My dentist tells me
I need to guard my own mouth
from my own teeth.
They war with each other
while I sleep.

And I wonder what else my
limbs and tendons,
guts and intestines,
red cells and white cells
plot behind my back.

And I wonder, too, about Men
on buses,
and park benches,
in court houses,
and white houses.

What other forces plan
domination
over my body?

While I sit.

While I sleep.

Mirah Harim worked on a ranch in Colorado, taught creative writing in Hong Kong, and is now a lawyer in San Francisco. She is currently working on a novel and learning to drive in the city.

It seems as though there’s an ever-growing list of things to be terrified about today. Bad lettuce pops up on a regular basis. Aside from sounding like a rock band, bad lettuce can cause gastronomical issues you’d rather not know about. Recently, I heard you do not want to inhale any of the air from a freshly popped can of tennis balls. Who knew? And, of course, don’t even think about sweeping up mouse feces without wearing an industrial-strength Haz-Mat suit and a Military Grade breathing apparatus.

And now the latest item to keep you up at night is knitting. Yes, knitting. Once known as a quiet, relaxed, almost Zen-like activity enjoyed by Barry Manilow listeners, knitting has created more hats, mittens and scarves than any one family could possibly use. It has apparently now moved toward the top of activities to be wary of. When I last looked, it was right behind cliff diving.

Of course, you don’t have to be told to stay away from some lunatic waving knitting needles around in an elevator or subway. But in an entire lifetime, this will never happen, so never mind. However, the dangers associated with knitting are apparently far more insidious than that. I know this to be true because my wife recently signed up for a knitting class at our local community college.

And that’s when the alarm bell went off.

In order to register, she had to fill out an “Acknowledgement and Assumption of Potential Risk” form. My first question to her was, “Why is this necessary?” She had no answer. Then she showed me the Code of Regulations. Specifically, Subchapter 5, Section 55450. She was asked to, “Acknowledge that I fully understand that my participation in this activity may involve risk of serious injury or death, which may result not only from my own action, but also from the actions of others.”

But wait. It gets even better.

She was then asked to acknowledge that she, “Assumes all risks which may occur, such as sprains/strains, fractured bones, head and/or back injuries, paralysis or loss of eyesight.”

While I could certainly see where this form would be necessary if she were taking a class in Combative Axe Throwing, Rugby for Senior Citizensor Let’s Have Fun with Plutonium, it didn’t seem to be a good fit for a knitting class.

Maybe she needs to go back and read the small print. Maybe this is really a full combat, martial arts knitting class. Maybe it’s a self-defense class with concealed carry knitting needles.

Just out of curiosity, I may go with her to the first class. But first, I need to order two Kevlar vests, chainsaw-proof pants, puncture-resistant needle helmets and laser-sharpened needles, just in case things get serious.

There are no quizzes or grades given in this class. But from everything I’ve seen so far, just surviving it will count for a lot.

Jim is a semi-retired ad agency creative director who just cannot stop word-wrangling. He began his writing career in Chicago as a catalog copywriter for Montgomery Ward, where a typical assignment was to sell a screen door in 12 lines of 36 characters.

There is more than fish and lake weed beneath the surface of the water. More than snapping turtles and a thousand lost fishhooks and lures sitting on the bottom of the lake. There are more unknown things than known. More questions than answers. There is a whole hell of a lot beneath that water, laying unseen to the eye, but seen every night in a repetitive nightmare. There was no end of the little bits of me in that lake. So many pieces. So many fragments. Probably my very soul.

There was that one time I dropped the keys to the Tacoma. I was way out on the lake. Way out where the shoreline was just a narrow horizontal smudge, pine-colored and squint-so-you-can-see-it. Way out there, might as well have dropped those keys, rabbit’s foot, bottle opener and all, into the Mariana Trench out in the Pacific. Or is it the Atlantic? Some place deeper than the soul I no longer really have anyways. Those keys were gone, rabbit’s foot, bottle opener and all.

There were Coke cans and beer bottles. The ones down deep, sleeping in the dark, bedfellows to catfish and carp, Coors or Bud or Miller Light; you’d never see them again but if you did you could read them, their labels and the text. The ones near the shore, tangled in emerald strands slicker than the fish that hides in them; those are the ones you’d see but could barely read. Sun bleached, all white or bright yellow, you’d only just make out if it’s Sprite or Pabst Blue Ribbon.

No doubt there was bound to be a snowmobile or three. Probably one in each bay, maybe more. Maybe less. But you hear about it each winter. Someone taking their motor sled out too early, too late, or just not knowing the lake as well as they should. Someone breaking the surface like a greedy finger into a piecrust. Except hot cherry filling, fresh baked apples, isn’t what’s waiting. It’s a whole lot of pain. Steal-your-breath-from-your-lungs cold. The kind of cold that doesn’t exist, cannot be quantified, until you feel it. But then you’re dead. And dead men don’t go explaining the type of cold that was the last sensation they ever felt.

Dead men, too. The lake has claimed many. Collected bodies over the years. Though more often than not those come back to the surface. Find the shoreline as if they need to keep on breathing. The gulls usually help with the search. Or the bears.

Not just lives lost on the water. Plenty lost out there.

I lost my virginity on a pontoon boat. A lazy thing that moved as slow as Mary did fast. My swim trunks were off before I knew anyone was working at those knots I never could untie myself. I always just wiggled in and out of the damned things. But there they were, plastered up against the wall of the pontoon and I only looked to see them there because I heard the slap of their impact. Next thing I know, I know Mary a whole lot more than I did moments before. And quick as it was, it happened all out on that lake.

There was a bit of dignity lost out there on the lake. The times I spent bent over the aluminum siding of the Lund Angler. The times I emptied a bit of me into the lake. I’d watch some pale purple cloud mix with the clear cold water. Little sunfish would pop up and nibble bits of what I ate a meal or two ago.

I’d lost my temper out there on the lake. The few times I nearly reeled in a fish the size of my Labrador.  Sweating my body weight working to pull in what felt like a sperm whale or maybe one of those dead bodies still dressed up in snow pants even though it’s the height of summer. I’d pull some denizen worthy to hang on any wall in any bar close enough to look it in the eyes. Sometimes I could kiss the damned things, whisper secrets into wherever the hell a fish ear is, then watch them splash back into the black, nothing to show for it but a broken line and another bout of hemorrhoids.

There was trash at the bottom of the lake. Maybe some treasure too. But the things I’d bring up from out the depths, disappointed when it wasn’t something fit with fins and gills, something alive and breathing so I could kill it and eat it, something instead, like a bike tire or an old shoe, six-pack rings and a dead duck tangled up in ways that didn’t look possible, they were things I’d put in the category of trash. Never did find any treasure. But I did find a scratch game winner once. Trouble was the card came to pieces when I picked it up out of the water.

Lots of memories out on that lake. A few in the water. Like the time I skinny dipped with Millie Martin when I was a kid hardly out of school. Like the time I cannonballed some real cold water onto Sarah who came diving in from sunbathing to swim me down and tickle my sides. How I nearly choked to death breathing in water while laughing. And when I caught my breath how we made love on the dock, ignoring those nagging horseflies gnawing at our backs and just letting that setting sun showcase our passion to the fisherman who were no longer focused on their fishing.

We had Sam less than a year later. Then the good times came fast and often. Some hard times too. Living selfishly and being a good dad, that’s like oil and water. There were sacrifices. Time, habits, sleep, dockside intimacies with Sarah, or any intimacies at all. But there were rewards. And besides, nothing more intimate than being a loving dad, a caring husband, seeing your home at the end of a hard day and smiling without a shred of effort. Seeing Sam smiling to see me in the window, smiling back at him and forgetting how tired I am. Life was good. Life was rich. Life was sweet.

‘How many drops of water are in the lake, Dad?’

‘A lot.’

‘More than a thousand?’

‘More than a million.’

There were well over a million drops of water in that lake. The sort of number that was the true answer to Sam’s question was probably the sort of number I couldn’t pronounce. Something with a whole lot a zeros trailing off the pages if you had the care or the patience to write it out.

A whole lot of zeros. Now that’s feeling familiar. That’s feeling like what I’ve got now. A whole lot of nothing. No soul, no love, no reason to go on breathing.

Sarah left the lake. Left me. Couldn’t look at my face any longer. Couldn’t stand the sight of me, the sight of the lake. She moved somewhere out of state and other than that I have no idea where or how to reach her. 

My son is down there in that lake. Sam is somewhere halfway in the mud making some bottom feeder feel cozy and safe nuzzled up in a hollowed-out ribcage, an underwater grotto that used to house my child’s beating heart. My boy is down there deep. Deep where the sun doesn’t bleach the beer cans. Deep where the catfish and carp rub their smooth bellies on the rough rocks.

Sam was nearly seven. His birthday was so near that we already had the presents wrapped and stashed beneath our bed. We had already ordered the chocolate cake which was a treat to ourselves so we wouldn’t have to bother making it. We bought one of those numbered candles. Seven. It was sitting unopened to this day. How many drops of water in the lake? How many tears on the carpet over where I routinely clutch that plastic wrapped candle?

I was teaching my boy how to fish. But I was also enjoying a Saturday afternoon like I used to do back when it didn’t have to be Saturday. Back then it was Monday, Tuesday, any old damn day. I was going through some cold ones from the cooler and I think I was around the same number as that candle back home. The day was blistering hot and the beers were demanding a snooze.

Sam started making excited noises. ‘I gotta big one, Dad!’

‘Good for you, Sam. Pull her on in.’ I smiled at my boy and tipped my cap over my eyes to make the sleep come easier. It was the last time I laid eyes on him. I was nodding off real quick, listening to Sam grunting and shuffling across the aluminum. The movement of the boat over the water was as lulling as a mother rocking a cradle. And I was feeling like the baby within. Last thing I heard was a lot of thrashing in the water, then a real big splash.

That must be some big fish. That’s what I was thinking when the sleep hit me. As big as a Labrador. I smiled in my sleep. That’s my boy.

Then some five or ten or maybe sixty minutes later I push my hat back from over my eyes. I’m squinting in the sun and rubbing the sleep away and feeling those beers and smiling at my boy. Then I realize I’m not. No boy at all. No Sam. And no fishing rod either. Just seven empty aluminum cans and the life jacket I hadn’t bothered to put on my son.

I sobered up in the worst way a man can. I scanned the horizon, far, far away where the shoreline was just a narrow horizontal smudge, pine-colored and squint-so-you-can-see-it. I dove into the black water and paddled as far as I could, downward, and didn’t come close to touching the bottom. Way out there, finding Sam was about as likely as finding those Tacoma keys.

My lungs were about to burst. My head was filled with pressure. I came to the surface for air. How I wish now that I never did.

There is more than fish and lake weed beneath the surface of the water. More than snapping turtles and a thousand lost fishhooks and lures sitting on the bottom of the lake. There is a whole hell of a lot beneath that water, laying unseen to the eye, but seen every night in a repetitive nightmare. There was a no end of the little bits of me in that lake. So many pieces. So many fragments. Probably my very soul.

James Callan is a great ape and the descendant of deep ocean microorganisms. He has never been to Greece, but has a frequent, recurring dream of standing in the long shadow of the Parthenon, a blood-red sun bloated on the horizon.

“I pray to birds, because they fly closest to heaven.” Lydia said once.

Wilbur had smiled amiably, always one to entertain her. “Heaven’s a long ways away from here, what makes you think they can make it?” Never mind the fact that Wilbur didn’t even believe in a heaven, hadn’t since he was six and his young shoulders didn’t yet know how heavy the world could be when placed on them. But Lydia did, and Wilbur had a soft spot for the woman who was the closest thing to a mother he would ever get.

“I never said they make it to heaven, now did I?” A playful smile tugged at her lips, eyes glittering sidelong at Wilbur in the cool autumn sun. “I said they fly close to it, because not even they can make it that far. They’re only birds.” She rolled her eyes like it was the most obvious thing in the world and couldn’t believe that Wilbur didn’t know this, and nudged him teasingly with her elbow.

            Wilbur laughed and nudged her back.

“Then why do you pray to them if they’re so bad at their jobs?”

“Well, who else am I going to pray to? The air? Now that’s just silly. God can’t hear me if I pray to air. Be reasonable.” Lydia snorted, leaning back in her rocking chair with closed eyes. A gentle wind buffeted past, it sighed in the orange-ing trees above and made the dappled shadows on Lydia’s face dance serenely, and Wilbur had marveled at how young she happened to look in that instance; wrinkles smoothing back into her face like early morning dew. For a moment, she appeared as she did nearly thirty years ago, when her joints had not yet been eaten by arthritic termites and her hair still held the tint of the sun’s golden rays. “Besides, birds are just angels who are too young for heaven and are still learning to fly. They’ll hold my prayers for me until they’re old enough to give them to God themselves.”

“Is that so?” Wilbur hummed quietly, turning an inquisitive eye to where a small woodpecker sat perched on a low hanging branch. He watched as it tilted its head one way, then the other, curiously peering inside a small crevice hidden in the tree’s bark. “What prayer do you give that one?” he asked, pointing out the woodpecker. Lydia followed the line of his finger easily to where the bird now pecked cautiously at the place it had been studying.

She turned a questioning eye to Wilbur, thin eyebrow arched skeptically at him, but Wilbur didn’t look away from the woodpecker and kept his face carefully neutral, so she sighed heavily and also turned her sights back to the bird. Wilbur swore he saw her give a tiny smile from the corner of his eyes, but didn’t want to acknowledge it.

“I pray that there’ll be sunlight in winter, and water in summer. That every butterfly will have two wings, that every stray penny will be found heads up, and that children will always scream in excitement when they hear the song of an ice-cream truck.” The way Lydia’s eyes seemed to gloss over a little, unfocussed, and with a wistful grin, told Wilbur that she was seeing things that were only visible to her eyes. “But mostly,” she said with something hinting to mischievousness playing at the edges of her voice as she turned to face him, leaning over the arm of her rocking chair like she had something she wanted to confide in him with. “I pray you’ll learn that burgundy just isn’t your color.”

Then it’s Wilbur’s turn to snort, though it’s months later when winter is just starting to creep in that he does.

He’s alone, and the chill seeping through his jacket isn’t from the cold—though some of it is, because it’s freezing and just this morning the weatherman said it was going to snow later that afternoon—but it’s also from the grief soddening his bones in Lydia’s absence.

It’s hardly been two weeks since Lydia slipped away peacefully in her sleep, but Wilbur misses her already—has missed her from the moment he knew she was gone. There wasn’t a lot of people who cared for Wilbur, who were willing to just sit and talk with him for hours about meaningless things in order to feel a little less alone in this all-too-big-world, and Lydia was one of those very few. But she’s gone now and Wilbur wants to be selfish enough to ask the God Lydia believed in to bring her back—but he doesn’t.

Instead he stares down at the grey slab of stone that bears her name and years of life like it’s some victory to be bragged about, and on some level, Wilbur supposes that it is. Lydia lived a long and happy life, one that was clearly illustrated in the wrinkled valleys and roads etched on her face; a roadmap of every smile she smiled and every tear she shed. He knows that she held no regrets, died ready to be swept into heaven on the back of some bird finally ready to gain a pair angel wings.

Wilbur fiddles with the stray thread of his scarf, the burgundy one Lydia had always tried to hide from him when he was a teenager because of how she claimed he looked horrible in the color, and closes his eyes briefly on a soft sigh.

When he opens them, he does so to the overcast sky, and wonders if Lydia had managed to reach her heaven even with all those clouds in the way. He hopes she did. Even though Wilbur could never find the ability to believe in God or a heaven of any kind, he wants it to be true for Lydia. Out of everyone else in the world, she deserved it most.

Casting one last glance down at the headstone, Wilbur finds a small thrush standing atop the newly dug earth at the foot of it, and smiles despite himself.

“I pray that you made it to heaven Lydia, and all your prayers had made it too.”

Jenny Zimmer is a senior studying English and History at Washburn University, where she works as a student assistant in the library’s archives and special collections. She currently lives in Topeka with her two cats, Arthur and Billy.

I sent it in, they read what I wrote,
then they sent me back a little note.
“We liked the concept of your poem just fine,
we read carefully, each and every line.
After careful consideration,
with due course and serious deliberation.
We’re sorry, but it’s not a good fit; therefore,
we must decline.”
Their last comment: they thought it had too much rhyme.
They didn’t recognize the form,
finally they said they weren’t going to publish it this time.
I’m afraid this is becoming the norm.
But it had an invitation for more poetry, they said I should submit,
it was at the bottom of the note, there at the very end.
Now I wonder if they’re more interested in the poetry they’ll get,
or is it more about the reading fee they want me to send?
Oh my gosh, now that could never be!
But, I think I’ll look for someone that might like my poetry,
that might be willing to take a look and see,
… but do it for free.

After a successful career as a Senior Engineering Designer working with international mining companies, William David is retired and living in Tucson, Az. He likes spending time now devoted to his passion: writing poetry. William writes for his pleasure and the pleasure of those who might read his poems.

    
Like a dead fish dislodged from the lake-bottom mud and bobbing toward the water-top mirror, the same thought surfaces periodically in Artie’s mind. On days when his skin is tight against his face, when his muscles feel the weight of his bones, the image that swims into his mind–dipping, bobbing, cavorting in the rising bubbles–is of himself, a mimeograph of Artie perhaps more grizzled and inveterate than it has any right to be. Inside-Artie can believe on the best days that Outside-Artie projects a picture of wind-worried confident heaviness, like an outcropping worn away over millennia into the shape of a lion, roaring his disclaimers across the desert. On the dense and weighty days, he pictures himself harsh-edged and somewhat lopsided.

     Artie is a mix of scrounged ingredients that bake right on down to average. Gray, tinging the edges of dark hair. Hint of gut. One set of glasses that try desperately to escape the bridge of his nose every time his gaze declines. The face of a character generated to fill the stadium bleachers in a video game. Still, on the days when it’s rainy and dim, and the streaked windows of his apartment show more of the lit inside than the stormy out, Artie feels like the great old ballplayer. Outside-Artie is Big Ed Delahanty, Doc Gooden, Shoeless Joe. The droplets staining his cheek, of course, are saline salutes to days way-back-when, when pitches seemed to hang for eons in dead air, waiting to be smacked into oblivion. Even on good days, Artie sometimes sees in himself this imaginary washed-up-slugger.

     Delusions of that nature often lend themselves to complex explanations, Freudian scripts read aloud with certainty. The reason this one sticks around is simple: Artie loves baseball. Once, he’d consumed all sports equally with an open, hungry mouth. Football, Basketball, Tennis, and whatever the hell else popped up on Fox or NBC when the channel changed, maybe WNEP if he was on the move. Never NASCAR. Eventually all the sports had withered away, shrinking smaller and smaller and smaller in scale until, now, the First-and-Goals he sees on TV at restaurants and bars are nothing more than vestigial organs. Baseball hangs on.

     It’s hard to define exactly why Artie loves America’s Pastime so, because he doesn’t much care that it is America’s Pastime – in fact, mostly he watches alone. There’s something enchanting about baseball on the radio, to be sure – a sense of slow method interspersed with meaningless heat. Something about AM/FM baseball suggests a wood-slat porch when he closes his eyes, surrounds him with pleasant dry heat and just the barest hint of a breeze.

     And he doesn’t just love it on the airwaves. He’s religious regardless of medium, and sometimes he’s even overtaken with the urge to see–in-person that particular shade of green that ballpark grass enjoys when it’s in perfect company with the light, sandy dirt. Even Artie isn’t quite sure why he has this fascination

     (obsession)

     with baseball. But 162 times a season (and more, if the good guys do well enough) he tunes in and listens to the crack of the Louisville sluggers and the slap-thud of ball into Wilson glove and the crazy vibrant commentary nothing else quite matches.

     This year, the season starts on a Monday. Sure, Artie watches what he can of Spring Training, but it really doesn’t hold the same luster when your boys are playing down in nasty swampy Florida, even if it just looks beautiful on TV. The longball looks strange poking its arcing dash past palm trees.

     Artie goes to work that morning in his best jersey (one of two #27s) and a throwback hat, with the old logo that upper management never should’ve changed. From Mikaila, the guard on duty, he gets “reppin’ today, Mr. Paget?” and receives a rivalry jab from Bill down the hall. Bill is certainly not“reppin’ today” in his three-piece suit. Artie leaves work fifteen minutes early to pick up the ceremonial chips-and-dip from the corner store, twisting urgently through the squeezed Gondola shelves. He’s snugly in his watching-spot when the pregame starts, half-an-hour out.

     Chuck and Chet on the local pregame show prattle on for a while, here’s-a-guying this and stat-citing that, and finally the game starts at its staggered time slot. First Pitch, 7:08.

     By the third inning, Artie is nearly in tears.

     “Pick up three new F/A sluggers,” he mumbles to himself, “and not a ball put in play the first time through the lineup?” He smashes a closed fist into the wall beside his couch, saved from property damage only by the heavy-duty exposed brick. His hand is not similarly saved; he’ll be favoring the other one for days. “Seven runs against,” he moans, and lays down for a while, his eyes still fixed on the abysm unfolding onscreen. “Seven.”

In the bottom of the fifth (13 runs against, 0 hits for, with a reliever in), Artie picks up and leaves. He can’t sever himself from the game, not completely, and so he keeps headphones in, listening to the WNEP broadcast, where the situation only grows more and more dire.

     Artie heads for the gym, his stomach still heavy with the chips he’d scarfed and the “cheese” dip that almost audibly congeals as he walks. He starts out at the punching bag, naturally, but the inning-by-inning failure still piping into his ear means that even the satisfying thwap of his hand into the nylon can’t soothe his soul. The rowing machine, its rhythm and stress normally so calming, simply whirs and thrums in tune to the enemy bats as the score creeps up to 21-zilch.

     It’s a 24-run deficit by the time he mounts the elliptical (and only the top of the eighth), and by then Artie’s a seething ball of frustration. The good guys have position players on the mound at this point, and Artie’s fury is so potent it makes an appearance on his face. At least one fellow patron goes home to her wife sharing the story of “the dude whose eyes were almost popping out his head.” He works into as clean a stride as he can manage on angry, trembling legs, and goes as fast as the four pounds of junk food in his stomach will permit.

     When the game returns after ads, Artie gets the miracle he’s been praying for ever since his heroes went down a run. It doesn’t take much to get Artie dialing up God’s number, and most times it seems like the big man has him on Caller ID Block. But there’s a run, and another, and another, until the rally gets to 12 straight and the score is a helluva-lot closer with just one man down. They come back all the way by bottom-9, at true diamond miracle, and with the game tied, it goes to the tenth, eleventh, twelfth, blow for blow by each team. The commentators ramble about the game’s record-breaking potential, and Artie rattles on atop the elliptical until the only ones left in the 24-hour fitness center are him and the security cameras.

     It ends in the sixteenth, 34-33, and the righteous have inherited the ballgame. Artie stumbles off the elliptical and sits on the floor, pouring water down his reddened face. It soaks into the jersey he’s left on, mingling with the perspiration and turning it two different shades of wet. He sighs a deep one, and waits for the strength to walk the three blocks home. The elliptical’s user-friendly monitor blinks for 60 seconds before figuring out that he’s gone, and displays his stats from over three hours on the machine.

     In the warm, sunny light of the next morning, Artie’s mind has already come to its conclusions. Three years prior, when the fellas in the right uniforms had made it into October, he’d grown himself a big old playoff beard. He’d let the thing run wild (“You look like a caveman, Mr. Paget”) and the best-daggum-ballteam in the world had come away with a trophy. This is irrefutable evidence in his mind, in the tangled processes of those flashing neurons, that his own influence is critical; Artie’s habits, of course, knit right on into his team’s success. Indivisible. It happened when it was just a beard, no real sacrifice on his part, so imagine, Artie’s brain whispers now, in its little voice, that hiss that never changes volume, imagine what happens when you really put yourself into it.

     But he doesn’t commit, not at first; it takes about a month for him to realize that the connection is absolute. They win when he works out – they lose otherwise. Binary.

     So after that first month, Artie sets about making his own luck. He tries, up until the All-Star Break, to keep an even keel. He’ll stuff his face after the game to refill his coffers and send back in the energy he’d sweated and panted out as the runs ticked up. But he gets the message soon enough, because every time he over-eats in replenishing, a loss is in store the next day, no matter how hard he runs. He decides to throw himself into it. Totally, fully, 100%.

     It’s only until October.

     Artie comes by joy through his method. The team is near perfect down the stretch – a record performance, frankly – and when they aren’t, Artie’s always able to figure out just which of his indiscretions caused the loss. By mid-September, he isn’t drinking, smoking, or eating sugar. He’s cut out caffeine and non-baseball entertainment, and he’s donated any slivers of his salary past the essentials, rent, and the cable bill. He weighs 128 lbs.

     By the end of the month, the gym has cut him off, and he’s begun to slip at work (“Getting’ awful thin, Mr. Paget”). No matter, he can run, and listen in on the station website. He learns the city well, and when the Series comes around he has his schedule all set. For Game 5 (he’d had a coffee at work the morning of Game 2), Artie’s suited up in an XS team shirt he bought online and a pair of baggy basketball shorts.

     He starts running through Royale Park, his wiry frame almost the only thing out on the streets of a city whose hometown boys are playing tonight. He beats his way down the gravel running trail as the President throws out the opening pitch, and he’s rounding the lake, breath coming heavy, by the time the top of the ninth comes around, a lead fairly secure.

     Artie Paget dies there, on the mixed gray-and-white gravel of the lakeside trail, sometime around the game’s final pitch. The rest of the city cheers and revels, and the postgame show plays over the radio into Artie’s dead ears for about three hours. He’s not discovered until the next morning, when a sorority girl with half a hope of jogging off her hangover stumbles across him, screaming her surprise into the chilly October air. The coroner’s never seen a thinner corpse, and he notes in his report that the decedent’s thin, pale lips have drawn back from the teeth after death.

     Artie doesn’t die the image of a weathered stone lion, doesn’t die the imaginary washed-up old slugger he thought himself to be. Artie dies looking like a stick-figure of himself drawn in flesh-colored crayon. Emaciated. Ghastly.

     But Artie Paget dies with a smile on his face.

Greg Burton hails from the Garden State, but has lived across the North- and South-east. He often writes about the topics that fascinate him academically, including psychology, language, and law.

Dominican son, Bantu bolero
first heard the night the taxi swept
me, sixteen, neighbor Michael, and his cousin
to Santo Domingo’s red-light barrio
after two Cokes and rum con limón.

Polyester palm tree shirt I barely filled
black hair lank and long like a girl’s
I trailed those boys to a patio of girls
head swelled, as twenty on benches tittered
made pick-me faces, same as at school.

I heard the speaker’s song: immense pain of loss,
smart of your parting, weeping black tears.
Girls’ mouths sang along, bright with lip gloss
hips swayed, yet eyes brimmed with sadness
Mixed to a slush of ice and eros.

I couldn’t. My companions picked and left
down a corridor. I stayed stuck, until an arm
pulled me in to dance, her letting hands roam
to the others’ laughter, asking what kept
me from doing what was natural.

I answered “Cindy,” invoked the faithless name
who gave me black tears back home.
All of them heard and sighed. It was enough
to still the hips of those who stood alone
together, as they watched us dance the son.

Johnny Payne’s work has recently appeared in Neon Door, Gasher Journal, Sparks of Calliope, Society for Classical Poets, The Chained Muse, and Soundings East. His most recent published novels are THE HARD SIDE OF THE RIVER and CONFESSIONS OF A GENTLEMAN KILLER, which won the IBPA Gold Medal for Horror in2021. His books of poetry VASSAL and HEAVEN OF ASHES were published by Mouthfeel Press. He has directed his plays DEATH BY ZEPHYR and CANNIBALS for Slingshot Players, Los Angeles.

Blinding light slices open my eyes. Something about the room has changed. I hear the familiar sound of waves rolling outside. Breathing propels me to the realization that she is near. A low glow warms my stomach, as tears of ecstasy grow behind my strained gaze. A melody sweet as honey floods the dark watery walls. I’m looking everywhere without turning my head—searching. I can sense what is about to happen next.

“MIA!” shouts the teacher, Ms. Leo.

“Present,” my lips automatically conjure up their well traversed word of daydream-defense. My eyelids blink rapidly adjusting back to the present florescent lights illuminating the slightly amused disgruntled faces of my fellow classmates. Ms. Leo raps her ruby nails on the thick black book resting on the podium. I feel myself gulp, lifting my vision to meet her tired worn eyes.

Two football players snicker to one another, while three girls giggle. I feel my cheeks burn, “Sorry, I thought—uh, er…” I stumble to find an excuse out of my mental escapade, but all my brain can muster is the image of a green light shimmering on the chalk board. I drop my gaze shamefully to my folded hands and hope that she just moves on.

“Mia, I am not taking class role, like I did this morning on this lovely day of February 27th.”

I grin secretly to myself—I always prefer the smart aleck approach.

The old fraying lady runs her fingers through her moppy silver hair that falls to the small of her back, “The question I was asking you, Miss Malone, was if you knew what the three properties of seawater are since that may very well be one of the questions on your exam this coming Monday.”

My mind fills with gallons of marine bio info that we’ve covered over the last few weeks. I swim around in my thoughts trying to find the right avenue that will help me to formulate an answer.

“Uh,” I stammer looking down at my chicken-scratched notes and doodles of eyes that I’ve come to acquire an obsession for drawing. They’re digging into my soul trying to figure me out as I attempt to configure a timely response. “The three properties of the seawater are its density, temperature, and…” I pause. I know it has to do something with taste, “and, uh—salinity!” I cry triumphantly over the impatient whispers of the aggravated audience of students.

Ms. Leonardo closes her eyes, brings two fingers to the top bridge of her nose, and lets out a sigh, “Good job, Mia,” she observes through tight lips repressing somewhat of a smile, “just please pay attention to our lesson, you’re not the only one in this class.”

I nod my head understandingly, pretending to write that fact down on my weathered notepad while shading in the tip of an eyebrow. At this point, most of my teachers have gotten used to my severe spaciness. I’m not sure what it is. All I’ve witnessed is that my mind seems to go off on these tangents of strange heavy thinking-cycles as well as to these peculiar places, which always translate some kind of message that parallels what I dream at night. I’m not too sure what it means, but these visions are never bad, like night terrors or paranoia related to psychotic problems, thankfully.

When I was younger, my dreams used to be very vivid and prevalent. Those were some of the most beautifully intricate and intensely real dreams I can ever remember. It was usually the same or at least the same theme. It would always start with this undeniably excited feeling I would get. Like the feeling you get right when you’ve finally reached the top of a roller coaster, right when you know you’re about to drop. It’s like an adrenaline rush but more natural and comforting. I feel like something has been waiting for me—or rather someone. I feel this feminine presence emanating from the four corners of the room to which I’ve awoken—my bedroom, yet it is not my bedroom. Instead of light yellow walls enveloped in sunlight streaming through the windows, there are cool placid watery markings dancing on the interior walls and creating a magically gloomy affect. There is a slight salty taste on my tongue that compliments my damp hair. That’s when I hear the most peaceful music that simultaneously stimulates and lulls every sensory muscle of my being. I can’t understand what she’s singing for it’s neither words nor any type of human language that I can discern. The best way to describe it would be like she is sending intuitive musical signs or auditory messages of great meaning and phenomenal urgency. It seems to be an emerald light glimmering on the surface of the moonlit floor. As I stare at the warping pattern, a wonderful sensation of pure ecstasy courses through every channel in my body. I feel elated and at home. That is when I see this pair of the brightest aquamarine eyes staring right back into mine. At first I am predictably taken aback in their breathtaking beauty, yet there is something more that piques my interest. There is some type of story being told—something that seems to go beyond. My pupils dilate as I attempt to make sense of this fascinating narration. That’s always as far as I get. After that small epiphany, I wake to birds chirping relentlessly outside my sunny window. I return each time consistently more curious than the last.

These fantasies or dreams stopped for a brief period between the ages of 13 and 16, but on my 17th birthday, they started back up again. They’re the same dreams, but the tone changed. They seemed more hurried in a way and more immediate. I always paid attention to these dreams wondering what they could mean if they did mean anything at all, despite my constant complaining about them to my therapist. Her name is Doctor Thomas. Doctor Thomas loves me. I think I fulfill some type of surfacing desire of inner satisfaction in relation to why she entered the field of psychology. My mother makes me see her in reaction to my consistent whining about these phantasmagories.

The bell screeches loudly pulling me back fully to the reality that awaits me outside these doors. I gather my things slowly in the midst of the bustle, and begin to make my way toward my locker to gather my things for swim practice. I saunter through the hallways toward Monterey High School’s ginormous pool. The halls are dotted with high schoolers doing high-school things. I’m able to pick the brown-headed bundle of energy out from the crowd easily, despite her swarm of friends.

“Meredith!” I shout over the gurgle of lockers slamming and thunderclaps of cackling, waving my hand wildly over the sea of heads.

Meredith parts the congregation and moves over to my side, “Hey, I’m not gonna be at swim practice today.”

“Again?” I inquire heatedly, concerned and flustered that I’ll have to attend yet another practice without my sister.

“Yeah, I just—” Meredith turns back her head to face one of her countless followers.

“It’s fine, Mer,” in an attempt to relieve her of her terrible guilt over the situation, touching her shoulder in understanding, as she turns back to face her friendly fans.

I continue on my way, watching the time meticulously. That’s just how my sister is, very much like me—stubborn as all get out. When I set my mind to do something, that something gets done. When Meredith sets her mind to being best on the team, by God she is the best one on the MHS swim team—number 25 in all of northern California. For when we set our minds to not doing something, one can only guess!

I’m not sure what has captured Meredith’s attention lately to prevent her from being the superstar of swim. I’ve theorized a boy, but then again Meredith never really got sidetracked in that way—a project of some sort, maybe school related. Whatever it is, though, it’s keeping her from being home from school until midnight, so really the only interaction I’ve with my sister is in the mornings when the main focus is catching up on last night’s readings and attempting to absorb some type of nutrition that will hold us long enough until lunch.

When I ask Meredith where she goes, she always gets this far off look in her eye and lets out a small giggle. She has always been spacey in that way, I suppose. Granted not to the eccentric level I dwell, which has allowed her to be better adjusted to her world. Her mysterious absence only recently started occurring this year—her sophomore year, and me my senior. I dismiss it as just a phase and hope it’s not a boy.

I timely arrive in the locker rooms and swiftly change into my sleek suit. I tie up my blonde waves into a careless bun, slick a tight cap around my skull, and unravel my goggles.

“Hey is Meredith not coming again?” My friend Sheila asks me, strapping on her goggles securely over her course tight curls.

“Nope,” I answer absent-mindedly as I scurry to shove my belongings in a locker, ignoring the painful looks Sheila is injecting into my back and fitting my goggles over my lump of a head.

We scuttle out to the turquoise pool and dive right in. The instant the cool water splashes my skin, I feel like I can breathe again.

When I’m in the water, I feel like time slows down. I go through the motions meditatively and let the laps of water hypnotize me.

The water is where I can be free.

The hours drip past and before I know it, I surface to the coach blowing his silver whistle signaling to towel off and to meet for notes.

“Finally,” Sheila exhales as she follows behind me to the benches. We towel off catching our breath. I notice again tiny colorful glimmers on my skin, not sure if it’s a trick with the lights reflecting the water droplets. I wipe harder with the towel, but still they remain. I try never to give them much thought, but as much as I try I still see a green light or hear the sound of an angelic croon. I wrap the towel around myself as we take our place on the cold bench, shivering from the overhead fan whipping our wet skin.

“Good job today,” Coach Becker begins. “Wanna see more utilization of that water space—don’t be afraid to expand your limbs to get a greater range of motion. Also, good job breathing today and remember to get a steady rhythm going that works best for you,” he pauses to scratch his red untamed beard. “Practice is postponed Thursday of next week due to another storm that will be crossing over, which I’m sure you’re all aware,” his eyes sweep across all of ours as he fixes the whistle around his thick neck. “I hope you all have a safe weekend and get some good sleep.”

With that we’re dismissed, and Sheila and I make our way out to get dressed into our dry warm clothes.

“Do you wanna come over tonight? My mom is making a pizza from this new cookbook she ordered for her new Paleo diet. We could watch Netflix and have a sleepover,” Sheila proposes as we gather our swim and school gear.

I shake my head regretfully, “Can’t, Aaron’s coming over tonight. We’re gonna watch a movie,” I cock my head at Sheila anticipating her response.

Sheila raises one untrimmed brow at me and shakes her head, “You think he’s really gonna show up this time?”

I feel a sharp pang ricochet off my ribcage. I inhale sharply, “We hung out this weekend.”

Sheila just shrugs her shoulders, and we stroll back through the chilly California air to our small suburbs in the still winter silence.

The indigo sky is stained with blue puffy clouds as I hug Sheila goodbye. I take out my headphones, as if on autopilot, and start listening to one of my Pink Floyd playlist songs. I hope that this will be enough to deter my mother from grilling me with questions about my day.

I swing open the wood door allowing the hall light to flood onto our front porch. Sunday, our orange kitten, comes bounding up to my legs, meowing heinously for someone to feed her. I scoop her up in my arms feeling her fuzzy little body warm my sore chest.

We make a beeline straight for the pantry passing my mother who whips her head up from watching television in the family room.

“Hi, honey,” my mother perks up, “How was your day?”

I halt with Sunday wriggling in my hands, who has gotten restless on this tiresome 30 second journey. “It was good,” I recite nonchalantly releasing the flailing kitten to the carpeted floor. I attempt to follow the scurrying Sunday in pursuit—

“Yea? Where is Meredith?” My mom sets down her wine glass. “Did she show up at practice today?”

“Nope,” I look down and pretend to be fascinated with my neglected nails.

“Is Aaron coming over tonight?” My mother asks.

“He’s supposed to,” I retort defensively.

My mother and I exchange a moment’s look of bitterness, and she turns back her head to resume watching “Dancing with the Stars.”

More or less sadly, my mother chooses to cope with her free hours of life, when she’s not at her private practice helping people accept their dreadful life events, by watching reality TV and drinking wine or living vicariously through the extraordinarily talented and charismatic Meredith. She definitely doesn’t win Mom-of-the-Year, but she is my mom. Our father died when I was only a few months old. I don’t remember him at all, but I have seen pictures. When I was little I pretended he was there with me as an angel, and we would engage in the most spectacular conversations.

I set my pack down on our huge couch deemed the “fly-trap” and traipse over to the kitchen. I pour out a generous helping of dried cat food. I tried cat food once when I was little and quite inquisitive concerning the unconventional. It was gross.

I refill the bowl with clean water from the tap and set it down for Sunday, who is scarfing down her supper.

My stomach growls in deliberation. I rise from my crouched position of cat contemplation and head over to the fridge to find remains of last night’s dinner wrapped in tin foil balancing on top of an egg carton.

I tear open the covering to a porcelain plate (my mother has always emphasized the importance of having fine china in one’s household) revealing a fat pink piece of salmon, stick it in the microwave, punch in a minute, and hit start.

Pouring myself a glass of lemonade, I watch from the kitchen window into the living room at the glaring screen. The hurricane signals radiate underneath the flickering image of colorful dancers.

As if on cue my mother calls out over the judge’s appraisals, “Mia, did you see there’s gonna be a nasty storm that’s supposed to hit on your birthday this week!”

“Yeah, our teacher told us.”

The microwave beeps, signaling my dinner is served.

“Do you have much homework this weekend, sweetie?” My mom shuffles into the kitchen in her nightgown focusing on making it to the sink.

“Not so much,” I set my warm fish dish on the round wooden table and begin to dig in, “Just studying for my marine bio exam this Thursday and reading more for English.”

“Oh, what are you reading?”

I slice a side off the salmon and blow on it, “The Lost Art of Compassion.”

My mother nods her head, and begins talking about one of her many cases she sees throughout the day, Stacy. I half listen and half tune out, not really wanting to know too much about Stacy and her relationship with Uncle Sam.

I gulp down the remaining drops of lemonade, clear my dishes and put them in the dishwasher, while I feel my mother’s eyes bore into the back of my head. I spin around to bid my mother goodnight.

As I begin to leave I hear my mother’s quivery voice, “Just make sure Meredith is back tonight, ok?”

I sigh deeply, “Ok.”

I don’t turn my head back because I wish not to see my mom’s distressed expression. I push away the tormenting thoughts which ensue with this religious occurrence, clearing a path for the really awful ones yet to begin.

Margaret Marcum lives with her cats, Adam, Alice, and Angel. She was recently awarded an MFA in creative writing from Florida Atlantic University. Her literary interests include ecofeminism and healing the collective through personal narrative. Her creative writing has appeared in literary magazines as Amethyst Review, Scapegoat Review, October Hill Magazine, and Children, Churches, and Daddies, among others.

Donovan asked the Andrews, Ron and Diane, still living in their rented upper duplex apartment in Rancho Park, adjacent to Hollywood, and from where they were unwillingly remanded from ever going anywhere,

      “Is everything okay here? You need anything.”.

       Ron groused, “I’d like to drive.”

      “That we know”

       Dianne said, “I’d just like to go to the supermarket myself once in a while.”

     “The public has to think it could be real.”

      “What the public doesn’t know is that it is real..”

      “They’d like that even more.”

       It was a weekday, kids at school, and after Donovan left, Ron signaled Dianne to go out to the utility porch. It was the only place in the house, except the bathroom, where they discovered, from watching TV episodes of themselves, they were never recorded from. The show never showed the bedroom either, but they knew there was a camera there and made sure there would be nothing for the dark web from there

    Out with brooms and mops, Ron said,

   “We have to escape.”

   “We can walk out the front door and go to the police.” Donovan was the newly formed West Hollywood Police Dept spokesman, and now their legal rep entertainment lawyer, besides being a Captain “I mean, stroll into LAPD turf.  They’d have to help us.””.

      “With all that Hollywood money involved?”

       “We need Virginia.”

       “She’s the co-producer.”

      “They just use here name and reputation.”

       Her rep was being a prostitute who helped capture a serial killer, becoming an actress as a

result, and now coproducing the show that was imprisoning them.

       “How can you be sure she’d help us?”

        “Her character”:

         She held back from saying ‘She’s a whore.”, did say “You should know.”

        “That was just sex.”

        “I’m sure it was for her.”

         “So then it was nothing. What’s to be jealous about?”

          “I’m not jealous. I’m angry I didn’t do the same thing. What about the kids? That’s really why we can’t just run out the door.”

           “She picks them up for school.”

            “Right. So?

           “She’s Donovan’s unwilling gofer.”

           “You really think….?”

           “Yes.”

            “That she would…?”

            “Yes.”

            Castle Productions used Virginia Castle’s name as co producer of the TV show EYES AND EARS, but Frankie Donovan was the real producer. It was a program about a family—suspension of disbelief or reality?— whose lives were being recorded then streamed every week without their consent or knowledge. To maintain this illusion, viewers were told the family were held prisoners. This information was conveyed in much the way wrestling asks you to believe its real while you watch, and almost everyone assumed the hostages bit was fictional. However, to maintain that premise, the family couldn’t be out and about the town.   

     The kids were taken in a discreet van to a very private school every day, played there afterwards, and all their friends were paid child actors and extras whose families signed NDAs, and  firmly taught their children what not to tell anybody .It was Virginia who picked them up, Donovan always ‘too busy’ now for it. She drove them home too, but one arranged afternoon, instead of the kids going into the house, Ron and Dianne, out on the lawn in professional gardener garb, faces protectively covered, took the shears, hoes and grasscutters, and got into the van also. Virginia drove over to the 5 Freeway and went south. They rode all the way to Mexico, then continued on to Ensenada, where they rented two rooms at the Sunset Motel.

     Dianne and Ron began home schooling, Ron on Math, Dianne on English, and Virginia, the high school drop out and aspiring writer, gave Creative Writing assignments that the kids took too. Science and Foreign Language were left on hold for now, until they actually figured out what the hell they were doing.

     Dianne and Virginia took a liking for each other that Ron found disturbing given his very different relationships with both of them, and that they were excluding him.

     He didn’t think anything carnal was happening, because it was always Virginia visiting their room when he or the kids were there, and never (that he knew) Dianne in Virginia’s. But because of the experiences with each, it was difficult to have a conversation with either if the other was present. He ended up talking to them like people he once sort of knew and met up with after a long absence—the weather (always hot), the lessons, what to order for food delivery.

     They were all wearing silly disguises—sunglasses, floppy hats on the women, a fake bushy moustache and cap on Ron. They got American TV, and EYES AND EARS was mysteriously on hiatus out of season. News reports told that the National Enquirer had reports of sightings in Barstow of Ron at a Burger King, Virginia in a Vegas casino, and Dianne teaching in Cincinnati. There was an “Elvis Syndrome” implied: They were dead, but people kept seeing them alive.

    The sensationalism they could talk about. Virginia was nonchalant, maybe had seen enough of life’s surprises already. Don was unnerved to be considered a ghost, but liked the fandom. Dianne thought it was all just silly, her position closer to Virginia’s. They thought the Mexican motel staff didn’t watch TV in English, but maintained their camo concealment.

       Donovan made a public plea for them to contact him.

      They were running out of cash. Ron bought a throw away phone, and called Donovan.. 

      Donovan asked, “Where are you?”

      “Wouldn’t you like to know.”

      “I’m showing Mexico.”

       “It’s a big country.”

       “Northern Mexico. Just come back. What do you want?”

      “We have to live like normal people. Free to go out.”

      “We’ll drop that part of the illusion. Maybe like other celebrities you can disguise a little. We’re all jut losing money like this”

       “E-mail a contract to me stating that.”

       Virginia moved into the duplex with them as Dianne’s girlfriend.

       Ron protested to Dianne, “How could you do this”

      “When I said I wished I’d done what you did. I was being specific.”

      The show continued and they were free to move about.

       Don, feeling emasculated, no longer cruised Hollywood for hookers, but couldn’t stop being a voyeur on wheels. There were still the police who noticed a vehicle continually traversing the same streets, and he was getting stopped. One night it was by Gorsky, who knew him well. She was sympathetic, even kind, and said “Get some help.”

       Donovan had an idea to help him. With a video camera, Ron could become THE EYES AND EARS on the street, to augment the continuing family life show that now included Virginia in the cast.    

      Ron realized he was being followed. He was inadvertently getting the pics the paparazzi wanted, so they’d keep one on him, who’d feed the others information, The tracker was giving it to competitors who of course wanted the best shots for themselves, but a little cooperation was sometimes needed. That ended when the picture taking started.

    Ron, aware of this with a little tech aid from Donovan, was monitoring their transmissions. He heard a heavily accented male voice, with the texture of boots scuffing gravel, gargle “East from Highland on Hollywood Boulevard. I missed the light. Can anybody pick up?”

    A voice that sounded from a smooth young woman said, “I’m at Vine. If he passes, I’ll take the tag.”

        Ron saw Maybelline ahead. Maybelline was a billboard She’d never done anything, but drove a gold Austin Healy, and had a billboard with a photo of herself that was forty years old, listing her first and only known name. She frequented the bar at the Renaissance Hotel and was their sole regular, being that a hotel bar is usually a venue for temporary guests.

     He wouldn’t recognize her. She was still a bleached blonde but didn’t match the billboard photo from when she was a poster model for Clairol hair coloring decades ago, but he recognized her car, especially as it bumped into the back of a UPS truck parked for delivery in a curb loading zone.

     Ron filmed from his car, as Maybelline got out with a bloody nose. He wanted to help her, but she screamed at the truck driver,

    “Your parking lights don’t work.”

     The UPS driver had fortunately been beside the truck not behind it, and said, “I’m parked and my flashers ae on.”

     She litigated on the scene. “Your flasher indicated you were moving toward an emergency. and I slowed down, but you weren’t moving at all, so I ran into the back of your truck.” She summarized her case with, “It’s your fault.”

     The driver examined the back of his truck, and seeing no damage, ignored her and continued taking packages off. Ron had pictures and audio of the verbal encounter and knew Maybe should be breathalyzed. A pretty pap, no doubt she with the golden larynx who’d been waiting for Ron at Vine, drove west when she saw the accident and was out of her car snapping. A dozen more pap raced down Hollywood Boulevard, parked in the middle of the street, jumped out and took pictures. of a…celebrity? Then one of the pap deliberately rear ended Ron’s car. He got out. No, it wasn’t a pap. It was Johnny Forrest, newest bad boy rocker. Johnny F said, calmly, “Look, I’m going to camera punch you. I won’t hit. Just snap your head back like you got hit. We’ll make it look real with camera angles, One grand you let me whoosh air in front of your face.!0 G if you press charges. Whaddaya say?”

     ““Show me the money.”

      “Harry.”

       Harry, a biker, materialized and pressed ten hundreds into Ron’s hand.

      Johnny F said, “Now get mad. Curse me out.”

     “Can’t you watch where you’re driving, you moron”

      “Hey, fuck you. You watch where I’m driving.”

       “You schmuck.”

        Johnny whispered “Now” and swung. It was close, but didn’t make contact, and Ron pitched his head backwards, thinking, a good take.  

     The UPS driver, with no doubt a lot of deliveries still to make, and surmising Maybeline’s role as part of a publicity stunt, got back into his truck and drove away.

     Mayabeline cried, “What about my bumper?”

     Sirens were heard. They were three blocks from the Wilcox Ave police station. Ron handed her a just -wiped- a–little napkin from his Carl’s Jr. coffee. For her nose. And he said, “Best thing to do is go. They’ll arrest you for DUI.”

     “Won’t leaving be hit and run?.”

      “Not if the other vehicle left.”

      “It was his fault.”

       “Okay, stay and tell the police. I smell alcohol.””

        She pondered that, then got into the Austin. But her fan belt was broken. Ron and a couple of kinder pap who got their pictures already pushed her car to the curb.

      She put coins in the meter, and, if not too steadily, walked away back in the direction of the Renaissance, just as several police cars arrived. With them were tow trucks that began hooking up pap cars blocking traffic while pap who could, moved their cars. It was a contest of Can you find room tp get out, or will you get towed?

    That was part of the police mission. The other was the reckless driving and assault by Johnny F. And a woman from a dress shop pointed to the Austin Healy and said “That’s Maybelline’s car.”

      A rookie asked, “Who’s Maybelline.?”

     A seasoned sergeant said, “She’s like the Easter Bunny. She doesn’t really exist.”

      Harry whispered to Ron, “Press charge, then go somewhere and make a bruise that showed up later and call our law guy.” He put a business card into Ron’s hand.

     The sergeant asked “WHAT is with that Austin?”

      He’d asked no one in particular, but a chorus replied, “It was here.”

     The dress shop matron insisted, “It was not. She rear ended a truck” 

    Somebody said, “What truck?”

     Well, what truck.?

     They took Ron’s report, cuffed Johnny— with many many clicks and videos—then freed Hollywood Boulevard to continue its touristy absence of any other purpose.       

      Donovan liked this when Ron called him. ”I’ll send a PI to watch the car until she comes back with a mechanic or tow truck.”

      Maybelline walked to where she was appreciated, the Renaissance’s bar, where Shorty quipped, “You don’t need tomato juice for the Bloody Mary.” even as he lovingly set her in a booth with  a cushion to lay her head back on, and provided a damp towel.

    The nose bleed was not severe, and when it stopped she called sugar daddy Mel, with whom she lived. Mel was 90, and paid her billboard rent and regular tickets for overtime parking in the Renaissance’s passenger loading zone. The hotel objected to their star getting tickets, but the ticket writers were civic workers not hotel employees, and their mandate was to fill quotas by citing all violators, regardless of.

      .Mel agree to meet her at her car with a fan belt and mechanic. She cried again thinking of the dent in the bumper, and Mel promised to take care of that too.

        If only Maybelline knew she was close to a comebac…. a first arrival.

       Donovan’s P.I. Danny, whose cover was being himself, a latter day hippie, at first just stood near Maybe’s car. After he was asked three times for spare change, asked if he sold crack, was offered crack, and propositioned by a guy who craved a spanking, he decided to sit in his car and keep the meter fed on both cars.

      Until the dress shop woman told him she called the police to report a stroker or lurker. The police came before he could leave, checked him out, confirmed his fly was zipped, and pointed out the two hour parking limit even if he was feeding the meter. She from the shop protested, “He’s been here longer than that, was just loitering in the street for an hour”

      The female officer asked Danny, “What was that about?”

       “More like fifteen minutes.”

       “I mean….”

        Donovan arrived when Mel, Maybelline, the police, the dress shop clerk, the P.I.and Ron, whom he’d called back, were all on the scene, The LAPD uniforms knew who Donovan was, he was a legend in law enforcement, one of theirs’ who became a producer. Everybody in L.A. knew who he was.

     The dress shop clerk’s evaluation of P.I.. Danny changed. She said “He wasn’t here so long, didn’t bother anybody”

     She asked Donovan for his autograph, then asked for Ron’s. She told Donovan she was available for extra work,

      Donovan told Maybe. “You’re going to be famous.”

    “I’m already famous.”

      “Again. More. For yourself

      “What do you think I’m famous for now if not myself?”

        Mel, who paid for her advertising, gently advised, “Just hear the man out.”

       Donovan wanted Ron to be at the bail hearing the next day, wait outside the court for Johnny F to come out, and punch him for real.

      “Does he know about this stunt?”

      “He’ll find out.”

      “I don’t know if I could beat him in a fight.”

      “ He’d probably be more forgiving if you didn’t. but okay, I’ll get a body double stuntman to do it. But you’ll get arrested.  Our defense will be, the Hollywood Boulevard fight was fake but this was a stunt that went wrong. You’ll just be charged with Malicious Mischief.  some such bullshit like that, whole thing dropped.”

         After the bail hearing and the bureaucratic formality of paying, only Ron and Donavan were outside.      

        Donovan said, “The stuntman flaked out. You have to do it.”

        He’d got the 10k for last time. It was up to 20 now.

       “How much if I do?”

        “Thirty.”

        “What if he beats the shit out of me?”

         “He doesn’t know, so hit him hard.”

          Ron hit Johnny with all he had, and he collapsed unconscious.

          Ron screamed, crying tears. “I broke my fuckin’ hand. I’m a film editor.”

         Donovan incorporated Maybelline into the family. She moved into the duplex with them. The kids loved her, and America loved her too.

        While the kids grew, they stayed famous in reality TV, but in time the original show dropped ratings. The novelty of a dysfunctional family seemed to wear off, had become too much like everybody’s life, if not specifically.

         Virginia ran for L.A. City Council in their district, won, then went her own way When the kids reached adulthood, Ron, Dianne and Maybe stayed in the duplex, had their memories, and all the reruns to watch, that somehow seemed better than the actual events because they left out the unpleasant details and made everything seem better than the actual events.    

      It was sugar daddy Mel who got the last word on Maybe and the rest of them, in an oft replayed CNN interview, when he said, “Maybelline never did anything. None of them did except Virginia, but Maybe’s a really nice person, and from what I know of Ron and Dianne, they are too. Just a couple of people who were minding their own, doing nothing but living their quiet lives of desperation.”

Patrick Breheny is an American ESL teacher and fiction writer in Bangkok and has had stories published by Running Wild Press, Straylight, Koan (imprint of Paragon), Havik (twice), and LVP Press.

            The call came on the rectory phone when Notre Dame was down by three. Father Pollock, watching TV in the den, heard the phone, but the Irish, on USC’s twenty, had just broken huddle. The play was about to begin. Father Pollock hoped Father Anthony would answer. The second ring sounded before the priest remembered Father Anthony had hurried over to St. Catherine’s Home, where one of the nuns was ill.

            A nagging, third ring came. Father Pollock sprinted for the phone. Someone named Simmons spoke, sounding scared. To his first question Father Pollock said, “Father Anthony’s not here,” because that’s who the caller, who sounded like a boy, had asked for.

            “Can you come?” Simmons said.

            “Where are you? What’s the matter?” Father Pollock asked. As he spoke, he stretched the phone’s cord out full length and craned to see the TV in the den. The glimpse of screen he got showed him a commercial. While Simmons babbled Father Pollock’s thoughts were on what might have happened. He had little faith the Irish might have scored, but he hoped the commercial meant a time-out had been called.

            Simmons said, “Sodality,” and then whispered, “Indigestion.”

            “What are you talking about?” Father Pollack snapped his question.

            The stuttering youngster began his explanation over. He had been assisting Father Getz at a Sodality meeting for eighth graders. Father Getz had become indisposed. “He went to see a doctor,” Simmons said.

            “Dr. Jack Daniels?”

            Simmons whispered, “I don’t know.” Father Pollack’s sarcasm had been lost on the nervous boy.

            In the absence of the boozy priest the children ostensibly gathered to learn to serve the Blessed Virgin had gotten out of hand. That was Father Pollock’s guess. Pandemonium reigned, as it would naturally reign when a crowd of early adolescents senses its power. The classroom was in St. Leo’s School, only steps away.

            “I’ll be right there.” Father Pollack told the frightened boy. Then he returned the phone to its table and sped back into the den to snap the TV off before he could be tempted by the resumption of the game.

            He pulled on his windbreaker and trotted to the school. First and ten, he told himself, as if he were a lineman and the day was glorious and Notre Dame was on the verge of yet another triumph. He let himself into St. Leo’s by the door close to the gym and heard at once an uproar from the second floor. He bounded up the stairs and followed the racket to a classroom lighted up behind its frosted window. He threw the door open and yelled, “Hey!”

            His voice had the same effect a rifle shot would have. Heads snapped. Children faced his way. What had been a roar turned into silence. Twenty or so revelers, aged thirteen or fourteen, instantly looked furtive—young hoodlums caught in the act. The ones who were standing began to slide into desk chairs. Some students in chairs tried to inch them into orderly files.

            “Knock it off,” Father Pollock barked, and the attempt the students were making to pretend innocence died an instant death.

            A reedy youth stood at the chalkboard. Over his street clothes he wore a deacon’s surplice which he had cinched at his waist with a gold-colored cord.

            Father Pollock felt his heart sink. The ridiculous young man—who was probably eighteen—had no business wearing a deacon’s long surplice. He had made himself absurd. What had he been thinking?

            “Are you here to learn or are you here to act like brats?” Father Pollock glared at the cowed students as he strode to where their shaking instructor stood. He faced the children. He made them meet his eye. He told them if they acted like animals they did not deserve the privilege of a Catholic education. “Get out paper. Get out pens,” he told them. “Each of you is going to write an essay and sign it with your full Christian name. In your essay you will personally tell me, Father Pollock, why you should not be thrown out of this school on your ear. If you act like little criminals you are going to be treated like little criminals. And little criminals do not belong in Catholic schools.”

            A girl in round glasses sobbed.

            “Stow it,” Father Pollock snapped, and while her nearby friends reached tentatively out to comfort her, other students pulled notebooks from their backpacks and opened them to blank pages. Pens began moving and squiggles of ink traced their way between the ruled lines. Even the girl who’d let her tears flow started writing, sniffing back the nose-goo of her sobs.

            Industry and quiet established themselves, and in that atmosphere of imposed control Father Pollock turned to the quaking, skinny youth. “Let’s talk,” he said, and he nodded toward the classroom door. The boy followed him to the hall. Father Pollock closed the door behind them. “What the heck are you doing in that get-up?” he asked. “Simmons? Is that your name? Who told you to put a surplice on?”

            The boy was blushing. He said, “Father Getz.”

            “If Father Getz told you to run through fire would you run through fire, Simmons? What’s wrong with you? This is Sodality. It’s not a Christmas pageant. You look like one of the wise men. Take that thing off. Put it back where you got it. I’ll stay with your class. What time are you supposed to let them out?”

            Simmons was already tugging at his gold-cord cincture. Father Pollock knew the boy would soon cry. He didn’t wait for an answer to his question. He said, “I’ll keep them for ten minutes then I’ll let them go. Enough Sodality for one day, don’t you think?”

            Simmons had already started down the hall, but he twisted around to nod his head in an affirmative answer. Father Pollock could have told him he would hang all the children who had caused the ruckus, and Simmons would have nodded in agreement. The boy fled, and Father Pollock watched till he was out of sight before he pulled open the classroom door again.

            A flutter, like panic, ran through the room. Obedience, if it had been challenged in his absence, reigned anew. The children concentrated on the essays that would explain why they should not be thrown out of Catholic school on their ears. Father Pollock, his hands clasped behind his back, strode up and down the orderly aisles. His measured march brought him to the window wall, and looking down into the parking lot he saw Simmons, in his civvies now, with a shabby, hip-length jacket on, scuttle out of sight across the street. The boy didn’t look eighteen. He looked like he was twelve. His shoulders sloped and his back bowed like an old man’s. Father Pollock couldn’t see his hands but he imagined Simmons clasping and releasing them, a gesture obsessively repeated, as if whatever the boy needed was always out of grasp.

            Where will he go? Father Pollock wondered.

            He answered his own question before the boy had even disappeared. Simmons would rush to a church, probably straight to St. Leo’s. He would genuflect and cross himself. He would drop to his knees in front of the statue of the Blessed Virgin. He would pray to her in anguish. He would believe the humiliation he had suffered was God’s way of testing him, and he would ask the Blessed Virgin to help him pass that test and find the strength for a life dedicated to the church.

            “Class dismissed,” the priest snapped when he swung around from his window view. He wore the same frown he’d worn since he first walked into the room. In their rush to hand in papers, no child met his eye.

            Notre Dame down by three, Father Pollock thought as he pulled the school door shut tight and rattled it to test the lock. He wanted to ignite again his interest in the game, which now would be over except for some blabbermouth analyst yakking on a sports channel. He didn’t turn at the walkway to the rectory, though. He hurried past it with Father Getz in mind, angry about the humiliation that drunkard had caused for poor, pathetic Simmons. Not that the reedy boy didn’t bear much of the blame himself. Two clowns. And who knows how much damage they had done. Making cynics out of Sodality students most likely. Turning an opportunity for a lesson about learning respect for the Blessed Mother into a freak show. What was the lesson in that? Father Pollock imagined himself saying those words to Father Getz. He could see, in his imagination, the surprised look the purple-faced old soak would turn on him.

            Lost in rehearsing a speech he knew would wound, Father Pollock let his steps carry him where they would. Without planning it, he came to the gray waterfront with its hearty, commercial bustle. Lumber in great, yellow stacks waited to be loaded onto boats. Cranes moved with the grace of dancers to lift containers off ships. Cannery hands in floppy rubber boots, cigarettes between their lips and their aprons bloody, waited on slimy docks for the silver treasures of salmon and halibut.

            Father Pollock inhaled rich, briny odors. Hoists and winches squawked and rumbled all around him. That masculine noise, a sign of work and health, restored his equilibrium. He lost track of the words he would have used to wound Father Getz. His anger emptied out. He let it wash away and became absorbed in the care a fork-lift operator took to move pine two-by-fours—a stack of lumber the color of butter—toward a waiting sling. When he’d watched that task to its conclusion, Father Pollock turned his back on the busy waterfront and climbed through neighborhoods made noisy by natural sounds. Children playing on the cracked pavement of the street lifted their shrill voices. Tenement neighbors called from windows two stories and three stories above the beeps of stalled traffic. The homely streets smelled of onions frying and garbage waiting for tardy trucks. Nothing Father Pollock saw required thought. He strode briskly in the cloud of his own musing until a relic of a church—a mass of stained and crumbling masonry called Holy Name—caught his eye. He pulled himself to a stop.

            The building, squared-off in the Romanesque style, stared out at its squalid street with ineffective disapproval. It had gathered its parking lot unto itself with a droopy chain-link fence, as a lady in olden times might have pulled her trailing skirt back from the filth of gutters. A Queen-Anne style home across the street, remodeled as a funeral parlor, shared some of Holy Name’s disdain for the surroundings, but those surroundings carried on with cheerful indifference. Pizza lovers munched greasy slices in a parlor cheek by jowl to the old church. A consignment store stood next to that, and an armchair, dignified but dowdy, was on display in its front window. Next to the parking lot, a storefront church with some kind of evangelical title in the Brazilian language had set itself up in competition with forlorn Holy Name. Father Pollock tried to translate what the title said, but his Portuguese was not up to the task. He turned with a frown of disapproval to Holy Name’s stately steps. They were as wide as the whole front. They had been built to bring the faithful in their pious waves to the old church’s imposing double doors.

            Neither of those great, green doors opened at the priest’s tug. They stood rooted in place, as if the habit of using them had died in that parish. Father Pollock tried a humbler door on the building’s left side, and through that more modest entrance he stepped into a dim vestibule with its shabby display of devotional pamphlets. A cardboard box marked Lost & Found stood rich with scarves and mittens. Double doors beyond the Lost & Found were open to the cavern of the sanctuary. Father Pollock, pulling off his cap, stepped across the threshold and stopped next to a baptismal font the size of a bird bath. Carved cherubs held up its veined, marble bowl. How expensive, Father Pollock thought. A dishpan on a counter would have served the purpose just as well. Some extravagance of pride had made the pious dig into their pockets for this Italianate atrocity, and the church’s whole baroque interior spoke of the same extravagance—the altar in its golden glow, the flickering ranks of vigil lights, the studied humility of Mary and Joseph represented by life-size statues, and tortured Jesus dying on his cross.

            A sense of grotesqueness soured Father Pollock’s thoughts, but when he turned from the church’s pious altar to escape back to the street, he saw his way out blocked by twelve or fifteen people queueing in through the humble, narrow door the priest had just used. All of them came dressed in their best, and a young mother among them beamed down on an infant wrapped in white and cradled in her arms.

            Baptismal party. Father Pollock did not need to be told why the group had come. Grandfathers. Grandmothers. Uncles. Aunts. Cousins of various ages. The boys and men all wearing ties. The women in the shoes and dresses they only wore for weddings and funerals. The decorum of the church imposed quiet on them all. Even the baby in its lacy garment resisted any urge it might have had to bleat.

            The family loosely organized itself around the baptismal font—the marble indulgence Father Pollock had been condemning in his thoughts seconds before. Now it seemed to him irreverent to have thought so critically. The marble extravagance, for the family, was the visible sign of the sacrament about to be performed. The ones who weren’t admiring the baby admired the font, but all eyes turned as if on cue toward the altar, and when Father Pollock looked where others were looking he saw a robed priest and an altar boy in cassock and surplice genuflect before the tabernacle and then start down the long aisle toward the waiting faithful, proceeding with liturgical dignity at the required, measured pace.

            Instead of leaving, Father Pollack took a seat in a pew a few yards from the font. He sat turned to look back at where the family waited for the priest. Their stillness made him want to stay and witness the welcoming of the infant to the faith. He knew the rationale for what was about to happen was the washing away of original sin, but he didn’t let his thought dwell on that doctrinal point. He admired instead everything else about the sacrament that had made the family interrupt its ordinary afternoon, and shine its shoes and shower and style its hair and put on its best clothes to collect in a group in the back of Holy Name and await the mystery to be performed.

            One male member of the family, an older man, separated himself from his relatives and joined Father Pollock in his pew. The priest had to slide over to make room for him. He thought, before he glanced at the man’s face, his pew-mate might have wearied himself climbing the stairs to the church and then grown tired of standing while the officiant and his acolyte made their stately progress from the altar.

            But the man wasn’t weary. He smirked at Father Pollock. His florid face—fleshy and broad—crinkled just a bit, only enough to make his smirk a greeting. His eyes, beneath their puffy lids, conveyed disdain. He was a cynic, and Father Pollock was not surprised when, just after the officiating priest in his brocade and lace went gliding by, his new companion leaned toward him to whisper. “Can you believe all this?” The man spoke in a low voice only Father Pollock could hear. As he spoke, he gave his head a toss in the direction of the group he’d separated himself from. He meant his relatives. He meant the piety they had put on for this special occasion. But Father Pollock—whose zipped-up jacket hid his Roman collar—understood the man intended his barbed whisper to mean more. He meant the whole, baroque interior of Holy Name Church, with its plaster-of-Paris stations of the cross and its dusty chandeliers and stained-glass windows. He had mistaken Father Pollock for a layman like himself, and he had assumed—perhaps because of how casually the priest was seated—that he was some sort of tourist in this church, someone who had come to see with his own eyes a curious ritual of faith.

            The impression lasted only a few seconds. One of the older women in the group around the font quietly called a name. To Father Pollock, it sounded like ‘Stan,’ but he wasn’t sure that was exactly what he’d heard. At the summons, his pew-mate rose and lumbered the few steps it took to make him once again a member of the beaming group waiting at the font for the trickling of holy water on the infant’s skull.

            Father Pollock turned his back. He faced the altar and tried to analyze to what degree he felt annoyed by the question he’d been asked. No clarity came to his mind. Simmons came instead—Simmons looking wimpy in his surplice and failing to tame the eighth-grade demons. If some cynic wished to sneer and say, ‘Can you believe all this?’ he should say it about Simmons. Simmons was a sham. He had no force, no power. He put his faith in garments even children knew to mock.

            Father Pollock’s own garment was a baseball jacket zipped up to his chin. If he shed that garment now, if he stood up with his Roman collar showing, would Stan the mocker, the cynic, the wise guy have an answer to his question? The collar would tell the cynic ‘Of course I believe all this. I am part of all this. I am a person of faith.’

            Notre Dame down by three, Father Pollock thought. The football team’s solidity returned him to a comfortable world where people did not make snide comments or poke their noses into matters that weren’t any of their business.

            He rose to go. He skirted the group surrounding the mother and child. He forged an angry look to ward off anyone who might challenge him about belief, but no one challenged him. No one met his eye. The individual supposedly called Stan wasn’t even discernible. He had melted into the supportive family taking time out of its Saturday to welcome to their faith a red-faced child.

            What welcomed Father Pollock to the outside street was a fender-bender accident. He hadn’t even time to sigh relief at having put behind him the quandary of his unsettled thoughts. The driver of a Dodge Colt had scraped the door and fender of a Chevrolet Camaro that had been steering into traffic from its parking place. The screech of metal on metal had captured attention up and down the street. Father Pollock froze to see what would happen next. Drivers slowed and gawked. Two boys with pizza slices in their hands stepped off the curb, maneuvering to get a better view among the slowed cars and the rush of sidewalk passers-by.

            The drivers of both cars pushed open their doors and stepped out. The woman driving the Camaro said, “Jesus!” as she eyed the ugly scrape on her car’s tan paint. The Dodge driver fingered the dent he found in his right fender. Each eyed the damage done to the other, then the woman yelled, “What the fuck were you doing?”

            “Lady, you should have looked.” The man spoke firmly but not in the same range of rage as the shouting woman.

            The woman, the tails of her coat flaring, charged two steps forward and shoved him.

            “Hey!” he shouted, and he raised his hands to ward off further menace.

            The scuffle, slight as it was, electrified six or seven scruffy boys. They’d been passing a football back and forth as they walked. They looked like they had come from some pick-up game. All were disheveled. The shove they’d witnessed, and the defense against it, made them roar. They packed in close to the drivers facing off. Others on the street thronged forward, too. A driver who had seen the altercation halted his car, setting off a honking protest from drivers stuck behind him.

            The woman, shouting things Father Pollock could not hear above the sudden uproar from the street, slapped at the other driver’s raised hands. Her aggression made him double his hands into fists. He yelled things back at her.

            Father Pollock hurried down the steps, dismayed at this rude rupture in his day. He felt like someone forced to witness the infliction of a wound. His strongest wish was to quickly turn away, though he had to thread through gawkers to do it. As soon as he escaped the crowd’s thickest knot he broke into a speed-walk in a direction aimed at bringing him swiftly back to St. Leo’s. His route led him into a neighborhood of seedier streets, where pawn shops stood cheek by jowl next to businesses that cashed checks for a fee. He paid no attention until, in glancing for a street name on a post, he saw the blazon display an adult book store offered. XXX screamed in giant letters across most of the building’s front. Beneath the letters, window displays showed mannequins of scantily clad women, some with feather boas draped around their necks.

            The priest looked away. He looked again. He took three steps. He reversed himself and stepped back to where he’d been.

            Can you believe all this? His eyes were on the garbage spilling from its plastic sacks and XXX blazing like a brand burned into flesh.

            Can you believe all this? That’s what the pouch-faced cynic had sneered in Holy Name. ‘A know-it-all, a wise-guy,’ Father Pollack thought. ‘I should have given him what-for.’

            As soon as he thought it, the priest knew what he’d do: He’d return to Holy Name; he’d find the cynic and drag him, by the ear if necessary, to Smut and Garbage Street, and say his own words right back to his face. ‘Can you believe all this?’

            He bulled past the overflowing trash cans and the grimy store fronts he had passed before. An aggressive feeling propelled him. ‘By the ear,’ he thought. ‘Drag him by his ear.’

            Blue lights. The sight of police in front of Holy Name brought Father Pollock’s purposeful stride to a halt. An officer stood writing down testimony the gesticulating driver of the Dodge was pouring forth. The Camaro woman sat sideways in her car, her face a mask of venom.

            Father Pollock skipped up the stairs to Holy Name’s side door. He tugged. It resisted. Locked. He tried the massive, main doors, too. No luck. He returned to the side door and pounded. No one came.

            The striders on the sidewalk, the investigating police, the Dodge driver reciting his story—Father Pollock saw no one free enough to tell him where the family with the infant might have gone, though the priest imagined a clear picture of the innocent child in his mother’s arms, she and the baby surrounded by loving relatives, the whole clan squeezed in shoulder to shoulder at some family-friendly restaurant, enjoying pancakes and eggs and orange juice in celebration of the sacrament that cleanses the soul of original sin and ushers a newborn into the light of God’s mercy and grace.  

            Father Pollock trudged back to St. Leo’s and sat in the back pew of the almost empty church. Two kneeling women, old and widely separated, knelt mouthing prayers and moving rosary beads through their arthritic fingers. They faced the glowing altar, praying to their unseen God. The hum of traffic from the street outside did nothing to disturb them, nor did the shouts of boys and the thump of basketballs on the playground by the school. After minutes, maybe three, another crone limped her way past the baptismal fount. She moved slowly, to the rhythm of a black cane she required for support. When she reached a pew five rows ahead of Father Pollock, she halted to gauge the difficulties it posed to someone as crippled as she. Whatever her assessment told her about impediments, she resolutely drew herself up as straight as her bent back allowed and maneuvered at her crippled pace to the center of the pew. She lay her black cane on the cushioned bench. She lowered herself in measured increments to kneel. Kneeling made her barely taller than the pew in front of her. She rested her forearms and elbows on the back of that pew and let her chin sink to rest on her bony, wrinkled hands. With her eyes fixed on the tabernacle, she whispered to the God her faith permitted her see behind the frame of glistening wood, the same God who would, in her belief, welcome her to heaven when her heavy treading here on earth came to an end.

            Father Pollock rose. He found his way to the sacristy. In the dressing room between the altar and the rectory, he pulled on a white surplice and cinched a golden cord around his waist. Then he sat in the rectory’s dark den, facing the blank TV, waiting for the Holy Ghost he hoped would blaze and sear.

Robert Kinerk writes fiction, poetry, and plays. His most recent publication is ‘Tales from the Territory: Stories of Southeast Alaska.’ A long-time Alaskan, Kinerk now lives with his wife, Anne, in Cambridge, MA.

It all began happily, if unexpectedly, one flawless Saturday morning just after Thanksgiving. The air held that special crispness that demands one last deep breath of late autumn purity. The sun did its best to shine despite seasonal weakness. Leaves had finally abandoned the trees. Streets were filled with the season’s early shoppers. Store windows, lampposts, overhead wires were draped in tinselly, sparkling things. Candy canes, ornaments, miniature St. Nicks with herds of reindeer abounded, both in blow-up variety and hard, molded plastic. In sum, all things festoonable had been festooned and, overnight, Brooklyn Heights transformed into a perfectly noxious holiday carnival.

 I had just returned to my apartment after a brisk early saunter. As the bolt of the upper lock released, I spotted the corner of an envelope sticking out from under the door. Initially, I mistook it for a menu from one of the nearby Chinese or Moroccan restaurants. They’re often left strewn about in the hallway. It wasn’t a menu. The quality of the paper told me that. A formal note, how quaint I thought. A few simple words in Waterman ink, an invitation to a weekend, alone I assumed, with Sheila. A phone call would have been more efficient and added a few extra tenths to her billable hours.

The invite said ‘fourish’, two weeks hence, her place in the country. What did I know of Sheila? A rising associate in a white shoe firm that handles employment work for the Company. Smart, obviously. A dry sense of humor. Good figure, long, slender legs. Not a head turner but a face to be studied, then appreciated. Unmarried. Whenever we spoke on the phone, I thought first of the face, flush cheeked and cheerful, then of those long, slender legs. I responded first thing on Monday, told Sheila I wouldn’t miss it for the world.

The weekend arrived with the threat of snow. The local weatherman predicted it would begin around eleven that morning and turn heavy sometime after one. If the forecast was right, I might find myself trapped in the country with Sheila for the weekend. Canaan, if all things went well, if Sheila was thinking what I was thinking. On the other hand, if the snow got serious during the ride upstate, the Jag might make trouble. British built cars often do. The wiring is temperamental in rough weather. The car doesn’t handle a wet road well. There was really no debate. If I stayed in the city, I might never find out about Sheila’s intentions and forecasts are seldom reliable.

The dog sitter didn’t turn up until two, a complicated story. It’s always complicated with young people. I hated leaving the dog, an Italian Spinone as gentle and loving as a dog can be, but what choice did I have. Sheila might be allergic or worse, not a dog lover.

When I left Brooklyn, the sky was as blue as the veins of an old man’s nose. I allowed plenty of time for the drive. If traffic was light, I could always stop for coffee. Make a fashionably late arrival. Give Sheila plenty of time to get ready. Try not to seem like a hound in rut.

The weatherman called it right though his timing was off by a few hours. Midway into the drive, snow began to fall. Large powdery flakes at first, a postcard scene, then sheet after sheet of wet, wicked snow. The Jag insisted on caution. I obliged, kept my eyes on the red lights in front of me and the speedometer at just under thirty. The Thruway was bad, the back roads were worse, narrow and winding and dark. I needn’t have worried about a premature arrival.

By the time I reached Sheila’s house, an accumulation of nearly half a foot prevented the Jag from attempting the driveway, a narrow, heavily wooded traverse. I abandoned the car on the road and force marched one hundred or so yards to the front door. Snow was still falling heavily and little but the front porch light was visible of the house until I was almost upon it. Shoes and socks filled with the cold, white stuff. My trousers were soaked from the knee down.

I looked for a bell without success then knocked. After a pause of about a minute, the door swung open to a dimly lit room and Sheila. Behind her was a small but unexpected group of people, familiar people, to themselves and me. They stood in a tight circle around the fireplace and an over logged fire. The heat was fierce but welcome. Between this group and Sheila was a long plank table holding a copper bin filled with ice and several bottles of chilling champagne. On the floor was a plastic bag of melting ice and two cardboard boxes, one filled with empties, the other with unopened bottles. A small party had apparently been planned and was well underway.

I had never been to Sheila’s house before. She rented it for the summer, enjoyed the experience immensely and decided to renew the lease through the following year. She told me this in September, when the sun is warm and the leaves are still green. I should have warned her of late March, of mud season and winter fatigue.

The house was of modern design, sharp angles, jutting corners, lots of pale wood. Floor to ceiling windows in the rear overlooked a small lake and a forest of pine. With snow falling and the lake an icy white mirror, the view was magnificent. A perfect snow globe of deep country winter.

Inside the house, the furniture was heavy and comfortable, all leather, glass and chrome. In the late spring and summer months, the interior would be filled with light. Now, the hour was late, the sky dark and heavy. The only light in the room came from the fireplace. A warm, orange glow highlighted a relaxed, animated crowd. 

“I was worried.” Sheila stood in the doorway, a half-filled glass of bubbly in her hand, a smear of bright lipstick on the rim. She radiated sex and genial hospitality. There was not an ounce of worry in her face. She wore a tight-fitting velvet pantsuit, belted at the waist, a deep crimson color that matched her lips. “You didn’t call. With the weather–” She smiled impishly, shrugged her shoulders and leaned her head in my direction. A scented cheek brushed mine, leaving in its wake a trace of honey and jasmine. “Not everyone is so intrepid.” Her hand swept across the room. “Come in” she cooed.  “You look like Frosty the Snowman. You know everyone, of course.” Nods, smiles, raised glasses responded.

I knew them all, liked them all well enough, some more so than others. Sheila took my arm, led me to the group. Her hand slipped under my coat. Her fingers massaged the soft flesh of my hip. Her touch sent an electric tingle through my nervous system. I felt it distinctly. I’m sure she must have felt it too. Hope that had faded with the discovery of other guests began to rekindle. 

Sheila parked me between Antonia and Chap, short for Chapman, Antonia’s current fast-fish and interim soulmate. She took my coat and scarf, nodded to the table and ice bucket. “We’re way ahead of you” she said and glided away with my coat. My eyes followed hungrily. Antonia watched with amusement or scorn. Probably both. I didn’t particularly care.

Antonia and I met in college, sophomore year, across a card table in the Student Union. I can’t say it was love at first sight, unless the love in question is contract bridge. We were natural partners, anticipating, understanding each other’s approach to the game. We should have left it at that, two supremely compatible bridge players. Sadly, we couldn’t and didn’t. When her roommate dropped out of school to join the VISTA program, we moved in together, became young, clumsy lovers.

She was Antonia Frank back then, an intense but untested young dumpling with dark tangled curls and a critical eye. Her eyes were magnified by cat eye framed glasses the size of pie plates. She was a major in art history, a minor in poli sci. A justice warrior, protest marcher, fighter for causes, great and small. Naturally, she went to law school. She was irresistible, to me at least, if not others. That was enough for us both for a while.

It’s never different this time. Tomorrow, the sun will rise, the earth will spin, the young will grow older, the dead remain dead. Antonia and I married, were miserable and divorced. Fortunately for the children, there were none. That was all many years ago. We have remained friends. She is still my preferred bridge partner.

The two other guests were lawyers who worked with Sheila. One a junior partner, Homer Donald. A Yalie, about forty, on the small side with thinning hair, the start of a paunch. Confident, opinionated. The other guest was an associate, Jean Ferenc, her smile too broad, too frequent, too forced. Also, on the small side. Dark hair, dark glasses, not into fashion. Clearly non-partner track. Neither played bridge.

As I have introduced my host and her guests, I will now introduce myself. By all outward appearance, I am a quiet, unremarkable civil servant of orthodox view and modest ambition. A minor cog in a vast, impersonal machine. Ah, but outward appearance is often a poor indicator and the way of Tweedle-Dum is not the way of Tweedle-Dee. Such is the case with your narrator. Such also is life within the Company. I may explain further in these pages. Then again, I may not.

I take my name from my grandfathers. Harold, my mother’s father, Adrian, my father’s. The surname is Russell. Harold Adrian Russell. Because of my father’s passion for anything written by Dickens, he called me, at birth, his ‘Little Pip’ and ‘Pip’ is what I have been called all my life. 

My father was a diplomat, not by profession but disposition. He was soft spoken, even tempered, judicious. Very set in his ways.  Mother was a chain smoking intellectual. Passionate, assertive, stubborn as a country mule when she was right. More so when she was wrong. They were not evenly matched. Opposites rarely are.

My parents were bridge players. They were both clever, educated, observant. Competitive, each in their own way. Bridge is the perfect game for people of that temperament. I believe the game also gave them cover for their perpetual bickering and hid an unhappy marriage from their circle of friends, of which they had many. Saturday nights were bridge nights. There were often two games going at once. There were a few non-players who followed the action and, of course, plenty of alcohol, gossip and not so light hearted flirtation. They weren’t really bad parties. No brawls, no black eyes or lost teeth. Just a few hurt feelings and an occasional woman passed out in the bathroom. On balance, it wasn’t really as congenial a crowd as it seemed.

I became a bridge player too. Chess may hold more purity as a game but what’s life without a little luck and why exist without a challenge. Bridge came naturally to me. A game of strategy, deception, concealment and tactics. The unknown decisive, the known artfully disguised.

“Hello, Chap.” I stuck out my hand in his direction. Antonia watched warily. Chap responded with a nod and light pressure, the barest of smiles. Okay, some of Sheila’s guests I didn’t like at all. I craned my neck in Antonia’s direction. She did the same. We made solid contact. Her lips, my cheek. 

“How’s it going, Pip.” Antonia’s critical eyes were on me. She had long since ditched the pie plates for soft contact lenses. “Sheila said you’d be here.” Her eyes shifted from me to Chap then back to me. I would swear that her face softened when it returned to me.

“Couldn’t be better” I answered with unusual enthusiasm. “I like your hair short.”

Antonia’s curls were clipped at the ear. She wore expressive native jewelry. Long, dangling, feathery things for earrings, around her neck a heavy silver chain with enameled medallion. “A butterfly” she advised me, “Aztec. Symbol of Transformation.”

We discussed Sheila briefly. Antonia knew her from the League of Women Voters. Tried to get her to join the Resistance Committee. Occasionally, they played bridge together when a fourth could be found. If not, they played three handed.

 “What’s new with you, Chap?” I didn’t really care and wished I hadn’t asked. He smiled again weakly and shrugged. Chap was in public radio and a weekend sailor. He wore a double vented jacket to cover his fat ass. His face was as flabby as the rest of him.  

“Oh, not much really” he replied distractedly and left us to refill his glass.

“And, how have you been Antonia?” I gave her my sincerest smile. “It’s been quite a while.” For some hidden reason, I found myself hoping there was friction between Antonia and Chap.

She looked deeply into her glass. “I’m okay” she said unconvincingly. She fingered the medallion then looked up quickly. Her mouth quivered, as if she were about to say more. Her eyes moved in Chap’s direction. “I suppose” she added mysteriously.

There was no opportunity for further words between us before the call to dinner. Sheila had planned a simple meal of spare ribs and barbecued chicken from a local roadside stand, with the usual side dishes involving starch, mayonnaise and cabbage. Inelegant perhaps but a damned tasty feed. A large bowl filled with weeds and grasses was provided for the less hearty eaters. All washed down with plenty of the sparkling stuff. The clean-up was more elaborate. An evening of bridge was to follow and no one wants sticky fingers dealing the cards.

As we set up a table for cards, the lights flickered briefly, then gave up the ghost entirely. A moment’s nervous laughter. Indecision and silence reigned. Candles were eventually found and lit. A dim yellow glow captured contentment, satisfaction, the onset of inebriety. The atmosphere was almost romantic. This was Sheila’s first winter storm in the country. All of life’s conveniences involve electricity. No power means no water, no phone. Sheila had not yet discovered this.

“Pip, be my partner” said Sheila. ‘It’s time we broke up the Antonia-Pip duet.” 

Sheila took my hand with a firm, moist squeeze. Her smile was irresistible. So were the long, slender legs and tight velvet fabric that stretched across her hips. I smiled weakly at Antonia. She scowled at Sheila. 

The game went on until past midnight. One game and two non-players, Homer and Ms. Ferenc, who wandered from fireplace to ice bucket and occasionally stood behind us and watched the play.

I have never played a defensive game. Like Giorgio Belladonna, I rely on an aggressive, decisive approach. Only one way forward. Pick a cliché. Life favors the prudent, the sagacious, the prepared. Nonsense, it favors the reckless. Until they triumph or flame out gloriously. Fear and adrenaline, the racing heart. If I appear cautious in my game, suspect a trap.

With Antonia to my side instead of in her usual place across the table, the match was evenly made. So familiar is she with my game and I with hers that there was no real advantage to either. Throughout the evening, we talked fondly of old friends and past adventures, of splendid meals and long vacations in faraway places.

“Please, God”, I begged, “no politics.”

At one point in the evening, Antonia’s leg brushed mine. It might have been an accident but, when it happened again, well, I know an attitude signal when I feel one. This time, she let her calf rest against mine. I offered a little friction and the leg moved away but I detected a faint smile on her lips. The game continued without another appendage overture.

The last hand delivered both the thrill and the agony. I had followed Antonia’s Queen of Diamonds lead with a low trump play, forcing Chap into a simple squeeze. He overtrumped, a careless and lazy mistake, and I shot a guarded glance at Antonia. A serious frown was on her face as she glared at Chap.  My eyes shifted back to Sheila. My satisfaction was short lived. Homer Donald stood behind her. His hand rested on her shoulder. Sheila crooked her neck to trap it. A soft, throaty murmur escaped from her lips. Homer’s confident smile reeked of possession. At one point during dinner, Sheila described Homer as her mentor. Apparently, she meant in more ways than law.

My enthusiasm for the game suddenly faded. Yawning noisily, I stretched in my chair. “Maybe time for a break” I suggested. Agreement followed from all and we took seats around the fire. The ice bucket was empty. The last bottle of bubbly was consumed. Our thirst was not.

“I’ll make hot toddies” announced Ms. Ferenc, the non-bridge playing associate. “A perfect way to finish the evening.” That’s when we discovered there was no water, no stove. The well ran on electricity as did the igniter on the gas range. We mixed bourbon with cold water from the champagne bucket and grew increasingly plastered in front of the fire.

The snow was still falling just as heavily as it had since afternoon. Wind pelted the windows with a steady, soothing patter. Homer removed his arm from Sheila’s shoulder, rose from the sofa and added too much wood to the fire. Chap’s eyes were closing, his head beginning to sag to his chest. Ms. Ferenc favored me with an overbroad smile. Antonia’s critical eyes narrowed to razor-sharp slits.

“Well, I’ll bet we’ve gotten at least eighteen inches” said Antonia.

“No” I said. “More like a foot…but deep enough.”

 “I haven’t heard a snow plow yet” said Ms. Ferenc helpfully, “and they make a lot of noise.”

“They don’t give you much for the tax money up here” said Sheila, “but I’m told they’re pretty good about plowing the roads.”

We speculated about many things. Whether the driveway would be plowed by morning, when the power would return and whether someone should venture outside to gather snow for tomorrow’s water, how long the bourbon would last.

“Well, gang” said Sheila, “I’m off to bed. I’ll mention Central Hudson in my prayers. Maybe tomorrow we’ll have electricity again.”

“Yep. Me too” said Homer with too much enthusiasm.

Jean Ferenc offered me an enormous, slightly loopy smile. Her room was on the first floor in the rear. She wobbled quietly to it, looking back hopefully in my direction once or twice. By now, Chap was sound asleep in a chair by the fire. His snores would have drowned out a snow plow. Antonia looked from Chap to me with disgust and shrugged. “I can’t tell you the last time…” She offered a bitter, resigned smile. “Nothing doing down here.”

She walked slowly up the stairs to her bedroom with me right behind her. As we passed Sheila’s bedroom, we heard rude noises that told us Sheila was not alone. Antonia looked back at me and giggled in a way I remembered from college when the RA was on the floor and we were trying not to make too much noise. At her door, Antonia turned her head to me and smiled. I followed into her room.

“What about Chap?” I asked. It was not an unreasonable question.

“Don’t worry about him” she replied. “I’m being punished for Sheila’s invitation of you.”

“Was that your idea?” I asked hopefully. While there’s not a chance in hell Antonia and I will ever get back together, a weekend boxed in by foul weather shouldn’t go to waste and my first choice, Sheila, proved a bitter disappointment.

“No, not my idea. But Chap is the jealous type.” Antonia screwed up her face. “He’s also the controlling type, the vindictive type and the mean, sloppy drunk type. I knew he’d probably find some other bed for the night. I’m surprised he wasn’t all over that mouse Sheila invited for cover.”

“So many reasons to love the boy” I mused.

By now, Antonia was shedding soft, crocodile tears. I knew the routine. Any misfortune in her life, not always earth-shattering, and water flowed from Antonia’s eyes like a spillway at the Kensico Dam. For some reason, disappointment aroused her. The only acceptable response was gallant, male comfort. No matter, I was game.

We were soon rolling around the bed, ripping at each other’s clothing, searching and finding long forgotten spots of carnal catalyst. Bodies throbbing, grinding, generating that sublime friction, our mouths as slick as fresh rain on melting ice. Antonia’s earrings jangled loosely in rhythm. The Aztec pendant snagged bits of hair from my chest, the sting adding intensity to the fire. We tumbled from the bed with a thud and continued uninterrupted on the floor. In the heat of the act, my eyes always close. Antonia’s, as I remembered, stay open. Her critical eyes survive even the height of her passion. 

When the business was done and I lay beside her, I could feel the cold of bare pine floorboards cooling the overheated flesh of my bottom. I exhaled deeply and laughed the laugh of the fulfilled but spent. I looked to Antonia, expecting a similar, satisfied release. Her head was tilted back against the mattress. The critical gaze was gone, replaced by an unfocused stare. Her eyeballs bulged oddly, exposing a great deal of white. Her jaw was slack. Her tongue was visible and pushed her lower lip outward. The chain was twisted around her throat. Somehow, in our union, my arm must have worked its way through the chain, providing lethal torque. I wondered later if this had increased the intensity of her orgasm. A final, if unexpected, pleasure.

“Tone?” I whispered in that affectionate diminutive but answer she did not. I got to my knees and knelt over her, shook her shoulders, lightly at first, then violently. Her jaw dropped lower, her head snapped loosely forward and back. There was no point repeating her name. She had either forgotten it or couldn’t hear me. Sadly, it was the latter. Dear Antonia had made the ultimate sacrifice, expiring in the saddle as it were. This, I had assumed, only happened to men.

I would have cried if capable or if it would have made a difference. The business of our coupling was delicate, hard to explain though innocent enough to the sufficiently broad-minded. However, the end result, a rapidly cooling and lifeless body, raised other more complicated legal issues, not all of them so pure. Or blameless. An ex-husband penem intrantem, his successor drunk and asleep in the wings, the object of our mutual ministration leaking seed, my seed, on the uncarpeted floor. It didn’t look good.

‘One was damned and one was saved.’ Easy call. Time to muddy the well of inquiry with the stick of precaution.  Musboot, Lord of Lies and Panic would guide me. I found a silk scarf in a dresser drawer, a lovely thing of deep reds and bright orange, and wrapped it around Antonia’s neck. I arranged her body comfortably in front of a closet and looped the scarf around the door knob extending her neck just enough to show adequate tension. A little work on the eyes, the jaw and mouth and Antonia looked almost serene. It might just appear, to a cursory inspection, to have been suicide. Despondency strikes I would wail and cry ‘Chap you fiend, what have you’ve done?’ though not so colorfully as to draw too much attention.

I dressed hurriedly and returned to my room for a moment of reflection. Could I get away with the suicide ploy? Had my skills of imposition been sufficiently effective? Would anyone buy it? Probably not I concluded. An alternative plan was needed.

Years at the Company, practicing the Dark Arts on a grand, global scale is not without price. Deception invites paranoia. No, demands it. A couple holding hands, a woman walking a dog, a young man raking leaves. Innocent people, everyday scenes. But are they what they appear to be? I have been those people and I certainly wasn’t what I appeared to be. Innocent strangers? Not a chance. Coincidence? Quite the opposite. There’s always a reason. A purpose. Or perhaps not. It’s been my job to know, to distinguish. 

Ah, the lies we live, the lies we dream of living. Eventually, all things appear jaundiced to jaundiced eyes. Trust the couple holding hands? The young man raking leaves? The woman walking her dog? 

“Four be the things I am wiser to know, idleness, sorrow, a friend, and a foe.”  It was a woman’s voice, a familiar voice. It was Mother’s voice. 

“As always, Mother, thank you.” I replied. “But I have no use for idleness or sorrow and a friend is unlikely in my occupation. And unwise. That leaves only the foe and him, or her, I must know to survive. Trust no one but the dog.”

“The dog?” Mother disagreed and was gone.

My mind raced unconstrained. Memories of childhood resurfaced. The warmth of the rug in front of the television. Sunday morning cartoons. The taste of jam and butter spread thick on toast. The hope that springs eternal with Jimmy safe at second and Flynn a huggin’ third. Other memories were not so happily recalled. A Saturday night bridge get together. Me banished to my room in the attic. The view from my window overlooking a moonlit backyard. Father and the school librarian. Mother’s bitter indictment, unproved, undenied.

My eyes closed. I tried to concentrate. Had I really killed Antonia in the act? Was she dead on the floor of a room not meters from this one? An insane dream? A fantasy gone wrong? I was tempted to go back to her room to be sure. I opened my eyes. The setting seemed real enough, an unfamiliar room in the country, my crotch still convincingly damp. Might as well play along. There was much to think of, much to do.

My ears filled with Mother’s voice reciting more lines of the poem. “Four be the things I’d been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt.” Love, for me, has been a strange affair. I’ve been married. We remained friends, until moments ago, although I can’t say that love had much to do with it. I suppose you could say that I love a way of life, of intrigue and charade and, of course, a well-played hand. Nothing, and no one, more…or less. I have a curious nature and doubt comes occasionally but brings little with it. I don’t have freckles.

I sat on the edge of the bed, tried to rid my mind of extraneous thought when I heard a noise coming from downstairs. I crept out of my room, tiptoed to the landing and strained, in the darkness, to see what could be seen. In the door of an open refrigerator, Chap stood, leisurely searching for something to eat. A piece or fruit, a leaf of lettuce, something without substance or flavor. The sound of spirited coition coming from two separate upstairs rooms must have roused him from sleep. Made him hungry. But not inquisitive.

“Look at the moron” said Mother quite incensed. “He’s standing there with the refrigerator door open while the power is off. Go give him a piece of your mind.”

I crept downstairs to engage him, as well as give myself a moment to think. Once fed, he might decide to climb the stairs and reward Antonia with his presence. I was about to point out his selfishness in letting the cold air escape from the refrigerator when he turned in my direction, a celery stick slathered with creamed cheese in hand, and belched in my face. Before I knew it, I found myself banging happily on his head like a drum with a cast iron skillet. The refrigerator door slammed shut. Chap’s inert form slid to the floor, his face an ashen mask of surprise.

Now, I didn’t hate Chap. Hate required more effort than he was worth. Nonetheless, while I was not displeased to see blood trickling from newly exposed capillaries at the top of his head down the front of his face, I knew I had gone too far. Sheila would never invite me back.

“You’ve certainly given him a piece of your mind” observed Mother. “And, now what? Is there a plan to extract yourself from this mess?”

“Well, I haven’t gotten around to thinking of one just yet” I responded as I examined Chap, without success, for signs of life. “It’s all been a little too sudden.”

That must not have been the answer Mother wanted for she vanished as quickly as she appeared. Now, I am generally prepared for life’s unexpected. Blizzards, power outages, running out of champagne. I am even prepared for death. I have that luxury. And when I am reduced to powder and my dust graces soft, vernal winds, I won’t have a worry but, at this particular moment, I was not prepared for jail.

I heard the slow creak of a door opening. Ms. Ferenc poked her head cautiously into the hallway. Outside, there was still no evidence of a snow plow. No strain of motors in low-gear. No jangle of tires wrapped in chains. No scrape of steel plow against ice crusted asphalt. Only the sound of the wind blowing vicious gusts of wet snow, rattling windows and ice falling in chunks from the roof. The kitchen island stood between Ms. Ferenc and the refrigerator. She could only see me from the waist up, not the skillet in my hand or Chap’s soulless body oozing blood on the floor. Still, what little she’d seen could not be unseen and, in the morning, she’d remember and worse understand.

“Is everything all right?” she asked.

Certainly not, I thought. “Just getting a bite to eat” I replied. “Sorry if I woke you.”

“You know what must be done” whispered Mother, close by my ear.

Until this moment, I had never seriously considered the course of action I was about to undertake. Oh, in an odd moment, I might have mused on the idea in an academic, detached sort of way. An idle fantasy, a script for a movie that would never be made. Antonia’s death had been an accident. Chap’s a moment of uncontrollable, if forgivable, madness. I was traveling in unmapped terrain. Then, I remembered my first impression of Homer Donald. The smug, satisfied face. The weak, clammy handshake. His hand on Sheila’s shoulder. Idle fantasy suddenly seemed a real possibility. A comedy, a tragedy? Both depending on the role to be played and I the author. 

Perhaps the time for white flannels and a walk upon the beach had finally come. A comfortable chair, a plate of lotus. The life had gotten to me. I had the uneasy feeling that I no longer lived in a world of concrete, physical form, that the drama of existence might be playing solely in my mind. Had I lost the ability to understand the nature and quality of my acts? If an external reality existed, did my actions still correspond? And who the hell invited Mother?  I, for one, didn’t have time to debate the questions or concern myself with the answers.

My father liked to say, if you must choose sides, bear in mind that you may be wrong and that you are certainly not as right as you think you are. Good advice, perhaps, but I reject it totally. Make a choice and damned the consequences.

“You can do this, Pip” urged mother. “You may be leaving the game but there’s always some unfinished business.”

Jean Ferenc had withdrawn her head and closed the bedroom door. I left Chap where he plopped and headed down the hall to her room. On the way, I threw more wood on the fire. No reason to be uncomfortable.  I tapped lightly on the hollow, veneered door, an economy I found surprising in such a substantial and elaborately designed house.

“Ms. Ferenc, are you awake?” I whispered.

She must have been standing just inside the door. It swung open a crack exposing her nose and eyeglasses. Her eyes were wide and bulged beneath the glasses. How like my last view of Antonia sans glasses. Ms. Ferenc was wheezing audibly, her breath redolent of an evening of heavy drinking. For once, there was no bootlicking smile. She nodded nervously in response to my question. Her eyes seemed to grow even wider. Did I detect fear in those distended eyes? Had she seen more than I thought? What did she suspect? What did she know?

“I was about to make myself a drink” I offered the sincerest of smiles, the one that disguises the knife. “The wind woke me. You look like you might need one too.”

Her eyelids fluttered nervously. The door opening narrowed. Her nose receded a fraction of an inch. Ms. Ferenc considered my offer for a moment with furrowed brow. A trace of the overused smile reformed on her lips and then her head nodded affirmatively, with slightly more vigor this time.

“Be right back” I said. She closed the door without a word. I heard the sound of the latch being fastened.

I trotted down the hall to my room and a supply of Carisoprodol which I take to relax. The drug can be obtained without prescription if you work for the Company. And know where to get it. Common side effects include drowsiness, dizziness and headache. It should not be taken with alcohol. I didn’t plan to but I thought Ms. Ferenc might need to relax. In fact, I knew she did. With a few tablets in my hand, I returned to the kitchen, to Chap, his uneaten celery stalk and the remainder of the bottle of bourbon.

“Make sure to use two different style glasses” said Mother.  “That shouldn’t be hard in a rented house and you don’t want to mix up the two.” The female of the species being more deadly than the male and certainly the more clever, I did as instructed and reappeared at Ms. Ferenc’s door.

“Let’s sit in the loft” I suggested. “It’s just above the fireplace. Nice and warm. Watch the snow fall on the lake.” Ms. Ferenc agreed reluctantly though I suspected she would have preferred to stay in her room, with me possibly in her bed.

There was no need to talk and we didn’t. Just sat on the floor, drinks in hand, shoulder touching shoulder and looked out at the night. A wind-blown canvas of bitter white cotton, snow-garnished trees, deep, penetrating darkness. In the loft, we were comfortable, warm and miles beyond wasted.

The tablets worked their magic. Ms. Ferenc was soon deep in dreams. She was a wisp of a woman, small framed and slender. No hips to speak of. Easy to lift and transport to a more appropriate location. The stairs were a chore in my condition and it’s not easy to open a door with an unconscious woman in your arms. I managed without disturbance and gently deposited dear Jean in a snowdrift, face down, mere feet from the front door. Drifting snow would cover her body and my footsteps by morning. Drunk and disoriented, a plausible accident? Remember, I hadn’t had much time to think, some of the cards were still in the deck and there were no other bids on the table. I was also three sheets to the wind but I doubt that would have made much of a difference. It was very late in the game. Except for yours truly, the house was asleep. Three permanently. The plan, as it appeared to be developing, seemed to allow for no happy ending. Death or jail? Was there no alternative? Time to consult Mother.

“Better a live dog than a dead lion.” Mother had always been quick with an adage. “In the words of the grand master, Alfred Sheinwold” she continued in an aphoristic vein, “the test of a real bridge player isn’t in avoiding trouble, but in escaping trouble once one is in it.”

Mother was, in her day, a fair hand at the game. That day ended, unfortunately, some years ago in a sprawling medical complex in the Bronx. No matter. She and the master offered hope, leaving me to fill in the details. Three deaths would be hard to explain. Would five be that much more difficult? That was the question I had to answer. As it stood now, only three Kings of Cologne remained, me included, to bear witness, not gifts. Two against one? Very likely. Divide and conquer? An option, but could Sheila be trusted?

“Can Sheila be trusted?” laughed Mother. “This from a man who trusts only his dog?”

Mother’s point was well taken. “Well then” I shrugged, “I’m fresh out of ideas.”

“Tennis” said Mother who was rarely out of ideas.

“Tennis?” I seldom question Mother.

“Tennis” she repeated with conviction. “Think Vitas Gerulaitis”

“Tennis.” I rolled the word around in my brain. Mother was right, of course. The better choice, eliminate both. It all made sense. It shouldn’t have.

Stealth was needed and stealth I could manage. The only tools required were a shower cap and a towel. Like a serpent, I crawled into Sheila’s room. The windows were closed. She and her partner slept blissfully in each other’s arms. On the floor beside the bed, a space heater glowed with propane-fueled brilliance. Each bedroom was equipped with one, mine included. All that was required was minor tampering with the air intake valve, a trick out of Chapter One in the Company playbook, and voila, the heater produces an odorless, colorless gas. Lethal to sleeping humans in a tightly sealed room. I covered the ceiling detector with the shower cap and plugged the door at the bottom with a towel. Time and fumes would do the rest.

“Let the punishment fit the crime” crooned mother in the cold sing-song way of a bird late in winter.”

“And, what is the crime, Mother?” I asked.

“A faithless invitation. Fornication. Public betrayal” she replied. “And besides” she added, “the wench is dead.”

“Yes” I admitted. “Or soon will be.”

I slithered from Sheila’s room and returned to the viper’s nest. Now, I had only to leave the window open in my room, sabotage the controls on my own space heater and wait. In a few hours, I would return to the locus mortuorum and dispose of the towel and shower cap. A call would be made to 911. No one at this end would be on the line. The phone would be left off the hook. When the police finally made their way through the snow to investigate, I would appear to be in a state approaching quietus. Nothing more for me to do but take a nice nap. I deserve it. It’s been a busy evening.

“My window was open all night” I would manage to groan. “A little fresh air helps me sleep.” My eyes would then widen in wonder at life’s unpredictable fortune. “That’s probably what saved me.”

“A foolproof plan” crowed Mother. “Neat. Nearly perfect but how does the unfortunate business with Chap fit into your narrative?”

“Shit!” I’d forgotten about Chap’s untimely, unscripted demise. A more prudent man, or one who was reasonably sober, would have thought of this.

“I suppose” mused Mother, “when questioned, you’ll have no ready explanation. In your gas muddled mind, you’ll be left with only conjecture. Again, let the punishment fit the crime. Chap must have discovered your indiscretion with Antonia. Confronted her, perhaps forcefully. What’s a woman to do but defend herself? Distraught and remorseful, she returned to her room and, overcome with guilt, she…” Mother looked disinterestedly to the heavens and shrugged. “A reasonable explanation and it eliminates the need for that ridiculous speech you planned to give blaming Chap as the cause of Antonia’s suicide.  All things in their proper place and not a witness to dispute you. A perfect grand slam if the cards fall just right.”

“That’s it exactly. Thank you, Mother.”

The author has had stories published in Tinge Magazine, Junto Magazine, Free Spirit and The Dark Sire Magazine.

 
When my father was done with living, when breathing, seeing, being, was leached out, the hard part remaining, like an effigy atop a crypt, was beautiful.  

“You wouldn’t have thought it,” my sister Suzie said, wiping the last bit of spittle from his lips. I called the undertaker.

After my father was too weak to climb the stairs to the room he shared with her, my mother cared for him in the family room downstairs. That’s where we were, with my father, when the minister came, inserting himself into the stillness.

“The undertaker called me,” he said when we expressed surprise. “Families like me to come.”

            My mother offered coffee. He smiled gently at this foolishness, told her to talk to my father. “Say goodbye.”

            She scowled, studied my father’s handsome head. Suzie had pulled the quilt up to his neck. “You shouldn’t have had to hurt so, Francis.”

            The doorbell rang as the minister was asking the Lord to welcome home Francis, your faithful servant, my sisters and I exchanging smiles at our father being called a servant. I rose to answer it. The minister glared at me. “No.”

            When he finished the undertaker was waiting outside, hat in hand, head bowed, as if he too was praying.

            “I’m glad it’s early,” my mother said. “I wouldn’t want Trevor and Kylie seeing anything when they leave for school.” My father was especially fond of Trevor, the neighbors’ seven- year old son. They’d come over in early November when my father was well enough to have visitors.

            “Now, we know Francis is going to die,” Trevor told my mother in an important tone, mortifying his parents.

            My father liked bright kids, admired boldness. He laughed. “You’re all right, Trevor.”

This, my mother claimed, put Trevor’s parents at ease and broke the tension. “Somewhat.”

The minister pointed out vacation had started and the children would be asleep.

            “Right,” my mother said.

            He suggested she join a bereavement group the church sponsored.

            “No need. I did my grieving when Francis was dying.”

After the minister left we waited in the kitchen as the undertaker and his helper carried my father out.

My mother told me to write the obituary. She handed me four pages covered in my father’s writing. “He wrote it last week but it’s no good.”

He’d started with his brother Harold, who’d died after ten days of life, three years before my father himself was born in 1930. Home births, he wrote. You don’t hear much about those anymore.

He said he’d been in the second to last class to attend the old Beckmeyer Grammar School. Before eighth grade graduation the teachers put on a weinie roast for the pupils. “We kids thought that was some fun!”

Between his Junior and Senior Year he’d attended Boys State held then at the Illinois State Fairgrounds in Springfield.  

The legionnaires told the boys they were lucky; this was the first Boys State since 1941. They didn’t have it during the war.

 But his own particular good fortune, he wrote, came later that summer when he met his future wife, Elaine Schmidt, at the gas station owned by her aunt, Mrs. Minnie Thorpe. He’d pumped gas and Miss Schmidt worked at the lunch counter Mrs. Thorpe also owned.

He listed my mother’s parents, their address, her father’s occupation and the church where they’d married, saying he and my mother were married there as well, on July 17^th, 1954, and it was where I, his oldest daughter Catherine, had been baptized fourteen months later.

His second daughter, Suzanne Marie, was born in the 42^nd General Army Hospital in Tokyo, on January 8^th, 1975.

“You still haven’t written anything,” my mother observed, walking past, my father’s bed linen in her arms.

His youngest daughter Amanda’s participation in community swim team, my marriage, my husband’s honorable discharge from the Coast Guard and his parents’ names, adding that my husband’s father served in the European theater during World War II, as a member of the Army Air Force. Since 1945, he wrote, this branch of the service has been known simply as the Air Force.

I asked my mother if I should mention his volunteer work for a local charity.

“He can’t do anything for them now.”

Should I list it as something people could donate to?

 “No.”

“What about how he liked dogs?”

“Oh, for God’s sake.”

I wrote about his education, his marriage, his employment. The Army, too, mentioning that he’d retired from the Reserves as a colonel (full bird, which is the best, though I didn’t say.)

“Take that part out about his being a colonel. They don’t like people having something they don’t.”

“Maybe I should put in something personal, like about he played old guy basketball.”

“He wasn’t good at it.”  

The three of us went with my mother when she took the obituary to the funeral home.

She went in and we stayed in the car, remembered my father making rhymes of our names. Amanda Sloper, famous Billy Goat Roper.

“I wish I’d done a better job,” I told my mother when she came back.

“It doesn’t matter. No one will read it.”

We were silly from lack of sleep. Punchy, my father called it. My dilemma and my mother’s response to it, made us laugh. My mother told us to stop. “What if someone sees you?”

That was funny too.

My mother said we couldn’t get an appointment today because it was their Christmas party but tomorrow we’d go back to select an urn for my father.

“Oh,” Suzie said. “A shopping opportunity.”

We could not stop laughing.

My mother said the funniest thing yet. “You never in your life saw anything so ugly as those urns they’ve got.”

When she began to cry she pulled over so Suzie could drive.

Jane Snyder lives in Spokane.