New Micro

by James Thomas

  JOYCE CAROL OATES

  Slow

  The wrong time for him to be returning home so she stands at an upstairs window watching as he drives up the driveway but continues a little beyond the area where they usually park in front of the garage and stops the car back by the scrubby evergreen hedge and then there’s another wrong thing, it’s that she doesn’t hear the car door slam, she listens but she doesn’t hear, so she turns slow and wondering from the window goes downstairs and at the door where there’s still time for her to be hearing his footsteps she doesn’t hear them so like a sleepwalker she continues outside moving slowly as if pushing through an element dense and resistant but transparent like water and at the end of the walk she sees that he is still in the car still behind the wheel though the motor has been turned off and the next wrong thing of course is that he’s leaning forward with his arms around the wheel and his head on his arms, his shoulders are shaking and she sees that he is crying . . . he is in fact sobbing . . . and in that instant she knows that their life will be split in two though she doesn’t, as she makes her slow way to him, know how, or why.

  NICHOLAS DICHARIO

  Sweaters

  I fell in love with her beautiful sweaters. She wore a different one every day. Solid ones, striped ones, loose ones, tight ones, bright ones, white ones. Cardigans, pullovers, short sleeves, long sleeves, crewnecks, V-necks, and daring cowls. She reminded me of Aunt Rita. When Aunt Rita died, our family donated over four hundred sweaters to the Salvation Army.

  She worked at the newsstand, this girl, in a narrow slot behind a glass counter, on the ground floor of a corporate monolith. She was a dash of poly/cotton color in a blue/gray blur of corporate uniforms. “Been meaning to tell you,” I said to her one morning. “Love your sweaters.”

  “Oh. Thank you.”

  “Thought you might like to go out sometime, you know, just the two of us—cup of coffee, dinner, film. You remind me of my Aunt Rita. She used to wear sweaters all the time, just like you. Such beautiful sweaters. Her favorite was a Scottish cashmere. We buried her in it.”

  While I stood waiting, she sold two lottery tickets, The New York Times, and a cup of coffee. The security guard popped in and told her that he’d finished his screenplay and was looking for an agent. Then we were alone. She leaned on the counter, scrunching the delicate chambray under her elbows, and said, “Did you ever wanna fuck your Aunt Rita?”

  “God, no! Of course not! Are you joking? You’re joking. Of course not!” I often spoke without thinking. Bad habit of mine.

  “That’s what I thought,” said the girl.

  She turned away to sell a pack of cigarettes, leaving behind a trace of static, and we never spoke again.

  MEG POKRASS

  The Landlord

  I smooth my hair, lean my cheek against the wall to chill. He wrote a note next to the emergency numbers, used the clown magnet, stuck it on the fridge. It said, for crying out loud, he’s letting me live here cheap, letting me use his car, his CD player, his lotions. It’s time. Says he’s falling for me, even though I’m a walking disaster. Those words.

  I walk out of the bedroom I rent from him. I pay on time. He’s lying on the sofa, bare feet hinged over the arm. A dish of cocaine and guest spoons dainty on the coffee table near the fruit bowl. I bend down to tie my shoes, say, “Hey, turn on the Jacuzzi, I’ll just run out for cigarettes.”

  He slices a sleepy-bear smile my way, my mouth stretches sideways and upward like a circus trick.

  MEG POKRASS

  Cutlery

  I knew exactly what he meant, so I wrote my lover a letter in which I told him that I was getting good advice, finally, and that I needn’t return. I knew he was without internet and accepted that he would never receive my message.

  I asked him if he had been noticing the male store mannequins, as he did in the old days when we were falling in love. I asked him how things were going with the butter knife collection. My lover would duck into a kitchen store for hours. He didn’t think there were any catalogs that would work for him, it had to do with weight and feel.

  “They have lots of ideas,” he whispered after leaving a kitchen store, smiling like a child at Christmas.

  When I told him that to me, cutlery was not fascinating, but it was kind of maybe a bit interesting, he would glow as if he held a powerful secret. I would glow back at him and he would glow forward at me.

  I had read articles about the way Chinese beetles mated. I’d watched videos of rattlesnakes having sex. We were each part of an intricate and delicate habitat, and we had our own ways of surviving. He had his butter knives. I had my dreams of finding a man who would find me.

  SHERRIE FLICK

  On the Rocks

  Bob drank Scotch. Always. “On the rocks,” he said, nodding to the bartender. He said it solemnly and because of that Sarah took him seriously. She came to believe Scotch was inherently somber, better than all other liquors.

  He drank his Scotch slowly. This seemed ironic in years to come as she realized what he had wanted was quick and easy; what he had wanted was a shot of bourbon and a beer. He slouched as he crossed one thin leg over the other. When he smoked it was a long, thin 100. He lit his cigarettes with the lighter his father had given him for an eighteenth birthday present years before his father had died.

  Bob looked rich and confident, and Sarah believed what he said over the slick bar top, ice clinking in his glass, smoke rising from the ashtray, the memory of his dead father resting deep in his pocket.

  SHERRIE FLICK

  Porch Light

  This Monday, before her morning appointment with her therapist where she discussed enabling tendencies, Hayley ate spinach salad with slivered almonds, as she did every day. She drove cautiously just minutes before confidently telling her therapist she was carefree. Hayley always walks quickly—even uphill—but decided to not talk with her therapist about obsession. At least not yet. She bought new clogs and thought about kissing her next-door neighbor, Tim. Instead, Hayley talked to her therapist about her husband, Donny—his grating interest in sports, his strange, new beard.

  That evening, after they finished mowing their adjoining lawns, drank a beer over the fence, and listened to Nirvana’s Nevermind on her screened-in porch—Donny off at a baseball game—Hayley kissed Tim. The music reminded her of the irresponsible time in her life that she described as carefree. Back then she obsessed over happiness, but was usually discontented. She enabled a string of boyfriends, enjoyed dysfunction. Back then she wore vintage prom dresses to clubs, drank until she fell over.

  Hayley kissed her neighbor who seemed to kiss her back, but then nonchalantly finished his beer, propped his hands on his knees, pushed open the screen door, and ambled through her cleanly shorn lawn and onto his without a goodbye.

  Pretty cricket noises, pulsing fireflies.

  The moon and yard sounds took over after Hayley clicked off the table lamp. Sitting in the dusky dark she heard a moth’s papery wings clobbering the dim porch light. Hayley knew she’d talk of stability at her next appointment, of changing attitudes, of the need for a new monotone wardrobe and a juicer—a juicer with a variety of settings.

  JOHN EDGAR WIDEMAN

  Witness

  Sitting here one night six floors up on my little balcony when I heard shots and saw them boys running. My eyes went straight to the lot beside Mason’s bar and I saw something black not moving in the weeds and knew a body lying there and knew it was dead. A fifteen-year-old boy the papers said. Whole bunch of sirens and cops and spinning lights the night I’m talking about. I watched till after they rolled him away and then everything got quiet again as it ever gets round here so I’m sure the boy’s people not out there that night. Didn’t see them till next morning when I’m looking down at those weeds and a couple’s coming slow on Frankstown with a girl by the hand, had to be the boy’s baby sister. They pass terrible Mason’s and stop right at the spot the boy died. Then they commence to swaying, bowing, hug
ging, waving their arms about. Forgive me, Jesus, but look like they grief dancing, like the sidewalk too cold or too hot they had to jump around not to burn up. How’d his people find the exact spot. Did they hear my old mind working to lead them, guide them along like I would if I could get up out this damn wheelchair and take them by the hand.

  BERNARD COOPER

  The Hurricane Ride

  In salt air and bright light, I watched my aunt revolve. Centrifugal force pressed her ample flesh against a padded wall. She screamed as the floor dropped slowly away, lipstick staining her teeth. But she stuck to the wall as if charged with static, and along with others, didn’t fall. She was dressed in checks and dangling shoes, her black handbag clinging to her hip. The Hurricane Ride gathered speed. My aunt was hurtling, blurred. Her mouth became a long dark line. Her delirious eyes were multiplied. Checks and flesh turned diaphanous, her plump arms, gartered thighs. Her face dissolved, a trace of rouge.

  I swore I saw through her for the rest of the day, despite her bulk and constant chatter, to the sea heaving beyond the boardwalk, tide absconding with the sand, waves cooling the last of the light. Even as we left, I saw the clam-shell ticket stand, the ornate seashore gate, through the vast glass of my aunt.

  When does speed exceed the ability of our eyes to arrest and believe? If the axial rotation of the earth is 1,038 miles per hour, why does our planet look languid from space, as bejeweled as my aunt’s favorite brooch? Photographs of our galaxy, careening through the universe at over a million miles per hour, aren’t even as blurred as the local bus.

  Momentum. Inertia. Gravity. Numbers and theories barrel beyond me. It’s clear that people disappear, and things, and thoughts. Earth. Aunt Hurricane. Those words were written with the wish to keep them still. But they travel toward you at the speed of light. They are on the verge of vanishing.

  BARRY BASDEN

  Johnny Came By

  He rode in on a little red Yamaha yesterday evening. Came all the way from Sacramento, took him four days. Said he stopped in Phoenix and my dad gave him twenty bucks for gas. Last of the big spenders that guy. He still owes me the twelve hundred he stole when I was in the army.

  Johnny said he was pissing blood from all the road vibrations. He sat on the bike in the driveway while we talked. Mary Lou wouldn’t let him in the house after last time. That was a while ago, but she’s like that. He’s still my son no matter what.

  Then a grackle flew over and splattered him and it ran down behind his ear and into his collar. I hosed it off as best I could and gave him everything I had in my wallet before he rode off.

  I stood out there in the growing darkness, listening to those fucking birds settle into the top of the tall cedar by the garage. I thought about taking the shotgun to them, but decided against it. Sure as I did, one of those paranoid dopeheads across the street would start shooting back.

  BARRY BASDEN

  Aerospace

  Her ex lives in another state with another woman. Her new place is close to the beach. Nothing is familiar. Music pours through the thin walls. She hasn’t heard so much bass since high school.

  Saturday mornings she drives down the coast to Kelly’s. He talks her into highlights then slowly turns her blond. She likes how his cut makes her feel sexy.

  She drives the hills for hours, running through the gears, pushing the little roadster through the curves. Near Escondido, she parks in front of a cantina. Chalupas and squash gorditas with guac and salsa picante. Rosie and the Screamers and a stuffed horse in the bar. Wine margaritas and pitchers of beer. Giddyup. She wakes in a small room, a stranger beside her, a foul taste in her mouth.

  Weekdays, she leaves for the plant in total darkness, roaring up I-5, nearly empty at this hour. She arrives in time to run two miles around the lighted track and take long hot showers before work. On afternoon breaks, she shares a joint in Donna’s van and buys junk food off the roach coach. An air force liaison officer, married, intrigues her for a few weeks.

  Her father begs the doctors not to do anything else and goes straight from the hospital to the funeral home. After the farm is sold, her mother moves in with Aunt Mary. Her yearbooks arrive by priority mail, with a note in her mother’s cramped handwriting, warning her again.

  AMELIA GRAY

  AM:103

  Carla snapped the tines off the plastic fork with her thumb. “No matter how deeply I bury you in the gravel pit of my memory,” she said, “you come crawling back out.”

  “There’s no need for poetry,” Andrew said. “I’m just here for my chair.”

  “I’m eating,” she said.

  “You just broke your fork.”

  “See, Andrew, that’s just how you are. It’s no damn business of yours how I eat, and what I eat with. What if I brought this fork to the door just to show you how serious I am?”

  “All I’m saying is, you’re not eating right now, and I want my chair back.”

  “I want those years back,” Carla said. “I want my youth back.”

  “You may have your youth,” Andrew said. He had a bag with him, and he reached into the bag and pulled out a small, carved box. He handed it to her and she held it with both hands.

  “Sorry I kept it for so long,” Andrew said.

  Carla took a step back to let him in. “Your chair is in the kitchen,” she said.

  AMELIA GRAY

  66:PM

  “They’re gold flakes,” Wallace said, reaching to touch them on his back. “Genuine.”

  Tess held her hand against the textured gold on Wallace’s tattoo. She drew her fingers back. “Are not,” she said.

  “Indeed they are. The artist was fantastic. He literally fused the metal to my skin, and I have to get it retouched every five years.”

  The gold leaf made a pattern of fish scales across his lower spine.

  “It’s beautiful,” she said.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, turning his head halfway.

  “Not as beautiful as a gold flake.”

  He considered it. “Maybe not. It was a very special process.”

  “Must have been,” Tess said. She felt sure she would die alone.

  MEG TUITE

  Dad’s Strung Out Women Blues

  The waitress plucked at her dollhouse features in the bathroom mirror. I was tempted to camp out in one of the stalls. Instead, I straightened my sunken shoulders and studied my strawberry tree hair. It was iron-red and stiff as a portrait. The waitress sniffed her middle finger, smiled at me, and sashayed out.

  The sports bar stench of burnt brain cells and stale beer tackled the thick smoke as I walked toward my father. He was slumped in a booth, poured into his dollar-store jeans, unable to surrender to his declining choices and torn curtain of a past. His shiny face was a milk pool of Jack Daniels he’d sucked down through the decades that now snaked out of his cavernous pores.

  The waitress pulled at her bra and stumbled over with a tray of forgotten nights. My dad and the waitress snorted and threw back a shot. She was another in a long line of tired notes my dad needed to strum. He always cried when he was drunk that he needed me. I figured out why as I slapped my wired hair against my skull and slugged back a beer. I was there to string all those painted smiles into some kind of demented tune.

  TOM HAZUKA

  Utilitarianism

  I return home for the first time as an adult. My parents greet me traditionally, Mom worrying “that woman” isn’t feeding me enough, Dad crushing my hand lest I forget which one of us survived Guadalcanal. But an odor of arrested decay has replaced the smells of childhood. The house of my youth is decorated with death.

  Stuffed creatures fill the rooms. Local varmints predominate—squirrels, chipmunks, some possums and porcupines, even a bullfrog—but Dad hangs my coat on an eight-point buck, and the TV blares from the belly of a rampant and silently roaring grizzly. We stand entranced, almost touching.

  “I bet you could eat a horse,” Mom says, and bustles to the kitchen.

>   “You know Jeremy Bentham, the philosopher?” Dad asks. “He’s stuffed. Mom and I are going to London to see him.”

  My father has hardly left the state since World War II.

  “Your favorite! Liverwurst on rye.”

  Mom puts the sandwich and a glass of milk on the dining room table. Then I see that the cat I grew up with is the centerpiece.

  “You embalmed Kitten!”

  “Embalming is for graveyards, son. Mom and I fixed Kitten to be with us forever.”

  I can’t eat with a corpse staring at me. “Where did you get all these, these dead things?”

  “My God, boy,” Mom says. “Open your eyes.” A shadow nicks her face. “I thought you loved liverwurst.”

  “Your mother saw the ad in a magazine,” Dad says, the two of them beaming as he puts his arm around her for the first time in my memory.