Hertha had on a string of pearls she hadn’t worn in years. She was looking rather nice, standing there in the vestibule wearing an old, though elegant, black velvet dress, her hair neatly curled and tied in place with a bright ribbon, her shiny NS-Frauenschaft emblem pinned over her heart; but the expression on her face was worried and angry. Hamlet wasn’t going to wait. Wolfgang, who was running late, had just emerged from his room, buttoning his jacket. Seeing her, he frowned and stalked quickly down the hallway, as though he meant to build enough momentum to push her out the door.

“Ready at last?” she said with a touch of sarcasm as he came toward her.

Wolfgang shrugged. He was wearing his good suit with a red and yellow kerchief-tie pulled through a signet ring. She put a finger to it and said, “Hanning, you look like one of those nigger musicians.”

“That’s the idea,” he mumbled. He grasped his coat from its peg and threw it on. “Tschüß, Paps,” he called into the parlor, where his father was sulking, and followed Hertha out the door.

Neither of them spoke as they went, though Hertha glanced furiously at her watch at regular intervals. It was a beautiful spring night; the scent of damp, thawing earth filled the street, the Alsterbach lay still as glass, and the trees rattled and waved their buds in the night air. Hertha’s legs pumped as they hurried toward the station—a tram had pulled up with a screech as they approached. She sat on a bench by the window on the way to the Neustadt district while Wolfgang stood, apart from her, showing her his back, one hand clutching the leather strap, the other thrust into his pocket. At length Hertha tried to talk about the play; a friend of hers, a woman named Aline Bußmann, an actress who had played Ophelia a dozen times, had recommended the production. Wolfgang didn’t care. None of it mattered to him: not Hamlet, not this famous Aline, about whom his mother couldn’t stop talking. All he could think about was the Staatstheater. The place would be stifling if it were full—and it would be, for all the world turned out for master Shakespeare. Wolfgang imagined himself sitting pressed in between his mother and some overfed Hamburg bourgeois, thought of the smell of all those bodies sweating in the theater’s hot air, and knew exactly why Fritz had suggested that The boy get some culture.

At the theater stop, an elderly man pointed at the ring that held Wolfgang’s tie and made a cutting motion with his index. Baring his teeth, he muttered something unintelligible as mother and son stumbled forward to the doors.

“Jesus-God,” Hertha said once they were out in the street. “I told you—about your tie.”

Wolfgang shrugged as though he didn’t care, and strode on ahead of her, hoping that his speed might hide that he trembled with anger—and fear—beneath his coat. He kept on until they arrived at the theater, where an usher asked him to stop until Hertha had produced their tickets. Mother and son took their seats, side by side, each of them brimming with fury, and neither wanting reconciliation; Hertha clutched her bag in her lap and breathed deeply, letting the air out in sharp blasts through her nose. From time to time she fussed with the program, while Wolfgang grasped the armrests of his chair as though he were seated in a fast-spinning carnival ride. Two older women, sisters by the look of it, sat down beside Wolfgang, the one nearest to him constantly touching a lace handkerchief to her nose while the other chattered on about their last visit. On the far side, by Hertha, a man in uniform and his wife were discussing the meaning of the play. Nothing to do with any of that silly Oedipus pap, according to the husband.

Wolfgang made a show of yawning and stretching, for the benefit of both his mother and their closest neighbors. His own performance finished, he propped his chin in his hand in a final show of boredom.

At last the lights dimmed and the curtain lifted, revealing a scene of snow and ice, of towering, jagged rock that on second glance revealed itself to be a castle. Wolfgang did not recognize at first how he had straightened up and taken notice. He hadn’t paid much heed to the palace guards huddled inside their coats, or to the armored ghost who challenged them. Hamlet was a different matter. For almost two hours he forgot the snuffling woman beside him; his mother’s tense body and indeed, every other living soul within that great room had, for him, ceased to exist. Hamlet was played by a slender, dark-haired fellow, not much more than twenty, dressed in simple black clothes and tall boots, who wore a tired expression that Wolfgang could read even from well beyond the orchestra box. He didn’t much care if he couldn’t quite follow the language, or even the intricacies of the story, but O, what a glorious man! Wolfgang’s mouth opened softly, his lips moving as though he were speaking—just to have felt what it was like to be that person, there on the stage, as though he were just now remembering that this was the man he had always wanted to become.

When the interval came, Wolfgang disengaged quickly from his mother and hurried out to the top of the stairs. He felt as though he were shivering, whether from cold or from excitement he couldn’t be sure. The grand hall was full of people, young and old, all of them dressed, as Hertha was, in their finest clothing and jewelry. A number of SS officers stood out, their black uniforms visible among all the colorful clothing, the gold braids and beribboned field gray of the regular army. The crowd parted as a group of four of them passed through, the chant of the Hitler-greeting following them as they crossed the floor. Party armbands and uniforms abounded—officials and senior officers out with their wives. The men boomed their laughter across the space, slurped from their champagne bowl, and filled the air with their smoke and talk, while their wives clutched their bags and sipped from their own glasses, grinning, their sequined shoulders flickering in the light. A woman standing on the staircase, her long auburn hair spilling to her waist and a pale fox stole wound about her neck exclaimed, Moritz, darling!—her voice surprisingly deep and loud, as she took a tall young man by the elbow and pulled him in close for three kisses. Among all these faces Wolfgang did not see Hertha. He wasn’t looking for her.

He ensconced himself between two marble columns. He needed to think. What was this play doing to him? His legs felt strained and weak, as though he’d been sprinting for the duration of the first three acts. His body felt as though it was no longer his, but having fed on Hamlet’s speeches, he had now become something other than the small-framed, hamster-cheeked Wolfgang Borchert. Unconsciously he had adopted the pose in which he had first seen the actor, head angled downward; eyes up, focused, so it seemed, on a particular face in one of the loge boxes; lips at an angle, as though in an angry sneer; hands down at his sides, formal, the tips of his fingers touching the seam of his trousers; his back erect, heels together, toes pointed slightly out.

He had been standing that way for several minutes when his mother found him.

“Hanning?” she asked, as though she were no longer sure of her own son’s face. “I thought perhaps you’d gone home.”

“No, mother,” he said, finding in his voice some new, borrowed quality.

“Don’t you like the play?”

He looked away from her. Hertha’s voice hurt him, though he wasn’t sure why. She said something else, and he turned again. She irritated him; her interruption of his fantasy, her very arrival and continued presence, spoiled every thought and emotion, broke his joy down into anger, and her persistence made it all seem as though this were exactly what she’d wanted. After a time she asked him, “Shall we return to our seats?”

Wolfgang followed her, unspeaking, uncooperative, as though she were dragging him off to school. Once seated she asked, “It’s a lovely production, isn’t it?”

What did she know of lovely productions? he wanted to ask. And what did he care if it was lovely? Couldn’t she see that the play was meant to be anything but? He trembled, waiting for the curtain to rise, eager as he’d never been for anything before in his life to discover how it all came to an end.

The play resumed, rescuing him from further talk, but on the way home, Hertha pressed him.

“You haven’t said anything about the play.”

Wolfgang pretended not to hear her.

“Hanning, I—”

“Don’t say anything!” he growled, turning his back on her as he did. Why wouldn’t she leave him alone? It was as though she had sensed this new feeling that was blooming inside him and sought to stamp it out by keeping him engaged. Their entire trip home was punctuated by her attempts and his deflections. A few people seated close by stared at the odd scene in disbelief, as though they’d never experienced a mother and son who didn’t always get along.

Fritz had gone to bed, though it wasn’t late when they arrived home. In the parlor they found an empty port glass and a full ashtray. A book laid sprung open atop the coffee table. By the look of it, he hadn’t left the sofa all evening. While Hertha busied herself with picking up Fritz’s mess, Wolfgang pulled down a volume of Schlegel’s Shakespeare—it didn’t matter to him which one, the first he could find—and went to his room, without bothering to say good night.

by Matthew Yost

My mother has dreams about choking on things. Peach pits, credit cards, her wedding ring, anything. I used to find her in the kitchen in the middle of the night, half-asleep, eating bread, which supposedly helps if you swallow something odd. That’s why, at first, I thought it was all a dream. Because of my mother. I thought, maybe it runs in the family.

 

The day it started, I kissed Bradley goodbye and watched his car move away down the street. Bradley is my husband whom I met on a subway. I noticed him because he had on this very interesting tie with a topographical map of Antarctica spreading down like a spider’s web, with the South Pole at the bottom. And so I said Hello.

 

I have always wanted to go to Antarctica. I think it would be very clean, and very quiet.

 

An hour later my mother called. Her voice was breathy and short. She said she’d been gassed while getting coffee in a Cuban restaurant. Someone spilled bleach into a heating vent, and all these invisible, burning fumes were seeping everywhere, and burned her lungs.

 

I took the train out to the house. She was lying on the couch in the sun room, and her face looked pale and slippery. I put my hand on her forehead and her eyes rolled back, just the whites, sort of fluttering. In this sleepy mumbling voice, thick like chocolate, she said, I think I swallowed that jewel.

 

I said, What jewel?

 

She said, That jewel I had in my mouth. Didn’t I have a jewel in my mouth?

 

She started to cry.

 

It turned out they had given her some antibiotics and something for the pain, and she was disoriented. I took her upstairs and put her to bed. I had to leave her high heels on, because the ankle straps were very complicated and I wanted to get home before Bradley did. I was glad I went, though—my mother had this wonderful black and white photograph of Tokyo that I wanted but hadn’t had a chance to get. Bradley likes me to be home during the day when he calls. He has a very stressful job.

 

The photograph of Tokyo was taken from above, and the people in the street look like a moving river. I have always wanted to go to Japan.

 

I got home later than I expected, and Bradley was waiting for me. He was very angry. He has a nice face and a good nose, but when he gets angry his chin turns bright purple and starts to quiver. We had words.

 

I went up to my room, and immediately I could tell things weren’t quite right. It’s nothing you would notice at first, just a sudden sense that something was off, and that’s when I realized. The rug. It was on the ceiling! Just stuck up there, like someone had glued it down! It’s one of those oriental rugs, rough like the fur of a horse, and very heavy. Well, I didn’t say anything to Bradley. He has enough to worry about without having to hear about the strange goings-on in my bedroom. He sleeps in his study most of the time, because he works so hard. I decided I would just wait to tell him until the time was right.

 

The next day I stayed home and watched one of those National Geographic specials on the Amazon. It was fascinating. I have always wanted to go to Brazil. It’s just terrible, what’s happening to the rainforest down there. They’re cutting down more and more trees every day. They call the Amazon “The Lungs of the World.” They say that when enough trees are gone, the world is going to fill up with bad air. I got so upset about the bad air that I walked around the rest of the day breathing very carefully. I just couldn’t shake the feeling that the air was already turning bad, and that any second I’d be flat out on the floor, gasping like a spilled goldfish. And then—I went upstairs to lie down, and my dresser and my desk were both on the ceiling. Just hanging there. As casual as can be.

 

I wasn’t surprised. I almost expected it. I was a bit startled, of course, but I had some sweeping to do in the bedroom, and after I cleaned for a while, humming a forgetful little tune, I guess I just got used to it.

 

I didn’t mention it to Bradley that day, either. When he got home he was wanting to have sex right on the living room floor, where I was clipping out food recipes from Bon Apetit, and I felt a little hesitant about bringing it up right then. And the next day, well, that was the really amazing day. Bradley was away on a business trip, so I took my mother to a matinee at one of those old revival theaters. The whole place smelled like nesting birds, sort of stuffy and warm, dry and floury and a bit like unwashed scalp. All theaters smell that way. My mother was breathing in little gusts, sipping from an inhaler every few minutes. And I remember this—it was so strange—she took my hand while the lights went down and she said,

 

Louisa, nothing bothers you. Even when you were a baby. You never cried. Where is it?

 

I said, Where’s what?

 

She said, Your pain. You must have swallowed it. Eat bread, Louisa, eat bread.

 

They were very strange, the things she said.

 

I guess she’s right, though, I don’t get bothered.

 

I suppose I’m just a happy person.

 

 

When I got home, I immediately went to my room, because I wanted to see if anything else had happened. I rushed upstairs and flung the door open, and sure enough—everything was up there. My bed, my little night table, everything. And on the night table, there was a glass of water. Full. Even on the walls, everything had been flipped. My mirror, my photograph of Tokyo, and the little hook by my bed where I hang my bathrobe—you’ll never believe this, but the bathrobe was hanging upwards, towards the ceiling. Really. It was like—it was like what I used to think Australia would look like, when I was a little girl. I thought that if I ever went down there, everything would be hanging off the bottom of the world, just barely attached, and you would have to dangle like a chimp, swinging yourself around from town to town. I have always wanted to go to Australia.

 

Here’s what happened. I put one foot against the wall. Just to see. I leaned on it a little, and I felt a little bit of a pull, and then there I was, standing on the wall. I walked over and stepped onto the ceiling.

 

I went over to the bed, took off my shoes, and dropped them, to see where they would go. They fell at my feet. I drank some water from the glass on the night table, and then I sat on the bed, looking out the window. This is where everything changes. If you’re upside down on the ceiling and all the furniture is upside down with you, nothing looks different at all. In fact, it looks just exactly the same. But through the window—

 

I don’t know if I can explain it. Snow. Think about snow. Picture the way it falls. When I watch the snow from my window, it comes flying up from below thick and silent, like a flock of startled birds, lifting off a telephone wire or the roof of a house, and moving as if they are one body. And I know that if I opened the window and stepped out, that they would carry me up, and I wouldn’t fall.

By Alyssa Knickerbocker

Three pairs of curious eyes stared out at us from the short yellow bus coming to a stop in front of my neighbors’ driveway. The bus driver gave the horn two friendly toots and Phillip, my neighbor, shot out his front door, massive backpack swinging wildly from his person, and disappeared onto the bus. Mrs. Wright, Phil’s mom and neighborhood MILF, followed him out the door and halfway down the path waving goodbye. As she turned to go inside, she noticed us and yelled “Good morning,” bending down for the newspaper. Mom had been torturing me with her mandatory first-day-of-school photograph, this final one meant to join the dozen or so already marching down the hallway wall. She waved back to Mrs. Wright and crossed the lawn for a chat. I was excused.

The program for special needs kids in my high school was called Option Three. Upon gleaning this bit of trivia our freshman year, me and Ronnie, my best friend, posed the question to each other that if being retarded was the third option, what, pray tell, were the others? Tucked away on an inconspicuous bench in the courtyard every day at lunch we developed a system of classmate classification. It was very scientific.

Option Ones, Double O’s we liked to call them, were the superstars—gifted in some way or at least perky enough to fake it. The athletes, the cheerleaders, the bright, the enthusiastic, the joiners. As a rule, we hated Option Ones.

Option Twos were your regular kids just getting by. The guy in your shop class who hoped nobody noticed that he only had two pairs of jeans which he alternated throughout the week—blue, blue, black, blue, blue. Your frizzy haired lab partner with persistent milk breath. The fifth (out of five) chair flautist in the band who cried during geometry tests.

Mostly, we were surrounded by people of this stature. Despite being admittedly clever bastards, Ronnie and I couldn’t, in good faith, classify ourselves as anything other than Option Two. Ronnie was fat but, despite his girth, had a way of disappearing into his surroundings. People were always running into him and then looking up in shock, as if he was at fault for merely existing. And even though my parents had made the infinitely wise decision to hold me back in the first grade, I was still one of the smallest guys in my class. I’d never been a stellar student in anything, with the possible exception of drawing and some late-in-the-game success in math. I had oily hair and zits so bad I resented having to leave the house. Options Twos were our people.

Option Threes, like my neighbor Phil, rode the short bus. With the exception of having developed a gang sign, an upside-down “OK,” that we imagined them waving out the window of their dropped bus after drive-by shootings of rival O-Three programs, Ronnie and I generally ignored these kids. They kept to themselves, which insulated them from the majority of teasing going on. In our school, we observed, it was only when someone tried to cross the Option borders that kids got mean. The wiser of us could sense the underlying peacekeeping force at work and tried to stay content with our respective plots, hopeful that college, and in my case art school, would sort things out fairly and justly.

At least that was the feeling I had after that last first day of school. Ronnie and I were reading comic books over bowls of cereal when Mom got home from work that afternoon.

“How’d it go?” she asked excitedly, all but sitting down on Ronnie’s lap until she noticed him sitting there. She ruffled his hair as an apology.

So encouraged by my day, I actually answered her, “Fine.” I didn’t even growl my response so as to prevent further inquiry. Ronnie nodded in agreement as he slurped up his cocoa-tinted milk.

Mom began sifting through the pile of mail on the counter, then stopped in thought and pointed an envelope at me.

“Oh. Mrs. Wright asked if you’d be interested in tutoring Phil once or twice a week.”

My spoon clanged loudly when it fell out of my hand and into my bowl. I looked up at her in disbelief and, knowing he would be thoroughly enjoying this at my expense, avoided looking at Ronnie.

Phillip and I had been buddies as kids. Young kids. My family moved to the neighborhood when I was four, and even though I knew Phil was different, I never really cared because he was such a good time, always ready to laugh. We ran around the neighborhood like savages, pillaging the woods behind our subdivision.

It was only when he went to school full time that Phil was really separated from the rest of us. His parents spent all sorts of money testing his brain. Eventually, as far as I could tell, they decided he’d be better off being the smartest of the Threes rather than the stupidest of the regular kids. It was about the same time that my parents held me back a grade, but Phil and I were too young to process our feelings about it together. All I knew was that from then on he rode the short bus, and we stopped hanging out.

“I told her I thought it was a great idea,” Mom said, smiling at me, eyebrows raised in anticipated agreement. She never gave up hope that I’d one day wake up and not resent her existence.

“You’re kidding.”

“No. Phillip needs help in math. You’re good at math.”

“Mom. He’s retarded. Are you sure he even takes math?”

Her face was still giving me the benefit of the doubt. I hated her for it. At the same time, though, she knew what she was doing.

“Tim.” She liked to mimic my tone, especially in front of my friends. “He’s not retarded. He takes math.”

I exhaled dramatically. “Do I have to?” I finally looked to Ronnie to make sure that he was getting the record of my potential indentured servitude straight.

“Well, of course you don’t have to. But I think it’d be good for colleges to see something other than ‘Japanese anime expert’ on your applications this fall. Yours too,” she nodded at Ronnie. She picked up our bowls and took them to the sink.

“And it’d be nice for you to earn some money,” she added.

“They’d pay me?” The force was strong with this one.

She nodded over her shoulder. “And we should talk about those applications,” she said over the noise of the running water.

And with that my mood was dampened.  The fact that she had no faith in my creative skills was one thing. She could be proven wrong. Revealing this in front of my best friend was something altogether different.

“I’ve got it covered,” I said, slinking off the bar stool, motioning to Ronnie that it was time to go. He followed me down the hall.

“Honey,” she called after me, “I just want you to keep your options open!”

The following Thursday night, having agreed to try the tutoring strictly out of monetary necessity, I knocked on the Wrights’ front door. I waited. When no one answered, I rang the bell and heard an annoyed voice from deep within the house yell “Mom.” A few seconds later Mrs. Wright, seemingly engulfed in the full glory of dinner preparations and never looking better, opened the door. She was wiping her hands on a dish towel and gestured me inside.

“Phil’s in his room. You can go on back.”

“Is his still the—”

“—first door on the right.”

“Right.”

I walked toward the familiar hall but was surprised to see that the Wrights had updated their family room furniture with these oversized modern couches and a huge TV. The last time I was here, their family room looked just like ours did and still does—beat up old sofas in itchy plaid fabric with a TV not even worth watching.

I knocked on Phil’s door.

“Come in already!” The voice was still annoyed.

I cautiously opened it.

Head buried in a text book, Phillip was sitting at the biggest desk I’d ever seen in a kid’s room. It wrapped around two walls and was covered in electronic equipment in various stages of disrepair. Model airplanes hung from every available inch of space on the ceiling, and he had the exact same poster that I had hanging over my bed on the wall above his. It was of a young Yasmine Bleeth, during her Baywatch years. I liked knowing that somewhere along the way, our appreciation of female television talent had developed in parallel even if our ability to critically read and write had not.

Phil stood up when he saw it was me.

“Oh. Sorry. I thought you were my mom. She’s driving me,” rolling his eyes for effect, “crazy.”

“Mine too.”

He moved some books off a chair and pulled it over next to his.

“Cool room,” I said, looking up at Yasmine.

“Thanks,” he said, following my gaze. A mischievous smile stretched across his face, and I noticed the sizable gap he used to have between his front teeth had been orthodontured out.

He sat back down at his desk, stared at his book, and immediately looked frustrated. I sat next to him and looked over his shoulder.

“So, what math are you in?” I asked.

“Pre-algebra. I hate it,” he said, drawing out the word “hate” and, again, rolling his eyes.

“Yeah, algebra’s a bitch. Who do you have?”

“Mr. Stevens.”

“Ah, he’s the worst. Everyone calls him Euclid.”

Phil stared blankly back at me. “Is that who you had?”

“Naw. I had Miss Dougherty, but my friend had Stevens and said he was a hard ass.”

“He’s OK,” he said, nervously looking away.

“Dude, did you hear about the time he passed out in the middle of a class?” I persisted.

Phil shook his head and looked slightly alarmed.

“It was a couple years ago. He just flops down in the middle of some lecture on variables or some shit, right in front of the board. So some cheerleader runs to the office for help, but no one knows what to do with him in the meantime, right? So this one guy, Gene Hunter, you know him, he bends down and crosses Mr. Stevens’ arms over his chest like he was dead. And they all just stand around in a circle looking down over him.”

Eyebrows raised in anticipated agreement that it was the best thing to ever happen in our young lives, I waited for the story to sink in. Phil didn’t think it was funny. When Ronnie recounted the event to me shortly after it happened, I laughed so hard I think I soiled myself.

Amidst the dozens of phone calls that Phillip received on his apparently private line over the course of the next hour, we went through his homework problems and a practice quiz at the end of the chapter. He answered each incoming call immediately, said a couple of cryptic words and then hung up sporting the same mischievous smile that Yasmine had seemed to induce.

When we had finished for the evening, I said good night to Mr. and Mrs. Wright, who were sitting at opposite ends of their fancy sofa watching the news. Mrs. Wright followed me out the front door and handed over a small white envelope.

“Thanks for coming tonight, Tim.”

“No problem,” I said, peeking into the envelope.

She looked around uneasily and lowered her voice.

“It would mean a lot to Larry and me if Phillip didn’t find out that we’re paying you for the tutoring,” she said, looking past me at her front door. “He still thinks of you two as friends, and,” her voice trailed off.

I instantly felt sorry for both her and Phil.

“Sure, Mrs. Wright. I’ll see you next Thursday,” I said, waving goodbye with the envelope. I walked across the grass to my house. My parents were sitting together on our crusty old couch. Mom looked up from her newspaper.

“How’d it go?”

“Classic,” Ronnie said, completely satisfied with himself. We were headed downstairs into B007, our school’s attempt at an artists’ grotto. Its windows looked out onto the baseline of the tennis courts, which, on windy days, provided even the most diligent of us with plenty of distraction in the form of the girls’ billowing short skirts.

“I told you the O-Threes fuck like rabbits. Brad Kennedy’s mom is the accountant for the Center for the Retarded, and he says that she says that they’re all on birth control because they’re all banging the shit out of each other.”

“Shut up, dude. Phillip’s not retarded.”

“Rabbits,” he demanded.

“It’s just a poster. I’m sure he’s not getting any,” I said with waning conviction.

“You need to find out what those calls were all about. I bet there was some nasty shit going down and you didn’t even know about it.”

“Whatever,” I said, settling in over the collection of ink drawings of which my portfolio was composed.

“O-Three girls aren’t inhibited like regular chicks, dude,” Ronnie said. “They’re down.”

I spent every afternoon that fall in B007 working on my portfolio and developing a quiet but profound crush on the backside of Mandy Evans, a junior and apparently new to our school. I didn’t know much, if anything, about her. She had a strong forehand, which alone probably made her Option One material, but I gave her the benefit of the doubt.

I spent most Thursday evenings with Phillip, each time accumulating more insight into his world. He had a nervous energy that manifested itself in repetition and, what felt like to me, chaos. Every night during the month of October, for example, we listened to “Hey Now, You’re an All Star” on repeat, and not really at a comfortable decibel level either. He wasn’t the jovial kid with whom I’d spent hours perched up in trees perfecting sound effects, everything from farts to incoming bullets. Instead he’d turned into some sort of parody of a teenager, like something he’d seen on television but wasn’t getting quite right.

One night late in the semester, when we were finished with his homework, Phil took me out to the garage to show me the old Mustang his dad had bought him to fix up. They had an agreement that if Phil could get a C average in all of his classes, they would let him take Driver’s Ed. He was getting close in Algebra but rolled his eyes when I asked about his other subjects. He was excited, though, because he would get to take shop the following semester and then really start working on the car.

“That’s cool,” I said and meant it. “My dad hasn’t gotten me shit.”

“But you have your license, right?”

“Yeah, but I don’t get to drive very often.” I ran my hand across the fender.

“But you can.”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

Phil moved around the car like he spent a lot of time with it. He opened the trunk to show me some of the tools his dad had given him for his birthday. He picked up a socket wrench out of the well-ordered collection and looked up at me, which he never did.

“Are you going to Winterfest?” he asked.

“Like, the dance?” I vaguely recalled our school having what I assumed to be the equivalent of a school-wide prom before winter break.

“Uh, no.”

Phil looked puzzled, disappointed. “Why not?”

It had never occurred to me to go to a school dance. “I don’t know, man. It’s just not my thing I guess.”

“Oh.” He looked hurt. I picked up a socket and put it on the end of my index finger.

“Why? Are you going?” I asked, almost afraid to hear the answer.

Phil swiveled the socket wrench around in his hand, the clicking noise filling the garage. “Maybe.”

That weekend I sequestered myself in my room in order to put the finishing touches on my portfolio for my priority schools’ early application deadlines, careful not to even acknowledge the stack of information from the junior colleges and shitty state schools that my parents had so thoughtfully amassed for me. Mom barged into my room holding the phone in her hand while I finished sealing the large yellow envelope that contained the entirety of my future well being and happiness.

“What?”

“It’s Mrs. Wright,” she said, handing me the phone.

I cleared my throat and said “Hello,” standing to close the door just in case it happened to be the day that Mrs. Wright demanded that I come over immediately so she could make a man of me yet. My mom’s foot in the doorway, however, impeded our privacy.

Phillip had told her that I had no big plans for the dance. “You see, Tim, Larry and I usually chaperone the dances, but Phillip, well, he really wants to do this one on his own, you know?” And would I mind escorting him and three friends, “just to keep an eye on things.” They would pay me, of course.

I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.

“Are you there, Tim?”

“Um, yeah, I’m here.” My voice cracked for the first time in a couple of years. “It’s just, I don’t really go to dances.” I looked up at Mom in the doorway, her face contorted to the look of “please don’t disappoint me by not being the man I know you can be” that she practices in the mirror every night to silently control me and Dad.

“But, OK, I guess so,” I agreed.

“No fucking way, dude.” Ronnie slammed his locker shut. “You’re insane for saying yes in the first place.”

“Dude, just do me this one favor. Please.”

“No. Way.” He shook his head at me like I was the Option Three. “One, I don’t go to dances. And two, definitely not with a bunch of retarded kids. Your shoe’s untied.”

I bent down to tie my shoe, and Ronnie clamped his hand on the back of my neck, holding me down. It was my own fault. We walked like that to second period.

Phil came over around 7:30 the following Saturday night. He was wearing a suit. I was in my standard uniform of jeans and a sweatshirt big enough to hide in. He helped me clean out the back of Mom’s station wagon before his best friend, Jason, arrived. He wasn’t retarded either, but I could tell that he was Option Three. He blinked incessantly, as if he was trying to forget some painful memory over and over again. He seemed relieved when his mom started to leave. She shook my hand, told us all to have fun and to be careful.

We stood around in the driveway drinking Dr Peppers, waiting for their dates. A shiny, camel colored Mercedes pulled up, and two girls, Leah and Cybil, got out of the back seat. Leah had very prominent gums but was otherwise normal looking. Cybil was extremely skinny and looked like she could use a bath. They rushed up to the guys and gave them each a hug. Apparently they were all “camp friends.”

We said goodbye to the Wrights and piled into the car, Phil in the front seat with me, Leah and Cybil flanking Jason in the back. Phil played with the radio while the girls chattered across Jason about what songs they were hoping to hear and who they were hoping would be there, a bunch of names I didn’t recognize. In the rearview mirror, Jason jovially looked back and forth between them, eyelids pressing tightly shut and releasing.

Hoping to keep a low profile, I pulled into the small parking lot on the side of the gym usually reserved for coaches or janitors. The backseat quickly emptied, but Phil stayed behind. When Jason had closed the door, Phil leaned over to me.

“Is your date meeting us here?”

“No, man. I don’t have one,” I said, maybe sounding a little defensive.

“No wonder you don’t like dances,” he said matter-of-factly, and hurried out of the car. He put his arm around Leah and waited for me to catch up.

I could hear Ronnie’s voice having a field day with the situation so made up some excuse to go to the bathroom so as not to enter my first, and what turned out to be my only, high school dance with a group of highly functioning special-ed kids. After spending enough time hidden within the safety of the handicapped stall without it looking like I was taking a massive shit, I took a deep breath and walked out of the bathroom.

I started down the hall toward the gym just behind a big pack of Option Ones. A girl in a short green sequined dress dropped her shiny gold purse on the floor. Having etched the shape of those legs into my mind, I quickly recognized them as Mandy’s. Her date noticed that she had stopped, but kept walking, announcing to his buddies in a poorly executed brogue, “Arrrgh, the leprechaun dropped her pot-o-gold!” Laughter erupted.

I bent down to pick up the bag at the same time she did, shaky on her high heels. She fell slightly into me and took the purse out of my hand.

She said “Thanks,” in what sounded like a sincere way. Up close I could smell beer on her breath, and her makeup made her look like a raccoon that had had a long night. She steadied herself with the help of my shoulder and pulled up her strapless dress. Then before turning to walk into the gym, she stared at me for a second, which made me self conscious about my skin.

“Sure,” I managed to say as we walked towards the gym. I opened the door for us. She made a beeline for something and disappeared into the crowd. The dance floor was buzzing, mostly populated by tight swarms of Option Ones suggestively grinding into each other.

I was almost relieved to see Phil and his crew standing to one side of the floor with a few other Option Threes. Phil saw me across the crowd and nodded but kept his arm around Leah. I casually walked over to him and asked if everything was OK. He said they were fine. Leah was gesticulating wildly as she recounted the story of how a “DS” had asked her to dance at her school’s homecoming.

I leaned into Phil and whispered, “What’s a DS?”

“Down Syndrome.” He rolled his eyes.

“Ah,” I nodded. I guess Ronnie and I had missed Option Four, the kids Option Threes make fun of.

I wandered around the gym, avoiding the dance floor, casually looking for signs of Mandy. I spilled Hawaiian Punch on my sweatshirt and had a seat on the bleachers and watched the room fill up. From a distance, Phil’s group looked like everyone else. They danced to the slow songs but mostly just stood around in the same spot trying to look like they were having fun.

The occasional female shrill could be heard over the loud music. When the first girl left the gym in tears, I made a mental to note to recount the occurrence in detail to Ronnie the following day. When the second girl left the gym in tears, I looked at my watch and decided I’d had enough.

Phil and his friends needed to take pictures before we left, so I waited next to the woman taking the money and watched the couples standing together in front of the wintry backdrop smiling nicely for posterity. The couples handed over checks for big packages of pictures that were to arrive by mail in six to eight weeks and then were stiffly posed together by the photographer.

Jason and Cybil then joined them for a group shot, but before the photographer could take the picture, Phil yelled my name, much louder than was required to be heard over the music, and waved me over to join them. I was caught off guard, like the photographer’s assistant had sucker punched me in the nuts.

I shook my head and said, “You guys go ahead! You look great!”

But Jason, Cybil, Leah, and even the photographer vehemently agreed and were all waving and yelling that I should come be in the picture. I looked around, certain that the whole gym was watching and realizing that the quiet guy in their homeroom class wasn’t just quiet but actually retarded, and good for him for making a B on that last math test, and at least he can draw pretty well. Mandy Evans was surely realizing that the little guy who had helped her with her purse has special needs and wasn’t that sweet of him. In the blur, though, I recognized only Milk Breath, also standing in the picture line, with a man who had to be in his thirties. Her usually frizzy hair was tamed into a stylish twist, and tucked into the side of her handsome felon, she looked happy, confident. She smiled at me.

I was shaking my head no but then looked up at Phillip, whose face had lost its merriment. My heart sank, and my balls retracted up into my throat. The group cheered as I stepped in front of the white sheet and took my place next to Phil, who promptly put his arm around my shoulder, merriment restored. I led the way out of the gym and into the cold night where two girls consoled another who was crying.

On the way home, we went to Sonic for cherry limeades, and the boys got to first base at Leah’s front door. I tried not to watch. When we got home the boys got out and said good night.

Taped to my front door was an envelope with my name on it. I was opening it as I walked in and found Mom sitting on the couch reading a book. She looked up at me.

“How’d it go?”

by Vicki Vaughn

From the Flatmancrooked Winter 09/10 Poet-In-Residence, Eleni Sikelianos, comes selected poems, chosen by the poet from her body of work. These posts will appear every Sunday for the next ten weeks, after which a new Poet-In-Residence will be introduced and his or her work featured. This number 9 of 10. The poems featured in previous weeks can be found here: Week 1, Week 2, Week 3, Week 4, Week 5, Week 6, Week 7, Week 8

This image-poem is from a series of experiments with minutes and hours, and is contained in my most recent book, Body Clock. When I wrote these, I was pregnant, and thinking a lot about the relationship between bodily form and time.  I began drawing “portraits” of first minutes, then hours, writing notes as I drew.  A minute had to be drawn within in a minute (which is harder than it sounds), and an hour within in hour.  The typed language at the bottom of the hour is the “residue” — the language that is left after the image-poem.–Eleni

Fourth Hour

Fourth Experiment with an Hour (Fourth Hour’s Residue)

Language hangs from the hour in crystalline repose

to set it in motion must we

Its stalk is feathered & gay

I saw this hour before it arrived shoeless speechless helpless

medusa dripping poison A’s   each B a sting a stamp because

because daylight savings saddens the ghost

it’s amazing how hungry an hour can be   Hand me something

to pillow the hour, protect it   from its own devouring minutes

I had to do things with this hour I would never have wished

In the hour’s-heart’s garden of earthly delights

A minute sat waiting on a rock with gnashing teeth

The human drips from herself where she hangs in time her

minutes are bleeding   her bream   this broken-mouthed minute

as if the minute   as if the minute

broken-mouthed machine

 

(more…)

The following is an excerpt from Daniel Grandbois’ The Hermaphrodite: An Hallucinated Memoir, Green Integer, 2010.

SIMONE’S surrender commingled with the cotton fibers of her panties, staining them with fertility icons and incomprehensible crystalline formations like snow. Oceans can be drawn into glaciers to reveal connections between lands.

Kree lifted her hips and pushed her dress beneath them. When he forced his breath through her panties, something tickled in her, but it seemed bodies away, dinosaur bodies away. The sort of tickling you can never get enough of, yet, if you did, you’d be crushed under the weight of dinosaurs.

He rested his head against her thigh. The nest of her pubic hair showed through her panties. A single hair poked out. Kree toyed with it, then traced the contours of her sex, which gave off heat. He snuck a finger under the fabric.

Simone got an ice cube from the freezer, popped it into her mouth and calved it down.

(Do you see Australopithecus, the first upright man, beating back an advancing glacier with the thighbone of a saber-toothed cat? Or, such a cat burying its tooth bones into the head of such a man and dragging him to a cave, dragging him by the bone? Millions of years later, a Homo sapiens will find the skull with holes in it like a bowling ball and imagine.)

Simone leaned over Kree and put his bone in her mouth.

(In his lifetime, Kree’s balls may produce enough semen to fill an oil tanker. How gung-ho would the American government be to protect a ship like that through the Straits of Hormuz? And what if an enemy blew a hole in her? We could have an unprecedented semen spillage in the Straits of Hormuz. Would it be toxic to the fish and plant life? Maybe the little sperm cells would swim around and fertilize everything in sight. Would the spillage remain a roving blob, or would it solidify to form a new island, a vacation paradise with milk-white beaches, where deluded Christian women could go and upon their return claim they were bearing the children of immaculate conceptions?)

“I’m thinking about our perceptual isolation,” Kree said. “People hear one another as they hear kelp growing in the ocean—”

Simone touched his lips. As if riding a frog’s curled tongue, words sprang from her mouth to catch the flies buzzing in Kree’s ear and give him a wet-willy besides.

He rolled to his side. She hugged him from behind. Her eyelids dripped down her eyes like wax down a candle. She took hold of his penis as she was falling asleep, as if it were the handle on the door to her dreams.

THEY walked to Pearl Street, Boulder’s pedestrian mall, where grew the happy hair of hippies, granolas and deadheads; where foot bags were knee’d and ankle’d to noodling jam music blasting from portable stereos; where jugglers punned and passed the hat; yogis folded themselves into Plexiglas boxes; and mediums mediated via crystals, coins, and cards. Businesspeople and tourists were most numerous, but they didn’t own the place. Members of a makeshift band on the courthouse lawn fiddled with pawnshop guitars and mandolins or beat on bongos or congas, once in a while hitting on a song they all knew. Neil Young’s, “Cortez the Killer,” sputtered to life like Frankenstein’s monster and bade Kree to sit in the grass and close his eyes. He heard his father’s voice guiding him through the desert. As for Simone, the song made a tear evacuate one of her ducts. Pierced by the hot rays of noon, which danced like toothpick puppets on her half-closed lashes, the tear vanished down her cheek.

Later, saying little, Simone and Kree strolled past cartoonish storefronts; hammock, kite and incense shops; art galleries; bookstores; carts studded with handmade jewelry or smothered in floppy hats; and children climbing statues of toads. A four-year-old skipped ahead of her parents, her gait flirting innocently with gravity. Gravity lost control and sent its semen reeling, impregnating the girl’s gait. She fell to the street and scraped her knees. Two fat squirrels chased each other around the limbs of an oak. One kept trying to fuck the other. A cat watched from below with feigned disinterest. A common fly flew by. Simone pinched it. Boulder’s bugs will let you do that. They’ll turn the other cheek if you swat. They’re rag dolls, living beyond the confines of their bodies, beyond the panic of corporeal death.

Simone and Kree sat on a bench. Before them, a man with a saxophone, looking like a sack of dirt on his folding chair, his bald head absorbing the day’s last light. He didn’t care much for finishing songs. He blew a few lines and then stopped and looked around, occasionally nodding to a passerby.

Her head on Kree’s shoulders, Simone imagined preparing a mold from his nose and using it to shape candles.

SIMONE and Kree on a grassy slope, his hand under her blouse. Her nipple hardened at the speed of trees—sentimental sapling to resolute oak. Truth hitched a ride on the transformation.

“Where am I?” Simone asked.

“Where you’ve always been.”

“Good. That’s where I’ll stay. And where are you?”

“Here,” said Kree, “but I’m going.”

His fingers on her breast brought out his sun. It revolved in him now like a slow-turning whale, one caught, perhaps, in a web of golden rope.

Simone pressed him close, wanting her skin to be smothered in Kree. She was new at saying good-bye.

Spinning toward oblivion, Kree forgot his own name. He withdrew from her arms like a ghost.

Simone got up and walked away, a thick honey-tear pushing out of her duct all the Kree that had coursed through her veins.

By Daniel Grandbois

Round and round again; the Piper felt his tired old muscles twitch. One more job to winch him back from the edge of endless sleep. And this job, they promised, would be easy, and he was grateful, but right now his fingers clicked on the steering wheel and he frowned at the dusty windscreen. He was lost, and roundabouts frustrated him. He circled slowly, roads and lights and indecipherable signposts peeling steadily away into the night. Rain began to fall; the windscreen smeared and the road dissolved before him in a glassy wet mess. Horns blared. The map gaped stupidly at him from the passenger seat. The Piper swore and swung the car out onto the next exit. One more job, and it was already giving him a headache.

In the hotel at last, exhausted and sweaty, he sat on the edge of his narrow bed and watched the steam from the kettle unwind. The television babbled to itself, and the window was sealed shut so that the moisture hung in a fug above his head. The Piper cracked his bony knuckles. His fingers, crooked and aching, were swollen with age and disuse. He peered at his reflection in the fogged-up chrome of the kettle. His skull pushed outwards, shedding hair, flaking skin, and his eyes and ears no longer worked well as he expected. He squinted. His eyes were sunken, veined, dilated. His nose hooked over his mouth like a claw, and his teeth had grown long, chipped, ruined, furred like ill-tended gravestones. His body tricked him into errors and stumbles. He was tired; so tired. He soaked his bones in the bathtub. The job, again, would remake him, wake him, untwist his creaking limbs and clear his clouded vision. He held the contract up to the flickering light and frowned at the tiny print until he fell asleep in the swell of lukewarm water, and the papers dropped from his limp fingers and fell into the bath, where the tight black words unwound and dissolved in the grey suds. His hollow and pale chest rose and fell to the uneven beat of his dreams.

Ten; that was the agreement. Ten was manageable, and the first, at least, was easy. He stood on the steps outside the hotel and polished his old pipe as he watched the traffic pass. The hard caress of his threadbare cloak unveiled the old sheen; the ebony shone with a soft glow in the morning light, born again in his calloused hand, and he smiled. He followed the slow line of yellow buses crawling and jerking their way through the bumpy streets, and waited outside a school, whistling softly to himself, coughing, touching dry lips with a dry tongue, nervous as a debutante. He thought, this is ridiculous. I’m ridiculous. He almost left. But when the first bus disgorged its wriggling cargo, he was ready: he played his song, the old chorus, trickier now, his lungs stretching and wrenching to reach the melody, the notes that trickled first and then poured out in the haunting refrain of the hunt, the ballad of a bird of prey, circling, tempting, baiting – and sweet – so sweet – though not as sweet, he thought, as it once had been. A single child, a little girl, detached herself unnoticed from the twisting mess of her classmates. She came to stand by his side, staring up at him, her eyes already wide and glazed, her mouth slack and slightly drooling. He mopped her up with a corner of his cloak and took her by the hand. They walked away, her short skips beating out a counterpoint to his slow, creaking stride.

The girl sat on the edge of the mattress and watched the television as he made up a bed for himself on the floor. Her expression didn’t change as he carefully swung her dangling legs up onto the bed and laid her back onto the pillows. He pulled the covers over her and tucked them in tight. When he bent his head low to murmur an awkward good-night, he could hear her humming his song, her voice almost imperceptible and completely off-key. Later, awake and uncomfortable on the floor, he listened to her breathe. She was too close, too near; it unsettled him. He pictured her future: bundled into a van, a stifling factory line, begging on a street-corner, strapped to a bed in a strange place, humming to herself as the men lined up. Feeling suddenly sick, he clenched his fists and forced himself to breathe deeply. It never used to be like this, he thought; it used to be easy, it used to be fast. The children were disposable, like the rats; he handed them on, he grew stronger, he sidestepped death and laughed. There was never space for imagination. What was this? These pictures – he would almost prefer the darkness. The night dragged on, and still unable to sleep, he traced out oceans and lost continents on the water-stained ceiling.

The second, third, and fourth came together as he bent his mind to the task – three siblings, twin boys, redheads, and their older, blonder, sister, skipping out the sliding doors of the supermarket to follow the Piper across the vast car park, while their mother queued up for breakfast cereals and orange squash. A bored lollipop lady waved them across the street. The fifth was a stray, collected from a cardboard encampment in an underpass, stinking of neglect and sticky with dirt and stale urine. The sixth was an infant, mewling, lifted from an unattended pram outside a shoe-store in a shopping mall. It smelt fresh, the way milk used to, creamy and frothy in the early-morning farmyard, and the Piper inhaled hungrily before tucking the child away in the folds of his cloak. But that was lazy, he chided himself, half-hearted; he hadn’t even used his song. He felt himself slipping, uncaring, and his head ached as he ticked the numbers off his list. One more job, he muttered, four to go.

The seventh and eighth ran out of church on a Sunday morning, giddy with rebellion, howling freedom at the empty skies, and were caught up by the Piper’s tune before their feet hit the pavement at the bottom of the church steps. The ninth was the flautist in a youth orchestra. The Piper listened to her practice, her narrow face concentrating on her instrument as she waited in an empty car park for her parents to come and get her. He wondered if he looked like that when he played, the passion and the focus, the beauty of the song expressed as a light in the eyes. He doubted it. He felt a deadened heaviness in his playing; a falling and a longing that wished only to put an end to the whole adventure. He thought about this child chained to the first, silent, bruised and bleeding, and he pushed the thought away. He brought the girl home and sat her with the others, placed the baby in her arms, lined them up on the side of the bed. The children’s shoulders slouched forward as they all stared at him, even the baby, its depthless eyes floating back and forth, following him as he moved about the room. The twins, in particular, he found disturbing, one deadened face echoing the other.

The room seemed to shrink to fit its occupants; the air grew stale; it smelled. The children sat wedged against one another and lay head to toe at night, pinned to the narrow bed with taut sheets. The Piper recoiled from bathing them, although they could do with a wash; when he accidentally touched their skin, it was tacky. He shuffled past them awkwardly to reach the door. Nine pairs of eyes tracked him constantly. Three times a day he fed them tinned food with a teaspoon, unable to escort this unconventional family to the hotel restaurant or a public diner. The television gabbled hysteria and panic; parents begged for answers in the newspapers; the flautist’s face peered down at him from flyers taped to lampposts and shop windows. His car radio recited lists of the missing children in a tinny voice until he switched it off. He didn’t need the names; at night he heard echoes of old screaming mobs, mothers baying for revenge, torches crackling in the darkness. His own ancient laughter. He lay there, breathless, and waited for his pounding heart to slow or stop. Outdoors, he wore his hat pulled low over his ruined face; in the hotel, he began to eat his meals sitting on the toilet. The children brushed against his legs if he stood in the bedroom.

The tenth one, the final one, he found at a playground. This was two weeks into the job, and he had barely slept. The balding grass and rusty swings filled him with a melancholy that made his bones ache harder than before. The children playing here were raucous; a smaller boy edged towards the swings and the others swarmed around him. The Piper, his song snatched away by the wind, stepped closer. The children pushed the boy and knocked him to the ground. The Piper felt their blows like wallops of freezing water slamming into his chest. He breathed hard as they punched and kicked the child, ripped his clothes, spat on him. He felt weak with the aftermath of a ferocious excitement as they retreated, leaving the boy bleeding and still in the slanted shadow of the swings. His body screamed for release; his mind, his resolve, wavered and faded. He blasted hard on his pipe and one of the attackers stopped, turned and walked slowly, deliberately, towards him. The boy’s face didn’t change, he didn’t go limp; the music died and he moved closer, frowning, his fists clenched. The Piper almost stepped backwards in sudden fear, but held his ground and waited. He saw the row of mindless ghosts on his rented bed, waiting to be bought and used and tossed away. He saw the girl’s flute, dirty and abandoned in the car park, the baby’s empty pram, the frantic mother of the twins and their sister, as sleepless now at night as the Piper himself, and he saw a faint, endless queue of children stretching across time, feeding some vast hunger in the sewers of the world, and feeding his own awful existence, again and again and again. He stared past the advancing youth to the limp boy on the ground, red blood staining his blonde hair, and as the older boy reached him, the Piper dropped his pipe and waited for the blow, offering himself up, exhausted, finished, ready. But the blow didn’t come. He opened his eyes and saw the boy standing there, less than a foot away, limp as the others, a vacant smile painting his lips, and the Piper howled, a desperate, miserable scream of frustration.

And now, while the children’s pleading images stared out from the muted television, he lined them up and smoothed them down. He combed their hair and tied their shoelaces. They raised their feet for him, lifelessly, like huge marionettes. He stood before them and played them one last tune; their cheeks flushed to sudden colour and some of them hummed along. The flautist whistled softly. The baby raised its arms and gurgled. The Piper felt lighter, almost buoyant, and the steady ache that thumped through his old body hovered on the edge of lifting. He could leave this moment – walk away, fade into quiet nothingness, let it end, leave these children behind. But when he lowered the pipe, and they sank back into blank lethargy, their eyes distant and empty, he sighed.

He herded them outside and down the street, moving quickly, afraid of attracting attention, hustling them around the corner into the alleyway where the buyers waited. His contact, ancient as the Piper himself, tall and lean and dark-eyed, watched as the hired men, smoking and grumbling, loaded the children into a truck. The baby was swaddled in a pillowcase and wedged for convenience into a drawer the Piper had taken from the hotel-room dresser. The children sat cross-legged in the windowless lorry and didn’t react when he climbed in and crouched before them and told them goodbye. He hovered for a moment, reluctant to touch them, but longing all the same to press them to his chest and to receive, somehow, a sense of grace, a transference of innocence, a blankness that would pass from them to him, a deep white fathomless release. The children didn’t respond, and he felt foolish, a stupid old fool, out of place and out of time. The buyers yelled at him to hurry the hell up, and he climbed out. The men slammed the door shut. His contact held out the final contract, his eyes narrowing on the slight tremble in the Piper’s fingers as he paused before signing. The Piper’s heart shuddered in his chest, and as the truck’s engine throbbed, he swayed and the world swam into brief darkness as pain sang through his chest. Sign, somebody said in a cold voice, sign, and gasping for breath, and with numb fingers, he scrawled his mark on the paper.

As the truck rumbled away, he leaned against a wall and rubbed his eyes. His body felt better already. Blood pounded through his loosening limbs and his skin tingled. An alley-cat twined itself against his legs, and he reached down to pet it, but it hissed and spat and darted away. He wiped his hands on his cloak, and withdrew his pipe. He fondled it for a moment, and then held it with both hands over his knee as if to snap it. He stood like that for a long moment, barely breathing, not blinking, and then he straightened, licked his lips and pocketed the pipe. Knotting his cloak tightly around him, he walked away, tall and smooth-skinned, his long fingers flexing in the breeze, the cold air running through them like fresh clear water.

by Valerie O’Riordan

The criminal sat in his hideout holding the remote to the doomsday device that he had placed atop the capitol building in Albany, New York. He waited for the police sergeant.

***

The police sergeant sat at his desk at home. He was scheduled to arrive at the criminal’s hideout momentarily, but his departure had been delayed by an idea for a poem.

***

The damsel sat atop the capitol building, strapped to the doomsday device for effect. She looked out over the city and, cracking her knuckles through her white silk gloves, wondered why it had to be Albany, New York.

***

The police sergeant finished his poem. It set out attempting to justify existence, failed at its attempt, and, in failing, succeeded. It was called “How I Lose” and successfully used a metaphor that compared the inevitable march towards death to gardening, a feat considered impressive in most literary circles, or so the sergeant was told by his neighbor, who happened to be a literary agent.

***

The criminal was upset with the sergeant’s lateness. He grew bored. There were many cabinets in the hideout, but the criminal, checking them one at a time, found only a chess set. Unfamiliar with the game, he read the rules, set up the pieces and began to play against himself.

***

The damsel received an unprecedented two superlatives in high school – most imaginative and most helplessly beautiful. Since the latter had caused her to be chosen as the damsel in the current situation, she decided to use the former to occupy her time.

***

The sergeant went with his neighbor to the literary agency. His neighbor asked him how many poems he could write before the end of the day. The sergeant thought twenty-seven. The agent gave him a notepad and a pen.

***

The damsel analyzed the city in front of her. She decided what she liked and what she did not like. Then she began to plan her own city. It would be where Minneapolis was if Minneapolis wasn’t there.

***

The criminal rapidly increased his chess ability. He began setting up one side with a clear advantage so that he might try to beat it with the other. He played without a queen. He played with only a king and a pawn. Each time, the disadvantaged side won with ease.

***

The police sergeant finished his book of poems in two and a half days. It debuted to rave reviews. He went on tour, reading at coffee houses and bookstores. He received honorary degrees. During an interview, a prominent columnist in Kansas City, Missouri asked him if, with his supreme grasp of the conceptual, he would ever consider working in the visual arts.

***

The damsel decided that, in her city, all of the buildings would be tall and cylindrical. On the roof of each would be a bonfire pit to host community gatherings. She knew that, with such architecture, the metropolis would inevitably gain the nickname of Cigarette City.

***

The criminal left his hideout with the remote to the doomsday device in his hand. He found the nearest chess tournament, registered and swiftly defeated all of his opponents. The tournament officials placed him under investigation for cheating. He could not receive his trophy or his prize money for quite some time. The criminal only considered this a testament to his colossal skill.

***

The police sergeant decided on installation art as his genre. He exhibited his first piece in a gallery in Cleveland, Ohio. It appeared to be a crime scene surrounded by caution tape. The chalk outline of a body had been drawn on the ground. In the center of a room stood a mannequin wearing a rainbow-colored clown wig and red plush clown nose. Those in attendance were invited to put on the wig and the nose as they walked around the scene. It was called “The Police Life.”

***

The damsel imagined herself as the beautiful mayor of Cigarette City. She imagined that all of the citizens would be upset that someone had strapped their beautiful mayor to a doomsday device atop of the capitol building in Albany, New York. They preferred her at home making new laws and being nice to look at. Local government officials held an important meeting around the bonfire on top of City Hall and made a decision: the beautiful mayor must be rescued. Only one man in Cigarette City could do the job. That man was the handsome pilot.

***

The criminal began appearing in the media. At first, he only graced the pages of chess-related periodicals, but after some time he began showing up in more mainstream publications. Photographers snapped pictures of him standing next to celebrities and supermodels. Readers always wondered what he was holding.

***

The police sergeant showed in several other galleries around the country. He filled the art and culture section of most newspapers. All praised him, except for the editor of the King City Gazette of King City, California, who found the police sergeant’s popularity to be shallow and faddish. The police sergeant worked his connections in both the justice system and art world. In mere hours, the Gazette disappeared from newsstands altogether.

***

The criminal signed an endorsement deal with a calculator company. He appeared on billboards sitting in a restaurant with an attractive woman. She looked worried while he calmly worked something out on a pocket-sized calculator. The caption said, even chess geniuses need help figuring out the tip sometimes. Next to the criminal’s plate sat the remote to the doomsday device. People just assumed it was another calculator.

***

The editor of the King City Gazette sought to avenge the death of his publication. He saddled up a horse, grabbed his six-shooter and began riding across the country.

***

The damsel imagined the handsome pilot as a well-built man with a giant, attractive chin. He wore a black leather jacket with white wool around the collar, a brown leather cap with straps dangling down, goggles on his forehead, and a red-and-white striped scarf. He lived in a blimp over Cigarette City. He accepted the mission to save the beautiful mayor without hesitation and parachuted down to the airstrip where his famous biplane waited in storage.

***

The police sergeant continued to wear his police uniform, even when attending gallery openings or lectures. Young artists took this as a statement and followed his lead. Classes at the country’s leading art schools appeared to be filled with crossing guards, firemen, meter maids, FBI agents and the occasional Indian chief.

***

The editor of the King City Gazette stopped at a hotel in Colby, Kansas. The hotel clerk asked him where he was going on a horse with a six-shooter. His response was of such a nature that the hotel clerk recorded it on a piece of scrap paper for inclusion in the cowboy novel he had been working on for the last half-decade.

***

The damsel sat wide-awake with her eyes closed. They were shut tight, causing creases to emanate out towards her nose, cheeks and eyebrows. Her white silk gloves were constant fists of concentration. She thought about nothing but the handsome pilot and Cigarette City. The gaps in her imagination became fewer and farther between. She imagined hard and she imagined all day.

***

The criminal stared at the remote to the doomsday device, perplexed. He remembered nothing about it except that he should not press the red button in the center.

***

The editor of the King City Gazette sat in a diner outside of Eerie, Pennsylvania. He waited for his lunch and read the newspaper. The cover story was about strange reports that were coming in from Minneapolis. Things looked different there. It was still a city, but the citizens didn’t feel like they could call it Minneapolis anymore.

***

The police sergeant spotted what he assumed to be a new gallery. Everyone going in and out wore police uniforms. He entered only to find it was the police station. The officers asked when he would be finished with his case. What case? the police sergeant wondered.

***

The beautiful mayor opened her eyes. She was finished imagining.

***

The criminal met with the chess club of an elite private school. They asked him questions about chess and supermodels. One boy asked him when he started playing. The criminal said it all began when he tried to destroy the world, or at least Albany, New York. This answer surprised everyone, even the criminal. He looked at the doomsday device in his hand and politely excused himself from the room.

***

The editor of the King City Gazette sat atop his horse in the street, waiting. He drew his pistol and fired at the police sergeant, who ran full speed up the street in the direction of the Capitol Building.  He fired a second shot at the police sergeant. He fired three, four, five, six times at the police sergeant. Each shot missed. He was only a newspaper editor.

***

The criminal arrived in front of the Capitol Building at the same time as the police sergeant, coming from the opposite direction. The editor of the Gazette followed behind on a horse with a pen and paper in hand. The police sergeant reached for his badge. The criminal moved his finger dramatically towards the red button. The editor of the Gazette readied his pen to record the happenings. Nobody noticed the biplane as it flew into the sunset, a white silk hand reaching out to wave good-bye.

by Sean Adams

I don’t remember much of the blizzard itself. There wasn’t much to remember if you were safe inside. Mostly we watched TV. There were three sets in our house, one in the family room, one in my parent’s room and one in the kitchen. My father was a large man, rarely cold. He passed the time lying on his side in his underwear watching re-runs on the TV in his bedroom, while my mother stayed close to the warmth of the kitchen, her eyes glued to a black and white nine-inch set with butter-slick knobs and a coat hanger antenna. My sister and I fought over the TV in the family room. Olive wanted cartoons. I wanted soaps. We compromised on game shows. Tacky garbage, my mother called them, but I loved how shiny with possibility they were. I’d imagine I was the one on stage screaming my head off, winning an all expense paid cruise to someplace warm, someplace that had never seen snow.

Every few hours my father would wander downstairs to watch TV upright in his recliner. “Vamoose,” he’d grumble, and flick his hand at whichever one of us was sitting in his chair. Then he’d switch on the news, settle in with a glass of bourbon, and watch the local weatherman at his radar map that showed a blossom of white where our city had once been.

The sound of three blaring sets could not drown out the constant onslaught of wind, great shuddering gusts that raged for four days. On the fifth day we woke to a blue sky and a landscape of undulating white mounds. I looked out the living room window to see a herd of antelope wandering the empty street. When I yelled for my family to come see, the herd turned their heads with one fluid motion toward my voice. They spooked and were gone, leaving behind delicate puncture marks in the snow with their slender legs. The morning news reported how drifts had piled up against the fences at the zoo, allowing some animals to simply walk out of their enclosures. Bison, polar bears and wildebeests were loose in our city, roaming the streets and peering in windows. We were advised to stay inside, and by no means should we try to feed the animals.

In school we had learned that snowflakes were made up of crystals that formed around a bit of dirt, like how a pearl forms in an oyster. Except unlike pearls, snow was worthless. We were buried under five feet of the stuff. The president declared us a disaster, and the National Guard was dispatched to dig us out. I was certain we would all go insane, like snowbound pioneers forced to eat our shoes, then belts, and then each other. Except food wasn’t our problem. My mother chain-smoked and baked an endless supply of casseroles, cakes and cookies that no one ate. My father barely moved from the TV anymore except to go to the bathroom or to open another bottle of bourbon. He sat in his recliner, spinning the ice in his drink like he was opening a vortex in the palm of his hand. My sister and I were at each other’s throats. We kicked, bit, and drew blood.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” my mother demanded, her hair on end, her face streaked with flour like war paint. Olive was only eight and got away with murder. I was fourteen, and supposed to know better.

“You’re what’s wrong with me,” I screamed. “This whole family is what’s wrong with me.”

I was banished to my room for the rest of our internment.

Later that night I woke to voices coming from outside. I peered out the window to see Doug and Dave Pike, the twins from next door, trying to navigate the drifts that had piled up in their yard. They were a year older than I was and hated me. When we were younger, I used to beat them up. They had been the kind of kids you couldn’t help wanting to hit, pale and slender as ballerinas, always eating popsicles so that their mouths were permanently sticky and stained red.

Then all of a sudden they had identical growth spurts, as if synchronized alarm clocks had gone off inside each of them. They grew four inches in a matter of months and their voices deepened. I could no longer play rough with them. I could barely even look at them. I was what my mother called a late bloomer, not exactly ugly, but flat-chested and awkward, and I wore braces with little tan rubber bands that sometimes shot out of my mouth if I opened it too wide. I had nothing that could interest these boys.

There was movement at the bottom of the Pike’s driveway. Two figures were standing in the glow of the streetlamp. One of them motioned for the twins to hurry. I couldn’t see their faces, but I knew it had to be Ian and Carl. Ian was the leader of their group, always with his black clothes, and dyed-black hair teased into a smoky nimbus about his head. Of all of them, I liked Carl best.  He was shy and bookish, and wore horn-rimmed glasses that he was endlessly pushing up onto the bridge of his nose. The others were a cool, contained unit, but Carl lumbered along at his own pace, just outside their protective ring.

I slid from my bed and dressed in darkness. Downstairs my father was snoring in his recliner, his bare chest bathed in the blue glow of the TV. As I slipped outside, small cyclones of snow blew in around my feet and then settled like powdered sugar on the floor.

The boys were hatless and wore old man coats. They lurched along like giraffes, snow up to their knees, carrying bottles of they had stolen from their fathers’ liquor cabinets. The wind kicked up sheets of fine, gritty crystals that lashed at their faces. Snot froze as it ran from their noses and they wiped at it with their fingerless gloves. They ran down the street laughing, challenging the cold, letting it fill their mouths with the startling taste of winter.

I quickly lost sight of them, but from the direction of their tracks I knew they were headed for the park. I had followed them there before. In the summer they stole shopping carts from the local grocery store and raced them down the hills. Their lair was a cluster of maple trees. They were expert tree climbers and had strung lawn chairs up among the highest branches. Sometimes they spent the night up there, drinking and listening to grinding punk music on a cassette player. I was amazed that they never fell. In the morning, if you looked carefully, you could spot a foot or hand dangling high among the leaves like a ripe piece of fruit.

When I finally caught up with them, Ian was firing snowballs at the twins as they ran back and forth between two trees like shooting range ducks. Carl was standing off by himself. I hunched down and moved carefully from tree to tree, staying close to the shadows, just a dark smudge on the snow. I got near enough to Carl that I could hear him wheezing from the cold.

The other boys had stopped their game and were quietly building a stockpile of snowballs. Carl was too busy sipping from his bottle to notice.

“Hey Carl,” one of them called out, “come here.”

I wanted to warn him, but I didn’t dare. He swayed toward the sound of the voice and wandered right into their line of fire.

Doug and Dave attacked from behind, Ian from the front. A snowball struck Carl in the face. His head snapped back and his glasses flew off and sank into the deep snow. Blood poured from his nose. It looked black from where I stood.

He charged like a wounded bear, took a swing at Ian, missed, and tumbled facedown into a drift. When he tried to get up, one of the twins pushed him down while the other kicked snow over him until he vanished into the landscape. He lay there until they finally fell back, panting and swooning from their exertions. Then he rose up on his knees and shook the snow from his coat. Ian reached down to help him up, but Carl shoved him away and stood on his own. Without a word to any of them, he staggered toward the entrance of the park.

“Come on, don’t be such a pussy,” Ian called after him.

Carl gave him the finger and kept walking.

“Fuck him,” Ian said, and let out a crazy howl that echoed through the park. The twins walked up and stood beside him, but the mood had changed. They werestill and silent, gazing off in the direction their friend had gone.

By now I was frozen to the bone. I wanted to see if Carl would come back, but I didn’t think it was worth losing a finger or toe to frostbite. From where they stood, the boys had a perfect view of the path leading back to the park entrance. To avoid being spotted, I had to walk the long way around, and then up the hill that led out to the street.

The hill was a favorite spot for sledding, but no one had been there since the blizzard. It was smooth as milk. I ran up it as fast as I could go, kicking snow up around me. It felt good to ruin something so perfect. When I reached the top I heard someone cough. I turned to see Carl sitting on a bench, watching me. It looked like he had been crying. Blood still trickled from his nose. He sniffed and spat a bright red wad into the snow at his feet.

“I know you,” he said, squinting as I drew closer. Without his glasses his eyes looked small and vulnerable. “How do I know you?”

I was too surprised to speak. I didn’t think he had ever noticed me. He kept looking at me until his eyes drooped and then closed. His lashes were thick and black and dusted with frost. I took a deep breath and sat next to him. The air felt brittle, like it was made of tiny glass needles. I willed him to ask me my name, willed him to think I was pretty, willed him to fall in love with me.

Somehow he had managed to hold on to his bottle during the fight. He took a sip and then offered it to me. I had never tasted whiskey before. It was like drinking gasoline. It tore at my throat but I didn’t spit it out. I took another sip, and then another. I kept drinking until I felt my fingertips and toes come back to life.

Carl slumped against me and mumbled something I didn’t understand. His breath slipped around me like a silvery ghost. “What?” I whispered, leaning in close. His face was wide and pale as the moon. I touched his cheek with my mittened hand, and then I kissed him fast, like a boxer delivering a right hook. His head lolled back and then righted itself. I kissed him again. This time I let my mouth linger. His lips were chapped and his mouth tasted like pennies from the blood that had frozen beneath his nose. Our tongues touched. They were warm and shapeless. When we pulled apart a strand of saliva stretched between us, and then snapped and landed frozen on my chin.

For a moment he sat there with his mouth open, kissing cold air. When he realized I wasn’t kissing back anymore he let out a lazy, wooly laugh. I tried to hush him, afraid that his friends would hear, but he just kept laughing. I stood and backed away from him.

“Where are you going?” he called out.

I ran toward the entrance of the park. The sky was spinning above me and it was all I could do to keep from falling over. I could still hear him calling for me as I made my way down the street. He still didn’t know my name. He just kept calling, come back! Come back!

By the time I got home my father had given up on TV and gone to sleep. I crept through the dark house and crawled into bed. I had never kissed a boy before. I wanted to keep the moment alive, I could still feel his mouth on mine, but the alcohol had taken hold and was dragging me down into the deep, warm layers of sleep.

That night I dreamed our city was invaded by an army of snowmen. We stood outside in our pajamas and bare feet, with our arms raised over our heads as they led us off, single file, into the glittering darkness.

Morning arrived and my mother called us down to breakfast. My head ached and my mouth tasted rancid. I shuffled downstairs to a breakfast of waffles, scrambled eggs, bacon and toast. Too sick to eat, I pushed the food round and round on my plate. I wrote Carl’s name in syrup and then quickly erased it with a swipe of waffle before anyone could see.

My father gnawed at his bacon and eyed my mother in her robe. He surprised us all by offering to do the dishes. He sidled up next to my mother and let his hand rest on the gentle slope of her hip, and then squeezed. My mother slapped his hand away with a spatula, but she was smiling. He whispered something in her ear and she turned red.

“You girls have been cooped up long enough,” she suddenly announced. “Why don’t the two of you go sledding in the park? Wouldn’t that be fun?” She said it like it was some kind of reward. Olive squeaked and clapped her hands. I wasn’t that gullible.

“That’s a stupid idea,” I said. My adventures from the night before had left me bold. I had kissed a boy. Things were different now, and there was no way I was going to be seen dragging my sister around on a sled.

My mother swung around to face me, the spatula like a sword in her hand. “I’ve had enough out of you, young lady. You will take your sister sledding and I won’t hear another word about it.”

“I hate you,” I whispered to Olive. She smiled triumphantly and showed me a mouthful of chewed eggs.

We ventured into the cold morning on wobbly legs. Olive trotted along with the sled while I lagged behind, my eyes searching for boys in long coats who might be lurking in snowdrifts. People were shoveling their sidewalks and digging around cars that looked like cupcakes. Everyone was in a festive mood, smiling and waving to one another.

I expected to find the hill swarming with bundled children, but when we got there, the slope was empty. A crowd was gathering just inside the park entrance. They stood behind a barrier of flimsy yellow tape that fluttered and snapped in the wind. A Policeman was telling people to move along, that there was nothing to see, but everyone just stood where they were, whispering, craning to get a glimpse of a figure seated on one of the benches.

It was Carl. He was sitting in the same spot where I had left him the night before.  My first thought was that he had been caught drinking, but as I drew closer I saw the blanket of snow that encased his legs, I saw how still he was, how his skin and hair sparkled in the harsh morning light.

“Come on!” Olive said, tugging at my coat. She was too small to see past all the onlookers and couldn’t understand what everyone was waiting for. She wanted to run ahead, to be the first one down the hill. I warned her to be quiet, but five days of being trapped inside had built up within her. She let out a joyful shriek and threw handfuls of snow into the air.

“Shut up!” I hissed, and slapped her hard across the face. She stumbled back and fell.

I had the urge to push through the crowd, to take hold of Carl and kiss him again. I thought that if I could give it back, that last warm moment, he would wake up, like in some stupid fairy tale. Instead I ran. I could hear Olive crying, calling out for me to wait, but I didn’t care. I was almost halfway home before I remembered his glasses.

I turned back and headed to the trees. When I reached the bottom of the hill, I gazed out over a pristine surface. The wind had taken the snow and shifted it into new, unrecognizable shapes. The footprints that had covered the ground the night before were gone, as if we had never been there. I picked a random spot and began to dig. The sun bounced off the snow, and it felt like tiny fingers were squeezing my eyes shut. The cold was seeping into my boots and through my clothes. I dug until I my hands were numb. I kept digging even though I knew I would never find them.

Olive had followed me and was watching from behind a tree, too frightened to come any closer. I could hear her sobbing and the crunch of snow beneath her feet as she moved about to keep warm. Above us the police were clearing a path to the street where an ambulance sat waiting. It took three men to lift him from the bench. They made a cradle of their arms and carried him as if he was something that would shatter into a thousand pieces if dropped.

“Come here,” I said softly to Olive. She stepped out from her hiding place and then walked slowly toward me. I held out my hand to her and she threw herself onto my lap and buried her face in my coat. She didn’t feel like my sister. She didn’t feel like anything I knew, but I held her tight.

It started to snow again. Big, soft flakes as fat and white as teeth. If we sat there long enough, it would cover us completely. We’d be lost until spring. I wondered how long it took to freeze. I thought of our bodies slowly growing rigid, no longer thinking, or dreaming. Our stubborn hearts beating on, trying to melt their way out. Until, like everything else, they finally stopped.

by Elizabeth Anderson