by Jim Hanas
Cassingle: Five Stories
Jim Hanas
Published: 2009
Tag(s): "creative commons" "short stories" "short fiction" "flash fiction" "literary fiction" "twelve stories" "literary journals" mcsweeneys fence
Cassingle—a follow-up to 2006's Single—is a collection of previously published short stories. "The Guest" first appeared in Fence (Winter/Spring 2007); "July 4: Easter" appeared in the debut issue of Twelve Stories (readtwelvestories.com); "Nose" first appeared in Bridge: Stories and Ideas (Spring/Summer 2001); "The Adventures of Bad Badger"—my first published story—appeared in McSweeney's #3 (1999); and "The Arab Bank" was serialized in May 2009 during the Cannes Film Festival (jimhanas.com/thearabbank).
Shortly after this collection appeared in late 2009, it was reviewed in (of all places) Toronto's Eye Weekly, a paper-based publication. The reviewer, Brian Joseph Davis, wrote: "As for the future of publishing, it won’t entirely look like Hanas’ experiment in free, but it will look more like it than not. At five stories and 33 pages, Cassingle is aptly titled and rather witty. A combination of original works and stories that have appeared in the likes of Fence and McSweeney’s, it is a good introduction to Hanas’s perfectly designed, well-tuned and aerodynamic tales… . No matter the cut, this is writing that speaks American, in all its complexity. Help yourself to the free sample."
Months later, when Davis and his partner, Emily Schultz, were on the verge of launching an e-book imprint based on their Toronto-based literary site Joyland (backed by Canadian indie stalwart ECW Press), I was thrilled they asked me to submit something. I'm even more excited to announce that my full-length e-book story collection, Why They Cried, was released in October 2010 as this imprint's debut release. To purchase a copy, visit whytheycried.com. In the meantime, as Brian wrote last November, help yourself to the free sample. Thanks for reading.
Best,
Jim Hanas
November 14, 2010
[email protected]
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.5 License. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ or send a letter to Creative Commons, 543 Howard Street, 5th Floor, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.
THE GUEST
Kent arrived home from work to find his wife beating a boiling head of cabbage like it was the body of subdued mugger. She stood at the stove like a flamingo, the sole of one foot wedged against the opposite knee, one hand clamped tightly to her hip. In the other, she brandished a slotted spoon and slapped at the cabbage as it roiled in the rapids of a saucepan. She was vigilant but in no hurry. The danger—whatever it was—had passed.
Kiki wiggled in her car seat by the refrigerator, burbling in a language that appeared to have parts of speech but nevertheless failed to mean. It seemed diagrammable, this nonsense, although neither Kent nor Deana, his wife, knew where to begin. Sometimes they halted everything—as Kent did after sliding a hand around Deana's waist and kissing her on the ear—and ventured interpretations.
"Mommy make dinner, yum?" he said as he set his briefcase on the floor and crouched down to tickle the baby's cheeks and forehead. Deana, unimpressed, kept working the cabbage as Kent knelt on the linoleum and played a quick round of Agree with the Baby.
"Yeees," he agreed. "That's right. That's right."
"Have you seen him today?" Kent asked, looking over his shoulder at his wife.
"No," she said, clubbing away. "But the Yellow Pages are missing."
Kent stood and looked down the hallway in the direction of the spare room.
"I think he's making a statement," Deana said.
"What kind of statement?"
"A negative statement," she said. "About me."
"Honey," Kent said, rising and hugging her from behind, poking her neck with his chin. "He's your friend, too, you know."
"That's what I thought," she said, her chest seizing beneath his arms. "But he hasn't come out at all. Not even to see the baby."
She pointed the spoon at the burbling, car-seated thing as if she were no longer sure it even was a baby.
"You need to talk to him," she said, her voice suddenly composed.
"I will," Kent said, although they both knew the moment had passed.
***
Todd had arrived on Sunday. His plane was late, and he and Kent had exchanged a series of messages over the airport intercom before discovering each other at Carousel 9. They had hugged and slapped one another on the back, then dragged Todd's bags to short-term parking, where Kent asked how the trip had been.
"Fine," Todd said.
Todd did not look fine. He looked tired. He had not worked in months and had been staying with his parents in the Midwest, where all three of them—Todd, Kent, and Deana—had grown up.
Todd and Kent stopped at a café in the neighborhood and sat outside. They ordered drinks and talked about their lives. About how Kent was a new father, and Todd was thinking about looking for a new job, maybe, or a completely new career. He wasn't sure what he wanted to do, but this wasn't unusual.
"You'll figure it out," Kent said.
"I don't know," Todd sighed.
Kent suspected that Todd didn't want to figure it out, that he enjoyed letting indecision weigh on him like damp clothing.
Closing time approached and the restaurant's terrace evaporated around them. The Mexican bus boys hauled away the potted plants and the tables, and they retracted the oilcloth awning with a crank.
"But how are you?" Todd asked, as though he had been feigning interest before and it was now time to be serious. "What's it like having a family?"
"Great," Kent said, laughing "What's it like not having one?"
"I don't know," Todd said. "It's not like anything."
They swallowed the last of their drinks in silence at a lone table in the middle of the sidewalk, then returned to the apartment and lugged Todd's bags up the back steps and into the spare room.
And then he was gone. It was now Tuesday, and neither Kent nor Deana had seen any more evidence of their guest.
***
Like his wife, Kent was not sure what to make of this, although he didn't admit this to Deana as she finished preparing dinner and set out plates for them on the porch. He decided, instead, to act as though it made perfect sense. He would be the go-between, the peacemaker, even if he did think it was strange and, as Deana suspected, a statement.
Kent walked down the hall to the spare room. He raised his hand to knock but could not. The moment had passed. It was like failing to introduce yourself around early enough at a party. To do so now would be awkward.
He walked back through the kitchen to the porch. He gulped some wine.
"We're going to a baseball game," he said.
"Really?" Deana said.
"Tomorrow afternoon."
"Great," she said, forcing a smile as they both eased into their knives into plates of cabbage and curried chicken. "You're taking the day off?"
"I'm all caught up," Kent said. "How was your day?"
"Okay," Deana said, staring out past the corner store and the gas station to the fog rolling over the hills. "I think Kiki picked something up at the playground."
"Something like what?"
"She's been sneezing."
"Have you been sneezing?" Kent asked the baby, who sat in her car seat on the table between them.
Kiki babbled.
"How was work?" Kent asked.
"Alright," Deana said. "It was hard going back, but they got along."
"I had a hell of a day," Kent began.
"Kent," Deana said.
"But it's funny to watch everyone scramble. With the new guy, I mean."
"Especially Rich. Follows the guy around like a damned duck."
"Sweetie."
"What?"
"Do you think he's alright?"
"Rich?"
Deana rolled her eyes. "Todd," she said.
"I told you. We're going to the game."
"But you think he's alright?"
"I think so," Kent said, chasing a scrap of cabbage across his plate with a fork.
***
After dinner, Kent gave Kiki a bath. She burbled on and on, insisting—telegraphically, as always—that her father join her in the tub. He complied, and the two sat babbling to each other in a tiny sea of suds and plastic fishes. Deana stood on the back porch and smoked cigarettes from the pack she kept hidden in one of her flower boxes, an indulgence she never allowed herself while in charge of the baby.
When Kent and Kiki dried off, the three reconvened in the bedroom to put the baby to bed. Deana slowly rocked Kiki in her arms while Kent read out loud. It was the easiest way. It didn't matter what he read. He read from trade magazines and junk mail and books he randomly pulled from the shelf above the bed. Tonight he read from a copy of Of Grammatology that Deana had acquired in college.
"You can't read that to the baby," Deana whispered as she rocked from foot to foot and patted Kiki's bald head.
"What?" Kent said. "She can't understand it. I can't understand it."
After her first day back at work—a day spent contemplating what statements were or were not being made against her—Deana didn't have the energy to fight. Kiki was asleep before Kent was through the footnotes on the first page.
Deana lay down on the bed and put the baby on her back beside her.
"Are you coming?" she asked.
"In a minute," Kent said, kissing both of them on their cheeks. "I've got a little work to do."
Kent went back through the kitchen to the porch. He retrieved the cigarettes from where Deana had hidden them and lit one off a candle that still burned on the table. He stood by the rail, looking out over the lights that dotted the hills. When he'd finished smoking, he ran water over the dishes in the sink and made sure the stove was off. On his way to bed, he saw that the light in the spare room was on. He pressed his ear to the door. He felt it with his hands, the way you're supposed to in a fire. He got on his knees and stared at the sliver of light that appeared under the door. He whispered Todd's name and and the sliver went dark. Kent got up, crawled into bed beside his wife and his daughter, and immediately fell asleep.
***
Kent slept late. He watched as Deana got herself ready and went to pass Kiki off to Ginn, who arrived every morning at 8. Ginn was a bubbly student from the art school and too sweet to be believed. He didn't know where Deana had found her. There were ways women met women that he didn't know anything about.
After Deana left, he listened as Ginn prepared to take the baby for a walk. It was a big production. Ginn, who projected a childishness that Kent found painful, knew many more games than Agree with the Baby. She knew Sing to the Baby, Dance with the Baby, Dance for the Baby, Try to Explain Drum and Bass to the Baby, and the popular Confide in the Baby About Your Love Life, a round of which he happened to overhear this morning.
"You're lucky," Ginn was telling Kiki. "You're a lucky baby because babies don't deal with boys."
Kent felt a little guilty about not liking Ginn, in part because he knew that he didn't really dislike her. There was not a piece of furniture in the house that he had not imagined screwing her on top of or against. Her body, covered by shapeless sweaters and paint-stained peasant skirts, was made all the more lust-inspiring by this concealment. He constantly imagined how her heavy breasts might dangle like enormous raindrops as he took her from behind. As a precaution, he waited for Ginn and the baby to leave before getting out of bed.
After taking a shower, Kent got dressed in fan gear—jeans, a baseball cap, and a golf pullover—and approached the door of the guest room. He stood and listened, straining to detect signs of Todd. He heard the wind blowing through the drapes in the window on the other side of the door. He raised his hand and knocked lightly. He thought he heard the sound of someone rolling over in the room's large feather bed—the only piece of furniture in the room, which was otherwise used for storing abandoned projects and broken appliances—but he could not be sure. He knocked louder, which made the room seem quieter still.
"Todd," he said. "Todd. You want to go to a game?"
***
The game was a massacre. A waste of an afternoon.
Kent bought a single ticket in the lower deck. He sat amid a bachelor party being held in honor of a pimply-faced transit worker whose elders spat volumes of tobacco juice that flowed down the park's concrete risers, slowly and gruesomely, like a catastrophic mudslide. The sharp wind was made worse by the half gallon of beer that a melon-shaped toll booth attendant spilled across the entirety of Kent's row. The man bought everyone a round, by way of apology, but the cold beer only deepened the chill.
He returned home in a foul mood. He stalked through the living room, past Ginn and the baby, without even bothering to mentally contort the nanny into the usual series of positions. He went into the bedroom and sat on the edge of the bed. Deana would not be home for an hour. He pulled his beer-soaked sweater over his head and stretched out.
***
"How was the game?"
Kent woke up to find Deana standing over him.
"Is that beer? Wow, you really smell like beer."
"It was a spill," Kent said.
"Well, how was it? How was the game?"
"Good," Kent said. "Fun. We lost, but fun."
"Where's Todd?" she asked. She expected everything to be fixed.
"I don't know. In his room?"
Deana waited.
"Did he say anything about me?"
"About you?"
"Yeah."
"Like what?"
"Like, you know, about why he's avoiding me and the baby."
"He didn't mention it."
"Is he at least coming out for dinner?"
"I don't know."
Kent rose and paid Ginn for the day while Deana started on dinner. She was brutal with the preparations. Chipped fiestaware clinked in the sink and the wok she had bought at a Chinatown bazaar sang like a gong as she bounced it off the stove top.
"Honey," Kent said after Ginn had left. "Honey, listen."
"What!" Deana looked up from the cutting board where she was dissecting carrots with the concentration of a thrill killer.
"Todd didn't come out today," he said. "He didn't come to the game."
"What?"
"I went by myself. I haven't seen him or talked to him all day. If he's making a statement against you, it's a statement against me, too."
Deana fell into an exasperated pose and almost cut her thigh with the knife. A wave of tension broke across her brow, then crested again.
"Is he fucking crazy?"
"I would say he is distressed."
Deana took a whack at the carrots.
"He's leaving tomorrow," Kent said. "I'll drive him to the airport. You don't have to worry. He'll be gone."
***
Kent and Deana began their dinner silently, except for Kiki's incessant burbling.
Finally, Deana spoke.
"He must be depressed," she said. She had been thinking about it all this time. This was her considered opinion.
"He has had a hard time," Kent agreed. "With the job and with Elaine—how that turned out. It's been tough."
"Maybe it's been tough because he's depressed," Deana suggested, sticking to her diagnosis.
"We used to have fun."
"We did, didn't we?" Deana brightened at the thought.
"Sure we did," Kent said.
"When we first started dating and you two were in law school and he was staying on your couch? We used to drink coffee all night and laugh."
"He was funny."
"He
was funny," Deana squealed. This realization made her happier than he'd seen her in days. "He was so funny."
"He's not dead," Kent said. "He might still be funny."
"Are we sure? He could be dead. We don't know."
Kent laughed.
"I saw the light go off last night," he said.
"Could be a short. Maybe he's not in there at all. Maybe he's been abducted."
"By aliens?"
"No, by gangbangers. Gangbangers have abducted our friend!"
"I'll call the police."
Deana laughed and gestured flamboyantly.
"Well, we can't pay the ransom," she said. "We've got an extra mouth to feed." She tickled the baby's nose. "At least Kiki would tell someone if we were abducted by gangbangers, wouldn't you?" she said.
"They wouldn't understand her, but she'd try. Wouldn't you?" Kent said, grabbing one of the child's tiny toes.
Kent and Deana had so much fun, they stayed on the porch past bath time. They laughed about their memories of Todd and finished the bottle of wine. They put the baby to bed and Deana retrieved the cigarettes from the flower box and blew smoke toward the hills. Kent pretended to be surprised but smoked a few himself before they stumbled into the living room and had sex between the couch and the coffee table.
They had forgotten all about Todd, wherever he was. As they lay beneath an afghan on the floor, Deana reminded Kent that he had to get up early to drive to the airport.
"I'm sure the gangbangers will drop him off," he laughed.
Suddenly, the baby monitor in the kitchen crackled.
"Yeees," it said. "Yeees."
Kent jumped from the floor, wrapped the afghan around his waist, and stumbled awkwardly down the hall. He entered the bedroom to find Todd standing over Kiki's crib.
His beard was overgrown and he was wearing the same clothes he'd worn at the airport. "Yeees," he was saying "Yeees." Deana appeared behind Kent in a towel.
"She's beautiful, you guys," Todd said, looking up at them glassy-eyed. "She looks just like you both. I see you both in there."
Deana entered the room and took Kiki in her arms. She rocked from foot to foot and turned so Todd could see the baby's face. They smiled at one another, Todd and the baby.