Grand Prize Winner 2011 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award:

The Thirteen-Lined Ground Squirrel by Athena Abrams

Athena Abrams grew up in Iowa and Florida and graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon, with a BA in cultural anthropology. After graduation she worked on an archeological dig in Guatemala, took numerous road trips across the U.S., attended the Burning Man Festival, and is settled down (for the moment) in Boulder, Colorado. She now spends as little time as she can get away with working as a freelance editor and index writer, and as much time as she possibly can on her personal writing. She recently completed a science fiction/fantasy novel, The Reunion, for which she is seeking representation. A second novel, The Third London, which weaves together three historical fiction time frames, is currently in progress. She plans to spend the next few years in much the same fashion as the last: traveling, writing and being inspired by life. Writecorner Press is pleased to nominate Athena's winning story for a Pushcart Prize.

The Thirteen-Lined Ground Squirrel

Athena Abrams

The air is so thick with moisture that I can feel my hair lifting and curling, frizzing upwards, drawn perhaps by the light of the stars. The humidity mixes with my face lotion creating a layer, not of sweat exactly, but of something I could scrape off with a fingernail.

Muggy. I think I'd forgotten the meaning of the word.

How long has it been? Two years? Might as well have been ten, as I’m already forgetting the meaning of these home-specific words. For muggy is this: this Midwestern nighttime heat that conjures crickets, mosquito whines, and the rustle, rustle, rustle of small creatures in the grass. It’s the languid movement of bits of newspaper, last autumn’s leaves and candy wrappers in the gutter, all just a bit too moist to really blow around. It’s the smell of wooden hallways in century old houses, the sweet scents of pine and cedar oozing out one more time into the summer air around window frames and doors, too damp to stay hidden under varnish. It’s chips of paint on houses, curling up at the ends even as you watch. Not that people are too poor to paint, though many are, but you’d have to repaint practically every season.

Muggy. I wander out to the edge of town, farther than I ever used to go. Here there is a dark countryside of unlit fields and dotted farmhouses that each have a solitary light: elephantine fireflies crouched in distant grass. The insects and frogs would make conversation near impossible here and real fireflies glow and fade, glow and fade, in the ditches and cornfields. I think about the little oasis world each farm light shelters: a family asleep, dogs asleep, cats on the prowl and horses and pigs in the barn.

From this distance those worlds seem so simple.

Ice cream. Ice cream would help calm this sweaty, muggy itch under my jeans, down my spine. But it’s nighttime, dark night, what’s open in a small Midwestern town at eleven o’clock? Something must be. So I keep walking the cracked and broken asphalt of the streets on which I learned to drive, not one bearing a center stripe but every one familiar with my bare summer feet, as I circle back in toward the few neon lights of South Main. Surely if I walk all the way out to the grocery store at the other end of town that will be open, at the least. But I come across the gas station with the Mini-Mart, open till midnight, that will do. I buy a Blue Bell ice cream sandwich, the childhood kind that tastes like cold cool whip between two soggy chocolate wafers.

I’m reminded of an elementary school friend, Kelsey, and barefoot walks for ice cream cones, chocolate melting and dripping on our toes, staining our pink shorts, my curls just as humid wild then as they are now, Kelsey’s long dark hair streaking through her ice cream and coming away clumped and sticky. 

Last I heard she’d moved to Michigan, though I don’t know what she’s doing there. I’ve been in and out of this town for years; long before high school ended I was only coming back to see my dad, with even those visits growing less frequent during my college years.

My dad. Of course he’s on my mind now, of course that’s why I’m here. Much as these familiar streets bring back a hundred inconsequential moments of childhood, this is what is really on my mind. My dad. My dad, and the hospital, and the possibility of death.

Somehow I managed to sleep on the plane ride with my head cushioned awkwardly on the tray table, but it was the hot red sleep that comes when you’ve cried yourself into it, sinking in fear. When they’d first called me they hadn’t been sure if he would live.

When I called the hospital again from my layover they still weren’t sure.

It wasn’t until I landed here that the doctor had definite news: everything is stabilized and he will be fine. Though it was hard to believe that when I saw my father, as my legs shook and bile rose unexpectedly in my stomach, my vision seeming to film and fade. I could barely comprehend that it was my father; he was so tiny under blankets and bandages.

And he still has not opened his eyes, still has not seen that I am here, flown back this afternoon when I heard about the accident: heard about the motorcycle taking the curve too fast, landing in a ditch; heard about my father lying pinned in the grass, for hours perhaps, still conscious until the EMTs came.

This is what is really on my mind, the whole day playing out over and over: the plane ride, the fear of death, the bandages and bruises. My thoughts are caught in circling loops and the harsh curve of Brighton Road.

So when I couldn’t take the hospital anymore I found myself out here, walking the darkly rustling streets as I always did, and in a way that makes sense. Something like this happens and we become very small, twelve again not twenty-five, and our old habits come back. The doctor said it will likely be a few more hours before my father wakes up, and I’ll return to the smell of sweat and vomit and cleaning products, the slow dripping catheters and IVs, the distant noise of crises, just as soon as I can. Even thinking about the white hospital fluorescents that leave no shadows, no mysteries, makes my head hurt. Out here all is shadow, all is mystery, and despite the heat the outdoors is a blessed cool relief from sterility.

Now I try to walk as I did when I was thirteen, still young enough to be enchanted with the world, intrigued by the tableaux playing out behind lighted windows; the way I walked before teen angst, with its boys and self-doubts and long dark walks with purloined cigarettes.

There’s the house, always shabby, which Anna and I thought was inhabited by witches. Something about the lacy curtains at the windows, grayed and stained, that twitched when we passed, the fragrant herbs in the planters, the fact that we never actually saw anyone. The house has changed now: the lace curtains are gone and in their place dark venetian blinds are tightened closed. The herbs are dead, the planters filled with grass and dandelions. The paint has peeled more and one of those pine trees that grow tent-like, the perfect play fort, harbors a grill, some plastic chairs, and an assortment of beer bottles, their labels rotting. The house must have sold. Perhaps the owner died.          

Death is on my mind.

The possibility of death hovers close, the nearness of it and my father’s reprieve from it. Yet it can only ever be a reprieve: and that is hard to accept.

I’m feeling cooler now from the ice cream, wondering if there is chocolate on my face and where I can throw away my wrapper. Rustle, rustle, rustle, the little creatures in the weeds.

But there is suddenly something unfamiliar in the nighttime creature sound, it becomes frantic, I hear a little cry in it, a gasping whimper.

My stomach knots up as I realize what it is: a small animal, rat or chipmunk maybe, hit by a car and struggling frantically at the edge of the street. I want to walk on, to leave it as nature’s problem, not mine. But I can’t. On this muggy night, death on my mind, this is my problem.

I turn back from where I have walked a few paces, heart aching, and peel off my outer tank top, moist even though it is second from my body. The creature is pushing itself around in desperate circles; I think maybe a leg is broken. It wants to leave the cruel street of cement and neon and the occasional roar of a passing car, I know it does.  Already it has made its way in dragging circles much closer to the curb, but it will never make it up the cement cliff into the soft encircling darkness of the grass: instead it will spend the last of its life pushing hopelessly against the uncaring asphalt. Unless it’s hit again.

Bracing myself I scoop up the little animal in my shirt, imagining the blood stains. It struggles wildly against my hands; I send it calming thoughts and suddenly it stills. Carrying it quickly over the sidewalk to the shelter of a tree I set the creature down in the grass.

At once its frantic circles recommence, but they are different: the miserable squeaking cry is gone and the creature burrows and presses against the ground, feeling relief I am sure at the comfort and coolness of earth and grass and shade. I can see it better now as I sit a couple of feet away. All its legs seem to work, but its mouth is red. Internal bleeding. Something is broken inside its delicate mechanism of a body. Something is bleeding, and this little creature will die soon. Its gasping breaths are moist.

It’s beautifully patterned: stripes of white run from head to tail and parallel between each stripe are rows of careful dots. It’s too long and low for a chipmunk, its tail isn’t bushy like a squirrel’s. I don’t know what kind of animal it is; I’ve never seen one before.

I tell it to settle, to sleep, that it is relaxing into peace, and I hope the little creature can sense my thoughts. I tell it to feel the coolness of earth, to relax against it, to welcome falling asleep, to let death come and to let death be a relief.

But I guess it’s not that easy, for the creature continues to circle as though it wants to run away from the pain, shed its skin, shed the pain. But it can’t.

Sometimes it settles for a moment but always it startles up again, scrambles, gasps wetly. I’d wanted to think that animals don’t feel pain the same way we do, that they aren’t afraid of death in the same way, but this one doesn’t seem to want to die. Maybe death isn’t easy, even for such a small piece of life.

Maybe death isn’t easy.

I tell it that it’s safe here and that I’m watching over it, that I will stay with it to the end. But I don’t know what that is worth to this little creature. Its eyes are closed.

It is alone with pain.

I look around at the infrequent cars passing a little ways away, at the dimmed lights of Dairy Queen and Pizza Ranch across the street. What would this animal’s death have been like before this town with its buildings and its lights, before we poured concrete over the prairie? It would have been darker here, more silent, though perhaps loud with insects and night wings. The creature wouldn’t have died like this at all, I suddenly realize. There would have been no cars hitting it with blunt force, cracking its little ribs and causing its lungs to bleed. Death would have come swiftly by owl or snake.

The world of the prairie I conjure feels somehow soothing, peaceful. I hope my thoughts and words can help the creature, perhaps awaken an ancestral memory of an easier death. Its little gasping breaths are coming shallower now, fewer. There won’t be life in it much longer.

I look up at the old tree above us, wonder what it has seen, and suddenly the watery air feels pregnant, pulsing with memory; not just of my childhood but of my friends’ childhoods, our parents’ childhoods, my father’s childhood. Hundreds of memories crowd through the thick air like gnats and I can almost see them, bringing life into this moment, into all moments, even when death is here also. This is just one moment under the tree.

Still the creature struggles briefly, falls back into the grass, pushes itself against the mud, pants shallowly and wetly. I remind it that I am here, for what that’s worth, watching over it the way a god might watch over a person’s death.

The way I hope some god might watch over a person’s death: with thoughts of comfort, of sleep, of rest and coolness.

I imagine the branches of the tree over our heads filled with the gods of small creatures, watching, waiting, humor in their wise eyes.

Can the gods of people see past thick hospital roofs with their fiberglass insulation and popcorn ceilings, past metal bedrails, papery blue blankets and all the rest? I hope they can.

At last the tail of the unknown animal flips up and then the creature, which has been nearly doubled in two with pain, stretches out long in a quick motion, lying on its side, red mouth open, and suddenly I am alone here with the tree and my imaginings of gods.

No breath disturbs the animal’s delicately patterned side.

Slowly I stand, stretching out my legs, unsure how long I have sat in my vigil, thinking and watching. The cars are less, the stars brighter. I look for a flower, find a prairie rose, its five petals darkly pink, and lay it beside the quiet body.

I should get back to the hospital. 

Yet before I leave I look down and thank the little creature; for now death seems, if not more explicable, perhaps a bit less unknown.

Editor's Choice 2011: Puppy by Kathryn Henion

Kathryn Henion's fiction has appeared in Karamu, Inkwell, The G. W. Review, Confrontation, Carousel, Kaleidoscope, Cottonwood and The MacGuffin and is forthcoming in Regarding Arts and Letters. She holds a Ph.D. in English from Binghamton University, where she also served as editor of Harpur Palate, a literary journal. She lives and writes in Ithaca, New York.

Puppy

Kathryn Henion

It seemed like a bad idea. Having those boys back at our Center, it felt as if we were the ones getting punished, and it sure made for one awkward scene—the three juvenile delinquents, their supervisor, and all us old folks standing in the kitchen where they cooked the puppy. We pressed into our canes and walkers trying to straighten our backs. We tried to look taller.

Virgil, the custodian, the one who found it, said the boys must’ve figured the oven was the best way to finish off the puppy. They broiled the thing; bound its paws with silver duct tape, drenched it in paint, and shut it in the oven cranked up to 550. It wasn’t our puppy, but it was our General Electric, and we were the ones to hear the news from Virgil the next morning when we showed up for 9 a.m. Gentle Yoga with Louise.

Why they chose our Center was beyond us. It was just another door amongst a line of downtown storefronts—a goldsmith, a deli, a hairdresser. Silas said it was because young people think old people are creepy. But it could’ve been because someone—Loretta!—left the front door unlocked, again. Only reason the kids got caught was Harold at the deli next door stayed late checking inventory that night. Heard something unusual, he said, loud voices and a general ruckus unusual for that time of night, except maybe on Poker for Pennies Wednesday when Herbert has one too many Shandies. But this was a Tuesday. Someone at Bubbles and Suds down the street IDed three teenagers kicking over a vending machine and the cops rounded them up shortly after that. Cops gave them Juvie and supervised community service at our Center. Lucky us.

The Center was a dump, but it was ours. We wanted something besides the downtown, assisted-living apartments our children schlepped us off to. “Like going back to college,” they’d said, trying to convince us, forgetting most of us went straight to work, started saving so they could go to college and make the kind of success they could share with us someday. They said, “Wish we could come too.”

Assisted living: a softened-up way to say assisted dying. Funny thing was it seemed like our kids who needed assistance living. Their scheduled lives. In their faces we see ourselves: another appointment or task on their To Do lists. Nothing left to offer, we don’t fit the modern, are stuck somewhere between the Carter and Bush Senior administrations. Between New Coke and Coke Classic. We eat our TV dinners and don’t ask questions. In their eyes, an elevated sense of importance colliding with boredom. Always emphasizing Have and Have Not over Please and Thank You to our grandchildren—fat bodies warming over-padded couches, limited attention spans, pale faces low-lit by hand-held electronics—cell phones, iPods, video games—always answering questions with syllables and grunts. We watch, say nothing, and marvel how they possibly came from us.

We moved to Assisted Living—what choice did we have?—and then found ourselves the Center. Franklin got the idea on a routine city bus ride when he caught the For Rent sign out of the corner of his good eye. It was a place of our own choosing, he said, where we could come and go without checking in and checking out, where we made the schedule. It was something we could hold onto. We pooled money and signed the lease without asking anyone else’s permission. It felt great.

Most of our valuables we kept at Assisted Living, so there was nothing to take. Nothing to tempt three boys anyway. No cash register, no safe. Refrigerator, yes, but only had in it our takeout leftovers—gravied mashed potatoes & chicken fried chicken from the pinochle tourney, some orange juice, cottage cheese. And the butt-ends of some breadmaker bread rejects made by Midge’s single daughter, Susie, who’d recently joined a Tuesday-night supper club in hopes of meeting her future husband. Instead she’d gained ten pounds and some aggressive cooking habits (if you call using a bread maker cooking). Whatever course she was assigned by the supper club each week, Susie made several batches ahead of time, dry runs she sent along With Compliments to us via Midge. Didn’t think we’d know they were failures, assumed our aged taste buds wouldn’t detect excess baking soda or lack of butter. Truth is, we kinda hoped those boys had taken Susie’s bread. But there it was, shoved at the back of the crisper with some browning apple slices and dried-out baby carrots. Before the police arrived, we stuffed the bread into the toilet to make it look like the boys’ work. A wasteful shame, we’d tell Susie later.

They didn’t touch Rose’s stamp collection or Sandra’s secret recipe for Kentucky Derby Pie, or the photo albums or scrap books or the half-made, brown-and-orange crocheted blanket Edna left on the back of the rocking chair by the front window. Terrance’s coin collection—he thought we didn’t know about it—was still in that old ski sock he stuffed under the loose floorboard by the radiator.

No, they didn’t dig into the place at all, only concerned with what was out-in-the-open, easy. They emptied drawers of kitchen utensils, pens, and phone books. They scrawled illegible graffiti on the walls with our Pictionary markers and strung toilet paper over lampshades and windowsills. And then of course the puppy who shouldn’t even have been there in the first place.

It was Sandra’s. A yellow retriever or lab of a thing she adopted from the pound and brought back to Assisted Living only to find out pets weren’t allowed. Sandra’s daughter took it for a week or two, until we got the Center, and then Sandra brought it to American Idol night, where it spent hours chasing its tail and chewing the coffee table legs. Some of us cooed and laughed that first visit—puppies can be cute when they’re not yours—but Sandra must’ve taken it to heart; by summer’s end the puppy was more a permanent resident of the Center than the rest of us. We called it Puppy. At our age, no use naming anything or getting too attached.

We all had puppies. As children or for them, they were a point of learning responsibility. We taught them to sit, shake, lay down, roll over. They followed us camping, fishing, for long walks by the river. At picnics they swam in the lake as we skipped round flat stones; got out and shook damp all over us. Learned to catch Frisbees mid-air. Sat with us waiting for the school bus, at the end of our long gravel driveways. Lying at the foot of our beds, they kept our feet warm on Christmas Eve. When Sheila Maglioni or Tommy Bradstreet broke our hearts, we hung our arms around their necks, dried our faces in their fur, slightly course but smelling of familiar. They stayed home with us when our children left for college. We were sad when they passed. And still, they were pets. Not the way some treat them now, dressed in tutus or monogrammed sweaters.

Some of us didn’t want the puppy. But Sandra said her daughter would take it back to the pound, and even though most of us weren’t the puppy’s biggest fans, we couldn’t send it off to a shelter. So as long as it kept out of the kitchen, where puppies could get into trouble, we agreed it could stay. Virgil, who had kind of a thing for it, put up a child gate he got from his daughter to keep it confined to the recreation room. When no one was in, on evenings and through to the morning, we shut it in the laundry room with its food dish and a blanket old Gerty donated. Some of us kept it in there when we were in, not charmed by its jumping and scratching and little nips. Still, locked in the laundry or confined to the recreation room, the thing was always yelping. Most of all the minute anyone came near it. We had only to walk past that door on the way to the bathroom and the darned thing would start up with the howling, yipping and scratching all wicked pitiful, dust flying out from the heavy sniffing at the crack beneath the door. If we let it out, it followed us everywhere, jumping and making a terrible racket. About drove us mad. We gave it a few good kicks and eventually it settled down, sat curled on its stack of blankets licking its paws.

We crumpled pieces of newspaper and pages of Time magazine, tossed them over its head toward the beige walls. But Puppy just sat there, staring at us. Dumb puppy, we said. Couldn’t even handle the simplest trick in the book. Would’ve known those boys were up to no good, too, if it’d had any sense. Would’ve stayed curled quiet on that old pillow Sandra left for it. But of course the damned thing probably yelped soon as it heard them. Being a puppy, it didn’t have any sense. Figured those boys wanted to play.

Thing of it is, we liked disliking the puppy. It gave us a sense of purpose and community. Mutual complaints: the smell and all the slobber, the unabashed neediness. Like children, the puppy reminded us how far from youth we’d come, how tired we were. Some of us kind of hated it for that, but not enough to do what those boys did.

We’re used to smells—fresh-baked bread and refrigerated cold cuts from the deli next door, the chemical tang and floral perfumes seeping through the walls from the hairdresser on the other side. None of us showers all that often and the one toilet at the Center needs some serious Lysol-ing. But burnt fur and flesh, it’s something different. Trumps all those other smells like a tidal wave. Took us right back to the time Bernie Talbot singed his eyebrows clean off trying to light the gas burner under his chicken and stars.

Cops said the boys had problems. Bad parents. Bad crowd. These days, we say, always some excuse; no one responsible for themselves. What’s more, mostly the boys got off. Too young to know better, the paper said. A four-year-old, maybe. But these boys, they took initiative. Went straight to it, got pretty creative with the duct tape and the paint. Tied the puppy’s front and back paws together, hog-over-a-pit-style, laid it in the middle of the floor and drenched it in a couple gallons of the Pixie Green Therese bought to decorate the kitchen. Was a dream of hers, she’d said, to have a Pixie Green kitchen. Reminded her how life looked when she was ten. The best year, she’d said with a smile and far-away eyes.

We thought they would’ve been older. Didn’t expect the three, blue-eyed white boys with little more than peach fuzz for facial hair standing there with their shoulders slumped and faces bent toward the floor with canned apologies for the trouble. We thought they would’ve looked rougher somehow, more criminal. We thought maybe they’d have had tattoos or piercings or scars on their faces, chipped teeth or colored bandannas tied slant across their foreheads. But they looked like any of the young kids we saw on our daily walks around the block or on bus rides for groceries and bank runs. Too-long hair and too-big clothes like they’re hiding from something. They looked like our grandchildren.

We asked how old they were.

The one with hardly any hair on his arms said, Fourteen.

At fourteen we were still rising early to help our fathers in the barns and our mothers prepare the daily meals. At fourteen we still relished hugs from our parents.

We asked, You got parents?

Yeah, they nodded, looking at us with that expression our own children use when we ask a question they think we ought to know the answer to. They look at us like we’ve got dementia.

We never thought we’d get like this. Old. Dispensable. A kind of speed bump slowing down everything around us. When did it happen, we wondered; when did life turn from gaining to losing? There must have been a moment, we thought. But we couldn’t place it in the mix of jobs, marriage, kids, retirement. Other than the way our bodies creak and hang, we don’t feel old at all. But we see it in our children’s faces when they look at us as if we’ll soon be dead, a mix of impatience and fear; they are uncomfortable with the lack of grace in our slowly losing control. We see it in these three young boys too. We want to, but we can’t remember what it’s like to be young and know everything. All that time and health and disappointment ahead.

The boys’ supervisor, a string bean of a man with a woodsman’s beard and dark glasses you’d expect on a blind person, said we should come up with some chores, things to keep the boys busy, occupied, so they wouldn’t have time to get other ideas. We came up with some stuff. We had them sweep the floor, take out the garbage, clean the windows. We took them on errands. At the Save-A-Lot for groceries, they pushed our carts, pulled the Lean Cuisines we could never reach off the top shelf of Frozen Foods. On the bus home, passengers looked up from their newspapers and pulp fiction to smile at the kind young men helping the elderly. Urban Boy Scouts, is what their brains seemed to register. They baked a puppy, we wanted to say.

The boys made planters for the front doorstep of our Center. We watched the middle-sized one, the kid the other two called Derek, punch his fist into the fresh topsoil, dump a geranium into the hole, and mash in more soil around its stem.

We said, “It’s not going to grow if you manhandle it like that.”

Derek shrugged and looked at his hands like they didn’t make sense. Then he said, soft like he thought we couldn’t hear, “It’ll live longer than you.”

But of course we did hear it, what with our hearing aids turned up, the ballsy superiority of a mind thinking it’s got all the time in the world and nothing to lose. But with what little we have left, our own balls too, we cracked his serve right back.

“Why’d you do it?” we asked the youngest one, the one with milky complexion.

He said, “Huh?” maybe a little surprised we’re talking to him.

“You didn’t take anything,” we said.

He shrugged.

“We was bored,” said Derek, jumping in.

“Bored?” It isn’t what we expected. A dare between friends gotten out of hand maybe. Rites of passage, testing boundaries; we understand. But to us it meant drivers licenses and jumping off the high dive. Breaking and entering, stealing even, we didn’t like it, but at a certain age, we got it. We remember it with fondness, even. Pulling the wings of flies or squishing a spider underfoot. But the puppy is different.

“Yeah,” Derek said.

“That doesn’t make sense,” we remarked, unconvincingly. Because it does. Boredom, dissatisfaction, we understood the quiet rage. And sometimes we felt like doing something ourselves. But we’re tired, and we’ve learned: some things you can’t change.

“We didn’t break in,” said the one that never said anything, never even looked at us. There was a lift at the corners of his mouth like he’d pulled one over on us, like we’d asked for it.

“Why’d you do the puppy?”

He stared at the ground, our feet, a kind of glitch in his cheeks when he said, “Dunno.” We believed him.

“It wouldn’t stop barking,” said Derek, showing his crowded teeth. “Frickin’ thing was possessed. It wouldn’t shut up.”

Yes, we’d experienced the puppy’s enthusiasm. Usually we gave in—threw a ball of paper or two, played tug-of-war with a sock—to quiet the thing for a spell. Or, we simply gave it a good kick and locked it away until it quieted down. But no, we’d never considered baking the puppy. It was another kind of leap. And yet.

“We know.”

Editor's Choice 2011: The Red Dress by Arlene Sanders

Arlene Sanders is an Appalachian Mountain writer. She is a native of Virginia and a lifelong Southerner. The MacGuffin, Iconoclast, The Dos Passos Review, Terra Incognita, and other literary journals have published her short fiction. She recently completed her first novel, The Liars: A Novel of World War II, and currently is working on Blood Mountain: A Novel of the Vietnam War. Sanders is a degree candidate in the M. A. in Writing Program at Johns Hopkins. 

The Red Dress

Arlene Sanders

Orchise

Vineyards of green and purple grapes lace warm fields in Orchise, like bedspreads Grandma Leticia crocheted when I was a little girl. The locals say or-keeze, and I like the sound of it. It makes me feel delicate and shivery, like everything French does. I’m too poor to go to Orchise, but on Fridays, World Travel on Main Street clears out their brochures, and Marcy lets me take what I want before she trashes them. Nearly all my selections are for the South of France. Or Italy, once in a while, because I like Italian men.

I’m Cassie. I live in a trailer, not even a doublewide. There’s no satellite dish either, and frankly, I consider myself above that. I’d rather read than watch TV. I read mostly Barbara Cartland, but on the wall above the kitchen table, I keep a whole shelf of the World Book Encyclopedia—which I’ve read all the way through twice—sitting right over the salt-and-pepper shakers, an Art Deco lion and a lizard. The lion is fucking the lizard, Kenny’s idea of a joke, if you can imagine that, and when you want to pepper your cabbage, you have to pull the beasts apart.

Marcy told me how to pronounce Orchise. I never would've figured it out.

I’m sorry. Kenny hates it when I run myself down, and I promised not to do it again, and here I’m doing it.

I’m down to one light bulb now. Since I like to read in bed, I keep that bulb in the lamp on my nightstand. If it stays on all night, which it does when I fall asleep reading, I have to wait until it cools before I can unscrew and carry it to the kitchen in the morning.

My solution to poverty is to meet a man with a job. These are my other requirements: He has to be neat and clean. Sex on Sunday mornings, then church, then McDonald’s. Nonsmoker, nondrinker, no dirt under his fingernails. I don’t care about the GED.

Is this too much to ask?

The scruffiest volume of the World Book is the “V”—because that’s where I dream. Versailles is my favorite place in the world. The palace has hundreds of rooms—with a husband for me in one of them—and the most famous room is the Hall of Mirrors, with seventeen arched windows on one side, seventeen arched mirrors on the other side, and a curved ceiling with paintings all over it.

But my Versailles isn’t just riches. It’s having my own maid to wait on me. It’s running water, happiness, a place to hang my hat. Versailles is feeling loved.

A wedding dress would make me feel loved, too. My grandmother’s gown

takes up practically my whole closet, and I wouldn’t part with it for anything in the world, but I won’t get married in it.

I read somewhere that Chinese brides get married in red, because that’s the color of happiness. So if I ever get married, I’ll get me a new red dress.

When I mentioned a red wedding gown to Kenny—bless his heart—he drove all the way to Chinatown in Washington, D. C., and bought me twelve yards of the brightest red silk you ever saw. I rolled it up and hid it inside Grandma’s wedding gown.

I think Kenny would've married me, too, but he got Carlie pregnant, so he married her instead. Carlie had a father who toted a shotgun, but her old man didn’t need a gun. Kenny married her because it was the right thing to do. And once she had little Kenny, Jr., and then little Zeke and Willie and Owen and Hodge, I knew he would never leave his family. I could tell you lots of guys came sniffing around me, but that’s not what happened.

The truth is, nobody wanted me. 

And now I’m older than dirt—well, thirty-eight—and the wedding dress in my closet is older than I am, even older than my mother.

Kenny said I would make some man a good wife. At least I can cook. In the morning, once my light bulb gets to the kitchen, I can make eggs any way you like them. And the best homemade sausage you ever had. I grow the sage in my herb patch in back of the trailer. Sage is the most important thing in homemade sausage, that and pepper. Two kinds of pepper: fresh-ground black peppercorns and the hot reds I grow myself. And coffee to die for. I grind the beans, and the cream is fresh and thick and warm, practically right out Sally Jenkins’ cow. She’s a Jersey—the cow—so the cream is the best there is.

I like Italian men. Maybe that’s not fair, but love doesn’t work the same as jobs and public toilets; it isn’t equal opportunity. You love who you love. You marry what you can get.

                                                              *    *    *

Barolo  

This Friday’s travel brochure says Barolo is Italy’s most collected wine—“the wine of kings, and the king of wines.” Even I know what that means: Barolo wine is the cat’s meow. It says Barolo comes from Nebbiolo grapes—I wonder if Marcy can pronounce that—and that the best Nebbiolo grapes grow on the left hills, and not on the right hills, in the Barolo section of Piedmont, Italy. I practically swoon at the pictures of incredible hills and valleys, green grass, and ancient castles of the Piedmont area. And just look at the names of the towns: Diano d’Alba, Grinzane Cavour, Castiglione Falletto. Somehow or other, I’m going to learn how to say those names, and Serralunga and Monforte d’Alba, too.

Maybe my Italian husband lives in one of those towns right now. When I close my eyes, I can see him. He’s dark and tall, of course, but I can’t see his face, because he’s leaning over the vines. Sweat ripples down his bare back, tanned and shiny in the sun. He prunes the grapes, handling them gently. His weathered hands are beautiful, fingers long and sensitive. I think a man’s hands are the second-best part of him. His voice would sound kind. I wonder if he talks to the grapes. I hope so.

Listen to this: Barolo wines are deep red. Their flavor is thick and complex. Some are flowery—violets, roses. Just the idea of that makes me feel trembly and refined, even if it isn’t French. It says only vineyards on hills with just the right slopes can produce Barolo, and that the terrains have to be “clayey-calcareous,” whatever that means. Also that Barolo is a tough wine for beginners to understand.

I knew about Barolo first from travel brochures, but after that, I went to A Jug of Wine in Front Royal, where the wine lady told me about this Italian guy who’s really into Barolo—their only Barolo customer, in fact. He always comes in on the Friday after the first of every month, and his name is Kyle.

“What time?” I asked.

“Right after lunch.” The wine lady winked at me.

                                                              *    *    *

Isola d’Elba

On the following Friday, I waited an hour, and it was worth the wait. When he walked into the store, I knew it was him. He looked like one of those Italian hunks pictured in my favorite cookbook, Gerard Renny’s The Men of the Pacific Street Social Club Cook Italian—dark, macho, with the devil in his eye.

I stepped in front of him. “Two Barolos,” I said to the wine lady.     

“You like Barolo?” he said to me.

“Excuse me?” His accent made my legs feel twitchy and hollow.

“You just asked for Barolo. I thought I was the only one around here who liked that wine,” he said.

“The only one?” I asked. “Then you need what’s here? For a party or something? Well, you take what they have. I can get some when their next shipment comes in. I don’t mind.”

“That’s mighty nice of you,” he said. “But I’ll tell you what. Why don’t you just come to my party? And then you can drink all the Barolo you want. For free.”

He said mighty nice. Like mountain folks here in the Blue Ridge say, but he wasn’t a country boy. Anybody around here could've seen that. He was just trying to fit in. Be careful, I thought. I didn’t want him to think I was easy or fast.

“When?” I asked.

“Saturday night.” He scribbled directions on a slip of paper and handed it to me.

“Well, we’ll see. Mr.—”

“Kyle,” he said.

After he left, I did a little pirouette for the wine lady, bought the tiniest chunk of Brie and drove back to the trailer. My dolls from the Franklin Mint stared at me from their shelf over the Victorian settee, their glass eyes misty and reproving, collars stiff and high about their necks, pantaloons peeking out from under puffy skirts. The Bébé Bru—my only bride doll—regarded me with disdain, as a woman with social class and a prospective husband would view an old maid. In this neck of the woods, she’d be a society lady—a Dupont or a Mellon—and when she got married, the newspaper would report that the bride wore—those magic words!—something swoony, drenched in pearls, lace handmade by nuns in French convents.

An old maid is a woman exiled from the world. At first, it’s just a definition, the definition being that nobody wants you.  But later, nobody wants you because you’re an old maid. That’s an important distinction, because “later” is when the exile changes from temporary, like Napoleon on Elba Island—to forever, like Napoleon on St. Helena, the place of his final exile and death.

I need to speed things up, because for me, forever is just around the corner. Maybe—Lord willing and the river don’t run dry—at the party on Saturday night.

Framed on the trailer wall beside the Bébé Bru is a New York Times article about Eleanor Roosevelt’s wedding, dated March 18,1905. I inherited both the article and the doll from my Grandma Leticia. Eleanor’s bridal gown, the article said, “was a white satin princess robe, flounced and draped with old point lace, and with a white satin court train. The bride’s veil was caught with orange blossoms and a diamond crescent. . . . Her bouquet was of lilies of the valley.”

Grandma Leticia told me that was the most romantic thing she’d ever read, and framed beside the article is a photograph of her wearing the exact same thing as Eleanor. On the wall beside that hangs a picture of my mother, eighteen years later, wearing Grandma’s wedding dress, her nails bitten to the quick, her nose buried in lilies of the valley.

“What are you looking at?” I grouched at the dollies. “If I could dress half as good as you.”

That night, I went through everything I had to wear, and nothing seemed right for a man like Kyle. But how would I know? So something plain. Maybe my blue cotton sheath. It’s Prussian blue—like the crayon in a kid’s Crayola box—and exactly the color of my eyes. And the string of pearls my mother wore on her wedding day.

On Saturday, I was so nervous I couldn’t work the clasp. I’d have to close it first, then slip the pearls over my head. But the string was too short. I thought about Versailles—the mirrored room in the mansion I would be mistress of. Confident, poised in a Balenciaga. And here I can’t even get a string of pearls around my neck.

I’m sorry. I’m running myself down again.

I manicured my nails. Then I bit them to the quick.

*    *    *

Versailles

The music at his place was weird, and so were his guests. The two guys had gone to Harvard with Kyle, and their dates had gone to Vassar, both of them. With Kyle and me, it was six of us altogether. The minute the men walked off to Kyle’s shop in an outbuilding, Vassar started in on me.

“Cassie. What a pretty name. Is it indigenous to the area?” the brunette asked. Ruth, her name was.

“It’s a country name,” I said.

“Cassie, where did you work before?” Ruth simpered.

“Before what?”

“Before you worked for Kyle.” She surveyed the living room. “I wish I could find somebody like you. This place is so clean you could eat off the floor.”       

“I was just thinking the same thing,” the other one said. Her name was Jolie, pronounced jo-LEE, like it was French, and her hair glimmered butterscotch blonde.

“Do you ladies like the wine?” I asked. Perspiration rolled down my back in hot droplets. I busied my shaking hands with an olive and a napkin.

“Cassie, where did Kyle find you? In a bar?” Ruth persisted.

“We met in a wine and cheese shop,” I said

“Oh, are you a connoisseur?” the blonde smirked.

“A what?”

“A connoisseur of fine wines.” She twirled her glass and sniffed the Barolo.

“I drink wine sometimes,” I said.

The girls exchanged an amused glance, like I couldn’t see that.

“Where did you do your undergraduate work, Cassie?” Jolie frowned at her drink and stirred like she was searching for ice cubes, so I knew what was coming next. Street smarts I’ve got.

“I’m a high school dropout,” I said evenly. “I grow herbs and collect imitation antique dolls, because that’s all I can afford. I’m a waitress in a diner on Route 66. And while we’re on the subject of waitressing, if you’re about to ask me to run to the kitchen to get you some ice—don’t even think it.”

“Why, I do declare!” Jolie’s face reddened, but it was too late. She knew I was on to her.

“Well!” I chirped. “What a sweet old Southern expression. Rolls right easy off your tongue, too. What part of the South are you from, jo-LEE? I’m bettin’ on Georgia. Georgia girls are the first to lose that ol’ drawl. Y’all work so hard at it. Tell me something, honey, do these fancy Harvard boys know where you’re from?”

I had her by the jugular, and she knew it. White trash bitch.

I twirled my glass and made a big production of inhaling the bouquet and sipping the Barolo.

When the men returned, both women complained of headaches and asked to call it an early evening.

Which left Kyle and me alone with a stack of dirty dishes.

The palms of my hands grew moist. I had wanted—yet dreaded—this moment. I felt like a kid plucking petals from a daisy: He loves me, he loves me not. Instinctively, I said nothing. Better to let him lead the way. I prayed that he wouldn’t simply make a pass at me. I wanted conversation, a release from this unbearable tension, a chance to get to know this man.

He relaxed into an easy chair and reached for the New York Times. “Just rinse them off and stack them in the dishwasher,” he said. “I’ll show you how to work it later.” He undid his belt buckle and eased the zipper down an inch or two.

My heart sank.

I stood in the doorway and waited until Kyle looked up at me. When he saw the expression on my face, he spread the financial section across his open fly.

“You brought me here as a maid, didn’t you?” I shouldn’t have said it like that. It sounded like an accusation.

“What?”

“How’d those girls get the idea I was your maid?” The words just tumbled out.

“Oh, for God’s sake.” He drew his lips into a thin, tight line and poured Barolo into his glass, leaving the bottle half empty. Then he drained the wine from his glass in one gulp and unzipped his fly the rest of the way.

“Come over here,” he said. “Just do what I really brought you here for, and then get the fuck out of my house.”

I picked up the phone and dialed 911.

His face turned the color of the wine. He hiked up his pants and snapped the silver buckle shut, eyes cold and close together. The tiniest flickers of candlelight quivered across the room.

“Front Royal cops make house calls on 911 hang-ups,” I said as I replaced the receiver. I picked up the bottle of Barolo and rested my hand on the doorknob. “They’ll be here in five minutes.”

In drab moonlight, a swale of low, marshy land swept down behind the house to white pines and mottled birches and then to the road, thinly graveled and rutted, that snaked the two miles to my trailer court. I picked up my glass and poured the wine back into the bottle. Some of it splashed onto the table and across flecks of candlelight that dotted the floor.

The brass doorknob chilled the palm of my hand. I picked up the Barolo, drank directly from the bottle, and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. Then I turned it upside-down and relished his gaping disbelief as the rest of the wine cascaded over the edge of the table in a veil of dark blood red. As sirens screamed in the distance, I tossed the empty bottle on the floor at his feet and stepped into the icy night.

                                                 *    *    *

St. Helena?

I ripped the wedding dress off the Bébé Bru and furled the flaming red Chinese silk bolt of fabric across her bosom. The fitting took some time; I’m not a seamstress. But the wasp waist was flattering to her. At least she hadn’t been knocked up, like Kenny’s Carlie, with Daddy brandishing a rifle in the wings. The rest of the silk bolt, nearly ten yards of gorgeous fabric, I’d keep. I looked around inside the trailer. Dear God, where?

Finally I emptied the kitchen table drawer into a plastic bag and shoved it under the bed, folded the red silk, wrapped it in tissue, and slid the drawer shut, the makings of my red wedding dress now directly beneath the lion and the lizard. Time would move on, but at least I’d be spared the stench and humiliation of wedding gown fabric bathed in mothballs. Besides, right there in the kitchen table drawer, it would be easy to peek at every once in a while.

A job. Neat and clean. Sex on Sunday mornings, then church, then McDonald’s. Nonsmoker, nondrinker, no dirt under his fingernails. . . .

Alone at my tiny kitchen table, I sat up straight and squared my

shoulders. I pulled the lion and lizard apart and studied their little faces.

“Listen,” I said. “I just want to be loved.”

I could almost swear they smiled and winked at me.

The Bébé Bru, radiant in her new red dress, stands in the center of my doll collection. In the spring, when lilies of the valley pop up next to the sage in back of my trailer, I will place some fragrant, tiny blossoms in her hand.

And in mine.

Grand Prize Winner 2010 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award:

The Once and Missing Captain of Commerce by Rodney Nelsestuen

Nelsestuen has published more than a dozen works of fiction and nonfiction and won or been recognized in several contests. He is currently nearing completion on a short story collection entitled on men and boys, of which this winning story is a part. He is also finishing a collection of personal essays, Killing the Bull Thistle, and is seeking to publish his short novel, Quiet Desperation. Another novel, Neighbors, is under revision. Nelsestuen holds an MFA in writing from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, and is an instructor at The Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis. While his interests in both fiction and nonfiction are broad, Nelsestuen pursues the male species with an empathy designed to expose the humanity that is usually obscured, and often self imposed, by the harsh expectations of men to be men.

The Once and Missing Captain of Commerce

Rodney Nelsestuen

The line at Old Country Buffet was unusually long for a Wednesday before noon and Elaine’s hope of beating the crowd had been dashed by the dozen people in front of them. She craned her neck around, twisted it painfully against arthritic vertebrae, looked up and studied Paul’s face as it loomed over the top of her head. The left side of his neck was covered with stubble which meant he’d held the electric razor in his right hand and swept it back and forth, up and down, along the same path for the ten minutes she’d left him alone this morning. But Paul was quiet, seemed at peace and gazed off toward the short meat buffet where a dark skinned man in a chef’s hat sliced him thin shavings of prime rib from a giant slab.

She blinked and again looked up at his neck. There was something distinguished in the salt and pepper stubble that crossed his face here and there. It reminded her of the stubble on his father’s face as he lay in his bed those final three days of his life, days that remained vivid but would, next March, mark a decade since his passing. Her husband had had such plans for Paul. Elaine had four prior miscarriages when the doctor told them, in the inexact science of the day, that he thought it was a boy and that he was “cautiously optimistic” about Elaine’s ability to bring him to term. The two would-be parents dipped into the rainy day fund that night and went out to dinner. A tall man nearly six-six, Everett was powerfully built and brilliant, but uneducated and held back from the promotions he so coveted. He’d spent most of his career buried in the backroom of a global corporation, embarrassed to be the only man in the third floor accounting pool—never mind the added insult his height provided in making him so conspicuous. Paul would be the vindication of his failings. That had been clear to Elaine from the night they went to dinner. And she often wondered if it was then, when she felt the weight of Everett’s expectations on her yet unborn son that things first began to go wrong. She was much younger than Everett. Barely 20 years old when pregnant with Paul and unnerved by miscarriages and prenatal science. Had she worried Paul into his state? Had she tried too hard to keep him inside her, rested so much those first four months when maybe God or nature could have taken him from her and none of their coming tribulations would have been realized?

Of course, Paul had dashed his father’s hopes. But he did grow taller by one inch by the time he was 17. And he had that same powerful V-shaped body, the clean lines of his father’s good looks—but the mind of a 3 year old. Or at least that’s what both Elaine and Everett had come to believe since it wasn’t until he was 5 that the doctor, a pale-serious look on his face, took them aside and said there was something wrong. How could they have known? They were first time parents blind to their own misgivings, misgivings that were finally and cruelly laid before them in the doctor’s declaration that “Paul was retarded.” The news had broken her heart. But it had simply broken Everett. 

And now Paul was 56. Elaine looked up at him again. Had this been a different day and had he been other than who he was, all of Everett’s dreams could have come true. That face could have belonged to a captain of commerce, a creator of civilizations, a leader of nations, all of which Everett had said aloud in their celebratory dinner so long ago. Elaine could still replay that evening anytime she thought about it. Everett had poured wine from a bottle they couldn’t afford and made a toast. He’d said of Paul’s yet unborn face that it would be a face “secure in its place in the world on a Saturday morning out in public when the clean lines of a fine woolen suit, golden cufflinks protruding from the cuffs of a starched white shirt and the shine of a Chinese silkworm tie bright and yellow against the dark jacket, have been set aside for wide wale corduroys and a cotton polo shirt with a surprisingly stiff collar and costly figurines embroidered over the left breast, all of which would engender an uneasy air of comfort, confidence and yes, even envy in those around him.” About his face, Everett had been right at first, but over the years Paul’s countenance had dulled in the reality of his capacity.

He’ll want a steak knife, Elaine thought. She turned to her purse and zipped open the side compartment and slid her fingers inside. The soft rubber knife bent to her touch. Paul had seen the knife in Wall Drug the year they ventured westward thinking he was socially and mentally up to the trip. She had known better than to let him entertain even the thought of a knife. But facing the haphazard stack of hundreds of fake, floppy-rubber hunting knives on the center aisle just one room off the boot department, he’d hummed and moaned, the noise attracting the eyes of other shoppers who looked at him with startled recognition. They moved deliberately to other parts of the store as he began his drone, the sound growing louder like the dive bomber in the Mighty Mouse cartoons he’d watch, closing in on its target. Elaine took the knife from his father’s refusing hand and gave it to Paul who went quiet immediately. But he wouldn’t hand it to the clerk at checkout. The man’s eyes grew angry until he looked into Paul’s—and then he’d blinked, frowned and quietly rung up the $3.97 it had cost, smiled and handed her the receipt, “No problem, ma’am,” he’d said. The ritual was always the same: a lack of patience, then the realization registered in a combination of enlightened disappointment and deliberate generosity, the sense of relief about one’s own situation and the inevitable questions in the eyes. Why was he here? Why not somewhere else? Somewhere invisible so they needn’t experience the tension of that pulsing unpredictability for which they’d have no adequate response, no effective technique, lacking the secrets to controlling him their eyes begged from Elaine.

Paul was 15 then. Elaine and Everett hadn’t traveled since Paul was born and sorely needed time away from the essential routines they’d come to dread. It turned out to be the only trip the three of them would take together. She turned again to see Paul fixated on the chef, thought for a moment, then decided to delay the knife as long as she could.

Routine had become her friend after Everett died. The sameness: rising at 7 a.m., daily trips for groceries to the same store with the same bakery chef who’d hand Paul a sticky bun, the complications of which kept him quiet and busy eating and cleaning his hands until Elaine was done shopping. By themselves Paul’s hands were large and warm and unusually flexible when he was calm. On another man those hands would have been held out, palms and fingers cupped to shape a better future while earnest, opposable thumbs stood apart to emphasize his humanity altogether urging the universe itself toward a more civilized horizon that others failed to see except for the vision made tactile in hands that were certain enough of their size and strength to seize the world and still be eternally gentle. That, too, had been Everett’s vision.

After shopping they’d return home for brunch. Elaine had kept them to 2 meals a day to limit Paul’s intake—except on Wednesdays when they’d come to Old Country Buffet. Paul had had high cholesterol for most of his adult life and in the past couple of years developed periodic painful spasms in his chest and down one arm the cardiologist said were indicative of a blockage in need of catheterization—except it wasn’t covered unless life-threatening and then, the doctor had said in answer to that eternal question, “He’s had a good life. You’ve done all anyone could,” and after all, Paul was good about taking his nitroglycerin tablets.  

By late afternoons Paul had had a nap, watched a DVD of his favorite cartoons, and then followed Elaine around in the kitchen, getting in the way until it angered her as she prepared dinner. But he was meticulous during dinner, careful in the use of both fork and spoon. When finished he’d sit back in his chair and wait, leveling his eyes at her. At times she’d imagine they were in a restaurant and he’d begin telling her why he had wanted to take her to dinner, that he’d had an idea of some great and far-reaching importance to run by her. His brow would wrinkle in what looked like thought but more often led to gas of some sort. Still, the top of his head would redden when he broke wind as if he’d internalized her patient explanations of social expectations that usually worked, if not every time, in public. She would consider the grey tufts of hair sticking up on both sides of the baldness like pointy ears on a terrier. She would imagine that large head, sleek and shaven, the head of a man who had long ago outgrown the self-indulgent need for hair, a man whose tanned pate spoke to a near-par golf game and whose broad shoulders were not obese but full—yes, a man in full—with the proper measure of earthly success layered over his frame, negating the need for padded shoulders in tailor-made suits.

Elaine felt Paul’s hand heavy on her shoulder and she lowered herself out of his grip before it became painful, turned to, and looked up. “What is it, dear?” Paul held out his right hand. “Yes, dear, we’re next,” she said as she turned and opened her purse. The palm of his hand had a long lifeline, a line she would trace when putting him to bed at night. He’d try to get her to hold his hand in the evenings when that mild fear of darkness came over him. But she’d refuse until bedtime when he was under the covers and she’d take his hand in hers, the giant palm dwarfing her short, thick fingers, their joints swollen with arthritis. She’d trace the long lifeline with the nail of her pointer finger and tell him how lucky he was, how great things lay ahead for him: fame, fortune, and at the end of the day, a long fulfilling life. But there was a price. And that was that he’d never marry, never fall in love. “You can’t even begin to think about women because there are greater things in store for you and this, this is to be your sacrifice, to live a life alone, a thing that could be sad but you shouldn’t be sad because all great men are full of great sacrifice. You are in the company of greatness, Paul.” Of all things he’d never learned, it seemed he’d learned this one thing since he hadn’t bothered a woman or girl of any age since he was 16, and while no real harm came to that girl, a lot was made of it, too much really, and he’d been removed from their care for three months before the social worker approved and the judge signed the order that returned him to them.

The cashier took her twenty without taking his eyes off Paul. Elaine took the change, unzipped the small pocket on the billfold and put the coins inside. She zipped the pocket shut, unsnapped a larger compartment and put the four dollar bills neatly inside, snapped it shut again and put the billfold in her purse. Paul touched her shoulder gently. She turned, smiled and took the wallet from her purse again as Paul held his huge right palm in front of her. The whole restaurant seemed to stare as Paul pulled himself to his full height and gazed out across the room as if recognizing something off in the distance. She unsnapped the large compartment, took out a dollar and handed it to him. He held it up in his hand and looked at it for a minute then touched it to his forehead and nodded at the cashier. He dropped the dollar into the tip jar next to the register and fixed a stare on the cashier. “Thank you,” the man said, never taking his eyes off him. Paul’s neck tightened and he nodded in final affirmation. He held out his hand, palm up. Elaine’s eyes flashed across its broad expanse. In the instant before taking hold of it, she saw the greatness of great men, leaders who made the world a safer place, a better place, men who overcame hardship, captains of commerce whose struggles into greatness served them all, made them all more civilized, took all humanity from the raw material of God’s clay and shaped a space big enough for them all, big enough for Paul.

Editors' Choice 2010: Frank and Me by Lester Colodny

Lester Colodny is a late blooming writer...84. He is a former advertising writer and director.

Frank and Me

Lester Colodny

When I was a kid, I used to take the BMT subway (that’s a subway in Brooklyn, New York) and travel all the way to Manhattan (the neighborhood that’s next to Brooklyn) to stand in line for three hours, in the bitter, freezing cold, to see the greatest singer in the world, Frank Sinatra.

Forty years later, I got in a ninety thousand dollar stretch limousine that took me to a two million dollar helicopter, that carried me to a ninety million dollar jet that flew me to a five hundred million dollar Las Vegas Hotel Casino where I walked into a room and told (got that? told) the star of the commercial to take his mark and read his lines.

That star was the most celebrated performer in the world, Frank Sinatra.

That night my mother called me. “What was he wearing?” she probed.

My father butted in, “Is he really short?”

My sister got on the phone but she couldn’t talk.

My secretary called to remind me to get autographed photos for nineteen members of her immediate family.

But more important, the superintendent of my building fixed a leaky faucet that had dripped for eight weeks. A neighbor returned a book he borrowed eight months ago. And my dentist, who hasn’t had an appointment open for what seemed like eight years, called, personally, to insist that I come in to have my teeth cleaned.

Such was fame.

Like the ugly frog kissed, metamorphosed into a handsome prince, this journeyman director was instantaneously transformed into an icon.

Doormen, shopkeepers, delivery people, hair stylists instantly knew my name.

In restaurants, I was seated at banquettes instead of tables near the kitchen.

And guys named Tony and Vito winked at me with meaningful smiles.

Not since I was carried around as an adorable infant had I enjoyed such hugging. Not since I came home from school with an “A” in geography had I gotten such praise.

Never, since I found my Aunt Fanny’s diamond ring in the garbage had I been the recipient of such appreciation.

Until a few months ago, I was “Lester, that funny guy who directs thirty second ‘Tide-E-Bowl’ and ‘Cooper-Pooper-Picker-Upper’ spots.”

From out of the blue, I was invited to lecture at Harvard Business School on the “Art of Film.”

Tabloids listed me as an inside source of gossip. Page six of the New York Post asked for a candid photo of me.

Headhunters called for bios.

Worse, my children asked for loans.

My wife shopped at Bendel’s and Bergdoff Goodman instead of Loehman’s. And my postman had to get a truss to carry my mail.

And no matter where I went, people stopped me and asked, “What was He like?”

“What was He like?” was my standard (playing it cool) response.

“Come on, Mr. C., What…was He like?”

That’s how they referred to Frank (notice, please, the familiar reference).

I was ready to go out and buy a suede jacket and lots of gold chains.

He.

Him.

The only persons I had ever known or had any truck with, in my whole life, that were referred to as “He” and “Him” had been Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios and God (not necessarily in that order).

But with Frank, it was different.

With Frank, it was Him, with a gasp.

Or Frank, with a knowing nod.

Oh the never-ending questions.

“How many takes did He give you?”

“How late did He show up on the set?”

“He really broke your balls, didn’t He?”

To be sure, I had been damned certain to be ready to roll film the second, the moment, the instant, He appeared.

So I rehearsed and marked and pre-lit and re-rehearsed and re-remarked, and re-re-lit.

I had every member of the crew visit the john, a doctor or psychologist, two hours beforehand.

I had been ready.

For Him.

I had checked the lavaliere microphones, the booms and the cameras a dozen times. I had given everybody in the crew a breath-o-laser test.

Was I ready?

And then it came to us.

To me.

Like a tablet from the mount.

He’s coming.

He’s on his way.

He’s on the third floor.

He’s in the hallway.

He’s here.

The man who I used to stand out in the pouring rain for.

Whose every record, album and tape I not only owned but whose every musical phrase of every song he ever recorded I could lip-synch.

There He was.

From From Here to Eternity.

From the Academy awards.

From the very heart and soul of America.

Frank.

And He walked up to me and said (I know you’re not going to believe this), “Excuse me, but where do I do what I do and what do I do when I get there?”

Those are the exact words He said.

We made a dozen commercials in twelve days. Twelve-count-‘em-twelve.

Frank and me. Me and Frank.

And he was pleasant. He was cooperative. He was funny. He was tremendous.

And he did the copy, not once, but three even four times, to make absolutely sure it was right.

Faultless.

Perfect.

I’m sorry to disappoint anyone who is reading the rest of this piece for juicy, terrible gossip about what a pain-in-the-you-know-what He was.

But Frank, who personally supervised the inauguration balls for Jack Kennedy, who was the leader of the Rat Pack, who married Ava Gardner…

Frank, the Man With The Golden Arm, who mentally seduced a million women…

Frank (it rolls off my lips like seltzer) was the ultimate professional.

But don’t take my word for it. Ask anyone who worked with me.

They’ll tell you that despite the hearsay, the gossip, the rumors, all the niggling nonsense, that Francis Albert Sinatra was…a pussycat.

Twelve days.

Twelve glorious days.

Ring-a-ding-ding.

Editors' Choice 2010: Absence by Evan Guilford-Blake

Evan Guilford-Blake writes fiction and plays. He has won 31 playwriting competitions and six for his short stories. His stories have appeared frequently online as well as in several anthologies. His plays are published by Playscripts, Eldridge Plays, Heartland Plays, TYAscripts.com and neoNuma Arts. More information is available at www.guilford-blake.com/evan.

Absence

Evan Guilford-Blake

The doves stare through the bars of their cage, the opened slats of the blinds, the tight mesh of the window screens, into the dismal, sunless morning. They are mystified, it seems; the world is as much a mystery to them as they are to Mary. She watches them while she waits for the water to boil; she can smell the newly ground coffee.

She wakes Tennyson with a kiss and a glass of orange juice. He is the only little child she has ever known—heard of—who likes to sleep, but, this morning, he wakes with a huge smile and throws his arms around her neck, surprising her and spilling a few drops of her coffee onto his favorite pajamas.

“Oops!” he says. “I got it dirty.” She smiles.

“It’ll wash out,” Mary tells him.

He sits up, takes the oj and swallows it in one large gulp. “My,” Mary says, “somebody was thirsty.”

“I was thirsty,” Tennyson replies, “not somebody.”

Mary kisses him again. Naming their children after other poets was Dillon’s idea. She’d been reluctant when he mentioned it—“who’d want to be called Hughes—or Plath?”—but when he suggested “Tennyson” the idea had grown on her: It was, after all, appropriate for either gender, and there were both singularity and inherent poetry to its sound.

“You’re somebody all right,” she tells him.

“I am?” he says.

“Yup.” Mary answers. “Get dressed. We’re having bacon and eggs this morning.”

“Oh boy!” he says, and scrambles from the covers.

*

“The sky is dirty,” Tennyson notes.

“Uh-huh,” Mary says as she sips the coffee. Tennyson’s appetite astonishes her: Food at 8:00 in the morning repels her, but he eats—as he does most everything else—vigorously. “It’s going to rain.”

“I don’t think the doves like it.”

“The rain?”

“The sky. They like sunlight.”

“So do I,” she says.

“Me too!” Tennyson exclaims.

*

At 9:30 she drops him at day care and returns home. She prefers to have him with her, but she’s learned that four-year-olds aren’t prepared to deal with the concentration demanded for writing. Before, she and Dillon took turns. Now…well, now is now.

She takes a shower, washes her hair, dries in front of the mirror, looks at herself. “There is nothing wrong with me,” she says, then shakes her head. She talks to—at—herself, her reflection, the objects in her  life, too often. “That has to stop,” she says.

The computer is still on from last night. She sorts through the stacks of papers, disks, pencils, coffee cups and curiosities that clog her chair, her desktop, and rereads what she has written, makes a minor correction, reads it again, then looks out the window. It’s busy: Women with strollers pass, trucks blow their horns, leaves fall. Downstairs the doves are cooing at the top of their oddly powerful lungs. Their cage needs to be cleaned. Her office needs to be cleaned. The house needs to be cleaned; domesticity was never her strength and, the past five months, it has become utterly incidental to her life. Everywhere, she is surrounded by dirt and disorder. She tries, more for Tennyson’s sake than her own; but, she acknowledges, it’s a half-hearted effort.

She sighs and stares at the screen, her fingers poised on the keyboard. She types:

As through a dream

The glimmer softens

And she stops. And there stands—what? who? Dillon, of course. But she loathes confessional poems and this has all the symptoms of one What would he think?

I’d hate it. But it would be a good confessional poem, he says.  

She sits back and looks at him. The urn is exquisite. And dusty. She looks at it, daily, of course, but she hasn’t touched it since she put it on the top of the low bookcase a week after the funeral. It has stayed there, an indelible scratch blemishing the otherwise cluttered but ignorable landscape of her office. Now she gets up, takes a t-shirt—one of Tennyson’s—that’s draped across a chair, left for some distraction on its way to the laundry hamper, picks up the urn and carefully, slowly, strokes it clean. Then she sits on the chair, the covered gray marble bowl between her legs, and reaches for the lid.  

When she first brought the urn home she sat with it, like this, alone, at night, arguing with herself whether to open it, to smell its contents, to touch them. She started to lift the lid—her fingers closed around its spired handle—but stopped. What, after all, was there? Ashes? Bits of bone?  Dust, become dust.  

That was—exactly—five months ago. The urn has, since, remained on the bookcase in her office, undisturbed. Tennyson has forgotten it: In his youthful resilience, he has adjusted: No nightmares, no recriminations. The occasional “I miss Daddy,” but he has accepted his absence. We forget because we must, not because we will. Wrong, Mr. Arnold, she thinks, and lifts the lid.  

Inside is a small mound of gray-brown-blackness, its contour interrupted by tiny protusions. She takes a deep breath, then touches one. Bone. But there is no sensation in the contact; it’s as insignificant, as asymbolic, as the residue of last night’s chicken.  

She lifts her finger to look at it. It’s no different. Flesh, soft and unsullied. She reaches down again; this time, her left index finger probes. She lifts it. There, on the tip, are specks of the gray-brown-blackness. And suddenly she is terrified: What can I do with it? she thinks. I can’t wash it off, it’s a part of Dillon. But I can’t leave it on; Tennyson will see it.

He won’t mind, Dillon answers.

She stares at it. She tries to think: It’s just so much dirt. It’s not Dillon.

No, it’s not, she hears him say. 

Keeping her index finger extended, she closes the urn and replaces it on the bookcase. She stares at the finger. The ash is still there. Should she just blow it away and get on with her life? Mary shakes her head It is Dillon.

You think so. Hmh. You really think so? 

She sighs, and sighs again. What will she do with the rest of the day? She can’t type, she can’t read, she can’t wash the dishes.

She goes downstairs. Sappho is in the nest; Catullus is standing beside it, preening her. They need baths; it’s been three days since she sprayed them. She can do that! If it were sunny she’d lug the cage outside but the rain looks imminent. Using her right hand, she gets the water bottle and opens the cage door.

The doves look unconcernedly at this intrusion into their sanctuary. She’s had them for six years now; a wedding present from one of their close friends (who thought they were a pair, not just a couple; “Sappho” was intended as irony), and they are as unaware of her as they were the day they arrived. But, if they’re not affectionate, neither are they perturbed by her presence. With her clean hand she reaches in, presses a finger gently against Cat’s chest, and says “Up.” Obediently (or instinctually, she’s never been sure which) she hops onto Mary’s finger. She moves her just below the perch; Cat hops up and onto it. Saph stares—longingly, Mary thinks: The doves dislike any separation.

She sprays Catullus through the bars of the cage. She blinks, lifts one wing, then the other, tucks one leg and stretches both wings in what Mary calls the birds’ Tai-Chi routine. Clearly, Cat enjoys this. So does Sappho, but her bath will have to wait until Cat replaces her on the eggs. If there is one thing they are deadly serious about, it’s caring for their eggs. That, in six years, not one has hatched is irrelevant. Hope springs eternal in their soft white breasts, too. The thing with feathers.

So there is the rest of the day. One-handedly, Mary pours more coffee, drinks it, watches her left index finger as if it’s ordained that the ash will somehow envelop the rest of her hand, her arm, her body. Despite her shower she feels unclean. This tiny fleck of residual love on her finger has scratched her soul, leaving its faint tarnish.

*

The morning has managed to pass. She’s finished four cups of coffee and is a little wired. In an hour she can pick up Tennyson. But in the meantime, there is still the matter of her left index finger. The ashes remain, reminding her vaguely of the wedding ring she decided she couldn’t wear any longer, but which left its impression for weeks after she took it off, an itch she could not—cannot—scratch.

She sits at the dining table, the breakfast dishes still on it; she can see into the living room, where books, magazines, newspapers, the occasional blouse or pair of shoes are randomly piled or left, in an abstruse pattern of loneliness. She watches the doves. On the wall is their wedding: Dillon and Mary, his curly tresses flowing over his collar, her straight hair severely short. They are smiling, both dressed in white: His tuxedo, her gown. We looked so happy, she thinks. We were, he says.

“Were we?” she asks the picture.

Of course. Newlyweds are always happy.

“That was then.”

His smile broadens. She squeezes her eyes in disbelief, and when she looks again the picture is exactly as it was.

Wash it off, he says. You won’t ever be renewed, but you’ll be fresh. –Ened.

“I can’t,” she says.

I struggle towards the light; and ye,

Once-long’d-for storms of love!

If with the light ye cannot be,

I bear that ye remove.

“Matthew Arnold did not have all the answers, Dillon!”

And you have them?

“No.” She sighs, sees that Saph has left the nest and Cat is settling in, gets the water bottle, coaxes the smaller dove to the perch and sprays her. She thinks Sappho almost smiles as she fluffs her feathers, discarding the motes of dust, the bits of seed among them.

The clock strikes one. The mouse ran down, she thinks in honor of Tennyson’s favorite nursery rhyme. She opens the door to find the day surprisingly warm and—expectedly—muggy, gets an umbrella, her bag, the keys. She decides she will take Tennyson for pizza, a special treat. Besides, it will be another hour she doesn’t have to face—this: She looks around the living room, the dining room, the staircase. All the places she lives her life.

Mary opens the door, still wondering what she will do about the ashes on her finger. She can see them, clearly; she uses her right hand to lock the door, to open the car, to put the keys into the ignition. She drives that way to the day care center. As she turns in she hears the thunder. She sees Tennyson standing among a group of children under the canopy of the walkway. She waves, but he doesn’t see her.

She parks the car in the lot and, as she walks the hundred steps to meet him, there is a flash of lightning and another thunder roll. Damn it, she thinks, I left the umbrella in the car. She waves again and calls his name. He turns and calls “Mommy.”

The rain breaks just as she reaches the covering. He runs up to her, gives her a big hug and pulls a large envelope from under his shirt. “Look!” he says. “I made it.”

He holds the envelope as, with her right hand, she opens the clasp and gently slides out the crayoned construction paper. On it, there is a neatly drawn picture of a roadrunner, a mountain, and a man in a car. A lump comes to her throat. “That’s very nice,” she says.

Tennyson points. “That’s Daddy.”

“I recognized him right away,” she says.

“You did?”

“Yup.” She looks at her son, closes her eyes a long moment. Behind them she sees Dillon, hears him murmur, but though she listens as hard as she can, the words are indistinct.

“Mommy?”

“Yes, Sweetheart?”

“Are you okay?”

She opens her eyes. “Absolutely. Hey: How ’bout some pizza?”

“Oh, boy!” he says.

She tucks the envelope carefully into her bag and says: “Let’s go!”

They walk briskly through the rain. Mary reaches out her hands and lets the water spill across them.  

Grand Prize Winner 2009 E. M. Koeppel Short Fiction Award:

Rational Actions by Noah Edelson

Edelson is the author of Cooperstown Dreams: Baseball Poetry for Children and a contributing author to Chicken Soup for the Preteen Soul. As the writer/director, Edelson saw his short film "78" premiere at the 1997 Sundance Film Festival, win the World Medal at the New York Festivals, and featured in over 35 festivals worldwide, including Sundance Japan. His script Hear, Boy! was awarded Best Feature Screenplay at the 2008 International Feel Good Film Festival. He has been a writer/producer/director for television and film since the 1980's. His stories for adult readers have received honorable mention from The New Millenium Writings Contest and the Juniper Creek Writers' Conference. He is currently working on a novel, "Healing the Invisible."

Rational Actions

Noah Edelson

I always sat in front, listening to the soft tackity-tackity-tack of Tracy Maple’s laptop two desks behind me.  Would she go out for a pizza, a drink, and a skinny dip?  Don’t kid yourself.  She was going for the frat boys, and that wouldn’t be me.

Not that I didn’t want to be one.  The frat house is cheaper than an apartment or the dorms.  God knows I tried to get rushed.  But the fact is I look way young for my age, plus I skipped a grade.  I’m not little.  I just have sort of a fresh face.  I’m the only freshman on campus that looks like he’s pushing fourteen, and all the girls I ask out think I’m “cute.”  I’ve got a lot of friends who are girls.  They definitely like me…”just not like that.”  I’ve got an impish quality.  Sounds like I’ve got a weird walk or I’m a Hobbit.  Hobbits have hair all over the place and I barely have peach fuzz.  And I’m much taller than any Hobbit.  Nope, I’m a hairless imp.  In all the fairy tales I’ve read, imps don’t get laid.  Knights get laid.  Shit, even frogs get kissed. 

Danielle White thinks I’m charming, and every guy on frat row “wants a piece of that.”  Danielle is Elizabeth Hurly gorgeous.  She’s got legs that make sneakers look like a pair of stiletto heels.  And Danni’s got this smell.  Not strong or sweet or patchouli smelling.  It’s simple, like the smell of clean, soft skin.  I don’t think she uses perfume.  It’s just her smell.  I’m just making an observation.  Danni’s great.  I mean, great.  But the last thing you want when you’re studying with a girl like that is to hear about her ex-fiancé in Fort Wayne.  I know everything about Randall Pierce from his dream car to his ring size.  He’s got a long red ponytail, he’s built like a Viking, and he hunts with a bow and arrow.  He’s not going to college because he’s got his dad’s store to take care of: Pierce and Son: Everything for the Real Outdoors.  Randy loves it.  Says he’s never leaving.  He hooked up with Danni’s high school Phys. Ed. Teacher two weeks after she started classes here.  That’s like nine months ago and Danni still cries about him.  That’s one fucked up dude to dump a girl that looks like Danni.  And she knows how to have fun too, in a real playful, sexy way.  She can tell a dirty joke, you know?  It’s just comfortable and funny.  Anyway she’s like a friend.  You don’t want to wreck a friendship like that.  She hangs out with me because, I don’t know.  I do have perfect teeth and, even though I take lousy notes, I have a real knack for retaining facts.  Danielle figures I’m not so tough to look at and frankly, she can use all the help with organic chem she can get.  So I’m useful.

Anyway, I don’t know if it’s worse to be able to hang with a girl like Danielle White or be invisible to a girl like Tracy Maple.  The point is I didn’t get rushed by any of the frats for the same reason I can’t get a date.  I’m like everyone’s kid brother who’s too young to play with the big kids.

It only sucked because I could save two hundred and forty-five dollars a month if I got out of those shitty dorms and into a frat house.

#      

Professor Parker Bullington paces in front of the room fondling his pipe while he gives his rote lectures.  You can’t blame him for playing with something while he’s in lecture mode.  The guy’s been sharing his insights for almost forty years.  These days you take his class for his rep and you pay the price.  We’re his captives and as long as you turn in a paper that confirms you’d never be able to write in old English better than he…him… Bullington… you’re going to pass with flying colors.  But he was so, I don’t know.  He was sure that no one else was right in the world. But that didn’t bug me.  I’m just mentioning it because it was a trait I noticed.  I liked the guy.  But you had to sit in front to really hear him.  This was a big room for the guy to be lecturing in without a microphone.  I know the kids in back didn’t hear a word.  And if they did, they couldn’t understand it.

No, I wasn’t bugged. It was nothing like that.  It was just for, I don’t know.  I felt like doing it.

Sometimes you just have to try things.  We’re students of life at a university known for testing limits.  Right?  All I did was test a limit.  Hell, all the great thinkers paid the price at one time or another for going off the beaten path.  I think the whole class benefited from it.  And it’s not like I was out in the world trying out the social taboos.  I kept it in the classroom.

The classroom had history.  It was a product of the early nineteen hundreds: worn hardwood floors, carved wood moldings, brass hooks to hang your hat on, worn brass doorknobs on the heavy oak door, alabaster lighting fixtures that held real light bulbs.  The blackboard dominated the front, and was made of real slate framed in a wood frame.  On the institutional olive walls, you’d see a few portraits of our founding fathers, and on the back wall, “The Signing of the Declaration of Independence.”  Inspiring.

All that rustic academia was offset by seventy-eight seat/desk combos made of plastic, Formica and chrome metal tubing.  You could still see the dots of wood putty and varnish where the old desks were screwed down.

While this was a time of discovery and experimentation, some just felt certain traditions and rituals should be left in tact.  Dr. Parker Bullington was not in favor of liberating student desks and without fail arrived at the classroom ten before two so he could create rows, aisles and order.  Just like it used to be.  This cut into his lunch, but the statement of order was one he wanted his students to learn.

His final touch was closing the window.  It was large and opened out to the quad.  Five lights by five lights, twenty-five ancient panes of glass joined by the wood of an oak tree that was most likely a sapling on this campus over two hundred years ago.  It was a picture frame of picture frames and by far was the most interesting attribute of the room.  Including the ninety minutes that Dr. Bullington paced and lectured next to it twice a week.

Bullington loved his corduroy jacket with the elbow patches, his cardigan sweaters, and his pleated slacks. He chose a robin’s egg blue button down shirt and brown wingtips to put the period on his fashion statement.  His bent stem pipe lived in his breast pocket.  He handled it constantly but never smoked.  They were his robes and he wore them like a lord.  His reign would lead the common folk through the battlefield of early English literature.  Make these serfs read Beowulf and Chaucer until they loved it…no, needed it.

Although he got high points in the academic trivia department, his work was considered pretty average in literary circles.  (I’d call him an over achiever though.)  Over his career Bullington had published three novels. Since no one had published in old English recently he figured that reviving the style would bring him fame.  You can’t argue with a guy’s passion for something.  Two out of the three masterworks were required reading for the class.  They even had medieval dirty parts. I mean literally dirty, peasants doing the nasty, with rats and the plague all around them.  (Too much information about your fantasy life Dr. B.)  Except for pages seventeen and three hundred fifty-six, everything else was like a sleeping pill on a page.  I’m not knocking the guy’s life work or anything.  He gets a ton of credit for trying to get these books to make sense.  The novels were annotated with old English hieroglyphics on one side of the page and his translation of his text on the other. Kind of like how Samuel Beckett wrote Waiting for Godot, in French then translated it back to English.  Only Beckett’s stuff is understandable in both languages.

Bullington’s books got him a few brown-nosing freshman readers and footnote in a new edition of The Canterbury Tales.  Nevertheless, the volumes were of note because they were all set in 12th century England and they were written in a dead language.  So the Doctor was gone a lot speaking at other colleges on “The Relation of Literature to Lifestyle for the Medieval Everyman.”  The impressionable minds in the lecture hall did not always understand these engagements, because he presented stories and his insights in old English along with a single-spaced handout of the translation.  He never stopped for questions.

In the classroom his quirks were sort of amusing, but they were definitely overshadowed by his, “I’m-a-dead-language-expert-so-I-know-about-life” attitude.  If you listened to him for any length at all you would know three things about him.

    1.He knows the struggles, heartbreak and joys of the English peasant.

• 2.No one can weave a story better than he.  There have been others through history that may have been his equal, but never his better.
• 3.His image of himself was about as warped as a Fun House mirror. 

Bullington conceded that there have been writers that have had a better command of Modern English than he…him.  However he always made a point of saying, “Just because you can put words together in a pleasant form doesn’t mean your storytelling is any good.”  (We heard that line once a week.)  He was the king of his classroom.  We were his obedient courtiers, no, vassals.  We listened to every word he said and were expected to take it for gospel.

Hell, Tracy Maple took down every word he said on her laptop.  She was an exceptional typist.  And she looked damn fine in a tank top.  I could never get the guts to introduce myself to her. 

#      

Right before Spring Break we had to turn in our midterm papers on “Dating in the 12th Century.”  (Dr. B. had his fun side.)  I get to the room while Bullington is finishing the desks; sit down in my assigned seat, and when he’s checking his seating chart trying to remember my name, my desk moves a little.  Bullington looks at me like I just shot his dog.  He doesn’t say a thing till the whole class is there with pens ready to take notes.  Then he starts right in on the lecture, without a hello or anything, and collects all our papers while he’s talking.  Dropping the stack of papers on his desk like we should feel pity for his burden, he goes into his routine, lecturing, pipe fondling and pacing in front of the class.  He’s almost brushing by the pleat on my khakis.

While he’s doing this, I’m thinking (and I swear to god I don’t know why) all I need to do is lift my leg, and he’d drop.  I wouldn’t even have to do it hard.  If I kicked him in the nuts right now he’s a sack of potatoes.  He’d be so surprised he wouldn’t know what happened to him.

He was just so completely vulnerable.  He came centimeters away from my leg and I thought about it again.  All I’d have to do is raise my foot.  It wouldn’t take much.  I squeezed back a smile, picturing him on the floor writhing around, moaning.

I laughed.  He stopped pacing and got real quiet. I guess a laugh wasn’t appropriate for what he was Thou-ing about.

Bullington stared at me.  “Yes?”

“Nothing.”  My eyes shot down to my notebook.  Blank page.  I took my pen from behind my ear, looked up and caught his silent eyes still on me.  Pen in hand, I was ready when he was.  He took the cue and started droning again.  There was no way I could keep up with him.  My notes morphed from words to scribbles.

See, I didn’t even know what he was talking about.  Nothing was bugging me.  I just had this thought itching my brain, heading down to my leg.   He kept on pacing.  Tracy kept typing.  How the hell she could keep up was a mystery to me.  She was probably keying in bullshit just to look good.

I raised my right leg at the knee.

Contact.

He didn’t go down for, I don’t know, four to six seconds.  His knees were together like he was going to block the kick, but he was way late.  He sucked air, looking right at me like I was an escapee from Area Fifty-One.  Before he hit the floor he gave us his quote for the yearbook, “Zounds!”

Short for “Gods wounds!”  Although a relatively up to date cuss word for this class, it was the first time any of us had heard it in a definitive context.

All the kids are standing around him now and, like a miracle, Bullington gets up too.  I swear to god, I would have paid to watch this.  This Old English professor looks me right in the face and growls.  I mean a real primal sound. Then he spins me around, grabs me by the back of my pants and launches me through the window.  And as I’m going through, I’m thinking, “This guy must work out.”  At one fifty-eight I’m no football player.  But you try throwing that kind of weight for any kind of distance.  Plus, the fact that I was hitting twenty-five panes of ancient, thick glass tied together with cured oak was like doing a belly flop onto concrete.  If I just went with it I could have taken the header, ducked and rolled onto the grass.  But I was resisting, trying to stand up, so I took a full body slam and about nine panes of glass out the window into the quad.

So this part I don’t remember at all, but the doctor says I have the intestinal injuries because I didn’t go all the way through the window.  I hit the glass, and kind of bent over at the waist.  You figure Bullington wasn’t bench pressing one fifty-eight consistently.  If he were, with the momentum he had on me, I would have flown through that baby.  Hell, I can press one eighty-two and I don’t work out like a maniac.

#                

I passed the class.

We all did.

Nobody saw my leg move.

Yeah, he swore on the Gutenberg Bble that I “provoked him with a kick to the groin.”  The sad truth is, out of seventy-eight students in the classroom, none of them could back him up.  They were too busy taking notes.  Most of the depositions said they heard him say “Zounds!” all squeaky, saw him growl at me, like he was an animal.  Then he ran me through the window.  Donna Bennett said she thought she saw me crossing my legs, but she didn’t think it was an act of aggression.

It wasn’t really.  An act of aggression, I mean.  It was only an experiment.  Not even.  An urge.  An itch that I had to scratch.

Don’t feel bad for either of us though.  I’m taking some time from school and healing up pretty well.  My folks settled with the university for “an undisclosed figure,” along with a written apology from Professor Bullington, on university stationery.  It’s the only thing he’s written in modern English that’s gone public.  I had it framed.

Bullington got an early sabbatical.  Plus he doesn’t have to teach at the school anymore.  (I think that was part of my parents’ settlement.)  He’s touring Asia this year with his Old English stand-up act.  If it was so riveting for English speaking lecture halls just imagine how much students in Tokyo are sucking into their brains.  When he gets back, he’s going to head up the newly formed Ye Olde Englishe Department. So he gets to be the boss of all these new teachers.  Well, a teacher and a T.A.  But that’s not nothing.  So I figure he’s got nothing to complain about.

I got get-well cards from all over the place.  Even from Bullington’s family.  My bank account is now stone cold solid.  Sigma Chi and the Tri Delts both are going after me to pledge next spring.  Top it all off, Tracy Maple came to visit me…twice.  The second time, Danielle showed up just as Tracy was leaving.  Danni starts in like she’s looking out for me.  She would “despair to see me involved with that girl.”  I think I’ve got a shot with both of them when I’m walking again.

#

Something still bugs me about this whole thing.  I can’t nail it down.  You get these feelings in your brain like something’s not right and your stomach says, “Yeah, something’s bugging me.”  When I was a kid I couldn’t steal a soda from the refrigerator without confessing to my mom.  It’s easy for me to get uneasy about little things.  My dad says it’s a natural reaction to the trauma and I should get over it.  I guess I will.  I look at it like the glass is three quarters full.  Aside from a couple of stitches and a male nurse who keeps asking me if I want a sponge bath, college is turning out pretty well.

You know how you feel like kicking a can to see how much noise it will make going down the street, or throwing a stone at a drifting log?  The log could turn out to be a crocodile and bite your leg off.  But you had to throw that stone.

Who knows what that noisy can is going to wake up?  No matter what it turns out to be, two things are for sure: You didn’t plan on waking that thing up, and you had to kick the can.

Editors' Choice 2009: The Limits of My World by Johanna Lipford

Lipford grew up near San Jose, California. She worked seven years in the American aerospace industry as a mathematical analyst, then moved to Rome, Italy, where she now works as a translator (Italian to English). She was a winner in the 2008 Aspiring Authors Writing Contest, the Turner Maxwell Books Short Story Competition, and the Fall 50-50 Fiction Contest.

The Limits of My World 

It was not at all, thought was telling itself for the thousandth time, like what it had expected.   There hadn’t even been any particular moment  when thought could say to him “Now I definitely am.”  Instead he had simply lain there watching while first his wife, then his sister, approached  to look  intently into his face and turn away sobbing – his sister had wept anyway.  His wife hadn’t.  Presently, the doctor entered the room, put a stethoscope  to his chest, and after announcing something he couldn’t hear, closed his eyelids,  imprisoning him in darkness.  He was unable to move, to hear, to feel, able only to think.  Then came panic.  A  scalding yellow fluid flooding his brain.  He had wanted to cry out “God!   Is this the way it’s going to be?   Forever?”  But of course he hadn’t because he couldn’t.  He could only shriek it in thought.

He had no idea how long the darkness lasted; he knew only that he had somehow become conscious of where he was; he neither saw nor felt nor heard, and yet he could in some way sense, in some way “see”, or visualize, his surroundings.  He was conscious of everything at once, and his self seemed to inhabit the space he was conscious of, just as once his self  had seemed to inhabit his head.  He chuckled grimly, or thought he chuckled.  He was lying in a stainless steel box.  Its shiny inner sides were lined with white satin.  It extended a few inches beyond his feet, and somewhat less beyond his head.   Its upper limit lay perhaps three inches  above his nose, and his corpse lay on its floor.  Rigidly.  (he was already beginning to rot;  his eyes had sunk into their sockets, and his belly was a balloon inflating, swollen by gases generated by decomposition;  his brain was an exploded mass in his skull, and his blood stagnant pools  in stomach and pelvis; there was a black hole between his eyes, and a gaping cavity in the back of his skull…).   He tried to visualize whether he was above or below ground, but could not.  The limits of his world were the limits of the steel box in which he lay supine, his collapsed eyes  blindly staring at its satin-lined roof.

No, it was not at all like what he had expected.  He had probably given as much thought to death as anyone did – that is, as little as possible.  But those times he had, he had supposed there would be some instant, before which you felt and thought, and after  which you simply were not.  Oh, of course, he had admitted as intellectually possible  that he might live on after death, but certainly not like this.   He had put little stock in any conventional heaven, and even less in a conventional hell.   If he had really thought about an afterlife at all, he had supposed it to be totally unlike anything anyone could imagine.  And this was:  no one could really imagine perpetual solitary confinement, unable to move or speak, without even the hope of death to deliv—

Easy, easy, thought told him.  Think about something else, anything else.  Don’t think about that.

The puzzle of course was, what was it that was thinking?  Certainly he had no active brain cells – they died within minutes after the blood flow stopped, and anyway he felt outside his body.  So what was this entity that thought?  Thought implied memory, and memory matter.   Could he be thinking with the  brains of the living?  All the people who had known him, carrying around pieces of him stowed in their skulls…   He  had once hypothesized  a telepathic internet linking all men, as an explanation of Jung’s Unconscious.   But there was also consciousness, which did not depend on thought – and which thought did not depend on. Thought was mechanical and could go on perfectly well without consciousness.    That was why some believed consciousness to be a mere epiphenomenon.  

But what generated  it?  In this case, not the brain for sure.   Well, anyway, call this consciousness that was aware of thought (his ego) the “soul”. 

But perhaps, perhaps he was only asleep and dreaming.  He no longer clutched at this with the hope he’d once had.  True (he went over the same arguments he had revolved before) he felt as if he were in a dream – that is, he could, as in a dream, somehow see himself from outside while nonetheless remaining an actor – if you could call this acting – but that was the only similarity to a dream.  He had no hope, as he remembered sometimes having in dreams,  that he could awake from this if he really wanted.  And it was a dream that had gone on a wretchedly long time.  He couldn’t begin to estimate the time, but it seemed infinitely longer than any dream he’d ever had.

No.  It was no dream.  Or if dream it was, it had come in the sleep of death, and he would never wake—

Hadn’t he, thought hastily skipped on, read about  people who had almost died and on reporting their experiences stated that they felt peculiarly light and free, that they almost hadn’t wanted to re-enter their body?  He didn’t feel light and free.  He felt weighed  down by this mass of decaying flesh sharing the coffin with the “soul” and his ego, as if he were somehow attached to it, as though his body were a rotting albatross  hung about the soul’s neck.  (liquified eyes, the hair seemingly flowing  from a shrunken scalp, the mouth, open, some putrescent liquid drooling from its corners…).   Mentally he licked a tongue over his mouth, but the ichor remained…(the belly had ruptured now,  greenish intestines  oozed out covered with a slimy fur of decay, glowing luminously  in the dark cavity against portions of flesh greasily white and maggot-infested…).  Thought wondered when flies had had a chance to settle on him.  But they were always around:  a housefly would be buzzing over the open mouth of the last dead human being on earth, the final victor.

Aware of his body, in a kind of congealing horror he tried to turn awareness away, but could not.  Thought  focussed awareness on the coffin.  Its white satin had turned powdery grey – cheap junk, thought offered.  Cheap.   The undertakers, they didn’t care.  Anything was good enough for the dead.  If they, just once, had to be buried in their own coffins… he dismally chuckled.  They would be.  That was the one sure thing.

Thought immediately returned to his body and he was vividly aware of viscous liquids soaking into the satin lining on the under side of his corpse.  He felt he retched.  Thought hastily turned away.  …he was going to be here forever, thought despaired, he was going to follow his body through every stage of decay, right down to the bone, and beyond, and finally there would be nothing in the coffin but dust, and a consciousness gibbering in madness…it’s not FAIR! he silently shrieked.  IT’S NOT FAIR!  IT’S NOT FAIR!   Nobody deserved this, no matter what their sins might be, give them Hell, yes, burn them, torture them, flay them, but don’t lock them up in utter loneliness with their own decaying selves…God, thought screamed, this was Hell.  This was Hell.  God, it prayed, don’t let me spend all Time here, God, don’t, don’t, don’t, DON’T….!

An odd feeling it was, that his head was in two halves, and that the slightest motion might separate them; gingerly he allowed a tongue of thought to lick around his situation.  His mind  must have come completely unhinged.  He felt more himself, now, so long as he avoided a certain subject.  He did not mention the subject to himself.  It was forgotten, he told himself.  Did he understand that that particular subject was forgotten?  Yes he did, he replied.  That Subject was under no circumstances to be approached again, not even to be mentioned to himself.  Thought erected a wall between itself  and that Subject.  Mentally stepping back he surveyed the wall, but made no attempt to test it – he feared  it could be too easily breached.  The Subject, thought determinedly stated, was now imprisoned—  his mind backed hastily away; he had almost breached the wall without knowing it!

With the Subject walled off, he decided that he was in a comfortable restful place where he could think without interruption ..careful .. where he could think.  Just think.  About what?   Well, he could indulge himself, let his mind wander where it would ..so long  as it didn’t wander too near the Wall, behind which lay the Subject…he had always been a contemplative type.  Really, this was an opportunity, where he was…careful…to meditate.  He would meditate on his life, he decided, and perhaps find out why he was here..careful, careful.  He would just meditate on his life.  He would face facts.   And talk about facing the fact of death!...he was doing that, all right, thought comforted itself.        

Thought had just decided that, all his life, he had been selfish; rather proud of himself he felt, for facing this fact.  If his older sister could only see him now, she would not be able to reproach  him for his unwillingness to face facts.  “You don’t  face life,” she used to say.   “You just shut it

He  had thought:   People starving are far off, and floods don’t affect me.  Wars are elsewhere.   There’s nothing I can do about them so why think about them?  Was that a sin?  Or was it simply recognizing reality?  Could he help what he didn’t care about?

“Whenever something comes up you don’t like, you simply deny it; it’s as if you build a little wall around whatever is unpleasant in life, and suddenly it’s not there any more.  And you leave the rest of us to face it for you."

That was true, thought decided.  Proud of his new clear-sightedness, he admitted  to himself the justice  of her charge.  A dozen examples from his life could be cited, when he had simply ignored the unpleasant, and left others to see to practical affairs.  But after all he was – had been – a professor of philosophy:  no one expected him to be practical, least of all his students.  Everyone treated him as if he were a sort of intelligent imbecile, able to competently explicate Hegel and Kant, but unable to solve life’s simplest problems.   And that wasn’t true.   He had certainly dealt with his share of life’s problems, after all.   The worst – second worst – was when their little boy had died after being struck by a car; he had tried to comfort his wife by making her see that however painful it was, it had happened and there was no point to fruitlessly dwelling on it:  she should do as he was doing:  turn her back on the memory and look forward to the future.    They would have another child.   When a thing hurt, the best you could do was to forget about it as soon as possible and go on.   Any psychologist would tell you that dwelling on the past finally became sick.  

But she hadn’t seen it that way.

Probably her obsessively pursued grief – a grief he had tried to reason her out of – was why he had become infatuated by… well, no, interested in,  Sofìa.    That and the fact that his wife endlessly blamed him for their son’s death.    He had been walking along, she accused, in a trance, thinking about  Wittgenstein’s true thought or something, and had let little Timmy run out into the street.    Which wasn’t the case at all:  the child had been walking right beside him, and  he still couldn’t explain how it was that the next  instant Tim was in the street and brakes were screeching and—    But it certainly wasn’t his fault.   And even if it had been, beating his breast and blaming himself would not bring Tim back.   He had simply removed – well! set the incident aside, and gone on.   Still, though, that she tried to make him feel guilty, and that she herself was always in mourning, was certainly behind why he had noticed Sofìa in his freshman class.   He had suddenly discovered in her seventeen-year-old  self a rare talent for understanding philosophy.   And she was pretty.   And revered him.

      He had certainly never intended anything personal with her,  and that was why it was such a shock when she had shown up on his doorstep with a suitcase.   When his wife had seen her…!    As his wife looked on he coldly informed Sofìa that she had totally misunderstood their relationship, and  insisted that she return home.   He himself got in  the car and drove her back, telling her how sorry he was.   He explained to her father, an emotional Mexican, why he was not responsible.  But there was a scene and he had to run to his car to  keep the situation from degenerating.  It was after Sofìa took the overdose of  sleeping pills that her father had come looking for him with a pistol…

Thought could see now the kind of man  he’d been…never facing the trouble he’d caused,  running away from its consequences, hurting people with his selfishness, uncaring.  He certainly deserved any punishment meted out to him.   But thought saw all the wrong he’d done, now.  Thought saw how he should have acted.   That was what counted.  And of course thought was sorry.   So  surely  he would be let out of here.

Perhaps, he might come across  Sofìa  some time, then…

Relentlessly awareness included  his corpse, and thought tried to ponder something else.   (black strings of  flesh were falling from his bones; his hair had fallen from his scalp and was a thick felt-like mass embedded in the fluids-soaked satin, which itself was mushy and black; gleams of white bone peeped through the interstices of rotted flesh…).  He would avert his gaze, and could not.  It was as though he were frozen, hypnotized, forced to look at his rotting self as in some sort of interior mirror, and he panicked; he tried to scramble away, and felt himself more rigidly fixed; he felt the six steel sides close about him, and thought was shrieking let me out, let me out, let me out, LET ME OUT, LET ME OUT…!

He felt exhausted.  He gazed at the rotting thing and, having no further energy, stopped fighting awareness of it..  Thought had offered a bribe to get out, and the bribe had been spurned.  Cheap.  He was cheap. His whole life had been a series of cheap attempts to avoid consequences.  A problem came up?  His response had been arguments to show why he was not responsible, or in any event why nothing could be done.  He had used thought, not to solve problems, but to mendaciously show that no problem existed or  anyway could not be solved.   He wished he had never been born, he felt his life had polluted a clean earth, and his death was polluting it yet again.  He gave up; if only awareness would cease and he could just die.  But he was dead.  And there was awareness.   That was a fact.   And he was that thing lying in the steel coffin, rotting.   He focused on  it.  The black and blistered flesh had dried, and was stuck to the bones, part of it had dried on the satin where it had dripped as it decayed.  Probably, all the air was used up.  Even the maggots were dead.  Bracing himself, he looked behind the Wall, at the Subject:   this was how he would spend eternity.   Alone, a sickening fragment of black matter that was the eternal part of him.  His true self.   Look at it.  Take a good look.  This is how you end up.   This is the real you.

In that moment he realized  that he was aware of the underside of the surface of the earth, and that below the surface there were plant roots and  worms and insects; a mole was burrowing a tunnel and he could feel their small satisfactions and its mole-ness, and below there was more soil, and below that, coffins,  and below them more earth and then rock strata.  Thought saw that somehow consciousness had expanded, and that the corner occupied by itself appeared small and mean by comparison.   Thought wondered what it all meant…

Editors' Choice 2009: La Esperanza by Rodney Nelsestuen

Nelsestuen has an MFA in Writing from Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota. He has studied with novelists Sandra Benitez and Linda Rice; poet Deborah Keenan; writers Honor Moore, Sheila O'Connor, Larry Sutin, Barrie Jean Borich and Carol Bly; and playwright John Fenn. A member of the Loft Literary Center where he serves as an instructor, Nelsestuen won the 2008 Loft Mentor Series competition. He has also been a judge in the Minnesota Book Awards Contest in Memoir and Creative Nonfiction.

La Esperanza

Rodney Nelsestuen

Between the statues of Saint Francis and Saint Valentine the old man pats his donkey while he studies Miguel and Alicia at the tour stand. Under the coming heat of midday, her mother’s disapproval of Miguel, and Alicia’s own doubts of both his prospects and his fidelity, Miguel protests. He is no worse than the others. And as for prospects, he will soon own a piece of the agency. Alicia fears Miguel’s flight when he himself comes to see the truth of it.

The old man ties red and yellow paper flowers to his donkey’s halter. A sturdy beast, the saddle blanket is for a larger animal and has the tipica red and yellow Aztec weave. A bright green and black design in the netted hemp cinch holds his saddle in place. The old man hangs a sombrero from the saddle horn where Miguel and Alicia turn as its rhinestones flash in the sun. The Polaroid around his neck swings side to side as he swats flies from the donkey’s eyes as if he didn’t know Polaroid is a poor choice in cameras.  

Alicia feels the tick of time in her midriff, once hoping to entice an American tourist for more than what attracts them. And surely American men speak of love while their eyes grow wide with the vision of her straddling them as the dark girls do in lap dances in the strip bars near the border. She fingers her crucifix.

Miguel leans over and shakes his finger. She looks down. He touches that same finger to her chin and pulls her head upward until their eyes meet. The tension goes out of him as she reaches for his cheek with her fingers while the flies have left the little donkey’s eyes.

The old man surveys the lack of shade at midday, wipes the donkey’s sweat from around its eyes and checks the film of which there is abundance.

Alicia’s polo shirt has its collar turned up under the sweep of hair held up by the comb. Her great, dark hair: the casual suspension within the comb’s grasp – except the carefully loosened swatch that falls across her eyes at propitious moments during Miguel’s scoldings, when a fingered removal and sideways glance take the terrible air from his anger.

The old man considers the true power of the sun. Age brings the wisdom: to take the donkey, to go home, to rest and not bear the fretful heat of midday. There are no dollars for there are no tourists and the donkey thirsts although he never speaks of it. Alicia smiles as they pass from the space between the statues of St. Francis and St. Valentine. The swatch of hair falls over the eye that tears up.

Miguel is angry. A seediness of age beyond his years settles across his face under the hot sun. Alicia, chastened in his disapproval, cannot escape hope in the memory of the old man. That, and the care for the donkey.