Lit Riffs

by Matthew Miele

  She takes another bite, but the flavor has gone. He had not recognized her as the stranger he was waiting for. He had not fallen prey to a dream, as she had. He took pity on her. He brought her along to flatter himself.

  She pushes the fish away. I don’t want any more, she says. I’m not hungry.

  They do not dance.

  When he has finished his sandwich, and what is left of hers, he gets himself another beer and sits there, not looking at her. Finally he rises and she follows him to the truck.

  For the first few miles they are silent. The sky has started to pink, tendrils of color leap up and across the horizon. The land is stark and lush at the same time. Empty and full of life.

  Meg presses her cheek against the cool glass and watches the fields pass. She is not sorry she got in the truck or drove all night, but she does not like this silence or the emptiness that accompanies it. It is different from the bouts of silence they shared on the way down. Those belonged to both of them. Now they each have their own.

  She thinks of her brothers asleep on the floor in front of the television, no one to put them to bed. Their limbs will be tangled, their cheeks flushed, the dark circles under their eyes softened by their dreams. She can almost smell them, feel their weight as she carries first one, then the other up to bed. But she will not be there to do that tonight. Tonight they are on their own.

  She rubs her temples with the tips of her fingers. You didn’t need to do me a favor, she says softly. You don’t know me. My life isn’t something you needed to rescue me from.

  He stares straight ahead, but his mouth twitches.

  What makes you think you have that kind of power, anyway?

  He doesn’t answer. Meg loosens her seat belt and pulls her legs up under her and for a while they watch the sun come up.

  Sorry, he says a while later in the full light of day.

  What?

  Sorry. About before.

  Oh.

  Aren’t you going to say thank you?

  You sure do have a lot of ideas about what I should do, Meg says, and that hushes him for a while.

  Well, anyway, he says a little later. I am. Sorry, I mean. I just thought you looked different in there. Like you might want to have an adventure.

  So you thought you’d do me a favor. Drive me all the hell across the state for some fish?

  You sure are prickly all of a sudden. I didn’t see you complaining before.

  She bites her lip, but doesn’t feel like explaining what she thought would happen: that he had come to rescue her, to hand over his heart, cracked open. She had no reason to believe this beyond the shaking and the way she couldn’t catch her breath when he’d sat down, when he’d touched her. Surely that wasn’t his fault.

  The trees have moved closer, but still there are places where they can see the red clay hills. She tucks her hair behind her ears and catches a whiff of the catfish. It was real good though, she says. The fish. Thank you.

  He glances over and squints. You making fun?

  No. She exhales. No, I mean it.

  You do?

  Yes.

  It is the best I’ve ever had, he says. But I don’t know why I brought you there. I’ve never brought anyone before, least of all a stranger. That place means a lot to me. He looks over at her and smiles, and she sees it again, the whole reason she came with him in the first place.

  What’s your music like? she says.

  He hesitates and licks his lips. It’s like what we were listening to before, he says finally. Kind of like that. Old-time country and a little blues. Just me and my guitar, mostly. I write my own stuff.

  Oh.

  You like that music?

  She looks at her hands and they seem to belong to someone else entirely. I guess, she says. You’ll think it’s strange, but I don’t listen to music much.

  Oh, he says. He sets his jaw again and she feels the wrongness of what she said, but it is too late, and anyway, it is the truth.

  I don’t know if I believe you, she says a little later. About your career? I mean, if you’re so well known, how come your truck is so beat-up?

  His hands grind at the steering wheel. Don’t talk about my truck.

  Why? It’s a mess.

  The back of his hand connects with her chin before she can move out of its way. She tastes blood and promises herself that she will not cry, even as tears leak out.

  Bastard, she whispers. You didn’t need to do that.

  They pull off the side of the road. I thought you were someone else, he says. That’s the truth of it. I thought you’d be someone I could tell things to but you’re not like that.

  You don’t know what I’m like. You don’t know anything about me.

  Sure I do, he says, his eyes narrow and mean. You grew up in that town and so did your folks. You dropped out of high school and probably wouldn’t have been able to finish, but you’re pretty, so people treat you nice anyway. You hope maybe someday you can get a decent house. You hope maybe someday you can marry some dumb ex-jock with a steady job and pump out a few little monsters, and by the time you’re thirty you’ll look like an old lady. That’s who you are.

  Her face is hot. She tries to open the door, but he reaches over and swats at her hands. Won’t open from the inside, he says. You can’t throw yourself out on the highway.

  She crosses her arms and looks for a familiar sign, a landmark, something to tell her where she is.

  He started to laugh. Aw, he says, sticking his bottom lip out. Did I hurt your feelings?

  She pulls her knees to her chest, refusing to look at him.

  You going to cry?

  You don’t know anything.

  Oh, I don’t?

  No, she says softly. Asshole. You don’t.

  Tell me one thing I got wrong, he says, and uses his finger to count. One thing.

  Okay. She turns to him. I graduated from high school second in my class. I had a scholarship to college and I even went. Did a whole year before my dad died. I bet that’s a year more than you. My mom is sick, she has been for a long time, and I have two little brothers, so I had to come home and care for them. I had to come home and work for them. And no, none of us are from this town, we moved there when I was seven and my dad got a job at the plant. You don’t know who I am or what matters to me and you got no right to judge my choices when you just met me. You never walked two steps in my shoes.

  He doesn’t answer, but after a minute he throws the truck into gear and they pull out on the highway again. Ten miles later he says he’s sorry he hit her.

  Too late now, she says. You did it. I can’t pretend this is fun anymore. I just want to go home.

  When she finally begins to recognize things, it is well into morning. The twins will have woken without her and fixed themselves cereal. They will have turned on cartoons and probably missed their bus. And with no one to notice, no one to drive them, what is the harm in that?

  Raylene will have opened the restaurant, grown impatient when Meg didn’t show up at ten and called the house. No one ever answers that phone. It is a wonder they even remember it is there.

  You going to get in trouble? he says. For being late? You going to be late?

  She sighs. I’m already late.

  Oh. He reaches over and turns the radio on, then spins the dial until he comes to a song he likes. It is one she recognizes, a sweet, catchy love song. She smiles.

  You like that?

  I do.

  He smiles, too. I wrote that—it’s not me singing it, but it’s my song.

  She looks over and sees how bright his face has grown, how young he looks, and stifles the urge to rumple his hair. He hit you, she reminds herself, but it doesn’t fade the impulse.

  Guess this didn’t turn out like either of us thought, she says.

  He gives a short laugh. They pull into town. She diverts him from the Clover and gives him directions to her house. When they get there, he pulls the brake and comes around to let her out.
r />   Thanks, she says.

  Yeah, well—

  Well.

  He leans over and kisses her on the cheek. She feels herself pull back but waits until the truck has disappeared around the bend before scrubbing at her face with the edge of her smock.

  The boys must have made the bus and gone to school after all. The house is quiet. Instead of calling the restaurant, or showering and making her way back, Meg crawls into bed and tumbles into a dense, dreamless sleep.

  She wakes in the early afternoon and takes a quick shower. She dresses and walks down the hall. The bedroom is dark and smells strongly of her mother. Vials of pills stand at attention beside the bed. Meg watches the blankets rise and fall and is comforted.

  Later Meg busies herself in the kitchen with baking a cake—the twins’ birthday is tomorrow—but humming behind everything, she feels a dark, slow coldness that she can’t push away. She pours the batter into pans, careful to shake each one so it will settle. There is no other way to go but forward. Night is coming and her cakes will go in and be baked. She is tumbling toward something old and worn, ugly but unavoidable.

  She didn’t graduate second in her class.

  She didn’t graduate at all.

  She opens the oven and places the pans gently, one by one, careful not to spill or burn herself. Then she closes the door.

  Is that you, Meg? Her mother’s voice is thin and distant. Meg?

  She does not answer. Instead she sits at the kitchen table and lights a cigarette, stares out the window at the familiar yard and trees. It is her house, the house her grandfather built. For a few moments out there in the world she forgot this: what it smells like here, what it feels like. Sitting at this table is like breathing, baking in this kitchen is like wearing her own skin: she knows where everything is, where it belongs. She can tell the time by the shadows on the cabinets, by the timbre of her mother’s voice.

  Meg?

  She spins the saucer she’s chosen as an ashtray. Outside the light is golden. She takes one last long drag and then scrapes the ember of her cigarette along the edge of the saucer until its tip falls off and lies there, still smoking. She watches it for a moment, then she licks her thumb to press it out.

  UNTITLED

  jt leroy

  They’re in the trenches and shells are skimming the tops of their heads, bodies blown up right next to them, and these eighteen-year-old men who aren’t really men but boys like me are shaking like a dog squeezing out a peach pit, cryin’ and callin’ for their mommas. It’s in almost every war film I’ve ever seen. And it would always piss me off, too, illustrating just in case you missed it, how the horror of war could reduce a grown eighteen-year-old soldier to the state of a three-year-old howling to her. But it always would hit me, too, in that sore place: Would I ever become man enough that mama ain’t a person or place I call out to, war or not? I thought when I hit eighteen, that delineating line of manhood, I would be done with callin’ out to Momma, no matter what was flying over my head.

  I was at that crag of maturity, eighteen, as I sat in the waiting room of a dentist who gears his practice to “young adults with drug and alcohol issues.” So the chairs are bright red and the music that same rockness designed to somehow appeal to “young adults with drug and alcohol issues.” And it’s as easy to tune out as elevator music.

  I’m just a newly-off-the-street eighteen-year-old. I can’t even go to a fucking normal dentist. I gotta go to one that my NA sponsor insists I go to. One that won’t let me, the constant lowdown dirty-dog drug abuser (as he somewhat nonaffectionately calls me), con the dentist into giving me drugs, like say, Novocain. And it’s not announced or introduced, it’s just thrust on me, like a mortar launch, as I sit there waiting to get my tooth filled. My hands are sweaty with the thought of getting drilled with only acupuncture. And I am supposed to avoid situations that might make me wanna pick up, to use. Anything stressful, besides getting my tooth filled with no painkiller.

  I am supposed to be doing this crap. Taking care of myself, cleaning up the wreckage of the past-type shit. But, fuck me, this comes outta nowheres! There is the way certain songs can fly out at ya like a liberated cargo load from a passing truck, smashing through yer strat of well-fermented armor. And I am thrown into a battlefield as the Foo Fighters launch into “Everlong” through the dentist’s sound system.

  “Hello, I’ve waited here for you. Everlong …” And I know Dave Grohl probably wrote this about some chick … and at first that’s what my wits ping to. All the fucked-up relationships … torturous, can’t get enough of, can’t get out of … with lines like he is almost groaning out. “Ya gotta promise not to stop when I say when …” It’s gotta be a very SM’y relationship he’s goin’ on about, and, man, do I know that…. I’ve said those words myself to many a lover … “Don’t stop, even if I beg you to …” The lover that holds all of you, all the control and your helpless as a … baby …

  And the drill skids in deeper, closer to that nerve…. And my hands grip at the red cloth of the couch. And I know Grohl pro’ly did not write this song thinking about his dang mama … but for me his words describe what I’ve never been able to quite say myself, about every relationship I’ve been in and how they are all her … my momma, and me trying to escape what I somehow know is crazy, but then needing more, the intense craving of her, calling out even though you know she won’t come. Or can’t anymore … and bang, I am there watching my mother slip a needle in her arm, sloppily telling me I can have what’s left, the drug mixed in with her darkened blood, in the syringe…. And how it would feel when I would take her inside me. Wrap her arm, too lost to protest, around me like a lead apron.

  And Grohl is singing her for me and it’s worse that he’s not even screaming. It’s his voice sounding almost subdued, pleading over the panicked music: “Breathe out so I can breathe you in.”

  And the throb is excruciating as he goes on and on. And the most exciting point I ever got to was never saying “when.” Just seeing how far someone can go, will go … before they come back. And he’s giving voice to it all. I never said “when” to her, to my momma. I’d go as far as she could—fuck, I went way further.

  And if she came back, I’d do it again. I’d never say stop. Cuz now somehow I have to say good-bye every fuckin’ day I don’t take her in me.

  Every day I have to remember the bodies around me, her body…. And that I do actually know how to say “when” and mean it. And how still as old as I will ever get … way past outgrowing the dentist for low-down, dirty drug abusers … as grown-up as U ever think I am … all it takes is to hear “Everlong” and I know, I’m still calling out to her, still hoping she will somehow come and it will all be … fixed.

  “Hello I’ve waited here for you. Everlong …”

  DIRTY MOUTH

  tom perrotta

  You can stand me up at the gates of hell, But I won’t back down.

  “I Won’t Back Down”

  Tom Petty

  I was walking home from school with Mark Hofstetter, listening to him defend the highly dubious proposition that a pound of feathers weighs just as much as a pound of pennies, when Larry Salvati grabbed me from behind and slammed me up against the rusty chain-link fence that bordered the lumberyard along Grand Avenue. Larry and I had once been best friends, so I was more baffled than frightened by his surprise attack.

  “Whadooinarry?” It was close to Halloween and I was wearing a set of wax vampire fangs I’d just bought at Frenchie’s, so the question didn’t come out right.

  “You think you’re so high-and-mighty, don’tcha?” Larry asked.

  Craig Murtha and Bobby Staples, two seventh-grade hard guys who were flanking Larry, nodded and muttered their wholehearted agreement with this unfair assessment of my character.

  “Goody Two-shoes.”

  “Little altar boy.”

  “Don’tcha?” Larry repeated, slamming me back against the fence once more for good measure.

  “
Narree,” I replied.

  In an attempt to facilitate our discussion, Larry plucked the wax teeth out of my mouth and tossed them over his shoulder into the busy street, where they were promptly run over by a passing Boar’s Head delivery truck.

  “Darn it,” I said. “Why’d you have to go and do that?”

  “Listen to him,” said Craig. He crossed his eyes, screwed his face into this doofusy-looking grimace, and spoke in a dumb Mortimer Snerd voice that was apparently supposed to be an imitation of me. “Oh gee, whiz golly, gosh darn it to heck. Why’d you have to go and do that?”

  Craig was mean, but he was also short and scrawny and hadn’t yet taken to carrying concealed weapons, so I glared at him with the contempt he deserved, a course of action that had the added benefit of keeping me from having to look at Bobby Staples, who was taller and way more intimidating. I don’t care what anyone says: it’s just not right for a twelve-year-old to have muttonchop sideburns.

  “Oh, shoot,” said Bobby in a voice as deep as Richard Nixon’s. He looked like he should have been overhauling a transmission somewhere, or breaking up asphalt with a jackhammer. “You broke my freaking fangs, you son of a bad person!”

  Craig and Bobby slapped five and burst into a storm of hysterical laughter. Just to be on the safe side, I started laughing, too. It seemed like a good idea to operate under the assumption that this episode was just a big joke, rather than a mysterious confrontation that might take a nasty turn at any moment. The only two people who didn’t seem to be enjoying themselves were Larry, who had tightened his grip on the front of my windbreaker, and Mark, who was looking on with wide, terrified eyes, his hands folded against his chest as though in prayer.