by James Thomas
He unlocked the door and crept into the kitchen. Mud speckled his glasses; his dark bangs slumped against his forehead. Joseph held out his cupped palms and inside was a green and yellow-shelled thing. “It’s a turtle, mom. He was sitting near the train tracks. I saved him.”
“Joey.” Tugging on his wrist, she led him outside. Squinting into the light, Carlotta placed the turtle on the sidewalk; it remained motionless. “Now hit him. You’re a boy.” Joey trembled. “No crying, hit him.” He bent down and tapped its shell with two fingers. Snot dribbled from the end of his nose. Carlotta drew her hand into a fist and pounded its shell. “You’re a boy. A boy.” She smacked it again and something popped and the turtle flattened. Suddenly her breath snapped and jerked out of her lungs; she was tossed backwards, the pavement burning her skin. Joey stood on top of her, his shoes making two muddy blobs on her blouse. She peered up at him. “Good,” she said. “That’s good.”
MICHAEL MARTONE
Miners
Going east, I cross the Ohio by a bridge that empties on the west side smack into a mountain face tunneled through to Wheeling. Set back from the highway on the old roadbeds are the miners’ houses. Mountains are at their back door. The highway cuts through the mountains, and on the sheer faces of the cliffs on both sides, I see where they’ve bored and set the charges like a pencil split in two and the lead removed.
I think about the products of coal. The stockings you wear. The records you play. The aspirin you take. The pencil you write with. These are mine. What would we do without all this carbon?
As I move, the face of the land is changing. I am going east so I can write to you.
The hillsides are quarries mining men. The men are going home where they will discover that all the waters in Shakespeare will not make them clean. This life has gotten under their skins. They make love in smudges.
I am going further east where men are inside of things, where they own things inside and out.
I am writing this with a pencil painted yellow and printed with a silhouette of a woman with no arms.
I wish I were a miner so that when you turned your back to me and the face of the land changed, before I would go back underground, I would reach out and write with my black finger some graphite text on the places you could not reach.
“You,” it would say, “are mine.”
MICHAEL MARTONE
Dan Quayle Thinking: On Snipe Hunting
They told me to wait, so I wait. They gave me a burlap sack and pushed me out of the car into the ditch next to a field. I watched the taillights disappear. They told me they would drive the snipes my way. “Wait here.” And I do.
Stars are in the sky. I’m in a mint field. The branches of the low bushes brush against my legs, releasing the reeking smell.
I think, suddenly, they are not coming back. Back home, they are waiting for me to figure out they are not coming back. They are thinking of this moment, the one happening now, when I think this thought, that they are not coming back, and then come home on my own.
But, I think, I’ll wait. While waiting, I’ll think of them waiting for me to return home with the empty burlap sack. They’ll think that I haven’t thought, yet, that I was left here in the mint field, that I am waiting for them to drive the snipes my way. I’ll let them think that.
In the morning, I’ll be here, waiting. They will come back looking for me. Dew will have collected on the mint bushes. The stars will be there but will be invisible. And I won’t have thought that thought yet, the one they wanted me to think.
The imaginary quarry is still real and still being driven my way.
PAUL BECKMAN
Brother Speak
My brother and I speak. He says, “Hey.” I say, “Hey” back and he gives me a light punch in the shoulder. I fake a punch to his gut and say, “Hey.”
He waves me away and I fake going after him, he turns and fakes a kick to my groin. I say, “Whoa” and turn. He laughs and fakes another and I say, “I said whoa” and he laughs again and punches me in my bicep with a punch that’s not a love tap as much as a warning tap.
Our wives come and get us for dinner. I ask him to pass me a dinner roll and he says, “Hey” and tosses one across the table. The family laughs and he asks for the salt and I grab for the salt planning to send it flying his way but my wife gets to it first and says, “Hey” and passes it civilly down his side of the table.
After dinner and before dessert we all go out and play touch football with a Nerf ball and when he touches me he says, “Hah” and touches me really hard.
I’m close to clocking him when the wives yell for us to come in and get coffee and dessert. We, my brother and I, sit around the table not talking but listening to the women and kids chatter nonstop.
He pushes back his chair and says, “Yo, gotta go,” and his wife gathers up the kids and they walk out to the car and he taps me on the head and says, “Hey,” and I knuckle punch his shoulder and say, “Bye” and he makes a move at me and I flinch and he laughs and says “Hey, hey—still a flincher,” and off they go from their yearly visit.
TIFF HOLLAND
Hot Work
The transvestites like scarves although none of the women in the shop wear them, not anymore. The transvestites are slippers-in, after closing. They’re incognito in the back room and emerge sweaty flowers. It is hot work, being beautiful, but they are willing to make the concessions, to pay cash so their wives cannot track their other lives. They try on the wigs gathering dust on the top shelves, the ones the beauty shop ladies spurn. It is just them and us although they would like nothing more than to mingle under the dryers, to nibble donuts and discuss the Enquirer. My mother applies their makeup. I feign sleep in the shampoo chair, sneaking a peek at the finished products: unwinged angels with five o’clock shadows, tottering in circles between the dryers and the styling chairs, trying in that small space to learn how to fly.
JEFF LANDON
Flying
Say we met. Say we met in Virginia and it was snowing in the mountains, and we were standing at the top of a steep hill with a toboggan in my hands, a blue toboggan, and say we were laughing, a little high from your brother’s pot, holding on to each other with mittened hands. We could huddle around a tiny bonfire with hot chocolate in one thermos and hot buttered rum in the other, and puff the night air with our words and your cigarette smoke. We would be the tallest people on the top of the hill, the grownups, and behind us, over an iced ridge of pine trees, a Chevron sign would glow neon red and blue, and you’d shiver and take off your stocking cap to shake out the ice from your hair. We would face each other on the blue toboggan, side by side, and listen to the way a small town feels after the first real snow in years. And let’s say we’re laughing and new to each other—let’s forget about all the years and the quiet distance.
Our coats crinkle when we move, and right before takeoff you loop your arms around me and we’re flying, flying down a hill on a blue toboggan. Stars pour down on pine trees and snow, and I can feel your smile on my neck, a crooked smile, and we slide down that hill and near the end of our ride we kiss each other hard, kiss like teenagers in someone’s dark basement, with our bodies pressed together, and we look like one large person, a lumpy one, flying down a hill that is steeper than any hill we ever imagined, back then.
JOSH RUSSELL
Our Boys
Our boys are born two years apart, and we dress our second son in his brother’s hand-me-downs. As children, their faces and haircuts are so alike, we later can’t figure out in snapshots which one’s which unless they both appear, so we halve the stack of photographs in which they’re alone, make two albums, label the first with the firstborn’s name, the second with the second’s. Our boys don’t notice. They bring home girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, offspring. Nobody figures it out. First the secret’s delightful—we’ve tricked our clever kids!—then troubling. We thought we’d made our boys carefully, raised two individuals. We thought we were exhausted
because we’d loved each with unique fervor. How can we now not recognize their differences? We study missing teeth, the Snoopy T-shirt’s faded collar, the weight of the cat in their laps. When the phone rings in the middle of the night, we worry it’s one of our boys, and if we answer and he greets us, we won’t know to whom we’re speaking.
JOSH RUSSELL
Black Cat
Remember prom, boutonniere pressed flat as if it’d been preserved in a book. Remember heat radiating through rented pants, through creaking tulle skirts, more than the heat of first sex. Remember blood on the sheet, the twitch of pleasure that shook her. Remember college, Saturday nights becoming Sunday mornings, coffee and the Post in bed, comics and front page kicked to the floor, sliding and crashing like water. Remember the breakup. Remember hours of pool with Physics major sharps who could not lose. Remember running into her at Sibbie’s party senior year. Remember being naked in the Honda in the parking lot, rain like code on the roof, windows fogging, then glowing as dawn broke. Remember the Christmas tree blown into the middle of the street in which the black cat played. Remember laughing at her while she stood at the second story window clad only in a blanket conversing in Spanish with Mormons, too polite to ignore the bell. Remember the months during which the only reasons you wanted to see each other were to fuck and have your papers proofread. Remember driving away to Baton Rouge, long lists of vows trailing. Remember the second breakup. Remember sadness and loneliness like possessions taking up space in the room. Remember your birthday falling on Thanksgiving, the trip north, how she gave herself like a gift. Remember Christmas. Remember the night she begged to be taken back and you, standing barefoot on the tiny rusted landing, looking at the alley’s luminous shell gravel and listening to her voice being pulled thin by a thousand miles of fiber optics, sure that prospects for love were numerous in that weird city, said no.
CHRISTOPHER MERKNER
Children at the Bar
They aren’t at all slow or simple. They totally get reproach. The man shares a steady, mannered gaze with his wife before turning to say, Dude, you’re in a bar. A bar. You brought your children to a bar. It’s accurate. My wife says, Hear this, but it’s accurate. We are in a bar with the kids. The burritos are amazing. If you want burritos like this, you field words like theirs. Then, again. And the vulgar couple isn’t satisfied: they come over and pull in. They float a few more sailors, directly to our faces. I avert, look at our kids. They are getting the words and their parents being named by these words. The vulgar lady moves swiftly, slips her mouth over my wife’s; then the dude has his mouth on mine. I don’t know what the vulgar lady is doing to my wife, but he is very rough on the face. He is blowing some pretty dark shit in there. It’s interesting. The kids are nonplussed: the burritos are really just really good here. My wife’s suddenly a head on the table. I fight, a weak jog of the neck, maybe two, but ultimately I let him keep blowing because I’m still strangely certain I have more space inside than he possibly could, and I am willing to take it to see this play out, and frankly it feels like it’s just what I need these kids to see.
TARA LASKOWSKI
We’re Gonna Be Here Awhile
And it snowed. And it blackened. And when I called Leslie from the county jail I told her I did it to get out of the storm. And she sighed, that’s all, and before she could say something I couldn’t hear I hung up. The officer helped me bandage up my arm. He asked me if it was worth it. Outside someone’s tires were spitting as they tried to pull out of their parallel space. The officer told me he used to live in Key West, but he couldn’t stand the humidity or the key lime everything. He had a mustache you could lose pea soup in, and a filthy way of rubbing his nose with his fingers. The jewelry storeowner was coming to give a statement, and while we waited we listened to the hum of the generator and watched the receptionist lose at FreeCell. Behind the officer’s head on the bulletin board there was a picture of a cat holding a bottle of Sam Adams in its paws and a crooked photocopy of the poem “Footprints.” The jewelry storeowner called, said he couldn’t get out of his driveway. I tried to remember why any of it was a good idea. The officer put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his squeaky chair and looked at me in that way that waiters do when you walk in on Christmas Day or New Year’s Eve, a resigned distaste for what has led to this particular moment.
TARA LASKOWSKI
Dendrochronology
It was 10th grade, the year of Hurricane Isaac, which mowed down the mighty oak in the teachers’ parking lot, snapped it like a cinnamon stick and prompted Mr. Luckanza to teach us about dendrochronology, counting the tree’s rings. Grown-ups wanted to turn everything into a lesson.
It was the year the football team had a shot, and they introduced cheese fries into the cafeteria. We had to take English 10 and read dog-eared copies of “How Green Was My Valley?” which everyone kept calling “How Long Is My Valley?” The economy tanked and my mom took a second shift at the late-night diner. We all turned 16 and some of us got parties. The biggest one was Shannon Richardson’s, talked about for months because someone vomited all over her parents’ white suede sofa and she posted flyers on certain lockers looking for a confession.
It was the year people started losing their virginity, whether on purpose or not. Then, right before Christmas break, they found Mr. Luckanza in his car with a pistol in his lap and a shattered windshield stained red the color of those poisonous berries our parents always warned us not to eat. In the spring, a group of men came in overalls to finally take the oak away, chain-sawing it in pieces and tossing the hunks over the side of their pick-up. Even after they drove away I could still imagine rolling my fingers along the tree’s insides, the roughness of the bark and the tenderness of the inside, some rings small, some larger, some stained dark and hardened like a cancer, almost like it knew what was coming but couldn’t tell anyone until it was too late.
MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI
Intrigued by Reincarnation, Skip Dillard Embraces Buddhism
When you have a next life, there’s no such thing as a one-on-one. The concept of not getting a second chance after failing on the first is so Western, it’s no wonder we’re always at war. Imagine a world where redemption is only a step off the roof away. Tripping in front of a bus would do it, too, and so would two bottles of Tylenol. A hungry bear in the woods. A lucky bolt of lightning. Colon cancer. No matter what you were guilty of, or innocent, you could start over any time you wanted. Sure, a margin of error exists. You could come back as an infectious microbe. A sickly leopard. The maggot born in the trash can behind some Chinese take-out joint. But you might get lucky, too, end up rich, a beautiful actress, married to a handsome athlete, always on the news for her charitable tendencies. You could be a famous doctor. An inventor. The first man to do something no one’s ever done before, like walk on Mars or travel back in time. You could be the lap dog to that same beautiful actress, traveling in her purse, your picture in a thousand magazines, a kiss on the nose for every flash of the camera. Even better, you could be nobody. You could go about your business, live your life. Minor victories would go unnoticed, as would major defeats. Even if anyone turned around to look, it wouldn’t matter. Either you wouldn’t care, or you’d move on again, the next roll of the dice. If you kept shooting, sooner or later, you’d get better at it, always get something good. Like you were money in the bank.
MICHAEL CZYZNIEJEWSKI
Eating William Wells’ Stout Heart, Fort Dearborn, 1812
In your hand, it feels like it’s still beating. The hardest part isn’t the kill, or the careful removal with a dull knife. It’s shaking the notion that you’re about to consume something alive, something whole, that it might scream out in horror when you break the skin with your teeth. Picture holding a small animal between your thumbs and pointers—a squirrel, a bat, a pike—then biting down into its shoulder. It is warm, full of blood, and trying its best to slip free, to claw you to shreds. The only thing that makes you go through with it is
your audience, everyone waiting for their turn, wanting their share of bravery, strength, and verisimilitude. Deep down, you know they’re thinking the same thing you are, that there are better paths to self-improvement. But first in line is an honor; you get the best piece, the most potent hunk. Your tribesmen aren’t the only ones watching, either. There are the others, behind the wall, witnessing why they call you savage firsthand. It becomes a pissing match at that point—who can be more turned off by what you’ve done, by what you’re about to do. You start to wonder if this is the only way to work out your differences, and then, as your hand drips red, you swear you feel another pulse. In the end, you know you’ll go through with it. That you have no choice. Otherwise, it would be an awful waste.
LEN KUNTZ
Lens