She’ll only be a few hours away.

But, you’ll be a senior at MHS and she’ll be a freshman out there. Away in academia.

She’ll call you a few times, then text, then send an email here or there, but you won’t be able to get in touch with her on a Saturday night. No fucking way.

When you do talk to her on the phone, once a week now, she’ll act distant but you don’t know what acting distant feels like yet, so you’ll think maybe she’s busy with her collegiate studies and pursuits or she’s having her period again. You’ll tell her about all the things you’ve been up to, how great your year’s going but how badly you miss her. She’ll feign interest, and you know what that fells like because every girl you’ve ever known has blown you off in that way once in a while. There must be something wild going on where she is, you’ll think, something better and more exciting, grandiose and radical. There might be.

Or maybe not.

Really, she’ll still only be a few hours away and come on now, how much can change over a few hours? It’s the same state, almost the same county, and you even know some of the people there. You visited when your older brother went there, so you ask her about the stuff you saw then, the places you went, and if they’re still around. She says she’s not sure and things like, I don’t know, that doesn’t sound familiar.

She’ll come home for Thanksgiving break and you’ll be so excited that you’ll forget to pick up your younger sister at soccer practice. Your mom will call and yell at your voicemail, wondering once again what the fuck is wrong with you. You won’t get the message though, because you’ll be busy trying to steal a six pack of tall cans from the CVS so you and your girl can go drink in the park like you did all this past summer. You’ll get chased out of the store and the cops will show up, but you’ll already be driving down Main St. over to her parents’ house.

She won’t be waiting outside.

In fact, she probably won’t be waiting at all.

You’ll call her and she’ll say something like, Oh shit, I thought you said you’d call me before you came over.

You’ll park down the street, crack a beer, sit on the hood of your car and wait for her.

She’ll show up an hour later and you’ll still be nursing the first one, then she’ll complain about the warm beer you hand her. You’ll say they were colder an hour or two ago and she’ll wince and act like she has a headache. She will act like she has a headache for the rest of the time you two are together. She doesn’t. I promise you, it’s just a ploy.

When you get into the car she’ll ask what you’re listening to and won’t wait for your answer. She’ll just tell you how much she’s gotten into Nick Drake and his Pink Moon LP over the past few months, but she’ll only have the MP3s on her iPod and will roll her eyes when she can’t play them in your car because all you have is a CD player. She’ll also tell you she’s been checking out a lot of low-fi indie-pop these days and by that she most likely means she heard Neutral Milk Hotel. Some sophomore probably played them for her in his dorm while he put the moves on her and his roommate pretended to be asleep in the other bed. He definitely had sex with her, told her about Pink Moon as well, maybe picked up his acoustic guitar and played a few chords from the record to show he was an emotional guy after he had slowly fucked her brains out.

Then he screwed her again, not at all gently. She didn’t mind. She liked it. And her new favorite singer is Nick Drake.

You don’t know any of this, so you put on your Dead Boys CD and start rubbing her thigh. She looks at you like you’ve never been in the same room alone together, but softens up a bit when you don’t know what to do but lean in and kiss her. Once you slide your hand up her shirt and try to bite on her ear lobe, she’ll tell you to stop, and then she’ll turn off “All This and More” during your favorite part. You’ll be so damn confused you won’t know what to do but try to adjust your torn jeans so she can’t see how excited that kiss got you.

Listen, she’ll say, I’ve been seeing other guys so I don’t think it’s right if we do anything more than makeout.

You won’t know how to respond now. You had your suspicions but you decided not to worry much: she’s busy, it’s college, she’s older now, whatever excuses you could give yourself to not feel like a total chump.

You’ll try to make a last ditch effort and ask if you and her can go inside up to her bedroom. No, she’ll say, I’m meeting so and so, you remember her, right? And we’re going to this bar downtown.

Okay, you’ll reply, but how are we getting in?

She’ll look at you now like you’re a lost puppy and say that she has a fake, don’t you?

Of course your answer is no.

This isn’t working she’ll say, and then she’ll apologize as your face burns and your cheeks get wet.

Fine, you yell at her. Fuck you. Fuck you. Fuck you.

But she’s already in her house, and you’re only mumbling to yourself, directing the curses at you and you alone.

This is the thing though.

You’ll call your friends who are hanging around the grocery store parking lot only a mile away. You’ll get over there, and they’ll already somehow know you and her are done, maybe just by looking at you. So they’ll hug you and put Young Loud and Snotty on in one of their parents’ cars and start telling you how that chick was always a total bitch and a fucking drag and a waste of time anyhow. Before you know it you’ll be splitting a case of Milwaukee’s Best in a field a few minutes out of town and the sky will be full of stars. At State you can’t see them because of all the lights, you remember this from when you visited, but out here, out here the world is a living breathing thing—but you’d never think of it that way. You would feel it though.

And the redness of your face, whether from anger or embarrassment or plain sadness, will subside. And you’ll sing along with “I Need Lunch” and smoke cigarettes, drinking those beers with your arms wrapped around your friends, all of your stupid young drunken hands burning holes in each other’s jean jackets.

And you’ll momentarily think about putting that college application off for another few days, definitely the one to State. Or maybe you’ll put them all off. For a week or two, a month, a year. It’s all abstract anyhow, a lifetime away, and in a year you’ll be nothing like her you tell yourself. In a year, how much could really change?

There will be more vacations and more family following the summer of 1967, but this picture is the last Grandma takes of the family in this composition. The image bears her signature: quarter-moon-slice of ring finger in the upper right hand corner. Callie is split in two by the thin white strip that borders the photograph as she rushes to be included.

When Grandma puts the camera back in her purse, Callie takes a seat on the step near her sister’s feet. “I’m no valedictorian…”

“And you never will be.” Debra, aloof in sunglasses, interrupts her sister without looking up from her magazine.

“But I can do simple math.” Callie paddles to the side of the pool and catches Jared as he topples in. “And there is no way Ryan is the father of that baby.” She points at the soft new bulge in her mother’s stomach.

“What do you want, Callie?” Mama inspects the peachy glow of newly applied fingernail polish. Her hope for this daughter is that one day they can have a conversation that begins with something other than an accusation.

“I want Ryan to marry you. How do you think he’s going to feel when he comes home from Vietnam and finds out that Jared isn’t the baby of the family anymore?”

“Like hundreds of other Vietnam vets.” Debra punctuates her response with a crack of her gum.

“Don’t be a smart aleck.” Mama rolls onto her side to make sure she tans evenly.

“I’m never getting pregnant unless I’m married.” Callie glares at Mama, angry with her for being a juicy piece of fruit that draws men like flies. “And I’m only having one baby.”

“Who would marry you?” April yells as she jumps high into the air, grabs her knees, and launches her cannonball into the pool.

“You’re so ugly, you shouldn’t be allowed to have babies.” Billy takes his twin’s cue then does a sharp jackknife off the diving board, slicing into the water and making another big splash.

Of all her brothers and sisters only Billy and April share a father, and that’s because they’re twins. Callie doesn’t even know who her father is, something she fears the baby Mama is carrying shares with her. She sets Jared on the side of the pool, patting his firm little belly. She loves his eyes that are round and dark brown like his father Ryan’s. “Watch him, Mama,” she calls as she swims quickly toward April, taking her by surprise and dunking her deep. Billy splashes Callie in the face, and the water war that ensues empties the pool of all who are not related.

In an attempt to protect the ash blonde beehive that she sprayed into place earlier in the day, Mama pulls her lounge chair farther away from the pool.

“You people are embarrassing,” Debra says. She gathers her towel and magazines and heads back to the room she shares with Callie, Mama and Jared. Billy spits a fat fountain of water at her as she goes, but splats a sunbather instead. The sunbather threatens to call the hotel manager.

“Come on, kids. We need to get ready for the concert.” Mama never apologizes. She slips into a silky cover-up that clings to her hips, sticky with sweat and sunscreen, and falls in a seductive fold over her breasts shaped by the wired cups of her swimsuit into large, soft cones.

Callie, April, Billy, and baby Jared scurry off behind her, leaving a snakelike trail of water that quickly evaporates in the heat. Grandma and Grandpa follow, gathering stray sunglasses, towels and flip-flops.

In her senior year of college, Callie will take the Family Vacations photo album, explaining to Grandma that she needs it to illustrate her thesis in American Studies, a lengthy piece of writing she calls, “Leisure Habits of the Lower Classes.” She does not tell Grandma, who has her own ideas about high and low class, the title of her thesis. Callie has learned to see her family through what her favorite professor calls a critical lens, and she doesn’t want to explain.

Callie watches the evening news while her family rotates in and out of the shower and dressing room. “How stupid do you think we are, Mr. Cronkite, showing us those pictures of soldiers smiling and waving like a bunch of dumb farm boys? Do you think we don’t know what’s going on?”

“Maybe he doesn’t want to scare us.” Mama never watches the news, afraid she’ll see her boyfriend, Ryan, strapped to one of the stretchers that spins lazily through the air on its way to a helicopter marked with a Red Cross.

“It’s war. We should be scared.”

“Quit fussing at your Mama and come in here.” Grandma calls through the open door of the adjoining room.

Callie does as she’s told and curls up next to Grandma on the big queen-size bed in the room where her grandparents sleep with the twins. Grandma’s sweet yeasty scent permeates the air around her. Callie will forever associate the colorless odor of vodka with desert heat and air-conditioned motel rooms. Grandma hums “I’m in the Mood for Love,” a song they have driven across New Mexico and a large portion of Texas to hear Louis Armstrong sing at an exposition called the Hemis-Fair.

“Can’t you make Mama get married?” Callie whispers. “She should be if she’s going to have so many babies.”

“Oh, Callie. I can’t make Patty get married. Or stop getting pregnant.  When you’ve lived more life,” she says, gently squeezing Callie’s arm, “you’ll understand.”

“I can’t stand this.” Callie wrestles free and makes a dramatic show of what this is by grabbing up the bathing suits, towels, soggy diapers, brassieres and jockey shorts that litter the room.

“You’re part of this.” Grandma tosses Callie the long t-shirt she slept in and left on the bed when she put her swimsuit on earlier in the day.

“My point exactly.” Callie grunts and dumps all the laundry into a plastic bag that will sour in the trunk of Grandpa’s car on the drive back.

“I always wanted a big family,” Grandma says quietly. She gets up and carries her drink to the vanity and motions for Callie to join her in front of the mirror. With the fingertips, of her free hand, Grandma lifts Callie’s bangs. “I like this short haircut. But you could trim these a little so people can see your beautiful green eyes.”

“It’s the style.” Callie smoothes her bangs, hoping they stay on the topic of hair and away from family because she can tell by the quiet tremor in Grandma’s voice that she is going to start talking about her dead babies, the twins with spina bifida and the baby boy who died in his sleep.

Callie kisses Grandma’s cheek and leaves her staring out the window at their view of the freeway overpass and then goes back into her mother’s room where the twins are playing checkers. People who don’t have to live with them call the twins good-natured. Why wouldn’t they be? Callie thinks. Together from the very beginning—swimming in the warm soup of Mama’s belly—always two. Never one. She checks her reflection in the mirror and dabs at the makeup Debra put on her nose and cheeks to cover up her big freckles. She wonders if Mama keeps having babies to replace Grandma’s dead ones.

Women Studies is offered for the first time in Callie’s junior year of college and she eagerly enrolls. She believes that Debra died trying too hard not to end up like Mama—an unmarried woman with too many children—or like Grandma—a woman drunk on grief. She thinks that by studying the lives of women, she can avoid the fate of the three she loves the most.

“Her boobs don’t talk,” Callie says to the desk clerk who is supposed to be calling them a cab but is instead trying to start up a conversation with Debra, who walks away shamed not only by what Callie said, but also by the fact that the desk clerk had been talking straight into her D cups.

“Young man,” Grandma interrupts before he has a chance to say anything. “I’ve been waiting 30 years to hear Mr. Armstrong sing. And I’m not going to miss a minute of it. Call us a cab. Now.” She takes Callie by the hand, and before they join Debra in front of the motel, she tells Callie, “You really should be thankful you don’t have large breasts like your sister and your mother. They are nothing but trouble.”

“Oh, I am glad, Grandma.” Callie pushes her glasses up on her nose that is caked with sweaty makeup. “And I’m thrilled with my crooked teeth and bad eyesight, too.”

“You have a smart mouth, Callie.”

And you drink too much, Callie wants to say but doesn’t. Otherwise she’ll end up watching TV alone in the motel room while everyone else is at the Hemis-Fair. She dutifully props Grandma up, and they wait on the burning sidewalk for the cab to arrive.

“Patty,” says Grandma, as Grandpa takes a seat up front, and everyone else piles into the back, “if you keep having children we’re going to become a two-cab family.” Grandma laughs and hiccups at the same time. Debra rolls her eyes.

“Nothing wrong with a lot of children,” says the cab driver. “I got me eight.”

“Don’t let Callie hear you,” says April.

“She’ll have you brought up on charges.” Billy finishes her sentence. The two of them laugh like they have made the best joke ever.

“Which one of you is Callie?”

Callie raises her hand the way she does in class when she volunteers an answer she’s unsure of but wants to talk anyway.

“See that little white house?” says the cab driver. He points to a hill where several small saltbox houses sit on lawns patched with grass and dirt, separated from the freeway by a chain link fence. “That’s mine. I’m out here driving around so we can send our kids to college. All eight of’em. During the day I work at the Post Office and my wife works some nights right back there at the Howard Johnson. We’re living Dr. King’s dream.”

When Callie is required to write a personal essay about cross-cultural encounters in her freshman composition class, she will write about the cab ride, remembering that it took her a minute to realize that the driver was talking about Martin Luther King, Jr. She wasn’t used to hearing him called Dr. King. She wrote that where she grew up—out in the country near one of the largest SAC bases in the U.S.A.—the war in Vietnam had occupied her thoughts in a way that the Civil Rights Movement did not. She could locate Hue, where Ryan was killed, more quickly on a map than she could Selma or Birmingham. In the margins of her essay, the professor calls her a racist and asks her how she could watch hour after hour of nightly news yet fail to be moved by images of demonstrators attacked by dogs and fire hoses. He uses the backside of the page to explain that she is an unconscious racist—the worst kind. Callie is unable to revise her experience to the professor’s satisfaction. She fails the assignment. But she learns the importance of things she does not understand.

“I thought it would be something else.” When she heard they were going to a Louis Armstrong concert, Callie had imagined a luxurious hall, carpeted floors, plush seating, at the very least a fancy movie theatre. The auditorium on the grounds of the Hemis-Fair looks more like a school cafeteria with its bright white walls and linoleum floors. Callie and her family sit in metal folding chairs at the back of the room. Up front the chairs are burgundy velvet, the kind Callie had imagined.

As the band takes the stage, Grandma grips Callie’s arm. “Mr. Armstrong.” She points to a small thin man who takes several bows before picking up his instrument. “He’s got cancer.” She explains his appearance, much diminished from the image of the bubble-cheeked man on the cover of the albums she’s been showing to Callie while they listen to the records on the hi-fi.

But there is nothing diminished about his music. When he begins to sing, Grandma rests her head on Callie’s shoulder, and for a moment Callie fears that Grandma is so drunk she’ll pass out and miss what she’s been waiting 30 years for. But when Callie feels Grandma moving to the rhythm, she knows her grandmother is reliving an old mood filled with love. Callie has a hard time believing it is a memory of her tight-lipped Grandpa who sits stiffly between his drunk wife and his unmarried daughter. But she’s also aware of her ignorance on the subject of romance.

When she fills out her college application, Callie declares herself an English major. In one of her favorite classes—American Short Fiction—she is assigned Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.” When they discuss the story, what the class does is argue.

She should have it. He doesn’t love her.

Who cares what he wants?

He can’t tell her what to do.

“. . .they just let the air in,” a girl screams out a line from the back of the room.

It’s illegal. A boy contributes this fact.

What Callie wants to talk about is the fact that the man in the story is the man and the woman is the girl. Jig. A little dance. Not even a full jiggle. Just Jig, forever alive in fiction, fingering the beaded curtain and drinking Anis del Toro. Debra had been alive in the real world, a National Merit Scholar, a girl who wanted to major in mathematics but instead hemorrhaged to death alone on a Greyhound bus headed for home after an abortion she’d had across the border in Juarez. Callie drops the English major and for two years remains undeclared.

To the annoyance of the people in the velvet seats who turn and glare at them, the people in the back of the auditorium—most of them Black, some of them White—begin to dance when Louis Armstrong sings “What a Wonderful World.” Grandma escorts Callie to the aisle, leading her in the slow two step she’s taught all her grandchildren so they will know how to do something other than twist and jerk. One at a time, the twins embrace Grandpa and take a spin. Humiliated as always by her family’s behavior, Debra flees to the lobby, arms full of sleepy Jared who drools on her neck. Mama waltzes away in the arms of a smitten stranger.

Many years later at the premiere of her film, Life Studies at the San Francisco Film Festival, Callie watches this final scene with her daughter Debra Armstrong, who she names for her sister and for the summer of 1967 that so many in the audience think of as The Summer of Love. Debra Armstrong cries and cries. She’s only ten. But she understands.

—

Jane Hammons has a story included in Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer (W. W. Norton 2010). She recently received a Derringer Award from the Short Mystery Story Society for Best Flash Story 2011. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and teaches writing at UC Berkeley.

The poem, which had been published in a magazine, lay on the counter listening. The woman who owned the copy said “Well…” in a kind of a drawl and winked at the poem.

“If that kind of silly crap can get published,” said Dix, “anything can. I don’t know why I don’t bother to send stuff out. Animals in her cunt! Jeez!”

The poem wasn’t really all that good from a metrical standpoint or from any other rigorous definition; it wasn’t elegantly put together or imaginatively worded, but it knew the feelings that well up in some women, and it was incantatory, a recitative, a descendant of an old and powerful style.

“I don’t know why people bother to write such junk,” said Dix. “It’s all a lot of crap.” She yawned. “You know, I gotta get going, ’cause I told Molly I’d pick her up and I’m dropping dead with this hangover anyway.”

“Okay,” said the other woman. She grinned. “My dear, you’ve got a perpetual hangover.”

“You said it!” said Dix. “Oh God, I’ve run out of Sen-Sen. Fucking pain in the rump! I’m gonna have to go get some before I pick up Molly. Like, what a bitch of a day – I hate mornings, don’t you?” She hitched up her leather pants and went out. It was already three o’clock, but she hadn’t gotten up off the couch until eleven.

The other woman went to the counter and closed the magazine. She then began to wash the glasses emptied at the previous night’s party.

Dix considered herself a black magic alchemist, and a thorough witch. She drew pictures of herself as the Queen of Spades and wore clothes that made her look like a punk biker going to the Renaissance Faire. Her bedroom walls were covered with spells and her kitchen was smoke-damaged from cooking on Quaaludes. All of her boyfriends thought she was down-to-earth and she couldn’t see why the hell she kept failing her class in Early Christian Thought. She picked up Molly, and, puffing a reefer, they swallowed a gallon of wine in a meadow.

“Hey, you know what I’m gonna do?” she said. “I mean I know it can be done – there has to be a way. I’m gonna find the herbal substitute for ‘ludes.”

“Yeah,” said Molly, “and then you’ll burn down the building instead of the kitchen. Gimme a joint any day, I can function on that.”

“All I need is the right ingredients,” said Dix. “Quaalude heaven is knocking on my door.”

When she went home, she uncorked and unstoppered and unwrapped and unscrewed and ripped open forty jars, bottles, bags and boxes, the contents of which she shook, piled, measured, weighed, toasted and steeped far into the night. The moon was right and her timing must be accurate, drunk and smoked-out as she might be, and regardless of her fond attentions to a bottle of Aquavit. She put on the Dils and the Dead Kennedys and let the vibrations saturate her ingredients, while on the apartment balcony she ground three worms with a pestle.

In a flat twenty miles away, a poet was chanting a paean to the gods and goddesses of her portals, to the inhabitants of her orifices, to the lions and tigers and bats and leopards and wolves and horses and snails and katydids that alternately danced and sang and rampaged within her; while Molly slept a drunken sleep half in and half out of her entangled bed; while the hostess of parties and possessor of magazines sat in an open robe with her feet propped on the wall imagining a thousand lovers; while Dix set forth her final ingredients, whispering “I’ve got it, I’ve got it, I’ve got it!”

She swirled and swilled the almost bubbling liquid: it was bitter to the pasty dregs and slightly slimy, and she scooped its last remaining residue with hungry fingers and sucked it from beneath her nails, throwing herself in mad circles like a dervish in the living room, caring not for the neighbors and their complaints but centrifuging every molecule to the extremities of her circulatory system; then flung herself upon the floor to wait her certain elevation.

And then between the shrieks and caterwauling of the phonograph there came a new and startling cacophony. A hissing and squawking, roaring and growling, grunting and tittering and flapping and scraping, squeaking and squalling and chattering; while twenty miles away a poet was reciting and inciting and dancing and jumping; while Molly jerked and toppled out of bed; while a woman in an open robe fell over giggling and clutching her so-called private parts; while Dix convulsed with fighting cunt brim-full of crowing cockerels and said “Oh God, what the shit is this, like give me a break man!” Then out the fighting cockerels spilled and spiked their hackles to each other as they leapt about the living room, and antlered stags began to rut and ram over her body, while suddenly her legs were covered with mating slugs, and a swarm of bees followed their queen up to hang in a vast precarious mass from the electric chandelier…

And Dix looked up at all this from where she had fallen. She rolled her eyes and turned her face to the nearest stain on the wall-to-wall. “Oh, fuck me with the Book of Lies!” she muttered, and passed out.

—

Karla Huebner‘s fiction has appeared in Northwest Review, Colorado State Review, Sun Dog, Collages and Bricolages, and Weave.

But, like I was saying, the boy hadn’t eaten anything for two days, and I pulled over to a diner by the side of the road. I had tears in my eyes when I said to him, boy, you have got to eat. I was on the verge of breaking down and he just looked at me and blinked, and I said, ok, we’re going to go inside and I’m going to order you a sandwich and you’re going to eat it, and he just kept blinking, but he ate the sandwich I ordered for him, so that was a start.

That boy could make you break down in tears. He was just inscrutable. It was like traveling with a little spaceman in the passenger seat. The boy never liked me; he held my job against me. I explained to him that it wasn’t my fault. He looked out the window and blinked.

His mother was a beautiful woman, a tall redhead with green eyes. She had her son when she was just eighteen years old. When I met her, she’d just tried to kill herself. So had I. I’d used a razor blade. She’d used pills. She told me all about her son. A beautiful boy, she said. She said the father was a son of a bitch, and I believed her. She said he’d tried to get her addicted to codeine. She said her parents were evil, and I believed that too. She said they were like tyrants, maybe they had her best interests in mind, but what that meant to them was that she should go through life without ever knowing the world – but it was too late for that anyhow, she laughed. She’d seen the face of the world; she knew it wore many masks. She ran away from home when she was fifteen. Her parents sent a detective after her. That was the first time she ever went in the hospital. In another story, I might have been the one to follow her on the road. She would’ve made a fine adversary, with her red hair and green eyes. She was twenty-five when I knew her. She and I slept together once in the ward. It was against the rules, but we did it all the same. She was a beautiful woman, and you have to take chances with a woman like that.

We sat together at mealtimes, and she told me stories about her son. Proud times, things he’d done well at school, art projects. He’d made her a necklace out of macaroni, wasn’t that clever? There was another man in the ward who’d been in adult films. He sat by us sometimes and told us stories from the sets, but they weren’t as interesting as you might imagine.

They let us both out of the hospital the same week. They let me out first. I’d given her my phone number and a week later, she called me. She wanted to meet, so we got coffee in a cafe. They’ve taken my boy, she said. She was hysterical. Her parents, she said, it was her parents. They’d taken her boy and gone to Arizona with him. He’s my son, she said, my son, not theirs.

I told her I would go pick up her son for a hundred dollars, plus gas money for the drive to Arizona. When I got to the house, her son was there riding a bicycle in the cul-de-sac. I presented her parents with an order from the court that the boy be released back to his mother and I introduced myself as a detective. They hated me from the start, but they invited me in and asked if I wanted something to drink. I asked for ginger ale. No alcohol, I said, I have a long drive in front of me.

I took the boy and put him in the passenger seat. He didn’t want to leave his grandparents even though I told him he was going home -home to see his mother. He shouted and kicked, but I got him into the passenger seat. I don’t think his grandparents were very sorry to see him go. They didn’t act like people act when they’re upset.

It was on the third day of the drive when I took us to see a movie. I couldn’t stand it anymore, the silence, the muttering, the blinking. The movie didn’t make much sense, it was something about a rock star who’s angry with his producer about how the record’s turned out. The producer is a big sleazy guy, addicted to cocaine, and there are some gangsters lurking in his office. The rock star tells the producer he won’t cut another track for him, and a couple of the goons go over and trash his place, steal his motorcycle. The rest of the movie follows the rock star as he seeks retribution for his lost bike. The bike turns out to be parked up on the roof of the record label, and in a bizarre final scene, the rock star drives the bike off the roof like Evel Knievel and lands in the road and drives away into the desert.

It was about as good as most of the movies I saw in those days. After it was over, I took the boy to get some more food, and he ate his hamburger all the way down. The boy was like a crime scene, you could look at him without ever seeing past the flashing lights, you could never see all the cracks through which something could slip. I paid our bill in the restaurant and we got in the car and drove the rest of the way back to his mother.

She called me a few times after that, we saw some movies together, slept together a couple more times, but nothing too serious. Eventually she stopped calling altogether. It’s all right. She was a beautiful woman, but her son scared me, and I don’t know if you should take chances with a boy like that, even when a woman like that is involved. I think someday maybe when her son is grown up, he’ll remember traveling with a man, he’ll remember driving for days and nights and sleeping in motels, but he won’t remember who that man was, or what his face looked like. And neither will I.

—

Ian Sanquist lives and writes in Seattle. His work can be found in Juked, Word Riot, decomP, and kill author. Visit him at morepostexistentialistbullshit.blogspot.com.

August & September 1989

The morning was unscripted, tired and seemed to pass in grim ritual. The cereal bowls, mugs, juice glasses and separate refrigerator door seal breaches, crumbs of toast, discarded bags of tea had been consumed privately, each mouth and set of hands as segmented as waffle grid borders, these late morning meals chomped in isolation as Dad grunted his subtle forecast and the subtle forecast, letting out hints in octaves and syllables, on his knees, gardening in the late guttural morning, and how as he put mug to lip how he began to map out his attempted conquest of the backyard garden, with mutterings, how he would try to make the menacing zucchini sprawl see it his way – its green prickling tentacles and leaves had pronounced themselves vivid past the lawn’s original border. Something had to be done: his way, non-stop.

Holly was in the shower; I filled a glass of water in the kitchen and returned to the den.

Outside, Dad was in the thick of it, digging hard, just a bit too hard. Adding vacant earth and erasing lawn with his cracked spade.

Mom was antsy and full of tasks. “I have to go to the library at some point today I, do you want to go?”

We were emptying the dishwasher. “And if you have any clothes for the Salvation Army drop box.”

“I guess I do, I’ll check.” I said.

Minutes later I was lounging by the television, soaking up the nothing. I flipped through the stations, never landing on anything for more than a few seconds. Past the television through the window, I could see his father’s veiled outline coming in and out of frame as he dug and stretched large. I saw my mother’s hands gesturing, then she stopped. Dad went out of frame again to dig.

She was behind Dad’s dig stance.

I turned the television off.

“David stop digging! Stop it!” My nose was at the window.

Mom repeated, “Stop it!”

“It’s my own damn garden!” Dad snapped back, on his knees and his red plaid shirt a big round back of sweat and sun and digging.

“Stop it David!”

The thirty-seven seconds I took to approach my father in the backyard from inside the house were without sensation; it seemed to take forever to reach him. I felt nothing but voluminous shaking coursing through my body as I moved from the window past the couch, through the hallway, across the sticky kitchen floor, down the side door stairs and opened the screen door. He was taking off his red shirt, revealing a yellow mountain of cotton tshirt and a pair of dirty brown cords.

“She doesn’t want you digging up the fucking back yard, you psycho. Stop!”

Dad didn’t budge. “Both of you get inside.” He wanted to keep digging.

Mom kept screaming. “Don’t!”

I pulled at my father’s shoulder. Dad pushed me away. I returned to the frazzle, now pulling him from the garden into the driveway near a pile of wood. “Stop it.” Dad shouted at me.

“You stop it!”

Now both of us were clogging the driveway. He pushed me away, into our neighbour’s house. I shoved back, knocking him into the wood pile. Dad dodged the logs and swung at me. “You asshole!”

The language was barbed as the combatants struggled; each taking quick breaths and clenching hands and fists while mom screamed like a banchee.

Upon passing the driveway one might assume a competitive road hockey game was going on, but no hockey sticks or nets were in play; they lay dormant in the garage, and now Mom began to shout at both of us to stop.

Dad began to instruct mom to get inside the house. “Stop it David, calm down!” I ran inside and went into the kitchen and found a wooden tea tray. I returned at full speed, watching my father trying to shove my mother inside.

The shouting continued, each of us taking turns, the sun’s spotlight and high noon’s battle call. I raced inside and found a wooden tea tray.

“Get inside!” Dad shouted.

“You’re scaring me David!” Mom screamed.

TWACK!

I slammed the tray across my father’s back.

As always, I could smell his father’s stale smoke alchemizing with his crap cologne and this blend now conquered the air that separated us. I stared deeply into my father’s steel wool eyes.

“Just get inside!” Dad shouted, as I dropped the tray on the driveway.

“Nate!” Mom screamed.

“Diane, inside!” Dad barked. “Call the police!”

“You’re insane!” I cried. “When they get here I’m gonna make sure they lock you up forever!”

“Diane, call the police.”

“You’re such a piece of crap!” I said, shoving his father into a nearby pile of logs that rested on the side of the house.

He was behind the screen door, glaring at me. He slammed the side door shut.

I stood in the driveway alone, the wooden tea tray at his feet; the sun now fully outstretched in the cloudless sky.

Several neighbors gathering in groups across the street.

*

I ran down the street towards the clutter of people, shouting with ribbons of tears streaming off my hot face. “Call the police, he’s insane! He’s going to kill her!”

The show-stealing antics were rewarded in kind, two police cruisers showed up, just as Dad was fidgeting with the car’s engine.

“What’s he doing now?” I asked hysterically, looking at his father playing with the car’s guts.

The police moved up the driveway; one officer taking Mom to a police car, the other, as far as I could see, talking with Dad beside the car.

Dad closed the hood.

I disembarked from the group of local spectators and crossed the street towards mom.

“What’s going on?” I said, sidling up to his mother who had lit a cigarette. She dubbed it out after three tiny puffs.

“They need a statement from me,” Mom said. “This is so embarrassing.”

As I gazed through the sun towards his house, feeling as if a sinkhole had risen up and formed. In it they would now — all of them — slide towards, this new fangled dent in the property’s schematics.

An officer was speaking to Dad. He nodded, and walked towards Mom and the other officer, passing a few neighbors who had frozen along the way.

“What?” Mom said, her voice rising as she continued, “they’re letting him go!?” She was marvelling at the police officer standing next to her, face in a twist of creases and astonishment.

“He’s putting the spark plug back in,” Mom said, sobbing. “He took it out so we couldn’t leave!” she cried, snot dripping from her nose.

I stepped back from the police car and watched as Dad finished operating on the car’s engine.

Fucking asshole, I thought, watching Dad drive away. “He’s going to cool off at his folks place,” the officer told Mom. “He said in Kingston, right?”

Mom was dripping with tears and mucus. She nodded shamefully, not making any eye contact. “We just need to take your statement Mrs. Moore.”

Slowly the gaggle of neighbors and onlookers withdrew, and we returned to our domestic shell. “You want to call someone, a friend, go out or something?” mom asked, blowing her nose with Herculean pomp. She tossed her cigarettes in the trash.

Later in the afternoon, Andrew came over with a baseball bat. Mom served us lemonade on the front porch. Telling Andrew what had happened both excited and shamed me; as if sharing the malicious porch gossip was fodder for future judgment and ridicule I had known my best friend capable of propagating. We rented two movies and ordered a pizza, my mother and I engaged in a silent pantomime of facial recognition and flat-line near smiles.

—

Nathaniel G. Moore is the author of Wrong Bar. This excerpt is from his forthcoming novel The Last Savage. Visit his website at www.nathanielgmoore.net.

“Like parties?” she asked.

“No,” I lied. But the word “party” means different things to different people, and this woman, in her starched white pantsuit, puke-pink lipsticky smile and high-as-hell heels, was not of my world.

“You’re kidding! Are you kidding?” she asked.

I shrugged.

“Birthdays?”

“They come every year,” I yawned. “So what.”

“Graduations?”

“Education’s retarded.”

“You’re young,” she said. “You must have friends who like parties.”

“Does an orgy count as a party?” I asked.

“I’ll just take the plates,” she said, smiling bigger, taking back her card.

I learned Alison was a Goodwill regular – the most regular Goodwill regular we had, actually. She parked her Beemer out front every other day around five, bought a shopping basket full of china, and left. She annoyed me, always small-talking at the register, complimenting my hair and my tattoos (I can’t stand compliments, what brownnosing bullshit), asking about where I went to school and blah blah blah. And smiling like her face was surgically set that way. After a few weeks I naturally started wondering what in God’s name a blond Beemer-driving party planner with business cards would be doing with all that china.

“How’s the party planning business?” I asked.

“Just fabulous.” She blinded me with a toothpaste-ad smile.

“What do you do with all these dishes, might I ask?”

“Oh,” she said, waving a manicured hand in the air. There was a band of skin whiter than the rest where her wedding ring would be. “You know – charity.”

“What kind of poor people need bone china?”

“Poor people deserve nice things too.”

“How about giving homeless people footrubs?”

“That would be gross,” she said, shaking her highlighted head and blinking her mascara-heavy eyes. “I hate feet.”

On a particularly wonderful day at work, a random customer – a Mohawked guy with Bambi eyes – asked me if I wanted to go to the Flipper show with him that night and I, of course, said yes. Then my boss gave me a ten-cent raise and I found an ashtray shaped like a foot. Plus, I got off early. As Alison Aleister left with her usual box of china, I watched her from my Datsun while it warmed up and spewed sick smoke throughout the parking lot. Through the haze I saw Alison’s Beemer zip away. And I followed.

Besides that time I saw Danzig in a Wal-Mart parking lot, I’d never car-stalked anyone before, though in movies it looked pretty fun. I drove behind Alison just for kicks at first, watching her check her makeup in the rearview as we passed my apartment above the taco joint. We joined the freeway. Where was she going, this party planner, this people-person, this opposite of me? She got off at the marina exit but sped past the marina, onto a dirt road that said “NO OUTLET” where all there was was an old defunct freeway bridge. She parked on the bridge. I parked behind some trees maybe fifty feet away and spied.

She got out of the Beemer and leaned against the railing, gazing at the rocks, graffiti and junk below. I’d gotten drunk and thrown TVs off that bridge countless times, but I couldn’t think of a single reason for Alison to be there. This was where junkies and homeless people and drunk teenagers hung out, not ladies in starched pantsuits with business cards. Unless she was a jumper. There were those.

Shit. Fuck. Not funny.

I grabbed my phone. Was this party planning bitch going to kill herself right now? I dialed a 9 and a 1. My hand shook. Then I heard her opening her trunk, so I looked up.

She put the box on the cement and started chucking china plates into the pit one by one. Whiz. Crash. Whirr. Smash. She screamed like a horror flick chick as she did. Thrashed, possessed. Breaking bone china. Hurling delicate secondhand plates. My heart hammered. The hairs on my neck stood up. When she was done, she threw the empty box in the air and administered a bizarre karate chop, sending it soaring down into the pit below. She got back into the Beemer and drove away, grinning, smoothing her flyway hairs in her rearview. She didn’t see me. My mouth still hung open.

I drove fifty feet forward, got out of my Datsun, and stared down at the pit, at the blizzard of fresh smashed porcelain hiding the annihilated TVs and the broken vodka bottles and the fast food trash.

—

Faith Gardner lives in Oakland and has work in or forthcoming in PANK, Word Riot and Defenestration. She can be found at faithgardner.com.

In the next yard my neighbor is watering his pepper bushes. When I first moved here I thought he was wise, I thought his emaciation fighting its way through the flesh was noble. I don’t think of him like that anymore. A lot of things changed since I moved here.

“Hello!” I call, approaching him, pretending to be cheerful. “It’s a beautiful day.”

“Yes, it is,” he says, dropping the hose and letting the cement flood. “Are you alright?”

“I’m fine. Do I look unwell? I’m fine. How’s the day? Anything ripe?”

“Not yet. But you still have to be here. You have to be ready.”

“Very true.”

“There’s such a thing as balance. When I began this garden I’d stay out here all night sometimes. Can you imagine! I was feverish…” I start getting bored and stare over his shoulder at a squirrel on the fencepost. When I turn back to him he’s not talking anymore, just looking at me with this curious smile and picking up the hose. He turns back to the wall.

“Do you mind if I watch?”

“Go ahead. If it interests you.”

I don’t watch his watering so much as the way the frailty given to him by manifestations of time in his movements. His hands shaking, holding the hose, his struggled breaths like pushing air through a drinking fountain. I pity him, I pity him and that time-crinkled skin. How many unclotted wounds of morning! but he always wakes up again. His back bent like a bridge arc, and the promise of death lurking around him like a bad smell, death soon –

“Enough. Please, enough,” he says, dropping the hose.

“Sorry, didn’t mean to make you uncomfortable. You said I could watch –”

“How could you go on like that? You think speaking under your breath makes you inaudible?”

“Huh?”

“I do not fear my own promised death. It will happen and I will embrace it. Don’t pity me; I pity you. My body I accept because all it’s saying is ‘Yes, this all happened.’ You would be lucky to look like me one day.”

“Huh?” I say once more, then I realize what happened. I reach up to touch my peach-soft forehead, lighter today because my thought-veil is gone. I try to think of where I left it but can’t even remember taking it off. Not left on my pillow in waking, or fallen in the shower to nap beside the drain –

“Go away. I don’t care where you left your damn thought-veil. I’ve got mine,” he says, pointing to himself. “All of us should keep it on. To avoid things like this.”

“My apologies –”

“Don’t mean much. Go away.”

The old man gave me a headache. I try to rinse it off in the sink, and hope that in the afternoon the sparrows will eat the rest of the worms. And we call them masochists who self-inflict their wounds but what of those who want their heads to be as the train wreck, repeating, repeating –

“Dude.” My roommate, Chad, is standing behind me; I shut the water off and turn around, feeling the wetness on my neck. “Dude, that’s nasty shit. That’s unhealthy. Is it pretend?”

“What?”

“Those things you thought.”

I try to erase my mind – thinking of a milk bottle broken on a sidewalk rushing out –

“You don’t gotta erase your mind for me. I understand you. But that milk bottle thing is nice…”

I turn away from him, because when the thought-veil’s down you can see their expression adjust to each new thought you have. A new kind of nakedness. Outside, the cherry-red apes are trapping squirrels in trees – think of these instead. The screams they make from their little throats like boiler tanks overheating (of course he can still hear what I’m thinking) “Yes I can. But I’ll pretend I can’t if it makes you feel better.” “It does.” The moon is a tongue hanging from a half-asleep mouth and the cypress trees like drowsing horses. Think Think Think

“Is now a bad time to drop something on you?” Chad asks.

“Well now you have to say it.”

“Cherrie called. She left a message.” My eyes drop to the windowsill. Yes but what could she say. An ant crosses the sill and gets stuck in a splotch of spilt soap.

“Well? What’d it say?”

“Don’t get too heavy about it, dude.” I already am; like frozen in secondless time and resumed days later unslept. Chad sighs. “She just said not to call anymore.”

O. Like bullets through parasol wings. As if snails snuck into their shells until castles were dust mounds. Remembering being breastfed where everything is given and nothing is asked – I was brain-damaged young because dropped. Like the bright sucked back into the flashlight “Dude, stop. It’s not like that. Things go on” and coughed out nickels. “Please. Believe me.”

“Nobody else ever loved me. This girl, dude…”

“I know. We give them our hearts so they can squeeze what they can out of them. I know. You’ve said it.”

“We give them our hearts –”

“I know.”

Ah, there are many things I used to think about when this happened. Gravestones. No, things like tide pools and the smell of churches. Walking through the park in my adolescence and (holding my mother’s hand) never getting hurt. If the heart were a turtle I’d tell him to stay inside, where there is only the sound of himself.

“Calm down,” Chad says.

“Yo, fucking pretend you can’t hear what I’m thinking. Alright? It’s much easier if you do.”

“Okay, but I don’t need to hear it to know you need to calm down. It’ll be okay.”

“Right.” As funerals are okay and happen correctly. They happen correctly; the dead get buried and sleep. The mourning mourn until they forget and then only the forgotten would mourn.

Chad wants to say something, but bites his lip. “I need a new one of these,” I say, touching the empty spot on my forehead.

Chad took his off and made it mine, temporarily. It fit with the warmth of someone else’s recent use and we sit out in the backyard, watching seagulls take laps in the sky.

“I don’t need that thing, you know. You might call me an ‘idiot.’” I laugh. When he takes his thought-veil down you hear almost nothing but farmyard noises: chickens rattling their cages, cows mooing in pastures. Sometimes you hear words but they’re always casually floating like ashes from a fireplace. Like “Dude” pigs eating out of a metal buckets “this grass” snorting, and rolling in the mud “is warm” the rooster at daybreak “as fuck. I gotta find some shade.”

Anyway, he took work off this morning to be with me. Here we are. Looking at the seagulls, and the grass like microwaved potatoes. And it could all be so warm but I think of her again.

When Cherrie and I were together we used to hook ourselves to televisions and watch each other dream. It took a while for the dream to start and until it did I’d always just stare at her, underneath the blankets on the couch, half-smiling. Never self-conscious. I’d kiss her forehead and think, “This will be my wife.” I used to think things like that. Then a dream would start in the television.

I loved watching what she dreamt. It was never cold; she wasn’t addicted to cold like I am. I’d watch cucumbers made out of sugar colliding and filling the whole screen with sugar. The moon wearing a dress, doing ballet. That terrible radio music she used to listen to. I loved it, because it was hers. And sometimes I’d be in it and I watched myself make love to her, and when we finished in unison she drew me into her and said “I love you. Always. My baby boy.”

My baby boy. Ugh… (the seagulls painted like broken blackberries)…

Then I would dream things that hurt her. She said it’s usually like when a plastic bag breaks underwater, but those weren’t the bad dreams, they were just ugly. The rest were filled with this unhealthy feeling she couldn’t understand but used to cry over. I told her I have no control over it and she said “You do, but you don’t. It’s because you do in the daytime and neglect to take control that you don’t when it’s night. Understand?”

Then once I dreamed something that really happened. I was with this girl who to me had always just been an orgasm. We were drunk and found ourselves in her bed. I remember thinking, staring up at her naked body moving, I love her because she’s not Cherrie. That’s all. And in the dream I said to her, “This is so wrong. Ah, it feels so good.”

“Should I stop?” Heavy breathing.

“No. Fuck no. Don’t stop.”

Cherrie called the girl while I was sleeping and she admitted it. Had no idea how we were discovered. I woke up with that dumb half-smile on my face and said “Did you like what you saw?” already forgetting what I’d dreamt, but Cherrie was gone.

“I have to call her,” I say.

“No,” says Chad. “No, no, no you don’t. It’s better if you don’t. It’ll never fix if you keep calling.”

Miles away, a thunder cloud breaks, and reaches us late and padded by the distance. But the blue sky’s being infringed by the rhinoceros of an approaching storm. I let my neck limp. “Why is it like that?”

“You say the wrong things, man. It comes off too desperate because you’re not thinking. Just talking.”

“But I could say it better now” and the grass is cooling down. He grabs my arm lightly but I shrug him off.

“Be honest with me, Paul. You know it’s no different.”

I point to my forehead. “Without this?”

“Oh God, that’s what you’re thinking? No man, definitely not. You need your thoughts hidden and you need prepared speech. Alright?”

I stand up. “I’m calling her.”

He looks at me sadly and then back down, his fingers running over the grass like it’s a piano. “If you have to. I’m gonna go to the store.”

Before he can say anything else to dissuade me, I cross the lawn to the back door and open it to go inside.

The sunlight like a wet beehive on the counter. In a room with no windows, no sound, you stop seeing time twitch like hummingbird wings, but then there is boredom, the other rabid mouth of time. (I stare at the telephone, my portal to another ear, and leave it hooked).

I should call her. She doesn’t understand and I could say it all right, like hot glue made of words. She doesn’t understand; poor girl. She thinks she understands but she doesn’t know better. I know what she’s losing and if I let her lose it, it’ll be gone forever. I won’t come back.

Then the dial tone like a tuning fork softly struck. I can hardly hear it and push the numbers in by touch. As it rings, I feel the outbursts of my heart grow more alarmed, heavier in the brain and back to the heart again heavier. The beehive of sun leaves abruptly, gagged by clouds outside, and she answers.

“Yeah?”

That voice, that old familiar…

“What, Paul?”

“Hi Cherrie.”

“Hi. Do you want something? I told you to leave me alone –”

“I can’t do that. Please don’t make me do that.”

She sighs (I could put that sigh in a bottle so it would never stop) and her fingers start tapping on something. “What?”

“How have you been?”

“You know, putting things back together. I’m better. I’m much better now. I’m doing much better.”

“That’s good. I am too” though I may walk through life like I’m suffocating. You were oxygen “and everything’s been alright. I miss you.”

“Don’t.”

“But I do.”

“Well don’t. It’s like wishing you were somebody else.”

“I don’t wish I was somebody else.”

“Then don’t miss me.”

“Why don’t you want that?” It’s alright, you don’t understand, I’ll make you understand. “I’m still here.”

“That’s good. Just don’t tell me about it.”

“Please give me another chance.”

“No.”

“I’ll do anything.” Remembering how before I broke things, you smiled at me without hiding anything. Then it happened and I lost that and the next time I saw you there was this look on your face like the morphine-dazed, you wouldn’t give me “Anything” and your lips like hardened cement.

“Why are you saying these things?”

“Because I want you back.”

“I’m sorry, Paul. Please understand” I do, you don’t. My words like hot glue healing things without blemishes “You need to understand.”

“I do.”

“No, you don’t. I’m going to hang up now.”

“Wait! Wait” while I think of what to say. “I love you.” I can’t help it; if the balloon broke it would still be beautiful falling. I’m addicted to these things, let’s keep starting over –

“I know who you are, Paul. Don’t think I don’t know who you are.” Her voice breaks in that tragic way and I can’t say anything back. “Sorry.” When she hangs up the phone I have a vision of my mother’s hand with stitching running along the sides as if severed from a doll. It lies with the fingers curling up, being eaten by mice.

When Chad comes home I’m sitting in the same place, watching the sunlight tint into a dusk-colored fossil of day. “Hey, man. I got you something.”

I look over and see a packaged thought-veil in his hands. He puts it on the counter, then says “Go ahead, open it. I’ll go grab the screwdriver so you can put it on.” I tear it out of the cardboard and plastic and it’s so much like a cold body in a coffin, the way it feels, but this is what each one of us wears on our foreheads. Out of a laboratory and onto my head, our heads, all of us wears one of these. I can see a blurred imitation of my image in its metal.

“Here you go. No more messy thinking,” Chad says, handing me the screwdriver, but when I say “Not for me” he doesn’t say anything back. A short laugh that sounds almost like groaning.

“Did you call her?” Chad asks.

“Yeah.”

“Well?”

“You were right.” I expect a jolt in my head like a sudden surge of tide pushing a boat close to tipping, but nothing. Smoke gathers at the hem of my mental sky. In life I collected acquaintances, they became paper dolls and most of them lit one-by-one in flame. Few left and those I imagine shivering at the constant dust of ash in the wind, or walking away by themselves. “At least I have you, man.” I look at the thought-veil again, thinking You can make me beautiful –

“What, dude? You’re a good-lookin’ guy.”

“You said you’d pretend you couldn’t hear what I’m thinking.”

“Okay, fine.” But he’s standing there biting his lip and I can sense the restlessness in him. “But why do you think that?”

“I don’t. You know how the mind works, always wandering.”

“You think you’re ugly? Because you know when you split with a girl you take a lot of her bad thinking with you. If Cherrie told you that, dude, forget –”

“Nah, dude. I’m not worried about that. Let’s put this thing on –”

“What’re you worried about?”

“I just like having my thoughts hidden, that’s all I meant, just like everyone else, but you know how the mind works –”

“Always wandering. How about this.” He takes the screwdriver and starts to remove his, loosening the screws on the right side first. “We both go without.”

“No, thanks. Keep yours on, give me that screwdriver.”

“No, dude. You are a beautiful person –”

“Dude, you’re too much. Calm down.”

“You are a beautiful person! I’m proud to be your friend!” Getting himself fake-worked-up to make me laugh. His face fills red and he dramatically works the screws out. Bending over for breath he shouts, “We’re doing this together!”

I laugh despite my resistance to it and grab his arm to make him stop. “Alright, alright. We’ll go without tonight. Tomorrow we wear them.”

“Fair enough.” He pulls the screws the rest of the way out and then his thought-veil is off. So the kitchen becomes barnyard sounds, with the cows and the horses almost-silent in the pasture, and the soft ring of porch wind chimes, and the hum air makes when throbbing in a sleeping place. A farm uninfected by thoughts like I have. For we are of two minds, let’s call these minds washcloths. His he wets in the warmest puddles he knows, it never stops being drenched in them, it never dries out or drips into something else, while mine I cannot get dry. I wring the water out of it every day but they say the sky looks like however you want it to look – No, they never said that, that’s something I say –

“I’m sorry,” Chad says. “You’ll be okay. Let’s put our thought-veils back on.”

—

Forrest Armstrong is a hybrid artist from Boston. He is the author of Asphalt Flowerhead (Crossing Chaos Enigmatic Ink) and the editor of Avant-Garde for the New Millennium (Raw Dog Screaming Press). He also puts out hip hop under the name Gasoline Monk. If you want to, you can probably find him walking around Back Bay in a daze, chain-smoking cigarettes and dreaming too hard.

Inside the factory, skeletons of impossible inventions, those that wouldn’t live to see their utility, littered the floor. Craig walked lightly through them, for he too had failed. Some of his inventions—the effortless divider, the stretching plane, the miniature handle—lay amidst the floor, adding to the carpet of loss. Craig didn’t care. None of the inventors cared. They just kept inventing.

The inventors were inventing at a furious pace. Rube, a man known for his complex machines that defied practical function, was poring over ornate blueprints, making intricate adjustments. Rube was paranoid that other inventors would steal his ideas, though few could even understand his ideas, much less reproduce them. Craig greeted Rube with raised eyebrows. Rube blushed and tried to cover his work with his upper body. “It’s—not,” said Rube, quaking in defense.

“Is that?” asked Craig.

“No,” said Rube.

Every inventor threatened one another, but no one owned their threats. Everyone knew that they had to invent, invent, invent. Hopes and gadgets cluttered every workstation, their functions unknown to anyone but their makers. Failures were forgotten as soon as they were deemed unworthy, and fell right to the floor. No one swept the floor.

Sometimes the tremors would swallow a few of the most buried never-inventions, which made the whole ground seem alive. The inventors called the groundswells “Justice,” and accepted them as happily as any inevitability.

The factory was big, too big; there were too many inventors. Craig looked at his dissolute desk and wondered what would come next, which ideas would deem manufacture. Craig’s ideas hadn’t been coming lately, and he reminded himself of this when his desk didn’t. His progress, charted in lights on a giant marquee on the wall, was flagging, there for everyone to see. Craig wrestled with components until his hands ached, but everything he made was curio at best, and would never survive Stage 2.

Craig sank into his chair, the leavings of his latest nothing cluttered in his lap, his hands full of twine and polymer. Craig sighed loudly, trying to elicit sympathy or inspiration from any inventor within earshot, knowing anyone who had heard him would only smile at the thought of another competitor vanquished. But there was no collaboration at the inventions factory, only bastard autonomy. Craig slumped in his chair until he found himself almost under his desk. He caricatured his own defeat in this posture, and imagined himself from the perspective of the other inventors. He held no sympathy for himself either.

The ground shifted under the factory floor, a seismic tickle that pulled on Craig’s treadbare shoes. Startled, Craig began raising his chair. He raised it and raised it, as high as it would go, until the edges of his desk pressed against his shins. Yet the chair wasn’t high enough. Then Craig had an idea.

Craig stepped off his chair and pulled it apart. He began reassembling it using all the instruments of assembly, because reassembly too isinvention. Using cylindrical pieces of 1½” metal piping, he welded and attached, joined and made. Craig placed the piping into and onto his chair: his chair rose ever higher. Craig went over to Keith’s workstation and stole Keith’s fast ladder and used it. Keith, too slow to stop him, was both upset and proud that his fast ladder was a success. All of the other inventors watched Craig with ineluctable curiosity, pretending to pencil in logistics. The ground growled.

Craig raised and raised his chair, now running out of ideal pieces of tubing. So, he used anything else: rubber haloes, a series of linked casement lock pins, caulk and insulation, butterfly and elbow joints. Craig raised his chair until his desk was a tiny disorganized rectangle far below him. Keith watched below in righteous envy. Craig’s inventing became a madness. He laughed in glee or triumph.

Eventually Craig’s chair reached its highest point possible, looking as high and crooked as a Coconut palm, its seat the eventual fronds. To get to the chair, Craig had to abandon the altered fast ladder. It clattered to the floor; Keith rushed to pick up the pieces. Craig shimmied his way up the uppermost section of chair, the pipe bending under his weight. Craig held the sides of his chair with white knuckles and brought his knees into his chest, swaying lightly, looking down at the field of inventors far, far below. Craig wrote “Hi chair” and a crude copyright symbol on a piece of paper in his pocket and then sailed it down to the rest of the inventors. Craig sat in teeth-grinding triumph, swaying above, watching for his lights on the marquee to light up and up.

Craig’s chair was high; too high; it wobbled with him perched atop it. But the other inventors didn’t catcall him, nor did they try to tip his high chair. They just looked up at him in his crow’s nest, crossing their fingers for the next quake, ready to see Craig toppled to the ground amidst the rest of the lost causes, ready for Justice again.

—

Matthew McCain Martin has been published in the North Carolina Literary Review, Burnt Bridge, A: The Colorado State University Literary Review, the Rocky Mountain Bullhorn, the Rocky Mountain Chronicle, the Colorado Springs Independent, and The Freestone.

Written by and reprinted here with permission from S.K. — world-renowned Sleep Watcher scholar and extraordinaire.

Very calmly and with a certain intention not to draw suspicion, invite a guest to your residence. Make your residence very tidy and welcoming. Purchase a potted plant. Light a candle in the bathroom nearest where the guest will sleep. Smile frequently. But not idiotically. Ask engaging questions. How is your guest’s significant other? Is the family well? Work, you assume, is going brilliantly. Has there been much travel? What a fantastic place in the spring.

Fetch your guest a comfortable pillow. Perhaps the most comfortable you have. Take it from your own bed if you must. Comfort here is necessary. Be sure to wash it should you have a particularly oily scalp. Scalp smell is not welcoming nor is it conducive to the sleep watching that will soon take place. It is not uncommon for a guest to leave should he or she be given a stinking pillow. Avail the shower for your guest. Place a fresh bar of soap in the holder. Make sure an extra packaged toothbrush is on hand should your guest forget his or hers. Designate a space in the holder that is sufficient for storage after teeth-brushing has been completed.

It is recommended that prior to this, you should offer your guest a snack or a cup of nighttime tea. I recommend this before hand so that your guest should not have the unfortunate experience of eating post teeth-brushing. This can taint the taste of the snack and/or beverage unfavorably. Offering this after your guest has cleansed their teeth can also seem somewhat weird. Weird is what you should aim to avoid the entirety of your guest’s waking stay at your residence.

The goal here is to have your guest comfortable and well satiated before bed. Clean and satisfied are the best conditions for a sleeping guest whom you wish to watch sleep. Once your guest has declared his or her being ready to retire, be sure to wish your guest a very good night’s sleep. Offer any last minute necessities. A noisemaker perhaps of a recorded ocean break or a bird song. An extra pillow? Once the guest has assured you of their comfort, proceed to your own room. Commence reading a book. Something light, as you will be watching the clock and listening to audible clues to ensure your guest’s complete and entire slumber. During this time, you can put your feet into thick and soft socks so that the sound of your steps will be unheard as you approach your guest’s door in the near future.

Make sure a minimum of forty-five minutes has passed with the guest’s light off as evident beneath the door. Subsequently, should you hear your guest utilizing the bathroom facilities, adhere an additional forty-five minutes post use of the washroom. Time is not to be skimped. It is not the same as baking cookies and you cannot open the oven before the time is up.

Once you are as sure as possible that the time has passed without so much as a peep or a labored snore, approach the guest’s room as though it is a sleeping infant’s. Any little noise can spoil the planned activities. Make sure all lights have been turned off and that your residence is as dark as possible. It may be advisable that prior to this excursion, an ample amount of WD40 be applied to the hinges before your guest’s arrival to ensure that the door will not creak at this very pivotal point. Place both hands upon the door. Push ever so slightly. Enter the room and press the door shut, ever so slightly, behind you. If it is dark enough, you may wish to leave the door open to make your exit all the more easy should something go awry.

The moment you have waited for has arrived.

Kneel, sit or stand silently and watch as your guest engages in a successful bout of slumber. Should a noise cue a rupture in your guest’s sleep, quickly and carefully make your way to the door. Remain in the room no longer than fifteen minutes. If your guest happens to turn over, put all of your weight onto the foot closest to the door so you can exit with sufficient momentum.

In the morning, offer your guest toast if you were undiscovered. And in the unfortunate event you had been discovered, send a note (since the visitor might have left rather abruptly) thanking your guest for his or her stay and explain that the circuit breaker was located in the guest room. Apologize, again, for the inconsiderate and entirely accidental disruption of your guest’s sleep.

An Exemplary Letter Should the Adherence to Manual Result in Unfavorable Legalities

[Reprinted here with permission From S.K., author of “How to Watch Someone Sleep”]

NOTE: It should here be noted that this letter was utilized in an actual case to very unfavorable results. Perhaps in the near future, a new, more successful letter could be sent via this author’s e-mail should you have legal success in any Sleep-Watcher case. Thank you.

It is with great respect and true authenticity that I dispute Mr. Gunther’s charge that I watched him sleep during his short stay at my residence last month.

The following is my refutation to Mr. Gunther’s claim of indecency accused of my person.

I did not invite Mr. Gunther to my house in a way that can be described as “catching suspicion.” I am not a mischievous character of this sort. It was not my intention that purchases of the following; “a plant, a candle, a tooth brush, a fresh bar of soap;” were in any way indications that I was to later “watch Mr. Gunther sleep.” Furthermore, I had not purchased these things in the hopes of “welcoming Mr. Gunther into a hostile and perverse environment.” My ways are not fashioned by such predatory characteristics.

While it is true that I fetched Mr. Gunther a fresh pillow, it was not utilized as, “a tool in the creation of an emotionally disturbing environment for my guest.” It was purely out of comfort and without ulterior motive that I allotted him this luxury within my home. I agree with the claim that ‘comfort is a necessity,’ (of which the provided instruction manual has similarly proclaimed). Yet now, given the particular context, this basic common nicety has alluded to the painting of myself in an extremely unfavorable light, one in which I was “possessed of intentions to watch Mr. Gunther take part in his nocturnal slumber.” Yes, I offered the man a clean pillowcase. This is not a crime and it was without notice to any prior knowledge that scalp-smelling pillows would thwart unsuspecting sleep-watch victims. It was a simple act of human decency, I tell you. Furthermore, I offered Mr. Gunther a shower. To insinuate that my intentions were so premeditated to have thought out the ritualistic cleaning and tidying of the shower to further enhance the prospective opportunity to watch the man sleep later that night is not only blasphemous, but also a fallacy. There was a space in the toothbrush holder that I made available to Mr. Gunther and it was propelled without, I repeat without, an inch of inclination to later watch an unconscious Gunther sleep.

In regard to the bedtime snack, it was I who had been eating in the kitchen when Mr. Gunther walked in. I was taught, I believe sometime before kindergarten, to share food should there be another person near by who might want some. So I offered the man half of my peanut butter and jelly sandwich. To imply that this was in any way “malicious” or “hostile,” given the events that would later transpire, is to base the accusation on faulty logic and unsubstantiated evidence. These little acts, while I admit share a striking resemblance to the document that has been presented to me in wake of the case, cannot be held against my person. I had nothing that night, but the best intention for Mr. Gunther. In fact, it was Mr. Gunther who asked for ‘sleepy time’ tea. And yes, I had purchased the beverage for myself, as I have trouble drifting off to sleep most nights and I find the chamomile ingredient in the drink to be somewhat sedative. The claim that I was trying to “drug my neighbor” is a charge that I refuse to take seriously. I was merely giving way to his request. It was just a cup of tea, ladies and gentlemen. And while the sequence of events is, yes, somewhat identical to that in the document forwarded to me, it is solely common-sense that fueled my decision to provide Mr. Gunther with a packaged toothbrush after the peanut butter and jelly sandwich and after he had finished his tea. In fact, while the document itself is perverse and bizarre, I must agree with it that the combination in taste of snack and toothpaste is horrible!

Of course I offered my guest any last minute requests before bed. What should happen if he realized, once ready for bed, that he needed an extra pillow for his bad back? Are you privy to the knowledge of his bad back? Well, I think it would have been negligent to have ignored his physical distress by not offering such an amenity. Should I have withheld from the man tools for his comfort? Would I be charged with “inhospitable hosting?” Please, I request from the jury and the levelheaded members of the presiding legal committee, to point out how I have done anything wrong up to now. I acted only and solely with the best of intentions in providing Mr. Gunther a safe and comfortable place to reside—nothing more. I had not designed the environment as one that is “conducive to sleep watching,” nor had I “premeditated actions” this night. I had no “plan drafted,” no “hidden agenda.” I tell you, I am not this kind of man.

This is exactly what happened: I told Mr. Gunther have “a very good night’s sleep” (simple usage here, of a common phrase—one which now, perplexingly, is incriminating me in a perverse sleep exploitation lawsuit.) Mr. Gunther stands corrected in his assertion that I “began reading a book when I retired to my room.” In fact, I was engaging in a crossword puzzle I had been working on for the entire week. Furthermore, it is true that this night is the night I finished the puzzle. I realize this evidence may be biased or unfit for the case, but I have dated the accomplishment in my journal under the date of the incident for further clarification purposes. And certainly, at the time, I hadn’t an idea this would become a legal proceeding or a claim filed against myself. Though I suppose my character is on trial, and one would have a hard time ignoring this while reading my journal. I suppose I could have written it in there last night. But I did not. I understand the unreliable nature of my journal. I understand because I am a reasonable man.

I haven’t the slightest idea how much time passed between the time I retired to my room and Mr. Gunther’s falling asleep. While he claims “exactly forty-five minutes,” I arguably could say more or less because, to be quite frank, I wasn’t paying attention to the time because it was not my intention to watch Mr. Gunther sleep that night. His charge that his door was “extra smooth at the hinges” is mere evidence of a handy and professional carpenter who applied the door years ago. Instead of chalking it up to my “perversion,” perhaps we should call on that carpenter for doing such a good and thorough job with the installation of that door. I think that would be much more productive than what we are currently dealing with here.

There had been a storm that night. This can be proven by meteorological reports and the cell phone call I put forth that night when the electricity blew out. I do find it “odd” that my residence was the “only one to lose power,” but this cannot be fault of mine. I’ve had multiple problems with electricity and have placed several calls into PG&E in the past five years. Please note my furious refutation of Mr. Gunther’s claims that these calls “had probably occurred during the stay of other guests” I’d “baited over.” These relentless allegations of exploitation and perversion make my stomach turn and my brain thick with despair.

The calling in of the electrician was entirely unnecessary for the purposes of this case. His insistence that, “the wire had been cut,” according to his findings, proves nil. This is not new, folks. The last several calls I put forth were all of the same nature. I have constantly suspected the hooligan kids of the neighborhood, as I have recently become a target for many of their pranks. I refute the claim that I was caught “red handed” watching Mr. Gunther sleep. Though I think we can agree here that he is of the personality to fictionalize truth. He had disclosed to me his complete comfort before sleeping. Should his comfort be so complete, would he wake to such a quiet push of the door open? I needed moonlight (visible only through the window in his room) for my crossword puzzle! Why shouldn’t that be enough?

In closing, I refute all charges of indecency. I am aware of the ill-published instruction manual “How to Watch Someone Sleep” and I can swear to everyone present that I had not known of it prior to this case nor had I had any part in “constructing the manual,” despite sharing the initials with the auteur. Need I point out how commonly the letters S.K., occur throughout the English language? I am a quiet man with many friends, all of whom sometimes stay the night. I am not interested in their sleep. And if I were, how does one explain the fact that I noted, in the same journal mentioned earlier in this letter, that Mr. Gunther had used the bathroom only ten minutes before the lights went out. If I had been whole-heartedly invested in sleep watching and fully familiar with the instruction manual, would I have disobeyed such a concrete rule as described in the manifesto? Highly unlikely. It is with great sadness that I recognize Mr. Gunther’s wish and court ordered restraint that he no longer spend nights at my house. I would like to reconcile amicably should the man so afford me this small act of decency. I am embarrassed and outraged by the preposterous reports that implicated me in this absurd matter last month. I hope this letter can remedy any and all doubts of my guilt currently circulating in the wake of this tragic case.

Sincerely,
Mr. Samuel Klauster, III

—

Katie Manderfield writes and lives in Los Angeles. She is an editorial assistant at Black Clock literary magazine and writes for the LAist. Her work has appeared most recently in Pindeldyboz, Word Riot and 3:AM.

The traditional dress of his forefathers was itchy and heavy and could only be dry-cleaned, not hand-washed. This aspect of the coat resulted in a smell similar to the smell of the inside of an oven which had never been cleaned.

Samuel breathed in deeply, filling his lungs with the putrid, burned-foody smell of his coat, the coat of his father, the coat of his grandfather, and so on and so forth back to the ancient West African tribes of the Sahara: tribes of naked, charcoal people who roamed the sands, their red-clay skin unscarred by the raging sun of Africa.

On the bus there was a blonde girl wearing spandex shorts and no underwear, reading the Upanishads, the Norton Classics edition with commentary, over 3,000 footnotes, and critical essays.

Hinduism never came to West Africa.

Nothing came to West Africa.

Except slave ships and elephants.

With the elephants, Samuel’s ancestors made huge, hairy coats that could not be hand-washed, only dry-cleaned.

With the slave ships Samuel’s ancestors made themselves into cargo, corpses, and cattle.

Samuels’ ancestors were willed to other people’s ancestors in legal documents.

The blonde girl with the Hindu text got off the bus. She dug at the spandex gathering in her crotch and waddled away, still reading the Upanishads.

When Samuel’s ancestors arrived with the elephant hair coat on the sandy shores of Connecticut, the healthy ones were sold to a blonde woman wearing a dress made out of the skin of a whale. Some of the sea-sick ones and most of the dead ones were ground up into pancake batter and baked into large, buttery flapjacks for the healthy ones to eat – which they did.

The blonde woman in the whale skin dress oversaw this process, accompanied by her four pet alligators, Chandogya, Kena, Aitareya, and Kaushitaki, who chewed on the hem of her whale skin dress when she was not looking.

Soon Samuel arrived at his destination, the Northern Connecticut Memorial Cemetery and Rest Stop. The bus let him off in front of a square building with a neon pink sign proclaiming FREE COFFEE.

Samuel was one of two people in attendance at the funeral. The other person was wearing a bumblebee suit. Samuel did not know the bee person, but that did not bother him.

Not wanting to be rude, Samuel nodded at the bee person in a solemn way as the priest said: “Seedhey jaaey. Phir dānyae mudiye” to the small wooden coffin before them.

Samuel felt anxious.

His elephant hair coat was itchy and uncomfortable, but he wanted desperately to speak to the bee person. He wanted to know who this small coffin belonged to, and why he had been invited here.

Samuel was not accustomed to being invited to funerals for people he did not know.

A few minutes later, the funeral ended.

The bee person turned without a word and strode across the lawn of the North Connecticut Memorial Cemetery.

The elephant hair coat was smelling worse and worse. Samuel sweat profusely in the hot August sun. He could feel the individual hairs of the elephant hair coat prodding their coarse little fibers into his fragile, papery skin.

He wanted nothing more than to run home and take off the elephant hair coat. It was an absurd article of clothing.

Wearing the elephant hair coat, in the time of Samuel’s ancestors, had been a test of will. Elders of the tribes wore the elephant hair coat to appear huge and hairy to enemies, but also as a sign of their tremendous patience and strength. The ability to wear the elephant hair coat was attained only through much practice.

Samuel was cheating. He wore a turtleneck beneath the elephant hair coat.

He wanted to ask the stranger in the bumblebee outfit about this funeral. He wanted to know if he too had received a small invitation printed on cotton paper with two vellum inserts requesting the honor of his presence at the funeral of a man he did not know with driving directions and a note reading: “In lieu of flowers, please donate to the Conservative Party in the name of the deceased.”

Samuel set out across the lawn of the North Connecticut Memorial Cemetery, after the bumblebee man. He took long strides to catch up but after several minutes he didn’t appear to be making any progress. Huffing and sweating in the elephant hair coat, Samuel began to jog across the cemetery lawn.

The bee seemed to be walking briskly but Samuel still was not getting any closer to catching up with him.

So Samuel ran.

Feet pounding on marble slabs in the ground, the tails of the elephant hair coat windmilling behind him, he wheezed and ran, kicking over flowers and small plastic flags.

The elephant hair coat felt like a hundred million needles piercing his skin through the turtleneck.

The bodies of Samuel’s ancestors were constructed to run. They ran across the sand, they ran to things and from things, they ran away from lions and sometimes they chased lions, they liked to light patches of brush on fire to flush out animals. When the animals emerged from the brush burning and scared, running out into the hot August sun, Samuel’s ancestors would run after them, herding them through the open sand-scape until they converged on the animals and skewered them with long poles.

The elders in the elephant hair coats would take the skewered bodies of the small animals and drain the blood of their bodies onto the elephant hair coats.

Then the bloodless animals would come back to life and dance for Samuel’s ancestors. They would dance modern dances, they would dance spiritual dances, but the dance that they most often danced was the Slabtown Rumba.

It was important for Samuel’s ancestors to be able to run very fast so that they could kill the animals that danced the Slabtown Rumba for them.

But a lot of time had passed since the perfect, toned charcoal bodies of Samuel’s ancestors raced around burning scrub brush to see the Slabtown Rumba. The only place Samuel had ever seen the Slabtown Rumba had been in his father’s kitchen when a skirt steak whirled on the countertop. Samuel’s father threw the steak into a pan, embarrassed, and hid the elephant hair coat in the back of the closet.

Samuel wheezed, but he was finally nearing the bumblebee.

“Wait!” he called.

But just as he spoke, the bee whirled around and Samuel stumbled into a large hole in the earth.

At first it didn’t appear to be a very large hole.

In North Connecticut they don’t dig graves very deep because there are other graves underneath them.

But when Samuel hit the bottom, he continued to fall down, down, clutching at roots and clumps of dirt that came away from the walls of the hole in his hands.

Samuel did not fall onto another bottom. He simply slowed down until he wasn’t falling, but hanging onto the side of the wall, lying on the side of the wall, on the floor of a tunnel.

Samuel stood and looked around.

This wasn’t where he had expected to end up when he stepped out of his apartment that morning to attend a funeral for a person he did not know.

Where he had expected to end up was back at his apartment, not wearing the elephant hair coat, which was still itchy.

—

The poetry of Kirsten Gwin has been published by Rivets Magazine, The Battered Suitcase, and Ellipsis Magazine of Literature and Art. She lives in Seattle with a big brown dog.