I was suddenly sick and sober, and I stared at the dark young man across the room from me. His eyes met mine.
"Did you sleep with my...?" My voice had gone hoarse with the bile rising in my throat.
Before I could finish the sentence, Sean was shaking his head. He looked old and sad and sorry.
"He told me he was in love with me..." he shrugged. "But no, I didn't. I... won't."
"Angela?"
He looked away then, picked up his cup and swirled the dregs of his nog around inside, watching them as though the tiny cyclone was the most fascinating thing in the world. Again, I could hear the thoughts churning in his head while they fluttered and fell into some sort of order.
"Sam," he croaked, "deserves to be loved by someone who can. He's not wrong about me. I wish he were." He drank the rest of his eggnog.
"And knowing this, you're still asking him to go with you to New York?" I was stunned.
His answer, if he had one, was swallowed by Sam's reappearance at the doorway, clutching a trash bag and a bowl of scraps for the raccoons. He stared at Sean for a moment, then hurried out the front door.
I found him bent over near the trashcans, surrounded by his usual congregation. They were less tentative now, friendlier, standing up on their hind legs to reach for food. Sam wasn't smiling, but he seemed at peace.
"You okay?" I asked him.
He nodded, doling out a small piece of ham to a particularly insistent raccoon.
"He can't help it, Sam," I said, stupidly. "You can't ask him to be something he's not."
"I've finally figured it out. You know what the biggest problem people have with raccoons, Dana?" he said. "Raccoons are okay, as long as people don't expect them to act like anything other than raccoons."
He smiled and stood up. "He can't ask me to be something I'm not, either."
I woke very late the next day. Christmas morning. I remember Christmas mornings waking up to a new world, one ripe with possibilities. It wasn't just the gifts under the tree, the lure of the unknown contents of packages holding a promise that I'd be happier person for opening them. It was the change of light, the point where the earth changed direction and you could feel it, the hope of spring, the turn of the earth towards the sun again.
This Christmas I awoke with a clanging hangover and a bitter stomach, only partially owed to the high proof of dinner. I laid in bed, listening for the aftershocks of the evenings debate. After Sam finished with the trash, he had gone straight to his room and again his door was deliberately and emphatically closed. The only difference was that Sean was deliberately and emphatically on the other side of it.
I had fallen into bed, only to wake up late the next day, the sun screaming through the window, my slippers still on from when I'd shuffled into them before venturing outside to console my brother. They were wet from the snow, my eyes were crusted, my teeth had moss on the north side, and I was pretty sure I needed to throw up at some point. But I waited and listened. For slamming doors, shouts, accusations, pleas, whatever the morning mayhem had to offer. There was nothing.
I crawled out of bed and headed for the coffeepot. Sean was sitting at the kitchen table and already half way through the pot before I found it. I sloshed some into a cup and sat down across from him. His eyes were red and his face was swollen under a layer of stubble. I didn't say anything, I figured that I looked as bad, minus the stubble.
"I should leave today," he muttered in my direction.
"It's Christmas day," I said.
"Even better. Less traffic."
"You're not going to try to change Sam's mind?"
"If I haven't changed it by now, I'll never change it, will I?" he said, bitterly.
"He loves you," I said.
"He thinks he does, or he used to think he did. Before he found me with Angela."
"He still does," I said, knowing it was true. After all, he was my brother, I should know. We had the same pride, the same hard core that would rather be alone and lonely than compromise.
"It doesn't matter. What matters is his art. He thinks he loves me, and he offers bits and pieces and promises of great things to come with every piece, every painting. And I guess," he laughed, "he thinks I've been doing the same. I guess he thought it was because he was only 17."
"You did tell him that you're not gay, didn't you?" I asked, again stupidly.
"Sam doesn't even know if he's gay - he's just a kid. He fell in love, or thinks he did, and suddenly he expects the birds to start singing. He just feels something and thinks it's the right thing to do; he just goes with whatever he feels. He doesn't stop and think about what he's doing."
"He seems to have stopped to think long enough about not going to New York."
Sean scowled at me, and with his puffy eyes and day's growth of beard and tired, world-weary sardonic eyes, I finally settled on somewhere around 23. It would be the last time I would guess, or try to.
"That's true," he allowed, blinking at me. "What he doesn't realize is that he can't let his romanticism overcome his ability to make wise career moves."
"I think," I said, running a finger around the rim of my cup, "that Sam is only half right about you. He said you would never be a great painter because you lack passion."
"Yes, he did. And he will never be a discovered artist because he lacks focus."
"And you think that he can simply turn off his heart and follow you and concentrate on his career while you stand over his shoulder at every turn?"
"I think that's what he should do, yes."
"That's why, I think, you never will be a great painter," I said. I reached up and brushed the hair from his face, out of his black eyes. "Because you could do that."
He had nothing to say to that, shrugged and concentrated on his coffee. I stroked his hair, I'd been wanting to touch it for months, and in deference to my brother whom I loved, I would never know what it felt like brushing across my breasts or watch it streaking across my belly in it's anarchistic way. But I would steal this moment, just for myself, just for now.
I could also feel sorry for Sean. There was no more envy.
That evening, Sam watched as Sean packed his few belongings into an old gym bag. Fortified with a thermos bottle of hot coffee and a paper bag of ham sandwiches, he stood at the door and shrugged on the peacoat he'd originally shown up with. He had on a rather stupid looking cabby's hat, but it suited him. He was handsome enough to pull it off and he knew it.
I gave Sean a quick hug goodbye. Sam stood back, his face betraying nothing. Sean looked up at him, waiting, "after all this?" in his eyes. Sam held out his hand, and Sean seemed defeated and resigned. His face twisted in a grimace as he took Sam's hand to shake it. Sam pulled the man into a hug and buried his face in his scarf-wrapped neck. Sean hugged him back tightly, and I looked away until I felt the cold air hit me as the door opened.
"See ya," I said, and Sean gave me a small smile.
"You call me if you change your mind, okay?" he said to Sam, who was standing, stiff-backed and stoic.
Sam nodded.
And then Sean Gordon was gone.
~
Sam and I quickly fell back into our old routine. I'm not sure what he was doing as the rest of his winter break days wound down, but he seemed to be busy in his room behind the deliberately closed door. I hoped he was painting. If he couldn't paint his joy, I hoped, at least, he could color in his pain and make some sense of it.
A few days after Sean left, I followed Sam out into the dark night. I had some leftovers from my packed lunch, and I wanted to find out what strange satisfaction he got from feeding the raccoons.
He squatted there in the semi-circle of bandit-faced mammals. Their tails were twitching in anticipation, and one of them had become brave enough to come up to him and take food out of his hand. I watched quietly.
"How ya doin', sis?" he asked me. I shrugged in my coat and made a non-committal noise.
"You know, it's kind of scary how muc
h they've come to trust me," he murmured. "I could grab any one of them, but they don't believe I can, now. They don't think I will. That's what having it too easy will do."
I said nothing. He was right. He was wrong.
"You know, Sam," I said, "you could still go to New York, if you change your mind."
"I will, Dana, I will. Maybe Angela's generosity and sense of guilt will stretch as far as NYU. You never know."
"What do you want, Sam?"
"Sometimes people don't really know what they want. They think they want something, but it turns out that it's not good for them."
"I think Sean really cared for you, you know." I watched my brother's thin shoulders as he shrugged again, unable to answer either way. We were good at The Shrug, Sam and I. "I think he really was just thinking of what was best for you, in his own way."
"Yeah, well," he said, standing, groaning a little. I heard a knee pop. "Sean's always been so keen on doing things the right way. I think I'll go to college first and then see what's left of me. Either way, I can't be his pet boy painter anymore than you could be Mrs. Archer, you know?" And I was reminded again, Sam was my brother, not my child. He wasn't anybody's child. He'd proven that.
I nodded.
"He said that you're a very gifted painter, Sam. He was right about that."
Sam tossed the last of the scraps to the raccoons. They dove on the remainders of our lunches, our dinners, the things we didn't want anymore, the morsels we felt we could do without. They'd been tamed in their desperate hungry state, and now they depended on him. From now on, when they were hungry, they would look for Sam.
He crumpled his paper lunch bag and shoved it in the pocket of his unbearable, impractical and fashionable topcoat. He smiled at me.
"Yeah, but it's my gift, isn't it?" He winked.
I took his hand, and we went back inside my little house of plywood and corrugated steel, and, inside the warm light and shabby comfort, we waited to be rescued.
On our own terms, of course.
Sarah MacManus lives in the center of the United States and has just completed her first novel. In her spare time she rescues princes from ravening monsters and makes meat pasties, not particularly in that order. She can be reached at [email protected]
Poetry by Richard Fein
Schrodinger's Litter Box
If the outcome of a circumstance is presently unknown
and by observing the circumstance you will disrupt it,
then it exists in all possible states simultaneously
This early morning Shrodinger left the litter box unlatched.
Predictably his cat escaped and the rest is problematical.
My window happened to be in an open state
which that wandering cat happened upon.
He jumped through it and on to my bed,
then sat on its haunches over my chest and stared down at me.
Behold, the observed now observes the observer.
What next? He could purr at me or poke my eyes out.
I could slowly reach for grandpa's old radium-dial watch
and scare the beast away, or maybe not.
But such effort is bound to fully waken me
and force me to face yet another good or bad day.
Possibilities, possibilities, I tired of facing a future of coin flips and dice rolls.
Stark impossibility would be a salve to my stability.
True, absolute certainty certainly produces an ennui of somnolence,
but I like sleepwalking through life half dead.
So shoo Schrodinger's cat.
But for once that feline is steadfast in its place and time.
I'm eye to eye with unblinking fickleness.
I'll pull the covers over my face like a mortician pulls sheets over the dead.
Now I grin, for life becomes wholly my own undertaking.
Who knows, the dead might also be secretly grinning under their sheets,
glad that's it's definitively over.
After all, no observer on one side of the sheet can see
the perversions of the observed on other side.
The cat is out of my sight, and I'm out of his.
Maybe it's gone, maybe not.
A paradox, all this guessing keeps me jumpy as an alley cat,
yet I seek the comfort of snoring certainty.
Richard Fein was Finalist in The 2004 Center for Book Arts Chapbook Competition and has been published in many web and print journals, including Southern Review, Morpo Review, Oregon East Southern Humanities Review, Touchstone, Windsor Review, Maverick, Parnassus Literary Review, Small Pond, Kansas, Quarterly, Blue Unicorn, Exquisite Corpse, Terrain and many others. He is also interested in digital photography and has published many of his photos, samples of which can be found at https://www.pbase.com/bardofbyte
Poetry by Suchoon Mo
Gross Domestic Product
she wanted to know
how gross is gross domestic product
because her lingerie is all produced in China
and not produced domestically
since her lingerie is not produced domestically
it is not a domestic product
and is not gross at all
I told her so
she seemed quite reassured
because she didn't take it off
to expose her nationalism
She Never Sat By Me
she said
she was in love with me
but she never sat by me
I was sitting on a fire hydrant
drunk
Try Harder
you foolish fly
you have landed upon her tit
she is still asleep
try harder
next time
One Loud Mouth
stop arguing
you have but one loud mouth
I have two silent ears
Drinking Happiness
your dog will quit smiling
your cat will quit laughing
once you quit drinking
or be happy and content
with your smiling dog
and laughing cat
Suchoon Mo is a former Korean Army Lieutenant and a retired academic living in the semiarid part of Colorado. His poems have appeared in a number of publications, including The Stylus Poetry Journal, Poetry Cemetery, and The Quirk. His music compositions have appeared in Hecale, Mad Hatters Review, and Eleventh Transmission as well as many others. He has no formal music education. He can be contacted at [email protected].
Artwork by Randy Getty
Photography gives Randy a good excuse to wander. He loves bad roads leading to unknown places hard to pronounce. He's at his best when he's hanging off the back of a truck in the middle of nowhere -- that's where he get the best photos. That's when he's the most alive. www.rgetty.com
Birds of Rangoon
Bird
Streets of Rangoon
Hanoi in the Rain 2
Hanoi in the Rain
West Meets East
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