Erie
for Karin Wiberg
Always the crossword clue for “Pennsylvania port.”
Everybody, I guess, thinks of a port as being
on an ocean. Not me. It’s the place I nearly drowned,
all those years ago, adrift on a rubber raft
Page 54 of 67
Another Small Death
Assured his references would be fine, two week’s notice was given, severance check guaranteed. That would give him one month total to get a life.
Freakyfour years gone just like that. Exiting in long strides through swinging doors, Gary walked to the elevator. This whole building, all twenty six floors, would be there when he was gone. His work was unimportant, in a few weeks nobody would remember him.
His hands hung in a gesture of hopelessness. His tongue covered with thick crust leaving a bad taste in his mouth. He sat down more numb than anything else. Shuffling his options like broken glass through his mind…if only one thought could come out straight, one sliver of truth. But truth could be hard to handle, like shards of glass, slashing your face. The bleary sky was streaked by blood red rays from a setting sun. Night approached deep and dark.
THE PAINTING
by
Jim Gordon
I look kind of grubby and I want to apologize for that. I’ve been here all night. In jail I mean and I didn’t shave. I’ve never been in jail before and I’d like to go home. Grace thinks — Grace is my wife. Grace thinks they’ll let me out soon. I sure hope so cause I don’t feel very good. I have a blood problem. I can’t pronounce it but the Doc told Grace it’s very serious. He says there’s a new drug that could help but it costs lots of money and the Medicare don’t pay for it. Grace called the drug company and asked if they could do something but they said they couldn’t. Grace thought maybe if we went there they might help me. So we went there, but no one would see us. Grace thought if we hung around maybe they’d feel sorry for us or something so we sat in the waiting room. Grace read magazines and I spent the time staring at this big blank painting on the wall. Well it wasn’t really a painting; it was a blank canvas ya know. “Nice, isn’t it,” says the girl behind the desk. “What,” I asked? “The painting,” she says – “the Caudio, – don’t you love it?” “When’s Mr. Caudio gonna finish it,” I said? “It is finished,” she said. “But there’s nothing on it,” I said. “Of course not, that’s why it’s called, Nothing.” I asked how much did Nothing cost. “Three hundred thousand” she said. “Caudio’s bring very high prices.” I asked why someone would pay all that money for a painting that isn’t a painting. “Because it’s important,” she said.
Peep Show
By
Dennis Milam Bensie
Love enters, unasked.
On a hazy Sunday afternoon
The side garden was packed with watchful family and friends
Bearing flowers, cake, and punch.
A wedding,
Not too showy
But triumphant,
A sense of relief and pride,
The gallant pair,
Hot and flushed,
Stand hand in hand
On a little platform at the foot of a tree.
There is no preacher.
The two handsome men get tangled up in their love-talk,
Then they kiss with gaiety.
Husband and husband
Are jubilant.
At last, queer rights.
Two men can marry
And settle down
Despite the sex.
Sarah got back to me pretty fast with the name and number of a psychiatrist in Myrtle Beach. “Are you asking for yourself?” she said. “Yeah.” She didn’t prod any further. That was a few days ago, and I still haven’t called. I think I need pills, but I’m not sure how much they’ll help. I am lonely, and sad, and I feel like a fucking loser. Most of that is my own fault though.
I chose to quit an alright job where I made pretty good money so I could attend graduate school for writing in South Carolina. I left New York voluntarily, moved away from my family and friends to live in a place where I knew no one. I told myself, before I left my decent job and even better family, that I would get a job as soon as I got to Myrtle Beach. Six months later, I’m still unemployed, and some days I struggle to put even one coherent sentence on paper. My writing started at lukewarm crap, and then it baked in the Carolina sun until it turned into sweltering shit. Apart from class, I go days without leaving my apartment. “What’s the weather like today?” my mom asks me. The fuck if I know. I look around and the walls are white, and the blinds covering the windows are white, and the door is double-locked and white. All I see is white. “It must be snowing,” I say. And now, when life is something I can reach out and touch, a physical manifestation sitting on my chest and suffocating me as I beg for one last breath, I’m going to Boston, where a blizzard is expected to turn the whole city into one giant white space, for a big writing conference.
The conference sounds promising enough. I write a little, and I like to read other people’s writing. Plus, my friends are going too, and they like writing and reading also. But we leave tomorrow, and I’m staring at a map of the weather on my phone and thinking, “Snow. Just fucking snow.” In between the texts from the three girls I’m going with, the excited messages that range from “How many beers do you think you’ll drink throughout the trip? Over or under 50?” to “Boston tomorrow! What what!!!” and various appropriations of “wicked” and other Boston slang, I’m just praying this storm front from the Midwest materializes and pounds New England with enough fresh powder to make the peaks of the Rockies look like they exist in a hand-held snow globe.
I wake up the day of the trip and open two websites on my phone. Weather.com doesn’t disappoint; there is a storm coming, it says, and Boston is going to get hit hard. Spirit.com is not being as cooperative; we don’t give a shit if God himself threatens to strike the plane down mid-air, it says, this flight is leaving Myrtle Beach on time.
I had never even heard of the AWP conference before Sarah and Brittany asked me to go a few weeks ago. We all started hanging out sporadically at the end of last semester, around the same time I started seriously thinking of going back to New York, and this was the first mention anyone had made of AWP. “Seamus Heaney is the keynote speaker,” Brittany said. I guess that was supposed to really entice me. The only problem was I didn’t know who he was, and when I looked him up and found out he was an old Irish poet—“he might die soon” is what Brittany said to unsuccessfully convince other people in our graduate program to go—I wasn’t any more intrigued. But I agreed to go anyway, almost immediately, because what the fuck else was I going to do, spend the weekend looking for marks on my white walls or stepping over garbage as I moved between my ugly flowered couch and the bed sheets I’d stopped cleaning months ago?
And then Brittany said, “Coastal is paying for the whole thing!” Hold on, so you’re saying school is reimbursing us for the entire trip, and I can hear an old Irish poet spit a few rhymes? Good deal, I told her. Our friend Annie decided to go also.
I pick up Brittany on the way to school, a few hours before the flight, and she spends the twenty minute ride saying how she hopes it doesn’t snow, showing me the scarf she bought for Annie, and asking me if I think she’ll like it.
“Yeah,” I say. “It’s real nice.”
“Are you sure?” she says, playing with the frayed ends of the white and black piece of fabric around her neck. “Maybe I should just keep it for myself.”
“No, she’ll appreciate it. Trust me.”
It’s not the easiest thing in the world to instruct a girl to trust you. It’s even harder when you’re sharing a hotel room with the girl, and only a few days earlier you confessed to having unrequited feelings for her. We were sitting at the bar we go to before class sometimes. I don’t remember exactly how I phrased it, except that I sounded pretty fucking stupid, and immediately after, I wanted to dive onto the floor, gather the words together, dust off the sticky beer and stale bits of leftover food, and shove them back in my mouth.
I felt my insides churning as Brittany prepared to respond. “I just want to be friends,” she said. She followed that with, “We’ll find you a girl in Boston,” and my stomach dropped into my sneakers.
I figure Annie and Sarah know about it by now, because girls tell each other those types of things.
*
The drinking starts in the airport terminal. For Brittany and Annie, who are sitting next to each other on the plane, it continues during the flight. By the time we leave the baggage claim and wait outside in frigid, but dry (fuck you, Weather.com) Boston for a taxi, they are both loopy and all three of them, Sarah included, are joking about how I will have had enough of them by the end of the weekend. I almost had enough before we came. Of me, not them. As my loneliness grew and my mind started to stray from American literature and contemporary collections of short stories and composition and rhetoric articles that read like they were written in Mandarin, I debated whether I’d skip the trip to Boston and go back to New York instead of waiting for the week-long spring break this weekend precedes. I was hoping the weather would make the decision for me, though I probably wouldn’t have been able to make it to New York if it snowed in the Northeast anyway. Regardless, I’m getting to New York next week for spring break, and I’m not coming back to Myrtle Beach. I haven’t told anyone but my mom.
“We’re not from here!” someone shouts as we fight the wind to climb into a taxi.
“Where are you going?” the driver asks.
Our hotel is two miles away, and Sarah, sitting in the passenger seat, gives him the address. I’m squished in the back with Brittany and Annie and the luggage that wouldn’t fit in the trunk. They’re still giggling like a couple of school girls. The radio is on, and they serenade the driver with a version of “Lady in Red” that they revise so the lyrics are “Cabbie in Yellow” or some shit like that. It doesn’t really matter, because it’s fucking awful, so off-key and shrill that if this was a cartoon, all the windows of the cab would pop out and the rearview mirror would shatter into a thirty piece jigsaw puzzle. But it’s funny too, so I laugh, and maybe the whole weekend will be full of shit like this, funny cab rides and impromptu karaoke and things that the girls will tell everyone back at school. And poetry readings and literary panels too. I almost forgot about those. I’ll tell everyone in New York about how informative they are.
“I hope there’s not an extra charge for this,” I joke with the cab driver.
He laughs, but then I realize I wasn’t really kidding, because he gets “lost”, and our two mile cab ride costs fifty-five dollars. The credit card machine is attached to the back of the passenger seat, and I swipe my American Express. Brittany reaches to hand me a twenty dollar bill. “Don’t worry about it,” I say. Annie laughs. She and Brittany grin at each other.
We get to the hotel around one in the morning. By the time we unwind, we only get two hours of sleep. We take the train to the conference in the morning, where the line for registration is crazy long and crazy slow. The cavernous room is full of writers and booths and signs advertising “AWP Boston: March 7-9, 2013” and future dates in Seattle, Minneapolis, and Los Angeles. An hour or two passes before Sarah and Annie decide to step outside to smoke a cigarette. Brittany says she has to pee, but I sense she doesn’t want to leave me by myself. Before Sarah and Annie left, everyone was bullshitting, passing the time with idle conversation. Now I can’t think of anything to say, and neither can she. The only thing that comes to mind is how pretty she looks, that I like the way those black-rimmed glasses frame her face and flowing dark hair, but I’m not an idiot. I know she won’t appreciate the compliment, not from me anyway, and I tell her it’s alright, that she can go to the bathroom.
As Brittany walks away, someone in line behind me says, “Hi. What do you write?”
“A little bit of everything,” I say, and if there’s a way to sound more obtuse I’d like to know what it is. I do write a little of everything though, but none of it well. I write fiction, and it’s bad. My critical analysis is verbose and hard to follow. People tell me I write sentences that are way too long, and I agree, but instead of trimming the fat I write longer sentences because staying in a moment you’re somewhat enjoying is much easier than moving on to another that will probably suck. “You’re such a good writer,” my mom always says, but I’m pretty sure she’s obligated to tell me nice things. It’s somewhere in the fine print of her parenting contract. Sarah is more honest. “I can’t see you ever being a non-fiction writer,” she said once. “You don’t express yourself honestly enough.” I just say vague things like “I write a little bit of everything,” and people, like the woman in line, generally leave me alone.
The girls return, and we finally register. Everybody splits up, but it’s finally started to snow, hard, and I tag along with Annie to the Converse store so she can replace her soggy canvas shoes with a pair of Chucks and so I don’t have to be by myself.
Around four, we meet Brittany and Sarah at a panel featuring a professor from our school. I haven’t really looked at the schedule, so I don’t know what it’s all about. They wanted to come though, so I’m here. The room is half-empty. There can’t be more than forty people scattered through the rows of chairs. It’s hazy outside and the snow is still falling, so it isn’t a great day for the twelve thousand writers at the conference to try to see Boston. It’s a better day to take in a panel or reading, and it looks like we’ve picked the least popular one.
The time slot, I soon figure out, is dedicated to a poet who recently passed away. One after another, his friends get up to the podium, struggle through the emotions of vocalizing what this guy meant to them. They get choked up, and they cry, and they have to pause when the memories overwhelm them. They must all be poets, because poets are friends with other poets, I figure, and because their words are so fucking beautiful. Words about how vibrant this guy was. Words about how much his work touched their lives. Words about how just knowing him made them feel grateful to be alive. Words that I want to write and feel.
By the time our professor adjusts the microphone and clears his throat, he’s following a number of difficult opening acts. He starts talking about friendship and loss, nothing that hasn’t been covered already. But what he talks about is so moving, means so much to him, and because it means so much to him it means so much to me, and I don’t even know the guy he’s talking about, and I only just introduced myself to him a half hour ago. If I was the type of person to cry at something like this, I would. But I’m the type of person who cries when he doesn’t want to, when it will make him look like a fucking pussy, when he’s on the phone with his mom in the apartment he hardly leaves, surrounded by empty cans of beer and the demons that have multiplied over time, telling her how much he hates himself, that life is worthless, that he doesn’t know how he’s gonna go on, and she’s urging him, “Don’t talk like that about yourself. Please, please, just come home. We’ll buy you a plane ticket. You can worry about getting your stuff later. Please come home.”
I’m the type of person who thinks too much, and I’m thinking of other things so I don’t remember exactly what our professor says, but everyone claps when he finishes, and Brittany is wiping tears from her eyes a few seats over, and God fucking dammit, this is the type of shit I should be crying about too.
I wake up around seven the next morning with no recollection of going to sleep. My throat is dry, and my head is pounding.
“Can you get me a glass of water?” Annie asks from the other bed in a whiny you’re-the-guy-so-you-should-do-this-for-me voice. Brittany is still asleep next to her.
I give her a blank stare. “Come on. If it was Brittany you’d get it for her.” She doesn’t actually say that though. “Fine,” I say, and I walk downstairs to the lobby for a glass of water.
In return, Annie fills me in on the details of last night. She and I skipped the Heaney reading, which I already knew. We went to the bar across the street from the convention center instead. Brittany and Sarah met us after the reading. We had already run up a hundred dollar tab. That doesn’t sound right, and it starts to get fuzzy from there, but I know Brittany and I were taking shots, probably because she said, “Let’s take some shots!”, and I’m sure the light danced off her eyes, and if she had said “Let’s go jump off the fucking roof!” I would have done that too. Annie and Sarah decided we should leave, and Annie held me up on the subway to make sure I didn’t fall.
“Get the fuck off me,” I told her. She said “OK,” let go of my arm, and I stumbled to the floor of the train.
“Sorry,” I say. I do drink, but I don’t like to drink until I make a fool of myself. I also curse, a lot, but I have no patience for anyone who curses at women. “I’m sorry,” I repeat.
“It’s OK,” she says. “You were fine. Funny, actually.” We’re eating breakfast at this point. I usually don’t eat breakfast; my sleeping pattern ranges anywhere from three or four in the morning to noon or one in the afternoon. I also don’t eat when I’m hungover, but I’m chomping on bacon, hoping that maybe I won’t hear Annie recount all the embarrassing things I said and did last night through the gnashing of my misshapen teeth. After I go home, I don’t want them saying things like, “Remember that loser who made a fool of himself in Boston?” Brittany meets us in the hotel lobby around the same time Annie finishes her morning coffee.
It’s snowing harder today, so Brittany, Annie, and I take a cab to the conference. We seek out a panel one of them has marked on her schedule. Sarah is already bouncing around somewhere. This is her Woodstock, and the hardest decision for her is whether to go see the Red Hot Chili Peppers or Rage Against the Machine, and fuck the scheduling gods for having them play at the same time. I’m looking at the Excel-type grid of all the panels and readings like it’s a teeny-bopper festival, and I have to decide whether I’d rather not listen to Justin Bieber or not listen to Taylor Swift. What I really want to do is go into a port-a-potty, close my eyes, and stick my fingers in my ears until I can’t hear any of the noise anymore. What time is that at? I don’t see it on my schedule.
We get seats in the back, but the small room fills up quickly, and by the time it’s standing room only, Brittany rustles my arm. “Look, it’s Junot Diaz,” she says, referring to the Pulitzer Prize winner. We’re reading him in one of the classes I’m about to leave behind.
But, “that’s not him,” I say. The guy by the door is sheet-white, definitely not Hispanic. He does have a goatee though, like Junot.
“It kind of looks like him,” I say. We all laugh. Brittany blushes, shrugs her shoulders.
The panel starts, and we’re all tired as fuck. We didn’t get enough sleep again. The writers seated at the tables surrounding the podium dive into their topic, “This is Your Brain on Fiction.” Brittany’s head tilts toward me sometime during the first presentation. I feel it resting on my shoulder. I’ve taken my jacket off, and I’m wearing my favorite T-shirt, the one that says “Sarcasm: Just One of My Many Talents.” It’s true, depending on how you look at it. It’s also soft, but not as soft as Brittany’s hair nestled against it. She shuffles, trying to get comfortable, and I try my best not to move. For the next thirty or forty minutes, my body is still, and it may be sappy, pathetic, hard to believe, and/or just downright sad, but for the first time all weekend, my heart isn’t ping-ponging inside my chest, protesting to get out. My mind isn’t working in overdrive. This must be how it feels for your brain to momentarily relax.
*
The next day is the last of the conference, and Brittany, Annie, and I do a lot of sightseeing. It’s still cold, but it has finally stopped snowing. We go to both Cheers bars, then cut through a park where a guy is making weird-sounding music with a weird-looking tuba-like apparatus draped over his whole body, before meeting our professors for happy hour. The plan is to go to the conference dance party at ten and stay up for our flight back to Myrtle at six, which is really five because tonight is daylight savings time.
We leave the bar to meet Sarah before the party, and I step aside to call my mom. I’ve been doing this all trip, and the joke has somehow become that I’m a gambling addict, that I’m leaving our hotel room to bet on games. The truth is I want to discuss the logistics of moving home with my mom, what I’ll do with my apartment, dropping out of school, and all that. Or, more accurately, that’s what I tell myself I’m doing.
I move to a far corner of the convention center with large ceilings and huge bay windows that offer a great view of the bars across the street. I have my mom on the line, and I start crying again. I cry because I want to go home, and I don’t. I want to stay in Myrtle Beach, and I can’t. I want to make it to the airport in a few hours, and I doubt whether I can last that much longer. I want to care about the rest of the trip, but I know it’s about to end and I haven’t taken the time to enjoy any of it because I’m too worried about other things. “Just breathe,” my mom says. I can’t. I can’t stop crying because I can’t figure out why I hate myself so fucking much. “I’m alright,” I say, which isn’t true. There’s no way she can believe it either. I hang up.
Brittany texts me while I’m washing the dried tears from my face in an empty bathroom, the only other occupant a janitor running a dripping mop over the black and white tiles.
“We’re going to the Sheraton Hotel,” she says. I don’t have a schedule with me, but I assume that’s where the dance party is.
“OK are you there already?” I say.
“Yea,” she says. “Go into the mall. You will find it.”
When I get to the ballroom of the Sheraton, it is dark, very dark, and loud, incredibly loud, and I somehow find the girls waiting on line for drinks. It’s an open bar, and Annie gives the bartender twenty dollars as a tip. We’re standing off to the side of the dance floor, which is packed. Everybody is drinking beer except Brittany, who is swaying her hips as she takes swigs from a glass of red wine. I’m not a dancer and never have been. I look out at the group moving around under the lights, and I’m not sure what the fuck I’m looking at, but for the most part it doesn’t look anything like dancing.
Courage foams at my mouth in the form of all the beer I’ve guzzled today, and I ask Brittany to dance. She purses her lips, slinks away from me a little. I ask her again, and a third time, and by this point I’m so pathetic and so desperate and maybe it’s because she can see that I’m pathetic and desperate that Sarah tells Brittany she should just dance with me.
The dancing starts the same way we ended up going to dinner together a few months ago. It was the first time we all hung out at Brittany’s apartment, a week before fall semester finals. There were five of us, and we were all drinking. Out of nowhere, Sarah suggested that Brittany and I should go out. But Sarah was drunk, flicking the remnants of her cigarette into an ashtray on Brittany’s balcony. It was December, but warm enough to be outside, even at two in the morning. I was drunk too, so I didn’t think anything of what she was saying. The next day, hungover at Bob Evans, she said the same thing. I brushed it off again. I wasn’t going to ask Brittany out. We don’t have much in common. I’m ugly, and she’s anything but. She doesn’t have any problem talking to people, and I’m socially inept. “Most days I feel like dying” never seems like the best conversation-starter.
I texted her anyway. “Hey, what are you doing tonight?” I said.
“Going out with my family,” she said. “Why what’s up?”
“Sounds like fun. Was just gonna see if you wanted to grab dinner or something.”
She said “thanks anyway,” and I started drinking. It was only two in the afternoon, but I didn’t know how else I was going to spend the rest of the day. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth PBR she asked if I would want to go out the following night. “Yea, definitely,” I said, and we went to a bar for dinner and drinks.
Winter break started at the end of the week, and she offered to drive me to the airport for my flight to New York. On the way, she talked about the Christmas shopping she had planned for later in the day. We pulled up, and she tried to find a space in front of the Spirit sign. I told her she could let me out anywhere. The Myrtle Beach airport is small, just one terminal. She parked right behind one of the oversized yellow speed bumps.
I watched her whole body contort as she tried to drag my heavy luggage from the back seat. “I’ll get the bag,” I said with a laugh.
She smiled, and I pulled the bag out myself. She stood on her tippy-toes in front of me. Her sunglasses were on top of her head, her black-rimmed glasses over her eyes. I wasn’t sure about the look, but she was pulling it off well and I had other things on my mind anyway.
Our lips collided, but to call it a kiss would denigrate the term. There was no grace, no rhythm of movement. Her face got red with embarrassment, but she was still smiling. We tried again. My hand cradled her cheek as I leaned in. The second kiss, much like the first, was more accidental head bump than concerted act of passion.
When I returned from New York, she politely declined my request to go out to dinner. “I have reading to catch up on for my thesis,” she said.
Crushed, and already emotionally spent (I’d spent the month-long break visiting a psychologist, trying to tighten the precarious grip I had on my life), I said, “No worries. Good luck with your work.” I don’t know whether she had an inkling about my depression and anxiety, but I should have told her turning me down was the best decision she ever made. Probably the easiest, too.
Brittany tires of dancing with me after a few songs. “I have to use the bathroom,” she says. I walk outside as well. Sarah and Annie are standing in the lobby talking to two of our professors. After a few minutes, Annie leans over and whispers in my ear, “We have to go.” She hands me a glass of red wine, then says, “Go find Brittany.” I don’t bother asking why I’m giving Brittany a full drink if we’re leaving anyway.
The music pounds the inside of my forehead as I walk back into the ballroom. The dance floor overflows with the awkward, flailing bodies of hundreds of writers. If you want to see bad, strange, abysmally poor, incredibly bizarre dancing, go to AWP. If you want to be able to find the girl you think you’re in love with who doesn’t feel the same way in a huge, dimly lit sea of people where you can’t hear someone standing right in front of you because the hack of a DJ is blasting music so fucking loud you feel it pulsing in your feet, don’t. I finally spot her talking to a guy with an overgrown beard to the side of the dance floor. I’m a guy with an overgrown beard too. It’s the only feature of mine I don’t hate, but I guess she likes his better.
She sees me approaching them and waves in my direction. “Hey Stephen, this is Jake,” she says. Or Larry. Or Allen. Or Bob. Or Jose. Whatever-his-name-is extends his hand. He looks nice enough, and I extend mine as well, but I really want to toss this glass of Merlot in his face, watch the red beads free themselves from the tangle of his beard and drip onto his white T-shirt.
“Here,” I say, handing her the glass instead. Then, I say “nice to meet you” to the guy, followed by “we have to go” to her.
We catch a cab outside. Brittany and I sit on the back bench of the white van, Annie in the chair in front of her and Sarah in front of me. Annie starts nodding off, and I make a joke about the guy she was texting while we were at the dance party. Maybe the joke is more mean-spirited than I think, because she doesn’t take it very well.
“Shut up,” she says. She’s twisted her whole body around to face me. “At least I tell you things.”
“What?” I say.
“I tell you things about myself.”
I look at Brittany, then Sarah, but I can’t see her face because she’s sitting right in front of me and it doesn’t matter anyway because it doesn’t seem like either of them is paying attention to Annie and I. “What are you talking about?” I say.
“You heard me.”
I was just trying to make a joke. “I don’t even know what you want me to say to that.”
“All those phone calls, leaving the room. Who were you talking to? Who’s Frankie V?”
“A friend from home,” I say. “Why?”
“I saw a text from him on your phone today at lunch.”
“So?”
“I feel like I don’t know anything about you, Stephen,” Brittany chimes in.
Maybe this whole thing is premeditated, some sort of intervention for a guy who is struggling to tread water. If the idea is to stomp my head below the surface and keep it there, it’s working. “That’s not true,” I say, and I honestly don’t know whether that’s true or false. I’m a guy, and I’m quiet. Plus I’m worn out and tired and I’ve drank too much and haven’t slept near enough during this trip.
“Yea it is.” This time it’s Sarah’s voice I hear from in front of me.
Annie says something else, and I say, “Whatever. You’re so drunk, you won’t even remember this conversation tomorrow.”
She turns to Sarah. “I’m done with him,” she says. She throws up her hands and turns her face toward the ceiling of the van.
When we get back to the hotel, they stay outside so Annie and Sarah can smoke a cigarette. “Let me get the key,” I say to Sarah. I take the elevator to the room, where I start packing my shit into my duffel bag. Annie and Brittany’s clothes are scattered all over the room. Sarah sends a text that says “Love you, Stephen. Everybody’s just tired.” When they return, I try apologizing to Annie. She ignores me and walks into the bathroom.
Brittany lies down and goes to sleep. Sarah must still be downstairs. I leave the room and find her in the little dark restaurant attached to the lobby. “Can I talk to you for a second?” I say.
We sit at a table in the corner of the room opposite where Annie and I ate breakfast yesterday. I don’t even care if I cry now. Tears are dripping down my face, and we sit for a few minutes in silence, minus my hysterical heaving.
“What’s going on?” she says.
“I don’t know,” I say. “I’ve been depressed and anxious for a while.” I wipe my face with the back of my hand.
“That why you asked me about the psychiatrist?”
I nod. I usually mumble and stutter my way through conversation, so how, or if, she understands what I’m saying when I’m crying like a two-year-old is anybody’s guess.
“You should call him when we get back,” she says.
I shake my head. “I think I’m going back to New York.”
“That doesn’t matter right now. You need help.”
“I’m sorry.” I worried about this type of thing before we came, that if I had an anxiety attack, or a breakdown, or worse, they would be responsible for me. I’ve already given my mom a tour of the place in my head where the demons breed. I’d rather not show other people around up there, for their own sake.
“There’s nothing to apologize for,” Sarah says. She reaches her hand across the table and lays it on top of mine.
“I feel like such a failure,” I say. “I’m sorry.”
“We wanted you to come with us,” she says, squeezing my hand. “We like hanging out with you.” Then she reaches into her pocket, pulls out a pill, and puts it on the table between us. “Take this,” she says. “It will relax you, get you through the rest of the night.” It’s small, like a grain of rice, and I can’t see how something so insignificant will do any good at this point.
I sniffle. “No, I’m alright,” I say. This isn’t my brain on pills. This is my brain on loneliness. This is my brain on self-deprecation. This is my brain on making too much of things. This is my brain on wanting to die, and not knowing exactly why.
“Just relax,” Sarah says. She tucks the pill back into the pocket of her jeans. “Slow down. Breathe.”
I’m trying to. I swear to fucking God I am.
Stephen Pisani is a Long Island, New York native and a graduate of Coastal Carolina’s MA in Writing program. His fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in Blue Lake Review and Soundings Review. Everything he knows about a good story he learned from his grandfather, Max.
How to Write Poetry
They will never understand you,
although you speak clearly
as light through leaf-break
splitting shadows in a dense forest.
You will be misunderstood,
because to them you are a river
evading a dam
to keep under control
for they will never comprehend wildness
and they will never try.
They will force what they cannot
into confines, but you are air
leaking in cracks, whispering
your difference. They are impatient.
They will go past gentle persuasion,
right to strong arm tactics.
It won’t work. You are light in a dark room.
Pretend to listen to them.
It appeases them. Make it believable.
Tell them, yes, yes, I agree;
when you don’t. Take what they say,
weigh the truth or lies of it.
If it seems almost right, consider slowly,
is it almost what you need
because it never will be one hundred percent.
If it feels like a half-truth or outright lie,
and it will, then consider what they gain,
what you lose, and the gap between.
Is it huge? They never expect thinking;
they only know forced cooperation.
They think everyone thinks like them.
They only know public relations
and blind obedience.
Become whitecaps stirring in a storm.
MINDLESS IDIOTS
By Sean Silleck
When the zombies first showed up, our building’s fire safety director told us to shelter in place. Then he told us to go to staircase A, where we must’ve waited half an hour. Then he told us to proceed to elevator bank F, so we did, a few of us glancing at our watches. That was the last time we heard from the fire safety director.
For almost an hour we waited in front of elevator bank F, and then Chuck, one of our associate creative directors, couldn’t take it anymore. There was a client call at noon, and he had to be on it. If the latest round of client changes didn’t arrive by this afternoon, we’d never be able to revise our pieces in time for next Friday’s launch date. We were already going to have to work really late as it was—even without the delay caused by the zombies.
In groups of twos and threes we started to drift back into the agency. We still had power and running water, so the zombie invasion couldn’t have been that bad. The kitchenette was well stocked. We had enough food and coffee to last a couple weeks, so there was no reason we couldn’t get back to work—as long as the client changes came in on time.
A few of us gathered at the window in reception to see what was happening outside. It was very quiet along the avenue, just a lot of paper swirling and twisting in the wind, half a dozen cars with their windows smashed in, and occasionally a couple zombies staggering along, searching for human flesh.
“They look so lost,” said Mindy, our account lead. “I almost feel bad for them.”
“I wonder if deep down they’re really just sad,” Brian, the junior copywriter, said. “You know, being undead and all.”
“It’s like they know something in their lives is missing, but they don’t know what it is,” commented Becky, an art director. “That’s why they’re so sad.”
“And they’re trying to fill the emptiness by eating human flesh,” added Regina, our new proofreader. “I do the same thing with Chips Ahoy.”
“Don’t waste your pity on a bunch of mindless idiots,” cut in Chuck, with a frown. “We have work to do, people—or have you all forgotten we’re launching next Friday?”
He was right—there was so much to do. First, we had to barricade all the exits in case the zombies got into the building and up to our floor. Then we had to route the new logo, which the client had approved last week with one major change.
The client, a large west coast–based juice company, wanted the mauve slash at the bottom of the logo made darker, so it more closely resembled the color of acai juice. They felt that mauve was closer to the color of pomegranate juice, which was not one of their products. Of course nothing could have been further from the truth. Everyone knows that pomegranate juice is a deep red, not even remotely mauve, but the client was firm—the logo had to change.
Which totally sucked, because it was on every piece we were creating.
No one in the agency had been in a good mood, even before the zombies showed up.
At exactly noon we all shuffled into the main conference room for the client call. After the usual banalities, Joe, the client’s director of marketing, said:
“So, are you guys all okay? We’ve heard about the zombies. It’s all over CNN.”
“Thanks so much for your concern,” replied Mindy, leaning close to the speakerphone. “We’re fine here. No worries. We’re still really excited about next Friday’s launch.”
“Oh, that’s such a relief,” Joe said. “We were really worried. It’s just … if we have to delay the launch, we’re going to be in really big trouble. Tropicana is putting out two new products next month, and if our campaign isn’t out in the world by then, it’s going to be real tough catching up.”
“Oh, no worries,” Mindy repeated, smiling really wide, even though the feed was audio only. “We’ve got your back, Joe. And, by the way, the new logo looks amazing. The dark mauve was absolutely the right call. We’ll send you a new PSD by end of day.”
“Great, perfect. Thanks, guys,” Joe said. “Anyway, we know you’ve got a ton of work, so we’ll keep this short. We just have one more comment, and we’re hoping it’s not too late to work it into the single-page ad.”
A tense silence descended over the conference room. This was the moment in a client call that everyone dreaded, the moment a client decided they wanted to do something not in the original scope of work. Something that meant another all-nighter for us.
“If you’ve got any ideas, we’d love to hear them,” Chuck said, and then shook his head, mouthing the words, “what the fuck?”
“Well, we’re thinking—you know how in the ad, there’s the girl in the park, and the sun is shining behind her while she drinks our juice? Well, we’d love to get a dog in there. Cheryl, who’s here with me, was looking at some numbers earlier, and she saw a clear response spike in ads that have dogs in them. People really relate to them, you know? Cheryl, do you want to speak to those numbers?”
“Hi, guys, Cheryl here,” Cheryl announced cheerfully. Cheryl was the client’s chief marketing strategist. “Just want to say that we think the team over there is doing a fantastic job. We love the campaign so far, we really love it.”
“Oh, that’s so nice to hear,” Mindy said. “Thank you, Cheryl.”
“You bet. So, yeah, I was going over some numbers this morning, and it just hit me, so clearly, this spike in response rates to ads that have a dog in them. Just, like, wow. You know? Everyone loves dogs. Of course, we know it’s too late now, but down the road, maybe in Q3, we’d love to do some kind of viral video with dogs playing with each other, and just, you know, jumping around and doing really silly things. That could be a lot of fun.”
“Great idea,” Mindy said, wincing. “We’ll absolutely put a brief together. But let’s get back to the single-page ad for just a moment. What kind of dog were you thinking about?”
“Well, I ran some additional numbers,” Cheryl said. “Of course retrievers are off the charts, but since we’re more of a niche juice, and have a very loyal customer base that our research shows has a very independent streak, we think something like a Boston terrier would be the perfect thing.”
“A Boston terrier?” Mindy said.
“Is that doable?” Joe asked.
“Well, you know we’ve already done the photo shoot,” Chuck said, grinding his teeth. “And with the zombie situation, we’re probably not going to be able to set up another one in time to make next Friday’s launch date.”
“Oh, we don’t want another photo shoot—the budget’s getting a little thin at this point,” Joe replied, with a laugh. “No, we’re just wondering if it’s possible to do the dog digitally, you know, add another layer to the PSD file—something along those lines.”
Becky, the art director, looked like she was going to be sick. “I can see if I can dig up some stock images,” she said, weakly. “I could probably have a few choices to send over by end of day.”
“That would be fantastic,” Joe said. “Becky? Is that Becky who was speaking?”
“Yup, it’s Becky,” Becky said.
“Thanks, Becky, we really appreciate it.” Joe cleared his throat. “So that’s all we’ve got for now. We’ll hang around long enough today to look at the next set of revisions, and then get any comments back down to you by this evening. How does that sound?”
“That sounds like a plan, Joe,” Mindy said. “Thanks so much.”
“You bet,” Joe said. “And be careful, guys. Let us know if the zombie situation gets worse. We’d hate for anything terrible to happen to you.”
“We really appreciate the concern,” Mindy said. “But we’re fine. We’re a hundred and ten percent committed to hitting next Friday’s launch date.”
As soon as the clients had ended the call, Chuck threw up his hands. He was incredibly angry. He looked like he was ready to join the zombies and start eating human flesh.
“Mindless fucking idiots,” he seethed. “Add a fucking dog! What a load of horseshit.”
“It’s going to be really hard to put a dog in the ad,” complained Becky, her fingers working nervously through a clump of her bright red hair. “We’ll have to put the art back into retouching. It’s going to take days to get it back.”
“Let’s keep what we’ve got, and just try to mock up a basic dog option,” Mindy said, in her soothing account person’s voice. “Just a new PSD for now. We won’t worry about retouching until after we send it to the client.”
This helped calm Becky, at least for the moment.
Back at our desks—all of us with two or three jobs in our queue—it was really hard to concentrate with the moaning of the zombies outside. It was a creepy sound, both menacing and forlorn. A lot of us had already been having concentration problems, ever since we’d moved into the new office with its open-floor seating plan. The concept was supposed to foster creative thinking and team unity, but all it really did was shred people’s nerves. The distractions were constant. Someone’s phone would start ringing while they were away from their desk. Or someone would be playing music from the 80s loud enough for you to know it was the Go-Gos but not which song. Or someone would actually have a conference call and speak in a horrible whisper.
With the moaning of the zombies on top of everything else, we were really struggling to get our work done.
Sometime around dinnertime, just as we were signing off on the last piece to incorporate the new logo, Chuck called us all into the conference room and laid a printout of the new logo on the table in front of us. We all waited nervously for him to say whatever it was he was going to say.
“It’s no good,” he said, finally, chewing on his lower lip. “It looks like shit. The dark mauve is ridiculous.”
He was right. The lighter mauve had worked really well with the other colors in the logo, but this darker tone somehow unbalanced the whole thing. The anxiety around the conference table was palpable.
“It’s what the client requested,” Mindy pointed out, her eyebrows arched. “I don’t think it’s that bad, Chuck. I think we can leave it.”
“Mindy, it’s a piece of shit.” Chuck put his hands on his hips and shot her a challenging look. “We took six months building the first logo. We put it through market research. It went through like eight client reviews. You change one color, and the whole thing goes down the shitter.”
“Then we should have expressed our concerns earlier.” Mindy spoke softly but firmly. She couldn’t have weighed more than 105 pounds but she was tougher than anyone in the agency. She ran a marathon every weekend, usually the kind where you had to swim through muddy culverts and crawl over barbed wire. To her, the zombies were probably just a minor irritant. “It’s too late to revisit this now,” she said, looking hard at Chuck.
“I did express my concerns. But no one listened, as per usual.” Chuck threw up his hands. He looked really pale and unhealthy, probably from working such crazy hours. He glowered at Mindy with bloodshot eyes. “But I’m only the ACD, so what does my opinion matter around here?”
And then he stormed out of the room, grumbling to himself.
“You don’t have to bite my head off,” Mindy called after him, angrily.
“He’s right,” Becky said in a small voice, after we’d all listened to Chuck rage down the hall and loudly slam his office door. “It doesn’t look good.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Mindy said, in a harsh voice. “It’s too late. Someone should’ve spoken up rounds ago. I don’t have a problem with this logo. It’s exactly what the client asked for.”
That was the end of the discussion. None of the rest of us had any desire to go toe to toe with Mindy. It was only the art people who cared about the logo, truth be told. The copywriters, account execs, proofreaders and project managers didn’t have any thoughts about anything other than how to survive this launch. We were all at our wit’s end. If the tension in the agency got any worse, someone really was going to get bitten.
And then we found out that the zombies had gotten into the building.
A little after eleven, Brian, the junior copywriter, stood up from his desk, a weird expression on his face. “Did you guys hear that?” he said. “What the fuck was that?”
We all gathered around his desk and listened. For a moment there was only silence. Then we heard it. A scraping noise, coming from the floor below us. It was accompanied by a banging and a grinding. Then we heard the moaning, and we knew.
“Shit, they’re in the office downstairs,” Regina, the proofreader, said. “That means they’re probably in the stairwell.”
We all rushed over to stairwell A. Sure enough, we could hear shuffling, lethargic footsteps on the concrete steps on the other side of the fire door. Accompanied, as usual, by the despondent moans of the walking dead.
“They’re going to get in,” Regina cried, backing away from the door, one hand to her mouth. “We can’t keep them out.”
“The door is really well sealed,” Brian said, checking the bike chain we’d fastened between the door handle and a thick water pipe next to it. “No one’s getting in this way. We’re fine.”
“They won’t go away.” Regina’s eyes had taken on the classic thousand-yard stare. Her mouth was as round as a donut hole. “Their desire is insatiable. And we’re the object of that desire.”
Brian shook his head. It was hard to tell whom he was more annoyed with, Regina or the zombies. “It’s a fucking Kryptonite lock. Schwarzenegger couldn’t get through that door.”
It did look pretty solid. We all took turns giving it a shake, and then exchanged encouraging nods.
It was a charade, of course. As we shuffled back to our desks, staring wide-eyed at nothing, we all felt incredibly self-conscious, knowing that an inch and a half of steel was all that separated us from a horde of flesh-eating zombies. It was going to be a really long night.
We worked as long as we could, and then took turns going into the small conference room, which we’d turned into a nap room. We’d already used it once as a nap room the first time we worked overnight, three or four weeks ago, finalizing the launch pieces ahead of the first client review. We just had to put the cots back together again and lay out clean blankets. Half of us slept (or tried to sleep), while the other half stayed awake to watch for zombies and field any client calls that came in. None of us got a good night’s sleep. When the light of dawn finally showed through the main window, we were all half dead.
After breakfast, there was more bad news. Becky couldn’t find a Boston terrier in any of the stock photo databases. All she could come up with were a pug, a French bulldog, a miniature boxer and a black and white Chihuahua.
“Wait, that’s not a Boston terrier?” asked Mindy, standing to one side of Becky’s iMac and pointing at the image of the French bulldog.
“No, it’s not.” Becky shook her head, sadly. “I double checked the database. It’s a French bulldog, for sure. Not a Boston terrier.”
“Okay, because it looks exactly like a Boston terrier.” Mindy nibbled distractedly on her thumb as she spoke.
“Boston terriers have a longer nose,” Brian offered. “And their ears aren’t as wide. My aunt had a Boston terrier once. They’re great dogs.”
“Can you call her?” Mindy spun around toward Brian. “Can she email us a picture of it?”
“She died years ago—my aunt, I mean.” Brian shrugged, and then frowned. “Hey, you don’t think she’s a zombie now, do you? That would be really fucked up.”
Mindy rolled her eyes and turned back to Becky’s computer. “Fuck it,” she said. “Let’s go with the French bulldog. The client will never know the difference.”
“Are you sure?” Becky asked, in a nervous voice. “What if they do notice? I don’t think we should lie to the client.”
“I don’t care. Just do it.” Mindy tore a long hangnail off her thumb and then spit it across the room. “I don’t give a shit anymore.” She stalked back to her desk.
While Becky worked on getting the French bulldog into an alternate version of the single-page ad, some of us gathered by the window to check on the situation outside.
Someone had noticed that one zombie never left the block, but instead wandered from one corner to the next and then back again, as if he were pacing. He was an older guy, judging by the white hair and the curve of his spine, and he was dressed in a pinstripe suit that had lost one sleeve and one pant leg. Even though he was undead, he still had a kind of dignity in the way he shuffled up and down the street—you could easily imagine him walking with a cane. We called him Winston.
“I wonder where he used to work,” Regina said. “Looks like a lawyer.”
“I used to see him getting a sandwich in the corner deli,” said Rasheed, our senior website developer. “Like, every day almost. The same sandwich, ham and provolone on rye. He was like clockwork.”
“Yeah, probably a financial guy,” commented Brian, leaning his elbows on the sill. “Those guys love a good routine.”
“Maybe that’s why he looks so unsure of himself,” added Kendra, one of the administrative assistants. “Deep down he doesn’t know what to do, because his routine is gone. That’s why he can’t leave the block. He thinks he needs to order his sandwich.”
“I don’t think he was in finance,” commented Angelo, a freelance production guy. “I’m pretty sure he was in advertising. I think I remember him from when I worked at McCann. He was one of the senior partners.”
We all agreed that, whoever he was, Winston was probably very sad, and we all felt kind of sorry for him, at least until Chuck came lumbering down the hall, grumbling and grunting, and sent us all scurrying back to our desks.
The work was endless, or so it seemed, and at this point, completely brainless. The new logo had been placed in every job, so now we were just checking to make sure nothing had fallen off in the process. It was just proofreading now, checking for bad line breaks and shifted art elements. The content of the pieces was all set. We figured one more round, and then we’d have a group sign-off and basically be done. We’d hit next Friday’s launch date with no problem.
Over the next 24 hours, the mood of the agency improved dramatically. Becky was able to create a pretty good alternate version of the single-page ad—the dog really looked like it was trotting happily along next to the lady drinking juice in the park. Anyone who didn’t know would’ve thought the dog had been there all along. And we hated to admit it, but the client was right. We all felt better seeing the dog in the picture. It made the whole ad warmer and fuzzier.
When Mindy hit the send button on her email, we couldn’t help applauding.
It was then, for the first time, that we could start thinking about the end of the launch—about getting our old lives back. The zombies didn’t even bother us so much. Listening to the creepy shuffling and moaning sounds coming from stairwell B—in addition to stairwell A now—we weren’t as freaked out as we’d been before. We could deal with it, knowing we didn’t have to stagger back to our desks and bury ourselves in half a dozen jobs. And we were no longer so worried about running into Chuck in the hallways and getting chewed out for not working hard enough. The work was done.
We all assumed the next client call would be a breeze, just a final approval of all the core launch pieces, but we could tell immediately by Joe’s tone that something wasn’t right. He spoke in a dull, lifeless monotone.
“Hey, guys,” he said, glumly. “Oh, boy. You all are going to kill us.”
Everyone in the room exchanged at least one glance. We all had that bloated feeling in our guts that accompanies the realization of imminent doom.
“What’s on your mind, Joe?” Mindy asked, clutching herself around the middle as she leaned in toward the speakerphone. “I’m sure it’s not that bad.”
“I’m afraid it is, Mindy,” Joe said. “Turns out you guys had it right the first time. Looking at the latest revisions you sent over yesterday, it just hit us all at once … well … the logo just doesn’t work anymore. The mauve is too dark. And, you know what? That’s totally on us. We don’t blame you guys at all. Absolutely one hundred percent our doing.”
No one on our side said a word. We were too shocked. A couple of us wore weird smiles, little rictuses of death, as Joe’s words slowly ate their way through our brains.
On the far side of the conference table, Chuck leaned all the way back in his chair and stared open-mouthed at the ceiling. He looked like someone had just killed him.
“Ah, so, we were just wondering,” Cheryl cut in. “Did you guys archive the last round? Would it be that hard to just go back to those versions? Like, use Time Machine or something? Is that doable?”
Mindy was the first of us to speak. She looked like she’d been infected with some sort of wasting disease. Her eyes were wide and unfocused. The color had drained out of her cheeks. Her shoulders were unevenly slumped. “It’s just, we’ve been through several rounds since we swapped out logos,” she said, tonelessly, into the speakerphone. “So, actually, we’d have to create a whole new round, and then load in the old logo, and then review each job carefully to make sure nothing fell off or that any of the current logos were missed—so we’re looking at a fair amount of work here. At least if we’re still thinking about next Friday’s launch date.”
“We’ll absolutely pay for the overtime,” Joe said. “A hundred and ten percent.”
“Oh, God, yes,” agreed Cheryl, in a slightly hysterical voice. “Whatever support we can give you. We’ll be here till at least six o’clock tonight, so don’t hesitate to run some ideas past us—any best practices you guys have that might help us all work smarter, not harder. We’re all ears.”
“Thanks, Cheryl. That’s very kind of you.” Mindy grimaced as she composed her next words. “We’ll do whatever we have to do to hit that launch date—no worries there. It’s just, you know, any more changes, especially global changes, and we’re not going to be able to make that guarantee. You know?”
“We hear you, loud and clear,” Cheryl said. “This logo thing is totally our fault. And we really appreciate you guys taking the time to make the fix. Thank you so much. We won’t have any more changes, we promise. Let’s just get this done, and hit that launch date next Friday. What do you say?”
“Yup, sounds great,” Mindy intoned.
“We just have one more question,” Joe said, after an awkward moment of silence. “We got the alt version of the single-page ad—thanks very much. The dog looks great, but we just wanted to confirm, are you guys sure that’s a Boston terrier? We think it might be a French bulldog.”
Mindy looked like someone was chewing on her leg. She bit her lip so hard a small trickle of blood ran down over her chin. She wiped it away with the back of her hand and took a deep, wheezy breath.
On the other side of the room, Becky got up without a word and tottered out of the room, one hand held out in front of her, as if she’d lost part of her vision. We all watched her go, our mouths slung open, but none of us spoke. What was there to say? We weren’t going to make the launch date next Friday—not if we had to update the logo again. We all knew it, but of course we weren’t going to say it to the client. We couldn’t. So we all just looked at each other, swaying from side to side, our arms dangling, our brains numb.
Then we heard someone coming down the hall, a slow but steady pace, one foot dragging behind the other, and we all turned at the same moment toward the open conference room door.
Somehow, even before he appeared in the doorway, we all knew it was Winston.
Sean Silleck has worked in advertising for over a decade, and so far has not had to resort to eating human flesh. He has been previously published in the Brooklyn Rail, Short Story Library and Pantheon Magazine, and is currently working on a novel about the first advertising agency on Mars.
Qi
Lavender silk rains from above,
but there’s no longer a God to worship.
Instead we decide to worship the sky.
Sifting through purple waves, we find stars waiting.
I think they are patient mothers.
You think they are lanterns lighting our way.
We both agree that we can hear them
mourning. They are only meant to be felt
like dry ice filled with dying matter.
The separation between stars above
and ground below is little more than wind.
The sky sends a phoenix and a dragon
for us to behold. The emptiness swallows both
and spits out a new color that is sharp
at the edges, but burning at the center.
Shifting under our feet, the world
molts and we accept it. Cracked dirt gives way
to rising lakes. We try to name creation,
but only your tongue moves.
I am silent.
A Sage of Dreams
-to Li Bai
I love wine more than myself.
A red river like blood runs
through me as it ran through
you. When my mind fills
with the metal of war, I can empty it
into a cup. I don’t much care
for sitting with flowers and trees
on nights like this, but there’s comfort
in the moon. The moon’s light
embraces the dark and creates
a shadow. I turn towards it and imagine
that you’ve come to drink. I raise my glass
to you, and we make a toast to the moon.
There is no singing or dancing, though.
Spring has vanished and taken you
and your joy. I’m too drunk to care
that you’ve left me. The soft grass invites
my eyes to close, but I try to look through
blurred vision to find your River of Stars
floating in a sea of pearls. Instead, I see
the moon and her light flood the sky
and merge with the night water below.
Now I understand why you grasped
for the moon with your arms.
In her light there is an endless sleep.
Massacre
Can you tell me God’s name? I think I’ve forgotten it in the grass. Monsters take out their knives to carve out shrieking chests. I dream that each blade mourns for Sơn Mỹ.
“I’m alive,” says the child.
All of her ancestors were on the wrong end of a gun. She looks into my face, but I don’t demand anything. I’m tired of everyone preaching about freedom. It’d be better to go look at the headstones of Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, and some 500 villagers.
“Who are you?” she asks me.
My mouth won’t answer sweetly; instead I talk with my eyes. I try to say I am from a place of trees, passion, and fire. I think those are related somehow, but I can’t put it together. The sunlight in her eyes fades. My words can’t seem to stop the clouds from coming.
“You’ll be fine,” I say.
I look for some salvation, but there is no one left to ask. I turn to America, to God, to the masses. They all turn away from me, so I turn to the jungle instead. The trees offer me the compassion of fruit, but leave none for the girl. All that’s left is heat beating down on my shoulders and mud sticking to my boots.
The Tet Offensive
The vase went missing
years ago, during the hunting
season. My uncle swore it was lost
in the Gulf of Tonkin.
I think he lost it in Saigon,
but I let his unrelenting waves
beat against my side.
His furniture fled
from the mermaids
as they rode in on green tides
and into our beige walls, leaving
a taste of ash in my mouth.
The family portraits waited
patiently to be taken
by these thieves. Instead,
the paint peeled into sirens
and waited for something new
to happen; maybe like the extinction
of the dinosaur.
I’ve been thinking,
they should have bought
better life insurance before the war.
Supernova
When the solar flares woke up,
they stuffed our lungs full of soot
and exiles. Our skin sizzled,
or maybe that was just the streets
trying to stop roses from blossoming.
Now those streets stretch on
and on and on. Everyone calls it space.
I don’t know if it’s empty enough
for that kind of name.
I’m pretty blue,
but I hear that’s the color of heaven.
I try to fit my words into infinity,
but I hear that science killed god.
I’m not sure what that means,
but I think I’m going to fly out to Mars
where no one gets lost in all-consuming blazes.
Everyone calls it the End
of Days, but I don’t know
any myths that end like this.
Instead I’ll trust my eyes, filling up
with crimson dust and an old sky
twisted into a slightly new frame.
Lucas Campbell is a poet whose greatest goal is to become a professional vagabond. He currently lives in Ohio, but will always have California on his mind. While he writes about a variety of topics, he has a special place in his heart for madness, wine, and myth.
Sparrows and Mourning Doves
It took Blackbird a moment to recognize the dead man in the marshes.
She had to crouch in the mud just beside him to peer at his downturned face, the eyes and mouth open. She would have known it right away had it not looked so bloated and white, like the bubbles in the lake foam just before they popped. The man’s name was Emery Hunt, a friend of her father’s from before they moved out of the city. He had a long face and small eyes with little wrinkles around them. “Kindness wrinkles,” as she’d thought of them. Kindness wrinkles were different from age wrinkles; Emery Hunt was not very old. Yet there were no lines in his waxy skin now, nor much else that matched her memory of his living self.
From behind her, the boy’s voice. “Do you think he fell from somewhere?”
Still examining, Blackbird made no move to look at him. The back of Emery Hunt’s head was smudged with red-brown, like rust from the chains of an old buoy.
“Or did…someone kill him?” The boy was never silent for long. Often in the evenings he rode his bike past her house near Maplewood, calling for her to explore with him, chattering all the while. Blackbird knew his age (nine—five years her junior) but not his name, and after several months it seemed far too late to ask. Sometimes she made up names for him, but in her head he was always “the boy.”
At last she stood. The reeds and lapping water tickled her bare feet; she’d taken off her shoes to enter the marsh. For a long moment she’d hesitated on the shore, but in the end felt she had to see the man’s face. Besides, the boy had been frightened and watching. “You shouldn’t have come to me first, you know,” she said quietly. “You should have had your parents call the police.”
The boy frowned. With his light eyes and thick, dark eyebrows, it had a comical effect. “I thought you’d want to see.” His eyes darted to the body and back again, as if he thought it would move if he looked away for too long.
To him, Blackbird knew, the discovery of a body was a morbid adventure. It was a sign of flattery that he’d thought to show her first. It wasn’t uncommon to see roadkill in the area—raccoons or possums, even a stray cat once or twice—and the boy always told her when he spotted a victim. He would lead her to the site, pedaling far more rapidly than she, and approach the carcass with solemn fascination. She’d watch as he studied it, circling until he thought he knew how the animal had been hit, sometimes even prodding it with a stick. But a human body was different. She was certain there had been no prodding of Emery Hunt. And if there had been, she wouldn’t want to know.
She started toward the road, her feet squishing in the muddy grass. “We should go back.”
“Who do you think he is?” The boy caught up to her, taking wide and sloppy steps. “Can the police find out who killed him? It couldn’t have been someone from here. Could it?”
He’d splashed water all over her legs. “Watch where you’re stepping,” she said. “Do you want the murderer to hear you, Little Elephant?”
It was mean, but she couldn’t help herself. The boy frowned again, still distracted by his questions. “How long do you think he’s been there? Maybe—maybe we should stay and look for clues.”
“I’ll race you to my house.” And she hopped on her bike before he could refuse, nudging the kickstand back with her heel.
The sun sank low over the marsh as she pedaled away, the boy on her heels, orange light washing over the dead man’s body for a moment before edging toward the shore.
******
Her father’s car was in the driveway when she returned. She waved to the boy and went inside, closing the screen door gently behind her.
Her father was sitting at the kitchen table with his crossword. “There you are, little bird. Were you on a walk?”
She went straight to the fridge. “Yeah, just a short one.” She took out the Styrofoam container, opened it to take out the sandwich and fries inside, and then stuck them in the microwave. “How’s the restaurant?”
He shrugged. “The usual business. Listen, when you’re done eating I was thinking we could go out in the boat. Take some binoculars, maybe see if we can spot the heron.” They often saw a heron at the edge of the pier, or skimming the water’s surface with its long body as it flew. A lone and regal bird, it always seemed to be the only one in the world, so that was how they talked about it.
“Okay.”
After a minute she sat down and began to eat. At first her father went back to his crossword, jiggling the pencil absently between his fingers, then writing a word. He glanced up. “You’re quiet. The food terrible or something?”
She smiled, shook her head. “No. It’s good. I’m just hungry.”
Maybe she should tell him now, before the police did. Maybe that would be better. Orange light streamed through the window, making her father’s wiry brown hair glow from behind. Blackbird remembered the dark stain on the back of Emery Hunt’s head, and kept silent.
Surely it would shock her father to hear of it. He did not need the news of another death, especially that of a friend; he had already lost Blackbird’s mother five years before. She had gone into the doctor’s office for an appointment, and had come out with cancer. Blackbird remembered the hospital room, its white bed with a hundred medical tools attached; and her mother, always a pale person, now so thin and white she looked like an egret or a swan, sitting up with delicate grace as they entered the room. Blackbird’s father had even gotten loans from friends to pay for her treatment. Before, the three of them often went to zoos and museums to see the animals, and to the bird sanctuary where they would picnic and bird watch for hours. One day Blackbird’s mother couldn’t go to those places anymore, and then she couldn’t go anywhere at all, and then she was gone. Afterward Blackbird and her father had moved to their current home in Twin Lakes, which had been handed down to them years before, after his family decided to move away to Michigan. It was only meant to be a summer home, but her father had worked on the insulation and eventually saved enough for a new furnace, so it was perfectly cozy in winter too.
It was far from winter now, with sunlight still reaching through the window at dinnertime, and the thick hum of cicadas in the trees, and a lone cricket chirping somewhere below the windowsill.
Blackbird ate her sandwich and fries. Her eyes wandered through the doorway to the living room. The black bookshelf, a crinkled and stained copy of Birds of the Midwest facing outward. The other books were always aligned by two bronze gargoyles, but now several books fell forward, a cascade of tiny steps.
“Where are the bookends?” she asked with her mouth full, pointing.
“Mm?” Her father leaned over to see. “Oh, I dropped one of them. Shattered in more places than you’d believe. I figured the other one’d be lonely by itself.” He flashed her a smile. “Besides, we can use the shelf space. There’s that book fair next week in town, and I could use something besides these puzzles to stare at.”
Her father was not a clumsy person. She wondered if afterward he had thrown them into the garbage, or maybe into the lake. She found herself wishing she could see them again.
“I’m finished,” she said, standing to put the rest in the fridge. He always brought her big sandwiches with too many fries so that she could have leftovers. “Are you ready?”
He stood, with a quiet salute. “Yes, ma’am. You get the binoculars and I’ll meet you outside.”
She moved, images of diving kingfishers and sparrows already floating through her mind. Smooth and graceful, they tossed their fish-prey up in the air, crunching down with sudden force. It was funny, watching their dinnertime dance, how easily she could forget about the tiny murders they were committing.
******
It was two days later, biking up Shores Lane, that she passed the cop car in the boy’s driveway.
The boy spotted her and waved. His parents stood behind him, talking to a policewoman with short red hair that Blackbird recognized from in town. Blackbird waved back, wishing she were not pumping uphill, because it gave the policewoman plenty of time to call after her. “Excuse me, young lady?”
She had to wheel back around to enter the boy’s driveway. Before she could speak the woman continued, “This young man says you’re a friend of his. That true?”
Blackbird hoped ‘this young man’ hadn’t said much else. “You could say that.”
“And do you know anything about the body he found in the marsh?”
She had told the boy not to tell anyone that he had shown her the body first. So he had listened. That meant word couldn’t get back to her father. She would have given the boy an appreciative look, but that would hardly make her seem innocent. “He told me about it. But I can’t help you. I’m sorry.”
She was always polite, if not expressive. The policewoman looked puzzled, and Blackbird wondered what the woman would have done if she’d said, There were crickets and thunder the night Emery Hunt visited, and I don’t know where the gargoyle bookends went. “What’s your name?” the woman asked, with an uncertain smile. “And where exactly do you live, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“She’s Blackbird,” said the boy, as if the policewoman were a little slow. “It’s her real name, even if it is strange. She lives at the bottom of our hill.”
“Your hill?” Blackbird favored him with a tiny smile. He had called her name strange a million times, and she didn’t mind—it was a strange name, and not the first she’d heard of it. But it was the name her mother had given her. When she was younger her parents had often played the Beatles song of the same name. They would take each other’s hands on either side of her, forming a Blackbird sandwich, and sway back and forth to the music. Her mother had once told her it had been their wedding song.
“So…Blackbird,” the woman said, as if the name tasted funny on her tongue. “Where were you at around two a.m. on Wednesday morning?”
Blackbird shrugged. “I’m never up past midnight, ma’am. Is that when it happened?”
“Thereabouts.” The woman was writing in her little brown notebook. “We think, since he was found in the lake after all, it’s possible he fell off the side of a boat. Hit his head.” She looked up. “Something hit his head, anyway. We’ll know more soon. Can I speak to someone else in your household?”
“There isn’t anyone else home right now. My father’s at work.”
“Well, here.” The policewoman pulled a card out of her pocket, handed it to Blackbird. “When your father gets home, have him give me a call. We’ll be by soon, just to ask some routine questions. Nothing to be afraid of.”
Blackbird nodded. “Is that all, ma’am?”
“That’s it for now. Go on, enjoy your bike ride.”
“Wait,” the boy called after her, and made a beeline for his bike. “Are you going to ride down Mount Doom?”
Mount Doom was what her family had dubbed the steep hill that led into town. When Blackbird was younger she had often coasted down it, her father on his bike behind her. One day she’d hit a stray pebble while going too fast. The horrible lurch of flying, and then she’d skidded several feet on her stomach, so that bits of gravel embedded themselves into her skin. Back home her mother had wiped the blood that went from her knees to her socks, picked out the gravel and bandaged her. That was before, when Twin Lakes was only a summer home, and there was no cancer. Now Blackbird rode her brakes down the hill, and avoided the gravel.
“Maybe,” she said. “Does that mean you want to come?” It wasn’t really a question.
The boy pedaled just behind her. “How come you didn’t want that police lady to know I showed you the…the dead man?”
She often worried he would clip her back wheel. “Why don’t you ride ahead of me, Roadrunner?”
He obliged. “Well?”
A kind breeze blew her long dark hair off her forehead as she pedaled upward. “I don’t need to cause any extra trouble for my father,” she said, looking straight ahead.
“What kind of trouble? You didn’t do anything wrong.”
“But I saw it.” They reached the top of the hill, turned their bikes to enter the development. “Parents worry about their children worrying. Seeing too much, and things like that.”
They rode side by side now. The boy looked thoughtful. “My parents get mad if I just come home after sunset. Even if it’s still really light out. When I showed them the body they weren’t mad anymore, but after they called the police they got mad all over again. They told me that’s why I can’t go riding around by myself when it’s getting dark out. But they didn’t know what happened to that man, so how could they know it was dark out when he died?”
“Just an assumption. They don’t want you to get hurt.” It was funny, how adults were as convinced as children that terrors came with the darkness. Let the dark keep its secrets, little Blackbird, her mother used to tell her, when she woke from nightmares that made her afraid of her room’s black corners. They won’t hurt you.
“I won’t get hurt.” The boy grinned at her suddenly, taking his eyes off the empty road. “I can ride fast and brake fast. No one can catch me or throw me off.”
Blackbird saw the grin falter a little. “You’re the best bike rider there ever was,” she agreed, and it grew once more.
“Want to race to Mount Doom?” The boy straightened in his seat, fear forgotten.
She was not much in the mood for racing. “Okay. You get a head start since your legs are short.”
“Nuh-uh.” He frowned his comical frown. “I’m the best bike rider there ever was, so I can beat you anyway.”
“Suit yourself,” she said, and waited for him to count off gleefully before pushing down on the pedal. The wind picked up with her speed, as if sweeping her away from something—forever—even if she couldn’t quite place what that something was.
******
Evening in the boat, and the cloud-mottled sunset made a liquid portrait out of the water. Her father let her hold the binoculars as the heron flew overhead, soundless.
“I saw a strange bird today,” said Blackbird. “It was blue, but not flat blue like a blue jay. More of a…shiny blue. The way seashells glint in the sun.”
“Like a metallic blue?” Her father leaned forward a little, a smile beginning to brighten his face.
“That’s the word I wanted.”
“Sounds like an indigo bunting. I haven’t seen one here in a few seasons. Where did you see it?”
“By the edge of the dead end road inside the development. But then that boy went too close on his bike and scared it away. Oh, and we saw a mourning dove, too.” Mourning doves weren’t rare, but Blackbird loved them anyway. They had been one of her mother’s favorite birds. Blackbird had once thought their name was spelled like ‘morning,’ which didn’t make much sense, since weren’t most birds awake in the morning? Now the real name seemed appropriate, and not just because of the low and melodic coo they made.
“Well.” He looked out on the water. “Isn’t this a good bird day.”
They sat in silence for awhile, until the sun was only a cap on the heads of the trees. Normally Blackbird liked the silences fine, but as the minutes passed her father grew tense. He would squeeze his knee with one hand, relax, then squeeze again, watching the lake all the while. At last he said, “Blackbird. I assume you’ve seen the cops around, haven’t you?”
She nodded.
“They came into the restaurant today, just for a few minutes. They—they’ve identified the body of that man. It’s Emery Hunt.”
He glanced up at her. Folded his hands, squeezed them together too. She only waited.
“Well,” he said. “Remember I told you he left before you woke up that morning? After he’d spent the night?”
She remembered.
“Well, I’m afraid he and I had a bit of a fight.” Squeeze, squeeze.
Please don’t say it, Blackbird thought. I’ll do anything if you would just not say it.
“He…wasn’t too keen to be around me, so he decided to catch a late train back to the city. I should have driven him, but I didn’t. He was going to walk into town and hitch a ride to the station the old-fashioned way, I suspect.” His hands were trembling now, even when he squeezed. “I thought he had made it to the train station. I don’t know what happened to him—we’d been drinking a bit, you know, so maybe he fell and hit his head somehow.” He looked up at her, his face contorted, his body slouched. “I’m telling you this, Blackbird, even though I didn’t tell it to the cops. I lied, Blackbird. You understand why, don’t you? How suspicious it all sounds?” He laughed shakily. “You were asleep, and there’s no one else to verify that it’s the truth. So they would suspect me, and maybe even arrest me, and then they would take you somewhere else.”
He leaned forward in the boat, taking her small hands in his shaking ones. “You know I would never let anyone take you away from me, little bird. You know that, don’t you?”
Let the dark keep its secrets, little Blackbird. “I know, Papa.”
“You understand, my girl?” He was still looking at her pleadingly. “You believe me?”
It was the hardest thing she had ever done, looking back at him. Harder than seeing Emery Hunt’s bloated face and blood-crusted head, and talking to the policewoman, even harder than two a.m. Wednesday when she’d woken up thirsty.
Think of birds, simple pretty birds. Kingfishers and mourning doves and great swans, and the heron, the regal lonely heron. Think of happy sparrows, twittering inside the evergreens.
“I understand, Papa.” And she did.
“There’s my girl.” For a moment he looked like he wanted to hug her. Instead he brought her hands to his mouth and kissed them, then sat back against the rim of the boat. Several moments passed, but when he spoke again his hands weren’t shaking anymore. “Well now, looks like the sun’s gone down. Shall we head in?”
******
By midnight the thunder had rolled in with the clouds. Blackbird lay awake and listened.
Wake thirsty. Kitchen. Two voices, rising. On the floor, shadows tearing. A thud. Then another. Silence. One voice. One voice, gasping, shuddering. Dry mouth. Bedroom window. A paddle on water. Crickets and thunder. Waiting. A boat returning.
Wake thirsty. Kitchen. Two voices, rising…
She rose from the dream that was not a dream.
She thought of the nightmares she’d had when she was little, how she would wake crying out in the darkness. Her mother or father would come to check on her, to smooth her sweaty hair and tell her to go back to sleep. Sometimes she would wake simply frightened, not enough to cry out, but enough to slip into her parents’ room. Even after her mother died, she would draw comfort from sneaking in to see her father, just for a minute, just to hear him say, It’s all right, little bird. Nothing bad will happen to you. It’s all right, Blackbird, go back to sleep. In the morning all will be right again.
Caitlin Raleigh is a crazy redhead who loves all things related to cats, the Beatles, and Christmas. (It’s fitting that her first widely circulated publication contains ‘furious’ in its name.) Her work has also been published in DePaul’s literary magazine, for which she has more recently been the fiction editor. She is currently a graduate student in DePaul’s Writing and Publishing program, and when she isn’t writing her many stories, she’s thinking about them. She lives and breathes equally Chicago, Illinois, and Twin Lakes, Wisconsin.
Trip
Carmel L. Morse
Lark, my artist friend,
my compatriot,
wakes me every Sunday morning,
I’m crashing, dear God,
please talk to me.
The flowers are vicious.
Eyes crawl from foreheads
and dark cloaks in corners
are dancing to smother me.
I am dying. Help me.
I spend an hour
on the phone
calming her.
Imagine a single rose,
swimming in a crystal vase –
petals open in slow motion
like in a movie
and it smells like June,
your birth month.
Find a mirror,
look deeply
your green eyes shimmer
like a proud cat
and there are only two,
a pair.
That is all you require.
Pretend that your eyes
are face cards,
two-eyed jacks
In a royal flush..
You can hold them
in your hands.
They are not exchangeable.
Walk to your closet,
remove your black cape
with the paisley embroidery,
put it on.
The swirls in the design
create a maze
that takes you on a journey
but the paths always
circle back to you.
You are the center
of your universe
that nothing can steal.
Your breathing has slowed.
There. There.
You have returned.
And Lark promises
she will never again
touch mescaline. Never.
But next Sunday
the phone will ring.
Carmel L. Morse has been writing creatively since she was in her teens. She received a PhD from the University of Nebraska and wrote a creative dissertation of her poetry. She has previously been published in The Connecticut Review, Darkling, Pudding Magazine, and The Great American Poetry Show, among others. She is currently an assistant professor in general studies at the University of Northwestern Ohio in Lima, Ohio.
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