This is how it begins–wind

whisking hats, what’s left of the roofs

of grayed barns and hurling them into hayfields.

Stalks bent, roads scored like games of tic-tac-toe.

My husband and the dog perched

on the seam between the two husks

of our double wide, the velvet

sofa stained with ashes and stale piss.

I–applying band-aids, strip-searching

pubescent riff-raff for Robitussin capsules, but then

we all had to hunker, keep our mouths between our knees.

The walls hissed.  In the movies

cows rise up, sigh, float down safe and I think

this city has that same dumb-eyed grace.

Motoring back across the tracks I didn’t fear I’d find bodies—

worse, all my housework scattered on some field.

When I was young and white-skirted I wanted

more, more than plains rolling out like pie crust.

Cities with cranes in the sky, steel

boned buildings rising.

I wanted my  lips

to stand out like the brick courthouse

too strong to suffer from the kiss of any gust.

To come out in full-color, red

shoes, blue dress, none of that cropped

hair glamour—Lulu Brooks all ash

and black, her tap-dance silenced

by the whine of the film reel. And I came

home today to the whole house tipping to the still

ground, sofa slammed into the vanity.

by Rebecca van Laer

*”Dorothy Comes Home From Work” was the 1st runner up in the 2010 Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize. It appears in Flatmancrooked’s Slim Volume of Contemporary Poetics, available for pre-order soon. Cover design by Michael Fusco.

Frank stood on my porch, beer in one hand and clapping the front door with the open palm of his other. Behind him, his truck jerked and hiccupped but he never looked back; I’d heard that old junkyard of a truck growling through the neighborhood so knew he was coming, had watched from the garage window as he pulled up, jumped out of the truck and barreled to where he stood now. I waited with slight amusement as he pounded and got frustrated at my absence until, finally, I pressed the remote and let the wall rise in front of me.

“Shit, man. I was starting to think you weren’t home.”

I’d just finished dinner, sitting alone in my car while Karen watched a movie in hers. Frank looked ready to go and I followed, was ready to leave before I even saw him turn into the driveway. I didn’t look back at my wife but could picture her curled up in her reclined passenger seat, her laptop balanced in her lap.

“The range, man. Let’s go hit the fucking range.”

I went back, grabbed my old clubs from the back corner and could hear Karen turning up the volume on her movie, trying to drown us out. I slowed down, waited for her to look up at me. Kept waiting all the way out the garage.

I threw my clubs in the back and Frank yelled to be careful, to be sure I didn’t scratch his clubs or anything. Mine weren’t anything special, an old mismatched set I found at a garage sale, but Frank thought the world of his. He treated them like his babies. I liked that I could throw mine around without worry, didn’t understand why Frank spent so much money.

I clicked the garage shut, snapped the remote to my side like to a utility belt.

“You in there working or something?” Frank asked, but didn’t look at me or wait for an answer. I hadn’t told him, hadn’t yet told anyone, that we’d all but moved into the garage, that this was how we were trying to work shit out. “There’s beer in the back. Grab one before they’re gone.”

I watched the garage close as we backed out and wondered if, while we were gone, Karen would go into the house or stay put. She hadn’t brought anything from inside the house to the garage, least nothing I’d noticed. I wondered if it was because she spent her time in the house whenever I was gone, or if she just didn’t need any of it. If she was making an effort to rough it just to be stubborn or what.

“I think I might have fucked shit up with Suzy,” Frank said. He tossed his empty behind my seat, grabbed another. I took a swig of mine and it was warm and stale but Frank didn’t seem to mind so I didn’t say anything.

I met Frank at a business seminar. Halfway through he’d looked at me and put his finger to his temple like a gun, triggered with his thumb. He dipped his head back a little and rolled his eyes up in his head. I didn’t know why he’d singled me out. I hadn’t thought I’d looked as bored as I was.

“You want to get out of here?” he’d asked. “Go hit some golf balls?”

“I’ve never played golf,” I said.

“Doesn’t matter. All you have to do is hit the little fuckers as hard as you can,” he said. “No skill involved, just man up and slap the bitches around a little.”

I laughed and couldn’t find a reason why not. We grabbed our food and jackets and didn’t come back after lunch. I followed Frank to the range, borrowed some clubs from the shop. Frank had his set in his truck. Always be prepared, he’d said. We hit our way through a couple buckets of balls each, didn’t talk much else, and it was the most fun I’d had in months. I’d never hit a golf ball before but liked the motion of it, trying to mimic and adapt my old baseball swing. I’d grown up watching and playing baseball, to the exclusion of all other sports, but hadn’t held a bat since playing softball in college. I missed it—the sport itself, the camaraderie with teammates—but it’s hard to find nine friends to get together on a weekend outside of school or maybe church. It had been a long time since I’d hung out with someone other than Karen or another couple. Since I’d had someone who would say stupid shit without worrying about who it might offend, just to be funny. Racist jokes, sexist comments that weren’t even jokes, though he made them sound like it, all of it vulgar and, moreso, oddly relaxing. It felt a little like I was in college again and I enjoyed the immaturity, the being able to let go. Soon after, we were going to the range every Wednesday before work. Wednesdays were half-price before five. I told my boss that the seminar went great, I’d met some contacts and had set up a weekly morning meeting, and he was proud of my initiative. I never asked how Frank got away, always assumed he just showed up at work when he felt like it, left when he wanted.

“I think I fucked up,” he said again, shaking his head.

Frank was always fucking shit up with Suzy. More weeks than not, they’d had some big argument, arguments that led to knock-down, wake-up-the-neighbors, call-the-cops fights. His words. But they always blew over as quickly as they started. Most weeks he showed up at the range on Wednesday morning all happy-go-lucky. He’d tell me about whatever fight they’d had the previous week, how now they were better and happier than ever.

“I don’t know. Last week, my ex was in town for something for her job and she called me up. We hadn’t talked in a year, at least, and she says we should get dinner or something.”

“OK.”

“So I just tell the old lady I’m going out and I go. My ex, you know, she looks great. Better than I’d remembered and then, after dinner, I go back to her hotel with her. I tell her I don’t know if I should, but she keeps saying, one drink, what’s the harm.”

We arrived at the driving range, parked. The sun had set as we were driving and I could see the overhead lights of the driving range beaming strong. We’d never gone at night and the lights reminded me of a night game. One of Karen and my first dates had been to a baseball game. She’d never been to one before and I was scared she’d be bored and it would ruin the game for me but she loved it. We made a point to go at least a couple times a season every year after that and they were always the dates we looked forward to most, buying tickets as soon as they went on sale and marking it on the calendar months in advance. I suddenly realized we hadn’t been in the last season and a half, wondered how that could have happened.

Frank rolled down his window and a chill blew in. The beginnings of fall, it was cooler out than I’d expected. I thought of our garage, how it would start getting colder in there soon. I wondered if it would be pessimistic of me to look into some kind of heating.

“I was trying to be good, man. I was.”

Frank dropped his left arm out the open window and underhanded his new empty toward a garbage can, missed.

I wasn’t sure why he was telling me everything. Frank always told me about he and his wife’s fights, explained their making up in detail, but never the instigations. The how or why, specifically, he might have “fucked shit up.” It felt weird hearing the back-story, the details, and I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Ask for more details, or if Suzy knew, or what.

“And Suzy found out?” I finally asked.

“Fuck no. And I ain’t gonna tell her. You some kind of retard? I’ll deny till I die, man. But she’s been asking questions, you know?”

I nodded some more, stared out at the field. There was a guy down on the end killing it, hitting balls farther than I’d ever seen. I watched him for a while, hypnotized, and thought of the times Karen and I had gone to games early to watch batting practice. She thought it was a little boring but it reminded me of going to games with my dad when I was little, getting there as soon as the stadium opened with my baseball mitt and a plastic box of cards to try to get signed.

“Fuck it,” Frank finally said.

“You ever go night golfing?”

“No,” I said.

“You’re gonna love this shit.”

Frank rifled through his golf bag, pulled out a package. He opened the plastic, tossed me a ball. I caught it, rolled it around in my hands. It looked like a bouncy ball: plastic and clear, though not quite see-through, with a hole drilled through the middle. Frank opened a package for himself, then got this quiet look across his face. He was still crouched down in the position to dig through his bag, and he started slowly bouncing on his toes. He looked up, out at all the open grass in front of us, but like he was looking somewhere out miles beyond it all. I wanted to say something, thought maybe that was all he was waiting for, but then he looked up at me, shook his face back into regular Frank, and said, “Glow balls. These are badass.”

He pulled a mini glow stick out of its wrapper and held it up to me. He bent it in two, shook, and it lit up fluorescent-green. Frank looked like a kid on the 4^th of July. He pushed the stick into the ball and placed the glowing orb on his tee, pulled his club back, and hit it as hard as he could. Even with a few beers in him, rushed, and trying to show off, he had perfect form. He’d often told me he’d been on his golf team in high school. He liked talking about how he could have gone pro. The one time I asked why he hadn’t, expecting some clichéd story—something about drinking or drugs or knocking up his old lady—he turned a hard stare out at the range and said, only, fuck golf.

The ball arced out into the field, a UFO or oversized firefly shooting through the night.

It did, as he’d promised, look badass.

“There he is,” Frank said, pointing out to the field, excited. The ball sweeper had appeared, collecting balls. When he rolled over one of ours, I tried following it into the machine, watching the flashing green get sucked up.

“Hit that fucker with one of these and it’s bonus points,” Frank said.

Frank swung back then forward, the ball perfectly on target but sailing high. I followed with my own attempt, focusing everything I could, and the ball hooked far left and I almost fell over. I’d only ever been able to pull the ball, despite all my coaches’ attempts to get me to spread it around. Frank folded over and laughed his face red.

“That’s some Funniest Home Videos shit right there,” he said as soon as he caught his breath.

“Fuck,” Frank said, rummaging through his bag. “Looks like we’re out.”

“Glow balls or beer?”

“Yes.”

“Shit,” I echoed. I hadn’t had half the beer Frank had, but still I could feel it starting to loosen me up.

“I might have something in the truck,” Frank said, and made for the parking lot.

I put a ball on each of our tees and hit them one after the other at the ball collector. I kept setting up two shots at a time, running back and forth between my tee and Frank’s. I’d barely thought about Frank’s leaving before he was back, a plastic shopping bag in one hand and another basket of balls in the other. He tossed me a beer from the bag and set the other five on the ground.

“Why do you have all this in your car?”

Frank opened the candy bag and spilled out glow sticks, the kind I remembered from Halloween and concerts.

“Just like I said, always be prepared. I’m a fucking Boy Scout, man.”

He took a pocketknife out of his back pocket, opened it up, and laid it on the ground. Grabbing three sticks, he bent them in half, shook until they glowed. He picked his knife back up and cut off the ends of each, upturned them over the bucket of golf balls and let the glow ooze out.

“Hand me a few more.”

I grabbed a couple more sticks from where he’d spilled the bag and handed them to him, and he repeated the process. Half a dozen sticks’ worth of slime poured over the balls. He picked up the bucket and swung and swirled it around. I remembered filling a bucket with water in grade school and swinging it in a circle, being amazed the water didn’t go everywhere.

“Voila!” he said. “Homemade!” He held the bucket out to me and I grabbed a ball, put it on my tee. I could feel the glowing residue on my fingers. I cocked my driver back over my head as far as I could, swung, and sent the ball flying out into the night, farther than I’d ever hit it.

“Nice,” Frank said, quietly nodding his head, and I felt proud.

The sweeper kept switchbacking across the field, picking up balls and I watched Frank wind up and hit one ball after another at it. I remembered why we were here, his confession in the parking lot. I looked over at Frank and wanted to let it all out, tell him about all of my and Karen’s problems which I’d been keeping bottled in. I wanted to tell him how I’d assumed she’d had an affair with this guy, Jeremy, but I couldn’t make myself, certain that I’d only believe she was lying if she denied it but also knowing I wouldn’t be able to handle it if she confirmed. How I couldn’t move on but I couldn’t forget about it; everything we did reminded me of this guy. When she wanted to rent an old movie, I couldn’t shake the idea that he’d recommended it, or we’d go to a new restaurant and I couldn’t help but think she’d found it while out with him. I was sure Karen knew I wanted to ask, but she wouldn’t say anything if I didn’t first so this cloud of silence just loomed overhead. I started telling her about my “lunch dates” with my coworker Amie, even though we’d really only gone out once. When she got jealous, I grew brave enough to actually start initiating the lunches that I’d been talking about.

I wanted to tell Frank all about Amie because I hadn’t been able to tell anyone else. I wanted to smile and tell him how much I loved watching her laugh. How she had these rings of red hair that perfectly framed her face, and the more we hung out the more I wanted to curl my hands into that hair, run my fingers through and play with it in my palm, see if it would bounce like a Slinky. How I wanted to take her to a baseball game, and how that made me feel guiltiest of all. And then one day, eating outside on a bench after grabbing sandwiches from the deli down the road from our work, I watched Amie laugh and thought of Karen and how I’d been jealous for the last six months, and leaned in like a kiss. I watched her close her eyes and tilt her head and realized I hadn’t gone in for a first kiss in years. Before our lips touched, my face already felt warm. I could feel the stickiness of her lipstick and how thin her lips were, pressed into mine, not good or bad but just different from Karen’s. I pulled away and watched her hold her eyes closed, a smile on her face. It was the smile that I liked seeing when we flirted, but better, and I leaned back in and cupped her cheek with my hand and pressed my lips into hers again.

That night I started a fight with Karen over something small on our drive home from dinner. By the time I pulled into the driveway, neither of us had spoken for ten minutes, but when the door closed behind us and I turned off the car, everything felt better. Like, somehow, the garage was our safe haven, a kind of “base.” We sat in the parked car and talked and then went inside and curled together in bed. The next time we fought, we moved to the garage again, hoping to recreate our previous results, and it worked, and then we started spending more and more time in the garage, unable to do anything but fight elsewhere. And now, now we weren’t even talking in the garage, both of us eating in our own cars and watching movies on laptops, but afraid what might happen if we returned to the house.

“Frank,” I said. I drunkenly rubbed at my face with my hands and it felt like a slug had crawled across me. I couldn’t see myself but could guess what it looked like. I wanted to tell him how fucked up it was living in the garage because I couldn’t just address the issue and Karen was too stubborn to do anything but go along with it. But when he turned and looked over his shoulder, I said, “Check this out,” and drew two lines under my face like eye black. I grabbed my club and held it over my head. I gave a little yell and thought of one of my favorite baseball cards: Bo Jackson breaking a bat over his knee after a strikeout.

Frank looked at me and laughed, raised his own club in the air in support.

I bent down, grabbed a glow stick and Frank’s knife. I snapped the stick, shook it up, cut off the end, and spilled it all over my hands. I rubbed my hands together and then up and down my club, gripped it tight like the sticky green was pine tar. Without thinking, I started running, sprinting out toward the sweeper. As soon as I was in striking distance, I swung as hard as I could, swinging through the air instead of down; I stepped into it and everything and it felt just like playing homerun derby in my backyard growing up. My club bent on contact, elled, but I kept swinging, beating it into the machine. I could hear the guy inside yelling What the hell over and over, but Frank’s laugh, echoing out toward me from our tees, was so hard and loud I let it wash out everything else. I didn’t turn to look but I could imagine him folded over, laughing. A loud ping echoed through the night every time I connected. It felt good, hearing that sound, feeling my arms swinging and swinging. The machine drove away but wasn’t fast enough and I chased, extending my arms, big full baseball swings into the thing. My driver bent again, into a z or a lightning bolt, and I thought of Roy Hobbs and his homemade bat from that lightning-felled tree, the lightning bolt he branded into it himself. The Natural had been one of the first movies Karen and I had watched together, neither of us having seen it in a decade, at least, but both remembering it fondly, and it had more or less directly led to our baseball dates. I kept at it, swinging and chasing, until the club finally snapped and broke and my body burned from exhaustion. I sat down, cross-legged and breathing heavy, and the sweeper finally dove away, out of reach and unscathed. Under the bright lights, I couldn’t see the golfers at the tees but noticed the absence of balls sailing through the air. A part of me hoped they would tee up, start swinging again. Try to hit me like we all had the sweeper. I probably would have.

by Aaron Burch

by bl pawelek

photo by Gena Mowish

(an FMC original)

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe The National Virginity Pledge.

BG: Enjoys snowflakes, Indian food, cartoons, long walks on the beach.

Five Questions Here

1. Tell me how this book is like a poker hand.

BG: Is this where I declare my philosophy of life and disguise it as a poker metaphor? I knew there was a reason I liked you. I don’t know. I think I tried to construct these tales in such a way that every detail is important and meaningful in any number of ways, depending on the reader and what they are bringing to the table at any given minute. Hopefully a reader can read the same story two or three or fifty different times and have a different reaction to it and it’s details every time they read it. So I guess the comparison is. You can be dealt any hand at any given time, hell you can get the same two shitty hold cards three or four times in a row, but if you know what you’re doing, there’s a better than 74% chance you’re gonna play those cards different every time you get them. It all depends what you’re bringing to the table before you sit down.

2. I have got to ask, what is the Tic Tac Toe thing?

BG: I wish I had some cool story to make up but I don’t. In K-12 I went to thirteen different schools, so I spent much of my childhood (and well into adulthood, depends who you ask), the stereotypical fat, awkward, poor, pimply, picked-on, friendless, new kid in school. Come sixth grade I was starting my sixth school and I just happened to get seated next to the kid who was “that kid” before I showed up. Well, this kid happened to be a sort of genius, so he never needed to pay attention. I didn’t bother because I knew I’d be heading off in a few months to a different school, so we kind of made a good pair. So he spent about three months kicking my ass every day at Tic-Tac-Toe, until the week before I moved. He taught me the secret to life, the sure fire way never to lose, and I haven’t lost since.

3. What is the history of the cover graphic?

BG: Kris Young, the editor at Another Sky Press, is pretty bad ass. When he asked me if I had any ideas for the book cover I said yeah, let’s have a blank cover, nothing on it anywhere. He said, let me think on it. Two weeks later he sent me an email and said, how bout this. The image he sent was pretty much the image you see on the cover. He didn’t tell me how he got it and I didn’t ask. We spent a week tweaking it, and that was that.

4. ‘Cats and Dogs; Like Rain’ – damn. How much of Barry Graham is in these stories?

BG: One of the best literary events I ever experienced was when Davy Rothbart gave a reading and Found Magazine presentation at Eastern Michigan University. I was teaching his short story collection (my favorite short story collection of all time), The Lone Surfer of Montana, Kansas, in my writing classes and I was taking questions from the class to ask him. One of the students noticed that all of the stories had a first person narrator, but only one of them went unnamed. It was the last story of the collection, Elena, about a young drifter who finds himself involved in a scam to rob truck drivers near the Mexico-California border and ends up falling in love with a fourteen-year-old prostitute, Elena. So after the reading I ask him some of the questions from the students and when we get to the unnamed narrator, I was hoping to relay some existential metaphor to the class, something funny and heartbreaking, maybe the clue to figuring out the Mayan calendar, so Davy laughs and says, oh, I didn’t even notice. So I guess just tell them, without a doubt, it’s always Davy. So yeah, apply that little story to your question any way you choose.

5. How would you describe ‘All His Chips’ (other than brutally sad)?

BG: I see All His Chips the same way I see all my writing, as a love story—with all the intricacies and complexities and contradictions that you’d expect to find if you hid in the closet of any given house on any given road in any given town and observed two people attempting to find happily ever after.

Five Questions There

6. What was the best poker hand you lost with?

BG: I’d like to tell you about the most heartbreaking hand I ever lost, but I’ll do that in person when you come to Jersey. But the best hand I ever lost with. I was playing a home game with some country boys, which is never an easy way to make money, country boys are born with a poker gene passed on by their daddies and granddaddies. So I’m holding on to a full house, kings over aces, and two people were still in it. I figured they both had flushes which made me smile, because when you have an ace or king high flush you never see the full house coming if there aren’t two pairs on the board. Well come to find out one of them had the big dog, the royal flush, clubs, and that was that.

7. What is your favorite line of the book?

BG: “I love you.”

8. I told you this reminded me of Bukowski. What do you think of comparisons?

BG: Comparisons to me and Bukowski or comparisons in general? I’m indifferent. Let talkers talk and comparers compare. But I will tell you this, if anyone tries comparing any of the new Legend of Zelda games to the old school shit on the Super NES, they are just plain fucked in the head.

9. Part of the title of this book is “short stories and other lies.” What is one true fact in this book?

BG: My father is dead.

10. What is the first sentence of the pledge?

BG: In the beginning God created the heaven and the Earth.

In ten words (no more or less), what are you working on now?

BG: A plan to pay back everybody everything I owe them.

Cover designed by Michael Fusco. Presale begins August 27th.

by Emily Pulfer-Terino

Scent of rotting vegetation back behind the gas station
swelled to a heavy twang. Hick spies, my brother and I

brought binoculars and canteens and broke into
cattail, bramble, back to the tracks where our family

roar grew fainter, married to the groans of distant trains.
We’d perch along those flanks of steel for hours, days,

not talking, straining to see something going on
behind the neighbors’ blinded windows. Whole seasons

seemed to go that way— our having left the house a stealth escape;
our watch a hunch that others’ homes were wracked.

Houses sagged along the rail; wet wash hung down one long line.
What could happen there, where kids swung sticks and watched the sky,

where men bought nails and women widened in the glow of afternoon tv?
We stared down tracks ‘til they shrunk to a point beyond our understanding.

Back by the pump, the dumpster teemed with beer cans, bags and shoes.
This was our best game then, what staked our separate selves together.

Trying other views, my brother traipsed off down the tracks;
his voice over the walkie-talkie, dense with urgency and static,

grew vague the farther on he got, the more he saw of other peoples’ lives.

by Emily Pulfer-Terino

*“Tracks” was the winner of the 2010 Flatmancrooked Poetry Prize

by Rebekah Hall

We only just caught wind of this. Lucky for you, too, because it’s not too late; this is the greatest writer’s retreat you probably don’t know about: Kate Braverman is currently accepting applicants for a rare writer’s workshop—Writing as a Criminal Act—at her estate in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The darkly lyrical Braverman has the enchanting ability to slip her entire fist into the very center of human life and drag from it all that is deep and shallow. She captures the simultaneous emptiness and fullness of existence in a language that is at once raw and poetic, accessible and immersive, a perfect synthesis of rhetoric and image. She’s a longtime favorite of the Flatmancrooked crew, and I’m super excited to head out to Santa Fe with Kate and smear coyote blood all over my manuscript while howling at the stars and full moon with twelve other writer-criminals.  Come lie and steal with me!

From Kate’s website:

Writing as a Criminal Act

Santa Fe Workshop, September 25, 2010 Kate Braverman will teach a rare total immersion one-week writing workshop. Participants will stay at her retreat, write, howl with the coyotes, write, watch the sunset like a massacre across their faces, write, eat, write, witness the promiscuous moon leave her greasy streaks across the innocent sky, write, have nightmares and write.

Ms. Braverman is interested in the concept of Writing as a Criminal Act. As writers, we employ the methods of professional criminals. We break and enter, we rob, we assume aliases and false identities, engage in fraud, lie, omit, impersonate, autopsy the living, exhume the dead for interrogation and deny everything. Recognizing the full extent of one’s writing tools should be liberating. We will use them with the ruthless conviction of people willing to be incarcerated for their acts.

The Santa Fe Workshop welcomes writers of all levels and genres. It’s not what you already know, but what you can learn from this one-on-one retreat workshop. Experimentation and improvisation are strongly encouraged. Risk is mandatory.

The Santa Fe Workshop is limited to 12 writers.

Kate is the author of two collections of short stories (Squandering the Blue, Small Craft Warnings), four novels (Lithium for Medea, Palm Latitudes, Wonders of the West, The Incantation of Frida K), a memoir (Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir), and a number of anthologized short stories and poems. Her work has been translated into six languages, and she has received an entire houseful of awards, including three appearances in Best American Short Stories, an O. Henry Award, a Pushcart Prize, and a Recognition Award from the California Legislature Assembly for “making California a better place to live.”

(To take part in Kate’s exclusive writer’s workshop at her estate in Santa Fe, New Mexico, contact Kate via her website or directly at her email: keb60@live.com)

By Sam Decker

It didn’t die right away, the duck. It waddled in circles for a while and then fell over on its head, pumping its little webbed feet like it was trying to swim away in an upside-down river. When they were convinced that it no longer had any life in it, the two of them sat against a pine tree and passed the warm body back and forth until they had removed all the feathers. By then it was dark and they followed the river back to camp. When they came into the light of the fire Conrad was holding the animal by the neck, its small pink body swinging just above the ground.

Conrad and Ben were assigned to the same tent and they always paddled together, but it wasn’t until the seventh day of the canoe trip that the two of them chased down the duck and beat it over the head with a canoe paddle that they thought of themselves as friends.

Everyone at camp was at the very least impressed. Some—the girls—were horrified, though most appreciated the touch of savage ambiance it lent to the evening. The campers removed their sticks holding hotdogs and marshmallows so that Conrad could ceremoniously place the duck over the fire. The two boys cooked the duck until it was charred as black as the river and then they took turns gnawing at it, spitting the crispy skin on to the ground. They didn’t share any of their kill, but admittedly, no one had asked.

They had been at camp all summer, swimming and fishing and playing soccer, just killing time, waiting for this trip on the Groundhog River. It was a thirteen-day canoe trip in the northern Ontario wilderness. They were to be on the Groundhog for eight or nine days and then, for the remainder of the trip, on the Moose River, which fed into James Bay, a huge body of water at the southern end of the Hudson Bay. This was above the Arctic watershed so all water flowed north.

The trip was to end at Moosenee, a town accessible only by train or, of course, by river. Once they had made it there they were to take the train to a bigger town, the name of which Conrad had forgotten because it didn’t possess the thrilling quality of being inaccessible by road. There they would be picked up in a van and brought back to camp, where they would be idolized by the younger campers for a week or so before having to return to their separate homes. There were eight teenagers—five boys and three girls—and two counselors, probably somewhere in their late twenties. After the night with the duck Conrad and Ben thought of themselves as on a different level than everyone else.

The two of them felt crazy after a day on the river—like wild animals or at least insane wild men. Not boys, not gangly teenagers with muscles conditioned for suburban existence. This was a feeling they loved and sought after. And each day they came closer and closer to achieving it. They paddled hard for hours—Ben in the back, steering, and Conrad in the front—to collapse in front of the bright fire in the orange dusk, collapsing into the depths of tiredness and hunger which blurred things together that before seemed separate. It felt good to surrender to the limits of one’s physical strength. Each day he and Ben wore fewer clothes, gradually becoming more consistent with their own images of themselves as stoic natives, until finally during the day they wore only loincloths made by hanging bandanas from their belts and at night they usually just threw on some long underwear.

Creatch, of course, was their guru. He was one of the two counselors. Creatch was short for creature. They were proud to know someone with a name like this. Creatch knew which roots to eat and when, and if you were sore he knew what curative yoga move to perform and for how long. But more impressive than what he knew was what he’d endured. Creatch told stories about his past that made grown men weep, a fact he’d made a point of mentioning. One night Creatch told Conrad about the time he’d gotten rabies from a skunk in western Montana and how he followed train tracks, crawling practically blind through hail and rain for three days before he came across another living soul, some bum who spent his life riding in boxcars and claimed to have magical healing powers. Despite his weakness, Creatch declined his strange remedies, convincing the bum to lead him to the nearest town, all the while having to resist his burning desire to consume him.

Every morning Creatch could be found staring across the glassy waters of the river, in what everyone agreed was a deep Zen state, practicing with nunchucks, his hair wrangled into a thick red braid that hung down his back. Conrad and Ben would get up earlier and earlier each day to try and catch him going out there, but every morning he had already taken his stance by the river, scattering the flies with his whirling moves. Finally they just had to accept the fact that he began his routine some time in the middle of the night.

Conrad sometimes even forgot about his older brother who, last summer, took so many pills that he just lay down under a willow tree on their grandfather’s property and died. When their grandfather retired he bought a large piece of land in Vermont and built a big house from where he could sit and look out on it. He intended it to be a place for him to die. It probably never occurred to him that someone else was thinking the same thing, namely, his grandson who was staying in the basement because he didn’t feel safe with his own parents and the hospital didn’t believe he was all that sick. All of this Conrad inferred from a letter his brother had written him when he first moved in with their grandfather in late spring. But forgetting all this was Conrad’s reason for being out there.

On the tenth night of the trip the sky was like the roof of a cave; there were no stars, no moon. Conrad lay awake in the tent looking out at nothing or maybe he was looking into the backs of his eyelids, he wasn’t sure. When he blinked he felt two separate feelings, but he was confused which feeling meant his eyes were open and which one meant they were closed. He could have felt with his fingers but he didn’t want to destroy the mystery. His gums and the insides of his lips still burned from the wads of chewing tobacco that he and Ben had sucked on before bed while they played cribbage and drank whiskey—a bottle of Jim Beam which they had stolen a few weeks before the trip from the cook and held sacred. It was one of the first times Conrad had ever been drunk. Now he could feel the warmth of the whiskey drying up inside him. He felt alone and very awake. Suddenly, far off, above even where he imagined the top of the tent to be, the darkness started acting funny; it moved almost like water. Then the darkness started to burn into pale colors and translucent branches spread out above him. They were soft looking and they hung downwards. They were willow branches, he knew, the color of dust. He tried to make them go away by cupping his hands over his eyes but the branches continued to fall around him like silent fireworks. He saw his brother’s body. Then someone spoke and, abruptly, the colors withered and Conrad felt himself breathing again.

“You awake?”

“I think so,” Conrad answered.

“My stomach hurts.”

“It’s probably from the chew.”

“Maybe.”

For a little while no one said anything.

“Do you miss where you’re from?” Ben asked.

“No,” Conrad said, somehow offended by the bluntness of this question.

“Nothing?”

“What is there to miss,” Conrad said, not as a question.

“Normal things we’re used to seeing. Like cars and TV. Light switches, I don’t know. I miss my little sister. She’s fourteen months old.”

“I guess I miss my bed,” Conrad offered, trying his best.

“It really feels weird. My stomach. Like something’s eating away at my insides.”

Conrad could hear Ben moving around in his sleeping bag.

“Maybe you should try taking a shit.”

After a little while Conrad could hear Ben embark on the series of unzipping and re-zipping that had to be done in order to get out of the tent. There was nothing to see; he just listened. When Ben had finally made it out Conrad could smell the warm night air. He thought he could smell the river. It was a sweetness that rose above the rotting of wet leaves half turned to dirt. Conrad listened to his diminishing footsteps. Then he must have fallen asleep.

He woke up to Ben’s hot breath swelling across his face. At the same time he was aware of a violent ruckus. He accepted this as rain and an indication that he had been asleep for some time and didn’t think anymore of it. Though he didn’t much like the metal-coldness of the new air that the rain had brought.

“Conrad. Wake up. I don’t know what to do. Wake up. Are you awake? I think there is really something wrong.”

“What are you talking about?” Conrad barely knew where he was.

“My stomach.”

Just then there was a flash of light and with blinding simplicity Conrad saw everything in the tent, all of which looked as though it were made from the same electric-golden material. He saw Ben’s messy hair, spilt forward around his big eyes and his face, glistening with rain and tears. The light was cut by total blackness, which was then toppled by a concussive eruption of thunder that shattered any chance that Conrad may have had at remembering the things he had seen in that illuminating instant.

“This is killing me,” Ben moaned invisibly. “It feels like I’m being stabbed.”

Conrad put his hand on his friend’s soaked shoulder and pulled himself up into a sitting position.

“Okay. Okay.” He was trying to think. He knew he probably shouldn’t yawn, but he figured he could get away with it with the rain banging so hard against the tent.

“I’m gonna go wake up Creatch,” he finally said. “He’ll fix you up.”

Conrad, now completely drenched, peered in at his counselor through the screen of his tent. He was surprised somehow to find him asleep like a normal person, snoring enormously. He said Creatch’s name several times, all without success, and then forced himself to unzip the screen and tug on his cold foot.

“What the—what in the hell’s going on?” Creatch wanted to know. Conrad told him it was raining and that Ben was sick.

“What do you mean sick?”

“His stomach hurts.”

Without getting out of his sleeping bag, Creatch arranged himself so that he was face to face with Conrad; he looked at him in a way that requested a more whole explanation and Conrad looked right back at him and did his best to tell him only what needed telling and nothing more. Creatch grabbed a flashlight and stepped into some slippers that in the dark did not look very far removed from the creatures they had once been.

Back at their tent, Ben was lying in a ball with his face buried in his sleeping bag. Creatch uncurled him gently, handing the flashlight to Conrad who was still standing out in the rain. Conrad held the light down on them. Creatch, having peeled back Ben’s shirt to reveal his glimmering white belly, started prodding around gently. Everywhere hurt. Judging from the expression on the sharp crescent of Creatch’s face, this was bad news. Conrad saw Creatch open his mouth like he was about to say something, but he closed it again. Conrad couldn’t help but think that this too meant that Ben’s stomach was very bad news.

“Stay here,” Creatch ordered. “I’m going to have a word with Bulukus.”

This was the other counselor. Bulukus must have been a Greek name because that’s where all the stories about his family took place and it could be the only explanation for such an incredible combination of letters. Everyone admired Bulukus, but also felt sorry for him because he was supposed to go pro as a pitcher until he threw his arm out. He had a defeated way about him and he never got mad at anyone, because if he let himself get mad, Conrad imagined, he would just fall apart.

When Creatch returned he pulled Conrad out into the rain and wanted to know how he was doing. Conrad felt okay, considering, and he said so, though he was disconcerted by Creatch’s interest in how he was, as opposed to how Ben was, suspecting it probably meant he would be needed to do something.

“Bulukus and I talked and he agreed to take the rest of the campers out of here in a few hours.”

Conrad wasn’t sure what this meant but he was vaguely afraid of what it could mean.

“You and I on the other hand,” Creatch continued, “are going to have to get Ben out of here right now.”

“Now?” Conrad asked, immediately ashamed at the wealth of terror in his quaking voice. “Where are we going to take him?”

“We’re going to paddle him up river to Moose Crossing and get him to a hospital.” Creatch had a sturdy way of saying this as though they’d already done it and it wasn’t that big of a deal so he’d rather not talk about it. Moose Crossing was the place where the Ontario Northland Railway crossed high above the brown expanse of the Moose River. They had stopped there just that day to call the camp to say that everything was okay. “We’ll have to use someone’s telephone to call the O.P.P.,” which Conrad knew stood for the Ontario Provincial Police.

Back in his tent Conrad told Ben a simplified version of the plan. He didn’t worry about packing up any of their stuff because Creatch told him that Bulukus would take care of it. Conrad checked his watch and was surprised to find that it was only 1:00 in the morning. Ben didn’t look like in the mood to go anywhere.

“Let’s just go back to sleep,” he said dreamily. “I’m sure I’ll be fine in the morning.”

“Put on your shoes,” Conrad said, uncrumpling a rain jacket from the ball that it had been at the bottom of his pack. He saw the pointlessness in wearing it, as he was just putting it over his soaking wet clothes, but he did it anyway. It seemed like as worthwhile a measure as anything. When Ben made no attempt to put on his shoes Conrad put them on for him.

Ben could pretty much walk on his own, but Conrad wrapped an arm around his waist just in case he got the idea again that he wanted to go back to sleep. Conrad could hear the river before he saw it. When they finally made it there, out of breath, Creatch was already dragging a canoe into the water. Without saying much of anything they lifted Ben into the duffer spot in the middle and Conrad went into the bow and faced the loud darkness that was the river. With one foot in the canoe and one foot in the water, Creatch pumped hard and then jumped into the boat. The river took them.

They worked hard against the current, cutting easily through the surface with their paddles, as the rain was already breaking it apart, opening it up. Conrad squinted at the husky mat of trees that hung flatly on either side of the river, realizing that they were barely moving forward, if at all. He held his paddle out of the water for a number of seconds, letting the water slip off the glossy curved wood. Their pace didn’t change the slightest bit. Conrad was embarrassed by the smallness of his own contribution to their movement upriver and hoped that Creatch was unaware. He turned around and saw his counselor’s massive shape heaving his paddle through the water in rapid, powerful strokes.

“Paddle,” he said.

“We’re barely moving,” Conrad answered.

“Turn around and paddle!”

Conrad had been yelled at plenty of times, but this was different. The only thing he could think of to account for this difference was fear. Creatch was just as afraid as he was. This horrifying notion made Conrad paddle harder than he knew he could, as if by paddling so hard he was pulling away from Creatch, putting space in between himself and Creatch’s fear. For a while his whole body ached and then everything became so numb that he had to keep an eye on his hands to make sure he was still holding on to the paddle. After an incalculable amount of time Conrad remembered Ben. He stopped paddling and turned around. Ben was curled up in the fetal position, his eyes tightly shut.

“Ben. How do you feel?”

Ben relaxed his eyes and then opened them.

“I’m trying to pretend I’m not here.”

“That’s a good idea.” Conrad said.

“It’s hard.”

“I bet.”

“Do you think maybe I’ll pass out before it gets too much worse?”

This question had alarming implications that turned their lack of progress into something that could no longer be denied. They decided to paddle to the shore and try to run along the side of the river, pulling Ben in the canoe. Conrad was anxious to get off the water with the lightning becoming more frequent.

Conrad’s body was stiff when he stood up to leap for the muddy ledge, speckled with shining stones. This rigidity caused him to under jump and land in the river, though it didn’t matter because he was already pretty much as wet as he was going to get. Running with the boat proved to be faster, but also more difficult and tiring. There were hidden rocks and roots, drop offs, and places where the edge of earth, cut sharp from the rushing water, rose two feet or so above the river’s current level. They had to bend down to pull the canoe over these high parts, stretching awkwardly to keep from falling in. For most of the time Conrad just sprinted along with his hand resting limply on the back of the canoe, trying to keep up.

They switched back and forth between paddling and running a few more times. Each time they switched, the new way seemed easy and the old way seemed like it had been a waste of time and energy, but quickly this optimism corroded into the old feeling of futility, as the difficulties came back to them. Conrad could sense Creatch growing more and more frantic.

On their third attempt to run with the canoe Creatch fell down and then crumpled into the river. It looked to Conrad like his body short-circuited. He resurfaced a few yards away, coughing and grunting. Conrad stood there dumbfounded, watching his counselor drift away. The current was strong, but not so strong that he should have any trouble swimming to the edge.

“Help me!” Creatch yelled. Ben lifted his head up to see what was going on.

“I’ll hold the canoe here,” he said to Conrad, stretching out to grab a large clump of grass. Conrad let go of the canoe and ran towards Creatch, utterly clueless as to what was happening. Getting down on his knees he was able to grab Creatch’s sweater and pull him towards the shore. He then hooked his hands under Creatch’s armpits, heaving his bulky top half out of the water so that he could lean into the shore and keep himself from being taken by the current.

“I’m not sure, but I think it’s broken,” Creatch said. “The top of the shin just below the knee. It feels like there could be bone coming through. I’m not quite ready to find that out yet.” Conrad just knelt there, letting these frank, terrifying words pass through his mind like fog, clouding his ability to think or respond. Creatch figured that he must have stepped into a hole and then bashed his shin into a jagged rock.

“Help me get out of here,” Creatch said. His tone was reminiscent of the way Conrad’s grandfather used to ask for help going to the bathroom in the weeks after he had broken his hip.

Once Creatch was out of the water he lay back in the tall grass, letting the rain patter onto his eyelids. Conrad bent down to examine the injury. The whole area looked ominously complicated in the dark. It just didn’t look right. But before he could decide exactly in what way there was a flash of lightning and he saw it: a white splintery shard of bone protruding through an open mash of blood and hair and hanging rags of skin. It was made vague and innocuous once again when the lightning flashed away, but by then Conrad was already lurching off into the reeds to vomit.

“I guess that means there’s bone,” Creatch said, laughing sickly.

“What’s happening?” Ben yelled. “Who’s hurt?” He was still sprawled out in the canoe, hugging the clump of grass. Creatch screamed back that they’d be there in a minute.

Conrad crawled out of the reeds to find Creatch biting on a stick. Conrad was too afraid to ask what he was intending to do that would require such a measure.

“Tie this around the wound,” Creatch gargled through clenched teeth. He took off his waterlogged sweater and held it out for Conrad to take. “Don’t worry about the bone. They can fix that later. The only important thing is to tie it tight enough so that nothing gets in there. We also want to stop the bleeding.” Conrad tied the sweater into a bulky knot around the wound while Creatch pounded the ground with his fist.

Slowly they made their way back to the canoe, Conrad more or less carrying his counselor, whose hair hung over his face in wet crimson tangles. Conrad wasn’t as much surprised by his own strength as he was by Creatch’s willingness to be carried.

“What’s happens now?” Ben asked when they approached.

“This shouldn’t change as much as you might think,” Creatch said.

With no other option they went back to paddling. Creatch rested his injured leg on the wooden bar just in front of his seat. The wound didn’t seem to directly affect his ability to paddle, though he was certainly weaker now than he had been.

They paddled on through the rain in silence and after a little under an hour, a faint line grew out of the dimensionless darkness of the sky, which as they approached, slowly sharpened into train tracks. They had made it to Moose Crossing. Conrad had never been so happy to see anything. He reversed his grip and paddled on his left side, causing them to curve towards the right. Feeling a burst of strength, he dug the paddle into the rippling water, driving the bow hard into the shore.

“Go to the nearest house,” Creatch said. “Tell them that our kid is sick and he’s turning yellow. Don’t forget to say the part about him turning yellow.” Conrad looked down at Ben. He wasn’t yellow but he thought he understood why Creatch wanted him to say he was. Weird symptoms like that had a way of scaring people into action.

“What about you?” Conrad asked.

“I’ll stay here with Ben.” He said this as though it was his decision to stay.

“But what should I tell them about you?”

“How many different ways are there to say that someone broke his leg.”

Conrad felt like he had done something wrong, though he didn’t know what that could have been. He bowed his head and then took off up the steep path, which wound through hanging green branches, lunging off rocks to avoid slipping in the mud. He reached the top and there were the tracks shooting out across the river. There were two houses on one side and a depot on the other. His wet clothes stuck tightly to his skin making it awkward to run. As he crossed the tracks, heading towards the nearest house, Conrad wondered what kind of insane person would ever want to live out here. He banged on the door. No one answered. He banged harder. He didn’t know what else there was to do. Then a terrible thought occurred to him. What if no one answered? What would he do then? Was Creatch in a good enough condition to perform a pair of rugged surgeries with a Leatherman on Ben and on himself? Before tonight Conrad would have said yes, but now it seemed doubtful. Conrad looked at a garden that was near the door, which appeared to consist of nothing more than a few vertical sticks that someone had shoved into the sandy dirt. He walked through the desolate garden on his way around the house. On the opposite side there was a low window emitting a blue mosaic light. Looking in, he saw a squalid living room dominated by heavily lacquered furniture, all of which looked somehow out of place. The TV, showing a hockey game, was on mute. A shirtless man was passed out on the couch, an empty bottle cradled like a newborn baby in his arms. Conrad hit the window, even though he was pretty sure that the man wasn’t going to wake up.

He left the window and ran to the only other house. It was identical: the same log cabin style, the same boxy smallness; there couldn’t have been more than a few rooms in there. All the lights were off inside. Conrad knocked on the door and waited. He tried again. After he knocked the second time a light came on right away as though the person in there was hoping that whoever was knocking would go away, but had made a promise to himself that if there was another knock he would get up and see who it was.

Soon a light came on just behind the door, sending two squares of warm brightness out above Conrad’s head. The rain flashed white as it passed through this light and then turned black again just before it hit the ground. The light spread out as it got further from the door and was so faint when it reached the trees at the edge of the patchy yard that it merely made the droplets of water glow on the branches without affecting the blackness of the branches themselves. The door opened and an old Indian man was standing there with a shotgun. The shotgun wasn’t pointed at Conrad, but it was there and that was enough. Conrad hoped that he might not be in the mood to shoot anyone having just woken up. The old man’s face was surrounded by a coarse mess of white hair that reminded Conrad of cold winters in Michigan, snow that had lain around on the ground for too long. The skin on his face was oily and porous and much of it seemed to be going to waste with the way it hung inertly in thick folds. At first Conrad was disconcerted by the man’s lack of expression but then he was comforted by the thought that it was probably about as easy for him to smile as it was for a 300-pound man to do a pull up. The old man stood there in jeans and an opened flannel shirt, not saying anything.

“It’s an emergency. I need a telephone,” Conrad almost shouted. He kept talking. “I’m on a canoe trip to Moosenee with my summer camp. My friend is sick. Something’s wrong with his stomach. He’s turning yellow. Yellow. Also my counselor broke his leg and the bone is sticking out.”

“Where are they?” the old man asked.

“They’re with the canoe by the river.”

The man stood there looking down at him. Conrad hoped that he was assessing the situation, determining what to do, though he could have been just standing there, thinking about nothing. Conrad waited.

“Which one would you say,” the Indian finally said, “is worse off?”

Conrad didn’t understand the reasoning behind this question but he thought about it anyway, deeming that it must be important. This was the first decision he was required to make all night and he didn’t want to screw it up.

“Creatch’s leg is broken. We know that. And I don’t think it’s bleeding all that much anymore. With Ben, though, it could be anything. So I’d say he’s worse.”

“Come in,” the Indian said and then disappeared into another room. Conrad stepped inside. He hoped that he had said the right thing. The room had looked warmer than it actually was. He certainly wouldn’t describe it as cozy. There were small woodcarvings everywhere—animals mostly; some Conrad recognized as actual animals and others he supposed were mythical creatures. A carving of a bear on the lamp table next to the sofa caught his eye. It was about the size of a rat. The bear’s expression was docile, his eyes closed. Conrad had never seen a bear in the wild but he never thought of one like that before. Abruptly the old man appeared again, this time holding two butter knives.

“No, not knives. Phone. Telephone,” Conrad said, turning his hand into a phone by extending his thumb and pinky.

“I don’t have a phone,” the old man said. “Follow me.”

He put the knives into his pocket and went out the door. Conrad couldn’t decide whether he was dealing with a very stoic person or just a tired one. Either way his presence gave Conrad a feeling that everything might be all right. This was the kind of person that Conrad had tried to become after his brother died: quiet and unaffected. He wasn’t very good at it and usually he just felt like he was being an asshole. He admired the people to whom it came naturally and he generally trusted them; they didn’t seem as likely to screw things up, uncaught in emotion. Conrad followed the Indian across the train tracks towards the depot. It was a broad and sturdy building like an old military bunker.

When they got to the front door the Indian took out the silverware that he had brought, holding a slender knife in each clenched fist. Conrad was half expecting to see some display of indigenous magic, but the man simply slid the knives into the crack between the door and the doorframe. He waited, watching the man’s flannelled elbows dance around as he worked on the lock. It looked like he had done this quite a few times. Within a minute they were inside. He followed the man through a series of open, musty rooms. It was not too much of a departure from being outside; the haunting creaks of nature followed them through each drafty room, echoing off the walls that smelled like trees and churning in the empty space between their heads and the high ceilings. The floorboards looked hundreds of years old; the varnish, if there ever was any, was gone. Many of the rooms had small bunks in them, neatly made with white sheets and brown wool blankets. Soon they were standing in front of another door and again the old man outdrew his butter knives.

Inside was an office with a tidy wooden desk and some file cabinets. Nothing looked real or like it had ever been used, giving Conrad the odd sense that he was on a movie set. There was a window, which constituted almost the entire wall, providing a view of the tracks and the river and the dim swaying woods. Rain fell onto the tracks; it seeped along the metal support beams, pouring off into the river in wide ribbons. The man picked up the phone and put it to his ear, then held it out to Conrad, who looked back at him as if to say: don’t you just want to call? You’re already holding the phone. But the man sustained his absolute imperviousness and Conrad took the phone and dialed the number, which the man recited out loud. After a few rings someone picked up. The officer had the casual and soothing tone of someone used to hearing news that other people were apt to consider tragic or at least urgent. It seemed like he was the annoying type of person who took pride in being difficult to impress. Conrad told him everything, highlighting the fact that Ben was yellow and that Creatch had bone coming out.

“Okay,” the O.P.P. said. “Sounds like an appendix to me. But who knows, maybe it’s not. I’m no expert, see. It could be anything.” Conrad got the impression that the officer hadn’t spoken to anyone in some time and was thrilled for the chance to become reacquainted with his own voice. “The only reason I say appendix is because it’s the most common thing. But like I said, it could be any number of things. An appendix is not necessarily a big deal. But it can be. I’m going to give you a number to call. As far as the broken leg goes—”

“I don’t have a pen,” Conrad interrupted.

“Just tell it to me,” whispered the Indian. “I’m good with numbers.”

“That’s Sam’s number,” the officer said after having given it. “Normally you can’t access your location by vehicle but he’s got a truck, Sam does, that can drive right on the tracks. You just tell him that you have an emergency. He’ll give you a ride on up to Moosenee. It shouldn’t take more than half an hour. I’ll radio in for an ambulance to meet you right there at the station.”

Conrad hung up, feeling further from accomplishing anything. The Indian repeated the number and Conrad dialed. It must have rung more than ten times before someone finally picked up. All Conrad could hear was heavy breathing. Then the person, Sam or whoever it was, dove into an intelligible rant that could have only been inspired by extreme amounts of alcohol and reckless depression. In the following minute Conrad’s expectations dwindled from thinking the man could drive them even though he was drunk, to thinking he probably shouldn’t drive, but maybe they could use his truck, to concluding finally that it was very unlikely this person could even stand up or help them in any way. Conrad couldn’t tell whether he was singing or pleading or just complaining melodically. He was certainly sobbing. Conrad hung up on him and called the O.P.P. again.

“Goddamn that Sam,” the officer said. “The trouble is there’s not much we can do now. We can’t land a helicopter at night, not in a storm like this. The morning would be as soon as we could get one out there.”

It was decided that Conrad would meet the helicopter outside the depot at first light. He and the Indian went back outside.

When they got down to the river Creatch was sitting on the ground with his leg raised over the rim of the canoe. His hand rested on the back of Ben’s head, who was still curled up in the duffer spot. Creatch watched them approach and when they got close he introduced himself.

“I’m George,” replied the Indian.

“And this is Ben,” Creatch said.

Conrad was embarrassed that he had forgotten to introduce himself, though he couldn’t think of a time it would have been appropriate.

“I’m Conrad,” he said to George, who nodded, but was more concerned with Creatch’s leg.

“Let’s get you inside,” he said. “That way we can take a look at you in some light and the boy can lie down.” Then he turned to Conrad. “We’ll have to take them up one at a time.”

“Take Ben first,” Creatch said. “He should get out of the rain. He’ll be easier anyway.”

The two of them carried Ben to George’s house and laid him down on the couch. Conrad swore that his face now had a yellowish tint to it. He looked peaceful in his sleep, like he wasn’t in any pain, though Conrad remembered what Ben had said before in the canoe; it may have been the pain that finally knocked him out. Before they went back for Creatch, George brought from the kitchen a small bottle of whiskey, which he slid into his back pocket. It was more of a struggle getting Creach up the path; as Conrad was about a foot shorter than him it was hard to keep his bad leg from hitting the ground. They brought him to the depot where there was a first aid kit.

George set them up in a room with a TV set and two bunks. Creatch reclined in one of the bunks with his leg propped up on some pillows and Conrad sat in the other, hunched against the wall, having given his only pillow to Creatch. It was hard for him to imagine the amount of pain Creatch must have been in. George brought in a chair, which he placed by Creatch’s bunk, and sat down. Conrad was quiet while the two men made small talk and passed the bottle of whiskey. When they ran out of things to say they turned on the TV. Of the three channels only one came in all the way. This channel was showing The Wizard of Oz. It was at the part when Dorothy falls asleep in a field of orange poppies. She looked tired and happy. Conrad wondered if his brother looked like that when he went to sleep under the willow tree. He could see how it would feel nice to collapse in the warmth of the sun and not care whether you got up again, not care about anything at all. He thought about Ben sleeping on George’s couch and wondered if he imagined himself in a place like that—some peaceful field. Conrad was pretty tired himself. His eyes were barely open as he watched the snow float down on Dorothy and the Lion. Dorothy looked beautiful, Conrad thought, when she was just waking up.

Soon George got up to brew some coffee. It didn’t seem like he cared too much for the movie. Conrad had been waiting for him to leave the room so he could say something to Creatch.

“You probably shouldn’t tell anyone that we watched this,” he had wanted to say, but he couldn’t because he was already asleep, dreaming about how beautiful Dorothy was with those tired eyes that weren’t quite ready to open.

by bl pawelek

(an FMC original)

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe “How To Take Yourself Apart, How To Make Yourself New”.

AB: Collection of instructional prose poems about dads, growing up, girls.

Five Questions Here

1 – The book is dedicated to your dad. Tell me your best dad memory.

AB: Hm. This is going to sound lame, but no single memory jumps to mind. But it’s dedicated to my dad because what does jump to mind is basically all the little moments that come up or are hinted at in the book – going fishing together, camping, baseball games. All that stuff.

2 – (p10) If you ever had to perform an autopsy, where would be your first cut?

AB: If not, like the short, at the “front of the scalp,” then probably just right in the middle of the chest. Which seems the most obvious, right? Cut right in, splay the body open, see what’s in there? An obvious starting place, but I’m a kind of obvious guy.

3 – (p12) What dream are you currently injecting?

AB: Whatever I think, right before falling asleep, will help me write something good when I wake.

4 – (p14) Describe yourself as a complicated math equation.

AB: Hell. One of the reasons I started writing was so I no longer had to deal with math, as much as I liked it. Recently, while having a conversation with someone about what we write, and the stuff we write over and over again, I said something like “dads and clouds and bible stories and paper cranes and malaise.” So, maybe something like:

X = (N(F + C + B) + M)/SD + PC

Or something like that.

5 – What is your favorite line in this book?

AB: I know you aren’t really supposed to admit this about your own stuff, but I feel like I like a good number of lines in this book. I’m pretty proud of the lines and, as someone who doesn’t really think of himself as a language or line writer, I find myself surprised by a decent amount of the stuff in there. Lame, I know. That said, I like “There, there.”

Five Questions There

6 – Your favorite folded piece of paper would be a …

AB: Folded checks are nice. Or love notes. Maybe my “favorite” would be, like, a junior high love note or something, with hearts and spirals and everything, back in those heady days when everything was so innocent and new. OK, OK… the “N” in the equation above is nostalgia.

7 – (p34) What is the best ‘piece of trash’ you have ever found?

AB: Hm. I’m actually not much of a trash collector, or even picker-upper. I’ve got this great, old Paul Bunyan book here on my desk that I’m not sure where I got, but I think grabbed for free at some garage sale giveaway or something.

8 – (p48) On the last piece of paper you have eaten, what was written?

AB: If I told you that, I wouldn’t have needed to eat it, now would I have?

9 – When you become a father, what is the one thing you will teach your son “How To” do?

AB: Is “take himself apart, make himself anew” two things? Is it a cop-out answer?

10 – What was the hardest part of this book?

AB: Organizing it. I wrote all the pieces pretty quickly, never once thinking of them as a collection, or a whole of any sort. But… the odd side benefit to only being able to write one or two things, over and over again, is that when you collect them, if you put the puzzle pieces together just right they can, hopefully, feel like they were meant to be like that all along. A kind of whole greater than the sum of its parts. So the hardest part was definitely deciding what fit, what didn’t, and how (if it was possible) to arrange them for best presentation.

In 10 words (no more, no less), describe your next project.

AB: My cheating preamble and so too-long answer is that I have two “next” projects – a book from Keyhole in September, and then what I am actually writing right now:

a) Novella made from shorts about clouds and a relationship.
b) Cliché roadtrip novel with religion, video games, and more.

Myfanwy Collins

In December the snow was so deep that deer knocked over the birdfeeder and denuded the shrubs at the front of Eve’s house, eating even the rhododendron leaves, all other forms of nourishment lost to them, covered over with white.

Hesitant sun poked through the evergreens and spiked the snowy yard that morning. It was mild. In the 30s. Earlier she heard footsteps squeaking up the snow covered drive—a man come to invade her house and kill her. But when she got up to check she found the dog in the hallway, his nails scratching against the tile from his dreaming movement.

Outside there was no man, but trees. Beyond the trees there were roofs, which throughout the region had fallen prey to ice dams. The eaves, heavy with ice and snow from rapid thaws and freezes and snows, were dammed so that behind them icy water backed up onto the roof and threatened to seep through into the house proper.

Ceilings caved in. Walls leaked. Nasty business.

Eve noticed the first drips in the window casings in the upstairs bedrooms. Soon the walls beaded and splotched. Her house was sweating on the inside.

She pawed through the tiny local phone book and settled on Fixit General Contractors. A man answered. “Talbot,” he said. She understood this was his name.

She spoke, breathless. Something weird was happening with her house. Water seemed to be coming from everywhere. Through her walls. Like a sign from God. Or the Virgin Mary. One of the stains might actually be in the shape of the Virgin Fucking Mary. She couldn’t tell for sure. Oh god, she needed help. Help. Could someone help? Please? She was a woman alone in these wild mountains. She needed help. Help me, goddamn it!

“I’ll be out this afternoon,” he said.

“I need you now.” In response, she heard him shuffling papers on a desk or table. Clearing his throat. The air moved in and out of his nose with precision. “The water is everywhere.”

“I’ll be there after lunch,” he said and hung up. Eve would have been infuriated if she hadn’t been so grateful. All she needed to do was wait until after lunch.

When Talbot arrived, Eve was standing in the driveway. She wore a bright orange down vest over a black sweater and jeans. Her dog’s leash rested in one hand and a toilet plunger in the other. “Thank god you’re here,” she said as he got out of his truck.

He nodded and eyed the roof. Icicles hung down several feet and a good foot of snow was backed up. It was a mess. “I’ll just get my ladder,” he said.

“What should I do?” Eve said. She twirled the toilet plunger in her hand as if it were an umbrella. The dog sank down and chewed on the crusty snow.

“Might as well go inside and wait. It’s going to take me a while.”

Each time he descended the ladder, she was there gawking at him through the front window, plunger in hand. Later, when they knew each other better, he asked her about the plunger. “I don’t own a baseball bat,” she said.

“So you were going to plunge my face off if I tried anything funny?” he asked.

“You got it.”

But he hadn’t tried anything funny. Instead he went about his work and thought about her. It wasn’t that she was so pretty. She was a good looking woman, sure. Strong jaw, clear eyes. But there were plenty of good looking women in the world. Hell, they even had some good looking women born and bred right there in the North Country.

He liked women, but in a fearful way. Partly because he was shy, but mostly because of his secret. Talbot still slept with a pacifier. He’d never been able to give it up and the only other person who knew his secret was his mother and she took this secret to her grave, God bless her.

This secret had kept him from doing just about everything he’d ever wanted to do—go to college, find a nice wife, have kids. None of it had happened because he could not bear to give up his pacifier. He’d sooner have died. And since he couldn’t give it up, he couldn’t foresee how he could ever sleep in a room with another human being. Just the thought of it filled him with a shame so blistering that his cheeks would redden and his hands would shake. And the shame made him crave the nipple—so supple and comforting against his tongue. He didn’t think there was anything else in the world that could make him feel so satisfied.

Eve ended up at the lake because it seemed to her there was nowhere else to go. Rather, there was nowhere else she could imagine herself being without wanting to peel her skin off strip by strip. It had been a childhood vacation spot. A place of memories—not necessarily happy, but not sad either. It was this middle ground she sought after Chet left her.

The last time she’d seen him was at the reflecting pool at the Christian Science Center. It was early June and stifling. Grimy children ran in and out of the fountain—some in bathing suits, some in shorts and t-shirts, others in underwear. Their weary parents sat on the sidelines, out of the spray, grateful for a chance to get their kids cooled off.

Eve waited for Chet on one of the stone benches. Above the traffic noise of Huntington Ave and Mass Ave and Boylston, she heard the whine of his motorcycle. He was going fast and he knew she would know he was and that it would irritate her. She gritted her teeth.

He was free to do whatever he wanted now. They were no longer together. She’d made that clear. Even though he was the one physically leaving—taking off cross-country on his bike—she was the one who left. Or at least that’s what she told herself. And this was the last good bye. He’d already moved all of his shit into the basement of his sister’s house in Framingham and now all that was left was for him to turn over the key to her condo.

He snuck up behind her, sweaty palms covering her eyes. “Ha, ha,” Eve said. He slid his hands away from her eyes and she smelled the lingering tobacco and motor oil from his skin and something else: the unique himness of him.

She was making a mistake.

He straddled the bench and sat facing her profile. He slipped the key into her hand. “You could have mailed it,” she said, turning the key over and over in her palm with the flick of her fingers.

He stood and took her by the hand and pulled her up next to him and then he bent her over backward and kissed her in a dramatic, winning way. He always had loved an audience. The kiss lingered and he reached a hand down the waistband of her thin cotton skirt and snapped the elastic of her underpants.

And then all that was left was the whine of his bike over the traffic. It was only later as she waited alone for the #39 bus that she realized he’d not said a word.

So she was at the lake and he was gone. She pictured him traveling west, his bike blazing past fields of sunflowers, tall grass, gazelles, and prairie dogs.

Before there was such a thing as online shopping, Talbot had to travel for his pacifiers. He had driven up to 150 miles to cover his tracks and always he ended up buying more than just the pacifier—he’d get diapers or a few toys as well, which he ended up leaving behind in a the bag in a shopping cart, hoping some needy parent would find them.

Sure, he had tried to quit, but always this ended in sleep deprivation and wild mood swings. He had toyed with the idea of hypnosis or something like that, but how could he do it when he’d have to tell the person hypnotizing him what he wanted to give up?

It seemed easier, then, to just carry on as he was and to resign himself to the fact that this was his life and that he would go out the way he came in, alone.

But then there was the worry. What if he died suddenly or what if he went mad or was paralyzed and needed to be cared for? People would enter his home, invade his sanctuary. He would be discovered. His secret found out.

Eve sold her condo in Jamaica Plain, put most of her belongings in storage, bought a little four-season cottage on the lake sight unseen and headed north, unsure of who and what she would find there. She remembered people from her childhood summers. She remembered Francesca, who had a moustache and sold penny candy in her store and how Eve was mesmerized by her, so much so that her mother had to warn her not to stare. “There’ll be no treats for you if you gawk at that poor woman,” Eve’s mother said.

Of course, as an adult she ached for Francesca. Why had she not bleached the thing? Waxed it? Eve herself knew how easy it was to hide one’s womanly deformities. And whenever she was lax about her grooming, she always had Chet to remind her, plucking at the stray black hairs growing up from her nipples.

The shame.

Men knew no such shame. She was convinced of this. All of their hair, all of their burps and farts and blood and fat, all of their many excretions, were just as they were meant to be.

Oh sure, they had erections, but these were easily covered over and dealt with. When had a man ever had to worry about blood in his underpants or, heaven forbid, seeping through the crotch of his white capris? When?

Up north she would be shameless. She would live alone in her small house and let the hair around her nipples flourish. It was a new beginning.

The house came furnished—a hodge-podge of maple furniture from the 50s. It would do. The view was, as promised, spectacular—mountains, sky, water. In the summer she would practice yoga on the dock as the sun rose and drink a glass of wine in that same spot at sunset.

It was electric baseboard heat, which would be expensive, but she had savings enough left over from her condo and she was sure she’d find a job. Teaching or something. Maybe she could write ads for a local paper? She hadn’t really thought it all through, but something would come along. Until then, she would settle into her house and wait for winter. It was September when she moved in. Chet had been gone for 63 days.

Never mind.

September was golden and red and burning orange. It was warm afternoons and chilly nights. However, September did not prepare her for December. The sun behind the mountains by 4. The dark mornings.

She had never known such silence—so quiet you could hear the ice groan as it froze. So quiet you could hear the cold settling onto the branches and filling up the cracks in the clapboards of the house. So quiet.

The dog showed up on Halloween. Eve put out a jack o’lantern and bought candy, but no children showed up. Before she went to bed that night she stepped outside to blow out the candle in the pumpkin when she noticed a dog sitting outside of the range of the porch light. He looked to be a shepherd mix. A sturdy dog, but skinny, sickly, stray. Normally she would have been terrified of such a creature, remembering any number of large dogs which chased her and her sister as children, but she craved.

She had always considered herself a loner when she lived in the city, but now this, this was really being alone and she didn’t like it. The wind was not enough. “I need more,” she surprised herself by saying out loud one night as she lay in the dark waiting for sleep. “More, more.” Repeating made it prayer rather than desperate plea in the darkness. More, more.

She bent and blew out the candle and met the dog’s gaze. “You might as well come in, then,” she said. He didn’t move. Was she dreaming him?

“Come,” she said and thinking better of it, “Come, boy,” unsure of his sex. She opened the door and showed him the way in with the swoop of her arm. He stood. She stepped over the threshold and then he did come trotting in, falling in a heap on the doormat, lifting his head only to lap some water and devour the can of tuna she put out for him. More, more.

He told her that the walls would need work. “Might need to replace the drywall.” Eve nodded, unsure whether this was true or not. She had never paid much attention to things—how they were constructed. That was Chet’s job. He was the one who walked through her condo with the inspector before she signed the papers. She hadn’t even known an inspection was necessary. “It’s just something you’ve got to do, Babe,” Chet said. And so she had.

She thought of him on his bike, rolling on, the wheel spinning into oblivion, as she nodded. She wanted to send him a message so that he might send one back and tell her what to do. “What do you think I should do?” she asked Talbot.

“Water can do a lot of damage,” he said, ominously. Eve nodded. She had heard from Chet—postcards forwarded to her from her old address. They were all from southern states, not what she expected. They were signed only with his name, no love or miss you. Just Chet. She got the feeling he wrote the same thing on all of the postcards he sent and he knew she would know that. It was a chastisement.

She had ridden on the back of Chet’s bike down to Providence once, weaving in and out of traffic on 93. On the way down, she’d been tense, her hands bunched into fists around his waist. But on the way home she’d been so tired that she fell asleep for a few minutes, her body trusting that he would keep them moving forward. She had been drifting, the air flying past and around her helmet, her body suspended—it was that place between life and death. An out of body experience. Had she seen light? When she woke she realized with horror that she could have killed them—leaned this way, fallen that way. But they had not died.

“Let’s fix the walls,” she said. Talbot nodded. She had made the right decision.

Talbot owned two bi-planes, each built from a kit. One of the planes he flew regularly in the summer; the other—he would tell his passengers once they were well above the ground—was at the bottom of the lake. Ha. Ha.

As a child Talbot jumped off cliffs, from tree limbs, arms and legs flailing from bridges into rivers below. There was something about the way his body connected with air. He had sky dived the one time and then decided to get his pilot’s license, which is what led to the biplanes.

When he was in the air, his secret was forgotten. And then there was the precious release when the pontoons hit the water, glided briefly, made contact. The landing, the takeoff, those were the moments of reaching the sublime, when he imagined a white button in the back of his brain shattering and splintering into exquisite release. He was young again, his father throwing him over and over into the air, the sun shifting and shadowing his father from behind. He had trust that he would not fall.

January was black and snow and then there was February—darkness leading to darkness leading to blue sparkles in the noon time. She had never really known winter before this. “Is every winter this way?” she asked Talbot. He was there several times a week, fixing her walls, her ceilings, projects that seemed to be taking longer than they should, but she was glad. He filled up the time between morning and night.

“What way?” he asked. He had a few corny jokes and some long, droll stories about local people she did not know, but other than that she found him difficult to converse with.

“So fucking cold,” she said. She hadn’t had opportunity to swear much since Chet left. It felt good and she was testing the water to see how he would react.

“I suppose,” he said. She leaned in the doorway of the room he was working on—her spare bedroom—and lifted her right foot up and hooked it behind her left leg. Had she offended him?

“I’ll take you up in my plane this summer if you like.” His offer drifted out in the air between them, purple and strange. She wasn’t sure what to say. It implied their knowing each other would extend beyond this season—that outside of his working for her, they would meet and enjoy time together.

He had not turned from his work but had stopped hammering, waiting—hovering in anticipation—for her to say something. She opened her mouth, but could not speak. She breathed in, out. He took up hammering.

One month before Chet left, he asked her to meet him at his work. He took her into South Boston, down to the loading docks. They’d been there before when they first met. He brought her over the chain link and onto a cement slab one night—they had a picnic, watched the murky water shiver as they drank wine right from the bottle. She’d been scared of climbing the fence, disobeying the warnings. They were trespassing. Later in their relationship, he’d come to mock her fear, always edging her forward until her toes were in space and she was falling off a cliff. And forward she would move, never wanting him to think she was not worthy of him, flawed and fearful though she was.

He led her back to that spot. It was a muggy evening in May, and still light. “Remember this?” he said, grabbing two fistfuls of fence.

“Sure,” she said.

He dug a foot in and started to climb. “Come on,” he said.

“I don’t want to.”

“Don’t be that way.” He hoisted himself up another foot. “Come with me.”

Eve crossed her arms, looked around to make sure no one saw them. She thought she might scale the fence, give in to his goading one last time. Show him that she was worthy. In the distance she heard laughter, horns honking. A breeze brought in a waft of rotting fish, kelp. Chet pulled himself up and over the fence, stood on the other side of it facing her. She didn’t move. Noted, instead, that his face was the fearful one. If she didn’t follow him, who was he then?

“Aren’t you coming?” he said.

After Talbot made his offer and could not take it back, the idea grew so large in his mind that he could think of nothing but taking Eve up in his plane. Before sleep he ran through the movie of how he would land near her dock and take her by surprise while she was sunbathing.

She would wrap a towel around her hips like a sarong and allow him to attach the belts around her when she sat in the passenger seat. He imagined the hot smoothness of her skin beneath his fingers as they glided over it.

He would see the water dividing beneath them as they took off, the sun shooting through the windows. She would turn and smile.

Talbot would point out the mountains on the horizon, the dark center, leading to the russet edges of the tannin-laced water. The dark green of the trees and the paler, more vibrant green of the fields. The orange sail on a catamaran, small now and far away.

He would say, Do you love it up here?

Yes.

Back on the ground, he would help her out of the plane and she would suspend in his arms, her mouth reaching for his. And when she kissed him, her tongue would linger on his tongue and he would suck on it so gently that she would not even notice he’d done it. Everything would fall away then, fall backwards and upwards. The gentle suckling. The white button opening up.

It was spring. Nearly a year since Chet had left. Talbot made a joke about a sunken plane. She did not react. She heard the whine of the plane engines, felt the vibration of air over wings.

Instead of seeing mountains and sky and water from the plane window, Eve saw herself turning from the chain link fence and walking back along the pier as streetlights flickered on in the distance. Behind her she heard the jingle of Chet scaling the fence, the slap of the soles of his Converse as he ran in the opposite direction.

The sky above her was a prairie divided by road. Hot black tarmac, a wheel pushing forward.

by Myfanwy Collins

by Kirsty Logan

Renfield lives down a narrow alley above the bar where he works. The bar is called Stereo. Renfield has a theory that every city in the world has a bar called Stereo. He doesn’t travel much, but he has Googled it. Montreal, Alicante, Frankfurt, and Saint-Petersburg all have bars called Stereo. Renfield still eats bugs.

On his morning off, Renfield walks through Glasgow. He orders fish and chips with a mug of sugary tea. He picks at the food, moving it around so it looks like he has eaten some. He suspects that hunters are watching and the appearance of normality means survival. He goes to Argos and flips through the catalogue. He browses the classics section in Waterstones. He watches the pigeons fight over shreds of battered sausage and the tourists photographing them. His destination is the Necropolis, but it is important for this to seem accidental because of the hunters. Renfield knows that the dead must have their hearts burned. He is not sure whether this counts as a crime. He knows that hearts sing through the flames.

In the bar, Renfield is a fixed point. The customers in the bar swarm and buzz, but Renfield keeps his place behind the counter. He pulls pints quickly and cleanly. After closing, Renfield locks the bar and climbs the stairs to his flat. It has three rooms including the bathroom. This is where he eats the birds. His kitchen window is small but has no blinds, and his neighbours can see in. The bathroom window is dimpled glass and shows only blurs of dark and light. He is no longer sure whether the birds are helping his life force to grow. He thought they might heal his broken neck, but their small bones catching in his throat just made it feel worse. To hide his neck Renfield wears high-collared shirts and sometimes even a neck brace. He says this is because he fell off his motorcycle. None of Renfield’s customers or fellow bartenders can imagine Renfield on a motorcycle. He does not look like he could be trusted with an object traveling at 100mph.

Renfield tries to live a simple life. He still fears that he will disintegrate. He keeps a stethoscope next to the kettle and every morning while his tea brews he checks that his heart is still beating. He leaves work early and visits Western Infirmary’s A&E department trying to find the person who stole his pulmonary artery. He runs away when the nurses approach him. He suspects that his body, used to human tissue consumption, is metabolising him from the inside.

The hospital is next to the Necropolis, and this makes it difficult for Renfield. He knows that the hunters are watching him. He knows that the dead are beginning to twitch. He can feel them under his feet, making the bowels of the city shake. Renfield leans his shoulder against the wall of the Western Infirmary and tries to understand the morse code of the shuffling bodies. He thinks it cannot be a crime, this thing that he needs to do. Then he thinks that maybe it is a crime. Renfield does not want to go back to prison.

When he gets home it is nearly time for his shift at the bar, but he leaves his front door unlocked in case his upstairs neighbour wants to drink his spinal fluid. He sometimes thinks that everyone has gone to the other side and the only thing to do is to become like them. He wonders whether it is possible to buy a bow and arrow in Glasgow. It’s easy to buy ox livers from the butcher. As long as he uses a plate and cutlery, he can even eat them at the kitchen table where the neighbours can see. It’s normal to eat internal organs because everybody remembers their mothers serving up tripe. Renfield does not like the feeling of blood on his teeth.

Renfield does not talk much in the bar. He pulls pints and measures out three colours of wine. He restocks the peanuts. Always quickly, always cleanly. He thinks about going away, escaping the frozen drizzled clusters of Europe, the Cyrillic letters shushing at the edges of his mind. He thinks about the cracked red earth of Australia spreading so far and so flat that it curves away under the horizon. He thinks about sun glinting off snow and the silence of wooden walls against the Canadian mountains. But the steady siren of the Necropolis will still reach him from across the seas. He lines the pints up neatly on the bar, punctuates the row with a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.

Renfield knows that the dead must be burned. He knows that limbs never stop twitching. He knows that the burning hearts will sing out his name. He knows that he will starve if he goes back to prison because he will have nothing to tempt the birds to his window. He does not like the way that insect shells dig into his gums.

After his shift at the bar, Renfield locks up. He posts the keys through the letterbox for his boss to find in the morning and he climbs the stairs to his flat. In the kitchen Renfield finds that a bird is still fluttering in the trap he set. He digs his thumbnail into the bird’s skin-soft throat. He waits for the blood to dry on his knuckles and then he flexes them slowly. It is too dark to see, but he imagines the rusted flakes piling by his feet. He thinks about how he could not breathe in jail, about bars between him and the sky, about tempting bugs into the tears in his mattress. The hearts have begun to beat under the city and Renfield can feel the vibrations coming through the floor. They make something deep in his belly shrink. There is no more time.

The flames are redder than the sunset and the hearts have already begun singing his name.