by James Thomas
She surprised me from behind and pressed her lips to my ear. We collected her bags and left the terminal. I splurged for a cab. While the driver cursed between lane changes, I could feel the rush of the chassis through her clenched thighs.
We were barely through the door when she led me to the bedroom. We fell together, a tangle of hair and tongues. The front of her jeans gave way to my fingers. She lifted her hips and slid them down. An unfamiliar mark appeared just above her hip bone.
What is that? I asked.
She smiled and gathered the hem of her sweater up with both hands. It’s Chinese, she said. Do you like it?
I leaned closer. It was a symbol I recognized from bumper stickers and New Age bookstores. Two tailless fish—one black, one white—curled next to each other to form a circle.
I thought you hated needles.
I hate getting shots, she said. I’ve always wanted a tattoo.
She was drawn to its simplicity, centuries of wisdom inscribed on her skin. Two sides in opposition yet necessary to make a whole, discrete yet inseparable.
It made me think of you, she said. Besides, I didn’t like any of the other designs. Can you imagine me with a sunflower on my ass?
What about my name? I said.
She wrestled me to the mattress, laughing. Silly, she said.
Later, I couldn’t sleep. I got out of bed and sat by the window, watching her. Her legs kicked free of the sheets. With every breath, the shapes inked on her skin rose and fell, two halves and the indelible border between.
PEDRO PONCE
One of Everything
I decided to celebrate my freedom. It was nowhere near the Fourth of July. I made a table out of a splintery plank and stacked milk crates. Over this, I draped a paint-splattered tarp.
I went through my kitchen and took out plates, cups, forks, knives, spoons. I took the salt shaker, left the pepper shaker. I came upon two saucepans humping lovelessly in the dish rack. Simplify, I said, separating them. I kept one of everything. The rest I took outside.
My selection was limited and customers were few. A neighbor from next door turned the full salt shaker suspiciously in one hand. A quarter, I said. No charge for the salt. She set the shaker down and left for a sale down the street.
By afternoon, I had still sold nothing. Two women approached to inspect my table. The prettier of the two wore a wedding band and smelled like sunscreen and the ocean. She ran a bronzed finger along the flowered rim of a bowl.
Are you moving? she asked.
I told her no, I was simplifying. I was here to stay.
She considered some silverware and a stack of plates but a loud honk drew her away. A rental truck pulled up to the house across from mine. She leaned into the driver’s window. A light breeze rippled the back of her skirt.
It was close to dark when I went inside. I taped a sign to my table that said FREE in big block letters.
ELIZABETH ELLEN
Panama City by Daylight
My daughter was in the tub. This was Tuesday: bath day. I had a far off look on my face. My body was in the bathroom, kneeled, before her. My mind was somewhere else: Memphis, maybe, or Moscow. “You’re falling out of love with him, aren’t you?” she asked. And by him she of course meant you. “No,” I said. “There are ebbs and flows in relationships. This is a time of ebb. That’s all.” “You’re not a very good girlfriend,” she said, before submerging herself under water. She was practicing holding her breath. I was supposed to be counting the seconds.
You asked me the same question last week. You said, “You seem distant.” Which was your version of “You don’t love me as much anymore, do you?”
I was in Hattiesburg then but I didn’t admit so.
“No,” I said. “I’m right here.”
I offered you a weak smile and dove into the pool. I floated to the bottom and made a tidy home on the floor. I turned on my side like I do in bed with you. I closed my eyes, slowed my breathing. I can stay down here a long time, I thought. I was halfway to Tallahassee already; I planned on making Panama City by daylight.
ELIZABETH ELLEN
8 × 10
In an unfamiliar room you disrobe, removing only bra/no panties, as previously discussed, as heretofore agreed to. An hour ago you sent your husband into the corner 7-11 for diapers and he returned with a porcelain rabbit and pack of chewing gum. His character has recently come into question. His entire act is up for review. You feed his child with a breast he begrudgingly shares while on the other side of the wall he entertains an unsuspecting audience with his one-man show. “I’m going to shoot that kid,” he says, making a gun of his thumb and forefinger and pointing it at the right temple of the man in the mirror. “I used to snort cocaine off a model’s ass. Those days are over,” he continues, arms in the air, pausing for dramatic effect.
In the 8×10 broom closet where they store him he will refuse to open his mouth. No more soliloquies, the doctor will tell you with a smile and a handshake, as though bad theatre were ample enough reason for the removal of a tongue. Left alone with your husband you stare at him through the glass above the door and he stares back at you, his eyes static, his mouth a single straight line:_____. You study him, remembering how it feels to stand before the ocelot at the zoo: like unmitigated self-pity, like you could move the bars with your eyes if only he’d lift a paw to help.
Watch now the baby grow fat. Watch her gorge herself on your milk, forgetting what it means to share. Read to her from her book of ABCs. “O” is for ocelot, you say, remembering that the average life span of an ocelot is 10–13 years in the wild, 20 in captivity.
DINTY W. MOORE
Rumford
Given how Uncle Skitch drank, no one in the family wanted to believe him when he insisted that Rumford could speak.
No one wanted Skitch to drive, either, but he did.
In the mornings, still stung from the four or five tumblers of whiskey he downed at the kitchen table the night before while shouting at the voices on his radio, Skitch would stumble out his front door, fumble into his massive, gray 1962 Buick—“the battleship”—and jerk-stop, jerk-stop, jerk-stop the damn car all the way to the end of the block before realizing his emergency brake was still engaged. He did this repeatedly, refusing to learn. The noise horrified everyone.
But old Skitch jerk-stopped his battleship to its final mooring spot when the railroad finally let him go. Skitch used to ride in the back of the train, watching out for equipment failure. After he lost the job, he just drank around the clock, and never drove anywhere. The neighbors were more relieved than annoyed to see that old Buick rotting out front.
Skitch still bragged about Rumford, though.
If you called Skitch at home, the dog would answer the phone. Or that is what Skitch said, anyway. Most of us thought it was his wife, Ethel. She had a deep voice from all those years of chain-smoking unfiltered Pall Malls. She loved a good practical joke.
Three years later, Skitch and Ethel vanished. The Buick disappeared from the curb. Mail piled up. The phone wasn’t answered. My father finally broke into the house to find no one at home, no note, but all the clothes missing.
Police quizzed the only witness.
Rumford didn’t say a thing.
MICHELLE ELVY
Triptych
The triptych, left: a whaling boat, riding high on rough seas. The tail of the whale is wrapped in ropes, thrashing; the boat is a bobbing wooden toy. The curator points—Class, listen—and speaks of form and shading. Girls squirm and boys move in close. John shuffles forward and is pressed behind Marianne. He worries he smells of sweat. Beth, to Marianne’s right, turns and glares. Beth is always at Marianne’s side. They have matching sweaters. John is wedged in, trapped behind the girls. His arm brushes against Marianne’s. Beth takes Marianne’s hand: a barricade of laced fingers.
The triptych, right: whale beaten and beached, men standing triumphantly atop his back; meat has been sliced from the creature’s body and laid
out on the beach. John lowers his head and tries to move right, away from such close proximity to honey-scented hair, but now he is forced forward, between Beth and Marianne. The front of his trousers brush against their still clasped hands. Beth shoots him a mean look, cuts right through him.
The triptych, middle (the largest image): the boat alongside the great creature, the first harpoon stuck in firm, the harpoonist perched with second harpoon raised. Ready for the kill. The crewmen row to keep steady. The boat rides on frothy waves. A grotesque and dizzying moment. John’s skin stings at the sight of the harpoon. The curator’s rising voice—Class, look!—chills his spine. John is sweating profusely now, squished between Marianne’s prickly sweater and Beth’s cruel gaze. The curator’s voice stabs into his head. He closes his eyes and rides the waves.
MICHELLE ELVY
Antarctica
The man finds the boy in a drainpipe and when he asks him what are you doing in there? the boy looks at him as if he should already know and says I’m looking for Antarctica. Later at home, the man’s wife catches him staring at the tiny specks of dust spiralling in the late-afternoon sun and when she asks What are you thinking? for about the millionth time he hates her but he also knows he’d hate it even more if she stopped asking so he shrugs and says I’m thinking about Antarctica.
He goes back the next day and the boy is gone. He waits for him because he knows there’s something they needed to say but forgot. The sky is heavy metallic: the hour before snowfall. He pulls his collar tight and heads home and when he gets there his wife’s standing naked in the kitchen. It has started to snow and the only color in the room is the orange of her fingernails. The snow falls and they can’t get warm, no matter how hard they make love. Later he’s staring again and his wife says Antarctica? but how could she know he’s more than a million miles away with the boy in the drainpipe.
He returns to the drainpipe and crouches down on his hands and knees. His shoulders barely fit but he wedges himself in. He is about to turn and crawl down the pipe, all the way to a new continent, when a stranger walks by and sees him and when he asks what are you doing in there? the man looks at the stranger as if he should already know.
DAMIAN DRESSICK
Four Hard Facts About Water
1. Mixed with Dewar’s White Label whiskey and served in a highball glass with shaved ice, it will cost nearly eleven dollars, on average, in most bars within two blocks of New York City’s Houston Street.
2. Many Christians believe a thorough dousing in concert with a contrite heart represents a first, but critically important, step on the road to the development and maintenance of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ.
3. Breaststroke, backstroke, butterfly, Australian crawl, take your pick—as Pennsylvania’s Junior State Champion 1994, you go through it like a fish.
4. After your two-year-old daughter trips and falls unseen into the neighbor’s in-ground pool while you are in their summer house trying to find steak sauce, your involvement with Fact One can consume your life, costing you your spouse and job and nearly, if not quite all, your self-esteem. Fact Two will be rendered utterly powerless in the face of this tragedy and Fact Three will come to be the way you define irony—when slurring to strangers who have already asked you once to please leave them alone as closing time approaches at O’Flanagan’s, always a little quicker than you’d like.
KATHY FISH
The Possibility of Bears
We’d been drinking wine and eating leftover wedding cake on the deck. I’d chosen rainbow colored frosting. It was supposed to taste like strawberries.
“I shouldn’t be drinking,” I said.
“Then stop.”
We were staying in a cabin in a national forest. The first thing we saw as we lugged our suitcases from the car were claw marks on the door. I asked if they were real. He said he suspected so.
Behind the cabin was a cornfield, which seemed out of place. I had wanted to go to Switzerland, but this place was okay. Cheaper.
He started cleaning up.
I said, “Well, look at that view.”
He wetted his finger and opened a garbage bag.
“Gosh, you’re so fastidious,” I said, but it came out wrong, sounded more like facetious. I read the label on the wine. A peppery finish, it said.
He reminded me about the possibility of bears.
I watched him sweep, moving in and out of the shadows. I tried to think if we’d been to any movies lately. There was an old style movie house five miles down the road in the little town, showing The Three Stooges.
“We could try to find Stephen King’s vacation house,” I said.
He continued to sweep.
“I think you can stop now,” I said.
I pointed out the hot tub, but his head was turned to some noise in the woods. He said, “I’m not exactly a Boy Scout.”
“Neither am I.”
Like wine, the hot tub was probably not good for me either.
He sat down. I toed off my slippers, forked cake into his mouth.
“Eat this,” I said. “Eat every last bite.” And he chewed and stared. When we were first living together, we used to do this. Feed each other. Lick things off each other’s bodies. After the ceremony he’d found some emails. I said they were old. But they weren’t old enough. And now here we were. Married.
“Wait. I hear it now.”
“That’s the sound of a bear protecting its baby.”
I heard it again. Closer.
“Cub,” I said.
KATHY FISH
Akimbo
We’re painting the nursery in the nude. Slapping eggshell over walls the color of a baby’s tongue. We’ve been at it awhile. The pink keeps bleeding through. We’re not using drop cloths because the carpet’s getting ripped up anyway—this sort of sculpted wall-to-wall that reminds me of my grandmother’s house and smells like cigarettes and corn. So we’re manic about it, spattering ourselves, our glasses, our hair and forearms, our privates. You paint a heart on your chest. I smear a swath across my forehead. A Flock of Seagulls song plays on the radio. There’s a tremor and it makes us stop. Now a jolt and you go, Whoa Nellie. The windowglass trembles. Bits of plaster copter to the floor. Paint sloshes out of the can. You’re trying to reach me and all I can think of is the electric football game me and my brothers had when we were kids and how we’d work forever setting up our offensive and defensive lines and when we’d finally flip the switch, all the little plastic players just stood in one place and vibrated impotently. This is you now, beautiful and vibrating, your arms akimbo, looking like all you want is to break free, achieve forward momentum, catch me, before the world splits apart.
ROBERT VAUGHAN
What’s Left Unsaid
He turned the car off, exhausted. The drive had seemed endless, hours elongated like taffy. He stretched his arms behind his head, challenged his burning eyes to stay open. In the distance, he could see the wisp rising from their sugarhouse chimney. He figured she’d be up already. A crack of dawn slipped through pillowed clouds, more dark than light. He loped toward the house, opened the kitchen door, set his bags down.
As he crossed the pasture, Serena whinnied inside the barn. She always sensed when he was close. He paused under a maple, looked down at his calfskin Tony Lamas. Wondered how he might explain blowing all their retirement savings in Vegas. Maybe he could work more overtime, save up again. Then he wouldn’t have to tell her.
ROBERT VAUGHAN
Time for Dessert
The couple sits on their front porch every summer night. Although the view remains the same, they never tire of it. The steady river birches in the side yard. A martin’s house across the road. Darting swallows chatter, catching multitudes of bugs.
He says, “Warmer this evening.” Sucks down the last bit of his third Manhattan, nibbles the cherry.
She nods, pulls the sleeves down on her cashmere sweater. Can’t seem to ever get warm enough. She points. “Look at how huge
that ship is.”
“They usually don’t let barges like that on the St. Lawrence.”
It’s the main reason they moved to such a remote location. He loves water, boats, and all the activities associated with them. That, and he’d also burned through most of their friends before retirement age. One too many drunken spats. They sit and watch boats motor by. A bee buzzes on the roses near the screened door.
“Are you ready for dessert?” she asks. “Fresh peach pie.”
“Yup.”
She ambles inside and he stares at her rocker’s motion, hypnotized. He sets it to an old favorite melody, Ella’s “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off.” From the kitchen he hears the familiar sound of plates clinking, the microwave beeps. He sees a fancy motorboat toting a teenaged skier. His mouth waters.
Tomorrow, he thinks, I’m going to get up early and go fishing.
All by myself.
MELISSA FRATERRIGO
Momma’s Boy
Joseph flung open the back door of the two-bedroom rental home and sprinted into the bathroom while Carlotta paid bills at the table, the help-wanted ads in a stack at her left, breakfast dishes still soaking in the sink. “Joey? What do you have?”
She shut the door. The fan on top of the refrigerator blew a hot gust on her face. Yesterday it was a kitten. Three days ago he brought home a gray rabbit from a girl two blocks over. If they lived closer to her brothers, Carlotta wouldn’t worry about Joey, but Detroit was a six-hour ride by train and with her salary at Sunshine Dental, they wouldn’t be making any trips until Christmas. “Joseph Michael Vespi, I’m talking to you.”