the point? I suddenly felt young and stupid, a feeling I’d missed out on in my youth, when my father’s circumstances made me grow up too fast, skipping all the years of silliness and play.

Then, a cup of water crammed to my chest, someone maneuvering me to the side of the bar. Are you okay? It was Terrence. I shook off his grip. Drank the water. Let’s take it outside, he said.

The sea was endless, dark. Stars strung across the sky behind a low haze. Leaning against a cool railing, I felt vaguely embarrassed for my behavior on the dance floor, whatever Terrence might have seen. He offered me a sip from his vape pen, unbothered. Did you once work in the business? he asked. Or just a big movie-goer?

How much time had passed? My teeth no longer chattered. My hair had dried itself into some brushy masterpiece. I told him I loved movies. That’s all.

You’re missing a finger, he said, gesturing at my hand. How’d that happen?

Just a casualty of trying to do the right thing.

And what’s that?

I prodded at my water with a tiny cocktail straw, still thoroughly thirsty. I said, One day, you wake up and you see how slim your choices are, by which I mean, there are no choices, and you’re desperate, you’re so desperate, you want to save a loved one, so you pick the only choice. I don’t miss the finger. What I miss is my dad.

You fell into organized crime, he said.

I started small, I said. Craigslist for cash quick. There was this woman who’d have me shoot into her bulletproof vest. I think she wanted me to miss.

Did you?

Just once, I said. But is it falling when that’s the only way out?

A sharp whistle from his mouth. You’re not like the others on this ship.

No, I said. They have dignity. It seems to me they’re less selfish too. They’re doing everything they can to please their families before the end of the week.

And you? You don’t want to please your mom?

It’s too late for that. Besides, I never got to live. They stole my youth. This is my one week to be me.

I said all this and a buttery silence fell over us. Together we watched the sky and sea. Terrence tipped his chest against the rail; he was so small, I worried what little wind there was could blow him away.

Are you here all alone? I asked. I thought about his pop star wife. Wanted to know the truth. Terrence nodded slowly, solemnly. A darkness now over him as he drew from his vape. She hates that I smoke, he said. But my life is over, who cares about holes in lungs? She iced me out, anyway. I don’t blame her. Wouldn’t you?

It wasn’t real love if she couldn’t see you through this, I said.

A murderer is a murderer, he said.

Is that what you are?

According to the courts.

And according to you?

Terrence sucked on his vape, the spumes drifting up in loose curls. They needed to blame someone, he said. I should have been more responsible.

His voice met the sound of waves crashing into the ship’s metal down below, the ship breaking the surface of the ocean, it was a miracle ships existed, it was a miracle we all did.

Tell me the story, I said. I want your version. I want the truth.

The truth falls somewhere in the middle. But I can tell you what I know. Suppose someone died in the tank. A mechanic working off-hours. Suppose it got covered up. Not because I wanted it to. Suppose it was the studio and the union that buried it. A coffin, not a tank. That’s what they called it. A moment passed before he said, Is that better?

But it happened again, I said. Isn’t that it?

It can only happen so many times before it becomes something else.

Serial murders. Conspiracy.

They needed a scapegoat.

Then: I’m sorry, I said.

I’m sorry for both of us, Terrence said, and he looked it: Sagging lines flanked his mouth and his forehead puckered. You know, I said, he hit me once.

Who did?

My father. It was no big thing. I wouldn’t have remembered if it hadn’t been for his gold ring. Thick and wrapped around his fat finger. His ring that drew my blood, and then he was off.

Terrence said his father beat him all the time. It wasn’t so unusual.

But it was so unusual for us, I said. I wish he knew how much it affected me.

I have a feeling he knew exactly how much you were helping him in the end.

I was hardly home. I was doing everything to save him and I wasn’t even there. You’re wrong, he had no idea. I said this and the silence between us returned. This time it felt strained.

You know, Terrence said. I can’t even swim.

He slipped his vape into his chest pocket and walked away.

***

I was feeling restless now that I was alone. Slumped beside the pool, I connected to the Wi-Fi and browsed the anonymous Grindr profiles of those aboard the Milagro using my old phone, the one with all the old pictures, the one my mother had saved for me when I went in. After a few scrolls, the naked torsos belonged to men from the coast hundreds of miles away.

Hi handsome :)

Hi handsome :)

Hi handsome :)

The first to respond told me what he wanted might be too scary, and I remembered I was on a ship with some allegedly dangerous people, though none of us seemed so bad, and wasn’t I one of them? He asked me how rough I could be, and could I kick him? I sent him pictures of my feet.

Damnnnnn very nice yeah I’d like to feel those up against me

They certainly rank very highly

Would like to see how they feel up against me in places

I stretched across a pool chair, reading his responses.

I want you to kick me quite a lot

Can you kick hard?

I wrote back. I gained some strength in prison so maybe I can be a little rough, I said before asking if we fuck after or if it’s just that, the thing with the feet.

Feet as foreplay. I like all the normal stuff too.

Good.

He was hunky in person. His arms were large cylinders of steel, his skin the bright color of wheat fields. He had a boxy face and plump lips. Hair shaved down close to his skin. We stretched out across his couch, where I tucked my feet beneath me. Self-conscious now that I knew what he liked. When a noise came from the bathroom, alarm bells dinged in my head, and I asked if we were alone.

Yeah, he said, we’re alone. His voice was so soft and full, any suspicions I had waned. He asked what I did for a living before I went in. I told him I was a scientist. I worked in a lab, I said, researching the relationship between circadian rhythms and metabolism. It came easy, this lie. In some ways, it was what had killed my father. A security guard with awful hours and even worse habits.

I used to work the graveyard shift, the man said. It sucked.

It’s so bad for you. It literally is a carcinogen.

A carci-what?

Gives you cancer.

Oh I’ve had that.

You’ve had cancer?

Sure.

He slid down my socks. Pressed his thumbs deep into my soles. Massaged one foot then the other. He licked my toes. Moaning all the time. Minutes passed before he removed them from his mouth, pressed my feet against his chest. He asked if I was ready. If I could kick him now.

When I thrust my leg at him, a vicious bark came from the bathroom. The door flung open and a dog bounded forward. I cried out, startled and in fear.

The dog lunged at me, and I kicked it, I kicked it good, harder than I had kicked the man, and, for a moment, I felt pleased by my strength. I hadn’t lied, I could kick hard. The dog rolled across the floor before scrambling back to its feet, its claws scraping the hardwood, and I yelled at the man: Do something!

He’s not so good with strangers, he said. His voice panic-laden now, any comfort I’d once had in it all gone. The dog stared at me, licking its snout with bloodshed, until it leapt. My leg flailed in the air—the dog was on my face, biting my lip.

The stranger screamed while blood spurted. Rivers of it down my neck. He gathered me into his arms, his hot breath on my face. Before I knew it, he was taking me to the ship’s medic. Apologizing the entire way. It was so hard, he said, convincing them to let me invite my dog and only my dog. I’m going to be in so much trouble.

We’re both dying in a week, I said. Does it matter? I pressed gauze to my lip.

He protects me, he said. I didn’t know if you’d be a creep or not.

Me? The creep!

Somehow, through this all, we laughed. Then the medic came in and examined me. He said he could give me butterfly stitches. There will be a scar, he said. His eyes flitted to my hand, the missing finger. Assuming that won’t be a problem? he said.

In some ways, I said, the scar will be all gone next week. Up in flames.

You’re getting cremated? the man asked.

Why? Do you want some of my ashes already?

The medic made a face and when he finished the man walked me to my room. He kissed my cheek, and I knew that would be it, that nothing else would ever happen, that it was too complicated, that I had my one night of freedom, that I had other wounds besides the surface ones to heal, and then he was down the hall and I was sinking into sleep, a good mattress for once. Yes, I thought, that was the point of this week. To sleep well before sleeping forever.

***

At breakfast, I scooped oatmeal into a bowl. I couldn’t imagine eating anything else with the bandage stuck to my upper-lip. Specks of blood ran through the gauze. I’d told my mother a loose dog bit my lip poolside the evening before; I didn’t tell her about the man and the feet.

Who would bring their dog? she’d said as if it were the biggest tragedy, bigger than any execution.

In the dining hall, she’d found a spot overlooking the ship’s bow. A mimosa in her hands she tossed back. I sank into the seat opposite her and asked if she planned on being drunk the entirety of the trip.

Do you think this is easy for me? She said this and sucked down her flute.

Then, leering at my lip: You’ll look like a cleft baby, she said.

I stirred my spoon, oatmeal and peanut butter swirl. You and Dad were always so vain, I said. It made me too self-conscious at too young of an age.

My mother sighed something loud and long. She said, One minute you love us, one minute you hate us. If you hate us so much, why did you risk your life to help?

I ask myself that question every day.

My mother’s face twisted for a flash before it settled into something unnervingly neutral. She remained that way until the end of the meal. I’m sorry, I said.

I wish we could just have a nice time, she said. But the circumstances. I can’t forget why we’re here. You can’t make me forget.

I’m not asking you to, I said. Her eyes were red-rimmed now. She crossed her arms to her chest, and her hands rubbed at the spot above her elbows, almost as if she was giving herself a hug, tiny rubs of comfort. She was consoling herself and the image made me catch my breath. It was devastating to watch, and it filled me up with a kind of regret over everything I’d done to land us here. Even if I felt I had no choice, I shouldn’t have done anything at all. I should have let my father waste away without my attempts at intervention. At least then my mother would still have a son by week’s end.

We’ll have a beach day soon, I said. You love the beach.

Tears built at the corners of her eyes. I love the beach, she said.

***

On our third day, the ship tossed us onto the sandy banks of a Mexican village. The jungle crept into the water. It was tangled and fetid, soggy and hostile. The local police had orders to shoot us if we attempted escape, though I expected none of us would. We were here with our families, and didn’t a small part of us think we deserved it just a bit? Besides, we were chipped, they’d track us down eventually. My mother and I spread ourselves along the beach. We took in the sun. The air was a wall and the palm trees stood still.

I hobbled towards a man with a cooler and bought two water bottles. Terrence came up from behind and bought one too. He looked at my lip and I saw judgment cross his face.

It’s not what you think, I said.

And what do I think?

That I did something criminal, or got into some fight. That I did something to deserve it. Though, in some ways, it could be karma.

I hate the beach, Terrence said. He guzzled from his bottle and looked out at the stretch of sand. I told him I understood he felt he didn’t deserve to be here, but that he had to stop acting like we were so different. He and I and the others on the ship.

What’s changed? he asked.

Nothing’s changed, I said. But don’t you think we should be less delusional about how this week will end? We’re going to die and there’s nothing we can do about it. Same with everyone else onboard. We’re all the same.

That ship? It’s a ship filled with no goods, he said. Bastards. He looked frustrated. It would be a shame if they never release the next film, he said. I wasn’t the only one who worked on it. We had a crew of hundreds. Hundreds of people were my responsibility.

This is what was really bothering him—and a piece of me softened all over again. I said, Have you always been such a worrier?

Neither of us would be here if we weren’t.

I took a sip then said: Do you believe in reincarnation?

Terrence laughed. And he balked at me when he saw I was serious. No, he said. When I die, I hope it’s nothing. Absolutely nothing. I don’t want to return to this Earth, where life is unfair and someone can get executed for something other people were just as responsible for.

Do you understand that’s why I’m here too? I took the fall just like you. Your studio system, how is that any different than the kind of organized crime I was a part of?

I don’t want to be here at all, he said. People don’t change. There’s cruelty everywhere I look. Even if I got a last-minute pardon, I wouldn’t want to spend another second on this Earth. Actually, he said, I’m glad I’m being executed. I hate I have to wait four more days. He said this, took another sip, and disappeared into the thin crowd of people entering town.

I stretched out beside my mother. Pearls of sweat sprouted from my chest and temples. I considered my sketchbook but the heat’s lethargy was contagious. Several hours passed before we rose and stumbled into the packed corridors of the open-air market. Both of us were splotchy red. We bought little trinkets. Bottles of smoky mezcal. Your father would have loved these, she said, pointing at the wall of joke t-shirts. Tequila Por Favor. Taco Emergency. I Survived La Chancla.

We should buy one for him, I said. In his honor. My mother’s face scrunched up as she rubbed the cheap material with her fingers. He’s been with us all this time, almost, I said. Don’t you feel that way?

Her mouth made a brief buckle. Your father is not here.

I walked on. The small hands of a young pickpocket slipped through my fanny pack at one point. I let him. A gift from one criminal to another. My passport, my cards, my cash. Let him have it all, I said to myself.

My mother and I returned to the shore. A plastic bag hung from her wrist—she’d bought the shirt. Mi Casa Es Su Casa, But Mi Taco Es Mi Taco. She set it on the sand beside us, a spot for my father, and the three of us roasted for several more hours. We heard screams at one point. I looked up, and through my sunglasses I saw a local officer dragging a young boy by the ears. He asked if I was the one in the passport. He broke the little book open, unfolding a portrait from several years back. I was an ugly boy, with juicy pimples that rimmed my cheeks and a bowl cut to top it all off. I nodded.

The officer returned my things. Looking at the young boy, he said, Don’t you understand these are murderers? With nothing to lose? My mother thanked him before sending her eyes to the same position as before: shut so tight I feared she’d break them.

Later, back on the ship, the intercom shot with sound. The captain was speaking. He said a passenger had still not re-boarded. Terrence the Tank. If we had any information on his whereabouts, we should notify a crew member. It doesn’t surprise me one bit, my mother said. He seemed done to me.

Done? I said.

With life, what else?

We left the room. Walked towards the railing that faced out into the beach town. We spent hours there, watching the people shuffling below like ants. The police showed. Sirens wailed. The man from the evening before passed behind us with his dog. My mother looked at him, sized him up. You should sue, she said.

I hope Terrence is okay, I said, knowing it didn’t really matter, what was the difference between one day and four days?

Nothing surprises me anymore, she said. Especially when it comes to men and their feelings. She snorted. It was an ugly sound.

Can we try to have a nice time now? I said.

Today was good, she said. I searched for her eyes behind her sunglasses and found nothing. I love the beach, she said.

Will you miss me when I go?

You’d think this would be my first time being alone, but I’ve been alone this whole time.

That doesn’t answer my question, I said, though she didn’t hear me—her sunglasses pointed towards the bar, where a row of fresh champagne glasses shimmered.

-30-

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Joshua Vigil is a writer and educator living in the Pioneer Valley. His writing has appeared in Hobart, Joyland, The Rumpus, and elsewhere. His chapbook, Shapeshifter, is out now from Bottlecap Press.

The life of a crossing guard: a modicum of respect, a paddle, a hat. But when our main character is terminated, all he has left is his poncho and whistle... and a feeling that there might be another opportunity, a strange one, for guarding ahead. 

Look both ways,

The Editors 

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There was a time when Crossing Guards were respected, but the regard for many things has diminished. Crossing Guards, male or female, were once treated like valuable members of the community. A child could go to a Crossing Guard for help for large emergencies like late parents or smaller ones like untied shoelaces. During budget cuts and belt tightening, the city began replacing Crossing Guards with speed bumps and investing in metal detectors. It was cheaper. It made sense. 

The Crossing Guard loved the uniform he put on five mornings a week, the policeman's hat and black plastic poncho with orange fluorescent Xs on both sides. In winter or rain he wore a long yellow slicker with handsome metal closures and protected the hat with a plastic shower cap.  

School Crossing Guards don’t carry guns or nightsticks. He had a wooden paddle with STOP stenciled in red on both sides. Using this paddle, blowing his whistle, he was able to hold back traffic in both directions. It was then his job to shepherd groups of children across two lanes of city traffic and check for stragglers. After he was sure every child was safely deposited on the sidewalk, he’d step back and wave his paddle in a motion he’d perfected like a ping-pong serve. He was a good ping-pong player. In the facilities he’d grown up in there was always a ping-pong table in the day room. 

When his wife was alive she’d cut his hair. Now when he took off his police hat his hair stood up like a wild stalk. With his crooked black glasses he looked like a gawky science teacher. In winter he sat in the buses parked across from the school, engines illegally running for heat, over the 3-minute limit. The bus drivers placed bets, writing tips and information with pencils in the margins on racing forms. If his wife were still alive they might have gone out to the track together. It was something she would have enjoyed. He couldn’t understand the form even with his glasses. Looking out the window, he watched the blue exhaust from leaky oil in the engine spiraling out of the back of the bus. 

A letter in his mailbox from the New York Police Department terminated his services. He was told to leave his paddle and policeman's hat in the office. He could keep his poncho and whistle. 

To become a School Crossing Guard he’d met certain physical and medical requirements. He spoke English and passed the drug screening and background checks then completed six days of training at the police academy. The pay was $18.00 an hour. He had health insurance, could walk to work, and picked up extra hours in the summer. 

The job had offered personal satisfaction. School Crossing Guard is an important job. Entrusted with the safety of the city's schoolchildren, safeguarding them across busy intersections on their way to and from school, Crossing Guards also oversee and control traffic flow around schools in the morning, lunch, and at closing time. 

There was a cake in the Teachers’ Lounge. The cafeteria ladies sent it over. He was popular with the cafeteria ladies. The school nurse showed up. She was wearing her pink uniform with a zipper down the front. He wanted her phone number, but didn’t know how to ask for it, even though she’d indicated it would be all right. He’d gotten to know her after a boy with authority problems hit him in the head with a rock while he was blowing his whistle. She’d been kind when his wife died and was gentle and practiced while she tended to his bloody head wound. But he hesitated for too long. The vice-president came in, shook his hand, called him by name then led him by the elbow to the door, thanking him for his 22 years of service and wishing him luck.

He had no wife, no job, no health insurance, but he had a home and free laundry. He could stay in the room he’d shared with his wife in Hell’s Kitchen as long as he could pay the rent. He went to the Emerald Tavern on 10^th Avenue, a hangout for Guards that was a network for job tips. He’d been here with his wife for a retirement party. They had a good time. There was a job as a daytime Security Guard in a retail store. 

Sitting alone at a table, drinking a beer, looking up at the TV pretending to watch the football game, the thought of standing in the doorway of a retail store, under the fluorescent lights and having to appear both alert and unobtrusive for 8 hours a day was terrifying. 

He and his wife had no children. How did this happen? After he moved into her room in Hell’s Kitchen there was never a night when they’d sat across from each other at the kitchen table and decided not to have children. He always thought his wife didn’t want them. How could they afford children? Children were expensive. As a School Crossing Guard his job involved children. He’d held many trembling hands on the first day of kindergarten and kept a large white cotton handkerchief available for runny noses or tears. His wife worked in a laundry and her only contact with children had been washing and folding their clothes. 

He turns on the TV. Without his wife the room is too lonely. He walks the city streets. When his wife was alive, she begged him to go window-shopping. It was something she liked to do. At the time he didn’t get it. Why look at things you’d never be able to afford? Why tempt and taunt yourself this way? He thought it could only lead to dissatisfaction. Now he saw why his wife enjoyed looking in store windows. His wife spent her days washing dirty clothes. To her the displays of crisp clean tops and bottoms were beautiful and uplifting. His wife had taken all the beauty with her. He was hungry for beauty. 

It starts to rain. He goes into the department store. Walking up and down the carpeted aisles he soaks up the glittery beauty of the cosmetics counters and gets misted with perfume. He takes the escalator up to Lingerie. His wife loved underwear. As a laundry worker who spent her days loading washing machines with dirty socks and underpants, she coveted these lacy bras and panties in pastels and bright colors. 

He’d liked living with a woman. It was strange at first, he’d grown up in all-boy facilities, but he liked her tights and bras hanging from the shower rod. Her bathrobe was still hanging on the door in the room they shared. If his wife were still alive what would he buy to surprise her? Assuming he still had a job, he reminds himself, but gives way to fantasy and searches through the racks, pushing back the hangers of camisoles. There are so many colors. Touching the silky fabric is comforting until a security guard taps him on the shoulder. 

Is this his lowest point? Ushered out of the store like a thief or a pervert by another guard.  

—

The Crossing Guard sits in front of the TV. The faces aren’t a substitute for his wife’s face, but they are better than nothing. There are reports of skirmishes at local schools. Contraband discovered by metal detectors on The Nightly News.  

He misses the children. He adds personal satisfaction to the list of things he’s lost. He starts standing on the sidewalk outside the school at 3:15, waiting for the first bell to ring and the doors of the two-story yellow cinderblock building to open and the children to come bursting out yelling and with high-pitched shrieks of freedom.  

One day four teenage boys surround him. They push him back and forth, bouncing him like a ball. Running off, they turn and yell back, “Perv!” 

His glasses fall off and get twisted. 

—

After a few days it no longer feels safe to stay at home. The TV is frightening. He returns to the Emerald Tavern determined to find a job. There’s one as a Night Guard in Brooklyn that requires a subway ride, bus-transfer and long walk. He likes the idea of this long commute. It could fill up many empty hours every day. 

To apply for the job he takes the subway, waits for a bus then walks the half mile through a zone of used car dealers and auto salvage yards until he finds Boro Auto. The job turns out to be the kind of Guard that requires wearing a costume. A German Shepherd-suit with a latex head modeled with a life-like snout and dark muzzle attached to a brown fake fur suit with a zipper up the back. 

On the wall behind the desk in the Boro Auto’s office is a photo of Rocky, the junkyard dog, who’d previously guarded the yard. Pregnant with her second litter, she’d been anonymously reported to SNIP, an organization that spayed and neutered working dogs in New York City funded by retired game show host Bob Barker. Animal rights activists were now protecting these dogs. 

After Rocky was gone, Boro Auto tried installing cameras in all four corners of the chained-link fenced lot and blasted it with 300-watt LEDs to deter theft. The globes looked like small spaceships hovering above the chain link fence and the commercial electric rate in Brooklyn made this too expensive. Other car lots and salvage yards were having the same problem. 

There were already Dancing Bananas and Pizza Slices who wore costumes to distribute leaflets. Hot dogs zigzagged with mustard handing out flyers and clowns promoting venues and events. Smokey the Bear and Santa Claus were longstanding paying jobs. Now there were Elmos, Mickey Mouses, SpongeBobs and Statues of Liberties posing for photos and making tips. 

Did it sound crazy? Maybe. But it made sense. It was cheaper to pay a clown in a dog suit with a phone to protect against theft. Instead of attracting customers it was a costume designed to repel thieves. Different types of junkyard dogs were considered as the model for the suit. Pitbulls or Dobermans? But it was widely known that German Shepherds commanded the most fear. Trained to scare potential oppressors and instantly defend their owners. German Shepherds, not just large, fierce and powerful, also projected a military image and were used as bomb sniffers in public places and as Police Search Dogs. 

As a Guard Dog he had to wear a costume. He’d have a flashlight and a phone to use to call 911 in case of an emergency and programmed with a Vicious Dog Noises app. He was stationed in the bushes on a chair near the gate. Would he fool anyone? A German Shepherd with a phone and a flashlight? 

He liked the job. He slept through the days, got his laundry done for free. The commute was an hour and a half each way. His shift began at 10 pm. Taking first the subway, then the bus, followed by the long walk past other used car lots and salvage shops. Joining the underground economy, he received $300 in cash in an envelope off the books every Friday but no health insurance. He worked 10 hours, seven days a week.

Sonny greeted him in the office, “Howdy, Skipper,” handing him the phone and flashlight. In winter he zipped the dog suit over his parka. Sonny didn’t care if he wore his glasses over the eye-holes cut out of the latex mask with its realistic snout. 

What happened to Rocky? He wondered. Was she adopted by a family? Looking at her snarling photo on the office wall, this seemed unlikely. Now that she was neutered, was she still vicious? Would she be able to get another job?  

He liked dogs. When he was a Crossing Guard there was an apricot poodle named Missy he frequently petted. There was a black and white cat in The WashTub, Oreo that his wife loved. But pets were expensive to feed and needed to be taken to the vet. They couldn’t afford a pet. At Boro Auto, he sat in the dark playing with the Vicious Dog Noises app on the phone. Creating random barks to see if there were other Guard Dogs out there in a nearby lot. Sometimes one answered. 

One night he noticed a cat. He saw its eyes under the fence, but scared it away with his flashlight. 

In the morning Maria unlocked the office door. She made coffee. He’d hang up his dog suit, turn over his phone and flashlight. They drank coffee and talked about the weather until her boss arrived. 

He enjoyed the long walk home to the bus in the mornings, the same faces on the crowded bus on their way to work in Manhattan while he was finishing his day. Sunday mornings the bus was full of families on their way to churches. 

He made enough money to pay the rent on the room in Hell’s Kitchen and had a lifetime of free laundry at The WashTub. When he got home he took off all his clothes, put on his wife’s robe and slept all day.  

He tried each night to wait until 1:00 to eat his lunch. He stopped at Al-Yemeni Market after he got off the bus each night on his way to work and always ordered the same Swiss and mayo on white. When his wife was alive they ate the foods they’d grown up with in the facilities they’d lived in. Cereal, tea, milk, bananas, hot dogs, pudding and applesauce. 

The cat started to arrive earlier. It took all winter for him to coax the cat to slink under the fence. He’d started buying cans of tuna fish. He took his time selecting a can opener and now carried the tuna can and the opener in a food sack, but still went to the Yemeni store to order his Swiss on white with mayo. Ahmed started putting lettuce on it. He discovered he liked lettuce. They called him Sammy. Was this a generic name for a male in their country, like Bud, Guy or Dude?

In summer it was too hot to wear clothes under the dog suit. He took off his shirt and pants and wore his boxers, undershirt and no socks. When it got really hot he rolled up the pant leg of the fake fur dog costume. The cat came over and licked his ankle with her tuna fish breath. It wasn’t his wife but he named her Alma. 

-30-

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Sarah McElwain teaches at Pulitzer prize-winning poet Philip Schultz’s Writers Studio. For ten years, she co-hosted Writers Read NYC, providing performance venues for writers in Greenwich Village. Her essay, “Fingertips Part 3, With Thanks to Stevie Wonder,” about teaching yoga to the blind is in The Art of Touch, University of Georgia Press (November 2023). 

Please take your seats for Autumn Kotsiuba's "The Proscenium," a surreal and pining trip to the theater where what you're seeing onstage may not be exactly as it seems. Or it may not be there at all?

We hope you enjoy, and remember to silence your cellphones,

The Editors

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Please, just listen. Let me try again.

That first day, sitting in the theater, I don’t know how I got there. I knew that it was snowing outside, and I was wearing a weighted dress that matched the velvet curtains of the stage, but I don’t remember walking in or buying a ticket, or even taking my seat. It felt like I had snapped into being from spontaneous combustion, me and the theater both, our existence only starting that moment.

Have you been to the Crieff Theater? I’m not surprised. It’s in one of those stocky brick buildings in the historic district. Bigger on the outside than the inside. The main lobby is a marble cathedral, all high ceilings with polished gray finishes. Then you find your seat and the hall itself is full of gold ornaments and rich fabrics, a different kind of grand, but the seats themselves are a soft wood that reminded me of a Puritan pew. They have two rungs on the back that pushed into my spine. I heard or read once that those kinds of churches purposely have unforgiving seats, that the experience isn’t a good enough sacrifice unless it hurts.

My seat was in the very back row, on the first of two balconies, just off stage center. I know that because I looked up what the different parts are called. I didn’t use to go to the theater, I didn’t know the lingo. The walkway on the ground floor, for instance. The one that lets people into the hall? That’s the vomitorium. The proscenium is the metaphorical space separating the stage from the audience. Ugly words.

As I said, I didn’t know what show I was about to see. I didn’t even know who I was, outside that room, but I didn’t let myself think about it too much. It didn’t seem to matter. Instead I watched the rest of the audience as an opener, and I had the distinct feeling that they themselves were actors. They looked cast. Of course that old couple in suits shared a pair of opera glasses, of course this woman was dressed in black and pearls, of course these few children present were sitting ramrod straight. They belonged a bit too perfectly.

I was expecting the curtain to part but it rose instead. The set was chaos. I imagine that the trees were made of cardboard but they looked real, like I could sink my teeth into the bark and peel it off strip by strip. The main thing was that all four seasons were present, fighting for dominance. Orange leaves, pink flowers blooming from dogwoods, frost on a third of the branches, the lights turned blindingly high as the sun.

And the people. I’ve since seen the stage empty, and I know only twenty or so actors could fit, but I swear there were hundreds and not one of them was standing still. They were the leaves themselves, I think, tussled by the wind and tumbling to the ground. I think that’s what they were meant to represent. But maybe I’ve just gone to the theater too many times now and have started seeing symbols that aren’t there.

I know that there was singing, and dancing, and talking, but I don’t remember a note or word of it. Truly. Even after seeing the play seventeen times. I couldn’t pay attention, I just couldn’t, because he was already on stage.

Upstage, stage left. (I had to look that up, too. I would have just said he was to the right of my vision, on the part farthest from the audience. From me.) I imagine that if I’d seen him on the street, my mind wouldn’t have registered his presence. Slim, on the shorter side, brown hair that blended in with his clothes. Sharp jawbones that made him look hungry and young. He had a disheveled look to him, wrapped in a jacket that had those sewed patches on the elbows that are only worn by eccentric professors. But none of this matters; these details only came to me when I began to see him again and again and I was able to look at something other than his eyes.

He was searching for something. You could just tell. His eyes were frantic, darting, like a child realizing too late that his mother had moved on to a different part of the shop. He had lost something, or was searching for something he’d never had. No one else noticed; the other actors were in their own homogeneous world. At one point I was able to tear my gaze away to my fellow audience, but everyone was looking towards the opposite end of the stage.

The singing still hadn’t stopped. It wasn’t a musical, to be clear. Yes, yes, there was music most of the time. But it didn’t feel like a musical. The notes were frantic but didn’t match up with his actions; I felt his anxiety was separate from the story it was trying to tell.

I couldn’t understand why no one was paying him any mind. I found that I was gripping the armrests, carving crescent moons into the wood. It was like watching a starving bird fallen from the nest.

Suddenly he stepped forward and his fellows parted, leaving a border of empty space around him. His hands were gripping his hair and he said:

Please. I can’t find her. Where is she? Where is she?

I jumped up. It wasn’t a conscious thought, I just did. Yes, I had to say: yes, darling, I’m here, I am here–but everyone else was standing, too, and clapping, because the curtain had fallen and it was time for a break.

*  *  *

The ushers on my floor were pouring complimentary wine. It looked watered down. I took a glass but when I brought it to my lips it was already empty, a smudge of purple lipstick on the rim. 

I caught snippets of conversation. A relatively unknown playwright, isn’t he? Do you think the babysitter's managing alright, should we call? The star is quite good, no?

I rounded on the speaker of this last question. Do you know his name, I asked, but the woman frowned at me.

I was referring to Mrs. Ellis, she said carefully, like I was a wild animal.

It clicked, and I think I handed her my wine glass. Of course no one was paying attention to him; he was not the protagonist. He was mine alone.

I found myself on the ground floor; I don’t remember taking the stairs. The lights hadn’t flickered their warning yet. The theater was at least a third empty so I planned on shuffling into an empty seat once the curtain rose, but an usher was waiting at the doors checking tickets.

Do you have a playbill? I asked instead, but they’d run out.

Are you enjoying the show?

I turned to find an older woman looking up at me with a familiar expression. She was wearing one of those hats, with netting halfway down the face, that I thought people only wore to funerals. But her expression was happy. Yes, it’s very intriguing. I asked if she was involved in the production but she didn’t seem to hear.

The actors will be in the main lobby after the show. If you’d like to meet them.

I thanked her, and it wasn’t until I’d returned to my seat that I realized how desperate my thanks had been, and how much she hadn’t been surprised.

*  *  *

He wasn’t on stage when the curtain rose for the second act. I felt a pit in my stomach at the thought of not seeing him again, of not being able to tell him that I was right here, that he no longer had to keep looking.

More singing, dancing, talking, weddings, deaths, wars. I don’t know. None of it stuck, it never did. But just before the end, there he was. Again parting the crowd. His finger shook as he lifted it; even from the back row I could see the light in his eyes–for it was me he was pointing at. Somehow no one in the audience was turning towards me.

It’s you, he said. It’s you. You’re finally here.

He was breaking character, I thought, he was reaching for something more dramatic than the minor role he played. We’d found each other. I couldn’t breathe.

The curtain fell again before I could move. It always does.

*  *  *

The cast was congregated in that marble entrance, drowning on champagne and compliments, dipping in and out of shallow pools of admiration. I saw him in a small huddle of admirers, deep in conversation.

An eternity later they broke away and, finally, he was one person instead of one of a group. Everyone wandered off to form new circles of conversation and I stepped out and met his eyes and there was a hardness there that I hadn’t seen before. Adam, I said, because of course that’s who he was, and concern flickered on his face.

Hullo. Did you enjoy the show?

I couldn’t answer. This was not Adam, this was not the man who had been searching for me. He bristled at my stare and looked away, pretended to notice someone else that needed his attention but I stepped in his way.

What is your name? I asked, and he answered, but I immediately forgot because it does not matter. He turned awkwardly away and I realized he was waiting for me to say well done, what a performance, Broadway is a short step away. I couldn’t say any of this, couldn’t even look at him, because he is not my person.

Do you understand yet?

*  *  *

Bethany didn’t understand either. We were on a patio waiting for our second round of mimosas; it was summer, I realized, though just yesterday it had been snowing. I mentioned it but she didn’t respond, instead going back to the basics.

So you liked him on stage but not in person. The waiter came but Bethany sent him back when the glasses were too full of orange juice.

No, I said, no, that’s not it at all. They are two separate people. I know him, or knew him, or will know him. And when she didn’t answer: He was looking at me. Searching for me.

She asked if I’m okay, if I’ve brought his old clothes to Goodwill yet, if she can help. I left without paying the bill.

*  *  *

I went again the next night. I bought a ticket that time. Presumably I had the first time, too.

I asked for a seat on the ground floor but they were sold out, and when I found my seat I realized it was the exact same one as the previous night. 

Please. I still can’t find her. Where is she? Where is she?

I didn’t stand this time, or say anything, or move. I knew there was still a curtain between us, that proscenium, invisible but just as heavy as the velvet.

It’s you. It’s you. You’re finally here.

There is no meet-and-greet this time; I think it was just part of opening night. I roamed the hallways, the vomitorium, the entrance, hoping to catch him as he left, until a security guard asked me politely to leave so he could lock up for the night.

*  *  *

I went again. Again. Again. The play never ends and still I caught none of it. I showed up early, late, right on time. I was able to get other seats, closer, and it made no difference. Twice I ran into him but it is not-him, and there is a wariness in his eyes that I needed to be mindful of.

*  *  *

Bethany kept calling. In-laws knocked and I wouldn’t answer the door. Mail piled up on the countertop. I knew one of the envelopes held a check that was supposed to cover for more happily ever after years I’ll never get.

*  *  *

The play doesn’t run on Saturdays but I went to the theater anyway and found the doors unlocked. Practice had just ended, I think, and not-him noticed me right away. He looked less scared this time, and invited me to see the orchestra pit.

I followed, careful to see if I could sense any part of the man who shared this body. He undressed and I could tell, still, it wasn’t really him. He touched my breast and I said Okay, okay, but don’t look at me oddly when I call out a name other than your own.

*  *  *

Again, again, again. He was so desperate to find me and I am trying, I wanted to tell him, I am trying but I don’t know how to get closer to you. He looked so lost and fragile and close to breaking and I would do anything to see his face relax.

The woman next to me shuffled down a seat when she noticed me crying.

*  *  *

I was let go. I think that’s what they were trying to tell me. Words like Take all the time you need and This isn’t healthy and We can’t imagine are just other ways of saying We don’t know what to do with you anymore.

It’s fine. I don’t really remember what I did there anyway.

*  *  *

I snuck backstage and not-he saw me. It was just a bit of fun, he said, we should see other people.

That’s what I’m trying to do.

*  *  *

This is what finally did it: I went backstage during the show.

Act two. Just a few minutes left, just before he’s meant to go back on, to say It’s you, it’s you, you’re finally here.

And it was actually him. I knew immediately, and it broke both of us, because not only had he found me but he could access me. I knew you’d come, I knew it, he said, and I dragged him away but knew, suddenly, that I couldn’t, that we had to stay as close as possible, that it would be far too easy to lose him. So instead he lifted me on a chest in a dark corner of the space, and he was so, so quiet, so gentle, so how I remember him, and I fell asleep and when I woke he wasn’t there.

*  *  *

The theater doors were locked the next day. I tried them again and again, sure that I just needed to push, to pull, to push, but nothing worked and I tried to shatter the glass but I didn’t have the power it takes to break that barrier. 

The widow was suddenly by my side. I think she’d always been there.

The curtain’s fallen, she said, but I was trying not to listen. Her voice was harsh and gentle and mean and kind. When the protagonist doesn’t show up for the finale, the show gets canceled. It’s only natural.

He was just a supporting character to everyone else, I argued, but she shook her head.

*  *  *

The flowers had all rotted. I couldn’t stop smelling them. I sat on the floor, reading card after card. We’re sorry for your loss. Here if you need anything. Adam was such a joy to know.

*  *  *

I still go. The play pops up all over the country, not in any discernible pattern of time or location, but it does. I don’t know how I find the details, the tickets, how I have enough money for more petrol, how I am constantly tugged to this thing that has no name.

But I watch, and watch, and there he is. Different bodies but it is always him, and he is always searching. Sometimes I wonder what would happen in the story if I were not there for him to cry out You’re finally here, if it would end a different way, if that would actually give him some peace. But I can’t afford to know. I have to be here.

So, please: I understand it’s sold out. I do. But please let me in.

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Autumn Kotsiuba is originally from the US but has lived in Ukraine, Bulgaria, Poland, and the UK over the past decade. Her work has previously appeared in Paddock Review, Book of Matches, and Carcinogenic Journal.