I know how I feel about the rain only when the faces of others come up to me like hard-to-differentiate blooms: everyone’s a daffodil then, or a hyacinth, or a lazy tulip, or wild roses. All their eyes are dim and downward, looking at the ground; they’ve become, in color, like the sandy dirt color of sidewalks, pavement: and they’re tipped low, thinking old thoughts, or new thoughts, or none, feeling the bright mystery of being wet, the conundrum of clothing normally comforting becoming uncomforting gradually as it becomes wet.

That’s rain, the climate of rain.

Rain and snow always make one hungry. Rain or snow make food always taste better.

I go soon to live in a rainy place, ruled by the dim sparkle and promise of rain.

In rain, I think you falter when you are sure of something; and when you are unsure, you irritably come to rapid full conclusion. Does he love you, or love you not? You know when it rains. Did you do badly or well? In rain or snow, you will not allow yourself to come to any conclusion about that sort of judgement; all judgements are as good as what they are next to.

In moving you shift your background, fully. I mean in moving very far, where you hear the sound of music, accidental and repeated, but never ceasing. You are moving to where you love the sound of human voices; they’ll become the hammock of your old age. Their voices which they have no idea are so lovely.

Fish you’ll have for supper or lunch at least once a week, and you’ll never cook it yourself. You’ll go by the waterside. Neptune’s your lunch partner; he’s sorry you never received an answer after your application to become a mermaid. It isn’t, he says, because there were no answerers; it’s because when there are no answers, that means no, he says.

Yet he meets with you whenever you have a meal of fish, looking like the person who knew he should have offered you a job but didn’t.

Given you that great a gift? He says.

It would be too great a gift, I find myself saying. The fish you are eating is rich in butter and lemon, but not quite enough salt.

Most have regrets, he says.

Regrets, you say.

Your greatest regret? He says.

I don’t live on my own island, I say.

That would truly be a curse, he says. You’d worry about nothing but climate. Whether Winter has a right to clobber Fall. Whether Fall is worth anything compared to Winter. What an indifferent irresponsible young sap Spring is, compared to Summer. And dealing with Summer like a guest who won’t go away.

Surely more than that happens on an island, I say.

Absolutely nothing but that happens on an island, he says. It’s worse, now, because of the sulky desperation about Save the Planet and Climate Change. Your little island can’t be the scientist or the politician or the philanthropist who figures it out and Saves the World. You’re just tiny you, and you’ll succumb even faster than everyone else.

Thanks, I say. But I could have been a mermaid, sealed away from all this worry.

Ignorance is not bliss, he says. You would always suspect you were being fooled. More tea?  There is nothing more wonderful than tea with fish. Go to sleep now. Fold your arms up and sleep here at the table. I’ll tell the restaurant folk you’ve been working day and night on a novel about climate, and there’s almost nothing left of you, and the fine food put you into a sweet downdrift of rest.

But they’ll close, I say.

No, no, he says. They won’t close. With Neptune here. I’m their supplier.

And I wake hours later. But I am no longer in the restaurant. Neptune did become tired of waiting for me or the restaurant was adamant it must lock its doors and employees must go home to bed. I wake in a bed which ripples like wheat in the water, and I feel a great silver tail instead of legs, and all the painful memories of my former sexual life I feel acutely for a moment and then it is gone. All a merman can do is hold my waist now, or touch my hair. I’m no longer a place for the Trojan Horse to come to rest.

Where am I, I say to everyone, but I’m like a country girl who’s come to the big city: no one understands my language.

I see Neptune up above, on a sea hill, on a carefully moored enormous throne; he has listeners. It’s spring, he’s crying to them.

What’s spring, they’re crying back.

I am dying, and happy to be dead.

Rebecca Pyle, named at birth for Daphne du Maurier’s and Hitchcock’s Brit masterpieces, Rebecca, is both writer and artist with work in Guesthouse (forthcoming), JuxtaProse, The Menteur, Gargoyle Magazine (forthcoming), Cobalt Review, Common Ground Review (forthcoming), and The Penn Review. American Rebecca Pyle has lived the past decade or two in Utah, not terribly far from the often cloud-draped Great Salt Lake and its many small islands continually hosting migrating birds. See rebeccapyleartist.com .

Three hundred miles south of Caracas, high in the mountains above the Rio Tomasi, the rain began. Gentle at first, touching the tops of the highest trees. After eight months of drought, these trees inhaled the memory of water. Limbs that drooped began to lift and spread. Brown and brittle grasses awoke, catching the rain, funneling the droplets to their roots.

The drought had transformed the land. Where the river’s width and depth had warranted a ferry crossing, a child could now jump from one side to the other. Above this, an empty reservoir let the dwindling stream pass unchecked through an open outlet.

In the lower valley, where the empty riverbed passed through parched farmland and vacant villages, twenty-two prisoners languished in a sweltering courtyard. The sixteen-foot cinderblock wall defined their horizon. And just above the wall, between the two strands of barbed wire, sixty miles to the south, the prisoners observed giant clouds rising in the mountains.

“Is this the storm, Viejo?” one prisoner asked.

Viejo closed his eyes and inhaled through his mouth, tasting the air.

“Is this the one?” the prisoner asked again.

The old man offered an almost imperceptible nod. “We must hope,” he said. And when he opened his eyes, he seemed disoriented, as though he had just arrived too quickly from another place.

“Hey, Viejo. Will I really need to swim?” another prisoner asked while making paddling motions with his arms, as though the courtyard were filled with water. He laughed at the old man, but the other prisoners didn’t laugh.

Viejo smiled at the man’s mocking. “Gordo, how long have you been in Santa Marta?”

“Seven years, Viejo. And a storm has never filled that barrel.” With his chin he pointed to the salvaged wine barrel next to the prisoners’ quarters. A black tin pipe ran from the rain gutter into the barrel. “It won’t hold water even though we have rain for a week.”

Light shown through the empty barrel where the staves had shrunk and separated. An iron band had slipped off and lay on the dry ground. “It is dry,” Viejo said. “Too dry today. But soon that barrel will overflow and you will wish you had learned to swim.”

“You’re a strange man,” Gordo said. “You’ve been in Santa Marta for a month and you’ll have us believe we will swim away from here. There’s not even a barrel of water to bathe in and you teach these men to swim.” Gordo kicked the ground and a dust cloud filled the space between himself and Viejo. “You’re crazy. All of you. The guards only give us water to drink and you think you’ll swim away from Santa Marta.”

 “Don’t worry, Gordo,” another prisoner said. “The fat fish don’t need to swim. They float. We’ll hang on to you when the water comes.”

Gordo lifted up his stained and faded tee shirt. His belly glistened in the noonday sun. He laughed while rubbing the enormous bulge. “This is my insurance policy,” he said. “Just in case Viejo is right.”

The blue sky above the courtyard suggested no hint of rain. Not a single cloud offered shade. But to the south, billowing clouds pushed higher and now flattened against an invisible ceiling.

Viejo squinted as he looked across the wall. The other prisoners turned their gaze on the clouds, and especially on one that rose higher than the others. One prisoner pointed to it. “That one,” he said, “I have seen these before. They are like a great anvil.”

Viejo squinted harder. “I think you are right, Chino. And I think the blacksmith is about to drop his hammer.”

Chino slapped Gordo on the back. “You better eat a good dinner tonight. You may need that insurance policy in the morning.”

Gordo climbed onto the table. “A ride to freedom,” he shouted. “For any fool who shares his dessert with me tonight. Freedom. Tomorrow morning. Prepare for the ride.”

All the prisoners laughed this time, including Viejo. The one guard—in the stilt tower beyond the wall—yelled at them. “Shutchyermouths, you dogs.”

“You’ll be struck by lightning,” Gordo yelled back. “Give me your dessert too, and I’ll let you live.”

Gordo’s bravado prompted more laughter. The guard aimed his rifle and fired one shot over the prisoners’ heads. The bullet ricocheted off the far wall as they ducked and scattered, still hooting and laughing.

That evening, after dinner, Chino found Viejo in the courtyard. “There’s electricity in the air,” he said to the old man. “Do you feel it?”

Viejo ran his hand over the grey hairs standing on his forearm. “I feel it. The storm is growing.”

“But not here,” Chino said. “Only to the south, and those clouds are far away.”

“And they are on our side of the mountains, which means they will fill the river that passes through Santa Marta.” Viejo leaned closer to Chino. “Listen to me. Don’t be fooled by the dry ground here. The river will grow and you will need to swim. That is our way past these walls.”

“Tonight?” Chino asked.

“Not tonight. Tomorrow night.”

The two men heard someone approaching and cut off their conversation.

“Is that you, Viejo?” Gordo called out.

“Yes. Chino and I were—”

“Let me guess. You were giving swim lessons again,” Gordo said. “And you’re excited about those clouds—about a storm so far away.”

“No swim lessons tonight,” Viejo said. “Did anyone give you dessert?”

Gordo patted his belly. “No one wants my help. You’ve taught them all too well to swim.”

“I know you don’t believe the old man,” Chino said. “But can you feel the electricity? The energy? Something is different tonight in Santa Marta.”

Gordo looked around the courtyard. Cigarette ends glowed orange where other prisoners gathered. “I feel it. Something is different,” Gordo said. “Perhaps it’s the fear this old man puts into our hearts with his talk of floods.”

“Not fear, Gordo. But hope.” Viejo said. “Two months ago, before I was sent here for protesting the dam, I spoke with an engineer. We stood between the old dam and where the new one would be built. I asked him why the government would not build a passage for the fish.”

“A passage for the fish?” Gordo asked.

“Yes. The engineer called it a fish ladder.”

“A ladder for fish.” Gordo said flatly.

“Not a ladder for climbing over this wall,” Viejo said. “But a kind of structure to let the fish swim past the dam.”

“A big slide.” Gordo said.

“Yes. Like that. But not too steep, so the fish can swim up and over the dam. A passage.”

“Why do you care where the fish swim?” Gordo asked.

“With the old dam, fish could go only downriver. Never up. In my lifetime, all the fish have disappeared from above the dam.”

“And this is why you are in Santa Marta?” Gordo asked. “For a fish?”

“Yes. For a fish. For many fish. For a way of life. I wrote letters to Caracas, to the legislature, even to President Maduro.”

Gordo shook his head. He put his arm around Chino, who had been fascinated with the fish ladder. “That was a mistake,” Gordo said. “To disagree with Maduro in a letter, with your signature. And you know the legislature is against him.” Gordo pulled Chino closer and pushed out his chest. “Chino and I stole cattle in Brazil, to smuggle. The military detained us at the border, and confiscated our cattle. We are in Santa Marta for stealing cattle, and maybe for other crimes. But you, you are here for a fish.” Gordo patted Chino on the back. “I will leave you to your swim lessons. Good night.”

“Good night, Gordo.”

Gordo crossed the courtyard and joined the other prisoners playing cards under a kerosene lantern. Viejo and Chino spoke long into the night, walking along the wall. They guessed at the strength of the wall and at the height the river might reach.

Nine weeks earlier.

Two men stood in the riverbed of the Rio Tomasi. One, an engineer for the new dam. The other, a villager that fished the lower reaches of the river. An old man. He had written letters to regulators, asking them to consider the fishery, to consider building a fish passage at the new dam. And though he had never threatened or been undignified in his language, the regulators felt the firm tenor of his letters—an inexhaustible resolve—one that bordered on anger born of injustice, one that wouldn’t be diminished with payoffs, one that peasants had wielded in revolutions. They worried that the old villager—whether living or martyred—would recruit others. They feared the legislature would give him an audience. But most of all, they knew the contractor would issue no more bribes if the project stalled.

The two men stood in the riverbed and talked of fish and the drought. The engineer humored the old villager. He didn’t know this was the same man who had agitated village and town councils for a hundred miles down the river.

“Such a dry year,” the villager said, as the two of them looked upstream at the vestiges of the old dam.

The engineer folded his arms and leaned back, looking up at the clear sky. “It’s a blessing, really,” he said. “With this drought, we don’t need a bypass pipe to carry the river through the construction site. Not that I want the drought to continue. Of course not. But it makes our work easier.”

“So you saved a lot of money?” the villager asked.

The engineer leaned forward just a little. “I thought we were talking about the weather, not boring things like money,” the engineer said, feigning mild disgust.

The villager laughed. “I suppose money is boring. But I’m a practical man, and depending on how you bid the project, I think you might save a lot of money if the weather cooperates.”

“And lose more if it doesn’t,” the engineer said. “Once we finish the first level of the new dam, it won’t matter what the weather does. We can let the river go right through the new outlets while we continue building.”

“Those outlets are for the turbines?” the villager asked.

“That’s right. This new dam will generate enough electricity for every town between here and Paraima.”

“But there are no transmission lines to Paraima. Only to Venécia. The opposite way,” the villager said. “And I understand Vensoluz intends to sell this electricity to Colombia.”

The engineer leaned back again, arms still folded. “What do I know? I’m a hydraulic engineer.”

“Perfect,” the villager said. “I have a question related to hydraulics.”

The engineer suggested they walk upriver and finish their conversation in the shade of what remained of the old dam. When the old dam stopped their progress, the two men sat and reclined against the cool concrete base.

“What’s your question, my friend?” the engineer asked, folding his arms again.

“How is it the Brazilians and Colombians build passages for fish, but we do not?”

“A fish ladder? You’re talking about money again, not hydraulics. But I’ll tell you. The crest of the new dam will be 340 feet high, seventy feet higher than the old dam,” the engineer said, patting the concrete at his back. “The cost is prohibitive—so I am told. For every foot that a fish must swim straight up, it must also swim ten feet straight ahead.”

“So the problem is space?” the villager asked.

“Space, yes. But financing is the real problem.”

“How much?”

“Every foot adds eighty-five thousand Yankee dollars,” the engineer said. He pulled his cell phone from his shirt pocket and tapped at the screen. “About twenty-nine million dollars total.”

“That’s 290 million new bolivars,” the villager said.

Both men sat quietly—the engineer hoping the villager would grasp the scale of the project, and the villager dividing 290 million bolivars by his daily revenue from fish sales.

“I have one more question,” the villager said.

“Go ahead.”

“Is there another way to let fish above the new dam? You know, a less expensive way?”

The engineer unfolded his arms and shifted on the ground, stretching his back. He turned and faced the villager. “Yes. But there is no guarantee it will happen. I have witnessed this phenomenon only once, many years ago. It was…how shall I say it?…a miracle of nature.”

The villager turned and faced the engineer. “What was this miracle? How did it happen?”

The engineer slipped his cell phone into his shirt pocket. He began:

I was working in Argentina. We had just dismantled an old dam, much like this one. There were no provisions for a fish ladder there either. But the river carried many fish. Different fish than here. Trout and salmon. Beautiful fish. Green and blue and red. They couldn’t pass the old dam and they would never pass the new dam. They spawned in the lower river.

When the old dam had been cut down, the river spilled over the low crest into a pool of clear water. I looked into that pool when I took flow measurements. There were no fish there. Just clear water and the colorful rocks.

The old dam had stood for ninety years. Only a few fish survived in the headwaters. They dwindled and were decimated by disease. You know? Like a village that doesn’t marry with another village.

The old man nodded.

One day, while I was measuring flows on the crest, I looked into the pool and thought it such a shame that the trout and salmon now had only to jump three feet to get above the temporary crest. But they had learned for ninety years that they could not pass and so they remained in the lower river. The river was open like this for several weeks.

That night I had a dream. I walked along the river where the fish were preparing to spawn—far below the project. In my dream, I walked upriver, waving my arms and calling to the fish, encouraging them to swim farther. It was night in my dream and I wasn’t afraid. I went into the freezing water and swam with them. Bumping against them. Jockeying with them. I swung my arms over my head and slapped the water, and pulled my cupped hands down toward my waist. The current was swift, but I was strong enough to overcome it. I swam until I arrived at the pool. There I could hear the roar of the water coming over the crest, crashing, plunging. Thousands of fish had come to the pool. They swirled in a giant circle, faster and faster, and they began jumping into the waterfall. Their tails thrashed at the air, and the water knocked them back into the pool.

I leaped with them into the waterfall. I fell back again and again. Then, one by one, the fish began making their way above the crest. In my dream I felt heavy. The crest was still too high for me. Nearly all the fish were gone and I wanted to follow them into the headwaters. On my last try, I thrashed with my legs and I swung my arms around and around, pulling at the water. But then I fell back into the pool and awoke.

Both men were quiet again. The engineer became pensive, lost in his own memory.

Water trickled over the crest and gurgled in the pool. The villager followed the trickle down the concrete face. Algae, bright green and slick, had spread in a narrow streak where the water ran. His eyes settled on the pool, no larger than a washbasin. Bellbirds called to each other in the trees beyond the riverbed.

After the long silence, the villager spoke first. “This is a beautiful dream, and maybe the beginning of a miracle, but still only a dream.”

“Yes. The beginning,” the engineer said. He appeared disoriented for a moment, as though still caught in the dream. He continued:

A storm arrived that night. A thunderstorm. As wide at a city. The storm started high in the mountains and then moved into the valley—the reverse of typical storms. The next morning, when I went to measure flows, the river was rising, but only a little. I measured the flows and went to the lower project. Then, in the late afternoon, the flows increased rapidly. I worried they would overwhelm the outlets, so I warned the contractor to remove his equipment from the site.

I walked upriver to the old dam, and as I walked I noticed fish in the rising river—where I hadn’t seen them before. By the time I arrived at the old dam, the downstream pool was deeper and the water surface was nearly to the crest. The fish were not yet jumping as they had been in my dream. But they began to swim in a great circle, swirling, faster and faster. Within a few minutes the water level had risen to the crest itself. The fish began to break away from the circle, and one by one they swam up and over the crest. Hundreds at first. But more arrived. I climbed up the hillside and watched them into the early evening. The water grew dirty from so much rain in the mountains. But the fish were so numerous I could see their backs on the surface. Green and blue and red. Fish that would not spawn for another two months joined in the escape. Yes! An escape. These fish had been held prisoner for ninety years below that wall of concrete.

After sunset, after I could no longer see the river, I went back to my truck and found a flashlight. At the river again, under the narrow beam of my flashlight, I saw flashes of green and blue and red passing upstream. At midnight I left to get some sleep.

The next morning, just as the sun was coming up, I arrived at the site and saw that the river had gone down. The surface of the pool was too far below the crest; the fish no longer had a way to pass above the old dam. Over the next month other storms arrived in the mountains, but these were typical storms, always moving from the valley into the mountains, and so the flows were not so large—and never again large enough for the salmon and trout to pass into the headwaters.

A year after the project was finished, I visited the site to conduct a final inspection. I went on a Friday. My family was with me this time—my wife and two sons and daughter. On Saturday, we drove high into the valley, above the cattle ranches, and made a picnic next to a small stream. Our daughter—she was five years old then—she waded into the stream and laughed as she tried to catch the fish with her hands. Green and blue and red. So many fish swam there. It was this way now in all the little streams high in those valleys.

Santa Marta

The sun rose to another clear day. Hot. Blue sky. Except to the south. The anvil-shaped cloud that had menaced the mountains the day before had collapsed into itself during the night, and a new one formed on this morning. First puffy and light. Gentle looking. But by noon, the top had flattened and the sides grew dark. A double-headed anvil.

“Another storm, Viejo,” Chino said.

“I’ve been watching it since sunrise. This one is bigger. Ten times, maybe,” Viejo said, not moving his eyes off the southern horizon. “Are you ready to swim, Chino?”

Chino looked around the courtyard. “Some of the others think you are giving us false hope. They have been talking with Gordo.”

“What do you think, Chino?”

“What do you mean?”

“Do you think there is harm in having hope?” Viejo asked. “Do you think it is dangerous to hope?”

“Perhaps. Yes. Some of these men have been here fifteen years,” Chino said. “Some have watched their friends die trying to escape.”

“Perhaps? Yes?” Viejo said, repeating Chino’s words. “It is either perhaps or it is yes, but not both.”

Chino shrugged, not committing to an answer.

“Chino, I want you to live through this escape,” Viejo said, facing his friend and grasping his shoulders. “It is dangerous to hope. Hope is what drives you into the unknown, into the dark, into the water, into newness and vitality. Hope is almost the most dangerous thing on the earth.”

“Almost?” Chino said.

“Yes. Almost. Hope drives us to wake up in the morning, to watch for the sunrise, to anticipate the harvest of corn or fish. But there is more than hope. Something more dangerous. Something more powerful.”

Viejo stopped to let Chino think for a moment, to let him wonder, to let him clear a piece of ground where the next words could be planted.

“Chino,” the old man said, pausing again to let the gravity of his words weigh on his friend. “Chino, you have hope. I have hope. Many in this prison have hope. I believe even Gordo has hope. But we must have faith. We feel hope when we cast our net into the river. But faith is the act of casting. It is faith that brings the fish into our arms. We feel hope when we hold a bag of corn seed at the beginning of the rainy season. But faith is the act of sowing. There is no middle ground with faith. Faith is not only a place of feeling, but a place of doing.

“I have taught these men to swim. All but one. To learn to swim is to ask the water to arrive. Our practice is a petition to the river, to the rain.” Viejo pointed to the enormous cloud growing on the southern horizon. “We have asked that cloud to fulfill a promise, to let us swim out of here.”

Chino looked above the wall. The highest strand of barbed wire cut the cloud in half. Even as he watched the cloud, it began to collapse into itself. Lighting flashed on the concave sides.

“I have hope, Viejo,” he said. “And faith, I think.”

Viejo nodded slowly and smiled. “You have faith, Chino. When you swim, that is faith.”

– – –

That same afternoon, as the engineer was packing up his equipment at the old dam, he heard splashing below the crest. He went to inspect the noise, to see if he might find an otter or paca at the little pool of water. As he walked onto the crest and looked into the little pool just below him, he saw a bass swimming in the clear water. Green and gold with black bands on its sides. He looked upstream, across the crest. A paper-thin sheet of water ran across the concrete. The bass couldn’t have come from there. He looked downstream, but only saw other small pools, scattered and separated.

A gust of wind came from the south, and with it the smell of earth and rain. He walked back across the crest, toward the temporary access road. As he put his equipment in the bed of the truck, he heard a rumbling sound. Not as loud as thunder. Something like a locomotive in the distance. He went to the edge of the road and looked down onto the crest of the dismantled dam—now running water knee-deep. The downstream pool had grown to the size of a house, and began spilling into the dry riverbed. Where he had seen one bass, there were now a dozen. The downstream pool rose to the crest and the river grew as wide as a highway. More bass swam in the pool. Other fish arrived from below. He started his truck and drove to the lower site, to verify the outlets were clear of debris, and to make sure the contractor had removed equipment from the riverbed.

– – –

Just after sunset, the rain arrived at Santa Marta. The storm that had started in the mountains now moved across the valley. Giant raindrops pelted the dry earth, first sending little dust clouds into the air. But as the rain fell harder, the dust in the courtyard settled and the ground turned to mud.

The prisoners gathered under the overhanging corrugated-steel roof that extended from their quarters. The downspout shook and water began pouring into the old wine barrel. Water spurted from between the loose staves. One of the prisoners lifted the iron band and pushed the staves into place. Gordo stood close to the barrel and watched the water rise. He pulled off his tee shirt and went into the downpour, arms extended to the sky.

The men had to shout over the noise of the rain on the steel roof. Gordo yelled to the others. “Come out and have a bath. Come out. Come out.” He retrieved a bottle from inside his pants, and took a long draft of the smuggled sugarcane whiskey. “Come out and swim, you fishes. Swim, Viejo.”

He walked to the far side of the courtyard and shouted at the guard. “We are going to swim away tonight, you fool. Swim. In Santa Marta.” But the rain hammered on the roof of the guard tower so loudly that the guard heard nothing else and only saw a drunken prisoner displaying his contraband.

 Viejo gathered the other men—still twenty strong—and lined them up under the overhanging roof. “Remember to swing your arms,” he shouted over the deafening rain. The old man swung one arm and then the other, showing the men to cup their hands on the down stroke. “Remember to cup your hands. Swing your arms out of the water behind you.”

Chino and another prisoner walked along the line of men, helping them with their form as Viejo shouted directions.

“Yes. That’s it,” Viejo encouraged the men. “And lie flat. Don’t try to stand. Keep your shoulders low in the water.”

The rain fell harder, drowning Viejo’s voice. He went to each man and shook hands, offering encouragement. Some of the men looked terrified. Others smiled and embraced Viejo. “Hope, my brother. Hope,” he shouted to each one. “All this time, we have had hope. Now we must have faith. We must swim.”

Gordo braced himself against the far wall and pressed his ear against the cinderblocks. He thought he heard thunder reverberating in the wall. Maybe something quieter than thunder—not a noise, but a movement. For the first time since Viejo’s arrival in Santa Marta, Gordo began to feel the opposite of hope.

Fear.

He dropped the empty bottle and staggered across the courtyard, slipping and falling and rising on the way. When he came into the light of the kerosene lantern, his eyes were wide with terror. White and red. Bloodshot with whiskey and panic.

“You tricked me, old man,” he wailed at Viejo. “You tricked me.”

But Viejo was busy instructing the men to brace themselves for the initial flood. He reminded them to let the courtyard fill with water, and then swim.

Gordo went from man to man, looking for Viejo. When he finally found the old man, he shared what he had discovered across the courtyard. “The wall is shaking over there,” Gordo said, pointing into the darkness. “The wall and the earth are shaking over there, but not here. Can you hear me, Viejo? There’s no flood.”

Viejo called to Chino. “The wall is going to break on that side, Chino.” He pointed in the same direction Gordo had pointed moments earlier. “Go out and see if the guard can hear you. Ask him what he can see outside the wall.”

Chino ran along the inner wall of the prisoners’ quarters and then into the courtyard, within view of the guard tower that stood outside the wall. There was no lantern burning in the tower tonight. Maybe the wind blew it out. He strained his eyes and searched for a burning cigarette. But he saw only darkness. He moved closer and shouted. No response. And then, with a mixture of joy and horror, he realized the tower was gone.

When he reached Viejo and the other men, they were clinging to columns and walls. Even Gordo stood on the table, shaking.

“Viejo,” Chino shouted. “The guard tower is gone. Washed away, I think.”

The men who heard Chino cheered at the news. Gordo now lay facedown on the table and began crying, howling. He grasped the edges of the table and prayed. Hail Mary…pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death…

Viejo went among the men and told them to climb as the water rose, and to let go and swim only when the water was no longer rising. “Look for something that floats, but you may not find anything,” he said to each man. “When the water comes, pull off your pants, tie a knot in the legs and fill them with air, as we practiced. Put these under your arms or around your belly. If they hold air, good. If not, then swim as hard as you can. Have faith!”

Chino caught up to Viejo and told him again what he had seen. No tower. “And what about Gordo?” Chino shouted. “Do you think that table will float?”

“No. The legs are metal,” Viejo shouted. “But this afternoon I removed the bolts and I told Flaco and Pelón to each grab a plank when the water comes. The wood is heavy, but it will float, and they are the least likely to swim well.”

“But Gordo is there already.”

Viejo looked at Gordo, sprawled on the table, convulsing, praying, crying. He ran into the rain, and as he approached the table a loud thump and then a rushing sound came from across the courtyard. Viejo grabbed Gordo by the arm just as the water hit them. He held Gordo long enough to get them both to their feet. The planks separated from the metal legs, and Flaco and Pelón jumped into the rushing water. The kerosene lantern hissed and sputtered and went out. Six feet of water. The men began climbing. Water poured through the breach—ten feet deep and rising.

– – –

Every minute a hundred fish swam upriver past the foundation of the old dam. Farther downriver the fish swam past excavators and scaffolding and trucks. A dozen men shined lights into the canyon, watching the river tumble and devour their equipment. The engineer stood with them, as surprised as they were at the flood. No men were lost, but this would delay the project, and the river would run deep enough for fish to swim upriver and into the headwaters for a month.

The engineer borrowed a flashlight and climbed down the canyon wall. He stood on the scaffolding that had been bolted to the bedrock face, and shined the light across the rushing water. Many fish swam upriver. Hundreds. Thousands. Green and gold with black bands on their sides.

– – –

Viejo shouted to Gordo. “Hold on to the column and climb. Let the water lift you.”

“But I can’t swim,” Gordo cried. “I can’t swim.”

“You don’t need to,” Viejo shouted. “You’ll float. Remember? Just let yourself float.”

Viejo reassured Gordo as the water rose. He looked out across the darkness and saw Flaco and Pelón clinging to the planks. The water stopped rising within four feet of the top of the walls. Viejo ordered the men to swim for the breach. “Unless you want to stay in Santa Marta,” he offered. Viejo counted the men: eighteen holding to the columns and walls, two on the planks, and he and Gordo on their own column.

Gordo began crying again. Viejo didn’t let go of his arm. Chino and the others began moving along the wall—sometimes finding a little handhold, sometimes swimming—toward the breach.

“Gordo,” Viejo said calmly, pointing with his chin at the other men. “Gordo, those men are leaving Santa Marta. Do you wish to leave with them?”

“Yes, Viejo,” Gordo whimpered.

“Then lie flat and hold on to my belt. Only keep your head above water—just enough to breath. If you try to climb on top of me, we will both drown. Do you understand?”

“Yes, Viejo.”

The old man let go of the column and swam slowly into the courtyard. He felt Gordo’s weight come onto his belt as the frightened man also let go of the column.

“How are you doing, Gordo?”

“I’m floating, Viejo. I float very well,” Gordo said, first laughing and then crying. “I float. I float.”

The old man slowly and calmly repeated the measured strokes of a frog. Pull. Kick. Glide. Gordo alternated between laughing and crying and praying. When the two men arrived at the breach, the other men had already been swept into the current. Viejo saw their heads bobbing, arms swinging. Some had inflated their pants. He tried to count them, but they were too far away.

The two men pushed off the wall and the current quickly pulled them into an eddy. A saddled horse, dead, but not yet stiff with rigor mortis, bumped against them, rolling, pushing them under. Viejo planted his feet against the saddle and pushed hard. Gordo pulled on Viejo’s belt, and they both went under. Gordo felt Viejo go limp, and he let go of the old man’s belt.

When Gordo came to the surface, he was out of the eddy and in the current, moving quickly away from the prison walls. He flailed, and screamed for the old man. “Viejo! Viejo! I can’t swim.” But Viejo didn’t respond. Gordo went under again.

A few feet away, Viejo’s head broke the surface. The old man moved his arms steadily under the surface, keeping his mouth just above the water. He let his face sink back into the water, until his eyes were only an inch above the surface. In the darkness, he searched for the silhouette of a hill or high ground. The rain continued and the clouds didn’t part, but a weak moonlight illuminated the valley. Far away—maybe five hundred yards—Viejo saw the outline of trees.

In the darkness, he let himself sink lower in the water. He reached down and felt for Gordo’s head or shoulders. He grabbed the back of Gordo’s shirt and struggled to pull the big man up. At the surface, Gordo coughed and cried, and then turned, trying to climb on top of Viejo. But Viejo pushed Gordo away and yelled at the terrified man. “If you grab me again, I’ll let you drown right here. Now roll onto your back.”

Gordo screamed again and then went under. Viejo quickly swam around Gordo and grabbed the back of his shirt again, pulling him to the surface. Gordo tried turning again, but Viejo kicked hard against the water and stayed at his back.

“Stop turning, Gordo. Stop it,” Viejo shouted. “Stay on your back and I’ll pull you.”

When Gordo saw that Viejo meant to stay with him, he rolled onto his back.

“There. Now lie flat,” Viejo said, more calmly now, trying to soothe his friend. “Let me pull you along.”

 Viejo swam harder now, pulling Gordo behind him, sometimes swinging his free arm, just as he had taught the other men, and sometimes pulling under the surface.

Gordo uttered the Hail Mary many times, whispering, whimpering—until around midnight, when the two men reached the shore. Viejo felt the ground first and pulled Gordo into the shallow water. They crawled up the bank where Gordo lay down and sobbed.

“Viejo,” Gordo started. “You saved my life.”

The old man lay flat on the ground, chest heaving, and didn’t speak for a long time.

“I didn’t save your life, Gordo. You could have climbed onto the roof at Santa Marta and waited for the river to go down. You might have been hungry for a few days, but you would have lived.”

“Long enough for the guards to come back,” Gordo said.

“Yes, the guards would have put you back in prison, in Santa Marta or elsewhere.”

“Then you saved my life, Viejo.”

“No, Gordo. You could have saved your life without my help, without Chino’s help. When I was teaching the men to swim, I could see you wanted to escape. You had hope. But you were too proud to learn, too proud to ask for help. You had hope, but that is all. No, Gordo. I have done more than save your life. I have freed you from Santa Marta. I had faith that we could be free.”

Gordo closed his eyes and shivered. Viejo continued. “Promise me one thing, Gordo.”

“Anything.”

“Before morning, I will walk far from here, far from you, far from Santa Marta. Promise me, Gordo, that you will not go back to Santa Marta.”

“Of course, Viejo. I’ll never go back to Santa Marta.”

The old man waited for his friend to begin snoring before he left. He found the road going south, toward the mountains. He followed it until sunrise and then spent the day in the forest, foraging and hiding. When night fell, he continued south. For a week he walked—at night—until he found his way into the mountains, into the headwaters of the river.

Paul Burnham works and lives in the mountain west. He is a civil engineer by day and a river rat or powder hound by night.

Dear God, why couldn’t you have made me a duck? I thought as I watched them sitting in the rain and shitting on the pavement. They looked happy. When it’d started to rain they still looked happy. I could almost see their rigid beaks curving upwards when the first drops hit their heads and they stood up to waddle down towards the lake. It was all the same to them. Water from the sky or water from below. They were always wet. I don’t even think they get cold. I’m cold. And my clothes are soaking wet and wrinkled from when I was sleeping.

I’d come to London for the day with the company I worked with for a job. Just picking up debris from a construction site and tossing it into barrels and skips. They thought it would take the whole day, but we finished before the sun went down. Before we started they handed us all train tickets home. It was for the ten o’clock train. With time to kill, I went into a bar and used the rest of the money in my wallet drinking and playing the boxing machine. I had my payslip that the company gave us to collect the cash for the job, so I wasn’t worried about having no money left. But when I left the bar I had no train ticket. I went back to look but it was gone. It could have fallen out anywhere during the day. I hadn’t checked since leaving the site.

‘Ahh Will. The champion fool. You tactless hack. You whiny miserable bastard how could you do that? what are you gonna do now?’ I beat my head in frustration before deciding what to do. What I did was make my way to Hyde park and fall asleep on a bench. I knew I could take my payslip to the London branch office in the morning to get my wages and get the train home. 

I don’t know how long I slept. You never do. I closed my eyes watching the stars twinkle and laugh at me and woke up with rain and thunder laughing at me. Sitting up I felt miserable. My whole life was a waste and I knew it and the weather knew it and the ducks knew it. Lightning flashed from the sky and hit somewhere, and thunder rolled around the park. Growling like an animal in my ears. I didn’t move. “What’s the point in moving,” I said to the ducks still on the pavement and waved my left hand at them. “Have you read Hemingway? Have you read John Fante?” I asked them. “You haven’t read a damn thing and your smiling at me like you know more. If I was a duck I’d be under a tree. I’d learn to burrow and go underground. I’d hide under a bench. Your wet all day. Why not try and stay dry for once? You don’t know a thing.”

The ducks stared at me and shook their tails. 

The park was pitch black. Only a few streetlamps showed anything. My head was cloudy from sleep and hadn’t cleared and when I blinked the rain from my eyes I saw flashes of red and blue. The blue was the same colour as the lightning that flashed almost lazily across the sky. I stood up and wandered away from the lake. Following the streetlamps. I’d seen there was a tunnel under a bridge by the edge of the park and I made my way there. When I got to the tunnel I saw that the floor had a two-inch puddle of water covering it from a crack that ran from one side of the roof to the other. I stood in there with my feet buried for a few minutes watching the storm when I heard voices. Stepping back out into the rain a bit I saw a doorway etched into the side of the tunnel that I hadn’t noticed. A man and a woman were sitting in there pushed right back against the metal door so the rain wouldn’t touch them. They looked up when they saw me and stared as I stared at them. After a few seconds, the man nodded at me and moved further away from the woman so there was a space for me in the middle. I hesitated for a second feeling uncomfortable before settling between them. 

The doorway was wide, and the door was set far back. There was a line on the floor where the rain couldn’t reach any further inside. We sat in silence for a while. The lightning had become more frequent and it seemed as we stared that it was dancing and singing. It hummed and flashed and seemed to creep into the bones of the earth as it struck. There were so many flashes that the thunder seemed constant. It rolled across the sky and beat against our ears begging to be let in. I was feeling pretty warm and comfortable until I felt a weight on my lap, and saw they’d started holding hands across my body. 

“I’m Joe,” The man said. “And this is Beth.” 

“I’m Will,” I replied.

“You got some clean clothes boy. I don’t see many of the homeless around here wearing stuff like that.” He said laughing a little. Letting go of Beth’s hand and fingering my sleeve like we’d known each other for years. 

“I’m not homeless. I’ve just lost my train ticket.” 

“Oh yeah. So, did we,” he said. Then he laughed again, and Beth laughed with him. I just sat there and wondered why I hadn’t stayed on the bench.

Both of them were dirty. He had mud and dirt in streaks all across his face. She had a lot of old makeup on that had been running from the rain, so she looked like an out of work clown. Both of them had rips in their clothes and I could see skin through some of them. 

“We’ve been sleeping in this park for nearly ten years you know,” Joe said and waved his hand out at the park like he owned it all. Some thunder crashed as he did it. “Ten years we’ve been either on that bench over there or here. I know every spot there is.”

Beth chimed in then. “It’s true, he does. One time when some guy we know was being chased by the police he came running straight to that bench that we usually sit on. He ran right up and said, ‘help Joe’ and all Joe did was look around once and tell him to hide in the boating shed on the lake. The police came a few minutes later and they didn’t even know there was a boating shed.” 

Joe touched her hand again by my lap. “I know all the best spots for privacy and beauty and my girl here knows how to get us money. We all need that money am I right?”

He nudged my leg and I nodded. Then he smacked his leg and grabbed my hand. “Of course, I don’t mean we’re thieves or anything like that. You’ve got nothing to worry about boy.”

“Well, that’s good,” I said and pretended to laugh a little. It was better to listen to them then be back out in the rain and the heat from their bodies was warming me up a little. 

“No of course not, he knew that Joe,” Beth said and hit him softly on the arm. 

They laughed together like no one would suspect them of anything sinister. 

We watched the thunder for a while. Its noise was tremendous. Like steel drums crashing together. They were used to it and watched it all like it was nothing. To me, it was like the whole world was breaking apart.

“I guess you’re wondering how long we’ve been together,” Beth said suddenly. Squeezing Joe’s hand on my lap.

“Fifteen years,” Joe said proudly. It looked like they’d practised this speech often. Probably to everyone who would listen. “We met in this park back before any of this happened.” He gestured to their clothes.

“I was a working girl then,” Beth said. “I still am I guess but it doesn’t seem as bad when you have someone who loves you.” 

“I offered to pay triple what she asked for just so she would notice me,” Joe said smiling, “Of course she didn’t take it. She thought I was crazy.”

“I still do,” Beth cut in.

Joe waved his hand “Maybe I am. I had a good job at the bank in those days. I had money falling out of my wallet. But one look at her eyes; it wasn’t anything else, her eyes, they sent me spinning. One second I’m pulling sixty grand a year, the next I’m cutting days off work to see her… Most girls would have left me after I got fired. Every single working girl would of. Everyone I knew. From the bank to my own family turned away. But not Beth. She understands what it means to feel like I do. I feel too much. It cuts into my heart,” He had tears in his eyes as he spoke.

“When I worked at that bank I wanted to die. It was like having a knife slowly twist into my heart every day. And every day it would get deeper in and every day it would get more painful. With Beth, every day is like the knife is being pulled out a little.”

I could tell from how he looked at her that he really believed everything he was saying. I didn’t know if he had always felt like that or if he’d just convinced himself it was true over the years.

“I wasn’t happy until I met Joe,” Beth cut in. Not willing to give up her side of the story. “I didn’t even know pleasure until him. Even now I don’t do what I do because I enjoy it. It feeds us and one day Joe will get another job and I won’t have to do it anymore.”

Their hands were still conjoined on my lap and their eyes were like little stars as they reflected the lighting back out into the night. For all their lies I liked them. They were normal people living life as it came to them. Joe wasn’t feeling any better with her and it damn sure wasn’t true that Beth didn’t get any joy or pleasure from what she did. She looked like the kind of person that could hump a bicycle pump and still get off. But they loved each other, and they might even have believed what they were saying. Anyway, it didn’t really matter. What did I know about it all? I was just assuming. And I was liking them more and more. 

“I’m really not homeless you know,” I said. I wanted them to know that I really was just a bit lost that night. It felt important to me that they didn’t think I was a bum. They obviously didn’t care but it mattered to me. “I was getting some drinks in a bar after work and I just lost my train ticket.” 

“Really?” Beth said. “You poor boy.” And she touched my leg slyly just above the knee. Both of them looked sad.

“That’s rotten luck kid. The number of times that happened to me when I was working,” Joe chuckled. “How come you’re sleeping put here then? You haven’t got a credit card or anything for a hotel?” 

“I haven t got anything except my payslip that I can take to the offices tomorrow. My bank account is empty. I never believed in credit. I always knew I’d just run up debt.” 

They looked like they didn’t believe me. They kept glancing at each other. But they kept their mouths shut. They didn’t want to offend me. 

“Besides,” I added, “There isn’t any point in just spending money for the sake of it. I thought I could handle one night out here,” I laughed, “Of course I didn’t reckon on it raining so much.”

A bolt of lightning hit something close by and a few seconds later the noise rumbled across the sky. The light from the electric burned into my eyes and dazzled me. It was like seeing God. I thought about the ducks out there and wondered what would happen if the lighting struck the lake. I imagined them all cooking like in an oven and the smell wafting over to us. 

They still looked doubtful, but they didn’t say anything. They just looked out at the storm. There was a different atmosphere now they knew I wasn’t homeless. They sensed the money I might have. They could smell it and they clearly thought it was mighty rude of me not to offer a single penny. But they were polite. They didn’t say a word.

“Really,” I said trying to make them believe, “If I had anything I wouldn’t be out here would I.”

They each nodded a bit and Beth stuck her hand out in the rain.

“It’s coming down hard isn’t it,” She said. 

“Mmm,” said Joe. “I haven’t seen it this bad in a few years have you, Beth?” 

“No Joe. Not since… was it five years back that man got killed by that falling tree?”

“Oh yeah. Mr Foggerty? I think that was his name anyway. Slept under the big tree by the playground?”

“Yeah him.” Said Beth.

They both clearly distrusted me now. I’d always found it odd that as soon as people thought you had something. Something they wanted they treated you different. These reacted by not saying a damn word to me. 

“Bad night,” I said, trying to get back their friendly voices. They had been comforting. It stopped me thinking about everything. About how I’d messed up. “Really bad night.”

There was a small silence before Joe spoke.

“Where do you live then kid?”

My relief almost hurt.

“Birmingham,” I said.

“I should have known from the accent,” He said almost laughing.

“I could tell,” Said Beth. She wasn’t laughing. “I love the accent.” 

I could see how she made her money as a working girl. Even with her makeup running down her face she was appealing. Her eyes had a sadness in them. Deep down in their centres and it made you want to take her in your arms. She was getting old though. I could imagine the money was getting harder and harder to pull in. It didn’t look like Joe did anything except find new places in the park for her and the clients to go. I wondered how he’d really lost his job. 

“You know I used to come to this park all the time when I was working,” Joe said. “Even before I met Beth. I used to sit on that bench that you were sleeping on earlier… yeah, we saw you. And I’d just watch people.” He paused as he looked out in the night. The funny thing about storms is that sooner or later you forget that they are there. He looked past it all. I looked past it all. 

“I used to see some things. I saw families break up. Lovers having arguments… too personal for a public park. Girls pick up men. Men pick up women. I saw women come to the park and ignore everybody until they saw a black guy. Chinese men come and ignore everyone except white women. Everyone sniffing around for something. Men ignoring everyone and just looking around for a place to be alone… places like this they are good places to be alone. You can be surrounded by hundreds of people here and not be noticed.”

He was quiet for a while. “I don’t miss anything about that job except the money.” He finally said still quite quietly.

“Baby you made the right choice,” Beth whispered. Too quietly. I didn’t even think he could hear her. 

Joe didn’t speak. He had shifted a bit away from me. It was obvious he didn’t want to speak now. Everything he’d said seemed to have taken something from him. Some kind of energy. He seemed drained and fed up.

A duck wandered by and waggled its feathery ass at us as it walked. I watched it stroll past. Beth did too. Joe was looking out at nothing like he wasn’t there. 

“It’s when it gets cold like this… that’s when things start to get desperate,” Beth said, “Both of us start to think more about money.”

“I don’t think about it,” Joe snapped. He was still looking out into the dark park. “I think about my old job. When you work there you feel constricted and when you leave you feel empty.” 

“There just isn’t any way to win,” I said for the sake of saying something.

They both ignored me. The rain was slowing up. But the thunder carried on getting louder. Joe pulled a half-empty bottle of wine from a rip on the inside of his coat. He was using the inside lining as a big pocket. Beth reached over and took a big drink and then another. I hadn’t figured them as drinkers. 

Joe took it back and hit the bottle. It was strong stuff. Port. And the bottle was one of those big litre ones. Even with half gone they could get pretty drunk from it. I took some when he offered the bottle. It was sweet and bitter and it rolled down my throat like an old friend. It warmed my bones right up. Even more than them pressing on either side of me. 

We passed it around like that for a while not speaking. Beth drank. Then Joe. Then me. Big gulps. You could hear the swallow of each sip over the thunder. It crept its way into our heads. Beth was getting pretty loose. We were getting loose. We started talking again. 

Beth kept reaching behind me and touching the back Joes hair and then mine. Joe started giggling when he saw and said to me “I like you Kid but you have to pay if you want her,” Before giggling again. 

I didn’t want her really. It was cold and the rain was still drizzling and besides, I couldn’t afford it anyway. Joe seemed to want me to want her. He kept reaching over and lifting some part of her clothes to show her skin. 

“Look how smooth that is.” He muttered to me sometimes. Looking proud for reasons I couldn’t work out.

It looked smooth from what I could see. Which wasn’t very much. Sometimes when the lighting flashed around and I was looking at them their whole faces would be lit for a moment and it was like someone holding a torch on them for a split second. Beth started leaning close and kissing me quickly on the neck. Joe leaned close and said remember you’ve got to pay for her. 

I leaned back more against the door to get away, but Beth came with me. She wanted to say something. Joe stood up and mumbled he needed a piss. 

“We haven’t eaten in four days. Ninety-six hours. Joe spent the last of the money of this bottle. He always buys one when we get unlucky like we have been recently. He says it’s the only thing that makes it all seem okay.” 

I could see the shape of Joe as he walked further into the shadows.  His shoulders slumped.

“He gets fed up in bad weather like this. When no one comes to the park. No one asks him about where anything is. He feels useless. Like he can’t provide for me.” She put her hand on my leg. We looked out at the park together. Joe came back and sat down. Beth leaned over and bit the bottom of my ear.

Joe saw and grinned at me.

“I really don’t have any money,” I said. I should have known when they brought out the wine what they wanted. Joe just laughed and rubbed his fingers together. I wanted to leave them, but the wine held me down. It was like a great red weight balancing on my mind. I was drunk. Too drunk.

“People always say that when you ask them for some change. Its why we have to use Beth. You ask them for some help, and they lie to you. They lie so damn easily it’s disgusting. The lies roll off tongues as if they’ve always been there,” Joe shrugged.

“I’m not lying.” 

“I know Kid.” 

He was still grinning at me. My head was swimming from the drink. Beth was massaging my thigh. Joe raised his hand and started to rub his fingers together again. The night started to come undone. Thunder crashed and I felt rain hit my ankle. We all looked up at the sky at the same time. The stars bled from the sky as we looked at them. They bled silver and bronze and it covered everything. It floated into the ground and swept its way onto our bodies and into our mouths, I stumbled out the doorway and tried to throw it up. All that came out was wine. I put my fingers down my throat and pulled them back out before more red came up. My fingers were still silver and bronze. I could hear joe and Beth coughing behind me. Coughing and laughing. They didn’t seem to notice the colours. The silver and bronze filled my belly and hardened up in a little ball. I could feel it hardening all over me. It filled my brain and my eyes and my pores and my little moustache. I saw the lakes rise up against it all and drown us. The stars kept bleeding and the sky wouldn’t shut up.  

When I woke up in the doorway I knew they had probably robbed my payslip. They couldn’t even cash it without my work ID, but I knew they would have taken it. They’d both screwed me, and I’d paid. 

I touched my pocket and opened my wallet. I was surprised they hadn’t taken the whole thing. The payslip was gone as well as the few old coins I kept in there. I walked and sat back down on the bench I’d slept on before. It was six in the morning and people were starting to walk by. I reached into my coat inside pocket to check and see my work ID card was there. I hadn’t checked on it since leaving work. It was. I saw a little bit of paper sticking out from behind the ID card. The corner of it was wet and it ripped as I pulled it out. It was my train ticket.

I sighed. It had stopped raining. I thought about running to the office and waiting to see if they showed up. But I felt too ill. Too weak. I decided to stay sitting on the bench for a while and watch the ducks waddle in and out of the lake. I didn’t want to move. They went in and out in and out. One after the other. They don’t know a damn thing. Dear God.

William Hayward was born in Birmingham, England. He has been writing for five years, ever since he first read the author Leonard Michael’s and fell in love with short fiction.

The helicopter was not his choice.  Aerodynamics would have been much better.  A twelve year-old Brandon was not only charmed by the highbrow and sexy sound of the word, he was thoroughly consumed by the idea of flight – squinting through Ray-Bans at the rapidly shrinking Earth, goosing the throttle and confidently pulling back the yoke to shake off life’s banal strictures and point himself toward a limitless horizon.  Aerodynamics as the topic of his Middle School Science Fair presentation was, for Brandon, a foregone conclusion.  With the effortlessness of destiny, an artful and scholarly vision had come to him:  an interactive display centered on a 3D model wing, blown by a fan motor that would run on a D-cell battery, and perhaps also float colorful little streamers.  This apparatus would demonstrate the core principals of weight, lift, drag, and thrust, the seamless mingling of learning and entertainment easily driving the judges wild.  The Science Fair had been announced at morning assembly with the mythic solemnity of a royal wedding.  “Each entrant must present an original topic, with no duplication, collaboration, or outside assistance,” aspirants were warned.  A buzz ran through the school, with good topics both jealously guarded and wildly speculated-on, but Brandon’s singular passion and depth of knowledge on the topic of Aerodynamics made him certain it was uniquely his.  He even cavalierly whispered his delicious secret over boloney sandwiches and GoGurts one day to Daniel Stenbock, a bit of a dim bulb, and not Science Fair material.    

On the day topics would be selected, Brandon waited in a long line of entrants to make his declaration to Miss Van Slyke, the willowy and pert recent gift to the school from the state college put in charge of that year’s Science Fair.  Her shimmering straight hair, maddening ribbed sweaters, short skirts, and long, flawless legs had lately been knocking around his adolescent brain almost as frequently as the thrill of flight; his stomach grew queasy when he stepped before her.  “Aerodynamics,” he said, trembling.

“Oh, sorry,” she frowned, looking at her clipboard.  “Somebody took that one.  Daniel Stenbock.”

 Standing exposed now before the perfect Miss Van Slyke, the idiot Stenbock’s treachery stung, but that prickly rush was quickly overwhelmed by the novel effects of a triple-narcotic cocktail, the sting and slam of which Brandon would come to know well and experience many more times: the rubbery, stupefying paralysis of being looked at by big, expectant female eyes, the dreadful fast-boil fear of disappointing her, and the primal spasm that arrests involuntary twitching or flailing to impose false cool.   “Helicopters,” he sputtered, naming the first semi-close thing that came to mind.

“Awesome,” Miss Van Slyke mumbled, but it did not seem to please her.

Brandon figured Stenbock was too dumb to also pirate his 3D display, so for the new helicopter set-up he would keep the fan and streamers, simply swapping a rotor blade for the wing.  But when he told his parents of this plan, his father thought the arrangement too technical, and that a diorama would better engage the judges.  The next night his father brought home an intricate scale model of the venerable Sikorsky S-70, better known as the Blackhawk, to be assembled as a father-son project, and ultimately featured as the centerpiece of this diorama.  It would hover heroically over the display area by means of translucent fishing line, his dad said.  Initially, Brandon was given the job of gluing the fuselage together, but was quickly shooed away for smearing glue and making fingerprints. 

A few days after starting the father-son project, Brandon’s father emerged from the basement, tenderly carrying a stunning tableau: the Sikorsky painted as a Fire and Rescue chopper poised tensely above a hillside made of Styrofoam, Elmer’s Glue and brown felt; it unwound a dangling stretcher basket to an injured hiker below.  The display was exquisite.  Even the faces of the tiny figurines his father had included were rendered in painstaking detail.  The macho Rescue pilot had a thick walrus moustache and wore jaunty sunglasses, while the hiker’s face was twisted in such bone-crushing agony that imagining what had happened to him on that craft store hillside gave Brandon bad dreams.  His dad said that painting with the microscopic brush under a magnifying glass had made him go half-blind, but he was sure the judges would appreciate the detail.  Brandon’s mother could not have been more proud.

When the awards were announced, and the project was given only a pedantic Honorable Mention, Brandon felt bad for his father.  Other parents looked at him and his shabby award ribbon with a resigned sympathy that seemed a little more like pity.  When he thought about it later, he had to conclude that their reaction was probably because of how his parents had cornered and loudly berated poor Miss Van Slyke.  Later she would give Brandon a hastily-printed Special Certificate for “Superior Craftsmanship” and in pressing it into his hands, seemed happy to be rid of him.  His dad hung it on Brandon’s bedroom wall, near the Sikorsky, which was strung from the ceiling with lengths of the translucent fishing line.  

That helicopter hovered unfailingly over his shoulder, always vigilant, ever-poised, seeming ready to unspool its umbilical, to hook onto his backpack strap and whisk him safely over the precipice of any impending stumble.  The Science Fair wasn’t the first time his parents had swooped in to kick up dust, or hooked-on to hoist him over an obstacle.  His father had been threatened with a lawsuit over his reaction to a blown Little League call that he could not let go.  His mother had found her way into every classroom as the tireless Volunteer Helper Mom, a position she created for herself when his Kindergarten teacher failed to nurture Brandon’s finger-painting gift, and had maintained each successive year by simply showing up with him at school daily and not leaving until the 3 PM bell.  Though not uncharacteristic, the Science Fair was when he first noticed the depths of their ostensible consumption.  He started wondering if other kids, like Daniel Stenbock, also felt the cool of an ever-present shadow hovering overhead.

A few months after the Science Fair, Brandon and his mom walked together into the schoolyard one morning.  “So I’ll be starting high school soon,” he said to her tentatively.  “I’ve been thinking maybe I should start getting ready.”   She said nothing, and this encouraged him.  “Maybe do a little more on my own.  You know?  To get ready…” 

His mother stopped next to the baseball backstop, turning as kids milled around them.  Her look was serene, but cautious, as if she had expected this, and had rehearsed an answer.  “You might think your dad and I are a little too hands on,” she began with a deep breath.  “But raising a child, especially one as exceptional as you are, is a sacred responsibility.  We signed up to do nothing less than our very best.  And how you turn out is a reflection to the whole world of our effort.  So maybe we try a little harder than others to do our very best.”

The din of adolescent chatter filled Brandon’s ears as he looked around at kids gamboling and slouching, screaming and whispering, strutting and shrinking, all unfettered, unsupervised, he the only one with a Helper Mom.  “Well, some of the other kids…” he stammered.  “Their parents aren’t as…I mean they don’t…”

He felt himself rising, a curious lightness tickling his knees and spiraling through his chest, as if flaps had deployed to thrust him skyward.  His mother smiled knowingly.  “Other parents don’t love their children the same way we love ours,” she chided.

It was only her hand that she placed gently on his shoulder, but it felt like the tubular steel of the Sikorsky’s landing skids crushing down.  “Someday, Brandon,” she said, “you’ll fly away.  But until then, you’re our responsibility.”  A soccer ball whizzed crazily toward them.  His mother deftly stepped in front of him, taking the ball’s blow on the shoulder.  Brandon looked into the schoolyard to see Daniel Stenbock smirking.  The idiot had done it on purpose.

High School, by virtue of its implicit mission to foster self-sufficiency and process pimply slackers into revenue-generating citizens, provided Brandon a little freedom.  Though he had to recite to them each day’s activities and obligations, and homework was still sometimes a group endeavor, he was often able to walk alone, in sunlight, without a looming shadow overhead.  Coincidentally, he noticed that the pitch of the Sikorsky model strung from his bedroom ceiling seemed different, perhaps nudged when his mother dusted it.  Instead of hovering, the nose now pointed up, as if ascending.  In his first week he signed up for the Cross Country team, and decided to give Band a try.

He had played the trombone before, sucking horribly, but had been encouraged to keep flailing away by teachers who needed extra bodies.  He sat with the other freshmen, their nervous chatter filling the noisy auditorium, waiting for tryouts to begin.  A few seniors huddled with Mr. Schulnick, the Director, ignoring the sweating noobs.  The room hushed when a long-legged girl streaming long, radiant hair swept in with an electrifying white-toothed smile.  The other seniors melted as she flitted among them, kissing each on the cheek, squeezing shoulders, pressing her chest into theirs.  This was Vanessa Rivington; she had pulled off the Triple Crown of secondary education performing arts: Student Band Director, Show Choir, and the lead in Oklahoma!  Even a clod like Brandon knew the story.

 “I’m super-excited!” Vanessa beamed at the freshmen.  “Our amazing director, Mr. Schulnick, and I, your Student Director, will evaluate each of you individually.  Don’t be nervous!  Be awesome!”

 Brandon’s audition sounded like a castrated harp seal with flatulence being assaulted.

“Awesome,” mumbled Vanessa, but it did not seem to please her.

“We might try you in percussion,” grimaced Mr. Schulnick.  “Ever played the tambourine?”

“Way to go Bran-douche,” sneered Daniel Stenbock.

It was rare for his father to leave work early, but when Brandon’s mother called after the audition he appeared, grim-faced and resolute.  His father dialed a number he had recently programmed into his cell, and Brandon overheard his half of the call:  “I’d like to speak to Mr. Schulnick please…Oh, he’s left for the day?  I’ll speak to the Principal then…yes, it’s urgent.” 

They emerged from the Principal’s office after about an hour the next day, his father shaking hands with Mr. Schulnick, who looked unnerved, perspiration rolling from his balding scalp.  His mother beamed.  “We’re going to try some private lessons,” Mr. Schulnick informed Brandon, sounding as if he was convincing himself both that this was a fantastic idea and that he was elated.

Brandon wouldn’t have really minded switching to the tambourine, but was happy to see his parents satisfied, so dutifully showed up for the lesson.  When he saw that it was Vanessa Rivington who would conduct it, his guts liquefied, and it was only a question of which orifice would falter first. 

“Ready for your lesson?” she asked, patting the empty chair beside her.  “It’s Brandon, right?”

He nodded as he sat, his throat suddenly parched.   

Vanessa’s abundant hair swayed as she reached for a sheet of music on the stand before them, sparks dancing from her polished nails.  Brandon had to look away, feeling scorched by the senior’s beauty and regal bearing.  Girls his age wore makeup, but they were all Kool-Aid lips and garish rouged-up puppet cheeks compared to Vanessa’s mature, artful, enchanting face.  Her eyes were round and expectant, dark caramel candy drops in a rosy shadow sliced by the lithe curves of raven lashes.  Paralysis from the first of three familiar narcotics stung and wracked him.  He fought to stay lucid as Vanessa’s plump lips announced their first practice piece as “When the Saints Go Marching In,” thready panic making his trombone impossible to lift.  Finally the third drug, barbiturate calm, kicked in and he could see the notes on the sheet.

“Show me what you got,” Vanessa smiled.

“Um,” she said, biting a plump lip after he had finished.  “Interesting.”   

“Terrific!” cried Brandon’s mother.  It probably shouldn’t have surprised him that she materialized, but he sat dumfounded at her stealth, and in awe of her dedication.  She must have hidden in the rafters, he thought.  “Good start, don’t you think?” she cooed to a confused Vanessa. 

Four years of largely ineffective tutoring, plus quarterly parent-teacher meetings with Mr. Schulnick, allowed Brandon to hold second chair through graduation. 

            There were nightly phone calls his first semester away at college, a running group chat used by the three of them throughout each day, and trips home every-other-weekend at his mother’s insistence so that she could do his laundry.  But on his own, he also experienced freedom again, a soaring, unfettered happiness at limitless possibilities that at times felt like he had always imagined flying would.  He bought a pair of knock-off Ray-Bans at the Student Union, and considered growing a moustache as virile as the rescue chopper pilot figurine, though he could manage little more than a scraggly, late-pubescent dirty chestnut fuzz. 

            Both his parents were as interested in his grades as they had always been, his mother reminding him of assignments that were due, and making sure he studied, his father proofreading and offering helpful re-writes of his essays.  His dad also seemed especially interested in whether he was making friends, or attending parties, while his mom often asked cloyingly if he was meeting girls.   

Kaylee had long, ruler-straight hair, and it brushed his cheek when she sat down in the seat beside him in the lecture hall one day.  She smiled and asked if he had last week’s lecture notes.  Brandon heard himself answer that he did, but his voice sounded to him like a surreal, dragged-out echoing yelp, as if coming off of a slow, warped LP amplified ghoulishly through a tin pail.   She put long, slender fingers capped by flawless flame-red fingernails to her sternum and introduced herself, then did this magical fluttering trick with her eyelids and lashes.  Brandon felt his heart inflate and collapse in an instant, becoming a shriveled pit that plummeted into his gut with alacrity.  Kaylee asked shyly to borrow his notes.  Had she asked for a kidney, he could not have agreed more readily. 

He said he would e-mail her, lying that he had typed the notes up already, but had forgotten his laptop.  In truth, he wanted to conceal all his flaws from her, poor penmanship among them.  That night he created a masterpiece – typing, spell-checking, re-reading, editing, and even supplementing with extra nuggets from the textbook.  He e-mailed her the file, and dreamed of a reply. 

Brandon spent most of that week thinking about Kaylee – her smile, her hair, those fluttering eyes.  She was arguably gorgeous, but neither Prom Queen perfect nor Pom Squad plastic.  She had a fresh, natural look with a preference for crumpled flannel, suggesting a genuineness to Brandon, and that perhaps she liked the outdoors.  And maybe she, like him, gravitated to books and science, and for their first date they could hike a well-lighted, not-creepy trail, settling to rest at its end on verdant grass to talk of the cosmos.  Their eventual wedding would almost surely be an outdoor one.

He lost his nerve when she found him in class the next week and thanked him with a diffident smile.  Agonizingly, he could do no better than mumbling “no problem” to the floor.  After that, he never seemed to score a seat next to her, and despite his willingness, Kaylee never again sought his notes (with sweaty horror one night, he conjectured that she had found them insipid, indecipherable).  He thought of her constantly.

Just before Thanksgiving he spotted her on the Quad.  She strode with feminine grace, swishing hair behind her that must have smelled of honeysuckle and promise.  Long legs carried her to him against the stately backdrop of academic brick and limestone plus autumn’s full splendor of scarlet, yellow, and orange leaves, the sun ladling out the last embers of its golden light.  With a strength he did not recognize, Brandon set his feet on the quad’s brick.  “Hey Kaylee,” he said, trembling.

She had earbuds in and gazed straight ahead, stumbling and pausing finally at the shadow looming in her path.  “Hey…you,” she said cautiously, seeming a bit unpleased.  Brandon stood shot-through again with the empty helplessness and rabid panic of that old three-narcotic cocktail, fumbling desperately for the synthetic, iced calm to kick in, but it was too late.  Kaylee replaced her earbuds and kept walking.   

Brandon’s mother was intrigued that Thanksgiving when she found out about Kaylee, but vexed that the girl seemed, in her estimation, shallow.  “She sounds like trouble,” his mother said.  “Thinks she’s better than you.  Well, let me tell you, there is no one better than you!”

In retrospect, it should not have surprised him that his mother insisted on staying overnight after she drove him back to college that Sunday.  She got a hotel room off campus and stood waiting outside his dorm that Monday morning.  It was early, a chilly gray day, late-autumn frost hoary on the grass, kids shuffling by, still half-asleep, hunched under backpacks and the weight of impending Finals.  “Let’s find this girl of yours,” his mother said.  Brandon’s stomach filled with both hope and dread, confounded by both the mortifying thrill of getting close to Kaylee, and also the nut-shriveling terror of what his mother might say.  She seemed to drag him on a translucent line toward the center of campus.  “As long as I’m here, I need to speak to one of your professors, too,” his mother said.  “That jerk who’s giving you a hard time in Sociology.”

It was the ruler-straight hair that he spotted from a distance.  Kaylee stood with a group of girls outside the Math building, lush, shiny hair spilling over a hoodie.  Brandon saw her laugh at something one of the others had said.  Turning, she looked right at him with a happy smile that seemed meant, somehow, for him.  That was when he knew for sure that he was in love with her.

He remembered his mother.

“It’s ok.  I don’t think you need to…” he stammered.  But she had already made off toward the group.  “Mom, you don’t even know who she is!”

“I saw the way you looked at that one,” she said, pointing.  “I know which one.  I know her type.”

He was unsure whether following his mother would make him look even more pathetic than he already felt, so hung back, consumed by both withering shame and an impossible hope that whatever was said might somehow work.  He watched his mother walk up to the group and beckon Kaylee aside.

Kaylee stepped away from the circle with a befuddled, but sunny smile.  Brandon could only see his mother’s head bobbing and hands dancing; Kaylee faced him, appearing to listen with the earnest interest and kind helpfulness of one asked if perchance she had seen a lost dog recently.  Gradually, Kaylee’s face melted to confusion, eyes narrowing, lips falling open.

Brandon strained to hear, edging closer.  There was a moment of quiet as Kaylee’s face went blank.  “I’m sorry, I don’t think I even know anyone named Brandon,” he heard her say.

A flash of sick heat ran through him as he became intently aware that he stood alone. 

His mother became more animated, even pointing with accusing zeal at the girl.  Brandon watched Kaylee’s face dissolve from puzzlement to concern, then quickly to alarm, clicking through emotions like the channels on a TV being changed by an impatient child.  She shrank back as Brandon’s mother intensified her harangue.  Kaylee’s darting eyes caught his just before the clutch of friends closed protectively around her, and instead of a bewitching flutter he registered a sour conflation of recognition, pity, and fear in them. 

He wished he could run away, wished the ground would open and swallow him, but he knew that at some point he would have to retreat across campus, towed behind his mother.  An awestruck crowd was beginning to gather, some swiveling their heads from his ranting parent to him.  Among them he spotted Daniel Stenbock, apparently just smart enough to get into college, and looking delighted to exhort the crowd.  Kaylee’s friends bunched around her tightly, a few of the braver ones shouting back at his mother, but this just seemed to enrage her more.  Her hands waved and chopped above her head as she cursed them, whirling like the blades of the old Sikorsky.  Brandon stood clutching the strap of his backpack, his only wretched hope that the trusty old umbilical would descend from the sky to hook onto him, whisking him away once again.

Tim Jones is a fiction writer living in Northern California. His proudest achievement is helping to raise two children, now college-age, without hovering too much. This story was inspired by parents he met along the way, who probably had good intentions, but may have tried a little too hard.

Nobody will tell you
How much it hurts at first
And then keeps on hurting
Until you are amazed
That this is how much you can bear;
Nobody will tell you
How hard it will be to speak
As if every topic under the sun
Could be spoken of but that one
How it will hang like a stone in behind your unfamiliar breasts;
Nobody tells you how the years fly by
When you live inside your own head
And how each and every misplaced joke
And every laugh will cut you
With the ease of a sharpened bread knife;
Nobody will tell you
That the last time you will be loved
As you yearn to be loved
Is when you are held in your mother’s arms
Over Christmas break
And nobody will tell you
That you’re the one who has to love now;
Nobody will tell you
How surprised you will be
At how strong you will be one day
When all this is over
But not really
And how a butterfly hatching from a caterpillar
Couldn’t compare to faith can hatch from a human mind;
Because if anyone had told you
Then you wouldn’t have done it at all

Linda Rhinehart, 31, is an editor and amateur writer and poet who has lived in the United States, Wales and Switzerland. She enjoys cats.

Roberta decided to come into the coffee shop and harass Harold again. She ordered a pot of chai rooibos and took a seat at the next table.  Harold ignored her as best as he could by looking down at the keys of his computer, which made him appear hard at work.  

            “How’s the next Nobel Prize winner?” Roberta leaned over and whispered to Harold. 

            Harold looked up angrily.  He hated Roberta’s cheap sarcasm.  She was his landlord, rich as hell, drives the most expensive vehicle while raising his rent at every opportunity.  She was an elitist snob who only read books on the New York Times bestseller list and believed that only a small number of brilliant people were capable of writing good books.

            “Oh, sorry, Harold.  I don’t want to interrupt the next great American novelist,” and put her hand over her mouth to cover a tittering laugh.

            A few months ago, Harold allowed Roberta to read one of his stories. That was undoubtedly a mistake. She went through every sentence with a fine-toothed comb and pointed out several questionable spelling and grammatical errors. She thought that the plot was weak, and the story’s premise had been done too many times before.  There was not one thing she liked.

            “Roberta!” the barista called, “Your chai rooibos is ready!”

            Roberta took the tea back to the table and decided that it needed a little more sweetening. She squeezed the brown bear until it squirted honey and made a loud, farting sound that she had hoped would annoy Harold. 

            Roberta thought that Harold should give up his foolish charade and stop acting as if he were an intriguing mystery writer, a la Raymond Chandler, by wearing a trench coat and a fedora as if it ever rains in Santa Barbara.

            At fifty-two, Roberta inherited a vast fortune from her father, who owned a professional Lacrosse team, and flaunts her wealth with lavish clothing and high-end automobiles. She had shoulder-length over-bleached hair, a painfully skinny figure, and a tight face from all the Botox treatments.  She may not be the youngest and prettiest woman in Santa Barbara, but she sure as hell was the richest.

            She had been Harold’s landlord in the Mesa for the last five years. He once was a successful plumber who had his own business. He dreamt of becoming a fiction writer since his early days as a plumbing apprentice.  His father, who was also a plumber, discouraged the idea of Harold becoming a novelist and persuaded him to pursue a more practical path.  At fifty-seven, Harold decided to retire from his business, rent an apartment on a hill overlooking the ocean, and live off of his modest savings.

            “Why don’t you try something that you’d be good at Harold, like fixing a clogged toilet?  You can help people more with your drain openers than you could with the keys of a computer.”

            Even though Roberta was well-read and collected magnificent works of art, she didn’t have a creative bone in her body. She was entirely materialistic—only concerned with what type of car you drove, where you lived, and whether you were a success or not.

            “Pretty soon you’ll run out of money, Harold, and then what are you going to do? You’ll be a pauper or perhaps become one of those homeless people who live in a tent under a bridge.”

            Harold ignored Roberta and scrolled down his e-mails, reviewing all the rejection notices he received from the past month—Atlantic, New Yorker, Antioch Review, and The Paris Review, among other notable literary journals.  He tried to be positive about all of his rejections but wished that he knew how to break into the world of published writers. The editors wrote back the same line: We are sorry that your story doesn’t fit our needs and hope that you’ll find a home for the work elsewhere.

            He drank his cappuccino while telling himself not to be discouraged; rejections are not failure. Not trying is failure.  He believed that all writers go through hard times; even the great ones like William Faulkner and Stephen King have had numerous rejections along the way.  

            He looked up at Roberta, who was smiling at him in such a condescending way that it made his stomach churn.  He had thoughts of strangulating her with one of her imported silk scarfs, stuffing her into the trunk of her metallic blue Bentley, and driving it off a cliff somewhere in Lompoc, thus ending the evil injustice that she represented to the world. 

            “When the day finally arrives when I’m successful, Roberta, you’re going to feel sorry that you mocked me when I was struggling. You’re going to feel awful that you weren’t supportive.”

            “Does that mean you won’t autograph your bestseller for me?” Roberta said with a sly grin.

            “Nor will I give you a free copy or mention your name in the acknowledgments. Why can’t you ever be positive for once? Why can’t you give me some helpful suggestions on how to get published instead of berating my work?”

             “Harold, don’t be naive.  Everyone doesn’t have a chance to do great things, and as far as you, like it or not, you don’t have the talent to become a successful writer.  I’m not one of those people who will sugarcoat the truth, Harold. I’m telling you for your own good.” 

            “I not only have talent, Roberta, but determination. I work on my craft every day and, although I’m not a Hemingway or a Faulkner yet—maybe, just maybe, I’ll get there one day.”

            “Harold, you’re one helluva dreamer.  No matter how hard you try, my deluded tenant, you’re not going to be another William Faulkner.  And from what I see, you’re not even going to be a mediocre writer. You sit around and contemplate your navel between sips of cappuccino while fantasizing about all the admiration you’ll get once you win the Nobel.”

            “You may not think I’m working, Roberta, but a lot is going on up here,” and he tapped the top of his head.  “I’m working on a great story for the New Yorker as we speak. It’s a humorous, inspirational piece with a lot of bite.”

            “Yeah, what is it called?”

            “Leaky Faucet,” said Harold.  “I write what I know.”

            It took much strength for Roberta to keep from bursting out in laughter.

            “That’s an interesting title,” she said while pulling back her bleached hair and tying it with a black scrunchie.

            “It’s based on a true story, Roberta. It’s about a gritty Philadelphia plumber who quits his profession to write poetry.  He’s an intelligent and sensitive man despite having a blue color job and a less than desirable circle of friends. Slowly, through his poetry, he unveils his hidden genius to the world and gets rid of his snakes and plungers for metaphors and meter.”

            “Sounds like a real winner,” Roberta said sarcastically, nearly choking on her chai rooibos.

            “Never mind,” said a furious Harold, and he got up from his chair to get another cappuccino.

            “No matter what I tell you, you’re going to think it’s a lousy idea.”

            Harold spent as long as he could, chatting with a flakey barista about a recent Bob Dylan concert he attended at the Santa Barbara Bowl, hoping that Roberta would get the message that he wasn’t interested in any more of her put downs.

            Roberta stayed for another thirty minutes and eventually got tired of humiliating Harold.  When Harold did look up from his computer, it was to stare onto State Street, watching the tourists walk by and wondering about different ways he could end Roberta’s life.  He could send her a letter bomb, light her house on fire, or put arsenic in her chai rooibos. Harold sat distracted with a pencil to his jaw, feeling angry with himself for sharing his story, Leaky Faucet, with someone who didn’t appreciate his talents.  Because of Roberta, he felt like crap about his writing and couldn’t concentrate. 

            “When you decide to give up that pipe dream of yours,” Roberta said, pointing to his computer, “give me a ring.  Quite a few hot water heaters in my apartments need to be replaced.”

            Harold’s anger burned like a furnace. “Not on your life, Roberta. I’d rather dance with a saber-toothed tiger than practice plumbing again.”

            “Oh, well.  I tried to save you,” said Roberta, picking up her Gucci bag and making annoying clomping sounds with her Prada heels as she left the coffee house. 

            A month later, Roberta would mysteriously disappear.  She had gone to New York for a few days to visit a friend and never returned. Her sister had called the police, who questioned Harold not too long after.

            “When was the last time you saw Roberta Westin?” asked the detective who vaguely resembled the old TV detective, Columbo.

            “At the Coffee Cup on a Wednesday afternoon, about four weeks ago.  She was drinking tea and not acting any different than normal.”

            “Did she tell you anything that could help us locate her whereabouts?”

            Harold couldn’t help but smile at her disappearance and secretly hoped that she had a particularly gruesome demise.  “No, officer.  She didn’t talk about going anywhere.  We just chatted about my writing.”

            “Thank you, Mr. Blevis.  I think that will be all.  Sorry to inconvenience you.”

            At the request of her sister, who strongly suspected Harold of foul play, the detective returned two weeks later and questioned Harold again.

            “I’m sorry to bother you, Mr. Blevis, but are you sure you don’t know anything else to add about Ms. Westin’s whereabouts?”

            “No, sir.  I’m afraid I don’t.”

            “What was your relationship with Ms. Westin?”

            “I was her tenant.”

            “Did you have any arguments with her or resent about anything that she had said to you, like say, your alleged writing career?”

            “No, sir.  She made some good suggestions.  I thought that she was trying to be helpful.”

            “How was your owner-tenant relationship?”

            “Fine. I paid the rent on time and never complained. She didn’t have any problems with me as far as I know.”

            “You have no resentment about her raising the rent periodically?”

            “I don’t like it, but I understand it’s a business.”

            “Mr. Blevis, Roberta’s sister said that the two of you had major conflicts over your story ideas in the past?”

            “Sure, we disagreed.  But I understood where she was coming from. Roberta has strong opinions and felt that I should quit writing novels and go back to a career as a plumber.”

            “Do you have any thoughts of harming her for some of those strong opinions?” 

            “No, detective–certainly not. I have no ill feelings toward her, if that’s what you’re implying?”

            About six months later, Harold received a letter in the mail announcing that his rent would be increased by over twenty-five percent, and, at the bottom of the typed page, was Roberta Westin’s signature.  When he realized that nothing tragic had happened to her and that she was still alive, Harold felt an overwhelming sense of disappointment. 

Mark Tulin is a former therapist from California. He has two poetry books, Magical Yogis and Awkward Grace, and The Asthmatic Kid and Other Stories due out in August of 2020. You can follow Mark at Crow On The Wire.

All Bee had read was the subject line, and already she felt saliva pooling in the declivities of her mouth. In the body of the email he’d pasted a photo of his back yard set up for an old party, and below it were a few words about finally coming together, with social distance of course. Clearly written to entice, there was also a list of probable menu items, the fantasy of which, after months peering in the window of her favorite still-shuttered breakfast spot, had taken on the dimensions of the divine.

At once she could almost see the champagne flutes spitting with pulpy mimosas, could almost taste the ‘patatas bravas with a rosemary tomato relish and poached eggs,’ the ‘bread pudding French toast made with homemade challah,’ and the ‘dark chocolate banana cannoli.’ The guy throwing this thing was a chef, after all. A chef with time on his hands. She didn’t know much else about him except that his last restaurant had closed before the pandemic, and that he was recently divorced at about forty to her thirty. She wasn’t interested, but they had a couple of mutual friends.   

Picturing that mimosa must have made her nearly drunk already, for somehow she convinced herself that the whole thing would present minimal risk. And the weekend was going to be hot, and she’d been so good, had done everything she was supposed to: bringing groceries to an elderly neighbor, checking in on the Lord-of-the-Flies-turned kids she’d tutored on the side of her also-shuttered retail gig at Couture Clash clothing boutique downtown, online dating with zero luck and as many actual dates, and filling virtual tip jars for local bartenders, servers and haircutters with the dregs of her unemployment checks.

Besides, her roommate Cammy was breaking their pact quite openly now. At first she’d been sneaking around, coming home at night as though she was just at work, which for her had stayed open, but she must have fallen asleep at her new boy toy’s place one evening. Then she came clean: he had six roommates, they were bros, but he was sweet. Still, the exposure was significant.

There was also this flirty smoking thing Cammy had been up to with their newly-bearded neighbor on their stoop. They’d sit there for hours, fewer and fewer feet apart these days, smoke swirling in and out of their mouths, making visible the air, she thought, like the pink stuff you have to drink before a CT scan. You’d think it would be alarming seeing air do that, but its daily effect was one of etching away at the very possibility of social distance, at least with this roommate in this cramped city. For if she asked them to move, they’d just be putting someone else at risk.

If he isn’t careful, I’ll just bounce, she told herself, thinking again of the host. But as an accomplished chef, he probably would be. Of their mutual friends, Serena was her closest, but she just had a baby. Deidre would be there though. She didn’t see Deidre that often, but Deidre was fun. The night they met, a couple of years ago now, had bonded them forever. They’d been introduced at a show through Serena, and a handful of hours later they were all swimming naked in the ocean, untouched by the cold, as the sky began to glow. Anyway, Deidre had already replied to the email, ending with a string of party-hat emojis and her signature clinking-bottles emoji. A green light and a trigger if there ever was one.

***

The morning of, she felt like she was twenty-two again, tiptoeing out to buy champagne and fresh OJ on her way somewhere she knew she shouldn’t go. Cammy was still asleep, but even if she’d been up, making messes and shuffling around in her ridiculous balloon-size Hello Kitty slippers, Bee wouldn’t have said a word.

Masked the entire walk, she passed dozens of boarded-up businesses and navigated at least as many homeless encampments, with gloves and masks littering the streets. Seeing it like this month after month, after a partial reopening then shutting down again, her heart broke for the city, but also, more recently, two thousand miles from her mother, for her own broken place in it. Yet here she was in a tank top and a pair of stretchy jeans she hadn’t worn in months, toting a bottle of champagne she hoped wouldn’t be bubbly in the extreme. She felt her privilege in every exposed inch of her pale skin, even if her unemployment would run out soon, even if she didn’t have a fallback plan. She’d called her mother yesterday to vent about things, but she hadn’t picked up. Her mother was practically living in her backyard garden these days. And when she wasn’t gardening, she was sewing masks with prints of various flowers. In fact, the very mask Bee had on was one her mother had sewn with a print of red and yellow poppies. A splash of color for this city of cement and glass and now quite a lot of plywood too.

There was a standing offer to come live with her mother in her quiet widowed life, which was a kind of fallback plan, she admitted, but it wasn’t much of one, in a town she barely knew. Though her heart did swell whenever she saw pictures of that garden her mother had begun from scratch when she moved into her little cottage after Dad died.

Nearing the four-unit building, she was just feeling for her hand sanitizer when she saw the garage was open. It was below street level, so the descent was dark, but at the back of the cobwebbed space a purple balloon hung from a nail above a backlit door. She walked toward it, past three sedans and an oddly muddy SUV, then took three deep breaths like she was readying her lungs for a free dive. Just Brunch she repeated, elbowing open the door.

***

The first face she saw was the host. Daniel was his name. He was sweaty as he lifted his glass of what appeared to be rosé. ‘Bee! You found us,’ he shouted, smiling gamely under a partial canopy of giant ferns. It was the same smile he’d given her the first time they’d met, except now he was divorced. In the back of her mind she knew this could get complicated, even as she swooned over the long picnic table covered with bagels, lox, capers, fruit, bacon, the patatas bravas with poached eggs, his bread pudding French toast, a large French press, and a sort of meringue cake he’d called a ‘pavlova fruits rouges’ with a sprig of mint on top. Oh, and there were the cannoli beside a trio of sunflowers in a vase.

She held up the champagne as she neared the group. Deidre had turned and raised her glass too. Another guy, introduced as Iz, smiled rather sheepishly from the end. None of them had masks on. Quickly she pulled hers off too, but less out of self-consciousness for being the only person with one on, than as a kind of saying yes to finally seeing smiling faces with them off. For at once this warm space seemed the perfect sanctuary from the new way of things, as though the past had a locality inhabitable and complete. Deidre even stood with crow’s feet at her eyes, and wrapped her in an epic chest-compressing hug, which simultaneously dazzled her senses with the first real embrace she’d received in way too long, while it sent through her electric eels of alarm.

She opened the champagne quickly for an excuse to stand back and away. Immediately it bubbled over, to the delight and laughter of the group. And for the next hour the four of them clinked glasses, savored bites, and got loud in the way people cannot resist when a collective buzz takes over—and more so when no one has had much occasion to drink collectively in a while. There was a peculiar kind of release as well, as if the whole thing was over now that everyone was good and tipsy. And they were sweet people, each of them. They had joy in them, was the word that came to mind. And to be here like this was joyous after inhabiting such sadness and uncertainty for so long.

And the pandemic didn’t even come up. They talked at length about food, going around the table with stories of delicious meals that stuck out in their memories. Daniel, who said to call him Dan, went into elaborate detail about an evening of pintxos in San Sebastian—particularly a plate of freshly foraged horns of plenty, saffron milk caps, and St. George’s mushrooms sautéed in herbs and arranged around a single uncooked red-orange yolk that, as the sky glowed the same color over the azure bay, had come to rank in the top ten highlights of his life. She’d known he’d run a high-end restaurant, but she hadn’t known until today what esteem it had risen to, almost-but-not-quite garnering a Michelin tire, as he called it. ‘Because tires float like a life preserver when associated with your name,’ he said. ‘Even when the economy pulls others down.’

She was about to ask him his plans in this scary new world, but he continued on enchantingly about the dishes they used to produce, relying solely on two farms and ranches less than a day’s drive away. She felt herself beginning to be at least mildly pulled to him, his earnest grin, sharp nose, with strong hands and plucky forearms that looked like they could acquit themselves as well outside the kitchen as in. At some point, however, as they laughed after a story of calamitous failure during the ambassador to Andorra’s visit to his last restaurant, she glanced up at some movement in a neighbor’s window and saw a woman scowling down, her young child climbing precariously onto the sill to see as well, until she picked him up and spun around, away. Their bubble had been pierced. Dan had seen it too. ‘Oh, she’s always a pill,’ he said. ‘As if I didn’t endure two years of that kid wailing.’

***

The conversation then swung to children, of whom Dan had one, a fourteen-year-old boy who was staying with his ex-wife. Deidre said her daughter was on a pot farm up north. She’d just come back from up there herself after a few months. This wasn’t a surprise to Bee; Deidre had been there before. Looking at her though, it was easy to forget that Deidre had a grown daughter, as she was still in her early forties and did things like live on pot farms and swim naked in the ocean. When they first met, Deidre’s stories of parenthood made Bee feel young and free by comparison, but now, alone in this new world and still living with Cammy (ugh) as she aged like a barreled cheese, something vital seemed to be missing from her life.

‘Which reminds me,’ Deidre pulled out of her cloth bag a zip-lock with a single massive purple bud and a sizable tapered joint inside. ‘Any takers?’

As she fired up the joint, the twisted paper end flared up, and Bee felt her eyes getting big at the possible exposure from sharing such a thing. ‘Oh, and maybe more appropriate to brunch I have these little butter cookies.’ Deidre then opened another zip-lock and slid them out onto a plate. Bee did take one of those. They looked innocent enough, though she knew whatever Deidre made would pack a punch.

Afterward, she held up the plate to Iz, whose face was now a little flushed, though he’d been relatively subdued compared to the rest of them. He declined, preferring the joint, and reached across the table. As he did so, he caught her eyes lingering on him a bit more than was polite (where were her manners, she’d just been away from people for so long!), and cleared his throat in that way, she thought, that people who are disinclined to share much that is very personal, work themselves up to do so. But Dan cut in. ‘Your daughter is in India still, right?’

Iz sighed, looking at the joint without taking a puff. ‘Honestly, I can’t keep track anymore.’

‘Those artist types,’ Dan said with a wink, giving Deidre a quick look. If he was playing matchmaker between Deidre and Iz, it was working, for Bee had seen them making eyes at each other already. Maybe he was hoping they’d pair off.

Now he turned to Bee. ‘Did I tell you Iz is an amazing woodworker? His gallery show last year was really some of the most sensual sculpture I’ve ever seen.’

She gave an impressed look, but she was more concerned with how it had been having his daughter so far away right now.

‘You should tell her about where you get the wood,’ Dan continued to Iz. ‘You’ve been up there, what, six or eight months now?”

‘Well, it’s hard to leave,’ Iz said shyly. ‘It’s a pretty cool place.’

‘Pretty cool?’ Dan said. ‘It’s incredible.’

‘Why don’t you tell her about it,’ Iz said, finally taking a puff. He blew the smoke up, away from the table, then waved the excess with his hand. Bee couldn’t help but think of Cammy and her neighbor and the smoke that filled her lungs whether she wanted it to or not. But this smoke felt different, enveloping her in some other reality.

‘Okay,’ Dan smiled. ‘Well it’s over fifty acres with a house, a studio, a large duck pond, a vegetable garden, and a fruit orchard. Iz has taken care of it for years, and in exchange he’s gotten to hew fallen redwood and oak trees and walnut, right?’

Iz nodded, then spoke a bit about not taking from the forest but harvesting what it gives, and finding sculpture there, waiting. ‘The owner was one of these survivalists,’ he said. ‘So he had this property up near Fort Gregg just in case, with everything set up. But he died a year ago.’

‘And he left it to you,’ Dan said, flashing a look to Bee.

‘He did,’ Iz said. ‘It’s getting sorted out. Just slowly.’

‘Lawyers,’ Deidre huffed. ‘If I never meet another one in my life, maybe I can forget they ever existed.’ Bee remembered that Deidre once said her ex-husband was a lawyer as she went on about how far she’d felt from lawyers and lawyering up north in the redwoods and the blackberries just beginning to redden. She then described an experience on a kayak in a nearby river with her daughter recently. ‘It was an estuary, really,’ she said. ‘The longest undeveloped estuary in the state. You start by the ocean as the tide is coming up and you follow a light current on a finger of salt water that gets narrower and narrower. What paradise it was with the cypress and their hanging moss above a lone elephant seal on the bank and baby otters playing in the reeds, then dipping into a stand of towering redwoods with walls of blackberries in the clearings. Then, farther up, under these huge fluffy cottonwood, we saw the sweetest family of ducks among purple iris, wild ginger and leopard lily. But the best part was that there wasn’t a human soul around.’

‘Wait,’ Bee said suddenly. She’d been lulled by Deidre, could listen to her for hours, but had these two really managed to be away from the city for most of the pandemic? ‘So you both have been up north for months until… when?’

‘Actually, I just drove down early this morning,’ Iz said.

‘Me too,’ Deidre said, glancing at Dan.

‘Isn’t it sad to be in the city now, with all the masks and things closed?’ Bee asked, fascinated to think about these two people possibly just seeing the effects of the pandemic for the first time. Maybe that’s what the feeling had been about when she came into this little garden, the feeling almost of having gone back in time.

‘This city’s fucked,’ Dan said. ‘The lines, the tenuous food systems, the businesses gone under, but rents are still never gonna drop enough for real people to afford it.’

‘I’m not coming back,’ Iz said. ‘I can’t.’

‘Me neither,’ Deidre said. ‘It’s felt so good to be disconnected these past months. To just unplug and live simply.’

The three of them were nodding at each other, but Bee felt an awkwardness in the silence.

‘Do you ever think about getting out of here, Bee?’ Dan finally asked.

‘Sure,’ she said, but in truth she didn’t know where she’d go. ‘But I mean, this has been my life, and anywhere you go right now, isn’t it kind of fucked?’

‘Not this place,’ Dan grinned.

‘You mean that property?’

‘Okay,’ he said with deep breath. ‘We didn’t know how to approach this, but I’m going to level with you. The three of us have been up there since the middle of March. It’s true that Deidre was on the pot farm, but then I introduced them.’

‘We’re in love,’ Deidre exhaled, beaming at her, then at Iz.

‘I’m sorry,’ Dan continued. ‘We just didn’t want you to feel cornered. But this property’s so amazing. We’re ready to live there for the long haul. In fact, I’ve got to be out of this place by the first.’

‘I know we haven’t talked in a while, Bee,’ Deidre chimed in again. ‘But you’d love it up there. We just want to share it. And a few weeks ago I told them about the night you and I met. About the beach and the swimming, and,’ she nodded to Dan, ‘he got the idea that you might be spontaneous enough to come with us.’

Bee felt her head beginning to swirl. ‘So all this…’ she gestured to the table.

‘An invitation,’ Dan said.

‘But,’ she began, pausing to try and wrap her head around this. ‘Weren’t you worried about the virus? Coming here, hugging me and everything?’

‘It was a risk we were willing to take,’ Deidre said. ‘But you’re not working. You don’t have to take the bus anymore. Though I was a little worried when I saw your posts. The one thing is your roommate. She’s the risk.’

Bee thought for a moment. She had complained on social media about the smoking on the stoop, and the visits back and forth with her boy toy, knowing it was a private page. But seeing there was a hidden agenda behind this whole brunch, she couldn’t help feeling manipulated.

‘Remember that night?’ Deidre continued quickly. ‘Sharing that towel, watching the sun rise, talking about our lives? Bee, you were complaining about Cammy even then. And you’re still there? How long can you live like that?’

Deidre was right, she’d been unhappy with Cammy for a long time, but she hadn’t the faintest memory of complaining to Deidre then, to a woman she’d just met. Looking at her now, Deidre seemed almost as much a stranger as she did then. Who was this woman, really?

‘I’m so sorry we didn’t tell you right away, Bee,’ Deidre added, seeing her face sour. ‘But we wanted you to feel what it could be like with us, happy, unafraid, eating amazingly. We’re all about respect up there, without dogma or anything, and you fit the profile perfectly of what we want to create.’

‘Profile?’ Bee asked trying to maintain a polite mask while inside she was really beginning to spook.

‘I guess I don’t really mean profile. But you’re young, Bee. You can still have kids.’ Deidre glanced at the other two as Dan shook his head with a guilty look. ‘I know I’m getting way ahead of myself here,’ she scrambled, laughing uncomfortably, and shrugging Dan’s way. ‘But we thought it all out. We want to do this right, raise children close to the land, close to what’s essential, with art in their lives. You heard we each have kids already, so we see how it could be done better, away from all of–’

‘Do you have a bathroom I can use?’ Bee stood with her purse in her hand, breath quickening to panic. What were these people starting, some type of cult?

‘Of course,’ Dan said with that same look. ‘It’s the third landing, past the kitchen on your right.”

***

Without making eye contact with Deidre, she was able to fashion her lips into a smile as she made her way to the stairs, but her legs were shaky, her hands almost numb. Holding the worn wooden railing all the way up, it wasn’t until she was nearing his small peeling deck leading to his kitchen that she turned and saw the fishbowl of other apartment buildings facing a grid of slouching fences crisscrossing the interior of this block. She didn’t even have a yard to share, so seeing these made her at once envious and a little sad that such an interior was so divvied up, more fence than space, really. It also reminded her how many people surely touched this rail with neighbors packed like sardines, much like her place with Cammy. At that, she promptly lifted her hand.

Past the kitchen, she found the bathroom and scrubbed her hands. She then splashed water on her face, peering at her bloodshot eyes in the mirror. The champagne and the pot were competing in her for dominance, it seemed, along with so much else in her head. Maybe it was from being such a shut-in for so long, but for that first hour she’d felt so light, thrilled to be living like they used to, with that joy instead of constant fear and vigilance, with physical ease instead of the glitchy unease of online dating. One guy she’d met had actually sounded a little like Deidre just now, the way he seemed to be ticking down an off-camera list for the trajectory of his future life.

When she came back to the kitchen, she noticed two huge empty duffel bags and a stack of folded paper grocery bags on the floor. The counters were covered in pots and pans and cutting boards, and yet, because no one had been living here, the space still felt spare. The only sign of having raised a kid in here at all were some old stickers in the window of the open door to the porch. Outside, she could hear their voices. No one was laughing anymore.

Scanning the empty apartment, she saw Dan’s front door. She knew she could walk right out and put an end to this bizarre morning, but she couldn’t seem to move. And yet this feeling of immobility was exactly what Deidre was calling out—her willingness to hide and complain well before the pandemic came along. Suddenly it was clear how venting, on social media and off, had deflated her into a kind of torpor. In that sense, walking out now could be an act of empowerment, a way to take control of her life and set its new course. But she knew she couldn’t force Cammy out, so she’d probably have to move.

Into her hesitation came the sound of footsteps. The panic returned as she saw Dan slowly ascending the back steps with a frown. When he saw her he stopped below the landing, hands on both railings. He was about ten feet away with the open back door between them. That fishbowl flanked him on both sides, shaded by another small wooden landing above him with more stairs leading up.

‘I don’t know what she was talking about,’ he began. ‘Deidre has her own ideas, I think, maybe from her daughter being in whatever courtship she’s in. See, they’d always been so close.’

Bee felt herself nod, getting bit of vertigo seeing him beside a banister that looked quite low for his body on those rickety stairs.

‘Leaving the city for good is so freeing, I’ve discovered,” he said. “But it also brings a sense of loss. Of mortality, too, for whatever heyday of youth you had feels like its behind you. The highs seem higher, and the lows get romanticized.’ He looked at his feet. ‘That’s not a great pitch for coming with us, I know. I’m a terrible salesman, but I’m just trying to be honest. And the highs up there are something else. Seeing baby ducklings take to the pond for the first time, then watching them grow, along with the trout we stocked and the fruit on the trees—we’re just starting out, but learning to solve problems like any small farm or garden would have, and seeing things flourish—it’s unlike any feeling I’ve ever had.’

Bee flashed to her mother in her garden with a smile across her face like she’d never smiled before. Oh how she wished her Dad could’ve seen that.

‘All that fruit on the table,’ he continued more pointedly. ‘Those strawberries and nectarines on the pavlova, and more I didn’t even bring down–’ Now he motioned inside and she backed up as he dipped into the kitchen, his hand reaching toward a bowl. ‘We grew these,’ he said, holding up some blueberries. ‘I can’t believe I’ve never grown anything in my life before, anything I could eat anyway. All I did was chop things, heat things, kill them. It’s like I was living with one hand behind my back. Life was so limited here.’

‘I feel like I’ve had both hands behind my back these past months,’ she blurted, sighing.

He gave a short laugh as he leaned against his sink, fully in his element, yet seeming bewildered too. ‘Meanwhile first responders and healthcare workers have all had both their hands full,’ he said. ‘But if we can reduce density in these cities, and therefore the severity of this next wave, while putting less strain on the food system, on supply systems of all kinds, then we’re helping, we’re second responders by getting out of the way.’

She hadn’t thought of it like that. Except hadn’t there been frustration in rural communities from such an influx of new people these days? ‘I wonder how the Fort Gregg area feels about all that,’ she said.

‘Sure, there’s some moaning about people like us,’ he said. ‘But we’re really pretty self-sufficient, and we’re planning on bringing things to the farmers’ market when we’re more set up. You know, give back to the community, be a part of it.’

She considered his plan, surveying again all the effort he’d gone to. It was creepy for sure, but at the same time, in one of the most isolated moments of her life, a little endearing. ‘But why me?’ She had to ask. ‘I mean, why not throw a bigger brunch and see who’s interested?’

‘We did, Bee. We didn’t want to have too many people here space-wise, but there were two others we reached out to. And you were the only one to come. What does that say, that you were the only one to actually make the first step?’

What did that say? Still, she needed to gauge his response to something. ‘Were they both women my age?’ she asked.

‘I mean, yeah, give or take,’ he said with that guilty look again.

She thought of Deidre. This was all too weird. She needed air. She walked out onto his landing. In the row of backyards, several people were outside puttering or watering. Two girls were fighting over a hula hoop.

‘But that’s not why.’ He scrambled behind her. ‘They’re both already friends.’ But she was only half listening as she peered down at the table and saw the sunflowers gazing up. Her mother had sunflowers too, in her raised beds of squash, cherry tomatoes, climbing peas, lettuce, and mint for mint juleps. At once, an image seized her of her mother kneeling alongside. Now there was a woman in control of her life.

Peering down at the table again, she realized Deidre and Iz weren’t there anymore. But she couldn’t see the whole space. She started down the first set of five steps holding the low railing. At the turn she’d be able to see the whole yard, like that enticing photo in the email.

But frightening her nearly out of her skin were the two of them crouched low on the steps. Even as she put it together that they were only eavesdropping, her body recoiled as if attacked.

All she saw next was the table swollen with fruit, flowers, mimosas, the pavlova and the French toast she never got to try. The colors of it pinwheeled as her breath caught. Now they were the colors of her mother’s garden, with her mother smiling in it. Her arms went out, reaching, but there was only rotten wood, splinters, nothing to grab a hold of. As she floated above the space for a moment, she felt what it would be like to leave the city, the leap of it, the loss, the mortality, but also a shedding, the fresh naked power in facing whatever came next. Yet around her the city was closing like a mouth.

Just then she felt hands on her legs. She was being held by the ankles.

‘I’ve got you,’ Deidre hollered with Iz behind her. ‘Holy shit, I’ve got you.’

From Oakland, California, J.Z. Wyckoff holds an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. His work has appeared in The Santa Clara Review, Art Practical, 90ways and elsewhere, and was recently long-listed in the 2019 Fish Short Story Prize. He used to haul art around the country for museums and galleries, but now he is a tutor and advocate for homeless and highly-mobile youth. He’s also beginning to shop around his novel about a city where rising seas, the tech industry, homelessness, and autonomous vehicles all collide.

My mother’s name is Moira. Her husband is Quadrey. Their last name is Quinzical.

            My name is Quincey. I was born to Moira and Quadrey Quinzical on Friday, February thirteen, 1976. Well—actually—I was born to Quadrey Quinzical and Moira Quellentine. My parents were unmarried at the time I was birthed. Had I been born on February fourteen, the names of my parents would be Moira and Quadrey Quinzical, and Quinzical only. They aren’t devout Catholics.

            I spend a reasonable amount of time with my parents, but it could be more. Moira Seven doesn’t work on Wednesdays and Saturdays, so those days aren’t available. And the days when I must go to the store. I hate going to the store. The cashiers always give a weird eye when checking out my list, and people always take a step away from me in line as if I don’t wear deodorant. I do.

I’m not quite ready to introduce Moira Seven to my parents. Soon, hopefully. I just need the courage.

            “I’m leaving, Quincey,” Moira Seven says from the front door, wearing her purple scrubs and a pink fanny pack.

            I walk to her, and we peck each other on the lips before hugging. I could crush her bones if I want.         

“Have I ever told you that you look great in purple?” I say.

            She drops her head and blushes like an embarrassed child.

            “Every time I wear it,” she replies. “I love you to death, Honey Bunches of Oats.”

            “Promise?” I say.

            Quincey Quinzical fiddles with a gold ring while staring out the front door. He waits for Moira Gaylewood’s red PT Cruiser to drift away from the replica of his childhood home.

            He runs to the bathroom he and his girlfriend share—outside their separate bedrooms—and takes a key out of the bottom drawer on his side.

Quincey inserts the key into the basement door.

            The smell of it is never pleasant, even for biology professor Q, but the pure joy that elicits from his skin in the form of goosebumps of getting to see his parents—his dear mother!—always instantly eradicates any negative feeling he could possibly feel from something so minor as a fume. It is also quite frigid. Because of the meat freezer, of course. There is also a gun on a desk to the side.

“Do you want some food, Mommy? You’ve got to be starving! I’ll make some popcorn.”

Life is better when Moira Seven is gone and I’m with my parents. Sometimes, I think about getting rid of her so I can spend all my time with my parents.

(Pop. Pop. Pop.)

Moira Seven is my first girlfriend. I found twenty-three of them on the online dating site I used, and I went on a date with every single one of them. Well, I would have, but I stopped on Moira Number Seven.

She was Date Number Three on Day Two of my originally planned week-long dating spree. She was perfect.

(Pop, pop, pop)

I planned all my dates at the bowling alley. On that day, Moira Number Five was first at 12:00 post meridian. She was close—no question.

“If you could meet one person in history, who would it be?” Moira Five asks.

“Freud,” Quincey replies, prepping to bowl, ball centered in front of his face.

“Of course,” Moira says as Quincey releases the ball. “The greatest psychologist—scientist, if you will.”

Quincey turns with a smirk, bowling a strike.

“Of course.”

But she beat me in our second and final round of pins, and I couldn’t have that.

Moira Number Six arrived at 3:03 post meridian when she should’ve been there at 3:00. I wasn’t always particularly fond of my father—his greatest quality is that Moira Quellentine loved him—but he did offer me an important piece of advice: “Always show up at least five minutes early to your occasion, and—if you reallycare—be there fifteen minutes early.”

“Will you leave?” Quincey demands.

“But we have one more game le—”

“I can bowl for you.”

Moira Seven, however, showed up to the lanes at 5:22 post meridian… thirty-eight minutes before our date was supposed to begin.Of course, I’m a man of my word—as she is, but a woman—so we waited to start the date until the official time of 6:00.

(Pop pop pop)

During this time, I continued to hash up my skills in lane thirteen of twenty-six while she sat in a wooden chair behind the pool tables. I knew it was her because each time I laid my eyes on her, she would shrivel in her seat, and her face would convert to the color of a ripe mango.

It was a relatively silent date—the best kind. We played our two rounds of pins, her complimenting my every move, just like Mom would, while I proved to her my remarkable bowling skills. I don’t think her teeth were ever covered by her lips the entire time we played.

(Poppoppop)

I called Moira Number Eight to tell her to not bother coming to the bowling alley at our scheduled time of 9:00 post meridian. I had found my Moira.

(Popopopopopopopopop)

What struck me most deeply about Moira Seven was how closely resembled she was to my mother. Black hair that was shorter than mine; skin as pale as a vampire’s; deep, dark brown eyes that have a specific beauty that can only be seen by the ones that love them most; and a body that could probably be snapped if they wore a dress that was a size too small.

(Pop… pop… pop…)

Beauty. Pure, utter beauty.

(BEEP! BEEP! BE—)

Quincey Quinzical sits between his parents on the couch. He feeds Quadrey and Moira by forcing the popcorn down their throats. With the same hand he uses to prod the popcorn through his parents’ mouths, he eats some of the popcorn himself, licking his fingers afterward so he isn’t wasting any food.

He also feeds them Kool-Aid. It gets sticky quickly, but he makes sure to clean the mess with his shirt. He recycles the shirt back onto his body.

Quincey is playing The Shining this morning—his favorite movie. His favorite scene in The Shining is the bathroom scene with the lady in the tub. He makes his mommy cover his eyes with her hand when the nude woman arises from the tub, but he always manages to peek through the hand like shutters in a window. He has always been more interested in what the woman becomes, really.

After the movie, it is nighty-night time—Quincey’s least favorite part of the day.

After Quincy returns his parents, they pray together, and they talk about how lucky they are to still have each other. And he gives his mother a goodnight kiss.

“How was your day, Honey Bunches of Oats?” Moira Seven says—she always says—every time she enters through the doors of my home and sees me sitting on the couch.

“Fine,” I always am. “Nothing spectacular happened today,” I always continue.

“That’s great, honey!” she always ends, and then our actual conversation always begins.

“So,” she starts in a tone like one of a parent who is about to tell their child they have a surprise for them. Unfortunately, I know the surprise, and I am not fond of it. “Are you excited for tonight?”

I make my way to the kitchen to pour a glass of red wine.

“Elaborate,” I reply.

“It’s our date night, honey!”

“Oh yes, oh yes. That’s right. But don’t you have work in the morning?”

“Honey,” she drags with a hint of frustration, “you know I don’t work on Saturdays.”

“Oh yes, oh yes. That’s right.”

“Are you excited?”

“Yes, yes.”

“Yay! I’ll be getting readyyy.”

And before she goes to her room: “I love you, Quincey,” she says in the same way she always says it: like it’s the final time she’ll ever get to say it.

“I know you do, Moira.”

I smile, and she does too—teeth uncovered.

I cannot remember the last time I put on makeup. Wait! Yes, I can. It was two-hundred and fifty-five days ago—on the night I united with the love of my life, Quincey Quinzical. What a lovely day that was.

Quincey doesn’t like to go out often. I’d say that it is his biggest flaw. Not that it’s really a flaw at all. Some people just aren’t “people people”, if you know what I mean. As long as he likes me, everything is fine.

I really hope he wears that turtleneck again tonight. Not to say that he doesn’t have a nice neck.

I’m Moira, by the way! Moira Gaylewood. Sorry for jumping in on the conversation like that, all willy-nilly. I just really enjoy talking to other people. I’m a “people people”. A Leo. What can I say.

I want to go to Japan one day. I got this jar after I watched the original Godzilla movie when I was thirteen, and I’ve put a dollar in it every day to save up to go. The culture is just so fascinating! Way ahead of America, I would say. The ‘United States’ America, that is.

What am I supposed to put on first again?

Oh, this white powder is so obnoxious. It’s perfect!

I love Quincey. Just the sight of him every day after work makes my heart flutter. I truly believe we were meant to be together forever; and, I know he can be a little blunt sometimes and seem like he doesn’t care, but I really believe he feels the same way.

Ugh, I’m crying. How embarrassing!

This powder tastes horrible!

But don’t you think so, too? That he loves me?

Oh my God! Where did this unibrow come from?

Moira fumbles with everything on the desk, searching for tweezers. After failing to find any, she leaves her room for the bathroom.

Quincey is in a deep sleep. A Rubik’s cube lays on his chest, and Beauty and the Beast is playing on the box TV.

Moira digs through all the drawers on her side of the bathroom, unable to find any tweezers. She hesitates for a moment, and then scavenges through Quincey’s side—all the way down to the final drawer.

“Moira,” Quincey calls, zipping up his blue Banana Republic pants. He’s not wearing the turtleneck. “Moira?”

Quincey leaves his bedroom for the living room. Moira is nowhere to be seen.

Quincey knocks on Moira’s bedroom door. He looks around cautiously before entering. He has never been in there before.

It smells so much of lavender, it can almost be tasted. The dark purple walls are covered with flags and pennants of different countries. Above her pink bed, the Japanese flag is framed.

Quincey tiptoes through a litter of extravagant dresses toward the closet. He stops at her desk.

Makeup cases cover most of the space—along with the jar—but what catches his eye is what is on the wall above the desk. A calendar is at the top. Every date before today is marked out and has a number that signifies a countdown, and today’s date is vibrantly colored with the words “DATE NIGHT” on it. Below the calendar are pictures of men and women. There is an ‘X’ in red sharpie through each picture. All except for Quincey’s picture on the far right.

His eyes fall to a yearbook that is propped up on the corner of the desk. He snatches it and scans through the pages.

More pictures are marked out—even entire pages. The first page like this he encounters shows the girls basketball team. Most of the girls are pictured performing impressive feats, such as making a jump shot or pulling off a difficult dribble move. Moira’s picture, however, shows her taking a hard screen, and the caption below it screams, “DETERMINATION”.

The next page marked out shows a cafeteria. Moira sits in the corner by herself, eating a salad.

The last marked-out page Quincey sees is of prom night. While the king and queen, Quincy supposes, are doing their dance, Moira is pictured in the back, fallen on her rear. The people around her are silently giggling, some less obvious than others.

Quincey props the book gently in its original positioning. Then, he stands still, contemplating. A smile forms on his face before he leaves the room.

He scampers through the entire house, leaving no room unchecked. Except for one.

Then, faintly, as if the voice were coming through one of those whisper phones you made as a child, I hear a cry.

            I open the door to beauty.

My mother and father lie on the ground in their usual décor: my father in a standard, black and white tux, my dear mother in her favorite short, strawberry red dress. Moira Seven stands behind them in a white wedding dress—with a veil and everything—with her head aimed down. The desk sits to the side with its sole decoration.

“You like Japan,” I say.

            She picks up her head. Her makeup is perfect.

            “Yes,” she replies.

            “You want to go there.”

            She nods. She squats down and strokes my mother’s hair.

            “Your mother is beautiful,” she says.

            “I know.”

            “I look a little bit like her.”

            I nod.

            “What are their names?” Moira asks.

            “Quadrey and Moira.”

            I find the ring in my pocket and roll it across my fingers.

            “What a coincidence,” she mutters.

            Moira stops brushing my mother’s hair and stares at me—fatigue in her eyes.

            “Why didn’t you introduce them to me before?” she says.

            “Never found the right—”

            Her eyes release from mine and back to my mother, and she says in a voice so blunt, I think it is coming from a being within her, “Why did you never tell me?”

She stands up swiftly and walks to the desk. She picks up my silver, chrome handgun.

“Who are the people in the photos?” I say in a voice that probably isn’t mine either.

Moira whimpers. The gun dangles loosely in her hand.

“I was always the loser, Quincey. The freak. The girl who was going to grow up and own a bunch of cats.”

A violent sob escapes her mouth.

“I don’t even like cats,” she says incoherently, then inhales sharply.

“I know you don’t.”

“I know I’m weird, Quincey.”

She laughs and wipes her nose. Snot fills her forearm.

“But I think you are, too,” she finishes.

“Who are the people in the photos, Moira?”

Tears are fighting to leave her eyes. The gun dangles loosely in her hand.

“They’re my exes, alright! I’m sorry, Quincey, honey. I didn’t mean to yell at you—”

“Why are they marked out?”

She laughs—genuinely.

“None of them compare to you, Quincey!” I almost can’t understand what she is saying, she speaks so quickly. “None of them loved me like you do.”

This time, I laugh, and she laughs with me.

“You know,” I say, “I thought I wanted to kill you.” Her laugh sprouts even higher, and mine goes along with it. “But now,” I contemplate, “I want you alive.”

“Oh, it’s too late for that, Honey Bunches of Oats,” she laughs.

My stomach drops to the floor, and my mouth follows it.

“Wha-what do you mean, Moira?” I ask. I try to hide the worry in my voice.

She smiles my favorite smile. And the gun goes to her head.

“Moira, I don’t want this anymore. I—I…”

Tears finally drift down the corners of her eyes, but not too many. A new smile forms on her face—an ugly smile with a crinkly face that I love even more. The gun remains.

“Quincey?” she says, barely louder than a whisper.

My collapsed throat is barely able to croak, “Yes?”

“Take me to Japan one day.”

I charge for her, but it’s too late.

The blood leaks onto the floor like a faulty fountain that looks to require maintenance, sputtering here and there, as it escapes Moira’s head. It permeates through her dress.

            Quincey slowly approaches Moira, a few tears flowing down his cheeks, a hand behind his back. He gets down on one knee if front of her and reveals the ring to her.

            He slips the ring onto her finger, and then they dance with no music playing. After they are done, he lays her down next to Moira Quinzical.

            For the last time, he puts his father into the meat freezer; then his mother; then his fiancé.

            There is one more spot available.

He grabs the gun and takes all but one bullet out of the chamber. Then he enters the freezer with the rest of his family. He positions the head of the gun to his forehead, unwavering.

            “I gave her your ring, Momma. She’s a Quinzical now.”