New Micro

by James Thomas

  Their gripes were valid. Their gripes were identical. They always agreed on this, their gripes. And everybody wanted them to fail, to stop succeeding. They were certain.

  So they had a baby boy and they named him Beef and they dressed him like a clown until he was three and was able to take off his clown clothes and tell them that he wanted to be dressed like a farmer.

  “One night,” they tell him, sounding—they knew—too rehearsed. “One special night. We’ll never forget. One night when there was so much love in the room.”

  ARLENE ANG

  Unannounced Guest

  The day we buried my sister, Mimi came. The rings on her face dangled. Everyone watched her as fish would observe a hook without the bait. She wanted to have the cookbooks that she had left my sister. I understood for the first time the word “lover.”

  Mimi stood there and chewed gum: You got to admit there’s something eerie about all these people who never knew her. And are here now.

  It was April. Dead fish were washing up from the lake. There are smells you bring home that write themselves into a novel. In this scene, I was serving egg sandwiches. I was thinking about the hour on Mimi’s digital wristwatch—15:39—and how it created a private neighborhood peopled with silence.

  My sister’s husband stood apart, holding their two children by the wrists. There was so much sun coming in through the French windows that I finally understood the concept behind alien abduction.

  RON WALLACE

  Siding

  You ain’t got no vapor barrier in the house,” the fat tin man wheezes. “That’s what makes all your paint pop off. Now aluminum,” he sings, “aluminum . . .”

  The wife knows this song by heart, her song—the fascia and soffits and weep holes, the Styrofoam insulation, the window wraps and tracks. The stereo booms from the living room. “Just can it,” she yells at their teenage daughter, her ears caulked with rock music.

  “It’s guaranteed,” the tin man intones, “for life.”

  The husband isn’t so sure. He thinks it’s a surface problem—bad preparation, warped boards, cheap paint. He kicks at the family cat who yowls tinnily and bares her rotting teeth.

  The tin man agrees, but says stripping down to bare wood is a bitch, and possibly an environmental hazard. Again, he counsels replacement.

  The daughter, thin as a paint chip, wired to her walkman, scrapes the cat off the floor and peels out of the house, siding with no one.

  The tin man continues—no rotting, no peeling, no blistering: a new start.

  The wife likes the idea and picks and picks at the paint.

  “Don’t!” the husband commands her, watching his whole house flake slowly away, his old angers condensing, his face moist, his passion stirring.

  His voice is as insidious as mildew, the wife thinks, lifting her hand like a barrier, her skin a nest of ants, her smile a stain on her face.

  The tin man comes between them with his lifetime guarantee.

  But things are getting steamy now. “Who asked you?” they say, cutting him off, nailing him firmly in place.

  RON WALLACE

  No Answer

  If only she hadn’t been so pink and steamy. I think that was it, the pink and the steam, the glow of her nude body in the tub as she lay gazing somewhere beyond me, the way women who should wear glasses, but don’t, look through you dreamily. Perhaps it was the pink and the steam and the heat in the white-tiled bathroom, our five-year-old daughter, Jennifer, sitting on the edge of the closed toilet, watching us watch each other, saying, “Mommy’s naked, Daddy. Why are you staring?”

  The phone in the bedroom was ringing. It was Andrea. She was calling from the cabin she’d rented in the Adirondacks, to see if I could get free. After twenty-five years she’d written me from Paris to say she loved me after all, and she’d be in the States this weekend. For twenty-five years I’d dreamed of her, and how the full moon had shown through the open back window of my father’s old Ford on her small breasts. And now she was back, wanting me.

  “The phone’s ringing,” my daughter said.

  “Aren’t you going to answer it?” my wife smiled dreamily.

  “Yes,” I said, mesmerized by the steamy scene, the glow of her blurred nudity.

  “Wash my back,” she pouted.

  The phone rang on through the pink and the steam and the old Ford and the moon.

  “Now beat it, you big buffoon,” she laughed, “so I can get out of the tub.”

  “Beat it,” my daughter crooned.

  I stood in the drafty hallway, musing. What was I doing? The phone rang on, desire still fast in its cradle.

  When Christine stepped out in the hall fully clothed, her mouth in its thin set line, her languor and loveliness gone, our daughter hard behind her, the phone stopped ringing. And the phone rang on.

  KIM CHINQUEE

  No One Was with Him

  He had his own business and let himself off at five, like a regular employee, and every day afterwards he called her, and today when she asked him how his day was he said fine except for the accident. She said what accident? He’d rolled his truck a few times. She said are you okay and he was fine, so he said he was perfectly fine. His truck was probably totaled, so he said that, and he wouldn’t find out for sure until the weekend. She asked if he was scared and he didn’t have time to be scared, so he told her that, and she said, but weren’t you? Like, didn’t you have a moment of freakiness? and he said no. He’d slipped his truck on ice, whirling and spinning, rolling one, two, he wasn’t sure how many times, so he told her that. She said was your brother with you? Maybe your new puppy? No, Hun. No one was with him. Someone called 911, and she kept asking him more questions, like what now? and what if? and he felt fine, so he told her he was fine, he said he was perfectly fine, and she asked more questions and he heard something like some ripping, and he said are you okay? He pictured her bedraggled, her hair a mess, her naked, asking him again will you ever touch me, will you again ever, and will you, will you, will you? ever, do you love me? She said please and are you sure that you’re okay and he said he was fine, Hun, he was perfectly fine, Hun, he was perfectly fine with everything.

  KIM CHINQUEE

  He Was on the Second Floor

  They sat on the edge of the bed, and he let the dog up. She moved closer to him and he told the dog he loved him.

  He said, “What’re you thinking?”

  She said, “We haven’t had sex in months.”

  He laughed and she didn’t. Then he said sorry.

  “You look away,” she said.

  “Sex is just an act,” he said. He petted the dog. The dog licked the sheets.

  She saw lights on the highway. Whatever it was, it was speeding.

  “An act?” she said. “Then why don’t we just fuck? Let’s have sex with strangers?”

  She wanted to make love. He said he didn’t know how. They’d already been over this.

  He wrestled with the dog, letting it bite. He got on the floor with the dog, growling and panting with it.

  She went to the kitchen to fix herself a sandwich. When she went back up, he was sleeping with the dog. There was drool on his arm.

  ANTHONY TOGNAZZINI

  I Carry a Hammer in My Pocket for Occasions Such as These

  A guy I didn’t like approached me on the street. He was wearing a backwards baseball cap and cream colored jeans. He might have said Hey man howzitgoing? He might have said Where you headin’ or You aren’t going to believe what happened to me today. I cast him a glance that read rapacious hatred.

  He said, “You know why you don’t like me, man?”

  I said, “Lay it on me.”

  He said, “The reason you don’t like me is because you don’t like yourself.”

  I said, “Is that so?”

  He said, “Yeah, perhaps a little sensitivity on your part.”

  I said, “You think?”

  He said, “Yeah, we project onto others our deepest fears an
d self-loathing.”

  “You may be right,” I said, considering.

  We walked awhile together on the street in silence, buses rushing past us. I thought about it. He was right. I knew he was right. After a time the guy asked if he could borrow some money from me. “No problem,” I said, and reached in my pocket for the hammer.

  AMY L. CLARK

  Looking for Nick Westlund on the MBTA

  Now that boy was amazing. He was a bike messenger but he fancied himself a Picasso, and he played the cello. Twenty hours on the bus from Boston and the cello on the seat beside him. He paid for the extra ticket so the instrument wouldn’t get lonely.

  He was a smoker too, but not like you or I smoke. He exhaled, and then inhaled. He used to buy two packs at once, some Luckies and some Kamels with a K and take them all out and mix them up and put them back then. So you never knew what you would get. When he moved to the Spanish section of Chicago he learned German. He hated origami, but could do a thousand paper cranes in the time it took the grass to grow. He was the one who pointed out that magic today is really just public survival, like freezing yourself in a block of ice in Times Square and emerging many days later, frostbitten and barely breathing, but alive nonetheless. Once, he showed up to work as a bike messenger wearing a tuxedo. But he always wore his helmet. He knew chess and checkers, could say mate like he meant it.

  He used to watch the grass grow.

  I guess if you were once a genius you are always a genius. And if you were once in Chicago you probably still are. And wouldn’t that be just like him to disappear for years then show up in the phone book instead of my subway car.

  AMY L. CLARK

  What I Really Meant Was That I Loved You

  I said these things to you, I said: I think only people who have never been arrested have sex with handcuffs on (but if you remember, that was when we were watching that movie and it was funny because of the other time, at the anti-war protest, when we got arrested together), and afterwards I said I didn’t want to tell you what my position on Palestine is (as it turned out, of course, I had one too many drinks and I did talk about Palestine, and unexpectedly we agreed on a two-state solution), once, in the middle of the night, I asked, are you going to die? (apropos of universal health care, you had told me you have a heart condition and I wanted to know if it was a metaphor), and later I also said to you: so it’s war now, is it? (but that was only because The Herald ran that headline IT’S WAR! many months after the war had been declared and a couple months after the president said it was over), and I said that the only way to subvert the militant patriarchal hierarchy was to fundamentally change the structure and nature of organized society by allowing anyone on the bottom to be on the top (it was probably the wrong time), but after all that I asked you if, really, you thought that, you know, considering, the ends could ever justify the means, like those suicide bombers exploding their desperate rapture all over public markets; and the thing is, you never answer me about the end.

  DAVID SHUMATE

  The Polka-Dot Shirt

  The soldier returns to the city, dusty and alone. Nothing is as he remembers it. Buildings have vanished. Streets have been rolled up and carted away. Even his favorite whores are pregnant and married in the suburbs. He rents a room in a fancy hotel. He takes a long shower and while his scalp is still warm he shaves his head. He opens his suitcase and is surprised to find he has picked up someone else’s luggage at the station by mistake. He unfolds a Hawaiian shirt and tries it on. Some khaki pants. A pair of loafers. He studies his reflection in the mirror and thinks he has seen this man before. Perhaps in a news report. Someone accused of swindling the elderly. Or an artist obsessed with flamingos. He takes the elevator to the hotel lobby and orders a drink at the bar. A woman regards him from a nearby table and smiles. Soon he is sitting with her, inventing a life as he goes along. After a few drinks she leans over and whispers something in his ear. He follows her up to her room and there they make love in the way she prefers. But the whole time he is distracted, wondering what will happen when he returns to his room and tries on the pants with the orange and yellow stripes. And the polka-dot shirt.

  DAVID SHUMATE

  Accordion Lessons

  While others drank vodka and spread their legs for boys, the girl next door played polkas on her accordion all the years of her youth. Nothing about her family suggested this exotic instrument fit into their lives. They were not from Sicily or Guanajuato. They were not possessed of an irrational zest for life. When the daughter reached puberty, her parents doubled her practice time and her music echoed through the midnight neighborhood as if set loose from a painting by Chagall. Her mother had watched the virgins of Lawrence Welk and knew that as long as the girl played, she was safe from all seduction. Let the others chase boys. Let the others drink vodka. She took comfort in knowing that not even the Kama Sutra, the ancient scriptures of erotica, imagines a sex act involving an accordion and two consenting adults.

  GAY DEGANI

  Abbreviated Glossary

  Want: I slide my naked leg between his thighs. Dev is trying a case tomorrow. He’s tired, but he owes me his touch, and I know exactly how to use my tongue.

  Pact: His lips disappear between his teeth when I break the news. He says he’s not ready—no diapers for him—but I know he is. I’ll do the hard part. I promise.

  Hope: My fingers knead the curve of my belly. Dev slips an arm around my waist and grins at his boss. Proud papa.

  Thrill: Dev can’t keep his hands off me, calls me “sexy mama,” but when he’s not around, I fret. Eight months along and my bump so small.

  Rift: Skull bones don’t always fuse together, the doctor tells me. I call Dev, but he’s in court, won’t request a recess, even when I beg. The hard part, I see, will be losing both.

  JAMES CLAFFEY

  Kingmaker

  The surgeon was off at golf, sweetly swinging his fairway wood. He shanked into the sand trap because of the phone’s vibration. The text message outlined an accident involving a kidney and a sharp tool.

  His patient was already prepped for theater, marked for the knife—not that the wound could be missed—a jagged red weal in his lower back. Poor bastard would be running on one engine for the rest of his life after the operation. He couldn’t recall the nurse’s name, or how he’d transgressed, but he did know she was from Tannourine El Faouqa. The Lebanon. His homeland.

  He thought of his own people and their exile, driven across the planet by red-sanded winds and the whim of dictators. He cut the incision in a familiar shape, and only when the anesthesiologist coughed did he recognize he had serrated the borders of his homeland into the man’s flesh. An obvious shape; close to a deer running at full pelt. Beads of sweat ran down his brow as he extended the incision to cover his error. This man would have quite the souvenir of his accident.

  Energy depleted, he passed instrument after shiny steel instrument to the nurse, not the same woman he’d insulted, so he hazarded a look into her bright green eyes. He couldn’t tell if she was attractive, or not, because of the mask hiding her mouth and nose, but he had created kingdoms, this man. He had created kingdoms.

  PIA Z. EHRHARDT

  Brides

  The realtor brought me to see a light yellow cottage near the Tammany Trace. I was looking for my sister. “This neighborhood’s safe for a woman alone,” he said.

  “She’s engaged,” I said. This had been true and I kept it that way.

  “Does she need a big yard?” he said.

  “No dog.”

  “A modern kitchen?”

  “Small appetite.”

  “Garage?”

  My ex-husband Ronnie rode a motorcycle with a seat fringed like a saddle that leaned my sister back, pelvis smiling up at him, hands on her thighs like arms on a chair. She’d never tired of the long rides to nowhere with our restless father. “Roll down your window,” she’d tell me. The wind whipped her long hair at my face. “Tie it back,” I’d tell he
r.

  The realtor stood in the driveway. “This crape myrtle tree,” he said, pointing over his head, “it stains carpet. There’s room to put in a carport. For when it rains.”

  “She doesn’t drive,” I said.

  The front door was beveled glass and unlocked. A pecan-sized cockroach skated across the hall. “Outside kind,” the realtor said.

  On his way to fuck my sister, Ronnie tried to beat the train at the crossing but his bike lost traction on the rails, slid him under a repair truck patient behind the wooden arm. I drove across Lake Pontchartrain to her place in New Orleans, took her in my arms. She wet my shirt with fresh tears. Mine stayed put imagining he’d long been dead to me.

  “What will I do now?” she cried. “Move on my side,” I said.

  We were the before and after.

  PEDRO PONCE

  The Illustrated Woman

  This was during better times. She called with her itinerary, reciting airline and gate numbers, her voice edged with hunger. I vacuumed, scrubbed, and laundered, shopped for two at the grocery store.

  I waited at the gate, bouquet in hand. Next to me, a man was listening to the radio. The volume on his headphones was so loud, I could hear Liz Phair comparing a lover to the explosion of a dying star.