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  all of Charlotte knew that something had to give. We did not think that even Rockin' Robbie could save Darling Donnis from Bob Noxious three times. Bob Noxious's pull was too strong. This time Lord Poetry had to do it himself.

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  They cleared away the cage from the Texas Chain-Link Massacre, and the houselights went down slowly until only the ring was lit. The white canvas was so bright that it hurt your eyes to look at it. Blue spotlights blinked open in the high darkness beneath the roof of the coliseum, and quick circles of light skimmed across the surface of the crowd, showing in an instant a hundred, two hundred, expectant faces. The crowd could feel the big thing coming up on them, like animals before an earthquake. Rednecks in the high, cheap seats stomped their feet and hooted like owls. Starla twisted in her seat and stuck two fingers into her mouth and cut loose with a shrill whistle. "Ohhhhh Ladies and Gentlemen and Wrestling Fans," Big Bill Boscoe said from everywhere in the darkness, like the very voice of God, "I Hope You Are Ready to Hold On to Your Seats"and in their excitement 23,000 people screamed Yeah!"Because the Earth is Going to Shake and the Ground is Going to Split Open"YEAH!, louder now"and Hellfire Will Shoot Out of the Primordial Darkness in a Holocaust of Pure Wrestling Fury''They punched at the air with their fists, and roared, like beasts, the blackness they hid in their hearts, YEAHHHHHH! "Ohhhhhhh," Big Bill Boscoe said when they quieted down, his voice trailing off into a whisper filled with fear (he was afraid to unleash the thing that waited in the dark for the sound of his words, and they screamed in rage at his weakness, YEAHHHHHHH!) "Ohhhhhh, Charlotte, Ohhhhhhh, Wrestling Fans and Ladies and Gentlemen, I Hope, I Pray, That You Have Made Ready"YEAHHHHHHH!"For . . . The FINAL . . . BATTLE . . . FOR . . . LOOOOOOOOOVE!"

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  At the end of regulation time (nothing really important ever happens in professional wrestling until the borrowed time after the final bell has rung) Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry stood in the center of the ring, their hands locked around each other's thick throat. Because chokeholds are illegal in SWA professional wrestling, the referee had ordered them to let go and, when they refused, began to count them out for a double disqualification. Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry let go only long enough to grab the referee, each by an arm, and throw him out of the ring, where he lay prostrate on the floor. Lord Poetry and Bob Noxious again locked onto each other's throat. There was no one there to stop them, and we felt our stomachs falling away into darkness, into the chaos. Veins bulged like ropes beneath the skin of their arms. Their faces were contorted with hatred, and turned from pink to red to scarlet. Starla jumped up and down beside me and shouted, "KILL Lord Poetry! KILL Lord Poetry!"

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  Darling Donnis ran around and around the ring, begging for someone, anyone, to make them stop. At the announcer's table, Big Bill Boscoe raised his hands in helplessness. Sure he wanted to help, but he was only Big Bill Boscoe, a voice. What could he do? Darling Donnis rushed away She circled the ring twice more until she found Rockin' Robbie Frazier keeping his vigil from the shadows near the entrance to the locker room. She dragged him into the light near the ring. She pointed wildly at Lord Poetry and Bob Noxious. Both men had started to shake, as if cold. Bob Noxious's eyes rolled back in his head, but he didn't let go. Lord Poetry stumbled, but reached back with a leg and regained his balance. Darling Donnis shouted at Rockin' Robbie. She pointed again. She pulled her hair She doubled her hands under her chin, pleading. "CHOKE him!" Starla screamed. "CHOKE him!" She looked sideways at me. "HURRY!" Darling Donnis got down on her knees in front of Rockin' Robbie and wrapped her arms around his waist. Rockin' Robbie stroked her hair but stared into the distance and shook his head no. Not this time. This was what it had come to. This was a fair fight between men, and none of his business. He walked back into the darkness.

  Darling Donnis was on her own now. She ran to the ring and stood at the apron and screamed for Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry to stop it. The sound of her words was lost in the roar that came from up out of our hearts, but we could feel them. She pounded on the canvas, but they didn't listen. They kept choking each other, their fingers a deathly white. Darling Donnis crawled beneath the bottom rope and into the ring. "NO!" Starla yelled, striking the air with her fists. "Let him DIE. Let him DIE!" Darling Donnis took a step toward the two men and reached out with her hands, but stopped, unsure of what to do. She wrapped her arms around herself and rocked back and forth. She grabbed her hair and started to scream. She screamed as if the earth really had opened up, and hellfire had shot up all around herand that it had been her fault. She screamed until her eyelids fluttered closed, and she dropped into a blond and white heap on the mat, and lay there without moving.

  When Darling Donnis stopped screaming, it was as if the spell that had held Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry at each other's throat was suddenly broken. They let go at the same time. Lord Poetry dropped heavily to his elbows and knees, facing away from Darling Donnis. Bob Noxious staggered backward into the corner, where he leaned against the turnbuckles. He held onto the top rope with one hand, and with the other rubbed his throat. "Go GET her!" Starla screamed at Bob Noxious, "Go GET her!" For a long time nobody in the ring moved, and in the vast, enclosed darkness surrounding the ring, starting up high and then spreading throughout the building, 23,000 people began to stomp their feet. Tiny points of fire, hundreds of them, sparked in the darkness. But still Bob Noxious and Lord Poetry and Darling Donnis did not move. The crowd stomped louder and louder (BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! BOOM!) until finally Dar-

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  ling Donnis weakly raised her head, and pushed her hair back from her eyes. We caught our breath and looked to see where she looked. It was at Bob Noxious. Bob Noxious glanced suddenly up, his dark power returning. He took his hand off of his throat and put it on the top rope and pushed himself up higher. Darling Donnis raised herself onto her hands and knees and peeked quickly at Lord Poetry, who still hadn't moved, and then looked back to Bob Noxious. "DO it, Darling Donnis!" Starla screamed. "Just DO it!" Bob Noxious pushed off against the ropes and took an unsteady step forward. He inhaled deeply and stood up straight. Darling Donnis's eyes never left him. Bob Noxious put his hands on his hips, and with a monumental effort threw his great shoulders all the way back. No, we saw Darling Donnis whisper. No. High up in the seats beside me, Starla screamed, "YES!"

  Bob Noxious's left nipple twitched once. Twitch. Then again. Then the right. The beginning of the end. Darling Donnis slid a hand almost imperceptibly toward him across the canvas. But then, just when it all seemed lost, Rockin' Robbie Frazier ran from out of the shadows to the edge of the ring. He carried a thick book in one hand and a cordless microphone in the other. He leaned under the bottom rope and began to shout at Lord Poetry, their faces almost touching. (Lord Poetry! Lord Poetry!) Lord Poetry finally looked up at Rockin' Robbie, and then slowly turned to look at Bob Noxious, whose pectoral muscles had begun to twitch regularly, left-right, left-right, like heartbeats. Darling Donnis raised a knee from the canvas and began to stalk Bob Noxious. Rockin' Robbie reached in through the ropes and helped Lord Poetry to his knees. He gave the book and the microphone to Lord Poetry Lord Poetry turned around, still kneeling, until he faced Darling Donnis. She didn't even look at him. Five feet to Lord Poetry's right, Bob Noxious's huge chest was alive, pumping. A train picking up speed. Lord Poetry opened the book and turned to a page and shook his head. No, that one's not right. He turned farther back into the book and shook his head again. What is the one thing you can say to save the world you live in? How do you find the words? Darling Donnis licked her red lips. Rockin' Robbie began shouting and flashing his fingers in numbers at Lord Poetry. Ten-Eight. Ten-Eight. Lord Poetry looked over his shoulder at Rockin' Robbie, and his eyebrows moved up in a question: Eighteen? Yes, screamed Rockin' Robbie. Eighteen. Ten-eight. "Ladies and Gentlemen," Big Bill Boscoe's huge voice said, filled now with hope, "I think it's going to be Shakespeare's Sonnet Number Ei
ghteen!" and a great shout of NOOOOO! rose up in the darkness like a wind.

  Lord Poetry flipped through the book, and studied a page, and reached out and touched it, as if it were in Braille. He looked quickly at Darling Donnis, flat on her belly now, slithering across the ring toward Bob Noxious. Lord Poetry said into the microphone, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?" Starla kicked the seat in front of her and screamed, "NO! Don't Do It! Don't Do It!

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  He's After Your Soul! He's After Your Soul!" Lord Poetry glanced up again and said, "Thou art far more lovely and more temperate," and then faster, more urgently, "Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May," but Darling Donnis crawled on, underneath the force of his words, to within a foot of Bob Noxious. Bob Noxious's eyes were closed in concentration and pain, but still his pectorals pumped faster. Lord Poetry opened his mouth to speak again, but then looked one last time at Darling Donnis and buried his face in the book and slumped to the mat. Rockin' Robbie pulled on the ropes like the bars of a cage and yelled in rage, his face pointed upward, but he did not climb into the ring. He could not stop what was happening. Please, we saw Darling Donnis say to Bob Noxious. Please. The panicked voice of Big Bill Boscoe boomed out like thunder: "Darling Donnis! Darling Donnis! And summer's lease has all too short a date! Sometimes too hot the eye of heaven shines! And often is his gold complexion dimm'd!" But it was too late: Bob Noxious reached down and lifted Darling Donnis up by the shoulders. She looked him straight in the eye and reached out with both hands and touched his broad, electric chest. Her eyes rolled back in her head. Starla dropped heavily down into her seat, and breathed deeply, twice. She looked up at me and smiled. "There,'' she said, as if it was late in the night, as if it was over. "There."

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  Forced Landing

  by Jennifer Fremlin

  Marsha drives, indifferent now, along Airport Road, her charm bracelet clinking against the steering wheel. She looks neither to the left nor the right, no longer interested in the cows chewing their cud, the sun setting over the fields. In the distance ahead, the lights of the city at dusk are burning for others. Her neck, rigid, isn't craning to catch a glimpse in the rearview mirror of planes taking off, planes filled with the passengers she ticketed and herded aboard. She pushes away thoughts of Bob Gianelli's invitation.

  Her lips are not moving; the radio is turned off. For the past three months, the once favorite part of her day has become a limbo time. She has no desire to arrive home, nor any to go back to work. She obeys the speed limit, and as she approaches the first outlying stoplight she slows for the amber. She changed out of her blue and gray airline ticket agent's uniform and into jeans and a sweatshirt after her shift. Her name tag lies beside her on the seat.

  At one time, before Berta's departure, she would have been sitting up tall in her outfit, her hair pulled back in a matching scarf decorated with the airline logo, piloting her craft to a safe landing. There was excitement in the risksspeeding because of an ill passenger, racing to land before the air controllers were needed to direct an in-coming flight, an hour ahead of schedule and nearly out of fuel. As she came into town the last night of the old days (as she thinks of them now), she had made such a trip, the car nearly turning itself at the proper corners. She had pulled onto Placid Drive, wide and quiet at the dinner hour. The streetlights blinked on exactly as she rounded the curve, a well-lit landing strip. Across the way the Schmidts were just sitting down to their dining room table, where they always ate at night, making their meal a formal occasion.

  But as the car had pulled into her driveway, the lamppost in her yard was dark. The kitchen too, except for an eerie glow. Nobody stood at the sink washing vegetables. No light by the back door cast the usual shadows, and underneath the carport she could barely see to park. Her chest hurt as she turned her key in the back door, pushed it open. She took deep breaths as she kicked off her outside shoes on the landing, and she stepped into her house slippers before pushing into the kitchen.

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  The little TV she had given her mother for the previous Christmas was turned on, but there was no sound. Built especially for countertops, it had AM/FM radio, and though it was only black and white Henry had spliced the cable. Her mother had thanked her with what had appeared to be genuine gratitude and immediately plugged it in. She said it kept her company in the early mornings; Henry went to work while it was still dark.

  But it wasn't Berta watching it now. Henry sat at the round wooden table, a beer in front of him, staring at the silent turning of letters. He didn't swerve his gaze even when she stood right in front of him.

  "What is it?" she had demanded. "What's wrong?" She saw her mother laid out on an operating table, or in a casket, and the memory of the smell of gladiolas overwhelmed her.

  Henry lifted his eyes then to the level of her name tag. He opened his mouth, but his tongue formed no sound. A bubble frothed on his front teeth.

  "Are you sick?" Marsha asked. "Or is it her? Where is she, what have you done to her?"

  Henry nodded. "She's gone."

  "You stupidwhat do you mean?" It was all she could do to keep from shaking the old man. Always talk with respect to your father, Berta had taught her, no matter what. It's the least he deserves.

  Henry remained dumb. Marsha shoved past the kitchen chairs and ran down the hall. The lights in the living room and her parents' room were off. Once, she had come home from school and her mother wasn't in the kitchen to greet her. No warm cookies were on a plate, and the damp heat of the dryer wasn't rising through the vents. She had raced through the house then too, until finally she came to the room at the end of the hallway. There, on the bed, her mother lay on her stomach, still as death, her cotton housedress pulled snug across her bottom. But then she had moved, she had rolled over, a wet cloth clinging to her forehead. "Oh, hello dear, you're home already. I've had a bit of a headache, but I'm fine now." And that had been that. Berta had gotten up, cooked supper as always, and when Henry came in from work there was no sign of anything out of the ordinary.

  No such form spread out over the covers when Marsha had looked that last night. The room was neat and empty. The closet door was cracked, as it usually was so Buttons the cat could creep in and sleep on the shoes. Marsha slid it all the way open. Her father's work shirts, neatly pressed, lined up alongside the matching deep green work pants. Several of Berta's dresses, the good ones she wore for bridge night or at Christmas time, hung on her side of the closet, a pair of pumps beneath each one on the shoe rack. But her cotton prints were missing. Berta had washed only the day before, so they couldn't be in the dirty clothes basket. Marsha pulled open the chest of drawers, something she hadn't done since she was a little girl. Small sachet pouches wafted the odor of her mother

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  up to her, the smell that clung to her underwear, closest to her skin, brushing off as she moved through the house. The drawers were nearly emptyonly a girdle and a couple of worn bras, some old pantyhose and summer socks were left behind.

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  One night a few weeks later, almost two months ago now, Henry was out God only knows where when Marsha came home from work. Marsha, angry with lavender and roses, had scrubbed out her mother's drawers with PineSol. At the back of the top drawer she found a blue box, and inside it was a silver charm bracelet her parents had given her the Christmas she was eight. The charms crowded the interlocking links: a girl's head, with her name and birthday engraved on it; a horse; a pair of skates, and one of skis; a treble clef and a bell that really tinkled; a snowflake; a Santa Claus; a cat with turquoise eyes; and a dimpled orange, "The Sunshine State" in tiny letters underneath. Marsha took it out of the box and put it on, the bracelet fitting snugger than what she remembered. She'd always been big-boned, and her feet were a size nine by the third grade. She stood inches taller than Berta, who seemed petite and fragile at just over five feet.

  It was about the time she found the bracelet that Henry to
ok to sleeping on the couch instead of in the large double bed with brass frame that he had shared with Berta. He pulled an afghan knitted by Berta over him, his feet sticking out the end. In the mornings when Marsha came upstairs from her apartment, the blanket would be twisted in a corner of the rose-colored chesterfield Marsha had purchased for Berta a couple of years back. The living room began to take on the smell of Henry, beer and pipe tobacco and the faint hint of sulphur from the steel plant, the smell of his lap when she was little.

  Henry still watched "Wheel of Fortune" every evening, but in the kitchen instead of on the big color set in the living room. He grunted in a specific way when he had figured out the puzzle. Marsha and Berta used to sit with him, after dinner, playing along, keeping quiet if they solved it first so as not to spoil it for him. Marsha could tell by the way Berta's fingers popped open on her lap when she had solved the riddle, and avoided her eyes. During the commercials, the women discussed the prizes, the merits of the fridge with an ice dispenser outside the door. Henry complained when they kept their refrigerator open too long, and he could hear the warning beep all over the house. He would tell them to hush, that any fool in his right mind would know enough to take the money, especially when it would be tax-free in Canada.