Tonya had no idea. She was asleep when Corey and his buddy Larry got the car stuck out in the woods on an otherwise quiet Sunday night, she was asleep when Corey came stumbling into the house around midnight, and she was still asleep when he fumbled with his lunch box out the front door, still buzzed, at six twenty in the morning. The police officer, on the other hand, did know what happened. It was fairly obvious that the two young men were out driving around drunk doing donuts and then decided to go off-road in a sedan that was not supposed to go off the road. Tonya wouldn’t know anything until Corey got a ride home from work, and then she would likely wonder why. Because she was going to need the car they shared to get herself to work that night. In the end, he could hear her saying. It was her current phrase of the month, something she seemed to say before everything. Before that, it was in a sense. In the end, Corey thought as his trusty buddy Larry dropped him off at work, she’s not gonna be thrilled about this. He tossed a handful of gum in his mouth and thanked Larry for the ride.

            Corey punched in and went out to the warehouse and started loading his truck. It was cold in the unheated warehouse. Loading his truck with a quickness only achieved when he was trying to stay warm, Corey decided there were two reasons why the cop had let them off. One, and probably most important, his driving record was impeccable, and the cop would have seen that he held a CDL. Second, the cop felt sorry for him. Corey vaguely remembered his voice cracking as he spoke of his career in driving and lying about his wife having their first child in her belly.

            Need to stop drinking, he thought, pushing a pallet jack into his truck. The classic overreaction. He’d made this statement to himself roughly a hundred times since he was seventeen, and every time it didn’t go well. Because seldom are we sincere with ourselves. He was too young to quit doing dumb shit. Even with the gray hair he’d been sprouting since age twenty six, the gray hairs which he had accepted with grace, the gray hairs which Tonya had requested he color.

            “Corey!” His dispatcher screamed from the warehouse floor.

            Fuck, Corey thought. Here we go. He stopped about ten feet from his boss, and stood. Keeping his distance, so his dispatcher wouldn’t smell the booze oozing from his sweaty pores. “What’s up?”

            “You remember delivering a safe on a Friday?”

            Corey looked up, squinting deep into his memory. Friday was a long time ago, a lot of alcohol ago. “Yeah,” he said. “On that dead end street.” By now he knew he’d fucked up. He just wasn’t sure how. But he was curious.

            “Do you know who signed for it?”

            “Yeah, it was the neighbor. ‘Cause the people weren’t home, and I called the number you  gave me and left a message. I was sitting there waiting probably twenty minutes. So this kid comes over and says he can sign for it, he knows the people.”

            “What did you do with the safe?”

            “He helped me drop it down off the truck. It was like, two hundred pounds. We pushed up next to the garage. He said it’d be fine there.”

            “Well, the customer called asking where the safe was, and Jen told them it delivered on Friday. They said nope, they were gone all day Friday, and they don’t see a safe anywhere.”

            “Brian, you know we do this type of shit all the time.”

            “Yes — when the customer says it’s okay.”

            “I just assumed, because obviously he knew the people.”

            “You assumed. And you know what happens when you assume? You make an ASS out of YOU and ME.” Corey had heard Brian give this line to other drivers many times, but it was the first time he’d heard it directed at himself. He’d rather it was directed at someone else. He felt like an idiot, remembering the stupid smirk on the kid’s face as they shook hands before parting ways. Brian said: “Did he have a vehicle?”

            “There was a pick up truck parked on the street.”

            “What kind of pick up?”

            “Red Ford F150.” Which was not true. He just wanted to sound certain of something.

            “You better hope they know this creep and he just hid it somewheres,” Brian said, heading back towards the office. “Because that’s on you if he stole it.”

            Corey finished loading his truck. He pulled the door shut and went to the break room. He took his paperwork off the counter. One of the other drivers came in from the warehouse. “Morning,” Corey said.

            “Yup, hey, are you delivering that nice pallet of hardwood flooring today?”

            “Yeah. Some place in Stonington.”

            “Why don’t you swing that by my house on your way outta town. I’m redoing my bedroom floor.”

            “Fuck off.”

            The other driver smiled, and said: “My old lady will sign for it.”

            At least they hadn’t taken away his regular route. The Downeast route. Or the Gravy run, as the other drivers called it. But Corey had earned a good regular route. Because aside from occasionally giving other people’s freight to punk kids in pickup trucks, normally Corey did exactly what his dispatcher liked: get the freight delivered, don’t call unless you need to, and don’t complain. Punch out, go home.

            But today there was much distance between each stop. Windshield time, they called it. Which translated to thinking time. Not necessarily a good thing when one’s life is in the toilet. Taking stock, pondering why he’d made some of the decisions he’d made in life, such as giving up on learning a trade (as his parents wished) and instead going to truck driving school (as a friend had suggested). He reached in his lunch box and ate cold Pop-Tarts for breakfast, thinking about how much better a McDonalds breakfast sandwich and hash brown would be. He couldn’t afford luxuries like that, not while trying to scrimp and save so they didn’t have to share a car anymore. But things could be worse: he could easily be eating a crappy breakfast in the county jail instead.

            His phone vibrated on the dashboard. He tilted the phone and read the text: So where’s the car

            Whaaaaat?

            No punctuation, which cemented her intention to sound pissed off. But how would she know? Fuck that. Don’t respond yet.

            He pushed his phone back across the dash. Glad that he hadn’t bragged to her in the morning about being let off by the police. That would have been embarrassing. No, fucking silly, considering his present life status:

            Ain’t it crazy, babe?

            What were you doing?

            Oh, you know, we were ripping pills off my dashboard and drinking beers and doing donuts out on Route 46. Just a typical Sunday evening.

            And how old are you?

            Yes. I am thirty.

            And he knew the foolishness of his juvenile behavior and somewhere in the back of his mind he was well aware that at some point something was going to happen that was going to force a change in him, and that something was probably going to be bad and until then, he was not letting go of his infantile lifestyle. But he almost had, about six months ago when she got pregnant. Suddenly everything was going to change. No more getting wasted every weekend with his buddies and doing stupid things out in the woods. No more pounding vodka and cranberry juice cocktails before dinner and then passing out afterwards. Soon he would have a little human to worry about after dinner. And early in the morning. Then she had a miscarriage.

            He was on a winding narrow road, trying to find his first delivery. Old homes sparsely spread and half the mailbox numbers not readable, either because there were numbers missing or the numbers were too small. He slowed for a stretch, then sped back up and blew right past the number he was looking for and didn’t realize it until he was a quarter mile down the road. He kicked the flashers on and backed up, not concerned about another car coming — he hadn’t seen another vehicle since town. He kept backing up directly into the long driveway, trying to avoid the low hanging branches that dangled above. He put on his hat and gloves and jumped out. The woman was supposed to be home — she needed to be home, because he needed a signature — but there were no cars in the driveway and no garage. Hoping she was home and she was hot and she was desperate for a handsome young delivery man. He knocked on the door.

            The door opened immediately, as though she’d been waiting for him. “Hello,” she said. Much older than he’d expected, hoped. “You must have my treadmill.”

            “I sure do,” he said. Fuck, he thought. She seemed to have a hard time standing — clearly she wasn’t going to be much help dragging that heavy box off his truck.

            He went back to the truck and climbed in the back and with his pallet jack moved the treadmill box onto the lift gate and lowered himself and the treadmill down to the ground. He heaved the box up on it’s vertical end and pushed a two-wheeler under it and rolled it to the front steps. Technically, his job was finished. He was only supposed to get the freight to the door, then it was up to the customer to get it from there. But he couldn’t leave it outside. No way she was getting it into the house on her own and wasn’t it supposed to rain later? So he wrestled the treadmill up the few steps and into the house. She was watching him the entire time, not saying a word, probably making sure he didn’t ding her door trim with it. He pushed it inside enough so that the front door would close, then he rose and wiped sweat from his temple. All done, he thought.

            “Thank you so much,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”

            She was going to get some tip money, he thought. Nothing special, five bucks maybe. But that was lunch money, baby. He’d take it.

            She was taking a while. He started thinking about all the other deliveries he had to make that day, before going home and figuring out a way to drag his car out of the woods. Then she returned, but she didn’t have any cash. She was holding a toolset.

            It would’ve taken me all day to assemble that fucking thing, Corey thought, defending himself from himself. He was back on the road. A half hour or so to the next delivery. Surely, she had a son or something who could come over and help put the treadmill together. She’d seemed disappointed, but she had given him a bag of frozen chocolate chip cookies on his way out. A nice old lady. Made him think of what his own mother might be like in ten years. Sweet and sincere and somewhat naive. Then thinking that that time was really not that far away. The next ten years were going to cruise by and no amount of self-induced abuse could slow it down. Hoping, praying that she was doing whatever she’d researched about avoiding the same fate as her mother; he didn’t want to watch her mind deteriorate like that. Then thinking, maybe that was why she wanted them to have kids so badly — she wanted to have a grandchild before her memory began to fade, anticipating the same fate for herself as that her own mother. He hadn’t told her about the miscarriage. They hadn’t told anyone, because nobody knew she was pregnant.

            He pictured his car out there in the woods again. Luckily, it hadn’t snowed since that first storm back around Halloween but it was still going to be a pain in the ass. Hopefully that dumbass still has his chains, he thought, glancing at his phone to see if she’d texted anything else. She had not. She must have gotten up when I left and saw Travis’ truck, only thing that makes sense. Don’t matter she’s gonna find out eventually and then he stopped thinking about that when he saw someone up ahead walking on the side of the road.

            It was unusual seeing anyone walking on the side of a road out there. He let his foot off the gas. The person was dressed in dark clothes, hood up. Some weirdo goth kid, he assumed. His phone was vibrating again. Leave me the fuck alone, he hissed. He leaned forward, enough to glance at it and see who it was, as though there was any question. He didn’t text with anyone else. He couldn’t read the message, all he could see was that it was Tonya. When he looked up, the goth walker was only about fifty feet ahead and suddenly leapt sideways into the road.

            One thing he’d learned, driving behind the wheel of a vehicle which could easily kill other people, was never to overreact. In certain situations, it was better not to react at all. Instead of killing one person, you might kill several, including yourself. In this case, he didn’t do nothing. He closed his eyes and pulled the wheel slightly to the left. But he knew he was going to hit this idiot and now he was only hoping not to hear anything.  Because he’d once heard a story from a female trucker who was driving down south somewhere and coming up on a bridge overhead, and a man hopped off the bridge and landed directly on the hood of her truck. And while the whole thing was disgusting and disturbing, and she kept asking herself why that person decided to pull her (not that he’d chosen her on purpose, but he had chosen someone and that someone happened to be her) into his terrible death scene, the thing that stuck with her the most even years later were the sounds on impact, the simultaneous grunts and thuds. “And what if I’d only stopped for a shower back at the Pilot an hour ago?” She’d said. “What if I’d been twenty minutes behind where I was?” Hours later, Corey would wonder how different things might be if he’d stuck around the house for an hour to assemble that fucking treadmill.

            It was a girl’s face. He’d ascertained that much, as she turned her head to the left, in the sliver of a second before he pulled the wheel and veered into the other lane, certain that he’d at least clipped the suicidal bitch. He hit the brakes and skidded to a stop with his left front tire edging the ditch on the wrong side of the road. He checked both mirrors — no sign of her behind him. He hadn’t felt or heard a hit, and while he was selfishly glad that nothing like that would remain engraved in his head, it didn’t mean anything. He’d probably hit her. He cut the wheel hard to the right and pulled forward, back onto the right side of the road. He grabbed his phone to call the police. Something told him no. Perhaps subconsciously he wasn’t yet ready to engage with police again. He dropped his phone in the cupholder. Then he punched on the flashers and kicked his door open.

            Halfway to the back of the truck, he crouched down and scanned underneath it. He continued on, thinking why, why would you jump in front of a truck? Why not down a bottle of pills instead? It’s a much cleaner way to go. He continued to the back of his truck.

            He stopped when he saw her in the ditch. She rose slowly like a little monster, her arms and legs caked with mud and dead leaves. Her hood was down and her dirty blonde hair all over the place. He moved closer. He said: “Are you okay?”

            At first she said nothing. She just stood there, holding her muddy hands out as if for him to see. But clearly she was okay, at least physically. Mentally, another story. “Yeah,” she said. “Sorry about that.” Like she’d just grabbed his hash browns or something.

            “Well, what the hell was that?” Not that he expected a decent, reasoned response. He was angry, now that he knew she was okay.

            “I don’t know,” she said, wiping her hands on her pants. “I’m sorry. Please don’t call the cops.”

            “Are you fucking serious?” Studying her face, which was pretty underneath the gaunt, sad expression.

            “Would you mind giving me a ride?”

            “Are you fucking high?”

            “No,” she said, climbing out of the ditch.

            “No,” he said. “Definitely not. First of all, I’m not supposed to have anyone in the truck with me.” But he didn’t get into the second or third reasons, he just stopped talking, and kept looking at her. What he should do, he knew, was call the police. Have them make a report. Then leave them to deal with her. Then he felt bad. Obviously she’s harmless, he assumed. 

            “Fine,” she said. She turned and started walking. He wanted to grab her and spin her around, and explain how she’d almost just killed both of them. Make her understand. He felt like he was dealing with Tonya, when she was in one of her irrational moods. Making him feel guilty about something he knew he shouldn’t…and then just walking away like that was the end of it. Nope, he thought. Because who the fuck knows? Yeah, he could get back in the truck and bounce, and then the next day be reading about her jumping out in front of somebody else. Nope. “Where are you going?” He yelled.

            Turning her head enough so he’d hear her, she said: “Does it matter?”

            Talking, even walking, just like Tonya.

            “Where you gonna go?” He glanced around, to make sure nobody was watching this ridiculous scene.

            She stopped, turned to him. He thought she was crying. She stumbled a few steps toward him, then a step back. Putting on a hell of a show. Mumbling to herself now, tears or spittle building on her big upper lip. Then he decided to take her. Enough of the show. He looked up and down the road. Still nobody coming. He went over and grabbed her by the waist and pushed her to the passenger side door and yanked it open. “Up!” He yelled.

            She was acting like a dead person, making him make all her moves. He grabbed her leg and placed her foot on the step, then shoved her butt up into the seat. She made no noise, she put up no fight. But she wasn’t helping, either. He tossed her other leg in and threw the door shut and rounded the front of his truck and got in.

            “What’s your name?” He asked. The first words spoken since he’d poked the gas pedal five minutes prior. She pretended not to hear him. Gazing out her window at the burnt blueberry fields and rolling hills beyond. His gaze went to her midsection, up a little, then back to the road.

            “I said, what’s your name?”

            “Sadie.”

            “Is that really your name?

            “No.”

            “Where you from?”

            “Nowhere.”

            “What’s wrong with you?”

            “Nothing.”

            “So that’s why you were trying to kill yourself? And you do realize you could’ve killed us both, right?”

            She looked at him. “Obviously, I wasn’t trying to hurt you.”

            “Oh, okay. That’s good. That makes me feel better. And you do realize how selfish you’re being, right?”

            “What do you mean?” Still looking at him.

            “Suicide. Don’t you think it’s a little selfish? You don’t have to deal with shit anymore and you leave your family and your friends and whoever else to sit there grieve and think about it and probably feel bad in one way or another for the rest of their lives.”

            “I don’t think you get it,” she said.

            “Get what?”

            “Do you have anything to eat in here?” Her eyes rummaging through the messy space between the seats.

            “I got my lunch cooler, which contains my lunch.”

            “Fine.”

            “There’s a store right up here.”

            “No,” she said. “Don’t stop.”

            “I think there’s a bag of chips in there.”

            “What kind?”

            “Does it matter?” Knowing he was sounding mean, but he didn’t care. “Beggars can’t be choosers. So how far you think I’m taking you?”

            “I don’t care,” she said.

            He looked over at her and said: “Then what’s your story? And why are you trying to hurt yourself?”

            “Does it matter?” Mocking him.

            Corey almost cracked a smile. His phone vibrated in the cupholder. He wondered what Tonya would think if she knew what he was doing right then. He shouldn’t have picked her up. Shit, it’s not like she’d persisted. He’d forced the issue. What the fuck was he thinking? And knowing he was lucky to have Tonya, any other girl would’ve left him by now, all the dumb things he’d done. Tonya put up with his shit. That’s how he thought about it. When he thought about why he liked her, the way people do when they’re riding high on the relationship wave, the first thing he thought about was that she put up with his shit. Like that was a respectable character trait.

            “Do you mind if I change?”

            “You might want to wait until we go by the store. It’s right up here.”

            The store was in view now, up on the right. He liked this store because they sold plastic wrapped chunks of pepperoni and cheese at the counter. He stopped there often. Peripherally, he noticed Sadie wiggle down lower in her seat. As they flew by the store, he felt her looking at him, but she said nothing. “What?” He said.

            “Nothing,” she said. They had passed the store. She looked back out her window. Then she took her backpack and plopped it on her lap. Corey glanced over at her she was setting her clothes on the dashboard. He almost said something. His eyes meandered back to the road. But  he could see her digging deep into the backpack, then her hand came up and went directly to her mouth. He said: “What was that?”

            “I have a headache.”

            “Oh.”

            “You sure your girlfriend won’t mind?”

            “What?”

            “Me changing.” Setting the bag down at her feet.

            He made a face. He didn’t look at her and he didn’t say anything. First, she took off her boots. She dug her back hard into the seat and pushed her waist up and wiggled her pants down. She pulled her sweatshirt off and then a t-shirt, rolled everything up and stuffed her bag. She didn’t change her socks. He almost said something.

            “You can look,” she said.

            He shook his head. What the fuck was he doing? Imagine if a cop rolled by and saw her without a shirt on? And why had she seemed to slouch like that when they went by the store? Obviously she didn’t want to be seen by someone. He should’ve said no to her changing. Better yet, he shouldn’t have picked her up in the first place. He was asking for trouble then, and now trouble was sitting there looking at him, almost naked with nasty socks dangling beneath her pale white legs, and naturally his mind turned dirty, if only for a few seconds. But that thought was easy to squeeze — she probably has something, he told himself, knowing it was a dumb thing to assume, just because she was literally dirty and a little mysterious and so yeah, that meant she’d fuck anything. “Put your fucking clothes on,” he said. But without sounding harsh, without sounding mean.

            “I am,” she said. She pulled on a pair of jeans, then a long sleeve shirt. She dug a gray baseball hat out of her backpack, and put that on. She pulled it down snug around her brow, and, watching her, he noticed her bob and dart her head around, as though she was seeking a mirror. He almost told her there was no visor on her side, but he didn’t. She’d figured it out. He didn’t want to talk anymore at all — he wanted to pull over and tell her to get out. His phone made another noise. He didn’t look at it.

            “You seem like the girlfriend type,” Sadie said.

            He didn’t want to acknowledge her. In his head, he was shaking his head. He said: “What does that mean?”

            “It means I bet you always had a girlfriend.”

            He wasn’t sure whether or not this was a compliment. He leaned towards the idea that she was calling him needy. But he decided to deflect, as she had shown she could do quite well. “I’m gonna take a guess at something here. Because I know you’re full of shit.” He paused, to let her respond.

            “Okay.”

            “I’m assuming you’re in trouble for something, and that’s why you’re trying to bolt for Canada. You do realize you need a fucking passport to cross the border now, right? Do you even have a driver’s license? I mean, you can’t just stroll across the border anymore.”

            “What do you and your girlfriend do for fun?” She asked, looking away.

            He thought about the question. They went around a long curve and crossed a town line. He said: “We play cribbage.” And he expected a sarcastic, maybe snarky, response to this. He looked at her. Her head was down and propped against the window; the baseball hat turned a little sideways the way a skater would wear it.

            “Hey,” Corey said. She’d probably fallen asleep. Who knows how long since she’d last slept. “Yo, Sadie,” he said. “Or whatever your name is. Yo, wake up.”

            No, he realized. She ain’t asleep. He leaned and grabbed her by the arm. He pulled her away from the window. Her body flopped towards him. He held her up, and with his other hand gripping noon on the steering wheel, he looked at her pale and doomed downlooking face. Blood dripped down on her clean jeans. Jesus. He pushed her back against the door.

            He drove with both bare trembling hands on the wheel, thinking barely thinkable thoughts. He took her by the arm and pulled her down gently to the floor. The baseball hat fell on the seat where she’d sat. Her head rested on one of her muddy boots. He turned down a road he wasn’t supposed to go down. At the end of the road there was a farmhouse on the ocean which currently served as a wedding venue in the summer but a hundred years ago served as an inn for island-goers waiting for the ferry. Corey didn’t go that far. He turned the truck onto a dirt fire road before that. The fire road led to a huge house he’d delivered a tacky statue to last fall. He remembered the rich prick saying he only summered at the house. But Corey didn’t go that far. He stopped the truck on a straight stretch where all he could see was trees and cut the engine. He couldn’t look at her. He thought about Tonya for a second and how she wouldn’t have approved of any of his moves since Sunday around noon. He thought about how the buddy he was leaning on to help him later that night was normally knee deep into a twelve pack by suppertime. Then he got out of the truck and went around to the other side.

            He threw her over his shoulder. He took her backpack and slung that over his other shoulder and he stomped into the woods, thinking: Because when and if they ever find her, they’ll assume she was all by herself and she overdosed on something and wandered out here, all fucked up. And then he was done thinking, and he kept on for a while, focusing on his footsteps. He stopped and looked back at the truck, which he could barely see even through the leafless trees. He decided to go a little further.

            “Stop,” a low-pitched, smoky voice said.

            Corey stopped. He looked up. The crossbow was pointed down at him. The bearded man sitting in the tree stand took off his bright orange hat, and dropped it to the ground. “What do you think you’re doing there, bud?”

Ryan S. Lowell is a fiction writer. His work has appeared in the Worker’s Write Journal and Underwood Press: Black Works. He lives in South Portland, Maine.

“Pearls used to be treasure. Now, they’re all plastic. What good are they to me?” Blondie stretched back inside her underwater castle, let her tail fin luxuriate in turquoise currents, her thick tail undulating, scales of holographic rainbows, hips like weapons of destruction. And her breasts. Well, like two pearls, real ones, the bright peaks of which were hidden by her gold hair.

“You can’t even lust after treasure like a normal…mermaid?” Toucan Sam said, wearing Kahuna shorts, scuba fins, and a bulbous brass diving helmet over his head.

“No need for a pause when you say ‘mermaid,’ Toucan.”

“Well, you don’t look like any mermaid I ever seen. It’s down here somewhere, damn it. A chest of gold. Real gold. Real pearls. Start looking, Blondie. Like I said, we’ll split the treasure.”

“Why should I trust you? Besides, you can’t move.”

“Keep floating on your back, Blondie, they’ll think you have bloat. Then I take the gold for myself.” His eyes glowered through the round window in his diving helmet. He was probably crazy. She’d read that happened, stuck in the tank for too long, like being sentenced to solitary at San Quentin. It made you nuts. But Toucan was harmless enough. Sunk into the gravel, he was just a plastic decoration to hide the air vent.

“How can I do anything with that dreadful music playing?” Blondie sighed as the water vibrated with the soundwaves of twangs and whistles, some spaghetti western playing on the television in the living room beyond the tank.

“Look who’s here,” Toucan said.

Where the water hit the glass, Blondie saw faces. The older man. And then the doughy man-child, with those innocent, angelic eyes, running back and forth in that ridiculous red cowboy hat, holding up a plastic revolver, shouting, “Pew pew!” He smiled his sadistic smile and tapped the glass with the tip of that revolver.

“Don’t count him out.” Toucan laughed. “He’s a fast shot.”

“It’s a plastic gun, Toucan.”

“So? You live in a plastic castle.”

“I’m not scared of him.”

“Never turn your back on a ten-year-old. How do you think I lost my arm?”

“The day I take advice from a one-armed deep-sea diver, is the day I hang up my fins.” Blondie swished in a slow circle around Toucan, let her rounded cheeks and long tail, the arch of her jewel-strung lower back, the river of hair, and her soulful, deep lapis eyes take him in entirely.

“What is this?” he asked, suspicious.

“I’m the only treasure in this tank. Too bad your feet are stuck.”

Bubbles drifted up in a sudden burst from his shorts.

“That must be embarrassing when that happens.” Blondie meandered to the glass and continued her seduction for a wider audience. She ducked and bobbed, winked and flirted. The man and his son pointed, excited now. Of course they were. A one-inch tall sex dream was living in their freshwater gulag.

The man-child gestured with both hands. Blondie realized she was tilting and straightened herself, turned with a dismissive flick of her tail and meandered behind the plastic algae plants. But then the kid made a dirty move. A dirty, sneaky little move. Fish flakes. On the surface of the water, a tsunami of them. That rotting bloom of stench drifting down. Her nostrils quivered.

“It’s sick, if you ask me,” Toucan said. “Feeding fish to other…mermaids.”

Blondie gulped greedily.

“Hey, Blondie!” Toucan shouted. “Bring me some, would you? I’m starving! They never feed me.”

“That’s ‘cause you’re strictly decorative. Get your own.” Blondie’s lips suctioned the surface, searching out every last drop, even when her mer guts started to ache. At the last second, she saw a shadow on the water as the tip of the plastic gun broke the surface. She ducked down, tried to dive, and barely outswam the pistol. Toucan was right, the kid was fast.

“You’re tilting to the side,” Toucan crowed. “Too greedy. Shouldn’t have stuffed yourself, Blondie.”

“Screw you,” Blondie muttered, her stomach bulging.

“I wish you would.”

“You’re too ugly.” Blondie decided not to tell him about the chest of treasure, just out of his peripheral vision, sitting amidst the plastic plants. “I’m too good for you. And you’re molded into that suit anyway.”

“I haven’t peed in two years,” Toucan sighed. “Oh, to get back to the open seas.”

“The only way you get there is the big flush.” Blondie turned on her back, stretched out, her slender fingers drifting through water.

“You better not float,” Toucan warned. “They’ll think you have fin rot.”

“Fin rot is for fishes,” Blondie said.

“Blondie, have you looked in the mirror lately?” Toucan let off another stream of bubbles. “There’s no such thing as mermaids.”

Blondie dove, but something was wrong. She wasn’t descending. And as hard as she flipped her tail, up she went, stomach skyward. She saw in the reflection of glass, a lumpy goldish, belly up. Not a mermaid. A plain fish. Impossible. Some kind of a mirage, like those western gunslingers on T.V., lost in the desert, saw delusions on the horizon. But the reflection just stared back at her. Fish. No such thing as mermaids.

Then the kid with angelic eyes locked his gaze on her. Blondie struggle downward, in circles, latched a fin on her little plastic castle.

Angelic eyes stared at her fish eyes, and her fish eyes stared at Toucan Sam’s eyes, and Toucan Sam’s eyes stared at angelic eyes. A circle of deadly tension.  

The kid held up a stick with orange netting on the end. And smiled.

“Help me,” Blondie hissed at Toucan. “I know where the treasure is. I’ll show you.”  

“Toucan is no fool! The next fish might be more reasonable, might help me out. The next fish might not turn her nose up at pearls!”  “Toucan, you son of a—” Blondie’s last words died as the orange net swept down on her.

Silver Webb is the editrix of the Santa Barbara Literary Journal, which spotlights work from Santa Barbara and beyond. When she is not inviting eye strain at the computer, she drinks hurricanes, contemplates ill-advised tattoos, indulges in yarn art, and blasphemes the art of cooking. www.silverwebb.com

Ten days after Sergeant Jeremiah Waters got away from the reb prison camp, sick in the head from summer heat and prolonged hunger, he met Gilead.  He’d come out of the forest and into a clearing.  Later he’d remember black-eye susans and clover and the sound of a dog yapping nearby.  He’d remember looking toward a brilliant sun in a white sky.  He closed his eyes and saw bright yellow where he’d been accustomed to see blackness.  But he never remembered tumbling down into the patch of browned grass nor whatever rock or tree root split his forehead.

“You can’t rest, friend, you got to move.”

Waters had never seen a man so black.  He’d learned that most of the so-called negroes down south were brown or even lighter–their very skin tone proof of the lust of the southern aristocracy.  This huge man’s skin reminded him of blue-black ink with which he wrote while in the academy.  Gilead prided himself on pure African blood.  In Mrs. Stowe’s novel, the most intelligent negroes were those with an admixture of white and black blood and Waters had thought that such must necessarily be the case.  But Gilead proved an adept and able man, one of great strength and cunning.

Gilead said, “I see you are on the run, young master.”

“I think I’m coming down sick.”

Gilead put his palm on Water’s forehead.  This was the first time ever Water’s skin touched black skin.  He could tell no difference in the way it felt and the skin of his father or of the soldier Wilkins or the reb to whom he’d given his watch.

“We better get you somewhere you can rest,” Gilead said and raised Waters to his feet.  “Any other with you?”

Waters said, “I came by myself.”

Waters thought they walked for hours.  Never looking back, the black man stayed just three steps ahead.  With the woods in shadow, it was hard to measure the passing of the day.  After a while, Waters began to hope that the man would stop and let him rest, perhaps offer food.  His leg muscles–stringy like a horse’s bridle–were no longer strong as they had been before his prison days.  He needed to stop.  But Gilead continued, his broad back rising and falling with every confident step.  Waters thought to reach out and touch the back, even lean up against it momentarily, to try to draw in some of its vigor, but he could not bring himself to do it. 

They emerged into a ragged clearing.  There was a small log house, a tumbledown shed, a corral with one horse and a dead mule, an acre of cotton and a patch of corn.  Water wondered what was a slave doing living here all alone?  But he could only conclude that this must be the man’s home.  He hurried to close the three steps between myself and the man.

“What’s your hurry?”  Gilead sounded amused.

Waters spoke with difficulty.  “Is it safe?”

“Safe enough.  If we’re careful.  Slow down.”  Gilead brought his arm around Water’s shoulders.  Waters finally permitted himself to slump against the black man.  “Finally, I can rest,’ he said  as the man half-carried him.  It seemed he barely needed to touch the ground with his old broken brogans–Gilead almost lifted him above the earth.

Gilead opened the low door to the shed and stooped to usher Waters in.  The soldier looked meaningfully back at the house, but Gilead shut the door just enough to block the view.

“No sir.  I wish I could keep you in there but it wouldn’t do.  News travels in this neighborhood.”

“It’s all right.”  Waters recognized some wisdom in Gilead’s words.  He regretted how dark it would be in the shed and how hot–it was no more than a windowless building with a packed earth floor.  But to rest in safety, away from that camp, out of the wilderness… This was more comfortable than anything he had hoped to see again.

Gilead acted both apologetic and satisfied.  “Have to be,” he said.  While Waters rested on the packed earth, he made a lying-place out of a blanket, some straw, and a broke-down saddle.

The sergeant said, “Water?”

“Thirsty?”  Gilead smiled.

“To wash.”  Then, correcting himself, “Both.”

“Wait here.”

Waters had no real choice.  Gilead left–shut the door and shut him in–but came back quickly with a bowl of water and a clean rag.  Gratefully, the soldier scoured himself of prison grime.  But the bath irked his pride a little, because Gilead stood watching.  His eyes made Waters feel oddly scrutinized.

“You’re sick,” Gilead said.  “You better eat and sleep.”

“Can you get me to our lines?  Where is our army?”

“Eat and sleep now.”  Obedient, Waters sat down to wait for the food, but fell asleep instantly. 

Doing his business in the camp sinks one day, Waters had spotted a small piece of bone amidst the excrement.  Some poor soul must have swallowed it whole and passed it through his guts undigested.  Waters reached into the mess, plucked the bone from it, and went a few steps upstream, to wash the bone more times than Pilate washed his hands.  As he went back to the barracks, he kept this small knob concealed in his fist, afraid that another prisoner might somehow guess he had such a delicacy.  Only after lights out, when the darkness made him feel safe, did he try to suck whatever dry nourishment might be left in this shard of a bone from an animal he could only hope had been fit to eat. 

When Waters escaped, he had fetched this piece of bone along.  Each morning, after sleeping out in the woods, he had to decide anew whether to gnaw it down to bone-meal, for the nourishment, or save the dry bone for the juice.  There was a small indentation along one side, which his tongue could caress and, as it could trap salvia, sometimes he fancied there was a particle of real meat and gristle clinging to the bone.

Food had been his greatest problem.  He owned nothing with which to hunt, nothing with which to fish.  Flat, pale mushrooms grew at the base of trees, but, ignorant of southern botany, Waters didn’t trust himself to tell the wholesome from the poisonous.  He harvested green pecans, filled his pockets with them, and ate a few every day.  A couple of nights, when he came nearer human habitation, he found stands of corn and he stole roasting ears that he could not cook but at whose hard kernels he could nibble.  Some days, like Nebuchadnezzar–or a sick dog–he fed on grass.  This was no worse than the prison camp and it was in the camp, he believed, not during his arboreal sojourn that he grew weak and sick.

When Gilead shook Waters awake, he found himself sprawled across the blanket, his nose in the saddle: the smell of leather and sweat and horseflesh.  He sat up too quick and, head throbbing, had to lie back down. 

“That’s all right, young master,”  Gilead said, “I’ll just leave it here.”

“Don’t close the door.”

Gilead served Waters fatty bacon and cornpone and a cup of make-do coffee–roasted acorns maybe or parched corn.  To Waters, it tasted like a Sunday dinner.  Gilead stood over him while he ate.

Gilead said, “You’ll be as healthy as a horse in just a few days.

Waters thanked him.  Gilead walked out, pulling the door closed behind him.  But he must have had an afterthought, for presently the door opened again.  “Name’s Gilead.”

“Sergeant Jeremiah Waters.”

“Yes sir.  Sergeant.”

Before Sergeant Waters had arrived at that flea-bitten collection of shanties the rebs called a prison, his one thought was how to escape it.  All the long train ride from Virginia south, several days of sitting on shuntings or moving so slowly that the boxcar barely rocked, he sized up his companions, wondering whom he could rely on, whom he could take with him.  He never doubted that he would escape.

The men on the train disappointed him. 

            Some looked sturdy, some counted themselves brave, some had long service and scars to recommend them–but not a man really understood the true nature of the war he fought.  Waters knew that slavery and the slavocracy have long poisoned the nation, but these men couldn’t see it.  Waters could not trust those men who said that this was a white man’s war and even less those who joked about “Sambo’s right to be killed.” He said to himself, give me a plain soldier who understands what he fights for.

All of them had heard about darkies helping Union soldiers find their way back north after they’d made an escape.  Hiding them, showing them back roads and secret ways, bringing food out to where escapees waited until it was safe to go on, nursing them back to health.  But these soldiers blamed the negro for the war and cursed Lincoln because he had shut down prisoner exchange for “nigger rights.”

“It’s not nigger rights,” Waters said.  “He’s standing up for the right of every man who wears Union blue.”

Wilkins, a man from Waters’s company, with a beard like a goat’s and a leg as plump as a hog’s, said, “You reckon the niggers is worth it?”

Waters said, “As much as the rest of us.”

He said, “That ain’t saying a hell of a lot.”

Wandering lost in the woods, Waters laughed at himself sometimes.  Back on the train, escape had meant organizing the men, leading a troop, perhaps a mad, gallant rush at the walls under fire.  He never thought it would be as simple as bribing a guard with a watch he hadn’t even paid for.  And the saddest part of the whole funny business is that the old man approached him before he even thought of it.  That had been the joyous beginning of a painful, laborious journey that for the time being had ended at Gilead’s.  Waters didn’t know if he should head north toward Grant’s army, or west toward the mountains, or east toward the Union navy.  Like a runaway slave, he guided himself by the north star, followed the drinking gourd, travelling by night, hiding in the day.  If he could recuperate, he knew he’d be home soon.

Wilkins had been chewing a plug of tobacco during that talk on the train south.  Rebs always had tobacco; they were always eager to swap it for something good.  The bulge in Wilkins’s cheek made him look an idiot.  That goat beard of his stunk of tobacco juice.  He said, “I didn’t join the army to fight for the niggers.  I joined for the Union and sixteen dollars a month.”

Waters said, “Like the President said, some niggers are willing to fight for you.”

Wilkins said, “They can have all the glory they choose.”

Three times a day, Gilead brought pretty much the same food, some combination of hog and corn.  Some meals the sergeant’s gut turned and he pushed the food aside, something that worried Gilead.  Except for meals, Waters rested.  Gilead took away his clothes to boil, as nothing else would clean them.  Out of a habit developed in the prison barracks, Waters saved out the bone and hid it, telling himself that he wanted to keep it as a memento of his hard times in the camp.  Actually he feared to let it out of his reach. 

Gilead gave him a suit of his clothes to wear, coarse nankeen shirt and trousers, far too big.  That didn’t matter much.  Even his own uniform would have been oversized for his shrunken body.  At every meal, Waters would promise Gilead, “I’ll be better soon.”

“Better,” Gilead said.

Evenings were best.  Waters was too sick to sit up long, so Gilead would open the door and carry him out on a pallet.  Then Waters could lie in the twilight, watching the light thicken.

Gilead told Waters that his master had been a improvident man, a slave himself to cards and whiskey and other unlawful pleasures.  He had hired Gilead out to a number of craftsmen, a blacksmith, a harness maker, a man who kept a stable and broke horses.  Allowed to retain a portion of his wages and borrowing the rest from the stable-owner, Gilead eventually bought his freedom.  Too much money in a lump had been his former master’s undoing; he drank himself to death in a year.  Gilead repaid the debt in five years time and had hidden himself away in the wilds, where he squatted on a piece of land he himself had cleared.

One morning in the shed singing woke Waters.  He was lying on my stomach and could see cracks of light between the earth and the wall.  Gilead had never sung before.

“Tramp tramp tramp the boys are marching

Cheer up comrades they will come.”

The shed door opened and Gilead entered.  Waters sat up–stiffly, head ringing, throat dry–but he sat up.  That was good.  That was hopeful.  Gilead handed out the same tin plate with the same food as always on it.  Waters bit off a piece of pone and chewed it; then, with the recovering invalid’s excitement, he realized he was actually hungry.  He smiled.

“Pie,” he said.  “Blueberry pie.  Or maybe some applesauce, like we get in the fall.”  Fall: the air chilled, the trees loaded with apples, the boys and girls courting as they went among the trees to pick them, the sound of the mill making cider.

“Blueberry pie,” Gilead spoke with derision.  He pointed to the cornbread and bacon. “That suits me.  It’s been suiting me all my life.”

Waters felt ashamed for even appearing to question his rough fare. 

“Now, later this year, maybe I could catch us a coon.  You like coon?  Bake it with sweet potatoes?  Maybe a possum?”

With all the politeness he could muster, Waters thanked him and refused.  He did not care to insult him but he didn’t think opossums and racoons would ka good eating.

“Then you better eat what you got.”

Gilead stood over and watched him eat the cornbread and bacon.  Then he reached behind the door and fetched out a burlap bag.

“You ain’t so sick now.  You can earn your keep.”

“What?”  

“Laying by time is over.”

“Gilead?”

“Get off that bed.”

Waters still could not understand.  He wondered if he were still sick with fever and all this a hallucination.

“Get off that bed.”

Gilead reached down and placed his forefinger and thumb underneath the soldier’s jaw.  The tips of his fingers found the spot where jaw joined skull; then he squeezed appraisingly.  When his grip was firm, he pulled lifted Waters from the pallet.  His head brushed the ceiling, his toes swept the floor.  Gilead set Waters on his feet and put the bag in his hands. 

He said, “You think I can afford to feed a layabout the rest of his life?” 

Pinching Waters’s shoulder, Gilead shoved him out of the shed into the sunlight.             It had been hot in the shed but the dark had provided the occasional illusion of cool.  This light seemed composed of pure heat.  The roof-line of the cabin, the bag in his hands, the dying grass he stood on all reflected heat into his eyes in waves of light.  Any way Waters turned, there were swells of heat, whitecaps, rising from the ground, coming down from the sky, the whole sky it seemed as it was diffuse to be said to come from the sun alone, coming from all objects within sight or touch, so that his own body tortured him, so that every part of his body that touched some other part of his body or just the fabric of his clothes was scorched by another.  Out of instinct Waters bent his head.  The heat rising and the sweat running out the line of his hair blinded him anyway.

“Welcome to Georgia,” Gilead said.  “Welcome to August.”

The field to which Gilead steered him was white and green like the ocean.  Gilead placed the strap of the bag on his shoulder, and Waters waded in, dragged the burlap behind.  He staggered up the line of plants, tearing half or a third or two-thirds of an occasional boll, missing far more bolls than he found.  Walking bent over hurt his back.  The plants tore his palms.  This was hard work.  Waters had read about what hard work it was in many an abolitionist tract but this day he grasped the authentic fact.

Gilead waited at the end of the row.  When Waters reached him, he took the bag and dumped the cotton into a bushel basket.  Then he handed the bag back and pointed.

“Pick it again.”

Waters wanted to protest, but it occurred to him that perhaps this was some kind of joke produced by Gilead’s odd humor.  So he worked his way down the row, picking a few of the bolls that had got pass him the first time.  He was even slower this time, with legs stiff and fingers bleeding.   Again Gilead met him at the end of the line.  This time he stared at Waters with contempt.

“Again,” he said.

Tossing the back to the ground, Waters said, “Damned if I will.”

Gilead shoved him and he lost his footing, falling into the cotton.  Gilead immediately pulled him up and back on his feet.  On his command, Waters went up the row, pretending to pick cotton, but actually just grabbing at anything, cotton bolls, leaves, empty air.  Once again, at the end of the row, Gilead took the bag and emptied in the basket.  He took the basket over to a piece of canvas and poured its contents out.  On his knees, he sifted the cotton, felt it, placed it into several piles meaningless to me.  That done, he summoned Waters.

“That’s trashy cotton.”

The phrase meant nothing to Waters.  Gilead pointed down.  There were rocks, sticks, and dirt in a heap in the middle of the canvas, all the trash the soldier had gathered up while picking the cotton.

“So?” Waters said.

“Don’t be saucy,” Gilead said.  “Take off your shirt.”

“You go to perdition.”

“Take off that shirt.”  Waters started running but in seconds Gilead had grabbed him by the scuff of his neck.  Damn exhaustion, damn infirmity.  Gilead ripped his shirt off and threw him on the ground, where he lay like an old newspaper.  Then, Gilead stood astride him and systematically whipped with a cowhide.

Just the touch of the sun on the naked back had been painful.  This cut the skin; this might break the spirit.  This was pain Waters had often heard about; stories about whippings had helped convert him to abolition.  As had been the case with picking cotton, he had failed to imagine this pain.  Salt from his body entered the stripes as they appeared.  He counted the lashes up to fourteen and then could count no more.

It was over.  Waters fainted and when consciousness returned, he was no longer outside.  He lay on his stomach on the floor of the shed, cotton lint covering him, stuck to his body with dried blood and dried sweat.  Flies and gnats swarmed in the air around him; they regarded him as a feast.  Waters rolled over but when his back touched the ground, he had to roll back.  His nose almost touching the earth, he saw a beetle making its way toward him.

Gilead was there too.  Waters could hear breathing above and beyond him; he heard the sounds of mirth as well.  But Gilead stooped down and began to wash his back.

“Yeah, boss,” Gilead said, “they used to treat me like that.”

“You can’t do this to me.”

“I saved your life.”

The water stung as if instead of ministering to the sergeant, Gilead whipped him again.  The drops that ran across his skin felt like fire-ants crawling.

“I might have started you on cotton too soon,” Gilead said, with a curious sympathy in his voice. He rolled Waters over and looked directly in his eyes. “We’ll start on shingling tomorrow.”

Waters said, “I am no man’s slave.”

“These are unusual times, unusual circumstances, boy.  Nobody can predict what he might come to.”

“I’m a white man, Sambo.”

“I wouldn’t run if I were you,” Gilead said.  “If I don’t track you down, the rebs are bound to.”  Nonetheless, from that night on he kept the door of the shed locked.  Whenever he let Waters out, he kept him carefully in sight.

Waters lay in the hot darkness and decided that the next day he would attack Gilead when the door opened, that he would stun him, maybe kill him, and escape.  He searched for an old friend hidden in the broken saddle that pillowed his head, the dry bone with its indentation and its knobby head.  Its taste and texture had remained familiar to his tongue.  As Waters waited for morning and the opening of the door, he sucked on the bone.  Saliva came to his mouth and helped soothe his dusty thirst.  By morning Waters was engrossed in a dream, debating the war with Wilkins as they drank coffee and ate blueberry pie.  When Gilead shook him awake, he had to think hard to remember where he was.

Reid Mitchell is a New Orleanian who spent the last decade teaching in China. In the twentieth century he was an historian of the American Civil War.

Old barns and empty sheds
hold most of what
you need to know
of your uncles.
In the doorframe rows
of knife-nicks mark
the growth of
Jesse, Dale, and Jim.

Tacked to a low beam
like tenacious last leaves
of autumn—sepia
photos of little boys
grinning in home-cut hair
and hand-me-down clothes.

Under the stained and rutted
workbench, safe
in a tin box for half
a century—leavings:
a pack of yellowed cigarette papers
two steelies
a fishhook and home-made fly
a skeleton key
three limp, smudged ticket stubs to a movie show
a shell casing
a rusted pocketknife
a guitar pick and a chipped arrowhead
that look oddly related.

Paulette Callen has returned to her home state of South Dakota in retirement, after 30+ years in New York City. Varying degrees of culture shock in both directions — but always, the place she returned to has been made home by a dog.

Caroline McPherson

Remembered (and lauded) for her famous end-of-autumn parties (that always managed to balance the fine line between the year’s two centripetal holidays, never too thankful in spirit or too heavy in joy), Caroline McPherson had a heart of silk. 

The week before last, Caroline passed away in a collapse of building scaffolding in the center of Manhattan. The cause of said tumble has yet to be determined, but her sister Pauline McPherson-McPhee believes it was Caroline’s crushing amount of love for life that tested the building’s support system, and ultimately won.

Caroline was stubborn, but only stubborn in the name of love. She nearly married three times—once to a small business lawyer, once to a juice salesman, and once to a vegetable farmer—but all three times she found herself kicking at the breaks because something else was waiting for her: New York City. 

The lawyer flew to New York City to donate his time to the excavation team working in the building’s rubble.

The juice salesman was last seen drinking red juice outside the McPherson home, chanting indecipherable prayers as he held up bottles of said juice. 

The vegetable farmer has created a donation box for Caroline’s mother, Ms. June McPherson, requesting non-vegetable food products so he can cook vegetable and non-vegetable meals for the McPherson family, which solely consists of June and Caroline’s dog Mupp, both of whom have stopped eating.

Sandra S. Saunders

A baker, sewer, sister, and friend, Sandra S. Saunders was the daughter of a doctor and sister of a now-pet-shop-owner, then-aspiring-cellist. Sandie, as her friends and family lovingly called her, was honored by her sister via a request to print the ‘i’ in her nickname with a star replacing the dot. Unfortunately, our publicationcannot stylize the typeface in that way, but the request has been duly noted and respectfully withheld.

As a valued member of the textile community, Sandie had a large group of friends in a knitting group, many of whom “kept her going,” according to Whitney Clark, president of Nightly Knitters Group, Inc., LLC. One short week before the scaffolding collapse that took her life, Sandie had been brokenhearted by a man she told her relatives (and friends in NKG, Inc., LLC.) she would marry in the nearest future.

According to Suzie Klein, the woman who shared an office with her who was out on a sick day the day of the collapse, said, “He was the best thing that happened to her in the last two and a half years; she floated on happiness in every moment of every day because of that man. Then he walked away. I wonder what he’s thinking now that she’s gone.”

When reached for comment, the man in question, Harvey St. Quinn, a lawyer of prestige for the City of New York, said, “She’s dead?” After, he slid down the backside of his mahogany office door, rolled up his silk tie and stuffed it into his mouth to muffle a scream, and wept silently for twenty-five minutes, eventually coming-to completely horizontal on the rouge carpet in his office in a puddle of self-inflicted sorrow, because, as Sandie’s officemate Suzie noted, “If he hadn’t left her like he did, I don’t think you’d be here asking me questions about her death. They would’ve been on their honeymoon that day.” Mr. St. Quinn emerged from his office, stark-faced and subtly shaking, and in the midst of profuse apologies (up to and including: “What have I done, why did I leave her, how did I make this mistake, when will I forgive myself [can I forgive myself], who am I?”), Mr. St. Quinn knelt to the floor and whispered her name over, and over, and over.

Editor’s note: Mr. St. Quinn started a GoFundMe to raise funds for NKG, Inc., LLC., as they jointly knit a quilt in Sandie’s honor; expenses include quilting supplies and shipping/postage to send the quilt across the continental U.S. to be knit by any member interested in participating.

Thomas “Moss” Tomlin

Moss was fascinated with life’s habit of turning on a dime. How irrelevance spun—in one full circle—to permanence. As a kid, Moss asked his parents from where the nickname “Moss” originated, especially when starting with “Thomas” as its base, to which they replied, in jest, “Like garden moss, you’re always there, whether we like it or not.” Moss’s wife, Petunia Dash-Tomlin, joked that his parents did him a favor by prescribing Moss as his nickname versus schoolyard bullies developing a nickname on his behalf. 

Moss spent a majority of his time daydreaming about moving to the countryside. He thought a lot about quiet, and how quiet starts, and where quiet begins and where quiet ends. Mrs. Dash-Tomlin posits that Moss was quiet up until the moment he died, rendered silent not by fear but by finally hearing the answers to his pile of quiet questions.

Mrs. Dash-Tomlin would like to note a few things about Moss: she knew she loved him the moment she heard his voice, and the casual greatness in its natural vibrato. In the beginning of their marriage, she dreaded the ends of nights like a crow fears the end of autumn, and at the end of their marriage, she dreaded the thought of his death like a woman dreading the thought of her husband’s death. Mrs. Dash-Tomlin would like to call specific attention to Moss’s delicate eyes and the equally delicate manner in which he saw everything and everyone. Winter was his favorite season, but she loved him with the hottest day of July. She wasn’t much of a writer, but she tried to write poems for him and when he slept, she whispered them to the silence of their room (“With you for miles / I am here” was her favorite line). Mrs. Dash-Tomlin, who would like to be referred to as Pettie from here on out, would like to note that Moss was a slice of peach pie and even on his worst days was a three-day-old slice of peach pie. If he had had the opportunity to live on a farm, he would’ve loved every moment: quiet expanding outward like a halo across tuba-brass fields, quiet rising on the back of the sun, quiet in what he heard when Pettie read poems to him in his sleep. 

Pettie would like to note that Moss had an insatiable need to not be disappointed in anything—not when a season failed its quest to ripen its crop so when he bought it from the store it would be ready within two and a half days, not when a restaurant was too full to be seated, not when they couldn’t have children, and certainly not when he died. But it is she who is disappointed now, when her husband’s obituary suddenly became about her—disappointment is never intended, her mother taught her. Disappointment is always welcome but never invited, she amended for herself. Disappointment has a room in your head, but you mustn’t furnish it, Moss revised.

Jayda Linnea

One of Jayda Linnea’s favorite things about the universe was the banana peel’s ability to hold a secret. Her father wrote messages on the bruised crescent for her to find during lunchtime at school. Love U. C U LTR. U R MY MOON. As an adult, she published a book of poems titled You Are My Moon (In/And Other Words To Live Through The Dark).

Why Jayda loved the city her family will never know. Why she loved spaceships, roasted summer corn, sleep (in excess), small chat with bank tellers, poinsettias, and all sixty-four colors of crayons—these things they might begin to understand. 

Jayda’s relationship with her partner was taut; what started as the Christmas-bowed puppy of everyone’s under-the-tree dreams became the downtrodden family dog lying in wait by the porch door to charge at the fence and set itself free when the owner (Jayda) looked away. But let their story be for another time.

Every day, Jayda kept a journal of words in her pocket or in her purse or under her sleeve or in the elastic band of her brassiere, in which she jotted down a word or two. The journal will be displayed at her wake. Donations in memory of Jayda can be made to Merriam-Webster’s ever-going fund to assist in teaching the youth how words are an ocean if you learn how to swim.

Their Story, at Another Time

The first line in Jayda’s obituary should’ve included how she was a poet who saw a missed train as a secondhand arrival for someone else, and died when a building’s scaffolding tumbled down, after watching a man tempt death, albeit unsuccessfully.

But—before the obituary:

A man sat on the ledge of the NQRW platform in Times Square on the morning of Jayda Linnea’s last day.

The morning felt birds-eye from the get-go, Jayda experiencing an already-haggard Manhattan morning neither here nor there but where a rogue crepuscular pigeon rests before dawn, observing the stoplights alternating at a pace slowed by morning, debating when to swoop in to snag a crunch of lemon agave muffin from an innocent passerby.

Everything felt just out of view while still remaining in view—an awful paradox, she realized, when the man knelt on the swiss cheese stripe running along the length of the platform.

Not many months before this, Jayda went to a poetry event sponsored by the MTA and the chairman of the board introduced the poets scheduled to read. After name-dropping for approximately four minutes, the chairman recited a poem.

“This may come as a shock to most of you,” he said, looking across the crowd with a knowing smile, “especially to my coworkers—and no, I’m not retiring just yet.”

A light buzz followed a sardonic set of poetry-snaps.

“I wrote a poem on the subway ride down here and I’d like to recite it.”

Jayda’s patience for impromptu poetry written and/or recited by people who did not appreciate poetry lived somewhere in the final swirl of water nearing a drain. She didn’t care to remember his poem. It sounded like sour lemonade, or being nauseous in elementary school, or more specifically, the helpless feeling of requiring dire assistance from a school nurse after drinking gone-bad lemonade when parents are an entire phone call away.

But on the morning of her last day, when the man tossed his feet over the ledge of the platform, promptly escalating the situation from kneeling-as-if-tying-shoelace to enacting-possible-death wish, Jayda remembered a line from the chairman’s poem:

A subway has an engine and in my heart I have my heart.

A heart doesn’t have a heart, she thought when she heard the line read aloud. But this man might throw his heart in front of an engine.

Still birds-eye, she noticed the lack of movement from anyone else on the platform. She thought what she’d read about bystanders must be true, having never been in a situation in which she’d have to consider bystanding. Later, if she were to tell the man who loved her about what happened that morning—a man nearly jumped to his death in front of her, one of those horrid newspaper headlines come alive, a horror story blown into frame, a life lost while other losses lived—would she have remembered the detail about no one reacting?

A guy in a full tweed suit and hat emerged from an until-then invisible door along the wall. Jayda used one of the recherché MTA-provided public restrooms in a subway station a week earlier. The faucet in the tiny magician’s box knew nothing about stopping and everything about running dry.

Before she left Iowa for New York, her mother called her rough-hewn. Her father said she was an avenue with no streetlights: long and nimble and traveling somewhere without seeing an inch in front of herself. Years prior, in a college course called On Poetry & The Expanding Sense Of Self, a professor called her “Genius.” Once, a flight attendant said she had beautiful hair, rivers of hair.

After hesitantly plucking a music bud from his ear, a businessman nudged his Gucci loafers closer to the ledging man and gently shouted, “Hey.”

The man on the ledge glanced over his shoulder, scanned the area as if waiting for a courier to deliver an important package, grimaced, and shook his head. 

“It’s been too long a day, man,” he said. “Too long a night, too. Too much of everything.”

The man in Gucci stepped closer and extended a hand. “Hey man, come on, let’s move away from the edge.”

“It’s about time I go.”

The man hovered his body above the platform, pushing the palms of his hands into the STAND BACK FROM THE yellow line. She couldn’t imagine witnessing this man’s death on the tracks, but also couldn’t imagine moving her body at all. Not one nerve moved as the scene unfolded, tugging her in as a bystander in a plot rife with them.

Overcome by an angel (or ghost?) haunting the MTA, the man on the ledge suddenly launched himself to his feet.

“I won’t,” shouted the man.

The man in Gucci held his chest in place with the palms of his hands. Jayda counted to five in her head, twice. Everyone else stood without the hint of a quiver. The man walked off, disappeared around a grimy pillar, into a crowd that didn’t know this group’s brand of anxiety. 

The journalist who covered the incident on the NQRW platform (“Manhattan Man Attempts To Throw His Life In Front Of W Train”) was the same journalist to cover the initial report of the crumbling scaffolding. To his editor’s chagrin, the journalist described the sound of the shifting rubble as “a schoolyard at its busiest hour: hysterical shrieks from a jungle of metal.”

Despite the debacle on the platform, Jayda arrived at her office not a minute later than usual, some strange proof that not everything lasts as long as it feels.

These were the tasks Jayda accomplished before the building began to shake: switch from sneakers to stately loafers, pour office coffee over office mug of ice, peel quote-a-day calendar page (“One must not dread what they think they might lose.” —Max S. Bloom, writer & philosopher), email with four cohorts, research the word “receival” after suspected improper usage in an aforementioned cohort’s email, renew The New Yorker subscription, contemplate phone call to father, decide not call the man who loved her.

The man who loved her had a bizarre fascination with the magician’s trick of sawing a person in half.

“There’s so many variations of it,” he explained to her over dinner the night preceding this. “Modern audiences don’t appreciate the illusion like they did in the past, but the fact that there are so many ways to practice the trick is what makes it a true art form.”

“The end result is the same, no?” Jayda asked, two-thirds-hearted in this conversation.

A single ice cube roamed and clinked in her glass of white wine as she rotated her wrist, the cube an awry metronome to a dinner conversation with a man whose love for her created an absence in her. His excitement for this particular subject shifted his shoulders forward and leaned his body close to the plastic flame of the perpetually flickering candle on the table between them, casting his face with artificiality against his genuine excitement about the idea of a body getting fake-cut in half.

“Yeah, I suppose. But the way in which the magician propels to the end…that’s what’s so magical.”

The rosemary on her chicken dish was accidentally thyme.

“A body sliced in half is a body sliced in half. I think the only magic about it is how it turns something impossibly grim into a performance.”

Jayda was Googling the variety of ways a body can be fake-sawed when the building first shook. The surface of her iced coffee jittered around the lilypad ice shards.

The man who loved her was right—there are many ways to go about completing the illusion—and for a moment she thought about calling him as coworkers around her buzzed with jittered pleasantries about “everything being okay.” She didn’t know it and never would, but the call she didn’t make would have been the last time they’d speak, and also the last time she’d speak to anyone.

After the building’s first tremble, smack in the center of a city that was immune to symptoms similar to an earthquake, a few people in her office stood up from their desk chairs and read each other’s faces for acknowledgement. After the second, some employees outspread their arms like surfers finding balance on the slow hill of a wave, the office manager pressed her body against a wall, and an accountant fled. An intern lit a cigarette. Not thinking or looking at the screen, Jayda’s fingers typed the word “tremor” into a sales spreadsheet. There was a science behind earthquakes, some equation of magnitudes, maybe? She couldn’t recall the vocabulary words associated with earthquakes but all the words about dying rushed forward with white flags waving.

She seemed a veteran of a childhood cutting coupons with mom rather than credit card swipes without her. Before settling into an office job with a desk chair that never felt consistently comfortable even for an hour, Jayda took up a nannying job for a boy named Till (short for nothing) while studying in Columbia’s MFA program for poetry. The initial hiring flyer was posted in her upper Manhattan apartment building on the wall of slate-grey mailboxes by the boy’s mother who lived ten blocks north of Jayda. When Jayda asked who the woman knew to post the flyer in her building, politely named Square Park by impolite architects (their impoliteness defined by a single elevator shaft for a building that clearly demanded three, Formica everything, and a basement with both a washroom and a dryer room, the navigation between which proved inconvenient at its very best), the mother said, “No one; not directly, at least.”

Jayda knew herself directly. She knew her parents directly most of the time, their octagonal relationship rarely skewed with indirection over things, other than her moving to New York. The man who loved her knew her indirectly but liked to believe his relationship with her was the most direct relationship in his life (it likely was). In the early morning, when guessing between night or day was a gamble, she knew him most indirectly, after the shape of her sleep was disfigured by his insistent sleep talk and subconscious need to converse while dreaming out his dreams.

One afternoon, following a full, sleepless night of the man who loved her addressing the bedroom as though it were an auditorium of anxious graduates blindly glomming advice from a quarter-famous commencement speaker, Jayda found herself six minutes away from losing her nannying job. After sending Till off for his afternoon nap, a rush of sickness swept across her body. How she managed to get herself horizontal she’d never known, but her hands found the coppertone plush area rug and she laid herself across it, pinned the lip of the rug to the edge of her torso, and rolled herself across it two times. When Till emerged from his bedroom an hour later, he took in the sight of her on the floor for the length of a yawn and then exclaimed, “Hotdog!” like a foodman in the 1920s at a ballgame.

“There’s construction going on downstairs, right?” a sales rep asked the collective office, an open-floorplan most employees despised until this moment. The human body does not seek isolation in moments of terror.

Maybe the subway platform man wasn’t all wrong that morning. Passersby shook their heads and grimaced as the man on the ledge slunked away, sobered by the shock of not going through with his intended action. Perhaps he was only a little bit wrong to cause worry among everyone standing there, but also right in his act of taking charge of something of which he’d not had charge prior to that moment.

The third shake sent everyone running. The industrial-chic Edison bulbs swung like metronomes, trendy bean bag chairs sifted into level disks, papers shook free of folders, succulents and plants broke loose from pots; to Jayda and her colleagues, the moment was simultaneously superluminal and molasses.

The employees sprung into action, resulting in a flood of people on Park Avenue as every last person exited the building. By the time she reached the ground floor, Jayda’s body was a rollercoaster: not the body feeling the result of a drop, but the metal holding itself in place, shaking against the weight of the experience. About half a block away from the main clump of people waiting for further instructions, Jayda found a quiet spot under the shadow of the building’s scaffolding.

As the scaffolding fell, there was no rush. The block remained static as people caught their breath, but everything in Jayda’s head whizzed to conclusions: did I say goodbye to him nicely, did I unplug the coffeemaker, did I finish signing my will, do I have a will at all I can’t remember, did I have a great love, the kind of love people harvest in films and books and songs, did I have that at all, can I die without having that and what success did I have, and my father, was he happy or did he see the boogeyman under every woman’s bed and my mother, was she successful in something other than love because I know she didn’t have love especially when the boogeyman reported all my father’s undoings or were they wrongdoings, is it wrong to fall out of love with one person and use the falling from one love to propel you into a new love or is that human nature, is that mother nature, is that the only way to avoid breaking everything apart, to fall quietly from one thing to the next; if the answer is my dad was always in love but with another woman and my mom loved for most of her life but not all of it then maybe I’m a conflagration of the two, is that the right word, no, maybe I’m a conglomerate of all the love which would mean if I’m remembering my arithmetic properly I too can find love or success or make amends with the boogeyman of my heart, maybe he’ll let me confess maybe he’ll let me sleep maybe he’ll let me go. 

A weatherman reported the blueness of the sky after the collapse with a cyanometer (“The sky was at forty-four today: a shade of blue so bright it is usually…unseen”). The field reporter who filmed live (although she wished to the devil it was not live) reported on the scaffolding collapse with a shaky microphone from her shaking hands, and stuttered mightily through her spiel, dust gently billowing behind her beige-suited figure as though wind over an ocean seeking the nearest sail.

The journalist offered to write the obituaries of those lost to the scaffolding: three people in total. It was inescapable, really—he assumed his editor would ask and he felt most qualified anyway; he’d seen their faces, the final expressions, the moments before a pulse vacated the premises of a body.

Years before her death, just before Jayda boarded a plane to New York, her father harped on a warning about the electricity running sprints on subway tracks.

“Be careful, the track’ll zap you like it zaps the rats: quickly.”

“If I don’t end up coming back to Iowa,” Jayda began, before her father interrupted by hugging her so-long. “Blame it on the electricity.”

The electricity in her heart, it turns out, wasn’t strong enough to save the muscle that housed it. But it was reliable enough to keep her alive under rubble, aware enough to feel the sensation of being saved when a firefighter’s hand reached toward her, his ashed jacket blurred in the foreground of her blurring vision, and kind enough to queue her lungs to release a final breath that could only be categorized as relief.

The Man Who Loved Jayda

The man who loved Jayda was told of her death by a police officer, over the phone, which he thought was pretty fucking rude. 

“Do you know how much I love her?” he asked the police officer, out of shock or out of sadness he did not know.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Wyatt.”

The police officer called him ‘Mr. Wyatt’ like a five-year-old would refer to their parents’ close friend, using the first name as the name to follow the title. His name was Wyatt Mark, arguably a surname bait-and-switch.

Jayda’s body was flown to Decorah, Iowa, a town reminiscent of a movie set that lost funding halfway through: sturdy homes with well-thought floorplans lacked fresh paint, unique storefronts with names too idyllic to succeed (i.e. Edy & The Crazy Pickle Deli), people in a constant state of smiling. Decorah was a breath away from having its sheet blown off, uncovering the truth of what was there: a cloaked man pulling levers or Jayda’s father speaking rhymes or god himself, paring his fingernails over his state of un-undoing.

After Jayda’s funeral, where Wyatt was mostly ignored or avoided (like most things, he could not tell which), he walked through downtown Decorah, searching for a sign of Jayda anywhere. In his reflection? There she was. Hidden in the bricks’ grout of her elementary school? Yes. Inside the mailbox slot on the corner of her childhood homestreet and Main? He saw her algae eyes glowing within the rectangle, curling up at their corners when he gasped.

Yes—Wyatt was losing his wits. He overheard Jayda’s father say this to an aunt of Jayda’s at the repast.

“The man is crazy,” is precisely what her father said, stirring an inky coffee with a red plastic straw. “Just like the city that took her.”

Decorah was Kafkaesque. Jayda’s father was Kafka. Jayda would’ve liked this comparison, Wyatt thought, as he pulled his tie from his neck so it hung scarflike.

Wyatt wanted to marry Jayda, and he would’ve married her there in Iowa if that was something she wanted him to do. Had she lived, he wondered when she would’ve taken him to visit Iowa. In what way would she introduce him to her parents, family, and friends? Would there have been a hug from her mother and a firm handshake from her father, versus the overall indifference to his presence at the funeral, which was likely a result of their fear of facing their reality: he was the man who kept Jayda in the city that killed her.

Wyatt found a spare bench on a spare strip of Main Street and watched people pass. Not many people, he thought, maybe the fewest people he’d seen in one place since walking into a lecture hall five minutes early on the first day of a college semester. 

He stood, stretched, and walked on. He stopped in Arty’s Artisan Arctic—an ice cream shop with a menu caffeinated by midwestern business owner dreams—and took a seat at the bar. The shop was a riff on the classic ice cream shoppe from decades’ past, with a steel bar top running the length of the space, guarded by an at-and-ready line of steel cherry vinyl bar stools, and walled in with time-worn photography of ice cream, kids with soft serve mustaches, and candy spilling out of jars.

The flavor selection was gently disconcerting: the amount of nontraditional flavors was too high to maintain long term. Do M&Ms not shatter after being frozen for a week? Does pretzel salt oxide cream after 72 hours? Wyatt wanted to ask Arty these things, who leaned over the counter to straighten out four cups indicating the serving sizes available. Instead, Wyatt asked for an extra-large cup of Grasshopper’s Delight (mint-chocolate-chip) with two scoops of The Worm’s Playground topping (chocolate cookies) on top.

As Arty scooped hefty piles of green-nearing-teal ice cream, Wyatt pictured Jayda’s face in the reflection of the bar, her features strewn about by the mismatched catches of light on the brushed metal surface.

A few funeralgoers had asked Wyatt about Jayda’s death, as if he had facts or figures to provide context for the thing that would keep everyone up at night for years to come.

“How did the scaffolding fall?”

“Did anyone survive?”

“Was God there that morning?”

Wyatt didn’t have any answers for any of the questions, only additional questions. 

He thought a lot about the onlookers from surrounding buildings who felt the phantom shake of their corporate grey carpeted floors after hearing an excess of the usual city siren symphony; the people who saw the bricks blow out into dust as the scaffolding collapsed. Was it in slow-motion for those who watched? Did the scaffolding shift downward with the gusto of an elderly man shuffling to bingo, or maple escaping its tree, or a lover watching their just-then-ex turning their back and walking away—the kind of slowness defined in high school classrooms in June, or when the phone rings in the late, late night.

When Wyatt thought long and hard about something, he pressed his thumb and forefinger into his bottom lip until he felt the outline of his teeth. At the funeral, his gums started bleeding.

Wyatt slapped money on the counter and was off, his resolve fading. He wandered north for ten minutes and found himself amongst a slew of Victorian homes decorated with mums, pumpkins, and various multigourds. Bicycles tossed in the grass, stray baseballs scattered about lawns, a partially wound chartreuse hose snaking across a front walkway, a swing swaying with nothing at all. Wind blew across a yard and shook blond leaves into his path on the sidewalk. The galloping in his chest settled. Maybe she didn’t feel anything when the scaffolding fell. Maybe she was writing a poem in her head, or thinking of a poem, or imagining her life as poetry, something free verse and loose like her hair on Saturday mornings, dark like how she liked her coffee, warm like how he hoped she felt him in her heart.

Out of sympathy, Jayda’s mother asked Wyatt if he wanted to say a few words before the closing prayer. His selfmade speech-gone-homily went on like this:

You don’t know me, and I’m sorry for being a stranger up here instead of a warm face, like Jayda’s. My name is Wyatt, and I was in love with Jayda. Well—I am in love with Jayda, but I’m working on how to change that into the past tense. Thank you, Mr. and Mrs. Linnea, for allowing me to say a few words about the girl we knew.

Her face—specifically in the frequent moments when he told her about her beauty she chose to ignore—splashed in front of him. He took a long, deep breath for a long, dark pause.

Jayda was a poet—a beautiful one, too. She wrote poetry because she didn’t know how else to give away her feelings. I’ve been trying to find poetry in what happened to her, and I remembered a word she used all the time: “contretemps,” which means “an unexpected, unfortunate occurrence.” It also means “mischance,” which is the definition I prefer. I can’t help but wonder how all of this is not the story of an unwritten poem of hers instead of reality. I can’t stop saying the word “contretemps” in every silence that finds me, and I can’t remember who I was before her, and I can’t unhear the beauty in her last poem when she read it aloud on the night before she died, trying to work out an ending to it, while an ending waited for her the next day.

After an uncomfortable farewell to her parents and a lurching cab ride to the airport, Wyatt caught his flight to New York not by the grace of god—but a different kind of grace, found in an airplane window when the glare of an eye-level sun reflects a version of your face you’ve not yet met, or the graceful way her possessions in his apartment packed into only one 18” x 18” x 18” box, or the grace in how, two years later, the newspaper clipping of her obituary slipped from a magnet on the refrigerator when he wasn’t home, the ghost of a weather worn memory making its way through the house to find an exit, all swift and discreet, fatigued from looking at the world birds-eye.

Laura Miller is a designer and writer working in New Jersey. Her short stories are published in The Journal of Compressed Creative Arts, Vending Machine Press, apt, Crab Fat Magazine, District Lit, Four Chambers Press, Menda City Press, Anomaly Literary Journal, Stylus Literary Journal, The Walrus Journal, and 99 Pine Street. She won first place for her novella “Ellipsis” for the Jimenez-Porter Writers Prize, and second place for both “Front Lawn” and “The F Train Downtown” for the Jimenez-Porter Writers Prize. She is currently working on her first novel.

He tells me he has never seen a field of corn.
I tell him it’s just row upon row of the same.

But he says: Look at this summer
and see all the colors you have ever known.

Mustard and thistle. Tumbleweed.
Low shady sunsets that pick out

flowers in the fields from
the dark foliage of trees

among a knob of hills.
Winds that breathe and blow

over bent-down grasses.
Crickets gossip along a limestone fence.

Lazy Susans grow up
one slope and down another.

Off in the distance a copse
of young pines and farther

still a creek with shale
slaked dry and white.

In a garden he points out snap peas
lined in their pods like rosary beads.

See, he says, how time moves
away not even leaving a shadow,

this world that only hints
of past lives, past loves.

And look, he says,
how one can get lost

in the crowded moment
of a single dot.

Richard Luftig is a former professor of educational psychology and special education at Miami University in Ohio now residing in California. His poems and stories have appeared in numerous literary journals in the United States and internationally in The United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, Europe, and Asia. Two of his poems recently appeared in Realms of the Mothers: The First Decade of Dos Madres Press. His latest book of poems, A Grammar for Snow, has been published by Unsolicited Press.

You see a pair of Bactrian camels standing against the railings of a makeshift corral, placid and stoic, as if it makes no difference to them whether they are looking out over the arid steppes or a busy roadway on the outskirts of Vienna. An impatient Austrian honks at you and you hit the gas to push the big van forward.

You drive past the Danish bedding shop, past the supermarket, turn at the car dealership just as it is written on the hand-drawn map. Albert-Schweitzer-Gasse, the delivery street, loading docks to your right and then the backside of the same camels ahead of you. You steer the van left into a straw-strewn driveway and stop before a flimsy gate. There is a hand painted sign hanging from the top rail: Circus Horvat.

You sit inside the van and look out over the circus camp. The corral is made of sectional cattle fence and covers a crumbling parking lot. A motley of caravans and trailers cluster on a narrow strip of land beyond the corral. At their back is the river.

The circus people and their animals are marooned by the restrictions of quarantine and a new disease, trapped amongst the sleek shopping outlets on the edge of the city. They cannot travel and they cannot perform, yet the animals must be fed, just like the stock on your father’s farm.

A trio of shaggy llamas wander past the gate. There are goats and sheep, a dog or two, and a gaggle of Chinese geese. On the far side of the corral you see a pair of dairy cows. You wonder at that. Why cows? Can they be taught to do tricks?

A giant of a man emerges from behind one of the caravans. He lumbers across the corral, one huge hairy arm raised in greeting. A crooked smile breaks through the expanse of his black beard and random animals are drawn into his wake. The bear-like man pauses before the gate and turns with outstretched arms. His voice comes in a bellow that matches his girth.

“Back now, get back my friends. We must let our visitor in.”

The animals obey his commands as if the giant speaks a language they understand. Then he is through the gate and standing beside the open window at your elbow.

“Welcome, my friend, welcome to Circus Horvat. I am Josip, Josip Babić, at your service.”

The giant speaks an old-fashioned sort of German with a heavy Balkan accent. The sheer volume of the man’s voice stuns you, but you manage to find your own words and your manners as well.

“Pleased to meet you, Herr Babić. My name is Günter. My father sent me with this load of feed for the animals.”

“And we are very grateful, friend Günter. But please, call me Josip. The circus family stands on no formalities, unlike the good Austrians. You bring us help, so you are now part of that family.”

Josip raises a meaty arm and gestures across the corral. You look at that finger, big as a sausage, then past it to the far side of the corral. You see a shed roof supported on poles and under the roof a meager collection of bales and burlap sacks. The giant is speaking again, and his voice fills your ears and the entire van.

“I will open the gate. If you would be so kind as to park beside our humble feed shed, we will unload your treasure.”

He slaps the door of the van and steps forward to the gate. It swings open in his hand like a child’s toy and you drive the van across the corral. You stop the van at the shed, turn off the engine, and slide down to the cracked pavement.

The llamas have fallen in step behind Josip as he stalks to the rear of the van. He scatters them with a wave of his arm.

“Back now, you greedy children. Leave us in peace.”

You hear his booming laugh as you walk to the back of the van and open the doors. Then he is beside you, laughing all the louder.

“Look at this, just look at it! Günter, you are a savior to Circus Horvat. Bales of alfalfa for the llamas and camels. They will be your friends forever. And what do we have in the sacks?”

“Feed corn,” you say, “and some carrots from the cellar. I am afraid they are old and soft.”

One of the giant paws lands on your shoulder.

“I have never seen a goat turn up its nose at a carrot. Come, we shall unload this bounty and then you will share our hospitality, poor as it is.”

Before you can reach into the van you see Josip with a burlap sack in each hand, forty kilos apiece and swinging like small grocery bags. You heave out one of the bales and follow him under the shed roof. The van is unloaded in the twinkling of an eye and the two of you are standing beside it as the animals eye the new pile of food.

Curious, you look about the corral for more exotic creatures.

“Josip, are there lions or tigers?”

“No, we have none of the big cats. They eat a great deal and are very expensive. Very much trouble. Not useful like elephants are. Alas, we have no elephants either, but they are wonderful beasts, wonderful. I have worked with the elephants when I was a younger man like yourself. Do you know that they are wiser than men? When once you look into an elephant’s eye, you cannot doubt this. You will know it.”

You look up at the big man and see that his gaze is far away, out past the hills of the Wienerwald. You want to know more about this strange world.

“Josip, what do you do here at the circus?”

“Eh, what’s that? Why, I am a strongman and a clown, but in truth I do a bit of everything. We all of us do, of course. The circus requires a person to have many skills. Ever since I am a boy I am in the circus. I am born to it as they say. Yet in all of those years, never have I seen such sad times as these. We cannot set up the bigtop, cannot perform, and they say we cannot travel.”

The great voice is softer, and you hear the sadness in it.

“My father told me that the circus was going to Croatia.”

“Yes, the spring camp is home, as least for the animals and the few of us that tend them. When the summer begins everyone comes back and we travel the circuit. But this season, who knows?”

Josip spreads his hand wide and smiles at you through the black beard.

“The thing to remember is that the circus survives. Through great wars, hard times, disasters, still the circus comes to town. The players may change from year to year, but the circus goes on. And speaking of the players, it is time you met them and received their thanks. Come.”

Then he is leading you into the labyrinth of caravans and you have no choice but to follow. Dogs trot along next to you, sniffing and darting. A calico cat peers sphinx-like from the atop the safety of a tall crate. Josip squeezes through a narrow gap between two trailers and you emerge into an open-air kitchen. Three people are sitting at a sway-backed table while a fourth, a child, tends to a camp stove. You look again and see the cook is no child, but instead a very small man. Josip calls out to them and the little person joins the others.

“Friends, this is Günter, who has brought an entire shipment of feed for our beloved creatures. Please, if you will.”

To your great embarrassment they rise from their chairs and being to applaud. Josip joins in, his hands slapping together like cannon shots. You feel yourself blushing and then you catch the eye of the young woman, or she catches yours, and you duck your head. You feel one of Josip’s hands scooping you forward.

“Günter, allow me to introduce our family. This is Madam Dragica, trainer of the world’s most intelligent dogs. She is also our nurse, veterinarian, and surrogate mother when we need one.”

Madame Dragica nods in a stage curtsey, one ankle crossed in front of the other. Then her eyes are on yours and you see the decades there, but her face is years younger than those piercing grey eyes.

“This is Petar, master of the horse, but as we have no horses at the moment, he is the master of the llamas and camels. And this is Ivan, Europe’s smallest clown and fearless human cannonball.”

The two men give dramatic bows, one very tall, the other very short. Ivan winks at you and it makes you laugh aloud.

“And this, this is Martina. She is lighter than the air itself, defying gravity from the heights of her trapeze. When she is not weightless, her needle repairs all of our costumes.”

The woman is young, but older than you are. She does not curtsey, and she does not bow. She gives you only a nod; without a smile, yet not with a frown. She is not pretty, but she is so beautiful you cannot breathe and when her dark eyes do not waver you drop yours because you must. Even with your head bowed, you feel those eyes like a pinprick that will not yield.

You know that they have all seen you, but there is nothing you can do. It is Josip who rescues you.

“Ivan, coffee for our guest, if you please. And Petar, if you would be so kind, a round of Rakia for everyone.”

He nudges you with an elbow like a battering ram and his stage whisper is loud as a shout.

“One small one won’t hurt anything, and we won’t mention it to your father.”

You are herded to a chair. Ivan bustles coffee around the table and Petar pours clear firewater into heavy shot glasses. The flared glasses sit in a battered tray and he fills each to overflowing. The tray goes round and then the Rakia is in your hand. Icy trickles slide down your thumb and forefinger.

“Günter, his father, and their generosity!”

They repeat Josip’s toast and throw back their shots in one go, so you must do the same and the ice turns to fire in your throat. Glasses are spun upside down and click to the table and yours follows.

Then everyone is talking at once and there is much laughter and you are happy just to be sitting here at this table. Ivan asks you about your farm, but you have little to answer. Yes, you say, my father and me and our farm and no one else. You feel a moment, a stillness, and then Petar is telling a story about Ivan being squashed beneath a fat woman who fell into the circus ring during a show in Salzburg. Everyone is laughing again, and you are glad of it.

You look across the table and Martina’s eyes catch yours and pin you where you sit. She is laughing with the others, but her eyes gleam with something other than laughter. You drop your head to your coffee while Ivan retaliates with a story of Petar falling from his horse. You laugh with the others and are more careful with your eyes.

The talk goes around the table, and with it more waves of laughter. You listen and laugh and drink your coffee. Your cup is empty, refilled, then emptied again. You are happy just to listen to their words, even knowing that your father is waiting and there is work to be done.

As if reading your thoughts, Josip slaps his hands against his massive thighs.

“Well, my friends, we must not keep our young man from his father. We would not wish to cause him worry.”

He pushes himself up from the table and the others do the same. Hands reach out to you and you take each one in turn. The last hand is Martina’s and the touch of it scorches you like the Rakia that burned in your throat. Then her fingers are gone from your flesh, but the fire remains.

Josip leads you away amidst the chorus of their farewells. You follow the giant as he threads the way back through the maze of caravans. He stops beside the van and you stop as well. The big man is smiling down at you, one hairy hand extended. Your hand disappears into his as you shake it.

“Günter, my friend, you are always welcome at Circus Horvat, whether you bring gifts or no. You understand this, yes?”

You nod your head and manage to murmur a goodbye. You climb into the van and shut the heavy door. The air inside is damp and vegetal and the smell of it surrounds you. You turn the key and the engine rumbles to life.

Josip is standing at the open gate as you drive through it. The big man steps back and raises a hand. You return his wave.

The two camels stand at the fence, but they are not watching the passing traffic. Their stoic eyes are on you, and you alone, as if committing you to memory. They know they will see you again.

Marco Etheridge lives and writes in Vienna, Austria. His work has been published in Canada, The UK, and the USA. His mantra is write, travel, repeat. All of his credits and other fine stuff is available at his website: https://www.marcoetheridgefiction.com/

Reviewed by Kevin Torrey

It takes a great deal of skill to tell a story without excess verbiage. Some authors spend 20 pages detailing a scene down to the last missing eyelash without advancing the story. Others use action as a substitute for plot.

But sometimes a writer comes along who uses dialogue so well that he can carry the story and still save the rain forest. Eric Luthi uses conversation the way a good artist uses color – it fills the emptiness between the lines with emotion and meaning. And often, the reader can picture the scene through the dialogue alone, which is where the real story lies. After all, this is not an action novel. It is a story about human connection. The characters have real depth, as if they are people the author actually knows. The reader would recognize them, were they to pass them on the street. The story has a genuine, gritty quality, yet lacks the jaded, reality television feel so often displayed by contemporary writers.

It is a quick read, but the characters will stay with you, making you sometimes wonder what they have been up to since you finished reading the story. Maybe Eric will tell us some day.

It would be nice to catch up.

Available at Amazon.